I have two
vivid memories of Robin Williams – one funny, one less so.
The funny
one: Very early in my TV junketing, back when I did segments for The Ron Stone Show in Houston, I got to
do a sit-down with Williams. It was the typical set-up – I walked into the
suite where he was already seated, eased into a chair opposite him, and started
chatting while one videographer focused on him, and the other focused on me.
Except
that it was anything but typical when he started riffing – manically,
hilariously – as soon as I asked my first question. I managed to ask, oh, I
dunno, maybe three or four other questions, but it didn’t really matter – he was
in inspired free-form mode, and maybe he felt even less inhibited than usual by
my willingness to just go with his flow. (At one point, he encouraged one of
the videographers to zoom in my embroidered sweater vest – “Look! It’s a test
pattern!”) I kept getting all sorts of signals from the off-camera personnel – finger-twirling,
palms swiped across necks, etc. – to cut it short.
But, really, it wasn’t my
fault that a 6-minute interview expanded to a quarter-hour. Indeed, it might
have gone on even longer had I not simply looked into the camera and, in my
most serious Walter Cronkite-type voice, asked: “At what point did I lose all
control of this interview?” While Williams paused to laugh, the videographers
grabbed their chance to stop taping.
The
not-so-funny memory: At the San Francisco junket for Good Morning, Vietnam, I had the opportunity to do a one-on-one
interview with Williams in his hotel suite. He was appreciably more serious –
maybe he got the vibe that I wasn’t expecting him to perform for me? – and we
veered off to a discussion of parental responsibility.
Specifically: I told him that I had recently read an article that detailed how some new fathers –
including guys who had never before cared much about firearms – felt the need
to buy a handgun to “protect their families” after the arrival of a first child.
(My son wasn’t yet two years old at the time.) And then I told him about a guy in
Texas who had gunned down a martial arts instructor who had molested the guy’s naïve
son.
“And you know what?” I told Williams, speaking as one dad to another. “That
motherfucker isn’t going to prison! That motherfucker is gonna walk!” (Which,
as it turned out, is pretty much what happened.) Williams replied: “Damn right!”
He wasn’t joking. He was approving. So both of us bleeding-heart liberals
slapped palms – and then continued talking.
Robin
Williams reportedly took his own life Monday, after years of struggling with
depression and knowing the true color of darkness. During the coming days,
weeks and years, we likely will be offered various and sundry “explanations”
for his suicide. But, really, will anyone who hasn’t ever plumbed the depths he
did – who hasn’t, say, pressed the
barrel of a gun to his forehead while fingering the trigger, or gazed at an oncoming
subway train and considered tossing herself onto the tracks – ever know why he
did what he did?
I feel wholly
ill-equipped to offer easy explanations. Instead, I offer these snippets from a
1991 piece I wrote after interviewing Williams for Awakenings.
X X X X
Some mornings, Robin
Williams would walk into the Brooklyn mental hospital where he filmed
Awakenings, take a long look and an even longer listen as he observed the
patients on the first two floors, and think, ''Yeah, there but for the grace of
God . . . ''
Williams has spoken freely of the alcohol and drugs he once abused
and which he uses no more. He is only slightly less forthcoming when he speaks
of a darkness that needs no chemical stimuli, of a rage that fueled so many of
his stand-up comedy routines before, during and after his first mainstream
success on television's Mork and Mindy.
When I spoke with him in 1988 during a junket for Good Morning, Vietnam, he admitted to a
certain pride in ''my darker side,'' the aggressiveness that enabled him to
deal with unruly crowds when the comedy wasn't working. Or even when it was.
''Performing stand-up,'' he said, ''is like being in the Roman arena. And the
lion has had two beers.
''Sometimes, the audience is hostile. And I respond to that...''
But things are calmer, less frenetic, these days. Comparatively
speaking.
Even now, Williams remains the Salvador Dali of stand-up comics
when he takes over a stage. And his amazing gift for free-association comic
riffs is every bit as impressive, even awe-inspiring, as ever. Dr. Oliver
Sacks, the neurologist and best-selling author whose experiments inspired Awakenings, served as the movie's
technical adviser, and had ample opportunity to witness Williams' free-wheeling
routines between takes. As Sacks describes it: ''There are things that other
people might think, deep down in their subconscious, that they would never say.
But with
Robin, there's all these wild things. They suddenly explode in
him, these fantastic associations . . .
''There's something like these strange, surreal explosions in some
people with Tourette's syndrome. There's an aspect of creativity in Robin that,
in a strange way, is very much like the compulsiveness in people with Tourette's.''
But there's a big difference: These days, at least, Williams can
turn off the compulsiveness when he wants to. If it's Tourette's, he and Sacks
agree, then it's a self-willed Tourette's.
''Yes,'' Williams said during a recent Manhattan interview, ''when
I met Shane, one of Sacks' patients, who really has Tourette's -- I felt a
certain kinship. Sometimes, I, too, have the ability to kind of override the
gland, or whatever it is, that would normally censor you. I drop that, the way
Tourette's people do. I understand that. And I understand the same exhilaration
they sometimes do.
''It's kind of like -- hah! -- like a comic savant. You know, all of
a sudden, flashes of idiocy flash through me, and I don't censor it.
''But I can hold back sometimes. Shane can't.''
This self-control, Williams admits, is only recently acquired. ''I do feel better about myself, more
comfortable about who I am and what am I. Why? Well, I didn't go through heavy
psychoanalysis, but, yeah, therapy, I talked to someone.
''And I have a good relationship,'' with his second wife, Marsha,
a painter and sculptor with an academic background. (They have an infant daughter,
Zelda.) ''It's a wonderful relationship, where I have freedom. And when you have that as a baseline, you're
all right.
''Especially,'' Williams added with a grin as he raised his thick,
hairy arms, ''if you have someone who doesn't mind that you have Quest for Fire gloves on all the time.''
That's when you feel safe, Williams said -- safe enough to not be on all the time. Now, his cartwheeling
comedy ''is not an aggressive thing anymore. Now, it's like a playful thing.
''There's much less of a mandatory feeling about it. It's not like
it's a necessity -- I don't have to keep doing it to keep the world at bay. I
can do it when I want, and then pull back, and talk about intimate things.''
Moviegoers got their first glimpse at the new and improved (and
more self-controlled) Robin Williams last year in Dead Poets Society. Despite a few moments of inspired mimicry --
like, when he offered us John Wayne as Macbeth -- he played it mostly straight,
and earned an Oscar nomination, as an iconoclastic teacher at a straight-laced
prep school.
Actor-turned-director Penny Marshall was greatly impressed by
Williams' performance. So much so, in fact, that she began to think of Williams
for the role of Dr. Malcolm Sayer, a character based on Sacks, in a film based
on Sacks' best-selling book, Awakenings.
''Someone sent me a clue,'' Williams said. ''They said, 'You'll be
getting something very special in the mail.' And I said, 'Like what? Publishers
Clearing House sweepstakes?'''
What it was, was the script for Awakenings, which offers a fictionalized gloss on Sacks' real-life
attempts to ''reawaken'' patients who can neither move nor communicate by
giving them an experimental drug. (Robert De Niro co-stars in the film as the
most prominent of the patients.) Williams read the script during a long
airplane trip. The second time he found himself weeping out loud, he knew he
wanted to do the film.
And, better still, he knew Marshall wanted him to do it, to bring
a warmly human dimension to the story.
''It's like, when she directed Big,
she worked against the comedy,'' Williams said. ''With this, she played against
the drama. There's something pretty instinctual about that, when you know that
from the beginning, in order to make something as potentially depressing as
this, you're going to have to, if possible, make it somewhat funny. In order to
capture those moments in the hospital. In order to bring you into this world --
and then hit you with this world.
''I don't mean using me as a comedian, riffing on patients, like,
'Hi, there, welcome to Club Medicaid.' No. But to slowly unveil this world to people,
and suck them into the story.''
Williams often is extremely funny in Awakenings. But the humor grows out of his character, a painfully
shy, often absent-minded fellow who, when his patients are concerned, has a
will of tempered steel. It's a beautifully restrained yet full-bodied
performance, the work of an actor who has learned that, yes, sometimes, less
really is more.
Surprisingly -- or, come to think of it, maybe not so surprisingly
-- Williams did not find it at all difficult to convey the tongue-tied, introverted
side of his role.
''Basically,'' he said, ''I was able to tap into the fact that,
for the first 18 years of my life, I was like that. All the way up to my junior
year of high school, I was pretty isolated. So I know that.
''People ask me, 'How did you get into this?' Well, I just
remembered what it was like from 16 onward, being an only child, growing up in
a huge house, all that stuff. With all that, you get a little shy, you get a
little awkward about dealing with people.''
As a stand-up comic, of course, Williams discovered how to
compensate for that childhood shyness. It took him a lot longer to discover how
to stop compensating.
And when he talks about that, he recalls once again the days in
the hospital where Awakenings was
shot.
''And I knew, looking around me there, that there have been times
in my life when I've been near that edge,'' Williams said. ''That point where,
if you went a little bit more, just a tad, just slightly more unglued
-- yeah, I'd be here.''
Postscript: One year later, during the junket for Toys – a film that I evidently liked
much more than most of my critical brethren – Williams shared with me his
concern about violent video games.
''What frightens me about video games, and
television and computer games -- and, yes, I'm addicted to computers, I have a
floppy disc and a hard drive -- but sometimes, I think they steal your dreams.
If you play video games long enough, when you go to bed at night, you replay
the game rather than dream. It denies you the access to something that's quite
wonderful, and quite primal, the ability to dream.''
Worse, Williams says, some
of the video games seem like high-tech nightmares.
''Have you seen some of
these things? Especially the shoot-'em-up ones? There's one in the arcades
that's called Hostage, where you have
to pick off people in doorways. There's a lot of them like that, where,
literally, the gun is there, and you learn to shoot it.
''I know you get negative
points if you hit, like, a woman with a baby in her arms by mistake. But after
a while, I'm sure there must be a temptation to just turn the gun and go wham!
''So I try to filter what
games my kids play. Or at least make them more aware of what shooting and
blowing up things really means. Like my father did with me. See, I used to
collect toy soldiers as a kid. And at a certain point, my father sat me down
and explained the horror of it to me, having been in the Navy on a carrier. He
told me there's nothing glorious about war, there's nothing fun about it, nothing
exciting about it.
''I disarmed after that
day.''
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