I actually have heard the inside voice. I first met Bill Murray in February 1977. A cover story I’d written on John Belushi for Crawdaddy magazine had led to a close friendship with Belushi, and I was visiting him up in the greenroom outside Saturday Night Live’s Studio 8H at Rockefeller Center late one afternoon when he waved someone over. I turned and this young guy sauntered to our table. Belushi said, “Mitch. Meet Billy, the new kid.” The new kid. And that is how I met Billy Murray.

In September of this year, on our way out to Montauk, Murray and I stopped at a Mobil station near Islip, Long Island, at midnight on a Thursday. Cars pulled up outside. By the time Murray stepped out of the john, the gas station was packed with people waiting for selfies. In the 38 years since we met, even during the post-Ghostbusters days (Murray starred soon after in Scrooged, which I co-wrote), I have never seen this level of, what?, idolatry focused on Murray—or, really, any actor—before. Ever. Murray’s appropriated face is on T-shirts, satin pillows, babies’ onesies, framable high-art paintings, laughable low-art tattoos. There are online articles titled “Why Bill Murray Is a Living God,” entire Web sites devoted to his “urban legend” sightings, an unauthorized volume called The Big Bad Book of Bill Murray, crammed with every detail—anything and everything he has ever said or done … in his life! Murray actually is omnipresent, institutional, a walking selfie magnet, a ubiquitous—and sometimes unwilling—brand. If I stop and think about what it really is to walk through this world as Bill Murray, to really be him, I have a panic attack. So I wonder aloud to Murray, as we sit in this quiet family study in Charleston, how, in the face of this Murricane madness, does he protect himself? How does he remain intact?

“Well, hell, I’ve been doing this awhile, and I am intact. If you’re still intact, if you’re still viable, it means you’ve been growing somehow. That all of the impressions of life have landed and stuck somewhere. You’ve been able to digest them and transform them into something, you know, that you can work with and live with and carry with you. The stars have shone on me.” But, I ask, can’t your inner self, your true self, be shaken, diminished, compromised, or even stolen from you?

Murray shakes his head. “It can’t be diminished, because it’s supreme. It really is supreme. It can’t be diminished. The only thing is if you don’t listen to it enough, you don’t hear it enough. That voice can’t be diminished. It can only be under-utilized—and mine is under-utilized. Everyone’s is under-utilized. I mean, God, I’m just so shallow, most of my day. You know? Most of my week, most of my month and year and life. But there is this desire, this wish to do better. Not in a competitive sense, but to just arrive, to show up. It’s when you kind of quiet down, slow things down—everything sort of turns back inside and sort of re-settles. Then, maybe, you can hear something.”

Santa Claus Wants Some Lovin’

‘As a kid, I never had any money at Christmas. So I was desperately scrounging for gifts that would be somewhat practical and functional. In the early days, they would cost a dime. Literally a dime. You would go to, like, a variety store. And you would get people combs. ‘Hey, you’re getting a comb this year.’ And I mean, like, a pocket comb. Like an Ace pocket comb. And then girls had hairnets, so you buy them a hairnet. When I was really feeling flush they’d get a comb and a hairnet. In the drugstores, they used to have a nut display, where nuts would be available in there. And they would be, like, heated. They’d be under a heat lamp. I thought, Hey, you know what? We never have cashews. I’ll buy everyone cashews. So I bought cashews—enough cashews for everyone, divided up into, like, eight groups for my brothers and sisters—and then wrapped them all in tinfoil. Unfortunately, I bought them about a week before Christmas. So I’d think, I don’t think I packed those evenly. Maybe Nancy’s had a couple extra cashews. And I just kept eating, eating—and the bags were getting smaller and smaller and smaller and smaller. So that it was really like everyone was getting about 14 cents’ worth of cashews. But Christmas was just waking up and feeling that feeling of Oh my God, life is good. People have been thinking about me. And my brothers that have hit me in the head have bought me a present. It was a free zone. Everybody’s in a good mood. There was no fighting. And whatever wrongs you’ve committed during the course of the year are all forgotten on that day. Which is its own little miracle.”

Photograph by Bruce Weber.

It is Murray’s Christmas-in-March 2015, at Silvercup Studios, in Long Island City, Queens, a very long way from the Wilmette, Illinois, young boy buying cashews for his eight siblings. We could, however, use our own little Christmas miracle. Murray and George Clooney, gorgeous in black-tie, and Miley Cyrus, wearing a red satin sexy-elf dress with white fur trim, kill time on a vast, all-white soundstage. They’re surrounded by a dozen showgirls dressed as reindeer, musical director/pianist Paul Shaffer’s all-star band (in white tuxedos), a couple of hundred crew members, director Sofia Coppola and her brother Roman, with his five cameras, and more—all waiting for rapper Rick Ross to arrive. Rick is playing Santa Claus and rapping to Albert King’s classic “Santa Claus Wants Some Lovin’ ” for our Netflix holiday special, A Very Murray Christmas, which will debut on December 4. But Rick Ross is missing. And apparently it’s my fault.