CHAPTER 13
JOHN FARLEY:
Chris said to me once, “You know what my dream is, Johnny?”
“What?” I said, thinking this was going to be some odd, Alice in Wonderland, through-the-rabbit-hole kind of thing. “What’s your dream?”
“Here’s what it is," he said. “It’s me and Dad. We’re both really skinny, and we’re the coolest guys at the party, doing backflips all over the place and dancing up a storm to ‘Twisting the Night Away.’ That would be really cool."
On January 11, 1997, Beverly Hills Ninja opened in theaters nationwide. Despite a unanimous critical thumping, it earned over $12 million on its first outing, topping the weekly box office. Following Tommy Boy and Black Sheep, it was Chris’s third-straight number-one film.
That January also marked Chris’s third-straight month of sobriety. After staying clean during the principal photography of Edwards & Hunt, he’d relapsed again in September and, with varying degrees of failure, cycled through three separate rehab facilities over the next two months. Then, in late October, Chris showed definite signs of improvement. When he celebrated his ninety-ninth day of sobriety in Chicago with Tim O’Malley, there was cause for hope.
But Chris’s confidence was on the wane. In New Orleans, Todd Green was expecting to meet Chris at the Super Bowl to watch the Green Bay Packers take on the New England Patriots. When Chris didn’t show, Todd called the Farley home in Madison, only to be told that the Super Bowl “wouldn’t be good for Chris right now.” Chris knew all too well what New Orleans’s French Quarter would look like after a Packers win (or, for that matter, a Packers loss). He had chosen to watch the game at the home of a friend instead.
Despite making money, Beverly Hills Ninja was largely an embarrassment. It bombed with critics and disappointed even hard-core fans. Chris found himself at a professional crossroads. Hollywood had typecast him as the clown, and he had been fully complicit in that, playing the part whenever he was called upon to do so. But fatty could only fall down so many times. Fortunately, a project had arrived with the potential to take Chris in a new direction. Earlier that year, Bernie Brillstein had brought Chris together with screenwriter and playwright David Mamet, and together they’d agreed to collaborate on Chris’s first dramatic film: a biopic of Fatty Arbuckle.
Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle was a silent-film star bigger in his day than Charlie Chaplin. He was on the receiving end of Hollywood’s first-ever million-dollar contract. He was also on the losing end of Hollywood’s first-ever sex scandal, being wrongly accused of sexually assaulting and fatally wounding a young woman. Arbuckle watched his career implode even as his innocence was proven in court. Brillstein was drawn to the story for its showbiz history and intrigue. Chris was drawn to it for the man himself. Arbuckle was a brilliant physical comedian who loathed his extra girth and outsized persona, despite having made it his professional stock-in-trade. After years of being made to play the crazy fat guy, Chris was being asked to play the guy behind the crazy fat guy. He was being asked to play himself, a role he rarely performed for anyone. Much like Jackie Gleason’s turn as Minnesota Fats in The Hustler, this was the role that would have fundamentally altered the course of Chris’s career.
With the Arbuckle biopic ahead of him and ninety-nine days behind him, Chris was in good spirits. On the first weekend in March, the U.S. Comedy Arts Festival in Aspen, Colorado, was hosting a reunion of Saturday Night Live cast members, hosts, and writers. Several dozen stars from the show’s history attended, from founding fathers Chevy Chase and Steve Martin to freshmen Molly Shannon and Cheri Oteri. For Chris to share that stage was an honor beyond anything he could have imagined growing up. It should have been one of the highlights of his career. It wasn’t.
JOHN FARLEY:
I don’t know what the hell happened. I remember everything had been fine in Chicago, but on the flight to Aspen he was acting strange. He may have relapsed that morning, or the night before. I just remember sitting on the plane, thinking, oh no.
CONAN O’BRIEN, writer, SNL:
When we were in Aspen, you could tell that the trolley was barely making it around the curves.
KEVIN FARLEY:
When I arrived he was already well into it, drinking and doing coke. From there it was just a total disaster. Spade really looked after him that weekend.
DAVID SPADE:
I went to meet him in his room to go to dinner with Lorne, and when I got to him he was already so messed up. We walked into the restaurant, and it wasn’t just Lorne. It was Lorne, Steve Martin, Dan Aykroyd, Chevy Chase, and Bernie Brillstein, all these people that Chris looked up to at this really nice, formal dinner. I said, real quick, “Hey, Chris, come over to the bathroom. I gotta tell you something.” And I took him into the kitchen, out the back door into the alley, and I said, “We’re getting the fuck out of here. You can’t sit with these people in this condition.”
These strangers showed up, and he started drinking with them. I tried to stay with him, but eventually I just had to go to bed. I was at lunch the next day, and he walked in. He was with the same people and obviously hadn’t gone to bed. They were all wired, and Chris’s eyes were rolling back. He said, “Davy. Davy, please stay with me. Don’t leave me with these people.”
JOHN FARLEY:
One day we had lunch at the restaurant on the top of the mountain. While we were eating, Chris started crying, saying, “I can’t stop. I just can’t stop.” He was crying his eyes out right in the restaurant. Chris wore his heart on his sleeve; he didn’t care one bit if he was crying in public, but people were starting to recognize him. We were like, okay, we’ve got to get Chris Farley off this mountain right now.
BERNIE BRILLSTEIN:
During the reunion, Chris was out onstage with about forty people from SNL. They were just telling stories, but Chris was crazed. I thought he was going to have a heart attack onstage. Finally, Dana Carvey quietly took him off.
CHEVY CHASE, original cast member, Saturday Night Live:
I read him the riot act that weekend. Everybody did. Chris was drunk and stoned and, on top of that, way overweight. I sat with him and I said, “Look, you’re not John Belushi. And when you overdose or kill yourself, you will not have the same acclaim that John did. You don’t have the record of accomplishment that he had. You don’t have the background that he had. And you don’t have the same cultural status that he had. You haven’t had the chance to get that far, and you’re already screwing yourself up.”
He kept saying, “I’m just trying to level out.”
That’s what he said he was doing with the drinking and the cocaine. It’s so silly. It means if you took nothing you’d be level already. Why take all this shit that’s killing you? And I told him that. I said, “I’ve experienced this. I’ve seen who dies. I’ve seen how far you think you can go, what you can take and what you can’t. You’re just going to end up being an overweight guy who could fall on his stomach and had one or two funny things in his career, but nothing that’s ever really stood out. You’ll be a blip in the New York Times obituaries page, and that’ll be it. Is that what you want?”
BOB ODENKIRK, cast member, Second City:
I was at a party for Mr. Show. Somebody came in and said, “Chris is out back. He wants to talk to you.”
There was this skanky deejay guy, the kind of guy who hangs out in these party vacation towns. He’d tried to pass David Cross some cocaine earlier, so I knew who he was. I go out back, and there’s a limo. I go to the door and knock and the window rolls down. There’s Chris, and he’s packed in there with girls and hangers-on and this fucking scumbag who was pushing coke around. Chris is bloated and red-faced; he hasn’t shaved. We talk for a few minutes, but there’s really nothing to say at those times.
I’d seen Chris fucked up before, but this time he looked as bad as anyone has ever looked. It was a horrible thing to watch. It’s one thing to shake your finger at a friend and say, “You’re gonna kill yourself.” It’s another thing to look at him and know he’s going to do it.
TOM FARLEY:
After Aspen, his managers said, “He’s going to rehab, and we’re serious this time. He’s going away for thirteen weeks and he’s not coming back— except to present at the Oscars.”
KEVIN FARLEY:
Brillstein-Grey sent him back to the lock-up down south, but they thought it would be okay for him to go to the Oscars, under supervision, and present an award.
TOM FARLEY:
This woman who ran the facility said the only way they’d let Chris go was if he was there with someone from treatment. The next thing you know, she’s the one who’s going with him, and she made him pay her extra for her time, buy her first-class airfare, buy her a dress, and do the same for her daughter to accompany her. I don’t think that helped. It just made him feel used.
KEVIN FARLEY:
I thought she was really unprofessional about the whole thing. It was her opportunity to go to the Oscars; she basked in the limelight for a little while. We were in the hotel, and she started rummaging through Chris’s gift basket, looking at all the high-end cosmetics they put in there. And Chris was like, “What the fuck are you doing? Put that shit down. Don’t you think I might want to give that to my mom?”
This woman just got way into it. “Ooh look, there’s George Clooney!” Who gives a fuck? Why don’t you do your job?
TOM FARLEY:
I didn’t get it. Chris’s managers were the ones busting him the hardest for fucking up at Aspen, and then two weeks later they were the same ones lobbying for him to come back and present at the Oscars. It was a money thing. The Oscars are exposure, and exposure means money. I guess they thought Chris needed it to help his career.
TOM ARNOLD:
Chris had a fear that his movies were starting to suck, and, you know, I know what that fear is like. But there’s always options if you’re talented.
BERNIE BRILLSTEIN:
A few months earlier, I’d taken him to New York to meet with David Mamet about the Fatty Arbuckle story. That story has always fascinated me, only because Arbuckle was innocent. Chris came to the meeting at a little restaurant down in the Village, and he was the good Chris, the well-behaved Chris, because he couldn’t believe that David Mamet even wanted to meet him. Mamet loved him. It was a great meeting. He said yes before we got up from the table, and he wrote it for Chris. To this day I know that it would have changed his career.
TOM FARLEY:
As soon as he heard little bits and pieces about Arbuckle’s life, he said, “This is me.” It was the whole idea that nobody understands the real person underneath. “I’m going to tell them about the real Fatty Arbuckle, and maybe they’ll understand the real Chris Farley.”
ERICH "MANCOW” MULLER, friend:
Chris had all these pictures of clowns in his hallway. He said that they frightened and fascinated him, and that he found them sad. When he was drinking he would always talk like Burl Ives and sing old Burl Ives songs. He’d go, “A little, bitty tear let me down, spoiled my act as a clown.” He’d sing that over and over and over.
FR. TOM GANNON, S.J., friend:
He felt his career was in trouble, and not just because of the drugs. The fatty-falls-down humor was beginning to take a toll. Sometime that year, he told me, “I can’t keep this up. I can’t keep falling down and walking into walls.” But people wanted him to keep doing the same thing, because it assured them financial success.
BOB WEISS, producer, Tommy Boy:
Chris had an idea of reinventing himself in a certain way that didn’t take into account very real forces in this industry, forces that can be tidal in nature.
FRED WOLF:
By that point, people were coming at Chris from every angle. They were trying to hire me in the hopes that they might make a deal with him. We went to dinner one night in New York, and he was telling me that he wanted to do movies like Nothing in Common, the Tom Hanks/Jackie Gleason movie. I was absolutely convinced that that was what he could do. We started throwing around some ideas, and we kept getting interrupted by fans coming up and saying, “Chris, I love you! You’re so funny.”
And then as they would walk away, Chris would sigh and say, “But that’s all they want.”
So we kept trying to have this very serious conversation about his career, but the fans just kept coming and coming and asking for lines from SNL or bits from Tommy Boy. They wouldn’t leave him alone.
FR. TOM GANNON:
One night we were at Gibson’s. People pretty much left him alone that night. But one couple came up and thanked him for his work and told him how much they loved him. Then they walked away and he turned to me and said, “They don’t really love me. If they knew me, they wouldn’t love me at all.”
I said, “That’s not true, Chris. People do love you. They don’t love you the same way I do, or your family does, but they’re sincere. You bring a lot of happiness into their lives.”
He got a lot of that kind of attention, but he didn’t get any nourishment from it, and so he felt he needed more of it all the time.
LORRI BAGLEY:
Chris would go to premieres and goof off on the red carpet, but then he’d complain that the business wouldn’t take him seriously. I told him, “Chris, when you stop playing the clown, they’ll stop treating you like the clown. They’ll take you seriously when you take yourself seriously.”
PETER SEGAL, director, Tommy Boy:
There were bidding wars for Chris on multiple projects, but most of them were not that good. He’d come to me with these scripts, and I’d turn them down. I kept saying, “No, Chris. That’s not a good one for you or for me.”
So there was a tension between us, because he thought I didn’t want to work with him anymore. There was a long time when he wouldn’t return my phone calls, and so I sat down and wrote him a long letter. I told him the reason I was turning these projects down was because I believed his potential was so much greater. And I think he realized it, too. He eventually called me back to thank me for the letter.
But I really meant what I’d said. I thought he could win an Oscar one day. I know people might think I’m crazy saying that, looking at his brief career, but I really believed in his talent. It was way beyond what he was showing.
BRIAN DENNEHY, costar, Tommy Boy:
Myself, I never understood why you’d want to be the twentieth-best dramatic actor in the movie business when you were already the best comedian in the movie business. But there is this impulse that comedians have to do serious work.
Interestingly enough, I think with the right part and the right director Chris could have done it. There was a sadness and a vulnerability and a fear that existed in his face and in his eyes. Jackie Gleason had it, a sense that “the world can never take away the pain that I feel, pain that I know that I have, but that I don’t fully understand.” You can see a little bit of it in Tommy Boy, but he hadn’t even really begun to explore it.
There are two ways to act, and some people are good enough to do both. One is to erect this very complicated, layered character around you in order to hide behind it, in order to disguise and protect yourself. It’s a kind of architecture. You’re creating a building. It may be a very impressive building, but it’s still a fucking building.
The other way to act is to absolutely strip away everything that keeps you and your soul and your mind from the audience. You rip it away and say, “How much more of myself can I expose to help the audience understand this character?” It’s more difficult, and it’s more profound, because, ultimately, the real challenge of art is to understand more about yourself. And I think Chris could have done it. I think he would have done it, had he lived. But most comedians, in fact most actors, are not capable of that.
With Tommy Boy, Black Sheep, and Beverly Hills Ninja, Chris had joined the ranks of elite Hollywood stars who could “open” a film—a certain core audience could be counted on to turn out for any Chris Farley movie. Even if Chris wasn’t thrilled with the reigning definition of “a Chris Farley movie,” it was an enviable place to be, and a strong place from which to make a bold, smart career move.
But that spring, Chris’s dance card was strangely empty. As a rule, studios take out short-term insurance policies on their lead actors to cover any possible interruptions in the production process. Many of those insurers were refusing to underwrite Chris’s films until he could once again prove his dependability. And so, while the Arbuckle project plodded along at the glacial pace of most Hollywood development deals, Chris was having trouble getting even a typical Chris Farley movie off the ground.
In this troubled time one good project did come his way, a voice-over gig for a little animated movie called Shrek. In 1997, computer-animated movies were still in their infancy—Pixar’s trendsetting Toy Story had opened only eighteen months before—and so there was little reason to believe that this fun sideline project would go on to spawn one of the most popular, highest-grossing film franchises of all time. Chris took it on almost as a lark.
Shrek was a popular children’s book by William Steig about an ornery yet good-hearted ogre who lives alone in the woods, cast out from the world. Jeffrey Katzenberg, head of DreamWorks Animation, had procured the film rights. Chris was his first choice to play the title role. According to everyone involved, Chris Farley’s Shrek was one of the funniest, most heartfelt performances he ever gave. Tragically, no one has ever heard it.
TERRY ROSSIO, screenwriter:
Chris was the number-one choice, and everyone was thrilled that he agreed to the project. For an animated feature his voice was perfect, very distinctive. Also, you know, Shrek kind of looked like Farley, or Farley looked like Shrek.
The recording sessions were essentially everybody in the booth rolling off our chairs onto the floor, laughing our asses off. I brought my daughter, who was twelve years old at the time, to one of the sessions at the Capitol Records building. It was her first time ever coming in with me to work, and she concluded I had the best job in the world, listening to funny people be funny.
ANDREW ADAMSON, director:
The character of Shrek is to some degree rebelling against his own vulnerabilities. And I think that’s probably a reason Katzenberg went to Chris, because there was an aspect of that in him, covering vulnerability in humor and keeping people at arm’s length. Within minutes of meeting Chris you saw his vulnerability. Sometimes he would switch on this very gruff persona, and you realized it was because he felt like he was exposing too much.
It didn’t make the final film, but at one stage there was a moment in the script where Shrek was walking along, singing “Feeling Groovy,” Simon and Garfunkel’s “Fifty-ninth Street Bridge” song. Chris was just so into it. When we were recording, I kind of got the impression that he wasn’t sure whether he was supposed to be doing a comedic take on the song or a sincere, heartfelt one. He was singing and putting himself out there in a way that was very touching. It made me see the longing in him to do something more genuine with his career. It made me feel bad, because we were in fact asking for a “funny” version. But that he was willing to give it to us, even though he felt so vulnerable about it, made it a very sad and touching moment.
TERRY ROSSIO:
We spoke about the essence or wellspring of Chris’s humor; much of it was the humor of discomfort. He would occupy a space of discomfort until it became funny. Shrek, in the Chris Farley version of the story, was unhappy at his place in the world, unhappy to be cast as the villain. So for me,
Chris’s comedic persona was key to the creation of the Shrek character— a guy who rejected the world because the world rejected him.
ANDREW ADAMSON:
After Chris died, we all had personal thoughts about whether we could use his voice track and find someone to impersonate him to finish the film. We definitely thought about whether that was the appropriate thing to do, but ultimately we felt that we weren’t far enough along in developing the story and the character. The animation process depends a lot on the actor. His death was quite devastating, both personally and to the process of creating the film. We spent almost a year banging our heads against the wall until Mike Myers was able to come on board. Chris’s Shrek and Mike’s Shrek are really two completely different characters, as much as Chris and Mike are two completely different people.
TERRY ROSSIO:
They’re both great in their own way. Mike created a very interesting character, a Shrek who has a sense of humor that’s not that good, but it makes him happy. Chris’s Shrek was born of frustration and self-doubt, an internal struggle between the certainty of a good heart and the insecurity of not understanding things.
ANDREW ADAMSON:
I always found Chris a very fun person to be around. Containing him in a recording booth was a great challenge, but he was a very down-to-earth guy on a certain level. We had an enjoyable relationship. The drug problem didn’t impact his work at all, and to be honest, I had no idea it was happening. Everything I’d seen indicated that he had overcome those demons. He was going through rehab at the time and was very disciplined about it. Any other impressions I had were thirdhand and after the fact. I really felt like he was on an upward spiral.
And Chris was—that week. But the next week he was back on a downward one, and who could say where he was going the week after that? By the time he finished voicing Shrek in early May, Chris’s ability to maintain his sobriety had all but vanished. His relapses started coming randomly, suddenly, and with alarming frequency.
One of Chris’s counselors described him as having the most severe addictive personality he’d ever seen—this in several decades of helping patients. As Chris surrendered his hold on sobriety, his compulsive overeating ran rampant as well. Chris had fought a constant battle with his weight since childhood. Those who knew him well knew it was the bane of his existence. Given the severe health risks of obesity, Chris was doing almost as much damage to himself with food as he was with drugs and alcohol.
After presenting at the Oscars on March 24, Chris had returned to rehab in Alabama, emerging sober to work on Shrek in April and early May. Following yet another relapse, he returned to the outpatient program at Hazelden Chicago on May 19. It accomplished little. June and July were spent in and mostly out of rehab, and by August the situation was catastrophic.
Chris’s relationship with Lorri Bagley, rocky and unstable in the best of times, was severely broken. It never ended, but the blowouts got bigger and more explosive, and the separations grew longer and longer. Friends who were active in Chris’s recovery, like Jillian Seely and Tim O’Malley, did their best to keep him on the straight and narrow, but their efforts were increasingly frustrated. Chris would either insulate himself from his friends in order to use, or insulate himself in order not to use. He had so removed himself from his usual social networks that many assumed he was simply off somewhere else, stone sober and hard at work. Chris had never let the trappings of fame and success put any distance between him and his loved ones. But addiction finally succeeded where fame could not.
ROBERT BARRY, friend, Edgewood High School:
Toward the end Chris would go hang out with these Board of Trade guys in Chicago. They had tons of money and wanted to hang with celebrities. When he was in Chicago, Chris didn’t call up Dan Healy or me or the Edgewood guys anymore. He’d call up those people. I never even visited his place in the Hancock.
FR. MATT FOLEY, friend:
For the last three years I had been living in Mexico, doing missionary work. I talked to Chris and his parents on a regular basis, but then Chris stopped returning my calls. One of the last times I saw him was on a trip to Chicago. We went to work out at a health club there by the John Hancock building. After that we were supposed to hang out all day, but he basically wanted to get rid of me. He didn’t want me around because I would have told him he was full of shit.
JOEL MURRAY, cast member, Second City:
The people who loved him didn’t want him to drink, so he couldn’t be with us anymore. I’d invite him over to barbecues and stuff out in L.A., and I could tell that he had a whole other thing going on. It wasn’t a celebrity, big-shot kind of thing; it was an “I gotta go do this stuff that I don’t want to tell you about” kind of thing. He was the worst liar in the world, so he’d just kind of be evasive. Next thing you know he’s hanging out with nefarious types who just want to wind up the comedy toy, and that’s never good.
DAVID SPADE:
There’s no shortage of those sorts of people. I’ve talked to Aykroyd about Belushi, and it’s the same experience. Friends you’ve known for three days aren’t friends I want to hang with.
I was working in TV, he was off doing his movies, and we’d just slowed down a little bit. It wasn’t Lorri. That was done with, but we’d been a little bit on the outs, and because of that I got a lot of shit toward the end about “Why weren’t you there for him?” But being that close, I dealt with it all the time. And in that situation, before the guy’s dead, he’s just kind of an asshole. Truth is, you get a junkie who’s wasted all the time and moody and angry and trying to knock you around, you say, “Okay, you go do that, and I’ll be over here.” I think that’s understandable.
TED DONDANVILLE:
Chris never had any animosity toward Spade at all; he had just respected Spade’s decision to walk away for a while. But after being all alone on Ninja and Edwards & Hunt, Chris started to realize how much he needed his friend. It was like Mick Jagger after those first two solo albums—maybe it was good to have Keith Richards around.
TOM FARLEY:
I always told Chris, “You love humor, but look around at the people you’re with when you’re doing these drugs. These people have no humor in their lives. You keep this up and you will end up surrounded by people who are not your friends.” And that’s exactly what happened.
NORM MacDONALD:
Sometimes you’d see him with prostitutes. That was mostly at the very end, like when he hosted SNL. The amazing thing was how well he treated them. He really fell for them. He’d take them to dinner and treat them so sweetly. He’d treat them equal to any other person at the table. He’d introduce them to you as his girlfriend.
TIM O’MALLEY:
Escorts and strippers are just part of the deal when you’re lonely and lost. It’s like phone sex, trying to reach out and talk to somebody. Every phone book has a hundred phone numbers in it; you can always dig up someone to spend time with you.
I went into his apartment one night, and he said, “Yeah, I relapsed last night. I had a pizza, and I figured since I’d relapsed on my OA program I’d have a bottle of scotch, and then I went to the Crazy Horse and I spent eleven grand.”
“Jesus, you were giving the girls five hundred a dance?”
“Yeah, how’d you know?”
“Because I know how it goes. You were trying to get some girl to come home with you by overtipping her, and those girls don’t want anything but more money. First of all,” I told him, “separate your food program from your alcohol problem. Food’s not going to kill you tonight.”
I hated the Overeaters Anonymous program for that, because if he relapsed on that he’d just go ahead and go the distance.
KEVIN FARLEY:
For Chris, by that point, every relapse meant going all the way. Some addicts will put a toe back in the water, but Chris would always dive back into the deep end. And that’s what happened when he went to Hawaii.
DAVID SPADE:
I was at the Mondrian in L.A., and Chris was there. He was doing an interview, and he had one of his sobriety bodyguards with him. It was kind of sad, because I hadn’t seen him in a while. He came over to my table— the bodyguard let him come over alone for a bit—he came over and he said, “Nobody cares about anything but Tommy Boy. Can we do another one? Can we do . . . something?”
“Of course. There’s always scripts they want us to do. I didn’t know if you wanted to do anything anymore.”
“We gotta do it, because that’s the only one that matters.”
“Okay,” I said. “Let’s find something.”
Then these two cute girls came over. They said, “Hey, come party with us. We’re in town with Spanish Playboy.” Or something ridiculous like that.
Chris said, “I can’t.”
“Oh, c’mon,” they said. “Just come up to our room for a bit.”
Chris looked at me. I said, “I’ll cover for you. I can buy you about five minutes.”
“Thanks, Davy.”
He took off, and then the bodyguard came over and said, “Where’s Chris?”
“He went to the bathroom.”
“Which bathroom?”
“There’s one in the hotel.”
“You fucked this.”
“Sorry.”
It was the wrong thing to do, I know. But we’d had a really nice moment together, and I liked that. It proved that we were still close, could still be friends, and I wanted to help him out. But then they couldn’t find Chris. He disappeared, and it just turned into chaos.
KEVIN FARLEY:
US magazine was doing a big feature article on him at the time, and Chris was spending his days with this reporter. Chris woke me up in the middle of the night and asked me if I wanted to come down and take a whirlpool with these girls he’d met from Playboy. He’d already relapsed and started drinking. I said no and went back to bed. I figured he’d play in the Jacuzzi and then go up to his room and sleep it off. But I got up the next morning and found out he’d relapsed hard, bought these girls plane tickets and gone to Hawaii. When that US reporter showed up and there was no Chris, the shit hit the fan. Gurvitz had to put that fire out.
When I talked to Chris about it later, he didn’t even remember going to Hawaii. He just woke up there. But when he called Dad from Hawaii, Dad was like, “Hey, you’re on vacation!” The level of denial at that point was just crazy.
FR. TOM GANNON:
You cannot understand Chris Farley without grappling with the relationship between him and his father. That was the dominant force in his life. He talked to his father every day on the phone, and was constantly trying to please him. And I think he did please him. But the family, which looked so normal on the outside, was terribly dysfunctional.
ERIC NEWMAN:
If you were a shrink, you could retire on that family.
TIM O’MALLEY:
The first people we know as God are our parents. And if you don’t get approval from your parents, eventually you can mature and find that from other places. But Chris was never able to do that. He was never able to find it from God or anyone else.
TOM ARNOLD:
Even when he was thirty years old, Chris would literally sit at his dad’s feet and tell him stories. I don’t think anything made him happier than to sit at the foot of his dad’s recliner and tell him stories about show business, or food.
There were a couple other times where I went with Chris to the Taste of Madison, which is this festival in the city square where every three feet there’s a booth of a different kind of food. All the conversations Chris had with his dad that weekend were just “Hey, did you have that pork chop on a stick?” “Yeah, that was good. Did you get some of this?” You know, they were surface conversations, the kind I would have with my dad, the kind that don’t get really deep. Because if you get deep it’s pretty painful.
KEVIN FARLEY:
I think my dad was basically a happy guy, but he had an addiction to food and alcohol. And when you get to be six hundred pounds, you’re in such a hole that what are you going to do to get out? And that’s what depressed him. He was confused by it. He’d be like, “I don’t know how I got this big. I don’t know how this happened.” I watched my dad’s eating habits. Yes, he ate a lot, but was it proportional to the weight he gained? No way. Part of it had to be genetic.
My father was handicapped, and when you have someone in your family with an illness, you want to do what you can to make them feel better. It wasn’t just Chris. We all wanted to make Dad happy, because we all knew he was on borrowed time.
JOHN FARLEY:
Then there’s the other element to it, not wanting to get skinny or sober because he didn’t want Dad to feel bad. Chris said that to me, that he should stay heavy for Dad.
LORRI BAGLEY:
Chris was very protective of his father. One night after I went with Chris to a meeting, he asked me if I wanted to meet his parents for dinner. When we were in the elevator going up to see them, Chris was like, “Look, my dad has this problem. Please don’t stare at him.”
A year later, the first time I spent the night with Chris, he showed me a picture of his family from when he was a kid, and his father was so thin. I said, “What happened?” But Chris never really told me.
CHARNA HALPERN, director/teacher, ImprovOlympic:
I had a very intense night with him alone in my house once. We were listening to a Cat Stevens album, Tea for the Tillerman, and the song “Father and Son” came on. Chris started crying. Cried and cried and cried. He said, “I love my dad so much, and I don’t want him to die.”
I said, “He probably feels the same way about you. You’re both in the same situation. You’re both alcoholics. You’re both overweight. Maybe you can help each other.”
“Yeah, but we can’t,” he said. “It’ll never happen.”
HOLLY WORTELL, cast member, Second City:
His dad was of a different generation. They didn’t go to see “headshrinkers. ” Chris told me that his father finally agreed to go with him to this weight-loss clinic once. They were sitting in a group therapy session, and everyone was going around the circle talking about their issues with food. His dad just stood up and said, “Let’s go.” They got up and went outside, and his dad said, “We’re not like these people. They’ve got problems. That’s not us. We’re leaving.”
FR. TOM GANNON:
They walked out, checked in to a resort on an island off the coast of Florida, took out a room, and proceeded to go on a binge together. With that kind of enabling, the kid didn’t stand a chance. The father was in denial, but in all fairness, I don’t think the brothers were straight with the father, either. Dad knew about the drinking but not so much about the drugs. The father never accepted that Chris was a drug addict until the very end, even though the two of them talked every day. So there was a lot of posturing going on.
TOM ARNOLD:
It’s not his father’s fault, what happened to Chris. It’s not. Chris had access to every tool in the world. He went to the best treatment centers, had the best people being of service to him, reaching out to him.
You look at all the pieces of Chris’s life, his father, his mother, his brothers, his life growing up, his work—everything. You look at all that and maybe some things are off or a little dysfunctional, but at the end of the day it’s his responsibility. It’s not like I didn’t sit with him a dozen times where he looked me in the eye and knew what he had to do to stay sober. You can’t blame your circumstances, and after a certain point you can’t even blame your father. You can’t blame him; you have to have compassion for him. It all comes down to you, and you’ve got to be a man about it.
LORRI BAGLEY:
Chris knew that to be himself, to be healthy, he’d have to pull away from the family, and he couldn’t do it. He said he couldn’t do it. But you have to cut the emotional umbilical cord at some point. Some American Indians have a ritual where you’re not allowed to be a part of the tribe until you leave, go out in the wilderness, rename yourself, and come back. Then you’re accepted as a man. But we don’t have that in our culture. That’s why families in the country are falling apart, and why women have to deal with all this Madonna/whore bullshit. It’s because men don’t grow up, and Chris never grew up.
ERICH "MANCOW” MULLER:
That May, Chris Rock was performing in Chicago. Farley called me and said, “I’ve broken out of prison. I’m out. I want to go see my boy Chris Rock!” Chris broke out of rehab to go to this show. I met him at his apartment, and I was begging him not to drink. I was sitting there, going, “No. No, Chris. Please.”
He said, “Just a little splash.” That’s how it started off, a Coke with a splash of whiskey—and I mean just a drop. Then an hour later it turned into a glass of whiskey with a splash of Coke. We went to the concert to meet Tim Meadows and his wife, and I spent the whole night fighting him.
TIM MEADOWS:
We went backstage after the show to see Rock, and Farley was drunk, fooling around in front of these girls. We’d been talking about going out for dinner after the show, but Rock and I looked at each other, and I said, “I can’t do it. I can’t be around him anymore like this.”
Rock said, “Yeah, I know what you mean. I’ll take care of him tonight.”
CHRIS ROCK:
He was so fucking drunk, drunk to the point where he was being rude and grabby with girls. He would go too far and you’d call him on it, and he’d give you his crying apology, the Farley Crying Apology. We probably had about four of those that night.
I remember dropping him off at his apartment. He wanted me to come up and see his place, and I just didn’t have it in me. He was so fucked up. I just couldn’t go up there. And as I drove away, I knew. It had gotten to that point. I knew that was the last time I’d ever see him alive.
JILLIAN SEELY:
I was waiting for Chris to pick me up for the Chris Rock show, and I got a phone call from him saying there weren’t enough tickets and so I couldn’t go. That was Sunday. Then Tuesday I got a call at nine o’clock at night from a nurse at the Northwestern psych ward. Hazelden had to send him to the hospital to get sober before they’d let him back into treatment.
Chris got on the phone. “I’m really scared,” he said. “I totally relapsed on Sunday and went back to treatment, and they made me come here. Will you come and see me?”
So I went over to Northwestern. I went up to Chris’s room, and I heard him go, “Hey, hey, in here.”
He was in the bathroom blowing his cigarette smoke into the air vent. I looked down at this stainless-steel paper towel rack, and there were lines of cocaine on it. Chris had gotten one of the hospital staff to bring him coke in the detox ward.
I said, “I’m totally telling on you.” I went out into the hallway and started yelling, “Chris is doing cocaine in his room!”
They came in and restrained him. He was screaming at me, “You’re a fucking narc! I hate you!” It was like a scene out of a bad movie. It was horrible, really horrible.
KEVIN FARLEY:
The fact that Chris was able to score cocaine inside the detox ward was just insane. When you’re famous there aren’t any rules. That’s when I knew things were getting bad. He was in a mental ward. You couldn’t get any lower than that.
As a kid, when he watched The Exorcist, he was terrified of the idea that something evil could take over your body, possess you, and make you do things you can’t control. Here he had this thing that was eating away at him from the inside, and he was powerless to stop it. And that scared the living shit out of him.
FR. TOM GANNON:
On the surface, the Farleys are a wonderful family. They’re loving. They’re supportive. They’re there for one another. I didn’t get to know the father. Met him once, maybe. Spoke to him on the phone a couple of times. And I suppose I have to be honest; I didn’t care for him that much. Whereas the mother is a lovely person, caught in the same vortex as the rest of them.
And therein lies the key to the problem: They didn’t know how to manage Chris. When it’s all said and done, I don’t know that they were any more or less dysfunctional than any other family, but Chris’s personality was so outsized that it sort of took over. It’s that old story from his childhood, when the nuns said that Chris didn’t know the difference between somebody laughing with him or laughing at him. That played out in the family as well. At what point do you draw a line that this bizarre behavior is too much to handle?
TOM FARLEY:
Nobody ever thought of the problem in terms of Chris’s health or the idea that he could die. Mom maybe had some premonitions of disaster but didn’t talk about it. No one talked about it—and that was the problem. My parents’ reaction was always the same: “Chris is out of control.” Or “Dammit, how could he do this? He’s going to ruin his career.”
And the motivations were always external, like getting fired from Saturday Night Live. It was always concern about the symptoms and never the disease, which none of us genuinely understood. But Chris wasn’t “out of control”; he was sick. And his sickness was just so deep and so entrenched.
TOM ARNOLD:
It’s harder for some people, and I don’t know what it would’ve taken for Chris to really, truly hit bottom. The absolute worst I ever saw him was at a Planet Hollywood opening in Indianapolis that July. It was the bad Chris. I mean, he was just so fucked up. He had his shirt up over his head and people were taking pictures. Kevin was with him. I said to Kevin, “You better get him out of here. I’m gonna fuckin’ tackle him, ’cause I have had it.”
KEVIN FARLEY:
Jillian and I were trying to get him out of the bar, but he didn’t want to leave. And at that point I couldn’t control him. Either he’s going to take a swing at me and we can get into a fight there in front of the cameras, or I can go home. We’d flown in on a private jet that night, so Jillian and I left and took it back together.
JILLIAN SEELY:
We were really quiet on the plane. We were both so sad that Chris had started drinking again. The next day I got a phone call around noon. I thought it would be Chris, calling from Indianapolis, confused and wondering why he’d been left behind and maybe having learned a bit of a lesson. But he was like, “Hey, what’s going on? I’m back in Chicago. Want to get lunch?” The plane went right back for him and picked him up. No consequences for his actions at all.
But his behavior at the party made the Enquirer and the entertainment TV shows. And then that profile in US magazine came out a few weeks later. It was a pretty hard-core article.
TOM FARLEY:
That was the first time there had really been any public exposure of Chris’s problems, which is pretty amazing when you look back on it. At that point, he was really staring at the abyss; it looked like he was going to lose it all. Brillstein-Grey went into damage control mode, trying to clean up the press.
They also sent Chris back to Promises in Malibu and made him start seeing this therapist in L.A. The sessions Chris had with this guy weren’t really therapy sessions; it was more this guy telling Chris what he had to do, and why, if he wanted to save himself. He really got into Chris’s noggin. He hit him in a weak spot, that superstitious thing that he always had. He was telling Chris there was this other side to him, this other being inside him that was bent on destruction. That really played to a lot of Chris’s fears, and I don’t think it was helpful at all. I think he just confused the boy.
FR. TOM GANNON:
Chris thought of his addiction in terms of good and evil, that drugs were the devil’s way of controlling him, and I tried to steer him away from that way of thinking, because it isn’t very helpful. Like many Irish Catholics, Chris’s spirituality was sort of a mix between religion and superstition.
TOM FARLEY:
He told me that heroin was the devil. “I’ve seen the devil, Tommy.” That’s what he told me after he’d tried it.
LORRI BAGLEY:
Chris told me that every time you do heroin, you can feel it take a part of your soul.
KEVIN FARLEY:
Chris would talk about his addiction in those terms, because that was the vocabulary he had for it. A lot of people laugh at that concept, but I think it’s as good a framework as any. What is a demon? A demon is something that wants you dead. And whatever was in possession of Chris certainly wanted him dead.
FR. MATT FOLEY:
Chris knew all too well that addiction was a disease. He and I had endless talks about it. He needed to separate himself from the shame that he felt. He needed to learn how to forgive himself and accept forgiveness from others. But I can relate to his thinking. I struggle with temptation every day, as do we all. There is no blessing that comes out of drugs and alcohol, and in that sense they’re evil.
TIM O’MALLEY:
They say that you should go back to your faith when you get sober, but it’s up to the individual the role that their faith plays. How did I survive? How did I not run myself off the road when I was driving around in my underwear looking for crack? I’d have to say it was God. But a lot of people don’t go back, because they feel so burned by the nuns and the priests.
I don’t think Chris ever got a chance to really clarify or learn properly some of the ways to sort out your life. So I think he used religion and did the best he could with it, still trying to be a good Catholic boy using the garbage we were taught by the nuns, the angel on one shoulder and the devil on the other. It’s a fifth-grader’s view of spirituality.
FR. TOM GANNON:
Chris was caught in a transition in Catholicism between an old-church approach to faith and a newer way of thinking. The old view of spirituality was that life was like climbing a mountain. You have to fight onward and upward, climbing with your spiritual crampons until you reach the top—and that’s perfection. You pass the trial and you pass the test and you get so many gold stars in your copybook. Then you come before the heavenly throne for judgment, and maybe you’ve got a couple of indulgences in your back pocket in case your accounting was wrong.
But that kind of faith only gets a person so far. Your spiritual life isn’t like climbing a mountain, waiting to find God at the top. It’s a journey, full of highs and lows, and God is there with you every step of the way, in the here and now and in the hereafter. The first approach is really a whole lot of smoke and mirrors. It’s only the second one that allows a person to grow, but that second view is hard for people to get ahold of unless they get in touch with themselves.
Chris didn’t feel that he was worthy of God’s love. He felt he had to prove himself. Well, you’re never going to get very far in any relationship with that kind of belief. Imagine if you had to prove yourself to your spouse every single day; that’s not the way love works. In all of our talks, that was the one thing I really tried to work with him on, adjusting to this different idea of faith, but he never really moved from one to the other. It’s hard. It takes a long time to come around to that way of thinking, and Chris just ran out of time.