The Life and Humor of Robin Williams: A Biography - Softcover

Jay David is the author of Growing Up Black: From Slave Days to the Present--Twenty-Five African Americans Reveal the Trials and Triumphs of Their Childhoods and Growing Up Jewish: An Anthology. He lives in New York City.

How this offbeat, contradictory man became one of the great twentieth-century improvisationists is a story that breaks all the molds and challenges all the cliches about the typical performer's blood, sweat, and tears.

Robin Williams was born in Chicago on July 21, 1952. He was a late arrival for his mother and father, who each had been married before; this was the second marriage for both of them. Almost fifty years old at the time of his son's birth, Robert Williams played from the beginning a rather remote role in the young boy's life.

Robin had two half-brothers, but they were grown and had left home by the time of his arrival, so he was virtually an only child--the only child in the house, at any rate. The half-brother on his father's side was named Todd Williams; the half-brother on his mother's side was named McLaurin Smith, or sometimes Smith-Williams.

His father was vice president and midwestern regional manager of the Lincoln-Mercury Division of the Ford Motor Company--an imposing figure, and one to be treated with the utmost respect by any small fry in the thirty-room house where the Williamses lived. That was a hard and fast rule: Robin addressed his father as "sir" most of the time. Later on, he would describe his father as "a very elegant man, like Lord Stokesbury, the viceroy of India."

Robin's mother was quite a different kind of person. A southerner, she was bubbling over with laughter, was full of fun, and led a very casual, almost totally carefree life. Laurie Williams has said that she and her son Robin were always close. As she put it: "His dad was a disciplinarian; I was the pal."

Funny though she was, she was not the only one who started Robin on his way toward being a comedian. Actually, she quoted him once as complaining that he had to leave home to get an honest laugh. Evidently, she was not completely attuned to his wacky humor. But she knew he was a very funny person.

For his part, Robin understood her humor and laughed at it, frequently calling her a "crazy southern belle." She spent some time with him; but when she was on her own, she socialized with her friends. In the evenings she went out to other peoples' homes and to parties. There weren't many hours that she spent with Robin.

When she was with him, though, "she was always funny," he recalled. "She had the jokes and the poems. Besides that, she played jokes on people.

She herself reminisced about an invitational dance she attended once at the Lake Forest-Lake Bluff (Illinois) Bath and Tennis Club. She wore a very stylish dress, every fold and crease in place, but she had obscured her two front teeth with Black Jack chewing gum, in the manner of a vaudeville comic. She remembered: "All the women were saying, You'd think someone who could afford clothes like that could afford to get her teeth fixed."Her motto in life was, "Man was put on earth to know great joy." And she was determined to support that idea in everything she did.

But, to repeat, she was not always around. Robin grew up lonely. Here he was, plopped down in a thirty-room house with a nanny to care for him, trying to be a little boybut with no other children anywhere in sight: "I was living on this huge estate. It was miles to the next kid."

What he did was agitate for toys, and the toys soon came.He had at least two thousand soldiers and a battlefield in the basement where he could stage wars and make one army overcome the other.