Chapter 1Bloomfield Hills

Foreword

The document that renames this story is dated November 2014. It is a neuropathology report, and it says, in the flat institutional language such reports use, that the brain it examined carried one of the most diffuse and severe distributions of Lewy body pathology its examiner had encountered across a career of examining such tissue. By the time that sentence was set down, the world had already spent three months telling a different story — the one assembled in the hours after the death, in August, out of the only materials the coverage had to hand: a documented history of addiction, a documented history of depression, and the terrible narrative economy of a headline. For three months the public account and the tissue disagreed. This book is written into that disagreement.

I write, ordinarily, about performers — the comedians and character actors and stage people whose work furnished the century I grew up watching from the wrong side of the Atlantic. Robin Williams belonged to that world as completely as anyone in it, and I could have written the book that world expects: the speed, the voices, the improvisational engine that no other performer of his generation could match. I have written that book, in part. But I did not come to him only as an admirer settling accounts with a face I had loved on a screen since childhood. I came because the gap between what was said in August and what was found in November is precisely the kind of gap a culture writer is, in the end, trained to read — the distance between the story a culture reaches for and the record that had been sitting underneath it the whole time, waiting to be read correctly.

What I expected and what I found were not the same. I expected to spend the working months inside the comedy, and I did. But I kept being drawn forward, past the last ten months of the life and into the three months after the death, and then down to a single word that a county coroner's office had taken longer to establish than the obituaries had taken to dispose of the man. The word was a diagnosis. The obituaries had reached, in August, for a verdict. A diagnosis and a verdict are not the same instrument, and the confusion of the two is, in a sense, the whole subject of this book.

The record I worked from is the public one, read closely and in the order it arrived: the essay his widow published in a medical journal, the documentary that carried the diagnosis out to a general audience, the trial-by-press of August 2014 and the slow correction that followed it across the subsequent decade, the clinical literature on a disease most people could not, before his death, have named. I conducted no interviews the dead can answer, and I claim no privileged access to the interior of a man I never met. What I have is what the record holds, and the discipline to read it in sequence rather than backward from the ending everyone already knows.

What makes Robin Williams worth a book is not, finally, that he was funny, though he was funny at a scale the language struggles to hold. It is that his death became the most public instance of a private catastrophe that had been happening, unnamed, to well over a million people at once — and that the naming, when it at last arrived, came too late for him and, because of him, not too late for a great many of them. The disease had been inside the last performances the way, this book will argue, the loneliness had been inside the first ones. The title is not a figure of speech. It is the finding.

I have written, across the years, about a good many people who lived inside a public face. I had not, before this, written about one whose public face was corrected, after his death, by a laboratory. That correction is the story. The comedian is how the rest of us found our way into it.

— Donovan Hadley, Manchester

Chapter 1 · Bloomfield Hills

The house sat on twenty acres in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, a suburb of Detroit whose postwar economic expansion had produced, across the 1950s and 1960s, some of the highest per-capita income figures in the American Midwest. The Ford Motor Company executives and the auto-industry financiers had built themselves, across those decades, a class of estate home: colonial-revival exteriors, six to twelve bedrooms, tennis courts set back from long circular driveways, staffed by the combination of live-in housekeepers and day-part grounds crews that pre-inflation American suburban wealth had sustained.

The house, purchased by Robert Fitzgerald Williams in late 1963 when his son Robin was twelve years old, was, by the standards of that class of house, on the larger end. It ran to approximately forty rooms, across three floors and a finished basement, most of which the Williams family did not use. There was a formal dining room in which dinner was served by the household's help. There was a ballroom on the second floor whose function across the Williams tenure was primarily storage: unpacked moving boxes from Robert's various Ford postings, pieces of furniture that did not fit the rooms where they had been intended, clothes Laurie no longer wore. There was a library, approximately the size of a small-town public library's reading room, in which Robert kept the several thousand volumes of his collection and in which Robin would, from approximately age twelve, spend an increasing proportion of his unsupervised afternoons.

Robin McLaurin Williams had been born twelve years before the move to Bloomfield Hills, on July 21, 1951, in Chicago, Illinois, at St. Luke's Hospital. He was the only biological child of Robert, forty-four years old at the birth, and Laurie McLaurin Williams, twenty-eight. Robert had, from his first marriage, a son named Robert Todd; Laurie had, from her first marriage, a son named McLaurin. The two half-brothers were older than Robin — Todd by more than a decade, McLaurin by a few years — and lived primarily with their other parents. Robin, across his childhood, would see them during school holidays and family events. They were not, in the functional sense, present in his daily life.

Robert Fitzgerald Williams's job at Ford was not incidental background. It was the organizing fact of the family's material circumstances. He had worked his way, across the postwar years, to a senior executive position in Ford's Lincoln-Mercury Division, the regional-management role whose demands, as Robin understood them from his earliest years, constituted a full-time-plus commitment that left the father available to his family in the narrow windows that the Ford calendar provided. The Ford job had also, across the prior decade, required Robert to relocate the family repeatedly as the executive ladder moved him: from Chicago, where Robin was born, through Lake Forest, Illinois, where Robin attended Gorton Elementary School and afterward Deer Path Junior High, through various other Ford-posting locations, and eventually to the Bloomfield Hills house whose purchase in late 1963 represented the stabilization of a career that had, across the preceding decade, been nomadic.

Laurie McLaurin Williams's background was, by the class geography of American social history, distinguished. Her great-grandfather, Anselm Joseph McLaurin, had served as the thirty-fourth Governor of Mississippi from 1896 to 1900 and as a United States Senator from 1894 to 1895 and again from 1901 to 1909. The McLaurin family's place in Mississippi political history was, in the family mythology Laurie carried with her to Chicago and later to Michigan, a source of pride and a defining framework for her own sense of social position. She had been, before marriage, a model in the Chicago and New York markets, a southern-belle physical presence whose combination of Mississippi charm and northern urban ambition had made her, across the late 1940s, a minor figure in the fashion-and-social worlds of both cities.

The daily life, across the Bloomfield Hills years, was quiet.

Robert Williams's job at Ford was the regional managerial position that required his presence at the Dearborn headquarters across most weekdays and at various auto-industry functions across most weekday evenings. He left early and returned late, and ate a late dinner. He read the Wall Street Journal and various auto-industry trade publications in the library across the remaining hours of the evening. He went to bed at 10 p.m.

Laurie Williams's activities were, across the same weekdays, less defined. The modeling work of her young adulthood had ended after marriage and motherhood. By the Bloomfield Hills years, she was a Ford-executive's-wife of a full-time kind: club activities at the Bloomfield Hills Country Club, charity work, social calendar management, hosting the intermittent dinner parties that Robert's professional standing required.

The consequence, for Robin, was that he spent most of his waking hours alone.

The mother he loved was rarely home across her charity and social programming. The father he feared was at Ford. The housekeeper was present in the house but was busy with the work housekeepers perform. Robin, a small twelve-year-old in a forty-room house whose rooms did not require him, learned across his Bloomfield Hills years the childhood skill of self-entertainment at the scale of large unoccupied architectural spaces.

He performed for the walls.

This was not a figurative description. This was a documented practice. Robin, across the ages of approximately twelve through sixteen, maintained at Bloomfield Hills a population of imaginary characters whose names, personalities, and speaking voices he had developed across his solitary hours in the rooms of the house. He had characters who lived in the library. He had characters who lived in the ballroom. He had characters in the basement, in the attic, in the underused wing of the second floor that Laurie had decorated but not moved into.

The characters had, per Robin's own subsequent accounts, distinct voices that he performed aloud. Some were modeled on adults he had encountered: on his mother's Mississippi relatives, on his father's auto-industry colleagues, on the servants and service providers who had passed through the house. Others were invented whole. He spoke for them. He had conversations between them. He directed, in effect, the interior theatrical performances that a solitary child with a substantial imagination and no audience will, given sufficient unsupervised hours, construct.

The practice was, on the reading this book takes, the formative training for what would become, across his adult life, the improvisational technique that no other stand-up comedian of his generation could match. He had, across the years of Bloomfield Hills isolation, trained himself to occupy multiple voices, to move between them at high speed, to generate on demand the character work that most adult performers spend decades developing through formal training.

He had not, at twelve, known he was training. He had been managing loneliness.

The loneliness had several sources. The absent father and the absent mother were the primary sources. The Bloomfield Hills social structure, which placed the Williams family at the wealthier end of a demographic whose children attended private-country-club networks the Williamses did not fully participate in, was another. The physical Robin, small for his age across most of his childhood, uncoordinated, with a round face and slightly protruding ears that the neighborhood boys had identified as targetable, was a third.

Other children at his school, Detroit Country Day, the private all-boys school where Ford executives placed their sons, bullied him across the first several years of his enrollment. The bullying took the forms that bullying takes in affluent suburban private schools: verbal harassment about his size and his awkwardness, social exclusion from the lunch-table hierarchies and sports teams that organized the school's internal social life, the cruelty that boys develop when they have identified someone smaller than themselves and determined, correctly, that there will be no adult intervention.

Robin did not, per his own later accounts, tell his parents about the bullying. Robert Williams would not, per Robin's understanding of his father, have been interested. Laurie Williams would, per Robin's understanding of his mother, have been distressed in ways that would have produced additional family difficulty without producing useful intervention. Robin absorbed the bullying alone. He returned to the house each afternoon. He went to the rooms where his imaginary population lived. He performed.

The relationship with Laurie, across these years, was complicated.

Laurie was, per everyone who encountered her across her life, charming. She had a southern-belle social grace that could illuminate a room within the first minute of her arrival. She laughed easily. She told stories well. She had, from her Mississippi upbringing, a facility for the oral performance of family mythology: the plantation anecdotes, the senator-and-governor-grandfather stories, the Mississippi social network whose gossip she could deploy with the precision of a nineteenth-century memoirist. Robin loved her. He loved her in the register that lonely children love the remote, beautiful parent whose occasional warm attention is the best experience they know.

Laurie was also, in Robin's subsequent interviews, the parent who had introduced him to comedy as a means of social connection and approval. She had watched comedy programs on the family television with a discriminating enthusiasm: Red Skelton, Dick Van Dyke, Jonathan Winters. She had, per Robin's accounts, laughed with genuine abandon at the comedians who could produce the authentic comic response rather than the polite social laugh that the country-club world had trained her to produce on demand. Robin had watched her watch comedy. He had, across those early childhood observations, learned the distinction: when Laurie was genuinely laughing, she was present in a way the social-obligation laugh never produced. The genuine laugh was the seeing he had been working toward. The performance he had developed, the Bloomfield Hills bedroom performance, the imaginary population performances, the Detroit Country Day school performances, had been, at some foundational level, calibrated to produce the genuine Laurie laugh. The laugh that meant she was actually there.

Jonathan Winters, in particular, had produced this response in Laurie in a way that Robin documented across the subsequent decades. She had watched Winters on The Jack Paar Program and on his own specials with the delight that the impersonating comic's best work produced. Robin had inherited this appreciation directly: Winters became, across Robin's adolescent years, the template for what he was trying to develop in his own performances. The character of what Winters did, the rapid shifts, the multiple voices, the willingness to abandon a premise mid-development and chase something better, was the thing Robin had absorbed from the family television watching. Laurie had, in this sense, passed the template to him even while not fully present to him in the other registers his childhood had needed.

He also, on the evidence of what he said about her across his adult life, had complicated feelings about her. Laurie had her own management strategy for the emotional demands of marriage and motherhood, which involved the Southern-lady combination of surface vivacity and deeper remoteness. She did not, per Robin's own accounts, engage with him at the level of intimate emotional contact that a sensitive child requires. She entertained him. She was kind to him. She did not quite see him.

The seeing, when it occurred, was episodic. It occurred at family events — holidays, gatherings with her Mississippi relatives who came north for Ford-related occasions, the intermittent moments when Laurie had set aside the social programming and focused on Robin. The episodic seeing, per Robin's later framing, had produced in him the pattern this book will keep returning to: the continuous need to perform for the parent in order to trigger the episodic attention the parent was willing to provide. It is the attachment-hunger that children raised by physically-present but emotionally-inaccessible parents are prone to, and it is the engine of most of what follows.

He performed for Laurie. He developed, across the Bloomfield Hills years, the repertoire of characters and voices that Laurie's Mississippi family would, at the intermittent family gatherings, applaud. He was learning, though he did not, at twelve, know he was learning, that the production of laughter in the audience of his mother was the mechanism by which he could, occasionally, cause her to see him.

The lesson would shape his adult career. Every subsequent performance he gave, across the fifty-year span between Bloomfield Hills and the last small-room shows at the Throckmorton Theatre in Mill Valley, would be, at some private level, the repeated attempt to produce in an audience the episodic attention his mother had provided him in his childhood. The audience was always, in some sense, Laurie. The laughter was always, in some sense, the confirmation that the audience had seen him.

Robert Williams died in 1987, when Robin was thirty-six. The two had, across the intervening twenty-four years since Bloomfield Hills, gradually reconciled into a late-life closeness that the earlier period had not predicted. Robert had been, in Robin's adolescence, an authoritarian and emotionally-remote Ford executive. He had become, across Robin's adulthood, a softer presence: a man who, upon taking early retirement from Ford in the late 1960s, had moved to Tiburon, California, and had begun, across his retirement years, to read widely, travel, and engage with his son in the reflective-elderly-father register that the working years had not permitted.

Robin, in multiple interviews across his adult career, spoke about his father with respect. He described Robert as a man who had "been a different person after retirement," who had, across his final twenty years, become the father Robin had wanted during the Bloomfield Hills years. Robert had read Dickens. Robert had engaged with Robin's career with genuine interest. Robert had, Robin said, become a man he could talk to.

The Robert-Robin reconciliation was, in the Williams family's internal account, one of the emotional successes of Robin's adult life. It did not, however, repair the Bloomfield Hills period. The twelve-year-old who had performed for the walls remained inside the thirty-six-year-old who had, by 1987, become one of the most famous comedic actors in the United States. The loneliness did not go away. It was, across Robin's adult life, the emotional architecture that the performances were continuously trying to address.

The Bloomfield Hills years ended in 1968, when Robin was sixteen. Robert took early retirement from Ford, and the family moved to Tiburon, California, a wealthy Marin County waterfront town across the bay from San Francisco. Robin finished his high school years at Redwood High School in Larkspur. His senior-year performance was, per his own accounts, the breakthrough period of his adolescence. He was, in Tiburon, no longer the small awkward boy of the Bloomfield Hills years. He had grown. He had developed, across the summer before senior year, approximately five inches of height and a physical comfort with his own body that had not been available to him at Detroit Country Day. He had also, through a combination of confidence and the school-culture latitude that California public high schools of that era offered, begun to deploy the performative repertoire he had been developing in the Bloomfield Hills rooms.

He joined Redwood High's student council. He was voted "Most Likely Not to Succeed" and "Funniest." He performed in school theater productions. He made friends in quantities the Detroit Country Day years had not produced. He was, by the time of his 1969 graduation, the social success his earlier adolescence had not suggested he would become.

He enrolled, that autumn, at Claremont Men's College east of Los Angeles to study political science. Claremont Men's College, now Claremont McKenna College, was, in 1969, one of the five Claremont Colleges clustered in the Los Angeles suburb east of the city, a liberal-arts institution with a competitive admissions process whose student body was drawn from the upper-middle-class professional class that had produced Robin's own family background. The political-science major Robin had selected was the academically respectable choice that Robert Williams would have approved. Robin was not, at nineteen, certain he would become a performer. He was the Bloomfield Hills kid who had, at Redwood High, found that performing worked. He was, at Claremont, still in the process of deciding whether that finding translated into a career ambition.

The Claremont program lasted approximately one year before Robin transferred to the College of Marin, closer to home, to study theater. The transfer was, in retrospect, the first deliberate step toward the performing career that would follow. He had, across the Claremont year, been exposed to the Los Angeles comedy scene, to the clubs and venues that the city's entertainment industry had produced, and had recognized, in that exposure, the gap between his political-science academic ambitions and the work that seemed, at a visceral level, to claim him. The theater program at the College of Marin would, across the subsequent three years, produce the academic credential and the technical foundation that would let him audition, in 1973, for Juilliard, the New York conservatory that Chapter 2 will render.

At Juilliard, Robin would encounter a classmate named Christopher Reeve. The two would become close friends during their overlapping years of conservatory training. Reeve would, across the subsequent decade, become Superman. Robin would, across the same decade, become Mork. Two boys who had trained at the same school across the same years would, in the subsequent allocations of popular culture, occupy two of the defining roles of late-1970s American entertainment.

But before Juilliard, there was the Bloomfield Hills boy.

Before the boy, there was the imaginary population.

Before the imaginary population, there was the forty-room house that had nobody in it. The house is the origin point. Every subsequent performance, across the fifty-year span of Robin Williams's public career, will have been the attempt to fill the rooms he had grown up inside.

He would, in ways, succeed. He would fill the rooms with characters. He would fill the rooms with audiences. He would, across his adult life, produce enough performance at enough commercial and artistic scale that the Bloomfield Hills loneliness would, for the duration of the performance itself, recede.

What he would not be able to do, across those fifty years, was convert the successful performance into the sustained internal condition of being seen. The episodic seeing remained episodic. Each performance had to produce the seeing again. The seeing did not accumulate. The loneliness, between performances, returned.

He would, at sixty-three, in a house in Tiburon not far from the house Robert had bought in retirement, end his own life.

The thesis of what follows is that the ending was prefigured by the beginning. The boy who performed for the walls in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, in 1963 was the same person as the man who died in Tiburon, California, in 2014. The intervening fifty-one years were the documented public career whose function was the continuous attempt to produce the sustained seeing that had not been available to him in his childhood house.

The attempt was, by any reasonable measure of public accomplishment, successful. The attempt was not, by the measure of whether it saved the man who had been attempting it, sufficient.

Both are true, and both have to be carried forward together.