CHAPTER 11
NORM MacDONALD:
When Chris left Saturday Night Live, it seemed like he wasn’t ready for Hollywood. There was the Cable Guy thing, the Beverly Hills Ninja thing. Hollywood was just ready to use a naïve guy in any way they could to make money. And Chris was naïve, but he certainly wasn’t stupid. He saw what was happening, and it hurt him a lot. Perhaps because of his faith, Chris had great confidence in human beings and their capacity for being good. And they’re not, really. Especially not in this town.
Paramount Studios released Tommy Boy on March 31, 1995. Despite a lukewarm critical reception, it opened number one at the box office and went on to gross a respectable $32 million. Suddenly there was a lot of growth potential in the Chris Farley business.
Paramount immediately ordered up, in essence, Tommy Boy II. No sequel ideas followed naturally out of Tommy Callahan’s story, but that was no obstacle. The movie’s basic formula was lifted, reupholstered, and set down in vaguely different circumstances—and Black Sheep was born. This time, instead of playing the screw-up son of a successful father, Chris played the screw-up brother of a successful politician. David Spade no longer played an uptight assistant helping Chris not ruin a sales trip; he played an uptight assistant helping Chris not ruin a gubernatorial campaign.
Chris had signed a two-picture deal with Paramount, and the studio’s interpretation of his contract prevented him from taking on any other films so long as they presented him with a “viable” project by a certain date. Fred Wolf was hired to write the screenplay, and on that certain date, under the threat of a lawsuit, he was compelled to turn in whatever script he had. Then, literally at the eleventh hour, Wayne’s World director Penelope Spheeris was attached to direct.
Chris was a valuable commodity coming out of Tommy Boy, and had many options from which to choose. Paramount shut them all down, including a part in the Farrelly brothers’ Kingpin and the lead in The Cable Guy (a project that would involve Chris in a wholly separate legal imbroglio).
And so Chris was shoehorned into the thankless role of Mike Donnelly, a warmhearted but hapless counselor at a community recreation center who’s such a political nightmare he’s got to be put under wraps during his brother’s bid for the governor’s mansion. Ever the optimist, Chris was determined to make the best of it. He hired old Red Arrow friend Ted Dondanville to be his personal assistant and constant companion, and then turned his attention to trying to improve the film, bringing in several writers to punch up the script. He also sought out Tim Matheson and Bruce McGill. Matheson and McGill had starred as Otter and D-Day, respectively, in National Lampoon’s Animal House. Hoping their comedy talents would improve the film’s prospects, Chris used his newfound clout to bring them in for supporting roles.
But no matter how hard Chris tried, Black Sheep was not going to be Tommy Boy. Despite the similarities, the film didn’t have the same director or the same producers. Nor for that matter did it have the same stars. The personal and professional chemistry of Chris Farley and David Spade had inspired Tommy Boy and come off beautifully on film. But the fabric of that relationship had begun to fray. Chris was receiving more attention, and more money, which would sow seeds of discontent in any partnership. And then there was the thing with the girl.
LORNE MICHAELS:
Black Sheep was an act of desperation by Paramount. Sherry Lansing felt that they missed it on Tommy Boy. They didn’t know what they had; they hadn’t marketed it well. Then after its release it got reevaluated. If nothing else, Sherry Lansing’s son Jack said Tommy Boy was his favorite movie ever. Suddenly they wanted another. I kept saying, “We don’t have one.”
ERIC NEWMAN:
When Lorne was making Wayne’s World 2, Mike Myers had written a script that the studio, for legal reasons, couldn’t proceed with. So Mike, as is his style, dug his heels in and said he wasn’t doing it. The reaction from Paramount was severe. They threatened litigation, and Mike found himself with no choice but to make the movie. That’s probably why Wayne’s World 2 turned out the way that it did.
When there was a question about Chris doing Black Sheep, all the same people were involved, and it got really ugly again. Paramount was making threats. Chris’s people were really angry, and they should have been.
DOUG ROBINSON, agent:
Our interpretation of the contract was that Chris owed Paramount one of his next two movies. Their interpretation was quite different, and they were really firm about Chris not doing Cable Guy, or Kingpin, which was another possible project we had lined up for him. Chris was being considered to play the Amish kid, the part eventually taken by Randy Quaid. We really wanted him to do that. But Paramount was putting a lot of pressure on Chris, and he ultimately didn’t want to fight it.
FRED WOLF:
I got a call from an executive at Paramount saying that I had to deliver a finished script by midnight on Sunday, the last day Chris was contractually allowed to get out of the movie. If I didn’t have a finished script—any finished script—they were going to sue me. I sat down and wrote forty-five pages that weekend. Eric Newman met me at Paramount at around eleven forty-five. We made copies and distributed them to the people at Paramount. They had their script, and they forced Chris to do it.
DAVID SPADE:
Now, we’re getting close to summer, and that’s the only time SNL cast members can shoot movies. I ended up going back in the fall, and Chris didn’t know at that point if he was going back or not.
But that summer Chris was also offered $3 million to do Cable Guy, and the Paramount deal was for way, way less, probably under a million. The thing was, I didn’t owe Paramount anything. I didn’t have a two-picture deal. I could say no.
So Chris comes to me at Au Bon Pain under 30 Rock on the way in to work. He sits me down and says, “Listen, I know they want you to do Black Sheep, and I owe them a movie and you don’t. So when you read the script, if you don’t like it then I’m free to go do Cable Guy.”
“Right,” I say.
“But if you say you want to do it, I have to do it, too.”
“Okay.”
“I read it. I wasn’t crazy about it. You read it, and you decide.”
And so I’m in a tough spot. If I say yes, Fred Wolf gets paid and gets a movie made, and so do I. If I say no, Fred and I don’t have work, but Chris gets to go and do the other one.
I say, “Look, I’ll read it, and I’ll decide based on no reason other than whether or not I like it. And if I like it, I have to say yes.”
“Fair enough.”
I read it, and I thought it was actually pretty good. Coming off Tommy Boy, I thought Chris, Fred, and I could pull it off.
ERIC NEWMAN:
And so Black Sheep was concocted to preempt Cable Guy, but, unfortunately, at the same time, the Cable Guy deal was falling apart on its own due to the Jim Carrey thing.
BERNIE BRILLSTEIN, manager/founder, Brillstein-Grey
Entertainment:
It was the worst. Endeavor sent me the script for The Cable Guy. You can’t even imagine how different that script was from what got made. It was a simple, fun story. Gurvitz and I took it over to Columbia, to Mark Canton. They bought it with Chris attached. We were then going through all the preproduction, and Brad Grey and I got a call from Canton. “Please be over here at six o’clock. It’s very important that we see you.”
Now, when someone calls you for an important six o’clock meeting, it’s never good news, and it’s never to give you money, ever. We went over to Columbia and Canton said, “Somehow, the Cable Guy script made it to Jim Carrey.”
“Somehow?” I said. “Did it fly over there or did you send it by cab?”
That started the meeting out on a bit of a hostile front.
“Jim Carrey wants to do it,” he said, “and we want to make it our summer tent-pole movie.”
Brad and I had brought Columbia this script, and, without our knowing, they had brought on Ben Stiller, Judd Apatow, and Jim Carrey, who wanted to turn it into a dark, black comedy. They were going to pay Carrey $20 million, and it was the first time anyone had broken the $20 million ceiling. I was very blunt. I said, “You just lost twenty million.”
So now Canton says, “Here’s what we’ll do. We’ll pay off Chris. You two can stay with the picture as producers, and we’ll pay you.”
It was a tough decision. It was a lot of money. It was our script, so I didn’t feel bad about taking the money, honest to God. And they weren’t going to budge off of Jim Carrey, so as long as Chris got paid, that was the best we could hope for, for him.
PENELOPE SPHEERIS, director:
One Sunday afternoon, I got a call from John Goldwyn at Paramount. He put Sherry Lansing on the phone, and they said, “Chris Farley wants to do this movie called The Cable Guy, and if we don’t exercise our option on him by tomorrow morning, we lose our rights to hold him to another movie.” They asked me if I would direct it.
I said, “Well, where’s the script?”
“We don’t have one,” they said, “but we have a great idea.”
They pitched me the idea. It didn’t seem something I really wanted to do. Then they told me what they were going to pay me—and it was obscene. It was about two and a half or three million dollars. They needed to get the picture done that badly. So, I hate to sound crass, but I did it for the money. Plus, after doing Wayne’s World I really did love Chris and really did want to work with him. Between those two things, I went for it.
DAVID SPADE:
And that’s when the trouble started. I believe up until that point we would have had another Tommy Boy on our hands. But Penelope got paid more than all of us put together, because she’d done Wayne’s World. So all the power went to her. The problem is, you have to give a lot of credit on Wayne’s World to Mike and Dana. I’m sure she did something right, but as far as the funny is concerned, that’s Mike and Dana, in my opinion.
So Penelope says, “I know how to make you guys funny.” Which is the first red flag. Chris, Fred, and I knew what we needed to do. We just needed someone to shoot us, but she ripped forty pages out of the script and said, “I’m going to work on this with my friend.” All our complaints fell on deaf ears, and Fred got fired.
PENELOPE SPHEERIS:
There was one point in a meeting when we were discussing the script with the studio people. Fred came up with some stupid-ass idea, and I said, “I’m not going to do that.”
Then everybody looked at Lorne, and Lorne said, “Well, Fred is the writer on the show.” Parentheses: The writer is king on Saturday Night Live.
So I said, “Okay, you guys can take your two and a half million and shove it up your ass.”
And I walked out. I couldn’t believe I’d done it, but I was walking across the parking lot and I heard the click-click-click of Karen Rosenfeld’s high heels, and she came up to me going, “Penelope, don’t leave. Please, please.”
They didn’t care about me, mind you. They just didn’t want to lose the director, any director, for fear of derailing the project and losing Chris.
ERIC NEWMAN:
A movie’s like a train, a five-hundred-ton train, and once it leaves the station there’s not a whole lot you can do about it. If you’re Jerry Bruckheimer it’s pretty easy to stand on principle and say, “This movie’s not ready.” (Not that he ever has.) But if you’re not at that level, you work with what you have. Everyone thinks, okay, it’ll all come out in the wash. The process will right the ship. And it never does. And so, despite the best efforts of Chris, David, Lorne, and Fred, Black Sheep is an entirely forget-table movie. It’s a terrible movie. It’s a really bad movie.
TED DONDANVILLE, friend:
Johnny Farley had moved to Chicago and started performing at ImprovOlympic, and he and I were drinking buddies. He told me Chris was looking for an assistant. So I just called Chris up and asked him for the job, and I got it. I wasn’t hired for my secretarial efficiency but because that concrete wall seals off after you become famous. You can only trust the people on one side of it, and I was on that side. And of course I’d taken care of him when he was the poor, starving actor at Second City.
We flew out to Los Angeles on the Fourth of July of 1995, and I was his personal assistant from that day on. When we got there we moved into the Park Hyatt hotel. He had a nice suite, with a big living room area. He lived there for all of Black Sheep, and then for all the time we weren’t on location for Beverly Hills Ninja and Edwards & Hunt. That was his home in L.A. Filming started about a week after we got to town.
Chris, because of his clout, got them to hire writers to work on punching up the script three or four nights a week. The guys who wrote Edwards & Hunt, which became Almost Heroes, they came in. Those guys would come over to Chris’s hotel suite, we’d order food, and they’d sit around for hours going over the upcoming scenes, trying to make it better. Those sessions were a great time, a lot of fun to watch, these intellectual writers setting Chris up and giving him stuff to work on. He’d act it out a little and tweak it with them.
The process was more enjoyable than the actual product. Not a lot of that material got worked in, ultimately, because it was all last-second stuff. So Chris knew it was a piece of crap, but he was going to go down swinging.
TIM MATHESON, costar:
Chris was very positive. Always prepared. You could tell that all the principal performers were just doing it by rote, to fill an obligation, except for Chris. I didn’t much believe in the movie. I just figured it had to be at least half as good as Tommy Boy, and that would be okay. But they just kept adding and changing crap all the time, and never to make it better. It just got dumber.
FRED WOLF:
If you’re going to do something in a slapdash manner, you need the captain of the ship to make sure it comes off right. I think we were all missing that.
On Tommy Boy, Pete Segal would call me in my room and say, “We’re out here with Chris and Rob Lowe. He’s washing him off after the cow-tipping scene. Do you have anything?”
And I knew that any time you had Chris dancing you had comedy gold. So I’d say, “Why not have him singing ‘Maniac’ from Flashdance?”
Then they were able to knock it out on the spot. On Black Sheep, the director wasn’t speaking to me, and I was banned from the set. Penelope Spheeris fired me a total of three times. Chris rehired me twice, and Lorne Michaels a third time. I missed Pete Segal.
TED DONDANVILLE:
Chris liked the way that Penelope was very open about hearing his ideas. On the other hand, he didn’t really trust her comedy chops. He had a fear of her not knowing what was funny and what wasn’t, and he was worried about the lack of strong direction. Personally, though, they got along great. He liked the freedom she gave him.
PENELOPE SPHEERIS:
It was actually Chris’s idea to get Tim Matheson and Bruce McGill for their parts, specifically because of Animal House. For me, I trusted him on it, and then I met the guys and they were just great. My first impulse was, “Who’s going to believe Chris Farley and Tim Matheson as brothers?” But they really felt like brothers.
TIM MATHESON:
I went in for the audition, and to my surprise Chris was there. He was the star, and I was just coming in for this supporting part, but he was so gracious and so deferential and so flattering that you honestly would have thought it was his audition. But I got the feeling that he was responsible for my being there. I was very grateful for that, and I wanted to deliver.
He wanted to hear anything and everything I could remember about Animal House. He wanted to get my take on the whole experience and what it was like working with Belushi. I liked to make him laugh, so I told him as many stories as I could.
Chris had an innocence about him, a golly-shucks-gee kind of thing. John felt like an older brother. Chris felt like a younger brother. John had big designs, was always in charge. He grabbed that ball and ran with it. Chris was always “Golly-gee, what do you think?” Belushi was also a sweet guy, but Belushi was very aware of who he was, the impact he had on people, and the clout that it gave him, both in the industry and just over average people. John was very savvy. You got the feeling that Chris wasn’t. Or, if he was, he chose to ignore it. He had a very salt-of-the-earth quality about him. When he introduced me to his brother, it was all about how great his brother was.
BRUCE McGILL, costar:
Toward the end of the movie, we all played in a golf tournament, so we spent about six hours out there together. You usually try and keep humiliating experiences down to ten, fifteen minutes, right? But a game of golf is just hours and hours of ego-bruising degradation, which breaks people down and opens them up. If you want to know something about a guy, go play golf with him.
And while we were out there we had a very protracted, involved three-way conversation about what had happened to John, and how he should avoid that for himself. It was fascinating to see how interested he was in Belushi and Belushi’s demise—and how adamant he was that he would not go down that road. Cut to two years later and he went exactly the same way. If there was ever a moth to a flame, whether it was conscious, unconscious, I don’t know.
LORRI BAGLEY:
When Chris left SNL, he told me that the only goal he’d ever had in life was to be on that show, that his father had loved John Belushi on that show, and if he could make it there, he’d make his father happy. That’s where the Belushi thing came from—his father.
BRUCE McGILL:
If Belushi made Chris’s father laugh, well, there you go. It’s positively Greek.
PENELOPE SPHEERIS:
My problem with Black Sheep was that then and to this day I find Chris Farley absolutely, brilliantly, hilariously funny. I don’t think I’ve ever even smiled at anything David Spade’s ever done. Chris was lovable and positive, and David was so bitter and negative. You take your pick.
I still have a recording of a message David left on my answering machine. He said, “You’ve spent this whole movie trying to cut my comedy balls off.”
DAVID SPADE:
The main problem was that Penelope separated us. She had Chris go off and do one thing and me go off and do another. We kept saying, “Look, our characters just need to be together. We need to fight and bicker and do all that shit.”
And Chris wasn’t helping much, because he thought he should be doing more dramatic stuff, that the movie should be more about his character and Tim Matheson’s character and less about me. He even hinted that “would I mind” if I got paid not to be in it so they could make it more of a dramedy. And I don’t think he meant it to be offensive to me. He just wanted to act and didn’t want to keep doing fatty falls down. Personally, I thought it was too early; we needed more experience before we tried to do those things.
So they added a few scenes for Chris and Tim to be a little more serious, and they had another writer come in to work on the ending. And I was kind of on my own. I didn’t have anyone to play off of. I didn’t have Chris, and my humor is funny when I have someone to play off of.
ERIC NEWMAN:
Actors need rules, and those rules need to come from the director. Penelope clearly didn’t get David, and she really allowed him to meander. Chris Farley alone is the comedy team of Costello and Costello. You needed the sharp-tongued straight man. You can pretend that you’re just making a Chris Farley movie, but you’re not. It’s a Chris Farley/David Spade movie.
TIM MATHESON:
I sensed that there was something wrong with Chris and David, but I thought it was David not wanting to be the second banana.
PENELOPE SPHEERIS:
You could feel the tension between them, believe me.
LORRI BAGLEY:
I was staying with Chris in his hotel room, and at the end of the shoot he would come back and see me and vent out all of his tension. “You’re the reason me and my best friend aren’t talking.” That sort of thing. It was hard.
TED DONDANVILLE:
It was about the girl, basically, and some underlying jealousy, too, which Spade actually handled very well. Spade was pissed off about how things went down with Kit Kat. I think it was one of those things where Spade thought she was his girl, but they weren’t really dating to begin with.
DAVID SPADE:
Dating, not dating, whatever. I don’t know what you want to call it. We were certainly hanging out a lot. I wasn’t her boyfriend, but we were very close. And I didn’t find out from them. It was an accident. For some reason, I wasn’t supposed to know. So if she and I weren’t dating, then why was I being kept in the dark? And whatever. The problems with Lorri were that I felt somewhat betrayed on both sides. I felt like, here’s my friend. I always made sure he got to hang out with us because he said he had no one else to be with, and to have that bite me in the ass later didn’t sit right.
TED DONDANVILLE:
I talked to Lorri about it a lot, and according to her, Chris was guilt-ridden over it. She says that she and David were never more than friends, but who knows how women revisit stuff.
LORRI BAGLEY:
Chris and I were just emotional, crazy people. Our relationship was always rocky. Up and down, like being on a ship at sea. David always used to say, “You two are going to kill each other.” The thing with Chris, the thing we had problems with, was intimacy. Any time you got close to him, if he let down his guard and really let you in, then he’d push you back out. As close as you got the night before, you’d be pushed that much further away the next morning.
TED DONDANVILLE:
Whenever Lorri would visit L.A., there was a standard pattern to it. They’d start talking on the phone a lot, then she’d come out and he’d send me away. For a couple of days it’d be full-time, lovey-dovey, baby-talk heaven. Then for a couple of days they’d begin to resemble a calmer, everyday, normal couple. I’d be invited back in—the third wheel added to their little bicycle—and we’d all hang out together. Then it’d start to disintegrate into some crazy-ass fight. I’d get a call from Chris in his hotel suite: “Come up. Come through the bedroom.” I’d go up and she’d be on the other side of his bedroom door, out in the suite, yelling and screaming, and Chris would be like, “Get her her own fucking room tonight and fly her back tomorrow.”
She’d fly back to New York, they’d ignore each other for a month or so, then the phone calls would start and the whole thing would crank up again.
LORRI BAGLEY:
In every part of his life Chris had a role to play. His relationships with people were always predicated on “What do you want?” And then he would be that for them. I actually tried to break all those different roles down. We’d fight about it, but then in the end he’d feel better that he didn’t have to play some part. I always felt that he could only really be himself with me.
People would never believe that we were together. They didn’t understand it, or questioned the reasons behind it. That was until they saw us together. They’d look back and forth between the two of us and say, “God, they’re like the same person.” One time he was going to do an interview. We were with his publicist in the car. She was like, “Chris, you’re so calm.” Then she looked over at me.
“Kitten makes me calm,” he said. He always said to me, “You’re the only girl I feel comfortable with. I’ve always been nervous and anxious around women, but not with you.”
TED DONDANVILLE:
I wouldn’t say Lorri wasn’t attracted to the fame and success, but she and Chris were genuinely close. She will tell you that they had this famous romance for the ages. Fact of the matter is, Chris had other girlfriends here and there. But I will give Lorri credit for being the most important woman in his life. That is certainly true. Unfortunately, of all the girls I saw Chris go out with, I didn’t think she was the healthiest or most stable.
DAVID SPADE:
Those two together, with Chris in a free fall, it was like nitroglycerine. I don’t know if Chris was in love with her. I know he spent tons of time with her, and she was okay with the other women, or whatever his famous life brought him, because they were “soul mates.” I was like, “Shit, is that how it works? I need me a soul mate. That’s awesome.”
LORRI BAGLEY:
Chris attracted control freaks. He made them feel wanted. And David is a control freak. If he’s not in control of a situation, he’ll just get out of it. It got ugly, and it was horrible for the two of them.
ERIC NEWMAN:
Every partnership has its problems. Costarring in a movie is hard. I think Chris and David really cared about each other, and they saw that they were good together. But I don’t think the quality of that movie was in any way affected by the deterioration of their relationship. While their problems may have impaired the process a little bit, that movie, in its DNA, was a turd.
FRED WOLF:
I grew up in New York City but then later moved to Pennsylvania, to the town where they filmed Deer Hunter, so you know how dreary that was. I would take the bus into Pittsburgh to watch the Marx Brothers movies. My dream had always been to work with a comedy team, and here I was. I thought Black Sheep could have been a repeat of Tommy Boy, but the missing ingredient remained missing. The movie isn’t atrocious. It opened bigger than Tommy Boy. Both of them were number one in the country, but the drop-off was a lot quicker because, ultimately, it wasn’t the same kind of movie.
Black Sheep wrapped in late summer, and Chris moved back to Chicago, taking up residence at his new apartment in the John Hancock Center, which he had bought after leaving Saturday Night Live. Also located in the Hancock Center was the radio studio of Erich “Mancow” Muller, a popular Chicago morning deejay. Chris frequently popped in at the show on his way in or out of the building. Along with regular drop-ins at Second City and ImprovOlympic, the show gave Chris a stage whenever he needed one.
That fall, a small group of people coalesced around Chris, forming a sometime entourage and de facto inner circle. Ted Dondanville stayed on as his personal assistant. Kevin and Johnny Farley had both moved to Chicago to take classes and perform at Second City. The brothers had never been very long apart, but now they found themselves all living in close proximity for the first time since high school. Chris also met a young woman, Jillian Seely. Seely herself had quit drinking several years before, and she was a great help to Chris. They attended recovery meetings together and became fast friends.
And naturally, any decent Chris Farley entourage needed to include a Roman Catholic priest. Sadly, Chris’s longtime confidant Father Matt Foley had left Chicago to do four years of missionary work in the small town of Quechultenango, Mexico. The two friends spoke by telephone often, but Chris needed spiritual guidance closer to home. In the months between filming Tommy Boy and Black Sheep, he had gone to Bellarmine, a Jesuit retreat house in Barrington, Illinois, just outside of Chicago proper. There he met Father Tom Gannon, who would meet with him and talk to him on the phone regularly over the next two years.
Meanwhile, preproduction work was already under way on Chris’s next film, Beverly Hills Ninja. He worked with the writers and producers on finalizing the script and took daily martial arts lessons from a teacher named Master Guo. For month after happy month, everything seemed fine.
JOHN FARLEY:
When I graduated from college, the family was driving back to Wisconsin from Colorado. I was the young sapling, had no clue what direction to take in life. I had Tommy on one side of me and Chris on the other. Tommy was saying, “Go into business.” And Chris was going, “Go into comedy.” They were kidding around, tugging back and forth on me.
I went back to Red Arrow Camp to be a counselor, basically piloted a ski boat all summer. Then I tried to get a job driving a Frito-Lay truck. They turned me down. Maybe it was my DUI. Maybe I was overqualified? But I doubt that. So then my mother was buying a new car, and I went with her. I thought, I like cars. Maybe I’ll sell cars. I asked about it. One of the salesmen took me aside and said, very seriously, “Son, this isn’t a job. This is a career. You’re makin’ a career move here.”
“Wow. Thanks.”
And I never went back. I figured, comedy, what the hell? I went to Chicago and did exactly what Chris did, started working at the Mercantile Exchange and started taking improv classes at night. Kevin got out of the asphalt business a year or two later when he saw how easily I’d gotten out of it.
KEVIN FARLEY:
I had worked with Dad for six years. In September of 1994, I packed my bags and moved down to Chicago. I lived on Johnny’s couch, got a running job at the Chicago Board of Trade, took classes at Second City, and worked as a host there, seating people and doing dishes.
Second City has a business theater, which is upstairs and is pretty lucrative; you can hire players from Second City to perform at your corporate events and write material for you. Eventually, they thought I had a little talent, and they sent me out on these corporate gigs. I got to make a living doing that.
JOHN FARLEY:
I did the corporate thing a bit, too, because it paid well, but mostly I was in the touring company.
KEVIN FARLEY:
Everyone in our family is funny. Mom’s hysterical. When you have a large family you want to have your own identity, so we all developed different senses of humor. We’re very similar in our mannerisms, but all unique. Johnny is out there. His mind works in a really dark but funny way. I’m a little more goofy and silly. Chris was just outlandish, in your face and raucous. Tom is very cerebral, and dry. Only he never got up onstage with it.
JOHN FARLEY:
If you had to break down the Farley brothers, I’m Chevy Chase, Kevin is Dan Aykroyd, and Chris is John Belushi. And Tommy is Garrett Morris.
TED DONDANVILLE:
I’ll be honest: Johnny and Kevin are often funnier than Chris in real life, in more normal ways anyway. Kevin Farley is the funniest guy in the world at a cocktail party. He tells stories, is very engaging. Tom and Johnny, too. The difference is when you put a spotlight on someone, there’s a very different kind of funny you need to deliver, and that’s where Chris was like Michael Jordan: He would always make the shot. But at the same time, a lot of people who’d meet Chris socially just didn’t get him.
JILLIAN SEELY, friend:
I met Chris buying a cup of coffee. I really didn’t know who he was. I remember he had an Elmer Fudd hat on, and he was wearing those electrician glasses he had. He looked like he was mentally retarded. He’d just finished Black Sheep and had moved into his apartment at the Hancock. I worked at a hair salon in the Bloomingdale’s building at 900 North Michigan Avenue, and he was there in the building with Johnny. I was looking at Chris and he was looking at me, and we both started smiling and laughing. He asked me if I would marry him, and then he introduced himself. “Hi, I’m Chris Farley.”
He asked me if I’d join him that night at a restaurant down the street. It was for John’s birthday, I think. I showed up, brought some friends, and we all hung out and had a great time. We ended up going to a restaurant that was open really late and just laughing and talking all night. The next day he called me at work at around nine in the morning and said, “Hey, I noticed last night that you don’t drink.”
“Yeah, I quit a long time ago,” I said.
“Me, too.”
He told me a little bit about his problems, and then he asked if I would go to a meeting with him later that night. I said sure. We went to the meeting and then went out to dinner, and we just clicked. From that day on we just started hanging out all the time. We laughed our asses off together.
The thing that was great about being with Chris was that he started all of his conversations with “How was your day? What did you do?” Nobody does that anymore. That’s why Chris was so different from most people. He was not selfish at all when it came to being a friend. We would stay up until three, four in the morning, opening ourselves up to each other, even when we were complete strangers to each other. To this day I don’t know why. I’ve had friends who made me laugh and friends I could have really serious talks with, but I’d never had all of that in the same person like I did with Chris.
KEVIN FARLEY:
We always thought Jillian was super nice. They did hit it off right away.
JOHN FARLEY:
At the time we were busy setting up his apartment at the Hancock building. It was crazy, because the Hancock building is literally a retirement community. That and the studio for Jerry Springer. Chris was the only young person in the building. “Dad says it’s the best place in town,” Chris said. And maybe it was, back in the sixties, but the people who were hip when they moved in were the only ones still there.
KEVIN FARLEY:
Whenever Chris was in Chicago we would meet and go out to dinner at the Cheesecake Factory, or the Chop House, or Gibson’s. Things were clicking with his career. It was a really good time. Nobody was worried about him.
TED DONDANVILLE:
At that point, sobriety was just part of his routine. It wasn’t a chore or a burden. It was a balanced part of his life. We weren’t hanging out at raging keggers or anything, but we’d go out to things where there was liquor served. People would buy him shots and he’d accept them graciously. Then he’d hand them to me and say, “Here, Ted. You do it.”
Even when he was enraged or in a foul mood, he’d just go to a meeting, get himself together, and come back calmer. In the Second City days, drunk or sober, he was always a comedian without a stage, always fucking around. Now he was very much in control of himself. He didn’t need to prove something to somebody all the time. He could turn on the comedian when he needed to be there.
JOHN FARLEY:
Chris and Ted, honest to God, were like Felix and Oscar. They were the Odd Couple. Just to watch them interact was hysterical. Chris lived to give him hell, and Ted was like, “Whatever.”
Chris would hide things and then demand them from Ted, just for fun. They’d walk out the front door and Chris would go, “Where’s the little, you know, my recording thing I need?”
“I didn’t see it,” Ted would say
“You didn’t see it? Well, let’s go back and look for it then!”
Then Chris would go back in and wait while Ted looked for the thing and say, “Look! Here it is under the couch!”
“Uh, okay.”
“You idiot! Let’s go!”
It was fun for Chris to beat up on him like you would a little brother, but Ted could ride out all of Chris’s mood swings without even a blip in his pulse rate. He just didn’t care. If you put Chris in real terms, he was a company making millions and millions of dollars, and Teddy was in charge. It was like, Holy Lord, this ship is headed for the rocks and nobody’s at the wheel.
KEVIN FARLEY:
To be an assistant to a star like that, you’ve got a lot of people calling you all the time—agents, heads of studios. It’s not an easy job. Chris would get frustrated with Ted, because oftentimes Ted wasn’t as thorough as he needed to be. But they were friends, so that’s why there was never really any employer-employee etiquette to be observed.
TED DONDANVILLE:
Chris was such a people pleaser that he’d give everyone what they wanted, always be so deferential. But he had just as much ego and just as much of a temper as anyone. All of that negative energy had to get channeled somewhere, and it got channeled to Kevin, Johnny, and me. He’d never let anyone else see that side of him, and so we’d take the brunt of it. But we also understood it for what it was, blowing off steam. Any outburst was immediately followed by a shower of apologies.
JOHN FARLEY:
Teddy was a good companion, and honest. He comes from more money than Chris or any of us had ever seen, so he didn’t give two shits about Chris’s money or his fame. He was just doing it for fun. He was probably the most trustworthy guy Chris could have had by his side. And we all had fun together. We’d go to Second City, work out at the gym. Chris was really into his martial arts training for Beverly Hills Ninja.
TED DONDANVILLE:
Master Guo had been a karate champion in Communist China and had defected. He didn’t speak very good English, and he only weighed about a hundred and ten pounds, but he was an amazing teacher. He and Chris used to do this thing where they’d stand shoulder width apart, clasp one hand, and then push and pull, and the first one to have a foot pulled off the ground would lose. Chris outweighed his teacher more than two to one, but the guy got Chris off his feet every time, without even trying. He was the real deal. But he was very impressed with Chris for what a fast learner he was. This was the football player in him coming back.
Thinking back on it, the martial arts training was something Chris lacked later on, namely a hobby, something to keep him occupied. It was a noteworthy time in that there was nothing too noteworthy about it. He was sober and happy and having a good time. It was never that way again.
JOHN FARLEY:
None of us saw it coming.
TED DONDANVILLE:
Chris was going to have a Christmas party at the Hancock, but first he had to go to New York to attend a screening of Black Sheep. For whatever reason, in the days before he left for New York, he started getting angry. He always had a temper, but this was a little more consistent, and more fierce. It was a gathering storm.
Then a rewrite of Ninja came back, and it really sucked. Following right on that, I was filming some of his training to send in to the screen-writers to come up with jokes, but the battery died on the camcorder halfway through the training session. Afterward, we went to look at it and it was all fucked up. Chris went into a rage, yelling and screaming and ranting about this goddamned script. He left Chicago really pissed off.
LORRI BAGLEY:
I picked him up in New York. The car came and got me, and I went to the airport to meet him. We were going to stop by the hotel and then go and have dinner. He got into the limousine, and as we drove off we started talking about work. And while we were talking it was like a black cloud came over him. I saw the Chris I knew literally disappear, just vanish into this distant world. I said, “What’s going on?” But he had checked out.
We went by the hotel and then got back in the car to go and have dinner. Chris was quiet for a moment. Then he turned to me and said, “Kitten, I’m drinking tonight.”