Robin Williams
-JOKE JUNKIE-

It’s his last remaining addiction – a craving for laughter from a live audience. Most nights, Robin Williams prowls the streets in his limo looking for a fix – clubs to gate-crash with his impromptu stand-up comedy act. CHEETAH HAYSOM tracked him down and fought to get a word in edgeways

THE TABLOID headlines screamed: “Robin Williams Runs Off With Son’s Nanny”, striking new dread in the hearts of insecure wives. Robin, one of the wittiest and apparently nicest comic actors around, seemed an unlikely sort to betray the home by raiding the nursery. How could that funny, intelligent man with the elfin eyes do something so vile? His devoted wife had been devastated, said the stories. And the poor child was now trapped in a love triangle.

It seems there is nothing in Robin’s life that he doesn’t have the courage to face in his stand-up comic routines – child-birth, his abuse of drugs, his womanising, his childhood or his sexual urges. The exception is the nanny story. He’s still angry and wounded two years later, because those headlines demeaned people he loves and implied he was a lout of a father. In an otherwise hilarious interview – his rubbery face repeatedly contorting in lunatic improvisations, and his brain snapping unpredictably into another gear and careering dangerously close to the edge of acceptability – he was suddenly sombre when it came to the tabloid stories. The slash of a mouth was immobile for a few minutes and the narrow eyes became steely.

In the mysterious way that a man is sometimes transformed from a mere hunk into an irresistible male when we see his tears, Robin’s defence of his family over those headlines only makes him more appealing. “I think he’s sexy because he’s so kind,” says Pamela Reed, who plays his wife in Cadillac Man, Robin’s latest film. “He’s got the biggest heart.”
“She said that?” asks Robin. Then mocks, “But you know, size makes no difference.”
I know he can’t be all heart, because he’s all hair. During my interview with him in San Francisco, his mustard-coloured shirt was buttoned almost to the collar, yet thick fur crept up his neck like a cravat. Robin calls it his “natural sweater from the Darwin collection”. After seeing him in the bathtub in a scene from Moscow on the Hudson a fan asked, “Geez! What are you? Some kind of monkey?”

Cadillac Man was shot in New York in midsummer when it was humid and the temperature was over 30ºC, recalls Fran Cresher, who plays one of Robin’s many mistresses in the film. The script called for a love scene. “It was so hot and we were both sweating. At the end of every take I’d be covered with his hair. Robin’s like a bear in bed!”

WHEN I MET HIM he was bearded and looked particularly hirsute. Shortish, wide-hipped and powerfully built, he occasionally scratched his chest, slipping his fingers between the buttons to get at the hair. He paced back and forth like a mildly agitated primate, lapsing into manic barking and growling as he imitated one of the starts of the film – a dog called Chester.

In Cadillac Man, his ninth film, he plays a sleazy car salesman whose power of persuasion makes him a hero in a bizarre hostage situation. The initial reaction to the concept was that “hostage-taking isn’t funny”. But with Robin Williams it is. He can turn anything into a laugh, even the war in Vietnam. Robin took the role of a GI disc jockey in Good Morning Vietnam, the 1988 film that was the first to unleash Robin Williams’s stream-of-consciousness humour. Veterans’ groups huffed, but Robin said he would never mock the war – and he didn’t. It was a box-office hit and won him his first Oscar nomination.

FAME AND FORTUNE came suddenly when he was plucked out of comedy cafés and bartending in Los Angeles to do Mork and Mindy, an American TV sit-com in which he played a hyperkinetic extraterrestrial. His first movie was Popeye, a film either ahead of its time or seriously misconceived, depending which way you look at it. Then there was a series of flops he agreed to do because, in his innocence, he believed that he could make them better. He was well reviewed as the title character in The World According to Garp, playing a New England writer, a role he says he wishes he could play again now that he has his own children. Moscow on the Hudson, a comedy in which he played a Soviet saxophonist who defects amid the aisles of capitalist excess in Bloomingdales department store, did fairly well – even though Soviet defectors were almost as revered at that time as Vietnam veterans. And last year’s straight performance in Dead Poets’ Society, as an unorthodox, inspiring teacher in a school run by conformist bores, was a box-office success, winning him another Oscar nomination.

WITHOUT ANALYSING what drives a comic to lunatic improvisations and intellectual contortions, it’s interesting to note that in Dead Poets’ Society, the student with whom Robin most identified was the shyest boy in the class, so painfully introverted he dared not read aloud. “I can barely talk to a single person,” notes Robin, “yet I can grab my dick on stage in front of 4000 people without batting an eyelid.”

Robin’s father was a motor company executive – an elegant, distant man, whom Robin called Lord Posh. His two step-brothers were much older so he grew up alone in a huge house, raised mainly by a nanny. “My mother was wonderful and witty. I wonder if comedy was my way of connecting with her. Maybe I wanted her attention.” It’s a simple statement: claiming he was a neglected child is not in his repertoire. In fact, he blesses his dad for accepting his desire to be a performer – unlike the father in Dead Poets’ Society whose contempt for acting has tragic consequences.

Robin spent his teens and was educated in Tiburon, a suburb of San Francisco, and then studied drama under John Houseman at the prestigious Juilliard school in New York. After three years he returned to San Francisco, and started doing one-night stands. He met and married Valerie Verlardie, his first wife, while she was waitressing to pay for her post-graduate studies. He’d moved to LA when a casting agent spotted him in a club and he was cast as the comic star of Mork and Mindy.

Robin was no match for the panoply of problems that are sent to test sudden celebrities. When beautiful women flung themselves at him, he seldom ducked. When cocaine was pressed in his palm, he seldom demured. And he drank like a demon. “Yeah, I had a wild life,” he says, his fingers fidgeting between his shirt buttons to scratch his chest again. “When you’re running around like that you’re usually running from something or looking for something and you’re scared shitless about yourself.”

TWO EVENTS made him quit. “Valerie became pregnant with Zach, and John Belushi was blown away.” Belushi, the comic actor from Saturday Night Live, died of a massive overdose of heroin and cocaine. That night Robin had called on Belushi, who had given him a line of cocaine. “I took it and went home. I felt I wasn’t wanted there.” Belushi’s death caused an exodus from drugs in show business. “And for me there was the baby coming. I knew I couldn’t be a father and do that sort of thing.” Robin was among several celebrities who gave evidence at the grand jury investigation into Belushi’s death. “It took several years to overcome my sense of guilt for not saving the guy.”

Robin may be one of the few show-business people to kick chemical dependency without a sojourn at the Betty Ford Clinic. He gave up booze by what he calls “decompression”. “You work your way down from Jack Daniels to mixed drinks, to wine coolers to Perrier. Cocaine is harder – it took a few months.” By 1982 he was clean. “When I stopped drinking and doing drugs, many of those people from back then would come up and say, ‘Robin, you made eye contact. You OK?’” Robin says he even gave up womanising. “That was also like a drug. It was de-humanising. I’m ashamed of all that.” Now he gets his highs in other ways. He runs. “Missing a day is like withdrawal. I call it Cold Nike,” he quips. He even calls having a child a kind of high. “Who could ever know that you can get a fix from just watching a child sleeping.”
Robin’s paternal imperative these days is to protect seven-year-old Zachary from star fallout. He clearly adores his little boy and at one point, when he was talking about his son, he lifted his arms in the manner of a man carrying a small child at his chest. Zach was a toddler when Valerie and Robin appointed Marsha Garces, a Finnish-Philippine artist, as his nanny. Marsha left after two years. A year later, as Robin tells it, the marriage broke up. He and Valerie were living apart when he met Marsha again.

“The grand illusion was that Marsha broke up my marriage, which was total nonsense. At the time I didn’t contradict it because I wanted to resolve things peacefully. But it became just horrifying. I should have said, ‘You liars, come here,’ taken a power tool, and said, ‘It’s time to talk about this . . .’” He seems about to turn his bitterness into a comic routine, but he pulls back. “I take responsibility because I didn’t talk at the time, but they made comments about my son, and they implied that he had problems. He’s one of the most precious things in my life and you just want to grab somebody and go . . .” His silence is more significant than a crash and a thud. It seems it’s his own reticence he wants to punish.

Now Marsha Garces and Robin Williams are married and have their own baby, a girl who checked in at 4.2 kg. “Aaaah,” cringes Robin, imitating a shocked obstetrician. “She’s given birth to a fully grown woman.” Deciding on the baby’s name was a problem. “We tried several: Queen Elizabeth of California! Neah. Thunderbird! Neah. Margarine. Margarine Williams! Neah. Finally Zach named her Zelda after one of the characters in a game.” Robin plans another child but swears off the Z names. “Imagine Zeus. Zeus, my son! Father, I cannot come – the Gods are calling.”

Zachary spends alternate weekends with his mother in their San Francisco apartment and with Robin in his. The comedian also has a 160-hectare retreat in the Napa Valley, north of San Francisco. But Robin is away on location a lot of the time – and not glamorous locations, he’s quick to add. Take Cadillac Man, shot in a motor showroom in a backstreet behind a cemetery in Queens, New York, in sweltering heat. “Darling, you must go there for your honeymoon,” he quips.

Various people in the cast told me they adored Robin because he was irrepressibly funny and very considerate. His only detractor was Chester, the Pomeranian, who snapped at him throughout four months of shooting. “Chester is a rat in drag,” says Robin. “The dog from hell, puppy from beyond, Freddy Krueger with claws. If you ask most people what they want to do when they see a Pomeranian, 90 per cent would say drop-kick . . . but I always have trouble with anything that has more fur than I do.”

His banter about Chester gets the subject away from him, a joke a second, with the facial contortions to match. Journalists who have interviewed Robin warn that he’ll make you laugh until your time runs out. It’s his way of avoiding questions. However, he stopped as soon as he was asked a question about Marsha, barely hiding a smile, as though he knew he was pulling a fast one. “She came on location with me every day when we were shooting Cadillac Man – in that heat, even when the baby was due. I worried – specially during the hostage scenes when there was gunfire and helicopters overhead.” He imagined the unborn baby absorbing this through the womb and then growing up unafraid of gunfire. “’It’s just a movie,’ she’d say.”

MARSHA, a private person who has never given an interview, acts as Robin’s personal assistant, consultant, companion, anchor and lover. He speaks of her with tenderness. When Robin goes prowling the late-night comedy clubs (his last vice), she comes along and waits in the limo, or sits inside with him until the last act is over and Robin goes to the stage.
He never allows his impromptu arrival to bump a scheduled performer. Given the choice of performing or acting he’d rather perform. He may have kicked all the chemical dependencies but he has a compulsion to make people laugh. His fix is applause. But he even mocks his own aspirations, demonstrating how he claps and grins to hide his disappointment on Oscar night when “the winner is ... not Robin Williams.” One day, he imagines, he’ll win the Oscar. “Here, little ones,” he’ll say to his children, “Daddy has brought home the great statue. And they’ll wail, ‘Daddy it’s blind and it’s got no genitals.’”

Perhaps in the future Robin Williams will even have fun with the nanny story. It could one day yield material – he could say that Prince Charles, who will one day be king of the British Isles and head of the Commonwealth, ran off with a nanny too. Just think of the headlines.