Robin Williams

Robin Williams appears in the diary during a transition from television success toward broader celebrity: admired for his performance, recognized in the street, and already the subject of divorce rumors, yet still moving through New York without the limousine and entourage the narrator expects. The entries make his rising fame visible not through a career overview but through encounters with Valerie, fans, and the people around them, where ordinary gestures sit alongside the demands of public attention.

First Encounters and Rising Fame

On April 13, 1979, the narrator went to the Copa for the Mork show and found Williams terrific. The evening continued at the Sherry-Netherland, where Williams’s wife had invited the group; Lucie Arnaz was there, and everyone sat around a large table of bagels. The narrator noted Williams’s hairy chest and arms and his blue eyes, registering a physical presence as memorable as the performance.

Four days later, after calling Williams’s hotel, the narrator and a large party met him and Valerie at the Sherry-Netherland. Although the group had expected a limousine, twelve people instead took three cabs downtown. Williams and Valerie offered to cover the fare, but the narrator paid. The modest transportation became a small emblem of a social world in which celebrity expectations and actual habits did not quite match.

New York in the Clothes from the Village

In the Village, the group visited a used-clothes store, where Williams quickly selected three suits that fit him perfectly. The diary returns to those clothes later: by August, he was still wearing what had been bought during that outing. Valerie, meanwhile, described having already gone to Bleecker Street that morning to find French provincial furniture to send back to Los Angeles, giving the visit a practical, domestic counterpoint to the star’s public image.

As the group walked the back streets, children greeted Williams casually as Mork, as if he were someone familiar, while adults became excited. The contrast captures two kinds of recognition: a character absorbed into children’s everyday world and a celebrity whose presence could still stir adult attention. The party also walked to Lady Astor’s and met Michael Sklar, a friend of Williams and Valerie who had appeared in the films Trash and L’Amour; the narrator noticed that Sklar looked thin in the face.

Williams’s career was already moving beyond the television role. The diary records that he was going to do the Popeye movie and that Sue Mengers had just become his agent. Valerie explained that, after they had lived together for two years and she saw that he was going to become famous, she did not want to face life and newspaper coverage under the unmarried name pairing of Robin Williams and Guest, so she had made him marry her. Her account places a decision about marriage directly beside the anticipated transformation of private life into public copy.

Valerie, Publicity, and Marital Strain

At Studio 54 in August, Steve Rubell brought the narrator over to Williams and Valerie. Newspaper stories said the couple were getting divorced, but Valerie denied that they were. When Cheryl Tiegs arrived with Peter Beard and appeared to want a picture with Williams, Valerie refused photographs. She presented herself as someone who ran things, then asked the narrator whether she was right to be so tough. The exchange shows her trying to control the couple’s exposure while also questioning the cost of that control.

Valerie said Williams had been invited to Fire Island for the weekend but that she did not want him to go, because it would put too much strain on both of them; she preferred that they go somewhere like Nantucket. The narrator speculated that Valerie might fear Williams could be gay, but this remains the narrator’s conjecture, not an established fact about either of them. The diary records Valerie’s stated concern about strain and her wish for a different destination, while leaving the source and nature of that strain unresolved.

Later, Valerie danced with a waiter the narrator had introduced, then became nervous. The narrator wondered whether she had wanted to make Williams jealous, but again the motive is presented only as speculation. In these scenes, Williams is less a fully narrated interior character than the center around which fame, marriage, publicity, and other people’s interpretations gather. The diary’s small details—the three cabs, the well-fitting suits, the refused photograph—make that pressure tangible without resolving the couple’s private conflict.