VideoAge International October 2018

12 Book Review October 2018 V I D E O A G E By Luis Polanco “B ut who was he?” asks Dave Itzkoff regardinghis subject, RobinWilliams. That question serves as the impetus for Itzkoff’s latest book, Robin (544 pgs., Henry Holt and Co., 2018, $30), an extensive biography of the late actor and comedian. With someone like Williams, who starred in such numerous and distinctive roles in films like Dead Poets Society , Mrs. Doubtfire , and Good Will Hunting , and who spent years performing on stage and on TV, it is a complicated endeavour to arduously parse through the layers and characters to uncover the man behind them. But Itzkoff, a cultural reporter for The NewYork Times , presents an admiring and objective portrait of the comedian, particularly excelling in his depiction of Williams when he was a nobody just discovering his own talent and technique (before he quickly turned into a brilliant somebody). Itzkoff begins with Williams’s childhood. Born July 21, 1951, the boyish Robin had a nomadic, but wealthy upbringing in Michigan and Illinois, raised by his socialite mother and a father who swiftly climbed the Ford Motorways Company corporate ladder. Growing up for some time in a giant mansion outside of Detroit, Williams spent his days in the attic, “where he taught himself to masterfully mimic the routines of favorite stand- up comedians he had preserved by holding a tape recorder up to his television set,” writes Itzkoff. Early idols for Williams were comedians, including the deadpan Jonathan Winters and the brash Richard Pryor. Years later, Williams would remember these favorite late-night jokesters as he went through his own four-minute set, rapidly alternating between his various comedic personas, including the “eager-to-please Soviet stand-up comic” and the “stoned-out Superman,” in an effort to land laughs. Williams moved to California with his parents as a teenager, attended Claremont Men’s College, and then headed east to spend three years at New York City’s Juilliard learning to act. He returned to the West Coast in 1976 to live in the Bay Area. It was there, in San Francisco, that Williams developed his “riffing style” of comedy performance. “As opposed to organized stand-up routines that proceeded in a logical sequence, this anarchic approach meant that any impulse could be explored at the moment that it occurred without the need for a setup or context and it could be tossed aside as soon as the next good idea popped up,” Itzkoff explains. In any good biography, the author manages to not only profile the life of its subject, but also the culture in which he arose. In describing the early days of Robin Williams, Itzkoff offers a comprehensive scene report of the 1970s comedy circuit in San Francisco and Los Angeles. When Williams later moved to L.A., his dream was to make it big by breaking into The Improv and the Comedy Store, comedy clubs frequented by comedians like Jay Leno, Andy Kaufman, and Freddie Prinze. “[Williams] just wants [his] audience to like him so badly,” writes Itzkoff of the actor’s early aspirations, “and he will assume as many identities as it takes until he has achieved this goal.” Leno called the L.A. comedy scene of that era a “hugely romantic period,” noting, “You had a bunch of outcasts, people who didn’t fit in their own communities, converge in one place, where they finally met people like themselves.” Williams got his first big opportunity when he guest-starred on an episode of Happy Days titled “My Favorite Orkan.” It developed into his own spin-off sitcom, Mork & Mindy , which would go on to run for four years on ABC. Its debut episode was viewed in an astonishing 19.7 million homes. As Itzkoff writes: “Robin was no longer just another striver peddling his comedy act at the Los Angeles clubs; he was a bona fide star, and soon everyone in the country would know exactly who he was.” From 1977 to 2014, Williams was featured in nearly 67 films, made countless television appearances, and appeared in a host of comedy specials. During that time span, he experienced marriage, drug and alcohol abuse, divorce, two other marriages, the birth of kids, several award nominations, rehabilitation, recovery, middle age, Flubber , more success, and health problems. Despite these life-altering ups and downs, triumphs and detours, Itzkoff writes, “the real Robin was a modest, almost inconspicuous man, who never fully believed he was worthy of the monumental fame, adulation, and accomplishments he would achieve.” The final days of a celebrity are often well documented, especially when they are the result of scandal or illness. And the end of Williams’s life is no different. He took on one low-budget film after another — the themes of which “seemed to be focused on finality, particularly in the form of death,” writes Itzkoff — until his main role on CBS’s The Crazy Ones , which debuted in the fall of 2013, and aired to dreary and quickly declining viewing numbers. That same fall, he began to experience tremors, difficulty sleeping, and vision issues. Williams died by suicide in 2014 after his “long- standing fears about the erosion of his career and the decay of his body had come to pass simultaneously,” Itzkoff writes. In the genre of celebrity biography there is often the tendency to mystify depression and mental health as the cruel fate of creative genius. Itzkoff’s book avoids those pitfalls by considering the details. In the case of Robin Williams, who was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease earlier that year, his autopsy report also indicated diffuse Lewy body dementia, an underdiagnosed degenerative disease. For Itzkoff, “these new findings about Robin’s condition seemed to fill in some of the most perplexing gaps surrounding his death, and they were rapidly embraced by his many friends and loved ones.” Endings are never easy, yet the inclination to offer a clean finish for someone who died by his own hand is even more crushing. Itzkoff interprets that Williams “had taken his own life in a moment of maximum desolation, almost surely to spare himself the punishment of having to stand by as a spectator while his once agile frame turned against him and calcified into a prison for his singularly inventive mind.” Itzkoff’s biography of Robin Williams presents a compassionate view of a man who underwent many public transformations and whose comedic genius is still missed four years later. Itzkoff concludes, “Only Robin knew for certain what his world looked like, but he seemed to understand that other people would want to piece together his story and try to make sense of it, and that whatever they came up with would inevitably be incomplete.” Robin Williams Biography Unmasks the Man Behind the Comic