by Sam Wasson
Billy worked summers caddying at the Indian Hill Club in Winnetka, one of Chicago’s tonier suburbs, studying the game he would come to love, and, at $3.50 a bag, absorbing the appalling class politics of country club culture. They weren’t all snobs. Billy caddied for some very rich men who didn’t appraise him by his father’s income, treating him kindly and engaging him in meaningful conversation about golf and school, the hardships of growing up as he had. Others at Indian Hill barely deigned to look at him. In their company, Billy caddied for eighteen holes of hostile silence, speaking only when spoken to, then shutting up. In time, he layered his snap judgments, discerning at a distance the good from the mean, and adjusted his temperament, from warmth to ice-cold passive-aggression, accordingly, whatever the old power rules required. Over ten summers, he mastered them all. “It was an extraordinary chance to see how the world operates,” he said. “You learn to spot bad apples real quick.” As it had in school, private irony, the inside joke he had with himself, freed him from total subjugation. For every wrong glance loaded with insult, Billy cultivated the perfect country club antidote—a bullshit smile.
He went out West for college, dropped out after a year, came home to Chicago, and moved back in with his mother, a new widow after the death of Murray’s father in 1969. In those days, both mother and son, both in need of the other, were unsure how to connect. “It was sort of a lonely thing,” he said, “because I really wanted my mother’s approval, but what she needed wasn’t what I was delivering. I would wake up in the middle of the night and clean her kitchen.” For money, he hauled concrete, mowed lawns, served pizza through a storefront window, anything. If it fell in his lap, he picked it up. Suffering over the loss of his father and the daily worry over his mother, working then in the mailroom of a hospital-supply company, Murray’s thoughts of his own career, whatever that meant, hardly occurred to him. It was day to day. He was a jumper-aboard. You could say spontaneous. You could say lost.
He had this dream—he always would—of being at O’Hare with no luggage and no ticket, grinning for a moment at the giant board of departures . . . Bangladesh, St. Petersburg, New Delhi, Crete . . . Just go.
In the evenings, he would just go to Second City (for free) to watch his older brother, Brian Doyle-Murray (who added the “Doyle” to distinguish himself from another actor, Brian Murray), improvise comedy with Joe Flaherty and John Belushi. After the show, they’d hang out at Brian’s apartment near the theater, or one of the bars on Wells Street. “They thought I was a riot—[a] weekend hippie,” Murray said, “you know, going back to my straight life in the ’burbs every night.” He didn’t think about improvising himself, but his eyes opened wide at his brother’s free and easy lifestyle, waking up late, laughing with his friends all day, and drinking on the house, after the show, all night. He couldn’t control a scene like Belushi—B’loosh, to them—and he didn’t have his big brother’s eye for character, or Flaherty’s versatility and flamboyance, but in his own way he knew he could connect to something funny. It was his stories. Sitting around the Earl of Old Town with Brian or Joe, telling them about the time, only a year earlier, when, in the weird days after college, traveling the country selling weed out of a suitcase, he got arrested in Colorado, Murray could actually get them laughing. At first, it seemed like mere good luck, a ball pitched smack into the thick of his bat; then, repeating the story for different friends, trying out new ones, Murray got laughs again, proving that it was definitely the batter, not the ball. He didn’t know what it was or how to control it, but Second City looked more fun than working the pizza counter, so on a lark he joined a workshop.
“I was so bad,” Murray said, “I couldn’t believe it.” He walked offstage and decided never to go back.
Belushi’s outfit took in Del Close like a favorite roughneck uncle, the one who always advocates for the kids against the parents (Bernie Sahlins and Joyce Sloane) for another hour of television, the good bad guy who, despite the Valium and morning cocktails, the filthy manners and the selfishness, comes through where it counts, not in ethics but—this being improvisation—risk. “Del,” said Ross-Leming, “felt an obligation to be as provocative and subversive as possible, whether culturally, sexually, or politically. He pushed for that, always urging us to go darker. You might pull back from it, but there was a lot of, ‘What if he sets fire to his wife’s head?’ He wanted you to be on the edge of good behavior—nastiness gave him new realities for us to play with. Even if you didn’t always understand why you were doing what you were doing, you knew he represented intellectual liberation.”
Prowling the lip of the stage, a highball and cigarette in one hand, a torn volume of mysticism in the other, Close directed, his leopard eyes searching the floor, in lectures seemingly intended for himself, as if Second City, instead of a barroom entertainment, was actually his secret laboratory that Bernie Sahlins had opened to the public. You could never be sure if Close was onto something or just on something, but the kids were so taken by his satanic glamour, his ties to Nichols and May and the green years of improvisation, and the incredible range of his spelunking mind, they “Yes, anded” his every fancy with a fervor and allegiance and openness that Close, up to that point, rarely had. “By the time Del came onboard,” Flaherty said, “we started creatively exploding.”
Close knew from the start that these kids, like him, saw improvisation as its own presentational art form. Recurrently breaking from a tradition as old as Second City, the Next Generation would improvise not just in the free set after the Saturday show, but often—to Sahlins’s consternation—took audience suggestions between sketches, once in the first act and once in the second. Encouraged by Close, Fisher developed new improvisational formats—make that spot-improvisational formats—outside the comedy playbook. Fisher said, “Sometimes we’d hang three pads on the stage labeled Who, What, and Where—professions, activities, locations—and when we took our break the audience would come onstage with markers and write stuff down. Then we would come out after the break and read the pad and improvise off of that.” The notepads did not amuse the boss. (“I was always getting in trouble with Bernie for dreaming stuff up.”) But Sahlins—in his wisdom—only smiled and headed back to the office. Second City was his; the players were Del’s.
Close told them to play with drugs.
One Saturday night, Harold and Eugenie ingested something that “made the improv and its requirements really challenging,” she said, so she stayed very quiet and fled the crocodiles (serving cocktails) and hid behind Harold as the walls melted down around her.
“Eugenie,” Harold whispered. “Are we standing?”
“Yes, I think we are.”
He nodded, momentarily assured. “But on the ceiling, right?”
Acid, speed, angel dust, booze, weed, they tried them all, mostly to unfunny results. “Do I think Del influenced John’s drug use?” mused Judy Belushi. “Certainly he was open about his drug use, and I think it did affect him—that it could somehow make you more creative.” The show itself was a high, all that adrenaline, the heady buzz of raw laughter. “No one wanted to call it a night,” Ross-Leming said. “Generally we were too wired. We all lived like a pack of wolves, going from one place to another till three, four in the morning. Let’s get fucked up at John’s place; let’s go see who’s playing at the Earl of Old Town. People just roamed. They slept wherever they ended up.” The everlasting night was heaven for John Belushi; he thrived among friends, his family. When they left for bed, the show ended, so John lived to keep them awake, lunging for checks, passing out drugs, taking the stage at a crowded bar and releasing his most anguished Cocker into the microphone. Last call? Not tonight. For Belushi, they stayed open. He was so magnetic they almost had to. A collector of good times with good people, he was at home all over Chicago. Parting on a joke, Harold headed back to his wife, but John and Eugenie and Joe Flaherty’s brother Paul, one of John’s roommates, would sneak into a forgotten warehouse in a ragged part of town an
d jam—Eugenie on bass, Paul on guitar, and John on drums—until exhaustion knocked them off their feet. They would reconvene hours later, at about noon, at Lum’s, a burger place near the theater, where a mix of Belushi, Flaherty, Ramis, and Doyle-Murray would spread their newspapers across the counter and circle in on the day’s targets. Invariably TV talk would derail the news. Up late with the midnight movie, Belushi and Flaherty were in love with genre parody and celebrity impersonation—“Hey, Johnny, channel four! On the Waterfront!”—and with Del Close behind them, preaching full-body immersion, they didn’t think twice about sidestepping critique and going broad. Why should the belly laugh be inferior? As Del had said, “Comedy’s an art. Satire’s propaganda. It’s an attempt to have an intellectual effect on the audience instead of a cellular effect.”
You could feel just that in Close’s handling of 43rd Parallel; or, Macabre and Mrs. Miller, their revue of March 1972, widely considered one of Second City’s best. “Although there is a fair amount of satire in the program,” wrote a Variety critic, “the strongest results come during items that approach slapstick and kindred yock techniques rather than the subtle, biting stuff.” Close built “Funeral,” Macabre’s immortal ensemble sketch, around the slow-rising rage Belushi, playing the son of the deceased, tries, and ultimately fails, to contain. The audience shares it. “How did it happen, Mrs. Smedley?” asks a concerned Flaherty at the top of the scene. The widow hangs her head. “He got his head stuck,” she sighs, “in a gallon can of Van Camp’s beans.” (Del gave them that line.) At this, Belushi squirms in his seat; Flaherty, feigning grief for the widow, turns to hide his laughter. One by one, as characters enter, learn the cause of death, and stifle their giggling, Belushi’s indignation becomes physically intolerable—until finally he explodes, banging his head against the wall, choking himself, ripping his clothes—and the audience, no longer in control, screams with laughter. They squeeze their guts and hit the floor. They hit each other. This—to see an improviser take over people’s nervous systems, destroy their egos for a golden split second of freedom—was Close’s Grail.
“During my days at Second City,” Close said, “I was absolutely hung up on Belushi.” Belushi named Close his biggest influence in comedy. “John worshipped him,” Flaherty said.
Moved, deeply, by their commitment to full ensemble scenes, Close introduced them to the Harold, the still-gestating dream of group longform he believed to be the next inhabitable planet of improvisation. Via the Harold—Del’s life’s work in progress—improvisers could sustain thirty- or forty-minute improvisations far more complex than what could be achieved with mere two- or three-person sketches and games, forms too often limited by length and scant points of view. Feeding off the imaginations of seven, eight, or nine simultaneous brains, the Harold promised bigger, stranger results, pulsing with the gestalt truths of communal agreement, the Jungian reply to all that Freud Elaine May had given him so long ago.
He thought of her always, still. Especially when directing, making adventures for his players, as she once had for him. Elaine he loved twice, both as a woman and as a totem of investigation, whose dark current of daring he sparked from St. Louis memory and conducted into them, into the Harold.
Harolds began with a question to the audience, a real question. Maybe Close’s improvisers would arrive at a serious solution. “Why am I so [fill in the blank]?” or “How do I get a date?” or “Why am I so concerned about [blank]?” would get an answer the team would use to trigger a round of monologues, “and out of that,” Flaherty explained, “suddenly two people would freeze and start a scene.” Concurrent with the first scene, on the other end of the stage, another scene—different, but related—would be taking shape. Say, for instance, separate conversations at the same restaurant. “That was something our group could do so well,” Fisher said, “really listen to each other and have two scenes going at once. One would get a laugh and then the other would take over and then get a laugh and then the focus would go back. And you just intertwined all this stuff and build to something.” Improvisers were free to freeze a scene, then flash it forward or back. “Thirty minutes later,” Judy Morgan said, “we would come off and say, ‘How did that happen?’” When the Harold’s puzzle pieces clicked together sensibly, elegantly, supposedly on their own, they startled audiences and improvisers both. “Other times,” Morgan said, “it would just sit there.” And so what if it did? “They hate us,” Joe Flaherty liked to cackle backstage. “Oh, they really hate us . . .”
In August 1972 Gary Austin, recently of the Committee, formerly a social worker, was now an out-of-work actor, accustomed to waiting on line at the California Department of Employment in Hollywood for his weekly seventy-five-dollar unemployment checks, which unceremoniously stopped one week, by way of a technicality he hadn’t foreseen.
“I thought I had three more months . . .”
“No . . . sorry . . .”
Now what? He could teach.
The thought surprised him. Teach? He was an actor. He had never taught before.
On a Thursday, Austin called his friend, former Committee member Howard Storm—one of a tiny group of improvisation teachers in Los Angeles—in a panic. “I think I’m going to have to teach.”
Austin procured the space Storm used at the Cellar Theater, then called Fred Roos, an ace casting director and Austin’s manager, and asked him to notify all the actors he could think of, a list seventy-five names long that included Harrison Ford and Jeannie Berlin. “Call each of these people,” Roos instructed Austin. “Tell them Fred Roos says to come to my workshop or else.”
By Monday, Austin was facing a roomful of twenty-one actors, his students, “and no clue,” he said, “what I was doing.”
“You don’t have to pay,” Austin told them that first day. “I have no idea how to teach. If you come back, you can pay me then.”
They came back—actors, improvisers, stand-ups, writers, songwriters, filmmakers—nineteen, to be exact, returned the following week to work on anything, everything, whatever they wanted, Molière, Pinter, Tennessee Williams, improvised scenes and monologues. Tracy Newman, whom Austin met while he was improvising with the Comedy Store Players, brought her sister, an actress, Laraine. She was not yet twenty, with a range of experience—Marcel Marceau in Paris, acting and improvising at CalArts—that suited the grab-bag variety of Austin’s workshops. Before long, he was teaching at different venues all over town and almost every night, four hours at a stretch, growing more impressed with the work throughout, until, finally—a year after his last unemployment check—Austin decided the work was good enough to present. “Let’s do a show,” he announced to the faithful, though he didn’t know what he meant, and neither did they. But catalyzed by their teacher’s enthusiasm, they went ahead and presented the results of their workshops—miscellaneous scenes and improvisations, revue style—under the banner of the Gary Austin Workshop. When scenes faltered, in front of an audience, Austin would sometimes pause the scene, get up, and give notes. “I had never seen that done before,” he said. Process was the product.
He wanted to formalize this thing. “Let’s make a company,” he proposed to his five closest students. “A company where we have workshops and do shows.”
The name they settled on: the Groundlings.
Wandering through downtown Chicago one frosty afternoon toward the end of the year, Bill Murray came to the distinguished block of State Street dominated by Marshall Field’s flagship store, then pulsing with a rush of holiday shoppers and the bong bong bong of its great clocks. Needing nothing in particular, he lingered a moment to absorb the spontaneous offering all around him, the Why not? spirit of the place, his hometown, the happy madness of the season, the curling wall of people, each one a secret door. Murray did not need a job or metaphysical purpose; he could make meaning just by doing this—leaving his mother’s house with an ounce of curiosity in his pocket and riding the wind’s suggestion. “There’s a lot of goodwill out there,” he sa
id, if you can ready yourself to receive it, to practice willingness, you can walk through the mundane and live in Christmas every day.
Standing there under a chiming clock, he felt a tap on the shoulder and turned to face Jo Forsberg, Second City’s workshop leader. “We’d like to offer you a scholarship,” she said, “if you want to come back.”
“Thanks, I will. Merry Christmas.”
“Merry Christmas.”
A miracle, he thought.
In exchange for classes, Murray painted Forsberg’s kitchen (purple), a tedious job complicated by exposed piping difficult to brush around. “It was one of the biggest shit jobs I ever did,” he said, about as fun as his first workshops under Forsberg. Murray knew he was bad; nobody wanted to work with him. Though he didn’t blame them, he recoiled in consequence, grew tense, and got worse. For a while, he got up there, made faces, and no one laughed. “When you talk about paying dues,” he said, “there are no dues like dying on stage.” But after dying enough times, Murray realized that he was actually still alive, and that the feeling of so-called failure was just that, only a feeling, one of many, and came as soon as it went. The turnstile impermanence of improvisation meant no mood, good or bad, could be sustained, ergo, prolonged disappointment, he came to see, signified a problem with the improviser, not his potential for good work. To address the problem, Murray had to shift his inner magnet away from himself, toward chance, the other person, and wait for their invitation to transform again. “The fear will make you clench up,” he said. “That’s the fear of dying. When you start and the first few lines don’t grab and people are going like, ‘What’s this? I’m not laughing and I’m not interested,’ then you just put your arms out like this and open way up and that allows your stuff to go out. Otherwise it’s just stuck inside you.” With every thought and action, he had to choose fun, and the more fun he had improvising, the better he did. “Comedy is not effortless,” he learned. “The key is to get in a good humor—to have fun. That’s not as easy as you might think. Obviously, if you’re going to work for eight to twelve hours, you’re not going to be in a good mood all day. So it takes a lot of tricks.” Through hard-won relaxation, Murray’s hyper self-consciousness opened into awareness. “The reason so many Second City people have been successful is really fairly simple,” he said. “At the heart of it is the idea that if you make the other actors look good, you’ll look good.” To improvise with Bill Murray was to be seen, held, carried by a swift and sensitive imagination ready to follow or lead you anywhere, even backward, through the gate, to the childhood playground you thought you had locked on your way out. “He had a very special talent,” said Forsberg. “He could project the good part of himself, the part that is optimistic and charming, onto an audience. His darker side he’d show in private, but never onstage. But what I really loved about Billy was that he supported everybody so well.”
