Jake Brennan (4:05)
Hollywoodland is a production of Double Elvis. The story's about Robin Williams are insane. His manic mind moved at such a breakneck speed that cocaine had the opposite effect than it had on most other people. It slowed him down. Speaking of cocaine, he did a line with John Belushi at the famed Chateau Marmont on the very night Joliet Jake Blues died from shooting up a speedball. Robin's primary addiction, however, wasn't cocaine. He was addicted to the company of women. He was addicted to the dopamine rush of being on a stage where he could let his mind run wild with free association and be rewarded with uproarious laughter. He was addicted to proving himself as a dramatic actor, even if that meant attempting to trigger his own mental breakdown by running in place for hours. And when he did die, tragically at the age of 63, the cause of his death was, surprisingly, not what anyone suspected. It still isn't, and Robin Williams made great films Unlike that clip I played for you at the top of the show, that wasn't a clip from a great film. That was a fair use sample from the Library of Congress of Arthur Collins performing Susie Woozy in 1902. I played you that clip because I can't afford the rights to a clip from Jonathan Lieberman's Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. And why would I play you that specific slice of Cowabunga reboot cheese? Could I afford it? Because that was the number one movie in America on August 11, 2014. And that was the day that Robin Williams body was found at his home in California. A shocking death that revealed hidden secrets about his life. In this episode, a manic mind, cocaine, dopamine, rushes, mental breakdowns and Robin Williams. I'm Jake Brennan and this is Hollywood. Pam Dawber didn't have to turn around to know who was thrusting something long and hard against her ass. She knew her co star would be right behind her, dressed in his bright red leotard, a cane in his hand. He always knew when she was a little off and needed to perk me up. It worked. Pam couldn't help but laugh. This was a typical moment on the set of Mork and Mindy. Robin Williams had shown up late and bleary eyed as usual, then immediately got to work without missing a beat, only ever interrupting the rehearsal to pull some endearingly inappropriate prank like pretending to shove a cane up her ass. Pam had a sisterly affection for the hairy goofball, so she didn't mind. They'd do what they always did. Laugh, move on, work another scene. Then she'd go home for the night and get ready to do it all again the next day. But not Robin. Once they finished shooting, Robin slipped back into his trademark rainbow suspenders, strapped on a pair of roller skates and cruised his way through the Paramount studio lot with a dorky grin on his face. He grabbed a ham sandwich as he skated past a craft food cart, spinning his way around frantic production assistants and set dressers, carrying tables across the way to yet another soundstage. Eventually, he made his way to LA's Sunset Strip. He did a line of cocaine in the parking lot outside the Comedy Store, ordered a rum and coke at the bar as he watched Richard Pryor or Jonathan Winters or some no name prankster try to coax a chuckle from the crowd. Then Robin Williams hopped on stage and grabbed the mic himself. Most comedians had a tightly scripted 10 minute set, but Robin's style was always a bit more freewheeling. You couldn't even tell the difference between the jokes that he'd rehearsed and the ones he'd made up on the spot. Do you think God gets stoned? Just look at the platypus. As soon as he was done, Robin was off to see his buddy Taylor Negron at the Laugh Factory. Do another line, have another rum and Coke, maybe flirt with the waitress, and then get back on the microphone. I the process substitute. When I turned 21, I was so bad, she gave me a refund. Cue the laugh track and the flood of endorphins. That's when Robin would see another old friend in the corner of the bar. Maybe this time it would be Jim Stahl from Happy Days. The two of them would have another drink, maybe a quick bump. Okay, just one more. And find another girl to flirt with. Sometimes you gotta go out of your way to get into trouble. It's called fun. Then it was off to the next stop of the night. Maybe this time it would be the Comedy Magic club that was all the way out in Hermosa Beach. But Robin's buddy was dating this model who lived around the corner, and her place was always packed with beautiful drugs and even more beautiful women. Besides, the night was young, and he didn't have to be on set for another eight hours. And if he was still awake when the sun came up again, well, that's why there was cocaine. The devil's dandruff, Peruvian merchant powder. God's way of telling you you're making too much money. Ask anyone who knew Robin Williams, and they'd tell you he was fast, not just on his roller skates or the way he talked. His brain itself moved at breakneck speed. It had nothing to do with cocaine. Hell, most folks said the drug slowed him down more than anything. What would have been uppers for anyone else brought his manic mind back down to the level that most people called reality. Made it easier for him to relate to other people and focus on the conversation at hand instead of firing off another impulse in his supersonic synapses. Robin existed on a totally different wavelength from the rest of the world. It's what made him such a damn good performer. But it also made him lonely. He was always out of sync, functioning on a different frequency than everybody else. He'd been that way since he was a kid. He was an only child, as far as he knew. His cold, alcoholic father had a corporate job. That meant the family moved around a lot, which made it harder for Robin to form new friendships. His mom was a socialite who used her wit to charm strangers and maybe to deflect from her own loneliness. Humor was the fastest way to her affection. And that left an impression on young Robin, who spent the rest of his childhood inside of his own head. Making someone laugh was the only way he knew to make a genuine human connection. That's not to say that Robin couldn't be serious. After all, he'd attended the prestigious Juilliard School for Acting. And although he did drop out once, he realized that the school's traditional approach couldn't do much for him. Later in life, Robin would be celebrated for his dramatic roles in films like Dead Poets Society, the Fisher King and Good Will Hunting. But his comedy was always a constant. More than women and more than alcohol and even more than cocaine, Robin Williams was addicted to the dopamine rush of being on stage, saying whatever came into his mind and lighting the audience up in hysterics. It was the closest he could come to that ineffable something he was craving. But it still wasn't quite enough to sate his frantic mind. Maybe that's why most of Robin's friends were also comedians, like Richard Pryor and John Belushi. They understood the craving and the thrill, the transcendent energy of feeding off the audience like a vampire. But Robin also envied them as artists, the way they turned their own vulnerabilities into weapons of hilarious delight. Robin always wanted to create that sort of confessional comedy, but he was afraid of what he'd find when he'd mine the depths of his own brain. During one of his many marathon LA comedy nights in the early 80s, Robin ended up at John Belushi's bungalow at the Chateau Marmont on Sunset Boulevard. He got there around 2am Just as Robert De Niro was leaving. Belushi was pretty out of it. He could barely form words. He strummed a boxy guitar and the sunk hippie chick sitting next to him had a creepy smile. She kept fiddling with a syringe. It was a bad vibe. Robin stuck around long enough to do an obligatory line and then he'd get the hell out of there. The next day, back on the set of Mork and Mindy, he couldn't stop thinking about the night before. Robin wasn't one to judge someone else's drug use, but the scene at Belushi's had been too weird to ignore. That girl, that needle. When Pam Daubert asked if she could talk to him during a break in that day shoot, Robin could tell it was serious. Pam had been sent by the show's producers to break the news. John Belushi was dead. Robin could easily guess why Pam was sent to soften the blow. They didn't want Robin to get too upset. They also knew that Robin had been with Belushi during his final hours and they needed to cover their asses in case their star was an accessory to manslaughter. Robin stood there wide eyed with his hands folded at his waist while Pam talked. When he finally spoke, Robin just kept repeating, I was there last night. I was with him. I was there last night. I was with him. Pam tried to comfort her friend, but eventually something inside of her snapped. She placed her hands on Robin shoulders and looked him straight in the eye. If that ever happens to you, pam said, I will find you and kill you first. Robin smiled cautiously. He reassured Pam that it would never happen to him. Swear to God, he hated lying to his friends. The Frog Prince was pissed. You could see it in the deadness of his bulging plastic eyes. Abc. Every single one of those corporate shit in their stupid suits. He ripped the web fingers off his hands and began to pound the green rubber head on his shoulders with his own fleshy fists. They don't have any taste. Would know a good joke if they got their dicks Wet. It was 1982. Robin Williams was playing the title role of the Frog Prince in the debut episode of Fairy Tale Theater, a new anthology series for the cable network Showtime, directed by Monty Python's Eric Idle. Robin didn't know what was worse, receiving the news that his sitcom Mork and Mindy had just been canceled or the fact that he had to process that news while being stuck inside of a stupid fucking sweaty ass frog costume. You'd be hard pressed to find anyone who'd described Robin Williams as short tempered or difficult, but press a little harder and they'd admit that, yeah, they'd seen him have a random meltdown here and there, just maybe not while wearing a giant rubber frog suit. At the time of the Frog Prince fiasco, Robin was struggling to break into movies. Morgan Mindy was a steady paycheck, but Robin knew he was meant for something else. He just didn't know what or how to make it happen. His only other credit at that point was a low budget musical version of Popeye the Sailor Man. And even though auteur Robert Altman directed at the picture and the legendary Harry Nilsson composed the music, the end result was so embarrassingly bad that it became a running gag in Robin's standup. Blow me down. Are you fucking Kidding me. That line actually worked on a woman. Robin's wife, Valerie had moved back up to Napa Valley. In the meantime, she wanted to avoid the LA spotlight. She knew that Robin liked the adoration, but it just wasn't her seat. For a while, the two of them only saw each other on the weekends or in between projects. But something changed that summer when Valerie told Robin she was pregnant. Robin had been trying to take it easy on the drugs After Belushi's death. The sudden realization that he was going to have a son made him finally get serious about sobriety. And he quit booze and coke straight away. No 12 steps or therapy or feel good programs. Just cold turkey. A few weeks later, his next movie outing, the World According to Garp, hit theaters. And the John Irving book became an almost instant hit at the box office. Things were finally looking up in more ways than one. Later in life, in a letter to his son Zach, Robin would write that his birth gave him a new sense of meaning and focus into his life. It also gave him plenty of of new material. My God, it's a boy and he's hung like a bear. Wait, no. That's the umbilical cord. Of course, there were some habits Robin still couldn't break. One was his addiction to the rush of stand up comedy and the high that he got from the crowd. He'd find any excuse to leave Valerie behind with the baby in Napa and head to LA to indulge in another one of those infamous all night comedy marathons. He even learned to enjoy them without the help of mind altering substances. Which brings us to the other habit that Robin Williams couldn't break. Women. Robin had always messed around in the past. Valerie would either give him her blessing or at least forgive him. She knew her husband was a star. She couldn't help the fact that women threw themselves at him. Besides, he was out on the road a lot all by himself. But after Zach was born, it got harder for for her to go along with it. She resented the fact that she was stuck at home with a baby while her husband was off gallivanting with some hot young thing. And Robin wasn't dumb. He knew it was getting to her. He tried to keep it in his pants for a while, but then another opportunity would present itself. And as Valerie once said, you'd have to be a saint to resist. And Robin was certainly no saint. God gave men a penis and a brain and only enough blood to use one at a time. Robin met Michelle Tash Carter at the Improv in 1980. 4, where she was working as a cocktail waitress. The 21 year old had spent her teenage years touring the country as a musician. And now she was looking for her big break in la. Robin's career wasn't quite in a spot where he could help her out with that, but he could still take her home. Again. This wasn't Robin's first affair. And again, Val insisted she was fine with it at first. On the surface anyway. It's not like Robin had any investment in Michelle. They had no emotional relationship. They were just fucking casually and regularly for about two years while Robin and Val drifted further and further apart. And by the time Robin called things off with Michelle, his marriage was already dead in the water. And then Michelle told Robin she was also pregnant with his child and that he had given her herpes. A woman would never make something as deadly as a nuke. She'd invent something worse, like a bomb that makes you feel really bad. For a while, it turned out Michelle was not telling the truth, instead just trying to extort Robin for his money. When he refused to give in to her lies, she sued him for $6 million for personal injury, fraud and intentional infliction of emotional distress. At this point, Robyn and Valerie were just starting their formal divorce process. Michelle Carter wasn't the reason for the split, but the added stress didn't make it any easier. Robin was already ashamed that he had let his marriage fall apart. And now he also lived in constant fear that Michelle's baseless claims would create a PR nightmare that would skewer his career. Beloved comedian settles herpes lawsuit in 48 point font on the front page. More than anything, he was terrified of what it might do to three year old Zack. Robin couldn't bear the thought of disappointing his son, especially after the estrangement he had felt from his own father, who Robin had just reconnected with after learning that the elder Williams was dying of cancer. While all of this was happening, the divorce, the cancer, the affair, the lawsuit, Robin also began a new relationship with Marsha Grace, who had been Zach's nanny and later Robin's personal assistant. Things with Valerie were over and done before anything happened with Marcia, but the press still spun it into a bigger, uglier drama than it actually was. And of course, this all exploded publicly right as Robin's dramatic acting career was finally taking off. It was like the ups and downs he'd experienced in the 80s had also helped him tap into the darkness he'd been carrying around for his entire life. Nowhere was this more apparent than on the set of the Fisher King, the 1991 film directed by Terry Gilliam, another former Monty Python member. Robin was cast in the role of Perry, a man dealing with homelessness and severe mental illness who thinks he's on a quest to find the Holy Grail. Robin beat himself up on set most days, either because he was worried about disappointing fans who liked him for his comedy, or because he didn't think that he was going dark enough. One day, he was filming a scene on a treadmill, running in place so that Gilliam could get some close ups during what became a terrifying hallucination sequence. It was late at night, but Robin kept running. He'd scream in agony, gripping at his heart with sweat pouring down his face as he tried to trigger his own breakdown. Gilliam said he got the shot he needed. Robin flipped. No, it's not real yet. He was heaving short of death, feet still pounding on the mat as he screamed. I can go deeper. I can feel more, show more. Gilliam reminded Robin that it's acting. It's not supposed to be real. He encouraged him to save his energy, but Robin wouldn't listen. He yelled at the crew for rushing him through the scene, even though he'd already been running in place for hours. These outbursts became more common as they kept filming. There were some nights when Robin's intensity legitimately terrified the crew, but he showed his silly side just as often, using his improv skills to scare away the vagrants who'd wander onto set during late night shoots in Central Park. He reveled in the scenes that had him running naked through the park, proudly shaking his hairy ass at the New York City skyline. Another night, a pack of pigeons unleashed an onslaught of ruddy white shit onto him and his co star Jeff Bridges, right when they finished filming an emotional scene at 4 in the morning. Bridges said it was the only time he saw Robin at a loss for words. After the movie came out, Robin sat for an interview with Playboy magazine. At the end of the conversation, the interviewer asked Robin if he had any fears of losing the balance between his public and his private life. He responded by comparing himself to Jersey Kaczynski, an acclaimed author who had just recently died by suicide after suffering a debilitating stroke. He just didn't want to become a vegetable. He didn't want to lose his sharpness. Robin said, if I felt like I was becoming not just dull, but a rock that I still couldn't spark, still fire off or talk about things, I'd get afraid. Robin explained that he had to keep finding new ways to let his mind run wild because that's what kept him stable. He didn't mention the bird.
