true but he also had a depressive streak, an addictive personality and a vulnerability that was not obvious when you saw him on stage or, indeed, for most people, in private. He had a self-destructiveness that would certainly not be helped by getting into drugs.
‘Every night was different,’ James Dulworth, who is now a manager at Dangerfield’s Comedy Night Club in New York’s Manhattan, revealed to
CBS News
after Williams’ death. He had been a booker at the Comedy Store when Williams burst onto the scene. And he revealed that Robin’s improvisation was actually a little more rehearsed than it seemed: ‘He developed cards pretty much in his brain for any situation for every single night,’ he said. ‘He already had those ready for almost any situation. The owner of the Comedy Store was Mitzi Shore, Pauly Shore’s mother,’ he went on. ‘I was working for her in the very beginning and she found [Williams] in San Francisco and brought him down [to Los Angeles].’
Others who saw him perform back then testify to a manic genius. ‘He had the audience convulsing with laughter,’ said Mark Breslin, who had hired Williams to perform in the club he then owned in Toronto. Now head of the Yuk Yuk’s chain of comedy clubs, he was talking to
CBC
News.
‘He was doing characters and accents and crazy associations and word games. He turned the entire club into his stage. He walked on the tables and did comedy. He was completely amazing.’
The range of his subject matter startled people. One moment he would be quoting Shakespeare (quoting Shakespeare in the character of someone else, such as Jack Nicholson or Marlon Brando, was to remain a specialty and put to extremely good use in the 1989 movie
Dead Poets Society
); the next he’d be grabbing his crotch to make sure ‘Mr Happy’ was home. He veered all over the place, now pretending to be Elmer Fudd singing rock songs before branching out into a riff on the current political scene. It was impossible for the audience to get bored and equally for them to know what would happen next. ‘Reality! What a concept!’ he would cry but it was sometimes hard to know exactly what his grasp on reality was.
There was a mix of comedy and satire – material that would have been funny at any point and also something that was extremely topical, reflecting on current events. Was it exhausting? Williams was to continue his stand-up well into his television career, leaving the set to go out to entertain another audience but surely the mania and the energy must have had its dark side. Up on stage, the subject of adulation, he was basking in the glory of an audience that was hysterical with laughter but backstage afterwards it was like coming off a high. For someone with his personality it was, perhaps, inevitable that this would leave a hole thathad to be filled somehow. And it wasn’t difficult to see where that would be.
For even then it was apparent that he was a troubled soul. He was beginning to get into drink and drugs in a big way and the perceptive saw this would not end well. ‘I’ll never forget how sensitive he was,’ said Dulworth. ‘You could see how maybe he would become depressed. It probably wasn’t easy to be him. He couldn’t go out there and not be jovial and energetic. He probably needed some of those “boosters” to help maintain that fast-paced, energetic persona. He almost had to do the drugs to maintain that level of performance. It’s almost like steroids with ball players.’ But the fact remained that he was fast developing a drink and drugs problem that he would continue to do battle with for the rest of his life.
There were many other issues he had to deal with and the one that appeared to cause him the most personal hurt was that he stole other people’s material. Most comedians will say that it is hard, at the very least, not to be aware of other people’s material and to recycle it unintentionally but with Robin it went further than
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