A Sad Farewell to Robin Williams

Every time I watch a Robin Williams comedy sketch, I still feels the pangs of a lost friend.

His mother lived directly next door to my family for many years. A petite widow in her late seventies, we often looked in on her, and invited her into our community social group.

More than once, I came home to find my late wife chatting with her in the living room over a cup of tea.

Robin, ever the dutiful son, thanked me on many occasions. He volunteered to appear at fundraisers at my kids? schools. Needless to say, he was a huge hit and brought in buckets of money.

To describe Robin as a giant in his industry would be an understatement. No one could match his stream of consciousness outpouring of originality.

I know some Disney people who worked with him on the Aladdin animated film where Robin played the genie, and he drove them nuts.

The script was just a starting point for him. You just turned him on, and it was all peripatetic improvisation after that. This forced the ultra controlling producers to draw the animation around his monologue, no easy trick.

When I attended the London premier of Aladdin, the audience sat with their jaws dropped, trying to decode cultural references that were being fired at them a dozen a minute.

It was safe to say that Robin fought a lifetime battle with drug addiction. He only got out of rehab last year for the umpteenth time.

His depression had to be severe. People who knew him well believe that his comedy evolved as a way of dealing with it. He used jokes as weapons to keep the demons at bay. Perhaps that is the price of true genius. In the end, it was probably genetic.

This has been reaffirmed by the many comedians I have met during my life, including Groucho Marx, Bob Hope, George Burns, Jay Leno, Chris Rock, and many others (I?m seeing Jay again this weekend at the Pebble Beach Concourse d?Elegance vintage car show).

Robin was a very wealthy man, at one point owning a $25 million mansion in San Francisco?s tony Pacifica district. He leaves behind a wife and three adult children.

He was at the peak of career, with another movie coming out at Christmas, A Night at the Museum III, and a sequel to Mrs. Doubtfire in the works.

These are not normally the circumstances where one takes his own life. One can only assume that to do what he did he had to be suffering immense pain.

He will be missed.