Not Exactly What I Had in Mind (15 page)

Because Murray does not kid constantly. He is unlike “Saturday Night Live” in that not everything is tongue-in-cheek with him. For instance, we were at the Hard Rock Café in New York, which is part-owned by Aykroyd and is where Murray’s brother John is a bartender. We were drinking and staying up all night and kidding around with NBC sports commentator Ahmad Rashad and an MTV tape jockey and this guy Alex Hodges I went to high school with, who went on to become Otis Redding’s agent. I noticed that over the dance floor were these enormous letters that said
ALL IS ONE.

And I said, “Why’d they put
that
there?” (Because, hey, I come out of the fifties. I do not know from mysticism other than Methodist hymns. And when I stay out late in New York, it is not so I can be informed that all is one. It is so I won’t meet any other Methodists.)

But Murray’s answer was, “I guess because they believe it.”

I think Murray goes over so well as the questionable exorcist in
Ghostbusters,
as the dry roomie in
Tootsie,
as the goof-off with leadership qualities in
Stripes,
partly because he is a great kidder and partly because he conveys this sense that if cinematic comedy doesn’t work out, there are other realms. “Anybody can get a laugh,” he says. “I’m interested in making sense.”

Offscreen, Murray is the kind of guy who finds places like Kelley’s. Kelley’s, which is in the middle of Miami somewhere, is the best bar you have ever been in unless you are exclusively into luxe. I heard that Kelley’s burned down last year, at least to its walls and ceiling, but that it is still in business. I haven’t checked it out yet, but I know that Kelley’s is not the kind of place that fire would hamper much.

Kelley’s opens out onto the street (I mean it did even before it burned down, if indeed it has burned down) so that you have plenty of room to dance to the jukebox, which has everything you want, including “Good Night, Irene.” That’s the biggest song at Kelley’s; when it comes on, everyone present sings it, and an elderly woman at the end of the bar beats the hell out of this bell on the wall, and everyone else grabs up these cans full of popcorn kernels and bangs them on the bar. …

You probably have to be there. Murray talked Jimmy Buffett into going there once, and they sat around and sat around and nothing went on and Buffett was saying he had to get somewhere and then suddenly somebody drove a Fiat right up almost
into
Kelley’s and people piled out of it, and the lady who sits at the end of the bar arrived, and there were so many renditions of “Good Night, Irene” that everybody lost count.

“I love Miami,” Murray says. “People there really keep track of their personal freedom. There are so many old people … they don’t want anybody giving them any shit. And you don’t have many laws down there. I met some third-generation smugglers whose family had been cutting deals with the Indians before Florida was even a state.”

In New York, Murray found this great Japanese piano bar, and another place that sometimes serves “inverted margaritas” — they put a funnel in your mouth and pour in the ingredients. I met a guy in the second place one night who told me he invented those little computer lines they put on everything you buy now and that he had twelve bidets in his apartment. I asked what he needed twelve bidets for. He said, “I might get lucky.”

Time, Newsweek,
and
People
all wanted to do cover stories on Murray when
Ghostbusters
became a hit, but he wouldn’t cooperate. It is his feeling that “those magazines take your picture and they make up their minds who you are from that picture and they base the story on that, and millions of people see it, and from then on, that’s
you.
It sucks the soul out of you.”

Murray is not kidding about that. Nor is he taking lightly the perils of Hollywood. “I’m on all these mailing lists now. An invitation a week to all these charity events. They want you to be on the dais or the committee — which is ten famous actors, ten people you never heard of, and fifty of the biggest criminals in the world. And it’s a benefit for wounded babies.” Third-generation smugglers are one thing, but Hollywood biggies are another. “They’re on all these decency committees. And they are the biggest thieves and crooks in the world.

“Sometimes I feel like they are really running everything and I’m kidding myself. You know the original idea of fear and loathing — it’s figuring out the worst thing that could happen in a situation and being ready for it. As an exercise, it prepares you for Hollywood. Hollywood has the same power over you that the FBI does, or the CIA. Look what they did to Preston Sturges — they thought he was too big and they broke him. I don’t know why. It could happen to anybody.”

It was happening to Belushi when he died. It’s not happening to Murray. He says he has improvised, written, or reworked almost all the lines he has delivered in movies. He refuses to have an answering service so he can avoid people (“You can continue to change your number, or you can not answer the phone, or you can answer the phone in Swedish”). He has made millions and not spent many of them (no drug problems, for one thing). Money, as such, doesn’t mean much to him. “When I really get
down,”
he says, “and I’m walking around in the street and really pissed, I think, At least I’m rich. But that’s really grasping at straws.” He can, however, afford to be choosy about projects. He agreed to do
Ghostbusters
for Columbia only if they would let him and his friend, director John Byrum, do
The Razor’s Edge
(for which Murray took only a fee for cowriting the screenplay).

The two of them wrote the movie all over the world, from the Frank Sinatra Room of the Friars Club to a curbstone in Paris, by way of the Himalayas. (Murray has a good-looking, responsible and highly understanding wife, Mickey, and a two-and-a-half-year-old chunk of energetic son, Homer, but he gets to roam the globe. And he gets to name his son Homer Banks William Murray, for Ernie Banks, who hit homers. Murray is a Cubs fan. His mother made him stick in the William so she can call the kid “little Billy.”) Originally a W. Somerset Maugham novel,
The Razor’s Edge
was first filmed in 1946, starring Tyrone Power as a man named Larry Darrell who goes around in remarkably high-waisted pants “searching for something. Something I can’t put into words.” There are exchanges like this:

“Have you found that peace of mind you were looking for?”

“No, but for the first time I’m beginning to see things in a clear light.”

The Murray-Byrum version is more hip. It turns great kidding into a mode of spiritual enlightenment. The character as Murray plays him is different from everybody else, more engaging and yet less satisfied, by virtue of his sense of humor. It’s a very interesting, personal yet cool, straight yet funny performance. In one scene, Piedmont, a character played by Brian Doyle-Murray, dies after saving Larry Darrell’s life. In his grief, Darrell holds him in his arms and begins to recite all of Piedmont’s
bad
qualities. “He really enjoyed disgusting people; the thrill of offending people and making them uncomfortable. He was despicable. I’ll never understand gluttony, but I hate it. And I hated him. You,” he says to Piedmont’s body, “will not be missed.”

Murray says he had his brother in mind during that scene, but also Belushi. After Belushi died Murray was with Aykroyd and some of Aykroyd’s relatives. They were all sitting around in black silence. Murray recalled something he had read about the Sufi religion. Certain Sufis have a custom of recalling terrible things about the dearly departed. So Murray recited several terrible things that Belushi had done, and everybody in the room could think of several more, and soon everyone felt able to rise to the grim occasion.

I guess that’s a form of kidding death, but a more highly evolved form of it than used to be practiced on “Saturday Night Live.”

“The year Teddy Kennedy was running against Jimmy Carter,” Murray recalls, “I saw a picture of Kennedy in the Saint Patrick’s Day parade in Chicago. There he was, wearing a bulletproof vest. I don’t know, I think I cried or something, it was just so sad. I felt terrible about it. I called Hunter Thompson and he got in touch with somebody and — actually, I just handed out things. Got in a cab and went out to Co-op City in the Bronx at eleven in the morning the day of the primary … everybody out there had already voted by then. But I figured, if this fucker is going out there with a bulletproof vest on, at least I can …

“And I had done him on ‘Saturday Night Live’ — low, cheap, Chappaquiddick stuff. Kept pulling seaweed out of my mouth. I’m not crazy about actors going public about politics. But down the road a way, something is going to have to happen.

“In
The Razor’s Edge,
in the end, when I say I’m going back to America …
America
is sort of a word people use in the modern world to mean a place where there is real spiritual freedom. I have a feeling that what is wrong or right about the world is very clear and simple: No war. Don’t kill Asians. Don’t beat up on people who are smaller than you are. We go down to Grenada, where they had one revolution repulsed by a guy pointing an unloaded twenty-two at a boatload of people. It’s like taking over a window-cleaning office in Manhattan. And people say, ‘Now we can hold our heads high in the world.’” He shakes his head.

“There’s a whole generation out there … everybody was pretty righteous from about eighteen till twenty-four, until they realized they had to make a buck. I wonder, where did all those people go? Where in the hell did they go? When John Lennon died, they came out again, for the first time in ten years. It was amazing, a lost race materialized. Somebody said they’re like Zapata’s army. A time’s going to come, somewhere down the road.”

So there is one rich thirty-five-year-old in the country who isn’t a yuppie.

Murray and I were watching the Olympics on TV when the American men gymnasts beat the Chinese and then got ecstatic. “Those boys are
conscious
now,” Murray said. “They won’t be able to remember it tomorrow because they won’t be conscious. But they’ll remember it whenever they’re conscious again.

“That’s my technique now, I guess. It’s hard to call it a technique when it’s something much bigger. When the cameras roll, I think: This is the most important thing I’m going to do. It’s going to be the biggest experience I’ll ever share with other people. The biggest moment of contact with people right now. And if you’re there, conscious of that … what you do doesn’t look hard.”

It is hard to talk about what an actor does, especially if, as Murray says, “the next day I act like a complete asshole and punch somebody in a bar. I’m still the same person, unfortunately. I’m not going to save the world because my own self is the first problem.”

One reason Murray is engaging on the screen is that he lets his own self in on the joke. “Ah, yes,” he seems to be saying, “here you are a movie star, running from a special effect.” (As a matter of fact, he says, he is getting tired of making comedies “that end in an explosion.”) He has been able to include America in that joke without losing himself in the process.

Maybe you would rather save the world by stockpiling bombs and invading Grenada. Murray prefers to make contact with potential enemies, himself included, by thinking on his feet and lightly evoking higher values.

He tells a story about driving around Chicago a few years ago, seven people in the car all smoking dope, and it’s the first time he’s been back in town since 1968, when the Old Town area was like an armed camp, cops milling around in wagons just waiting for someone to look halfway bustable.

“And all of a sudden we come to a stop right next to a paddy wagon. Inside are two of the biggest-headed guys I’ve ever seen. Just
huge
-headed guys. And we have really long hair.

“I’m driving. I don’t want to sit still in the water for these guys, that is sure suicide. So I figure in these situations, if you can say something first … say, ‘Excuse me. Can you tell me where the Claes Oldenburg baseball bat is?’

“He gets out of the paddy wagon. I say, ‘We’re fucked.’

“He comes to the window. He says, ‘The Claes Oldenburg bat is in front of the Social Security Building. The Picasso woman is at the Civic Center. The Calder standing mobiles are at the Federal Center, and the Chagall mosaic mural is at the First National Bank.’

“I say, ‘Thanks very much.’

“Cops in Chicago used to be so scary. I think those art pieces really changed that town. We did go to see that baseball bat, and it was everything I ever wanted it to be.”

If Joe McCarthy

Had been less swarthy,

And the other one, Gene,

Had been less clean …

A
ND NOW FOR A
message that takes real courage:

I can’t find it in my heart to like light beer. I would rather have one heavy beer than seven light ones. I wouldn’t mind having seven heavy ones. And I don’t really care what brand the last four and a half of them are.

When I speak of courage I am not alluding to the risk of corpulence on my part. I believe a person should live in such a way that he can carry a little corpulence. The reason it takes courage is this: I guess it rules out my appearing in a great beer commercial.

I, a living American, accept that I will never be in a great beer commercial, probably. With no less gravity would an eighteenth-century Viennese have said to himself, “Let’s face it. You ain’t ever going to hit a great lick on a clavier, probably.” Great beer commercials are so good they nearly do a transcendent thing in our culture: they nearly redeem television.

I don’t mean the beer commercials with actors in them. Those icky-yuppie figments of the “Tonight is kinda special” stripe are
not beery.
Nor can I tolerate that around-the-campfire vignette in which one guy goes off into the woods to talk a grizzly bear out of a case of Stroh’s. Here we have a workable concept, ruined by performances so callow that any half-grown bear, grizzly or fluffy, would chase those guys
and
their campfire all the way back to Hotchkiss.