Jake Brennan (27:56)
The sudden knock on the door made Robin Williams jump so high he almost dropped his bottle. It's hard to get that sour mash smell out of the carpet. Harder still to hide it from your friends. Who is it? It was Minns, Robin's longtime makeup artist. A new drugstore was opening up downtown. Minns heard they might cut a ribbon, blow up some balloons. Might even be cake. Oh yeah. Wow, that sounds like a rollicking way to spend the day. Robin rolled his eyes and took another swig of Jack. If only there was literally anything else to do here in nowhere Yukon territory. They were there to work on an indie flick called the Big White. It was a smaller production than Robin and his team were used to. It was a lot colder and more desolate than they expected. We could always go outside and throw a cup of coffee up in the air, robin said. We can see if it'll freeze before it hits the fucking ground. As he took another drink, he realized Mittens was right. A pharmacy opening probably was the most exciting thing that was ever going to happen there. Fine. He'd be right out. Robin opened the door to find Minns frowning. She looked him up and down once, twice, and then again. She took a big cartoonish whiff of him and crossed her arms. What? Robin tried to play innocent, but he knew that she knew exactly what was going on. He reeked of whiskey. He was wasted. He was eager to make some mistakes. The Big White seemed like a small commitment when Robin took the job in the spring of 2004. A few weeks in Yukon and then another few in Skagway, Alaska, and then back to the Yukon before wrapping up in Winnipeg. Besides, he'd never acted in sub zero temperatures before, so it sounded like a fun challenge. But the lonely tundra also Gave him plenty of time to reflect on his failings. There were no comedy clubs out there, no laughing crowds to distract him from himself. Robin's mind had nowhere to hide, and he didn't like his own company. At a local grocery store, a nip of Jack Daniels caught his eye. It had been almost 21 years since he'd gone cold turkey, so he figured he could handle it. Just to take the edge off, right? Within a week, you could hear the bottles clinking everywhere he went. In the decade or so leading up to his relapse, Robin's career had been a roller coaster. Straight off the Fisherman King, he starred in massive Hollywood hits like Hook and Jumanji. He had even more success with his voiceover work on Fern Gully and Aladdin, although he got into a bit of a pissing match with Disney over using his voice to sell shitty toys to children. As an alcoholic, you will violate your standards quicker than you can lower them. Robin had spent the 90s working to the bone, filming projects back to back and releasing up to four films a year. And all the those highs were met with even deeper lows. For every Mrs. Doubtfire, there was a flubber or a Father's Day, an absolute critical and financial disaster. Even Robin's most successful project still put him in the crosshairs of the critics who said he was too silly or too saccharine or too sentimental or just too Robin Williams, phoning in some weird performance that was maybe entertaining on its own, but never quite connected to the rest of the movie. He finally won his first Oscar in 1998 for his role as a therapist in Good will hunting. And 18 months later, he was a joke again, thanks to Bicentennial Man. By the time Robin got to Alaska, he had plenty of regrets to dwell on. So he crawled inside a bottle to quiet his thoughts. Then six months later, his best friend passed away. Robin had met Christopher Reeve in college, and their ascents into stardom have been almost parallel. Chris was even godfather to Robin's son Zach. They both struggled with the balance of their personal and professional lives, except that Chris had literally been both Clark Kent and Superman. After a horse riding accident left Chris paralyzed, Robin renovated his friend's entire home to make sure everything was still accessible for Chris. New wheelchair. The news of Chris's death sent Robin spiraling further. Being a functioning alcoholic is kind of like being a paraplegic lap dancer. You can do it, just not as well as the others. Things came to a head the next year at Thanksgiving. Imagine a shit faced Robin Williams with an Uncooked turkey neck dangling out of his pants as he slurred his way through a monologue about his tender meat. Do you think God was high when he made dicks? And yet. Nah, we'll just pull this part back and put a mushroom at the tip and bam, we're done. Oh, let's put some balls at the bottom. Balls are fun. Who doesn't like balls? It got so bad that Zach, now in college, had to carry his father up the stairs and wrestle him onto the bed. But Robin still hadn't found his rock bottom. Not even in 2006 at Cannes, when he drunkenly dropped hundreds of thousands of dollars at a charity auction. At one point, Robin stumbled up to the podium with a pair of designer sunglasses on to hide his bloodshot eyes and proudly proclaimed, I just bought a $40,000 Coke vial. It was actually a diamond necklace from Armani. The paparazzi were there to document the night, so Robin thought the ruse was up. He was so clearly tanked that someone had to figure it out. But everyone else thought it was one big joke, and everyone adored Robin's wacky improv skills. Everyone, that is, except his wife, Marcia Grace was mortified until she saw how much money he'd spent on that private wyclof Jean concert. 80 grand. Then she was just pissed. A few weeks later, Robin sat naked in a hotel room with his pal Jack Daniels by his side. Fuck life, he said out loud. A little voice inside his head was sweet. Sober enough to hear him. It spoke back. Seriously, what the fuck? You know? You got it pretty fucking good, right? You think maybe that bottle there might be influencing your thought process? Great. So let's save the suicide discussion for another day. Maybe after we start therapy. Not long after Zach got the family together to stage an intervention, Robin agreed to spend the summer of 2006 at a residential rehabilitation center in Oregon. He was still a little hesitant about the 12 step program. After all, he'd gone cold turkey once before. He could do it again, Right? But then he realized that was exactly the problem. He had never stopped to reflect on why he'd been abusing drugs and alcohol the first time around. Robin's time in Oregon brought him clarity and helped him find a new perspective on life. His new commitment to sobriety meant new beginnings. Zach had just moved to New York with his own fiance, and Robin was eager to get to know him as an adult instead of just as a son. He was just as excited to see his daughter Zelda finish high school and move to LA to start her own acting career, but his relationship with Marcia Grace never quite recovered. The betrayal of his relapse and the lies that came along with it had left a wound too deep to heal. But it wasn't just emotional wounds that Robin had to contend with, or the crazy shit he had done while he was high. It was something else, something inside of him waiting to go out of sync one final time. Robin Williams couldn't stay single for long. In 2011, he got married again, this time to a visual artist named Susan Schneider. Together they settled into a new home in the Bay Area, in a small town of 10,000 people. When he wasn't doing stand up at the local community theater or nearby playhouse, he went to regular meetings for his 12 step program, even returned to Broadway for a stint. As Robin entered into his sixth decade of life, he was finally feeling content and ready to enjoy things at a slower, steadier pace. But Robin's brain was always fast, and it slowed down even faster. In 2013, Robin took another TV gig on a show called the Crazy Ones. It was his first regular sitcom role since Mork and Mindy and seemed like a nice, easy paycheck at the time. But he had trouble keeping up his energy, and even more trouble hiding it. He thought maybe it was a lack of a live studio audience to feed off of. And then his body started aching in new and unexpected ways, and things got worse from there. At one point, the producers convinced convinced his old Mork co star Pam Dawber, to come out of retirement for a recurring role in the show in the hopes that it might get Robin's spirits up. It didn't. After the show ended, Robin traveled to Vancouver to reprise his role as Teddy Roosevelt in the Third Night at the Museum Movie. Minns, his longtime makeup artist, went with him, as usual, and once again she knew something was up. She found him in his hotel room, sobbing. The hell is wrong with me? Robin asked. Can't even remember my goddamn lines, Minns thought. Maybe he just needed that audience adrenaline, and that always cheered him up. She grabbed him by the arm to try and pull him off the bed, which was far easier than she expected. He'd lost a lot of weight. She reminded him about a comedy club down the street. They should go check it out. Robin looked at Minns with sunken eyes. His heart beating began racing faster, faster, faster still, a steady rhythm pounding in his ears, a pulsing pain that started in his core and pushed up through the center of his skull. He clenched a hand against his chest as if he could stop his lungs from shriveling tighter inside of him. I I can't, Mintz, he said. I don't know how. The room seemed to shrink and then collapse all around him. The walls heaved in and out. He tried to breathe, breathe, but it was like someone was squeezing his throat shut. There was no way out, no way out of the room, no way out of his mind. Several weeks after Robin suffered a full blown panic attack, a doctor diagnosed him with Parkinson's disease. Robin probably had at least 10 good years left in him if he did things right. But Robin's relief was short lived. He wasn't having any trouble with motor functions. Whatever was happening to him, it was in his mind. Robin went home to his wife, Susan, and suddenly started losing entire days as soon as they happened. I just want to reboot my brain, he told her. Some days he'd call Zach, ranting paranoid about how Susan's friends were all drug addicts out to steal his money, and then forget the entire conversation. One night, Robin saw fellow comedian Dana Carvey in the parking lot at the Bay Area, a theater that had become his second home. Robin ran after him, pleading, tears streaming down his face. I'm sorry about my dick, he said. How I call it Mr. Happy. That was your joke. I stole it from you all those years ago, and I just pretended like it never happened. I'm so sorry. Dana held Robin while he cried and gently tried to explain that actually, that wasn't his dick joke. If Robin had stolen it, he must have gotten it from someone else, and this just made Robin even more confused. Over the course of that summer in 2014, Robin's friends and family became increasingly concerned about his behavior. They all tried in their own ways to gently intervene. On a Sunday night in August, he said good night to his wife, did some reading on his iPad, then went into the other room and hanged himself. After Robin's death by suicide, a medical autopsy revealed that nearly every single neuron in his brain had been ravaged by Lewy bodies. These are the same degenerative proteins that cause Parkinson's. But Robin was actually suffering from a different disease, a cousin to Parkinson's called Lewy body dementia. Several doctors said he had the single worst case they had ever seen. Instead of affecting Robin's motor skills, the Lewy bodies attacked his amygdala and his brain, rapidly destroying his ability to process memories, make decisions, or regulate his emotions. By the time of his death, nearly half of the dopamine neurons in his brain had been destroyed. There's an old joke. Guy goes to a shrink, says he's depressed shrink tells him to go see a clown called Poliacci who's performing in town that night, and that'll cheer him up. And then the guy says, but doctor, I am Pagliacci. It's not uncommon to hear about depressed comedians, but that's not what happened with Robin Williams. Sure, he struggled with his mental health for other reasons throughout his life. Obviously, no one could know what was going through his head at the time of his death, but the Lewy Body Dementia meant that he was literally losing his entire sense of pleasure or reward. By the time he died, Robin was physiologically incapable of being happy. Robin Williams Blitzkrieg brain was his greatest gift to the world. It was also the thing that killed him. But like the man himself once said, death is just nature's way of saying, your table's ready. I'm Jake Brennan and this is Hollywood.
