CHAPTER 10
MARILYN SUZANNE MILLER, writer:
In the years I was back at Saturday Night Live, I so didn’t belong there. But then of course, no one belonged there. The cast didn’t belong there. The writers didn’t belong there. And we didn’t belong there with each other. The whole thing was a real marriage of hope.
Just two years earlier, during the run of the 1992 presidential election, Saturday Night Live had been at the top of its game, consistently funny and culturally relevant. But in the fall of 1994, as Chris Farley and David Spade flew back and forth from Toronto to film Tommy Boy, they returned each week to find the show slipping further and further into confusion and disrepair.
Cast stalwarts Dana Carvey, Jan Hooks, and Phil Hartman had all left. In their place, Lorne Michaels had hired a slew of actors and comedians, both young and old, known and unknown. In all, the cast swelled to seventeen members, more than double the original group of Not Ready for Primetime Players in 1975. But in spite of all the talent in the room (or because of it), very little seemed to work. The cast was not a team. It was an odd collection of ill-fitting parts. There was little chemistry and no love lost among several of those sharing the stage. It was not a happy time.
Off-camera the changes were just as severe, and the process just as broken. The younger writers were coming to the fore, but the writing staff as a whole never gelled, especially with veterans like Al Franken and Marilyn Suzanne Miller feeling pushed out and stymied by the new generation. Caught in the midst of this chaos, and trying to manage it, was head writer Jim Downey. Downey’s experience probably encapsulates best what everyone was going through: At the end of the year he was served with divorce papers on the same day he was fired.
With the show in a rut, Chris found himself in one, too. He put in a hilarious turn as a lost contestant on a Japanese game show, and he took on some of the show’s political humor with his impression of House Speaker Newt Gingrich—a role that would even take him to the halls of Congress. But as far as memorable performances go, that fifth year added virtually nothing original to Chris’s SNL legacy. The Motivational Speaker came back again (and again). So did the Gap Girls and the Super Fans. And as Saturday Night Live limped to the end of a particularly disappointing season, Chris’s attentions drifted elsewhere.
MIKE SHOEMAKER:
It was a terrible year. Everyone was miserable. And once it starts getting bad, it almost has to get worse.
STEVE LOOKNER:
There was definitely a sense at the start of the ’94-’95 season that we needed to make the show better. After every taping there was more discussion over what worked and what didn’t, more of a conscious effort to pull things together. Nobody wanted to be the cast that brought Saturday Night Liveto an end.
TIM HERLIHY:
The ratings plunged. It wasn’t just a critical reaction; it was a popular one, too.
JIM DOWNEY:
My feeling was that the show had been running on vapors for a while, but the ratings had been crazily spiked by Wayne’s World. It annoyed me that the network didn’t care if the show sucked while the ratings were high. They only cared if the show sucked and the ratings were low.
DAVID MANDEL:
It was just very unclear what the show was supposed to be. When you look at the 1992 year, you had Carvey and Myers and Hartman, Jan Hooks and Kevin Nealon. Those guys were all-stars. Hartman used to put on a bald cap and play ten different characters with ten different voices in ten different sketches. So the beauty of adding a guy like Sandler to that group was that Sandler could go on Update and do his weird, funny thing and kill with it. Same with Chris. He could be a killer supporting part, like in the “Da Bears” sketches, then turn and have his own starring role, like in the “Chippendales” sketch. That was all you really needed of Farley in a given show. It was like a flavor of something. Jim Downey used to say something very interesting, and I will paraphrase it. He used to say that Farley and Sandler were like the special teams on a football team, the great kicker or the great punter, the guy you need to come on, do his thing, and then get off the field.
After the all-stars like Hartman left the show, it never seemed like a working cast so much as “Here’s the Sandler sketch. Here’s the Farley sketch. Here’s the Spade sketch.” All of a sudden, we were playing a football game with nothing but these special teams guys out on the field, and that’s not a team that’s going to play well for a whole four quarters.
JANEANE GAROFALO, cast member:
The system was flawed in a way that funneled the cream to the bottom and the mediocrity to the top. When we did the table read-throughs on Wednesdays, there were always funny sketches in there. Rarely did they hit the air. Downey was still there, but he wasn’t spiritually there. I think there were some personal things going on in his life that he wasn’t fully present, emotionally. He didn’t have the reserves needed to manage the room. The system was just broken.
MARK McKINNEY, cast member:
People were clinging to the stuff that worked in a time without a lot of focus. It was really, really hard slogging. But I saw Chris as ensconced in a brotherhood of his own making with several of the writers. He was comfortable in a way that I never was.
JANEANE GAROFALO:
Chris had the luxury of not only being talented but also well liked. When he would come onstage, even just to take his mark during a commercial break, people would start cheering. It was clear that he was an audience favorite, and kind of the go-to guy for a laugh.
FRED WOLF:
All the writers wanted to get their stuff on the show, and you learned very quickly that there were guys that you could count on. You could ride their charisma onto the air. We would do that with Chris.
Ian Maxtone-Graham gave me this diagram he’d made of “Fred Wolf’s Sketches for Chris Farley.” There were three different dials on it. The first one was labeled “Chris is: Dry. Moist. Soaking Wet.” And the dial was set on “Soaking Wet.” The second one was labeled “Chris is: Quiet. Talking Loud. Screaming at the Top of His Lungs.” And the dial was set on “Screaming at the Top of His Lungs.” The third one was labeled “Chris is saying: Gosh! Oh no! Oh, sweet mother of God!” And the dial was set to “Oh, sweet mother of God!”
It seemed like every sketch I wrote for a while had Chris getting soaking wet and screaming, at the top of his lungs, “Oh, sweet mother of God!” But I couldn’t resist writing them, because they would always bring down the house.
ROBERT SMIGEL:
When we did the first “Motivational Speaker” sketch, I added something that I thought was really helpful at the time but that I somewhat regretted later. The sketch was pretty much word for word as Bob Odenkirk had written it at Second City, except for the ending. The stage version didn’t really have a topper for Chris, other than “You’ll have plenty of time to live in a van down by the river when you’re . . . living in a van down by the river!” Chris was so powerful onstage that it carried you to the end. But TV flattens stuff out and I thought it needed something more, so I added the part where he’s telling David Spade, “Ol’ Matt’s gonna be your shadow! Here’s Matt, here’s you! There’s Matt, there’s you!” And then he falls and smashes through the table.
It worked really well, but it inaugurated this trend of Chris being really clumsy and falling down a lot. There were several more “Motivational Speaker” sketches, and all of those ended with him crashing through something. Then the writers started having him fall through other stuff. He used to joke about it. “Everybody laughs when fatty falls down.” Chris and I would laugh about how hacky it had become. I’d say, “Chris, give me a triple boxtop.” And he’d do a certain kind of fall for me.
That sort of broad clumsiness was actually the opposite of what Chris’s talents as a physical comedian were. What really struck me at Second City was how graceful and nimble and athletic he was, a brilliant physical performer who was also capable of really specific, subtle things. But a lot of that got buried in this succession of sketches with yelling and pratfalls. It was to Chris’s detriment, and the show’s.
JANEANE GAROFALO:
I think that the writers began to use him as a bit of a crutch, but that’s not entirely the writers’ fault. There’s a natural instinct among a lot of comedians, particularly younger ones, to want to get a laugh. You want desperately to be liked, and sometimes the quickest route is to be loud and broad in your gestures. I think Chris did that in the beginning, and then, unfortunately, it stuck.
DAVID MANDEL:
As much as the writers used him in a certain way, he also liked working in that certain way. It was easy for him to default to the pratfalls and so on. He could power through a sketch just by hiking up his pants and playing with his hair. Those were stock Chris Farley moves. He also hadn’t started wearing his glasses when he should, and he couldn’t always read the cue cards. You’d write a quiet, subtler sketch, and he’d flub a line ’cause he’d miss the cue card. So maybe you didn’t want to take a chance with him on that kind of sketch, and you’d default to something loud and physical.
There was never any sketch where we said, “This sketch isn’t working. Let’s have Farley walk in to be the joke.” It was not a fallback move. But there were definitely a lot of sketches, especially in that last season, that could be reduced to: “Chris yells a lot.”
MICHAEL McKEAN:
It paralleled Raymond Chandler’s rule: Any time the action starts to slow up, just have a guy come through the door with a gun. That’s how they used Chris. He would bring a lot of juice to what could have looked like lazy writing, and he saved a lot of bad sketches. There was this sketch with Deion Sanders—I mean, the comedy stylings of Deion Sanders, first of all—where this flying saucer lands and they keep sending men in to explore, and they all either get killed or anally probed. Then they send Chris in, and he comes out with his clothes in tatters, virtually naked, having been anally violated. That’s all there was to the sketch. In fact, I think I’ve probably embroidered it a little. But even with that, Chris gave it a shot, and he was funny.
JANEANE GAROFALO:
The Deion Sanders alien anal probing sketch, it was so embarrassing.
AL FRANKEN:
The show was always best when there was a balance between the writers and the performers, when both were operating at their peak level and working together. To some extent, Sandler and Spade and Schneider and those guys were not in sync with the writers, at least with my generation of writers. I was not thrilled with what was happening. But maybe it was just time for me to go.
MARILYN SUZANNE MILLER:
There was a quality among those guys, Rob Schneider, Adam, Chris, and Spade, that it was “our show.” It was a very David Spade attitude, and it certainly excluded me. Also, I think they knew that, at the bottom line, we weren’t loaded with respect for what they were coming up with.
For some reason the phrase “anal probe” found its way into virtually every sketch. Most of those didn’t make it to air, but at the read-through table it seemed like “anal probe,” “bitch,” and “whore” had assumed the same status as “Good morning, how are you?” It was imbecilic and just as offensive as offensive could be.
TOM SCHILLER:
I think that the humor did change, and I didn’t get into it that much. And that’s because the times changed. But the stuff we were doing in the first five years of SNL, I wouldn’t say it was necessarily so smart. When they talk about this “dumbing down of comedy,” I think comedy just keeps changing with the times, all the time. You can trace the evolution of vaudeville to Ed Sullivan to Your Show of Shows to Laugh-In to Saturday Night Live. And it just keeps evolving.
JOHN GOODMAN:
It’s similar to what happened to the guys who took over National Lampoon after Doug Kenney and Henry Beard left, when it all fell to tits and racial slurs. Michael O’Donoghue used to say that comedy isn’t a rapier; it’s clubbing a baby seal. But you can only club that baby seal for so long.
TOM DAVIS:
They were taking their cues from Animal House, whereas we had taken our cues from Bob and Ray, Sid Caesar, and Johnny Carson. Comedy just takes these turns. But that show has to stay young. It doesn’t matter if you like it or agree with it or think it’s funny. It has to stay young.
MARILYN SUZANNE MILLER:
Chris was part of this gang, and he identified with this sort of gang spirit that they had. When he and Adam and Spade did those Gap Girls, it was kind of like the gang was getting together to play, only they were doing it on national television. They were like the Little Rascals, or the Lost Boys from Never-Never Land.
I remember being overwhelmed one night at some of the capers that were going on. All these overtly sexual—and, frankly, homoerotic—hijinks. Just constantly grabbing each other’s asses—and much worse than that. I went into an office with Al Franken, and he explained to me that when a bunch of guys are marooned on an island together, as was the case with that show, you get this kind of behavior. It happens at boys’ prep schools, on submarines. There was a sketch Jim Downey wrote on the old show, “The Adventures of Miles Cowperthwaite.” It was about this young boy trapped on a ship with all these pirates, and it was all about manly men being manly and doing manly things at sea to prove their manliness—and they all turn out to be gay. Everything these kids were doing was like that.
JIM DOWNEY:
It became more of the atmosphere of the show, because you had this critical mass of young guys. I always went to all-boys schools, so I have to admit it’s something that makes me laugh, you know, when it’s done right. Chris would burst through the double doors of the writers’ room with his pants around his ankles and his privates tucked back between his thighs doing the thing from Silence of the Lambs. He’d start rubbing his breasts and saying, “Am I pretty?” It was just so balls out, so to speak. I mean, you had to give it up for that.
MIKE SHOEMAKER:
Comedy people, when we’re alone and insulated, just get more and more shocking, and it doesn’t play to the rest of the world. It’s the same way to this day. I’ve seen worse before and since. A lot of it was disgusting, but in the context of this place it was always funny. We were just constantly thinking, oh, this is so damn funny, but if anybody saw it we’d all be arrested.
JIM DOWNEY:
It’s hard not to laugh even if you think it’s encouraging irresponsible behavior. Sometimes, to get Chris to stop doing something, we’d talk among ourselves while he was out of the room and agree not to laugh no matter how funny it got. Chris’d get perplexed, and eventually frustrated, because no one was laughing. Then he would just escalate more.
Farley liked to do this routine where he would jokingly hit on waitresses. He’d say, “Well, little lady, I’ve got a problem. I’m in from Moline, Illinois—work with a grain elevator outfit out there—and I’m in town for a couple days on business. And darn it, if I don’t use my whole expense account the home office’ll be liable to cut me back. So, how’s about you and me do this town up right.” And so on, using all this weird, Jazz Age lingo. You’d be like, Chris, what the hell are you talking about?
One night we were at this Mexican restaurant in Midtown named Jose’s. It was one of those places where you buzzed downstairs and they let you in and the entire restaurant was up on the second floor. One night, Farley was doing his goofy routine with the waitress all night, and she was kind of rolling her eyes, like, “Yeah, yeah, buddy.”
The rest of us, I suppose, were not giving him enough attention, so he felt he had to take it up a notch. He jumped up, scooped her up in his arms, and ran down the stairs and out of the restaurant. I turned and looked out the window, and I saw him dashing up Fifty-fourth Street and getting into a cab with her. We all hung back, staying in the restaurant, like, “We’re not going to bite. We can’t give him the satisfaction.” Then I said, “Jesus, we could all be sued.” I was acting in loco parentis with these kids, so I ran downstairs after him. But Chris liked to do that, do big put-ons with strangers who didn’t know who he was. In most cases people realized it was a joke and were happy to be a part of it.
NORM MacDONALD:
Chris would do things with girls, like a kid would do. He’d always be like, “You shure are purty. Can I touch your leg?” It was all for the comic effect of how you’re not supposed to approach a girl. It was all harmless, but obviously because he had a lot of money, some extra came on the show and decided this amounted to sexual harassment.
JIM DOWNEY:
The second-to-last show of the ’93-’94 season, I had written a piece about Bill Clinton called “Real Stories of the Arkansas Highway Patrol.” We had to go upstate and do some outdoor filming. Some women were extras in the piece, and one of them went up in the car with us. It was me and her and Schneider and Farley. It was a limo, with that wide space between the two rows and seats facing each other. Schneider and I were sitting together, and Farley was next to this girl. He was doing his usual “Hey there, little lady!” shtick. And he was poking her and hugging her, but if you knew Chris you knew it was all playful. I finally told him to knock it off—not because I thought it was assaultive behavior but because it was getting annoying.
Well, this girl went to the talent department and complained, hinting at some sort of legal action for what Chris had done. But Chris never did anything wrong. I know because I was sitting there, and as the producer of the show I never would have allowed it. My impression, honestly, was that she was mostly complaining about the size of her part. She thought she had several lines, and it actually wasn’t a speaking role. I think we paid her for a speaking part instead of as an extra, and that was the end of it.
MIKE SHOEMAKER:
Nothing ever came of it. It was actually a very minor incident. It became a much bigger story in people’s minds because of the prank that followed, more so than because of the incident itself.
JIM DOWNEY:
So the next week it’s last show of the season. Farley came in, and we decided to have some fun with him. It was just completely random and totally unplanned. He came by, and I said to him very casually, “Chris, you know about the lawsuit, right?”
“What?” he said.
“You know, the sexual harassment suit. Anyway, you’re not going to do any jail time. That’s—don’t worry about that. I mean, it’s not one hundred percent you won’t, but it’s at least a sixty to seventy percent chance you won’t do any jail time.”
“Wh-what are you talking about?”
“You know. The girl from the limousine. Anyway, it’s too early to tell, but NBC’s lawyers are all over it.”
He was really starting to shake and sweat. Then the other writers started gathering around. Mind you, I’d seen Farley do plenty of similar put-ons to other people, so in no way did I think this was unfair. And also, I thought that he needed to learn a lesson, that the kind of outlandish behavior he pulled in the limo can have consequences, even if it’s harmless and well intentioned.
I said, “Now, Chris, I used to be a process server, so I know how this works. If you’re walking down the street, for the next two . . . well, for the next several months, if you’re walking down the street and someone approaches you, do not wait to find out who it is—you run. You flat out run.”
And then Ian Maxtone-Graham chimed in, “Oh yeah, I was a process server for a whole summer. If they even touch you with the document, you’ve been served. If it touches anywhere on your person.”
Eventually, everyone’s getting in on this, giving Chris advice on how to hide out and things like that. I don’t know what happened with Chris in the intervening days, but we went to the prop department and had them make up a subpoena, and I had one of the writers I knew from Seinfeld serve Farley with a lawsuit at the end-of-the-season party. He was devastated. A couple of people were coming up to me, saying, "C’mon, that’s cruel. He’s close to tears.”
NORM MacDONALD:
Chris was just ashen, and the even crueler part was that they didn’t let him in on the joke until an hour or two later. To make it that much worse, his mother was standing right there beside him when it happened. It was really terrible.
MICHAEL McKEAN:
It was a really shitty thing to do.
JIM DOWNEY:
And I was like, “Now, wait a minute. I’ve seen Chris put many a waitress through the paces before. He’s a big boy.” But finally I said, “Okay, let’s end it.” I went over and talked to him. It took me about a half hour to convince him that it was a put-on. As far as I heard, he was never mad about it, because he liked to put one over on other people, too. I talked to him a few days later and I reminded him, “You’re a celebrity now, and people will be on the make. You should keep that fake subpoena as a reminder not to do anything that could be misconstrued.”
And he said, “I don’t have it. I burned it.”
It was like he had to destroy the evidence of the whole thing.
FR. MATT FOLEY, friend:
Chris was very much a man’s man. There were girls who were his friends, but anyone who was being honest would say he did some pretty inappropriate things with women. He was often mean to them. It was weird. It was the trust thing: Will you love me for who I am?
Chris used to say that every girl he went out with before he got famous looked like him with a wig on. Not to slam those women, but it’s probably true. Then, all of a sudden, he’s famous and these hot girls are all over him. So obviously, sexual issues, relationships, were very difficult things for him. I think he trusted God implicitly; I don’t think he trusted people. “Why do these women want to go out with me?” He was very confused by that. He didn’t trust them. He didn’t know who to trust.
TIM MEADOWS:
That was something we talked about quite a bit. He’d always say, “How could any beautiful girl love my fat ass?”
MARILYN SUZANNE MILLER:
One of the real differences between John Belushi and Chris Farley was that John Belushi was married, whereas Chris was sort of the opposite of married. I wouldn’t even put him in the category of “single.” He wasn’t single; he was the opposite of married.
FR. MATT FOLEY:
He went out with this girl named Lorri—her nickname was Kit Kat—this really hot girl. I was in New York one weekend and Chris told me, “I really like this Kit Kat girl.” I saw her on the set. She was this five-foot-ten Victoria’s Secret model, long legs, just hot. They clearly weren’t going to talk about second-century world history together. Chris said, “What should I do? I don’t know if she likes Spade or not. I want to ask her out, but I’m so confused.”
I said, “Well, Chris, why don’t you go to work today and ask David if it’s okay if you ask her out?”
He did, David said it was okay and he asked her out. So here we are on a date, Chris, Kit Kat—and me, his priest. The next night we all went to a movie together. It was just bizarre as hell. It was like I was back in eighth grade.
DAVID SPADE:
Lorri lived directly across the street from me. I’d see her at the deli. She was this Victoria’s Secret girl, who I eventually realized was one of the Victoria’s Secret girls back from when I used to look at Victoria’s Secret and found her quite striking. She was very friendly. I invited her to the show, and we started talking. I didn’t have a whole lot of friends in New York outside of SNL, so it was nice to meet someone to hang out with.
We became friends and started dating. Chris would hang out with us. She thought he was funny, and I didn’t mind that he’d come along. This happened a lot, and he’d always paw all over her, going, “You’re so purdy,” and all that. And I wouldn’t get mad, but I was like, “Dude, be a little more respectful, to me and her. C’mon with that shit.”
Then sometimes Lorri and I would go do stuff, and I’d say, “You know, Chris isn’t doing anything this weekend. Can he come with us?”
LORRI BAGLEY, girlfriend:
Chris and I met because we were both best friends with David Spade. David and I had met, and we just clicked. We’d meet for breakfast, hang out after work. We even wound up living across the street from each other. Before Chris and I met, David would always say, “You’re just like Chris. The two of you are the same person.”
“I want to meet him,” I’d say.
“No, if you do, you’ll fall in love with him.”
Men being men, I think David would have liked to date me, but for me it was just never like that. He asked me to go to the movies one night, and I said no, because I didn’t want to be alone in a movie theater with him. So he said, “I’ll bring Chris.”
For a year, the three of us were just friends. We were like this fun-loving threesome that hung out together all the time. It was the most fun time of my life in New York. This was all about a year before Tommy Boy. I was a model, and I was doing Victoria’s Secret shoots, and Fred Wolf said, “We have to have a pretty girl in the movie. It should be you.” So I did the scene as the girl in the pool at the motel.
After Tommy Boy, we all kept hanging out just like before. Chris and I had never really been alone. We were always with David or a group. But Chris would always do these little things, like pulling my chair closer to his at the dinner table—little things that said, “She’s mine.” One night after my acting class, we were all at the Bowery Bar, just dancing and having fun. Sandler was there. It got late, people were going home, and Chris wanted to go out some more. Sandler looked at us and was like, “You guys are baaaaad . . .” He saw the connection. So Chris and I went out alone. That was the first night he kissed me. He was a very good kisser.
When it all first came up, Chris came to my apartment and said, “I have to work with David. Until I finish Saturday Night Live, we can’t see each other, because I can’t go to work every day and have that kind of stress.”
I said I understood, and we stayed apart for like three days. We just couldn’t do it. David lived right across the street from me, on West Seventy-ninth, so that didn’t make it easy. One night there was an after party for the show. Chris didn’t go so he could come and see me, but it turned out David didn’t go, either. He came home and saw Chris in the car out front waiting for me to come down.
I was getting ready to head out when David called me. “Is that Chris waiting for you downstairs?” he said.
“Um . . . yeah.”
“You fucking bitch.”
And he hung up the phone.
NORM MacDONALD:
It drove a wedge between them. Chris wasn’t a ladies’ man like Spade was. Chris wanted to fall in love and be married. Spade’s the opposite. He’s a real playboy. Chris decided that Spade had a million girlfriends, so he could have just this one.
TIM MEADOWS:
Spade dates nothing but hot girls, still to this day. But for Farley she was a coup.
DAVID SPADE:
And that was the part that ultimately kind of pissed me off. I had brought him into the mix. I should have just kept it the two of us, but I always made sure Chris was involved, because he didn’t have anyone.
FRED WOLF:
I loved Lorri Bagley. She was great. It’s really fun to walk around with celebrities and see everyone’s reactions. But when we walked around and Lorri Bagley was part of it, she definitely did not detract from the excitement factor. She just had a stunning quality about her.
TODD GREEN:
She was so beautiful. Chris would just look at Kevin and me and shrug his shoulders like, “Can you fucking believe that I’m with this woman?”
We were playing golf down in Hilton Head. Chris was down there at some diet clinic and a bunch of us went down every year to play golf. Chris was actually not a bad golfer, but he wasn’t having a good game. He was just getting frustrated. All day he kept muffing his drives and missing putts and getting more and more angry. Finally I said to him, “Farls, why are you so upset? You’re dating Kitty Kat.”
He just howled. He did that really deep, guttural laugh he had. And for the rest of the entire round, every time he missed a shot he’d just shrug and say, “Hey, I’m dating Kitty Kat.”
She was flighty, but she really cared for Chris, and she genuinely loved him.
LORRI BAGLEY:
Chris would tell me stories about his life before he was sober, and I just couldn’t picture it. He liked that. He liked that I couldn’t even imagine that side of him. He was so organized, and so hardworking. He’d wake up every morning and make his bed, go to his meeting. He had the neatest, cleanest apartment.
And he was so romantic, always a gentleman. He would always walk on the street side of the sidewalk, always stand up when you left the table, and always stand up for you when you came back to sit down. He was very elegant that way, chivalrous, like someone from a different time. Once we were meeting for dinner in New York. We were supposed to meet at a certain time, and I got there forty-five minutes late. He had been outside waiting for me the whole time, just so he could be there to open the door and make sure he could pay for the taxi. I mean, who does that? That’s so much better than flowers.
Although when he did buy me flowers, that was always special, too. I was in this phase where I was always changing my hair color, and whatever my hair color was, he’d match the roses to it. I always loved that. He never got just red. One time the florist messed up and sent me plain red roses. He was so upset he called and bitched them out. He just hated to be typical. He wanted there to be thought behind everything he did.
Another time I was in Los Angeles, and we’d gotten into this huge fight. I said, “Okay, come out to L.A. and we’ll work things out.” I was staying at the Four Seasons. Every hour on the hour he sent something new. One hour it was flowers. The next hour it was a bottle of champagne. It went on for ten hours.
And the first night I spent with him, he got up to go downstairs to get water. I was lying there without any clothes on. He went to his closet and got out his robe and came and wrapped it around me, just so I would feel safe. He was a beautiful man.
While things were going well for Chris privately, Saturday Night Live had continued to suffer, and it was clear that major structural changes were needed. Early in the year, reporters had begun to take aim at the show’s shortcomings, and by season’s end the media had launched a full-fledged assault. Particularly derogatory was a New York magazine article by a reporter who had lived in and among the cast for several weeks. While the criticisms in the piece were not wholly without merit, its perspective was rather myopic, and its tone was unrelentingly foul. The magazine’s cover featured Chris wearing a television on his head—the poster boy for the death of Saturday Night Live. And the headline of the piece, “Comedy Isn’t Funny,” wasn’t exactly what Chris thought his legacy at the show would be.
TIM HERLIHY:
The stuff with the press that year was heartbreaking. Not only were they saying bad things, but Phil Hartman was saying things to TV Guide, and a lot of us were being misquoted here and there. The show was just being eviscerated.
FRED WOLF:
The worst hit piece was the New York magazine article. The guy who wrote that was living in our midst for at least half a season. He was around all the time. Then all this stuff came out and he just tore the show apart.
NORM MacDONALD:
The guy was really down on Chris in the article, but when Chris was telling stories in the writers’ room, this reporter was on the floor. He was laughing like crazy. But the guy had the agenda to write this hit piece, and he was going to write it regardless. Even when he came there and found out that Chris was funny, it didn’t matter to him. And then to have Chris go to a photo shoot where they put a TV on his head and to put him on the cover—to put a guy through all that, completely unknowing of what you’re going to write about him, it was just low.
Later, when Chris filmed Dirty Work with me, he was saying he felt bad that he and Sandler had “ruined the show.”
I said, “No, Chris. That’s insane. They said that at the time, but you guys have all come out as the biggest comedy stars in the world.”
MIKE SHOEMAKER:
The irony is that Farley and Sandler were the poster boys for the show’s problems that year, and yet every week we’d do a show and they were the only ones getting laughs.
JIM DOWNEY:
What I didn’t like was the opportunism of the press. It was a lot of late hits and piling on after the whistle. Basically, to be honest, I just wanted out.
MIKE SHOEMAKER:
At the end of the season, everything was in limbo. Nobody knew who or what was coming back, management included. Nobody thought the show would be canceled, but we thought we might be. There was never a time when Chris and those guys were officially fired. Everyone just kind of instinctively knew it was time to move on. All the writers just left, every single one of them.
DAVID MANDEL:
I’d love to say it was an ax coming down, a real housecleaning, which is what SNL needed. But it was more that we were all just exhausted, working like dogs, and people began drifting away. If there was an ax, it was a very passive-aggressive ax, which is Saturday Night Live in a nutshell.
KEVIN FARLEY:
I don’t even know what word you would use to describe what happened at the end of that year. Weird? Crazy? The whole place runs on rumors and innuendo. But Chris had a lot of meetings with his managers, who told him he’d be fine stepping right into movies. I don’t think Chris was fired, and he didn’t exactly quit. He just never went back.
LORNE MICHAELS:
Chris’s head had been turned by the exposure he’d gotten from the movies. Starting back when he was in the first Wayne’s World, Chris was only on the screen for a minute, but the audience clearly knew him and liked him and was invested in him. Gurvitz and Brillstein were pressuring him to get out there. There was a Chris Farley business now.
MIKE SHOEMAKER:
There’s a sketch at the very end of Chris’s last show, written by Fred Wolf. It’s Chris and Adam and Jay Mohr and all those guys, playing themselves. They’re at the zoo and they’re screwing around, daring each other to jump into this polar bear pit. “I bet I can swim across the moat and back before the polar bear gets me.” That sort of thing. It was the last sketch that those guys ever did on Saturday Night Live, and I always remember it as sort of being a metaphor for their leaving the show. Everybody leaps into the polar bear pit, and, one by one, they all get mauled and eaten alive.