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.

So fundamental is Murray’s face to us longtime acolytes that trying to describe it is like trying to describe the taste of salt. It is the root to its own adjective, the answer to its own question. What does salt taste like? Salty! What does Bill Murray look like? Amazingly Bill-Murray-ish. As a young man, he already had what seemed to me the enviable crags and hollows of hard experience. Now that he’s 62, his face is a ball of crumpled newsprint framed by a trim gray beard and a thinning but still unruly shrub of hair.

Above all, he remains supremely aware of the effect he has on others, a scholar of eye contact and personal space. It is his genius. "It’s not so much what you do, but the way in which you do it. I can slap you on the back and it can be a wonderful thing, if it’s done with joy," he says. "But if I slap you on the back just as you’re coming out of the elevator, and I’ve had too much to drink, it’s a completely different thing."

This is the most obvious connection to the role he plays in his upcoming film _Hyde Park on Hudson, _which at first might appear an unusual part for Murray. FDR, as he plays him, is a deceptively doddering manipulator of both the big stage (deftly paving the way for the U.S.’s entrance into World War II) and the small (assembling a willing harem of doting mistresses at his Hyde Park estate). The night before, at _Hyde Park’_s premiere at the New York Film Festival, Murray had sat, with other cast members, for a post-screening Q&A. The thirty-second president, he told the sedate art-house crowd, had balls. "I actually don’t use that word much. Guts isn’t right, either," he says now. His voice, with its latent Chicago accent, is like an instrument tuned half a note off, but nevertheless musical. "I should have said he had sand. I like sand because it has gravity to it. There’s something solid down at the bottom. It’s like the clown that you can punch and he sits right back up again."