The schools are still standing. But I was an underachiever and a screw-off. I remember I took the National Merit Scholarship test, and I scored high enough to win, but when I got the score back, there was an asterisk next to my name, meaning I had qualified for the National Merit Scholarship but wouldn’t get one because I wasn’t in the top half of my class. Which was devastating, really bad news, ’cause my father would have loved to have heard somebody was going to come up with the money for college.
What was the matter with you in school?
This is the same conversation I had with my teachers then. “What’s wrong, Bill? Something bothering you? Something wrong at home?” I don’t know, I just didn’t care for school much. Studying was boring, I was lazy. I’m still lazy. And I had no interest in getting good grades. In grade school, I was basically causing trouble all the time. But not very serious trouble. When I got to high school, I started to meet a more sophisticated kind of troublemaker. I mean, these guys were really smart—with 148 IQs—and really nuts, the first guys that got kicked out of our school for grass. They just traveled on a different plane than the general Jesuit “all right you’ll study tonight, you’ll crack them, you’ll come in and you’ll shut up” sort of attitude. I mean, you couldn’t have long hair in our school, so these guys would let their hair grow long and grease it down so it looked like it was short, and you’d see them on the weekends, and you couldn’t believe how much hair they had, ’cause they’d washed it. They put up with all the grief that the preppie crowd gave them for being greasers, and they didn’t care. Because come the weekend, they were doing a completely different thing than the guys from Wilmette who were trying to drink beer and get high. They didn’t have any interest in being part of the social scene at this preppie Catholic school. They were downtown, stoned, listening to blues.
So where were you? Were you downtown at the blues joints?
I was not. I was basically in the middle. It was all right, because I got to look at both sides. I didn’t know from downtown and the blues joints, but at the same time, I didn’t have enough money to really have a lot of fun. I didn’t have a car; I didn’t have a driver’s license until God knows when. So I basically relied on friends; they were my wheels. Or I’d take a bus or hitchhike. And in the suburbs, that’s really lowballing it. Everybody else’s parents drove them, or they had their own car. My parents just looked at me: “Your brother hitchhiked to school, and you’ll hitchhike to school.”
Were you close to the people in your family?
I was pretty close to my sister Peggy. She was the one close to me in age.
What has she become?
She’s become a parody of herself. No, she lives in the suburbs, and she’s got three kids. She’s an activist. She’s about as active as anybody can get. She drops out of bed rolling. Gets a lot done. She always was that way. So when I went into my bad phase, in college, she had no time for me. At that point, the only decent relationship I had in the house was with the dog.
What was the dog like?
The dog was the greatest dog in the world. Cairn terrier, one of those little dogs. My mother’s dog. He was one of those dogs that will play fetch forever. And he just loved to go for walks. I’d take him for walks to Evanston, about a fifteen-mile walk. His feet would be sore, but he would love it. This was my bad period. Everybody had left the house. My oldest brother was in the air force, my second oldest brother was living downtown, one sister was in the convent, another sister had moved away somewhere.
My day would basically begin around twelve or one. I’d wake up, and I’d eat like about eight fried eggs and about half a loaf of toast, and then I’d drink about half a gallon of milk, and then I’d hang around, I’d read, I’d listen to the radio, I’d make a few phone calls. And then, at about five-thirty or six, when my mother was going to come home, I’d split. And I’d come back around four or five in the morning. I’d be lying there in bed, and my mother would scream at me, “I want you here when I get back.”
I’d have been downtown, hanging out with my brother Brian Doyle-Murray. Also, I had friends who went to Northwestern. I’d walk the streets of Evanston all night long. Walk home or ride home on the subway in the middle of the night. It was so cold in the winter, I would just jump in front of cars to get them to give me a ride. And they were so scared, so glad I didn’t have a gun, that they’d give me a ride home.
When was the first time that you figured out that you might want to be an actor?
I was in The Caine Mutiny at school. I played Keefer, a sleaze guy who rats on everybody. It wasn’t much of a part. The only great thing about it was that you got to get out of class for a few hours, and that was like getting a three-day leave in the army, because class was hell.
Then they had another show, The Music Man. I auditioned for the part of the Music Man because I could sing. I auditioned for the part with two other guys, but someone else got it. Then, we three auditioned for the barbershop quartet, and we got those parts. One day after school, I walked by the school theater, and there were girls in there, and I just walked in. It was an all-boys school, you know, so it was like, girls—you wanted to take your clothes off. They were attractive girls, too, and they were wearing almost no clothes, ’cause it was a dance audition. A woman turned around and said, “Now, who’s going to audition to be a dancer?” I just jumped up and said, “I’m a dancer.” And people were like, “Huh? What? Come on.” So I went up onstage. I just wanted to sort of stand behind these girls, really, get as close as I could. I did my little audition, just clowning around, really. The woman said, “Okay, you, you, you and you,” and she pointed to me, and I was in. So I told my friends, “Hey, I’m not going to be in the barbershop quartet—I’m a dancer now.” They said, “What? Why?” I said, “I don’t know, man, I don’t know. It’s just an instinct.”
It turned out to be a good move, because the dancers rehearsed at night. The dancers rehearsed at seven-thirty, ’cause the dance instructor was a real dancing teacher, and her only time was between seven-thirty and ten at night. So it meant that I would go home, eat dinner and say, “Mom, I gotta go out.” And I would leave the house, which was even better than leaving school. I would get to go out for three hours, and it turned out that the dancers were like the kind of people I was telling you about who were misfits in that school. They were slightly nuts and had different tastes in all areas. We had just incredible times. Sometimes, the dance teacher would say, “I have to leave early,” and we’d go, “Oh, that’s too bad; that means we just have another hour to drink gin out of Coke bottles and jive around with these girls; that’s just too damn bad.” And I’d come home half snookered on gin and Coke, and my mom would say, “How was it?” and I’d say, “Uh, I hurt my foot.” She was thinking I was Baryshnikov or something, since I was so dedicated. I had the greatest time of my high school career doing that show, so I got hooked on show business.
What was your next step?
Well, I took one acting class in college, ’cause I thought it’d be a piece of cake and there were a lot of girls in it. I knew I could act as good as these girls could, just by seeing them around the coffee shop. And I figured if you were a man and went into a course that was mostly women, you couldn’t get a worse grade than your costar. And all these girls were getting good grades because the teacher was kind of working the ropes. He was running “the artist one” by them—you know, “Oh, yes, I am an artist.” But when class was over, he was lonely and so on. So long as you never looked funny at him while he was staring at a girl, you got a good grade. But I only hung in there for one semester. That was that.
So still there was no star that you were following.
Still no star I was following. And it really only happened because my brother Brian started acting, and I went and started seeing him. Brian is five years older than I am. After high school—when I was still a grade school punk—he vanished. He went to school out in California for a while and then quit and became a railroad s
witchman. He put a couple cars into San Francisco Bay once, but I guess all railroad men do something like that. He did a lot of weird things.
When my father died, Brian came back and was supposed to support the family. He got a good job, and if he’d stayed in it, he’d have ended up a very wealthy man. But after six months, he quit the job and went to work at Second City. He had started by taking workshops there, and then he went to work there full-time. That drove my mother completely around the bend. She couldn’t believe it.
Brian lived in Old Town, where all the hippies were, and I started hanging out at his place. That’s where I met Harold Ramis and John Belushi and Joe Flaherty and Del Close, who directed the show, and Bernie Sahlins, who ran Second City. They thought I was a riot—weekend hippie, you know, going back to my straight life in the ’burbs every night.
I had good friends at Northwestern, and I would drag them down there, and we would all weasel our way into the show for free and watch. After you’d seen the show a hundred times, they couldn’t really expect you to pay.
Were you and Brian the family cutups?
No, everybody was a cutup. Everybody was funny.
Was your father funny?
He was real funny, and he was a very tough laugh. He was very tough to make laugh. He was very dry, very dry. He sure as hell wasn’t going to laugh unless it was really funny.
My father’s father was the real nut. He was crazy till the day he died. He lived to be ninety. He was the kind of guy who had the light-up bow tie. But you’d really have to beat on him to get that bow tie out there. He would do it only at the most tastefully tasteless occasions.
He was a real good man, my grandfather. He always had licorice in his pocket, and he always had a Budweiser and a Camel. He had false teeth. There was always a baby in our family, and he’d always say, “Come here, little baby.” And then he’d pop out his teeth exactly like the ghost in Ghostbusters and just scare the hell out of the baby. My mother’d get really pissed at him. “Grandpa! How could you scare him like that?” He wouldn’t say anything; he’d just drink his beer.
Is your mother funny?
Well, I didn’t use to think she was funny, but now I realize she’s like completely out of control, nuts. I just never noticed it. I sort of took it all seriously, you know, and acted like it was normal. Now I realize that she’s funny to watch at least 60 percent of the time, like the way it’s funny to watch a baby panda fall over stuff at the zoo. I finally started taping her phone calls when I worked in Saturday Night Live. I couldn’t believe that someone could go on like that, and I realized that I’d been listening to that my whole life. I mean, you can really hear her mind work. I steal her stuff all the time.
Can you think of an example?
Well, not really. I mean, I steal so much that sometimes Brian will laugh, and he’ll say, “Mother.” If I’d started paying attention to my mother when I was twelve instead of trying to sneak out the door and avoid her, not only could I have handled her a little better, but I could have gotten a much better education about women and about people. But it was a fear of the unknown, I guess. Now she’s become a show-business mother. She’s gone around the bend. I remember when she came out to Hollywood one time, and we took her to the Polo Lounge. Brian called Doug Kenney [cofounder of the National Lampoon and cowriter of National Lampoon’s Animal House] and said, “Page my mother at the Polo Lounge.” So this guy who looks like a Mexican general walks through, saying “Lucille Murray, Lucille Murray” at the top of his lungs, and the entire Polo lounge is looking around for Lucille Murray, and she gets up to, like, visual applause from the entire crowd. And all of a sudden, she just snapped. She started talking like Photoplay magazine circa 1959, about Eddie Fisher and Liz Taylor and Richard Burton and all this stuff. For about six or seven weeks she was completely around the corner. She would call me up and say stuff like, “Well, they have to come to you now.” I mean, we’d taken her into our dark little world, and now she was a show-business authority. It was insane. This was my mother, this was the woman who’d said to me, “Couldn’t you be happy doing community theater?” And now she was cutting my deal for me.
When had she said that about the community theater?
Just in the beginning, after Second City. Maybe she said it to Brian, actually. She didn’t see any money in acting, even though Brian had gotten good reviews in Chicago and was really great in the show. Or it may have been in the period when he’d gone out to Hollywood and tried to get different kinds of work and was starving again. She said, “This is not working. Couldn’t you try community theater?” She wanted him to do anything to make some dough. “Fine, you’re having a ball, but I still have an eight-year-old to feed at home.” I mean, how she managed to get all the rest of the family raised is amazing. How my father did it on the money he made was amazing.
When did you first work with Belushi?
I might have improvised with him once or twice at Second City. But I didn’t work with him until I got to New York. It was on the National Lampoon Radio Hour. John was one of the producers. He dragged all these people to New York—Flaherty and Harold and Brian—and got them on the radio. A lot of people stayed at his place. Then he put The National Lampoon Show together, and we went on tour—Philadelphia, Ontario, Toronto, Long Island. That was in 1975. Later we opened off-Broadway in a place called the New Palladium. I was Belushi’s roommate on the road. We drank a lot of Rolling Rock in those days.
You mean you weren’t doing coke all night long?
No, no, no. We didn’t have any money to do coke. Coke wasn’t a big deal anyway at that time.
Were you doing any drugs?
Oh, smoking grass. But basically we were juicers at that time. At most of these gigs, we got free drinks, so we drank. We were still starving actors, so we had to get whatever perks we could get. We drank Champa Tampas at the New Palladium, champagne and orange juice. It was a special there. And it’s a great drink to work on because it’s got that sugar pump, and it’s nice and cold. And the air-conditioning was no good in that place, and we were just drenched with sweat. After three shows on a Saturday night, you’d literally have to wrap up your shirt in a paper bag and put it inside a plastic bag.
Everybody in the show was good: Belushi, Gilda Radner, my brother Brian, Harold Ramis, Joe Flaherty and later Richard Belzer. One night something happened and I came late, so I got to watch the scenes. And it was the funniest show I’ve ever seen in my life. They were the funniest people in the world. I was laughing so hard. And I’d already done the show for three and a half months.
How did you get from the Lampoon show to ‘Saturday Night Live’?
Well, while we were in the stage show, they started to cast Saturday Night Live with Howard Cosell and Saturday Night Live at the same time. People from both programs would come and watch our show. We all auditioned for Lorne Michaels of Saturday Night Live. Things dragged on and on, and Brian and I and Belushi were going to take the job on Saturday Night Live with Howard Cosell, ’cause it didn’t look like Michaels was going to hire us. Then Belushi got hired for Saturday Night Live, and Brian and Chris Guest and I took a job on Saturday Night Live with Howard Cosell. Everybody else was on the other show. So we were on TV, and they were on TV. But they were the show, and we were on with the Chinese acrobats and elephants and all sorts of crazy acts, and we would get cut almost every other week. And then that show got canceled, and we got a job working on a documentary that TVTV was making about the Super Bowl. Michael Shamberg was doing it, and he wanted to have funny people doing funny things with the situation.
Then Shamberg asked me if I wanted to work for him on the next couple of documentaries, so I went out to California for nine months. During which time Saturday Night Live kept rolling, and Chevy left the show, and they wanted somebody new, and they called me up. I’d worked with Gilda and Belushi in the Lampoon show; I’d met Danny when we were both in Second City. So they just figured I knew the styles. “We’ve worked with hi
m. He’s all right.”
What was it like coming on as the new guy?
Well, it was tough. I had to spend about six months being the second cop, the second FBI guy. The first week I was on they gave me sort of a test. They gave me a lot of stuff to do, and I went crazy, I loved it. I roared. I was there on a look-see basis. I had a three-show deal. It was three shows, see if I can do it. After the first show, Lorne said, “Well, I guess you’ll be moving to New York.” So that made me feel good, but then for the next six months, I didn’t have anything to do. They gave me a lot the first week, and then I realized how competitive it really was.
The hard part was, the writers made the show, and the writers didn’t know me, so they’d write for who they knew. If you do a great scene one week, the next week the writers would write for you. If you blew a joke in somebody’s sketch, you were history. You were invisible. I blew a joke in one of Anne Beatts’ sketches, and she still hasn’t forgiven me.
What was the joke, and how did you blow it?
We were four guys running clubs, and I was opening a new bar called the Not Just a Meat-Rack Bar. I blew the line. I had the office right next to hers, and she wouldn’t even look at me for at least six weeks. It was like that. If you blew a joke, people didn’t trust you. If you blew a joke, what you basically did was you failed to get this writer’s joke to 20 million people that were watching the show. Twenty million people would have laughed if you’d said those words properly. It was very serious. I blew one of Michael O’Donoghue’s jokes. It was the Burger King sketch. The counterman said, “How do you want yours? We’ll make it any way you want it.” And I was supposed to say, “I want mine with the blood of a Colombian cocoi frog on it.” What happened was I went out there and for the heck of it, I wore this brand-new yellow silk baseball jacket that someone had given me. It was the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen in my life. I said, “I’ll wear it in the sketch. I look so damn good in it.” We’d rehearsed the sketch, done it in blocking, so on and so forth. For the real show, they put stage blood onto this Colombian-frog burger, and whoever it was sprayed blood all over this jacket. I just about went nuts. I guess I blew the first line, then they sprayed the blood all over me. This is my classic Saturday Night Live story. They sprayed the blood all over me, completely destroyed the jacket, I had blood all over my hands, and I had two minutes to get out of this clothing. Taking off the jacket, I got blood all over everything. I had two minutes to get on a wig, a mustache on my lips and a pillow in my stomach to look like Walter Cronkite. And all this stuff was being done while the band was playing “Contusion,” by Stevie Wonder, at top volume. The makeup guys were fighting about how much gray to put in my hair. I’d blown O’Donoghue’s joke, and I was now in danger of blowing myself completely out, because I had this huge pillow and it never fit; the zipper didn’t close. There was blood still all over my hands and the wig and everything. The band screeched to a halt, and the guy said, “Five seconds.” And I went absolutely crazy. I went absolutely hysterical. I shrieked like a banshee, and the audience started laughing. They said, “This guy’s having a breakdown.” But then I pulled it together, and I was really funny in the sketch, and that was really when I realized that it could be fun because it was so ridiculous. That was when I finally relaxed. But I had to blow a big joke in order to do it.
The Rolling Stone interviews Page 22