If you ever find yourself playing kickball in a New York City park on a pleasant Sunday afternoon—this is no recommendation that you do, kickball being the quintessence of hipster self-infantilization, but if you do find yourself in such a situation—and if, in the middle innings, a strange homeless-looking man appears and asks if he can take a turn at the plate, do not, as may be your temptation, shoo him away in anger and disgust. That man may be Bill Murray.
That we live in a universe in which such rules need stating is the great gift of Bill Murray's late-stage career. And it's what went down one brisk day this fall, when a group of twentysomethings playing kickball on Roosevelt Island were suddenly involved in the one-man flash mob that is a Bill Murray Sighting.
"We just figured he was someone's dad on the other team and kept playing, NBD," one of the participants wrote to Billmurraystory.com, a website devoted to chronicling such ubiquitous and predictably unpredictable events. "The man kicked the ball and ran pretty well to first base, trying to round to second, but one of my teammates chased him back to first, deciding not to attempt to peg the man. That was when everyone on my team realized who he was.... BILL MURRAY DECIDED TO PLAY KICKBALL WITH US!"
Murray made it as far as second base before getting doubled up on a line drive. He gave everybody on the field high fives. He hugged one player's mother, who was standing on the sidelines, lifting her high into the air. He posed for a group photo that would soon be all over the Internet. (All this, it should be said, after blowing off a GQ photo shoot.) And then he vanished.
It sometimes seems that making movies is merely Murray's hobby these days, secondary to these kinds of mystic, generous, Dadaist materializations. A pop-culture icon since his mid-twenties, he has emerged lately as something more bizarre and transcendent: a kind of wandering, perpetual performance artist, everywhere and nowhere, wherever the wind or spirit carries him: indie movies, golf tournaments, college frat parties, your karaoke booth right now. As one astute Internet commenter put it: "Some people photo-bomb pictures. Bill Murray photo-bombs life." That it's nearly impossible to tell the apocryphal sightings from the real ones may be precisely the point.
"I always laugh when people bitch about the subways. It's like, 'You have no idea,' " Murray says. It's a couple of hours after kickball, and still wearing the blue cutoff shorts and loose flannel shirt in which he played, he's ensconced in a hotel suite high above Manhattan. Murray is big, bigger than you expect, and his presence is bigger yet. He brings to even this, the most sterile of rooms, a kind of crackling kinetic energy, whether perched on the edge of the suite's round salmon-colored sofa or springing up to pour a cup of coffee from a silver tray. He's reminiscing about his early days in New York, part of a migration from The Second City in Chicago to The National Lampoon Radio Hour, which paved the way for Saturday Night Live.
"I got here in 1974, just as everything went to shit. Subways were insanely cold in the winter and insanely hot in the summer," he says. "The windows were all open, so you'd get metal filings and dust in your face. It was like being on a prison train, or working in a mine. I used to run all the time. I would get off that train and just start running."
Part of the joy of the city, of being Murray, was talking your way into places you weren't supposed to be. "You had to wheedle your way in those days. It was like, 'How do I get this experience?' So you go face-to-face with someone. You make eye contact," he says. "My brother and I crashed the Tommy premiere party in the subway, which was like the tightest ticket of whatever year... 1975? We had no business being at this thing, but we knew the guys in the kitchen. It was a party in the subway! People talk about it now, and it sounds like fiction." There's something beautiful about imagining Murray, semi-anonymous, before his adventures were instantly recorded.
"He was kind of scarier then," says producer and writer Mitch Glazer, who was introduced to Murray by John Belushi during Murray's first weeks on Saturday Night Live. "I didn't know him very well. He was blazingly funny. But he also seemed angrier."
This is the Murray of legend—punkish, confident, a modern incarnation of a line that stretches from Puck and Pan to Brer Rabbit and Groucho. (Or as Harold Ramis, his longtime, sometimes estranged collaborator and friend, once described it to me, "All the Marx Brothers rolled into one: He's got the wit of Groucho, the pantomimic brilliance and lasciviousness of Harpo, and the Everyman quality of Chico.") It's the Murray whose on-screen persona seems undivorceable from his exploits off. And it's the Murray frankly idolized by men who were a certain age when he was in his prime, men not overly blessed with good looks, wealth, or athletic prowess, for whom the actor seemed to have sprung forth, as surely as John Wayne, with an alternative blueprint for manhood: self-possessed, on the side of good, exquisitely capable of making one's way through the world. Several years ago, when I went to interview Ramis, he opened the door to his office, chuckled, and said something to the effect of "They always look like you." I imagine that Murray must feel the same way today; guys like me have been coming expectantly to see him for decades.
by Brett Martin, GQ | Read more:
Photo: Peggy Sirota
