Show Business: The Good Little Bad Little Boy

At 22, Comedian Eddie Murphy has become a multimedia star

Ever hear an audience smile? No? Then go see Eddie Murphy in Trading Places. You won’t hear it when he makes his first appearance onscreen, as a not-blind, unlame beggar; that’s the time when the moviehouse erupts with cheers and whistles and rhythmic chants of “Eddie! Ed-die!” Nor is it when his mouth gapes into an innocent, megawatt smile; that is the occasion for a huge communal laugh. No, it is when he is just standing there, waiting for some other actor to set up a screwball twist to the plot, that Eddie Murphy’s effect on people is easiest to measure. In those quiet moments, 2,000 moviegoers turn into so many pussycats, purring contentedly, basking in the delight that is both provided and experienced by a 22-year-old black man in what is only his second feature film. In the 1,368 theaters where Trading Places is on display, you can hear an audience smile.

To convince people that you are funny is tough enough. That demands talent, resilience, digital-watch timing, an amplitude of self-confidence that never spills over into arrogance, and Eddie Murphy has it all. But for people to like you is something else, something more difficult to define: a gift, a charm, a comedic sex appeal. Murphy’s bad-boy street patter, with four-letter words used less to shock or threaten than to salt his jokes with the rhythm of machismo, carries with it an inner-city demand for respect. Then suddenly his handsome face flashes a good-boy dimple, and out of his mouth comes the laugh that sounds like a happy goose crossed with a stopped-up vacuum cleaner, and the audience cracks up. Very bad Eddie, very good Eddie, his fans love them both. More than any other entertainer in recent memory, Eddie Murphy just plain makes people feel good.

And now, like any other smart young American dreamer, Murphy is marketing his broad appeal in four major media: TV, records, concerts and movies. Consider this jet-blast ride to stardom:

Three years ago, the kid from Brooklyn won a job as a featured player on NBC’s revamped Saturday Night Live; he was paid $750 a show. “His effect was dazzling,” says John Landis, his director on Trading Places, of those early shows. “There was a ding! when he walked on, almost like Marilyn Monroe.” Soon he was the program’s one breakout star. Next season he will return for at least ten shows, at $30,000 an appearance.

Last year Murphy recorded an album of his stand-up comedy at the Comic Strip in Manhattan, where a few years earlier he had been working for peanut shells. The LP, an undisciplined 48 minutes mixing raunchy insults with on-target family humor, copped two Grammy nominations and has sold 250,000 copies.

Later this summer Murphy goes on his first concert tour—35 gigs in 17 cities—a new country waiting to be conquered. His five concerts at the Westbury Music Fair in Long Island, N.Y., which are nearly sold out, will be recorded for another album, and his Washington, D.C., appearances taped for an HBO special and a Paramount video cassette. These last two spin-offs should earn him $1 million.

The neophyte actor took a couple of Richard Pryor hand-me-down roles and parlayed them into movie stardom. In 48 HRS., released last Christmas, Murphy played a sassy convict sprung from stir for two days to help Tough Cop Nick Nolte catch a couple of killers. The film’s director, Walter Hill, says of Eddie: “This kid is so enormously talented he can get away with anything.” This time Eddie ran away with the movie: 48 HRS., for which he was paid $200,000, has tallied an imposing $78 million at the box office so far.

The bandwagon rolls on with Trading Places, a loose-limbed comedy in which Lowlife Eddie and Blueblood Dan Aykroyd are forced to switch roles, and then get even with the two greedy geezers who did them dirt. It is the summer’s lone comedy hit, grossing $30 million in its first three weeks of release. “Eddie is definitely a movie star now,” says Landis. “And he’s too smart not to realize how good he is.” Paramount realizes too. Last week the studio signed Eddie to an exclusive five-picture deal with a $15 million guarantee. This puts him in the movies’ major leagues next to Burt Reynolds and Clint Eastwood—”Now those guys are movie stars!” says Eddie, modest for a moment. And up there even with Richard Pryor.

Pryor, the most popular black actor in movie history, was one of Murphy’s early comedy heroes; as a fledgling professional comic, Murphy used to perform an entire act using Pryor’s material, calling it “A Tribute to Richard Pryor.” Both performers have won the multiracial mass movie audiences, and both have swum in the dark blue undercurrents of ethnic humor. Since meeting Murphy on an airplane last year, Pryor has been “very kind and generous to me, offering all kinds of advice. I’ve started calling him Yoda. When I told him I was thinking of leaving Saturday Night Live, Richard said”—and here Murphy shifts into a perfect impression of the Jedi sage—” ‘You must learn all you can, Eddie. Take all you can learn.”

Long before he met Pryor, Murphy had learned to admire the artist, not imitate his excesses. Pryor was and remains a street kid, always in trouble or on the move, honing his hostility into a fine and angry art. Murphy, as Landis notes, “has solid middle-class values. Put it another way: he’s too vain to destroy himself.” He does not smoke, drink or use drugs, and even after he hit it big on SNL, he continued to live in his suburban home with his mother, stepfather and half brother Vernon Jr., 16. “Being black has never been a hindrance to me,” Murphy says. “I’ve been called ‘nigger’ only once in my life. There’s very little anger in my humor.” Pryor’s movie characters show the resentment and vulnerability of the underdog; Eddie, in front of the cameras or away from them, is a hot dog, full of sass and guileless assurance. The Murphy analysis: “Richard’s funny as the victim, but I’m funnier when I try to fight back. Maybe the star of the ’90s will be the funny black guy who runs the show. It would be nice to see that progression.”

The other big difference between the two men is that Murphy shot into prominence within the dangerous discipline of television sketch comedy. From TV’s long and distinguished list of skitcom graduates, the few who made a successful transition to movie stardom were usually those who had created and sustained their own ingratiating personalities on the small screen: Goldie Hawn’s daffy blond, Chevy Chase’s overage preppie. Bill Murray’s blitzed-out party guy. The other group—the inspired mimics who hid themselves behind the galaxy of comic characters they portrayed—looked both stretched and cramped when, in a movie, they were required to inhabit only one personality. From Sid Caesar and Carol Burnett to Lily Tomlin, Gilda Radner and Aykroyd, these performers had enough energy and scarifying talent to burst out of the small screen, but lacked the strong, smooth identities that Hollywood could package as star quality.

Eddie Murphy is the first of skitcom’s major mimics to span the gap. On SNL he presents a roster of hilariously varied characters. One minute he is Little Richard Simmons, finding just the right comic fusion—effeminate yet macho—of the rock-‘n’-roll screamer and the Liberace of aerobics (“Good golly, Miss Molly, you look like a hog!”). The next he is Velvet Jones, a pomaded pimp, with teeth like sheathed knives, huckstering his how-to books for young ladies, I Wanna Be a Ho and Exercises of Love. Now he is Tyrone Green, an illiterate convict lionized by radical chic for his vengeful poetry (“Cill My Lanlord”) and moving with the mean swagger of a ghetto goon pulling off his toughest scam. A few commercials later, he is Tyrone’s spiritual cousin, Film Critic Raheem Abdul Muhammad, fashioning a variation on local-news patter—”Angry Talk”—as he accuses Jerry Falwell’s followers of having a sneaking fondness for dirty movies (“The next time I see one of them in a movie line I’m gonna put the majority of my foot up his moral butt”). Murphy can do creepily precise parodies of Bill Cosby, Stevie Wonder and the Mandinka-coiffed Mr. T. If venom rather than vinegar laced these creations, they would prove too toxic for the TV audience. But behind them is the impish good will of a little boy exercising his craft, cadging merrily for laughs.

Murphy’s palette holds softer shades too. One character, known as Solomon, is every happy-sad old man you ever edged away from on the bus; he spars gingerly with an old pal, croaks a song or two and returns without warning to the attic of reverie. Look behind the electrified hair and the cunningly garbled consonants of Murphy’s Buckwheat, a resurrection of the character from the Our Gang comedies, and you will find a showbiz paradigm: the exploitation of a smile and a conspicuous lack of talent into big bucks. Whites are not immune either. He can metamorphose into Gumby, the ’50s cartoon character who has somehow aged into a carping Catskills comic; or a late-show pitchman, peddling Galactic Prophylactics and the Funeral in a Cab; or a suburban dandy, with attitudes and accent straight off the Main Line; or even an Irish priest, his brogue as thick as a County Clare mist.

In his two movies he is none of these characters; he is an actor named Eddie Murphy, and that is plenty. Both 48 HRS. and Trading Places are shaggy, shambling films that often trip over their own loose ends. But both are immensely likable, partly because Murphy finds places where he can have fun, perform extended comic riffs, give his ingenuity a brisk walk. In 48 HRS. he stops the show when he suddenly takes charge, with a little gunplay and a lot of nonchalance, in a rowdy bar full of red necks. And as Billy Ray Valentine in Trading Places he gets to impersonate an exchange student from Cameroon and a bantam rooster practicing Kung Fu.

One thing that makes Trading Places an audience delight is Murphy’s transformation from parasite to plutocrat. Plunked down in Aykroyd’s Philadelphia town house by scheming Capitalists Ralph Bellamy and Don Ameche, Eddie tries to pocket every heirloom in sight before he realizes that the place is, for the moment, his. Soon enough, when some of his rowdy friends drop by to party, he is the stern property owner (“Haven’t you people ever heard of coasters?”). Later he is completely at home in a posh dining club: some one asks his advice on commodities futures, and the room falls silent as everyone strains to hear what the master has to say. When Eddie talks people listen.

Eddie Murphy has been talking, almost nonstop, since he was born in the Bushwick section of Brooklyn in 1961. “He was such a lovable kid,” his mother Lillian, 41, recalls. “He’d sit on your lap until you moved him. Your leg would fall asleep, and he’d still be sitting there.” Eddie’s parents separated when he was three. Soon after, when his mother had an extended stay in the hospital, he and his older brother Charles, now 23, were placed in the care of a woman Eddie recalls as “a kind of black Nazi. One day she gave us pigs’ tails for dinner and then, when I told my grandmother that we were being fed snakes, the woman grabbed Charles and whipped him. Those were baaaad days. Staying with her was probably the reason I became a comedian.”

Eddie’s stepfather, Vernon Lynch, a soft-spoken man of 50 whom Lillian married when Eddie was nine, says the boy “hated to touch anything nasty. He would always wash his hands right after taking out the garbage. I used to tell him that when he grew up he’d better get a degree and sit behind a big desk so other people could do the dirty work.” At school, Eddie cut an ungainly figure. “I had a pot belly brown frame glasses and a bald head,” he insists. “One day in the third grade, Mr. Wunch came into class and said that whoever made up the best story would win an Eskimo Pie. I cracked the kids up with a story about rice and Orientals. It was my first performance. And guess who won the pie!”

Eddie traces his “warped” sense of humor to a childhood lived in front of the TV set. He perfected impressions of Bugs Bunny, Tom and Jerry, Laurel and Hardy, Martin and Lewis. “You’d never be sitting around with just Eddie,” says his mother “always with some other character.” Trading Places’ Landis sees Murphy’s “brilliant view of show business” as rooted in those early video perceptions: “I grew up hooked on TV, but Eddie is TV. His world experience comes from the tube.”

Eddie’s family moved to Roosevelt, Long Island, when he was ten. A small lad who was not athletic (even today he watches few sports events because, he says, “I can’t stand seeing other people excel at something I can’t do”), Eddie rose to the recourse of any budding comic: the fine, foul art of “ranking.” Light insults were his way of making friends. It worked: by the end of high school he was voted the most popular boy in class. In 1976, when he was only 15, he gave his first stage performance, an impersonation of the smooth soul singer Al Green at a youth center in Roosevelt. “I looked soooo good to those little girls,” he laughs. “They’d squeal at my every move. Looking out at the audience, I knew that I was show biz for the rest of my life.”

Schoolwork was no priority for the budding Mr. Show Biz. “I was articulate, with a strong vocabulary, but most of the courses bored me. I mean, E=mc² who gives a damn? My focus was my comedy. You could usually find me in the lunchroom trying out my routines on the kids to perform them in clubs later that night.” His career and his ego both took a a jolt when he was forced to repeat the tenth grade. “As vain as I was,” he says ‘I don’t have to tell you what that did to me. Well, I went to summer school, to night school, I doubled up on classes, and I graduated only a couple of months late. I still wake up in a sweat sometimes from dreaming that I his didn’t graduate from high school. “Underhis senior yeargook photo, Murphy composed this motto: “All men are sculptors, constantly chipping away the unwanted parts of their lives, trying to create their idea of a masterpiece.” The career citation read, “Future plans: Comedian.” Within two years of graduation he was a regular performer on Saturday Night Live. On the opening night of his second season, Little Richard Simmons minced onscreen, and Eddie Murphy was suddenly that living cliché: the over night success.

Now that he is this year’s show-business pheenom, Murphy is taking his eminence as calmly as any child would who woke up one day to find himself proclaimed king of Disneyland. His modest split-level home, only a few minutes from his mother’s, boasts not much more than a dime-store print of Emmett Kelly and a bookcase containing the Encyclopedia Americana—oh, that and his 4-ft. Mitsubishi TV screen in the den, available to run the tapes Eddie has kept of his Barbara Walters and Johnny Carson interviews. Though his 5-ft. 10-in. body carries a taut 160 lbs., he seems to exist on junk food: giant cream sodas, a 39¢ package of cinnamon buns and the vagrant slice of pizza are a major part of his diet. It is as if he can fend off the adult demands of stardom by treating life as one long summer vacation.

He has also ringed himself with a circle of familial trust. “I don’t think he lets too many people get a handle on him,” says Actress Jamie Lee Curtis, who plays a good-hearted hooker in Trading Places. “That would slow him down.” Murphy has become best buddies with Joe Piscopo, 32 the adroit, rubber-faced comic actor who is the closest thing to Dan Aykroyd on the new SNL; next month Eddie will move into a new house a mile away from Piscopo in Alpine, NJ. Otherwise, his best friends are his oldest friends. One of them, Clinton Smith, is an assistant to Saturday Night Live Executive Producer Dick Ebersol Another, Derrick Lawrence, 28, has signed on with Eddie Murphy Productions as an all-purpose aide-de-camp. “I’d been laid off from my job,” Lawrence recalls, “and Eddie asked me if I wanted to work for him. I love Eddie for it and I always will. I’m like his Knight of the Round Table. I’ll serve him till the day I die.”

Murphy is enjoying the fruits of success: a Jaguar and a Porsche, an extravagant leather wardrobe, mountains of jewelry. (Says Richard Tienken, who, with Robert Wachs, owns the Comic Strip and manages Murphy’s career: “He’s the only comedian who dresses like a rock star.”) Richard Avedon has photographed Eddie for the cover of Rolling Stone; in its September issue, Playgirl will proclaim him one of the ten sexiest men in America; he has thunderstormed his family and friends with costly gifts. But not even Sir Derrick of the Round Table can fend off the demands on King Eddie’s time. “I have no privacy at all,” Eddie notes solemnly. “It used to be that I couldn’t walk down the street in peace. Now I’m followed by people even when I go for a drive. They want to pull over and talk.”

Jamie Lee Curtis puts Murphy’s leap to stardom in perspective: “I love it that despite all his success, Eddie acts like he’s 22 years old. His life is cars and girls, girls and cars. More cars. More girls.” Last September Murphy broke off with Shirley Fowler, a student of social work at the University of Pittsburgh, and is now assiduously playing the field. Observes Walter Hill: “Eddie can hear the rustle of nylon stockings at 50 yards.” If anything bugs Murphy, it is the matter of image: “I don’t think that entertainers should be heroes or preachers. If people want to imitate my drug-free life, fine. But I’m not trying to make any statements with it. Onstage, my subconscious takes over, and what I’m about comes out. But I’m not very political. I don’t even vote. The way I see it, the President does what he wants to do, and if we do what we want, we don’t have to be affected.”

Murphy is his own greatest booster, his own severest critic. “One drawback to making it so young,” he notes dispassionately, “is that I have to grow in the public eye. I still think of myself as a stand-up comedian, a performer, not a movie actor. Certainly not, at this point, a movie star. I do still get a kick out of seeing myself on a movie screen, 30 ft. high, though the oh-wow-I’m-in-a-movie period has left me. Some day, I’d like to produce and direct pictures. But the biggest kick is thinking that 50 years from now, people might be watching me on the Channel 9 late movie after Joe Franklin, and commenting on how the young Eddie Murphy looked.”

Fifty years is a long time. Perhaps Eddie Murphy will show nothing more than firefly form: a flash of lightning followed by critical and popular pans. Perhaps he will tire of squeaky-clean living and head for Pryor-like self-immolation. Perhaps he will cease to be an entertainment event and become an agreeable habit, working a Vegas lounge, living on tired blood and the public’s memories. But if he keeps going as he is going now—young, gifted, black and hot—he can hope for the ultimate backhanded compliment. On a Saturday Night Live in 2033, some bright young comic will trot out his famous Eddie Murphy impression. And everyone will still be smiling. —By Richard Corliss. Reported by Elaine Dutka/New York