Playtime For Gonzo

By RICHARD CORLISS

Robin Williams stalks a concert stage, conning inspiration from the ether. In a nightclub, a customer's name will spark a from-nowhere verbal riff. And in the course of an hour's interview, he will miraculously inhabit the skewed brains of two dozen apparitions. Among them: a meat-eating Mahatma Gandhi, Gomer Pyle with a case of VD, Elvis Presley drafted for Viet Nam, Wheel of Fortune's Pat Sajak and, of course, a singing hunchback. Here is Williams speaking about his role as Good Morning, Vietnam's gonzo deejay: "God, it can't get any more right than this! If this isn't the right part, then there's nothing. I'll be doing game shows. I'll be saying ((and here he imitates Sajak)), 'Show me the vowels!' I'll be playing third hunchback in the musical of Notre Dame. ((Sings in operetta style:)) 'Look out, he's going,/ He's got a hunch.' "

The uncaged onstage Williams contains multitudes -- a Sybil's worth of funny, fractured personalities. The man who was Mork, on TV's sitcom smash of the late '70s, can switch in nanoo-seconds from an infant's helium singsong to Elmer Fudd as Bwooce Spwingsteen. This glossolaliac gift can give the listener a high and a headache; it is that quick, sharp and scary. Scares Williams too. "When it works," says the Chicago-born comic, 36, "it's like . . . freedom! Suddenly these things are coming out of you. You're in control, but you're not. The characters are coming through you. Even I'm going, 'Whoa!' It's that Zen lock. It's channeling with Call Waiting. "

As a movie star, though, Williams was on Call Waiting for the worse part of this decade. Fresh from Mork & Mindy, he starred in Robert Altman's Popeye. "It was a painful experience," he recalls. "We were on location for six months, the weather was awful, we were running out of money, and the sets were underwater. It was Apocalypse Now in Malta." Subsequent films were a little like Stardom When? The World According to Garp domesticated John Irving's novel and neutered Williams' wild talent. The Survivors set him up as the butt of a gun-crazy satire. Moscow on the Hudson gave him a Russian accent, at least, but too often the movie went soft, like spun-sugar quicksand. In The Best of Times, Williams went Chaplinesque -- Geraldine, alas, not Charlie -- as a weak geek trying to validate youthful dreams of football glory. And Club Paradise cast him as the ringmaster of a clown caravan. No fair: other guys got to be funny. And not funny: Popeye remains his biggest box-office hit to date.

Something was wrong. Other skitcom graduates, like Bill Murray and Eddie Murphy, had profitably accommodated their TV personalities to the big screen. But Robin Williams was not allowing himself to be Robin Williams. It made for a dispiriting spectacle, like watching a great juggler hold, just hold, a lemon. Williams traces his yen for straight roles to Manhattan's Juilliard School, where he studied acting. 'I had my Juilliard training -- ((highbrow accent:)) 'I'm an actor here' -- and then I do comedy on the side. It's this Jekyll-and-Jessel thing -- ((stentorian voice:)) 'Actor during the day; at night, strange man who talks about his genitals.' " Still, playing romantic leads in forgettable films chafed the sacred maniac inside him. "When your favorite actors are Peter Sellers and Peter Lorre, you're not seeing yourself saying ((a la Clark Gable:)), 'Frankly, my dear . . .' You just want to go ((and now he shifts into Lorre's metallic purr:)), 'My shirt! You dirtied my shirt!' " Williams needed to find a movie that dirtied his shirt, that liberated his pinwheeling raunch. Now he has. Goodbye, straight-man straitjacket. Good Morning, Vietnam.

There was a real Adrian Cronauer. He did host a lively radio show, he did play rock 'n' roll, he was ordered not to read a news dispatch about a cafe bombing he had witnessed. ("Adrian is now in law school," says Williams, who met Cronauer two weeks ago. "He looks like Judge Bork.") But around these few facts, the film spins a fantasy of irreverence and lost innocence. Mostly, it puts its star behind an Armed Forces Radio mike to devise some stratospheric ad libs. The monologues, the English lessons for Vietnamese students and Adrian's chat with a truckload of G.I.s were all improvised under the astute eye of Director Barry Levinson. "Barry lets you be free," Williams notes, "but not so free you're floundering. He sets up these little cones, like the ones they put on the freeway. If you knock one over, it's O.K."

Professionally, Williams looks to keep on flooring it over those cones. He may soon take the reins of his movie career and write himself a script. Next fall he plans to play Estragon, with Steve Martin as Vladimir, in the Mike Nichols production of Waiting for Godot -- thus synthesizing Juilliard and wackiness. Personally, however, Williams is quieter, more settled. He is past bouts of alcohol and cocaine dependence. Separated from his wife of nine years, he now keeps company with his personal secretary, Marsha Garces. And he is famously devoted to his four-year-old son Zachary.

Does Williams, who says his improv work is "like playing -- child's play," see in the boy a time-warp mirror image of his own fecund creativity? Seems so, as you listen to proud dad: "I watch Zachary absorbed in playing with his rockets, I listen to him whispering his multiple voices, and I think, 'That's where it comes from. That's the source.' " Williams tells a story of Zachary at his "gestalt" day-care center. "The teacher was playing tapes of noises for the kids to identify. One was of a baby crying, and a little girl said ((little girl voice:)), 'That's a baby crying.' Then they played a tape of laughter. 'I know! I know!' Zachary said. 'That's comedy!' And I thought, 'Riiiight!' " Play on, Robin.

With reporting by Denise Worrell/Los Angeles