Playboy Interview: Robin Williams

Four years ago, an unknown, offbeat comic named Robin Williams starred in the first installment of TV's "Mork & Mindy," and after two weeks, the ABC sitcom became one of TV's top-ten-rated programs--and Williams was being hailed as the medium's brightest young star. As Mark from the planet Ork, Williams portrayed a zany, engaging extraterrestrial whose rapid-fire ripostes were the series' strongest asset. Ably supported by actress Pam Dawbcr, who played his girlfriend (and then his wife), Williams made mincemeat of TV's tidy demographics, for he somehow appealed as much to adults as to children. Although the industry had anticipated a warmed-over remake of "My Favorite Martian," "Mark & Mindy" turned into a showcase for one of the most remarkable talents TV has ever presented. Within a very short time, indeed, the show's 55,000,000 weekly viewers were delighting themselves (and driving everyone else batty) by greeting one another with their Orkan hero's best-known phrase, "Nano nano."

"Mork & Mindy" rose to the top of the Nielsen heap, but Williams didn't even briefly stop honing his high-energy night-club act. After putting in a full day at Paramount, where "Mork & Mindy" was filmed, Williams would take a short break and then rush off to perform without pay at several Los Angeles comedy clubs. Money was no problem: From a reported initial salary of $15,000 per episode, Williams had been raised to $30,000 after "Mork & Mindy's" first season and by 1981 was said to be earning more than $50,000 for each installment.

As a night-club comic, Williams is unlike his TV persona. Eager to put as much distance as he could between himself and Mork, the funky performer often began his act by asking people at the front tables to move back a bit, whereupon he grabbed his crotch and announced, "I'd like to show all of you something I'm really very proud of." After that, Williams unleashed such comedy creations as Beverly Hills blues singer Benign Neglect ("Woke up the other day,/Ran out of Perrier"), the Reverend Earnest Angry ("Remember, you can fool some of the people some of the time and jerk the rest off") and Russian lounge entertainer Nicky Lenin ("I would like to begin by doing some basic Soviet suppressions"). A brilliant impressionist, Williams became Belle Davis playing Quasimodo, Jacques Cousteau doing a commercial for Union Oil, Lord Olivier selling Ripple wine and Mr. Rogers greeting America's tots with, "Let's put Mr. Hamster in the microwave oven, OK? Pop goes the weasel!" As if all that weren't enough, Williams then acted out all the parts of an imagined Japanese horror movie titled "Attack of the Killer Vibrators" before presenting his original one-man ballet, "Death of a Sperm." It was ingenious, high-powered stuff, and in 1979, when Williams recorded "Reality . . . What a Concept" (his only comedy LP thus far), the album quickly went platinum by racking up sales of more than 1,000,000.

In what seemed like the blink of an eye, Williams had become America's undisputed young king of comedy, and TV, record and night-club reviewers felt no compunctions about comparing him to everyone from Sid Caesar and Jonathan Winters to Danny Kaye and Marcel Marceau. When Williams was picked by producer Robert Evans to star in the movie version of "Popeye," most show-business observers believed that the 5'8" performer would quickly emerge as the new screen star of his generation.

At that point, however, a funny thing happened to Williams' career: It began to fall apart. "Mork & Mindy's" ratings began to plummet in the 1979--1980 season. Then, "Popeye" premiered in December 1980. Williams received lukewarm reviews and the movie itself turned out to be a turkey. ABC canceled "Mork & Mindy" this past April. Williams' second movie, "The World According to Garp," was released in July, and although they didn't put down his acting ability, most critics agreed with Playboy's Bruce Williamson: "Good as he is," Williamson noted, "this still isn't the breakthrough role to suit his unique talent." Many of Williams' fans began to ask themselves an unspoken question: Was their boy's rocketlike rise to the top about to flame out as spectacularly as it had begun?

The comic himself didn't think so. Born in Chicago in July 1952, Williams, the son of a Ford Motor Company vice-president, grew up in the ritzy Detroit suburb of Bloom field Hills. Just before Williams entered his senior year of high school, his father retired and moved the family to Marin County, California. After graduating from Redwood High, Williams studied at two California colleges and then won an acting scholarship to Juilliard in New York City. After spending nearly three years there, he returned to San Francisco, where he began putting together a stand-up comedy act that won him a following there. In 1976, he moved to Los Angeles in quest of bigger things, and within six months, he was signed by producer George Schlatter to become a regular on NBC's ill-fated 1977 revival of "Laugh-In." By the following year, Williams had won his role in "Mork & Mindy," and the rest, as they say, is showbiz history.

Playboy assigned Lawrence Linderman to follow Williams around California. His report:

"Robin Williams and his wife, Valerie, live a peripatetic life. They have two residences in the L.A. area (a home in one of the canyons and an apartment in Hollywood), an apartment in San Francisco and a ranch in the Northern California wine country. I live just outside Sonoma, and I bumped into Williams there when Tommy Smothers, who owns a nearby vineyard, took him to Marioni's, the town's leading hangout. The word for Williams is charming. He's polite, amiable and funny, and also caught up, I think, in puzzling out how to hold on to aspects of his personality that he wants to share with no one but himself and his wife. (Valerie, incidentally, is one terrific lady.) Williams told me he was trying to spend as many weekends as he could at his recently purchased spread in neighboring Napa County; that was where he wanted to begin our interview. Several weeks later, I met him there one afternoon when he was watching a telecast of 'On the Waterfront.' Want to know who Robin Williams is? In the last ten minutes of the movie--when Marlon Brando's Terry Malloy is getting the shit kicked out of him by Lee J. Cobb's Johnny Friendly and his hoods--I glanced over and noticed that Robin had a hand over his face, which didn't at all conceal the tears that were streaming down his cheeks. I don't think I've ever interviewed a more sensitive guy. Or a gentler one, for that matter.

"During the following weeks, I saw Williams frequently in L.A., and before our interview was done, I caught his night-club act at San Francisco's Boarding House. In place of his line-up of various characters, Williams now does what amounts to total improvisation that blends burlesque, satire, mime, impressions and occasional stand-up comedy with such blinding speed that it's almost impossible to define his act in normal terms. One moment, he is a Brooklyn bruiser doing a number on those Falkin' Islands; the next, he's doing a take-off on 'Quest for Fire'; the next, he's improvising on subjects shouted to him by the audience. Williams uses a career's worth of premises in a single show, darting in and out of them like a manic postman on his appointed rounds. There's really no one else who does what Williams does.

"In any case, when we finally began our interview, 'Mork & Mindy' had just been canceled, and that provided the opening subject for our conversation."

[Q] Playboy: Let's start with your television work, which is how most people have come to know you. ABC announced earlier this year that it was canceling Mork & Mindy. Why did the show's ratings slip so badly during the past couple of years?

[A] Williams: I think the stories just got too complex and we got away from the simplicity of the character. Mork & Mindy originally worked because it was about this cheerful little man from outer space doing very simple things--"Mork buys bread" or "Mork deals with racism." Mork and Mindy were both very strait-laced and the charm of the show, I think, was in having Pam Dawber deal with me in normal, everyday situations--to which I would react in bizarre ways. The show began with very human roots, and Pam was responsible for a lot of that: she's a fine actress and a friend, and there was a wonderful exchange of humanity between us. I think people really connected with the characters we played, and in our first year, the series was exactly what it was designed to be: a situation comedy. When you think of, say. The Honeymooners, you know who Ralph Kramden was and you know who Norton was; they were at their best in everyday situations, and the simpler the better. If the stories ever became too complex--which is what happened to Mork & Mindy--there still would have been some funny things going on, but the show wouldn't have been nearly as effective. I didn't want to see Mork & Mindy bastardized that way, but it was.

[Q] Playboy: Why did it happen?

[A] Williams: The network got cocky. Television is like a game of chess, and guys at the three networks are always trying to gun one another down. Good shows help a network build power blocs; Herr Silverman taught us that. Once you build a power bloc, you're able to sweep certain nights, and then you slowly but surely expand outward. When we started our second year, ABC took shows that were doing well and split us all up because it wanted to sweep every night. So for that reason, it shifted Mork & Mindy from Thursday to Sunday nights and scheduled us opposite Archie Bunker's Place. As a result of all that maneuvering, two or three ABC series got canceled, including a very good one called Angie. It was a simple case of greed, and it didn't work. Then, when the network realized things were going poorly for our show, it got panicky and started putting in all these sexually oriented stories: "Mork becomes a cheerleader for the Denver Broncos!" I think people who'd always watched the series just looked at that stuff and said, "Jesus, what's this?"

[Q] Playboy: Was that your reaction as well?

[A] Williams: It didn't piss me off as much as make me wonder why. Everyone was then doing T-and-A shows, so I guess the network guys said, "Let's put Mork in drag--that's always funny." But that was going far away from what we had originally had, a gentle soul who was suddenly becoming kind of kinky. The producers were torn between the network's saying, "We need stories we can promote" and their own feelings about supporting the characters. Well, because the network wanted a T&A show it could promote, there I was with 32 cheerleaders. [Sings] "We've got 32 girls, 64 nipples--and what can we talk about now?" Just count 'em, folks: 32 girls, 64 nipples--65? Ah, yes, the Venusian woman on the end; bless you, my dear. Right after that, we had a two-part show with Raquel Welch playing one of three dynamite-looking aliens who come down to Earth, take me prisoner and then try to get information out of me through sensuous tortures. Raquel was in a wild Bob Mackie outfit that had the guys on the set breathing very hard, and one of the other girls was a Playmate, Debra Jo Fondren, with long blonde hair braided all the way down her back. The planned tortures included putting me in a hot tub and having the Playmate whip me with her hair. I was not unhappy when they decided against going with that. [In a child's voice] "Daddy, Daddy, look--Mork's into bondage!" Then they came up with this little ball that was like a vibrator, and the girls were supposed to rub it up and down my body until I got crazy and gave in.

Shows like those changed us during the second year, and they weren't a help. By our third season, the network guys were desperate for stories they could promote. It was almost like, "Mork changes sexes! Watch out--he's got everything going now, and Mindy doesn't know what to do!" We continued to get our ass kicked, but they kept looking for promotable stories. "Are you ready for this, America? Mork becomes an iguana!" And then last year, in their search for promotable stories--that became the key to each week's show--we discovered that Mork and Mindy were going to have a child. How well could ABC sell that child? They almost forgot about the stories and the characters themselves. Right about then, I knew it was time to turn around and say, "They're near the east gate, mein Herr."

[Q] Playboy: Were you opposed to having Mork give birth to Mirth, the Jonathan Winters character?

[A] Williams: No, having him on the show was one of the main reasons I stayed with it. For me, it was like the chance to play alongside Babe Ruth, I'd always wanted just to meet Winters. When I was a kid, my parents would say, "All right, you can stay up a little longer to see this wonderful man fly around the room and do all his crazy stuff." I found out much later that Jonathan's shows never did well in the ratings, but an awful lot of people I've talked with remember those shows, and they vividly remember things that he did. And I mean exact lines and whole routines.

[Q] Playboy: Such as?

[A] Williams: My favorite was King Quasi of Quasiland. His country was five feet wide and 11 miles long, and its main exports were rope and pasta.

[Q] Playboy: Were you instrumental in getting Winters on the series?

[A] Williams: No, I wasn't, though the producers knew I wanted to work with him. Jonathan had done one episode in which he played another character's brother; the chemistry between us that night was terrific, and we got fantastic feedback on it. The first time I saw Jonathan on the set, he came up to me and said, "How are you, young man? My name is Willard Cespar and I'm here to check on violations of the building code." Somebody asked him what he'd been doing, and Jonathan started playing an old guard working the gate at Paramount, and then he did a thing about starting a telethon to keep Lucille Ball off the air. When the decision was made to have him play Mirth, I was happy about it and the network people were ecstatic. They had something else to promote: the new crazy man and the king.

[Q] Playboy: As you mentioned a few minutes ago, Winters has never been very successful on TV, and some industry observers felt that making him a regular was like a kiss of death for Mork & Mindy. Do you think that's true?

[A] Williams: No, I don't. I sometimes believe Jonathan thinks so, but it's not true; he didn't kill the show. In fact, he gave it a big boost, because the ratings shot up like crazy when Jonathan first came on. We did a couple of very good early stories about Mirth, like one in which he gets flak from the kids at school and then brings me to class as his show-and-tell project. But then we got back to doing bizarre stories that had no semblance of reality, and the show's ratings went way down. For a little while, I thought, God, maybe I'm not goosing up like I used to; maybe the old mad energy is gone. But I decided that wasn't true, because people still liked my performances. I think the show just had a confused base. The combination of that and going up against Magnum P.I. was finally too strong. In San Francisco, guys were walking around saying, "Who is that man on Magnum P.I.? Do you think he'll put on another Hawaiian shirt and undo one more button?"

[Q] Playboy: How did you take the news that Mork & Mindy was being canceled?

[A] Williams: Well, there was a period during which I thought, Oh, fuck, man, they're out to kill us all! After that, it was, All right, let us die gracefully. My feeling now is that we did some good stuff--some strange stuff, too--and I know that we made an impact on our time.

[Q] Playboy: Are you referring to eight P.M. on Thursdays?

[A] Williams: Where does it say the interviewer is supposed to make jokes? By the way, why is the red light on your tape recorder winking at me?

[Q] Playboy: That's Japanese Morse code warning us that we're about to run out of tape on this cassette. We'll only be a second . . . there, we're back. What happens to Mork now? Will we ever see him again?

[A] Williams: No, I don't think so. It was wonderful while it lasted, but I wouldn't want to bring the character back. When something like that ends, you just say thank you and put it away. In Mork's case, he ended with a kind of videonasia. I carefully lowered the volume on my TV set, let loose the vertical hold, put down the rabbit ears and let him go gently into that last good night. Mork was my day job for four years, and now it's over. The show was a crap shoot that worked out, and the freedom I had on it was incredible. If Mork & Mindy had been totally scripted, I don't think we would have lasted more than seven weeks, but the producers saw an energy happening between Pam and me, and they didn't want to mess with it. So they let me improvise, and in the script, there'd be notes for me to say something on the theme of such and such, and I'd just go off and expand on it.

[Q] Playboy: Isn't that unusual in a TV series?

[A] Williams: As far as I know, it is. But you have to remember that Mork supposedly was an open book, a sieve who'd picked up his knowledge of the planet from years of watching Earth television. He was a little like a comic-book character called Zippy the Pinhead, somebody who absorbs everything that comes in but who puts it back out a little out of context, like a word processor with dyslexia. It helped that Mork was an alien, because in some ways there were no real boundaries as to what he could say or do.

[Q] Playboy: You never ran afoul of network censors?

[A] Williams: Sometimes, but we always had wonderful censors. We had a Filipina lady who was great, and then we had a black censor who was really something else. I tried to sneak a few Yiddish phrases past him, but he knew all of them. It turned out that the guy spoke Yiddish and was also studying other languages. He got some interesting greetings: "What's happenin', bro'? What is a putz? Yeah, Jack, that's cool." In one show, a guy delivered flowers to Mork, and I told him, "Here's your tip: Don't eat Mexican food when standing next to an open flame." I couldn't believe they left that in! Mostly, the network's censorship worries had to do with product references. For instance, we had a major hamburger chain sponsoring the show, and one time, I did something about a hamburger chain selling kangaroo meat. I said, "Look, Min, my hamburger has another hamburger inside its little pocket, and there's another little hamburger inside that one." No chance. Another time, I was going to talk about sugar and then go into a hypoglycemic fit, but one of ABC's major sponsors was a candy manufacturer, so I couldn't do it.

[Q] Playboy: Did ABC executives treat you as if you really were an alien?

[A] Williams: They really didn't know what I was. When we started the series, the network guys would all come in and sit together, and at first they didn't laugh, but then they couldn't help laughing. Starting with the first taping in front of an audience, it seemed like everyone was having a good time, and the more freedom I was given, the more I enjoyed it. It was the kind of playfulness I'd experienced in night clubs but hadn't thought I'd ever be able to get on TV. I mean, I'd guested on certain TV shows where they were specific: "Mr. Williams, your line is 'Lola, Jimmy's home now.'" There was no deviating from the script, but in Mork & Mindy, I was allowed to work the way I do onstage. In the middle of a monolog, I could suddenly go off into different accents and characters, and nobody would blink.

[Q] Playboy: Did other cast members want to improvise their roles?

[A] Williams: No, probably because we all knew that if you've got too many people going off and getting crazy, there's no reality base. The series needed some normal characters or else people would have thought, Jesus, everybody on this show is out of his fuckin' mind.

[Q] Playboy: It's a little difficult to believe that you won't miss. Mork & Mindy. Is that entirely true?

[A] Williams: Oh, no; there's a painful aspect about the series' going off. But the thing that's always kept me sane is performing live, and even while shooting the series, I'd drop in and entertain at Los Angeles clubs like The Comedy Store and the Improvisation. It's therapy for me, and one night, I did an improvisation with some friends who were suddenly saying, "Mr. Williams, you must understand--it's time to let go of the series. Pam Dawber is going on to Broadway, but you'll still have films, records and night clubs to play with." And then I said [in a little girl's voice], "No, I want this doll. I want my Mork doll! Oh, look--its head comes off." That helped me explore my feelings about the series' going off, and after that it was, Yeah, OK, I can deal with it. I can go on to other things, like films. Well, one night not long after Popeye had come out, when I was improvising, somebody yelled out, "What about Popeye?" I said, "You're a cruel person. For your information, it's playing in Hollywood on a double bill with Heaven's Gate." That helped me expunge the initial pain I felt about Popeye and, again, I could explore that by doing lines like, "If you watch it backward, it really does have an ending." But that wasn't really meant to attack the picture. It was just my way of dealing with the pain and disappointment I felt about the way Popeye was received. At the same time, I'm proud of the picture, and I'm proud of my association with Robert Altman, who directed it.

[Q] Playboy:Popeye wasn't a total dud, but it certainly wasn't the blockbuster most people thought it would be. What went wrong with it?

[A] Williams:Popeye was a nice fairy tale with a loving spirit to it, and I think most people--especially movie critics--were expecting a combination of Superman and a Busby Berkeley musical. In some ways, I expected that, too, but in the end, I think that what Altman got was a very gentle fable with music and a lot of heart. I recently found out that a lot of people are buying video tapes of Popeye, and their kids watch it four or five times a month. That makes me feel good, because although adults were expecting what they'd seen in cartoons for years and were disappointed when they didn't get it, no one tells children what to expect. You don't have conversations in which a woman says, "Jimmy, I think this should have been a bigger film" and little Jimmy answers, "Yes, Mother, but it works for me."

[Q] Playboy: Altman says that he conceived of Popeye as a morality tale about a young man searching for his lost father.

[A] Williams: That's probably why it missed, because people wanted to see the Popeye they remembered from when they were kids. I knew that when we were making the movie, and I could feel what was missing. For instance, we needed a couple of slam-bang musical numbers that really tore the tits off the place. Same with the action: When the cartoon Popeye started dancing, walls would come down, windows would break, people would go flying out the door and Popeye would be swinging Olive Oyl around with her body parallel to the floor. Instead of all that, we shot in a real small space where you couldn't kick out the jambs. A lot of the movie was filmed on a sunken steamer that was sitting on the end of the bay in Malta, and that kept things confined. So we wound up seeing the softer side of Popeye. [In a fey voice] "I enjoyed Popeye because the clothes were so interesting. And I loved those rubber forearms. I want to meet this man. If I give you money, will you put those arms on for me?"

[Q] Playboy: How long did you spend getting made up each day?

[A] Williams: About an hour and a half, and after that, they'd strap on the latex arms: they tied me off almost as if I were a junkie. In some of my fight scenes, I'd lose all the circulation in my arms and they'd lock up, so we'd have to stop shooting. I'd ask for a little blood, and they'd untie me and say, "Relax, Robbie, relax." Once the circulation got going, they'd tie up my arms again so I could fight for another half hour. It was very strange and very strenuous.

[Q] Playboy: Did you have to put in a lot of preparation for the role?

[A] Williams: Oh, yeah. Gymnastics, fighting, tap dancing and so forth.

[Q] Playboy:Tap dancing?

[A] Williams: Ah, this must not be a happy day for you, Mr. Interviewer. [Sings] "Let's get cynical, cynical. . . . You learned how to tap-dance, Mr. Williams? Where did you use it in the film?" You want to see a screening of The World According to Garp now; can we start on that one? "Did you really wrestle, Mr. Williams? I mean, did the other guy have to let you pin him?" Yes, I learned how to tap-dance, and I worked hard on my one song in the film, and I often practiced Popeye's speaking voice, which sounded like a frog farting under water. That was all in a good cause: It was my first movie, it was being directed by Robert Altman and it was being filmed in a strange country.

[Q] Playboy: How strange is Malta?

[A] Williams: Imagine San Quentin on Valium. Malta is a small island populated by nice, warm but very tough people who've never been conquered. The Maltese have a language of their own, which sounds Arabic, and they always speak loudly. They also speak English the same way. A guy will come up within two inches of your face and say, "How are you today? I like you very much!" "Gee, could you whisper?" "I am whispering!" We all lived just off the set in a kind of compound--Stalag Altman--with guards at the front gate and barbed-wire fences around us because the studio was afraid people would come in and steal stuff. We were there for six months, working six days a week, and soon after we got to Malta, it started raining and hardly ever stopped. That stretched out our shooting schedule, and we'd just sit there for days, going bats and feeling trapped.

[Q] Playboy: What did you do for kicks?

[A] Williams: Well, there are no great entertainment centers on Malta, and on weekends, we used to drink. They had this very strange wine available on the island: cabernet muck. There aren't a lot of vineyards on Malta, and the few grape presses I saw were covered with spider webs, so obviously the wine was mainly chemicals. When the English had a naval base on Malta, they built a few pubs, which are still there. We'd visit them on Saturday nights and get a little loaded and then sleep all day Sunday and go back to the grind on Monday.

[Q] Playboy: How did you happen to get the part in the first place?

[A] Williams: I heard about Popeye when Robert Evans asked me to be in the picture. Dustin Hoffman originally was supposed to play Popeye, and he also was supposed to do Garp; if there's another film you don't want to do, Dustin, just tell me and I'll be there. Mork & Mindy was real hot when he backed out, so I guess Evans thought, Well, we'll get Williams and let's see what happens.

[Q] Playboy: What did you think of your work in Popeye?

[A] Williams: I thought that I had guts and my performance had depth, but while we were doing it I felt confined and I really wanted a chance to explode. I thought that would come when we had our big boffo ending, but suddenly Paramount pulled the plug on the film and said, "You people have to come home. You're tired and over budget, and if you stay any longer, you're going to be there on your own." So there was no boffo ending. On the last day of shooting, we were struggling desperately to come up with an ending, and we all knew it would take great special effects to pull it off. I'd pictured Popeye flying through the air, sort of like the cartoon thing in which he becomes a tornado with his legs spinning around at warp four. And I know that I was supposed to punch an octopus out of the water and have it go whirring into space, but that didn't happen, either.

[Q] Playboy: Why not?

[A] Williams: Because when we were ready to shoot the ending, the special-effects guys had already left Malta. We were backed against a wall, and we all knew it. Shelley Duvall, who was terrific as Olive Oyl, was supposed to be attacked by an octopus, but the one that was built for the movie couldn't do anything. The Disney studios had half investment in Popeye, and if anyone had let them know that the octopus couldn't even manipulate its arms, I think they would have sent over a couple of guys and we would've had an octopus that could blink, wink, blow bubbles and smoke underwater. Shelley had to do a scene with the octopus grabbing her, so she literally wrapped its tentacles around her like a wet rubber boa and had to sell the fucker as hand-to-hand combat; that's when I was supposed to show up and launch the octopus into outer space. We blew it up instead, but you couldn't tell what had actually happened. I've got distance from it now, but Popeye was real painful for me, especially when it came out and got knocked so heavily by some reviewers.

[Q] Playboy: What had you expected? That Popeye would be the kind of role Superman turned out to be for your buddy Chris Reeve?

[A] Williams: Absolutely. When I was training for Popeye, I thought, This is it, this is my Superman, and it's gonna go through the fuckin' roof! I also had that dream of getting up to thank the academy, but I got beyond the this-is-it stage as soon as we started shooting. After the first day on Popeye, I thought, Well, maybe this isn't it, and I finally wound up going, Oh, God, when is it gonna be over? The process really becomes good when you're having such a great time doing the movie or you're so deeply involved in it emotionally that you forget about your fears. Oh, no! Gene Shalit's coming toward me--he's got a blow dryer! Help! You start thinking about that again just before a movie's release.

[Q] Playboy:The World According to Garp is scheduled to open around the country before this issue reaches the newsstands. Are there Shalits currently lurking somewhere in your mind?

[A] Williams: The hopes and the fears are there, sure, but everything else about Popeye and Garp is different, starting with the directors. Altman and George Roy Hill represent two extremes. It was incredible to go from an Altman, who gives you all that freedom, to a Hill, who says "You've got to do it this way"; they're like the yin and yang of the directing school. Hill knows exactly what he wants. On the day we started shooting Garp, I improvised a line and Hill called a wrap for the set. I thought, OK, you've made your point. I won't do that again.

The roles themselves were opposites. Garp was like an oil drilling. I had to dig down and find things deep inside myself and then bring them up. Heavy griefs and joys, births and deaths-- Garp is an all-encompassing look at a man's life.

[Q] Playboy: How do you think the movie and your performance will be received?

[A] Williams: I don't know, but the advance word is good, because since I did Garp, I've been getting a lot of scripts. There was an initial wave of parts offered to me when people found out I wanted to do films, but after Popeye, the number of screenplays sent to me tapered off. It comes in waves; Hollywood's really like that. "Ah, he's hot again." Studio executives go to screenings of just about every film before it's released, and I guess some of them liked what they saw in Garp. Of course, if the picture doesn't do well, they may start recalling all the scripts I've been looking at.

[Q] Playboy: Do you have another movie lined up?

[A] Williams: No, and right now, I'm just interested in learning what I can about movies, because there are two possibilities: I can act in other people's films or I can eventually write and act in my own. I hope I can play a supporting character in the next film I do, so that I can sit back and watch people work rather than take the burden of being a major character, as in Popeye and Garp.

[Q] Playboy: At this moment, we're sure, a lot of actors are giving you a great deal of sympathy.

[A] Williams: Oh, yes, I can hear them now: "Fuck you, scum bag. Oh, how tough it must be, Robin, playing all those leading roles. I've been playing a spear carrier for several years now, you motherfucker, so I can really appreciate your problem." Yes, I just want to explore minor roles for a while, folks. "Mr. Williams, you might very well begin exploring minor roles. You might even begin to explore the Zen concept of not working at all, you lucky asshole." Ah, but I want to explore all possibilities. "One of the major possibilities, Mr. Williams, is that you might be on unemployment like the rest of us, Jack. So enjoy your major roles while you have them, and you can play supporting roles later on--like when your career tumbles to a quick end. Perhaps one day, you can appear underwater as fourth bubble in The Lloyd Bridges Story."

[Q] Playboy: If you're through conversing with yourself, Robin, it sounds to us as if you intend to follow Woody Allen's example and jump into movies exclusively.

[A] Williams: No, I'll always do live comedy, even if it should mean performing on the streets, with a little pig-nosed amp and a shitty microphone. And I'm not ruling out television, either. I'd like to come back and do something once in a while.

[Q] Playboy: The Robin Williams special?

[A] Williams: The Robin Williams mundane. A lot of my friends have been massacred trying comedy or variety TV specials. What happens is that you'll do a special and the network guys will put it on any time they need to fill an hour. They can really screw you up by televising the show before there's a chance to promote it. On top of that, most specials have a similar format--complete with guest stars--and they get creamed for having a similar format. It's going to be hard, but I'd like to find something to do that would be fun and totally free form. So TV's only a possibility, but there's no question about my continuing to work in clubs.

[Q] Playboy: You said before that night-club work is therapeutic for you. In what way?

[A] Williams: In a lot of ways. When I was doing Mark & Mindy, working the clubs was a way for me to keep my creative energies flowing without getting all flustered. It also provides the chance to explore other sides of myself. I have a piece about Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Williams, a comedian. Mr. Williams would end his act by saying, "Well, fuck you, Jack!" and then would walk offstage and go back to being himself. [Imitates Boris Karloff] "Thank you; is my coach ready yet? I have to go home now. What's that? I didn't really say fuck, did I? How strange. You must have me confused with someone else."

Club work also allows you to improvise. I've had two dreams come true: the chance to work with Jonathan Winters and the chance to improvise with Richard Pryor. We did two nights of improvising at The Comedy Store, and the energy we generated was incredible. Improvising with other people is real fragile stuff; sometimes you come up with a piece that's funny only for the moment, and then there are wonderful nights when you create a piece that can stand on its own anywhere, any time. It's like musicians jamming. Comedy jamming, I guess, would have to be called comming. "What are you doing?" I'm comming. "What, is it good for you?"

Incidentally, is this good for me? I can already see the newspaper stories: "In an interview for Playboy, Robin Williams talks about comming. . . ."

[Q] Playboy: No, too rough for the family trade. Moving right along, Robin, we'd like to know why you want to stay active in virtually every phase of show business.

[A] Williams: I just like keeping several things going at once. People see you on television in Mork & Mindy and get an idea of who you are, and then they see the same guy on Home Box Office using those strange words, and it shows them another dimension. I like changing profiles but not just for career reasons. I'm so hooked on improvising that I'd like to put together an ensemble group for TV or maybe do a record with some of my friends. Contact with live audiences is important to me, so I'm going to continue to fine-tune my act, and I'll probably go on tour later this year. As I've already told you, I want to continue acting in movies, and I hope to write some, too. But there's something else I'd like to do in movies, and it's a long way off: I directed one of the last episodes of Mork & Mindy, and eventually I'd like to direct my own movies.

[Q] Playboy: Now that you're a successful actor, of course you want to direct.

[A] Williams: "Now that you play basketball, you'd like to coach, wouldn't you? C'mon, Missa Bradley, don't go into politics. New Jersey don't need you, Missa Bradley--we got Springsteen." Yes, I've always wanted to direct. My first film will be a very simple one, and to make it, I'll need only $10,000,000. The film will be about a boy, his dog and his budget.

[Q] Playboy: The studios will beat down your door. Let's get back to your work as a stand-up comic. Do you still get nervous when performing in clubs?

[A] Williams: There's total fear every time you go on, and it doesn't matter whether you're playing in front of 20 people or 200 or 2000. You get the same feeling every time, and if you don't, you're fooling yourself. Before you go on, your body issues an order: "Jettison all excess baggage." Some people actually throw up before they perform, and others act like animals before a fight; they take a dump to get rid of anything that might possibly slow them down. At that point, the adrenaline shoots way up--there's a lot of initial banging up and down. After that, I get the yawns for a little bit, and then I'm up again and ready.

[Q] Playboy: Would you think something pure were slipping away if you felt more relaxed about performing?

[A] Williams: Oh, no; being relaxed is wonderful, and I'm not saying that manic is good, either. When you're manic onstage, that's when you're desperate; and the faster you talk, the more you're afraid. The ultimate relaxation is when you're working and you're totally in control. You feel as if nothing can go wrong and stuff just comes out of nowhere--that's the joy of it. My wife, Valerie, once told me she thought it was good for me to go onstage at comedy clubs as long as I wasn't doing it to get stroked. Because you can go out there and play that game of "Hi, I'm Mr. Incredible--aren't I cute?" If you're not exploring and coming up with new things, then it becomes a massive jerk-off.

[Q] Playboy: What's the latest routine you've developed in clubs?

[A] Williams: Last week I walked into a store and bought a used red beret for a dollar, and the next night, I put it on at The Comedy Store and started doing a piece that I want to work on. [Imitates a Hispanic tough] "Hello, I am a Guardian Comedian. Jokes are dangerous things. Don't use them at home unless you have a premise and a punch line. Remember: Two Jews do not walk into a bar without a reason. If you are heckled, prepare to deal with the heckler. If his heckle works and you have no response, you are dead."

[Q] Playboy: If we asked you to analyze your comedy, how would you do it?

[A] Williams: The New Federalism of Humor. I don't know; I've never tried to describe what I do.

[Q] Playboy: Try.

[A] Williams: I've heard other people describe me as a comic genius. I'll settle for that--will you?

[Q] Playboy: Try again.

[A] Williams: Thanks a lot. The only answer that occurs to me--I'm being straight now--is that my comedy is like emotional hang gliding.

[Q] Playboy: Fair enough. In terms of becoming a comedian, did it take you very long to learn how to hang glide?

[A] Williams: Long enough. The first couple of pieces I did were what you might expect from a young comic. I had this thing about Lawrence Welk going. "Tank you, tank you. Now let's all get down and get fonky. The boys in the band will now play for you a luffly melody, Chumping Chack Flash. Play that fonky Muzak, white boys. Folks, I want you to know that elery one of the boys in the band is a real motherfucker in his own right." The other piece I did when I started out was about a quarterback on acid who'd go up to the line of scrimmage and instead of calling signals would say, "Well, hike when the energy's right." In the beginning, you find yourself doing a lot of drug humor, and when you can't be funny, you can get some laughs by saying motherfucker a lot. One of the initial reviews I got tore me up, because it said I was a "scatological pubescent," and that was true. It hit me right on the nose. In the beginning, you're also imitating everybody you've ever seen--for me, it was touches of Winters and Pryor. But all of a sudden, you get to a point where you go, "Ah, I can be me. I can develop my own stuff." And you do.

[Q] Playboy: Mort Sahl says that the current generation of young comedians specializes in very lightweight humor. Do you disagree?

[A] Williams: Sure I do. Sahl raps all young comedians as being too namby-pamby, but he's wrong. He says they don't talk about anything but products and advertising, the reason being they don't have any guts or balls. Well, I think a lot of people are now doing political humor that's just as powerful as Sahl's and only half as bitter. Really, there's been a massive resurgence of political humor, which is something we haven't had for a long time.

[Q] Playboy: Why do you think it's happening now?

[A] Williams: Probably because it's easy to pin-point Ronald Reagan on things like his being a former actor, his age, his tax cuts and even his hair. When Reagan was governor of California, Jonathan entertained at a dinner for him. He played Maude Frickert remembering Ronnie as a kid and said, "Even then, your hair was orange." Nancy's also in there for her share because of things like her dishes and the little gun she was packing. I still think Nancy does most of his talking; you'll notice that she never drinks water when Ronnie speaks. Reagan's also got some wonderful people in his Administration, starting with those Pentagon types and their designer cruise missiles. Of course, the French are going the Americans one better with their Michelin bomb: It destroys only restaurants under four stars. And then there's James Watt, the only Secretary of the Interior who's ever wanted to sell the interior.

[Q] Playboy: Watt claims that much of what he's said has been misunderstood.

[A] Williams: So does John McEnroe. "Mr. McEnroe, did you call the umpire an asshole?" "No, I said passing shot." Maybe we can get McEnroe's father working for the Government. "No, no; James Watt didn't really mean that he wants to lease the Grand Canyon to the oil companies.

[Q] Playboy: Several observers of the current comedy scene believe your humor is a lot gentler than that of your contemporaries. Any reason that might be true?

[A] Williams: Maybe it comes from the fact that I come from an upper-middle-class family; maybe slightly upper but not that much.

[Q] Playboy: You and your family did live in a 30-room house on 20 acres, didn't you? Most people would define that as upper class.

[A] Williams: Yes, but the house was rented, and we didn't heat all the rooms.

[Q] Playboy: Once again, Robin, you have our sympathy.

[A] Williams: And once again, you've nailed me. From the burden of doing major roles, I now have to re-evaluate growing up in a cold house in the suburbs of Detroit. "Daddy, Daddy, come upstairs-- Biffy and Muffy aren't happy. We have only seven servants. All the other families have ten."

[Q] Playboy: Were you popular with the other kids in the neighborhood?

[A] Williams: There were no other kids in the neighborhood. There was nobody around to play with except the maid's son. Mom and Dad had each been married before, and they each had a child, but my half brothers. Todd and Loren, were a lot older than I and I didn't see them until I was around ten. Todd always extorted all my money. He'd come into my room and say he needed some beer money, and I'd say, "Oh. gosh, yes, take it all." My mother would get furious, because Todd would get into my piggy bank and walk out with $40 worth of pennies.

[Q] Playboy: Growing up alone in a 30-room house sounds as if it must have made for a very lonely childhood. Did it?

[A] Williams: Yes, but I got started kind of early in floating and finding stuff to do. For instance, I made up my own little friends. [In a child's voice] "Can I come out and play?" "I don't know; I'll have to ask myself." We had a wonderful dog named Duke that would play hide-and-seek with me, and I could always find Duke, who thought that if he couldn't see me, I couldn't see him. Duke was dumb; I'd always spot--or hear--this big tail going whop! whop! whop! on the parquet floors. Pretty early on. I banished myself to the attic, where I had a huge army of toy soldiers. I must have had about 10,000 of them, and I had them separated by periods in boxes. I'd have time-machine battles, with Confederate soldiers fighting GIs with automatic weapons and knights fighting Nazis.

[Q] Playboy: That doesn't seem quite fair to the knights.

[A] Williams: We didn't care about fair; we needed a warm-water port. I'd throw all those soldiers into battle and build castles in the attic, and I always made Carl, my turtle, the king. Unfortunately, one day I flushed Carl down the toilet, because I wanted him to be free. I told Mother, "I let Carl go. He's happy now." Yeah, it was real lonely after Carl left.

[Q] Playboy:Did your parents spend a lot of time with you?

[A] Williams: Yes, and we've always been very, very close. Picture George Burns and Gracie Allen looking like Alistair Cooke and Audrey Hepburn and that's what my parents are like. Dad was a trouble shooter for Lincoln-Continental in the days when Lincolns were strong rivals to Cadillacs, and for a long time, we bounced back and forth from Detroit to Chicago. He has a very wry sense of humor, and Mom is always flying around, very bubbly and effervescent. Even when I was very young, she'd recite all these nasty poems to me. One of her best: "Spider crawling on the wall, / Ain't you got no sense at all? / Don't you know that wall's been plastered? / Get off that wall, you little spider." She thought that was great. Her favorite was a short one: "I love you in blue, / I love you in red, / But most of all, / I love you in blue." Mom also had an inexhaustible supply of jokes and stories. The one I remember most was a book supposedly written by a 19th Century English princess who was famous for throwing parties. The title of the book--Mom swears it's real--is Balls I Have Held.

[Q] Playboy: Would it be fair to say that your mother gave you your start in show business?

[A] Williams: I got her energy and funkified sense of humor, and I got a grounding thing from Dad. I never met my grandmother on Mom's side, but Mom says she was a great character who just loved to watch men wrestle. There's probably a lot of happy madness that's been passed down in the family, with characters from Arsenic and Old Lace all over the place.

[Q] Playboy: Do you recall the first time you consciously performed?

[A] Williams: Yes. I started telling jokes in the seventh grade as a way to keep from getting the shit kicked out of me. Mom and Dad had put me in public school, and most of the kids there were bigger than me and wanted to prove they were bigger by throwing me into walls. There were a lot of burly farm kids and sons of auto-plant workers there, and I'd come to school looking for new entrances and thinking, If only I could come in through the roof. They'd nail me as soon as I got through the door.

[Q] Playboy: Why? Because you were a rich kid?

[A] Williams: How could they know I was rich? Just because I'd say, "Hi, guys, any of you play lacrosse?" They thought lacrosse was what you find in la church. Because of Dad's job, we had to move, and I finished the seventh grade at a private school for boys, where I went from dealing with shtarkers to intellectual bullies. All these hyperintellectuals would really lay into me with lines like "That was a very asinine thing to say, Williams." I remember one kid was into heavy calculus in the seventh grade, and everyone else would go, "Wow, cross sections of a cone. Gee, Chris, I wish I could do that." That was one side; the other side was physical abuse. The real problem was that everybody was going through puberty or about to, which produces a lot of tensions. That, combined with going to an all-boys' school, gave us all a certain extended view of women for a while.

[Q] Playboy: Was it tough to meet girls?

[A] Williams: We'd have only brief contacts with them. They'd bring in a busload from an all-girls' school and dangle them in front of us at a dance. Then, just when you were asking, "Was that your tongue?," they'd pack the girls back up on the bus. I'd be chasing it, shouting, "Wait, come back--what are those things? What do you use them for?

[Q] Playboy: Did you get into a lot of trouble at school?

[A] Williams: Just once. The school's motto was Monsanto incorpori glorius maxima copia, which in Latin means, "When the going gets tough, the tough go shopping." The faculty was dedicated to making sure we acquired poise, and one way to do it was to have us make speeches during lunch. One day, when I was in the ninth grade, I did a comedy speech and people liked it, but I told a Polish joke. When I sat down, I immediately found out from my friends that our big, heavy assistant headmaster was Polish. Before lunch was over, Mr. Kroski came up to me and said, "Williams, may we talk for a moment?" Yes, sir, Mr. Kroski, I sure must have lost my head.

[Q] Playboy: What else do you remember about that period?

[A] Williams: All my friends were Jewish, which is why I know so much Yiddish. I went to 14 bar mitzvahs in less than a year, and it was great. My friends made me an honorary Jew and used to tell people I went to services at Temple Beth Dublin. Being an honorary Jew was a real challenge, but I knew I could master the art of guilt. That's about when I took up wrestling, too. After getting pushed around for a couple of years, in my first year of high school, I decided, Fuck it, I'll take control of this thing. So I did a lot of calisthenic work and got on the wrestling team.

[Q] Playboy: Were you a good wrestler?

[A] Williams: I was undefeated in my freshman year, but then I had to go to the state finals, where I was matched against some kid from upstate Michigan who looked like he was 23 and balding. I remember the guy asking me, "Are you a grappler?" Grappling is what you do when your opponent has twisted you up in such a way that you're about to bite your own balls. Really, parts of your body will be in places you never dreamed they could go, and you think about that when the inside of your knee somehow gets behind your neck. I dislocated my shoulder and had to quit during my sophomore year, but wrestling was fun for me. If you're a small guy, which I was--I competed at 103 pounds--wrestling finally gives you the chance to take out your aggressions on somebody your own size.

[Q] Playboy: Did that put an end to your athletic career?

[A] Williams: No, I was on the football team for a week. They put me at safety, and in my one and only scrimmage, the other squad ran every offensive play at me and over me. It was not easy for a 103-pound safety to stop a 200-pound running back. Toward the end of the practice, when the coach told me to get back in there, I asked him if he'd mind painting me white so that I could disguise myself as a yard marker.

After that, I played soccer, which was fun, because a little guy can dart in and out and not get creamed too bad. In those days, you didn't have soccer teams if you didn't have foreign-exchange students. We had an Abdul who didn't like too much contact, and if someone caught him with a flying tackle, he'd get up and say, "Thot's eet, I going now." He was an Egyptian playing on a team made up mainly of Jews, with a couple of goyim like me thrown in. Abdul and I were friends, but there were days when he suspected that everyone was out to get him. "You, too, Thobbie," he once told me. "You pipple all trying tockle me." I said, "That's not true, Abdul. We just don't pass to you very often."

By the end of my junior year, I had my act together. I was a good student--a member of the magna cum laude society, in fact--and I was going to be president of the senior class. I was looking forward to a very straight existence and was planning to attend either a small college in the Midwest or, if I was lucky, an ivy-league school. But just before my senior year, my dad retired and we all drove out to our new home in Tiburon, California, just north of San Francisco in Marin County.

[Q] Playboy: Did you have any expectations about life in California?

[A] Williams: I had no idea what it was about, but the surprises started when we got near San Francisco and I saw this gray stuff rolling over the hills real fast. It was the first time I'd ever seen fog pouring in, and I thought it was poison gas. It scared the piss out of me.

[Q] Playboy: Did Marin County's often-satirized lifestyle send you into deep cultural shock?

[A] Williams: In terms of cultural shock, it probably would have been easier for me to move to Mexico. I had total cultural shock. Marin has the image of people bobbing for Quaaludes, but it wasn't quite to that stage when I got there. Sausalito, for example, is now all shops and hot-and-cold-running quiche, but in 1969, it was a lot less of a tourist town. I got a job at the Trident restaurant, which had the most beautiful waitresses in the world. They were also the strangest waitresses in the world. They wore spray-on two-piece macramé outfits that looked like a pair of socks. It was like, "Sonja, your nipple's hanging out." And she'd say, "I know; I'm trying to get tips." Girls literally had to audition for their jobs. They'd come in and get their pictures taken, and most of them were these lovely mondo organo earth princesses. They'd go up to a table and tell people, "Hello, I'm your waitress. How's your energy today? Our lunch special is the Gestalt sushi--we give you a live fish, and you take the responsibility for killing it."

In the Midwest, we knew about organic chemistry, but we'd never heard of organic food. The waitresses told me, "You come from the Midwest and give us cars; we give you avocado, alfalfa sprouts and wheat berries." The first time I tried organic wheat bread, I thought I was chewing on roofing material. A lot of customers at the Trident were on holistic diets and drank things like mu tea, which I thought came from a cow's bowels. "Robin, you just don't understand; there's so much energy in mu tea and ginseng." I was sure ginseng was an ethnic thing: "Gin sing today?" "No, Juda sang, Gin's gon' sing tomorrow."

[Q] Playboy: What was school like out there?

[A] Williams: It was wonderful--and very, very weird. I went to Redwood High School, which had courses in 16mm film making and a lot of psychology-type classes. It was the height of the encounter period, and in a lot of classes, teachers would get everybody together for an energy hug. I remember one teacher would sometimes just stop what he was doing and then a few kids would start pounding out a beat and everybody would get up and dance around the room. There was also a black-studies department, even though there was only one black kid in the school--and he didn't want any part of it. He said, "I know I'm black, so just leave me the fuck alone and let me go to school. I don't have to be in no black-studies program."

It was incredible to go from a private all-boys' high school to a place where there were Gestalt history classes and where kids were always flying around on acid. The first time I walked into one of the bathrooms, a bunch of guys were in there, all spaced out. One kid took me aside and whispered, "Don't wake them." I didn't.

[Q] Playboy: You obviously regarded your new classmates as wackos. How did they feel about you?

[A] Williams: Well, at first, I still carried my briefcase, and guys would either ask, "Who's the geek?" or stare at me and say, "Wow, a briefcase--how unmellow. You're really creating negative energy." In the Midwest, if your classmates thought you were creating negative energy, you'd hear, "Yo!" followed by a right cross to the jaw. It took me a few weeks before I showed up at Redwood High without a tie on, and within a couple of months, I finally took the big step and went to school in jeans.

[Q] Playboy: Why was that a big step?

[A] Williams: At Detroit Country Day School, we always had to wear decent slacks and our school blazer, which was blue for the sea that brought us here and gold for the harps we hoped to find. Right after I started wearing jeans, somebody gave me my first Hawaiian shirt, and after that, I was gone; I got into a whole wild phase and I learned to totally let go. Among other things, I learned to say "For sure," which Californians pronounce furshirr.

[Q] Playboy: Among other things, did you try drugs?

[A] Williams: Furshirr. Before coming to California, I hadn't even known what grass looked like. One of the first times I smoked it was on an astrological scavenger hunt--people who had the same astrological sign would pile into a bus and they'd drive all over the county searching for things like lost mandalas. The only problem I had with grass was that it got me real sleepy, so I didn't get into it and never have. At the time, though, there was a more important reason I didn't want to smoke it. I was on the cross-country running team, and I thought it would be bad for me.

[Q] Playboy: How did you think marijuana would harm you?

[A] Williams: I thought that if I smoked grass, it would screw up my endurance. My hero then was Frank Shorter, who later won the Olympic marathon, and I grew a mustache so that I could look like him. Shorter's running mate was a guy named Jack Bachelor, and I and a teammate named Phil Russell used to fantasize that we were Frank and Jack. Our cross-country team would run up and down those beautiful Northern California hills, and I remember going up a steep trail high on Mount Tamalpais and coming to the edge of it--and there, below us, was the fog sitting on Stinson Beach. That gave me a beautiful Zenlike feeling of satori, and I ran right down into the ocean. The other guys warned me not to go into the water, but it was too beautiful to resist. The moment I jumped in, both legs went out on me. It was like my body's saying, "You use me so hard for an hour and then you do this to me? How's about it I cramp up both your legs and make your testicles disappear right up through your scrotum? Think you'll remember not to jump in the water next time?"

Not long after that, by the way, somebody interviewed a runner who'd just won a major cross-country event and asked him what he used for training. The guy said, "Oh, about a lid."

[Q] Playboy: Did that cause you to change your training habits?

[A] Williams: I got stoned only once on a training run. I remember we came over a hill and there, in the middle of the trail, was this strange thing--a turkey vulture. Marin has a lot of them, and I thought, Well, it'll just move aside. But when I got close, it went hsssssss and spread its wings, and I turned to the rest of the guys and said, "Oh, Jesus, I knew this would happen if I got stoned. I can't deal with it!"

[Q] Playboy: Did you ever have a full-fledged freak-out on drugs?

[A] Williams: Just before graduation, a friend gave me peyote without telling me what it was. I said, "Why is this mushroom so mangy?" and he said, "Don't worry about it." A little while later, I could see that he was having some problems. I said, "Gosh, your face is turning into Silly Putty, and why is your head expanding? Your eyes are moving now--why do you have one eye on your chin? Uh-oh, your face is starting to melt."

The closest I came, I guess, was three years ago, at the Bread and Roses music festival in Berkeley. During a performance, somebody gave me some cookies that would supposedly give me a buzz. I hadn't had anything to eat that day, so I thought it would probably be OK to eat half a cookie. It wasn't. A few hours later, I was sitting at a pool, and all of a sudden it became difficult for me to breathe and I couldn't move. Some little kids came over and asked for an autograph, but I wasn't even able to sign my name--I couldn't do anything. Some people get very vivacious and outgoing on drugs; I just get debilitated.

[Q] Playboy: So you're telling us that despite all the dope references and the rumors, you've never really gotten into drugs?

[A] Williams: No, never. And I never will. I mean, somebody once gave me a Valium and it stayed in my blood for a couple of days. I was like [shakes his head, out of it]. Most times, anything I try, I have the opposite reaction to what I'm supposed to have.

[Q] Playboy: Does that include cocaine? Instead of speeding you up, it makes you nod out?

[A] Williams: Yeah, I get passive and just hold back. Most people get talkative; I don't say anything to anybody. It's always weird, because I don't have regular reactions to any of those things. I don't like doing any of the heavies, because normally my energy is just up when I'm performing.

[Q] Playboy: At a Mark & Mindy taping we attended, a couple of teenagers in the audience asked you how many lines you do every morning. Presumably, they meant cocaine or, possibly, speed. Did that surprise you?

[A] Williams: No, because if you've got energy, that's their assumption: "Good God, he's got all this energy; what's he really doing? You doing speed, man?" They assume you gotta be doing that shit and that it goes with the territory.

[Q] Playboy: It doesn't? On a Tonight Show some time back, you told Johnny Carson--

[A] Williams: That cocaine is God's way of saying you're making too much money. Just kidding. That was part of a bit I used to do about those great reasons to buy cocaine: severe impotence and paranoia. [Imitates an L.A. swinger] "Hi, honey, Mr. Wonderful's here." [In a woman's voice] "Come on, I'm waiting." "I'll be with you in a second. [Angrily addresses his penis] Come on, damn it!" No, the best drug in the world for me is performing.

[Q] Playboy: What's the high like?

[A] Williams: Imagine sex in a time warp. [Sings in a high-pitched voice] "Oooh, oooh, I'm coming. Over a period of hours." When it works, there's nothing better. When it doesn't, there's nothing more horrible and painful. You get the sweats, you get furious and sadness sets in.

[Q] Playboy: How did you feel when you performed Saturday night?

[On the day after John Belushi's death, Williams spent the afternoon being interviewed by Playboy. That night, the Playboy interviewer met him at The Comedy Store in Hollywood where Williams put in a surprise 45-minute appearance.]

[A] Williams: It was good, but there was a strange mood in the air. It was just kind of up and down.

[Q] Playboy: It seemed strange to us that none of you comedians mentioned Belushi's death.

[A] Williams: No one will; I don't want to for a long time. It's too personal. No one would, out of respect and kindness. I think it'll be a long time before anybody really puts it together. That's why I couldn't talk about it and probably won't for a long, long, long time. Maybe I never will. We were all feeling the same thing, but we didn't want to talk about it--so as not to open up a can of worms for somebody. You know, there were a lot of reporters there.

[Subsequent to that exchange, rumors surfaced that Williams and actor Robert De Niro, a close friend, had met with Belushi several hours before he died of an overdose. In June, Catherine Evelyn Smith, the woman who had spent Belushi's last evening with him, said in the National Enquirer that she had given Belushi a fatal injection of heroin and cocaine. She also claimed that Williams and De Niro had shared cocaine with Belushi that night. Playboy set up a final interview session to discuss the rumors and Smith's allegations, but three days before Williams was to meet with Playboy, the Los Angeles district attorney's office announced that it was reopening its investigation of Belushi's death. At that point, Williams' lawyers counseled him not to comment further on the matter until the district attorney's investigation was completed. Williams took their advice.]

[Q] Playboy: Let's talk of lighter things, Robin. Before we began discussing drugs, you were telling us how alien California seemed when you moved there. Was there anything about the state that didn't strike you as bizarre?

[A] Williams: Yes, the women. As far as any war between the sexes, California girls were all for disarmament and wanted the boys to drop their weapons immediately. In Michigan, everybody was still observing the native courting rituals of the North American Caucasian: the parking of the car, the meeting of the mate's parents, the admiring of the father's shotgun collection and stuffed rabbit heads. I think my last vestige of my Midwestern upbringing was my choice of a career: When I graduated from high school, I went down to Claremont Men's College, because I knew that it specialized in political science and I was determined to become a foreign-service officer. One of the eight freshman courses I signed up for was an elective in theater, and after my first day in class, I was hooked. The school's theater seated about 80 people, and we formed an improv group called The Synergy Trust and filled the place every Friday night. I'd never had so much fun in my life, which was probably why I didn't show up for any of my other classes. When finals came around at the end of the year, one professor said, "Who is this man?" Another professor commented, "If I knew who he was, I could give him a failing grade." I don't claim to have total recall, but I can still quote the entire essay I handed in for my macroeconomics final: "I really don't know, sir." The following year, I was back up North, studying theater at Marin Junior College.

[Q] Playboy: Did you have any regrets about your premature retirement from the foreign service?

[A] Williams: No, and if I'd gone through with it, I probably would've ended up as a hostage somewhere, preferably inside the Belgian Embassy, with a crowd outside refusing to let me go until we shipped them more Brie.

Meanwhile, I'd made a conscious decision to become an actor, and Marin J.C. had a superb theater department. The school's auditorium housed a replica of the old Globe Theater stage, and we performed Shakespearean plays there.

[Q] Playboy: What did your parents think of all that?

[A] Williams: Dad said to have an alternative career waiting in the wings and recommended welding. Mom said, "Your grandmother would be very proud" and wished me good luck. I had good luck that year, mostly because I fell in love with the ultimate California girl. She was blonde, Bambiesque and very, very gentle.

[Q] Playboy: What's the difference between a California girl and a Michigan girl?

[A] Williams: A handgun. That girl was my first great infatuation. I remember running home and saying, "Momma, Momma, look; I'm writing poetry." Mom said, "Let me see some of it. Hmm, it doesn't rhyme." I said, "I know, Mother. It's free form, like the ebb and flow of the sea." Mom told me that was a very shabby simile and offered me the use of her car. "I don't need it, Mother. My heart has wings--I can fly to her house." Mom just looked at me and said, "I know, son, I know." Anyway, I was at the junior college for two and a half years, and I was also studying with The Committee in San Francisco. I did a lot of acting during that period, but I knew that if I stayed in San Francisco, all I could look forward to was becoming a big fish in a little tide pool. It was time to kick forward and go on to the next level. I'd heard that Juilliard had just started its acting school, and that sounded good to me, because it was in New York. I had visions of Broadway in my mind, so I auditioned for a scholarship.

[Q] Playboy: Was the audition held in New York?

[A] Williams: No, in San Francisco. Juilliard holds auditions in every major city and in some minor ones, too. You know, of course, that they have theatrical recruiters out beating the bushes for talent. Alumni will tell them about an Othello down in Georgia, an Iago they saw in Iowa; and sometimes, they'll bend the rules and redshirt a couple of Prosperos and maybe a foreign-exchange student from Denmark, whom they'll bring in for only one play, Hamlet.

When I went to audition, they were seeing about 50 people a day, and when they got to me, I did a speech Malvolio makes in Twelfth Night and Leper Lepellier's flip-out scene from the novel A Separate Peace. Next thing I knew, I was in New York.

[Q] Playboy: Was that a heavy adjustment for you to make?

[A] Williams: I was the walking epitome of furshirr meets yo' ass. On my first day in New York, I went to school dressed like a typical California kid: I wore tie-up yoga pants and a Hawaiian shirt, and I kept stepping in dog shit with my thongs. My first week there, I was in a bus going uptown to see an apartment when an old man two seats in front of me suddenly collapsed and died. He slumped over against a woman sitting next to him, and she said, "Get off me!" and moved away. Somebody told the driver what had happened, so he stopped the bus and ordered everybody off, but I wanted to stay and help. The driver told me, "He's dead, motherfucker, now get off! You can't do shit for him, so take your raggedy California ass and get outa my bus!" I knew that living in New York was certainly going to be different.

[Q] Playboy: Was it difficult as well?

[A] Williams: Not really. New York appealed to me because I'd been in danger of becoming terminally mellow, and it peeled away that layer very quickly. I'd be walking down the street and six Puerto Rican drag queens would go, "What you doin' here, baby? Want to go upstairs, muchacho?" New York forces you to toughen up, but I never got to the New York blinders stage, which is when you always look straight ahead, even if someone's getting mugged ten feet away. I got there in September of '73; one of the first things I learned was the Brooklyn alphabet: fuckin' A, fuckin' B, fuckin' C....

[Q] Playboy: Were Juilliard's teaching techniques vastly different from those of the colleges you'd attended?

[A] Williams: Yes, they really were. In the other places, you'd do scenes and then discuss them, but at Juilliard, we worked on all the skills needed by an actor. It's a little like the Army; they break you down and then they build you back up. In my first few days at school, I learned that I didn't project out, that I talked too fast and that I swallowed my words. One of the first things I tried in class was a religious monolog Dudley Moore had done in Beyond the Fringe. I thought I did fine, but my teacher, a man named Michael Conn, hated it so much that he said, "You have two choices: Come back and do it again or give up any thoughts you have about an acting career." He really was furious with me, and it was because I'd only imitated what I'd heard and hadn't tried to find new things that would make the piece mine.

[Q] Playboy: Did that shake you up?

[A] Williams: It did, but that's what it was supposed to do--they wanted to reorient you and get you out of easy patterns. A lot of teachers were intense, including a New Yorker named Gene Loesser, who'd stop you in the middle of a reading and shout, "What the fuck do you think you're doing?" What we were doing was working our asses off; between all the acting, speech, movement and even fencing classes, we'd be at Juilliard from eight in the morning till nine or ten o'clock at night. In the same way that the Juilliard School of Music didn't acknowledge jazz or pop, the acting school emphasized the classical approach. John Houseman, who was principal of the acting school, gave a speech one day in which he said [imitates Houseman], The theater needs you. Don't be tempted by television or the movies. The theater needs new plasma, new blood." And then, a week later, we saw him in a Volvo commercial.

[Q] Playboy: Did you have any run-ins with Houseman?

[A] Williams: He talked to me once when I was blowing a literature course. In a very elegant way, Houseman told me to pull it together. That wasn't easy. Me and Chris Reeve had come in together as advanced students--Chris had gone to Cornell--and we had to catch up to the other students who'd been at Juilliard for a year. Chris lived about five blocks away, and we used to go up to the roof of his apartment building and drink cheap wine and talk about present and lost loves. Except for my friendship with brother Reeve, that first year was rough, especially at Christmastime. I couldn't afford to go back to California for the holiday, and it was the first cold, cold winter I'd experienced in many years--and New York seemed unbearably bleak and lonely. One day, I just started sobbing and couldn't stop, and when I ran out of tears my body kept going; it was like having emotional dry heaves. I went through two days like that and finally hit rock bottom and realized I had a choice: I could either tube out or level off and relax. At that point, I became like a submarine on the bottom that blows out some ballast and gets back up again. [Imitating Georgie Jessel] "Yes, I'm glad you asked. Once in a while, it's good to have a nervous breakdown. A little emotional house cleaning never hurt anybody."

Once all my anxieties were behind me, the rest of that year was easy, and the following year was even better, mostly because of a girl I'd met who'd recently come to New York from California. She was a free spirit who thought nothing about walking through tough neighborhoods wearing white lace gowns. I told her that if she kept it up, she'd get killed, and she said, "No, my aura will defend me." Her aura? I said, "Your aura's not gonna do shit against a straight razor." I was wrong. She'd blithely walk down the most dangerous streets in Manhattan and guys would stop her and say, "Hey, what's happenin', dear?" or "Yo, you lookin' good today, baby." Her best defense was not having one. We had a very wonderful time, and then I went back to California for the summer--and really fell in love. That was a transformation point in my life.

[Q] Playboy: How so?

[A] Williams: Well, it began with my not wanting to leave my girlfriend. When I came back to Juilliard in the fall, Chris had left to do a soap opera, and the amount of actual training I got dropped off: Juilliard used third-year students to perform shows on the road. We'd go to the Bronx and play at tough high schools and then we'd go to very elegant places upstate where the audiences were straight out of Night of the Living Lacoste. I really missed my lady friend, and I began running up $400-a-month telephone bills--and at the time, I was having trouble just making the rent. The tension of a long-distance romance was such a drain that before spring came, I dropped out of Juilliard and went back to San Francisco. As soon as I got back, I realized why I had left: I was at an impasse there, and it was time to take another step forward.

[Q] Playboy: What did you have in mind?

[A] Williams: I wasn't sure, but I knew I'd reached the end of the line at Juilliard. When I got back to San Francisco, the girl and I lived together for about a month and then it just fell apart. I went into a massive depression, and when I wasn't accepted by the couple of San Francisco theater companies that actually pay their actors, I joined a comedy workshop. It didn't take me long to put together my first stand-up routine, and the guy who ran the workshop, Frank Kidder, had us perform on weekends at a place called The Intersection on Union Street. It was a former religious coffeehouse, and before we went on, there'd be poetry readings. I liked the feminist poets best. I remember one poem that really plucked at my heartstrings:

Man.With your big penis.Big-prick violence, smashing windows.Do you only want to come?Can't we go somewhere?

[Q] Playboy: Did you put your acting career on hold at that point?

[A] Williams: Yeah, I did that immediately. Comedy had always been an outlet for me, but I'd always treated it as a guerrilla activity. It became primary for two reasons: It was a form of therapy that helped me get over the relationship, and it also allowed me to support myself for the first time. I'd do $25-a-night gigs and I'd actually make enough to pay my $100-a-month rent. I was self-sustaining, and I could say, "No, Pop, I don't need that check, but thanks." I played a lot of tiny clubs, like The Holy City Zoo in San Francisco--I met Valerie there--and the Salamander in Berkeley, which was a very strange place. One night, the guy who ran the Salamander shot a customer just because the man had asked for change.

It happened pretty quickly for me after that. Before long, I was getting good time slots at bigger clubs and I started making decent money. When Valerie and I had been together for about six months, it was time to take the next step and join the great migration south.

[Q] Playboy: To Los Angeles?

[A] Williams: Right. San Francisco comedians were finding work down there, and a couple of them had gotten on The Merv Griffin Show. I pulled up roots then and convinced Valerie to come with me even though it was going to be tough for her. Valerie is a modern-dance teacher, and there isn't too much of a call for that in Los Angeles. I mean, Twyla Tharp doesn't choreograph The June Taylor Dancers. Valerie went with me, though, and a few days after we got there, I auditioned at The Comedy Store and was hired for $200 a week. After that, I worked the Improv and other clubs, and after about six months in L.A., George Schlatter saw me at The Comedy Store and hired me for Laugh-In. I went into that show with such heavy illusions.

[Q] Playboy: What were they?

[A] Williams: I thought that I'd made it into the big time and that I'd have a big house and everything else that goes with being on a hit TV show. Unfortunately, doing a remake of a show that was one of the milestones of TV was a little like doing Jaws VI: How are you going to top the original? Are you gonna have the shark come up on land and gum people to death? Laugh-In sure sobered my ass up. The show lasted 14 weeks, and most of the time, I played a redneck or a Russian. My best line: Frank Sinatra was on Laugh-In one week, and I went up to him and said, "Mr. Sinatra, I'm so happy to meet you I could drop a log." I was afraid they'd want to fire me and that I'd have to explain that I'd never meant to upset Uncle Frank. Thank God, he laughed.

[Q] Playboy: Before Laugh-In went off the air, you were hired as a regular on The Richard Pryor Show. Why didn't that series make it?

[A] Williams: Richard got nailed by the network censors in the opening shot of the first show, and that was the beginning of his frustration with TV. It was sad, because he went into it with so much hope. I don't know if you remember this, but the first show was supposed to open with a close-up of him saying, "I'm on TV--me, Richard Pryor--and I didn't have to give up a thing." Then they were going to pan down on him and he'd be nude until the camera got below his waist, and after that, he'd have nothing down there--sort of like a Barbie doll. Well, that shot was shown on every newscast at all hours of the day, and they had big photos of it in The New York Times--but NBC cut it out of the show. After six or seven weeks, he was so disappointed that he'd just do his old nightclub act as his monolog; they'd run film on him for 45 minutes, and after the broadcast-standards people got through editing it, they could use maybe three minutes.

In spite of all that, we had some great times on the show. In one sketch, I played a liberal white Southern lawyer defending a black man charged with raping a girl who was a steaming hunk of white trash. I had a couple of ideas for lines and I wasn't sure if I should do them, but Richard said, "Just go for it," so I did. At one point in the trial I got up and told the jury, "Negro--what a wonderful word. Say it with me: Negro. From the Latin negora, meaning 'to tote.'" Then, when Richard was on the witness stand, I asked him, "Who taught you the meaning of doo-dah?"

That was the first chance I ever had to uncork on TV, and it didn't happen again until I got the part of Mork on a Happy Days episode. When I auditioned for it, I made every bizarre noise and gesture I could think of, and the director, Jerry Paris, hired me and pretty much let me play it the way I wanted to. The show got some positive feedback, and for whatever reason, ABC decided to use the Mork character in a spin-off series.

[Q] Playboy: Two weeks after Mork & Mindy went on the air, it became one of TV's top-rated series; and since then, you really have been in the big time. Do you ever worry that your career might suddenly collapse as abruptly as it took off?

[A] Williams: I've thought about that, sure. Sometimes I think I might wind up like that old sleaze-bag character I do, sitting in a bar on Pico Boulevard and saying, "Remember me? I did a lot of good stuff in my time." The other extreme is that I wind up like Reagan, saying, "Valerie and I are happy to be in the White House. I'm glad I've succeeded Monty Hall as President, and I'll try to keep Let's Make a Détente an active part of our international policy. Next week, I'll be introducing my Gestalt tax plan: You can pay what you want but only if it feels good."

[Q] Playboy: How do you think your future will turn out?

[A] Williams: I have no idea, but I'll settle for Valerie and me living on our ranch in Napa and one day passing on the things I've learned to a child of ours, who'll sit there saying, "Really, Daddy, I saw Popeye yesterday--did you have to squint?" As far as being an actor or a comedian, I'll always perform, because show business is in my blood. Or maybe it's in my feet. Wherever it is, I don't think I'll ever stop.

"I didn't want to see 'Mork & Mindy' bastardized that way, but it was. It was a simple case of greed, and it didn't work."

"We had a black censor who was really something else. I tried to sneak a few Yiddish phrases past him, but he knew all of them."

"A lot of 'Popeye' was filmed on a sunken steamer on the end of the bay in Malta: Imagine San Quentin on Valium."

"I still think Nancy does most of Reagan's talking; you'll notice that she never drinks water when Ronnie speaks."

"Marin has the image of people bobbing for Quaaludes. Sausalito is now all shops and hot-and-cold-running quiche."

"Some people get very vivacious and outgoing on drugs; I just get debilitated."

"New York appealed to me because I'd been in danger of becoming terminally mellow, and it peeled away that layer very quickly."

"Sometimes I think I might wind up like that old sleaze-bag character I do, sitting in a bar saying, 'Remember me? I did a lot of good stuff in my time.'"