Bill Murray: Making It up as He Goes
Knots
Mickey Kelly likes to say that she had a surprise wedding. She thought they were going out for Mexican food. Bill Murray harbored more dangerous notions. It was the day before Super Bowl Sunday, which he considers a national holiday. In his mind, the idea of driving to Las Vegas and getting married on Super Bowl Sunday was building up an overwhelmingly powerful momentum. It just seemed… right.
For Mickey Kelly, the concept lacked appeal. Not that marriage had never come up. When a couple bounces around together on and off for a decade, the subject is bound to arise. Maybe she even felt ready for it. But not quite like that. Let’s drive to Vegas, boom. Right then, January 24th, 1981. As Murray steered through the San Fernando Valley in a rented car, all she wanted was Mexican food. So she got into a sour humor and clammed up. Stone silent. Murray was in a bad mood, too. She could tell, because he started veering on and off the road, and then he would stop the car and gaze silently out the window. Each insists that the other was responsible for generating the funk.
She: “I thought he was trying to drive me insane.”
He: “I figured tonight was the night. This was the night I’d chosen to take her and marry her, and she was in one of the ugliest moods I’d ever seen her in.”
It was true love.
Mickey broke. In the face of Murray’s lunatic intensity, she crumbled. Also, he had enlisted the help of two friends who had been married in Vegas the year before. Mickey gave up. “I really was gonna pick a fight, and then I thought, ‘Let’s just do it.’ He had this thing planned out. I thought, ‘Aaaaah, go with it.'”
Off they sped with their friends and a bottle of booze, windows open, tape player blasting Ry Cooder across the Mojave Desert.
Murray describes the ceremony as beautiful and touching. It was performed at 4:30 in the morning by a man in dark glasses. There was inspiring music. Murray had wanted Pavarotti’s “Ave Maria,” but by the time the “I do’s” came around, the tape had segued into “Pagliacci.”
What Bill Murray remembers hearing as he took his wedding vows that Super Bowl morning was this: laugh, clown, laugh.
He had to laugh.
Strikes
Opening Day 1981 for the Utica Blue Sox. A huge crowd pours into Murnane Field. Tension mounts as game time draws near. Last season, fewer than 800 fans attended Opening Day. This year there are 3,500. It is believed that most of them have come to hear the national anthem.
Bill Murray is hiding in the Syracuse airport. He and Mickey Kelly have flown in from Chicago, and Murray is distraught. It seems there is a full-fledged controversy occurring in upstate New York, and Murray is the cause. When it was announced that he would sing at the Blue Sox opener, a furor ensued. A worried editorial appeared in the Utica paper. Veterans protested. There were fears that in Bill Murray’s larynx, our splendid anthem might be subjected to horrors that could wreak irreparable damage. After all, was not Bill Murray’s best-known character from Saturday Night Live that awful Nick the lounge singer, mugger of music?
Star Wars, nothing but Star Wars
Gimme those Star Wars
Don’t let them eh-eh-end…
Whoa! That nut’s gonna trash “The Banner.” Turmoil. Ruckus. This is why we find Bill Murray half-crouched in a phone booth, trying to arrange transport to Utica, when a man in a suit and tie walks up and asks if he is Bill Murray.
“Who wants to know?” asks Murray, dark with suspicion.
“Welcome,” says the man. “I’m your ride.”
Murray loves sports. Murray will go witness almost any form of sport if a friend asks him to. One of his friends is named Van Schley, and he is a kind of minor-league baseball mogul. Every season he runs a team in a different part of the country. At some point, Murray usually turns up.
“They should definitely close the state hospitals and make more minor-league baseball,” says Murray. “It’s very good for the brain.”
In 1978, Murray went to the state of Washington, where the Grays Harbor Loggers were playing the Victoria Mussels. Murray went in to pinch-hit for the Loggers and, amazingly, singled. He should have quit right then, but several days later, he came up in a game against the Walla Walla Padres and this time had to face the best reliever in the league. He whiffed. “He threw three sinkers,” Murray says. “I don’t know a TV actor who can hit a decent sinker.”
Now Murray is feeling better. He and Mickey are riding to Utica in a jeep. There is a police car leading the convoy, siren screaming, and a truck emblazoned with the legend ‘Matt’s Premium Beer.’ Why a beer truck? Because when Schley invited Murray to Utica, he asked what kind of refreshment he’d like on the drive from the airport. Maybe a beer, Murray had replied.
Thousands cheer as Murray arrives. “Come on,” he shouts. “You all know the words!”
He sings the song. Plays it straight.
“I sang like a bird,” he later reminisces. “They just went crazy.”
Well, not completely straight. He does a little reprise of the last line, Nicks it.
The la-hand of the free-hee-heeee
And the home…of the…Uticaaaa Blue So-hoxxxx!
Then Murray runs down on the field and taunts the Little Falls Mets. “You guys are nothing!” he yells.
The crowd goes wild.
The Sox win going away.