Robin Cook: The American Physician Who Wrote Coma Underwater

On this episode of Our American Stories, Robin Cook is best known for his novel, Coma. The book was published in 1977, and premiered as a movie the next year. Robin is here to share his life story with us, including how Coma came to be… underwater of all places.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:10):
This is Leigh Habibe, and this is our American Stories,
the show where America is the star and the American people.
Up next comes to us a story from Robin Cook.
You know the name. He's the author of thirty eight
best selling books, a giant in the literary and publishing field,
but the one he is best known for is his

(00:32):
second book, Coma, the first true medical thriller ever released. Today,
he's sharing with us his personal story, his life story.
Here's Robin. I was born in Brooklyn and immediately exported
to Queens and then moved over to New Jersey when
I was eight. You know, I have to say that

(00:53):
I think that I'm a particularly lucky person because everything
happens seemed at the right time. If I had continued
to grow up in Woodside, Queens in that environment, my
life I think would have been completely different. In fact,
when I think back on it, I might now be

(01:13):
I'd probably be fairly successful, but I'd be really involved
an organized crime. I can remember the older kids teaching
us young kids how to steal from the store, and
they like to use us young kids because I guess
the store proprietor, particularly the candy store, was less suspicious

(01:35):
of young kids, you know, in kindergarten, and so the
older kids would get us to go in and whatnot.
We had what we called the alley behind the house.
It was all row house, so you had an alley
behind and that was where at that time, parents just
opened the door let the kids out into the alley

(01:55):
and we had full run of the alley from a
very very early age, and we had all sorts of
games that we played in that part of my life.
I remember with great fondness. But I also realized how
lucky it was that my father's business did well enough
that we realized that we could move out of our

(02:17):
apartment in Woodside, Queens. My father's what he wanted most
was a place to build a house that had a view.
So he found a place over in New Jersey up
on a hill and he bought this part of land
because it had a view looking west out over New Jersey.

(02:38):
My parents never looked into this town what the town
was like. But it turns out that I was really
lucky because the town was fabulous and what was phenomenal
about Leone, New Jersey. It was sort of like a
bedroom community for a lot of academic institutions, Columbia University,
the Museum of Natural History, the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

(03:02):
So my friend's parents, a lot of them were involved
in these very academic things, including my best friend. His
father was head of dinosaurs at the Museum in Natural History.
Can that be any better for a kid in the
fifth sixth grade? And so we would go practically every

(03:23):
Saturday to the Museum in Natural History. We got to
go behind the scenes to see how they take these
huge blocks of stone, bring them back to the museum
and then carve out these dinosaur bones and then figure
out how the animal lived and what at eight. So
that was our Saturday mornings. But there were other people there.

(03:45):
Two four or five physicists on the Manhattan Project came
from Leoni, New Jersey. My next door neighbor was Buddy Hackett,
and he took a great liking to me, and I
babysat for his kids, and because of that I met
a lot of the people like Sammy Davis Junior and

(04:06):
Frank Sinatra because I was a babysitter and Buddy Hackett
had a miniature car collection. And you know, as a
teenager I got my license. My father wouldn't allow me
to even back the family car out of the garage.
I had to wash it, but I couldn't back it.
He'd back it out and then I'd wash it. But

(04:27):
Buddy Hackett noticed this. He didn't say very much, but
then he started offering and allowing me to drive his
cars to my high school dances. So I got and
he had a Corvette, a Jaguar, and a brand new
black Bonneville at that time. That was really the cat's

(04:48):
me out. It was quite an amazing item circumstance. Plus,
the school system was fantastic. It was a school system
that was way ahead of its time in terms of
experimenting with rapid learner courses or advanced placement course And
I was part of a study almost myself in three

(05:11):
or four or five of us were taught what they
called a new math then, and so the amount of
math that I had when I graduated from high school
was really quite exceptional. So I think of myself as
particularly lucky because it wasn't that my parents looked into
this and said we have to find a great school system.

(05:33):
I just found myself in this great school system in
a town, a small town that's a mile square, that
had phenomenal interesting people. I didn't realize it at the time,
but because the school system was good, because the kids
were motivated, I was motivated. I'm a competitive person, athletically competitive,

(05:55):
but also competitive in intellectual sense. And here I was
in this great environment. The information was there. We had
a wonderful library. After school. We would often go to
the library. At a very young age, I started reading
all sorts of fiction books. At a very young age.
I had found myself in a public school where academic

(06:20):
effort counted. And what a difference that makes, because then
when it came to going to college, it was never
any thought that I wouldn't go to college. I have
to admit I didn't do a very good job picking
a college because I was too busy. I was on
this committee and on that committee, and this council and

(06:42):
that council, and I was the valedictorian of the school,
and I played sports. And I remember suddenly I said, oh,
my gosh, I'm supposed to tell the guidance counselor where
I want to go to college, and have to do
it tomorrow. And I remember going down into the basement
to get something in our house, and on the way

(07:02):
up on the stairs there was a box and it
said Yale Locke And I said, oh, okay, that's telling
me something. So when I went in the next day,
I said, I want to go to Yale. And when
we come back. More of the story of author Robin
Cook thirty eight bestsellers, and where he grew up. More

(07:26):
Robin Cook's story here on Our American Stories. Lee Habibi
here the host of Our American Stories. Every day on
this show, we're bringing inspiring stories from across this great country,
stories from our big cities and small towns. But we
truly can't do the show without you. Our stories are
free to listen to, but they're not free to make.

(07:48):
If you love what you hear, go to our American
Stories dot com and click the donate button. Give a little,
give a lot. Go to our American Stories dot com
and give And we're back with our American Stories and

(08:11):
with Robin Cook. When we last left off, he had
just told his school counselor that he wanted to go
to Yale for college, a decision he'd made because of
a Yale walk he'd seen in his basement the night before.
Let's return to Robin and the counsel said, good choice,
that's fine, you know, and everything else, and so we

(08:33):
went ahead and applied and did all that sort of
stuff and I was accepted. But then I got invited
to Wesleyan for their equivalent of their athletic They don't
give athletic scholarships, but there was always a weekend where
there was the home football game, and people who were

(08:55):
on the football team had an opportunity to invite kids
from their former high school. And I got invited to
Wesleyan for the weekend, and I was very much interested
in these two guys that had been in our high school.
I knew them vaguely, but why I was so interested
as both of them were premeds, and at that point

(09:18):
I was premed. I wanted to be premed, So, you know,
I responded to that invitation. I went to Wesleyan for
a weekend and seemed fabulous, and I was taken, and
I went back and then applied to Wesleyan and got
to Wesleyan. Even that, I think again that I'm a

(09:41):
very lucky person because it turned out that Wesleyan was
a particularly good choice for me, not that Yale wouldn't
have been, although I probably wouldn't have been able to
make the football team Yale. The reason that Wesleyan turned
out to be such a good place for me to
be is because it had a very unique program that
ultimately played quite a big role, I think in my life,

(10:04):
and that was if you did well enough, and that
Wesley and I did very well, as like I did
in high school, I really applied myself. And if you
did well at Wesley and you were invited in your
senior year to take part in what they called the
Honors College, and the Honors College gave you the opportunity

(10:25):
to write an undergraduate thesis. And I decided, Hey, why
not do this? Now? Why I thought I could do
that as first of all, I realized that I wouldn't
get graded until after I was accepted at medical school.
Plus I had taken so many extra courses that I

(10:48):
could have graduated probably somewhere as in my junior year,
because since I was paying for college, I realized that
the more courses I took, the cheaper they were. And
so anyway, prior to that, I think the longest paper
I had written maybe was like five pages, which seemed

(11:10):
terribly long, or ten pages maybe at the most and
I wrote significantly more than one hundred pages. But why
that is so significant for me is because later on
in my life, when I decided, wouldn't it be interesting

(11:31):
to try to use fiction and entertainment as a way
of getting people to understand medical, social, and biotechnical issues,
to try to use entertainment. And the reason why I
came to that thought was because having read a number

(11:55):
of books about being a doctor and seeing a number
of TV shows and movies about being doctors, that after
I got into medical school, I realized that all those
books that I had read, all those shows that I
had watched, were not accurate. They missed the mark, and

(12:17):
they were glorifying medicine, putting it on a pedestal. And
yet it was very apparent to me right from day
one that medicine in a lot of ways was going
in the wrong direction. It was being influenced too much
by business interests and moving away from its nineteenth century

(12:40):
roots of taking care of people. But since I had
taken that opportunity to write that thesis of one hundred pages,
I thought, well, hey, I did it once, why couldn't
I do it again? Why can't I write a book?
About medicine. But the only trouble was that I decided
this in medical school, and I had no time in

(13:02):
medical school. In fact, I had no time for anything
in medical school. Medical school alone was obviously very time consuming,
but I also had to pay my way, so I
had to have I had multiple jobs, not only all
through college, but also multiple jobs at medical school. When

(13:25):
I first got to medical school, first thing I did
was run around and look at all sorts of ads
and stuff for jobs that I could somehow do along
with being a medical student. And I found lots of jobs.
I was the first one, I think at Columbia who
wanted to work in the cafeteria in the dorm. I

(13:46):
would serve the food in the food line, and my
fellow students were all coming in, and I remember feeling
sorry for myself in some respects because I could see
out through this little wind though, that they were out
there talking about the day and probably talking about what
they had learned and exchanging ideas, and I was wishing

(14:10):
I was out there. But I also tried to make
it as much fun as I could. I would bring
out two separate bowls of the same vegetable, and they,
of course would never look at the menu and they
say what's tonight, I'd say, well, we have some interesting things.
And I said, well, we have some carrots here. We
have two different types of carrots. We have truck farm

(14:32):
carrots and we have large farming carrots. And I said, well,
what's the difference. And I said, well, you know, and
I go into providing a medical student with a decision
would stop the line. But it was a way for
me to entertain myself. But I did everything. I drew blood,

(14:55):
cleaned animal cages. All these jobs weren't the best, but
I took as many as I could. And it's actually
turns out that I was lucky that I had to work,
because had I not had to work, like all my
fellow medical students, I wouldn't have had a certain opportunity

(15:18):
that presented itself, and that was that the professor who
was in charge of the lab in the hospital, he
was a friend of Jacques Cousteau, and of course Jacques Cousteau,
so when everybody knew he was quite famous, etc. And
Jacques Cousteau was about to do an experiment where he

(15:39):
was having divers live under water and they were going
to live at one atmosphere pressure that is thirty three
feet down. But one of the things that you really
had to know is physiologically what the blood gases are doing.
He had no idea, and this professor told Jacques Cousteau
that you really need to know. So I got asked

(16:03):
if I would be willing to go over to the
south of France and set up a lab for Jacques Cousteau.
And I thought about it for about five minutes. And
I get one month off from medical school every year,
and i'd have one month I could select as an elective.

(16:26):
So I put these two months together during my summers
as a medical student, and I spent these time in Monaco,
where the os Innographic Institute is, and then I flew
over and put the lab together and then trained this
French fellow exactly how to use the equipment, etc. I

(16:50):
stayed then for the two months, and then I came
back the next summer and the next summer and so,
which was really interesting because I was this destitute medical
student and I was spending my summers on the riviera.
And you're listening to Robin Cook share his story, and
my goodness, what a story it is. It should be
a book all by itself. And by the way, Robin

(17:12):
is the author of thirty eight bestsellers that I've said before,
and his latest is called Nightshift, and go to bookstores,
go to Amazon, pick it up. It's as good as
anything he's written. And by the way, he's blessed time
and again, not just in the little town he grows up,
but he goes to Wesley and he's working hard and
incomes this guy who knows Jacques Cousteau, and the next

(17:33):
thing you know, he's in Monaco doing tests on how
human beings can thrive or not living under water. When
we come back more of Robin Cook's story, here are
our American stories. And we returned to our American stories

(18:10):
and to Robin Cook's story, and he's sharing in the
end his own well memoir. It's his life story he's
sharing with us. Now let's pick up where we less
left off. After graduating from medical school, I decided to
do a residency in surgery because I thought I wanted
to become a surgeon. I had worked for the open

(18:32):
Heart Surgical Team, so I got to know these very
very high ranking heart surgeons who were really monumental in
creating the opportunity to do open heartness name doctor Mom
and doctor Bowman, and as a medical student, I got
to meet them and no other medical students got to

(18:53):
meet them. And interesting enough that when you finished medical school,
you have to apply to your training program, you have
to try to apply to a residency, and the competition
actually ratchets upward and it's very competitive to get into
certain certain hospitals, so you have to be really on

(19:15):
top of your game. And one of the things that
really helped is very good letters of recommendation. I asked
these top heart surgeons. I asked the top one if
he'd write me a letter of recommendation for my residency,
and he said he would, which is phenomenal. And anyway

(19:39):
he wrote me the letter of recommendation was very glowing,
and I was thinking that I would go to Columbia
stay at Columbia, and I applied to several others, like
the Massachuset General Hospital, because I had heard that was fantastic.
But the day before, the night before, I guess when

(20:00):
you actually had to put in your list which one
you want. I had a very good friend in medical school,
and he and I talked about the next couple of
years being residents, and we were both going to do surgery,
and it was his suggestion first. You know, he started,

(20:20):
He's saying, you know, what about breaking this sort of
expected route, What about going someplace where we could have
some fun when we have time off, And we started
talking about going to the University of Hawaii. We stayed

(20:41):
up really late talking about this and doing something really unique.
There was a sudden, great attraction, and because we both
said let's do it, we put University Hawaii first. And
of course the University of Hawaii was not one of
these top places, and it had never gotten medical students

(21:06):
from into the Ivy League medical schools. We were of course,
we were accepted. And I remember that this big heart
surgeon found out about it and found out that he
had written a letter of recommendation and that I was
going to the University of Hawaii. He was so furious

(21:30):
that the next time he saw me, he stuck his
finger in my chest. He yelled at me that I
would dare to ask him to write a letter of
recommendation to such a school. And he told me his
last words were, let me tell you something, it's easy
to drop out of the big leagues, but you never

(21:53):
come back. And I thought, oh, I guess I may
mistake But in retrospect it turned out to be one
of the best decisions of my life. I went to
University of Hawaii, the two of us, and we were
both good, good students, and we essentially took over that

(22:15):
surgery department. Who are we interns? I took over Essentially
I took over the intensive care, the surgical intensive care unit.
I applied for and got a license in Hawaii, and
the hospital was very proud of us. And as far
as you can drop out of big leaves, you never
get back. After I finished my surgical training, I remember

(22:39):
finishing my I don't know how many gall bladders and
walked out and I remember thinking, gosh, I'm almost I'm done,
and I just didn't feel any terrible euphoria. And there
was always this room across the way, another surgical operating
room that always seemed to be dark. You can know,

(23:02):
you have the little window, and it was always dark.
I never knew what they did in there. So this
day it was very close to the end, I went
over there and I cracked open the door and a
little bit of Mozart came out and the nurse came
running over. The circulating nurse what can I help you?
And I said, yeah, what are they doing in here?

(23:22):
And he said, oh, we're doing a retinal detachment surgery.
And I looked in. I could see the surgeon there,
and the thing that impressed me the most is he
was sitting down while he was operating. I had just been,
you know, three hours standing there doing a gall bladder operation.
And that was when I socided. You know, ever since

(23:42):
I've been little, I wanted to be an ophthalmologist. So
I quickly applied to ophthalmology training programs. I applied to
the mass Ioneer mass General the Harvard System, and I
applied to the University of California, San Francisco. I wasn't
fact I was accepted to both, and I can remember

(24:04):
hearing doctor Mom saying, you can drop out of the
big leaves, but you never get back. I thought, I'm
gonna love going to New York and see if he's
still there. I never did that, but in between my
surgical residency and my ophthalmology residency, the Vietnam War was

(24:26):
firing up, and so when I finished my surgical residency,
I got a notice from the Navy that I was
being drafted and that I was assigned to the Marines
and I was going to go to Duna as a surgeon.
Now I was not excited about that idea. And I

(24:48):
remembered something that had happened to me on one of
those idyllic summers in the south of France, and that
is a Captain Bond from the United States Navy visited
and he was running what was cold at that time,
the Sea Lab, and that was where the United States

(25:10):
was similar to what Custeau was doing. He came over
because he was very interested in this Call Show three
experiment that Custeau was doing and wanted to find out
all the details, etc. And I guess meet Custo plus.
Navy guys love to do boondoggles, and I'm sure that
was considered a boondoggle by him coming over and going

(25:34):
on the Calypso. And so I was on the Calypso
with him and sort of helped a little bit. When
he left, he gave me a real Navy handshake and
he said, thanks, young man. He said, if you ever
find yourself in the Navy, give me a call. And
I thought to myself at the time. There's no chance

(25:55):
I'm going to be in the navy. But that's yeah,
it's nice to hear things like that. Well, lo and behold.
Five or six or seven or how many years it
was later, I'm in the Navy, signed to the Marines.
I'm going to Dinan. And I called him up and
I asked him if you remember me, and he said,
of course I remember you. I said, well, you said

(26:18):
to give you a call if I ever found myself
in the Navy. I said, I'm in the navy. He's
all wonderful, wonderful. He said, Oh, I'll get you here
in our program if you want. Yeah, that would be terrific.
And you're listening to Robin Cook tell a heck of
a story about serendipity, about going against the grain, about

(26:39):
following your instincts and well just meeting people and following
them down and making a good impression on people and
staying with him, and the amazing things that happened in
his life because of the people he meets and the
trust they put in him and the trust he puts
in them. Isn't his best friend's decision to go to Hawaii,

(27:00):
go to the Big leagues and ultimately working his way
right back in when we come back. More of the
story of best selling author Robin Cook and his latest
is Night Shift Again. Go to Amazon or the usual
suspects wherever you get your books. More of Robin Cook's
life story here on our American Stories. And we're back

(27:37):
with our American Stories and with Robin Cook. When we
last left off, Robin had just been drafted into the Marines,
and by the way, during the Vietnam War. He was
not thrilled, but he had an opportunity to join a
very unique program due to a prior relationship. Let's return
to Robin. He told me I had to volunteer for

(28:01):
submarine school. So I did, and so I was in Groton, Connecticut,
and I went to submarine school. And then I called
him up and I said, I finished submarine school. He said,
now volunteer for deep sea diving school. So I went
to Washington then deep Sea Diving School and graduated from that.

(28:24):
And then I called him a piece. All right, now
you're ready for UDT Mark nine training, which is a
type of rebreathing apparatus. And then when I finished all that,
and I was ready to become part of the sea
lab as one of the equinaults. I realized that I
had become very enamored of the whole submarine situation, and

(28:50):
I don't know what possessed me, but I really thought
that it would be a crime not to actually go
out on a real patrol and see what do with
this real like. And I told the Captain Bond, I said,
you know, I'd really like to go out and do
a regular operational patrol. He thought I was crazy, but anyway,

(29:11):
so that's what I did. I got shipped out to Hawaii.
It was in Hawaii, so I went out on a patrol,
a real patrol, and we were underwater for seventy five days.
We didn't come to the surface the whole time. It
was a very interesting circumstance, and it turned out again

(29:32):
to be really lucky, because I don't think I'd ever
have a better place if I had this idea about
writing a book. What better place? I mean, you're not
bothered by the sun coming up or going down. So
I did write my novel underwater. The idea was to

(29:54):
show how a personality changes when they go through the
very difficult hazy that's done in medicine, which is also
done in the military. It's not a good program, and
it's not doesn't really foster the kind of personality traits
that make people a good doctor. I think most doctors
have to recover from it, rather than making them helping

(30:18):
them to be a good doctor. So when I came
off that submarine, I had to climb up the latter,
you know, like in the movies, clutching my handwritten novel.
I got up on deck. Somebody said, what is that?
What do you hold it? I said, that's I wrote
a novel. And I said, oh really, I said, did

(30:40):
you know that it's really hard to get a novel published?
I said, no, is it? I was so convinced that
it was going to get published. It just never occurred
to me. So then I was presented with a major problem.
If it's difficult to get a book published, what am
I going to do? So you look on the Writer's

(31:02):
Guide and it says that none of the large publishers
want you to send manuscripts to them. They only accept
requested manuscripts. So how do you get a manuscript requested?
That was a question. So I came up with a
sort of a novel idea of approaching a number of

(31:24):
different editor types with the idea of getting them to
want to see my instead of me just snding it
in and it just coming in over the threshold. And
what happens at most publishing houses is that the twenty
two year old woman who graduated from Smith with literary

(31:46):
and wants to get into publishing and sitting at the
front desk, and she reads it and she's no. So
I composed very careful letter over a long period of
time that I then started to send to editors, and
I knew it had to be sure, it had to

(32:06):
be grabbed their interests somehow. So I turned my manuscript
into a solicited one. I started getting returns from editors
saying it sounds interesting, Yeah, send it in. And so
my first book became a solicited manuscript, and lo and behold,
I was offered a deal fairly quickly. And then, of

(32:29):
course I had to take that editor in a sense
the course of creative writing that I never took. The
book was published, but then there was a bigger problem.
The bigger problem wasn't nobody bought it. When that book
came out, I had just started my residency and ophthalmology

(32:52):
at Boston and the retina doctors were shocked that I
wrote a novel. I mean, that's ridiculous, particularly a novel
where I was sort of suggesting or complaining about hazing.
And you know, I was back as a first year resident,
so I was going to be hazed to some degree.

(33:13):
Although you know, I got a little bit more respect
because I had already done a surgical residency and that
didn't happen that often. But anyway, they gave me a
lot of ribbing about it that I would I was
making this complaining novel and you know, be a man,
you know, a surgeon. So then I thought, well, what

(33:36):
am I going to do? Should I just give up
on this idea? How do I now make a book
that's going to be successful that people will want to read?
And so I guess the case method is is that
I should study successful books. And there were several role

(34:00):
that jumped out at me that had been written by
heretofore unknown authors that were very successful. And the two
that I chose was Jaws and Love Story. And so
I then spent quite a while really investigating exactly how
those projects were happened and put together, and both of

(34:24):
them were written as screenplays first, and it was a
combination of a Hollywood and the publishing industry that kind
of made the whole project of success. So I ended
up deciding that I would follow that same process. I
would write a screenplay of what I considered would be

(34:47):
a good medical mystery thriller that would get people's attention.
And it seemed to me that was easy because people
had an idea about medicine that were wrong, and how
can I I undermine that in a way that would
get their attention, And that was the origin of coma.

(35:07):
So I put it all together, wrote it as a screenplay,
and then as soon as I had a contract for
the book, which I was only offered an advance of
ten thousand dollars, but way before the hardcover came out,
I sold the paperback rights for one million. I got
an agent, and then Hollywood, hearing this kind of stuff,

(35:28):
I had people very interested in and I had some choices,
and I knew at that point that it was going
to be a movie, and I held out for Michael
Crichton to be the director because I was friends with
Michael and he had gone to medical school, and I
knew I was afraid Hollywood would take it, and it

(35:50):
wasn't meant as a horror story. I wanted to be serious,
and there were several other directors who really wanted to
do it, but I sort of about for Michael. I
suddenly I was still a resident, first year resident, and
suddenly I was invited. The guy who was going to
be the producer, Marty Erlichman, happened to also be the

(36:16):
manager of Barbara Streisen, and Barbara Streisan had just finished
a movie with Chris Christofferson, and I got invited to
the world premiere. So here I was a first year
resident in ophthalmology, and I was sitting at the head
table with Barbara Streisen and Chris Gristoffs and I had

(36:39):
a sense that that Coma was gonna was going to
do really well. It's really been amazing experience, and people
were became very interested in medical thrillers after Coma, because
there's no other issue that affects people so close because

(37:01):
we're we're all patients and we could be a patient tomorrow.
That's why I still think my only hope is is
to sort of try to get the public behind and
how are they going to learn about these things? And
the only way I know really is by trying to
get them involved and interested in fiction and movies and

(37:26):
TV series, etc. That show this other side, because I
really feel that medicine has to return to recognize in
its real goal. A terrific job on the production and
storytelling by Madison Derekott and his special thanks to Robin Cook.
Thirty eight bestsellers to his name. His latest is called Nightshift.

(37:46):
I go to Amazon, go to your bookstore wherever you
get your books. And my goodness that he finds himself
in a submarine for seventy five days, well all that time,
no day, no night, and when he finds failure the
book gets published, he just starts to study and figure
out how to turn that failure into his success. The
story of Robin Cook, a chemistry, math and physics major

(38:09):
turned best selling author here on our American Stories