A Robin Williams story from backstage at Carnegie Hall. Orchestra Room 3 is packed with rock stars and their usual retinue but all eyes and ears are on one man. Robin Williams is winding himself up to take the stage, running shtick and bouncing off the walls with his customary boundless energy. It’s somewhere between a stage performance and a psychotic episode with Robin simultaneously name-checking and impersonating everyone who’s ever set foot on stage at Carnegie Hall.
Into the room saunters Peter Asher in a spectacular, pale magenta, crushed-velvet suit with a black string tie tied just so and an attitude that seemed to say, “Oh, this old thing? I just threw it on.” If you were in the music biz back then then you could easily imagine this sight because Peter was always showing up right on cue to upstage a pop star. Well, he might have been ready to steal some thunder from Diana Ross and Elton John who were in the room but he wasn’t ready for Robin. Robin, in mid-stream enacting an imagined duet between (I’m not making this up) Coolio and Luciano Pavarotti, turns to Peter and says in a cartoonishly heavy Puerto Rican accent, “Peter, I can either make you the painting of the Madonna with the eyes that follow you around the room or the suit but I don’t have enough material for both. I think you should take the painting– ees berry nice– but eet’s up to you.” And with that, before Peter even got to inhale to begin his retort, Robin was off on another bit and then another and then another. Peter was left in the dust like Wile E. Coyote and got in exactly as many words as Wile E. did. It was the most complete and one-sided take-down I have ever witnessed and I guess, now that Robin is gone, that I ever will.
Those lines he was running backstage seemed totally spontaneous but when I heard him do the same bits later on stage (including the one about Coolio and Pavarotti but not the one about Peter) I realized that I had witnessed an elaborate one-man rehearsal. What seemed like mayhem from an addled mind was actually a carefully articulated stage piece with Robin simultaneously the performer, the director, the writer, the editor and the choreographer.
After the show Robin was back down to planet earth: warm, personable, sober… maybe a bit deflated. Aside from my endless admiration, I felt such mad affection for this man that I was compelled to tap him to join the secret Society of Phooles which was our own little Mad Magazine come to life back then. He gladly accepted and said he would certainly come to our annual meeting if he was available but he never did make it.