A Warm-Up Act

Robin Williams, the $20-million-a-picture star, is standing outside a comedy club near his home in San Francisco. It’s a drizzly August night, going on 10:30. Williams’ personal assistant drifts in and out of the club as Williams waits in a deserted courtyard. He is doing absolutely nothing. He doesn’t pace. He doesn’t crack jokes. He’s off the clock, and off the clock Williams is not a clown. Tonight, you could project a million different emotions onto his face. He’s vulnerable. He’s guarded. He’s off someplace in his head. Then again, who knows if he is any of these things? Maybe you’re thinking of “Good Will Hunting,” his impenetrable therapist look. Maybe you’re under the misconception that when he’s not on, he’s down. * In a few minutes, Williams will go onstage at Cobb’s here in the Cannery. He’ll do an hour and then go home. Back in the 1970s and ‘80s, when stand-up comedy was a vibrant part of the American culture, he lived in places like this, inhabiting clubs like a gym rat, the performance sweat eventually eating through his Hawaiian shirts. He hung out into the wee hours with other comedians, a crowd that would watch his ascent with amazement--an amazement sometimes laced with accusations and incredulity. Audiences weren’t conflicted. They fell in love with the prolific exhibitionist who invited everyone to his kiddie party onstage: Yorick from “Hamlet,” Moammar Kadafi, your Yiddish-speaking uncle.

For assorted reasons, that all stopped, but it stopped primarily because Williams got into movies, made a lot of them and became successful, an Academy Award-winning actor. Now, he says, he wants to go back--or at least as far back as a celebrity of his magnitude can. In the next six months, after hawking two new movies, he intends to focus on stand-up comedy. He doesn’t know how or where or when, exactly, he doesn’t know the dates and details, he just knows that he’s done too many movies (11 in the past four years and 17 this decade, not including cameos in a handful of others), and that something’s missing.

Over the years, Williams has dropped into clubs to get a fix before a talk show or Comic Relief appearance. This, he promises, is going to be different. This is going to be great. “It’s like priming a pump with endorphins, sweating and everything, and then all of a sudden everything starts to flow--body, mind, everything,” he says.

*

Williams’ last official act as a stand-up comedian came in 1986, with “Robin Williams--An Evening at the Met.” He may feel ready to resume his place as an out-there artist, but the ground has shifted since he left. All those big-hearted characters at the movies have turned Williams, once a comedy icon, into something else: what New York magazine film critic Peter Rainer recently called “a sad, old show-biz story--the dulling out, at premium prices, of a once-firebrand talent.”

Rainer made the comment in his review of “Patch Adams.” The 1998 film grossed $135 million domestically but also made a lot of critics and comedy fans angry. Here was Robin Williams’ “Titanic,” all mawkish and exploitative, with the star as an eccentric doctor healing with laughs, using sick people as props.

“It’s a wonder Mr. Williams’ friends, the ones who aren’t on his payroll, haven’t tried to do some kind of intervention on this guy,” wrote the New York Observer’s Ron Rosenbaum, in a recent column about how warmth destroys a satirist’s voice.

“Now comedians are doing routines based on Robin’s dramatic career,” says Bernie Brillstein, the longtime talent manager whose Beverly Hills firm, Brillstein-Grey, represents Adam Sandler and David Spade, among others. “It’s the first time I’ve seen people take shots at him. He’s become a semi-cliche. And that’s too bad.”

Even before “Patch Adams,” Williams was an established saccharine figure, an easy mark for comedians. In July, at Just for Laughs, the Sundance of comedy festivals in Montreal, comedian Andy Kindler suggested a version of “Scared Straight,” the documentary about the social program that pairs up hardened convicts with juvenile offenders to discourage them from a life of crime. They should take young hack comedians, Kindler said, and lock them in a room with Robin Williams. You could call it “Scared Funny.”

This is typical fodder from the younger, alternative comedy crowd, for whom Williams is fuel for cynicism. He is, after all, a huge star. His movies--”Aladdin,” “Flubber,” even “Good Will Hunting”--aren’t hip or violent. He hasn’t sold out with a gun in his hand. And even at its best, Williams’ live comedy, while dazzling to behold, never taxed audiences. In fact, says Laurie Stone, author of “Laughing in the Dark: A Decade of Subversive Comedy,” Williams’ performances were not so much journeys into the unknown as glimpses of the crowd-pleasing star he would become.

“Something about him isn’t willing to be revealed, and because of that, he can’t bring you in,” says Stone, who covered comedy for the Village Voice. “He remains unknowable in a certain sense. He really is delightful when he moves very quickly from image to image to image.” But, she adds, when a performer’s need to be reassured overpowers his willingness to take risks, he’s dead.

Williams says he was particularly stung by the reaction to “Patch Adams.” (“I was just shocked at [that] kind of vitriol.”) But he can’t say why he’s drawn to movies that cast him as a social and moral redeemer. He does throw out theories, things that explain everything. Or nothing.

It has to do with his childhood, the fact that he moved around, from Chicago to Bloomfield Hills, Mich., to San Francisco: “I was an only child, so maybe there’s an extreme desire to connect. That’s one thing I learned in years of therapy, I grew up like that. I grew up as an only child, moving around a lot, so I wasn’t exactly allowed to connect a lot. So maybe the craving of that drives performing, drives the roles I choose. These outsiders, as they say, trying to change things.”

It has to do with his fear of isolation. With the fact that his father, a sales executive for Ford Motor Co., and his mother, whom Williams often describes as a “Christian Dior scientist,” were often away: “When you wonder why people keep doing movies, it’s because movies [provide a] strange sense of intimacy. You have this created family, and you work very hard for four months and then it’s over.”

It has to do with his needing to work: “That’s why going out and doing stand-up again is probably necessary, you know, almost like a sorbet. If I’m truly getting warm and cuddly, it’s time to go back and pop up and smack the [expletive] around.”

Though Williams doesn’t come out and say it, you could look at it this way, too: Why should he apologize for “Patch Adams”? The film was immensely popular and earned him a great deal of money. On paper, he says, the character looked promising. “I was fascinated by the idea of this guy who had this outrageous idea for very hands-on, humane medical care, which obviously isn’t that outrageous,” Williams says. He seems almost wounded when he explains later: “Those are real Make-a-Wish kids in [the movie].”

“Jakob the Liar,” due out Friday, may not stem the cynicism. Williams plays a Polish Jew in a World War II ghetto who overhears a radio report of a Russian victory over the Germans. With that tidbit of information, Jakob goes from doomed man to messenger of hope. He also takes in an orphan girl.

It is difficult, in describing this movie, to get through more than one sentence before people start groaning. There is, they feel, a certain inevitability to a sad clown like Williams doing a Holocaust movie. There was Roberto Benigni in “Life Is Beautiful.” There was Jerry Lewis, in his never-released-but-infamous 1972 death camp movie, “The Day the Clown Cried,” with Lewis leading kids to the gas chambers. And now there’s Robin Williams in “Jakob the Liar.”

In fairness, Jakob is no clown, and the film was shot before “Life Is Beautiful” hit American theaters. It’s based on a novel by the late Polish author Jurek Becker and directed by Peter Kassovitz, a Hungarian who immigrated to Paris. It’s an ensemble piece, more art house film than Hollywood blockbuster.

For Williams, the blockbuster comes in December with “Bicentennial Man,” based on a short story by Isaac Asimov and directed by Chris Columbus. The film, about a robot servant who gradually humanizes over two centuries, took two studios and more than $100 million to make.

And then? Williams, who has a history of being seduced into doing too many projects, will say no to more movies. At least temporarily. “People have sent some [scripts], and there’s a couple of wonderful ones, but I said, ‘Listen, I’ve got to do this first, and then after that we’ll talk.’ It will be six months, I think, of performing. We’ll see what happens. But it will be six months just to get back up to speed.”

Tonight, the small room at Cobb’s is packed. Before Williams does anything, people volunteer their affection. “We love you!” a woman shouts. Someone takes his picture. For Williams, this is the kind of instant gratification that movie stardom doesn’t bring--an interaction with fans that doesn’t take critics or meetings or lawyers to broker.

“In movies, you do a comedy, you set up the joke and you’re not getting the laugh until the spring,” says comedian-turned-actor Billy Crystal. “Ultimately you’re a comedian, and you should be comedic.”

“When they laugh, for something that’s completely out of you, it’s like your own personal rock concert,” adds Rick Overton, a stand-up comedian who has known Williams for decades. “It’s a huge, huge rush. And, you know, I think I speak for the entire comedy community when I say it’s supplemental approval on a grand, golden scale.”

But as the audience at Cobb’s soon discovers, Williams isn’t working up to warp speed tonight. Warp speed was easily achieved years ago, when Williams inhaled the club life and all its rewards and drug-induced depravities. He’s 48 now, with a wife and three kids at home. Tonight is about stretching his stand-up legs--and seeming at times stumped for material.

Williams isn’t Jewish, although people think he is. It has to do with the menschy goofball they see on the talk shows. In truth, his late father was Episcopalian, “but I have payess envy,” Williams admits.

It is two weeks before his Cobb’s set, and Williams has flown to Los Angeles to play in a charity tennis match with Crystal, Pete Sampras and Andre Agassi.

“We’re there to be, like, rodeo clowns,” Williams says over lunch at the Hotel Bel-Air. An hour into the meal, he relaxes and starts performing a little. Sometimes, too, Williams cuts up to avoid dealing directly with a sensitive subject. He does that, for instance, on the topic of his manager, Michael Ovitz.

Early this year, Williams’ agent, Michael Menchel, left Creative Artists Agency to join Ovitz’s start-up Artists Management Group. Ovitz, the almighty former CAA chief, has poached big names (Williams, Martin Scorsese) from CAA, and in retaliation CAA has told its clients to choose--either you are with them, or you are with Ovitz. Williams is with Ovitz.

“I only see him, like, you know, on the High Holidays,” Williams says. He goes into the voice of a Jewish father quizzing his kids at Passover. “But, children, why do we celebrate Ovitz? Now, we take out our mobile phone . . .” The bit disassembles, and Williams turns serious, if careful. Ovitz, he says, is very honest, and he’s always got interesting plans for his career.

But now there’s a glut of managers, because Williams is also represented by longtime associates Larry Brezner and David Steinberg. The central figure in this mini-nation state, though, is his wife, Marsha Garces Williams, who produced “Mrs. Doubtfire” and “Jakob the Liar.” Everything, insiders say, must be “cleared with Marsha.”

It was Brezner who saw Williams in 1978 in an L.A. improv class run by the late Harvey Lembeck and brought the comic to his bosses, Jack Rollins and Charles Joffe. Their boutique management firm had an elite client list--none bigger than Woody Allen. Rollins and Joffe saw another original in Williams, though one whose influences--Jonathan Winters, the British comedy troupe Beyond the Fringe, acting classes at the Juilliard School--made him a trickier sell. They set up an entertainment industry showcase for him at The Comedy Store, where, Joffe says, Williams improvised a whole crazy routine as both characters in “The Defiant Ones,” the 1958 film starring Sidney Poitier and Tony Curtis as escaped convicts.

“They thought he was brilliant, but [they] had no idea what to do with him,” says Joffe. “I said to them, ‘The next time you want to make a deal for Robin, the bottom line discussion fee will be a million dollars. That’ll be the opening discussion number.’ And they laughed.”

Meanwhile, among comics, says Overton, Williams prompted “everything from sheer amazement to petty jealousy. He’s brilliant, and that creates controversy almost instantly.”

Williams says he doesn’t recall doing “The Defiant Ones” routine, but his material has always been more expendable than his dynamism. He isn’t a writer, and anyway, in those days he was drinking and doing cocaine. Williams’ lack of discipline sometimes frustrated his managers.

“Woody [Allen] is the most disciplined person I’ve ever worked with in my life,” says Joffe. “Every morning, from 9 to 12, he will not even take a call from me or from Jack [Rollins] or anybody else in the world. He’s writing. He can write 10 pages or one, but he’s there every day. Now that’s discipline. That’s why he can do a film a year. You can’t get Robin to sit still for five minutes.”

Throughout Williams’ rise to stardom, from the hit TV series “Mork & Mindy” to the film “Good Morning, Vietnam,” comedians shuddered at the platitudes about his genius. They still do. They call him an “audience pleaser,” shorthand for a guy addicted to laughs and who uses anything--the gay guy voice, the sex crack, a stolen joke--to get his fix. An incorrigible mimic, Williams was never a comic’s comic, and his overblown energy was an affront to observational comedians, who viewed such behavior as needy.

And then there is the reputation, which still dogs him, that Williams is a joke thief. Yes, he has a mind that can access imagery and data at a breathtaking pace, comedians agree. Except the data sometimes isn’t his.

Accusing someone of stealing is a popular blood sport among comics. Williams concedes that he has appropriated jokes. But it’s been more than a decade, he says, since he was what he calls “The First Bank of Comedy,” writing out checks to comics who demanded restitution for a one-liner or concept. Still there’s a reason that, at Cobb’s in 1999, Williams waits outside, at a safe distance from the comedians onstage.

“I used to love to watch other people, just because I love comedy,” he says. “But now I don’t. I don’t go into clubs. I can’t. I don’t want to take a chance that if sometime I’m on a talk show, if in a moment of riffing, something comes out that might be somebody else’s--I don’t want to take that, I don’t want to hear that from anybody.

“Was it a constant practice?” he continues. “No. Did it become a myth? Yeah. I would hear [a joke] and it would register in the back of my subconscious. And then sometimes it’ll just pop out, and you go, ‘Oh, [expletive].’ You have to be very careful.”

“It’s not going out and stealing somebody’s material,” says Joffe, now semi-retired. “It’s that he doesn’t differentiate between his inventing it and developing it. But that’s natural. I will tell you that very rarely will Woody go see a comedy. Because he’s deathly afraid that something’s going to stay in his mind and influence him.”

Comedians have long scoffed at the notion that Williams’ transgressions were inadvertent. Meanwhile, other urban legends grew--that comedians refused to go on if he was in the room, that payoffs of a few hundred dollars were prevalent after Williams’ talk-show appearances.

“It’s folklore now,” says Joffe. “In all the time I dealt with Robin, I only got about three calls. It’s three too many is what it is. I will never deny, if somebody comes to me now or any time, and said, ‘He stole that,’ I’d say, ‘Probably.’ He was the only client I ever had that I could say that about.”

Comedian George Miller, a regular on “The Late Show With David Letterman,” says Williams paid him $100 after telling his joke some 20 years ago on a remake of “Laugh-In.” “I had a great show business job when I started out,” went the joke. “I was the emcee for Seals & Crofts. But they fired me. I got loaded and called them Arts & Crafts.”

Today, weighed against Williams’ obvious talents, such stories seem like pebbles hurled at a distant target. Comics may call Williams a thief, but how much of this is about knocking a movie star down to their size? Even if he isn’t always the free-form improviser he appears to be, he creates a convincing illusion. It’s the same illusion that Milton Berle, famously dubbed “the thief of bad gags,” perfected in another era.

“I think you take a swipe at Robin because, what’s he gonna do?” says comedian Bobcat Goldthwait, a friend of Williams. “He’s not gonna kick your ass. He’s a very sweet man. I have noticed this: A lot of people who talk smack about Robin, a lot of these people, when he’s in the room, have their head thoroughly up his ass.”

*

In the ‘80s, Williams was very funny about the Cold War, sex and drugs. He did Reagan, entering Congress like a cowboy busting into a saloon, tumbleweeds blowing in behind him. In the scene, Caspar Weinberger became Bela Lugosi and Henry Kissinger was Peter Lorre, cooing: “I’m your only real friend.”

“It was a dark act, but he said it with a smile,” says comedian Chris Rock. “You never thought you were watching Sam [Kinison] or Lenny Bruce.”

Onstage at Cobb’s, Williams touches on headlines--the Internet, Viagra, the arrival of bears in New York City. He does standby voices: an old Jew, a Frenchman bitching that Tour de France winner Lance Armstrong won because hair loss from chemotherapy made him more aerodynamic. He spots a guy in the front row with a poster from Alcatraz. The prop unlocks the door to his rich fantasy life. “A gift shop at Alcatraz!” Williams says with glee, then adds, in a kid’s voice: “Daddy, get me the electric chair.”

“Do I talk about my family?” Williams says of his stand-up act. “No. My mother and my father and how I grew up? Is there a way of doing it? Yeah, maybe when I’m comfortable.”

*

“What’s my take on his career?” Marsha Garces Williams says. “I don’t really have a take.” But then, suddenly, she does. She is seated on a couch in a suite at the Ritz-Carlton in San Francisco, talking about her husband’s career. Given her tone, it amounts to a defense. “His range is unbelievable,” she says. “People either like it, understand it, or don’t. I don’t think I’ve seen another person that can do what he does, which is go out in front of thousands of people and do stand-up comedy, live, and then turn around and do a dramatic piece like ‘Good Will Hunting,’ on screen.”

Her bluntness has helped earn her the role of the bad cop in Robin’s life and career, the superego in a relationship with a man who solicits guardianship. Having felt burned by the press, she’s wary of being portrayed as the bitch behind the clown. “When they talk about me in the third person in print, it’s usually negatively,” she says. “He asked me to say no on his behalf.”

She dismisses, however, the suggestion that she wields monolithic power over his life. “He asks my opinion, I give it,” she says. “If he had followed my opinion, he would have only done maybe eight of the last 15 movies.”

She won’t say which eight. In the 1980s, Williams hired Marsha as a nanny for his pre-K son, Zachary. As his first marriage ended, she moved up to become his personal assistant, his confidant, his wife, the mother of two more children (Zelda, 10, and Cody, 7) and the producer of one of his biggest hits, “Mrs. Doubtfire,” which she developed from “Alias Madame Doubtfire,” the children’s book. Her Blue Wolf Productions also shepherded “Jakob the Liar” from novel into film.

In conversation, Marsha Williams’ answers have the meat of opinion whereas his are often the reheated happy talk of many, many PR junkets. In this way, she proves to be more revealing of Robin Williams’ career choices than Robin Williams. “Someone has to entertain kids intelligently, and I think he does,” she says.

After 20 minutes, Robin Williams slips quietly into the room. Lunch has arrived, and he joins his wife at the table. She talks, he eats. He dispatches a chicken sandwich and potato chips while she discusses Hollywood’s glorification of violence (bad), the reaction to “Patch Adams” (“many, many, many people have said how inspired they were by it”) and the current vogue for adolescent guy humor, a la “There’s Something About Mary” and “American Pie” (“that’s what we need, more testosterone in the world”).

“My kids don’t get to watch ‘South Park,’ ” she says.

“The older one does,” Robin Williams says.

“He’s 16,” she corrects.

Later, after his wife leaves, Williams says: “I’ll clown around her, but it has to be intelligent [to make] her laugh.” He then admits, almost conspiratorially, that he’s a “South Park” fan. He raves about the “South Park” movie, its subversive spirit, the scenes of Saddam Hussein in hell, with the devil as his gay lover.

“It’s a bit weird because when you’re a celebrity, you’re sitting there watching it, going, ‘Oh, God, when are they going to get me? When are they going to hit me?’ ”

*

Twenty years ago, when Williams had “Mork & Mindy” but was still connected to his live comedy, he liked to perform at a small San Francisco club called the Holy City Zoo with cohorts like Jeremy Kramer. They’d show up on open mike nights, after midnight, when there were maybe 60 people in the audience.

“There’s something about it which strips away the pretensions,” Williams has said of those shows. “People still yell things at you and heckle you. They give you about five minutes’ grace. Then, if you get them, it’s great, but after that five minutes, you better have something. It really forces you to find stuff and tap into it.”

Williams is now a star, rich beyond his dreams, and Kramer, 46, lives alone in an apartment in Sherman Oaks. He’s a squarish man who wears an overcoat, a tie and a fedora, even in hot weather, and he’s content with his career, he says. It’s a career that looks a lot like it used to. He gets the occasional bit part on TV, but mostly he appears in off-the-wall coffee shops and bars around L.A.--maybe a dozen people in the audience.

“You found Jeremy?” Williams says when you first bring up his name, and during three separate interviews he steers the conversation back to Kramer, as if he’s some sort of talisman. Williams can’t recall exactly what they did at the Holy City Zoo so much as the feeling of being there. He wants to know what Kramer is up to. The last time you saw him, you tell Williams, he was hosting a show in a Hollywood joint called Killer Burger. It was Passover weekend, and Kramer, who onstage and off is sublimely odd, urged people to drink and drive responsibly on Pesach, and thanked Steven Spielberg for “Schindler’s List,” because its popularity allowed comedians to joke about the Holocaust.

This news thrills Williams, even inspires a hint of envy. “Oh, Jeremy, they don’t know what to do with Jeremy,” he says. “That world just fascinates me, you know? Live. Live is different. It’s different than tape, it’s different than film. It’s good to do.”

Today, it’s safe to say there’s nowhere Williams can go to re-create the days of the Holy City Zoo. At Cobb’s, for instance, it’s hard to tell whether he owes the laughs to his material or his celebrity. And is there any incentive for Williams to sort that out?

Kramer wonders. Despite their divergent career paths, he says he doesn’t envy Williams at all. He liked him as the psychotic in “The Fisher King,” because it tapped into a seldom-glimpsed facet of Williams. “He has a lot of anger, but he rarely gets to show that because he’s got to be the clown all the time.”

They haven’t seen each other in ages, Kramer goes on to say, but Williams is a good person. A generous guy. Never a snob. And he used to be great onstage. “A lot of the times, the stuff that was funniest people didn’t get, so he would grab his [crotch], or do his terrible black character, which is just shy of racist, in my opinion,” Kramer says. “I think Robin has the capability of performing at a genius level. I don’t know if he has it in him anymore or not. I kind of feel sorry for him. Performing in the clubs meant a lot to him. He’d be in there every night, working out. For him to cut himself off from that was very difficult.”

Williams feels good after his hourlong set at Cobb’s. He sticks around to sign autographs and chat. He tells you it’s just a matter of time before he gets his groove back. Maybe it’ll take a week, or months. And yet, it’s hard to erase a particular image from his performance, a moment about midway through, when Robin Williams did a very surprising thing: He checked his watch.