Robin Williams: The Rolling Stone Interview
This story originally appeared in the February 25th, 1988 issue of Rolling Stone.
He is still a kamikaze of the night. In the cockpit of his blue four-wheel-drive vehicle, he purrs through the hushed, sloping arteries of San Francisco, seeking out comedy huts to raid, improve stages to commandeer. He never strikes before midnight, never allows word of his attack to leak out in advance. He likes it that way. It is the only instant gratification he permits himself nowadays, the only vice he has not sworn off. “Joke ’em if they can’t take a fuck,” he has said, not a little ruefully. Laughs are all that is left, and laughs are what he craves most Okay, maybe laughs and a thriving movie career, but we’ll get to that.
Robin Williams lives in San Francisco. His family migrated to the Bay Area From the Midwest when he was a teenager, and now he has come home to stay, to reclaim normalcy in his life. He has vanquished the demons that had ravaged his reputation: drugs, liquor, womanizing. His primary motivation was the birth of his son, Zachary, who is now nearly five. But despite fatherhood’s cleansing effect, his nine-year marriage to Valerie Velardi is in disrepair. They have been separated — on amicable terms — for more than a year, with no resolution on the horizon. (William’s father died last October, compounding the inner turmoil.) Williams now keeps company with his personal assistant, Marsha Garces, a petite brunette. It is she, in fact, who unfailingly rides copilot during his nocturnal comedy missions.
On successive nights in mid-January, they zero in on a pair of favorite targets: an upscale north-of-North-Beach club called Cobb’s and a scruffy Richmond District walk-in closet called the Holy City Zoo. The latter is where it all began for Williams, where he worked his way from behind the bar to the stage These days Williams, ever the polite interloper, will not lunge for the microphone until all of the scheduled comics have finished their sets. He lingers outside or on a secluded bar stool — usually with a hood yanked down over his forehead — nursing his anonymity before moving in for the kill.
The kill, as perpetrated by Williams, has always been a thing to behold. His brain fires off a synaptic staccato of lunatic frissons. His rubbery face twists and congeals. Marauding voices take his tongue hostage. And on these chilly nights, his antics are as fecund as ever. He switches mineral-water bottles from table to table, announcing, “It’s a little game we like to call San Francisco roulette.” He is Bernhard Goetz taking a Rorschach test (“Is it Oprah Winfrey?”); a male lesbian (“I feel like a man trapped inside a man’s body”); a channeled spirit called Limptha, “an 8000-year-old retail salesman that somehow speaks English perfectly”; and a swishy gumshoe (“The fog wraps around me like a cheap mink coat — that’s the way I like it”).
Late in his set at the Holy City Zoo, a back-row inebriate begins to chant, “Popeye! Popeye!” Williams, a bit agitated, leans forward and solicitously lectures him: “No, Lumpy, no more Popeye. But I have a new movie that just might work, and if not, I’ll be off somewhere shouting, ‘Show me a vowel!‘ There’s a scary thought, boy.”
He refers, of course, to Good Moming, Vietnam, the Barry Levinson film that has been hailed as the first bigscreen project properly suited to the comedian’s frenetic genius. More important, it also promises to be Williams’s first unqualified box-office bonanza (in its three weeks of limited release, GMV earned $1 million playing on only four screens; in its first weekend of wide release, it earned nearly $12 million).
It has been a long time coming. After exploding upon the scene ten years ago as a hyperkinetic extraterrestrial in ABC’s hitcom Mork & Mindy, Williams embarked on a meandering film career. Only his canny performances in George Roy Hill’s World According to Garp and Paul Mazursky’s Moscow on the Hudson earned critical huzzahs for the Juilliard-trained actor. The rest of his oeuvre has become the soggy mulch of dolorous cable programming: Popeye, The Survivors, The Best of Times, Club Paradise.
Now, as military DJ Adrian Cronauer in Good Morning, Vietnam, Williams is at last happily typecast as an exultant anarchist. Handling the Saigon morningdrive shift on Armed Forces Radio in 1965, he is the father of shock radio, stirring platoons in the fields with nonissue sarcasm. Williams, sans constraint of script, pursues his inimitable manic riffs behind Cronauer’s microphone. He becomes, in quicksilver aims, Walter Cronkite, Gomer Pyle, Elvis Presley, Mr. Ed, Richard Nixon and a host of chowder-head officer. As a fey military fashion consultant who disapproves of camouflage: “You know, you go in the jungle, make a statement. If you’re going to light, clash!” As LBJ, explaining his daughter’s ornithological middle name: “Lynda Dog would be too cruel.”
The role fits. “It’s amazing to me that some people have seen this and said, ‘Well, that’s what Robin does,” says director Barry Levinson. “That’s a bit like saying Fred Astaire dances well.”
The Levinson-Williams dynamic has proved so copacetic that already there is talk of a second collaboration, possibly on a film entitled Toys, which would explore the eccentricities of the toy industry. And there are plans for Williams and Steve Martin to share the stage this fall in Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, directed by Mike Nichols, at New York City’s Lincoln Center.
These are bittersweet times for Robin Williams: personal life in flux, professional life in the ascendant. Yet, as his longtime manager, Larry Brezner, explains, “he is handling the crises in a really mature way. There was a point at which Robin would have simply run off and refused to face difficulty. Now, maybe for the first time in his life, he is an adult.”
The newly introspective Robin Williams was in evidence throughout this interview. During the discussion, he swallowed a gallon of coffee (“Betty Ford speed balls”), flounced perkily upon a couch and summoned the usual menagerie of comic voices. And when the interviewer brandished a vintage 1979 plastic Mork doll at the outset, Williams barely blanched.
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