He's ubiquitous: every month or so lately, there's been a new Robin Williams movie. First came a bit part in Dead Again, in which he plays a ruined yuppie wretch who advises the movie's hero during the latter's supernatural quest for redemption. Then The Fisher King -- as a ruined yuppie wretch whose wife's murder propels him and the movie's hero on a supernatural quest for redemption. Now it's Hook, in which he plays a wretched yuppie whose children's kidnapping propels him on a supernatural quest for redemption.
In the highly improbable protagonist's role -- Peter Pan grown up? Peter Pan, a Type A investment banker? -- it is hard to imagine anyone other than Robin Williams. After all, the arc of Hook's Peter Pan -- an impish, Dionysian youngster, after a painful struggle with worldly temptation, finds his family to be the source of true happiness -- is a pretty fair summary of Robin Williams' life at 40.
During most of the time America was falling in love with Williams -- charmed by his TV character Mork, thrilled by his semi-improvisational comedy on cable-TV specials, charmed again by his early movie roles (in Moscow on the Hudson, in Garp) -- his life was pretty much a mess. "I think I had my mid- life crisis at around 27," says Williams, who was 26 when Mork & Mindy went on the air. In addition to too much trivial sex, there was too much vodka and bourbon and way too much cocaine. "It was like symbiotic abuse. It was Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Williams. The bloated fish," he calls his early-'80s self. "The Michelin poster child."
He quit both booze (gradually, all by himself) and coke (cold turkey, all by himself), but unlike many of today's celebrity recoverers, Williams has not succumbed to just-say-no zealotry. While he knows cocaine is "a totally selfish drug" and a dead end, he's also unafraid to recall the fun. "It was always around. 'Robin, want to do some blow? Want to do some blow in a back room with some very famous people?' 'Oh, yeah!' "
But sobriety by no means fixed his life. He and his first wife separated when their son Zachary was four, and he eventually took up with Marsha Garces, the woman who had once been Zachary's baby sitter. A PEOPLE magazine cover story, he says, badly distorted the facts ("I had been separated from my wife for a year and a half -- my wife was living with another man") and inaccurately cast Garces as a home-wrecking nanny. After almost four years (and marriage to Marsha; and two babies, Zelda, 2, and Cody, two weeks), Williams still gets apoplectic on the subject.
The story came at a high-stress moment. In addition to the marital disarray, ! his father had just died and his last three movies had bombed. "It was starting to look like" -- the voice assumed is a prissy superego -- " 'Uh- oh. Have we made several wrong choices? Have we just batted out at the bottom of the third?' It was a pivotal time."
Because Williams' comic persona is supercharged and allusive, and because he was a sex-and-drugs wild man, people assume that he has always been a hellion. In fact, he was a quiet, dutiful, good son -- a not very religious Episcopal acolyte, a student-body president, and in 1969, in Marin County, Calif., a quiet, dutiful, unrebellious teenager. The blowout hedonism of his 20s and 30s was the aberration, because now, at 40, he is quiet, dutiful and good once again.