Robin Williams, Former Trident Busboy, Dies By The Sea

One of the Marin County local legends that is authentic is that Robin Williams worked as a busboy at Sausalito's famed restaurant, the Trident, in the late 1960s. The Trident was the hangout for the likes of Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Peter, Paul and Mary and The Byrds. Janis Joplin, Jerry Garcia, Joan Baez, Clint Eastwood, Bill Cosby, the Smothers Brothers and rock promoter Bill Graham hung out there.

Moviegoers can see the inside decor of The Trident in a scene in the Woody Allen film, Play it Again, Sam (1972). The Trident, 558 Bridgeway, closed in 1980, but opened again as the Trident in 2012.

(I lived in San Francisco in 1974-1975, but spent weeks in Marin County, often staying specifically in the Tiburon group home I directed. I also ate at The Trident with my Sausalito girlfriend. It was interesting times. The first movie I saw when I moved to the Bay Area was Play It Again, Sam, and as the film unfolds, I discovered I was sitting in the very theater where the motion picture begins. Talk about synchronicity.)

The Trident, reports Our Sausalito, is "one of Sausalito's best-known big-view extravaganza restaurants at the heart of downtown, arguably one of the two most fabled restaurant buildings in town." The story of Robin Williams working there is a local true story.

In the 1960s the old Trident Restaurant was owned by the Kingston Trio, and it has been a long-time destination for musicians recording at local studios like The Record Plant. Janis Joplin had her own table here (at the far right on the window as you face the Bay), and the Stones were feted here by Bill Graham after a concert in 1974. A teen-aged Robin Williams worked here as a busboy in the late 1960s. Source.

On August 11, 2014, comedic actor Robin Williams was discovered dead at his northern California home, law enforcement officials said. Williams was 63.

Robin Williams home

95 St Thomas Way

Tiburon, CA 94920 ‎

Investigators suspect "the death to be a suicide due to asphyxia," according to a statement from the Marin County, California, sheriff's office. Marin County authorities are reporting it as death by hanging.

Williams' body was found inside his home in Tiburon, California.

My Mexican correspondent, Red Pill Junkie reminds me that "Tiburón means 'shark' in Spanish. So there's a bit of a 'Neptunian' connection there. Interestingly enough, Discovery Channel's Shark Week started last Sunday."

Robin's favorite animal wasn't the shark, but dolphins -- the "clowns of the ocean'."

Tiburon is in Marin County. Marin is from Latin Marinus, from marinus (“of or pertaining to the sea”).

I recently penned a blog posting entitled "The Paradise Syndrome: Celebrity Suicides," noting again the link to the "Hemingway Curse." Robin Williams and Ernest Hemingway shared the same birthday - July 21st. (H/T to TravisV for the birthday heads up.)

Needless to say, I never would have imagined that looking into the suicide of Robin Williams I would discover the Trident syncs of late would strike to the heart of this news. Sad. Frightening. And impossible to ignore.

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As I note in my book The Copycat Effect, Robin Williams' powerful movie role in The Fisher King figures in two mass shootings that involve elements of murder-suicides.

The copycat effect, regarding the case of San Ysidro McDonald's Massacre and the Luby's Cafeteria Massacre, has been discovered to be rather apparent and clear.

On October 16, 1991, George Hennard drove a 1987 Ford Ranger pickup truck into Killeen, Bell County, Texas’ Luby's Cafeteria. He jumped out and screamed: “This is what Bell County has done to me!”

Hennard shouted this while opening fire with a Glock 17 and then a Ruger P89, shooting to death 23 people, and finally killing himself with a shot to his head. At the time, this was the worst mass murder in US history, only to be surpassed by the Virginia Tech shootings of April 16, 2007.

On Hennard's dead body police found a ticket for The Fisher King, a 1991 Robin Williams movie. The film stars Jeff Bridges as a shock radio DJ Jack Lucas, who has a fan that takes the character Lucas's rants literally and goes to a restaurant with a gun, murdering guiltless diners. The motion picture’s massacre resembles the one carried out by Hennard.

Before George Hennard crashed his truck into Luby's cafeteria in Killeen, Texas, on October 16, 1991, he had also watched a documentary (on videotape) at his home about a similar mass murderer, James Huberty, who killed 21 people at the San Ysidro California McDonald's on July 18, 1984. Huberty was shot to death by a SWAT sniper, in a "suicide by cop" situation. Some reports indicate Hennard viewed the Huberty tape several times.

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Still in another movie role, Robin Williams as Peter Pan in Hook syncs with another underlying theme to be found within the Twilight Language. See here, here and in "Peter Pan/Hook Deaths" from 2010, for examples.

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Need help? In the U.S., call 1-800-273-8255

National Suicide Prevention Lifeline

The current Trident sync to Robin Williams is rather unbelievable, yet there it is.

These are Trident Times...at Twilight Language, recent selections are:

Robin Williams, Former Trident Busboy, Dies By The Sea

Director Zack Snyder Defends Aquaman Due to His...Trident

Several Sites Are Studying Trident Syncs

Ancient Trident Found in Indian Archaeological Dig

Two Venices, Three Deaths

Death In Lightning Strike Off Venice Beach

Tripoli, Tridents, Three Cities, Mermaids, Navy Seals, and Jonah

More Tridents: Medak & Air Disasters

GE 222 Crashes Into Xixi Buildings

Flight MH17: Twilight Tridents and Noteworthy Numbers

Hemingway Curse

What is the Hemingway Curse?


Following is an excerpt from The Copycat Effect:

The copycat effect even affects celebrity families. Learned behavior and the modeling power of the copycat effect may be a stronger link than even biological predeterminism. The so-called "Hemingway Curse" is one such example. Pulitzer Prize and Nobel Prize winner Ernest Hemingway wrote literary masterpieces. His father and two siblings died by suicide, and the rumors of a Hemingway Curse has become an urban legend. 

One allegorical story is told of Hemingway's mother baking a cake for him on his 21st birthday, and putting the gun his father used to kill himself in the middle of the cake. The story was repeated in Time Magazine. But other sources note that Hemingway's father died by suicide by gunshot when Hemingway was 26, and it was Hemingway who asked for the gun his father had used from his brother. 

Hemingway, nevertheless, decided to use the same basic method, death by shotgun, and killed himself on July 2, 1961. His granddaughter actress and singer Margaux Hemingway was only 41 years old when she died by suicide near the anniversary of her grandfather's suicide 35 years earlier. She was found on July 1, 1996, having overdosed on prescription drugs. Ernest and Margaux Hemingway are both interred in the same Ketchum Cemetery at Ketchum, Idaho. 

Her sister, Mariel Hemingway was interviewed by CNN News reporter Connie Chung on January 17, 2003. When Chung asked Mariel Hemingway about the "Hemingway Curse," she responded: "I just think that it's an easy way for the media to go -- it's just such a hook, the Hemingway curse and suicide and this, that, and the other thing. That's not my life." 

The copycat effect may even play a role in the so-called "Paradise Syndrome." Reuters reporter Rachel Noeman explained the term in a 1996 news story: "They inherit celebrity names, appear to have it all and live apparently gilded lives, but what may at first seem like paradise can end in pain or even tragedy." 

Noeman was reporting on the suicide death of Amschel Rothschild, 41-year-old chairman of Rothschild Asset Management and great-great-great-grandson of Nathan Meyer Rothschild -- who established in 1804 the merchant bank in the City of London that still bears his name. He hanged himself in a Paris hotel room ten days after Margaux Hemingway, who also was 41, was found dead. 

Noeman was making the link between the two, in terms of the "Paradise Syndrome." While the modeling of a suicide on those most like the suicide victim is most often discussed in terms of people basing their suicide on that of a celebrity, descendants of celebrities may actually be the most vulnerable for the copycat effect. Amschel Rothschild’s widow Anita Rothschild repeated what is often said in the wake of such deaths, that it was “totally unexpected,” and the family was "shocked and devastated."

Robert Roper wrote in Obit Magazine in 2011 of the risk factors leading to Ernest Hemingway's suicide, putting the final act in the broader context of the famed writer's six major brain traumas (resulting in concussions?), his alcoholism, the prescription drugs, and some questionable mental health treatments (including electroconvulsive therapy).

Roper very directly talked about Hemingway's dance with suicide:

He often talked about suicide.  The times just after finishing a book were some of the worst for him.  Even in his robust roaring 20s, world-famous as an author already, he talked often about having night terrors, about feeling “contemptible,” about being afraid he was losing control – “you lie all night half funny in the head and pray and pray and pray you won’t go crazy.”  In a love letter to the woman who would become his second wife, he wrote, “I think all the time I want to die.”  A love letter!  The inner Hemingway was agonized, was ever on the cross.

Roper also extends the number of people directly related to Ernest who died by suicide:

In 1928 his father had killed himself.  Hemingway’s mother sent him the revolver that his father had used – it was a Smith & Wesson his grandfather had carried in the Civil War.  Hemingway was said to cherish the gun but to have been deeply disturbed by his mother’s gesture.
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Of his five brothers and sisters, three died by their own hand, a fourth probably also.  One of his sons, Gregory, was drug-addicted and deeply troubled and died in jail.  One of his granddaughters, Margaux Hemingway, the actress, also was an addict and an early suicide.

Therefore, looking at those in Ernest Hemingway's orbit, who did die by suicide?


Ernest Hemingway: born July 21, 1899,  339 N. Oak Park Avenue, Oak Park, Illinois; 61, died by suicide by W. & C. Scott & Son shotgun, July 2, 1961, Ketchum, Idaho.

Directly related to Ernest Hemingway

Ernest Hall (Ernest's grandfather): attempted suicide with a Civil War-era .32 caliber pistol but lived because his son-in-law, Clarence, Ernest's father, had removed the bullets.

Clarence Edmonds Hemingway (Ernest's father): born September 4, 1871, Oak Park, Illinois; 57, died by suicide by his own father's Civil War Smith and Wesson .32 revolver, December 6, 1928, Oak Park, Illinois.

Ursula Hemingway Jepson (Ernest's sister): born April 29, 1902; died by suicide by drug overdose, October 30, 1966.

Leicester Hemingway (Ernest's brother): born April 1, 1915, Oak Park, Illinois; 67, died by suicide by a borrowed .22 pistol, September 13, 1982, Miami Beach, Florida. 

Which ones of Ernest's other siblings (Madalaine, Marceline, Carol) died by suicide? 

Margeux Hemingway (Ernest's granddaughter): born February 16, 1955, Portland, Oregon; 41, died by suicide by drug overdose of phenobarbital, July 1, 1996, Santa Monica, California.

Others

Ernest's first wife, Hadley Richardson's father James Richardson, Jr., died by suicide in 1903.
Julius Mordecai Pincas, known as Pascin (pronounced pass-keen), Jules Pascin, or the "Prince of Montparnasse," born on March 31, 1885, in Bulgaria, was strongly identified with the Modernist movement and the artistic circles of Montparnasse - and Hemingway who features him in A Moveable Feast; died by suicide from cutting wrists and hanging, at age 45, on June 5, 1930, at Montmartre, Paris, France.

Ernest's third wife, Martha Gellhorn, died by suicide by drug overdose on February 15, 1998, in London.


There are others. I just haven't discovered or been made aware of them yet.


For a review of the 2012 movie Hemingway & Gellhorn, click here.

by Loren Coleman ©2004, 2007, 2012.