There are worse spots to wait for Bill Murray than the Vince Lombardi Rest Area on the New Jersey Turnpike. Sure, the place smells like piss and feels like a peep-show booth, but it's got the Jersey-rest-stop grand slam: a TCBY, a Nathan's Famous, a Burger King, and a Cinnabon. Although only the Bugrger King and Cinnabon are open at 9:00 A.M., which is now.

I'm hanging on a bench fronting the parking lot, thinking about Murray. I've got some history with this guy, and it goes beyond being old enough to know firsthand what a startling joy he was to watch on Saturday Night Live--the glorious seventies SNL, when 11:30 P.M. on Saturdays meant taking communion, except with a bong--or seeing Stripes on June 12, 1981, one of the two best boy-girl dates of my life, or believing Lost in Translation is a perfect movie and that Murray's work in it ranks with the very finest performances ever put on film.

With Murray, the history is personal. And I wouldn't raise this sort of thing here if what I actually know didn't say something important and revealing about this particular guy:

He's an utter douche bag.

Oh, wait ... that was Mickey Rourke. It gets confusing, writing dozens of celebrity profiles over so many years.

What I meant to say about Bill Murray is, he's a mensch. We met when Esquire put him on the cover as Santa Claus in 1998. We weren't profiling him, so he had nothing to gain by pandering to the writer, but he invited me to a dinner party Disney was throwing for the premiere of Rushmore. And he told me to ask my wife to join us.

That was special. In my experience, no celebrity treats any journalist with such consideration, and for good reason: We're like talk-show hosts but without the depth, gravitas, or clout. You hit your mark, pitch your product, and get the hell outta there.

Later, after Murray had won Best Supporting Actor awards for Rushmore from the National Society of Film Critics, the Los Angeles Film Critics Association, and the New York Film Critics Circle--he also was nominated for a Golden Globe--he got stiffed by the Academy: no Oscar nomination. Murray called to invite us to a party at his home; his wife, Jenny, had bought a fancy dress, and since they weren't going to Los Angeles for the ceremony, they were throwing an Oscar bash of their own so that she could wear it.

That party--on March 21, 1999--was the other best boy-girl date of my life. My wife was pretty pregnant, so we bought her a nice dress-up outfit, and I borrowed a suit from Esquire's fashion folks and bought myself a hat, and we drove up to Murray House--and if Shakespeare in Love hadn't whipped Saving Private Ryan for Best Picture, we would've copped the Oscar pool, which, as I recall, was a four-figure payout. There were at least a hundred guests, but the only celebrity I saw there, besides Bill Murray, was Tim Meadows--and it was a grand time. I don't remember Jenny's dress, but the host wore a white tux and did hilarious faux-presenter shtick, riffing karaoke-style in front of a massive, muted TV during the awards broadcast.

So that's the truth about Murray: The cat's way cool. Beyond ordinary cool, which any yutz with large enough fame and money can pretend to be. He's pure Chicago jagoff cool, a big soul who deals with people, "important" or not, on the square and loves to share the good times--an Everymaniac.

By the way, that's the truth about Mickey Rourke, too: douche bag.

MURRAY'S WAVING from the front passenger seat of a silver Ford Expedition as it pulls up at the rest area. Gibby the Teamster--that's how Bill introduces him--is driving; Gibby and Bill are both working on a Jim Jarmusch movie that just began shooting. Gibby looks nice--casual shirt, a touch of premature gray around the temples, no visible weaponry--and as for Bill, he looks tired, tousled, stubbly. He's got on an orange gimme T-shirt from some executive jet service, a pair of old shorts, and scuffed sneakers.

Murray always has looked like who and what he truly is, a working-class Irish stiff, the fifth kid of a nine-child clan squeezed into a small house just north of Chicago proper, soft of heart yet gimlet-eyed. And though he has aged sleekly into his mid-fifties, smooth and handsome enough to play a dapper man without smarm, he still has the ancient acne pock going for him and the crooked caddy's grin that tells you he knows just how far over par you'll shoot--and how much you'll tip--before you even tee it up.

The morning's plan calls for Bill to ride with me; we'll follow Gibby's spoor to the shoot, in a parking lot at Newark Airport--hence the Vince Lombardi, which is both on Murray's way down from his home near New York City and not far from where I live. But before we leave, I ask if maybe we ought to bring along some Cinnabons.

"Heck, yeah," Murray says. "Everyone loves Cinnabons."

We load 'em up--three boxes, each holding half a dozen, maybe sixty pounds of frosted manhole covers--and set out for Newark. Gibby's got the lead foot, and the highway's heavy with trucks all the way to the airport. Murray and I talk about the Cubs, who haven't yet collapsed. Murray, whose attachment to pro sports, particularly the Chicago teams, borders on pathology, had flown back and forth to see the Cubs at Wrigley on the weekend before the Jarmusch movie shoot started, and he insisted that his trailer be crowned with a satellite dish so he can watch baseball when he isn't acting.

It's a decent enough trailer--parked in the short-term lot of Terminal B--but on the small side, nothing fancy.

"The one I had in Rome had a fireplace," Murray chuckles.

"A fireplace?"

"A fireplace." Murray sounds sardonic; I'm unsure if he's joshing about the fireplace. He spent five months in Italy this past winter making The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, due out this Christmas, his third film with director Wes Anderson. Apparently, fireplace or no, it wasn't fun, at least for Mr. Bill. All the action takes place on a boat--Murray's character, Steve Zissou, is a Jacques Cousteau type seeking to avenge his partner's death by shark--but Murray won't discuss the awful details.

"It's like talkin' about war stories," he says. "I can't even think about it. My impression of Italy before doing this job was that it's one of the greatest, most beautiful places in the world. After this job, if you say 'Italy' to me, it's like a whole lotta cockroaches in one room--you don't know what to deal with first. It was by far the hardest job I've ever had, and I always work hard. I work the same hard on all of 'em. But this one--I've been kidding about it, saying they almost broke me, and they may have and I just don't know it yet."

Well, I say, I'm sure it's gonna turn out to be a good--

"God damn it," Murray snarls, "the movie better be the greatest movie ever made. If it's not, I'm gonna kill Anderson. He's a dead man. If it's not the greatest movie ever made, or in the top ten, he may as well just move to China and change his name to Chin, and he better get himself a small room in a small town--and even then, I'll hunt him down."

Murray grabs a box of Cinnabons and hauls them over to the makeup trailer along with a couple of CDs--Prince, the Stones--and comes back to flip on the Ryder Cup. Golf for Murray is not a passion so much as a religion; his 1999 book, Cinderella Story--surely the best-written showbiz memoir since John Houseman's Unfinished Business and arguably the best golf tome since Tom Watson's Putz!--is subtitled My Life in Golf. Interviewing Murray while the Ryder Cup's on is like farting in shul. He's wolfing a Cinnabon one-handed, no mean feat, working the clicker with his other hand, and running down the set caterer's breakfast options for my benefit.

"Gibby was havin' some oatmeal. Want some oatmeal? They make a nice breakfast burrito. You could have a vegetarian one, or you can get it with bacon and hot sauce in it--the garbage-can one." He turns to Steve, his wee-but-wiry boy assistant: "I'll take a small one." To me: "You gonna have one?"

All right. Gimme the garbage can.

Murray pushes a box of Cinnabons across the table. "Here," he says. "But pace yourself."

I can't eat these, too, man. I got fat.

Murray nods and grins. "And it feels good to get there. You have the largesse to eat enough and move so little that you actually gain weight. 'Hey, I've made my bones, and I can afford to go on out and have a nice veal.' That's the line I use to myself whenever it gets really shitty on a movie: 'Jesus Christ, I could be eatin' veal in a nice restaurant. What the hell am I doin' here?'

"To me, that is indulgence: I'm gonna have myself some veal, which assumes you're gonna have a little pasta on the side and some red wine, too. You've earned that--and the sensation of the veal going into your belly and the feeling you've earned it become a compound-comfort thing. And then you get heavier. Get in the hole! Uhhhh!! He skunked that fucking putt."

On the TV, the U. S. is getting smoked by the Europeans, but Steve has brought the burritos ... and the burritos are spectacular.

"Isn't it great?" Murray says, chewing. "This is movie life. This is one of the good things."

Murray's movie life spans roughly three dozen films over three decades, and its arc is peculiar as hell. On the heels of his four seasons on Saturday Night Live, he stole Caddyshack in 1980; by '84, with Ghostbusters, he was huge, the box-office king of broad comedy. During that same stretch, though, Murray also did Where the Buffalo Roam and The Razor's Edge--neither movie was a success, but you could see even then that this guy was an actor alive, open every moment, fun to watch--and, in an uncredited, underwritten role in Tootsie in '82, he held serve and then some onscreen with Dustin Hoffman.

"I got noticed in Tootsie," Murray says now. "I mean, I was some sort of movie star then, on a junior level--I had done Caddyshack and Stripes--but not of an adult nature yet. Those movies had done well, but they weren't the same thing. I remember meetin' Jimmy Stewart at the Cannes festival; he had no fuckin' idea who I was. Of course, I'm not sure he knew who his wife was. But I figured, Well, shit, I'll walk up to him and say hello--'I'm so-and-so, I'm an actor, and I like your stuff.' And sometimes when you say you're an actor, they at least fake it--'Oh, sure, sure.' He couldn't even swing that."

But after Ghostbusters hit the jackpot, in that ancient age when grossing more than $100 million meant something special, Murray more or less walked away from his career. For four years.

"I didn't have a plan. Once you've been on top in terms of box office and stuff like that, when you've really been up there--I sort of decided not to stay up there. I didn't want to stay up there. My life"--Murray's first kid was born in '82, his second in '85; he now has six children, all boys--"required more of my time. To be a bachelor and in the movies is the greatest, because you've got nothin' else to do.

"It's like Tiger Woods: As long as he didn't have a girlfriend, he was unquestionably the greatest golfer in the world. And people, myself included, said, 'Well, wait'll he finds a girl. He'll find that his time's gonna be different. His life is gonna get more complicated.' And it did for him, and it does for everyone."

Murray's comeback took another four years. There was delight along the way--Scrooged, Quick Change (which he codirected), What About Bob?, and Mad Dog and Glory, with Murray playing a gangster and Robert De Niro as a timid cop--but it wasn't until Groundhog Day that Murray became a major star again.

"That was sort of the turning point. That was the first time the New York press went, Hey, wait a minute--this is a real movie here, not just that broad thing. It also was--they're proud of the Saturday Night Live people. New York claimed them as their own in a way, and people were glad for me. We'd lost Johnny and Gilda; they were truly beloved New Yorkers while they were here, significant, influential people. They made a lot of friends, and they touched a lot of people.

"I remember that there was a caricature of me in The New Yorker, comin' outta the ground. And it was so cute and it was so great. That felt good. It wasn't an Academy Award, but it was somethin' I liked a lot. It was more significant."

After Groundhog Day, a new generation of directors wanted to work with Murray: Tim Burton on Ed Wood, the Farrelly brothers on Kingpin, Wes Anderson, Sofia Coppola, Jim Jarmusch.

"Because I didn't embarrass myself in my earlier run," he says, "I was desirable. I never made any movies that people went, 'Ohhhh, you can't,' because there are people who make choices that're so bad that you can never look 'em in the eye again."

He laughs. "I've done some that didn't make it all the way across the Atlantic, but there were none that were really the death knell, and people appreciate that. Wes, Sofia, this guy Jarmusch--these are people who've got real cinema stuff. They're not dabblers. And it's not like you're working with some bully or some blowhard. And I think I'd learned enough about makin' movies that I really felt like I was--not a journeyman, but a master. Well, master sounds a little vain. I'm a guy that--I can do it. I feel like I can do it. I really feel that I can do pretty much anything."

IT'S TIME FOR MURRAY to get to work--"Fifteen minutes, brother," shouts wee-but-wiry Steve through the trailer's open door, which means it's time for the beastly Waterpik to blast Bill Murray's gums free of Cinnabon and burrito.

"This thing was my concession to aging," he says, mouthing the nozzle and starting it up. "You ever done this? It feels good!"

It pulses, loud as a jackhammer. Murray's standing in profile at a small sink and mirror in the middle of the trailer, working the thing around his mouth, bending to the mirror to keep his torso out of the range of any blowback or leakage. It's like watching a Buster Keaton short.

Amazing you can do that without soaking your shirt, I say when he's finished.

"These are the gifts," he says. "That's the first time I ever did it with cold water. I wouldn't do that again. But I'm telling you, it feels great. You gotta be able to figure out how to get the drool outta your mouth--and you put a little bit of hydrogen peroxide on it, and it kills all the germs in your mouth and also makes your teeth whiter. It's an old Rosemary Clooney trick. My mother told me that."

He burps. Cinnabon?

"Absolutely. I gotta go to work now. I know we've gotten a lot done, but I'm basically locked in a bus for the rest of the day."

But before he goes, he slips me a photo. From that Oscar party--a close-up of my wife's fingers laced over her swollen belly.

"Isn't that nice?" he asks. "The missus remembered and gave it to me to give you. She said, 'Ohhhhh, I've got a good picture,' and I'm thinkin', How good a picture could this be? Well, it really is a good picture."

Oh, yeah. It's beautiful. My wife's gonna cry when she sees this.

"Of course she will," Murray says. "Maybe you'd better save it--you know, pull it out to show her when you really need it."

A WEEK LATER, MURRAY'S still in the trailer, but the teamsters have hauled it up to a different location, in Sloatsburg, a small New York town just across the New Jersey border. Murray's not only tired--his shooting days are running from 11:00 A.M. to 2:00 A.M. or later--he's now hocking phlegm, too. TheraFlu helps some. Chicken soup. Tea. Blueberry muffins. He offers whiskey, but he's not having any. And he's got cigars, an assortment of Cubans. He's not smoking, but he insists, and who am I to say no to a Cohiba?

Outside the trailer, a swarm of townsfolk and children--on bikes, on foot, on scooters--gathers. Every time he leaves for makeup or to shoot another scene, Murray autographs their hats, papers, arms, whatever.

"The thing that's really breathtaking and most pleasing," he says, "is just the number of times people say, 'You've given me so many laughs over the years.' They say, 'I hope you don't mind me sayin' so.' I say, 'That's the nicest thing I could ever hear.' That makes me feel good, like I did somethin' worthwhile with my life. At least there's something on that side of the ledger, you know?"

But there are some things Bill Murray won't do for his public. Inside the Actors Studio with James Lipton, for instance.

"I met that guy a while ago and he said, 'You're never gonna do the show, are you?' I guess I've been invited before, but I always had a problem with it being called Inside the Actors Studio. When I was at Second City"--the legendary Chicago improv troupe where Murray, Belushi, and other golden-age SNLers honed their chops--"we always had a bit of an attitude about the Actors Studio. The Actors Studio--yeah, they had a couple of good actors. So? Do we all have to get down and worship 'em? It always bothered me. And when he called the show Inside the Actors Studio--well, what're you talkin' to Meg Ryan for, or any number of these people they've got now who couldn't find the Actors Studio with a phone book? It's so hard not to take yourself seriously just day to day. The idea of going up there and being trumpeted and fellated for so long ..."

He trails off, shaking his head. By any current standard of celebrity, Murray is a real oddball, practically a hermit. He doesn't shill for his movies or bare his soul for the press. No publicist. No agent. No shit.

"I've never had a publicist," he says, "and I don't have an agent--and it's great. It's great. I wish I'd done it a long time ago."

So how do people get scripts to you?

Murray shrugs. "I really don't know," he says.

Jeez, you seem so Zen about it. Do you worry?

"About what?"

Well, you've got a big family to feed, a great career ...

"I seem sad about it?"

Not sad--Zen. Zen.

He laughs. "I thought you said sad."

You wanna work, you gotta get scripts, right?

"Ehhhhh," he says, and shrugs again. "If they want me, they'll find me."

ONE OTHER THING MURRAY won't do: He won't say what he whispered to Scarlett Johansson at the end of Lost in Translation.

"I guess the answer is, there's somethin' that makes it impossible to tell," he says. "But I'll tell ya a good story about it. I'm gettin' on the ferry at Martha's Vineyard, and some guy yells out from across the way, 'Bill, what'd ya say to her?' Everyone hears him ask, and I pause for a second with my mouth open and start to speak. And as I start to speak, the foghorn sounds, about a twenty-five-second blast, and I just"--Murray starts moving his lips silently--"I acted it out like I was saying something really sincere, and the crowd laughed so hard. It was great. I couldn't have bought that moment."

IT'S LATE--10:00 P.M.--but it's the middle of Murray's workday. He puts on a suit, his costume for a scene in which Sharon Stone will try to seduce him. The Cubs are on the dish playing the Mets; it's tied in the eighth inning when Steve pops in with a ten-minute warning.

"I gotta work," Murray says. "Take another cigar. Stay and watch the end of the game."

You don't mind?

"Fuck, no. But I should ask this guy Soapy to come in and watch it, too, if you don't mind. He's a good guy."

What about Gibby?

"Well, Gibby's gone home for the weekend."

Bill, one last question: Were you really pissed off at the Oscars last year?

"Pissed off?"

Yeah--that you didn't win Best Actor. You looked mad.

"I was actually joking. My first movie, I got nominated for a Canadian Oscar--for Meatballs. For MEATBALLS. And who am I up against? George C. Scott. So he wins the award and I stand up and go, 'That's it--let's get the hell outta here.'

"So I'm tellin' this story to someone I'm sittin' next to, and when Sean Penn wins, I think they're goin' to a commercial. I say, 'That's it--I'm outta here,' and I start to get up, and Billy Crystal sees me and he's like, 'Whoa, Bill, sit down.' He thinks it's serious. I was just screwin' around, and he thought it was real--because I'm such an effective actor, I guess."

Okay, fine. But I know how pissed off I was that you didn't win: plenty. You earned it.

"You know what? I had it the best of anybody. The best was to get to go all the way to it, have all that fun, and walk away--not to have to be on TV the next morning doing an interview about how you won the Oscar. We had a great time. And the thing is, 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."

Murray hails Soapy from the bottom of the trailer steps.

"Excuse me, young fella," he says. "Can you go in there and watch the game for me? Just keep an eye on it."

"Heh-heh-heh," says Soapy. "No problem."

Soapy's not a young fella. He's a white-haired, big-knuckled union man, and he's got a thickset, cross-eyed colleague in tow. They take the couch without a struggle.

"Hey," Soapy says. "How you doin'?"

Super, Soapy. You?

"Heh-heh-heh. I have to watch TV. You have to keep your eyes open to do that."

I fire up a Saint Luis Rey--oooh, baby. Velvet. A velvet torpedo.

This is movie life. This is one of the good things.

So's Bill Murray.

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