LABOUNTA, TODD
See DiLaMuca, Todd.
LA CROIX
Faux French sparkling water brand preferred by Murray until the early 1990s because it was bottled in La Crosse, Wisconsin. According to a 1990 magazine profile, Murray “will drink anything made in Wisconsin.”
LANSON
Murray’s preferred brand of French Champagne.
LARGER THAN LIFE
DIRECTED BY: Howard Franklin
WRITTEN BY: Roy Blount Jr.
RELEASE DATE: November 1, 1996
FILM RATING: **
MURRAY RATING: **
PLOT: A motivational speaker travels across America with an 8,000-pound elephant.
STARRING BILL MURRAY AS: Jack Corcoran, self-help author turned elephant companion
By 1996, Murray had not played the lead in a film since Groundhog Day three years earlier. “I really have to get more active,” he confessed to USA Today. “I’ve been lazy… . I don’t work as much as other people do.” His agent, Mike Ovitz, thought he had the perfect starring vehicle to lift Murray out of the doldrums. “You know, you and an elephant would be funny,” Ovitz told his client. Murray immediately smelled a rat. “When he says stuff, I always know there’s an agenda. Somebody he knows has got an elephant script.”
That “elephant script” turned out to be Larger Than Life, an innocuous road movie about a Tony Robbins–type motivational guru who inherits custody of a four-ton pachyderm from his late father. Originally called Nickel & Dime, the project was briefly redubbed Elephant Man 2 before an on-set contest was launched to come up with a final title. Larger Than Life was selected, with Elephant Men and The Wackyderm among the runners-up. Humorist Roy Blount Jr. was brought in to revise the script to fit Murray’s comic persona. Howard Franklin, Murray’s erstwhile Quick Change collaborator, was hired to direct. Tai, an Asian elephant best known for her performance in the previous year’s Operation Dumbo Drop, took on the challenging role of Vera, the orphaned circus animal who teaches Murray how to care.
From the first day of filming, Murray formed a deep and lasting bond with his elephantine leading lady. “She has probably spoiled me for all other elephants,” he declared on the eve of Larger Than Life’s release. “This was the only time I cried when I said goodbye to a costar.” Having worked opposite Andie MacDowell, Geena Davis, and Sigourney Weaver, among others, Murray boldly placed Tai in the top ranks of actresses with whom he’d shared the screen. “She’s the best,” he gushed. “She’s definitely the most talented—except for Gilda [Radner].”
When he wasn’t cavorting with Tai, Murray was his usual Jekyll and Hyde self on the set. According to a published report, he demanded that a member of the crew be fired because he objected to the man’s cologne. During filming of a scene in which Murray and the elephant trek through the Rocky Mountains, traffic became so snarled that Murray had the entire cast and crew line the highway and perform the “YMCA” dance for the entertainment of enraged motorists.
That wasn’t the only snafu that bedeviled the production. When studio executives were given a look at a rough cut, they were appalled. Murray appeared to be sleepwalking through his performance. Reshoots were ordered, with new scenes added for Matthew McConaughey as a methed-out truck driver who gives Murray and the elephant a ride. Larger Than Life’s opening was delayed and then hidden from the eyes of critics. When reviewers did get a look at it, they were not impressed. The Boston Globe called it “a thin, disjointed road comedy,” while Variety’s Todd McCarthy rated it “entirely mirthless” and railed: “Some talented people step in a rather large pile of elephant droppings.”
Sensing that he had a turkey on his hands, Murray embarked on a frenetic one-man publicity campaign. He appeared on Larry King’s CNN talk show, submitted to several newspaper and magazine interviews, and even filmed a promotional featurette—in drag—as a Mary Hart–like entertainment reporter. USA Today described Murray in lipstick and a wig as resembling “RuPaul after a nuclear accident.” But the promo tour failed to have much of an effect. Larger Than Life came and went quickly, leaving Murray fans to console themselves with his two-scene cameo in Space Jam, which opened two weeks later.
NEXT MOVIE: Space Jam (1996)
“THEY SAY AN ELEPHANT NEVER FORGETS, BUT WHAT THEY DON’T TELL YOU IS THAT YOU NEVER FORGET AN ELEPHANT.”
LATE NIGHT WITH DAVID LETTERMAN
Murray was the first guest on the first episode of this iconic late-night comedy series on February 1, 1982. Adopting a mock combative tone throughout his conversation with Letterman, Murray played with the lint in his pockets, showed a video of a family of pandas purportedly living in his backyard, and performed an impromptu aerobics routine to Olivia Newton-John’s hit single “Physical.” Unbeknownst to the audience, Murray almost didn’t make the appearance. According to the recollections of crewmembers recounted in Brian Abrams’s Amazon Kindle Single AND NOW … An Oral History of “Late Night with David Letterman,” 1982–1993, Murray disappeared from the building shortly before taping began. A frantic search ensued. At the last minute, Murray returned to the studio, claiming he had gone home to feed his cat.
LEGAL EAGLES
Debra Winger supplanted Murray in the lead role of this 1986 romantic comedy from director Ivan Reitman. Legal Eagles was originally written as a buddy picture, with Murray and Dustin Hoffman slated to costar as bickering attorneys. The plot was based on the protracted lawsuit over the estate of Mark Rothko, the celebrated abstract expressionist painter who committed suicide in 1970. “The movie was supposed to be about the marriage of art and commerce,” Murray mused in an interview. “And the more I learned about Rothko, the more I wanted to make the movie.” Indeed, Murray was jazzed enough about Legal Eagles to cut short his Parisian sabbatical and return to the United States. When Hoffman backed out to make Ishtar with Warren Beatty, Murray lost interest in the project. Robert Redford stepped in, demanding that the script be retooled around a Tracy/Hepburn–style couple.
LIFE AQUATIC WITH STEVE ZISSOU, THE
DIRECTED BY: Wes Anderson
WRITTEN BY: Wes Anderson and Noah Baumbach
RELEASE DATE: December 25, 2004
FILM RATING: ***
MURRAY RATING: ***
PLOT: A washed-up marine explorer pursues the man-eating “jaguar shark” that devoured his friend.
STARRING BILL MURRAY AS: Steve Zissou, lugubrious pot-smoking oceanographer
Murray had a miserable time making this, his third film for director Wes Anderson. Shot on location in Italy during the harsh winter of 2003–2004, The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou was “by far the hardest job I’ve ever had,” according to the actor. He called the five-month location shoot “absolute hell” and claimed he never would have taken the part had he known it would drag on that long—or that the weather would be so cold. “I got a bone chill so bad that Anjelica [Huston] came in and was rubbing my body trying to keep my blood moving,” Murray said. “They were covering me with cashmeres and all these kinds of crazy things they were getting from town. My bones got so cold. They were cold for months afterwards.” Adding insult to Murray’s agony was the fact that retakes for Garfield: The Movie forced him into an Italian recording studio to redub tiresome cat jokes during breaks in the Zissou shooting schedule.
In the end, Murray’s loyalty to Wes Anderson won out over his desire for comfort. Despite the tsouris that attended the film’s making, he has called The Life Aquatic “the best film Wes has ever made” and placed it in the top ranks of his own work. “I’m proud of everything that’s on the screen,” he told an audience at a 2004 retrospective of his career at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Whatever one thinks of the film’s mannered style and hipper-than-thou deadpan humor, the part of Steve Zissou—an over-the-hill undersea explorer modeled on Jacques Cousteau—seems tailor-made for his mid-2000s persona. As a grown-up leading man role, it makes a worthy follow-up to Lost in Translation and rates as one of Murray’s most quietly commanding performances.
“Every single scene of that movie was funny,” Murray told GQ. “But when Wes assembled it, he streamlined and excised the detonation point of the laughter. The idea is you keep it bouncing and never skim the energy off of it. You keep it building in the name of a big emotional payoff—which comes when they’re all in the submarine together and they see the jaguar shark.”
NEXT MOVIE: Broken Flowers (2005)
LIMITS OF CONTROL, THE
DIRECTED BY: Jim Jarmusch
WRITTEN BY: Jim Jarmusch
RELEASE DATE: May 1, 2009
FILM RATING: *
MURRAY RATING: *
PLOT: A contract killer exchanges matchboxes with people at various Spanish cafés.
STARRING BILL MURRAY AS: The American, reclusive target of assassination
“Sometimes I like it in films when people just sit there, not saying anything,” says a character in The Limits of Control. So does director Jim Jarmusch, who once again subjects his audience to two hours of characters sipping coffee, gazing blankly into the distance, and occasionally engaging in inane conversations. If that’s your cup of espresso, you will be mesmerized by this “thriller” starring Isaach De Bankolé as the world’s most inert hitman. Murray, in an instantly forgettable cameo, plays his latest victim, a mysterious American who lives in a heavily fortified compound in the Spanish countryside. In the film’s climactic scene, De Bankolé garrotes Murray with a guitar string.
The Limits of Control was Murray’s third collaboration with Jarmusch and the last film he made before his rancorous divorce from second wife Jennifer Butler. If he seems to be phoning in his performance, it may be because he had personal matters on his mind. It took several months for Murray to emerge from the torpor of his broken marriage. In an interview conducted in October 2008, after shooting had concluded on The Limits of Control, Murray reflected on this unhappy period of his life and declared himself rejuvenated: “I’ve just come out of a sort of doldrums and I feel like I want to go,” he said. “I want to work. I want to get going. I want to do a few things at once. I really want to connect with other people that are going that way and ‘Let’s go’… I want to bounce off like a pinball. Like a pinball, I want to bounce off bumpers that are positive. I want to bounce off people that are positive and hope that’ll make me more positive and give me momentum.” A few months later, he pinballed his way to a much more successful cameo in the comedy-horror romp Zombieland.
NEXT MOVIE: Zombieland (2009)
LITTLE CAESARS
After he dropped out of college in 1970, Murray worked part-time as a pizza maker in the Evanston, Illinois, branch of this national pizza chain. In 2014, during a speech at a charity event, Murray revealed that he was so poor at the time that he often ate raw pizza dough when no one was looking: “It has active yeast inside of it, so when you’re full of the raw dough, the yeast continues to expand until your body begins to explode. But those are the early days, when we went through some stuff, didn’t we all? Huh? So. Anyway.”
LITTLE MISS SUNSHINE
Oscar-nominated 2005 comedy about a dysfunctional family on a road trip to a beauty pageant. Screenwriter Michael Arndt wrote the part of Frank Ginsberg, the suicidal Marcel Proust scholar, with Murray in mind. The studio preferred Robin Williams. In the end, the two sides agreed to offer the part to Steve Carell. Murray later said he regretted missing out on the role.
In March 2010, while attending the weeklong SXSW festival in Austin, Texas, Murray rolled into the Shangri-La bar accompanied by RZA and GZA of the hip-hop group the Wu-Tang Clan. Taking over the bartending duties, Murray insisted on serving shots of tequila—and only shots of tequila—for the remainder of the evening. Over the course of the week, Murray was also spotted at various house parties in the Texas capital.
In December 2010, a group of revelers at the New York City karaoke bar Karaoke One 7 were shocked when Murray accepted their half-joking invitation to join them in their private karaoke room. Murray rolled into the room with an entourage of female companions and proceeded to treat everyone to a round of “weird green drinks” made with Chartreuse liqueur. He stayed for four hours, performed a duet of the 1961 Elvis Presley hit “(Marie’s the Name) His Latest Flame,” posed for photos with the partygoers, and then left.
LITTLE SHOP OF HORRORS
DIRECTED BY: Frank Oz
WRITTEN BY: Howard Ashman
RELEASE DATE: December 19, 1986
FILM RATING: ***
MURRAY RATING: ***
PLOT: A nebbish adopts a man-eating plant.
STARRING BILL MURRAY AS: Arthur Denton, masochistic dental patient
After two years of self-imposed exile from Hollywood, Murray returned to do a cameo in this musical adaptation of Roger Corman’s camp horror classic. In a brief scene that marks his first and only big-screen collaboration with Steve Martin, Murray plays Arthur Denton, a masochistic dental patient who flummoxes Martin’s best efforts to torture him. While Martin’s performance is showier—he wears a fright wig and huffs nitrous oxide in a madcap attempt to live up to Muppeteer Frank Oz’s stylized direction—Murray plays it low-key and ends up stealing the scene, much as Jack Nicholson did as an analogous loon in Corman’s original.
NEXT MOVIE: She’s Having a Baby (1988)
LOOSE SHOES
DIRECTED BY: Ira Miller
WRITTEN BY: Royce D. Applegate, Ira Miller, Dan Praiser, and Charley Smith
RELEASE DATE: August 1, 1980
FILM RATING: *
MURRAY RATING: *
PLOT: A collection of mock trailers for coming movie attractions.
STARRING BILL MURRAY AS: Lefty Schwartz, condemned prisoner and gastronome
Murray has a small role in this agonizingly unfunny film spoofing movie trailers in the manner of the then-popular satirical anthologies The Groove Tube and The Kentucky Fried Movie. Also known as Coming Attractions and Quackers, Loose Shoes was shot in 1977 but released in 1980 to capitalize on Murray’s Saturday Night Live fame. (The film’s puzzling title is a riff on an infamous, now forgotten quote from former U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Earl Butz: “The only thing the coloreds are looking for in life are tight pussy, loose shoes, and a warm place to shit.”) Of the eighteen sketches that make up the 84-minute feature—many of which trade in crude racist, sexist, and anti-Semitic stereotypes—Murray’s segment is by far the funniest. In “Three Chairs for Lefty!” he plays the title character, Lefty Schwartz, a death row inmate who starts a riot in the prison mess after he is served insufficiently flavorful quiche. Wearing a bald cap and mascara, Murray does what he can with the sophomoric material—the punch line involves Lefty “cooking” a roast for the warden in the electric chair—but the skit sinks under the weight of its own stupidity. Although Murray is on-screen for all of five minutes, he was featured prominently in promotional materials for the film.
NEXT MOVIE: Stripes
LOS ANGELES
Like most successful movie actors, Murray has spent a considerable amount of time in southern California. But he remains largely immune to its charms. Of his periodic residencies in L.A., he once remarked: “It just never took. It’s like the first day you check into a hotel in L.A. there’s a message under your door. The second day, there’s eleven messages under your door. The third day, there’s thirty, forty, fifty, sixty, seventy messages. And I realized that they just want fresh blood. They. Just. Want. Fresh. Blood. You gotta get the hell out of there. And you really feel, if you live in New York, that you’re three hours ahead of them—I mean that literally. It’s like, Oh man, we gotta help these people! And the longer you stay there, the less ahead of them you get, and then you’re one of them. No way, man. Not for me.”
Murray spent much of 1976 living full-time in Los Angeles following the demise of the New York–based Saturday Night Live with Howard Cosell. It was not a happy sojourn. In a 1984 interview, Murray described his rented home in L.A. as “the most disgusting house in California. It was like a den of evil. There were statues of embracing nudes all over, the library was The Joy of Sex, Good Sex, Better Sex, that kind of thing. There was an electronic bed. It was basically built to spend seventy-two hours in with a runaway teenage girl. Or boy, if that’s your taste. Scampering from the sauna to the Jacuzzi to the pool to the mechanical bed. The walls were velour, the rocks were velour, it was sleazy and amazing.”
LOST CITY, THE
DIRECTED BY: Andy Garcia
WRITTEN BY: Guillermo Cabrera Infante
RELEASE DATE: April 28, 2006
FILM RATING: **
MURRAY RATING: **
PLOT: A Havana nightclub owner is caught up in the tumult of the Cuban Revolution.
STARRING BILL MURRAY AS: “The Writer,” mysterious unnamed wag
Fittingly, for a deal that was sealed on the golf course, Murray delivers a workmanlike supporting performance in this ponderous period piece from actor/director Andy Garcia. A sweeping family drama set in the last days before Castro took power in Cuba, The Lost City was Garcia’s passion project, sixteen years in the making. He first pitched the film to Murray on the back nine at the 2004 Pebble Beach Pro-Am and then pestered him with phone calls begging him to join the cast. Fresh off the grueling shoot for The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, Murray was not sure he ever wanted to work again. But his wife convinced him to give in to Garcia’s entreaties. “What made the Andy movie happen is my wife likes Andy,” Murray told Cigar Aficionado magazine. “‘That’s okay. Go work with him. He’s a gentleman.’”
Murray called the script for The Lost City, by legendary Cuban novelist Guillermo Cabrera Infante, “one of the most extraordinary pieces of material I’ve ever read”—a considerable overstatement if true. “No one’s gonna see this movie,” he told Garcia, “but I want to be in it.” According to the director, Murray faxed over his signature without ever reading his contract. When Garcia informed him he could only pay him scale, Murray paused, said “What’s that?” and never mentioned salary again.
Playing an ambiguously gay gag writer loosely based on Cabrera Infante, Murray supplies much-needed comic relief. He does a brief Jack Benny impression, rocks the short-pants-and-suit look made famous by Angus Young of AC/DC, and comments mordantly on the revolutionary goings-on. Much of his dialogue was improvised, including a scene in which Murray and Dustin Hoffman discuss the proper way to make an egg cream. In an interview conducted for the DVD release of The Lost City, Garcia likened Murray’s character to a “Cuban Groucho Marx” and “a satirical Greek chorus.”
NEXT MOVIE: Garfield: A Tail of Two Kitties (2006)
LOST IN AMERICA
Director Albert Brooks offered Murray the male lead in this 1985 comedy about a married couple who quit their jobs to drive across America in a Winnebago. Murray was living in Paris at the time, in the midst of his four-year sabbatical from Hollywood, and explained to Brooks that he wouldn’t be available for another two and a half years. Brooks ended up playing the part himself.
LOST IN TRANSLATION
DIRECTED BY: Sofia Coppola
WRITTEN BY: Sofia Coppola
RELEASE DATE: October 3, 2003
FILM RATING: ****
MURRAY RATING: ****
PLOT: A pair of unhappy hotel guests runs through the streets of Tokyo together.
STARRING BILL MURRAY AS: Bob Harris, melancholic whiskey pitchman
“I had a wish that I could do a movie that was sort of romantic,” Murray said of his state of mind in 2003, when he accepted the lead role in writer/director Sofia Coppola’s bittersweet paean to emotional dislocation. Lost in Translation wound up being the crowning achievement of Murray’s career to that point, earning him multiple industry awards and his first Oscar nomination for best actor. “I knew I was going to nail that character,” he said of Bob Harris, the melancholy movie star who forges an intense bond with a sullen young woman in a Tokyo hotel. In fact, the project called out to him the first time he read Coppola’s 90-page screenplay. “It wasn’t overwritten, it wasn’t sentimental, it wasn’t maudlin,” he told PBS gabber Charlie Rose. “It was clean. It was really spare.”
Getting Murray interested in the script was easy. Getting him to take a look at it in the first place was the hard part. After writing the role of Bob Harris with Murray in mind (reportedly because she liked the idea of seeing him in a kimono), Coppola spent the better part of a year calling him on the phone and begging him to do the film. “I left him a lot of messages,” she said. “He probably got sick of it. I sent him pages, and then I would leave him messages about what I was thinking about it.” To seal the deal, she enlisted two Murrayland insiders: producer Mitch Glazer and director Wes Anderson. Glazer arranged a lunch with Murray in New York, where Coppola made her pitch. Anderson wooed him over dinner the following night. “It was one of those patented Bill evenings,” the Rushmore director told the New York Times. “He was driving. He went through a red light, reversed the car, and then ducked into this Japanese place that only he could see. By the time the sake came, I knew he would do the movie.”
Even after all that, Murray’s participation was far from assured. He wavered on committing to the project until the last possible moment. After a week of filming at Tokyo’s Park Hyatt Hotel, Murray still had not shown up on the set. In a panic, Coppola called Glazer looking for her wayward star. When Murray finally arrived, he was jet-lagged and grumpy—conditions he ended up incorporating into his performance. The four-week Tokyo shoot was arduous, and elements of Bob Harris’s plight hit uncomfortably close to home for a husband and father all too used to being separated from his family. “You are always away from home, as a film actor,” Murray told the Guardian after the film’s release. “You can be stuck in a hotel, several thousand miles away in a whole different time zone, and it is never glamorous. You can’t sleep, you put on the television in the middle of the night when you can’t understand a word, and you make phone calls back home which don’t really give you the comfort they should. I know what it’s like to be that stranger’s voice calling in.” For the record, Murray modeled Harris’s weary affect on Harrison Ford, whose glowering visage loomed over Tokyo in billboard ads for Asahi beer.
Murray took home nearly every major acting award for Lost in Translation, although the most coveted prize of all—the Oscar for best actor—eluded him. Few people remember Mystic River today, or Sean Penn’s rather pedestrian performance in it, whereas Murray’s portrayal of the morose Suntory whiskey spokesman has only grown in stature as the years have passed. In part that’s due to the enduring mystery of Lost in Translation’s final scene. The question of what Bob Harris whispers to Scarlett Johansson’s Charlotte comes up nearly every time Murray discusses the film. Digital enhancement of the soundtrack has narrowed the field to two possibilities (“I have to be leaving, but I won’t let that come between us, okay?” or “Go to that man and tell him the truth, okay?”), but Murray is characteristically cagey about what he actually said. “I told the truth once and they didn’t believe me,” he told Charlie Rose in 2014. “So I just said, ‘To hell with it, I’m not telling anyone.’ I whispered in her ear, but the moment happened, and I was wired—they had microphones—and Sofia and Ava Cabrera, the script supervisor, had this moment where they just looked at her and said, ‘He doesn’t have to say anything. You don’t have to hear anything.’ And I had the same feeling from sixty yards away. I went, ‘It doesn’t matter what the hell I say in her ear. This will be a wonderful mystery.’”
Elsewhere, Murray told a story about a time he was getting on a ferry at Martha’s Vineyard when someone in the line asked him to reveal the secret. Murray waited a beat before he started to speak, letting the sound of a bellowing foghorn drown out his answer. “I acted it out like I was saying something really sincere, and the crowd laughed so hard,” he said. “It was great. I couldn’t have bought that moment.”
NEXT MOVIE: Coffee and Cigarettes (2003)
“THE MOVIE IS THE PRIZE. IN TIME, NOBODY REMEMBERS WHO WON THE DAMN OSCAR. THEY JUST REMEMBER THE MOVIE IF IT WAS GOOD. IF YOU HAD SAID TO ME, ‘YOU COULD BE IN MYSTIC RIVER AND WIN THE OSCAR OR YOU COULD BE IN YOUR MOVIE AND NOT WIN’—NOT A FUCKIN’ CHANCE. NO CONTEST. I LOVED THE WHOLE EXPERIENCE. IT’S A GREAT, GREAT MOVIE.”
LOVE
“I had girlfriends from the time I was in kindergarten,” Murray once confessed. He fell in love for the first time at the age of twelve but was devastated when he discovered that the object of his affection didn’t share his feelings. “She was in love with another guy at school,” he said. “It baffled me that you could love someone so much and not get it back. That changed me in certain ways, which I’ve never been able to plumb. I stopped reading, and I used to read all day long. I just stopped and something changed in me, and I don’t know how, but it’s affected what I’ve become.”
Since then, Murray has been through two marriages, at least one extramarital affair, and two bitter divorces—as well as a tempestuous relationship with his Saturday Night Live cast mate Gilda Radner. But he remains a proponent of old-fashioned romance, which, he says, “basically starts with respect.” In an interview, Murray claimed that he took romantic inspiration from Stephen Stills’s 1970 free-love anthem “Love the One You’re With”:“There is something to that. It’s not just make love to whomever you’re with, it’s just love whomever you’re with. And love can be seeing that here we are and there’s this world here. If I go to my room and I watch TV, I didn’t really live. If I stay in my hotel room and watch TV, I didn’t live today.”
LOYOLA ACADEMY
Murray attended this private Jesuit high school in Wilmette, Illinois, from 1964 to 1968. He paid his own tuition with money saved up from caddying. Murray has described Loyola Academy as a “preppie Catholic school” and dubbed it his “caddy money repository.” Murray caught the acting bug at Loyola, appearing in school productions of The Music Man and The Caine Mutiny Court Martial.
Although the arts intrigued him, Murray was not nearly as committed to his studies. He was notorious for his indifference to classwork. In a 1984 interview with Rolling Stone, he referred to himself as “an underachiever and a screw-off” as a high school student. “I just didn’t care for school much,” he said. “Studying was boring. I was lazy … and I had no interest in getting good grades.” He was bright enough to score highly on the National Merit Scholarship test but was disqualified because of his poor grades. He later called the rejection “devastating, really bad news, ’cause my father would have loved to have heard somebody was going to come up with the money for college.”
Murray often misbehaved in class. “He was always a rebel,” said one of his high school friends, Lena Zanzucchi. “If there was one thing you knew, it’s that he was going to do what he wanted.” Another student remembered him as “a kid who liked to sit and observe people in the hallways. He’d select a spot where he could avoid the wrath of the Jesuit priests for loitering, then just sit and take it all in. If someone stared back at him, he just made a face at them, a consummate goof-off.” Around campus, Murray was known as “the man least likely to succeed.” His high school English teacher, Father Lawrence Reuter, called him “brilliant, but a terrible student.” Instead of making Murray sit at the head of the class with the other unruly pupils, Reuter often put him in the back so he would not act out in front of his classmates.
Shortly after arriving at Loyola, Murray fell under the influence of a group of nonconformist “troublemakers.” “These guys were really smart—with 148 IQs,” he told Rolling Stone, “and really nuts, the first guys that got kicked out of our school for grass.” Although long hair was officially banned at the school, “these guys would let their hair grow long and grease it down so it looked like it was short, and you’d see them on the weekends, and you couldn’t believe how much hair they had, ’cause they’d washed it. They put up with all the grief that the preppie crowd gave them for being greasers, and they didn’t care. Because come the weekend, they were doing a completely different thing than the guys from Wilmette who were trying to drink beer and get high. They didn’t have any interest in being part of the social scene… . They were downtown, stoned, listening to blues.”
Murray would have liked to join them, but he lacked the necessary funds—and, more important, the means of transportation—to do so. “I didn’t have enough money to really have a lot of fun,” he said. “I didn’t have a car; I didn’t have a driver’s license until God knows when. So I basically relied on friends; they were my wheels. Or I’d take a bus or hitchhike. And in the suburbs, that’s really lowballing it. Everybody else’s parents drove them, or they had their own car. My parents just looked at me: ‘Your brother hitchhiked to school, and you’ll hitchhike to school.’”
When Murray graduated from Loyola Academy in 1968, as a final kiss-off to the school he made a point of wearing a Nehru jacket and tennis shoes to the graduation ceremony.
On Halloween night in 2008, Murray attended a concert by the Brooklyn-based electro-pop duo MGMT at the Music Hall of Williamsburg. After the show, he went party-hopping with the band and eventually ended up in the apartment of twenty-nine-year-old graduate student Dave Summers at three thirty in the morning. Summers’s costume party was just winding down, but the unexpected arrival of Murray immediately energized the remaining revelers—one of whom was dressed as Carl Spackler from Caddyshack. Murray guzzled Modelo Especial beer, boogied down on the dance floor, and rhapsodized about his fondness for sweet potato casserole with marshmallows before departing into the Billburg night. The prevailing good vibes were interrupted only briefly when a party guest brought down the room by informing Murray—who had just gone through an acrimonious divorce—that he was “making bad life choices.”