The Big Bad Book of Bill Murray

by Robert Schnakenberg

  “THEY HAD THE PRETTIEST BALLPARK. AND THEY HAD ERNIE BANKS.”

  —MURRAY, on why he became a Chicago Cubs fan

  Since achieving national celebrity in the late 1970s, Murray has been a fixture at Cubs games from coast to coast. He filled in for ailing play-by-play announcer Harry Caray in 1987 and led the Wrigley crowd through a spirited rendition of “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” at the club’s home opener in 2012. In 1989, during a Cubs–Mets game at Shea Stadium in New York, Murray leaned over the edge of the visiting dugout and tried to hand a beer and some Cajun fries to pitcher Rick Sutcliffe. Sutcliffe declined the offer. “At least take the fries,” Murray said, and then proceeded to eat them.

  When he agreed to star in The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou in 2003, Murray had it written into his contract that he would receive a live satellite feed of every Cubs game while on location in Italy.

  CHRISTMAS

  The yuletide season has always been fraught for Murray, whose parents couldn’t afford to buy expensive Christmas presents for their nine children. “I never asked for toys,” Murray admitted. “Asking for toys was out of the question; they were low priorities. It’s not that we were denied anything so much as the fact that we knew not to make requests. For Christmas you got essentials: school clothes. Whenever toys surfaced at all, they were pretty much inherited.”

  Every December, Murray’s parents gave him one dollar with orders to go to the dime store and buy something for each of his eight brothers and sisters. His siblings were issued the same instructions, resulting in a shambolic exchange of gifts on Christmas morning. Typical presents included a single battery (bestowed with the benediction “I hope you get something to put it in”) or some paintbrushes and chalk (for the aspiring artist in the family). Often they were packaged so haphazardly they “resembled badly wrapped body parts,” in Murray’s words. Brian Murray once harvested scrap wood from his father’s lumberyard, nailed it into blocks, and gave one to each of his siblings.

  Bill Murray’s own gift-giving nadir came on Christmas Day 1960. He purchased two pounds of peanuts, wrapped them in individual foil packets, and stashed them under the tree. “It was a terribly lazy move for a ten-year-old to pull,” he remembered later. “I kept going in each day before Christmas and taking a few nuts from each package, so by the time the day rolled around the matter had grown disgraceful.”

  Three years later, Murray spent Christmas of his thirteenth year in a gloomy funk. “That was my ‘unloved year,’ he told the New York Times Magazine. “I got everything I wanted, which was really only a clock radio, but I was in some sort of a state, going through a phase. They say the middle kid gets the least attention, but that can be accentuated in a house overrun with them. [My parents] gave me all these things, and I just sat there with a puppy dog’s long face. Then I got even more attention because I wasn’t happy. Then they got angry.”

  There were some happy times. Every Christmas Eve, the Murray kids clambered into the family car for a drive through Lincolnwood, a Chicago suburb known for its elaborate holiday light displays. But even after they grew up and moved away from home, the Murrays continued to keep some unusual holiday traditions alive. In a 2009 interview, Bill Murray revealed that his brother Brian has been buying him socks for Christmas for decades:

  “He lived in a dry gulch where the world of socks and shoes became extremely fascinating, and he felt that everyone needs a good pair of socks, and why not limit his gift giving to something that everybody needs? He thought that there was something humorous about it. So he gives socks. The first year I had money, I really went shopping. I got really caught up in it. I bought all my brothers sets of luggage, and I bought ’em winter coats from Giorgio Armani—winter coats. And I got a pair of socks from this brother. I could tell by the look on his face that he was having a moment in front of himself, so I thought, Well, next year it’ll change. But it didn’t—he’s continued to give socks.”

  See also Christmas Tree, “Murray Christmas.”

  CHRISTMAS TREE

  In a 2014 interview with the USA Today website EntertainThis, comedian Chris Rock revealed that Murray maintains a “tricked out” Christmas tree outside his house year-round.

  CIGARS

  Murray is a longtime cigar smoker. He favored cheroots in the early 1990s and in recent years has become a devotee of Cuban cigars.

  Murray smoked his first cigar at age thirteen while working as a caddy at Indian Hill Club in Winnetka, Illinois. “It was a broken cigar, thrown into a trash bin at the golf course,” he told Cigar Aficionado magazine. “I remember seeing this cigar that hadn’t been smoked, but it was broken in two pieces. And I thought, ‘When I finish this round of caddying, I’m gonna walk back here and smoke it.’ And I did. I don’t remember the brand name, but I do remember it’s hard to smoke a cigar that broken. And it was only when I got past the break that I found out what a cigar tastes like. But I liked that feeling.”

  “ONE OF THE PERKS OF BEING A MAN IS SMOKING A CIGAR.”

  —MURRAY, on the pleasures of a good stogie

  That connection between golf and cigars persists to this day. The links remain one of Murray’s favorite places to pass around the stogies. “People bring various levels of performance anxiety to the golf course,” he says. “One of the things having smokes around says is that, this experience is gonna be a lotta things, but not something so serious that you can’t smoke a cigar.”

  As he’s gotten older, Murray has cut back on his cigar consumption. But he still carries a few around, just in case he meets a fellow puffer. “I love just sharing cigars,” he says. “I don’t have to smoke ’em so much to enjoy ’em… . My favorite cigar is whichever one my friend is smoking, because I’ll always say, ‘I got some cigars. Which one would you like to smoke?’ And he’ll choose the one he’d like to smoke. And that’s my thing—to me, it’s something you do with someone. To me, it’s not important that I smoke a cigar so long as someone does.”

  Another selling point for Murray is the lore and legend of cigar production. In 2010, he told the New York Post about his recent visit to the Padrón cigar factory in Miami, where he saw how some of his favorite hand-rolled Cuban-style cigars are made. “It’s a family business, and their symbol is a hammer,” Murray said. “Their grandfather came from Cuba—he was a refugee—and he went to another Cuban and said, ‘Can you give me work? I gotta have a job.’ And the guy said, ‘I can’t give you work, but I can give you a hammer.’ And he gave him a hammer. And the guy went from house to house repairing and building. Within six months, he had somehow bought some tobacco and was rolling cigars out of the trunk of someone’s car. Now they make a million cigars a year.”

  CINDERELLA STORY: MY LIFE IN GOLF

  This 1999 book is the closest Murray has ever come to a proper autobiography. Written in collaboration with George Peper, then the editor-in-chief of Golf magazine, Cinderella Story combines reminiscences from Murray’s Wilmette, Illinois, upbringing with anecdotes about his experiences on the pro-am golf circuit in the 1980s and ’90s. Fittingly enough, Peper pitched the idea for the book to Murray on the driving range of the Sleepy Hollow Country Club near Murray’s home in Palisades, New York. According to Murray’s editor, Shawn Coyne, Murray sent in his chapters via fax, hastily—and often incorrectly—formatted: “They were written single-spaced and every letter was uppercase,” Coyne said. “Somehow Bill had permanently locked the ALL CAPS button on his Pleistocene-age word processor.”

  CINNABON

  Baked goods chain specializing in cinnamon rolls for which Murray has declared a predilection. “Everyone loves Cinnabons,” he once told an interviewer.

  CITY OF EMBER

  DIRECTED BY: Gil Kenan

  WRITTEN BY: Caroline Thompson

  RELEASE DATE: October 10, 2008

  FILM RATING: **½

  MURRAY RATING: ***

  PLOT: Two teenagers try to escape from a dystopian netherworld.

  STARRING BILL MURRAY A
S: Mayor Cole, gluttonous burgermeister of the city of Ember

  In a rare villainous turn, Murray cranks his personal ham-o-meter up to eleven to play the venal, sardine-sucking ruler of an underground city in this postapocalyptic fantasy based on a popular young adult novel by Jeanne DuPrau. As Mayor Cole, Murray gets to wear a fat suit and cackle maniacally as he thwarts the efforts of the film’s teenaged protagonists to save the citizens of Ember from encroaching darkness. In what is arguably his finest on-screen death scene, Murray’s character is eaten alive by a giant mole.

  Murray based his portrayal on a composite of all the corrupt politicians he encountered growing up in Illinois. “I’d hate to be selfish and pick just one,” he told the Chicago Tribune. “There’s no one that comes to mind. They’ve all disappointed. They’re like crack girls; no matter how attractive they are, they’re going to break your heart.” He also drew on his experience as a parent. “I think a mayor can be a father figure who can disappoint you,” he said. “I’m a father figure and I’ve probably disappointed on occasion.”

  Murray was lured to the project by the prospect of working with screenwriter Caroline Thompson (Edward Scissorhands), with whom he partied in the early 1980s. “She works on a higher level than the rest,” Murray told the New York Daily News. Murray’s “gung-ho attitude” toward playing the heavy impressed director Gil Kenan, who foresaw Mayor Cole as heralding a turn toward new and more interesting character parts. “From my perspective, he’s in a place where he’s more open to things than he may have been in the past,” said Kenan. “There’s a lot in him. We’ve seen aspects of that on the screen now that he’s had a career, but I actually feel like there’s a lot more there that hasn’t been seen.”

  Sadly, Murray’s career as a big-screen baddie was to prove short-lived. Shot over sixteen weeks in the summer of 2007 in Belfast, Northern Island, City of Ember opened to considerable fanfare in the fall of 2008. But it failed to catch fire with audiences, grossing a paltry $3 million in its opening weekend. The film’s grim steampunk mise-en-scène may have been slightly ahead of its time, while an inane online ad campaign featuring YouTube “celebrity” Lucas “Fred” Cruickshank appears to have driven away more moviegoers than it attracted.

  NEXT MOVIE: The Limits of Control (2009)

  CIVIC METROPOLITAN TRAUMA THEORY

  Hypothesis developed by Murray that postulates that sports teams in cities that experience natural disasters are more likely to win championships.

  CLOSE, DEL

  Legendary improv teacher who coached Murray during his days at Second City in the mid-1970s. Murray has called Close’s long-form improvisational techniques “the most important group work since they built the pyramids.”

  Born in Manhattan, Kansas, in 1934, Close spent much of his adult life in Chicago, where his improv students included Dan Aykroyd, John Belushi, Chris Farley, Mike Myers, Tina Fey, Harold Ramis, John Candy, and Stephen Colbert—as well as Murray’s brothers Brian and Joel. “He was a guy who had great knowledge of the craft of improvisation,” Murray told Esquire magazine. “And he lived life in a very rich manner, to excess sometimes. He had a whole lot of brain stuck inside of his skull. Beyond being gifted, he really engaged in life. He earned a lot. He made more of himself than he was given… . He was incredibly gracious to your talent and always tried to further it. He got people to perform beyond their expectations. He really believed that anyone could do it if they were present and showed respect. There was a whole lot of respect.”

  Hired by Saturday Night Live to serve as “house metaphysician,” or improv coach, during the bleak 1980–81 season, Close battled ill health and substance abuse problems during the last two decades of his life. When he fell perilously behind on his taxes in the mid-1980s, Murray volunteered to pay his bill and refused Close’s offers to reimburse him. “That guy is, and always will be, a friend and a gentleman,” Close said. When Close was dying of emphysema in 1999, Murray was one of a select group of friends and former students to visit him in his hospital room to say goodbye. Close’s decision to bequeath his skull to a Chicago theater for use in a production of Hamlet inspired Murray to muse publicly about doing the same with his own cranium after he dies.

  In the mid-2000s, Harold Ramis wrote a screenplay for a proposed Del Close biopic, in which he hoped to convince Murray to star. The project never came to fruition.

  CLUB PARADISE

  Harold Ramis wrote the part of Jack Moniker, the lead in this 1986 comedy about a Chicago firefighter who retires to a Caribbean island, with Murray in mind. Monty Python’s John Cleese was Ramis’s choice for the role of Anthony Croyden Hayes, the British governor-general of the island. But both actors backed out of the project at the last minute. “When it came time to make it Murray said, ‘Eh, it feels like I would be the guy from Meatballs, the camp counselor for grown-ups,’” said Ramis. “And John Cleese didn’t want to leave home, didn’t want to be in the West Indies for three or four months, which was what the film required.” Robin Williams and Peter O’Toole stepped into the roles, resulting in a film that was, in Ramis’s opinion, “not as interesting or as solid as it might have been if Bill and Cleese were there.”

  COFFEE AND CIGARETTES

  DIRECTED BY: Jim Jarmusch

  WRITTEN BY: Jim Jarmusch

  RELEASE DATE: March 12, 2004

  FILM RATING: **

  MURRAY RATING: **

  PLOT: A succession of eccentric diner patrons palaver over java and smokes.

  STARRING BILL MURRAY AS: Himself

  Murray enlivens this otherwise dreary anthology of short films from downtown New York auteur Jim Jarmusch. The eleven vignettes—nine of which are completely aimless—are loosely linked by the titular vices, which the characters all consume as if they are going out of style. In his segment, Murray plays “Bill Murray,” a fictionalized version of himself who slings coffee in a diner. RZA and GZA of the hip-hop group Wu-Tang Clan are customers at his table. Their conversation revolves around alternative medicine and the interpretation of dreams. In one of several surreal scenes in this black-and-white indie, Murray drinks coffee straight from the pot and gargles with hydrogen peroxide.

  Murray agreed to appear in the film after Jarmusch promised that shooting would take only one day. “Could you make it a half a day?” Murray asked. “No,” replied Jarmusch. “I think it’s going to take a whole day.” “All right, I’ll do it,” Murray agreed. “Just leave a message on my machine the night before. Tell me where and what time and I’ll be there.” And he was.

  In 2014, the New York City gastropub Sweetwater Social began serving a cocktail inspired by Murray’s work in Coffee and Cigarettes. “For all of my smokers out there, this is right up your alley,” said the drink’s creator, Tim Cooper, who combined single malt scotch, bourbon, rum, coffee beans, and coffee-flavored demerara sugar to mimic the “flavors” of Murray’s performance.

  NEXT MOVIE: Garfield: The Movie (2004)

  COLUCHE

  Irreverent French comedian of the 1970s and ’80s to whom Murray occasionally compares himself. Equal parts Red Skelton and Lenny Bruce, Coluche was known for his anarchic, politically charged brand of humor. He ran for president of France in 1981 and died in a motorcycle accident in 1986 at the age of forty-one. “He was really funny, and he was sharp—incredibly smart, savage wit,” Murray once said. “He would say anything, and he wasn’t mean, either. He was almost like a peasant in a way, but he was brilliant.” When speaking to the French press in the ’80s, Murray would often describe himself as “Coluche with cheekbones.” “They used to think that was pretty good, except they didn’t quite get what the ‘with cheekbones’ thing meant.”

  COMMUNALISM

  Murray has likened the experience of making movies to life on a commune. “The movie business is the only place where communes still exist,” he once said. “Maybe that system works because it’s temporary and none of the political complications of communes come into play. And if everyone accepts that,
that I’m gonna be taken care of by the state and also that I’m gonna take care of this movie when it needs me, then the movie becomes greater than the sum of its parts… . It sounds strange to say it, but I think communism—that is, communal living—starts at the top. That means if the person at the top—the stars, or the director—is willing to live with less and say, ‘Whatever the movie needs, I’m gonna do,’ then everyone benefits.”

  CON AIR

  Murray has professed a fondness for this 1997 action movie from schlockmeister Jerry Bruckheimer. In one of his iconic roles, Nicolas Cage plays a recently paroled convict on board a hijacked prisoner transport plane. “Strangely, I thought Con Air was funny,” Murray said. “I have no idea why, but that movie made me laugh.”

  COSELL, HOWARD

  Toupéed, nasal-voiced sportscasting legend who gave Murray his first big television break. In 1975, while scouting for talent for his upcoming ABC variety series, Cosell saw Murray perform in the Off-Broadway revue The National Lampoon Show. Entranced, he offered him a spot in his repertory comedy troupe, the Prime Time Players. Although Saturday Night Live with Howard Cosell came and went in just eighteen weeks, it did put Murray on the national radar during a critical period in the history of television comedy. A year later, when Chevy Chase left the cast of NBC’s Saturday Night (soon to appropriate the Cosell show’s title and become Saturday Night Live), Murray was recruited to replace him.