Drugs, Death & Remorse: Robin Williams' Secret Demons Exposed In New Documentary
RadarOnline.com can reveal secrets of the heart-wrenching new documentary about the life and tragic death of comedian Robin Williams, who took his own life in his California home in August 2014.
Through personal interviews with some of Williams' closest friends and family, Robin Williams: Come Inside My Mind paints a picture of a lonely man who used comedy, drugs, and women to hide his sadness.
But according to Williams' half-brother, his loneliness began much earlier than his fame.
"Even though there were three brothers, we were all raised as only children," McLaurin Smith-Williams said of Robin and their other half-brother, Robert Todd Williams.
"To be honest I think that none of us would've turned out the way we did had we grown up together. Growing up by yourself a lot you can either go nuts or you have a very comedic attitude toward it."
Smith-Williams added that there was a strong element of depression in their family as well.
Robin himself acknowledged his lonely childhood, saying, "It was so lonely, there were no friends around. I was an only child, raised by basically the maid for a long time."
As his loneliness didn't fade with his move to California, Williams soon turned to his first vice of choice: Women.
As RadarOnline.com readers know, Williams was married three times, and his first divorce from wife Valerie Velardi was messy and highly publicized. But according to fellow comedian Elayne Boosler, his infidelities had already started when he and Valerie were only dating.
"Robin started pursuing me, I had never been so pursued in my life," Boosler says in an interview. "All the comics were so caring for me and they said 'you know we think he has a girlfriend in San Francisco'…I said, 'do you have a girlfriend in San Francisco? Oh no," was Williams emphatic answer.
But he did have a girlfriend—Valerie Velardi. After Boosler and Williams stopped seeing each other, he married Velardi.
The infidelities didn't stop once Velardi and Williams were married, but Velardi claims she was never as upset as the media made her out to be. "He loved women, loved women. And I got it, I understood it, I wanted him to have that," she says in the documentary. "Except I also wanted him to come home." Ultimately, Williams left Velardi for the nanny she hired to take care of their infant son.
Once Williams landed his breakout TV role in Mork and Mindy, his fame led him to the seedy world of drugs and alcohol addictions.
"In the second year of the show, Robin was doing drugs," said Howard Storm, director of Mork and Mindy. "He was drinking, and coke. It was like jumping into a giant cake, you know?"
Williams' manager Stu Smiley added, "You'd get phone calls that'd say yeah Robin left his car. It was found someplace on Sunset." Oftentimes after long nights of partying, no one could find Robin.
Williams' addictions followed him through his career, and despite multiple stints in rehab he struggled with addiction until his death.
Through his personal turmoil, friends and family maintain Williams was a selfless and giving person, whose greatest flaw was that he perhaps felt too deeply. Williams first son, Zak, remembered how hard it was to watch his father go on a USO tour for the troops when he had been traveling for so much of Zak's life.
"Sharing and watching my father give his time to others, the selfish part of me wanted to keep our relationship to myself and have us just spend time together," Zak said.
Despite it all—the drugs, the affairs, the alcohol, and the relapses—Williams' family and friends maintain it was not his addictions that killed him, but his diagnoses.
Prior to his death Williams was wrongfully diagnosed with Parkinson's disease, which coroners later revealed was actually Lewy body dementia. The diagnosis coincided with extreme depression for Williams, and many friends noted the decrease in energy from a usually spirited character.
Longtime friend and co-star on Mork and Mindy, Pamela Dawber, saw Williams for the first time in nearly two decades not long before his death. "I could just tell that something was really just not right. He wasn't that peppy soul that he had been. His body was stiff and he wasn't super sharp. He looked like a wax figure," she said.
"He came to visit us and just hung out at the house all day, he was shooting that sitcom he was doing. Sort of the sparkle had gone out of his eye," friend Mark Romanek later said.
Williams took his own life by hanging on August 11, 2014.
Robin Williams: Come Inside My Mind premieres on HBO July 16.
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