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  Kenney was partnered for the better part of a year on the Yearbook project with a recent Lampoon hire named P. J. O’Rourke—a young, chain-smoking renegade from Toledo with a vicious sarcastic streak. Based on an idea that Kenney and O’Donoghue had come up with together for the Lampoon’s November 1970 “Nostalgia” issue, the Yearbook would be a special stand-alone publication that elaborately replicated and riffed on the social hierarchies and archetypes of heartland adolescence at a fictional school named C. Estes Kefauver Memorial High School in Dacron, Ohio. The genius of it would lay in the jeweler precision of its details.

  Kenney and O’Rourke combed through dozens of school newspapers and yearbooks, identifying the various social castes like zoologists classifying insects. Kenney would later say, “It was chilling to see how much they were all the same. Bully, clown, intelligent introvert, politician, proto-homosexual. It was Nazi social engineering. By weight of social pressure these people became these things.” With the Yearbook, Kenney took those stereotypes and simply exaggerated them. He was cranking out some of the funniest and most pitch-perfect satire he’d ever written. The best inside joke, of course, was saved for last: the requisite “In Memoriam” page dedicated to a deceased classmate—the popular and handicapped Howie Havermeyer.

  The picture of Howie is actually Kenney’s own crew-cut high school yearbook photo. Across the picture someone has scrawled, “What a dipshit!” Harper’s Magazine called the Lampoon’s High School Yearbook Parody: “A literary masterpiece. The best work of collective writing since the King James Bible.” It would go on to sell more than a million and a half copies.

  Kenney was back.…

  And O’Donoghue was out. Increasingly prone to destructive, diva-like tirades, Michael O’Donoghue had finally had enough. After his girlfriend, Anne Beatts, had her office at the Lampoon taken away without sufficient respect shown or explanation given, O’Donoghue stormed out and never looked back. That summer, Simmons handed the Lampoon Radio Hour to Belushi, who had just finished a run with the Lemmings touring company. It was an odd choice. No one would have ever pegged Belushi as the management type, but Simmons was eager to keep him within the Lampoon orbit. Plus, Simmons was already beginning to flirt with the idea of another stage show and would need the breakout star of Lemmings as its marquee draw. Belushi now had to find a new stable of acting talent to fill the air every week. He didn’t have to look far.

  “John called me up and said that I needed to come to New York right away,” said Harold Ramis. “He sounded like a gold prospector who’d hit a vein and was now saying that there were riches to be had for all of us. Come East! Come East! He invited me and Brian Doyle-Murray from Second City in Chicago and then he brought in Joe Flaherty and Gilda Radner from Toronto. The idea was that while we worked on the Radio Hour we’d develop a cabaret show to tour under the Lampoon name.”

  Ramis was itching for a new challenge. He had been performing at Second City on and off since 1968. Before that, the son of Chicago shopkeepers had grown up on Marx Brothers movies and attended Washington University in St. Louis. After graduating, he worked as an orderly in a mental institution, a substitute teacher, a freelance reporter at the Chicago Daily News, and eventually became Playboy’s party joke editor. By the time he arrived at the Lampoon in his late twenties, Ramis was already married and gave off the lanky, mellow, and slightly nerdy air of a suburban psychiatrist, albeit one with a playful, subversive streak. His eyes always seemed to be at half-mast, as if he had just woken up from a long nap or smoked a very potent joint—or perhaps both.

  Although Second City and the Lampoon shared similar genetic strands, Ramis quickly learned that they were, in fact, quite different worlds. “There was a tremendous arrogance around the Lampoon,” he said. “They believed they were—and maybe they were—the smartest people writing comedy at the time. They were really smart. It was almost frightening. And very cruel. They attacked anyone’s weakness or sensitivity. It was a very predatory atmosphere. Second City was always more of a benign enterprise.”

  Brian Doyle-Murray had been at Second City with Ramis since 1968, the year that Chicago seemed to be erupting between the city’s race riots in the spring, the tear-gas violence of the Democratic National Convention in the summer, and ultimately the surreal circus of the Chicago Seven trial. Doyle-Murray, who added “Doyle” (his grandmother’s maiden name) so as not to be confused with a South African stage actor of the same name, grew up in Wilmette, a well-to-do suburb just north of the city. His Irish-Catholic father was a salesman at J. J. Barney Lumber Company, a profession that the six Murray boys and three Murray girls would joke (or half-joke) allowed him to bring home free wooden yardsticks to discipline them. Like several others of the Murray boys, Brian grew up caddying at private golf clubs in the swankier Chicago suburbs to earn tuition money for parochial school. Beneath Doyle-Murray’s button-down Bob Newhart appearance and gravelly, rock-tumbler voice lay a barbed and merciless, sadistic sense of humor.

  With Ramis, Doyle-Murray, Flaherty, and Radner now in New York, Belushi finally had a stock company. Doug Kenney was the first to start regularly hanging around the radio studio with the new arrivals. Part of it might have had to do with Kenney’s own secret desire to become famous as more than just a writer, and part of it might have been that he felt that he was still on thin ice with the Lampoon staff after abandoning them. Either way, Kenney was again the office’s transfusion of type O blood.

  Kenney and Ramis first met during the taping of a Moby-Dick radio parody that Sean Kelly had written. They immediately hit it off. Belushi played the part of Ahab, Ramis was Starbuck, and Kenney portrayed a random sailor who finds an apple in a worm barrel.

  “Doug liked our company,” said Ramis. “He was as smart as anyone I ever knew. I remember once he came over to my apartment and he stood at my bookcase, closed his eyes, and randomly pulled a book out and turned to a page and started reading aloud. And at some point he started improvising and you couldn’t tell where the book ended and Doug’s improvising began. He could do it with any book on the shelf. It was his little parlor trick.”

  After a few months, the Second City crowd was beginning to blend in at the Lampoon office. They were all becoming one organic unit. Then, one morning, Sean Kelly recalls, he got off the elevator on the eleventh floor to open the radio studio and found something strange in the reception area. “There was a dude curled up asleep on the couch,” he says. “My first thought was that someone had let in a homeless guy because he looked pretty rough and ragged and he was snoring. He might have smelled too. That’s how I met Bill Murray.”

  3

  Live from New York

  JOHN BELUSHI HAD SUMMONED BILL Murray from Chicago. He’d called the twenty-three-year-old at Second City and told him to pack his bags and take the overnight bus to New York that evening. “Belushi was really instrumental in dragging everyone out,” says Murray. “He said there’s easy pickings out here in New York. So one by one we came out, and we found that we could survive there and liked it there. Actors from Chicago either had to go to New York or LA. And at Second City we thought of ourselves as serious actors, and serious actors went to New York.”

  Belushi had given Doyle-Murray’s little brother the address of the Lampoon building—but nothing more than that to go on. So, after getting off the bus at the Port Authority terminal, Bill headed for 635 Madison, talked his way past security, and took the elevator up to the eleventh floor, where he found the closest thing to a bed he’d seen in days. That’s where Sean Kelly first set eyes on “the most unkempt, fucked-up looking human I’d ever seen.” In one short year at Second City, Murray had established himself as Belushi’s heir apparent—an instant star who gave off an anything-could-happen sense of lunatic danger every time he bounded on stage. He had certainly taken a circuitous route to get there.

  Five years younger than Brian, Bill was the fifth of the nine Murray kids tightly packed in at 1930 Elmwood Avenue in Wilmette, a three-bedroom
house on a tree-lined street across from the Sisters of Christian Charity convent. In school, when he wasn’t getting his knuckles rapped by the priests, he developed an interest in theater, mainly because it was the only way to meet girls while at Loyola Academy, his all-boys Catholic school. Other than that, his only experience performing had been trying to make his father laugh at the dinner table. Like his brothers, Bill worked at nearby golf clubs in the summer to earn money for tuition. It was the Murray way.

  “I started as a shag boy at Indian Hill in Winnetka when I was ten,” says Murray. “A guy would hit balls from the driving range, and I’d run out and collect them. You were basically a human target. They’d hit the ball right at you. And you wouldn’t be able to pick it up until it was too late, so you’d block them with your body. That’s how we paid our way through Loyola. Then you’d work your way up to caddie. First, B caddie where you carried one bag and didn’t get paid much. Then A caddie, where you got paid full freight because you carried doubles. Being a caddie, you learned how to treat people. Most people don’t have a job where you’re asked to carry a heavy load no matter the weather and don’t speak unless spoken to. It was an extraordinary education.”

  Hard work was something that Murray’s father drilled into his kids before he passed away from diabetes, in 1967. He was forty-six; Bill was just seventeen. “I remember the first time I met Bill,” said Ramis. “Brian and I were in Second City together and he said, ‘Why don’t you come up and have dinner at my mother’s house?’ And we stopped off at the golf course. Bill had just graduated high school and his job at the time was running the hot dog stand on the ninth hole of the Wilmette public course.”

  Recalls Murray, “Harold was like a mythical creature back then, because he’d once had a job as a joke writer for Playboy! He even had an apartment! He was in a very different category from the rest of us when I first met him.”

  If Murray looked up to Ramis, he absolutely idolized his older brother Brian. Bill could make people laugh, but he wasn’t sure he had what it took to do it in front of a crowd in the Second City footlights. After graduating from high school, Murray enrolled at Regis College in Denver as a premed student. True to his work ethic, he also got a sideline job that brought in a lot of money: dealing weed. In 1972, on his twentieth birthday, Murray was arrested while boarding a TWA flight out of O’Hare airport. Unable to produce ID to show that he was young enough to qualify for an under-twenty-one discount fare, Murray joked, “That’s too bad. I wanted to get on ’cause I got two bombs in my suitcase.” The joke didn’t go over very well. Murray walked away and tried to stash his luggage in a locker, but he didn’t have any change. The police caught up with him and searched his bag. They found eight-and-a-half pounds of marijuana, worth roughly $20,000. Murray spent the rest of his birthday in jail. “It was stupid, but I guess I was turning myself in,” said Murray. “I did do one good thing: I ate a check this guy had given me that was in the suitcase, and that guy owes me his life and reputation.”

  Released on probation, Murray dropped out of school and returned to Chicago, where he auditioned for one of Second City’s improv workshops. He bombed the tryout. Then, a short while later, he had a run-in that would change his life. “It was Christmastime. Bells were ringing. There under the clock at Marshall Field, I met the head of the workshop, and he said, ‘We’d like to offer you a scholarship, if you want to come back.’ The bells were going bong, bong, bong, and I figured it was a miracle.”

  Following in his brother’s footsteps, he soon landed a spot on Second City’s main stage. His most famous character there was a side-talking doofus he called the Honker. Murray would jut his lower jaw out, twist his lips, and speak with a deranged mush-mouthed lisp, sounding drunk or brain-damaged or both. Murray would slip into his Honker alter ego whenever the mood struck him, whether he was on stage at Second City, accosting random people in the streets, or simply running into a busy Chicago intersection and randomly deciding to direct traffic.

  When Murray showed up at the Lampoon office in New York, he brought the Honker and an arsenal of other outsize characters he’d been working on, such as an early, oily version of Nick the Lounge Singer. He proved right away that he was a gifted improviser on the air—that he belonged with the brain trust of older, more seasoned Radio Hour performers. “Bill turned out to be tremendous in the studio,” says Sean Kelly. “He was marvelous ad-libbing when the tape was running, especially when he was with Christopher Guest. They were like Peter Cook and Dudley Moore. And to be able to keep it deadpan like they did. What they could do was rare.”

  Murray also quickly developed a reputation as being temperamental and having a short, sometimes violent, fuse. He could fly into black rages at the slightest provocation. One time, Murray barged into Matty Simmons’s office demanding to know why $1.20 was missing from his paycheck. Simmons told him to go to the accounting department, but Murray wouldn’t leave. Simmons eventually stood up from his desk and fired him on the spot. He hired him back the next day.

  But if Murray had one personality trait that seemed to dominate it was his attitude of casual indifference. He just didn’t seem to care whether you liked him or not. It didn’t even seem to weigh on his mind. When Murray was still at Second City, Ramis was visiting from New York. The show’s producer asked the improv veteran if he would talk to Murray about his bullying volatility with his fellow performers. “I remember sitting down with Bill and saying, ‘You know, a lot of people in the cast are pissed off at you,’” said Ramis. “And he said, ‘Yeeee-eah.’ I said, ‘Do you care?’ He said, ‘Nnn-o.’ So I said, ‘Okay, good talk.’ And that was it. That kind of defined him.”

  By the fall of 1974, the new Second City arrivals had been moonlighting between putting out a weekly Lampoon radio show and writing and rehearsing the follow-up to Lemmings, creatively titled The National Lampoon Show. The cast comprised Belushi, Doyle-Murray, Radner, Flaherty, and Ramis. Doug Kenney wrote a Patty Hearst sketch for the show, but most of the material was hatched by the Second City actors themselves. When the revue headed to Philadelphia to kick off a series of one- and two-night stands, Bill Murray was left behind, relegated to the role of understudy and tasked with holding down the fort at the radio studio with Kenney. The two hit it off. “Doug was one of the great guys,” says Murray. “He enabled so many people to succeed. People like Chevy, Chris Guest, and myself. At the Lampoon, at one time, there was more talent in that building than anywhere else in the world.”

  Out on the road, it didn’t take long for problems to bubble up. Belushi, the de facto leader of the troupe (based on both the hard-charging hurricane force of his personality and the seniority of his tenure under the Lampoon banner), was trying to out-Lampoon the Lampoon by ratcheting up the venom in the show. His instincts always seemed to tell him to push the boundaries further and further until the audience either bent to his will or snapped and walked out. “The Lampoon and Belushi had their own approach to comedy, which was basically insulting the audience,” says Flaherty. “Belushi said they loved it, but I couldn’t get into it. We were taking potshots at everybody.”

  In particular, Flaherty points to a sadistic musical parody of Cole Porter’s “You’re the Tops” called “You’re the Pits,” aimed at the very people who had paid to see the show. Flaherty eventually decided to leave and go back to the calmer waters of Second City. Making matters more complicated, Doyle-Murray had fallen into a lopsided romance with Radner on the road. The sting of unreciprocated love was too much for him to bear every night, so he returned to the Radio Hour and let his little brother take his spot. Like Belushi, Bill Murray had no problem dishing out abuse from the stage on a nightly basis.

  In Toronto, The National Lampoon Show was booked for two weeks at a club called the El Mocambo. It was a friendlier audience—and also marked a homecoming of sorts, since the city had its own Second City outpost that included Eugene Levy and John Candy. After the show, the cast would party late into the night at a tiny after-
hours bar owned by another young Second City Toronto cast member named Dan Aykroyd. Also in the crowd at the El Mocambo was Ivan Reitman, a hungry Canadian movie producer who knew Radner and was knocked back on his heels by what he was seeing.

  “In the late ’60s, my generation took itself a little too seriously,” says Reitman. “We were pretty fucking earnest. And finally, you had this group that just seemed like the future of comedy. Watching them was like grabbing an electrical wire. I knew that this was it. It spoke to me in a way that nothing else ever had.”

  At twenty-seven, Reitman had already produced a handful of disreputably schlocky and mildly risqué B movies in Canada. He’d also directed a 1973 horror-movie parody called Cannibal Girls. His résumé didn’t quite jibe with a serious and slightly nerdy demeanor that was, no doubt, informed by a bleak childhood. Reitman’s mother was an Auschwitz survivor, and his father had fought with the Resistance during World War II. The family had fled Czechoslovakia when Ivan was four. Reitman’s biggest professional success had been as a producer of The Magic Show, a hit Broadway extravaganza starring the corny Canadian illusionist Doug Henning. It ran for five years.

  Sitting in the El Mocambo, being jolted into revelation by the Lampoon’s electric current, Reitman knew that what he was witnessing was the future—and he needed to be a part of it. Reitman cold-called Simmons at the Lampoon office in New York and laid out a proposition. He offered to produce The National Lampoon Show when it returned to New York for its stage run there in exchange for the opportunity to adapt the show into a movie which he would direct. He thought it could be his ticket to Hollywood. “I don’t think Matty was particularly impressed by my credits,” says Reitman. “But he was impressed by the fact that I’d done a very successful Broadway show.”