Robin

by Dave Itzkoff

  Robin could wind himself up and go without very much guidance. In just a single take seated at the microphone, running about four and a half minutes, he either recited or ad-libbed bits about the pope delivering his mass in Yiddish (performed in his customary George Jessel accent); the Vatican offering its own line of bath products (he tries both “soap on a rope” and “Pope on a rope” as punch lines); the discovery that Liberace has been found to be Anastasia, the lost princess of the Russian imperial family; LBJ declaring his daughters an endangered species; Ethel Merman’s music being used to jam Russian radar; the first Puerto Rican player in the National Hockey League; Gomer Pyle returning to Vietnam after an R&R trip to Thailand; the Ku Klux Klan suing Casper the Friendly Ghost; LBJ declaring his wife an endangered species; Great Britain recognizing Singapore (“Hey, wait a minute—didn’t we meet last year at the Feinberg bar mitzvah?”); and Walter Cronkite working as a fill-in meteorologist (“Today’s weather: hot and shitty”).

  He was almost always disappointed with his delivery of these monologues, to an excessive degree. “He so wanted to please and for everything to work,” said Mark Johnson, one of the film’s producers. “Sometimes, he would, first thing in the morning, come to me and say, ‘Look, I want to redo yesterday’s work. I’ll pay for it.’ And there was no reason to redo yesterday’s work. It was spectacular.”

  Part of the problem, the filmmakers found, was that Robin was improvising in a comedic vacuum; he was performing to largely silent rooms where no one could respond to what he was doing, and he was missing the crucial, real-time feedback to his performance. “He’s doing all this free-form spontaneity but he doesn’t have an audience,” Levinson said. “It’s not like you’re doing a scene and there’s humor to it. Here, he’s doing one-liners and characters and no one can laugh. And that was a little difficult.”

  The impediment wasn’t simply that an errant, offscreen laugh could ruin a take. As Mark Johnson explained, “Our crew was primarily British and a lot of Thai. Robin would do some extraordinarily funny bits, many of them specific to American culture, and of course, the crew didn’t get it. So Barry would call cut and they would go back to doing what crews do, and Robin was devastated because he was sure the stuff wasn’t funny, because no one was laughing.” When Robin would joke, for example, about the Highway Beautification Act forbidding LBJ’s daughters from riding in convertibles, Johnson said, “Barry and I would go crazy, and the rest of the crew would sit there. They had no idea that Lyndon Johnson had daughters.”

  Levinson once tried bringing in a live audience, seating people in a separate room from the radio studio and transmitting their laughter to the headset that Robin wore in his broadcast booth. This worked for Robin’s first attempt at a particular joke but did not hold up in repetition. “The problem was that once you did it again, they had already heard it, so it wasn’t as much fun as the first time,” Levinson said. “And then he thought maybe he’s not doing it well. So we go, All right, that idea’s not going to work. So we gave up on that.”

  While Robin was putting it all on the line in his DJ sequences, Levinson was especially proud of the careful, quieter work he was doing in the scenes where Cronauer commandeers a classroom full of Vietnamese civilians learning English, and starts teaching them American slang and swear words. For these portions of the film, in which the classroom was populated with Thai locals of various ages dressed in their own street clothes, Levinson determined it was all but impossible to generate authentic-seeming interactions between them and Robin by sticking to a script. “We started to play around,” the director said, “letting them just talk around what we were supposed to talk about, but trying to say the lines specifically.” Rather than slate a scene—that is, formally announce that it was starting by banging a clapboard and calling action—Levinson would instruct Robin to go up to one of the students and just start talking. “I would give a hand signal, and the camera operator would get up, and the sound guy, and everybody would suddenly know that this is what we’re going to do,” Levinson said. “And it became very natural. There was a real honesty to it all. Robin was really good at just talking with them. And his spontaneity and excitement would kick their spontaneity, and that was very influential to the movie.”

  Robin felt engaged and inspired by every aspect of the filmmaking process, and along the way Marsha was becoming an increasingly vital component of his life. She was so much more than his secretary or transcriptionist; she was his constant companion to and from the set, at meal breaks, and at after-hours dinners with Levinson, Johnson, and their wives. She was his surrogate, with a keen understanding of his voice, helping to refine his dialogue and to speak up for his day-to-day needs when he was too shy to do so himself. “He relied on her,” Johnson said, “and we in turn relied on her when she would let us know that there was something else that needed help or attention.”

  Marsha, who turned thirty during the making of Good Morning, Vietnam, was vivacious with long dark hair and exotic features. Her mother was Finnish, the youngest of seven children in an immigrant family that had settled on a farm in rural Wisconsin. Her father was Filipino, and he had completed two years of medical school before emigrating to the United States; he served (as Robin’s father did) in the US Navy in World War II. Marsha, the youngest of four children, considered herself a loner, even among her siblings. “I grew up in a German community, where all the other kids were blond, and we were dark, so I know what it feels like to be what is considered different,” she said. “I was different even from my brother and sisters. They were very social. I was always by myself.”

  By her own account, Marsha was four years old when she taught herself to read by studying the label on a shampoo bottle, and by the age of nine she was taking on voluminous classics of fantasy literature like J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. As an adult, before she came to work for Robin and Valerie as Zak’s nanny, she had had two past marriages that ended in divorce. Through all the service jobs she had worked—waitress, bank teller, caregiver—she said she had discovered something about herself: “I learned that I had an instinct for making people feel comfortable.”

  It was hardly a secret to their colleagues on Good Morning, Vietnam that Robin and Marsha had become romantically involved. But Robin was careful about how he talked about this blossoming relationship to the outside world, trying to temper his excitement with discretion. As he said to one reporter on the set in Bangkok, Marsha had become “my assistant, friend, confidant—and some other titles we can’t talk about until she leaves the room.”

  When Robin returned to the United States that fall, his father, Rob, had become gravely ill with cancer. Knowing that their time together was running out, Robin spent many weeks traveling from San Francisco each afternoon to see Rob in the Tiburon house where he had moved the Williams family some twenty years earlier, and the two men began to open up to each other in ways they had waited their whole lives to do. Observing Rob now, at the age of eighty-one, Robin contemplated the enigmatic taskmaster who had instilled in him his values for hard work, diligence, discipline, and propriety; he saw past his father’s reserve and recognized him as human and vulnerable. “I saw that he was funkier, that he had a darker side that made the other side work,” Robin said. Up until that point, he said, “I kept distance out of respect. Then we made a connection. It’s a wonderful feeling when your father becomes not a god but a man to you—when he comes down from the mountain and you see he’s this man with weaknesses. And you love him as this whole being, not as a figurehead.

  “He’d had operations and chemotherapy,” Robin said. “It’s weird. Everyone always thinks of their dad as invincible, and in the end, here’s this little, tiny creature, almost all bone. You have to say goodbye to him as this very frail being.”

  Alluding to The Wizard of Oz, Robin added, “There was this little man behind the curtain, going, ‘Take care of your mother and I love you and I’ve been very worried about certain things. And I’m afraid, b
ut I’m not afraid.’ It’s an amazing combination to exhilaration and sadness at the same time, because the god transforms to a man.”

  With nothing to hide and no reason to hold back, Robin opened up to his father about the disintegration of his marriage to Valerie, and his fears that the livelihood he’d worked so hard to establish as an actor was slipping away. “I don’t want to lose my family or my career,” he said.

  Rob, for the first time, told Robin of the challenges, disappointments, and failures he had faced in his own life: how he’d had to give up his youthful aspirations to work in the family coal business when it was nearly wiped out; his deployment on the USS Ticonderoga, where he’d taken shrapnel in a kamikaze attack; the collapse of his first marriage; the regret that he’d felt, in his last years at Ford, about wanting to devote more time to Robin and Laurie but feeling that he could not tear himself away from his responsibilities to the company, and then retreating to the Bay Area when he could not take it anymore. “I loved what I did, but all they wanted to do was churn out as many cars as they could,” he told Robin. “The companies were losing their sense of pride in their product. I couldn’t stand by and watch it happen. I had to get out.”

  Though the pain still lingered for Rob, Robin found inspiration in these stories and the courage he felt his father had shown. The lesson he took is that he had to decide for himself what kind of life he wanted and then claim it for himself. “He gave me this depth,” Robin said of his father, “that helps with acting and even with comedy, saying, ‘Fuck it. Do you believe in this? Do you really want to talk about it? Do it. Don’t be frightened off.’ Somewhere in his early life, he had to give up certain things, certain dreams. And when I found mine, he was deeply pleased. He was working his tits off to make this life and he had been screwed over by too many people in the automobile industry, which uses you and discards you just like the movie industry. He had seen that my life was in transition and that I was starting to take control.”

  Rob Williams died in his sleep on October 18, 1987, in his Tiburon home. Laurie called Robin that Sunday morning and told him, calmly and evenly, “Robin, your father’s dead.” “She was a little in shock,” Robin recalled, “but she sounded happy in a certain way, if only because he went without pain.”

  Amid the sadness, Rob’s death reunited Robin with his half brothers Todd and McLaurin—who was not Rob’s blood relative but regarded him as a father, and who had changed his name from Smith to Smith-Williams as a Father’s Day gift to Rob. “It kind of melded us closer as a family than we’ve ever been before,” Robin said. Rob was cremated, and his family gathered on the Tiburon coast to scatter his ashes into the water.

  “At one point I had poured the ashes out,” Robin recalled, “and they’re floating off into this mist, seagulls flying overhead. A truly serene moment. Then I looked into the urn and said to my brother, ‘There’s still some ashes left, Todd. What do I do?’ He said, ‘It’s Dad—he’s holding on!’ I thought, ‘Yeah, you’re right, he’s hanging on.’ He was an amazing man who had the courage not to impose limitations upon his sons, to literally say, ‘I see you have something you want to do—do it.’”

  By the time of his death, Rob had embraced Robin’s artistic ambitions, and he had watched his son achieve extraordinary success in pursuit of them, but he had never seen him fully realize the potential of his gifts. It was now up to Robin to utilize his talents to their fullest possible degree, if only to prove to himself that he was worthy of them.

  As postproduction continued on Good Morning, Vietnam and its promised Christmas release date drew closer, Levinson and his team began to sense that the distribution executives at Touchstone Pictures were growing nervous. It had been only a dozen years since the fall of Saigon; the Vietnam War and its aftermath were still raw subjects for many moviegoers. Thus far, Hollywood had addressed the war in motion pictures like Coming Home, The Deer Hunter, and Apocalypse Now, which were serious-minded and dealt unflinchingly with the human toll of its brutality; only a few months earlier, Platoon, Oliver Stone’s semiautobiographical drama about a US infantry company decimated in battle after battle, had won four Academy Awards, including Best Picture.

  The concern at Touchstone was that Good Morning, Vietnam might be seen as making fun of a subject no one was ready to laugh at, a worry that Levinson had shared when he was initially approached about the film. “Vietnam means soldiers fighting,” he said. “It’s a bad war, a negative war. That’s why, when I first heard about this script, I thought I didn’t want to do it. Then I read it and I went, ‘Oh my God, how naïve, how narrow-minded I am.’”

  “You forget,” Levinson said, “that the thing spanned twelve years and there was an everyday life that went on that didn’t relate directly to the soldiers fighting.”

  Touchstone did not put a halt to the film or ask for substantive changes to it, but the release plan for Good Morning, Vietnam was scaled back to just four theaters on December 25. That way, the movie could still make the deadline for the Oscars, and the studio could test the waters to see if wider audiences were ready for it. The print campaign, which emphasized a photo of Robin in an airman’s uniform and an Uncle Sam pose, holding a microphone and pointing a finger in front of an American flag, emphasized in its text that Adrian Cronauer had been sent to Vietnam “to build morale,” and described him as “The wrong man. In the wrong place. At the right time.”

  In the days just before this limited opening, Robin seemed punchier than usual, clearly understanding that the stakes for this movie were different from any of his other films. As he introduced a clip from Good Morning, Vietnam to Johnny Carson and the audience of The Tonight Show on December 18, Carson remarked offhandedly, “I think it’s going to be good,” to which Robin responded, in a mocking basso voice, “I hope so, and if not, I’ll be on a game show.”

  Later, in a newspaper interview, Robin dismissed a reporter’s gently flattering notion that he was America’s premier comedian. “I don’t like that title,” he said. “It’s too much. There are a lot of other funny people out there.” Robin’s modesty did not prevent him from suggesting that he had many unnamed enemies in the comedy world who “take a lot of shots” and would love to see him knocked down from his lofty perch. “You have your friends and then you have people who aren’t that friendly,” he said elliptically. “You’re in a position where people are gonna fire at you and, in a certain way, you have to accept it. You can’t make fun of other people and then go, ‘Stop! Don’t you understand? I’m sensitive!’”

  That fog of anxiety began to lift with the first reviews of Good Morning, Vietnam, which were effusive celebrations of Robin’s performance. They not only suggested that the movie would be a hit but that this was the revolutionary film role he had been searching for. Look at Robin’s motion-picture résumé up to this point, Vincent Canby wrote in the New York Times. “Each film has had its endearing moments, but there was always the feeling that an oddball natural resource was being inefficiently used, as if Arnold Schwarzenegger had been asked to host Masterpiece Theater. Just how much of the fresh, cheeky Williams brilliance was going up the chimney can now be seen in Good Morning, Vietnam.”

  Praising the delirious Adrian Cronauer monologues, Canby wrote that Robin “floats down the stream of his own manic consciousness. He talks about sex, the drama inherent in weather forecasts in the tropics, body functions, Army regulations, politics and Richard Nixon, then the former Vice President. At frequent intervals, he conducts interviews with characters inhabiting the dark side of his brain, including an Army fashion designer who’s distraught about the material used for camouflage uniforms. (‘Why not plaids and stripes?’ asks the petulant designer. ‘When you go into battle, clash!’)”

  Levinson, he said, had succeeded “in doing something that’s very rare in movies” by bringing to life “a character who really is as funny as he’s supposed to be to most of the people sharing the fiction with him.” Most importantly, Robin had given a performance
that, “though it’s full of uproarious comedy, is the work of an accomplished actor. Good Morning, Vietnam is one man’s tour de force.”

  Michael Wilmington of the Los Angeles Times was less taken with the film as a whole, calling it “good-hearted but shallow.” But he was every bit as abundant in his praise for Robin, who he said was

  so blazingly brilliant that he detonates the center, exploding it in berserk blasts of electronic-age surreality. When he does Cronauer’s anarchic broadcasts—screeching “Goo-oo-oood mornin’, Viet-nam!” and launches into bursts of giddy, wildfire free association, punctuated with Motown and ’60s rock—he’s transformed.… Williams at the mike is like a man possessed, purified, liberated.

  These early reactions were encouraging, but for Levinson the success of the film did not seem tangible until he and his wife, Diana, were driving on Sunset Boulevard one night and found themselves in front of the Cinerama Dome, the one theater in Los Angeles where Good Morning, Vietnam was playing.

  “My wife said, ‘Why don’t we just check and see how the movie’s doing?’” Levinson recalled. “I saw like a dozen people in line for the eight o’clock show, I thought. I didn’t want to go in, so Diana went in and I waited. And she came out and she said, ‘Well, the eight o’clock show is sold out. And the ten o’clock show is sold out.’ I said, ‘Really? Who are these people in line, then?’ ‘They’re lining up for the midnight show.’ And suddenly, we went, ‘Oh my God.’ We saw some people that had some tickets and people were trying to get tickets. You could hear all this on the street: How do you get the tickets? It’s sold out. This buzz was going on. It was on its way.”