Robin Williams Live talk show--UPDATEnew info found-pics with eddie murphy,super man and robbert dinero and more!!

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  First of all , Robin Williams you will be missed, I feel so sorry that im in my own depressive mode AND think of ending it my self, im just learning this year just last month, people with money have problems too, we love you, may you now get the rest you deserve!! R.I.P

 

 

 

The Oscar-winning actor and comedian Robin Williams died Monday in California. He was 63.

"At this time, the Sheriff's Office Coroner Division suspects the death to be a suicide due to asphyxia, but a comprehensive investigation must be completed before a final determination is made," the Marin County Coroner said in a statement. "A forensic examination is currently scheduled for August 12, 2014 with subsequent toxicology testing to be conducted."

"Robin Williams passed away this morning," the actor's rep Mara Buxbaum added in a statement to ABC News. "He has been battling severe depression of late. This is a tragic and sudden loss."

Robin Williams' Best Roles

Born in Chicago, Williams discovered his passion for acting in high school, before moving to New York City to study at Juilliard alongside Christopher Reeve.

A few years later, he also began doing stand-up comedy and working in television, before landing a star-making guest role as alien Mork in "Happy Days." In 1978, he was given his own spin-off series, "Mork & Mindy," for which he won a Golden Globe.

SLIDESHOW: Robin Williams' Best Roles

Robin Williams, in the Moment

Robin Williams Checks Into Rehab

Robin Williams Reprising His Role in 'Mrs. Doubtfire' Sequel

Around that time, Williams suffered a great loss: His friend, John Belushi, died of a drug overdose in 1982, prompting Williams, who had struggled with alcoholism and cocaine abuse, to quit, cold turkey. (Williams also said that the birth of his son in 1983 made him rethink things: "You realize, OK, now you have this responsibility, and [I] dealt with it," he told Nightline in 2011.)

He would go on to make two trips to rehab, once in 2006, and again this past July, which his rep told ABC News was "the opportunity to fine-tune and focus on his continued commitment, of which he remains extremely proud."

"It's [addiction] -- not caused by anything, it's just there," Williams told "Good Morning America" in 2006. "It waits. It lays in wait for the time when you think, 'It's fine now, I'm OK.' Then, the next thing you know, it's not OK. Then you realize, 'Where am I? I didn't realize I was in Cleveland.'"

Celebrities React to Death of Robin Williams on Twitter

Meanwhile, Williams discovered a passion for film in the '80s. With that came a litany of awards, including a Golden Globe for his role in the 1988 film, "Good Morning, Vietnam," a Golden Globe for his 1993 film, "Mrs. Doubtfire," and a Screen Actors Guild Award for 1996's, "The Birdcage." In 1998, after three nominations, he won his first Oscar for his role in "Good Will Hunting."

"This might be the one time I'm speechless!" he quipped while accepting the honor.

President Obama said in a statement on the actor's passing: "Robin Williams was an airman, a doctor, a genie, a nanny, a president, a professor, a bangarang Peter Pan, and everything in between. But he was one of a kind. He arrived in our lives as an alien – but he ended up touching every element of the human spirit. He made us laugh. He made us cry. He gave his immeasurable talent freely and generously to those who needed it most – from our troops stationed abroad to the marginalized on our own streets."

Williams also had a rich personal life. In 1978, he married his first wife, Valerie Velardi, with whom he had one son, Zachary, now 31. He and Verlardi divorced in 1988, and the next year, he married Marsha Garces, who had previously been a nanny to Zachary. He and Garces, from whom he split in 2008, had two children, Zelda, now 25, and Cody, 23. Williams married his third wife, graphic designer Susan Schenider, in 2011.

Recently, Williams had been hard at work. He starred in the CBS series, "The Crazy Ones" and he recently finished filming several film projects, including "Night at the Museum: Secret of the Tomb." He also recently celebrated a birthday and, in his last Instagram post, wished his daughter a happy 25th.

"#tbt and Happy Birthday to Ms. Zelda Rae Williams!" he wrote. "Quarter of a century old today but always my baby girl. Happy Birthday @zeldawilliams Love you!" 

Robin Williams: 'I was shameful, did stuff that caused disgust – that's hard to recover from'

His new film, World's Greatest Dad, is a glorious return to form. But a mournful Robin Williams would rather talk about his battle with drugs and alcohol – and recovering from heart surgery

 In the normal order of things, an interview with a Hollywood actor observes the form of a transaction. The actor wants to promote their film, and ideally talk about little else – least of all anything of a personal nature. The newspaper is mildly interested in the new film, but hopes they can be tempted to talk about other matters – best of all their private life. Sometimes the agreement is explicit, but most of the time it is mutually understood, and so the interview tends to proceed rather like a polite dance, with each party manoeuvring in its own interests. On this occasion, however, the convention appears to have been turned on its head.

 Robin Williams's new film, World's Greatest Dad, is brilliant. Having starred in a lot of unspeakably sentimental dross in recent years, here he is at last in something clever and thoughtful; a dark, slightly weird comedy that touches on all sorts of interesting themes that I'm hoping he'll talk about. Williams, however, has other plans. It is almost impossible to get anything coherent out of him about the film, or any of the issues it raises. He is vague, tangential and at times more or less incomprehensible – until the conversation turns to more personal matters, at which point he becomes lucid and forthcoming. What Williams really wants to talk about, it turns out, is his relapse into alcoholism, his rehab and his open-heart surgery.
Unfortunately, it takes me some time to cotton on to this, so I keep asking questions about World's Greatest Dad. Williams plays Lance, a failed writer, failed teacher and single father of perhaps the most irredeemably dislikable teenager ever to appear on screen. His son Kyle is addicted to hardcore internet pornography and is almost universally loathed – until he accidentally dies. His father fakes a suicide note, and when it is leaked, the school magazine reprints the letter, its poignancy prompting a posthumous revision of everyone's former low opinion of the boy. Soon a juggernaut of confected grief is roaring out of control.
Unable to resist the allure of his new popularity, Lance proceeds to fake a whole journal, passing it off as his son's and fuelling the insatiable hunger for loss. A bidding war breaks out between publishing houses, the journal becomes a bestselling book, and Lance winds up on a daytime TV show, like a pseudo celebrity, peddling his mythical son's tragedy to the nation.
The film is a devastatingly funny indictment of the modern grief industry, but when I ask Williams if he thinks it's getting worse, he says mildly, "Well, I think people want it. In a weird way, it's trying to keep hope alive." So does he not share the film's judgment on mawkish sentimentality? "Well, you just try and keep it in perspective; you have to remember the best and the worst." It seems as if he's about to engage with the question – "In America they really do mythologise people when they die," he agrees – but then he veers off at a tangent, putting on Ronald Reagan's voice but talking about the ex-president in the third person: "Maybe he was kind of lovable, but you realised half way through his administration he really didn't know where he was."
I wonder if Williams had experienced a little bit of the film's theme himself, when his great friend Christopher Reeve died. Was it hard, I ask, to see fans mourning Superman, when to Williams he was a real person, a real friend?
"He was a friend," Williams says solemnly. "And also knowing him, especially after the accident and everything he went through – it was a weird thing." What was it like, I try again, to grieve privately for a public figure? "Well, it's a whole different game," he says, but then starts talking about the death of Reeve's wife a year later. "It happens all the time, I know, but I know their kids, they're amazing, and to see them go through so much loss in one year – that's tough."
I ask about the media's role in the manufacturing of grief, but instead he recalls a talkshow he saw where a man confessed to adultery before a female studio audience. "Idiot. Why don't you just go bobbing for piranha? These women are screaming 'You bastard!', but the idea of being on TV overrode everything." He adopts a southern redneck accent: "'Ah'm on TV, y'all.' You're a schmuck, why would you do that?" Then the accent again: "Ah'm on tee-vee, ah'm gonna be fay-mous.' Yeah, for all of five minutes, big time."
We're not making much headway on the grief industry, so I try internet porn. Williams's three children have grown up through the internet age, so I'm curious about his views on its impact on adolescents. "It's just like – there's everything you could ever think about online." But what does Williams actually think about it; is it liberating and a good thing, or corrupting and a bad thing? "It's an old thing," he shrugs. "Look at the walls of Pompeii. That's what got the internet started." Then he starts talking rather boringly about iPhones, and how it's now possible to do video-conference calls on a mobile.
My worry beforehand had been that Williams would be too wildly manic to make much sense. When he appeared on the Jonathan Ross show earlier this summer, he'd been vintage Williams – hyperactive to the point of deranged, ricocheting between voices, riffing off his internal dialogues. Off-camera, however, he is a different kettle of fish. His bearing is intensely Zen and almost mournful, and when he's not putting on voices he speaks in a low, tremulous baritone – as if on the verge of tears – that would work very well if he were delivering a funeral eulogy. He seems gentle and kind – even tender – but the overwhelming impression is one of sadness.
Even the detours into dialogue feel more like a reflex than irrepressible comic passion, and the freakish articulacy showcased in Good Morning Vietnam has gone. Quite often when he opens his mouth a slur of unrelated words come out, like a dozen different false starts tangled together, from which an actual sentence eventually finds its way out. For example, "So/Now/And then/Well/It/I – Sometimes I used to work just to work." It's like trying to tune into a long-wave radio station.
I find myself wondering if alcohol abuse might have something to do with it. Williams used to be a big-drinking cocaine addict, but quit both before the birth of his eldest son in 1983, and stayed sober for 20 years. On location in Alaska in 2003, however, he started drinking again. He brings this up himself, and the minute he does he becomes more engaged.
"I was in a small town where it's not the edge of the world, but you can see it from there, and then I thought: drinking. I just thought, hey, maybe drinking will help. Because I felt alone and afraid. It was that thing of working so much, and going fuck, maybe that will help. And it was the worst thing in the world." What did he feel like when he had his first drink? "You feel warm and kind of wonderful. And then the next thing you know, it's a problem, and you're isolated."
Some have suggested it was Reeve's death that turned him back to drink. "No," he says quietly, "it's more selfish than that. It's just literally being afraid. And you think, oh, this will ease the fear. And it doesn't." What was he afraid of? "Everything. It's just a general all-round arggghhh. It's fearfulness and anxiety."
He didn't take up cocaine again, because "I knew that would kill me". I'd have thought it would be a case of in for a penny – "In for a gram?" he smiles. "No. Cocaine – paranoid and impotent, what fun. There was no bit of me thinking, ooh, let's go back to that. Useless conversations until midnight, waking up at dawn feeling like a vampire on a day pass. No."
It only took a week of drinking before he knew he was in trouble, though. "For that first week you lie to yourself, and tell yourself you can stop, and then your body kicks back and says, no, stop later. And then it took about three years, and finally you do stop."
It wasn't, he says, fun while it lasted, but three years sounds like a long time not to be having fun. "That's right. Most of the time you just realise you've started to do embarrassing things." He recalls drinking at a charity auction hosted by Sharon Stone at Cannes: "And I realised I was pretty baked, and I look out and I see all of a sudden a wall of paparazzi. And I go, 'Oh well, I guess it's out now'."
In the end it was a family intervention that put him into residential rehab. I wonder if he was "Robin Williams" in rehab, and he agrees. "Yeah, you start off initially riffing, and kind of being real funny. But the weird thing is, how can you do a comic turn without betraying the precepts of group therapy? Eventually you shed it."
Williams still attends AA meetings at least once a week – "Have to. It's good to go" – and I suspect this accounts for a fair bit of his Zen solemnity. At times it verges on sentimental: he asks if I have children, and when I tell him I have a baby son he nods gravely, as if I've just shared. "Congrats. Good luck. It's a pretty wonderful thing." But it may well be down to the open-heart surgery he underwent early last year, when surgeons replaced his aortic valve with one from a pig.
"Oh, God, you find yourself getting emotional. It breaks through your barrier, you've literally cracked the armour. And you've got no choice, it literally breaks you open. And you feel really mortal." Does the intimation of mortality live with him still? "Totally." Is it a blessing? "Totally."
He takes everything, he says, more slowly now. His second marriage, to a film producer, ended in 2008 – largely because of his drinking, even though by then he was sober. "You know, I was shameful, and you do stuff that causes disgust, and that's hard to recover from. You can say, 'I forgive you' and all that stuff, but it's not the same as recovering from it. It's not coming back."
The couple had been together for 19 years, and have a son and a daughter, both now grown up; he has another son from his first marriage to an actress in the late 70s. Williams is now with a graphic designer, whom he met shortly before his heart surgery, and they live together in San Francisco. "But we're taking it slow. I don't know, maybe some day we'll marry, but there's no rush. I just want to take it easy now. This is good news. It's the whole thing of taking it slow. And it's so much better."
Williams thinks he used to be a fairly classic workaholic, but at 59 is now taking it slow professionally too. "In one two-year period I made eight movies. At one point the joke was that there's a movie out without you in it. You have this idea that you'd better keep working otherwise people will forget. And that was dangerous. And then you realise, no, actually if you take a break people might be more interested in you. Now, after the heart surgery, I'll take it slow."
Williams has been nothing if not prolific. After first finding fame in the late 70s as a kooky space alien in the sitcom Mork and Mindy, he became better known as a standup comedian, but his astonishing performance in Good Morning Vietnam earned him an Oscar nomination in 1988, with two more in the following five years, for Dead Poets' Society and The Fisher King. Mrs Doubtfire, in which he dragged up to play a nanny, brought wider mainstream success, and in 1998 Good Will Hunting finally won him an Oscar. In recent years, however, he has made an awful lot of what would politely be described as less critically acclaimed films.
Some of them have been downright awful; schmaltzy family comedies drenched in maudlin sentiment, such as the unwatchably saccharine Patch Adams or, even worse, Old Dogs. When I ask why he made them, he says: "Well, I've had a lot of people tell me they watched Old Dogs with their kids and had a good time." It didn't offend his sense of integrity? "No, it paid the bills. Sometimes you have to make a movie to make money." He didn't mistake them, he adds, for intelligent scripts: "You know what you're getting into, totally. You know they're going to make it goofy. And that's OK."
Like many people, I had always been confused by Williams's film choices. The sharpness of his early standup just seemed so incompatible with the sentimentality of his worst movies, and if, as Williams claims, Old Dogs simply paid the bills, he must have one very high-maintenance lifestyle. When I watched World's Greatest Dad I just assumed it echoed his own sensibility more accurately than all the other rubbish he has made. But actually, having met him, I'm not sure it does. I don't know whether it was rehab or heart surgery, but he seems to have arrived at a place where sentimentality can sit quite easily.
I ask if he feels happier now, and he says softly, "I think so. And not afraid to be unhappy. That's OK too. And then you can be like, all is good. And that is the thing, that is the gift."
World's Greatest Dad is released on 24 September


San Rafael, Calif. — Investigators here said today Oscar-winning actor Robin Williams's death was a suicide by hanging: He was found dead in his bedroom, clothed, slightly suspended in a seated position with a leather belt around his neck, with one end wedged between a closet door and door frame.
At a press conference, Lt. Keith Boyd, assistant chief deputy coroner for Marin County, Calif., said he was cold to the touch and rigor mortis had already set in.
Williams was found by his personal assistant, who broke in to his room Monday morning when he failed to respond to knocks. She was distraught in the 911 call and indicated Williams' death was a suicide by hanging.
Williams' wife last saw him at about 10:30 pm the night before; she left the house Monday around 10:30 am thinking he was still asleep in his room.
Neighbor Sandy Kleinman said yesterday that she saw his wife go out with the dog for a walk "in the morning."
Boyd said some superficial cuts were found on the inside of Williams' left wrist, and a pocket knife was found nearby. It is being tested to determine if residue on the knife is blood and if it is Williams' blood.
"The preliminary, and I again say preliminary, result of the forensic examination reveals supporting signs that Mr Williams life ended from asphyxia due to hanging," Boyd said.

Marin County Sheriff Lt. Keith Boyd briefs media after autopsy of Robin Williams on Aug. 12 in San Rafael, Calif.(Photo: Photo by Justin Sullivan/ Getty Images)

Boyd would not say whether a suicide note was found. Nor would he discuss medications; toxicology reports won't be available for several weeks, he said. But he did say Williams had recently sought treatment for depression.
Boyd said today's forensic examination, conducted by the Marin County Sheriff's Office chief forensic pathologist, "did not reveal any injuries indicating that Williams had been in a struggle or any altercation" prior to death.
The body is no longer in the county's custody but Boyd would not discuss funeral arrangements, saying they were up to the family. So far, the family, including Williams' widow, has pleaded for privacy.
His family has not released any information about a funeral but late Tuesday asked that in lieu of flowers donations be made to these charities: St Jude Children's Research Hospital, Challenged Athletes, Christopher and Dana Reeve Foundation, Glide Memorial Church in San Francisco, Muhammad Ali Parkinson Foundation, and the USO.
That's going to be difficult given the worldwide interest in the story. Already, mourners are turning up on the quiet bayside street in Tiburon where Williams lived.
Such as fans Sabrina Hahnlein, 55, and her daughter Kathryn, 23, of San Diego, who found their way to his home to leave a bouquet of flowers and pay their respects. They loved Williams work so much they named their two dogs after his first big breakthrough: Mork and Mindy.

Oscar-winning actor and comedian Robin Williams was found dead at 63 Monday of an apparent suicide. In his four decades in Hollywood he left an indelible mark on pop culture. VPC

The star was found dead at his home in Tiburon, Calif. Monday, leaving Hollywood and the comedian's many fans in a state of shock. Williams, 63, was found unconscious and not breathing at approximately noon local time, and was pronounced dead shortly after.
Williams' daughter, Zelda, 25, who is shown as a baby in the final post on the actor's Instagram account, tweeted early Tuesday morning, "I love you. I miss you. I'll try to keep looking up."
His wife, Susan Schneider, issued a brief statement on Monday: "This morning, I lost my husband and my best friend, while the world lost one of its most beloved artists and beautiful human beings. I am utterly heartbroken."
The shock from Williams' death continued to reverberate throughout the culture, even the world. Some fans reacted today with touching tributes.

The bench and written messages in tribute to Robin Williams on Aug. 12. The bench, in Boston Public Gardens, was where scene in 'Good Will Hunting' featuring Williams was filmed.(Photo: Photo by CJ Gunther / EPA)

Boston fans chalked tributes and the words that Williams spoke in Good Will Hunting around the bench where he and Matt Damon filmed a scene for the movie, creating a singular memorial. Chalk footprints of where Williams sat were drawn on the bench, right above famous quotes from the movie, such as "Your move, chief."
At Los Angeles' Laugh Factory on Sunset Boulevard, the marquee read: "Robin Williams Rest In Peace Make God Laugh."



Many of Williams' co-stars and Hollywood contemporaries expressed their shock and grief, too, via statements and social media.
One constant theme: No matter his demons, Williams was a good guy — warm, sweet, generous, compassionate, humane.
Stage superstar Nathan Lane, who co-starred with Williams in the film The Birdcage, said Williams once made him laugh so hard he cried, and on Monday he cried again at the thought that he was gone.
"What I will always remember about Robin, perhaps even more than his comic genius, extraordinary talent and astounding intellect, was his huge heart — his tremendous kindness, generosity, and compassion as an acting partner, colleague, and fellow traveler in a difficult world," Lane said in a statement.
On Monday, President Obama paid tribute. Today, Secretary of State John Kerry praised Williams' "extraordinary zest."
"Robin wasn't just a huge creative genius, but a caring, involved citizen," Kerry said in a statement. "I'll always be grateful for his personal friendship and his support for the causes that we both cared about deeply."
Alan Alda, in a tribute published on TIME.com, called Williams a "Niagara of wit," adding that his death made him want to do something.
"I hope it makes us all want to do something," Alda wrote."While the whole country, and much of the world, feels this moment of sadness at his death, can we turn the loss of this artist we loved so much into something that pushes back against the ravages of despair?"
"I feel stunned and so sad about Robin," his Mrs. Doubtfire co-star Sally Field told Entertainment Tonight in a statement. "I'm sad for the world of comedy. And so very sad for his family. And I'm sad for Robin. He always lit up when he was able to make people laugh, and he made them laugh his whole life long ... tirelessly. He was one of a kind. There will not be another. Please God, let him now rest in peace."
On the Today show Tuesday morning, Inside the Actors Studio host James Lipton called Williams a "genius."
"His gift ... was genius. Geniuses can do things we have to learn to do. ... You can teach craft, you can teach technique. You can't teach genius. He had genius."

AJ Polis leaves a flower outside a home in Boulder, Colo., alongside a placard and photo of the late actor Robin Williams on Aug. 11. Williams played Mork from Ork in the television series "Mork & Mindy." (Photo: Brennan Linsley, AP)

Steve Martin tweeted, "I could not be more stunned by the loss of Robin Williams, mensch, great talent, acting partner, genuine soul."
Sarah Michelle Gellar, who starred with Williams on CBS' The Crazy Ones, remembers her co-star as a friend who became family.
"My life is a better place because I knew Robin Williams," she told People. "To my children he was Uncle Robin, to everyone he worked with, he was the best boss anyone had ever known, and to me he was not just an inspiration but he was the father I had always dreamed of having. There are not enough adjectives to describe the light he was, to anyone that ever had the pleasure to meet him. I will miss him every day, but I know the memory of him will live on. And to his family, I thank them for letting us know him and seeing the joy they brought him. Us crazy ones love you."

 

 

Meryl Streep, interviewed by Matt Lauer on Today, called Williams a "generous soul."
"It's hard to imagine unstoppable energy stopped," she said.
The family of the late Superman actor Christopher Reeve, who was Williams' roommate at Juilliard in the early 1970s, recalled that Williams helped Reeve cope after he was paralyzed in a horse-riding accident in 1995. Reeve died in 2004.
"After our father's accident, Robin's visit to his hospital room was the first time that Dad truly laughed," the family said in a statement to People. "Dad later said, 'My old friend had helped me know that somehow I was going to be okay.' "

Robin Williams Actor Robin McLaurin Williams was an American actor, stand-up comedian, film producer, and screenwriter. Rising to fame with his role as the alien Mork in the TV series Mork & Mindy, Williams went on to ... Wikipedia Born: July 21, 1951, Chicago, IL Died: August 11, 2014, Tiburon, CA Children: Zelda Rae Williams, Cody Alan Williams, Zachary Pym Williams Spouse: Susan Schneider (m. 2011–2014), Marsha Garces (m. 1989–2010), Valerie Velardi (m. 1978–1988) Awards: Academy Award for Best Actor in a Supporting Role, More

   UPDATE

"The legend is true," Tom Hanks writes in the new issue of Rolling Stone. "In 1978, word came from the set of TV's Happy Days. That week, Fonzie's ultracool was threatened by a stranger from another world. The guy playing the alien was hilarious."

Robin Williams on the cover of Rolling Stone. (Photo: Peggy Sirota/Trunk Archive)

The new issue of Rolling Stone (on stands Friday) is devoted to the triumphant life and painful final days of a comedic genius: Robin Williams, who died after hanging himself in his California home on August 11th at the age of 63. Contributing editor David Browne traces Williams' comedic roots to his childhood, when he'd try to attract the attention of his mother, Laurie ("The first laugh is always the one that gets you hooked," Williams once said) and spent hours alone with a massive collection of toy soldiers, making up voices for many of them.

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Peter Travers' 9 Favorite Robin Williams Performances

Martin Short recalls Williams' joy at the success of Mork & Mindy, when the show became an instant sensation, Williams' salary jumped from $15,000 to $40,000 an episode and his life was transformed. "He couldn't get enough," Short says. "He loved it." In the years before Mork, Williams' party-animal side was under control, but the series offered him full access to Seventies debauchery. Browne writes about the night in March 1982 that gave the young comic a wake-up call: He'd stopped by John Belushi's bungalow at the Chateau Marmont hours before Belushi died of an overdose.
The success of Good Morning, Vietnam, which earned Williams his first Oscar nomination, re-energized his post-TV career, and he continued to be a major draw on the road. "You can't look at any modern comic and say, 'That's the descendant of Robin Williams, because it's not possible to be a Robin Williams rip-off," Judd Apatow says. "He was doing something so unique that no one could even attempt their version of it. He raised the bar for what it's possible to do, and made an enormous amount of us want to be comedians. He looked like he was having so much fun."

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Why Do So Many Comedians Wind Up Self-Destructing?

But Williams' on-character fun was always tempered by his demons. "He was so addicted to entertaining people and making them laugh," says Mark Romanek, director of the serious One Hour Photo, "that he needed to be funny between takes to get that out of his system, so when he went into character, he could be completely free of that urge."
In 2011, Williams seemed on the verge of a new beginning, and turned to television for the first time since Mork & Mindy for a David E. Kelley show, The Crazy Ones. But when the show was canceled, Williams took it hard. He returned to rehab to "fine-tune" his sobriety. And he learned he'd been diagnosed with Parkinson's disease. Friends say in the last few months, the actor was sad and unhappy. "We were all worried about him," friend Peter Asher says.

 

Hitting big with his first perfect movie — 'Good Morning, Vietnam' — the crazed comic talks about the pitfalls of fame and the perils of cocaine

This story originally appeared in the February 25th, 1988 issue of Rolling Stone.
He is still a kamikaze of the night. In the cockpit of his blue four-wheel-drive vehicle, he purrs through the hushed, sloping arteries of San Francisco, seeking out comedy huts to raid, improve stages to commandeer. He never strikes before midnight, never allows word of his attack to leak out in advance. He likes it that way. It is the only instant gratification he permits himself nowadays, the only vice he has not sworn off. "Joke 'em if they can't take a fuck," he has said, not a little ruefully. Laughs are all that is left, and laughs are what he craves most Okay, maybe laughs and a thriving movie career, but we'll get to that.

Robin Williams lives in San Francisco. His family migrated to the Bay Area From the Midwest when he was a teenager, and now he has come home to stay, to reclaim normalcy in his life. He has vanquished the demons that had ravaged his reputation: drugs, liquor, womanizing. His primary motivation was the birth of his son, Zachary, who is now nearly five. But despite fatherhood's cleansing effect, his nine-year marriage to Valerie Velardi is in disrepair. They have been separated – on amicable terms – for more than a year, with no resolution on the horizon. (William's father died last October, compounding last October compounding the inner turmoil.) Williams now keeps company with his personal assistant, Marsha Garces, a petite brunette. It is she, in fact, who unfailingly rides copilot during his nocturnal comedy missions.
On successive nights in mid-January, they zero in on a pair of favorite targets: an upscale north-of-North-Beach club called Cobb's and a scruffy Richmond District walk-in closet called the Holy City Zoo. The latter is where it all began for Williams, where he worked his way from behind the bar to the stage These days Williams, ever the polite interloper, will not lunge for the microphone until all of the scheduled comics have finished their sets. He lingers outside or on a secluded bar stool – usually with a hood yanked down over his forehead – nursing his anonymity before moving in for the kill.
The kill, as perpetrated by Williams, has always been a thing to behold. His brain fires off a synaptic staccato of lunatic frissons. His rubbery face twists and congeals. Marauding voices take his tongue hostage. And on these chilly nights, his antics are as fecund as ever. He switches mineral-water bottles from table to table, announcing, "It's a little game we like to call San Francisco roulette." He is Bernhard Goetz taking a Rorschach test ("Is it Oprah Winfrey?"); a male lesbian ("I feel like a man trapped inside a man's body"); a channeled spirit called Limptha, "an 8000-year-old retail salesman that somehow speaks English perfectly"; and a swishy gumshoe ("The fog wraps around me like a cheap mink coat – that's the way I like it").


Late in his set at the Holy City Zoo, a back-row inebriate begins to chant, "Popeye! Popeye!" Williams, a bit agitated, leans forward and solicitously lectures him: "No, Lumpy, no more Popeye. But I have a new movie that just might work, and if not, I'll be off somewhere shouting, 'Show me a vowel!' There's a scary thought, boy."
He refers, of course, to Good Moming, Vietnam, the Barry Levinson film that has been hailed as the first bigscreen project properly suited to the comedian's frenetic genius. More important, it also promises to be Williams's first unqualified box-office bonanza (in its three weeks of limited release, GMV earned $1 million playing on only four screens; in its first weekend of wide release, it earned nearly $12 million).
It has been a long time coming. After exploding upon the scene ten years ago as a hyperkinetic extraterrestrial in ABC's hitcom Mork & Mindy, Williams embarked on a meandering film career. Only his canny performances in George Roy Hill's World According to Garp and Paul Mazursky's Moscow on the Hudson earned critical huzzahs for the Juilliard-trained actor. The rest of his oeuvre has become the soggy mulch of dolorous cable programming: Popeye, The Survivors, The Best of Times, Club Paradise.
Now, as military DJ Adrian Cronauer in Good Morning, Vietnam, Williams is at last happily typecast as an exultant anarchist. Handling the Saigon morningdrive shift on Armed Forces Radio in 1965, he is the father of shock radio, stirring platoons in the fields with nonissue sarcasm. Williams, sans constraint of script, pursues his inimitable manic riffs behind Cronauer's microphone. He becomes, in quicksilver aims, Walter Cronkite, Gomer Pyle, Elvis Presley, Mr. Ed, Richard Nixon and a host of chowder-head officer. As a fey military fashion consultant who disapproves of camouflage: "You know, you go in the jungle, make a statement. If you're going to light, clash!" As LBJ, explaining his daughter's ornithological middle name: "Lynda Dog would be too cruel."
The role fits. "It's amazing to me that some people have seen this and said, 'Well, that's what Robin does," says director Barry Levinson. "That's a bit like saying Fred Astaire dances well."

The Levinson-Williams dynamic has proved so copacetic that already there is talk of a second collaboration, possibly on a film entitled Toys, which would explore the eccentricities of the toy industry. And there are plans for Williams and Steve Martin to share the stage this fall in Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot, directed by Mike Nichols, at New York City's Lincoln Center.
These are bittersweet times for Robin Williams: personal life in flux, professional life in the ascendant. Yet, as his longtime manager, Larry Brezner, explains, "he is handling the crises in a really mature way. There was a point at which Robin would have simply run off and refused to face difficulty. Now, maybe for the first time in his life, he is an adult."
The newly introspective Robin Williams was in evidence throughout this interview. During the discussion, he swallowed a gallon of coffee ("Betty Ford speed balls"), flounced perkily upon a couch and summoned the usual menagerie of comic voices. And when the interviewer brandished a vintage 1979 plastic Mork doll at the outset, Williams barely blanched.

Do you recognize this guy? [Hands Williams the doll.][In a geriatric warble] Oh, look, from the old days! Here, let me check the nose to see if there's anything up his nostrils! [Inspect doll.] This way we'll know if it's authentic. This is amazing. this is the doll that had the bad voice backpack where you pull the string and hear garbled sentences. Some people sued because some dolls in the Midwest actually said. "Go fuck yourself."
Strangely enough, its body is dated 1973.Oh, that's scary. Then the body is obviously from an old G.I. Joe doll or maybe a Ken or a Barbie. Yes. it's probably from a Barbie doll. "Mommy, look, Mork has tits!" It's very strange to see this again. It was also strange to see them dismembered after the show was canceled. You'd see 'em hanging out of garbage cans, burned. It's so weird.
I don't know whether I'm experiencing nostalgia or nausea looking at this. It's like a combination of both. But that's a great way to start an interview. "I handed him the Mork doll." Well. Let's put this away for now, shall we?
All right. Do you think Mork complicated your progress in Hollywood?Hardly. You can't say that something that took you from zero to a hundred was damaging to your progress. It certainly wasn't a hindrance economically, either. And no matter what happened on the TV series, I always had the other image: the nightclub comedian. If I'd lust done Mork and nothing else, it might've been dangerous. But I always had a total other outlet beyond that character. I thank God for cable TV. Without it, I think it would be death for comedians.
Did you ever find the transition from TV to films unwieldy? It seemed in some ways like bringing a Tasmanian devil into captivity.Some of the reviews have indicated that. I've had an odd habit of choosing projects that were the opposite of me, sometimes to the detriment. People are now saying about Good Morning, Vietnam, "This film is basically you and what you do best. So why did you wait eight years?" Well, I made other choices. I wanted to go against what I was doing on TV – not just with Mark & Mindy but the cable stuff as well. I was saying, in effect, "I'll act. I'll show you I can act."
If Good Morning, Vietnam hadn't worked out, what do you imagine the status of your film career would be? Did you feel like 'If this one doesn't hit, I'm hosed'?You're not hosed, totally. You simply slip down the comedy food chain, that list of people who get scripts. It exists. From the top there's Eddie Murphy and Bill [Murray] and Steve [Martin]. I guess on the next level there's Tom Hanks, myself, John Candy – there's a lot of us. It all kind of works that way.
If this film had failed, I'd go down another couple of notches. So you have to work your way back up again or do character parts – or you fall back and punt. Now, with this, I knew I had this open field to run through. The radio broadcasts obviously afforded me the freedom to improvise, yet the story had dramatic elements that provided some interesting turns. It was a chance to fuse those two things together.
Hasn't it confounded you that Eddie Murphy can sniff out sure-fire parts almost effortlessly?Very much so. He's instinctual, like a shark who knows where the blood is. He's only made a few mistakes. He knows what his area is and what he does. That's why he's on top of the script food chain.
Do you agree with those who feel that you'd never found the right role onscreen?Well, like I said, it was part ego, part stubbornness, in trying to do something unexpected. Then there were other times when I took on slight projects, thinking, 'I can fix this.' I got suckered into a couple films like that – The Best of Times, Club Paradise. I thought, 'Well, they'll give me the freedom to do my thing,' but it turned out they didn't.
Also, for the first time I didn't have fear or tension. Berry Levinson kind of took away to onus of being "on." He would surreptitiously roll cameras and not go through the whole thing of "We've got speed and – action!" I could ease into a scene, and it helped me a lot. I started to relax.
The real Adrian Cronauer wasn't exactly the radio desperado you portrayed him as.No, he's a very straight guy. He looks like Judge Bork. In real life he never did anything outrageous. He did witness a bombing in Saigon. He wanted to report it – he was overruled, but he said okay. He didn't want to buck the system, because you can get court-martialed for that shit. So, yes, we took some dramatic license.
But he did play rock & roll, he did do characters to introduce standard army announcements, and "Goooood morning, Vietnam" really was his signature line. He says he learned whenever soldiers in the field heard his sign-on line, they'd shout back at their radios, "Gehhhhht fucked, Cronauer!"

I heard you improvised several characters on mike that we never saw in the movie. Do you remember any?We left out a lot of stuff because the jokes just took too long to set up. Some other stuff might have been too rough. I was trying a riff on booby traps and said [as black GI], "Now, if it was a pussy trap, people would line up to get in." Armed Forces Radio used to give out winning bingo numbers, so I tried this: "Our lucky bingo winners are 14, 12 and 35. If you've been with any of these girls, call your medic immediately!"
Do you think Bob Hope approved of you moving in on his territory? It looked like he gave you the cold shoulder on the Carson show a few weeks ago.[As Hope] "Yeah, wiiiild, isn't he?" I don't know. Certainly, there's that line about him in the film: "Bob Hope doesn't play police actions. Bob likes a big room" I think Hope knew about that, because he leaned over to me at one point and said, "You know, I was there in '65, but they didn't want to get all the guys in one place." At one point he was talking about going to the Persian Gulf, and I said, "I'll go if you like." He said, "Yeah, right." Translated: "I'd no sooner have you there than a third testicle."
Let's try mounting a brief retrospective reconsideration of your filmography. What did you think of Popeye?Popeye was a sweet-enough character. I had to dub that movie over twice, though, because people couldn't understand what I was saying. I sounded like a killer whale farting in a wind tunnel. The weirdest thing of all was to watch it at one of those Hollywood premières, which are rough to begin with. But when a film doesn't work – [simulates a seizure] oooh! I remember walking out and seeing this fifty-foot can of spinach. It was like 2001, but on bad acid.
What about Garp?I think Garp is a wonderful film. It may have lacked a certain madness onscreen, but it had a great core. It had a wonderful sense of family. Maybe if I had known more about children at the time, I could have done more with it. I would love to take now what I know about my son and the powerful feeling of parenthood and play Garp again.
Moscow on the Hudson?I loved doing it. Immersing yourself into another language and culture is wonderful. Oddly, it was a little bit like Mork in that I was looking at the American culture from the outside. People may have thought the ending broke down and got a little saccharine. Maybe. I'll always remember leaving some screening where a woman came up and said, "You are really hairy." She was referring to that scene in the bathtub where my body just looked like fur. She went, "Jesus, are you some sort of monkey?" "Thank you, thank you very much, glad you enjoyed the film. . . ."
For the first time ever you're seeing a therapist. People around you are saying you're saner than ever.[Grinning] Yeah, they bought it.
Has inner peace been difficult to achieve?Oh, I don't have inner peace. I don't think I'll ever be the type that goes, "I am now at one with myself," Then you're fucking dead, okay? You're out of your body. I do feel much calmer. And therapy helps a little. . . . I mean, it helps a lot. It makes you reexamine everything: your life, how you relate to people, how far you can push the "like me" desire before there's nothing left of you to like. It makes you face your limitations, what I can and can't do.
The hardest word of all to say is no. Bette Davis told me, back when I was doing the revival of Laugh In about ten years ago, "The one word you'll need is no." The secret is to be able to turn things down, to not take on projects like The Best of Times or Club Paradise just because they say they want you. If they can't get you, they'll get anybody, so wise up. They'll take Gary Coleman.
You don't audition on a regular basis, do you?I have recently. I'm not going to play that game of [indignantly] "What do you mean, audition? I'm Robin Williams!" Fuck it, I'll go read. It's worth it to try. And it felt better to read with somebody than to get hired and not have the chemistry work out It's sobering, too, because a couple of parts have fallen through.
I read for a movie with DeNiro [Midnight Run], to be directed by Marty Brest I met with them three or four times, and it got real close, it was almost there, and then they went with somebody else. The character was supposed to be an accountant for the Mafia. Charles Grodin got the part. I was craving it. I thought, "I can be as funny," but they wanted someone obviously more in type. And in the end, he was better for it.
But it was rough for me. I had to remind myself, "Okay, come on, you've got other things."
Sounds like Robin Williams has grown up.[Facetiously] Yeah, right. [As Freudian analyst] "But you still talk about your dick a lot, though, don't you?" It's been a tough year with the death of my father, the separation from my wife, dealing with life, with business, with myself. Someone said I should send out Buddhist thank-you cards, since Buddhists believe that anything that challenges you makes you pull yourself together.
You used to refer to your father as Lord Posh – he was an uncommonly elegant man, a powerful automobile executive. Did you see him any differently at the end?I got to know another side in the last few years. I saw that he was funkier, that he had a darker side that made the other side work. He was much older than me; he died at eighty-one. Up until four or five years ago, I kept distance out of respect. Then we made a connection. It's a wonderful feeling when your father becomes not a god but a man to you – when he comes down from the mountain and you see he's this man with weaknesses. And you love him as this whole being, not as a figurehead.
Were you with him when he died?I was here in San Francisco, and he died at home, out in Tiburon [a nearby suburb]. So I was close. He'd had operations and chemotherapy. It's weird. Everyone always thinks of their dad as invincible, and in the end, here's this little, tiny creature, almost all bone. You have to say goodbye to him as this very frail being.
At least he was at home and died very peacefully in his sleep. My mother thought he was still asleep. She came downstairs and kept trying to shake him. She called me that morning and said [calmly and evenly], "Robin, your father's dead." She was a little in shock, but she sounded happy in a certain way, if only because he went without pain.
Is it true that you scattered his ashes?[Chuckles] Yeah, it was amazing. It was sad but also cathartic and wonderful in the sense that it brought my two half brothers and me together. It kind of melded us closer as a family than we've ever been before. We've always been very separate.
That day we gathered right on the sea in front of where my parents live. It was funny. At one point I had poured the ashes out, and they're floating off into this mist, seagulls flying overhead. A truly serene moment Then I looked into the urn and said to my brother, "There's still some ashes left, Todd. What do I do?" He said, "It's Dad – he's holding on!" I thought, "Yeah, you're right, he's hanging on." He was an amazing man who had the courage not to impose limitations upon his sons, to literally say, "I see you have something you want to do – do it."

What has fatherhood taught you about yourself?That most of your actions have consequences with the child. And I've learned to have the security not to worry that he will love me – as long as I keep the connection strong enough. I've learned not to try to force the love. You can't All you can do is try to set up a world for him that's safe and stable enough to make him happy. I want to protect him and shield him from public sight. I want him to have his own life.
How is he handling your separation?Very well. He's more comfortable with it now. He understands it. He sometimes gets confused and calls someone by the wrong name. But we have a good custody agreement, so he comes and goes freely. He knows exactly how many days he's here and how many days he's there. Children at his age do not want to deal with the anger and the volatility or whatever would develop. As long as things are peaceable, he's fine switching back and forth. Also, he doubles down at Christmas: "Look, I got this many dinosaurs."
Do you find yourself performing for him?Yeah, and sometimes he'll love it. I did a Señor Wences thing for him. I dressed my fist in a napkin and was Mother Teresa. I played her drunk and made her drink water, which I'd spill down my arm. He liked that.
The hard part is when you really have to back off and provide him with the time to play alone. Children are a drug. I used to say they beat the shit out of cocaine: you're paranoid, you're awake, and you smell bad. It's this constant metamorphosis. This is a precious time. Some of those lines in Garp ring true. I never thought I would literally sit and watch a child sleep. But you can. I never thought drat would be real.
You've been drug free for how long now?Five years. Six months before Zach was born I basically stopped everything.
Do you remember the last time you were on the cover of Rolling Stone, in 1982?Wasn't the basic premise that I'd cleaned up my act?
The headline was "Robin Williams Comes Clean." Was that honestly the end of the self-abusive chapter in your life?There was no going back. I realized that the reason I did cocaine was so I wouldn't have to talk to anybody. Cocaine made me so paranoid: if I was doing this interview on cocaine, I would be looking out the window, thinking that somebody might be crawling up fourteen floors to bust me or kick down the door. Then I wouldn't have to talk. Some people have the metabolism where cocaine stimulates them, but I would literally almost get sleepy. For me, it was like a sedative, a way of pulling back from people and from a world that I was afraid of.
Going from zero to a hundred on the American fameometer, I take it, was a bit harrowing.I was twenty-six or twenty-seven, and then, bang, there's all this money, and there are magazine covers. Between the drugs and the women and all that stuff, it's all coming at you, and you're swallowed whole. It's like "Whoooaaa!" Even Gandhi would have been kind of hard pressed to handle it well. [As Gandhi on cocaine] "Just one line, if you pleeeze. I'll just do a little and save the world – fuck India!"
Talking about your marriage five years ago, Valerie said, "If I had said, 'Don't cross this line,' he would have been long gone." In retrospect, was she too tolerant of your indulgences?Maybe. I don't think I would have been long gone. I think I was crying out for someone to say, "Enough." In the end I had to make my own line. Anybody who finally kicks himself in the ass and wants to clean up makes his own line. You realize the final line is the edge.
Is the failure of your marriage a great disappointment to you?It's not disappointing. That's why therapy helps a lot. It forces you to look at your life and figure out what's functioning and what isn't. You don't have to beat your brains against a wall if it's not working. That's why you choose to be separated rather than to call each other an asshole every day. Ultimately, things went astray. We changed, and then with me wandering off again a little bit, then coming back and saying, "Wait, I need help" – it just got terribly painful.

Would you admit you're tough to live with, even cleaned up?

Oh, God, yes. I'm no great shakes. It's the "love me" syndrome combined with the "fuck you" syndrome. Like the great joke about the woman who comes up to the comic after a show and says, "God, I really love what you do. I want to fuck your brains out!" And the comic says, "Did you see the first show or the second show?" One hand is reaching out and the other is motioning to get back. Couldn't you have gotten therapy sooner and circumvented a lot of the trouble? Were you afraid of it?A little bit. My mother is a Christian Scientist, whose tenets maintain that you can always heal yourself. So I said, "Well, I'll fix myself." But there are certain things you can't fix in yourself. You can get yourself healthy. I kicked drugs alone – I never went to a hospital.
You may be the only celebrity who beat dependency without the benefit of the Betty Ford clinic. What's your secret?With alcohol it was decompression. The same way I started drinking, I stopped. You work your way down the ladder from Jack Daniel's to mixed drinks to wine to wine coolers and finally to Perrier. With cocaine, there is no way to gently decompress yourself. It took a few months. Someone said you finally realize you've kicked cocaine when you no longer talk about it. Then it's gone. It's like pulling away and seeing Pittsburgh from the air. People come up to you with twitching Howdy Doody jaws, and you think, "Hmmm, I looked like that." You realize that if you saw by daylight the people you'd been hanging out with at night, they'd scare the shit out of you. There are bugs that look better than that.
How much money do you think you ultimately spent supporting your drug habit?The weird thing about the drug period was that I didn't have to pay for it very often. Most people give you cocaine when you're famous. It gives them a certain control over you; you're at least socially indebted to them. And it's also the old thing of perfect advertising. They can claim, "I got Robin Williams fucked up." "You did? Lemme buy a gram them." The more fucked up you get, the more they can work you around. You're being led around by your nostril. I went to one doctor and asked, "Do I have a cocaine problem?" He said, "How much do you do?" I said, "Two grams a day." He said, "No, you don't have a problem." I said, "Okay."
How often does John Belushi cross your mind these days?Not a lot. I mean, he crosses my mind. I've been through the grand juries, I've talked about it. And I know, in the end, I was only there [in Belushi's bungalow at the Chateau Marmont the night of Belushi's death] for five or ten minutes. I saw him and split. He didn't want me there, really. He obviously had other things he was doing. I do think I was set up in some way to go over there. A guy at the Roxy said John wanted me to stop by his bungalow. But when I went by, he wasn't looking for me. He wasn't even there. When he arrived, he said, "What are you doing here?" and offered me a line of cocaine. I took it, and then I drove home. If I had known what was going on, I would have stayed and tried to help. It wasn't like he was shooting up in front of me.
The next day, on the set of Mark & Mindy, Pam Dawber came up to me and said, "Your friend died." Here was a man who was like a bull. I didn't talk about it immediately at the behest of some people. But not talking about it only created more controversy.
What motive would there have been in setting you up?I don't know. You could say it would have been a great bust if it had happened.
Robert DeNiro, along with Belushi, supposedly had summoned you there, right?I called DeNiro's room upstairs, but he was with company. And John wasn't around. It just didn't seem like I was really called there. Obviously, all the elements didn't fall into place, because I didn't stay long.
Have you harbored some guilt over his death?It took me a couple of years to go, "Wait, there's nothing to feel guilty about." I was there, yes, but a lot of people saw him that night, did drugs with him or talked to him. Yeah, there's a feeling that if you could have known, you would have stayed and talked with him or dragged him out to get something to eat. I wasn't close enough to say, "Hey, don't be an asshole!"
I mean, I admired the shit out of him. I'd had a wonderful time with him. One time he took me to a heavy hardcore punk club, and I was scared shitless. People were slam-dancing, which I'd never seen before, and there was a band playing called the Bush Tetras. He said, "Guess which one is the woman." I said, "The guy on the right?" And he said, "They all are! Ha, ha, ha!" It was like being on a tour with Dante, if Dante were James Brown. He took great delight in seeing me go, "Whoooaaa!" I was like Beaver Cleaver in the underworld.

Do you think you can ever deal autobiographically with your drug problem onstage the way Richard Pryor has?I can now, I think. It's because he did it so well that I choose to talk about it almost in a third person. I've hinted at it. I mean, everyone knows exactly what I've done; it's implied.
Moreover, can I really stop people from doing drugs? I can't proselytize. [Comedian] Bob Goldthwait probably hit on the best antidrug campaign ever. He said that he'd read a quote where Bob Hope said he smoked marijuana once. Can you imagine a picture of Hope toking weed, going, "Wiiiiild, isn't it? This hooch is wild! This Many Jane really drives me nuts! Ya know, I'm so hungry, I can't tell you!" Some fifteen-year-old would see that and go, "Oooh, fuuuck, man!"
You recently played the Prince's Trust concert, in England. Did you clean up your act for Charles and Diana? I suppose you had to lose your royal-incest material.Yeah, the royal-family shaving routine. "Oh, hemophilia!" There's a fear there. You're not allowed to talk about what might be happening in their lives. So how do you keep your anarchy and still keep your respect? You have to talk about cultural differences, about how their newspapers make the National Enquirer look like Pulitzer Prize material. [As a page-3 girl] "My name is Betty, and I don't like bombs – but look at these missiles!"
Meeting the princess was amazing. She's exquisite. I knew he would have a certain presence, but with her you go [long wolf whistle], "Wow!" She's obviously been trained to do certain things, one of which is this look: she'll look at you, then turn away, then look at you again. It's beyond coquette. It makes you go [as Goofy], "Oh-ho, shucks, ma'am, you're so purrrty!' Before the show she asked me, "Do you know what you're going to do tonight?" I said, "No, I really don't know, but after you see it, I don't think you'll want me back." She said, "Oh, don't tell me that." And she gave me one of those looks. "Whoooaaa, golly, ma'am."
As a comedy professional, are you going to miss the Reagan presidency?Am I going to miss Reagan? Or is that Miss Reagan? That's a great movie title: Miss Reagan. [As Butterfly McQueen] "Oh, Miss Reagan, I don't know nothin' 'bout balancin' no budget!" People say satire is dead. It's not dead; it's alive and living in the White House. He makes a Macy's Thanksgiving Day float look ridiculous. I think he's slowly but surely regressing into movies again. In his mind he's looking at dailies, playing dailies over and over. Nancy's kind of in another world too. She's pushing for him to get a Nobel Peace Prize, but she's out arm-wrestling with Raisa on the lawn.
Did the recent rash of religious scandals surprise you at all?[Comedian] Sam Kinison, who was once an evangelist himself, has always said that these people have dark lives. Still, who would have the balls to say, "God will take me away unless I get $8 million"? As if God's a large man named Vinnie, going, "Where the fuck's the money?" They're selling the promise of hope on the strength that there's no such word as audit in the Bible. The Lord was not audited. Jesus did not have an accountant, even though he was Jewish. That would be great, to play Jesus' accountant: "Okay, we've got nails, that's a valid expense. How many dinners did you have this week? One? Okay, we can write that off."
Did you see the item about the pope supposedly wanting to meet Madonna?And she said, "If he wants to meet me, let him come see the show." Yeah, that's nice when she gets herself confused with her predecessor. [As Madonna, snapping gum] "He wants to say hello? Sure, tell him to come backstage." [As a black bodyguard] "Madonna! Madonna! John Paul's here!" [Madonna] "The Beatles?" [Bodyguard] "No, just one guy. He's wearing a yarmulke. Okay, Yo' Emmense, she be out in five minutes. She gotta get outta her lace thang. Can I get you somethin'? Some wine? Crackers? So, you got two names. You from the South? That's ermine you're wearin', right? You a little light in the sandals? Ha, I'm kiddin' you. Madonna, come on out here!"
A few years ago, you ended one of your cable shows with a vignette about Albert Einstein. You quoted him, saying, "My sense of God is my sense of wonder about the universe." What do those words mean to you?It's like Mel Brooks's great line as the 2000-year-old man [in a Yiddish accent]: "There's something bigger than Phil." You can't help but see it when you deal with nature in the extreme. Like when you're body surfing on Maui and a storm suddenly makes a ten-foot wave come at you. It gives you a sense of your mortality. Or it's when you see something incredibly beautiful. I get it when I see Zachary changing. Here's this being who is you but not you slowly growing and forming opinions of his own.
It stems, too, from a sense of horror at things that go on in the world. The planet's climate is changing at such a drastic rate, causing the worst blizzards and droughts in history. Now there is an incredibly large hole in the ozone layer. Like Shakespeare said, this place is such a delicate, fragile firmament. It's a one-in-a-billion crapshoot. And we're fucking it up.
Einstein is your idol, isn't he?Yeah. Good old Al. [Chuckles.] Imagine Al doing stand-up. [As Einstein] "So, it's relative. Does that mean I have to make love to my mother? No, I'm keeding, please! I gotta go. . . . I came back to make a bomb. Nagasaki! Who's there? It was a joke! Hey, I gotta go!" Wasn't he wiiiiild?

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