Robin Williams - When the Laughter Stops 1951-2014 (13 page)

‘It talks about artificial intelligence and human behavior. I’ve always been fascinated by both. Hence acting. That’s kind of the drill, really, I mean, to find different aspects of it. But with this, it’s the idea of a creature evolving. And Asimov was basically talking about a moral, humane creature, of robots as being these sentient beings who were bound by the three laws like commandments. They can’t violate them, even if they wanted to.’

In the event, the film got fairly mixed reviews and failed to set the house on fire.

One of Williams’ most appealing characteristics was his vulnerability: unusually for someone who had been bullied as a child, he was not afraid to tell people when he was hurt. And the reviews he’d been getting recently really did hurt. He was never able to escape the charge of sentimentality – sometimes deservedly, as with the mawkish
Patch Adams
– but that didn’t mean he could just laugh it off.

‘Oh God, it was frightening,’ he told
totaldvd.net
in a 2002 interview. ‘I’d read reviews about other movies and they would attack me again. One woman said the film she was reviewing was so bad the director should be put on a desert island with the people that made
Patch Adams
and may they all drown with Robin Williams. I was like, “Oh lady, come on, you don’t have to beat me up again.” I think these last few movies have changed people’s perception a bit, though.’

He was referring to a trio in which he played a number of very creepy characters indeed. In
One Hour Photo
(2002) he plays a lonely photo-lab technician who becomes obsessed to the point of stalking the Yorkin family, whose pictures he develops.
Death To Smoochy
(2002), the second film, was a dark comedy about a children’s entertainer wreaking horrible revenge on a rival and then there was the massively underrated
Insomnia
(also 2002), in which he starred with Al Pacino. The film was centred around Pacino’s character, a Los Angeles cop sent with his partner to Alaska, who unwittingly kills said partner and gets drawn into a very unhealthy web. Robin was quite superb as a truly fleshcrawling killer who enters into a phone relationship with Pacino, in which he admits his guilt.

The film was both a commercial and critical success, so it cannot be said that Williams received the same kind of brickbats as he had from other films but it should have garnered even more praise than it did. It is entirely possible that his reputation was actively working against him with this one, to the extent that people couldn’t quite believe that he was holding his own against the great Al Pacino – but he was.

Was this a deliberate move on his part, to play monsters after the cloying Patch? ‘Ah yes, the brown period,’ he told
totaldvd.net
. ‘I didn’t consciously go after darker movies, things just kind of happened that way in a weird synchronicity – first
One Hour Photo
, then
Death to Smoochy
, then
Insomnia.
They were so good and so strange, I thought,
I have to do these, especially with these directors attached. I saw [
Insomnia
director Chris Nolan’s]
Memento
with twelve people and they were all like “What was that? I have to get a tattoo now: See Movie Again.”’

Robin was rather enjoying playing villains – and it was certainly casting him against type – but he was all too aware that there was the danger of getting typecast there too. ‘If another nasty character comes along I’ll probably do it, but if I keep on taking these roles it’ll be like, “Oh, I see you’re doing another one of those characters Mr. Williams,”’ he said. ‘I love playing characters like this because you’re no longer bound by the laws of likeability and the audience get a surprise attack. People think “Oh, it’s that nice man, he wouldn’t do anything awful.” And then they realise… He’s a prick!’

He was clearly desperate not to be typecast and it was, perhaps, this that led him to return to stand-up proper. Throughout his career he had continued to perform live at clubs but this was going back to the big time. In 1986 he became the first comedian ever to appear at New York’s Metropolitan Opera House and now he returned to Broadway with a stand-up act that was to be the fourth to be broadcast on HBO – this time live.

As ever, he was alone, totally exposed and on stage for over two hours – a feat that required prodigious amounts of energy, especially to keep up a performance as manic as his. He was met with a rapturous reception: no matter how much people appreciated his performances as an actor, what
they loved best was how he could make them laugh. Really, really laugh. Robin made jokes about everything and anything: President Bush, golf, the Scots, Canada (‘Canada’s like a loft apartment over a really great party’), pandas (‘they anaesthetize a panda, which is kind of redundant’), terrorism, Keith Richards, Afghanistan, intimate piercings, Sir Winston Churchill, giving cigarettes to babies, Michael Jackson claiming racism (‘I’m like, “Honey, you gotta pick a race first.”’), Canadian snowboarding, Donald Rumsfeld, psychics, Coco the gorilla, naughty Catholic priests (he got a few boos for that one), cats, terrorism, boxing, the Swiss, Ted Kennedy, the Oscars, Martha Stewart, Mike Tyson, airport security, Gandhi, Charlton Heston on gun control, turning fifty, Viagra, Osama bin Laden, Genesis (the Bible, not the group) and much, much more.

It was an astonishing performance and one he did not only night after night, through twenty-six sell-out shows, but live on TV too. (There was actually a glitch on that live broadcast. According to the
IMDb
website, ‘At the beginning of this show, the announcer said, “Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Robin Williams!” about five seconds too early. (He was supposed to say it so that the end of the announcement would butt right up against the first drumbeat of the opening music.) It was the only show on the entire tour where that happened.’

The audience was regularly reduced to weeping with laughter and many fans were publicly calling on Williams to return to stand-up and give up the film career. (As if!)
He, meanwhile, was in his element, doing what he had always done best and, when the show came out on DVD, there was another rush of sales. In 2003 it won a Grammy Award for Best Spoken Word Album.

Williams was still the pro he had always been.

But, as ever, sadness lurked in the wings. Christopher Reeve was not getting any better – and never would – and Robin’s mother had died in 2001. Asked what the saddest thing he had ever experienced was, he replied, ‘A double bill. The death of my father and the death of my mother.’ He was then asked what he would, if he could, change about his childhood. ‘Having a brother, not a half-brother,’ he said. That lonely little boy was still very much there, albeit now a man in his fifties.

Robin couldn’t help but dwell on serious issues. When he was gaming or on stage, he didn’t have to deal with reality but, back in the cold light of day, there was an awful lot to feel gloomy about. ‘Just the insane violence all over the world; that makes me cry,’ he told
Autograph
magazine. ‘And it’s unrelenting. I was performing in a club in New York and afterward there was a guy sitting down with an Iranian, a Palestinian and an Israeli, and they all acknowledged that they want peace but they don’t know how to get to it. How do you create a Palestinian homeland when there’s a large amount of Palestinians who want to obliterate Israel? How do you stop this insane cycle that just keeps going on and on?’

Of course, these were questions to which there was
no answer but Robin was asking himself a lot of similar ones. And all the cycling in the world couldn’t blot out his melancholia, to which, ultimately, there would be no cure. Frequently, he said that he’d had enough of playing little boys trapped in an adult man’s body but that, ultimately, is what he truly was.

In 1984 he had taken part in a television show called
Superstars and Their Moms
(check it out on YouTube) and the Robin that comes across there is totally different from the one seen by the outside world. Clearly, he absolutely adores his mother but, unlike in almost any other public exchange he’d had with anyone, it was clear that she was the one in control of the conversation, not him. There was a great deal of banter between the two of them and enormous affection too.

Finally, he had got the parental attention he needed in a big way… But he didn’t have his mother anymore.

In retrospect, it is now quite clear that 2004 was the year that marked the beginning of Williams’ lengthy decline. A once rock-solid marriage was to end, booze and rehab beckoned and an extremely sad end awaited him. But there was no sign of this at the time. However, what is also clear, looking back, is that his character seemed to fragment. By then, he was dividing his time between stand-up and deeply serious films in which he played not just creeps but killers too. He wasn’t making comedies anymore. Nor, when interviewed, was he his usual lively self. If he wasn’t
putting on the fast-talking manic act, he was speaking so slowly he was coming across as catatonically depressed. Robin the clown still appeared occasionally but alongside him was a more serious character, barely able to raise a smile, let alone mock all of the ills of the world. It was a far cry from the days of
Mork & Mindy.

More inferior films followed, including the sci-fi number
The Final Cut
(2004), a sub-Matrix number in which he played an ‘editor’ who edited people’s memories. Williams deliberated on his joint role as serious actor/comedian. ‘It [comedy] gives you a kind of fearlessness, because you know that to go out and do it you have to be ready to put your arse on the line,’ he told the
Sydney Morning Herald
in 2004. ‘Directors say they like working with comics, usually because they’re not afraid to try stuff. They have to [be prepared to] do anything to get the laugh. They are shameless on that level, but also fearless.’ Why no more onscreen comedies though? ‘It’s hard to find a script where you can kick out that hard, and if you do people say: “That’s not the role, you know.”’

Accessing all this darkness from within cannot have been easy. He was changing physically too. Of course, everyone starts to look different as they grow older but Robin appeared to be shrinking. By the time of his death, a decade on, he was about half the size he’d been in his twenties. Never what you might call a snappy dresser, he started to lose interest in his appearance, was often bearded and, while not unkempt as such, certainly seemed to have
made no effort to brush up. Hindsight is a wonderful thing but, looking back over his life, this is when everything began to change.

And the reason was grief. He had been hard hit by the death of his mother three years previously: ‘Marsha and I are both orphans now,’ he said. ‘When my parents died, I never thought they would. My mother was so full of life. The next thing you know, she is a husk. My father too – he almost died and was, like, brought back to life and he said, “Why did you do that?”’ Like so many others of his generation, he was seeing his parents live to extreme old age, with very painful results. And then he lost them; the grief ran deep.

And now came another loss that delivered a body blow. His close friend Christopher Reeve had been working as a director on an animated film,
Everyone’s Hero
(2006), when, in October 2004, he died suddenly and unexpectedly of cardiac arrest. (Almost unimaginably, given they had a young son, his non-smoking wife Dana was to die of lung cancer, just two years later.)

Robin was poleaxed with grief. The death of any friend at any age is a hard cross to bear but this was a particularly tragic end. Reeve was only fifty-two when he died but his physical decline had been a sad one to behold. One of the most handsome actors of his generation, his nine years in a wheelchair had left him a shadow of his former self, almost unrecognisable from the striking Superman. There was no rhyme or reason to be had from any of
it: Christopher was a universally liked figure, generous to a fault and well thought of. To succumb to such a fate seemed beyond cruelty.

‘It’s hard for me to believe he’s gone because he was such a fighter and such a strong personality and soul to begin with,’ Robin said in a 2004 interview with
CBS.
‘People used to come up to me in New York, I remember, the first time after the accident: “Tell your friend he’s amazing!” Guys in the back of a garbage truck: “Tell Chris hello!” Guys yesterday when I was coming in for the ceremony, there were guys standing outside. “My feelings are with you; I’m very sorry about your loss.” Just guys, regular people who were sending out their condolences.’

Life went on, as it has to do, but those words couldn’t even begin to convey the pain he was feeling. As Dana once said, they were more like brothers than friends. They had started out together when they were young and the world lay before them, forming the bond that only comes after decades of shared memories. And this is how it was to end. Life felt exceedingly bleak and all the comedy, all the gaming, all the cycling and the other distractions couldn’t shut out the sadness now engulfing him.

It didn’t help that he was making some pretty terrible and almost immediately forgettable films.
The Big White
(2005) involved a travel agent with a wife with Tourette’s syndrome, who steals a corpse and pretends it’s his long-lost brother. Not exactly
Citizen Kane.
But behind the scenes, and despite whatever misery he might have been
feeling, were acts of sheer kindness, not just to the likes of the much-lamented Reeve. In 2004 it was revealed that he had taken the trouble to telephone a dying English Literature teacher called Tim Pechey, whom he had never met but who was a very big fan of Robin’s and especially
Dead Poets Society.
They first spoke for thirty minutes on the phone; Robin rang again and also sent him video clips.

Williams clearly made a habit of this. In 2014, shortly after his death, it emerged that, just a few weeks previously, he had made a video for a terminally ill twenty-one-year-old girl called Vivian Waller from Auckland, New Zealand. The video showed Robin blowing her a kiss and saying, ‘Hey, girl, what’s going down in New Zealand?’ He even sang to her. It was way beyond what could be expected of anyone and this just before he finally became overwhelmed by his own problems.

He kept up his charity work for the armed forces too. In December 2004, just two months after Christopher’s death, Robin was back in Afghanistan: an experience he related to the
San Francisco Chronicle.
‘Some of the shows in Iraq were indoors,’ he explained. ‘A lot were outdoors. It’s weird when you’re doing the shows, like in Iraq we do these shows and everyone’s in full camo (camouflage) and we’re not – so it’s kinda like, “Woooow!” It’s weird to see all these different camouflages because in the coalition troops, the coalition of the willing, there’s all types of camo. The Australians come with somewhat desert camo, we have desert camo and some guys come straight deployment and they have full green,
which I’m going: “Doesn’t work here. Nice desert.” And then the Air Force has this new blue camouflage. Unless you’re up against the sky, what is this s––? Blue, like big time. Even gay people are going, “Like: no. Quail egg, what is it? It’s teal, it’s teal and white, it’s so fabulous!” The shows, we would perform to 2,000 to 3,000 in some places… by the end, it got to be a good rhythm.’

And he was well aware that he was following on a tradition started by Bob Hope during the Second World War. ‘Oh, yeah, like a traditional Bob Hope show, kind of, except blue,’ he said. ‘You know, Bob Hope with a strap-on. The general [chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Richard B. Myers] opened the show. He was like the hardcore. He sets the tone just to say, hey, thank you. He’s very personal because he gets out and meets everyone. In the first year, we went with him. The first year we went alone. It was just USO shows, just me. We did the shows and most times we’d stay in the bases overnight. Like in Afghanistan, we’d stayed. Bagram, Kandahar, Jacobabad [Pakistan] and then a base in Afghanistan. You’d go visit all the bases. When you go with the general, it’s in and out. The first time it was just me. Last year it was with the general again, which was fun. You travel on his nickel and you get in and get out. No waiting.’

When he was fifty-three, Robin was awarded a Golden Globe Lifetime Achievement Award, quite possibly a little early, and gave voice to Fender in an animated film called
Robots
(2005). Boasting a cast that included Ewan
McGregor, Halle Berry, Greg Kinnear and Mel Brooks, it was a step up, garnering good reviews and commercial success. This was his first animated film since
Aladdin
and it was a positive experience. As with the earlier film, he ad-libbed, this time around producing over thirty hours of tape, although much of it couldn’t be used on the grounds that the material was too blue. ‘I guess I got too adult,’ he confessed. ‘I can’t help it. I feel inspired and words just roll off my tongue.’

In the background, however, another huge problem was beginning to re-emerge: during the making of
The Big White
he had fallen off the wagon. For some years now, he’d been drinking again and now it was really starting to take its toll. ‘I was in a small town where it’s not the edge of the world, but you can see it from there, and then I thought: drinking,’ he told the
Guardian
. ‘I just thought, hey, maybe drinking will help. Because I felt alone and afraid. It was that thing of working so much, and going fuck, maybe that will help. And it was the worst thing in the world.

‘You feel warm and kind of wonderful. And then the next thing you know, it’s a problem, and you’re isolated.’

There it was again, that vulnerability coming out: he felt alone and afraid. What did Williams have to be afraid of? Still a massive star, he could sell out mega-venues and was a big enough name to get a film going on the strength of his involvement alone. Plus he had a secure family unit in the background. But the little boy was still there and it seemed his problems were not going to go away.

In actual fact, what really started the initial relapse were concerns about his career. He could scarcely ignore the fact that his films were getting terrible reviews, with a lot of them not doing well at the box office either. Hollywood could forgive any amount of sentimentality but it would not accept failure and that was what he was really beginning to fear. It had happened to countless others, after all. Yet another of the stresses about being an A-lister is that, when you reach the top, there’s an awfully long way to fall down. Nor is there any lack of detractors happy to kick you as you do so.

‘
The Big White
,’ Williams recalled of the film that had him raiding the mini-bars again. ‘It was shot in Skagway [Alaska], this tiny town. It’s not the end of the world, but you can see it from there. The movie was interesting, but I was worried. My film career was not going too well. One day I walked into a store and saw a little bottle of Jack Daniel’s. And then that voice – I call it the “lower power” – goes, “Hey. Just a taste. Just one.” I drank it, and there was that brief moment of “Oh, I’m okay!” But it escalated so quickly. Within a week, I was buying so many bottles I sounded like a wind chime walking down the street. I knew it was really bad one Thanksgiving when I was so drunk they had to take me upstairs.’

He denied that Christopher Reeve’s death made it a lot worse but then we cannot always tell why we act as we do. ‘No,’ he told the
Guardian
when that was put to him, ‘it’s more selfish than that. It’s just literally being afraid. And
you think, oh, this will ease the fear. And it doesn’t.’ What caused the fear? ‘Everything. It’s just a general all-round arggghhh. It’s fearfulness and anxiety.’

According to him, he realised almost immediately that this wasn’t going to be pretty, although he carried on for another three years. ‘For that first week you lie to yourself, and tell yourself you can stop, and then your body kicks back and says no, stop later. And then it took about three years, and finally you do stop. Most of the time you just realise you’ve started to do embarrassing things.’ He recalled drinking at a charity auction hosted by Sharon Stone at Cannes: ‘And I realised I was pretty baked, and I look out and I see all of a sudden a wall of paparazzi. And I go, “Oh well, I guess it’s out now”.’

At least he stayed off the coke. ‘I knew that would kill me,’ he continued. ‘No. Cocaine – paranoid and impotent, what fun! There was no bit of me thinking, ooh, let’s go back to that. Useless conversations until midnight, waking up at dawn feeling like a vampire on a day pass. No.’

But the drink was doing for him. Williams favoured vodka – many an alcoholic’s choice – and started having blackouts, unable to remember what he had said or done the next day.

By 2006 his life was in upheaval and his marriage in serious trouble. ‘You know, I was shameful, and you do stuff that causes disgust, and that’s hard to recover from,’ he admitted later. ‘You can say, “I forgive you” and all that stuff, but it’s not the same as recovering from it. It’s not
coming back.’ Under pressure from his family, he checked into rehab, specifically Oregon’s Hazelden Springbrook treatment centre, where he stayed for two months, drying out. He had also been unnerved by what had happened to Mel Gibson, another actor who spent decades fighting alcohol problems and who had just been arrested for driving under the influence – naturally, he was concerned a similar thing could happen to him. Locals who saw him during his stay reported that he appeared very subdued and haggard. He was clearly in a bad way.

In fact, he was worse than he himself had realised. ‘Williams originally entered a 30-day treatment programme,’ a source told the
Sun
. ‘But after the initial 30 days were up, he realised that he needed another 30 days of inpatient treatment to get his life under control. During the last 30 days, he lived in a house near the rehab centre specifically set up for after-care patients. He was still required to attend daily AA meetings and appointments with his counsellors.’ After he left, he did not return to the family home but rather rented an apartment in Los Angeles. ‘Instead of going home to his wife and two teenage children in Napa Valley, he’s moved to Los Angeles, where he’s renting an apartment and living with a “sober companion”,’ said the source. ‘Williams hired the companion to watch over him 24 hours a day and ensure he doesn’t fall off the wagon.’ At that stage he was still hoping he could rescue his relationship with Marsha but it was not to be.