The sequence with Wilcoxon required Murray and the seventy-four-year-old actor to stand under whirlybird rain towers for hours—an endurance test for an actor half Wilcoxon’s age. “I loved the guy,” says Murray. “During our breaks, I would ask him for advice and he told me about a book he read that influenced him. It’s called The Art of Dramatic Writing. I still reread that book all the time to get what I need. It talks about premise, and how everything just has to jive with the premise. It’s quite uncomfortable to be under a rain machine. We’d get drenched and his coat would end up weighing forty pounds. But he was a great pro and nailed everything he did. Those are the guys you meet that make a difference.”
For the great British star of the London stage and Cecil B. DeMille’s Hollywood epics, Caddyshack would be his final major film role. Wilcoxon died in 1984 at the age of seventy-eight.
* * *
Since Bill Murray’s time in Florida was so limited, Ramis worked him hard, brainstorming situations for Carl and shooting them with little or no preparation. They could worry about finding a place for them in the film later. “Everything we shot with Bill in the movie was just him riffing,” said Ramis. “We just described the physical action and he made up the lines. He’d done so much improv at the Lampoon, he could just go. He would just turn up and do weird stuff. That’s how he worked.”
Murray was due back in New York for the beginning of the fifth season of SNL on October 13, 1979. Ramis and his fellow writers scrambled for more impromptu Carl moments. Kenney thought up a raunchy sight gag (it’s actually Carl’s introduction in the film) in which he’s standing in a sweat-stained gray T-shirt and a camouflage hat behind a hedge leering at a foursome of older-women golfers and seems to be masturbating until it’s revealed that he’s actually working the plunger on a ball washer. As Carl quietly moans and vigorously tugs the pump handle, Murray uncorks a pervy string of ad-libs: “You wore green so you could hide from me.… You’re a tramp.” Ramis nearly ruined the take because he was laughing so hard off camera.
Then there was the matter of the smattering of Carl’s scenes with a golf-course-destroying gopher. At that point, the gopher was far less important to the film than he would eventually become in postproduction. Most of Murray’s gopher scenes were little inserts of him setting up explosives, fashioning clay bombs, and trying to flush the varmint out of his network of underground tunnels with a hose. In fact, Ramis shot only one scene of Murray with a gopher puppet—back then it was nothing more than a mangy, matted, chinchilla-looking sock puppet that Trevor Albert wore on his hand and pushed up through a hole in the ground. It looked as crude and primitive as a kid’s stuffed animal.
The gopher scenes were random and disjointed, but the crew rushed to nail down as many of them as they could before Murray had to leave. “We had Bill talking about the gopher,” says Rusty Lemorande. “We had Bill dragging the fire hose around the course; we had Bill turning on the hose and having the water rush up through all the greens. But that was the extent to which the gopher was referenced. It was all the effect. There was no sign of the cause.”
When he was shooting the gopher scenes, Murray didn’t understand how they would all be pieced together in the finished film. But that wasn’t his problem. Plus, he was having a blast shooting them. “It was the time when people were making movies like The Deer Hunter and Apocalypse Now,” says Murray. “And that was my Vietnam movie. The ridiculously inappropriate firepower I used to kill a small rodent. And a guy who was taking it all personally and it didn’t have anything to do with him. Carving those clay bombs of the rabbit and the squirrel, that stuff, you’re just amusing yourself. And if I’m making myself laugh and making these guys laugh, then it’s funny.”
Ramis worked Murray around the clock and to the point of exhaustion during his contracted six days in Florida. Murray never complained even though he was spent.
Recalls Cindy Morgan, “There was one day, you could hear on the walkie-talkies, ‘Where’s Bill?’ … ‘He’s sleeping in a sand trap!’ … ‘What do you mean he’s sleeping in a sand trap?!’”
* * *
Cindy Morgan’s initiation on the set of Caddyshack was a brutal one. She had been petrified while shooting her first scene as Lacey Underall on the high-dive board. She’d been endlessly baited by Kenney afterward for not nailing it. And she’d woken up the following day on a nude beach in Jupiter, Florida, with Bill Murray after an evening of sandy abandon. It had certainly been an eventful beginning. The second scene she would shoot was even more so, and would end up becoming her absolute low point on the film. In the script, Morgan’s Lacey has a love scene with Michael O’Keefe’s Danny in Judge Smails’s bedroom. Morgan knew that nudity was required—and she insists that she was OK with it. She just never thought she’d end up feeling so exploited by the way it all unfolded.
Jon Peters always expected that Caddyshack’s target audience would be men between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five. It was the same rich demographic vein that had been mined to turn Animal House into the biggest comedy of all time. And the hope all along—ever since he had first approached Kenney and Ramis about partnering up—was that that same pay dirt would be struck twice. Peters thought it was absolutely essential to have an R rating and to give those male moviegoers some gratuitous “tits and ass.” The problem was, Peters had a surprise in store. Knowing that his movie’s big nude scene was coming up on the schedule, he invited a photographer from Playboy to visit the set and shoot some candid skin pictures for Hef’s magazine. No one had bothered to mention this to Morgan until she was about to film the scene. “I got a call from Peters and he says, ‘We’re sending Playboy.’ I said, ‘Thank you, that’s a big compliment, but I can’t do it.’ And he goes, ‘What do you mean you can’t do it?!’ And I said, ‘I’m the Irish Spring girl and I feel it’s a conflict.’ And he goes, ‘You don’t understand, you’re doing it!’”
Morgan says that she was fine with appearing topless in the scene, but being naked for a few fleeting seconds on film was an entirely different matter from having topless pictures in a magazine where they would be forever frozen in time under some teenage boy’s mattress. “She didn’t want to do it,” said Ramis. “And I’m the good guy. I said, ‘I don’t want you to do anything you’re not comfortable with.’ So Jon’s surrogate on the set, Don MacDonald, ran for the telephone. And he came back and said, ‘Jon wants to talk to you.’ Jon said, ‘She won’t do the nude scene?’ And I said, ‘Well, no, is it that important? She’s not comfortable.’ And Jon said, ‘Put her on the phone; let me talk to her for a sec.’ When she got off, she said, ‘I’ll do it.’ I asked, ‘What did he say?’ And she said, ‘He told me if I didn’t do it, I’d never work again.’ Jon’s Old Hollywood.”
Morgan did the scene in the end, but without the Playboy photographer present. “I don’t have a problem with nudity,” Morgan says, “I have a problem with bullies.” For his part, Peters doesn’t even try to deny his position. “She was definitely pressured to do the nude scene by me,” he says. “The producer side of me was like, How can we not have a nude scene? I wanted her to get naked, absolutely.” Morgan says that Peters told her that if she did not allow the Playboy photographer on set, he would take away her billing on the film, her billboards, and her paid ads—all of which he eventually followed through on. Peters even “forgot” to invite her to the film’s New York premiere when it opened the following summer. Morgan was so shaken by Peters’s coercion that she called her agent back in LA to complain. “He said, ‘Honey, you’re not some doe-eyed girl from the Midwest. Handle it.’”
After Morgan agreed to go through with the scene, she sat down with Ramis, and they worked out some ground rules. He had to clear the set of all but the most essential crew: Ramis, Michael O’Keefe, the cinematographer, and the focus-puller. That’s it. John Barmon, who played Spaulding, remembers trying to sneak onto the set that day to get a look at Morgan in the flesh, but was stopped at the door. In solidarity with his costa
r, O’Keefe suggested that everyone else in the room take their shirts off, too, to make the still-rattled Morgan more comfortable. They did.
When Cindy Morgan returned to Los Angeles after the film wrapped, the first thing she did was fire her agent.
* * *
When Ty Webb and Lacey Underall have their first moment of meet-cute flirtation at the Bushwood dinner dance, there was more than just blazing sexual tension between the characters. Behind the scenes, Chevy Chase and Cindy Morgan had developed a rocky relationship that burned hot one minute and cold the next. In their introduction, when Ty asks Lacey what brings her to “this nape of the woods,” she says that her father wanted to broaden her. When asked what she does for fun, she says that she enjoys “skinny skiing” and “going to bullfights on acid.” It seems as if the unflappable Ty may have met his match. In an early draft of the screenplay the relationship between the two is less comical. They also end up together—two damaged souls who couldn’t be less right for each other, which somehow makes them perfect for each other.
That early script changed, of course. Many times. In a movie full of men acting like boys, Lacey is the lone take-charge woman—aggressive and progressive in a way that none of the male characters are. In fact, Kenney had gotten Warner Bros. to screen To Have and Have Not for Morgan so she could study Lauren Bacall sparring with Humphrey Bogart for pointers. Putting aside the fact that Morgan is often parading around Bushwood clearly without a bra, in skintight tennis clothes, she’s the movie’s idea of a liberated female who knows what she wants and how to get it. And she wants Ty Webb, at least for the moment. “After what I’d been through with the pool scene and the blowup with Jon Peters over the nude scene and the Playboy photographer, I had gotten a lot more confident and a lot tougher,” says Morgan. “I felt like I wasn’t just playing Lacey; I had become Lacey.”
A few scenes after they meet at the dance, Lacey pulls up at Ty’s home in a yellow Mercedes. The place looks like a cross between a disheveled space-age bachelor pad and a Benihana, right down to the gong doorbell. As Lacey wanders around his unkempt living room, she finds an uncashed check for $70,000 (Ramis’s inside joke aimed at Kenney’s habit of obliviously leaving five- and six-figure checks lying around like forgotten laundry tickets). Lacey then sits down next to Ty at his organ, does a tequila shot with him (yes, it was real tequila), and asks him to sing her a love song. The majority of this was not in the script. Ramis was dead reckoning at this point in the shoot. But right before the scene, the two actors got into an argument sparked by a condescending joke about Morgan’s lack of acting experience. It got heated. And ugly. “Chevy’s prickly,” admitted Ramis. “He’s difficult, and not always great to women.”
Though both actors prefer not to pick at long-forgotten psychological scabs, insults were exchanged. “Chevy said something and I didn’t like it, so he walked,” says Morgan. “He wasn’t going to shoot with me. Harold came up and said to apologize, and I said, ‘You apologize.’ So after a forty-five-minute standoff with Harold running back and forth between us, Harold came back and said, ‘OK, I’m going to shoot two masters,’” meaning he was going to cheat and make it look like his two bickering stars were in the same shot together when they couldn’t even stand to be in the same room. Eventually, the storm passed. But Morgan is convinced that the lingering anger helped juice their scenes with a feisty, anything-can-happen electricity.
Before Morgan sat down next to Chase at the organ, Ramis whispered into her ear, “Tell him to sing you a love song.” It was just another of the director’s last-minute firecrackers designed to keep everyone on their toes. So Morgan did just that in what she thought was a rehearsal take. She didn’t know the camera was rolling. Chase made up his love song’s lyrics on the spot: “I was born to love you/I was born to lick your face/I was born to rub you/But you were born to rub me first.” If you look closely at Morgan during the scene, you can see the exact moment when she realizes that the camera is rolling for real. She sort of sobers up, snaps to attention, and goes with it, adding her own unscripted grace note. “I played along,” she says. “I wasn’t going down without a fight. I had a big wad of gum in my mouth and I blew a bubble in his face. And that was the scene.”
Although Ramis wasn’t happy with all of the time that had been wasted by Morgan and Chase’s spat, he decided to exploit their animosity when it came time to capture the moment when Ty gives Lacey an oil massage. He and Kenney both suggested that Chase might want to think about clumsily spilling a little too much oil on her back. It would be funny, they promised, egging him on. Chase, already on thin ice with Morgan, figured why not. “That scene was all Doug and Harold,” says Chase. “I was trying to convince her, as I was with girls at that time in my life, that sleeping with me was the right thing to do. And they said to maybe spill a little too much baby oil. I went a little over the top.”
At the exact moment that a shocked Morgan realizes that she’s been completely doused, she cranes her neck back and says, “You’re crazy!” It was her genuine unscripted reaction in the moment. “That was an entire bottle of baby oil,” she says. “I had no idea it was coming, and it was all in my hair so you knew we weren’t going to get a second shot at it. I was half mad and half laughing, which pretty much describes all of our scenes together. It wasn’t always tense between us. You can see scenes in the film where he’s feeding me lines and helping me. But during the massage, let me tell you, love and hate are a lot closer than you think.”
In virtually every single moment on-screen between Chase and Morgan, there’s a battle of the sexes going on off-screen. You’re witnessing a man using every trick he can think up to get the upper hand on a woman, and a woman trying to hold her ground and give it right back. You can see competitiveness and cooperation, fits of anger and brief flashes of respect, passion, and dispassion. It’s all right there in the baby-oil scene. What you don’t see during that particular moment is what was happening right on the other side of the wall on the set while they were shooting it: Doug Kenney slumped in a chair sound asleep, still hungover from partying the night before.
* * *
During the second half of production on Caddyshack, both Variety and The Hollywood Reporter sent reporters down to Davie, Florida, to check in on the progress of the film. These sorts of set visits by entertainment journalists tend to be pretty rigged affairs. They’re like UN weapons inspections. Anything negative or incriminating is hidden, and everyone is on his or her best behavior for a day or two. Tough questions and investigative sniffing were the last things on these reporters’ minds. Back in the late ’70s, the trades were still essentially house organs for the major studios, glorified press agents. Had their eyes been open, they might have noticed quite a bit—rampant drug use, acrimony among the film’s stars, a first-time director who had tossed his script in the trash long ago.
The Hollywood Reporter item would come out first. Jon Peters, who back then never missed an opportunity to hype himself in the press, flew out for the set visit to glad-hand the visiting journalist. Peters boasts about how in sync he is with Ramis, Kenney, and Doyle-Murray, talking about how they all “clicked” because none of them know the words “It can’t be done.” Ramis is quoted saying that he resisted the temptation to come in “over-prepared”—a whopper of an understatement. And Kenney jokes about how unnecessary he is as a producer. The reporter swallows all of the self-promoting and self-deprecating platitudes without an ounce of skepticism, ending his toothless article with the following: “Hopefully, it will possess some of that Animal House audience rapport and gold. If it doesn’t, it won’t be because Peters, Ramis or Kenney haven’t given it a good shot, mixed with energy, imagination and daring. And those are qualities which helped build this business in the first place.” Oh, brother.
Variety, meanwhile, digs a little deeper in its report into the nuts and bolts of the production, talking about the heavy rains that have slowed production, how much money the film is pouring into the Flori
da economy, and how Kenney, despite the failure of the recent Animal House spin-off show, Delta House, can envision a Caddyshack TV series. The story casts a slightly ominous eye toward the competition that Caddyshack will face at the box office from The Blues Brothers, Steve Martin’s The Jerk, and Airplane! It also alludes to the film’s big finale, still yet to be shot, for which Ramis will blow up the golf course. Apparently, the lockjawed board members at Rolling Hills had let their Variety subscriptions lapse. Because they were still under the impression that the fiery, pyrotechnical orgy of destruction had been cut from the script. As free PR goes, the one-two punch from the Reporter and Variety was a bonanza. Or, at least, hadn’t been harmful. Plus, with the reporters now gone, the party was free to continue. All contraband could be safely taken out of hiding.
12
Pool or the Pond
ON MOST MOVIE SETS, the open consumption of hard drugs such as cocaine would be prevented by layers of responsible and experienced middle-aged producers and representatives from the studio on the set. But the fact that Doug Kenney was the producer turned those normal checks and balances into a joke. That, combined with Jon Peters’s only-occasional presence in Florida, and Orion’s hands-off, go-make-your-movie-without-studio-interference ethos, made Caddyshack a perfect storm. Or, in this case, a perfect blizzard.
Before he would find himself on the business end of a rusty pitchfork courtesy of Bill Murray in the film’s Dalai Lama scene, Peter Berkrot was a nineteen-year-old wannabe theater actor from Queens. He wasn’t sheltered, exactly, but he certainly had never been exposed to the sort of Hollywood decadence he was about to discover in Florida. “I had never seen cocaine before I got to the set of Caddyshack,” he says. Although he stuck mostly to drinking and smoking pot, Berkrot says that the sight of coke was hard to ignore at the motel where the cast was staying. As the shoot went on, coke use on the film would escalate. Recreational use that started by the gram turned into binges indulged by the ounce. It seemed to be the fuel that kept the film running.
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