The Big Bad Book of Bill Murray

by Robert Schnakenberg

  HOWARD, RON

  Murray has had a somewhat fraught relationship with the former child star turned Hollywood director. In the 1980s, he turned down chances to play the lead roles in Howard’s films Splash and Gung Ho. Then, in 1990, when Murray was looking for a director for Quick Change, Howard returned the favor in a particularly irksome manner. Impressed by Howard’s work behind the camera on the 1977 car chase comedy Grand Theft Auto, Murray sent him the script for Quick Change and asked him to consider taking it on. “I don’t get it,” said Howard after reading it. “There’s no one to root for.” “He lost me at that moment,” Murray remembered later. “I’ve never gone back to him since.” He has called Howard’s rationale for passing on the project “the craziest Hollywood jive” he ever heard.

  HOW DO YOU KNOW?

  Murray verbally agreed to play wealthy businessman Charles Madison in this 2013 comedy from director James L. Brooks. He started rehearsals with the rest of the cast and then mysteriously disappeared two weeks before shooting was scheduled to begin. Jack Nicholson ended up replacing him.

  HUGHES, JOHN

  Although the beloved director of The Breakfast Club and Sixteen Candles was born the same year as Murray and spent part of his childhood living in the suburbs of Chicago, Murray claimed in a 2010 interview that they never met—despite his having done a cameo in Hughes’s 1988 film She’s Having a Baby. “Steve Martin said to me once, ‘You’d hate him,’” Murray told GQ. “‘He’d say, ‘Do this, where you stick something in your nose!’ That kind of stuff drives me nuts.” And though Murray has professed his admiration for The Breakfast Club, he was shocked by the over-the-top memorial tribute Hughes received at the 2010 Academy Awards ceremony. “I was kind of surprised they gave him a big thing at the Oscars,” Murray said. “I mean, I remember Hal Ashby barely got mentioned, and this guy made half a dozen unbelievable movies.”

  HYDE PARK ON HUDSON

  DIRECTED BY: Roger Michell

  WRITTEN BY: Richard Nelson

  RELEASE DATE: February 1, 2013

  FILM RATING:: **

  MURRAY RATING:: **

  PLOT: As clouds of war gather overseas, a randy Franklin Delano Roosevelt consoles himself with hand jobs from his cousin Daisy.

  STARRING BILL MURRAY AS: Franklin Delano Roosevelt

  “Can this guy be serious?” Murray thought when director Roger Michell offered him the chance to play America’s thirty-second president in a big-screen biopic based on the private journals of FDR’s sixth cousin, Daisy Suckley. “I wouldn’t have cast myself,” he confessed to the New York Times. Although Murray may have been an unconventional choice, he proved to be an inspired one. Although he struggles a bit to capture FDR’s hightoned Mid-Atlantic accent, Murray won plaudits for his empathetic portrayal of the historical icon he called “the most formidable character” he’d ever played. “Murray, who has a wider range than we sometimes realize, finds the human core of this FDR and presents it tenderly,” wrote Roger Ebert in a review that was representative of the critical consensus.

  After securing the part in the spring of 2011, Murray spent the next several months reading biographies of Roosevelt and listening to recordings of his speeches. But he drew the most direct inspiration for his performance from the experience of his sister Laura, who had contracted polio as a girl. “That shaped the state I was in while I worked,” Murray explained to the Los Angeles Times. “Because I realized she didn’t complain about anything.” By the time shooting was under way in the summer of 2011, Murray had overcome his initial reservations and convinced himself he was the perfect man for the role. “Not to compare myself, but certain personality things were similar, like the way [FDR] tried to leaven things and move attention around a room, get everyone their little slice of the sun.”

  Unfortunately, though Murray acquits himself favorably, his efforts are undermined by a screenplay that depicts the polio-stricken president as a pervy creep. The decision to center the film on a purported sexual relationship between Roosevelt and his naive female cousin ensured that it would generate controversy, but the plot was historically and dramatically dubious. Directed with the gauzy stateliness of an episode of Downton Abbey, Hyde Park on Hudson is much too charitable to its lecherous protagonist. But Murray had made it clear from the beginning that he wanted no part of a movie that called FDR’s character into question. “The story that we’re going to tell, is it going to be a tearing down of an icon?” he told the New York Times of his mind-set in accepting the part. “I don’t know if I want to be part of that kind of action, where you trash someone. What was the John Travolta movie, Primary Colors? I didn’t want to do something where you were really just napalming someone.”

  NEXT MOVIE: A Glimpse inside the Mind of Charles Swan III (2013)

  Murray was at his absolute prickliest during the making of Groundhog Day in 1992. Relations between him and the studio got so bad that producers asked him to hire a personal assistant to serve as a go-between. Murray responded by hiring a deaf-mute who could communicate only in Native American sign language—which Murray promised to learn. (As it turned out, the only sign he mastered was the one for “tractor trailer.”) The passive-aggressive move angered director Harold Ramis, who denounced it as “anticommunication” and added it to the list of reasons why he would soon stop talking to Murray in any language.

  In his 2014 “Ask Me Anything” session on Reddit, Murray revealed that things ended badly for him and the assistant too: “I was sort of ambitious thinking that I could hire someone that had the intelligence to do a job but didn’t have necessarily speech or couldn’t quite hear or spoke [sic] in sign language. She was a bright person and witty but she had never been away from her home before and even though I tried to accommodate more than I understood when I first hired her, she was very young in her emotional self and the emotional component of being away from her home was lacking…. She was like one of your own kids that never had a job, and then they get a job and realize that certain things are expected, and you can’t react to everything you don’t like or care about. So the first time you have a job and someone says ‘you have to do this’—it was more complicated than she imagined. We were both optimistic, but it was harder than either of us expected to make it work.”

  IMPRESSIONS

  During his years on Saturday Night Live, Murray did impressions of celebrities and public figures, including Robert Duvall, Cary Grant, David Susskind, Walter Cronkite, Robert F. Kennedy, Ted Kennedy, Ralph Lauren, Richard Dawson, Paul McCartney, and the shah of Iran. He also performed a convincing impersonation of an over-the-hill Joe DiMaggio on a 1982 episode of SCTV and attempted a brief Richard Burton impression in Scrooged. Although he has a knack for mimicry, he has rarely performed the same impression twice. He does not consider them to be his strong suit. “Impressions really aren’t a higher form of life,” he once said. “There aren’t too many people who make their career by them, and those who do end up hanging by a noose doing eight different characters as they swing.”

  INDIAN HILL CLUB

  Winnetka, Illinois, golf and country club where the Murray brothers worked as caddies in the 1960s. During the time the Murrays lugged bags at Indian Hill, club membership was restricted to wealthy Protestants. Caddies were mostly Irish American and Italian American Catholics. The club’s eighteen-hole golf course was built in 1920 to the specifications of master course designer Donald Ross. The bushy area behind the ninth green was where Bill Murray “learned to curse, smoke, and play cards for money,” according to his autobiography.

  IN-N-OUT BURGER

  Murray is a passionate devotee of this regional fast food chain beloved by southern Californians since 1948. “It’s a great burger,” he has said. “They do a great job with it. The french fries are real potatoes. The burger’s great. You can get it all kinds of ways. It’s definitely the best franchise burger by a million miles.” In a 2014 interview with radio host Howard Stern, Murray revealed that he once ordered his chauffeur to t
ake him through the drivethrough at a Las Vegas In-N-Out Burger and then tipped the driver with In-N-Out Burger coupons. According to published reports, Murray sealed the deal to appear in 2014’s St. Vincent during a visit to a Los Angeles In-N-Out Burger with the film’s director, Ted Melfi.

  INSIDE THE ACTORS STUDIO

  Popular basic cable interview series hosted by composer and soap opera actor James Lipton. Murray has declined numerous invitations to appear on the program, out of disgust at the prospect of being “trumpeted and fellated” by the unctuous Lipton. “I met that guy a while ago,” he told Esquire magazine in 2004. “He said, ‘You’re never gonna do the show, are you?’ I guess I’ve been invited before, but I always had a problem with it being called Inside the Actors Studio. When I was at Second City, we always had a bit of an attitude about the Actors Studio. The Actors Studio—yeah, they had a couple of good actors. So? Do we all have to get down and worship ’em? It always bothered me. And when he called the show Inside the Actors Studio—well, what’re you talkin’ to Meg Ryan for, or any number of these people they’ve got now who couldn’t find the Actors Studio with a phone book?”

  IRELAND

  Murray has a special fondness for the Emerald Isle, largely because of his Irish heritage. His paternal grandfather emigrated from Cork, and his mother’s people are from Galway. Murray has visited Ireland many times to play golf. “It’s the most beautiful country to play golf in,” he once declared. “When you come as a guest to play golf you are treated like a king.” Murray’s favorite place is the Tralee Golf Club in County Kerry. He has called the par-72 course, designed by Arnold Palmer, the prettiest he has ever played.

  ISLEY, RUDOLPH

  Founding member of the 1960s R & B group the Isley Brothers whose mansion overlooking the Hudson River Murray purchased at auction for $7 million in 1990.

  JANIS, LOU

  Legendary caddy master at the Indian Hill Club in Winnetka, Illinois, in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Janis introduced the Murray brothers to the world of caddying and was the real-life model for the Lou Loomis character in Caddyshack.

  Ed Murray, Bill’s oldest brother, was the first of the Murray boys to work under Janis’s tutelage. “I was an altar boy at the church, and me and four boys serving Mass saw this man standing off to the side of the sacristy,” Ed recalled in a 2005 interview with Chicago magazine. “After Mass he told us he was the caddy master for the Indian Hill Club. If we wanted to make some money, he said, he would take us up that day and show us how to do it.” Brian, Bill, and Andy Murray soon followed in Ed’s footsteps.

  Janis was a rough-hewn but neatly dressed man who drove a Ford Falcon. Bill Murray once dubbed him the “prince of polyester.” A compulsive gambler, he was known to bet heavily on NCAA football games. While working at the Indian Hill Club in the mid-1960s, Bill Murray helped Janis make his weekly college football picks.

  JERK, THE

  Murray filmed a cameo as a gay Jewish interior decorator that was cut from the final version of this 1979 comedy starring Steve Martin as the titular wanker.

  JUNGLE BURGER

  See Shame of the Jungle.

  KELLY, MARGARET “MICKEY”

  Murray met his first wife while they were teenagers growing up in Wilmette, Illinois. They dated off and on for more than a decade before tying the knot on January 24, 1981—Super Bowl Sunday, which Murray considers a national holiday.

  The wedding took place in Las Vegas. Murray was taking a break from filming Stripes and told Kelly he was taking her out for dinner to a Mexican restaurant in the San Fernando Valley. They ended up driving to Vegas to elope, a matrimonial method Murray once called “efficient, fast, and binding.” A mysterious officiant in dark sunglasses performed the ceremony, which got under way at four thirty in the morning. For musical accompaniment, Murray selected “Ave Maria” as sung by Luciano Pavarotti, but by the time the bride and groom were in place, “Pagliacci” was playing instead. “It was grim,” Murray later recalled.

  A second, more traditional ceremony was staged two months later, on March 25, in front of family and friends at the Catholic church in Wilmette where Murray was baptized. Murray’s sister Nancy planned the event. His brother Brian served as best man. “We did the whole thing,” Murray recalled. “Church, priest, reception. All those Irish people drinking heavily. It was great.”

  A onetime talent coordinator for The Tonight Show and The Dick Cavett Show, Mickey Kelly later ran a custom furniture shop near the couple’s home in New York’s Hudson Valley. In a 1984 interview, Murray admitted he “ruined” his first wife’s career. “She used to be in TV. At one time, she was the head of comedy development at HBO. She was fired for telling them what she thought of them. It was the best way out. If both of you have careers, then nobody’s there when you get home.” In another interview, Murray expressed his displeasure with Kelly’s constant nagging: “I probably take more grief than anybody in the world who earns enough to buy his wife jewelry. Some people would call it keeping him in line, some people would call it maintaining communication, others would say it’s having your chops busted.”

  Murray’s marriage to Mickey Kelly lasted fifteen years, officially, during which time she bore him two sons. When they separated in 1994, it was revealed that Murray had been in an extramarital relationship with his costume designer Jennifer Butler for several years. The divorce was finalized in 1996.

  KINDERGARTEN COP

  Director Ivan Reitman offered Murray the part of classroom lawman John Kimble in this family-friendly 1990 comedy. When Murray passed, the role went to Arnold Schwarzenegger.

  KINGPIN

  DIRECTED BY: Peter and Robert Farrelly

  WRITTEN BY: Barry Fanaro and Mort Nathan

  RELEASE DATE: July 4, 1996

  FILM RATING: **½

  MURRAY RATING: ***

  PLOT: A crippled bowler confronts the man who ruined his once-promising career.

  STARRING BILL MURRAY AS: Ernie “Big Ern” McCracken, the Muhammad Ali of bowling

  Before returning to lead roles with Larger Than Life, Murray gifted the world with one last indelible character turn, playing an obnoxious professional bowler with a gravity-defying comb-over in this lowbrow sports comedy from the then red-hot Farrelly brothers. Although it bombed at the box office on its initial release, Kingpin has gained a cult following over the decades. It would be Murray’s last watchable film until he reinvented himself as a serious character actor in 1998’s Rushmore.

  “STRIKE, STRIKE, STRIKE—THE FIRST THREE HE THROWS. THE PLACE WENT BALLISTIC. THEY COULDN’T BELIEVE WHAT HE DID.”

  —PETER FARRELLY, on Murray’s amazing exhibition of bowling prowess in Kingpin

  Jim Carrey was the Farrellys’ first choice for the role of “Big Ern” McCracken, the sleazy grifter whose machinations lead to Woody Harrelson’s permanent disfigurement. Once he won the part, Murray put his own unique stamp on the character. He ad-libbed nearly all of his lines, discarding much of the scripted dialogue. He also managed to out-bowl the other actors, rolling a “turkey”—bowling argot for three strikes in a row—in one take for the film’s climactic showdown sequence. “He was just the consummate pro,” Bobby Farrelly told USA Today. “When we shot the big tournament in Reno, we had about 2,000 extras. And over three, four days, they could get bored. But Bill was in the stands playing with the people. No one wanted to leave.”

  NEXT MOVIE: Larger Than Life (1996)

  KING RALPH

  The part of Ralph Jones, the titular monarch in this 1991 comedy about a slovenly American lounge singer who inherits the British throne, was written with Murray in mind. Producers ultimately opted to go with John Goodman, who was riding a wave of TV fame spawned by the hit sitcom Roseanne.

  KUNG FU HUSTLE

  Murray has called this cartoonish 2004 homage to Hong Kong action movies “the supreme achievement of the modern age in terms of comedy.” In a 2010 interview with GQ magazine, he described the experience of watching his
1990 comedy Quick Change on a double bill with Kung Fu Hustle. Quick Change “looked like a home movie” compared to Stephen Chow’s film, Murray contended. “It looked like a fucking high school film… . There should have been a day of mourning for American comedy the day that movie came out.” In a 2015 New Yorker profile, Murray asserted that, next to Kung Fu Hustle, “pretty much anything is Cream of Wheat.”

  In June 2014, lovebirds Ashley Donald and Erik Rogers of Charleston, South Carolina, were posing for photos to commemorate their recent engagement when Murray snuck up behind the photographer, lifted his shirt, and started rubbing his distended belly in a clownish manner. Photographer Raheel Gauba initially pegged him for a crazed vagrant and tried to go on with the shoot, but the actor’s frenzied mugging quickly became a distraction. When Gauba finally realized whom he was dealing with, he invited Murray to pose for a photograph with the happy couple. “I took the shot and off he goes,” Gauba said afterward.

  Capping off an eventful summer of 2014, Murray spent the Saturday before his sixty-fourth birthday partying down at the home of Marvin “Larry” Reynolds in Jedburg, South Carolina. According to eyewitness reports and a widely circulated YouTube video, Murray ended the evening feverishly boogying to Tommy Tutone’s “867-5309/Jenny” and DJ Snake and Lil Jon’s “Turn Down for What.” He also took moose-call lessons from some of the “old country people” in attendance.