Copyright © 2002, 2009, 2014 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s
Newsmagazine • All rights reserved
Robin Williams in One
Hour Photo
I went to junior
college with Robin Williams. No, I didn’t actually know him, but I certainly
knew of him. At the time I was an
aspiring journalist and political activist who’d just got out of high school in
the spring of 1970 and edged my way back into academia at the College of Marin
in spring 1971. Robin Williams was the reigning star of the college’s drama
department — which, after it acquired a national and even international
reputation, got rather grandly renamed the Department of Theatre Arts — and in
the fall of 1971 he and the other stars of the school’s most famous production,
Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew relocated to the American West, had just got back from the Edinburgh
Shakespeare Festival. Not only had they been invited to perform there, but
Princess Margaret, Queen Elizabeth II’s sister, and her husband had been at
their last show in Scotland.
Thanks largely
to Robin Williams’ popularity and the royal cachet from Princess Margaret’s attendance, The
Taming of the Shrew was revived at the
start of the 1971-72 fall semester and I got to see him on stage for the first
time. As the play’s male lead, Petruchio, he delivered a swaggering performance
that more fully lived up to Shakespeare’s demands for the role than many other
actors with greater Shakespearean reputations. Later I saw him in another Shakespeare
role, as Orsino, the romantic lead of Twelfth Night — which the Theatre Arts people, looking for another
triumph on the level of Shrew,
had intriguingly relocated to California during the Mission era. When I told
this story to people after Robin Williams had become a star — but one
identified with zany comedy rather than finely honed acting — those who knew
the play immediately assumed he’d done one of the openly comic supporting
roles. No, he was the leading man, and a fine one, too, full of romantic yearnings
and thinly veiled passions.
Thanks to the
success of these productions, the College of Marin Theatre Arts Department
became one of the most important parts of the school, able to lease an
off-campus theatre for productions for which neither the barn-like 600-seat
campus auditorium nor the 100-seat workshop theatre were suitable. I saw Robin
Williams at least once more, in the 100-seat space, in a production of Oscar
Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest
that veered annoyingly between 1890’s period and modern dress. Williams’
costume was blue jeans and a T-shirt with an airplane propeller motif, but despite the handicap of that silly costume he
was as able to make Algernon Moncrieff come to life as he had been in
Shakespearean parts on the big stage.
I mention all
this not to do an I-knew-him-when brag (as I said, I saw him on stage but didn’t actually know him), but because just about
everything written about Robin Williams from the time he signed to do his
late-1970’s sitcom Mork and Mindy
until the obituaries ignored this part of his career. To read the standard
histories of Williams’ career, you’d think he sprang full-blown from the stage
of the Comedy Store in L.A. in 1975, got seen there by executives from
Paramount and ABC and signed to do that dorky but screamingly funny show that
made him a household name. I would tell people that I’d seen Robin Williams
perform in Shakespeare in junior college productions, and they wouldn’t believe
me. It’s not that different from the legend that America’s Queer rights
movement sprang full-blown from the Stonewall Inn riot in New York City in 1969
— ignoring that there’d been sporadic Queer activism in the U.S. at least since
1926 and a continuous movement since 1950.
So when my
then-girlfriend urged me to watch this great new show called Mork and Mindy with this hilarious guy named Robin Williams, I
didn’t make the connection to the young man who’d started out in my junior
college until I actually watched the program, and it dawned on me who Robin
Williams was. I can’t say I really was a huge fan of Williams — I didn’t follow
his every move or watch his every movie (some of which were pretty forgettable)
— but what I saw of him, I generally liked. I remember watching Good
Morning, Vietnam — his breakthrough film in
which he played D.J. Adrian Cronauer, a real person (who, naturally, protested
against the inaccuracies in the movie) who had done a pop-music show for the
“grunts” in ’Nam. Though I found the film a bit too arbitrarily divided between
a relentlessly comic first half and a tear-jerking second half, nonetheless
Williams deserved the kudos he got from critics who were finally discovering
what we early-1970’s College of Marin alumni had known all along: that Robin
Williams was a great actor and
not just a crazy improv comedian.
Not that Robin
Williams was the first person to balance those talents. One of the most
annoying aspects of biography writing is what I call “first-itis,” the tendency
of people who write about someone to assume that they were the first person
ever to do this or that. When I heard one of Williams’ TV eulogists say he was
uniquely innovative in his ability to combine comedy and drama, my immediate
reaction was, “Does the name ‘Charlie Chaplin’ mean anything to you?” Over the
next few days I found myself ransacking my brain for the names of other actors
equally adept in comedy and drama, and equally skilled at coming up with nervy
combinations of them: Cary Grant, David Niven, Peter Sellers, Jack Lemmon. It
doesn’t take away from Robin Williams’ enormous talent to note that there were
other actors before him who could make you laugh and break your heart —
sometimes, like Chaplin, at the same time.
The last time I
saw Robin Williams live was in April 1981, when he was one of the stars of a
big peace rally at the Starlight Bowl in Balboa Park put on by something called
the April Coalition, an uncertain and internally divided group of people
agreeing on little except their opposition to President Reagan’s military
buildup. I actually have stronger memories of a much less well-known performer
on the bill, Earl Robinson, who in the 1930’s and 1940’s had written such
Popular Front classics as “Ballad for Americans” and “The House I Live In” and
whose song “Black and White,” written to celebrate the 1954 Supreme Court
ruling in Brown v. Board of
Education, had been a major hit for Three
Dog Night. On the stage of the Starlight Bowl, Robinson proved charmingly funny
and warm, even when he was lamenting that Three Dog Night’s version of his song
had left out its most politically pointed verse.
What I remember
about Robin Williams on that day was a routine he did spoofing the various
weapons President Reagan wanted to add to the U.S. military arsenal — including
the cruise missile. Assuming a stereotyped Gay-queen voice, he had the cruise
missile say, “Ooh, a city! Let’s destroy it!” Almost nobody who wasn’t at that rally, whom I
quoted that line to later, thought it was funny. That’s why Robin Williams
became a huge star and I didn’t. So much of great comedy is timing — the way a
joke is delivered so that something that looks only slightly amusing on paper
can evoke huge belly-laughs when spoken by a master. The late Lenny Bruce was
frequently put on trial in the early 1960’s for obscenity, and he’d have to sit
in court while police stenographers solemnly and humorlessly read from
transcripts of his act. (In self-defense he started recording his performances,
which meant that after he died of a heroin overdose in 1966 plenty of “new”
Lenny Bruce albums were released from those tapes.) Bruce would claim, usually
in vain, that an act that sounded obscene when delivered in a monotone by a
bored cop wasn’t when a trained
stand-up comedian did it. Likewise, Robin Williams’ cruise-missile routine
sounded outrageously homophobic when I repeated it — and brilliantly funny and
not at all anti-Queer when he did
it.
I also found
myself lamenting when Robin Williams started pursuing the self-destructive path
that tempts a lot of people who become famous. “Going Hollywood,” they called
it in the 1930’s — indeed, a movie of that title starring Bing Crosby was made
in 1933 — and it took much the same form then than it did in the 1970’s when
Williams made it, and it does today. Drinking. Drugs. Partying. Women (or men).
Late arrivals on set and diva-ish
behavior when you actually do
show up for work. And a lot of forgettable pieces of presumably commercially
appealing trash to make quick money to pay for it all. Williams lasted a lot
longer than many burnout stars — he didn’t drink himself to death, he didn’t
O.D., he didn’t disgrace himself completely, and he did enough genuinely good
movies in between the mediocre or downright wretched ones that periodically he
reminded people of the sheer range and breadth of his talents.
One I
particularly remember because I reviewed it when it came out was called One
Hour Photo. “Basically One Hour
Photo is Michael Powell’s Peeping
Tom meets Martin Scorsese’s Taxi
Driver,” I wrote. “Sy Parrish (Williams) is a pathetic character who
bears all the indicia of motion-picture alienation: a grungy downtown apartment
in which he lives alone, an obsessive-compulsive commitment to do his job
absolutely perfectly; a bare minimum of emotional connections — he’s on a
first-name basis with the waitress who serves him at a coffee shop but she
seems to be the only woman he
knows at all outside his work — and a fixation on a particular family that
leads him to print extra copies of their photos and literally paper his wall with them. Needless to say, it also
leads him to stalk them, and worse … ”
One Hour
Photo wasn’t much of a movie — “Williams
Shines Brighter than Film,” I headlined my review — but it offered its star one
of those haunting performances he remained capable of throughout his entire
career. Even after he got too old to get huge roles in blockbuster properties,
Williams could still get jobs from oddball “independent” producers and
directors — and it’s a tribute to his open-mindedness that he took a lot of
parts most stars of his reputation and history wouldn’t have considered. Former
Monty Python member Terry Jones recalled approaching Williams in 2010 asking
him to provide the voice of a talking dog named Dennis for an upcoming film
called Absolutely Anything — and
having to approach him again four
years later after Jones finally got the money to take the script into production.
“I e-mailed him with a sinking heart, fearing that so much time had elapsed and
he may not want to voice Dennis,” Jones recently recalled. “But I need not have
feared. He wrote back that he was up for voicing the dog.”
Robin Williams
died August 11, 2014 in Tiburon, California — not far from the College of Marin
where I’d first heard of him and seen him. The matter-of-fact press conference
given by the Marin County sheriff’s department, which I watched on CNN, told a
story straight out of one of Williams’ edgier movies, made even more
frightening by the Jack Webb just-the-facts-ma’am understatement with which the
cop told it. They’d found him hanging by a doorway in his home, holding a knife
whose blade was stained with a red substance. The cop giving the press
conference resolutely avoided making even the most obvious inferences, but it
seemed clear that in his last minutes on earth Robin Williams had been so
determined to end his life he’d hacked at his wrists, trying to slash them, and
then hanged himself when that didn’t work. (If it hadn’t happened for real, one
could readily imagine this as a screamingly funny Robin Williams comedy
sequence: the hapless man who can’t even kill himself properly.)
In the six days
between Williams’ death and my writing this, there’s been endless speculation
attempting to answer the unanswerable question: why? Why did a man who seemingly had it all become so
desperate to take his own life? And a more poignant question, at least to me:
how did a brilliantly talented performer who brought so much joy and laughter
to millions of other people have so little left over when he needed it himself?
The bitch-goddess aspects of celebrity — the Faustian bargain any sort of
stardom brings with it, the fishbowl existence that’s the dark side of renown —
have been expressed so often they’ve basically become clichés. When you’re a
star, you can no longer have a normal life. You can’t eat out, go for a walk,
date or do any of the things normal people take for granted without being
followed by paparazzi and
so-called “fans” who think the money they’ve paid to see you on screen entitles
them to horn in on your life any time they get the chance.
And
in Robin Williams’ case there was another factor that haunts every celebrity
who doesn’t do a Byronic flame-out and
exit in their 20’s and 30’s. It’s called age. A performer like Williams who
makes it big on the basis of youthful exuberance and energy is going to have a
good deal of trouble later on when the energy gets drained and the exuberance
is harder to sustain. When I finally caught up with his’ 1997 film Flubber — a remake of Walt Disney’s 1961 The
Absent-Minded Professor with Williams
playing a part originated by Fred MacMurray — in 2009, I wrote on my movie blog
that “it probably would have been better if Williams had made it about 10 to 15
years earlier (when he wouldn’t have had to rely so heavily on digital effects
and stunt people to do his pratfalls for him).”
Williams
may have been a giant talent, but when he died he was already on the downgrade,
no longer considered for leads in big blockbusters and instead playing big
roles in independent movies and small ones in commercial films (like the Night
at the Museum series, in which he played a
wax statue of Theodore Roosevelt which comes to life), and his TV sitcom The
Crazy Ones — heavily hyped by CBS as Robin
Williams’ long-awaited return to series television — had been canceled after
just one season. The downside of fame is not only the loss of privacy and
connection to normal humanity, it’s also a cruel awareness of how quickly the
brass ring can pass you by on the next ride on the merry-go-round. An old
Hollywood proverb says it best: “You’re only as good as your last picture.”
Other
comedians managed the transition without taking their own lives. Charlie
Chaplin and Harold Lloyd saved their fortunes and were able to spend their last
years in quiet, dignified retirement. Buster Keaton and Groucho Marx made
late-in-life comebacks as elder statesmen of comedy. Jerry Lewis and Danny
Thomas did charity telethons that kept them busy and before the public long
after they could no longer get cast in the sorts of roles that had made them
famous. Age is usually more of a curse on celebrity women than celebrity men —
in what other line of work is a woman considered washed up in her mid-30’s? —
but among men it’s particularly difficult for comedians because making people
laugh, especially in the strenuous high-energy way Robin Williams made us
laugh, is pretty much a young person’s job.
Goodbye,
Robin Williams. May your restless soul that made us laugh so hard find peace at
last. I feel like I’ve grown up with you; maybe because you’re an old school
mate of mine that your death hit me a lot harder than most celebrity deaths.
I’m sorry that your career and your talents cost you so much in the end. And
for the enjoyment you gave me, I can only say a quiet, dignified, “Thank you.”
