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

High School in Larkspur. Unlike the previous establishment, this was not a private school and it opened him up to a whole new world. Hawaiian shirts became a part of his wardrobe (and remained there); he started driving a Land Rover… Life opened up.
    ‘When I came out to California to go to high school, it was 1969,’ he told the
Oklahoman
. ‘I went to this gestalt high school, where one of the teachers actually took LSD one day. So you walked in and you hear [whispers], “I’m Lincoln.”’ The place suited his anarchic personality perfectly: from the formalities of the Midwest to California just after the Summer of Love was quite an eye-opener. And by now his joke-telling was such that he was seriously beginning to consider a career in the performing arts.
    Indeed, the move from the Midwest was probably the making of him. The Midwest still seems to be dominatedby pioneer thinking – it is only just over a century since men risked their lives to bring the territory under control. But laid-back California and San Francisco was something else altogether. In later life Williams enjoyed living there because no one seemed to notice him, he said. Of course, this was partly because he was a long-term local resident and they were used to him but it also implied that there were already so many inhabitants who were, perhaps, a little eccentric in that area that he fitted right in.
    And the same applied to his considerably more relaxed school, where he was away from the tormentors and able to enjoy himself at last. And while it might not have been a private establishment, it was still a sound place to study, with plenty of other alumni going on to make their names. Comedian and author Greg Behrendt was one such pupil, as was the actor David Dukes. Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist for the
New York Times
Eric Schmitt was another, as was Andy Luckey, who went on to produce the television version of
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.
There were some noted academics too, including Gunnar Carlsson, a professor of mathematics at Stanford University, and noted US epidemiologist Don Francis, who became a big name in HIV and AIDS research.
    From the moment he first saw it, Williams’ new city made an impact on him. ‘I was sixteen years old,’ he told
American Way
magazine in 2007. ‘My father and mother [and I] had driven across the country. As we drove across the Golden Gate Bridge, there was actually fog pouring in.I’d never seen fog in my life. Is that poison gas? No. The way it pours over the hills in Marin County and comes over the Gate – it’s quite impressive. That was my first impression – what is this strange smoke?! But it was quite beautiful, seeing the bridge. In Detroit, there aren’t many things that are that big. I was also struck that quite close to the city, there’s all this nature. Mount Tamalpais State Park. We have the whole coastline – extraordinarily beautiful.’
    All in all, it was a new environment that was a welcome change and brought him the opportunity to mature into the man he wanted to be; to explore sport and drama and also to relax. His father, of whom he had always been a little afraid, may have become more relaxed too. He was retired now, after all, out of the world of commerce and able to relax in the domestic environment in a way he never really had before. (That said, Williams never really spoke a great deal about his father, other than to recall the time when he launched into him for buying a Japanese car rather than an American one. So perhaps relaxation never came.)
    His mother Laurie certainly noticed the change in her son. ‘Robin was very shy as a child,’ she told the
Chicago Tribune.
‘His father was strict, and I think the turning point for Robin came when he left Detroit Country Day School, which was a bunch of boys wearing very proper white shirts, and we moved to Marin. He went to Redwood High School and began bringing home some pretty wild and wooly friends. I don’t