The Rolling Stone interviews - Jann Wenner [90]
BILL MURRAY
by Timothy Crouse
August 16, 1984
I know that you come from Chicago, but I’d be interested to know your social background.
That’s tough to call. My father was a lumber-company salesman, and he got promoted to vice president about six months before he died. He was just about to start making the dough.
When did he die?
He died December 1969, when I was seventeen. I was a junior in high school. He never made a lot of money, and we had nine kids in the family, so even a lot of money wouldn’t have made much difference. I grew up in a suburb called Wilmette, and people had money there, but we weren’t among them.
Did everyone work to help support the family?
Well, it wasn’t like that. My father did it, really. We paid our way through high school, ’cause we all went to a Catholic school—except for two of my brothers, who were heathens and went to public school. My brothers and I, we would caddy in the summer, and my sisters would babysit.
Where do you fit into the family constellation?
Fifth. I like to say that they peaked with me, and it was all downhill after that. I was sort of in an odd spot, but I guess everybody thought they were in an odd spot in our family. I had the misfortune of reaching adolescence at a time when the world turned upside down, and I somehow had to represent the changing society to my parents—with limited success. I was speaking for the entire culture, everyone from Tim Leary to the Airplane.
Were you a problem in school?
The schools are still standing. But I was an underachiever and a screw-off. I remember I took the National Merit Scholarship test, and I scored high enough to win, but when I got the score back, there was an asterisk next to my name, meaning I had qualified for the National Merit Scholarship but wouldn’t get one because I wasn’t in the top half of my class. Which was devastating, really bad news, ’cause my father would have loved to have heard somebody was going to come up with the money for college.
What was the matter with you in school?
This is the same conversation I had with my teachers then. “What’s wrong, Bill? Something bothering you? Something wrong at home?” I don’t know, I just didn’t care for school much. Studying was boring, I was lazy. I’m still lazy. And I had no interest in getting good grades. In grade school, I was basically causing trouble all the time. But not very serious trouble. When I got to high school, I started to meet a more sophisticated kind of troublemaker. I mean, these guys were really smart—with 148 IQs—and really nuts, the first guys that got kicked out of our school for grass. They just traveled on a different plane than the general Jesuit “all right you’ll study tonight, you’ll crack them, you’ll come in and you’ll shut up” sort of attitude. I mean, you couldn’t have long hair in our school, so these guys would let their hair grow long and grease it down so it looked like it was short, and you’d see them on the weekends, and you couldn’t believe how much hair they had, ’cause they’d washed it. They put up with all the grief that the preppie crowd gave them for being greasers, and they didn’t care. Because come the weekend, they were doing a completely different thing than the guys from Wilmette who were trying to drink beer and get high. They didn’t have any interest in being part of the social scene at this preppie Catholic school. They were downtown, stoned, listening to blues.
So where were you? Were you downtown at the blues joints?
I was not. I was basically in the middle. It was all right, because I got to look at both sides. I didn’t know from downtown and the blues joints, but at the same time, I didn’t have enough money to really have a lot of fun. I didn’t have a car; I didn’t have a driver’s license until God knows when. So I basically relied on friends; they were my wheels. Or I’d take a bus or hitchhike. And in the suburbs, that’s really