OK, I am stunned. I don’t know if you are- I mean, the guy was a force of nature, manic almost, and if he wasn’t exactly your cup of tea, he was definitely a distinct and vibrant brew.
I was going to present some recollections of car people this morning, but I am rocked back on my heels and will have to defer that. I will get to the why of the impact in a minute.
My favorite Robin Williams role? No, not the dorky “Mork and Mindy.” It was his portrayal of Armed Forces Radio and Television Service’s maverick DJ in Saigon, Adrian Cronauer. His performance resonated with guys of a certain age on a lot of levels.
The looming presence of the war in Southeast Asia for all of us of draft age is part of it, of course, and later those long nights on shift in the Alert Center at Yongsan Garrison in Seoul with only A-Farts spinning discs to keep us connected back to The World.
But there is much more, of course. See, Robin and I shared not only the same birth year (the Rabbit) but we learned to drive on the same streets. My first big ticket was not far from where he lived. I was a Gemini baby, a month older than him. He was a Cancer, born under the water sign of The Crab. Cancers are said to be highly emotional, caring, generous and intuitive, if you believe that stuff.
I came into the world in Detroit, inside the city limits, and he was born in Chicago, where his Dad was a senior Exec at Ford’s Midwest Regional Office in Downer’s Grove west of the city. In those days, execs split their time out in the real world and at the stratified HQ culture of The Glass House in Dearborn.
Robin William’s father was emphatically a car guy.
He never talked much about his family, but did give some insight on the culture from which he came. His Dad got pissed when Robin bought a Japanese car- a Toyota four-wheel Land Cruiser like the one above. In an interview with the Chicago Tribune, he recounted this exchange:
“I remember I bought a four-wheel drive Toyota, and he went, “By God, you buy American!”
“But, Dad, they have dead rats in their engines.”
“Shut up and buy American.”
When the family came back to Detroit they rented a palace at the corner of Woodward Avenue and Long Lake in Bloomfield Hills, which according to a 1996 interview, “was little short of a fairyland.”
I remember those houses, the ones that were so vastly different than the little starter places in Grabbingham. Williams said “It was a giant, beautiful old mansion, with a gatehouse, an empty garage with room for twenty-five cars, barns, and there was a very wonderful old English man, Mr. Williams, who looked after the gardens…the first house, it was so wonderful, so peaceful. There was no one for miles around. Only this giant golf course with people named Tad whacking the old ball.”
In the interview, Robin launched off into a caricature of a preppy fellow named Tad, whacking the old ball and muttering upper-class inanities at the Bloomfield Hills Country Club. My ex-Father in Law was a member there at the zenith of his career in the specialty steel business. It was a very posh place with limited membership so there was never a problem for the automotive execs to get a tee time.
Williams was of the upper strata of the Detroit car culture. He did not go to Bloomfield Hills Lahser high school, which is where the Hills kids went to public school, much less Earnest W. Seaholm where I did, though it was just a couple miles away. He was in the Class of ’69 (we loved spray-painting that on garages) at Detroit Country Day School.
People Magazine- the first time the Socotra has sourced a story to that publication- reported back in 1991 that William’s Academy Award Winning portrayal in Dead Poet’s Society was largely based on a teacher he had had at Country Day.
Robin was President of the Senior Class, played varsity soccer and wrestled. We public school kids would have loved to have competed against the private school kids- it would sort of been a reflection of the larger culture of the Little Two auto companies against GM, Ford and Chrysler.
Michigan left its impression on Williams, though he lived in California for most of his life after the family moved there. I don’t know what happened to his Dad to cause him to throw over the Glass House life for Marin County in the Golden State, but once out there, Robin un-buttoned his preppy shirts and fell in with the artistic crowd, leaving the car culture behind.
He remembered it pretty well, though. One of the movies you will not be hearing about this week is Cadillac Man. Robin played a GM salesman (you can’t imagine this as a Lincoln dealership, right?) with a complex life. The reviews mostly panned it, though the cast was extraordinary. Robin played Caddy salesman Joey O’Brien, who is having a horrible, no-good, very bad day. He has to sell a dozen cars before closing or he loses his job. He has a rebellious teenage daughter, a irate Ex, a married woman, and an ambitious girlfriend in his life.
Comedy meets drama as the husband of the married woman shows up at the dealership with an attitude and an assault rifle and holds staff and customers hostage in an effort to find out who’s been sleeping with his wife.
Trying to take charge of the situation, the synopsis says “Joey attempts to find a way out of the armed struggle and slowly recovers his self-respect when dealing with all the un-raveling aspects of his life.” The critics said at the time that Robin could not quite pull it off.
So maybe Cadillac Men is a better movie than anyone knew at the time, since that is the way it worked out in real life. In the end, I am sort of stuck with the concluding lines of the Edwin Arlington Robinson poem we learned- probably around the same time Robin did- entitled “Richard Corey:”
So on we worked, and waited for the light,
And went without the meat, and cursed the bread;
And Richard Cory, one calm summer night,
Went home and put a bullet through his head.
Of course, none of us in Grabbingham ever went without anything, though we did have to work. But you get what I mean. No kidding. Robin Williams, Academy Award winner, celebrated on the various continents, wealthy enough to buy all the cars he wanted, and he killed himself.
That is why I am so spooked. I don’t mind celebrity passings, but he was younger, better looking and had it knocked. The rest of us still have to get up in the morning and pretend to look interested. Jesus.
(This 1968 Mercedes Benz 114, driven by its owner, David Zammit, ferried Williams around while they were filming on the island of Malta in the Med. It is as close to a cult car as I can find associated with Robin. Maybe he had enough of Detroit to last the rest of his life).
Copyright 2014 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
Twitter: @jayare303