Robin Williams - When the Laughter Stops 1951-2014 Read Online Free PDF

the
Oklahoman
in 1991, he gave a considerably more subdued description of life back then.‘I wasn’t so exuberant,’ he said. ‘I spent about three years in an all-boys school. It was almost like the one in
Dead Poets
Society
. Blazer. Latin motto. I was getting pushed around a lot. Not only was there, like, physical bullying but there was intellectual bullying going on. It made me toughen up, but it also made me pull back a lot. I had a certain reticence about dealing with people. Through comedy, I found a way to bridge the gap…’
    In other words, he was being bullied. To start with, he tried to find other routes to go home but that didn’t work. Boys taunted him because he was, as they saw it, small, fat and well spoken. He was also dyslexic, which meant he struggled at school and, in all likelihood, suffered from Attention Deficit Disorder (ADHD), neither of which conditions were recognised back then. Robin couldn’t fight back physically, nor could he get away from his fellow pupils, so instead he tried a distraction technique: he began trying to make them laugh. ‘I started telling jokes as a way to stop the shit getting kicked out of me,’ he once revealed, again a textbook example of the melancholia that hides behind so many comedians’ smiles. Using laughter to avert violence? Right from the start Williams must surely have known his talents would prove a double-edged sword.
    Nor were bullies the only people Robin was trying to impress. He wanted to fit in at school but at home he continued to long for the attention of his parents, particularly his mother. And so he employed exactly the same trick as he did at school: he told jokes.
    ‘I’m just beginning to realize that it wasn’t always that happy,’ Williams admitted in an interview with
Esquire Magazine.
‘My childhood was kind of lonely. Quiet. My father was away; my mother was working, doing benefits. I was basically raised by this maid, and my mother would come in later, you know, and I knew her and she was wonderful and charming and witty. But I think maybe comedy was part of my way of connecting with my mother – “I’ll make Mommy laugh and that will be okay” – and that’s where it started.’ In fact, his first-ever impression was of his grandmother; the start of a talent that was to define him.
    And so it went on, the little boy desperate to avoid being beaten at school and, at home, eager for parental attention. And as he continued to develop coping strategies, he was beginning to discover that he really did have the most phenomenal ability to make people laugh. But it never entirely worked: the family had maids who looked after Robin but, as fond of them as he might have been, they were no substitute for his mother. As an adult, he confessed to an acute fear of abandonment and a severe case of ‘Love Me Syndrome’. It wasn’t hard to work out why. Despite having some friends, his was a childhood spent in loneliness and isolation. The man who would one day have the whole world eating out of his hand was a shy, lonely and frightened little boy and, at the heart of it, that is what Robin Williams always remained. As someone once observed, all the money and success in life cannot make up for an unhappy childhood.
    Nor did his mother’s religion help, although, typically, he turned it into a subject for humour. He was attacked ‘because my mother was a Christian Dior Scientist. I was not only picked on physically but intellectually – people used to kick copies of George Sand in my face.’ It was a brave attempt to hide past pain but the sadness still shone through.
    When Robin was about sixteen there was still more upheaval, although this was to prove the making of him. Increasingly disillusioned with the automobile industry, his father Robert took early retirement and the family moved again, this time to Woodacre, California, part of Marin County, an area Robin was to make his home for much of his life. He enrolled at Redwood