The Tao of Bill Murray Real-life stories of joy, enlightenment, and party crashing

there are two types of show business star: matte and gloss. Matte stars deaden the light, their recesses best revealed in shadow. Creatures of chiaroscuro, they conquer and retreat, like Garbo, turn chameleonic in company, like Brando, alternating sullen disgruntlement with outright self-sabotage. Beards may be involved. Gloss stars, by contrast, eat up the light like a cat sunbathing on a windowsill. They strut with the room-temperature ease of toddlers showing off to their parents. Think of the peacock thrill of being looked at that John Travolta evinces in "Grease" or Tom Hanks in "Big" or Jennifer Lawrence in anything besides "The Hunger Games." Theirs is an egoless egotism that, by dint of the generosity with which it is offered up, yields audiences the promise of transcended, liberated self. Here, have me. Alan Cumming is the latter. His new book, you gotta GET BIGGER DREAMS: My Life in Stories and Pictures (Rizzoli, $29.95), is a scrapbook of photographs taken by the actor over the years, accompanied by biographical sketches of what he was up to at the time - prose selfies for a kind of Instagram-era memoir. Here is a shot of Glenn Close's "totally smoking ripped back" on the red carpet at the Tonys. Here is Eva Mendes's cleavage at the Roosevelt Hotel in Los Angeles. Here is a blurry shot of Oprah snapped in the star's tail winds at an Elie Wiesel Foundation dinner in her honor. "Very famous people create whirlwinds," he notes, and kicks his book off with a Force 7 gale : Hurricane Liz, whom he runs into at Carrie Fisher's birthday party and soon has cackling "like a trucker who'd just heard a good fart joke." The book ends, some 250 pages later, with the actor's being barged out of the way by Diana Ross making a beeline for the dance floor at an Oscar party. "The song she was so desperate to dance to was one of her own!" he notes. "Talk about being in the middle of a chain reaction." There is a tradition of stars turning paparazzi - Jeff Bridges has taken beautiful photographs on and off the movie set. There's a tradition, too, of British performers going to Hollywood and returning with their wits intact to write up the experience in best-selling memoirs: David Niven set the bar with "The Moon's a Balloon." Quentin Crisp turned his bone-dry humor into a cottage industry. Cumming has already proved himself a gifted writer with "Not My Father's Son," wringing humor from the hard facts of his upbringing in Scotland, not least his brute of a father, who used to shear him with clippers, like a sheep. Cumming Sr. makes a brief appearance at the start of this book, too, sneering at the little plastic Kodak camera that his son wins in a church raffle: "Get on with that grass" - an instruction to which the rest of the book might be said to raise a puckish middle finger. "I am a sensualist," he writes. "I understand the need to let go." There is a curious innocence to his pictures of drag queens and go-go boys snapped on trawls through the dive bars and strip joints of Lower Manhattan, which he eats up "like a deprived child." What makes Cumming unusual is that the powers of observation that make him a good writer haven't canceled out the instincts for pleasure that propel him out into the world. He has advanced and found a retreat within himself, as all artists must, throwing his own after-party to which we are all luckily invited. Think of this book as the goody bag you get to take home afterward. "I had never seen my name engraved on a dildo before," Cumming writes of his haul from the Fleshbot Awards. "And I had never received an award that I could potentially penetrate myself with, safely at least." It's that "safely" that sets you thinking. He never does get around to finishing his father's lawn. If celebrity is the biggest party the ego can throw, then the example set by Bill Murray takes the principle a step further, asking: Can the ego crash its own party? In the TAO OF BILL MURRAY: Real-Life Stories of Joy, Enlightenment, and Party Crashing (Random House, $26), the Rolling Stone contributing editor Gavin Edwards tracks the mysterious yeti-like sightings of the comedian made by the public for years. The Scandinavian exchange students' party he crashed near St. Andrews Links in 2006, where he ended up washing the dishes. The two-day international conference on biodiversity and conservation Murray dropped in on to talk about sturgeon. The music festival in Austin where he popped up behind the bar in 2010, pouring people tequila regardless of their order. The list goes on: a game of kickball on Roosevelt Island, a snowball fight in upstate New York. Typically, festivities end when Murray slips away with the words "No one will ever believe you." Edwards has saved some of us a lot of work. Murray watchers have been keeping unofficial scrapbooks of this activity for years, and like many of us, the author suspects there is more going on here than the off-duty irrepressibility that has long lightened his forays to the golf course - using spectators' sweaters to polish his balls, for instance - although Edwards includes these, for good measure. "Our modern-day trickster god," he writes, "Bill isn't just being a clown. He has a tao, a way of being, a philosophy of life." Murray's deus ex machina drop-ins are an attempt, in Edwards's formulation, "to make real life more like the movies." He takes careful note of the courses in French and philosophy Murray took at the Sorbonne in the years following his "Ghostbusters" success, where he was exposed to the teachings of the Greek-Armenian thinker George Gurdjieff, who argued that most of us sleepwalk through our waking lives; it is the task of the freethinker to wake us up. There's no record of these wake-up calls ever being unwelcome, although one Williamsburg hipster, disgruntled to find Murray at a Halloween party with the band MGMT, does accuse him of making "poor life choices." The bulk of the activity postdates the end of Murray's second marriage in 2008, but as with his screen performances, the dusting of midlife melancholy adds rather than subtracts from the stories. My favorite has Murray driving a golf cart around the streets of Stockholm with two drunken Swedes singing Cat Stevens's "Father and Son" until they are stopped by the police. "Bill's explanation that he was a golfer proved insufficient," Edwards writes, which may be one of my favorite sentences in any film book this year. There have been greater, weightier testaments to the art of cinema published in 2016 - Edwards's book is no more than a magazine article, really, padded out with a bio of the comedian and a slightly redundant filmography - but for sheer dopamine release, it's hard to beat. Tippi Hedren puts gossips out of their misery early on in her memoir, TIPPI (Morrow/HarperCollins, $28.99): Barely 37 pages in and here is Alfred Hitchcock, "shorter and even rounder than I was expecting," casting the 32-year-old model in "The Birds" after seeing her in a Sego commercial. What follows has long been the subject of Hollywood rumor and inspired a 2012 TV film, "The Girl," so Hedren's decision to break her silence on her director's "obsessive, often embarrassingly ardent, often cruel behavior" is a significant addition to our current Trump-era conversation on sexual assault. Fixing Hedren with an "unwavering stare" wherever she went on set, Hitchcock instructed her co-stars, "Do not touch The Girl," had her followed and - creepiest of all - had a "life mask" of her face made for his own personal use. "I'm so sorry you have to go through this," Hitchcock's wife, Alma, confides in her at one point. Jay Presson Allen, the writer of her subsequent film with the director, "Marnie," pleads, "Can't you love him just a little?" Finally, after a series of "excruciating" encounters in her dressing room and a fumble in the back of his limo, he summons her to his office and assaults her. "It was sexual, it was perverse, and it was ugly," she writes. "I'll ruin your career," Hitchcock threatens upon being rebuffed, and then proceeds to do just that, denying her opportunities to appear opposite David Niven and Marlon Brando in "Bedtime Story" and in François Truffaut's "Fahrenheit 451." But the rest of the book (written with Lindsay Harrison) is not without incident. Hedren marries her manager; the pair grow obsessed with lions, start a small animal sanctuary in their backyard and plow every penny into a film epic starring the beasts . A decade in the making. "Roar" has the scent of genuine insanity, involving multiple trips to the E.R. after the cats attack Hedren's daughter, Melanie Griffith; the cinematographer Jan de Bont (later to direct "Speed"); and Hedren herself, who is mauled by a leopard named Pepper. "I sat on the floor with my eyes tightly closed and held perfectly still while I felt his claws on my right thigh, followed by his sandpaper tongue licking honey off my cheek," she recalls, in slightly more detail than her mauling by Hitchcock. At least Pepper didn't block her from working with Truffaut. Bryan Cranston's memoir, a life in parts (Scribner, $27), suffers from the lopsidedness that afflicts any account of late-breaking fame - Cranston was 51 when he took the role of Walter White in AMC's "Breaking Bad," which made him a global star. But Cranston is a good-enough storyteller, practiced enough in his skills of self-examination, to make those five decades pull their weight. Determined not to repeat the path of his father, an actor who appeared on TV shows and in a movie about killer grasshoppers before succumbing to terminal resentment, young Cranston works as a farmhand, learning the correct way to kill a chicken; he sees a cadaver split open while a trainee for the Los Angeles Police Department; learns how to spot shoppers from thieves while working as a security guard ("Shoppers move quickly. Thieves have a slower pace"); and is motorcycling down the Eastern Seaboard when, seeking refuge from a storm, he reads "Hedda Gabler" in one sitting. As he drifts off to sleep that night, he knows what he wants to do with his life. "I knew how he carried himself. Burdened," he writes of Walter White, upon being sent the script for "Breaking Bad" by the showrunner Vince Gilligan, who remembered Cranston from a small role he'd given him on "The X-Files." He'd also, by that point, appeared in six episodes of "Seinfeld" and seven seasons of "Malcolm in the Middle," and was up against Steve Zahn for the role. As intriguing as the Zahn idea is. it was Cranston's less glitzy résumé - the years spent doing commercials for Excedrin and Preparation H - that was required for the tighty-whitey-wearing chemistry teacher turned drug kingpin Walter White: a pinpoint study in frustrated ambition and simmering megalomania, i n White's demented liberation a lusty Gloria in Excelsis Deo for jobbing actors everywhere. Jason Diamond's SEARCHING FOR JOHN HUGHES: Or Everything I Thought I Needed to Know About Life I Learned From Watching '80s Movies (Morrow/HarperCollins, paper, $15.99) is one of those pop culture bildungsromans in the vein of Nick Hornby's "Fever Pitch," wherein a writer enacts an obsessive battle with a pop culture phenomenon that fills his or her sky, before finally realizing the fixation is perilous and parachuting to safety. Growing up Jewish in the Chicago suburbs, beaten by his father, abandoned by his mother, Diamond is by 15 a blue-haired punk with a Jewfro, carving a Dead Kennedys logo into his desk, seeking plaintive escape in films like "Pretty in Pink," "Home Alone" and "The Breakfast Club." "I wanted to live in a John Hughes film. I wanted everything to turn out just right," he says, but wonders, "How many more times could I tell myself there'd be a happy ending?" The reader suffers from a similar curiosity. Diamond, now the sports editor at Rollingstone.com, never gets far enough into his John Hughes obsession to explain it, or why his alienation doesn't express itself in angrier popcultural form - the music of Nine Inch Nails, say, rather than the quirky but well-adjusted world of Hughes. But the sweetness is telling, a sign of the strain to his nature that will eventually win out. He moves to New York, takes a job as a barista, starts an unauthorized biography of Hughes, stalls on Chapter 1 ("He's an artist just screaming to break out," his notes read), before finally returning to old haunts in Chicago, where he succeeds in laying some of his ghosts to rest and opening a crack of daylight between himself and his idol. I'm not sure Diamond gets enough about Hughes into the book - for long swaths, the title rings literally true - but he has successfully negotiated the writer's most important rite of passage: He makes himself matter, first to himself and then to us. A sequel to his previous book, "How to Read Literature Like a Professor," Thomas C. Foster's reading the silver SCREEN: A Film Lover's Guide to Decoding the Art Form That Moves (Harper Perennial, paper, $15.99) aims to make you "a better reader of movies. More informed. More aware. More analytical." Despite this lofty aim, the book is written in the pop-professor style of someone anxious to reassure his readers that they will not be left behind at any point: "Films not only have to have chemistry; they're like chemistry. Now, relax, there won't be any lab reports." Foster goes in for so many of these icebreakers, each an implicit expression of the author's confident air of superiority, that you grow a little impatient for the fruits of the wisdom whose brilliance he is so thoughtfully shielding from us. What you get is this: "Movies are motion"; "If you put enough" shots "together in the right order you get a movie"; "Every character has a story"; and "A filmmaker can jump from place to place," but "jumping from time to time is problematic." This last observation is so off the mark you wonder if the author has ever seen a movie: "Citizen Kane"? Flashbacks? Flash-forwards? Elliptical editing? Every now and again, one stumbles through the fog of generalities across a piece of analysis born of simple observation: the way John Ford uses Monument Valley to frame the landscape of the West, for example, or the Escher-like cocoon of alcoves, rooms, elevators and stairwells in Wes Anderson's "The Grand Budapest Hotel." "This is a world very much like the actual world between the wars," Foster writes, citing Ionesco. "Personal freedom is a scarce and fragile commodity." It is telling that Foster is at his best when he forgets his readers entirely. Brian Jay Jones's biography george lucas: a Life (Little, Brown, $32) tells an oft-told tale: how a scrawny, easily bored nerd from Modesto, Calif., resisted the lure of his cooler, more flamboyant filmmaking contemporaries to stun the world with gee-whiz cinema aimed at his inner 6-year-old that reshaped Hollywood overnight. The collective double take over "Star Wars" never gets old, although if it's a definitive reconstruction of the creative spaghetti that fed into the saga you want, then Chris Taylor's masterly "How Star Wars Conquered the Universe" is your book. Jones, who comes to Lucas from a celebrated life of Jim Henson, tells a more straightforward story in definitive detail, although you have to wonder whether Lucas is a good fit for the biographical format: a cautious, withdrawn man, bland in his tastes, his resentment toward his father driving his career-long fight for autonomy from the studios. So much in Lucasland seems born of peeve and pedantry, it's a miracle the films are as ebullient as they are, but then that is the Faustian sacrifice behind "Star Wars": All the fun, humor and adventure in its maker's life are instead up there on the screen. Crisper pleasures await in bresson on BRESSON: Interviews 1943-1983 (New York Review Books, $24.95), edited by Robert Bresson's widow, Mylène, and translated by Anna Moschovakis. This collection of interviews reveals the great French filmmaker's own interview technique to bear more than a passing resemblance to Roger Federer's drop shot. In shuffles a nervous interviewer to take his or her seat, stealing the odd personal observation: The auteur's eyes are blue-green, and he speaks softly. "What was it that drew you to this subject?" he is often asked. It seems innocent enough, but this is Bresson. He thinks, then gently deconstructs the implicit assumptions about cinema contained therein, and rolls the ball back to the interviewer's feet with a smile. "I don't choose my subjects. They choose me," he says. "Films should not have subjects at all. . . . What I'm trying to do is to come up to the edge of saying too little, in order to try to express with silence what other films express with words - the almost imperceptible things that happen on a face, or in a look in someone's eyes." He interviewed much as he made films: by saying very little, with great eloquence. TOM SHONE is the film and TV critic for Newsweek. His book "Tarantino: A Retrospective" will be published in 2017.

Fans of actor and comedian Bill Murray have likely heard of the star's habit of randomly showing up in the most unexpected places, only to vanish just as quickly. Rolling Stone contributing editor Edwards (Last Night at the Viper Room: River Phoenix and the Hollywood He Left Behind) investigates this and the star's other off-kilter antics and the philosophy behind them. Edwards does an admirable job of profiling Murray's unique approach to life, friendship, and work, via interviews with the actor himself as well as friends, collaborators, and those acquaintances. The book is bursting with anecdotes that underline Murray's unconventional and fun-loving life: he's commandeered a street cleaner, crashed an off-campus house party and started doing the dishes, and driven a cab while the cabby practiced playing saxophone in the back seat. Edwards provides a rough biographical sketch of Murray, but excels far more in his assessments of Murray's films, which comprise the final third of the book. Murray's fans are sure to savor this book and walk away with a deeper appreciation of the actor and his work. (Sept.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

The First Principle   Objects are opportunities.   The greatest misadventure ever involving alcohol and a nontraditional motor vehicle belongs to country-music legend George Jones: When his wife hid his car keys so he wouldn't drive to the liquor store, he made the eight-mile trip on a John Deere lawnmower. Bill Murray, however, gave the singer a run for his money in August 2007, when he went to the Scandinavian Masters, a golf tournament in Sweden. Late enough on a Sunday night that it was actually Monday morning--around 3:30 A.M.--Murray was spotted in downtown Stockholm, driving a golf cart through the streets. This was a sufficiently unusual mode of transportation that he got stopped by the police on suspicion of drunken driving. (Even if he had wanted to outrun them, he was in a golf cart.)   Apparently the golf cart had been on display all week outside Bill's hotel--until Bill and some friends commandeered it for a party at the Café Opera nightclub, about a mile away.   The Café Opera manager, Daniel Bodahl, said Bill "was a very good guest."   The man in charge of the Scandinavian Masters, Fredrik Nilsmark, said, "I don't hold any grudge against Bill Murray for borrowing our cart for a while."   Detective-Inspector Christer Holmlund of the Stockholm police force said, "I have done this since '68 and I've never experienced anything like this."   Bill's explanation? He hadn't personally borrowed the golf cart, he claimed--he had started off as a passenger, being driven to a party. (Which sidestepped the question of whether the people driving him had permission to use that golf cart.) "I was taken to the party by people who did not feel they could drive the golf cart back," Bill said. "They said, 'We can't drive back--we'll lose our license.' I said, 'I won't lose my license.' That's what America used to be famous for: helping out, pitching in."   So he drove the golf cart through the streets of Stockholm sometime after 3:00 A.M. A "twilight drive," Bill joked--being so far north, Stockholm has incredibly long days during the summer. He had about six passengers crammed into the back of the cart and he was dropping them off at various destinations, like a bus driver. To complete the surreal scene, two drunk Swedish guys were hanging on to the very back of the cart, singing the 1970 Cat Stevens song "Father and Son."   The last two people on the cart wanted to be dropped off at a 7-Eleven. "I didn't know they had 7-Elevens in Stockholm," Bill commented. In front of the 7-Eleven, the police spotted Bill behind the wheel of the golf cart and called him over, assuming that he must be drunk. Bill's explanation that he was a golfer proved insufficient.   Holmlund said that when the police officer smelled alcohol, Bill declined to take a Breathalyzer test, "citing American legislation."   "Or as Bill told the story, he told the police officer, "I'm sorry, but where I come from, you have to act stupid or goofy or hit something or drive erratically or something--you're just assuming that I'm drunk because I'm driving a golf cart at three-thirty in the morning."   Holmlund agreed that Bill wasn't visibly drunk: "There were no obvious signs, like when someone is really tipsy."   The confrontation migrated to the police station. "They said, 'We're going to take your blood now,' and I said, 'What if I politely decline?' " Then, Bill said, "They introduced me to this guy, Gunther or somebody...who had a smile on his face, but not the smile you want to see." Bill submitted to Gunther and the police administered a blood test; Bill signed a document conceding that he had been driving under the influence and authorizing a police officer to plead guilty on his behalf if the matter ever came before a judge. Bill was then released and allowed to leave Sweden.   When the blood work ultimately came back, Bill's blood alcohol content was around 0.03 percent--way below the general American DUI standard of 0.08 percent but above the strict Swedish threshold of 0.02 percent. He had to pay a fine. "For having any amount of alcohol and having a golf cart, you have to pay something," Bill said. "It's just a courtesy, I guess."       Producer Joyce Sloane founded the Second City Touring Company, where the junior performers of Second City would take the group's Chicago-tested material on the road, with everyone piling into a van. She said that in the early seventies, after the tour hit Notre Dame, one of their performers disappeared for about a week--apparently, Bill Murray had discovered that Saint Mary's College, a women's-only college, was next door. Even when Bill stayed with the group, he was a force of chaos.   The troupe did a show at Wabash College in Crawfordsville, Indiana, which went extremely well: They were even invited to a reception at the president's home. But as the van pulled away and headed out of town, the entire cast had the giggles. Soon enough, Sloane figured out why: "Bill had taken it upon himself to take the Oriental rug from the president's home and put it in the back of the van."   Dan Patrick, revered sportscaster on ESPN and other venues, tells this story:   We were doing a pub crawl in New York, an A-to-Z pub crawl. I run into Bill Murray at a place in the Village, and I said, "Billy, we're going to go on a pub crawl and do you want to go with us?"   He said, "Sure." So we're walking down the street, there's Antique Boutique, and he goes, "Hold on." He runs in and comes out with an orange tie.   I said, "What's this for?"   He says, "Didn't you say on SportsCenter that the hardest thing about being the coach of Tennessee is trying to find those god-awful orange ties?" He said, "Put it on!"   I put it on, we went on the A-to-Z pub crawl, we got to the letter L...and there's a street cleaner, the street sweeper; the machine is on. And Bill goes, "What are you thinking?"   I go, "I don't know. Am I thinking what you're thinking?"   He said, "Let's steal this thing."   I wasn't thinking that. I wasn't. I was thinking, let's get to the next bar. I didn't even know the thing was running, and Billy goes, "Let's get in it." So he starts to climb up in the street cleaner.   And this guy runs out and he's like, "What are you doing? I'll lose my job!"   And he sees it's Bill and I think Bill said, "Don't worry." He said, "Can I just take it down the street a little bit?" So we just inched along like a tank down the street.     Lorne Michaels, creator and executive producer of Saturday Night Live, analyzed Bill Murray's location in the comedy firmament: "So much of my generation's approach to comedy was a reaction against the neediness of performers. When Bill was onstage, he didn't much care whether they liked him. Because of that, he had enormous integrity."   Michaels discovered, however, that integrity wasn't the same thing as reliability. In the summer of 1979, Michaels needed to get his Volkswagen Super Beetle from Los Angeles to New York; the producer had left it behind when he relocated to Manhattan for SNL. Bill volunteered to drive the car across the country--and he did, but on his own timetable. "Remember, I was his boss," Michaels said. "Occasionally I would hear from Bill on the road. He'd be in Florida, and I'd say, 'But, Bill--is Florida on the way?' Or a week later, he'd be in Aspen and I'd say, 'But, Bill...' " Bill may not have treated the driving mission with the focus Michaels expected, but he did ultimately deliver the car, and with a bonus. The car arrived weeks late, and had accumulated hundreds of unexpected miles on the odometer--but Bill had installed a top-notch stereo.   In 1985, Trine Licht was a young Danish woman living in New York City, delighted to have gotten a job as an assistant at Punch Productions, Dustin Hoffman's personal production company. She worked in the Directors' Guild building, on 57th Street, helping to find novels and screenplays that Hoffman might want to star in or direct. After she had been on the job for a few months, she had a surprise visitor in her office: Bill Murray poked his head in and said hello. (Hoffman and Murray were friendly, having recently played roommates in Tootsie.) Bill became a semi-regular visitor. Licht said, "He had an office down the hall but was not always there, only between shooting films. I think he read screenplays and novels there; maybe he did other things too. But he did occasionally ask, 'Have you read this' or 'Have you read that,' and he always looked like he was reading."   One summer day, Bill dropped by Licht's office, as was his custom--only this time, he asked, "Want some popcorn?"   When she said that she did, Bill disappeared. He was gone for long enough that Licht assumed he had forgotten about the popcorn. But when he came back, he didn't just have a bucket of popcorn: He pulled a cart full of warm popcorn into the office. Bill had gone down to the street, negotiated with a popcorn vendor, and bought his whole operation. Excerpted from The Tao of Bill Murray: Real-Life Stories of Joy, Enlightenment, and Party Crashing by Gavin Edwards All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.