After Robin Williams ended his singularly pyrotechnic life last week, his friend Penny Marshall’s phone kept ringing. All the old gang—Carol Kane, Julie Kavner, Robert De Niro—were calling, in shock. Marshall, the director who once played Laverne in “Laverne & Shirley,” said, “My brother Garry”—who created “Mork & Mindy” for Williams—“was crying, and that made me fall apart more. I’ve never seen my brother cry. He could always talk to actors, settle them down. He said he loved Robin but he couldn’t get through to him, that some inner layer was out of reach.”
She lit a Gambler cigarette, explained her puffy eyes—“I’ve got this eye thing”—and subsided into an armchair in her Upper West Side apartment. Marshall first worked with Williams when, as Laverne, she made a crossover appearance on “Mork & Mindy” ’s pilot: “Fonzie was in it, and he fixed me up with Mork, because I was a fast girl, and Mork came on to me in his Morkish way, and I had to slap him.” She rolled her eyes—seventies sitcoms. “All of our scripts seemed to blend into each other—who’s got the monkey this week? Who’s on roller skates? But we’d all go watch Robin—he was just out there, so many voices, so many connections. No one was that fast. Valerie, his first wife, told me, ‘I can’t keep up with him.’ I said, ‘Well, who can?’
“Robin was either on”—her eyes went wide, eyebrows a curtain going up—“or he was off, and the sweetest, gentlest man. Later, we all went on vacation to Mexico, and he’d eat peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches and watch that Civil War documentary with his son Zak. He was very childlike. I remember him asking his second wife, Marsha, for permission—‘Can I go swimming now?’ He was Peter Pan. He was one of those people who can’t be alone, who have to entertain you. And the truth is it’s dull, just sitting around—this is why people do drugs!”
When Marshall directed “Awakenings,” in 1990, she cast Williams as a doctor who tries dopamine on encephalitis victims who are unable to move. The treatment works for a time, particularly on Leonard, a patient played by De Niro. “Robin had already done a drama, ‘Dead Poets Society,’ but he told me he was afraid Bobby was going to blow him off the screen. I said, ‘I won’t let that happen.’ So it was my job to keep Robin from being funny. We had a shorthand signal for when he got a little flamboyant, improvising.” She curled her fingers tight and dropped the fist to her groin: “It meant ‘More balls.’ ” She smiled, remembering how hard it was to corral him: “There was a scene where a cockroach was going to crawl across the table, and Robin suddenly did a thing where he was a cockroach who was up for a Raid commercial.” She went on, “Robin could make Bob laugh so hard his face got all red, and Bob was supposed to be, you know, sick.”
On the press tour, she recalled, “I slurred, and said the film was set at a menstrual hospital, instead of a mental hospital—and Robin immediately said, ‘It’s a period piece.’ But he also made you cry at the end, when all the patients go back to being frozen.” She grabbed another cigarette—“I’m going to stop smoking”—and continued: “We had a Ouija-board scene, and it looked like a monkey was doing it, and I told him, ‘Robin, you gotta take the hair off your hands!’ He said, ‘I know: I sweat! I’m hairy! God’s gifts to me!’ He made fun of himself, which a lot of comedians can’t, and he had a great laugh, and there was not a mean streak in him.”
For years, she didn’t see much of him. “He seemed excited about his third wife, and he called when I was sick: ‘How can I help?’ ” (Marshall was treated for lung cancer in 2009.) “I wish—I wish—I’d known to call him.” She plumed smoke. “Lauren Bacall dying, O.K., she was eighty-nine—I want to be dead at eighty-nine. That’s enough. But not sixty-three!” Referring to reports that Williams—who, it later emerged, was in the early stages of Parkinson’s disease—had slashed at his wrist before using a belt to asphyxiate himself, she said, “It didn’t look planned. Most of his improvs were great, but he takes a penknife, you know? Then thinks, That’s not going to work.” She laughed, despite herself.
After a moment, Marshall went on, “There’s something he said, I think in his Actors Studio interview. James Lipton asked, ‘What do you hope Heaven is like?’ and Robin said, ‘I hope there’s laughter, and it’d be great if, when I talk to God, God goes, “So two Jews walk into a bar . . .” ’ ” She fell silent. “I’ve got this eye thing,” she said again, to explain why she was crying. “And I’m sad.” ♦
