Robin Williams - When the Laughter Stops 1951-2014 (8 page)

And some just couldn’t get on with the film. ‘What are
we to think of these people and the events in their lives?’ asked the rather more skeptical Roger Ebert in the
Chicago Sun-Times.
‘I thought the acting was unconventional and absorbing (especially by Williams, by Glenn Close as his mother, and by John Lithgow as a transsexual). I thought the visualization of the events, by director George Roy Hill, was fresh and consistently interesting. But when the movie was over, my immediate response was not at all what it should have been. All I could find to ask myself was: What the hell was that all about?’

Pauline Kael was none too happy either: ‘There’s no feeling of truth in either the book or the movie,’ she declared, and the ‘generally faithful adaptation seems no more (and no less) than a castration fantasy.’

Whatever people thought about it, however, it had made the point that Robin Williams could act. Some, including the film critic Roger Ebert, were to maintain the view that he was essentially a comedian rather than an actor but, from now on, it was clear that his talents ran far deeper than anyone had realised up until then. And it was good timing too:
Mork & Mindy
had just come to a close and now it was time to get on with life’s next act.

But three months before the movie came out something happened that was to have a profound effect on Williams’ life. In March 1982, aged just thirty-three, his close friend and fellow actor and comic John Belushi died of a drug overdose, after consuming a speedball (a mixture of cocaine and heroin). He was found dead in his room
at the Chateau Marmont on Sunset Boulevard. In the early hours on the day of his death he was visited both by Williams and fellow actor Robert De Niro. It was a terrible shock for all concerned.

Like Williams, Belushi was one of Hollywood’s rising stars. He, too, had made his name on television – in his case
Saturday Night Live
– and, like Williams, he was a staggeringly talented comic performer, now probably best remembered for his role in
The Blues Brothers
(1980), with his great friend Dan Aykroyd, who penned the role of Dr. Peter Venkman in
Ghostbusters
(1984) with him in mind (the part later went to Bill Murray). Like Williams, his ascent was meteoric and he, too, was beginning to learn what a shark pool Hollywood can be. The day before his death, Paramount Pictures had been pressurising him to appear in
National Lampoon’s The Joy Of Sex
(1984), something Aykroyd very much advised against, saying they were just using Belushi’s involvement to get the picture made: ‘Oh, don’t do that piece, are you kidding me?’ he told his friend. ‘Get out, get away! Come home, it’s the spring, something will happen over the summer or fall.’ That something would almost certainly have been
Ghostbusters
but it was not to be.

Despite this encouragement, Belushi agreed to do the film. Perhaps it was his innate disgust at the project or maybe it was just that his drug use was now hopelessly out of control but he spent his last night with another notorious drug user, Catherine Evelyn Smith, a former back-up
singer for The Band, among others, veering between The Roxy theatre and the Chateau Marmont, with Smith repeatedly injecting him with heroin. The next morning he was found dead in his bed. Smith was later arrested and charged with first-degree murder; she eventually plea bargained this down to manslaughter and served eighteen months’ imprisonment.

Williams had been there earlier, snorting several lines of coke, but it seemed he was repulsed by Smith, whom he found ‘creepy’. Somewhat unfortunately, it has been said that he left that night with the words, ‘If you ever get up again, call me.’ Though meant to be a throwaway line, it was frighteningly prescient. Although he was in no way to blame, Robin was to suffer enormous guilt in the wake of that night, although, in truth, by that stage it was unlikely that anyone could have saved John. His friend and co-performer Penny Marshall (who directed Robin in
Awakenings
, 1990) revealed decades later that John was absolutely incapable of resisting any kind of temptation, with inevitable and sad results. ‘I swear, you’d walk down the street with him, and people would hand him drugs. And then he’d do all of them – be the kind of character he played in sketches or
Animal House
,’ she told
The Hollywood Reporter
over thirty years after his death. ‘I love him, and I miss him, and I wish he hadn’t gotten in with the people he was around. But in the ’70s and ’80s, people were crazy.’

John Belushi’s early death was a terrible shock to Hollywood and the wider world. His widow, Judy, who
had been his childhood sweetheart, was beside herself. Close associates knew Belushi to be an addict but, even so, he had such a promising future ahead of him that no one could quite believe what had happened.

‘What can I say? John was excessively talented, and I guess you could say he sort of lived life “excessively,”’ said the music producer Bruce Robb, who had worked with him in the past and was also a close associate of Dan Aykroyd. ‘I think what happened to John had a sobering effect on a lot of people, me included.’

And it had a shattering effect on Robin, for John had been a good friend. He had seen him only hours before he died and there were too many parallels between the two of them not to be concerned that the same thing might happen to him. Then again, it must be said that his own drug taking was not on a level with John’s. ‘It was a strange thing because my managers sent me to this doctor because they said I had this cocaine problem,’ he told the
Los Angeles Times
in 1991. ‘He said, “How much do you do?” And I said, “A gram every couple of days,” and he said, “You don’t have a problem.” That was before they’d started to acknowledge it was psychologically addicting. And then at a certain point you realize, maybe it is. Physically I’m not craving it, but mentally I’m really thinking it might be a good idea.’

He was certainly doing enough to realise his habit was in danger of spiralling out of control and he was drinking heavily too. It was one of those pivotal moments in a
person’s life when things can go either way. Like Belushi, Williams was a young man who had burst onto the scene and had a huge future ahead of him. He could choose to embrace that future or he could give in to the dark side, with all the risks that entailed.

There were other reasons for going sober as well. Robin and Valerie were giving their marriage another go, so much so that, a few months after John’s death, Valerie became pregnant with Robin’s first child. Robin might have been wild and reckless at that stage but he was not foolish, and to introduce a baby into the kind of lifestyle he was experiencing was simply not on. He knew he had to stop and so he did. At that stage, he did not go into rehab, as he was to do in later life but, through sheer willpower, he gave everything up, going cold turkey. For decades afterwards he was clean.

‘The Belushi tragedy was frightening,’ he told
People
many years later. ‘His death scared a whole group of show business people. It caused a big exodus from drugs. And for me, there was the baby coming. I knew I couldn’t be a father and live that sort of life.’

It seemed a new chapter was opening and, to a certain extent, it was. Robin was just at the start of an extraordinarily successful film career, he had cleaned up his act and he and Valerie had a baby on the way. But he was never quite able to rid himself of his demons. Although his marriage was back on track, he would soon find himself immersed in an affair that resulted in a spectacularly embarrassing court
case, making headlines for all the wrong reasons and, despite the fact that he and Valerie worked at it, their marriage was not to last.

In one of life’s great ironies, Robin Williams, who brought so much joy and laughter to those around him and who was to become such a great entertainer, was never able to make peace with himself.

London, England. It was the early 1980s and one of Hollywood’s hottest new stars was in town. He decided that he’d like to do a gig in the UK and so he asked a taxi driver to take him to a comedy club. The taxi driver took him to The Comedy Store, where regulars Alexei Sayle and Andy de la Tour agreed to Robin Williams’ request that he should play a set, so they sent him on first to warm up the audience before the real pros did their bit. It was a performance no one present would ever forget. He was set to do fifteen minutes but it didn’t quite work out like that.

‘Forty minutes later Robin Williams walked off the
stage,’ de la Tour recalled in his book
Stand-Up or Die
. ‘The audience was a spent force. They were laughed out. They weren’t going to laugh at anyone else probably for a year. They were draped over the chairs in a state of total exhaustion. Williams had given us a comic exhibition of such energy and imagination that “tour de force” doesn’t come close.’

British audiences, it seemed, loved him just as much as those across the Atlantic. Already he had won a Grammy for his 1979 live show at the Copacabana in New York,
Reality… What A Concept
(the self-same album that Mindy was holding when she and Mork met Robin). Alongside his growing film career, he continued to make wildly popular television specials:
Off The Wall
(1978),
An Evening With Robin Williams
(1982) and
Robin Williams: Live At The
Met
(1986). He was fast becoming a chat-show regular too, first appearing with David Letterman, where he put in another manic performance after becoming famous as Mork, and then with Johnny Carson. In total, he was to appear fifty times on
The Late Show with David Letterman
and the presenter was to become a friend for forty years. Letterman first saw Robin at the LA Comedy Store and remembers thinking, ‘They’re gonna have to put an end to show business because what can happen after this? He came in like a hurricane,’ adding that he thought to himself, ‘Holy crap, there goes my career in show business.’ (In the event, he did OK for himself!)

But he was still intent on building up that film career,
now appearing in another disappointment,
The Survivors,
alongside Walter Matthau in 1983. ‘With his new social-message comedy,
The Survivors,
starring Robin Williams and Walter Matthau, Michael Ritchie has returned to slipping whoopee cushions beneath the bottoms of smug gurus. Rude noises ensue, but the laughs are thin and scattered,’ wrote James Wolcott in
Texas Monthly.
The major film success that he craved still wasn’t here.

In 1983 Robin’s first child, Zachary Pym ‘Zak’ Williams, was born. Another film followed shortly afterwards:
Moscow on the Hudson
(1984), about a Russian musician who defects to New York. It wasn’t a massive hit but it did garner some positive reviews and added to the growing perception that Robin Williams was an actor to be reckoned with.

‘Halfway through
The World According to Garp,
I began to think Robin Williams might need weights in his shoes to keep from floating in the air – he was that insubstantial,’ wrote David Denby in
New York Magazine
in a highly positive review. ‘But this time Williams is securely grounded; he has a real character to play, and he’s extraordinarily touching. Bearded, and hairy as a Russian bear, he’s a small, nearly innocuous figure in the Moscow scenes, clutching himself against the cold, grimacing at the sight of a three-hour waiting line for toilet paper.’

Newly sober, Williams was now a family man with a young son. He was heavily into cycling, which was to prove a life-long passion, in an effort to stay clean; just the latest sport that Robin became interested in. Previously a
runner, the exercise was beginning to take its toll on his body and so he found cycling more congenial. He managed to stay sober for the best part of two decades before there was a relapse. Even so, those demons were never going to leave him alone for long. Just as he appeared to be calming down, there was yet another crisis in his private life, again centring on a woman but this time one who would end up taking him to court. Robin met Michelle Tish Carter, a cocktail waitress (just as Valerie had been when he met her), when he was performing at an LA comedy club called Improv. The two began an affair but this one lasted a little longer than some of the others before it went spectacularly off the rails.

In 1986 Michelle sued Robin for $6.2 million, alleging he had given her herpes without telling her he was infected with the virus. It was an ugly and embarrassing case, something Williams’ lawyers dubbed ‘Financial Attraction’ (
Fatal Attraction
, another tale of an initial encounter that goes spectacularly badly wrong, had recently come out) and one that reflected badly on all the parties concerned. The case was eventually settled out of court, with Robin never admitting nor denying that he had the virus. Two years later, he and Valerie finally divorced, although there was another scandal attached to that too.

The nature of this trial was by no means unique at the time. This was the 1980s, when herpes and AIDS dominated the news agenda and an awful lot of sexually active adults were terrified of both. Debates had started
about how much information you should give your new sexual partner and both Robin and Michelle were forced to admit publicly that neither had asked the other whether they had a communicable sexual disease. Philip Ryan, Robin’s lawyer, argued that being the case, a person who doesn’t ask and doesn’t insist on condoms should be assumed to have taken the risk. Otherwise, he said, these cases will ‘create a judicial ménage à trois’ and open the courthouse ‘to any forlorn lover whose affair has come to an unexpected end’.

Robin himself maintained a dignified silence on the subject of the virus but he couldn’t resist hinting at recent turmoil in his act. ‘And as we all know, there’s THAT OTHER THING out there,’ he told one audience. ‘Which means we all have to use a little – condom sense. You know what a condom is? The bathing cap of love!’ (Laugh.) ‘A prophylactic, from the Latin
prophylactorum
, which means: strange party favours. I know you hate to put it on. In the heat of passion, you don’t want to say, “Let’s stop and put on a balloon.”’ The piece got a huge laugh.

It might be asked why, given that he publicly acknowledged a certain neediness and based his entire career around the concept of the phrase ‘love me’, Robin behaved so badly towards a wife who, indeed, loved him and who had now given him a son. But there is no straightforward answer to this. All that can be said is Williams was not stable – not even then, when he had given up drink and drugs. It was his manic side that fuelled his comedy but it was that same
side that made him incapable of finding peace. While even his greatest fans would find it hard to excuse his behaviour, the problem was that the damage had already gone too deep. The man who craved love was hurting the woman who was supplying it – and very publicly too.

As divorce became inevitable, the work continued, this time with an adaptation of Saul Bellow’s novel
Seize the Day
(1986). Again, it did perfectly well but failed to set the world on fire. ‘Robin Williams is for the most part up to it,’ wrote John Leonard in
New York Magazine.
‘His nervous comic energy reverses itself; looking inward, it corrodes instead of tickling. He is all pain, no smirk, eating his cigarettes, popping his pills. It is a claustrophobic performance, as it should be. We are crowded by his helplessness and hopelessness. And what, exactly, are his sins? Disappointing his father? Changing his name? Going to Hollywood? Wanting love? Not belonging? It is perhaps no wonder that Williams can’t manage a cry that reconciles us to the thought of death.’

In 1985 Robin co-hosted the first Comic Relief in the States with Whoopi Goldberg and Billy Crystal – a charity to help the homeless which was based on the UK model and went on to raise upwards of $50 million – and in 1987 he went into therapy (‘open-heart surgery in installments,’ he quipped) and it was this that he credited with finally giving him the success he so craved. No one could have predicted it in advance – a movie about a disc jockey in a war zone? – but his considerable comedic powers, both
as an actor and a stand-up, all came into play with
Good Morning, Vietnam
(1987).

Loosely based on the experiences of AFRS radio DJ Adrian Cronauer, the plot – as with the initial series of
Mork & Mindy
– could have been spun with Robin in mind for it played perfectly to his particular gifts. It involved Cronauer arriving in Saigon in 1965 to work for the Armed Forces Radio Service. His irreverent attitude quickly begins to annoy his superiors, including Sergeant Major Philip Dickerson (J.T. Walsh). However, others like him and his show, a mixture of humour and rock ’n’ roll. As with
Mork & Mindy,
Williams was positively encouraged to improvise.

Cronauer meets Trinh (Chintara Sukapatana), a young Vietnamese girl, and follows her to an English language class, which he takes over. He then befriends her brother Tuan, whom he takes to a GI bar. A brawl ensues. Cronauer is reprimanded but business continues as usual until Tuan pulls him out of a bar minutes before it is destroyed by a bomb, something Cronauer reports despite orders not to. He is suspended but his replacement is a poor substitute. Cronauer continues to pursue Trinh and is finally and reluctantly persuaded to return to work after a convoy of soldiers convinces him to do an impromptu ‘broadcast’ for them before they go off to fight. Cronauer is sent out into the field and forced to hide in the jungle from the Vietcong; Tuan again finds him and rescues him once more. He is then unmasked as a member of the VC, which means Cronauer must leave with an honourable discharge
if he goes quietly; the vindictive Dickerson is then also transferred away. Cronauer leaves and his place is taken by Garlick (Forest Whitaker).

The film was an absolute smash hit. Robin was awarded a Golden Globe for his performance and nominated for an Oscar (he didn’t get it but he didn’t have to wait for long), a Bafta and a Sant Jordi Award in Barcelona for Best Foreign Actor. The film itself and various members of the crew went on to win other awards. What’s more, the critics loved it: ‘Make no mistake about it: Mr. Williams’s performance, though it’s full of uproarious comedy, is the work of an accomplished actor.
Good Morning, Vietnam
is one man’s tour de force,’ wrote Vincent Canby in
The New York Times.
TIME Magazine
called it ‘the best military comedy since M*A*S*H’. ‘From the start, the film bowls you over with excitement and for those who can latch on, it’s a nonstop ride,’ declared
Variety
. ‘The perfect showcase for Robin Williams and his peerless abilities as a comic performer,’ said Stephen Carty in
Flix Capacitor.

Other reviews were more fulsome still. ‘Levinson’s seriocomedy about Vietnam is first and foremost a star vehicle for comedian Robin Williams, who gives a manic, highly charged performance as the real-life DJ Adrian Cronauer in the early years of the War,’ said the American film critic and professor Emanuel Levy. ‘Offering only hackneyed insights into the war, the film makes for stodgy drama. But Williams’ manic monologues behind the mike are worth anybody’s money,’ wrote Geoff Andrew in
Time Out. ‘Good
Morning, Vietnam
proved that Robin Williams could act and be hilariously funny in the same film,’ said James Plath in
Movie Metropolis.
And so it went on.

Somewhat ironically, given how much he wanted to be taken seriously as an actor, Williams himself admitted that the film was so successful because he was essentially playing himself. ‘Until this role, the acting and the comedy have been pretty much separate on screen,’ he told
The New York Times
in 1988. ‘Barry [Levinson, the director] would say, “You don’t have to be funny here.” In the past I used to think, “I’ll push it, I’ll make it funnier.”’

And he was certain that the therapy had helped him make the breakthrough. ‘It allowed me to show more vulnerability, and I think the camera can catch that. I think therapy has helped me to bring out a deeper level of comedy,’ he revealed. ‘[Success] moves you up in the food chain. It’s like life in the Precambrian sea. There is a food chain of scripts, and success can give you access to better scripts.’

It was all the better, he said, as ‘It’s a hard movie to categorize. I mean, how do you describe the funny and the serious elements? It’s a dramedy. But no! It’s a midget comedy! No! It’s a tragic farce – no! It’s a black comedy – no! Well, what is it?’

He was pleased that Vietnam veterans liked it too. ‘No one has said, “Hey, I was there in ’65 and you weren’t, and you can’t do that movie.” There’s still so much ambivalence about the war because we are a country oriented toward victory, toward winning, and we weren’t victorious… My
draft number was 351, and they stopped taking people at 120. I was one lucky little white boy! I mean, with my draft number, it meant that you’d fight the V.C. when they came east on Mulholland Drive.’

‘I probably would have joined up,’ he added. ‘My father was in the Navy and my brother was in the Air Force.’

Finally, he had the success he craved. To this day,
Good Morning, Vietnam
is considered one of the high points in his career.

In 1988 Robin and Valerie finally divorced. Exact details of the settlement are not known, but it is thought that she was awarded $50,000 a month for life (Williams was becoming an exceedingly rich man) and a one-off payment of more than $518,000 from a profit-sharing plan he had taken out. But there, too, the circumstances were extremely messy. ‘Sure I’m happy about the movie,’ he told
People
. ‘But right now I’m moving through my personal life like a hemophiliac in a razor factory.’ He wasn’t kidding: this had been building for some time.