The Tao of Bill Murray: Real-Life Stories of Joy, Enlightenment, and Party Crashing by Gavin Edwards

Author:Gavin Edwards [Edwards, Gavin]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
ISBN: 9780812998702
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2016-09-20T06:00:00+00:00

TALES FROM THE GRAPE D’VINE

“One day in May, it was raining cats and dogs,” Joe Printz remembers. “It was raining really really hard. Nobody was even driving, but this son of a gun rides over on a scooter: Are you out of your mind?” Soaking wet, Bill Murray came in from an apocalyptic rainstorm, wearing jeans, a slicker, and Evel Knievel’s helmet. For real. “He had just bought it at auction,” Printz says. “It was the helmet that Evel Knievel had jumped over Snake River in.”

May 14, 1991: Bill Murray appeared on Late Night with David Letterman and did a rehearsed bit where an audience member (actually Joe Furey, a writer on the show) heckled him—one of many scripted bits Bill did on the show over the years, ranging from bursting out of a cake to making his entrance in a Peter Pan costume, suspended over the stage by wires.

The setup: When Furey expressed an excessive amount of enthusiasm for the Finger Lakes (a region in upstate New York), Bill advised him, “If you get a chance, sir, while you’re here, check out the rest of the world.”

“Screw you!” Furey shouted, soon followed by “Hey, Murray, you suck!”

Bill stood up, ready but relaxed, like an athlete about to enter the game. “I suck? Who told you I suck?” Bill asked.

When Furey moved on to heckling Letterman, Bill said, “Hey, pal. Say what you want to me, but you leave David alone.”

“Why don’t you come up here and make me?” Furey challenged him.

Bill marched into the audience, grabbed Furey by the shirt, and shoved him out the stage doors, to wild cheers.

During rehearsal, Furey said, the confrontation got even more physical as Bill threw himself into the moment: “He grabs me. We’re fighting and punching. He’s kicking me and throwing me out of the doors. Then he literally slipped and fell right on top of me. Then he got up, helped me up, and said, ‘By the way, I’m Bill.’ ”

.   .   .

Circa 2010, John Knizeski was doing construction work in Snedens Landing, New York: “Actually, we were doing demolition of Orson Welles’s old house,” he says. It was near where Bill was living, so the crew would sometimes see him out and about, walking his dog. “A tiny little dog,” John says, measuring out a space with his hands roughly the size and shape of a car battery. Some of the guys on the demolition crew spotted Bill and started shouting out to him: “Hey, Bill Murray! Come on over, Bill!” Instead of coming over, Bill mimed that the tiny dog was pulling him uncontrollably. He feigned being out of breath and exhausted by the immense power of his miniature canine, and waved helplessly as it pulled him out of sight.

.   .   .

Before Naomi Watts worked with Bill Murray on St. Vincent—she played Daka, a pregnant Russian prostitute, and Bill played a cranky veteran who was her long-term customer (and possibly the father of her child)—they had met at a party and gotten along well. He had even prank-called her voicemail.

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