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.
Robin Williams as Adrian Cronauer in Good Morning, VietnamCREDIT: ALAMY
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.”
Adrian Cronauer at the 10th Anniversary celebration of the Air Force Memorial in Arlington, Virginia, in 2016CREDIT: AB FORCES NEWS COLLECTION / ALAMY STOCK PHOTO
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.
Adrian Cronauer, born September 8 1938, died July 18 2018
Broadcasting to American forces on an air-force base in Crete, the radio host Adrian Cronauer hit on a simple catchphrase: “Good Morning, Iraklion!” Soon he was transferred to Saigon, where it transpired that “Good morning, Vietnam!” had more of a ring.
Audiences agreed when Robin Williams starred as Cronauer in Good Morning, Vietnam, the 1987 film loosely based on his experiences as a military disc jockey at the outset of the American ground war in 1965 and 1966.
It was a breakthrough Hollywood role for the actor and comedian, although not everyone was entertained by the real-life Cronauer’s perky salutation that included an elongated “Goooooood” at the 6am start of his Dawn Buster show. In the field, troops would shout back “Geeeeeeet f***ked, Cronauer!” he recalled. “On one occasion a guy picked up his M16 and blew away his radio.”
It turned out that there was a calculation behind the wild, strident yell. Cronauer realised that stretching out “Good” bought him a few extra seconds while, still half-asleep and fumbling, he set himself up in the studio and switched one record for another.
During production of the film, Williams (obituary, August 13, 2014) and Cronauer were kept apart to ensure that the actor’s performance would not be influenced by a meeting; they were not introduced until the film’s premiere in New York.
Yet Cronauer was far from the subversive, irreverent and frenetic character portrayed on the big screen. He was a conservative figure who went on to work for the US government in Washington. As a broadcaster he was calm and controlled, his rich, deep voice the sonic equivalent of tasting dark honey.
However, as in the film, Cronauer did play rock’n’roll music and tried to bring individual flair to the staid world of forces’ broadcasting, believing that replicating the upbeat tone of mainland US radio stations would boost morale and help soldiers to better handle their culture shock.
He did teach English to Vietnamese students, although not crude slang, and on one occasion was subjected to US censorship when he was forbidden from discussing a massacre at a floating restaurant on the Saigon River where he had eaten a few minutes earlier. “I couldn’t get any of it on the air. I had personally seen heads severed from torsos,” he said in a 1988 interview. “The duty officer would not give me permission to report it.”
Adrian Joseph Cronauer was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in 1938. His father was a steelworker and his mother a schoolteacher. He met Jeane Steppe, a probation officer and later a Broadway usher, when they took part in a community theatre production. They married in 1980 and she died in 2016. He is survived by a stepson, Michael.
SHUTTERSTOCK
Cronauer wanted to be a broadcaster from a young age and helped to found a campus radio station at the University of Pittsburgh before studying broadcasting at the American University, Washington. In 1962 he joined the US air force, planning to become a pilot, but switched to media operations.
He left the military in 1966, worked for television and radio stations in Ohio and Virginia, and formed an advertising agency, using his own voice in commercials. In 1979 he moved to New York, where he did voiceovers for television and radio adverts.
Partly inspired by the popularity of M*A*S*H, which was set during the Korean War, he developed a story with Ben Moses, a fellow Vietnam radio veteran. Studios were unwilling to make a Vietnam comedy so soon after the conflict and the idea languished for years, until it came to Williams’s attention.
Directed by Barry Levinson and written by Mitch Markowitz, the film was a hit and Williams was nominated for an Academy Award for best actor. Capitalising on the film’s success, Cronauer wrote a guide to delivering voiceovers in 1990. He also appeared as a DJ in Street Fighter, the 1994 film starring Jean-Claude Van Damme and Kylie Minogue.
In the late 1980s he used his windfall from the film to study law at the University of Pennsylvania, then ran a law firm specialising in communications, although prank callers would yell his catchphrase down the phone and his celebrity status was not always helpful in attracting clients. “They’d say, ‘Did you see that movie? He’s a nutcase. We can’t have him as our counsel,’ ” he said in 2010. He was disbarred in the District of Columbia in 2014 and in Pennsylvania the next year after being accused of misleading practices. A lifelong Republican supporter, Cronauer taped a TV advert for George HW Bush’s 1992 presidential re-election campaign that accused Bill Clinton of dishonesty over his draft record.
“I always was a bit of an iconoclast, as Robin was in the film,” Cronauer said in 1999. “But I was not anti-military, or anti-establishment. I was anti-stupidity. And you certainly do run into a lot of stupidity in the military.”
Adrian Cronauer, broadcaster, was born on September 8, 1938. He died from undisclosed causes on July 18, 2018, aged 79
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