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Tim Robbins's scathing takes on Hollywood (in The Player) and Washington (in Bob Roberts) would have gotten him blacklisted forty years ago. Today, they've made him a star.

Timothy Francis Robbins once had a set of exclusive friends. They lived on Houston Street in Greenwich Village, not far from the one-bedroom fifth-floor walk-up he shared with his folksinger father, Gil, his mother, Mary, and his three siblings. Tim slept in a walk-in closet with his older brother, David, so naturally the two were close. One day, Tim asked David if he'd like to meet his secret friends. They were all named for colors. There was Bluey, and his friend Orangey, and another guy, named Pinky.

The two Robbins boys scuffed around the corner and Tim, a second grader, went ahead to the appointed address and knocked on the door where his friends lived. There was no answer. He knocked again. Still, no answer. "I guess they're out," he said with a sly, dimpled grin.

So yes, David Robbins says now. He always knew his brother was different. Twenty-five years later, actor, writer and director Tim Robbins is back in the same neighborhood. He still plays pickup basketball at the small, elbow-to-elbow public court known as the Cage, and points out the location of the thread shop where he failed at a career in spooling. "I don't know," he says. "Lost my focus." He singles out other landmarks of his childhood, many of them refurbished into hip bistros. There was Gerdes Folk City. The Village Gate. The Bitter End. The Other End. We ride down the street where the Gaslight was. His father used to comanage the club, and Tim hung out there on weekends, taking reservations and sitting by the stage, listening to Dave Van Ronk, Cat Stevens and Eric Andersen.

"Wow," he says. "It's a bar. Let's go down there." He asks the driver to stop. He opens the car door, ducks his head out of the backseat, catches the toe of his aircraft carrier-sized Air Jordan on the handle of his umbrella, and the six-foot-four King of Cannes is catapulted forward, landing spread-eagled on the pavement.

"I can never do that on film," he mutters, brushing the shanks of his jeans and examining his palms, flushed pink.

He strides across the street. There is punkish graffiti on the building and, in loopy neon letters, a sign that says "SCRAP BAR." Robbins peers through the security gate. There's a woman behind the bar, tidying up. "I remember just sitting at the end of the stage on sold-out nights," he says softly. "Watching Livingston Taylor, Seals and Crofts. Richard Pryor. My father dragged me out of that one."
"Excuse me," the woman behind the bar calls. "Do you want something?"

"No. We're just looking in here," says Robbins, a trace of sadness in his voice. "Do you remember when this used to be the Gaslight?" he asks.

"Yeah," she drawls, not impressed. "Lawnngg time ago."

"I used to work here," he says with a grin.

"No way. Wadja dew?"

"Answer phones."

"Really, it's a little different, huh?"

"Yeah," he says under his breath. "It's a little weird."

The quaint coffeehouses where poetry and protest once throve now seem a dim memory, as does the high idealism of the 1960s, once the heartbeat of these narrow streets. Tim Robbins can rightly be seen as a keeper of the flame. He has donated time and money to liberal causes, made speeches on college campuses, marched for abortion rights and plowed his earnings into an avant-garde theater troupe he helped found, the Actors' Gang. When he was warned last year that his anti-Desert Storm stance would hurt his career, he went to Washington and protested anyway. Forgoing potentially lucrative offers, he did The Player for the equally rebellious Robert Altman, winning the best-actor nod at this year's Cannes Film Festival. And when Robbins conceived a film about a neofascist folksinger turned senatorial candidate, he spent six years dickering over the script, raised the necessary $4 million from British investors and cajoled a bunch of cohorts into doing cameos. The result, Bob Roberts, brought down the maison at Cannes and has made Robbins, at 33, this year's "next Orson Welles."

Like Citizen Kane, the mock documentary Bob Roberts uses the journalist-as-inquisitor device, echoing the search for the enigmatic demagogue's Rosebud. And like the fictional Bob Roberts, Robbins has suddenly become the Man of the Moment. But the public courtship has been strained. He can be prickly and defensive, is likely to show up for interviews looking like an unmade bed and refuses to be grilled about his personal life: "I think I'd probably put a bullet in my head if I had Robin Leach over to my house."

Queries about his five-year relationship with 46-year-old actress and activist Susan Sarandon (they fell in love on the set of Bull Durham and now have two sons, Jack Henry, 4, and newborn Miles Guthrie) are met with a glacial stare. The pale-blue eyes are hidden behind rimless glasses, and his face has a certain cherubic, unfinished quality. (It's the dimples that betray him: two deep commas framing a generous mouth. For all his earnestness, they're signposts to a well of silliness just beneath the surface.) At times, he seems at odds with his own generation. Inside Tim Robbins, there's a cranky 60-year-old with a bad prostate and a host of complaints: about the press, the military-industrial complex, the Bush administration, Hollywood, the economy, The New York Times, celebrity journalism.

"The worst thing," he says emphatically, "is that condescending attitude of 'Oh, here's another actor who is politically correct,' as if we don't have the right as Americans to say any of this stuff and we should just simply celebrate our celebrity, open up the door to our personal lives, invite everyone in and say 'Isn't this a great living room we're all in, and aren't you glad?'"

What has set him off is a mention of Sarandon, to whom he dedicated his best-actor award, referring to her as "my partner in crime." "There is no rule that I sign in my contract anywhere that says that I have to open my door to my private feelings about someone I care for.. I just don't think it's appropriate. Quite frankly, I get embarrassed for some of these people who do talk so openly about their relationships. I'll say that we're very happy together and we've made a commitment to each other that's going to last a long time. We have great children whom we love very much. Listen, I'm happy. I'm a happy guy. So I just told you my private feelings about how I feel for her."
Here, a sardonic laugh. "Have you ever noticed how many couples who appear together on People magazine break up a couple years afterward? I think there's a real connection."

Surely other interviewers have asked questions more invasive than whether the mother of his children - who appears briefly in Bob Roberts - is an influence on his work?

"Only once. And I got up and walked out."

He makes a noise like a cat scratching at a screen door. "I think what you're getting at is, 'Was she a mentor?' And the answer is 'No.'"

"He can be horrible in an interview," laughs Ron Shelton, who directed Robbins in his breakthrough performance, as the dim-witted minor-league pitcher Ebby Calvin "Nuke" LaLoosh in 1988's Bull Durham. "I've seen him shut down and just be nasty. He loves to come off as laconic, but there's always a nuclear meltdown going on inside him."

Gore Vidal, who also appears in Bob Roberts, calls Robbins "a dangerous man."

"I think I know what he means," says Altman, who refused to replace Robbins after he was told that his star wasn't a big-enough name. "You never can be in his presence and feel you have control over him. He has a way of making me feel a little inadequate. He's very smart and very stubborn. There's a lot of antisocial rebellion about him. He has qualities that could make him the next Orson Welles."

The label is a mixed blessing because Hollywood never cottoned to Welles's brand of filmmaking. Maybe because "it reminds one of how little Hollywood cares to be about anything," says Adam Simon, a director and writing partner of Robbins's.

There's no doubt that Tim Robbins cares. Raised in a progressive atmosphere, he has the social conscience and self-righteous anger of a Sixties student radical. Which is why Bob Roberts is such a personal statement. Born in a commune, the upwardly mobile Bob rejects his hippie parents, runs away to military school, becomes a Wall Street raider and eventually parlays a folksinging career (parodying Bob Dylan protest songs) into a right-wing, dubiously financed, highly manipulative, terminally unethical bid for the Senate. The Rebel Conservative. Tricky Dick with a Martin D-28.

Because Robbins focuses on skewering the Right exclusively, the film comes off as a bit polemical, especially toward the end. But Robbins's timing couldn't be more deadly. With Bush flailing about, Perot wimping out, and the electorate sitting it out, Robbins's take on the political climate is brilliant, hilarious and ultimately grotesque.

The film has already sparked controversy and left many of the media elite squirming in their private-screening seats. Whether it is, as talk-show host John McLaughlin said, a parable of "political skulduggery that was swinging out in all directions" or "a wonderful failure," as George Plimpton pronounced, Bob Roberts is sure to be one of the most-dissected films of the year. ABC news anchor Peter Jennings, reviewing the film for The New York Observer, found it "occasionally heavy-handed" but admitted to a certain degree of squirming. "Others in the audience didn't - and should have," he wrote.

There are no Mr. Smiths in Robbins's Washington, only image-savvy hucksters at the mercy of special-interest groups who, like Charles Foster Kane, have the ethics of a cockroach and attain power on a lifetime layaway with Lucifer himself. Robbins puts Bush in this league.

"George Bush is such an insensitive, arrogant leader," Robbins, in shorts and a baseball cap, says later in the week, over lunch at a moderately fancy midtown restaurant. "He doesn't have a clue as to what the problems out in the world are. This is the man who denied there was a recession for months! You make so many deals, by the time you get to Washington, the only constituency you're serving is the money that got you there, not the people who voted for you. It's business. That's what's so ironic and hypocritical about Bush being outraged about Perot investigating him. They do it every day! It's part of business. 'He's investigating my children. How dare he!' Gee, gosh, George. He's a great grandfather. The father type, protecting his children.
"He's connected to business before ethics. That's how he became who he is and so therefore that's who he is. I don't know how important ethics have been in his life or in his sons' lives."

And this: "All that shit about him being a wimp? Beautifully staged. He's about the farthest thing from being a wimp. This is a spook, you know? There are no wimps in the CIA."

d if he and the president were stuck in an elevator together, what would he say?

Robbins sucks on a Marlboro and exhales. "I'd say, 'I don't buy any of it, George. I don't think you're doing anything productive for this country. Why don't you just not run?'"

"Did he tell you about the Eveready Tour?"

Mary Robbins is one the telephone from her Connecticut home, spilling a few beans about her son. Almost as an afterthought, she mentions the Eveready Tour.

It happened in the summer of 1965. Gil Robbins, songwriter, actor and former singer with the Cumberland Three, later a member of the Highwaymen (Michael Row the Boat Ashore), was hired by Eveready to drive across the country with Mary and their four children, posing as the Cordless Family.

Tim was 7 at the time.

"Well, they rented a station wagon for us, and we had to demonstrate cordless appliances all over the country," Mary recalls. "We did interviews with television and radio and newspapers. There was a press kit, and they took our pictures and paid for all our hotels and everything." The Summer of 1965 Cordless Family Tour included stops in St. Louis, Chicago, Philadelphia and Washington, DC.

"Tim had to hold a battery-operated bank with some sort of arm. We had a ball. It lasted a couple of months. We'd drive in the car, singing Skip to My Lou, and Gil played the guitar."

This fleeting reference to what must have been a seminal pop-culture experience seems to confirm that the Robbins family has a high threshold for the bizarre.

Gil and Mary, who met as music majors at UCLA, married in 1952. When Tim, their youngest child, was barely 2, his father was signed to cut a record in New York City. Gil flew ahead from Los Angeles, while Mary packed up the car and drove the kids - Adele, 7; David, 5; Gabrielle, 4; and Tim - to Manhattan.

"I have the feeling," says Robbins, "the first two years of my life were very quiet. Serene. Birds chirping. And then into our station wagon and driving cross-country. New York City! Raarrgh! This explosion!"

Tim was not a happy-go-lucky toddler.

"He was very sober and pontifical," recalls his father. "We used to call him Timothy Cardinal Robbins. My ex-manager once came in and saw Tim and called him 'the oldest person in the world.'"

Adding to Tim's mystique was the fact that he didn't speak "until a relatively late age," Gil says. "But he didn't have to. He had a form of language, but it was not intelligible. His three siblings translated for him." Tim also, according to his father, had "a wonderful fantasy life." All sorts of characters inhabited "his extra-extra-world. It was Tim's joke."

Short on money, the Robbinses - crammed into a top-floor railroad flat on King Street - were long on talent and ambition. The children shared a love of music and drama, and Gil gave them guitar lessons. But he "didn't encourage any of the kids," he says. "It's a very difficult life. I made sure they saw the backside of it as well as the glitzy side."

With Ian and Sylvia coming to Thanksgiving dinner and Tom Paxton regularly at the kitchen table, the Robbinses entertained an eclectic group of friends who were smart, outspoken, and involved. The theater of the streets provided a colorful backdrop, with a neighbor who flounced down the block in velvet Shakespearean suits and Norman Vincent Peale leading protests in Washington Square Park. A women's house of detention once stood in the neighborhood. "You'd walk down the street and hear these women: 'Help me. I need to get laid so baaaddd. I need somebody to fuck meeee!!' I was, like, 11 years old," says Robbins. "That's probably why they closed it down."

The neighborhood did not make him tough, just disciplined. "I have a different meter as far as who I trust and who I don't," he says, measuring his words. "What is real and what isn't. If it's sometimes too defensive, that's called 'street law.'"

The Robbins children attended parochial school and were taught by nuns. Tim now says the role of altar boy was his first "stage experience," and when it came time to choose a confirmation name, he wanted Illya, for Illya Kuryakin, of The Man From UNCLE. "My parents said I wasn't allowed to. Illya's not a saint."

Gil Robbins continued his career as an actor, appearing in Off-Broadway shows like How to Steal an Election and joining the road company of 1997. The 10-year-old Tim performed with his older sisters in plays for the Theatre for the New City. He directed his first play at the age of 14 and performed satiric political sketches lampooning Watergate figures.

The Robbinses voiced outrage at crimes against democracy. "I suppose it was skepticism as far as politics is concerned," recalls Mary. "I think mistrust of the government was probably a theme." When his older sister Adele was attending Ohio's Antioch University, says Robbins, "one time my mother came into my room, woke me up and said 'I want you to be very proud of your sister. She was just arrested for protesting the Vietnam War.'"

Acting wasn't Robbins's only obsession. He'd wake up at 4 am for hocked practice, and he also became a decent baseball player. He attended the elite, science-oriented Stuyvesant High School, where he got good grades. [Don't let the word "elite" fool you: it's a public school. - Pol] His brother, David, meanwhile, has veered off into heavy-metal music and left for California. Tim was awarded a Regents Scholarship to the State University of New York at Plattsburgh, twenty miles from the Canadian border. Isolated and remote, the college nevertheless had a small theater department, which Tim participated in. Says Gil, "He was a large frog in a small pond. He wasn't learning anything about himself."

But he was learning how to party. He says Plattsburgh had a thriving bacchanalian scene. "I've done hallucinogens, but I don't think it's responsible to talk about this kind of stuff because people read that and think that validates whatever they're doing. I know there are definitely personalities that should not take hallucinogenic drugs.

"I had raucous times in college," he adds. "Slam-dancing, the Sex Pistols. I loved the Clash."

After two years, Robbins left New York and fled to Los Angeles to live with David. Tim went to work waiting tables at Hillcrest Country Club and delivering pizzas in Beverly Hills, and he enrolled in UCLA in the fall of 1979, as a theater major. He graduated two years later.

Along with a few friends, he conceived the Actors' Gang, a Dadaist troupe of performers in clownish whiteface on the order of the Theatre du Soleil crossed with Monty Python. The group eventually attracted such young actors as John Cusack and Fisher Stevens. David Robbins became its musical director. Its motto? "Dare to be stupid."

In 1985, the theater company was getting noticed for its radical productions (Robbins, meanwhile, was playing deranged young men on St. Elsewhere and Hill Street Blues). That same year, Robbins costarred as a young civil-rights activist with Jodie Foster and John Turturro in John Patrick Shanley's Five Corners, which reflected Robbins's idealistic bent and was produced by Forrest Murray, who later produced Bob Roberts. In The Sure Thing and Tapeheads, he got a chance to work onscreen with his friend Cusack (who turns up in Bob Roberts as a member of a TV comedy troupe not unlike the Saturday Night Live gang).

Robbins won't stand by Fraternity Vacation or Howard the Duck (the duck was miscast, he now says), movies he did to fund Actors' Gang productions. "Even the mistakes were fruitful," says Adam Simon, citing Robbins's small role in the mega-hit Top Gun. "Very little motivated him to be as political as the glorification of the military-industrial complex. That actually spurred him to do other things."

Robbins is sanguine about the choices he's made. "It's always been a battle between having to survive and trying to keep some momentum going in your career and doing what is right," he says. "I would take five months off every year to do a play, which drove my agent crazy."

Robbins and Simon wrote three plays together, the last of which, Carnage: A Comedy, eventually made its way to New York's Public Theater, where it was roundly panned by the critics. "There may have been a more amateurish work than Carnage on a professional stage in New York this year," wrote The New York Times's Frank Rich, "but somehow the gods spared me from seeing it. The play doesn't so much preach as condescend. and its arrogance is far harder to take than its routine ineptitude."

Despite this kind of reception, Robbins continued to refine his skills with the Gang, which became a sort of wigged-out Mercury Theater. The group was also a manifestation of Robbins's healthy ego.

"I wouldn't say 'healthy.' 'Enormous' is the word," opines Simon. Still, says David Robbins, Tim "was never into acting to become a star. His motivation was not to be famous."

In the summer of 1987, Ron Shelton was having a hell of a time finding the right actor for the part of pitching phenom Ebby LaLoosh.

"I couldn't cast the part. It required an open soul and an open heart," says the director. "Everyone came in doing the Lords of Flatbush or just stupid. Tim came in, and I thought he sort of occupied his own territory." It is no secret that Orion officials were worried that Robbins wasn't funny enough. In fact, then-studio head Mike Medavoy called Shelton on the set after seeing dailies and ordered him to replace Robbins. Shelton said if Robbins went, he went. "You know something? That same fucking person who did that now takes credit for my success. I'm telling you, man," moans Robbins. But that isn't the only reason Shelton is high on Robbins's list of gutsy directors. On the second day of dailies, one of the film's producers, Mark Berg, evidently confided to Susan Sarandon that she looked bad in her close-ups.

The next day, when Berg walked into the dailies, Shelton jumped up and went after him. "I strangled the guy," Shelton says. "He was a maniac," Robbins remembers. "Before I knew it, Ron has this guy pinned up against the wall, saying 'You ever talk to my actors again, I'll kick your fucking ass.'" Shelton dragged Berg down the hall, threw him in an office, shut the door and continued his tirade for another twenty minutes. "I was gonna kill him," he says.

"He's really a wonderful man," Robbins says of Shelton.

What Shelton didn't know was that Robbins and Sarandon were falling in love. "They were obviously attracted to each other," recalls costar Kevin Costner, who remains friendly with Robbins. "Look, if you want to know about Tim, look at the woman he's with. Susan's a world-class woman. You know he has quality."

Sarandon, thirteen years Robbins's senior, had been married to actor Chris Sarandon; after divorcing him, she was linked with Christopher Walken, lived with Louis Malle and eventually had a daughter, Eva, with Italian director Franco Amurri. She was nurturing, smart and politically involved. Against the advice of friends, she traveled to Nicaragua, in 1984, at the behest of MADRE, a group that offers aid to families in war-torn countries. Here was a woman after Robbins's own heart.

"They do share a lot of beliefs and ideas," says brother David. "And they both have the same amount of guilt."

"He called me from the set of Bull Durham," remembers Simon. "He seemed like a teenager. I'd never heard him like that." Robbins, who says he had been "for the most part monogamous, but with short relationships," fell hard. "He had cut quite a dashing figure in LA," says Simon. "The women I knew he was involved with were quite intelligent and pretty political." But this was different. "He felt very vulnerable. There was still some question of whether Susan would get back together with Franco. For God's sakes, he is Italian! But it never did seem to be a problem."

The two went their separate ways after the film ended, Robbins to London to star in Erik the Viking and Sarandon back to New York. Several months later, Mary Robbins got an overseas phone call from her son. He was going to be a father.

"We were shocked! But you could tell he was in love," she recollects. "It was the first time that it really had some substance."

After the baby was born, in the spring of 1989, Simon spoke to the couple by phone. "I said, 'Who does he look like?' 'He looks like Tim,' they said. 'I don't trust that,' I said. 'Every baby looks like Tim.'"

By the following year, Robbins's career was picking up. He was tapped for Cadillac Man, opposite Robin Williams, and then took the starring role of a tormented Vietnam vet in Adrian Lyne's Jacob's Ladder. Sarandon went to St. Louis, to film White Palace.

But making the transition from character actor to leading man was proving difficult. Jacob's Ladder had left Robbins physically drained, and he was searching for his next role, always with an eye on getting financing for Bob Roberts.

By the time Altman started casting The Player, a wicked Hollywood satire centering around morally bankrupt studio executive Griffin Mill, Robbins's was the first name on his list. "I really stuck with him because of his theater work, none of which I'd even seen. But just the fact that he cared so much about it," says Altman.

Robbins was available, having backed out of a big-budget production. The Player became the most-talked-about ensemble piece in years, rejuvenating Altman's career and making Robbins - whose improvisational skills were finally put to use - a hot property.

The teaming of Altman and Robbins was crucial to the fate of Bob Roberts. After-hours, the actor rewrote the original script and remade Bob from a slick businessman who becomes politically involved into the candidate. David and Tim worked on the score, coming up with new "protest" songs for the right-wing politician, and Tim, after six years of being turned down by everyone in sight, found a British company, Working Title, willing to put up the $4 million.

Like Altman, Robbins operated at the edge of the mainstream and was determined to succeed or fail on his own terms. Immediately following The Player, he went into a sort of ad hoc preproduction, hiring Altman's cameraman, Jean Lapine, and his assistant director, Allan Nicholls, and a nonunion production manager. Several actors from The Player were invited to appear in Bob Roberts, and did so as a favor to Robbins. The performers - including Alan Rickman, Peter Gallagher, James Spader, Fisher Stevens, Fred Ward, Pamela Reed and Susan Sarandon - were paid scale. Sarandon's old friend Gore Vidal was enlisted to play the incumbent senator, Brickley Paiste, an inspired bit of casting.

Vidal, who first met Sarandon in 1972, when she appeared in his Broadway play An Evening With Richard Nixon, was in Italy when he received a copy of the script. He immediately signed on. "I love Susan, and I like the politics," he says from his home in Italy. "It was a great lark." Although he wasn't as close to Robbins, he had enough of a sense of the actor to know he was "dangerous": "Anybody who shows how the system works is very vulnerable. Any dissident voice is considered dangerous." Vidal calls Sarandon "a good partner" for Robbins. "They're sort of like Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt."

Bob Roberts was a nonunion film (though the cast was paid union wages). Robbins was not required, nor did he elect, to join the Directors Guild of America.

"He's not a member of an outdated organization," says Forrest Murray. "This thing was done very independently."

Says Robbins, "It was very high-pressure for me. I tried to keep it away from the other actors so they didn't know what was happening. I'd go to the office after shooting twelve hours a day and rewrite the next day's scenes. See the dailies, get three hours of sleep and then be back with total energy. Jesus, motivating the troops: It was like being the camp counselor, and it was great. It was like an Outward Bound experience. If you fall, everyone falls with you.

"On every project I've ever done, I've had a moment where I've wanted to quit," he continues. "There's always a moment that's incredibly dark where I feel that it's not worth it and that I shouldn't spend any more time on this because it's only going to lead to more anguish and grief."

But once you get beyond that moment, terms like "boy genius" start getting tossed around. "I was quite shocked when I saw [Bob Roberts]," marvels Altman. "I thought the level of filmmaking was so interesting and daring and gutsy. I can't see the seams in it."

Robbins was pleased by the film's reception at Cannes but says "it's a strange time." Everyone keeps telling him how happy he should be, and you want to believe him when he says he's a happy guy, but somehow he seems to be smiling less and less. Altman feels Robbins is suffering from "mixed emotions. Before, he was known as the guy living with Susan Sarandon. Next year, it's going to be Susan Sarandon is living with Tim Robbins. On one hand, he likes that. But I don't think he wants to become competitive with her. I think there's a state of confusion. There's a sense of drive inside him that's really strong. He really wants the golden apple."

And he also wants a private life. There are a few trappings of success - a loft in Manhattan, a country home in Westchester County - but he's making less money than he did three years ago. He is committed to appearing in Altman's next feature, LA Short Cuts.

On a balmy late-summer day in the Village, he is a goofy sight, loping down the sidewalk, his hair sticking out of his baseball cap. Suddenly, we are in front of 21 1/2 King Street. He points to the upper floor, the Robbinses' old apartment, opens the outside door and steps inside the vestibule. "GILBERT L. ROBBINS" is still on the ancient-looking mailbox, though it's been six years since his parents lived there. The door to the building, missing a glass pane, has been patched with a board and painted over. Robbins chuckles to himself, "I broke that window with my hockey puck. Took a wrist shot from across the sidewalk. It was a pretty good wrist shot. He still hasn't replaced it."