Robertson’s Insomnia: Sex, Drugs, and Scorsese

If you think you know all about Martin Scorsese, the acclaimed film director, guess again.

You can’t understand the whole story till you’ve read a new bombshell called Insomnia.

The revelations about Scorsese, who has helmed such iconic New York-centric films as “Taxi Driver,” “After Hours,” and “Goodfellas,” are among the features of Insomnia, the second (and, regrettably, last) memoir to come to us from Robbie Robertson, the songwriter, guitarist, and savant of The Band. The book is due to hit the shelves this month.

In fact, it’s hard to imagine a book that is more fun to read about life in the fast lane of Hollywood. But reality sets in eventually. The drugs lose their luster and the fun ends.

“We went through a wild, creative, mad time together that sent us into a dark tunnel, trying to find the light,” Robertson wrote.

At the center of Robertson’s saga is the close friendship and collaboration that he shared in the late 1970s with the Oscar-winning Scorsese. They created The Last Waltz, the groundbreaking film of The Band’s final concert with their original lineup, on Thanksgiving night of 1976.

Robertson and Scorsese worked together on many excellent movies, such as Gangs of New York, The Irishman, and Killers of the Flower Moon, and remained the best of friends up until Robertson’s death from cancer in 2023.

And what a wild, cocaine-plastered ride it was from 1977 to 1979! Robertson, who proved to be as gifted a prose writer as he was a songwriter, does not leave much to the imagination as he takes loads of cocaine and lives the life of a Hollywood playboy while he and his wife were separated. He even hit on Sophia Loren!

As Robertson wrote: “Marty and I were becoming some kind of whacked-out new version of The Odd Couple. But I’ll be damned if I didn’t kind of like it.”

Much of Insomnia deals with Robertson’s dueling attitudes: carrying on like the president of the wildest frat house on the campus while missing his old, normal life with his wife, Dominique, and their three young children.

After The Last Waltz

When Robertson needed a place to live, after his wife ordered him to leave their Malibu home, Scorsese took him in, and the frivolity soon ensued.

All good things come to an end. Robertson writes poignantly of how devastated he was when Scorsese, who suffered from asthma, ultimately wound up hospitalized from all of the partying.

Something for Everyone

There is something for everyone to savor in Insomnia. For movie mavens who admire Scorsese, Robertson provides insights into the brilliant director’s creative process. The same is true when it comes to assessing how Robertson made music.

For me, a huge fan of Robertson’s work with The Band, I found his story to be the most intriguing portion of the book. Robertson, whose mother was Mohawk and father was a Jewish gambler, left his hometown of Toronto when he was 16 years old to play rock and roll on the rockabilly circuit in the southern USA. Eventually, his loud and bluesy band hooked up with Bob Dylan, when Dylan was going electric in 1965.

In 1968, The Band released its first album, the landmark Music From Big Pink, which combined country, mountain echoes and rhythm and blues to inspire such icons as Eric Clapton and George Harrison to re-think their approach to making rock and roll music.

Searching for Mentors

Insomnia underscores Robertson’s lifelong search for mentors as big brothers and father figures

Robertson’s father died before his first birthday, and he had no brothers. His life, it seemed to me, was a quest to find dominant male figures, such as his self-described brother in The Band, Levon Helm, the manager Albert Grossman, Bob Dylan, entertainment mogul David Geffen, and finally, Scorsese. Insomnia is partly Robertson’s engrossing search for role models.

After Robertson’s Death

Since Robertson died before the book came out, Insomnia has had an unorthodox journey to publication.

Robertson’s longtime manager, the ever-resourceful Jared Levine, told me that Robertson had finished the book before his death.

Still, the challenge was to put together his final draft into a cohesive book.

Levine and the editing staff at Crown—which had also published Testimony, Robertson’s first book, in 2016–wanted to be true to Robertson’s vision.

As it turned out, Robertson went back to his family (wife Dominique wrote a moving afterword), and Scorsese left the hospital, healthy enough to direct the masterpiece Raging Bull.

Insomnia, ultimately, is a story of Hollywood at its most fun-filled and unhinged. It shows the hard work and sheer joy of creating a memorable movie. It is also a cautionary tale about the perils of excess.