in was to deposit his soaked shirt into a plastic bag held open for him by his longtime personal assistant Rebecca Erwin Spencer. The shirt would later be sent out to the dry cleaner (but not before Rebecca tossed it in the shower).
For Robin’s downtime, he had private spaces in his home in San Francisco and at his ranch in Napa where he could completely withdraw from everything and everyone. In San Francisco his retreat was a hidden room behind a movable bookcase, while in Napa, it was a separate watchtower with its own staircase. Inside were computers, monster models, Star Wars spaceships, rows and rows of toy soldiers, and stacks of video games. There was also invariably a pile of scripts.
NEWSWEEK COVER SHOOT, LOS ANGELES, 1986
On one visit in 1993, I walked into his lair in San Francisco and saw a military video game on his computer screen. He explained that it was a new air-to-air combat game with the latest US and Soviet fighter jets and that he had just finished an aerial dogfight with Steven Spielberg, who was in Los Angeles. Robin smiled, and proudly said he’d smoked him.
As long as I knew him, Robin was in love with video games, and took them seriously. Sometimes he would even drive over to Electronic Arts and meet his friend Bing Gordon, the Chief Creative Officer, to beta test new products (pages 178–179). When Robin was engrossed in any action video game, you quickly learned that the area around him became a “no-fly” zone. I made the mistake of penetrating his air space on more than one occasion and got scorched.
Robin had an incredible number of friends who were highly accomplished in a wide variety of fields, not just in the entertainment business. He knew glassblowers and painters, politicians and authors, scientists and scholars, athletes and musicians. Whenever I would meet up with Robin in New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, or just about anywhere, I would be introduced to an array of fascinating and intriguing people, a lot of them famous, but many I had never heard of.
That’s how I wound up meeting Oliver Sacks for dinner one night in Robin’s suite at the Carlyle while Robin was shooting Awakenings. I had no idea who he was, but by the end of the meal I was as captivated by Oliver Sacks as Robin, who was playing him in the movie. Another time at a studio shoot in New York for a Premiere cover to coincide with the release of Good Morning Vietnam, Robin introduced me to a petite, older woman named Lillian Ross, who had a reporter’s notepad and pen in hand. I wasn’t familiar with her, but during a break, Robin informed me of her legendary status and stellar reputation as a writer. She was doing a piece on him for The New Yorker. As the years passed, I would see Lillian with Robin at various events and family gatherings, and they became good friends. She found him fascinating, but she also liked to laugh, and Robin never disappointed in that department.
That was the thing about Robin that seemed so obvious, but most everybody took for granted, including me. You were really lucky to be around him because at some point you knew you were going to laugh your ass off. And that was a real gift from him. When Robin was riffing, it became a transcendent experience for anyone lucky enough to be within earshot. Even from long distance Robin could throw you a good laugh, especially if something was going south in your life. Right after he heard about my divorce in 1999, he gave me a call and proceeded to tell me in an earnest voice how sorry he was for me and also for my wife. Then he paused a beat and asked, “Would it be OK if I slept with her?”
ELOPEMENT DINNER PARTY, NEW YORK, 1988
As private a person as Robin could be, out in public or in private settings, he was always approachable. He had a well-deserved reputation for being down to earth and nice to everyone regardless of their economic or social status and ethnicity. I never saw him say no to anyone who asked him for an autograph, except one time in a restaurant when he had a fork full of food halfway into his mouth and was interrupted by a fan who wanted his autograph. Robin put down his fork and politely told the lady that he couldn’t do it just then because he was eating (in case she hadn’t noticed), but promised to do it before he left, which he did.
Every professional photographer I ever spoke to who had worked with Robin always said the same thing: how easy he was to get along with and what a great guy he was. And of course they all had fun hanging with him. Robin liked photographers, and from time to time on a studio shoot, he would entertain everyone by putting on his best Annie Leibovitz impersonation, pretending to be asking him to go along with some crazy setup, like hanging by his legs nude from a tree branch with a banana in his mouth.
Everybody knows that Robin was an incredibly generous man who gave both his time and his money to various public causes and charities. I also saw the small ways he showed his generosity. There never was a time when I was with Robin that he didn’t stop for a panhandler or a homeless person and hand them some money. When a mutual friend of ours came down with a tropical disease while traveling in Asia, Robin flew her first class back to San Francisco where she could get the proper treatment. When a good friend of his from Julliard needed money to finish his feature film, Robin lent a financial hand. When a local teaching hospital was in need of a piece of medical equipment, Robin and his wife Marsha quietly bought it for them. He once offered to charter a jet for me so I could get home in time to be with a terminally ill family member. The list goes on and on.
I’ll never forget what Robin did for me when I eloped in October 1988. When I called him that afternoon from DC to tell him that I had just gone down to city hall and tied the knot, he immediately said I had to fly up to New York that afternoon so we could have a celebration dinner with some of my friends who lived in the city. The timing was perfect, he said, because it was a Monday night and the play he was doing with Steve Martin, Waiting For Godot, was dark. Amazingly, everything came together without a hitch. We had a rollicking dinner party for sixteen with Robin Williams as the entertainment. After dinner he and Marsha surprised my wife and me by putting us up at the Carlyle for the night with a great bottle of chilled champagne waiting in the room.
Less than a year later, I was able to repay Robin in a much smaller way. He and Marsha were getting married in Lake Tahoe in a private ceremony with only a small number of their good friends in attendance. I had a dual role as guest and wedding photographer and took the photographs of their late afternoon ceremony on a wooded path by the lake. Afterward, there was a fabulous dinner then gambling late into the night. I woke up early the next morning and was the first person in the door when the local one-hour photo place opened. During the group breakfast, I hustled back to the photo store and picked up the envelope of color photos and negatives. When I said good-bye to Robin and Marsha a few minutes later, I handed them their wedding present. They were genuinely surprised and appreciative that I’d managed such a quick turnaround (this was way before the instant digital era). As my taxi pulled away, I watched them standing on the sidewalk looking animated as they checked out their one-hour wedding album.
ON THE SET OF JAKOB THE LIAR, PIOTROKOV, POLAND, 1997 ©ROBERT STALEY
It should not come as a surprise that artists like Robin are sensitive individuals. Behind all the projected stage and film confidence, there is always a degree of insecurity, and Robin was certainly no exception. There were times, especially having to do with the entertainment business side of his life, that I saw genuine disappointment, anger, or sadness over something that was going on in his career.
The worst episode that I remember was in 1988 as Robin’s film career was taking off. He told me the story right after it happened. He was sent a script that he absolutely had to read over the weekend to give the studio an up or down answer by Monday morning. He was also told that no
