Contents Cover Title Page Copyright Author’s Note Introduction The Ten Principles of Bill The First Principle: Objects Are Opportunities. The Second Principle: Surprise Is Golden. Randomness Is Lobster. Interlude: Voice of Harold The Third Principle: Invite Yourself to the Party. The Fourth Principle: Make Sure Everybody Else Is Invited to the Party. Interlude: It’s Hard to Be a Saint in the City The Fifth Principle: Music Makes the People Come Together. Interlude: The Friendly Confines The Sixth Principle: Drop Coin on the World. The Seventh Principle: Be Persistent, Be Persistent, Be Persistent. Interlude: Poetry in Motion The Eighth Principle: Know Your Pleasures and Their Parameters. Interlude: Every Grain of Sand The Ninth Principle: Your Spirit Will Follow Your Body. The Tenth Principle: While the Earth Spins, Make Yourself Useful. The Tao of Being Yourself: Bill Murray Day The Films of Bill Murray Dedication Acknowledgments Sources By Gavin Edwards About the Author Author’s Note Bill Murray has shown up everywhere, from the sideline of the 1986 NFC Championship Game, wearing an old-fashioned leather football helmet, to the Mediterranean island of Yeronisos, volunteering as a digger on a 2006 NYU archaeological expedition. Because everything seems possible when it comes to Bill, the man has attracted more than the usual number of fabulists. For years now, inventing Bill myths has been one of the Internet’s favorite games. (In case you were wondering, Bill isn’t running for president and he doesn’t actually have the contractual right to steal the master tapes of the Wu-Tang Clan album Once Upon a Time in Shaolin from Martin Shkreli.) But one of the beautiful things about Bill Murray is that there are more than enough staggering true anecdotes to fill a book. This book, for example. While working on The Tao of Bill Murray, I conducted dozens of interviews with Bill’s friends, collaborators, and acquaintances, and consulted countless published reports. If you want to know more about my sources for any particular story in the book, check out the section in the back that’s cleverly titled “Sources.” Other writers have compared an encounter with Bill to a visit from an angel. While the man’s temperament is more profane than sacred, I feel blessed that before I started writing this book, he answered some of my questions about his approach to existence. My conclusions, like any errors in the following pages, are my own; Bill gets the credit if you find inspiration in his extraordinary life. Introduction You are standing on a corner in New York City, waiting to cross the street. Lost in thought, you aren’t paying much attention to the world around you. Suddenly a man puts his hands over your eyes and says, “Guess who?” Nobody’s played this game with you since elementary school. It would be alarming, except that the voice is familiar. You can’t quite place the speaker, but you’re pretty sure he’s a friend. You whip around and see, much to your surprise…international film star Bill Murray. He is taller than you expected and his shirt is wrinkled. You sputter, groping for words, unable to process the unlikelihood of this situation. Bill grins, leans in close, and quietly says, “No one will ever believe you.” Variations on this story began to circulate widely around 2010. Sometimes it happened in New York, sometimes in Austin, Texas, or Charleston, South Carolina. Sometimes Bill wasn’t blindfolding people with his fingers—instead, he was stealing a french fry off somebody’s plate or grabbing a handful of popcorn from a stranger at a movie theater. But the punch line was always the same, underscoring that this encounter was an eruption of surrealism on an otherwise ordinary day, meant to be enjoyed for a few flickering moments: “No one will ever believe you.” For years, it was unclear whether this was something that Bill Murray actually did, as part of a personal campaign to make the world a better, odder place, or whether it was an urban legend that had grown large enough to have its own zip code. Asked point-blank about it in a magazine interview, Bill artfully managed not to unravel the mystery. “I’ve heard about that from a lot of people,” he said. “A lot of people. I don’t know what to say. There’s probably a really appropriate thing to say. Something exactly and just perfectly right.” Bill considered the rhetorical tightrope he was walking, and then he smiled: “But, by God, it sounds crazy, doesn’t it? Just so crazy and unlikely and unusual?” In the seventies and eighties Bill starred in comedy blockbusters such as Ghostbusters, Caddyshack, and Groundhog Day. Just as his success as a wisecracking film star seemed to be dwindling, he reinvented himself with wry, world-weary performances in much-lauded movies like Rushmore and Lost in Translation. In recent years, however, his fame has seemed almost completely disconnected from his accomplishments as an actor: Bill Murray, according to popular belief, has become the man who will drop by your bachelor party to give a toast, come to your assistance when you’re having engine trouble, or crash your party and then wash the dishes. One minute, you might be walking around your hometown with your fiancé, taking engagement photos—the next minute, Bill Murray could be standing in front of you with his shirt over his head, rubbing his belly. If Bill Murray makes a surprise appearance in your own life, you know that no one will ever believe you. But they should. All those things have happened to actual human beings. There is photographic evidence of Bill doing karaoke with strangers and crashing kickball games. I’ve spoken with multiple people who had a real-life Bill encounter that ended with those infamous words, “No one will ever believe you.” When my friend golfer Dan McLaughlin ran into Bill at the annual Pebble Beach golf tournament, he asked Bill point-blank if that phrase was something he said. “Oh yeah, all the time,” Bill confirmed. It turns out that while it’s fun to live in a world where Bill Murray might cover the eyes of strangers and maybe find other ways to prank the world, it’s even better to live in a world where he really does these things. The Navajo had Coyote. The Ashanti people of Ghana had Anansi. The Norse had Loki. They’re all mythological figures that taught humanity how quick thinking could enliven and enrich the species. Also high on the honor roll: Hermes (ancient Greece), Reynard (France), Bugs Bunny (Looney Tunes). The twenty-first-century U.S.A. has Mr. William Murray, our modern-day trickster god. The fact that he occupies this place in our society means not just that he’s willing to engage the universe with freewheeling tomfoolery—it tells us that as a culture, we need somebody to embody this spirit of all-American anarchy. If celebrities have taken the place of demigods, living out myths in the pages of tabloid magazines, then Bill Murray is our philosopher-clown. A couple of years ago, I interviewed actress Melissa McCarthy at an Italian restaurant in Los Angeles. When she told me about her first encounter with Bill Murray—in the makeup trailer for the 2014 movie St. Vincent—she remembered, “He was really funny and so distracting that I couldn’t even be nervous. He’s the most present person I have ever met. He’s not trying to alter