Not Exactly What I Had in Mind

by Roy Blount

And all he will tell us is, “I could be sleeping with a horse for all [people] know,” and “It’s not as though six people have caught me in bed with six men.” Most of the characters John Wayne played could have said the former and Truman Capote could have said the latter. Do we want a vigorous twenty-one-year-old American hero who either never has sex or never has it with anybody he wants to be seen with? True, Michael Jackson seems to get away with one or the other, but (a) he is a Jehovah’s Witness and (b) an element of creepiness works in rock and roll. As opposed to track and field.

  What if Lewis’s sexuality is something major companies and Mr. and Mrs. America frown on? Well, every American hero’s sexuality must include a broad streak of philosophy summarizable as follows: “Fuck ’em.” Otherwise, how are major companies and Mr. and Mrs. America going to learn anything?

  2. Revive redneck chic.

  Joe Namath worked against type by making panty-hose commercials. Carl Lewis might start saying things like “all vines and no taters.” Fortunately there is a sound new book out, You All Spoken Here, by Roy Wilder, Jr., which provides any number of useful expressions: “He lies so bad he hires somebody to call his dogs.” “He’s so tight, when he grins his pecker skins back.” “He’s been places and et in hotels.” “Fast as salts in a widder woman.” “Dumber than a barrel of hair.”

  3. Start hanging out with somebody other than family or walk-around guys.

  How about Chuck Yeager. Vanessa Williams. Geraldine Ferraro. George Burns. It would humanize Carl Lewis’s profile if people were to ask George Burns what the two of them did together and Burns were to reply, “He wanted me to run with him but when we came to the first lap I sat in it. Then I introduced myself and she said, ‘Aren’t you going to go any farther?’ I said, ‘It’s nice of you, but not at my age.’ She said, ‘Aren’t you going to jump with Carl?’ I said, ‘No. At my age, what could surprise me that much?’”

  4. Collect something different.

  I have been told that Waterford crystal fits into a new mandarin elegance among rich black males. Well. Maybe. I still say it sucks. He who accumulates crystal is bound to start watching his step. Remember when someone broke into Carl Lewis’s house during the Olympics and smashed all his crystal? That might not have happened if he’d collected something more people could identify with, like duck decoys.

  5. Develop vulnerability.

  Cart Lewis insists on being a master of all he deigns to touch. “He is secure enough to risk,” says his acting coach. But there is actors vulnerability, and then there is folks’ vulnerability. A real American hero — Muhammad Ali, Richard Pryor, Billie Jean King — is out-of-plumb enough to keep his security hopping. Who wants a hero who is all ups and no downs? For starters, Carl Lewis could go fishing on “The American Sportsman” and — no, not fall in. Just not catch anything.

  6. Do something for free.

  After the Olympics, Lewis’s agent claimed that his client had turned down $100,000 for a single track meet and would not sign with a pro football team for less than $1 million a year. Since Lewis is said to hate the macho regimentation of football (hey, I too would rather watch “Kate and Allie” and “Cagney and Lacey” than “Monday Night Football”), this means that he would undertake half a year of something he can’t stand for seven figures, but wouldn’t do one night of something he loves for six. This is not heroic. Far better would be for Carl Lewis to give himself over to some large-scale charity effort. This would prove he is rich. It also might do Carl Lewis and people some good.

  How about a Carl Lewis Telethon? To combat a major affliction. I have one in mind. It strikes hundreds of thousands of contemporary Americans: lawyers, bishops, campaign aides, yuppies, consultants, TV Christians, Pentagon officials, and, yes, superstar athletes. I don’t know the scientific name for this condition, but down home we used to call it Too Stuffed to Jump.

  Who You Gonna Call?

  EVER SINCE JOHN WAYNE became a ghost, America has been yearning for a real guy. “Who you gonna call?” asks the theme song of Ghostbusters, the most copiously grossing movie of 1984.

  Are you gonna call Clint Eastwood? No, he gets off on wasting punks. Burt Reynolds? No, he has gone too arch. Ronald Reagan? Well, the electorate certainly clings to him; wants to believe he is a real guy.

  Bill Murray, the star of Ghostbusters, is one. It is as if the usher, after unsolicitously lighting you to your seat, has walked on down the aisle and stepped onto the screen. And done a take and looked back in your general direction and said, “Catch this action.”

  Murray never quite seems to be in the right place, and yet there he is, enjoying it. “I was going to go into the army and train to be a doctor,” he says, “but my friends were going to college so I went to Regis, this Jesuit school in Colorado. I arrived with my first Dopp kit and everything. They said, ‘You never answered when we accepted you. We don’t have a place for you.’ So I stayed in the lobby of the dorm, over where they kept the coats, until some guy quit. People would ask me what room I was in. I’d point to the coats and say, ‘Ohh, over there. …’”

  Today, it is true, Murray has a big penthouse on Manhattan’s ritzy East Side. But it is also true that he says to his doorman, “Hey, great shoes. You make those in prison?” True, Ghostbusters is said to have earned him, personally, something in the low eight figures. True, Murray can now get away with just about anything in Hollywood — even portraying, in The Razor’s Edge, a spiritually enlightened person. But that doesn’t mean he is going la-di-da on us.

  Of course there are people to whom this does not seem to be the issue. There are people who feel Murray is not la-di-da enough.

  “Murray?” these people will say. “I saw him at the Olympics closing ceremony. He and this TV cameraman were shoving each other.”

  “Murray? I saw him at a big Oscars party. Everybody’s in a tux except Murray, who’s in jeans and a T-shirt and looks drunk.”

  I remember being at a Super Bowl several years ago, doing my best to act childish throughout Pasadena and its environs, and hearing the rumor that Murray and Hunter Thompson had just peed on the rug in the lobby of the Beverly Hills Hotel. I remember thinking, Well, I can’t keep up with that action. I can respect it. I can see the point of it. But I just can’t keep up with it.

  I have known Murray since before he was famous, but I’d never sat down with him and said, “Billy, you maniac, what are you up to?” Now I have. And I think he is keeping a flame alive. True, the amounts of money he is making are obscene enough to establish him solidly in the eighties. But as long as he is wrestling ghosts, looking scruffy, and keeping an eye cocked for the meaning of life, the sixties are not dead.

  Like all the guys he has played onscreen, from demented greenkeeper to seeker after higher truth, Murray is a great kidder. And I mean that sincerely. The son of a bitch can kid. I have watched him kid Yogi Berra, my children, John Candy, some Himalayan village women (onscreen in The Razor’s Edge, but you could tell they were real Himalayan village women and he was really kidding with them), a Guatemalan waiter, even autograph seekers.

  It takes grace to kid autograph seekers, since they are always running after you in the street. But I watched Murray deal with them as if he and they were all in the street together.

  “Will you sign this ‘To John’?” asked a panting man in his thirties.

  “John,” said Murray, signing, “what the fuck kind of name is John?”

  “Would you sign this for my sister, she’s a real diehard,” asked a college-age youth waving what looked like half a McDonald’s napkin.

  “Try hitting her when she’s sleeping,” counseled Murray as he signed. “Wait till she dozes off, and …”

  Then there was a guy who looked to be in his twenties and confessed to being in insurance who came up to Murray and John Candy on Fifty-fourth Street and Fifth Avenue in Manhattan and said, “You got to breakdance with me. I got to tell people I was breakdancing with Bill Murray and John Candy.” So the guy lay down
on his back on the sidewalk in his business shirt and tie, and Murray and Candy each got him by a leg; first they had him going in two different directions, but then they got together and spun him around. And he appreciated it. It was kind of nice. Murray and Candy didn’t have anything better to do, and it meant a lot to the guy.

  As people go, famous actors don’t have the highest reputation for being exactly there in real life. Murray does have a way of disappearing, but often it is into real life. During the period when I was plumbing him for this portrait he was off unreachable somewhere in San Francisco for a couple of weeks. But then he resurfaced, as he said he would, and it turned out he had been helping a friend stucco two houses. There he was, an idol of millions, all nicked up from the chicken wire you use to hold wet stucco on a wall. To be recognized less, he had altered his appearance. The last time I’d seen him he looked like Professor Irwin Corey. Now he had let his beard grow so that he looked like a young Karl Marx or a reflective Yosemite Sam. Or Professor Irwin Corey with a big beard.

  In his efforts to eschew false glamour, Murray has at least one thing working for him: the more he needs a haircut, the more he looks like Professor Irwin Corey. And yet onscreen he is the joint reincarnation of Harpo Marx and Clark Gable. We do not think characters played by beautiful actresses are crazy when they go for him, nor do we doubt it when characters played by people like Dustin Hoffman think he is cool. We wonder, if we let ourselves go a little seedier and stopped holding our stomachs in (Murray looks vaguely athletic, but his midsection and Richard Gere’s do not seem to belong to the same period in history), whether we might be in better touch with ourselves, or even with characters played by beautiful actresses.

  I like the way he runs in Ghostbusters. He is never quite as comic a mover as a Marx brother; he seems like a real guy running. But if a gait can roll its eyes slightly, that is what Murray’s gait does. He seems to be sharing a small joke with his body.

  Sometimes in movies he doesn’t seem to be doing much of anything. I have never seen a performance quite like his in Tootsie. There he is in the middle of a tightly organized, concept-centered movie, playing the soft-edged buddy of the intensely focused Dustin Hoffman. All he does is sit around musing, off in his own world, occasionally saying things like “I think we’re getting in a weird area here,” and he gives the movie a kind of second focus that mocks the concept (the way Abbie Hoffman made fun of America) yet makes it more convincing.

  Murray did not develop this knack overnight. He grew up in a big, economically marginal Catholic family, in a mostly affluent neighborhood outside Chicago, competing for laughs at the dinner table with his eight siblings and never dreaming of becoming an actor. After either dropping out or being kicked out of everything from Boy Scouts to college, he drifted into Old Town, where Chicago’s hippies hung out, and followed his older brother Brian Doyle-Murray into Second City, the comedy-theater group that produced most of “Saturday Night Live”s early stars. His first experience at Second City was an improvisation class. “I was so bad!” he says. But later he ran into a director of the troupe who said she would give him a scholarship if he would paint her kitchen purple. “It was one of the biggest shit jobs I ever did,” he says. “There were all these ceiling pipes that had to be purple.

  “Second City was a great life,” he recalls. “Waking up at eight-thirty at night, drinking free at the theater. But it was tough starting out. Nobody would want to work with you. You weren’t any good, for one thing. But how were you going to learn? John Candy and I went through hell together. He and I did fifty of the worst improvisations anybody ever saw. If you got any kind of laugh, they’d bring the lights down, just so you could have some kind of ending. Afterward, you’d be screaming backstage — the audience would hear you screaming and crying. Then you’d walk off into the night. That’s really not getting your rocks off.”

  But Murray eventually improved, and five years later graduated to “Saturday Night Live,” where no one could ever find him. Most of the cast lived the show and breathed the show — slept in the studio or with a phone right next to the pillow in case of a middle-of-the-night call to confer on a sketch revision. Murray was always late or missing; he’d show up for read-throughs with ideas that he hadn’t thoroughly worked out, much less typed up. And whatever people wrote for him he would rewrite. It appeared for a while, after he joined the show as Chevy Chase’s replacement in 1977, that he wouldn’t last. But his oily lounge singer and his cozy-with-the-giants entertainment reporter and his beltline-above-the-stomach nerd won their way into late-night Americans’ skewed hearts. And now, of all “Saturday Night Live”s early stars, he is the only one to establish himself resoundingly, by critical and financial standards, in the movies.

  Alan Zweibel, who wrote for “SNL” in its glory days, says that most of the people on the show were so devoted to producer Lorne Michaels and his vision that he could understand how a Reverend Jim Jones could arise. But Murray, Zweibel says, always kept a distance — was part of the gang but had his own notions. Now he is doing more to perpetuate the show’s tradition than anybody else. At John Belushi’s funeral, Murray and Dan Aykroyd got together and, Murray says, “we said we went through something together on that show that no one who wasn’t on it could understand. And we shouldn’t let it be lost.”

  The show had great outrage and liberation. It also had nihilism. It was making great television by trashing television. When Belushi and Aykroyd made movies that trashed movies — 1941, The Blues Brothers — the effect was less felicitous. And then Belushi trashed himself. Murray, meanwhile, gained more and more clout in godless Hollywood by playing these laid-back guys who seem to be watching the movie right alongside the audience and yet are running around in the midst of the movie having a good time and making the whole enterprise seem friendly. “Lorne always talks about the danger in Murray’s eyes when he’s performing,” says Zweibel. “But the truth is, there’s always something there that says, however wild I get, you’re safe with me.”

  When you’re with him, Murray can suddenly leave the room mentally on you. But here’s what I think he is doing, and I wouldn’t say this about every actor: I think he is thinking.

  Because Murray does not kid constantly. He is unlike “Saturday Night Live” in that not everything is tongue-in-cheek with him. For instance, we were at the Hard Rock Café in New York, which is part-owned by Aykroyd and is where Murray’s brother John is a bartender. We were drinking and staying up all night and kidding around with NBC sports commentator Ahmad Rashad and an MTV tape jockey and this guy Alex Hodges I went to high school with, who went on to become Otis Redding’s agent. I noticed that over the dance floor were these enormous letters that said ALL IS ONE.

  And I said, “Why’d they put that there?” (Because, hey, I come out of the fifties. I do not know from mysticism other than Methodist hymns. And when I stay out late in New York, it is not so I can be informed that all is one. It is so I won’t meet any other Methodists.)

  But Murray’s answer was, “I guess because they believe it.”

  I think Murray goes over so well as the questionable exorcist in Ghostbusters, as the dry roomie in Tootsie, as the goof-off with leadership qualities in Stripes, partly because he is a great kidder and partly because he conveys this sense that if cinematic comedy doesn’t work out, there are other realms. “Anybody can get a laugh,” he says. “I’m interested in making sense.”

  Offscreen, Murray is the kind of guy who finds places like Kelley’s. Kelley’s, which is in the middle of Miami somewhere, is the best bar you have ever been in unless you are exclusively into luxe. I heard that Kelley’s burned down last year, at least to its walls and ceiling, but that it is still in business. I haven’t checked it out yet, but I know that Kelley’s is not the kind of place that fire would hamper much.

  Kelley’s opens out onto the street (I mean it did even before it burned down, if indeed it has burned down) so that you have plenty of room to dance to the jukebox, which
has everything you want, including “Good Night, Irene.” That’s the biggest song at Kelley’s; when it comes on, everyone present sings it, and an elderly woman at the end of the bar beats the hell out of this bell on the wall, and everyone else grabs up these cans full of popcorn kernels and bangs them on the bar. …

  You probably have to be there. Murray talked Jimmy Buffett into going there once, and they sat around and sat around and nothing went on and Buffett was saying he had to get somewhere and then suddenly somebody drove a Fiat right up almost into Kelley’s and people piled out of it, and the lady who sits at the end of the bar arrived, and there were so many renditions of “Good Night, Irene” that everybody lost count.

  “I love Miami,” Murray says. “People there really keep track of their personal freedom. There are so many old people … they don’t want anybody giving them any shit. And you don’t have many laws down there. I met some third-generation smugglers whose family had been cutting deals with the Indians before Florida was even a state.”

  In New York, Murray found this great Japanese piano bar, and another place that sometimes serves “inverted margaritas” — they put a funnel in your mouth and pour in the ingredients. I met a guy in the second place one night who told me he invented those little computer lines they put on everything you buy now and that he had twelve bidets in his apartment. I asked what he needed twelve bidets for. He said, “I might get lucky.”

  Time, Newsweek, and People all wanted to do cover stories on Murray when Ghostbusters became a hit, but he wouldn’t cooperate. It is his feeling that “those magazines take your picture and they make up their minds who you are from that picture and they base the story on that, and millions of people see it, and from then on, that’s you. It sucks the soul out of you.”

  Murray is not kidding about that. Nor is he taking lightly the perils of Hollywood. “I’m on all these mailing lists now. An invitation a week to all these charity events. They want you to be on the dais or the committee — which is ten famous actors, ten people you never heard of, and fifty of the biggest criminals in the world. And it’s a benefit for wounded babies.” Third-generation smugglers are one thing, but Hollywood biggies are another. “They’re on all these decency committees. And they are the biggest thieves and crooks in the world.