Robin Williams Called Conan O’Brien After ‘Tonight Show’ Fire
Conan O’Brien revealed it to Eric Idle on a recent episode of the Podcast ‘Conan O’Brien needs a friend’ (via Entertainment weekly) that Robin Williams cold-called him after NBC fired him as host of “The Tonight Show.” O’Brien took over the late night show from Jay Leno in 2009, but he was infamously fired after seven months. The network decided to dump O’Brien and bring back Leno.
“I was fortunate to have had some great interactions with Robin Williams before he passed,” O’Brien said. “One of the most memorable examples for me is when I went through my whole ‘Tonight Show’ debacle. Finally the show is over and I don’t know if I have a career anymore. What am I going to do next? I’m lying on the floor in the living room of my house, and my phone rings, and I answer it and it’s Robin Williams.
“I don’t even know how he got my phone number,” O’Brien continued. “[Williams asked,] “How are you, Chief?” And he said, you know, ‘You’re going to be fine, you’re going to be great.’
Williams then instructed O’Brien to go to the local bicycle shop in Santa Monica, as Williams had a bicycle set up for O’Brien to rent that day. Both gentlemen were avid cyclists at the time.
“And I said, ‘What?'” O’Brien recalled. ‘And he said, ‘No, no, no, just go there. If you drive around, you feel better.’ And I went down and it was a Colnago, which is a really nice bike. And he said, ‘I told him to paint it in all those crazy Irish colours.’ I go there and it’s the ugliest thing – I mean, it was just green and shamrocks and stuff. And he said, ‘You’ll like that bike, chief. Don’t worry about it. ”
It turns out that clearing his head and cycling around Santa Monica is exactly what O’Brien needed at that moment. He added: “I said thank you [Robin] many, many times. I just couldn’t believe he was thinking about me.”
Idle was a close friend of Williams and told O’Brien that such a kind gesture was “typical” of Williams, who died in August 2014. “He would go to great lengths to make you feel better,” Idle added. “That is fantastically typical Robin. That generosity and kindness combined with the man’s humor is not a common combination.”
It was Williams who taught Idle to be generous to fans, the Monty Python comedian admitted. “I’d just tell them to fuck off and they’d laugh and leave, you know?” Idle explained his fan interactions. “And that became a thing. Then I looked at Robin and his empathy, remembering that this is someone’s moment in their life and it’s a big moment in their life because they’ve been waiting, they love you, they want this moment. So if you’re shitty or dismissive, it’s a bad memory.
Listen to the full Podcast episode “Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend” with Idle here.
