Adrian Cronauer
US Forces DJ who inspired the film Good Morning, Vietnam
ADRIAN CRONAUER, who has died aged 79, was a US Armed Forces Radio disc jockey whose stint in Vietnam inspired Barry Levinson’s film Good Morning, Vietnam (1987) a biting satire of the US military effort, starring Robin Williams in best manic, over-the-top form.
Cronauer hosted a four-hour daily radio show, Dawn Buster, during his tour of duty in Vietnam in 1965-66, and like his Hollywood alter-ego signed on each morning with a booming “Gooooood Mooorning, Vietnam.”
While Williams’s portrayal led to the phrase becoming associated with a subversive attitude to military authority, however, the real Cronauer adopted the phrase to buy himself time to set up a record on the turntable when he was running late.
Cronauer was no Robin Williams. “He was a comedian and I’m a DJ. There’s a big difference there,” he recalled. “If I was a comedian I’d be out in California saying ‘Nanu nanu’ and making a million dollars.” But although the film elaborated on both plot and character, much of the story was essentially Cronauer’s.
Like his character in the film, he taught English to the Vietnamese, but not to meet a particular young woman. As in the film, a popular GI nightspot was blown up just minutes after he left; however the real Cronauer was not pulled to safety by a Viet Cong terrorist friend who planted the bomb in the first place.
Nor did he report the news in defiance of orders, an act of disobedience which leads his fictional counterpart to be booted out of the Air Force.
The film, though, was partly Cronauer’s idea. After his discharge he kept in touch with an old colleague, Ben Moses, a fellow military DJ who had gone into television. In 1979, encouraged by the success of the television series M*A*S*H, the two cooked up an idea for a television sitcom based on their own experiences.
The networks were not ready for a comedy about Vietnam, however, and the story remained in limbo until it caught the eye of Robin Williams’s agent. The script went through at least five revisions. By the end, the project bore little resemblance to Cronauer’s real Vietnam experiences.
Cronauer did not meet Robin Williams until after it was made, the actor not wanting Cronauer’s personality to influence his interpretation. Nonetheless the film turned Cronauer into almost as much of a celebrity as Williams. There were publicity tours, talk show appearances, interviews – not to mention hoax callers phoning him up at all hours of the night to shriek “Goooooood Moooorning, Vietnam.”
The son of a steelworker and a schoolteacher, Adrian Joseph Cronauer was born on September 8 1938 in Pittsburgh. He attended the University of Pittsburgh and American University before enlisting in the Air Force as a radio-television production specialist.
In 1963 he was posted to Heraklion, Crete, where his early morning greeting “Good Morning, Heraklion”, gradually morphed into “Goooooood Moooorning, Heraklion.”
Although Cronauer was no comedian, he tried to inject humour into his broadcasts, a former veteran recalling a long tale about dropping off rolls of film and waiting for his prints to be developed “or, as the next song put it, ‘Someday My Prince Will Come’.” The ritual response by some troops to his sign-on, “Get f-----, Cronauer”, was not recorded in the film.
After his discharge, Cronauer worked in television and radio, started an advertising agency, did voice-overs for commercials, enrolled in the Pennsylvania Law School in the late 1980s and became a media lawyer. People who associated him with Williams’s portrayal were often surprised to learn that he was a card-carrying Republican.
In 1980 Cronauer married Jeane Steppe, who predeceased him.