The Big Bad Book of Bill Murray

by Robert Schnakenberg

  MURRAY, EDWARD JOSEPH III

  Murray’s oldest brother, born on September 7, 1944, was the real-life model for Danny Noonan in Caddyshack. Ed Murray attended Northwestern University on a Chick Evans Caddy Scholarship, awarded annually to outstanding caddies with financial need. After a stint in the U.S. Air Force and a brief foray into sports radio (he once aspired to be the play-by-play voice of baseball’s Chicago White Sox), Ed Murray enjoyed a long and successful career as a senior vice president and financial adviser with Morgan Stanley. When he was working on the script for Caddyshack, Doug Kenney interviewed Ed and incorporated many of his anecdotes into the screenplay. For his contributions, Ed received a “special acknowledgment” in the credits of the film.

  “IT WAS HIS FORM OF REVOLT … AND IT WAS REVOLTING.”

  —MURRAY, on his brother Ed’s decision to root for the Chicago White Sox rather than the Cubs

  MURRAY, HOMER BANKS

  Murray’s oldest son, by his first wife Mickey Kelly Murray, was born on March 23, 1982. He is named after Homer’s Homemade Gourmet Ice Cream, an ice cream parlor in Murray’s hometown of Wilmette, Illinois. His middle name is a tribute to Murray’s all-time favorite baseball player, Chicago Cubs legend Ernie Banks. Homer Murray is a chef and restaurateur in Brooklyn, New York. He has a nonspeaking cameo in Broken Flowers as a young man who may—or may not—be his father’s character’s son.

  “I WANTED TO PICK A NAME I WOULD NEVER HEAR AGAIN IN CASE THE BABY WERE BORN LOOKING LIKE DAN [AYKROYD] AND I HAD TO PUT IT UP FOR ADOPTION.”

  —MURRAY, on naming his firstborn son Homer

  MURRAY, JACKSON WILLIAM (“JACK”)

  Murray’s fourth son and second child by second wife Jennifer Butler was born on October 6, 1995.

  MURRAY, JOEL

  Murray’s younger brother, the ninth of the nine Murray siblings, was born on April 17, 1962, in Evanston, Illinois. Joel Murray, who “may be the funniest one of all,” according to his brother John, attended Marquette University in Milwaukee. There he became a friend and frequent improv partner of future Saturday Night Live regular Chris Farley, who subsequently joined him at Second City in Chicago. Joel Murray is best known to television audiences for his recurring roles on Dharma & Greg, Still Standing, and Mad Men—in which he plays alcoholic, incontinent copywriter Freddy Rumsen.

  MURRAY, JOHN COLLINS

  Murray’s younger brother, the eighth of the nine Murray siblings, was born on June 22, 1958, in Evanston, Illinois. As a young man, John Murray tended bar at the Hard Rock Café in New York City and wrote for Inside Sports magazine. (“The highlight of my career there was being assigned to find out how many hot dogs they served at Super Bowl II,” he once said.) In the 1980s, he worked as an extra and production assistant on Caddyshack and joined the writing staff of former Saturday Night Live producer Lorne Michaels’s prime-time sketch comedy series The New Show. In 1985, he starred in his own lowbrow comedy feature, Moving Violations. He also appeared opposite Bill as Frank Cross’s brother in Scrooged. John Murray helped write and develop the Murray family travel documentary series The Sweet Spot and is currently a co-owner of the Murray Bros. Caddyshack restaurant. In 2013, he was charged with driving under the influence after he was caught driving his car through people’s front yards at the World Golf Village near St. Augustine, Florida.

  MURRAY, LAURA LUCILLE

  Murray’s younger sister, the sixth of the nine Murray siblings, was born on May 21, 1952, in Evanston, Illinois. Laura Murray contracted polio when she was a toddler. (All the Murray children possess the polio gene, in fact, but only Laura was stricken with the disease.) Forced to wear excruciating leg braces, she compensated by developing formidable upper-body strength. “She could lift a table with one hand,” Bill Murray once said. He drew inspiration for his portrayal of Franklin D. Roosevelt in the 2013 film Hyde Park on Hudson from Laura’s struggle to overcome her disability. “That shaped the state I was in while I worked,” he told an interviewer, “because I realized she didn’t complain about anything.”

  Married in 1995 to Robert Dietrich, the former Laura Murray is retired from a job at an air freight import-export company. She lives in the Murray family home in Wilmette.

  MURRAY, LINCOLN DARIUS

  Murray’s sixth son, the fourth and presumably final child borne him by second wife Jennifer Butler, was born on May 30, 2001.

  MURRAY, LUCILLE COLLINS

  Murray’s mother was born on September 29, 1921, and died of cancer on November 2, 1988, at age 67. She was known for her strong singing voice. As a girl, she sang in the church choir and performed in school plays. She met Murray’s father, Ed Murray, when they were in high school and married him on November 6, 1943. Lucille Murray bore nine children, losing another three—including a set of twins—to miscarriages. Her son Ed Murray III once likened her to Edith Bunker from the 1970s sitcom All in the Family. Like her husband, he said, “she had a wonderful sense of humor, too, just in a quieter way.” Bill Murray once described her as “a real character, a talkative soul who can make friends with anyone” and who had “always been a massive influence on me.”

  After her husband died in 1967, Lucille Murray worked a series of jobs to provide for the family. She delivered phone books, worked at Marshall Field’s department store, and operated a telephone switchboard. In 1969, she took a job as the mailroom clerk at the American Hospital Supply Corporation. She remained there for seventeen years before taking early retirement in 1986. She also served as president of her local chapter of NAIM, a Catholic widows’ organization.

  As a single mother raising nine kids, it fell to Lucille Murray to set expectations for her family—something Bill, the self-described black sheep of the family, initially chafed at. “We had no money, and my mother pressured us to pick up occupations,” he once said. “She wanted a plumber, she wanted a dentist, a doctor, a priest, a nun, a carpenter. She wanted one of everything to do all those things we kept getting bills for.” He later expressed regret that he did not listen to his mother’s advice as a young man: “If I’d started paying attention to my mother when I was twelve instead of trying to sneak out of the house 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.”

  Over time, Murray’s relationship with his mother improved. She was pleased by his early show business success because, he said, “I didn’t turn out to be a complete wastrel.” He came to appreciate her sense of humor. “I didn’t used to think she was funny,” he remarked to an interviewer in the early 1980s, “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 sixty percent of the time, like the way it’s funny to watch a baby panda fall over stuff in the zoo.” When he joined the cast of Saturday Night Live, Murray began surreptitiously taping his mother’s telephone conversations and incorporating some of her “material” into his character work.

  “NINE WAS A LOT. MY MOTHER WAS A SPORT. SHE MUST HAVE ENJOYED A GOOD TIME AND WAS A SPORT ABOUT THE WHOLE THING. SOME PEOPLE LIKE THE PROCESS, BUT NOT THE PAPERWORK.”

  —MURRAY, on his mother’s decision to have nine children

  As her son’s fame grew in the wake of Ghostbusters’ success, Lucille Murray began to revel in her new role as a celebrity mom. She retired from her job, moved to a condo in Fort Meyers, Florida, bought a mink coat, and dyed her hair blonde. In an interview published after her death, Murray describes her “sitting on the veranda … wearing her mink in 80-degree temperature, talking about ‘my son the stockbroker’ and ‘my son the chef’ and ‘my son the actor’ and ‘my daughter the nun.’” Toward the end of her life, as she was battling cancer, Murray gave her an American Express card and encouraged her to spend as much as she liked on travel, clothing, and luxury items.

  The loss of his mother in 1988 left Murray feeling “bereft,” he sa
id. “It seems strange to say now that I felt so lonely, yet I did. It was as if her passing put me into the same category of a kid who was an orphan. Crazy. And this is from a man in his forties.”

  MURRAY, LUKE FRANÇOIS

  Murray’s second son by first wife Mickey Kelly was born on April 1, 1985, in Paris, France, during Murray’s mid-’80s sabbatical from filmmaking. His middle name is an homage to François Joubert, the protagonist of Murray’s favorite novel, A Story Like the Wind by Laurens van der Post. Luke Murray currently works as a Division I men’s college basketball coach.

  MURRAY, MARGARET ANN (“PEGGY”)

  Murray’s older sister and the fourth of the nine Murray siblings was born on May 6, 1949, in Evanston, Illinois. The closest to Bill in age, she is also the one with whom he has said he had the closest relationship. Peggy Murray worked for Marshall Field’s in Chicago and had three children with circuit court judge Clayton “Jay” Crane, whom she married in 1971. She is the inspiration for the Caddyshack character Mrs. Crane, the older golfer whom Murray’s Carl Spackler leers at while he pretends to masturbate.

  MURRAY, NANCY MARY

  Murray’s oldest sister, the third of the nine Murray siblings, was born on November 1, 1947, in Evanston, Illinois. She is often described as the most serious of the Murray kids. A Dominican nun, she is referred to within the family as “our sister the sister” and “the white sheep of the family.”

  As a child, Nancy served as the director of the Murray family nativity play staged in the basement of their home. In 1966, shortly after graduating from high school, she entered the Dominican Sisters convent in Adrian, Michigan. She may have been driven to a life of celibacy by the antics of her brothers. On the occasion of Nancy’s first date, the Murray boys greeted her beau at the door in stereotypical hillbilly costumes, complete with a banjo. “The poor guy must have been scared to death,” John Murray later confessed. Nancy Murray, now Sister Nancy Murray, earned a theater degree from Florida’s Barry University and a master’s in pastoral studies from Loyola University in Chicago. She is the only Murray sibling with an acting degree.

  Since 2000, Sister Nancy Murray has traveled around the world performing her one-woman show “St. Catherine of Siena: A Woman for Our Times.” She plays fourteen characters in the ninety-minute show, which pays tribute to a fourteenth-century teenage nun known for her charitable work with the poor and sick.

  MURRICANE, THE

  Nickname given to Murray by his erstwhile Saturday Night Live colleague Dan Aykroyd because of his notorious mood swings. The Murricane is also the name of a cocktail inspired by Murray’s 2009 visit to the Anchor, a nautical-themed dive bar in New York City. “He was commenting on the drinks,” the bar’s manager told the New York Times, “and we offered to name one after him. He was a good sport about it. He wanted something with Chartreuse, but we talked him into bourbon.”

  In a 2009 interview with the Chicago Tribune, Sister Nancy Murray revealed her three favorite Bill Murray movies.

  1. Meatballs: “I love that it was the first and I love that it reminded me so much of my father—Billy sounded so much like our dad. The way he talks to the young boy, Rudy—that kind of joshing thing, that was like an imitation of my dad.”

  2. Scrooged: “I love this one because it’s Christmas, of course. But also because four of my brothers are in it. And the message was heartfelt, you know? At the time, I was doing work with the homeless and working on food pantries. I was working out of St. Sylvester Parish [in Humboldt Park] and that movie just kind of brought all that home.”

  3. The Razor’s Edge: “It came out at the peak of the Ghostbusters thing and nobody wanted to see him in a serious role. But I loved that he wouldn’t do Ghostbusters until they let him do this first. It showed a depth of character and another side, a serious side, that I knew he had. When I go on retreats for the seminary, sometimes we use it as a learning tool.”

  THE MURRICANE RECIPE*

  INGREDIENTS

  2 ounces fresh watermelon

  4 or 5 basil leaves

  1½ ounces bourbon

  ¾ ounce fresh lemon juice

  ¾ ounce St-Germain elderflower liqueur

  Freshly ground black pepper, for garnish (optional)

  Watermelon wedge, for garnish (optional)

  PREPARATION

  Combine watermelon and basil leaves in a mixing glass or shaker and muddle until watermelon is crushed and juicy. Add bourbon, lemon juice, St-Germain, and ice and shake vigorously. Strain into a cocktail glass and garnish, if desired, with a sprinkling of black pepper and a wedge of watermelon.

  *Courtesy Lazy Point Bar (formerly the Anchor)

  MUSIC MAN, THE

  Murray has called his participation in the Loyola Academy production of this classic Broadway musical the high point of his high school experience, crediting it with inspiring him to pursue a career in show business. He originally auditioned for the lead role of Professor Harold Hill, the peripatetic con man who attempts to swindle the residents of an Iowa town by offering bogus music lessons. Considering himself a “dead ringer” for Robert Preston, who originated the role on Broadway, Murray was shocked when he lost the part to classmate Larry Basil. He did manage to win a slot in the show’s roving barbershop quartet, the Buffalo Bills. But a teenaged Murray wasn’t destined to warble high harmonies on “Goodnight Ladies” either. After noticing a number of scantily clad girls trying out for dancing roles, Murray switched gears and auditioned to become a chorus boy. “I just jumped up and said ‘I’m a dancer,” he recalled in a 1984 interview. “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.’”

  Murray’s instinct was right on the money. He wound up having a ball at nighttime dance rehearsals, hanging out with “slightly nuts” female dancers and sneaking liquor when no one was looking. “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.’”

  Apparently, Murray’s fascination with The Music Man endured long after he left high school. Some years later, while visiting the University of Notre Dame with the Second City touring company, Murray disappeared from the troupe for several days to go skylarking at a nearby all-girls college. During his walkabout, he was thrown out of a restaurant for singing “(Ya Got) Trouble,” the showstopping number from The Music Man, on top of a table.

  In July 1978, Saturday Night Live sent Murray to Aberdeen, Washington, to film a segment for a special titled “Things We Did Last Summer.” The premise was that Murray was quitting comedy to pursue his lifelong passion of playing professional baseball. On July 28, Murray strapped on the flannels of the Grays Harbor Loggers, a minor league team in the Pacific Northwest League. In his first game, against the Victoria Mussels, he went one for one during a 7–4 Loggers victory. He returned to the lineup a few days later in a game against the Walla Walla Padres and struck out on three pitches. “I don’t know a TV actor who can hit a decent sinker,” Murray said. “He was not like us, but he was a good athlete,” said one of Murray’s teammates, pitcher Tracy Harris. “He got in some cuts, he threw the ball, and he could catch flies.” The brief bush league stint endeared Murray to fans and fellow ballplayers. He won a dance contest in Aberdeen, sang “The Star-Spangled Banner” before a game, and recited Lou Gehrig’s farewell speech to the crowd before he “retired.” Murray also developed a reputation
for always picking up the check in restaurants. Once, in an airport bar, when a woman recognized Murray and sat down next to him, he pointed to Harris. “Do you know who this is?” he asked her. “This is Don Drysdale.”

  Murray’s stint in the bushes was a brief one, but it was not soon forgotten. Nearly thirty years later, on July 8, 2006, the Class A Fort Myers Miracle honored him with a Bill Murray bobblehead doll giveaway. The doddering figurine depicted Murray in his Grays Harbor Loggers jersey.

  NADER, RALPH

  Murray has called this crusading consumer advocate and two-time U.S. presidential candidate “the greatest living American.” He has credited Nader with saving the lives of several million people through his promotion of seat belt use and compared him favorably to Oskar Schindler, the German industrialist whose efforts to rescue Jews during the Holocaust were chronicled in the 1993 film Schindler’s List. “[Schindler] saved hundreds,” Murray told the Guardian. “Great man. Deserved a movie. Spectacular. Great film and a great human being. But this guy, Ralph—there’s no movies about Ralph.”

  Murray campaigned for Nader during his first unsuccessful run for the presidency in 2000. But their association goes back much further than that. Nader was the guest host for Murray’s first Saturday Night Live episode on January 15, 1977. Backstage, Nader jawboned Murray about the importance of safety features in automobiles. Murray promised Nader that he would buy the first-ever mass-produced car with dual airbags. Eighteen years later, he made good on his pledge. In 1995, Murray purchased a Chrysler LHS, fully equipped. He did make some major aesthetic alterations. “I had to pay a lot to make it look acceptable to me,” he said. “I painted it black, took the chrome off. It has some very styling hubcaps.”