The co-star Robin Williams hired out of pity: “I was so bad, and they hated me so much”
When he wasn’t being accused of stealing jokes from his fellow comedians and then paying them off after committing plagiarism, Robin Williams was always regarded as one of Hollywood’s kindest souls.
While there are a handful of stand-up comics who didn’t get to see his gracious side, with a couple of them even blasting the Academy Award-winning legend for ripping them off without asking for their approval first, countless co-stars and colleagues have celebrated Williams for being a borderline saint.
He shut down the production of Mrs Doubtfire so that Sally Field could grieve after her father passed away, protected Nathan Lane during the press tour for The Birdcage when he wasn’t ready to out himself as an openly gay man, and bestowed Conan O’Brien with a new bicycle and words of encouragement when he was fired from The Tonight Show.
Those are just three examples, and there are plenty more, one of which Harvey Fierstein will never forget. An actor, writer, and playwright who won three Tonys in the 1980s for Torch Song Trilogy, he wasn’t a stand-up comedian by trade, although he had dabbled several times during his stage and screen career.
The worst thing for a comic is being unprepared, and when he was told at the last minute that he needed to wing his way through 30 minutes of joke-telling, things didn’t go well. “Lily Tomlin asked me to do a benefit with her and Robin Williams to raise money for this movie they were doing, a documentary,” he told Seth Meyers.
“I thought I just had to introduce them, but when I got there, they said, ‘No, no, no, you have to do a half-hour of stand-up,'” Fierstein continued. “I said, ‘But I ain’t got no half-hour of stand-up.'” Still, being a trooper, he took to the stage anyway, where he promptly went down in a ball of performative flames, leaving him equal parts shaken and embarrassed.
“They had to send guards to get me out of town,” he quipped. “And I was so bad, and they hated me so much, they kept booing. They couldn’t even hear the jokes. They were just booing. And Robin stood in the wings, watching, because as a stand-up comic, he knew what it was like to bomb like that. And I just kept looking over, and he’s laughing. And in the wings, Lily is laughing. And I said, ‘Oh, this is great.'”
It was one of the most embarrassing moments of his professional life, and it wasn’t really his fault, either. Things would have gone much better had anyone bothered to tell Fierstein that he would need to do a 30-minute set, but the silver lining emerged the very next day when he got a phone call from Williams.
Instead of trying to massage his bruised ego or trying to convince him that his routine wasn’t all that bad when Fierstein knew it was awful, he was offered the role of Frank Hillard, the brother of Williams’ Daniel Hillard in Mrs Doubtfire. It was a bolt out of the blue, and one that he was happy to accept.
