When you photograph politicians and celebrities, there is a ritual that sometimes happens at the end. “You get along with someone and they give you their phone number, say ‘Let’s stay in touch,’” said Arthur Grace, who has photographed presidents and entertainers for Time, Newsweek and other publications. Usually, nothing ever comes of the overture. But with Robin Williams, whom Mr. Grace photographed in 1986 for the cover of Newsweek, that exchange of numbers turned out to be the start of a three-decade friendship and a uniquely intimate working relationship.
“There was probably something in the chemistry between us,” Mr. Grace, 69, said from his home in Los Angeles. “And also, I spent a lot of time with him initially. We were together from the first thing in the morning to the club at night, on and off, for a month.”
It helped that Mr. Grace knew something about what it was like to get on stage and try to make people laugh. In the late 1960s, he had tried his hand at stand-up at a friend’s coffeehouse in Cape Cod. For a week, he took his lumps in front of a live audience. It was a learning experience, he said. “I realized that to be funny on a nightly basis, you have to be a professional.” He relinquished any hope of becoming a comedian, but not his interest in the men and women who worked the trade, some of whom – including Mr. Williams – appeared in his 1991 photo book, “Comedians.”
From the first assignment in 1986, their friendship flourished, Mr. Grace said. Mr. Williams was interested in the photographer’s trade and his life, and peppered him with questions about what it was like to photograph Ronald Reagan or about the Cold War. He asked about photographing in East Germany under the eye of the government’s surveillance apparatus.
They went on family vacations together. Mr. Williams insisted on taking Mr. Grace snowboarding (a failure) and throwing Mr. Grace a party to celebrate the photographer’s wedding (a happy success). When Mr. Grace took pictures, it was often at Mr. Williams’s request, not to fulfill an assignment. It was the kind of access that photographers dream about.
Still, Mr. Grace said he never saw the emotional distress that led to Mr. Williams’s suicide in 2014, or the effects of the diffuse Lewy body dementia underlying that distress. In a 2015 interview with People magazine, Mr. Williams’s widow, Susan Schneider Williams, was quoted as saying, “It was not depression that killed Robin.” She added that “depression was one of, let’s call it 50 symptoms, and it was a small one.”
After hearing of his friend’s death, Mr. Grace holed up for six or seven months, avoiding requests from magazines that were seeking his photographs of Mr. Williams. Finally, he said, “I felt an obligation to his fans that loved him, who respected him. Because I was in a unique position – I’d had unlimited access for three decades. What are you going to do?”
Mr. Grace assembled a makeshift office and began sorting through thousands of photographs, including shots he had taken for Mr. Williams’s Christmas cards or during private family outings. The result is his new book, “Robin Williams: A Singular Portrait 1986-2002,” and most of the images are appearing in print for the first time.
“There are certain people who have a face that the camera loves,” Mr. Grace said. “Ronald Reagan looked great all the time. You couldn’t take a bad picture of Reagan. Robin always looked great. The camera liked him. But not like a fashion model. And he was always cooperative unless he didn’t like you.”
His aim with the book, from which the images here are taken, was to convey “the whole picture of what he was like,” Mr. Grace said. “Was he depressed? I don’t know. I know when something was bothering him, something hurt him. He felt it and got angry just like anybody else.”
He added: “No one knew about the Lewy body dementia. The last time I saw him in 2013 or 2014, he was the same old Robin. He came to my house for dinner. He just wanted to be peaceful because the demands on him were hard, and he was over 60 now. He needed more time to be quiet and reflect. But he would switch from that, and the next second he’d be riffing about my dog, and it was so funny you couldn’t eat your food.”
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