ACT III
CHAPTER 12
TED DONDANVILLE:
That first relapse, that was the big one. The rest were just dominoes.
Chris Farley had been sober for three years. At a time when his commitment had never seemed stronger, he gave it all up with one drink on the flight from Chicago to New York. As news of the relapse spread, Chris’s friends and family all asked the same question: why? Some felt it was the gathering stress and anxiety over his career. Others felt that Chris had never successfully dealt with every aspect of his compulsive and addictive behaviors, most notably with regard to food. Still others felt that Chris’s sobriety had always relied too much on external motivators, like the threat of losing his job at Saturday Night Live. Whatever precipitated the relapse, it happened. And it was devastating.
LORRI BAGLEY:
I started crying. “No, you’re not,” I said. “You’re not going to do that, and you’re not going to do it with me.”
“I’ve already started. That wasn’t water I was drinking in the hotel. It was vodka,” he told me.
We went to dinner, and he started drinking martinis. After that, we went to the Rainbow Room. Steve Martin was there. Chris was acting like a madman. I thought I could get him through the night, call Ted the next morning and find his sponsor, and see where to take him.
I got him back to the hotel room. He was drinking and crying. Then he said he was going to this spot in Hell’s Kitchen to get drugs. I said, “If you want to go there, I’m going with you, and then you need to take me home because I’m not going to play with that.”
We got in the limo, went to this place, and he went inside while I waited outside. After a minute I got nervous and went in after him. He looked at me and said, “Get me out of here.”
So he left without doing anything, and I took him back to the hotel. He just kept drinking and crying and talking about the voices in his head. He kept saying, “How do you turn off the voices in your head? They’re in my head. How do I get them out?”
I finally fell asleep as the sun was rising. When I woke up I called his name, and he wasn’t there. I waited and waited, not knowing what to do. About an hour and a half later, I started getting ready to go, and he came in with sunglasses on. I could tell he hadn’t been to sleep, and he was way too calm and mellowed out from what he’d been the night before. He was on something.
I told him, “I thought that I could handle being around you if you started using again. I thought I’d never leave you no matter what, but I can’t be around this. It’s just too much.” And I left and went home.
TOM FARLEY:
Chris called me and said, “Tommy, you want to go and see a sneak preview of Black Sheep in New Jersey?” I said sure. He was staying at the Four Seasons, so I stopped up there. He looked fine to me. The limo was going to pick us up any second, and Chris was getting into the minibar, filling his pockets with the little bottles. I said, “Chris, what are you doing?”
“Oh, I’m just getting a couple of these for the limo driver,” he said. “They like that.”
And after three years of sobriety, I actually let myself think that was okay. I just didn’t for the life of me think he could be lying. We got in the limo and drove out to Jersey.
We were up in the screening room, waiting for everyone to filter into the theater. At one point he said, “I gotta go to the bathroom.” I did, too, so I went with him. We got to the men’s room, and it was this small, janitor’s closet kind of thing. I followed him in anyway. He was like, “What are you doing?”
“I gotta go to the bathroom,” I said.
We’re brothers, for God’s sake. I’d been in the bathroom with him hundreds of times. But all of a sudden he’s like, “Get out. I can’t . . . I gotta go by myself.”
I thought that was very strange, but I left him to it. Then we watched the movie, and we were driving somewhere else, and, same thing, “I gotta go to the bathroom.” So we pull over and he goes in someplace to use the bathroom. And, of course, what he was doing was drinking. I certainly didn’t see him give away any of his little bottles. I didn’t put two and two together until the next day when I got a call from Dad, saying, “What the hell happened?”
“What do you mean?”
“Chris trashed his hotel room at the Four Seasons and did three thousand dollars’ worth of damage.”
And then it was back to rehab.
KEVIN FARLEY:
When I got the call in Chicago that he had relapsed, it was devastating; devastating to me, devastating to him, and devastating to everyone in the family. He took so much pride in his sobriety, more than any of the movies or work he’d ever done, more than any other success in his life. Those three years were his crowning achievement.
JILLIAN SEELY:
Chris and I had been hanging out every day, and then right around Christmas he disappeared off the face of the earth. He called me early in the morning on New Year’s Eve. He said, “Hey, it’s Chris.”
“Hey,” I said, “why haven’t you called me?” I was pissed.
“I relapsed.”
“You’re lying,” I said. “I don’t believe you.”
We had talked so much about his sobriety, and I was so confident in him that I really couldn’t imagine it.
He said, “I really want to see you. Will you come and meet me at a meeting?”
There was a meeting that morning. I went with him. He told me about the relapse and the screening. He said that he’d fucking hated Black Sheep, that it was just Tommy Boy II, only worse.
TED DONDANVILLE:
That screening didn’t help. He saw one shitty movie that he’d made, and then he really started worrying that, with Ninja, he was working on a second one.
Beverly Hills Ninja was a script that had been around, and around. Several stars had turned it down. Chris himself had passed on it a number of times. But negotiations for the film had taken a dramatic turn the previous summer, while filming for Black Sheep was still under way. Sensing Chris’s impending stardom, Ninja’s producers got very aggressive. They offered him an ungodly salary, and that changed the whole equation. Chris was still reluctant, and his managers were vehemently opposed, regardless of the payday. But Chris’s dad counseled him otherwise, essentially saying, “You don’t turn down that kind of money.” Show business is not the asphalt business, but in this as in all things Chris listened to his father. He signed on to play Haru, an infant boy orphaned in Japan and raised to fulfill a prophecy as the Great White Ninja. Through a series of slapstick setups and wacky misadventures, Haru makes his way to California and solves a crime. Shakespeare it wasn’t.
Chris had rationalized his taking the film by saying it would make a good kids’ movie. Another big factor in the decision was simply his confidence. The story was one big, long pratfall, and Chris’s abilities as a physical comedian had never failed to deliver huge laughs. But Chris’s other major asset was his Midwestern Everyman appeal. Dressing him in martial arts garb and giving him hokey, Zen-sounding dialogue was not a good fit, and it flopped onscreen.
The project was not without its bright spots. It did turn out to be a successful children’s movie. Chris Rock was struggling professionally at the time, and Farley used the movie to lend his SNL friend a helping hand. But all things considered, it was a serious detour.
Following his stint in rehab, Chris flew to Hollywood in January of 1996 and started production on the film. He stayed clean throughout the shoot, determined not to let the relapse derail his three years of hard-fought sobriety. But the change in him was obvious to everyone on the set. His anxiety was rapidly eclipsing his boisterous amiability, and the strength and serenity he’d possessed just a few weeks before had all but vanished.
ROB LOWE, costar, Tommy Boy:
At that point, Chris could have done almost anything, career-wise, and for him to do a movie where he offered himself up as “the fat guy” I felt was a recipe for psychic disaster. I don’t want to sound overly dramatic by saying that that movie killed him, but the decision to do it was Chris surrendering a creative part of himself. He was raising the white flag to easy Hollywood mediocrity. I know that he hated himself for saying yes.
BRAD JANKEL, producer:
I used to work at a company called Motion Picture Corporation of America. We’d had some success with the Farrelly brothers. We did Dumb & Dumber and Kingpin. We did Bio-Dome with Pauly Shore. Then we got ahold of Beverly Hills Ninja. If I recall properly, Dana Carvey had been attached to it at one point, and Chris held Dana in such high regard that he was open to looking at the script. Chris really was the first guy that we went to. We offered him a ton of money.
TED DONDANVILLE:
One day while we were filming Black Sheep, Chris’s agents showed up. Agents always stand out because they’re the only ones in L.A. who wear dark suits. They were really happy, really up. They came rushing in and met Chris in the trailer. Beverly Hills Ninja was a movie that he had rejected a number of times. “No, thanks. Pass.” But this time the script came in with an offer for $6 million, which at the time was like a three hundred percent increase in what Chris was making. All of a sudden it was like, “Eh, maybe the script isn’t so bad after all. . . .”
BERNIE BRILLSTEIN:
Marc Gurvitz and I, we told him not to do Ninja. It was about a fat guy in tights. Let’s face it, who wants to see Chris like that? It was an embarrassing film. But the offer was $6 million, which even then was a lot of money. Chris called up and said, “I have to do it. My dad says I can’t turn down that kind of money.”
DOUG ROBINSON:
After his father weighed in, there wasn’t much of a conversation. I remember sitting with Chris in his trailer at Paramount, telling him that there would be other big paydays down the road. It was one of those situations where you want to advise your client not to do it. But you could see that as soon as you told him the amount of money involved, the ship had sailed.
LORNE MICHAELS:
It was a bad decision in that no one was telling the truth and people had all kinds of different agendas. There are so many rationalizations: “It’ll get your price up.” “It’s important to keep working.” “Not every movie’s a masterpiece.” But Chris was an incredibly sensitive kid. No matter what he did, he always had some kind of hope for pride in his work, and so for Chris to do something that empty just didn’t feel right.
LORRI BAGLEY:
It was fear. He took that movie out of fear. Chris’s only goal in life was to be on Saturday Night Live, and after that was over he would always say, “I never imagined myself being a film actor.” And I’d think, oh shit, he’s out of his comfort zone. Movies and Hollywood and all that are out of his comfort zone, and things are going to get difficult.
KEVIN FARLEY:
Chris loved football, and he loved being part of a team. Saturday Night Live, Second City, those are team sports. Chris was competitive. He wanted to win, but he wanted the whole team to win. Winning doesn’t mean anything if you can’t share it with someone.
When you’re a movie star, all the pressure is on you as an individual. But if you put too much pressure on one player, you’re not going to win ball games. On a film, clearly one guy is making the most money, and they’re banking on him, win or lose. His career is on the line. In Hollywood, you’re kind of alone.
TED DONDANVILLE:
The crew used to joke that when the Beverly Hills Ninja action figures came out, the Haru figure would come with its own Ted figure. Unlike most personal assistants, I was never out running errands and taking care of other things. Chris always wanted me to delegate that stuff to other people so I could stay, literally, right next to him all the time. We’d work all day and he’d be like, “No, c’mon. I’m taking you to dinner.”
On that movie he was hung out to dry. That was a Chris Farley movie from start to finish. Except for those few Chris Rock scenes, every scene hinged on him.
BRAD JANKEL:
Farley wanted Chris Rock in the movie. He was very adamant about that. It was almost to the point where he wouldn’t do the film if Rock wasn’t involved. I think it was a bit of a life raft for him. I distinctly remember that Chris’s best days on the set were the days that Rock was there.
Whatever reservations Chris may have had, to me he was just so appreciative, and grateful, and he really felt a personal responsibility that came with taking that much money. I had never experienced that with an actor before. He was so excited that we were hiring him, let along paying him so much, that during shooting he’d often say to me, “God, I hope I’m doing okay. Are you guys happy?”
And that kind of raised the bar for us. After he’d say those things to me, I’d walk away going, “Oh jeez, I hope I’m gonna deliver for him.”
Chris also helped develop the script. When we went into Ninja, we wanted it to be a really broad, adult movie, and, to his credit, Chris really took it more in the direction of being a movie for kids and families. That’s what he wanted. And thank God he did. It wasn’t a huge success, but kids loved it. They really turned out, and that’s where the movie made its money.
JASON DAVIS, costar:
The producer of Beverly Hills Ninja had done a movie that I was in, and I got cut out of that one. But he said I’d be perfect for this. I remember going to audition for it. I had to run into a wall and fall down. That was the audition. When they said I had the part, I got real excited. I got to play Chris Farley as a little kid. At the time, what could have been better? He was one of my heroes.
For my big scene, I was supposed to flip a stick around and accidentally hit this kid on the head. The director said, “You can hit him as hard as you want, because he has padding.”
So we do the scene. We’re twirling the sticks around, and I smack him on the head, only not on the part where he has padding. The kid goes down for the count. I just remember turning my head over to the right, looking at the director and seeing Chris going “Oh, fuck” and laughing his head off. He had this expression like, yup, he’s just like me.
TED DONDANVILLE:
The role of the young Chris Farley is supposed to be this shitty little ninja, right? Well, Jason Davis literally was a shitty ninja. He was such a bad athlete and such a spastic little kid that it was funny to see him play this idiot. Chris saw this kid who was just a mess, and that amused him.
KEVIN FARLEY:
Chris liked that kid a lot. He always used to say, “That kid reminds me of me when I was little.” Jason was kind of an out-of-control little guy. He’d go up and talk to anybody. Since Jason looked up to Chris so much, Chris kind of took him under his wing whenever he was around.
JASON DAVIS:
For the three days I got to work on the movie, I got to hang out with Chris a lot. Then, about a week later, he called me and said, “Hey, we should go out to lunch.”
I thought, wow, that’s really awesome. So we went out to lunch, and from then on we just really clicked. We’d hang out. We’d go and do stuff together.
What I loved about Chris was that he was the only person who ever understood me. For a period of time, if I needed to count on anyone, it was Chris. I was like eleven or twelve, and my mom wanted to send me away to fat camp. I was trying every which way to get out of it. I was praying for Chris to kidnap me and hold me for ransom so I wouldn’t have to go. But Chris would talk to me about being a kid with a weight problem, and he really helped me a lot. I could call him and say, “My mom’s being a bitch. I’m pissed off. I want to run away. I hate it here. What should I do?”
And he’d be like, “Relax. You’re obviously going through denial. Your mother loves you. Don’t run away. Besides, you’d have to stop at McDonald’s every other block just to survive.”
NANCY DAVIS, Jason Davis’s mother:
Jason saw a side of Chris that maybe a lot of other people didn’t see. Chris understood what he was going through, and touched Jason in this amazing way. He really did. When Jason was filming Beverly Hills Ninja with Chris, he was going through a hard time in his life. His father and I were getting divorced, and Jason had some similar issues with Chris, some weight issues, really deep father issues, and maybe Chris saw that in Jason. It was like he could just sense it, and he really made a point of helping him to deal with it. People are so afraid to talk about what’s bothering them, and Chris really got him to open up about it. Jason’s always been quirky and different, and Chris gave him the strength to think that was okay.
TED DONDANVILLE:
When I first started working for Chris, he’d been sober for about two and a half years. He was doing really well. He was very comfortable in his sobriety, and very strong. After that first relapse, he was very different. It changed him. He was still sober most of the time, but it was not the same strength and confidence you saw before. He’d be on edge about it. He used to never care if I drank around him. Now, if he found out I’d been out drinking, he’d get angry. So after that first relapse, there was a change. After the second, third, and fourth, they were all kind of the same.
BRAD JANKEL:
It was no secret that he was battling addiction. In preproduction he had it down. He didn’t talk about it. He didn’t need to talk about it. But then, during filming, he would struggle at times. And by struggle I mean that his actions were a little more overt. He would talk about his need to stay sober. There were a few more mood swings, but his commitment stayed the same. You could tell he was just trying to buckle down and get through it. I appreciated that he was open about it, and we all tried to support him.
TED DONDANVILLE:
The whole time we were shooting Ninja, there were no problems whatsoever. He had the first relapse before shooting, and then the second relapse came after—idle time.
BRAD JANKEL:
When he came back for reshoots, he was a different person. I wasn’t there that day, but I got calls about all the problems. They couldn’t make the film match. He’d put on weight, and he looked horrible. He wasn’t the same old Chris. They kind of had to shoot around him different ways.
When we wrapped shooting, I could sense that he was starting to feel that the movie wouldn’t turn out how he’d hoped. Chris went into it thinking he was making a good, earnest film for kids, but in the end he wasn’t proud of it the way he was about other movies.
BERNIE BRILLSTEIN:
After the first screening of Ninja, I took Chris into the bathroom and he just cried on my shoulder. Cried and cried. It was one of the saddest things I’ve ever been through.
BRAD JANKEL:
I was disappointed, too. It didn’t turn out as I had hoped. Thank God it played with the kids, because it missed with the older crowd. Not everything turns out the way you want; some things fail. I mean, you’re talking to the guy who produced Bio-Dome.
There’s a reason they give the Best Picture Oscar to the producer, because it’s a collaborative effort and the producer is responsible for bringing all those collaborators together. But Chris felt like the whole thing was his failure, and it wasn’t.
Principal photography on Beverly Hills Ninja wrapped in March of 1996. Without the incentive to stay clean for work, Chris relapsed a second time and returned to Hazelden in Minnesota. Other than the reshoots on Ninja, he spent the spring and early summer in Chicago, passing time with friends and family and working his twelve-step program. It was a frustrating time. Chris would maintain his sobriety for six weeks, two months at a stretch, then head angrily back to the starting line and begin again. It was not easy, but no one could say that Chris was not trying in earnest.
In May, he returned to Marquette to receive the speech department’s Distinguished Young Alumnus Award, an honor of which he was exceedingly proud. Then, in June, he joined David Spade at the MTV Movie Awards to accept the Best On-screen Duo award for Tommy Boy.
Chris went back to work that August, taking the lead role in Edwards & Hunt, a satirical spoof of Lewis and Clark’s historic journey to find an overland route to the Pacific Ocean. Before the film’s eventual release, the studio’s marketing team found cause to change its name, and it has gone down in history as Almost Heroes.
Chris had been cast in the role of Bartholomew Hunt, master tracker and woodsman. Spinal Tap veteran Christopher Guest signed on to direct. The producers set about assembling a comedy ensemble to flesh out the exploring party, including Eugene Levy and Bokeem Woodbine. Several actors were considered for the lead role opposite Chris, and the part ultimately went to Friends star Matthew Perry.
Beverly Hills Ninja had been a bad choice, and Black Sheep was no choice at all, but at the time Edwards & Hunt was a good bet. On paper, the script recalled the absurdity of classic Mel Brooks, and it was widely thought to be one of the funniest unproduced scripts in Hollywood. As the cast and crew began shooting in the forests and small towns of northern California, everyone believed, somewhat prematurely, they had a bona fide hit in the works.
MARK NUTTER, screenwriter:
Tom Wolfe and I were working on a sitcom with our third partner, Boyd Hale. One Sunday, we decided to skip a trip to Anaheim to watch the L.A. Rams—it was raining—and had some beers at a bar in Venice instead. Boyd came up with the original concept of a Lewis and Clark comedy; the ideas flowed freely from there, and we wrote the script in a couple months. Our agent Rob Carlson also represented Steve Oedekerk, who had written for Jim Carrey, and with Steve’s help the script made the rounds.
TOM WOLFE, screenwriter:
Steve was so hot at the time, because of his stuff with Jim Carrey, that Edwards & Hunt became a hot script. Turner Pictures ended up buying it. I don’t remember exactly when Farley came on board, but I know he was first. For the other lead, we wanted Hugh Laurie, who’s now the star of Housebut at the time was not well known. Turner wanted someone far more famous. I remember one of the executives saying, “Yeah, we could get a bunch of great actors and make a great little movie . . . but then what?”
And of course, from her way of looking at it, she was right. It would be much harder to market a “little” film with “unknown” actors. For a time Hugh Grant was interested, but he bowed out. I remember when Denise Di Novi brought up Matthew Perry for the first time. Being the self-loathing TV writers we were, we weren’t that thrilled with a TV actor being the costar. But we were the writers, and this was our first film. The caterer had more power than we did.
DENISE DI NOVI, producer:
The script was brilliant. We even hired Christopher Guest to direct it. I’ve thought so many times about what went wrong. I always like to say I have the distinction of making the only unsuccessful Christopher Guest movie.
You never know with movies. It’s kind of like alchemy; the chemistry just didn’t work. It had all the right actors. It had a great director, a great script. But I think the tone of the comedy was very odd. It almost read better than it played. It wanted to be a quirky, British, Black Adder type of comedy, and here we had Chris Farley and Matthew Perry. It was just a weird combination.
TOM WOLFE:
We thought Chris Guest would bring the right sensibility to the script, but then the notes about changes came from the studio. They saw it from the beginning as a buddy comedy between Edwards and Hunt, and less like the ensemble comedy we saw it as. In one meeting, someone from Turner called Lethal Weapon “the greatest buddy film ever made,” and I thought, oh shit, this is not a good sign.
TED DONDANVILLE:
They had to trim fat, and so they trimmed a lot of the funny stuff going on around Chris, which, ironically, would have helped Chris’s performance. The movie would have been funnier with all the things the peripheral characters had to do, but of course those are the first to go; you have to build a movie around “the star.” They cut the ensemble scenes first, Matthew Perry’s second, and Chris’s never.
BOKEEM WOODBINE, costar:
It was one of those things where they should have left well enough alone. Stuff was getting cut, and it was kind of bizarre. We shot the ending one way, and it was a pretty cool ending. Then they totally reshot the ending without my character there. That kind of shit happens sometimes. You don’t get your feelings hurt, but the thing is, it affected the film, because it wasn’t linear. At one point we’re all together, fighting as this band against these conquistador bastards, and then in the next scene they all meet up and regroup—except for me, and it’s like, “What happened to the brother?”
TED DONDANVILLE:
The movie came out after Chris died and when Matthew Perry had gone into rehab, and so a lot of the speculation was that drugs were to blame for the movie’s failure, but that wasn’t true.
The first weekend of filming, we were shooting in Redding, California, and he was drinking then. Denise Di Novi and the other producers, they found out about it, realized it was a major problem, and even threatened to shut down production. Chris thought he’d really blown it, that this time the personal shit had hit the professional fan.
So Chris had a sobriety bodyguard for the rest of the film, somebody who stayed with him the whole time. With that, Chris stayed pretty much okay for the rest of the shoot. As always, it was the work that kept him going.
DENISE DI NOVI:
That was the only incident. We traveled around a lot on this shoot, and whatever city we were in I would try and find a sponsor and a meeting for him to go to. I have to say it made me gain a lot of respect for people in recovery. No matter what teeny-tiny town we were in, within a couple of hours somebody would show up.
He also went to church every Sunday. No matter where we were on the road, he would find a church nearby and go. He got upset one week when we had to shoot on a Sunday. So instead of going to mass, he had a priest come from his church in Santa Monica and say mass for him on the set.
He was great with my kids. I remember I was sitting on the set one day with my son, who was about four and a half. We were playing a game for about a half an hour, and Chris was just watching us, staring. He said, “Boy, your son is so lucky to have you. I bet he’s going to grow up to be a really great person.”
And there was just such a sadness in that moment. He had a really big heart, but there was a melancholy there. I never really understood where it came from.
TED DONDANVILLE:
During Edwards & Hunt, this girl from the Make-A-Wish Foundation who was dying of AIDS wanted to meet Matthew Perry. She showed up on the set, and everyone doted on her. But Chris noticed she had a brother off to the side, whom everyone was ignoring, and who had probably been ignored for a while, what with his sister taking up all the attention. Chris went and brought the brother into his trailer and goofed around with him and just gave him the greatest day of his life. And it was Chris who instigated it. It wasn’t the kid coming over and asking to meet him. The boy ended up having a better Make-A-Wish day than his sister did, and he hadn’t even made a wish.
LORRI BAGLEY:
If you even mentioned that, say, your friend’s mother had died, tears would start to well up in Chris’s eyes. He had such a big heart, and when you have a heart that big, you have to find ways to protect yourself. People who didn’t know Chris that well just thought he was the most naïve little kid—and he was—but he knew that he was, and he knew how to use it. He knew exactly how to push your buttons, how to hurt your feelings, how to get you to feel sorry for him. Chris even said to me, “I know how to play people’s games.” And he did. He was always a hundred percent aware of what was going on and what he was doing.
ERIC NEWMAN:
He’d play dumb with people, but then later he’d recount something from their conversations that let you know he knew exactly what was going on. “The Chris Farley Show” character, the guy who asks the dumb questions, that was the guy he could become when he wanted to. It was a defense mechanism. It protected him, and it made people feel better. I remember we were sitting once in Toronto with Jim Carrey. Carrey’s father had just died, and Chris sat down with him and kind of took on this obsequious role. At the time I didn’t really think much of it, but looking back, he did it to put Jim Carrey at ease, and Carrey is, by all accounts, a pretty uncomfortable guy out in the world.
TED DONDANVILLE:
He had a very high psychological intelligence. Anything that had to be learned in a book he probably shied away from, but he understood people very, very well.
Bob Timmons was a professional sobriety guy. He’s the guy who would send out bodyguards to sit with Chris on the movie set. These “sober companions” got paid good money to essentially sit around the set and do nothing. They certainly got paid more than I did. Chris resented that, and he went through those guys like nothing. He would break them down, mentally. It was like the movie Jeremiah Johnson, where they only send out one guy at a time to try and kill Robert Redford, until he kills so many of them that they have to have respect for him.
On Edwards & Hunt there was a thief on the set who’d made off with some production equipment, and the producers were trying to figure out who’d done it. Gary was Chris’s new sobriety watcher, and the producers came around after the theft, asking Chris, “How well do you know Gary?”
“Hmm,” Chris shrugged, “not very.”
Things got a little uncomfortable for Gary after that. People stopped talking to him. Then a couple weeks later he left, never really knowing why. Then they sent out another guy. That’s basically how it went. Chris would treat these guys like a new best friend, and then a few weeks later— either passively, aggressively, or passive-aggressively—they’d be gone, not really understanding why it didn’t work out.
I don’t know that those people helped so much. Ultimately, all those professional celebrity recovery people have their own issues and their own agendas.
ERIC NEWMAN:
Maybe it’s a recovery thing, but Chris attracted loonies.
JILLIAN SEELY:
There are some real wackos out in L.A., a lot of really disgusting people. There was one guy who wanted to be Chris’s sponsor, but he charged $125 an hour, and this was back in 1996. I’d never heard of anything like that. You’re someone’s sponsor, but you charge them by the hour? What the fuck?
KEVIN FARLEY:
There’s this whole community of recovery “professionals” who charge you money to watch you. They’ll escort you to Hazelden and charge you three grand just for riding on a plane. And that really breaks with tradition. You’re not supposed to take money for anything you do to help someone in recovery, and, if you do, it’s only because those folks have that money to give.
If you go back to the way it all started, with Bill W. and Dr. Bob, they would go and visit hospitals and they would just find drunks, bring them to meetings and start talking to them. They never charged them money for it. You can make the argument that it costs $13,000 to spend a few weeks at such-and-such facility because they’ve got staff costs and real estate to keep up. But the whole idea of recovery is that it’s free. I don’t think it does any of these stars any good to try and deal with the problem inside that bubble. The whole idea is to break yourself down and destroy this illusion you have that you can handle the booze again. You go to a Chicago meeting, or a Madison meeting, and you get humbled pretty quickly.
JOHN FARLEY:
Chris needed a psychologist, not a guy punching a clock to sit around with him. I don’t know how much Chris spent on them, but those guys charge exorbitant amounts of money. Jillian, Tim O’Malley, those guys didn’t charge him anything, and they were the ones who were really helping him. But I think also the studios were stipulating that those guys be around; otherwise Chris couldn’t get insured.
BOKEEM WOODBINE:
I saw those bodyguards hanging around Chris, but they were so cool about their shit that I didn’t see them for what they were for the longest time. I didn’t realize that Chris was going through the struggles he was having.
I remember one Friday we had wrapped for the week, and we were in somebody’s trailer. I had a six-pack of Corona, and I was ready for the weekend. Chris had this trick where he knew how to open up a bottle with a cigarette lighter. I held up a beer and said, “Hey, Chris, could you open this for me?”
Everyone just stared at me. Chris said sure. He went to open it, and his hand was shaking. I thought he was making a joke, you know, being Chris. So I just started laughing, saying, “Look at this guy. He’s hilarious.” And everyone was looking at me like, what the fuck is wrong with you? And I wasn’t getting it. It all went right over my head.
Well, about the third beer, Chris obliged me and opened it, but his hands were still shaking terribly. Then he left to go take a walk, smoke a cigarette or something, and Matthew Perry was like, “Bokeem, what the hell’s wrong with you?”
“What do you mean?” I said.
“Chris is an alcoholic. He’s having a hard time right now, and you’re giving him fucking beer to open?”
“Shit, nobody sent me the memo. I didn’t know.”
Of course, if I had known, I never would have even brought the beer around. But I was impressed by his dedication. I got the definite vibe that he was serious about not screwing up, and it seemed like his mental attitude was getting progressively healthier throughout the shoot. He was more and more upbeat every day we were working.
TED DONDANVILLE:
After Edwards & Hunt, when we weren’t working, Chris would deliberately do things like going to health resorts or weight-loss clinics, places where he’d be safe and preoccupied with staying in shape. That year was definitely more up than down, and the downs were not so terrible. The relapses were smaller. He’d have a couple drinks, kick himself over it, talk it out, and be right back at a meeting the next day.
KEVIN FARLEY:
Chris was fighting it like crazy. He’d put together two, three months, and you’d think, okay, he’s sober again. Then something would trigger it.
TODD GREEN:
Chris had been in L.A. full-time, so that Christmas I hadn’t seen him in probably six or seven months. We all got together at some restaurant in Madison. At one point we kind of broke away and had our own little conversation, and Chris said, “Greenie, man, we’re almost thirty-three years old and we’re not married. God, that’s weird.” He just seemed really anxious.
I said, “Chris, what’s wrong?”
“I just . . . I don’t know. I’m playing these parts where I’m just the funny guy, and I’d like to do some more serious stuff.”
I told him, “Why don’t you come back to New York and do something onstage, Broadway or off Broadway?”
He really liked the idea. He seemed to take it seriously. Then we agreed that if the Packers went to the Super Bowl we would get together there, since we’d both be going anyway. He was doing great, and we were all so proud of him. I walked away from that conversation thinking, Chris is back. We’ve got him back for good.
TIM O’MALLEY, cast member, Second City:
When Chris was at a weight-loss camp that November, he started to put together some time again. I met up with him again sometime that winter. I had about a year sober by that point. After Chris had left Second City, I’d stayed in Chicago, and my addiction just got worse. Eventually, when my brothers wouldn’t come and bail me out of jail anymore, I cleaned up. Chris called me, and we started to go to meetings.
On January 20, 1997, we hooked up at a party at the Hancock for a recovery club that’s here in Chicago. He had ninety-nine days. He was so happy, happiest I’d ever seen him. I watched him do backflips. He was doing actual backflips in the room. He was jumping and flipping and yelling, “I did it, Tim! Ninety-nine days! I did it! I did it!”
I was so thrilled for him that day. I was so fucking happy that I was crying.
He said, “I’m going to be here in Chicago for a while. If I keep checking in with you, will you help me?”
I took it as a request for sponsorship. He didn’t specifically ask me to sponsor him or spell it out like that, but I could tell he wanted help. So for a few weeks he’d call me, I’d pick him up and take him to meetings. He started to get it again. He was happy and it was fun and we could crack jokes and make fun of each other just like we used to.
And then he stopped calling.