Back in the day — that day being the 1970s — Robin Williams had a certain “magic” with workplace behavior that now would be considered far from appropriate.
At least that’s according to Pam Dawber, his costar on the TV series “Mork & Mindy.”
“I had the grossest things done to me — by him. And I never took offense,” Dawber says in a new book excerpt obtained by the Daily Mail. “I mean, I was flashed, humped, bumped, grabbed. I think he probably did it to a lot of people … but it was so much fun.”
The late actor even broke wind on her, she said.
“Somehow he had that magic,” Dawber continued in the excerpt from New York Times journalist Dave Itzkoff’s upcoming biography of Williams due out in May. “If you put it on paper you would be appalled. But somehow he had this guileless little thing that he would do — those sparkly eyes.
“He’d look at you, really playful, like a puppy, all of a sudden. And then he’d grab your [breasts] and then run away. And somehow he could get away with it. It was the Seventies, after all.”
Director Howard Storm said there was “nothing lascivious about it,” at least in his star’s mind. He would grab Dawber’s body parts if, say, he was bored.
“It was just Robin being Robin, and he thought it would be funny. He could get away with murder” on the sitcom, which ran from 1978 to 1982, Storm said.
Witness the time Williams goosed an older woman who was playing a grandma on the show — by putting a cane between her buttocks.
“I’m standing there watching this and I’m thinking, ‘Oh my God’ and I just laughed,” Storm said. “I thought she was going to turn and say: ‘How dare you stick a cane in a woman’s [backside]?’ That sweet old lady.”
Experiencing the early stages of dementia with Lewy bodies, Williams committed suicide in 2014. He was 63.
RELATED STORIES:
Robin Williams’ suicide was followed by a sharp rise in ‘copycat’ deaths
Robin Williams was ‘compulsively, prodigiously inventive’
.galleries:after {
content: ”;
display: block;
background-color: #144A7C;
margin: 16px auto 0;
height: 5px;
width: 100px;
}
.galleries:before {
content: “Entertainment Photos and Video”;
display: block;
font: 700 20px Georgia,serif;
text-align: center;
color: #1e1e1e;
var playlist = ‘chi_ent_movie_trailers’,
layout = ‘autoblurb’,
iu = ‘%2F4011%2Ftrb.chicagotribune%2Fent’;
Watch the latest movie trailers.