Robin Williams - When the Laughter Stops 1951-2014 (9 page)

Marsha Garces was born on 18 June 1956 and was half Filipino. Her father, Leon Garces, had been born in Ubay, Bohol, and moved to the United States in 1929, later serving in the US Navy in the Second World War. Her mother, Ina Rachel Mattila, was Finnish. Marsha grew up in Shorewood, Wisconsin, and trained as a painter before finding work as a waitress and going through two brief marriages. And then, in 1984, she went to work for the Williams’ family as a nanny for baby Zak.

Robin was experiencing various tribulations at the time as his marriage became increasingly rocky, but it is generally accepted that the relationship began around 1986, when Marsha officially became his secretary. Sometime in 1987 Robin and Valerie quietly separated, with a shared custody agreement for Zak and from then on it was, perhaps, inevitable that he and Marsha would wed. She was ‘the one who makes my heart sing,’ he declared.

Whatever the rights and wrongs of it, Robin was clearly extremely happy. ‘Marsha is Robin’s anchor,’ said his friend and former co-star Pam Dawber. ‘She’s reality. Ground zero. She’s very sane, and that’s what he needs. She’s incredibly loving too. And protective. She knows who is bad for him and who is good, and she helps keep the good relationships going.’

And she was there with him in Thailand for the filming of
Good Morning, Vietnam.
Producer Mark Johnson said, ‘She was the hardest-working person on the set. She was there for him 24 hours a day. She truly loves him.’ Marsha was also there for him when, in 1987, Robin’s father died. The pair may have had a difficult relationship but the loss of a parent is always traumatic and Robin needed all her support.

Of course, there was also a child in the picture and so everyone was trying to be as civilised as possible. ‘He’s just wonderful,’ said Robin in a 1988 interview with
People
magazine, ‘the most sobering and wonderful thing in my life. Blond. Valerie’s blue eyes. My chin. Full lips. He looks
like an Aryan poster child. He has a very fertile imagination and he loves numbers. Sometimes he’s like a forty-year-old Jewish accountant. Sometimes he’s like Damien in
The
Omen
. Sometimes he’s like an angel without wings. He knows what he’s feeling at all times. Today I took him to a diner for lunch. It was noisy and he doesn’t like noise. “We must come back some time,” he said tactfully, “when it’s not so crowded.” And he’s not Mr. Outdoors. When I took him camping, he said, “We’ve got to find a room with a full refrigerator.”’

But how was Zak coping with everything now? ‘He’s amazingly adaptive,’ insisted Robin, ‘and we all try hard to make the arrangement work. We all love Zachary, and Zachary loves us all. Also, we’re all in therapy, and that’s helped a lot – Jesus, I should get a discount! Valerie and I have a good understanding too. The separation was difficult, but it was also gentle. Better to do that than to go at each other’s throats.’

Valerie concurred. ‘Robin has been conducting himself very well,’ she told
People.
‘We’re acting together in Zach’s interest. We separated to reexamine our lives. It’s a time for personal growth for both of us. I see another man’ – the journalist David Sheff – ‘but I live alone, and I like it that way.’

And so the divorce went through but however civilised everyone involved was being, there was criticism in some quarters. Over time, Robin attempted to dispel a certain notion once and for all. ‘Marsha did not break up my
first marriage,’ he told another interviewer. ‘It was broken in shambles before we fell in love and Valerie had already found someone else. Marsha is the one who put my life back together. She’s a gentle, great soul,’ he told the
LA Times.

Fresh from the success of
Good Morning, Vietnam,
Williams took part in what can only be seen, in retrospect, as a very bad idea. But it is also possible to see why it had briefly looked so good on paper. In November 1988 he and that other fine actor and comic Steve Martin starred in Samuel Beckett’s classic play
Waiting For Godot,
at the Lincoln Center in New York. Directed by Mike Nichols, it was a seven-week run that sold out so quickly the tickets never even went on sale to the public. Financially, at least, it was a success.

The reasoning was obvious: two great comics who were also actors taking part in a darkly comic play about the uselessness of human existence; two tramps waiting for Godot, who never actually arrives. And there were plenty of precedents for this: it was not uncommon for huge Hollywood stars to take part in low-key stage productions, if nothing other than to prove they could. They tended to accept extremely small salaries as well, mainly to show that they were prepared to suffer for their art (and that they didn’t need the money!). But if there was one playwright you should not attempt to improvise, it is Samuel Beckett, whose every comma is carefully thought out in advance. And that is where Williams went wrong.

The critics were merciless. ‘But their frustrated yearning
to be recognized and their sense of life as perpetual diminishment should seem universal,’ wrote William A. Henry III in
TIME Magazine.
‘Instead, the supreme existentialist tragedy of the 20th century has been reduced to a heartwarming revue sketch about the homeless. The chief sinner is Williams. When the slave Lucky makes a long, anguished speech, a flux of debased knowledge, Williams enacts the audience’s presumed boredom at having to think. He scampers. He pounds the ground. He thrusts a big bone into the slave’s hands as though it were an Oscar and tells him to “thank the Academy.” As Martin feigns death, Williams hovers over him, murmuring the pet name “Didi, Didi,” then segues into the theme from
The Twilight Zone
. Martin is never so outrageous, but his familiar cool-guy strut and laid-back vocalisms keep him from inhabiting his character.’ Ouch!

‘The play has new lines written into it, all vulgarisms and quite uncalled for,’ fumed John Simon in
NewYork Magazine.
‘Many are spoken by Vladimir and Estragon during Lucky’s monologue to discourage the speaker. Coyote jawbones become a movie clapper in Estragon’s hands, or Yorick’s skull as this gung ho Gogo, Robin Williams, mutters a Hamletic “Alas!” He also wields a large bone with words appropriate to an Oscar presentation, and goes through his usual vocal routines, doing a buzzer on a TV game show, a takeoff on the
Twilight Zone
menace music, and all sorts of trick voices, as if this were
Good Morning, Godot
.’ Double ouch!

‘Turning Beckett’s feast of agnostic irony into a series of
revue sketches threatened to make Godot no more than a vehicle for Martin’s and Williams’ favourite routines,’ snapped W. J. Weatherby in the
Guardian
. ‘Steve Martin in a film recently turned Cyrano de Bergerac into a contemporary American with a long nose and he has now done much the same with Vladimir. As Mike Nichols did not stride on stage to demand what the hell Williams was doing, his improvisations presumably had the director’s approval. But one wonders if there will be any negative reaction when news reaches the author in Paris.’

Frank Lipsius from the
Financial Times
was a little kinder. ‘But does the nonchalance of their hip and cynical generation do justice to Beckett?’ he wrote. ‘The answer is yes, despite liberties the author would no doubt look askance at, since he is a notorious purist about productions of his plays. There is only one false note, at the end of Act One, when Robin Williams as Estragon groans unnecessarily as the lights go down on their inability to move. Yet throughout the production Williams does a complete pantomime with only slight reference to the text. When Vladimir hurriedly exits, Williams stares after him, laughingly lifting his leg and scratching the ground like a dog. He picks up a steer skull and addresses it like Hamlet or moves the jaws like a ventriloquist. To get Lucky to stop talking he shouts out “You’re a liberal!” in a mocking reference to the presidential campaign.

Williams, newly covered in glory from
Good Morning, Vietnam,
and Martin, were unaccustomed to such a reaction.
It clearly hurt and, some years later, Robin returned to the subject. ‘Painful,’ he told
Playboy
. ‘We put our ass out and got kicked for it. Some nights I would improvise a bit and hard-core Beckett fans got pissed off. We played it as a comedy team, it wasn’t existential. Like these two guys from vaudeville who would go into routines that would fall apart into angst. Basically, it’s Laurel and Hardy, which is how Beckett staged it in Germany.’

But he didn’t need to worry. After a tumultuous few years of drying out, divorce, law suits, remarriage and then, finally, the hit movie for which he’d been waiting so long, Robin Williams was still one of the hottest names on the planet. He had the pick of the scripts in front of him now – everyone wanted a piece of him and was clamouring to sign him up. He would go on to make plenty of dud films, lapsing far too much into the sentimental but, for now, he was on a roll. And his finest hour was still to come.

The debacle of
Waiting for Godot
aside, the late 1980s and early 1990s saw Robin Williams at the peak of his profession, producing arguably his finest work. It was as if
Good Morning, Vietnam
had opened the floodgates: after some years in which it had seemed he would not, after all, achieve his potential, now the successes were flooding in thick and fast. He was to make over sixty films in total, some of them unforgettable or – worse in some eyes – far too sentimental but the most noteworthy rank right up there with the best films ever. And
Dead Poets Society
(1989) is unquestionably one of them.

Directed by Peter Weir, with a script by Tom Schulman, and set in the Welton Academy in 1959, the film depicts the
story of an inspirational teacher, John Keating (Williams), who turns accepted teaching methods on their head. His students – Neil Perry (Robert Sean Leonard), Todd Anderson (Ethan Hawke), Knox Overstreet (Josh Charles), Charlie Dalton (Gale Hansen), Richard Cameron (Dylan Kussman), Steven Meeks (Allelon Ruggiero) and Gerard Pitts (James Waterston) – may call him ‘O Captain! My Captain!’ he tells them, a reference to a Walt Whitman poem. He then persuades them to rip out the introduction to their poetry textbook!

On discovering that Keating is himself a former alumnus, the boys revive a club, the Dead Poets Society, to which Keating once belonged, which meets in secret. Meanwhile, Keating is encouraging them all to discover their inner potential, helping Anderson with a writing assignment. Dalton publishes an article saying that girls should be admitted to the school and is punished as a result. Overstreet falls in love and woos his girl with poetry. Perry wants to be an actor and takes part in a production of
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
against the express wishes of his father, who confronts Keating before withdrawing his son from the school and telling him he will go to Harvard and have a career in medicine. Perry subsequently commits suicide.

An investigation is launched, during which Cameron puts the blame on Keating and reveals the existence of the Dead Poets Society. Dalton punches him and is duly expelled. Headmaster Nolan (Norman Lloyd) calls Anderson to his
office, forces him to admit to belonging to the society and then makes him sign a document that blames Keating for encouraging Perry to flout his father’s wishes. Keating is then fired.

Nolan takes over the English class, discovers the introduction to the poetry book is missing and, as he finds one undamaged book for a boy to read from, Keating enters the class to reclaim a few possessions. Anderson tells him that he was forced to sign the document and, as Nolan orders him to be silent, climbs on his desk and shouts ‘O Captain! My Captain!’, Nolan tells him that, if he doesn’t sit down, he will be expelled. The rest of the boys ignore him and climb onto their desks, looking to Keating. Very much moved, he leaves, having changed the boys’ lives and made them aware of their own potential.

A touching story (even if it managed to imply that individuality and inspirational teaching will get you the sack if you’re the teacher and cause death if you’re the student), it was one of the greatest successes of Williams’ career. The critics were almost united in their praise: the
Washington Post’
s reviewer called it ‘solid, smart entertainment’ and praised Robin for giving a ‘nicely restrained acting performance’. Vincent Canby of
The New York Times
wrote of his ‘exceptionally fine performance’ and pointed out that ‘
Dead Poets Society
is far less about Keating than about a handful of impressionable boys’. Pauline Kael wasn’t sure about the film’s ‘middlebrow high-mindedness’ but praised the lead: ‘Robin Williams’ performance is more graceful
than anything he’s done before – he’s totally, concentratedly there – [he] reads his lines stunningly, and when he mimics various actors reciting Shakespeare there’s no undue clowning in it; he’s a gifted teacher demonstrating his skills.’

Roger Ebert was more cautious, worrying that Williams’ comic persona spilled into the acting and talked of a ‘collection of pious platitudes … The movie pays lip service to qualities and values that, on the evidence of the screenplay itself, it is cheerfully willing to abandon.’

Awards began flooding in.
Dead Poets Society
won the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay, while Williams, director Peter Weir and the film itself were all awarded Oscar nominations. Various Bafta awards and nominations followed, alongside citations from around the world. The famous line ‘Carpe diem. Seize the day, boys. Make your life extraordinary,’ was voted the ninety-fifth greatest movie quote by the American Film Institute. Even the title was vindicated – there had been concerns that it would be a difficult one to sell to the public, with actor and producer Harrison Ford saying the only worse title he could think of would have been
Dead Poets Society in Winter
– but it had worked.

Peter Weir revealed that he’d had to keep Williams on a tight leash. ‘Keating’s humor had to be part of the personality,’ he told
Premiere
magazine in 1989. ‘Robin and I agreed at the start that he was not going to be an entertainer in the classroom. That would have been wrong for the film as a whole. It would have been so easy for
him to have the kids rolling on the floor, doubled up with laughter. So he had to put the brakes on at times.’ However, he did allow the actor to run loose in the Shakespeare scene: ‘I had two cameras going, obviously, and I just said, “Boys, this is not a scripted scene. Treat Robin as your teacher and react accordingly, and don’t forget that it’s 1959.”’ Another innovation on Weir’s part was to gather the seven young actors who played the students together and get them to play sports before filming even began in order to create a bond between them that was essential for the movie.

Meanwhile, Robin, the acknowledged hero of the hour, was walking on air. His personal life was looking up too: on 30 April 1989 he married Marsha and she gave birth to his daughter, Zelda Rae Williams, shortly afterwards. Famously, Zelda was named after Princess Zelda of ‘The Legend of Zelda’ video-game series – Robin was a very keen gamer up to the end of his life, so much so that some people thought it might have contributed to his depression – although he later said that it was Zak’s idea. But he was very happy about it. The couple’s second child, Cody Alan Williams, arrived in 1991.

Robin was now involved in a set of films that were making headlines. Next up was
Awakenings
(1990), the true story of the British neurologist Oliver Sacks – turned into an American called Malcolm Sayer (Williams) in the movie – who discovers that the drug L-dopa (also known as levodopa) can be used to treat those who survived the 1917–28 epidemic of Encephalitis Lethargica (EL). Patients,
including Leonard Lowe, who was played by Robert De Niro, were awakened after decades of catatonia. It was directed by Penny Marshall, John Belushi’s old friend.

While a difficult subject, the general consensus was that it was treated with a good deal of taste. The film began with Sayer discovering that some patients could respond to certain types of stimuli: when a ball is thrown at them, for example, or when they hear familiar music. Leonard is reached by means of an Ouija board. Gradually, the patients start coming back to life and, as he does so, Leonard becomes romantically interested in the daughter of another patient, as well as beginning to chafe against the restrictions the hospital places on him and causing some disruption in the process. But then his body once more starts to disintegrate and everyone realises that the effect of the drug is only temporary. In the only slight hint of mawkishness in the film, ‘awakenings’ is taken to have a different meaning as Sayer, a chronically shy man, asks a nurse out for coffee and the medical staff begin to treat the patients, once more catatonic, with greater respect.

There was another flood of good reviews. ‘After seeing
Awakenings
, I read it, to know more about what happened in that Bronx hospital,’ wrote Roger Ebert in the
Chicago Sun-Times.
‘What both the movie and the book convey is the immense courage of the patients and the profound experience of their doctors, as in a small way they re-experienced what it means to be born, to open your eyes and discover to your astonishment that “you” are alive.’

‘
Awakenings
has been made with sensitivity and taste,’ wrote David Denby in
New York Magazine
. ‘There is certainly no exploitation of the obvious sort, and nothing in the sensational, brazen style of
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
(the high reputation of that ideological nuthatch bash amazes me). The patients are always treated as people, not as spectacle, though in fact the strangeness and the stress of their clinical symptoms are the most arresting things in the movie… As concocted by screenwriter Steven Zaillian, Sayer needs awakening himself. Timid and guarded, kindly yet cut off and asexual, he is a man with a vital element missing. Williams, having dropped the adorable Pied Piper act that made his performances in
Good Morning, Vietnam
and
Dead Poets Society
so tiresome, does some serious work. Masked by a fuzzy beard, he holds his arms at his side and hunches slightly, as if he were trying to stop cold air from sliding up his tummy.’

Other critics were won over, albeit with reservations. ‘There’s a raw, subversive element in De Niro’s performance: he doesn’t shrink from letting Leonard seem grotesque,’ said Owen Gleiberman of
Entertainment Weekly.
‘Yet
Awakenings,
unlike the infinitely superior
Rain Man,
isn’t really built around the quirkiness of its lead character. The movie views Leonard piously; it turns him into an icon of feeling. And so even if you’re held (as I was) by the acting, you may find yourself fighting the film’s design.’

Oliver Sacks, however, author of the 1973 memoir on which the film is based, ‘was pleased with a great deal …
I think in an uncanny way, De Niro did somehow feel his way into being Parkinsonian. So much so that sometimes when we were having dinner afterwards, I would see his foot curl or he would be leaning to one side, as if he couldn’t seem to get out of it. I think it was uncanny the way things were incorporated. At other levels I think things were sort of sentimentalized and simplified somewhat.’

But he loved Williams’ performance. ‘Robin has an almost instant access to parts of the mind – dreamlike parts, with phantasmagoric associations – that most of us don’t,’ he told
New York Magazine.
‘Robin becoming other people reminds me of Theodore Hook, the early-nineteenth-century wit who could improvise operas, playing every part. He was the most popular man in London, constantly invited out to dinner and to perform. For Hook, as for Robin, the demand never let up. But Hook never had a chance for quiet inwardness – he drank heavily, and he died in his fifties. Robin’s brilliance, however, is considerably controlled. He’s not in its grip.’ It was a somewhat prescient comment in light of what was to happen two and a half decades on.

But the admiration was mutual, with Robin citing this role as his favourite ever in his 2013 interview on
Reddit
. ‘I think playing Oliver Sacks in
Awakenings
was a gift because I got to meet him, and got to explore the human brain from the inside out,’ he said. ‘Because Oliver writes about human behavior subjectively and that for me was the beginning of a fascination with human behavior.’

Meanwhile, the reviewers were still having their say and Desson Howe of the
Washington Post
was not so impressed, saying, ‘when [Sayers’ love interest] nurse Julie Kavner (another former TV being) delivers the main Message (life, she tells Williams, is “given and taken away from all of us”), it doesn’t sound like the climactic point of a great movie. It sounds more like a line from one of the more sensitive episodes of
Laverne & Shirley
.’

Janet Maslin of
The New York Times
said, ‘
Awakenings
works harder at achieving such misplaced liveliness than at winning its audience over in other ways.’

Williams was, by now, widely considered to be an outstanding actor but his next choice jarred with many: playing a grown-up Peter Pan in
Hook
(1991). It is conceivably possible that the reason he accepted the role was because he’d never actually seen a production of the play: he did so for the first time at the age of thirty-eight after director Steven Spielberg had already signed him up. It has a sensational cast – Dustin Hoffman (Captain Hook), Julia Roberts (Tinkerbell), Bob Hoskins (Smee) and Maggie Smith (Granny Wendy) but the conceit, that Peter has grown up and as Peter Banning, a corporate lawyer with a wife and two children, has forgotten his own childhood, was too much for some. The villainous Hook kidnaps his family and Peter must go back to Neverland to rescue them, but the story just didn’t come off. The film was a commercial success (though not as successful as forecast) but a critical failure and, in a career of hits and misses, this one definitely fell into the latter camp.

This unexpected flop was almost immediately compensated for when Williams made what some people consider to be his finest film:
The Fisher King
(1991). Directed by Terry Gilliam and written by Richard LaGravenese, it was a fantasy offering that could easily have lost its way but did not. It concerned Jack Lucas (Jeff Bridges), a shock jock whose on-air utterances prompt someone to commit mass murder in a Manhattan bar. Lucas becomes a hopeless drunk, working in a record store with his girlfriend Anne, before being attacked by a group of thugs. He is rescued by Parry (Williams), a homeless man looking for the Holy Grail. Initially, Jack is cautious but then discovers that Parry had been rendered catatonic for a time after seeing his wife murdered by the same psycho who carried out the bar killing (and had previously called Lucas). Parry is haunted by a hallucination of a Red Knight, of which he is terrified. He tells Jack the story of the Fisher King, who was charged with guarding the Holy Grail.