Robin Williams - When the Laughter Stops 1951-2014 (12 page)

Some of the film was shot in Marin County, near Williams’ home and so at least he was able to return to his family every night, which kept some of the demons at bay. ‘It deals with such emotionally intense issues, I didn’t know if I’d want to do this for four or five months, be near this kind of dark pain and loss that are at the core of it,’ he told
CNN.
‘But as we kept doing it, I thought, “Well, it’s certainly interesting.” And it makes you look at your own life and how you live your life – but that’s a side effect of being near this kind of intense emotion.’

When he wasn’t having to access inner turmoil, however,
Robin was fairly happy, not least because, finally, he now had an Oscar in the bag. ‘It’s nice to have, like Bertolt Brecht said, a passport to go anywhere,’ he admitted to
CNN.
‘It’s nice to have that option, to have that kind of opportunity where people say, “You can try this, because you’ve proven you can do a character, a full-out character, a character who has this emotional range.” That allows you just more opportunities to have the comedic, which is wonderful, and to have these dramatic roles. It just gives you a larger range, a bigger field to play on.’

However, it had been obvious for some time now that Williams was as much a serious actor as he was a comedian – ‘I go both ways’ – and his output continued to be phenomenal. There was a turn in a somewhat sour Woody Allen number,
Deconstructing Harry
(1997), a return to clowning in
Flubber
(1997), in which he played an absent-minded professor and another serious bout in
Jakob the Liar
(1999), about Polish Jews in World War II (Robin himself was frequently and mistakenly assumed to be Jewish).

Marsha remained heavily involved in every aspect of his life and this is one of the films she worked particularly closely on. Jakob was a former restaurant owner living in a Polish ghetto; his neighbours mistakenly believe he has a radio and Jakob starts to give them hope by pretending to hear news flashes. Eventually, the Nazis hear about this inmate with a radio and go after him. The film ends tragically, as it was bound to do given the tale
it told. Written and directed by the Hungarian filmmaker Peter Kassovitz, it was originally intended to be a French production but the sensitivity of the subject matter put the French producers off.

‘I then decided to rewrite the screenplay in English and tailor it for Robin Williams,’ Kassovitz told the
Calgary Sun
in an interview that made it clear that the actor was more reliant on Marsha than ever. ‘You can’t go directly to Robin. You have to go through agents and lawyers to get to Marsha and then she decides if Robin gets to see the material. Robin relies a great deal on Marsha and she has a great deal of power because she has Robin and people want him in their movies.’

‘I met with Peter after I read the script and we worked on it for about a year before I gave it to Robin. This is not a unique situation,’ said Marsha in 1999 to the
Calgary Sun.
‘I worked on
Mrs. Doubtfire
for a year before Robin ever saw the script. I look for characters I don’t think he has done before. Much of what producers and writers want Robin to do is stuff he’s already done. [I treat him] like any other actor. I wouldn’t think of giving an actor a screenplay until it was pretty much at production level.’

As for Robin, he was perfectly happy with this arrangement, realising that he could rely on his wife and that, unlike so many of the Hollywood players he encountered, she would give him her honest opinion. ‘She is the only person who is brutally honest with me,’ he said. ‘Most people would prefer to tell me what they think I want to
hear. Not Marsha. She refuses to let me recycle old schtick just because it works. It’s vital to have someone who is determined to see that I grow as an actor.’

Looking back at their obvious closeness at that stage and how well they worked as a team, the couple’s subsequent divorce seems all the more tragic. But for all that Robin was at that point holding it together, staying away from the drugs and the booze and getting into cycling, he was alas to go seriously off the rails once more.

Next, however, in what it must be said some people considered the nadir of his career, there was
Patch Adams
(1998), which was about the last film to help him grow as an actor. It is obvious, in retrospect, why the project might have seemed like a good idea at the time: it was based on the true story of Dr Hunter ‘Patch’ Adams, a doctor with some very unconventional views about how to treat patients. It was set in the 1990s, when Patch was nearly expelled from Virginia Medical School for ‘excessive happiness’. Unfortunately, to the impartial observer, this reveals the film’s weaknesses at a glance.

Patch believes that humour should be used to treat patients but that humour includes dressing up as a clown and setting up a giant pair of legs at an obstetrics conference and, while people can be good at being a doctor or good at being a clown, not many of them embrace both these fields. Humour can be tasteless and, alas, not even funny.

The critics hated it and so, too, did the original Patch
Adams, who not only attacked the film but also slammed Williams, although he later withdrew some of his remarks. But star power is star power. The movie still made over $200 million worldwide, with various Oscar and Golden Globe nominations (none of them won).

But no one involved saw the critical reaction coming, least of all Robin, who gave his usual series of cheerful interviews to publicise the film. ‘His critics call him a modern Don Quixote who’s deluded, but Patch is not chasing windmills,’ he told the
Calgary Sun.
‘He’s committed, dedicated and intelligent and he does everything possible to help his patients.’

In one scene, the doctor entertained cancer patients: ‘Most of the children in that scene really are cancer patients,’ revealed Robin. ‘They got their roles in the movie through the Make-A-Wish Foundation. Their reactions are spontaneous. It’s not acting.’ He also met the real Patch, adding, ‘We became instant friends. He made me laugh so much it hurt. He’s an outrageous guy, an absolute born clown.’ It must have hurt him a great deal when his new friend was extremely critical of him after the film’s release. But that’s showbiz, them’s the breaks.

In another interview, this time with the
Toronto Sun,
Robin actually, without realising it, put his finger on another of the trouble points in the movie. ‘We do Patch’s time in medical school,’ he said. ‘It’s kind of like the beginning of this outrageous character. Patch was very uplifting. We try to show that. But we also show that he could be irritating,
too, with his desire to always challenge the system.’ There is, of course, a danger in portraying someone irritating onscreen – it can come across as irritating.

Williams was now facing another problem: fans, especially those from the early days, were beginning to complain that they wanted him to be funny again in the way he used to be. In fact, he never stopped being funny – the ongoing appearances in comedy clubs confirmed that, as did his frequent appearances on talk shows, where he seemed to think it was his duty to have people almost weeping with laughter from the moment he went on. But Robin was the clown who wanted to play Hamlet – more than that, he was the clown who could play Hamlet, or Osric, at least. And this was something that he would never entirely resolve: comedian or serious actor? And why couldn’t people accept he was both?

‘People just want to be entertained,’ he told one interviewer. ‘They see you do something wonderful and they want you to do it again… and again… and again… until they get tired of it and want somebody else. That’s the danger. If you do it again and again and again, they’ll finally go, “Harrumph! Seen that!” But that’s what you wanted! “Used to…” And you’re dead.’

One particular incident with a fan seems to have upset him. ‘It’s the woman coming up to me in the airport and going: “Be zany! Be zany!” What? She wants me to be wild. So you have to keep re-inventing yourself like Madonna. This year is her Indian year. Last year was the Valkyrie year.
Two years ago it was the Edsel-tit year. What do you do? You change yourself.

‘I’ve been freed because films such as
Dead Poets Society
or
Awakenings
or
The Fisher King
or
Good Will Hunting
have been successful. And it isn’t just the Academy Award. That perception started a while ago. I re-invented myself from comedy to do drama. You keep changing. So it’s just another colour you get to paint with.’

But the frustration was palpable. Robin could see that he could veer between the two different disciplines, so why couldn’t anyone else see the same?

When you break free of one addiction, usually you end up with another. That’s the received wisdom and it tends to be right. That had happened to Robin: when he gave up drink and drugs in the early 1980s, he took up cycling and, in a hilly area like San Francisco, he had the perfect landscape in which to become as good as any pro. And so he was. He built up a large cycle collection and anyone who cycled with him quickly came to see that this was not a man to be trifled with. Besides, it was good for him: physical exercise helps anyone with depression and the more he cycled, the better he felt.

He was friends with the cyclist Lance Armstrong (this was before the disgraceful revelations about Armstrong’s drug-taking) and would cross the Atlantic to see him in the Tour de France. ‘I love it over there,’ he told
Sports Illustrated
in 2003. ‘I love to watch his teammates, the domestiques. These guys go flat-out for whatever Lance needs – food, water, pull him up a hill, radio’s broken, whatever. They’re all hunched over on their bikes, bringing him things. It’s like, “Quasimodo is Gunga Din!” The coach says, “Hey, would you mind coming back to the van and getting a water for Lance?” And the guy has to drop all the way back, get the water, bust his hump all the way back to the front and hand him the water. And then Lance goes, “This one’s too warm.” Turns out domestique is French for slave!’

He also cherished his bike collection. ‘You can get them for six or $7,000,’ he told
Autograph
magazine. ‘They’re cheaper than Maseratis and easier to store. They’re all hanging in the garage. I love riding them. A lot of them are hand-made sculptures, really. Most of them are made by craftsmen.’

Tony Tom was the owner of a San Francisco bicycle store and Robin’s biking partner. ‘He just loved cycling – it was his outlet,’ Tony told
Nightline
in an emotional interview after Williams’ death, during which he was clearly on the edge of tears. ‘He came [to the shop] shortly after John Belushi passed away from a drug overdose. He needed some kind of an outlet and said, “I’ll tell ya – cycling saved my life.” And he said, “Biking is a whole lot better for you
than cocaine.” He just loved cycling. [The area around San Francisco] to him was his backyard, so to speak, he loved getting out.

‘I’d see him probably once a week when he was around. He was a very avid rider and a very proficient rider. And he was always cordial. I can’t remember him refusing ever to sign an autograph, or not talking to anyone who just walked up to him. He’d always respond. He was incredibly gracious and very giving. He was a really good man. We’re all going to miss him and I think we should cherish the gifts that he’s left us, all those performances, all those movies. There’s never going to be another guy like that.’

Indeed not. But Williams had developed another addiction too: one that was nothing like as good for him and, in all probability, actually the opposite. It had been known that he was a keen gamer – both Zelda and his son Cody had been named after video games, the latter after Final Fight – but it wasn’t until the early years of the twenty-first century that anyone outside of his close circle of intimates knew just how far it really went.

Not that Robin was trying to hide it: he was quite open about his pastime. In fact, he was something of an Internet junkie, not just gaming but venturing into chat rooms (not necessarily revealing his identity, although rumours that he sometimes posed as a six-year-old girl called Samantha were not true) and having fun online.

‘I’m not afraid of it, I’m actually kind of addicted to it,’ he admitted in an interview with
Zap2it
in the early
noughties, that is, before widespread Wi-Fi. Indeed, his computer had become his regular travelling companion, which, while standard today, was less so in the days before smartphones and iPads. It tended mainly to be people travelling on businesses who took their computers everywhere. ‘When I find out a hotel doesn’t have a DSL [digital subscriber loop], it’s like “What? There’s no toilet?” Once you get used to high speed you ain’t going back,’ he declared. ‘Once you’ve had DSL, you don’t go back. I play games, I’m not going to lie about it, and when you play online against someone else, it’s the best. Especially when you’re playing against a 12-year-old kid who’s been playing the game for a year and knows all the secrets. I’m fascinated by military games.’

Did he look at his own fan sites? ‘That’s like bobbing for razors, that’s really bad news because you’ll find great things and horrible things. I did it once,’ he revealed. ‘You’ll find people who love what you’re doing and people who despise what you’re doing. That’s the Web, that’s the gamut of all personalities.’ Of course, this was before Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and trolling; a period when the full range of opportunities offered by the Internet were still unknown.

But Robin did love his games. He was an aficionado of First Person Shooter, Half-Life and War Craft 3: ‘There are a million games and there are mods with these games,’ he said, displaying some in-depth knowledge of the area. ‘The mods are taking these games and basically redesigning
it and doing it on their own thing. There’s a game called Half-Life and these guys made up a total different take on it using the engine to make a World War II engine called Day of Defeat with Germans and Americans doing kind of like a Normandy beach type thing. But these guys made it on their own and the company basically kind of gave them their blessing. It’s amazing. It’s a world. It has its own mythology, plus clans and groups.’

In fact, it turned out that Robin knew a huge amount about it. ‘They start off with a kind of primitive version where people were off wandering around conducting quests but now with Morrow Wind and Never Winter at Night and Dark Age of Camelot, people are in there creating characters and building up the characters to the point where if they build up a character with enough points they’ll sell it on eBay,’ he added. And then, the potential downside appeared to occur to him: ‘Just as long as it doesn’t become like… Well, because it’s video cocaine, it can be as addictive as anything in this world with computer widows. You have to limit it though because it’s addictive because of this world. I guess the worst-case scenario was some kid who killed himself because his character died. You have to go, “Wait a minute. This has gone way beyond the limits of a game.”’

One of Williams’ tragedies was that, although an exceptionally intelligent man, he couldn’t see the truth about himself. Not only was it staring him in the face but he’d even identified the danger: it was addictive. And
while there was relatively little downside in being addicted to cycling, an obsession with gaming was something else altogether, especially for someone who struggled with depression. Alone, in a room with his computer and his thoughts, was the worst possible scenario for him to be dealing with and, in the wake of his death, there was some speculation that this obsessive gaming had played havoc with his state of mind.

But, as is so often the case, no one saw any potential concerns. Robin appeared for a stint on
The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon
and talked about how much he loved Call of Duty; he loved role-playing too (perhaps unsurprisingly for an actor). After his death, it was announced that he was to be memorialised in World of Warcraft. This was a side to him that his fans didn’t see so much but it was very much there. He performed live at Google’s keynote session at the 2006 Consumer Electronics Show and participated in a live demonstration of Spore at the invitation of the game’s creator, Will Wright, at the 2006 Electronic Entertainment Expo, in which players created basic, spore-like creatures, which evolved into small communities, then cities, countries, planets and outer space.

Williams created something that was flexible in the extreme – ‘This is a creature that can kiss its own butt’ – and ended up with three sets of arms, a thin torso and short legs. ‘I’m putting together a creature that would make Darwin say, “Hey, I’m not taking acid ever again,”’ he said. And he gave it a very long nose. ‘This is basically a creature
that can do coke a mile away.’ He followed this up by being one of a number of celebrities to participate in the 2007 Worldwide Dungeons & Dragons Game Day in London.

In his online interview with
Reddit
, he talked about it: ‘I’m still waiting for the next Call of Duty,’ he said. ‘It’s been very unusual for me because I’ve done trips overseas to Iraq and Afghanistan, and I would see guys who had just come back from patrol playing Call of Duty, and I would say “You’re living this stuff! And yet you’re still playing this game…”’

But again, there was that note of caution: ‘I’m playing a game called Battlestation Pacific,’ he continued. ‘I’m looking forward to the next Xbox. I can’t imagine the graphics being any better. It will be like these characters are living in your house. I’ll have to be doing duck and cover just to get to the bathroom! For the WiiU or the PS4, at this point I haven’t seen them yet but I might have to check into the cyber wing at Betty Ford.’

And again, ‘It’s like cyber-cocaine,’ he told the
Daily Telegraph
in a 2011 interview. ‘Especially if you’re online playing against other people, it’s totally addictive, you get lost in the world.’ That was half of the appeal, of course – there was nothing he wanted more than to lose himself and, if he couldn’t do that with the consciousness-altering stimulants of alcohol and drugs, he would find something else instead.

This resulted in some very strange postings. Someone calling themselves DigInTheCrates started a thread on an
entertainment site called
The Vesti
under the heading ‘Are people bracing themselves for the fact that Robin Williams will die soon?’ This was all very well but it was posted on 8 August 2014, three days before Williams’ death. Not that anyone knew that, of course.

‘Are you going to kill him or something?’ was one reply.

DigInTheCrates said, ‘He’s old and his health is poor which is why I made this thread. no I don’t plan to kill him you sick weirdos, why would I kill someone I love.’

And then, of course, poor Robin did die, prompting an explosion of action on the thread, mainly (but not seriously) blaming DigInTheCrates.

‘Yep op is possessed by Satan.’

‘Police gonna see this thread.’

‘did anyone else think “I really hope RW didn’t find this thread, see we haven’t been entertained in well over 10 yrs and end it all.”’

‘OP is the angel of death.’

‘Don’t blame me,’ insisted DigInTheCrates. ‘I blame all you people for not loving and appreciating him enough while he was here.’

But they were not slow to honour him once he was gone. In the aftermath of his death, it was not only fellow actors who paid tributes but fellow gamers too. A user called Vulpes wrote on a
Zeldauniverse.net
forum, ‘Considering his connection to “Zelda,” does anyone think the community sending his family some kind of organized condolences or something like that would be appropriate? We could
raise money for his Windfall charity, maybe?’ Many others chimed in with praise: for all that Robin felt like an outsider for so much of his life, he was certainly accepted here. His fellow gamers loved him: by going public about his hobby, he had shown himself to be one of them.

Vulpes subsequently told
Salon.com
, ‘The most impressive thing about Williams’ relationship with gaming was how shameless he was about it. These days, if a celebrity admits to playing games, it’s frequently treated as a dirty secret: “I know it’s nerdy, but I play video games!”’

But it couldn’t have been good for his health. Some years ago, Dr Douglas Gentile of Iowa State University took part in a survey called ‘Pathological Video Game Use Among Youths: A Two-Year Longitudinal Study’, which was published in
Pediatrics
. Of course, Williams wasn’t a youth but, reading what Dr. Gentile had to say in an interview about his study, it is hard not to suspect that the conclusions applied to him too.

‘I was expecting to find that the depression led to gaming,’ he said. ‘But we found the opposite in that study. The depression seemed to follow the gaming. As kids became addicted – if you want to use that word – then their depression seemed to get worse. And, as they stopped being addicted, the depression seemed to lift. I was expecting to find that the depression led to gaming. But we found the opposite in that study.’

He came to believe, however, that, in actual fact, the two went hand in hand. ‘I don’t really think [the depression] is
following,’ he said. ‘I think it’s truly comorbid [when two medical conditions are intertwined]. When a person gets one disorder, they often get more. If you’ve been diagnosed with bipolar disorder, a year or two later you might end up with anxiety problems or social phobias. They all start interacting with each other and make each other worse. [The test subjects’ gaming ‘addiction’ and mental health problems] are close enough in time that they’re probably affecting each other. As you get more depressed you retreat more into games, which doesn’t help, because it doesn’t actually solve the problem. It doesn’t help your depression, so your depression gets worse, so you play more games, so your depression gets worse, etc. It becomes a negative spiral.’

It certainly wasn’t a healthy pastime for someone who had been suffering from mental-health problems all his life.

But in the meantime, the films and occasional television appearances went on. In 1997 Robin appeared with his friend Billy Crystal in an episode of
Friends
– ‘The One With The Ultimate Fighting Champion’ – and, as the new millennium approached, there were plenty of projects lined up. He played a robot in
Bicentennial Man
(1999), based on a novella by Isaac Asimov – one with feelings, natch, which was a thrill to a science-fiction fan like him: ‘I read
I, Robot
in college,’ he told
Science Fiction Weekly. ‘Bicentennial Man
I’d only read after we decided to do the movie. And then I read
The Positronic Man
, which is the book that Asimov wrote with Robert Silverberg. It’s pretty interesting, because [the movie] keeps to the spirit of what he was capturing with
robots. It’s weird that Asimov has never been made into a movie before; I’m pretty sure that’s correct.