Robin Williams - When the Laughter Stops 1951-2014 (14 page)

‘It waits,’ he told
Good Morning America
in 2006. ‘It lays in
wait for the time when you think, “It’s fine now, I’m OK.” Then, the next thing you know, it’s not OK. Then you realize, “Where am I? I didn’t realize I was in Cleveland.”’ The stint in rehab was enough to get him sober again (although not, this time, for two decades – there was to be a final slip) but the damage was already done and his marriage was beyond repair. Finally, the partnership that had worked so well on a personal and professional level was about to end.

Somehow, in the midst of all this, Williams continued to work. He was still worrying about his career and now he was being offered nothing like the choice roles he’d had in the past but his output continued to be steady. Next up was
House of D
(2004), directed by David Duchovny (and also featuring his daughter Zelda). It told the story of thirteen-year-old Tommy and his friend Pappass (Williams), a middle-aged man with the same mental age. The attempt to stop playing damaged children trapped in the body of an older man was not going so well. Somewhat ominously billed as a ‘coming-of-age comedy drama’ – the film was, alas, another turkey. At this stage in the game, he could have done with an even break.

Nevertheless, consummate professional that he was, Williams dutifully gave interviews to publicise the project. ‘I just did the research about a high-functioning mentally handicapped,’ he told
Cinema Confidential
in 2005. ‘Socially adept, but intellectually and emotionally not that adept in certain situations, intellectually about a ten- or eleven-year-old, and physically it was like that
capable of doing manual labor and stuff… This is a very specific film, so you want to try and find a range that you haven’t seen in most people. People who know, who go, “I know what that is.” And other people who kind of look around and go, “Oh, that’s different.” I mean, he’s very verbal, but he’s slow with certain things. He’s able to understand and pick up what’s going on emotionally, but it’s an arrested development at a certain stage, maybe about ten or eleven.’ And, as he didn’t say, ‘again’.

But it had been fun working with Zelda, who played Melissa, with whom Tommy becomes interested. Her father was certainly proud. ‘She was so good in the movie
House of D
,’ he said happily. ‘She was so instinctual. I was playing a character that was mentally challenged. I am kind of sitting there watching her and at the same time saying, she is good. She has the same kind of mental quickness but she is also sensitive. The greatest compliment of all was that she was not only a good actress; she was also kind to people. She treated all the other kids well. She ate lunch with everybody. She did not have an attitude with them and was decent with all the crew. People said, “Your daughter is good but she is also nice.” That is kind of the double bill.’

And then there came
The Night Listener
(2006). From the original book by Armistead Maupin (of
Tales of the City
fame), it’s the story of a DJ who befriends a little boy on the telephone but comes to doubt that he really exists. It was another very mixed bag. Listening to interviews from the time, Williams was beginning to sound far more subdued,
even when he can’t help himself and starts putting on silly voices again. But he was now hinting at far deeper problems too. ‘Do I perform sometimes in a manic style? Yes,’ he told Terry Goss in a radio interview. ‘Am I manic all the time? No. Do I get sad? Oh, yeah. Does it hit me hard? Oh, yeah… No clinical depression, no. No. I get bummed, like I think a lot of us do at certain times. You look at the world and go, “Whoa!” Other moments you look and go, “Oh, things are OK.”’

The deaths of his parents, his friend Christopher Reeve’s death, drinking, rehab and now a failing marriage… He was now caught up in a maelstrom that, at times, seemed to be hurtling out of control. Then there was the undeniable fact that his career was not what it was: he had made some pretty awful movies and no one seemed to want to let him forget that. ‘Why?’ The
Guardian
asked. Just why had he chosen to do so?

Williams rallied – briefly. ‘Well, I’ve had a lot of people tell me they watched
Old Dogs
with their kids and had a good time.’ Then he fessed up. ‘No, it paid the bills. Sometimes you have to make a movie to make money. You know what you’re getting into, totally. You know they’re going to make it goofy. And that’s OK.’ But was it really OK? After all, he was a Juilliard-trained actor, someone who took his craft seriously. And there were quite a few audiences who didn’t think that it was all right at all. When you have tasted the glory, it is hard to cope with the second rate.

Alas, more dross followed –
Man of the Year
with Christopher
Walken (2006),
RV
(also 2006), which barely lasted in the cinema a couple of months before going straight to DVD – all the trauma of recent years may well have affected his judgment in that he took part in so much that was so bad. Perhaps it was due to the fact that another costly divorce was clearly on the horizon but, in 2004 and 2005, he appeared in three films each, while in 2006 he was in an astonishing six movies. That’s a huge amount of work and either he badly needed the money or he was using the work to ignore what else was wrong in his life. At any rate, something was going on but, in among all the forgettable films, some gems showed signs of surviving the test of time. Though not his own vehicles, they certainly benefited from his input.

The first of these was
Night At The Museum
(2006), which was actually a Ben Stiller vehicle (if Williams resented playing second fiddle to a younger comic actor who was playing a role that he himself might have been given a few years previously, he had the good sense not to say so). Stiller played Larry Daley, a security guard at the American Museum of Natural History, who discovers that the exhibits come to life at night. Theodore Roosevelt (Robin) explains the reason for this to him and, over time, Larry learns how to control the mayhem. The film received mixed reviews but it was a huge commercial success – and was credited with increasing visitor numbers to the real American Museum of Natural History. Robin was not that keen on sequels but he was to appear in another two to this film, including one that has yet to be released.

The second project,
Happy Feet
(2006), also spawned a sequel. This was an animated film about penguins, in which Robin voiced Ramón and Lovelace. Ostensibly, it was mainly a jolly lark but one with a strong environmental message: ‘You can’t tell a story about Antarctica and the penguins without giving that dimension,’ said director George Miller. Not only did the film garner good reviews, it actually beat
Casino Royale,
starring Daniel Craig as the latest incarnation of James Bond, to the top slot at the box office. It also won a slew of awards, including an Oscar for Best Animated Film.

Robin reprised his role in the sequel (unimaginatively titled
Happy Feet Two,
2011) and, whatever his feelings about sequels or no, this particular series sparked quite a serious discussion about the environment – one that continues to this day. It is ironic that a man so often accused of overt sentimentality ended up in a film that was, on the face of it, a children’s movie, but a far more serious treatise lay underneath.

More films followed, not always worthy of mention, but, whatever his workload, he couldn’t shy away from the inevitable any longer. That three-year drinking binge had taken its toll and the estrangement from Marsha was complete. Robin, the needy child who couldn’t bear to be alone, was heading for his second divorce.

Williams might have been hoping to save his marriage but there had been too much stress to deal with and, in March 2008, Marsha filed for divorce, citing irreconcilable differences. In total, he was to end up with a £20 million bill – no joke, even for someone who was seriously rich. ‘I get on fabulously with my exes – now we’re not together any more. And they always appreciated my body hair, which was a plus, obviously,’ he told the
Daily Telegraph
, evidently attempting to make light of things.

In reality, however, there was a lot more going on. Robin
compared being married to a comedian with owning a cobra. ‘Basically, there’s a certain amount of novelty, and the novelty is showing the cobra to your friends – but comics can be nasty,’ he admitted. ‘Along with our desperate insecurity, sometimes we’re equipped to be vicious.’

But joking aside, this was really no laughing matter. Marsha had been a real source of stability for Robin: four years after they got together he gave an interview to the
New York Times
in 2008 in which he said, ‘I don’t need to go out to a club now and get a little bit of intimacy from 100 or 200 people. Now I can get that talking to friends around the table.’ She had done that. His former wife had also helped shape his career and, while it hadn’t been doing so well in recent years, she had been heavily involved in projects including
Mrs. Doubtfire
and
Robin Williams Live On Broadway.
They had been involved in the Windfall Foundation together, hosted numerous fundraisers and encouraged each other in their own charitable enterprises, Marsha’s particular causes being Doctors Without Borders and Seacology. She was also the mother of two of his children and had previously helped him when he had been in a very bad place.

Robin was to marry for a third time and it would be quite wrong to imply that Susan Schneider, his third wife, meant any less to him than Marsha. But the separation from Marsha marked a seismic shift in his life. They had been together not only through his reign at the top of the Hollywood A-list but also the pain of his first divorce and had shared
the happiness of family life. For two decades Marsha had been at the centre of Robin’s world and the break-up was a terrible blow. At the root of it, he was so very unhappy and insecure and it came about at a point when his career was in the doldrums. This was not a good time.

Although neither had said anything publicly, in fact, there had been signs for some time that all was not well. In 2007 Williams was honoured by the San Francisco International Film Festival with the Peter J. Owens Award but, strangely, Marsha wasn’t by his side. She issued a very gracious statement after Robin’s death but there was clearly a great deal of hurt on both sides. Now in his mid-fifties, he was having to deal with the issue of ageing (not easy for anyone). He insisted it didn’t matter, telling
Philippine News Online,
‘I don’t really think about old age. I acknowledge that at a certain age, there are things that all of a sudden you start to realize I did not hear that. Or, you have a senior moment where you go, what is my name? Oh Robin. Yeah right.’ Life was proving remarkably tough.

To make matters worse, Robin’s oldest half-brother, Robert Todd Williams – ‘Toad’ – died in 2007 after complications on the back of heart surgery (something he himself would later undergo). There was yet more cause for great sadness – while the three half-brothers had not been close as children, they had become so as adults and Robin was very distressed. Somewhat ironically, given Robin’s recent struggles with alcohol, Toad ran Toad Hollow, a famously winery, called one of his saloons Risky
Liver Inn (in private, at least!) and, as Robin said of him, ‘Toad left a big footprint with a cork, or as a friend said, he left a great trail.’ A larger-than-life bon viveur, he would be greatly missed.

By this time, Christopher Reeve’s widow Dana had also passed away: another tragedy that totally floored Williams, not least because she left behind a young son. And so he did what he so often did when life seemed to be getting the better of him: he went back to stand-up. In 2008 he announced that he was to embark on a twenty-six-city stand-up tour entitled
Weapons Of Self Destruction
, a very obvious reference to his recent woes. Many, many more dates were to be added and the tour went to the UK and Australia. There was some speculation that he was doing it because he needed the money but, whatever the truth, several elements stood out. The first was that stand-up had always offered some sort of refuge in troubled times and those were troubled times indeed.

His old friend Billy Crystal certainly thought so. ‘Over the last couple of years and the pain that he’s gone through, his brain is the one thing that’s kept him buoyant,’ he told
The Guardian
in 2009 ‘I think he needs the stand-up in a different way than he did before. It’s still a safe place for him to be, but he can talk about things and make himself feel better, not just everybody else.’

The second was that, whatever travails he might be experiencing in his film career, his stand-up act was as popular as it had ever been. Almost instantly, the tour sold
out – not bad going for a man in his late fifties. Williams the film actor might be having problems but Williams the stand-up was as adored as he had ever been. Indeed, this was always the case: public affection for Robin never wavered, right up until the end of his life.

It was something he experienced when he went out on the road. ‘I just walked around and most people were like: “Oh, hi, how are you?”’ he told the
Robin Williams Fansite.
‘Ninety-nine per cent of the people are so sweet.

‘The only time I run into people who violate that boundary are drunks. And having been one, I get it, but I don’t need to tolerate it. Like, I was walking… he wasn’t even drunk. There was a guy who all of a sudden started grabbing me to make a picture with his cell phone and I said: “Let go.” He kept grabbing me and I went: “No, no, I know your English isn’t great, but don’t grab me.” I’ll take a picture with you. Treat me like a person and not like a prop. And most people do that.’

It was an illustration of the fact that he could never be anonymous; of course, something he had lived with for years. But it also meant that, when he experienced difficulties, it had to be very public.

The tour kicked off in September 2008, with Robin now openly saying that he was doing it for the money – he didn’t like the film roles he was being offered. Among the usual targets, he also talked quite openly about his recent travails (‘Poor me, poor me… pour me a drink!’) But even this was not quite so straightforward as it seemed.
The comic Eric Idle, who had known him for a long time, put his finger on it: ‘I’ve always felt that Robin’s blinding speed and flash of wit was an effort at concealment, rather than revealing,’ he said. ‘He would be talking about something personal or sexual, but it was always in general, not about him.’

He had certainly lost none of his renowned antipathy to George W. Bush – ‘The Bush library will be interactive – which is code for, Not So Many Books’ – and was happy to talk about the new President as well: ‘Obama is an amazing combination of Martin Luther King and Spock.’ And he was just as funny as ever; he still had the capacity to reduce audiences to tears of laughter. On stage, as he himself so often observed, he didn’t need to deal with real life.

But if he was, at least in part, doing this tour to take his mind off his current troubles, life was about to put another on his plate. As the tour went on, he began to experience bouts of breathlessness – no joke when an act is as frenetic as his. He was quieter these days off stage but on stage quite the firebrand he had always been and, by February and March of the following year, had developed a cough as well. As it became increasingly obvious that something was wrong, he consulted his physician. At first, he appeared to have a respiratory complaint and then it became clear that the problem was actually with his heart. An angiogram followed, which revealed that he needed a heart bypass and, in March 2009, after postponing some tour dates, he went in for surgery at the Cleveland Clinic in Ohio, before
going home for a few weeks to recover. He had one aorta replaced with a cow’s valve, which, of course, was to be the basis of a great many more jokes.

‘I would finish shows and all of sudden I would be going, “Wow, I am really kind of rundown”,’ he told the
New Zealand Herald.
‘It wasn’t like normal, where I was tired but feeling great. So I was in Miami, about to do some shows, and it was “No, no, you have to get this looked at. You have two weeks to decide where you want to have your surgery”. That was like, “Beep! Put the brakes on and do the valve grind”, which I think sounds like a great sexual dance. The tour really kind of pointed out, “You have got to do something about this, pal”.’

For Robin it was second nature to joke. In reality, however, it just served to heighten his sense of melancholia. He had ‘a bit of fear’ that the surgery would kill him, he told
The New York Times
in 2009, adding, ‘I think, literally, because you have cracked the chest, you are vulnerable, totally, for the first time since birth. It’s like, oh, don’t get weepy now. My children! My babies.’

In the event, the operation was a total success but it could not have come at a worse moment. He had already been having a torrid time of it, something he was dealing with by being on stage, and to have to stay at home with only his thoughts for company was not a recipe for happiness. He needed to work and he needed to be out there and there was a sense of great relief when he was once more permitted to tour.

Williams was keen, however, to show that he was back on form. Eight weeks after the operation, he released a picture of himself with his T-shirt pulled up, displaying a huge scar that ran the whole way down his chest. He then appeared on David Letterman’s show to explain what had happened to him, throwing in a few riffs along the way. ‘I realise now that shortness of breath is kind of code for heart problem,’ he admitted, ‘just like exhaustion is code for alcoholic. Yeah, I’m going to Betty Ford for exhaustion. I’m taking a nap!

‘I’m ethanol challenged. I would walk up a flight of stairs and all of a sudden I realised, “I’m old”. But something was off and I went in and they did a stress test and I walked on the treadmill. I have one new valve and a repaired valve. I have a cow valve and the grazing’s been fun. And I give a good quarter cream too. It’s from the heart of a cow. They give you a choice – you can have a pig valve and then find truffles, or a cow valve. The mechanical valves last much longer. It’s great but, if someone uses a remote control, you fart.’ Oh and, ‘It really makes you appreciate the little things, like breathing.’ That was Robin and, with that, he was back on the road again.

‘I took three months off, and after the three months I was like, “I think I can do this”,’ he told
Star Adviser.
‘One night I went on stage a little early, about a month or two into the recovery time, and I was out of breath and I went, “Not ready, not ready. Warning.” Then after the three months, I went, “No, I can do it.” It’s slightly slower than I was before
but not by much. Only a few people would notice, but you do take it a little bit slower.’

He was to spend quite a bit of time touring, with the act inevitably ending up as an HBO special and, although he’d complained about the quality of the work being offered, the films continued to pour out too. And it is not true to say that they were all bad. ‘I have been doing small movies,’ he told the
New Zealand Herald.
‘Small movies are great to do, but they don’t pay the bills. Literally. You do them and they are great to do, and I am very proud of them but it doesn’t pay the overheads. Even the guy I did the last movie with, Bobcat Goldthwait, the director, he’s a comic too. He has to go out and play clubs. I’m playing auditoriums. We are both making money the old-fashioned way.’

And what, he was asked, of the duds? ‘You don’t rue them. There are some you go, “Maybe you shouldn’t have made that”, but you did. There are some that are wonderful, some that are not so good and some that you go “Woah!” And usually the ones that didn’t work were the ones where someone said, “This is going to be a hit.” That is the most frightening one – where you went into it for the wrong motivation – to make shitloads of cash.’

There it was – that reference to money again. Despite all the initial speculation after Williams’ death, it really does not seem that he was in financial difficulties, expensive though the divorces had been, not least because he still had a few films to come out. What is far more likely is that he was becoming obsessed with the fear of running
out of cash – something quite different – which is why he talked about it so much. But when you enter a period of darkness, everything seems hopeless, although he wasn’t quite there yet.

That film he referred to making with Goldthwait was, in fact, a massive return to form. The two of them made
World’s Greatest Dad
, which was quite on a par with some of his finest films in the past and garnered the best reviews he’d had in years. As a small, art-house movie, it only received limited theatrical release but it showed him at his sharpest, a world away from his more sentimental material. It was a comedy but it was very, very dark. Robin played Lance, an English literature teacher who was pretty much the opposite of his character in
Dead Poets Society,
given that he taught a poetry class everyone hated. A failed novelist, desperate to be published, he was a single parent to his obnoxious son Kyle (Daryl Sabara) and engaged in a desultory relationship with a fellow teacher, who was also dating a considerably more successful teacher at the school.

One night, Lance returns home to discover that Kyle has accidentally killed himself in an act of auto-erotic asphyxiation and, in order to save his son embarrassment, he makes it appear as if he has hung himself the more traditional way, as well as forging a suicide note. This note achieves a cult status at the school, as does Kyle’s journal, which Lance has forged. Lance himself experiences a huge shift: his pupils start to respect him and he also appears on television as the media become increasingly interested in
the story. The only person who is suspicious is Kyle’s friend Andrew (Evan Martin), who thinks the moving note and journal extremely uncharacteristic of his friend. When the principal announces that the school library is to be renamed after Kyle, Lance can take it no more and confesses what he has done. Though renounced by everyone, he is free.