Robin Williams - When the Laughter Stops 1951-2014 (3 page)

A genuine tide of grief was developing: Robin Williams may have been flawed but he was a decent, kind and caring man and his untimely demise was not only affecting his fans but also those who had previously never given him much thought. So who, exactly, was Robin Williams? And how had he come to make such a huge impact on so many people all around the world?

Chicago, Illinois. It was the height of summer in the Windy City and Laura McLaurin, a former model from Jackson, Mississippi, and her husband, Robert Fitzgerald Williams, an executive at the Ford Motor Company, were elated. On 21 July 1951, Robin McLaurin Williams was born. He had two elder half-brothers, Robert Todd Williams (who was to become a wine-maker known as ‘Toad’) from his father’s first marriage and McLaurin Smith-Williams from his mother’s first marriage but, essentially, although he always got on very well with his half-brothers, Robin was an only child; they all were. ‘All three of us grew up
as only children – Todd, myself and Robin. I was adopted by my mother’s parents after her divorce from her first marriage. Todd grew up with his mother. We all get along famously. Todd is no blood relation to me, but we’re real close,’ McLaurin, a physics teacher, told the
Chicago Tribune
in 1991.

For someone who was to develop such an anarchic character, Williams certainly came from highly respectable stock: his mother’s great grandfather was the Mississippi senator and governor Anselm J. McLaurin, while his father hailed from an extremely prominent family in Evansville, Indiana. There was great wealth there: Robert’s father, also called Robert, and originally from Kentucky, was the chief clerk and in 1902 was secretary, treasurer and general manager of the Indiana Tie Company. ‘He has contributed much to the success of the enterprise, capably controlling the interests of the company and managing its trade connections in such a manner that successful results are achieved,’ according to the History of the City of Evansville and Vanderburgh County, Indiana. Quite a few of Williams’ family members are buried in the Evansville cemetery, a fact that caused much excitement when it was revealed by Robin Williams’ Evansville fans.

But that wasn’t all. Famously, Robin could list English, Welsh, Irish, Scottish, German and French among his ancestry: a clue, perhaps, as to why he was so good at accents in later life. The family was wealthy: Robin grew up surrounded by privilege and creature comforts but, in
many other ways, his was a deprived upbringing. His father was forty-six when Robin was born. He was strict and didn’t have a lot of time for his young son. Robin’s mother was an aspiring model who had many philanthropic interests outside the home. She, too, was largely absent and already wounds were beginning to form when he was very young that would never heal. Over time they would grow into torments, provoking a good deal of anguish for the rest of his life.

Robin’s early life was spent in Lake Forest, an affluent suburb north of Chicago. In those days he was nothing like the outgoing comic he was to become. The family had a vast house but he spent a great deal of time on his own, playing with his toys: his father was often away because of business, while his mother was involved in charitable work. It does not take a degree in psychiatry to work out that the young Robin spent a great deal of his time trying and failing to catch the attention of his parents – something that was to turn into a lifelong quest.

Shy, plump, melancholic and quiet, he was also a nervous child, afraid of the shadows and somewhat afraid of his father, come to that. It may be a cliché to point out that so many people become comedians to combat their own inner melancholy but Williams’ childhood was a classic example of what turns an individual to blot their inner pain with drink and drugs and a lot of comedy. Laughter, as a child, was often in short supply. ‘I collected model soldiers, thousands of them,’ he recalled. ‘You learn how to create
games for yourself and you read a lot. It wasn’t exactly fun, but later on it helps with your range as a comedian and it gives you an imagination.’

Nevertheless, he did have some friends and one such friend remembers his vast collection of toys – 2,000 in all. ‘I just had the regular, olive green plastic army men, but Robin had this whole setup of hand-painted English soldiers made of lead,’ Jeff Hodgen, who met Williams in fifth grade at Lake Forest’s Gorton Elementary School, told the
Chicago Tribune.
‘He was kind of standoffish when we first met, but that was only because he was the new kid at school. I remember once we were throwing snowballs, and we hit a cop car, which put a stop to that. Every time one of our phones rang at home for months after, we were terrified it was the police calling to talk to our parents.’ Interestingly, Hodgen added that Williams was not at all the clown of the class; rather a serious and somewhat introverted boy.

Life in Lake Forest was good, however. Despite the proximity to Chicago, it was more like a small city in its own right: part of the north shore development, it had Lake Michigan on one side, where the town’s inhabitants could go swimming in the very hot summers and ice skating in freezing-cold winters. The large houses, standing in their own plots of land, were in many cases designed by some of the twentieth century’s most famous architects, including David Adler and Frank Lloyd Wright; the big gardens were good for playing in and children could cycle down the
city’s wide sidewalks, as they were expected to do – there was no cycling on the quiet roads. Poverty was not much of an issue in Lake Forest and neither were ethnic minorities: the city was largely white.

After Gorton, Robin moved to Deer Path Junior High School in the sixth grade but, when he was in seventh grade, aged about twelve, the family moved to Detroit. Hodgen was surprised but accepted it. ‘I missed him but I had just started playing football, so I sucked it up,’ he said.

The family moved to a huge, thirty-room mansion in Bloomfield Hills at the corner of Woodward and Long Lake and, in later years, Robin made it sound like paradise. ‘It was a giant, beautiful old mansion, with a gatehouse, an empty garage with room for 25 cars, barns, and there was a very wonderful old English man, Mr. Williams, who looked after the gardens,’ he told the
Detroit Free Press.
‘We didn’t own it; we just rented it. Then we moved to Chicago, and when we came back to Detroit a few years later, we just lived in an apartment. And it was very different, you know. But the first house, it was so wonderful, so peaceful. There was no one for miles around. Only this giant golf course with people named Tad whacking the old ball.’

In actual fact, this was Robin embroidering the tale, whether deliberately or not, for the truth is somewhat less rosy. Surrounded by his giant toy collection, he had a whole floor to himself in the attic but he didn’t enjoy it. He was rather frightened of the shadows and dark corners. It was a solitary existence for a little boy and, as Robin
played on his own, he started to make up stories and characters. At that stage no one had a clue that they had a comic genius in their midst, however: all they saw was a little boy wanting to be loved, having been uprooted from a previous existence and now starting over from scratch. ‘My only companions, my only friends as a child, were my imagination,’ he once said.

Church was a part of his life. His mother was a Christian Scientist, although Robin was brought up as an Episcopalian. Indeed, he played a very active role in the church for a time and it, too, would become the source of some of his comedy, as well as the inspiration when he starred in the 2007 film
License to Wed
. ‘Having been a choirboy, and I’m not Catholic, just going back to the old days when I was into going to church and remembering, as a Protestant, which is Catholic light once again, the idea of somebody that could really advise and has something [to] offer,’ he told
Canmag
around the time of the movie’s launch. ‘It was just remembering those guys that I grew up with in the Episcopal Church, which is there is no purgatory, just spiritual escrow. That was [the] beginning of that. And then the idea that he’s pretty much hands on as much as you can be without being a priest.’

Robin enrolled at Detroit Country Day School, a private school where he did well in some respects but also had some very unhappy times. He became president of the class, played soccer and joined the wrestling team, and one of his teachers is said to have been the person upon whom
he based his role as John Keating in
Dead Poets Society
. ‘I loved school, maybe too much really,’ he told the
Washington Post
in an interview that coincided with the release of
Jack
(1996), a film about a boy who ages four times faster than everyone else and which painted a much sunnier picture of his early days than was the reality.

‘I was summa cum laude in high school. I was driven that way. I can’t say it was easy to fit in. I just went out of my way to fit in. It was a private boys’ school, Detroit Country Day, and I played soccer. I was on the wrestling team. Mr. All-Around, you know? But I think what made me want to play Jack was that innocent time before all that, riding bikes, friends in treehouses, all those things that loom on the boundaries of child and boy. When you’re ten, you are still a boy, and that time right before puberty, which hits at twelve – or eleven if you live somewhere the milk is different – is so incredible. A boy is still so vulnerable then. Boys that age don’t have a lot of chops in terms of hiding feelings. What they feel is right there on their faces.’

In fact, what some of those boys felt was malevolence. Robin might have loved school, or at least he had come to think he did, but he had a fair few problems to deal with when he was there and it was this, combined with seeking out his mother’s attention and his relative isolation in the family home, that really began to lay down the foundations for the comedian he would one day become. In another interview, this time with the
Oklahoman
in 1991, he gave a considerably more subdued description of life back then.
‘I wasn’t so exuberant,’ he said. ‘I spent about three years in an all-boys school. It was almost like the one in
Dead Poets
Society
. Blazer. Latin motto. I was getting pushed around a lot. Not only was there, like, physical bullying but there was intellectual bullying going on. It made me toughen up, but it also made me pull back a lot. I had a certain reticence about dealing with people. Through comedy, I found a way to bridge the gap…’

In other words, he was being bullied. To start with, he tried to find other routes to go home but that didn’t work. Boys taunted him because he was, as they saw it, small, fat and well spoken. He was also dyslexic, which meant he struggled at school and, in all likelihood, suffered from Attention Deficit Disorder (ADHD), neither of which conditions were recognised back then. Robin couldn’t fight back physically, nor could he get away from his fellow pupils, so instead he tried a distraction technique: he began trying to make them laugh. ‘I started telling jokes as a way to stop the shit getting kicked out of me,’ he once revealed, again a textbook example of the melancholia that hides behind so many comedians’ smiles. Using laughter to avert violence? Right from the start Williams must surely have known his talents would prove a double-edged sword.

Nor were bullies the only people Robin was trying to impress. He wanted to fit in at school but at home he continued to long for the attention of his parents, particularly his mother. And so he employed exactly the same trick as he did at school: he told jokes.

‘I’m just beginning to realize that it wasn’t always that happy,’ Williams admitted in an interview with
Esquire Magazine.
‘My childhood was kind of lonely. Quiet. My father was away; my mother was working, doing benefits. I was basically raised by this maid, and my mother would come in later, you know, and I knew her and she was wonderful and charming and witty. But I think maybe comedy was part of my way of connecting with my mother – “I’ll make Mommy laugh and that will be okay” – and that’s where it started.’ In fact, his first-ever impression was of his grandmother; the start of a talent that was to define him.

And so it went on, the little boy desperate to avoid being beaten at school and, at home, eager for parental attention. And as he continued to develop coping strategies, he was beginning to discover that he really did have the most phenomenal ability to make people laugh. But it never entirely worked: the family had maids who looked after Robin but, as fond of them as he might have been, they were no substitute for his mother. As an adult, he confessed to an acute fear of abandonment and a severe case of ‘Love Me Syndrome’. It wasn’t hard to work out why. Despite having some friends, his was a childhood spent in loneliness and isolation. The man who would one day have the whole world eating out of his hand was a shy, lonely and frightened little boy and, at the heart of it, that is what Robin Williams always remained. As someone once observed, all the money and success in life cannot make up for an unhappy childhood.

Nor did his mother’s religion help, although, typically, he turned it into a subject for humour. He was attacked ‘because my mother was a Christian Dior Scientist. I was not only picked on physically but intellectually – people used to kick copies of George Sand in my face.’ It was a brave attempt to hide past pain but the sadness still shone through.

When Robin was about sixteen there was still more upheaval, although this was to prove the making of him. Increasingly disillusioned with the automobile industry, his father Robert took early retirement and the family moved again, this time to Woodacre, California, part of Marin County, an area Robin was to make his home for much of his life. He enrolled at Redwood High School in Larkspur. Unlike the previous establishment, this was not a private school and it opened him up to a whole new world. Hawaiian shirts became a part of his wardrobe (and remained there); he started driving a Land Rover… Life opened up.

‘When I came out to California to go to high school, it was 1969,’ he told the
Oklahoman
. ‘I went to this gestalt high school, where one of the teachers actually took LSD one day. So you walked in and you hear [whispers], “I’m Lincoln.”’ The place suited his anarchic personality perfectly: from the formalities of the Midwest to California just after the Summer of Love was quite an eye-opener. And by now his joke-telling was such that he was seriously beginning to consider a career in the performing arts.