by Roy Blount
“Sometimes I feel like they are really running everything and I’m kidding myself. You know the original idea of fear and loathing — it’s figuring out the worst thing that could happen in a situation and being ready for it. As an exercise, it prepares you for Hollywood. Hollywood has the same power over you that the FBI does, or the CIA. Look what they did to Preston Sturges — they thought he was too big and they broke him. I don’t know why. It could happen to anybody.”
It was happening to Belushi when he died. It’s not happening to Murray. He says he has improvised, written, or reworked almost all the lines he has delivered in movies. He refuses to have an answering service so he can avoid people (“You can continue to change your number, or you can not answer the phone, or you can answer the phone in Swedish”). He has made millions and not spent many of them (no drug problems, for one thing). Money, as such, doesn’t mean much to him. “When I really get down,” he says, “and I’m walking around in the street and really pissed, I think, At least I’m rich. But that’s really grasping at straws.” He can, however, afford to be choosy about projects. He agreed to do Ghostbusters for Columbia only if they would let him and his friend, director John Byrum, do The Razor’s Edge (for which Murray took only a fee for cowriting the screenplay).
The two of them wrote the movie all over the world, from the Frank Sinatra Room of the Friars Club to a curbstone in Paris, by way of the Himalayas. (Murray has a good-looking, responsible and highly understanding wife, Mickey, and a two-and-a-half-year-old chunk of energetic son, Homer, but he gets to roam the globe. And he gets to name his son Homer Banks William Murray, for Ernie Banks, who hit homers. Murray is a Cubs fan. His mother made him stick in the William so she can call the kid “little Billy.”) Originally a W. Somerset Maugham novel, The Razor’s Edge was first filmed in 1946, starring Tyrone Power as a man named Larry Darrell who goes around in remarkably high-waisted pants “searching for something. Something I can’t put into words.” There are exchanges like this:
“Have you found that peace of mind you were looking for?”
“No, but for the first time I’m beginning to see things in a clear light.”
The Murray-Byrum version is more hip. It turns great kidding into a mode of spiritual enlightenment. The character as Murray plays him is different from everybody else, more engaging and yet less satisfied, by virtue of his sense of humor. It’s a very interesting, personal yet cool, straight yet funny performance. In one scene, Piedmont, a character played by Brian Doyle-Murray, dies after saving Larry Darrell’s life. In his grief, Darrell holds him in his arms and begins to recite all of Piedmont’s bad qualities. “He really enjoyed disgusting people; the thrill of offending people and making them uncomfortable. He was despicable. I’ll never understand gluttony, but I hate it. And I hated him. You,” he says to Piedmont’s body, “will not be missed.”
Murray says he had his brother in mind during that scene, but also Belushi. After Belushi died Murray was with Aykroyd and some of Aykroyd’s relatives. They were all sitting around in black silence. Murray recalled something he had read about the Sufi religion. Certain Sufis have a custom of recalling terrible things about the dearly departed. So Murray recited several terrible things that Belushi had done, and everybody in the room could think of several more, and soon everyone felt able to rise to the grim occasion.
I guess that’s a form of kidding death, but a more highly evolved form of it than used to be practiced on “Saturday Night Live.”
“The year Teddy Kennedy was running against Jimmy Carter,” Murray recalls, “I saw a picture of Kennedy in the Saint Patrick’s Day parade in Chicago. There he was, wearing a bulletproof vest. I don’t know, I think I cried or something, it was just so sad. I felt terrible about it. I called Hunter Thompson and he got in touch with somebody and — actually, I just handed out things. Got in a cab and went out to Co-op City in the Bronx at eleven in the morning the day of the primary … everybody out there had already voted by then. But I figured, if this fucker is going out there with a bulletproof vest on, at least I can …
“And I had done him on ‘Saturday Night Live’ — low, cheap, Chappaquiddick stuff. Kept pulling seaweed out of my mouth. I’m not crazy about actors going public about politics. But down the road a way, something is going to have to happen.
“In The Razor’s Edge, in the end, when I say I’m going back to America … America is sort of a word people use in the modern world to mean a place where there is real spiritual freedom. I have a feeling that what is wrong or right about the world is very clear and simple: No war. Don’t kill Asians. Don’t beat up on people who are smaller than you are. We go down to Grenada, where they had one revolution repulsed by a guy pointing an unloaded twenty-two at a boatload of people. It’s like taking over a window-cleaning office in Manhattan. And people say, ‘Now we can hold our heads high in the world.’” He shakes his head.
“There’s a whole generation out there … everybody was pretty righteous from about eighteen till twenty-four, until they realized they had to make a buck. I wonder, where did all those people go? Where in the hell did they go? When John Lennon died, they came out again, for the first time in ten years. It was amazing, a lost race materialized. Somebody said they’re like Zapata’s army. A time’s going to come, somewhere down the road.”
So there is one rich thirty-five-year-old in the country who isn’t a yuppie.
Murray and I were watching the Olympics on TV when the American men gymnasts beat the Chinese and then got ecstatic. “Those boys are conscious now,” Murray said. “They won’t be able to remember it tomorrow because they won’t be conscious. But they’ll remember it whenever they’re conscious again.
“That’s my technique now, I guess. It’s hard to call it a technique when it’s something much bigger. When the cameras roll, I think: This is the most important thing I’m going to do. It’s going to be the biggest experience I’ll ever share with other people. The biggest moment of contact with people right now. And if you’re there, conscious of that … what you do doesn’t look hard.”
It is hard to talk about what an actor does, especially if, as Murray says, “the next day I act like a complete asshole and punch somebody in a bar. I’m still the same person, unfortunately. I’m not going to save the world because my own self is the first problem.”
One reason Murray is engaging on the screen is that he lets his own self in on the joke. “Ah, yes,” he seems to be saying, “here you are a movie star, running from a special effect.” (As a matter of fact, he says, he is getting tired of making comedies “that end in an explosion.”) He has been able to include America in that joke without losing himself in the process.
Maybe you would rather save the world by stockpiling bombs and invading Grenada. Murray prefers to make contact with potential enemies, himself included, by thinking on his feet and lightly evoking higher values.
He tells a story about driving around Chicago a few years ago, seven people in the car all smoking dope, and it’s the first time he’s been back in town since 1968, when the Old Town area was like an armed camp, cops milling around in wagons just waiting for someone to look halfway bustable.
“And all of a sudden we come to a stop right next to a paddy wagon. Inside are two of the biggest-headed guys I’ve ever seen. Just huge-headed guys. And we have really long hair.
“I’m driving. I don’t want to sit still in the water for these guys, that is sure suicide. So I figure in these situations, if you can say something first … say, ‘Excuse me. Can you tell me where the Claes Oldenburg baseball bat is?’
“He gets out of the paddy wagon. I say, ‘We’re fucked.’
“He comes to the window. He says, ‘The Claes Oldenburg bat is in front of the Social Security Building. The Picasso woman is at the Civic Center. The Calder standing mobiles are at the Federal Center, and the Chagall mosaic mural is at the First National Bank.’
“I say, ‘Thanks very much.’
“Cops in
Chicago used to be so scary. I think those art pieces really changed that town. We did go to see that baseball bat, and it was everything I ever wanted it to be.”
On Politics
If Joe McCarthy
Had been less swarthy,
And the other one, Gene,
Had been less clean …
Testimonial, Head-on
AND NOW FOR A message that takes real courage:
I can’t find it in my heart to like light beer. I would rather have one heavy beer than seven light ones. I wouldn’t mind having seven heavy ones. And I don’t really care what brand the last four and a half of them are.
When I speak of courage I am not alluding to the risk of corpulence on my part. I believe a person should live in such a way that he can carry a little corpulence. The reason it takes courage is this: I guess it rules out my appearing in a great beer commercial.
I, a living American, accept that I will never be in a great beer commercial, probably. With no less gravity would an eighteenth-century Viennese have said to himself, “Let’s face it. You ain’t ever going to hit a great lick on a clavier, probably.” Great beer commercials are so good they nearly do a transcendent thing in our culture: they nearly redeem television.
I don’t mean the beer commercials with actors in them. Those icky-yuppie figments of the “Tonight is kinda special” stripe are not beery. Nor can I tolerate that around-the-campfire vignette in which one guy goes off into the woods to talk a grizzly bear out of a case of Stroh’s. Here we have a workable concept, ruined by performances so callow that any half-grown bear, grizzly or fluffy, would chase those guys and their campfire all the way back to Hotchkiss.
I mean the beer commercials with real people in them: the Miller Lite ones with Bubba Smith, Boog Powell, Jim Honochick, John Madden, Marv Throneberry, Bob Uecker, and all. Those commercials are the only form of television that captures what jocks are like. (Which is to say, what everybody wants to be like when he or she is drinking beer.) They may be the only form of television that captures what people are like.
Most of the time as we watch television what are we thinking? “Unhhhhh. Television.” Or, “Holy jumping Great television! But should the children be witnessing actual dismemberment?” Or, “Will wonders never cease? Considering it’s television, this almost bears some relation to art or life!”
Great beer commercials, however, are fresh, full-bodied, tasty: better than “MASH,” for my money, and almost as good as “The Honeymooners.” Being commercials, they are what television is all about; and yet there is actually something genuine about them. True, the point is to sell light beer by showing heavy guys drinking it. But these guys (who have lived in such a way that they can carry a little corpulence) are being funny about drinking beer in ways that people actually are funny, or think they are, when they are drinking beer.
Of course these heavy guys do not take any beer into their mouths, onscreen. And I know the poignance of that.
Years ago, after I wrote a book on the Steelers, I appeared in a commercial, shown in Pittsburgh, for Iron City beer. (This was back before there was light.) It wasn’t a great commercial, because I was alone — didn’t have Dick Butkus to bounce off of. But it was heartfelt, and it taught me how to execute “the beauty pour.” The beauty pour means transferring beer from bottle to glass with so fine a touch that the suds rise just far enough above the brim; look irresistibly heady; but do not crest and break and come running down your arm.
The beauty pour does not, however, entail drinking any beer, aside from what you may be able to lick off your arm while the director isn’t looking. I did thirty-eight takes of my commercial, and listened to thirty-eight beers being poured unaesthetically down the toilet, as I sat there feeling more and more porous and dry. Beer commercials waste more beer than Carrie Nation.
How would you like to film a love scene with a beautiful person of the diametrically opposite sex who is topped off by this wonderful pouf of hair that you can’t wait to stick your nose into, and thirty-eight times — just when your lips are about to meet — have her snatched away, murdered, and replaced by someone else fully as comely and unattainable? I don’t think I have been as drunk since, as I went out and got right after filming my beer commercial.
But you can tell that the people in the Miller Lite commercials have, in their time, swallowed a few. They are not getting all misty and warm over what a wonderful institution beer is for bringing the right sort of persons together. They are getting the way people get, ideally, when they are having fun drinking beer: rowdy without serious breakage, lightsome in a ponderous sort of way, and just confused enough to be entertaining.
Why aren’t more commercials, for beer or anything else, as fitting as these? Why do so many of them involve, for instance, children beaming in ways that children never beam and exclaiming things that children never exclaim? “Gee, Mom, these Hodgson-Furbinger Reconstituted Thaw-’n’-Sizzle Fish Nuggets are really something else.”
If only I were able to believe, for thirty seconds, that light beer tastes like beer.
As Well As I Do My Own, Which Is What?
WHEN SOMEONE TAKES TOO authoritative a tone with my friend Slick Lawson, the Nashville photographer, he will say, “Well, I go along with what Donald Wilson Breland said about that.”
Then he will proceed to snap pictures. After a few moments the person who has taken too authoritative a tone will say, “Well … I don’t know Breland. Of course I know his work. …”
Then Slick will go on to mention that Donald Wilson Breland was a kid who sat in front of him in the fourth grade and ate paste. And what Donald Wilson Breland said, about everything, was “Whutcha wawnt me t’ do uhbout it?”
Someone is going to catch me out like that someday. And only because I am trying to be gracious.
At my twenty-fifth high school reunion last year, you would have been proud of me. The way I called those names up, with seldom even a quick half-glance at a tag, you would have thought they were Ajax, Salome, Mrs. Miniver, and Jackie Robinson. I hadn’t seen Steve Fladger or Mickey Wallis in a quarter of a century, and they were the only two returning members of the class whose bone structure had changed (late height spurts) since graduation. But their names came to me like the list of vowels; because I had learned them when I was fresh, back before I had met or heard of 375,000 other Americans. By the time anyone gets to be forty-three, if he has followed current events and been out of town a few times, two-thirds of the names he hears sound vaguely, but only vaguely, familiar.
People ask me, “Do you know Mason Swint?”
And I am not sure whether:
(a) I certainly do.
(b) I don’t personally, but I do know of him, because he is the one who just won an Emmy or Oscar or Grammy or Tony or Obie or Golden Globe or Gold Glove or Olympic gold or Nobel; or National Book Award or that other thing that’s like the National Book Award or one of the three or four world junior light-heavyweight championships.
(c) I don’t personally, but I do know of him, because he is that petting-zoo operator who was charged with lambkin, piglet, and duckling abuse.
(d) I am thinking of Morgan Swift, Morris Wilt, Milton Sweet, Marion Sweat, Morton Swing, Martin Short, or Myron Smart, some of whom I am sure I do know, or know of, and some of whom I believe I do, unless I am thinking of Mason Swint.
I should cut down on my name intake. But I don’t want anyone to think that I don’t know who’s who in my field. And I don’t know what my field is. Furthermore, I love names too much, for their own sake. How can I close my eyes to the fact that Stanford University has professors named Condoleezza Rice, an arms-control specialist, and Jon Roughgarden, an ecologist? All those z’s and g’s, on one faculty! Roughgarden should be a common term, like rough-house or rough fish. Condoleezza Rice, according to the Stanford Observer, is from Birmingham, Alabama, and “her unusual name of Condoleezza is derived from the Italian musical term con dolce which means ‘with sweetness.’” Ah.
Does Condoleezza rhyme with Louisa, pizza, mezza? In this country names can ring a range of bells. My friend Walter Iooss, the Flemish-American sports photographer, pronounces his name like “Yost” only with another s in place of the t. When Iooss took his marital vows, he did not say “I do.” He said what New York Knicks announcer Marv Albert says when a Knick hits a shot: “Yesss!” Iooss and I once rode in a Chicago cab driven by Rosetta Shinboom.
Cabdrivers, as a class, have the most noteworthy names in America. There was one in the New York Daily News the other day named Just Ackah. And yet they are quite often quoted anonymously. This strikes me as fishy. The way I look at journalistic ethics, license to cite a cogent cabdriver should not be extended to anyone who cannot also make up a credible name: “‘Well,’ observed U Gonxha, the Burmese-Albanian hackie who drove me in from the airport, ‘what most folks around here are saying is …’”
Most folks are not cabdrivers. But when I was younger I could remember their names anyway. One weekend in Pittsburgh I must have introduced my wife to two hundred people, flawlessly except for a set of twins. (With twins I have always tried too hard. I get them down pat, and then I look at one or the other, and it’s not as if I don’t know which one it is, but I think, “Pat. Is this the one I am determined to remember is Pat, or isn’t Pat?”) That was ten years ago. Now names come to me like dreams: at first so vivid (oh, I’ll have no trouble holding on to this!) and then gone.
I fault not only my age, which is advancing, but also the one we live in, which isn’t. Names today are like dollars: there are far more of them than there used to be and they amount to less. Baseball players should all be mythical. But today there must be, among the Minnesota Twins alone, four or five semi-phenoms who have moved right on into budding sort-of-stardom without ever quite registering. There is a Teufel. If you held a knife to my throat, I couldn’t tell you whether Teufel is pronounced as in “Teufel, Teufel / We adore thee” or to rhyme with “rueful.” I just don’t know. I don’t know whether I ever will know.