Remembering the Robin Williams Rolling Stone interview: “With cocaine, there is no way to gently decompress yourself”

When it came to vices, the late actor and comedian Robin Williams didn’t do anything by halves - class A drugs, alcohol, womanizing... he knew how to party and did, while keeping his inner demons hidden from view.

Williams struggled to keep a lid on his long-term addictions to cocaine and alcohol - dependencies that sunk to deeper depths following the death of his close friend and Saturday Night Live sidekick John Belusihi in 1982 then losing his father Robert Fitzgerald five years later.

At the height of his addiction, Williams opened up about his drug problem in an extensive interview with Rolling Stone’s Bill Zehme in 1988 - a scatter-gun confession as candid and frenzied as his own stand-up routine, downing countless cups of coffee and punctuating almost every sentence with an impersonation or comedy voice. He told Zehme that he had been clean for five years - going cold turkey when his son Zachary Pym was born in 1983.

Robin Williams discusses how he kicked drugs

“Six months before Zach was born I basically stopped everything,” Williams explained. “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.

He elaborated on how he got trapped in a vicious circle of drugs and alcohol abuse. “I was 26 or 27, 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. [does impersonation of Gandhi high on cocaine] “Just one line, if you pleeeze. I’ll just do a little and save the world — fuck India!”

But even when he was drug-free, Williams openly admitted that for the women in his life - wife of 10 years Valerie Velardi and second wife Marsha Garces, he was not an easy guy to live with... “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 f*** 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“.

Working your way down from Jack Daniels to Perrier

Kicking his habit though, was not as painful as expected: “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," he told Rolling Stone, “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".

Free drugs for being famous

In spite of his lavish drug habit, Williams said that at his height, he was sniffing just a couple of grams a day and it never became an expensive lifestyle.

“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 then.’ 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.’ Everyone knows exactly what I’ve done; it’s implied. Moreover, can I really stop people from doing drugs? I can’t proselytize".

Williams took his own life on August 11, 2014, asphyxiating himself using a belt wrapped around a door handle. he was 63.

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