Hey, Robbie!” It's a black voice, wildly enthusiastic, a fan's voice coming out of a passing car. We're on San Francisco's Clement Street in Robin Williams' white Land Rover, driving out to see the new house he's just built overlooking the Bay and the serene Marin coastline.
This passing anonymous fan has just provided yet another Voice Eruption. But this is the first Voice Eruption of the afternoon that hasn't come flying out of Williams' own lips. All Voice Eruptions will be indicated hereinafter as [V/E: Unknown Fan: “Hey, Robbie!".]
Writing about Robin Williams requires special punctuation. The English language was hardly designed to quote a man with at least 10,000 voices.
Hanging out with Robin Williams is more like hanging on: white-water rafting on the furious drift of a stream of consciousness that cascades from one Voice Eruption to the next. For example, just before the fan's "Hey Robbie” interrupted us, Robbie himself was in the middle of a looping monologue about how this former Irish-Russian neighbourhood - has become totally Hong Kong Chinese. Williams recalls that his wife Marsha used to live hereabouts. “She lived with this old lady who smoked Larks. Suddenly we’re into V/E mode. Hoarse Crone: “Hello dear. You want to see Marsha?” Horrendous wracking coughing fit. She had this cough. You could hear her spleen disintegrating. Wonderful listening to an old lady hawk her spleen out. [V/E: Terrifying spitting noise. ‘Have any Larks, dear?’] Wonderful.”
I am now laughing so hard I can hardly see the Chinese supermarkets through the windscreen. Just as you, reader, were laughing yourself silly if you ever saw Williams playing the army disc jockey Adrian Cronauer in Good Morning Vietnam, the first of his films to achieve major box office success and a role for which he won an Oscar nomination. In that film, in the enormously popular Dead Poets Society, in Terry Gilliam's acclaimed The Fisher King and in Disney's recent international blockbuster cartoon Aladdin, it has been Williams' comic talent, his gift for improvisation and his powerful screen presence - which manages to fuse slapstick with satire and eccentricity with common sense - that have made people walk out of the theatre shaking their heads.
Still, Williams' skyrocket journey to international stardom over the past dozen years has not been without its bouts of turbulence. Most recently, there have been several extremely disappointing films, notably Steven Spielberg's ludicrously over-produced and under-scripted Hook, and Barry Levinson's bizarre adult fairytale Toys. The former was a critical flop but a modest financial success; the latter went down in flames the moment it opened.
Williams' latest movie, Mrs Doubtfire, is the first film he has produced himself. It is a Tootsie-esque domestic comedy about a divorced husband who dresses up in drag so that he can return to his family, albeit disguised as a housekeeper. It opens in Britain in late January.
Whether Mrs Doubtfire soars or sinks, the universal verdict is certain to remain that Williams is easily the funniest American comic to come along in the past 25 years. But Williams is far more than just a comic. He is one of Hollywood's highest paid mega-stars with enormous box office draw, who can demand and receive large percentages of the gross turnover of any film he appears in, and whose range as a serious actor far surpasses anything any other comedian has achieved in decades.
Before this, Williams had transformed American television. Following his breakthrough from nightclub comedy into the hit late-Seventies’ TV sitcom Mork and Mindy, which opened the door for the subsequent sit-com successes of other stand-ups like Roseanne Barr, American networks have decided that the future lies with young men and women who get up on tiny stages in smoke-filled rooms and attempt to ad-lib jokes in front of abusive drunks.
According to a recent article in the New York Times, in the past twelve months the networks have signed hundreds of young American standup comics for development deals, hoping that there will be at least one will turn out to be “another Robin Williams’.
So who is Williams? Let's face it, there is a common perception of comedians as madmen and Williams is hardly immune from this stereotype, even if he defies every other. The stereotype is based on some rather dramatic historical precedents. Take that great American comic Jonathan Winters, an early idol of Williams, a man of a thousand voices too, who had to be locked up in a loony bin for years. In the UK, Tony Hancock's madcap wit ended with his suicide. Most recently, Woody Allen's behaviour in real life has made his neurotic film comedies look repressed by comparison. If you are a manic improvisational genius, a reformed drinker and drug user who visited John Belushi the night he died (as Williams was and did), whose rapid-fire one-liners seem to come out of some mysterious subconscious place inside your skull, people are going to suspect that, “Hey, this guy must be a bowl of macadamia nuts.”
"I still find Robin an elusive creature,” says ex-Python animator and director Terry Gilliam, who first met Williams backstage at the Saturday Night Live studio in New York City and later cast him in both The Adventures of Baron Minchausen and The Fisher King. "There's a kind of madness in him that is wonderful. When he does something funny, he's almost in awe of it himself. He's many different things. His confidence comes from his knowledge that he can always pull something out of the hat.”
The hat, yeah. Let's call it The Hat. Gilliam’s Hat. Shakespeare’s Hat. Williams' Hat. It is an invisible piece of headgear that holds the source of inspiration for all born comics, all true improvisers, for the Bob Dylans, John Coltranes, Jonathan Swifts, Hieronymous Boschs: the prime creators of our culture who go on pulling these amazing new things out of... The Hat.
According to Oliver Sacks, the gifted psychiatrist (author of The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat) who was the living model for Williams' role in the film Awakenings and who spent many weeks with the actor before and during filming: "There's some part of him which is unconscious and preconscious, with an extraordinary rapidity and explosiveness. It suddenly comes out. It has a mind of its own. It is and isn't under control. The it is a form of genius, of course, and this rush up from the depths is characteristic of genius.” The “it” is The Hat.
If you wear The Hat, you are bound to be strange. Terry Gilliam, who has been wearing The Hat for years through those weird cartoons in Monty Python and then in his wonderfully eerie movies, says of Williams, “He’s a strange character. When he's not out in public, he becomes very childlike. Introspective. Very soft." Gilliam notes that Williams is well protected by his wife, Marsha, and by his publicist, Mark Rutenberg. “They do try to control the situations that Robin gets into. He brings out their protective side."
Gilliam is clearly very fond of Williams. When they were shooting The Fisher King in New York, the two men used to take long night walks around Manhattan together. "Robin would always stop and talk to the panhandlers and the homeless people. He gave away a lot of money to people on the street." Gilliam recounts how, during one late night when they were on the set and everyone was dragging with fatigue, Williams suddenly came to the rescue. He began to improvise a routine composed of bits about each member of the cast and crew. It left them gasping with laughter, but also with enough energy to get them through the scene. Although he might find Williams elusive, his brilliance, stamina and generosity made a profound impression on Gilliam.
Ten minutes after the anonymous fan gave us his "Hey Robbie", we're outside the palatial, early twentieth-century mansion he and his wife are in the process of restoring.
"Simple little thing." Williams jokes as we look at a house which would keep a window cleaner busy for a month. Suddenly... [V/E: Rich Old Junkie's Voice: “This is the tiger skin room. And here's our Percodan Suite.”]... Where did that come from? Where did it go? The Hat, of course. And now we are driving off, because Williams has left the key at home. Besides, they are still working on the place. "Let's skip the house and go look at the view."
In a few minutes, we park next to an observation point. It is a lookout on a cliff edge above China Beach in San Francisco's Seacliff district. The mouth of the Bay and the Golden Gate are spread out in front of us like a hopelessly romantic tourist poster; the fog horns far below sound mournfully like a B-movie track. Williams leads me from the car to a point right at the edge.
He is dressed in a dark blue, expensive, cotton shell suit. His face looks rather pale - he's had the flu the past several days, although it hasn't stopped him from flying to New York for the weekend, or from running miles every day, or from meeting to work out with his personal trainer back at the Pacific Heights house he lives in now. His eyes are pale blue and limpid.
We first met the previous day. He had arrived at the converted warehouse-turned-studio south of Market Street, where the one hour photo shoot for this article was to take place, appearing suddenly, lugging a huge suitcase full of his own clothes, a shortish but broad-shouldered man with a baseball cap pulled down low over his eyes and a well trimmed moustache, playing the role of a dogged menial porter to perfection. Playing up before anything could go down. "He's a born show-off.” I thought. "A compulsive clown." But what he proceeded to show us in the studio over the next four hours, was something no jester nor buffoon I've ever met could begin to match. His work in that studio was, well, one hesitates to use the word, but, yes, it was artistry. It completely overturned my own first quick impressions.
Few people in the world can match Williams when it comes to making pictures, to creating images. As they say in Hollywood, the camera loves him. But what you don't see in the pictures is how much he loves the camera. Why else would he work so insanely hard to seduce it? Yes, he's a Julliard-trained actor with many years of stand-up, television and Hollywood experience behind him. Yes he knows his craft. But craft is not inspiration. Good craft can only take you so far, not way out on the edge where Williams plays.
"There's a thing I call hyper-comedy,” he explained later. "It's like the hyper card in a Mac. If you allow yourself to free-associate - to juxtapose things - and let different levels come up at the same time, people are ready for it.”
In front of hot lights and a small group of people who watched, convulsed with laughter, for hour after hour, Williams put on a hyper-display of physical comedy. It was comparable to the greatest physical comedians, to Buster Keaton, Marcel Marceau and Charlie Chaplin. Riffling through the poses, he pulled character after character out of his sleeves, his trousers and, yes, his Hat. Dressed in radical men's fashions, Comme des Garçons, Jean Paul Gaultier, before our eyes he became an animated stream of caricatures: an old Italian peddler, a TV cowboy, a Wall Street yuppie, an English snob, a Glaswegian yob, an old Jewish man, a kung fu star, and many, many other characters that were his alone - singular, vivid, funny.
Funny is the key to everything in Williams' world. Not the ultimate goal, but the oil that allows his engine to rev faster and further. Humour is everywhere in his life: in his conversation; in his houses; in the painted wooden Punch and Judy figures which hold up his glass-topped dining room table; in the plaster mask of Comedy above the front door of his house.
Humour is how he copes with the nightmarish memories of the past: his mother ("A Christian Dior Scientist"), his drug dependency ("Cocaine is God's way of telling you that you've made too much money"), his first year as an acting student in New York.
"The first day, I was on a bus and a guy died in the seat right in front of me. I thought we had to help him. Some old lady behind me... [V/E: Elderly Jewish Woman: "He's dead. Get offa the bus. And don't forget your transfer. You’re moving on, he's not.”]... I was kind of naive. I wore sandals the first year... [V/E: Tough Brooklyn Guy: ‘You are fed up, yah knows dat? Yah fing Birkenstock-wearing, sprout-sucking piece of shit’].... I spent the winter alone. Christmas alone... [V/E: Naive Young Williams: ‘Do you have any specials today?’ V/E: Jewish Waiter: ‘Everything's great here. Jus’ give me your order.’]... I almost had a nervous breakdown,” he said, turning a corner in the Land Rover, leaving this passenger reeling somewhere back on the corner of an imaginary New York City he had just conjured up. Perhaps being Robin Williams is always living close to a nervous breakdown. For most of us, it would be.
Funny is also the way he copes with his anger. In London, Terry Gilliam had suggested: “Ask him about Aladdin. That'll make his head spin around.” And now, when I repeat this to him as we stand on the cliff-top, his head literally spins towards me in annoyance. Then he laughs.
Yes, as has been widely publicised, he is furious at Jeffrey Katzenberg and the rest of the Disney Corporation. He agreed to do the voice of the Genie in Aladdin for much less than his normal fee. He had no points in the film, no percentages. "I love cartoons and Disney has made some of the world's greatest. Also, I have made some wonderful pictures with them.” His one stipulation was that his voice should not be used to sell anything, particularly not the toys and other products that would be merchandised with the film.
Later, when the film became a monumental hit in America, and the video sales looked like they were going to reach into hundreds of millions of dollars - all this as a direct result of the three weeks that Williams had done for scale wages - the Disney people thanked him in an unusual manner. They gave him a Picasso painting.
"At the time, I thought that was very nice. Three weeks later, this TV ad came out. Selling their shit with my work. The painting was a wonderful gesture. But it was worth probably one thirtieth of what I would have received if I'd had points without any salary. But you can't say anything to them because they're like religious fanatics: Mousies... [V/E: Toon Voice: ‘Yeah, it's a family. All the characters here at the Betty Boop Hospital, we're just trying to get our shit together. Mickey's over there right now having his prostate erased’]... I said to them, ‘I'll do the voice. The visual images are yours. I don't want to sell anything. I don't want to be associated with McDonalds.’”
According to Williams, Disney Corporation even resisted paying him royalties on two songs he sang in the film. "Now I know why the Mouse only has four fingers. So he can't pick up the cheque.” Williams says. "But I didn't make a big thing about it. I didn't go to court. It's a great film for kids and adults. It's like a Warner Brothers' cartoon made by Disney, with that classic Warner Brothers adult cartoon humour. That's what I gave them in those tapes, although at first they weren't sure about it. But they, unlike any other animation studio, are so advanced that they could take my improvised stuff and work right around it. They can even make rough cuts with their animation. Still, it doesn't make me want to ever go back there, to bend over again... [V/E: Lisping Male: ‘Please, sir, I'd like to ship out with Bubba again.’]... Originally, I did it for my kids.”
Williams has three children, one from his first marriage, two from the second to Marsha. She is an attractive, dark-haired woman in her thirties who handles a great deal of the business side of their lives, personal and professional, as well as looking after the three children and managing a household that includes various secretaries, nannies and personal trainers.
A great deal has been written about Williams' personal life during the past decade: about his supposedly rather distant Detroit car executive father and his alcoholic Southern Belle mother; about his marriage to Marsha, who was a painter and sculptress whom he first met when she came to work as a nanny to his son; about his early success and how it brought on womanising, drinking and drug taking; about the LA waitress who sued him for allegedly giving her herpes; about a whole tabloid full of personal information and misinformation. No more and no less than what you expect if you are an international megastar. As we stand on the edge of the California cliff facing one of the most spectacular landscapes in the world, I have no intention of asking Williams nasty questions about his dad or LA waitresses or his former pharmaceutical habits. But I have the strong impression that I could ask him just about anything and that he would try to answer it. Strange as it sounds, this human chameleon who can fast-forward 10,000 comic voices in hyper-conversation seems completely exposed as a person, as unable to hide his true feelings as he is to shut down the improvisational flow that rushes out of his mind.
After his dealings with Disney, I ask, would he ever want his children to be actors? He raises the subject of his own father. "He called himself an Old Turk. He never tried to impose his values on me, maybe because he had to give up whatever dreams he had when he was a kid. When I told him about acting, he said, "If you love it, fine. Just have a back-up profession - like welding. He was from Pennsylvania, from a very wealthy family that lost all its money when his father died. He was a very ethical man, but what he did was who he was.” A ranking executive with the Lincoln division of the Ford Motor Company, Williams' father retired disillusioned with the car industry in the Sixties, when quality began to be sacrificed for fast-buck mass-marketing techniques. He moved the family from a wealthy Detroit suburb to Marin county, where Williams finished high school, suddenly flourishing in the new liberal atmosphere.
As for Williams' own children, he obviously adores them and spends as much time as possible with them. But he is also realistic about the limitations of being some kind of New Age Daddy. "There's only a certain envelope of time before the kids eventually tell you to f*** off," he says. “And now, as a result of parents spending this shit-load of time with their children, we're turning them into little adults. There's a danger of them... [V/E: Little Adult Voice: ‘No, I really would prefer not to, Dad.’]... responding like they're 30 years old and making alimony payments. Wait a second, you're only six!”
As an American comedian, the issue of PC - political correctness - is one which he faces with increasing frequency, from all sides. "I did a piece about anti-abortion people. I suggested that we deliver a crack baby to every one of these angry anti-abortion women.” He received a lot of hate mail for that. "Strange how 90 per cent of these anti-abortion people are also in favour of the death penalty.” He sees the role of a comedian as being a kind of cathartic antidote to all the political extremes. "As Americans, we're descended from people who were so uptight that the English kicked them out. Puritans. PC is in some senses puritanical. On the extreme left and extreme right, they kind of meet up with that same self-righteousness. Comics are in the middle, farting and pissing and jerking off. If you're going to be totally politically correct, it's like being a Nerf soft styrofoam) vibrator. It doesn't seem to work very well, doesn't seem to stimulate."
Williams loves to discuss politics. He had recently seen Ronald Reagan at a benefit concert. "It was strange. He had red hair. And he's a big guy. He was walking with Nancy. Do you know what he looked like? Like a Mardi Gras float. I thought, ‘There's somebody inside there working his controls.’”
Clinton, he believes, "offers what Bush in his cynicism, or Perot in his flat-out f***-you attitude didn't. Clinton offers hope. That's why he was elected. I think people will give Clinton a chance. First of all, he's not going anywhere for three years. And the lie is over. It is a depression. To acknowledge it is probably to begin to recover... [V/E: Psychiatrist's Understanding Voice: ‘You're a deeply depressed person. You've been medicating yourself for the last four years with shitty investments and no regulations. Now it's time to regulate again.’]... Yes, it's a manic-depressive economy. First it went... [V/E: Cowboy-on-LSD Voice: ‘Whooooahhhh!’]... Then it went down. Especially when we had a President who, according to the stories, was on Halcion a lot of the time. That might account for those mood swings... [V/E: Cranky Bush Voice: ‘Tell them no, we're not doing it. No. No.’]... Hey, let's go to the book store.”
It's time to leave the clifftop. The fog is rolling in and it's getting dark. And there's this book store on Clement Street that he wants to show me, one of his favourite places, selling both new and second-hand books. We browse around the crowded shelves for about half an hour, not talking, no more fans shouting “Hey, Robbie”, but you can tell they know who he is. They leave him in peace. In the end, he buys me a book he thinks I'll like and I buy him a copy of Stephen Fry's novel The Liar. We swap our gifts and walk out to the Land Rover. When he pulls away from the curb side it starts again. The Voice Eruptions: clusters of jokes, outrageous mimicry, obscene cracks.
Soon he's talking about an event he went to in New York the previous weekend, a celebrity "roast” at the Friars' Club. This one was held "in honour" of Whoopi Goldberg and 2,000 people attended; all the proceeds went to charity, The Friars' Club is an institution, a place where America's stand-up comics go to make off-the-record fun of each other in the most vulgar terms possible, while fundraising for worthy causes. Williams quotes Lenny Bruce's description of it as: "A place where old Jewish comics get together to talk about their dicks in order to buy milk for children.”
The "roast” had hit all the newspapers on Monday. Ted Danson, Whoopi's boyfriend, the actor who played the bartender in Cheers, had come on stage in Al Jolson black face and made a lot of sexist, obscene jokes - as they always do at these brutal affairs. In the audience, a black afternoon TV talk show host Montel Williams had taken offence and walked out, later going public - for the first time in history - with some of the offensive jokes. PC legions across America were outraged. All this in front of Mayor David Dinkins of New York, who is black and who was in the middle of a tight election campaign. Later the Mayor described Danson's jokes as “way, way over the line" - when of course the point of a Friar's "roast” is that anything goes.
Williams is describing the "roast” for me, at which he sat on the dais between Michael Douglas and Robert De Niro, as we drive back towards his house. He is in hyper-comedy, Voice Eruptions coming like wildfire, while driving carefully at moderate speed over San Francisco's hilly streets in the dusk.
He gets on to the performance of RuPaul, a famous black transvestite New York "personality", who appeared on stage dressed in a nun's habit. [Here comes the RuPaul V/E: “Ahm a wohman, motherf***er. Ahm an incredibly well-hung wohman.”]
[Back into Williams' Voice] "She got down and humped the podium. She actually humped the podium.”
[V/E: RuPaul's Voice: "Take it baby, take it."]
[Williams:] "And there are a lot of old Jewish comics sitting out there thinking..."
[V/E: Jewish Comic: "Ehh, I'd pay good money for that. That bitch sodomise me. That would help my [link url="http://www.gq-magazine.co.uk/article/male-g-spot"]prostate[/link]."]
[Williams:] “And there is Mayor Dinkins in the audience thinking…”
[V/E: Mayor Dinkins Voice: "Let's see here, who am I going to condemn? Will it be the black transvestite nun humping the podium? Or the white man in the black face?”]
And it's dark now. We're in the car, pulling up to a stop sign on a steep crest, as these voices keep coming out and Whoopi's "roast” is being grilled alive by Williams. And I'm thinking: "Here we go. This man is not crazy. This man is brilliant.” The cats in The Hat.
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