Robin

by Dave Itzkoff

  The TV critic Tom Shales, who attended one of the shows in person, wrote, “If the HBO cameras only capture a modicum, a vestige or a semblance of the actual performance, it’s still likely to be a night in comedy Mecca. Watching Robin Williams do his phenomenal and incomparable act is like riding to the moon in a Waring blender. You leave the show spent and exhausted and wonder what poor Robin must feel like.”

  It had been a grueling tour and a punishing final set of shows, but Robin had taken some encouragement from Marsha Garces, who was typically the last person he would see each night before going out onstage, and, as was her custom, gave him a hug and a message of affirmation before the curtain went up at the Met. “I told him, ‘You can do it. You’re okay. I love you’—which is what I say to my friends all the time,” she explained. For Robin, the inspiration that her words provided could not have come at a better, more necessary time. “Marsha used to tell me I was a good person, and finally I believed it,” he said.

  Over the course of these shows, Marsha said, “Robin was complaining, in a joking way, about the bimbettes who knocked on his door at the hotel. I asked him, ‘Why are you so surprised? If I weren’t working with you and I didn’t know how screwed up you are, I’d be interested in you!’ And he said that gave him a feeling that he could be really loved.”

  Robin could surely use the moral support. At the end of the year, he and Valerie reached a private agreement, handled out of court, that would allow them to split custody of Zak and live separately from each other. The longest loving relationship of his adult life was likely over, and it was time to pick himself up and begin again. What else could he do except say “Fuck it” and move on to the next stage of his life?

  10

  GOOOOOOOOD MORNING

  Back when he could still allow himself to contemplate passion projects—the sort of work he did not because it would pay him particularly well or because it would advance his career in some strategic way but simply because it was what he wanted to do—Robin had committed to starring in a film adaptation of Saul Bellow’s Seize the Day. In that 1956 novel, Bellow chronicled the unraveling of Tommy Wilhelm, a failed actor turned salesman who has lost his wife, his family, and his job and over the course of a dire day in New York is subsequently parted from his money, his sense of purpose, and his sanity.

  The film was made for a meager $1.6 million, with a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, and could not afford to halt filming even when the city was hit by a hurricane. But it offered Robin an opportunity to pour his heart and soul into the Wilhelm character, to work with the director Fielder Cook and costars like Jerry Stiller and Joseph Wiseman. Wiseman played Wilhelm’s wealthy, overbearing father, who chides him for having given up college to pursue his Hollywood pipe dream and demeans him for not having chosen a career that would make him financially secure.

  “You want to be proud?” the father snarls at him in one brutal confrontation. “Have enough money in your checking account.… Let me tell you something, Wilky. You know what you are in this world without money? Nothing. Absolutely nothing.”

  When his father demands to know what he wants from him, Robin, as Wilhelm, breaks down: “What do I want from you?” he says, nearly in tears. “Help. Affection. When you see me suffering, doing all this.… Please, Pop.”

  Acknowledging that his father will surely die before he does, he says soberly, “It isn’t fair, is it sir? The better of us, the more useful, the more admired is going to leave this world first.”

  For Robin—who felt an obvious kinship with Tommy Wilhelm and his existential crisis—Seize the Day provided an emotional cleansing, a place to work out unresolved conflicts with his own father. “I think there’s that incredible feeling that, when you tap into those things, you can’t get down any further,” he said. “You really appreciate life when you finish a really cathartic scene where you examine a relationship and look at your own life. My own father, I’d go home and call him and say, ‘Dad, I love you. Let’s play football.’”

  The film was meant to be shown on PBS, though throughout 1986 there were sporadic efforts to show Seize the Day at film festivals and bring it to distribution marketplaces in the hope that it might get a proper theatrical release in the United States. That never occurred, in part because its shoestring budget and dated production values were evident in every weather-beaten frame, and in part because of abiding concerns that Robin could no longer open a movie. When Seize the Day made its PBS debut in April 1987, the New York Times called it “a miscasting fiasco.” From its very first scene, Robin was “a man falling apart, whimpering pathetically when not screwing up his face into odd contortions. There is no disintegration. He is virtually certifiable from the outset. There is no drama. Tommy is a foregone conclusion.”

  By now, Robin had come to his own conclusion that he no longer ranked among those actors who could command their choice of projects. He had recently learned, after a series of auditions, that he had lost out on a costarring role in the buddy comedy caper Midnight Run with Robert De Niro; the part had instead gone to Charles Grodin. He was certain he had further to fall, and he was making his peace with what came next. “You simply slip down the comedy food chain, that list of people who get scripts,” he said. “It exists. From the top there’s Eddie Murphy and Bill [Murray] and Steve [Martin]. I guess on the next level there’s Tom Hanks, myself, John Candy—there’s a lot of us.” And if he were to sink any further, he said, “You have to work your way back up again or do character parts—or you fall back and punt.”

  He had been a hot commodity once. “That was nice,” he said. “But this is nice, too, not being hot. Now I prefer the quiet.”

  And then, a project that had taken years to put together for Robin was about to come to fruition. Starting in 1979, Adrian Cronauer, a veteran of the US Air Force, had been trying to sell a TV sitcom about his experiences as a disc jockey on the Armed Forces Radio morning program Dawn Buster, which he had hosted in Vietnam in the mid-1960s. Imagining a hybrid of M*A*S*H and WKRP in Cincinnati, Cronauer sought to depict a version of Saigon, and of the Vietnam War, before they both went utterly to hell.

  “When I got there, Saigon was still a sleepy little French colonial town, but by the time I left, it was a nightmare,” Cronauer said. “It was this massive influx of troops and equipment and money. By the time I left, the economy was in ruins. The traffic was unmanageable. The black market was flourishing. But it was an interesting experience to see all this happen within one year’s time.”

  A later treatment by Cronauer, written as a TV movie, had been optioned by Robin’s manager Larry Brezner, who essentially stripped it for parts and had it reassembled to better suit the needs of his client. Mitch Markowitz, the screenwriter assigned to rework Cronauer’s premise and turn it into a feature film for Robin, said he was given little in the way of direction. “There wasn’t really very much about this idea,” said Markowitz, who had previously written for M*A*S*H and other sitcoms. “I remember telling Larry, I said, ‘I really can’t get hemmed into some story here that you have. I need to know all your preconceptions about this thing, just tell me what you absolutely need to have. And I will go and I’ll write a script.’ He said, ‘Okay.’ He said, ‘Disc jockey, Vietnam, and a girl. And a romantic thing with a girl. And a brother—her brother is like, a Viet Cong, something like that.’ I said, ‘I have it.’”

  In Markowitz’s script for Good Morning, Vietnam, a fictional version of Cronauer arrives in Saigon. At his first appearance, as he deplanes from a flight from Greece, he is described as “dazed,” with “a crazed, anesthesia-oriented smile, and wears mirrored sunglasses, sandals, a jacket with a name tag that reads, ‘Hiya,’ a scarf knitted by a grandmother, not necessarily his, Jamaican flour sack pants, a USAF hat, and a Greek peasant shirt stained with juices of many lands.” In what was to have been his first scripted line of dialogue, after gazing up at the sun and seeing that he and everyone around him is sweating, he would toss aside
his scarf and say, “Guess I won’t be needing this.”

  The rowdy but likable Cronauer character upends the monotonous military radio station where he has been posted and falls in love with a Saigon native, only to learn that her brother is a Viet Cong operative, a development that forces Cronauer to resign his position and take an honorable discharge. The screenplay included several scenes that would show the character in his element at his DJ booth, spinning records and spouting comic commentary for his listeners. These scenes would presumably be showcases for Robin’s improvisatory talents, even if they did not accurately reflect the real Cronauer, a mellifluous and even-tempered broadcaster who was not exactly a desperado of the airwaves.

  “He’s a very straight guy,” Robin said of Cronauer. “He looks like Judge Bork. In real life he never did anything outrageous. He did witness a bombing in Saigon. He wanted to report it—he was overruled, but he said okay. He didn’t want to buck the system, because you can get court-martialed for that shit. So, yes, we took some dramatic license.

  “But he did play rock & roll, he did do characters to introduce standard army announcements, and ‘Goooood morning, Vietnam’ really was his signature line,” Robin explained. “He learned whenever soldiers in the field heard his sign-on line, they’d shout back at their radios, ‘Gehhhhht fucked, Cronauer!’”

  Good Morning, Vietnam had been set up at Paramount, but executives there wanted it to be a comedy from beginning to end, without any dramatic elements or political commentary. So it was shopped from studio to studio before it landed at Disney, where it was picked up by Jeffrey Katzenberg, a former Paramount executive, who believed it had potential for the company’s new adult-oriented Touchstone Pictures division.

  The director Barry Levinson was finishing his film Tin Men for Touchstone when he was offered Good Morning, Vietnam as his next project. Levinson had once been a stand-up and improv comic himself, and he was an early member of the Comedy Store Players in the years before Robin joined the ensemble. He and Robin also shared the services of Michael Ovitz, the powerful cofounder of Creative Artists Agency, who packaged their movies and negotiated their paychecks. (The Rollins Joffe team would continue to manage Robin’s day-to-day career and develop new material for him.) Though he and Robin had not previously crossed paths, Levinson could easily imagine him dominating the screen with his voice and his imagination.

  “My intention was to play around with the radio,” Levinson said. “This is one of the things he could be so great at, even though he’s never done it in a movie, but he’s got the perfect persona for it.”

  Levinson knew that this was not necessarily how the rest of the industry regarded Robin. “At that moment in time—and I know this is going to sound crazy—but that’s the nature of the business,” he said. “It was: ‘He has these movies. They didn’t do well. It would be crazy to put Robin Williams in the movie.’ That’s what I would hear. ‘Why would you do a movie with Robin Williams? That doesn’t work. What’s wrong with you?’ I’d hear that a lot.”

  “And sometimes you’ve got to say, all right, I hear you,” Levinson continued. “But I just can’t buy into that. You say, ‘This is an immensely talented person. We’ve just got to find a way to make him really work for what we’re going to do.’”

  As a proof of concept for what the film would be, and a way for Robin to try out the Cronauer role before there was no turning back, he and Levinson shot some test footage in Los Angeles, with the aim that it could be used as an early trailer if they were satisfied with the results. The sequence opens on a black screen, and a title card that reads:

  VIETNAM 1965

  Every morning military D.J. Adrian Cronauer went on-the-air.

  His mission:

  To send the troops to work

  laughing.

  We first hear the hand claps and high-pitched refrain of the Four Seasons’ “Walk Like a Man,” followed by Robin’s boisterous voice: “Goooood morning, Vietnam! That was a little song by Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons, ‘Walk Like a Man.’ Thank you, Frankie. [responding to himself in a high-pitched voice] ‘Thank you, Adrian.’ Wow, walk like a man, sing like a girl. An incredible thing to do. Hey, we’re coming at you right now, it’s 0600. Woo hoo. Not a bad time of day if you’re a chicken. Weather today: Hot. Tonight: Hot. Tomorrow: Hot. Guess what? Big surprise tomorrow night: Hot.”

  The picture fades in on a darkened studio, where the camera circles around one corner and then another to find Robin alone at his broadcast booth, wearing a headset and a US Air Force jacket bearing a name tag that reads CRONAUER, while a small American flag sits on his console.

  Robin runs through a few more riffs—“Also, we have an interesting coincidence here. Ho Chi Minh. Colonel Sanders. Possibly the same person? Whoa. You be the judge. The lines are open. Call in.”—and offers his impression of Ethel Merman singing “Silent Night” before the brief scene closes with a recording of Aretha Franklin’s “Respect.”

  The trailer that Levinson quickly cut and rushed into theaters that summer of 1987, even before principal photography had begun on the movie, added one final title card in blue military-style lettering on a black background:

  ROBIN WILLIAMS

  GOOD MORNING

  VIETNAM

  Then, in smaller white letters, an ambitious promise: COMING THIS CHRISTMAS.

  This was an aggressive timetable for a movie that did not yet exist, even one that had been budgeted at just $14 million and would be filmed over a span of about three and a half months, but Levinson had total confidence in Robin as soon as he saw him perform this scene. “Right then and there, it occurred to me that he’s going to be fine,” he said.

  That summer, Robin and the production team began filming Good Morning, Vietnam in Bangkok, which would stand in for Saigon. Summer temperatures there could reach 110 degrees or higher, and bicycle traffic shared the streets with impromptu military processionals. Robin found himself fascinated with Bangkok’s enduring and ageless way of life, the ornate Buddhist temples that seemed to be everywhere, and the children who would run up to him on the streets and call him ling—meaning monkey—as they grabbed at his hairy arms. For the portions of the film that were set in rural environs, the cast and crew would travel to the rain forest province of Phuket, using hand-drawn maps with helpful advisories like “last half of this road is dirt” and “Animals: Goats, Cows, Water Buffalo on location 07.00.”

  Still, some negative stereotypes about Bangkok persisted, enough to dissuade Robin from bringing Zak with him for any portion of the shoot. “They told us all these horror stories,” Robin said. “I was afraid for him. Bangkok itself is pretty sanitary for a city with 300,000 prostitutes.”

  He did, however, travel with Marsha, who was now his full-time assistant and an indispensable partner as he planned for the movie. In the weeks before they went to Thailand, Robin had begun to study up on the events of the Vietnam War and the popular culture and vernacular that would have been familiar to military personnel of the time. As Robin started to think about the Cronauer character, a historical consultant created a research file for him, comprised of photocopied pages from history textbooks, lists of period-appropriate television shows (Bonanza, The Beverly Hillbillies, Gomer Pyle U.S.M.C.) and movies (Mary Poppins, Goldfinger) that Robin could crib from, and tables that translated the crude, hilarious lingo used by US servicemen, in which “Ho Chi Minh’s revenge” meant “the shits” (as you’d experience from an antimalarial pill), “white mice” were the Vietnamese police, and the first rule of the Saigon bar girl was, “No tea, no talk; no money, no honey.”

  His preparations continued each day after filming, when he and Marsha would return to his hotel room and develop the material he would later deliver in his disc-jockey monologues. These scenes needed to look spontaneous, as if Cronauer were making things up as he went along, but doing so required Robin to be equipped in advance with dozens and dozens of one-liners that he’d already written and road-tested, as well
as countless more jumping-off points for further riffs that might occur to him in the moment. There were no comedy clubs for him to do this in Bangkok, so Marsha became his audience of one, as well as his coach and cowriter.

  Together they filled the pages of his notebooks with Robin’s own loose and just-barely-legible handwriting, as well as Marsha’s more careful and controlled mix of cursive and print; these represented the records of their efforts as they worked back and forth on a joke and she attempted to transcribe his stream of consciousness. Sometimes these notes were simply Robin’s reminders to himself (“No psychedelic or soul … Kinks, Beatles, CCR, DC5, Top 40s”) or names of characters he was starting to develop for Cronauer to banter with (“Hanoi Hannah,” “Marvin the ARVN”). In other instances he or Marsha would write out an authentic news headline that Cronauer might read on the air, filled in by a gag playing off of the announcement (“the Mississippi River broke thru a protective dike—when asked, she said…,” “Pope Paul 6 named 27 new cardinals raising college to a record of 103. ‘I hope one day to field my own football team’”). Titles of songs that Cronauer was likely to play on the air were also pored over and paired with jokes, usually about the unattractiveness of President Lyndon B. Johnson’s daughters. (“Mrs. Brown, You’ve Got a Lovely Daughter”—Lady Bird if you want to beautify America stop cranking out those ugly daughters; “Crying in the Chapel”—dedicated to anyone who marries a Johnson girl.)

  Of course, having all this material at his disposal, Robin still had to perform it.

  Cronauer’s radio patter, which makes up about twelve minutes of the movie, was filmed over a span of a few days at a studio in Bangkok. The general approach to these scenes was that Robin would perform a take, he and Levinson would confer and evaluate it, and then Robin would deliver another take based on those adjustments. “I might say, ‘Well, that thing you did, it was really good, but I wonder if we could just make it a little shorter,’” Levinson recalled. “‘What about if you want to try that?’ Let’s try this, let’s try this, let’s try this. Then he would throw in some new thing—say, that’s pretty good!—and out of that kind of playing around, it just kept evolving.”