ACT I
CHAPTER 1
MIKE CLEARY, friend, Edgewood High School:
Freshman year of college we’re heading out on a road trip to Milwaukee to see a big game. We’re in the car. We’ve got the fifth of vodka, the gallon of orange juice. We’re ready to get loaded and party. Just as we start to drive, Chris says, “Stop!”
We stop the car, and he pulls out a rosary. We have to sit there in the car and say one decade of the rosary—ten Hail Marys and an Our Father—before we can leave. Then he balls the rosary up in his hand, tosses it in the glove compartment, slams it shut, looks at all of us, and says, “Well, it’s in God’s hands now." And we hit the road.
On June 24, 1994, life for Chris Farley was good. He had just finished his fourth season on NBC’s Saturday Night Live and was coming into his own as one of the most promising stars in American comedy. As the earnest, sad-sack Chippendales dancer and the swaggering, van-dwelling Motivational Speaker, Chris was bringing a kind of energy and anarchy to the show not seen since its seventies heyday. Dana Carvey, Mike Myers, and Phil Hartman were stepping down as the show’s reliable go-to players, and Chris was leading the charge—alongside Adam Sandler, Tim Meadows, David Spade, and Rob Schneider—in the next cycle of revitalizing and redefining the late-night institution for a new generation. Chris was also about to take on his first starring role in a feature film, Tommy Boy. The following year, Tommy Boy would open at the top of the North American box office and solidify Chris’s status as a bankable movie star.
From his very first days onstage—starting in plays at summer camp and eventually at Chicago’s Second City—Chris had possessed a singular talent for capturing and relating to an audience. In the words of SNL creator Lorne Michaels, “People liked Chris Farley, they trusted Chris Farley, and they thought they knew Chris Farley.” In his lifetime, that likability translated to a huge following on television and three straight number one box-office hits. And since his death at the age of thirty-three, Chris’s appeal persists. In the past ten years, Saturday Night Live’s Best of Chris FarleyDVD has sold over a million copies, making it the second-best -selling title in the show’s entire history. Tommy Boy, for its part, has gone on to become one of Paramount Studios’ top-selling DVDs of all time.
But Chris’s success had not come easily. His rise at SNL had been marred by a constant struggle with alcohol and drug addiction. High school and college drinking had given way, eventually, to cocaine and heroin use. Through the intervention of friends and family, Chris had attempted several different recovery programs, all of them eventually ineffective.
But on June 24, 1994, Chris was clean and sober and standing onstage in a large auditorium at Hazelden, a nationally renowned drug rehabilitation facility in Center City, Minnesota. Chris had visited Hazelden twice before, both times as a rather unwilling and uncooperative resident. This time he walked through its doors of his own free will, as a guest, invited to share his recovery experience with other addicts struggling in their own battles with the disease.
Chris’s presence filled the auditorium; he knew how to work a room. Only this time, abandoning his popular, manic persona, he held the audience captive by simply standing at center stage and speaking in calm, measured tones. It was a Chris Farley that only a handful of close friends and family members ever knew. Dressed in a blue button-down shirt and stone-colored khakis, he paced a small circle, nervously fidgeting with his hands and running them through his slicked-back hair. At no point did he fall down or remove his pants. And there, alone on the stage that day with no crazy characters to hide behind, no wild-man stunts to impress, Chris gave a “motivational speech” quite unlike any he’d ever delivered on television.
CHRIS FARLEY:
Good to be here. Um, pretty nervous. I was here a couple times, so I know what it’s like to be sitting where you are, full of fear and anxiety. Kinda how I’m feeling tonight! Heh heh heh!
Anyhoo.
I’m supposed to share my experience, strength, and hope with you, and so I’ll start. I remember my first drink. I was seventeen years old, almost eighteen. My friend Patrick was a year above me and I admired him quite a bit, looked up to him. He was a great football player, all-state and everything like that. I went to a party with him one night. We went down in the basement. The guys started drinkin’, and they went, "C’mon and take a drink, Chris.”
So I took a shot, and I remember going, “Man, this sucks. I can’t believe you do this.”
“Just take it down like medicine,” they said.
So I wolfed down about ten of ’em, no problem. And I remember hearing stuff like, “Man, I thought he was wild before, and now he’s really gonna be a wild man!”
So that kind of planted in my cranium what I’d always wanted, and that was to fit in, or to be liked. Everyone seemed to love it. When I went upstairs, I remember the girls were like, “Great! Chris, finally!”
And I was like, “Yeah! Maybe I’ll even get a chick now!”
So that night I got blind drunk and threw up in my bed. Then I called Patrick the next day and said, “Man, this was great! When are we gonna do it again?” And I got blind drunk every weekend until I graduated high school.
Then I went on to college at Marquette University. I was away from home and that meant I could party every night. I did. Each year I got worse and worse. Freshman year I’d party Thursday, Friday, and Saturday. Sophomore year it’d be Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, and Saturday. Then it started on Tuesdays, and by the time I was a senior it was every night.
Every drug that I tried I couldn’t wait to try more. Sophomore year I tried marijuana and fell completely in love with it. I went home and watched Love Connection and was like, “Ooooohhhh man ...” You know? I couldn’t understand why everyone wasn’t getting high. It was the best way to live. My God, how boring it must be for you poor sober people. So I got high every day from that day on. I’d try psychedelics and I’d have a really bad trip and still couldn’t wait to do it again. “Maybe this one’ll be different.” And that was the way it was. I just wanted to escape.
And so I remember reading about John Belushi in the book Wired. A lot of people read Wired and thought, “Man, that poor guy! I never wanna do drugs again!” But I was like, “Yeah! If that’s what it takes, I wanna do it!” ’Cause I wanted to be like him in every way, like all those guys from that show. I thought that’s what you had to do.
When I got outta school, I didn’t know what I was gonna do with my life. I knew I didn’t have much in the grades department, and so I was very fearful. A whole lot of fear. I remember drinking was the only time I felt, you know, good. I went and worked for my dad after school. I’d show up late and stuff like that. He was the boss, and so I was his screw-up son. I didn’t get in too much trouble. He’d let it slide.
The one thing I knew was that I wanted to go into acting. I went down to Chicago to try to go into a place called Second City. I auditioned for that and got in pretty quickly, but I couldn’t stop partying. They gave me a warning: “If you do it again, we’re gonna kick you off the main stage.”
I wanted to continue performing, so I only got high for the performance, on marijuana. Then afterward I couldn’t wait to get ripped. I remember one time my director was giving me notes, and I drank a pint of Bacardi in about ten minutes, before he was done talking. He asked me a question, and I was slurring my words. He said, “Oh, you’re no good. I’ll talk to you tomorrow.” But it was kind of tolerated. My lifestyle cradled it, because I didn’t have to wake up in the morning. I could get blind drunk every night, and that’s what I did.
Then I went to New York and started working on Saturday Night Live. That was, I thought, a dream come true. I’d read all about my idols and how they partied back then. I thought, man, this is gonna be great! I am gonna get ripped!
Well, that just wasn’t the case. It wasn’t hip anymore. I stuck out like a sore thumb, taking my clothes off at parties and making a fool of myself, which I had learned to do pretty good because I thought people would like me. Nobody’s afraid of the fool. “Hi! C’mon, idiot! C’mon aboard!” I was totally full of fear. I’d do anything for you to like me, including doing things that I didn’t want to do. As long as I had my substance, I was okay.
I went back to Second City after my first year on Saturday Night Live and took a bunch of acid and cocaine and a ton of liquor and went onstage and made a complete ass of myself. They booed. I remember during a blackout between scenes someone yelled, “Get the drunk off the stage!” That kinda rang true.
I had to cover my ass so they’d hire me back at SNL again next year. So I came here to the Shoemaker Unit at Hazelden. I hated every minute of it. I complied and kissed ass until the counselors went home and then screwed around and tried to make everybody on the unit laugh, and didn’t take it serious one bit. Got outta there and thought I was cured. “All right, I did twenty-eight days sober, no problem.”
So I got outta here, didn’t go to meetings, didn’t get a sponsor, didn’t do anything that they told me. And guess what? I got back to New York and started doing a lot of drugs. I thought, if I don’t drink in front of people, they’re not gonna know I’m high. I thought I was fooling everyone, and I was fooling no one.
That Christmas, after a real bad bender, my apartment was just totally ripped out. I’d ripped apart drawers, everything was on the floor, because I’d been looking for something. “Oh, what’s this? Is it in here? No?” Crash! “Where’s this?! What’s that?! Oh fuck!” So Christmas, coming home to surprise my parents, what a lovely gift I was. They put me in a detox for a couple of days.
The whole rest of that season I did the outpatient thing, which was a complete joke. I would comply with them and say,“I’m really trying hard.” Meanwhile I always had a thing of urine in my pocket just in case they tested me. God, what an ass, asking my friends for their urine. “Kevin, yeah, you got that, uh, urine?” Jesus. Everyone knew I was using. I just remember a horrible dismay. I was crying all the time, because I could not stop. I couldn’t imagine a life with sobriety, because drugs and alcohol were the only thing that was my friend. I knew I was in trouble.
I came back to Shoemaker. I decided to make sure they knew that I was trying. “By God, I’m your boy, boss. I’m trying. Pluggin’ away!” So I screwed around and complied in treatment again, and didn’t take it serious. I wasn’t listening, and that’s what you gotta do about this disease, because it’s hell to stop.
I got outta there thinkin’ I was cured. La di da! Didn’t last even as long as I did the first time out, and by that time I had almost thrown in the towel. I went out to California to do some work the next summer. I got into another rehab out there. It was like every time I turned around I was in friggin’ rehab. God, it sucks! But I kinda started takin’ this one serious, because I was like, “I don’t wanna come back here, man.” The door was open just a little bit. I was sick of using, and I knew I was gonna be fired very soon. I didn’t want that because SNL was everything I’d worked for.
They told me to go to Fellowship New York, a halfway house that had just opened. So I went there and this time I was gonna finish it, you know, give it a real shot. I was frightened of going to recovery meetings. Because what if I couldn’t do it? That’s what would really suck.
I was glad to be sober, but after ninety days people weren’t patting me on the back anymore, sayin’ “Good job on that sobriety! Go get ’em!” People just expected it. And why shouldn’t they expect me to be sober? I’m working for them. But I wanted the pats on the back, and they weren’t doing that.
That ninety-day mark was a real tough one for me. After a bad day at read-through, the writers didn’t write me into the show, and I was going back and forth. I used. I did five bags of heroin. Then I came back and told my boss. I thought if I was honest with him, you know? That’s another manipulating tool. “I’m being honest with you, so you won’t fire me, right? Because I’m trying. Can’t you see I’m trying?” All that bullshit.
So, I lost my job for about a week. I kept begging and crying, the same manipulative things. Finally he gave me my job back, but he sent me to this place in Alabama, which was kind of like a boot camp. It was exactly what I needed, a good kick in the rear end. They told me stuff like “You’re arrogant. You’re complying.” They made me cry every single day. They’d say that if you pick up drugs and alcohol, you’re a baby. I didn’t like to be called a baby. I didn’t like to be called arrogant. I didn’t like to be called all those things that I was.
It was around Christmas time, too. Man, what a horrible place to be over Christmas, you know? Hearing “Have yourself a merry little Christmas . . .” when I’m in a stinky hospital ward. But I did things in this treatment that I didn’t do before, like making sure I made my bed every day. I practiced what I would be doing on the outside. I prayed to God in the morning to please keep me sober that day, and then I’d thank Him for keeping me sober every night.
So I got outta that thing in Alabama. I got a sponsor. I got a home group. I was reading from the Big Book. I went to a morning meeting every day at seven-thirty. I got involved, because I know I can’t stay sober without these things, without going one hundred percent. But I can stay sober when I do. And sobriety’s good, man. Sobriety’s not carrying around urine jars—that’s a real treat. It’s not waking up in a horrible apartment with everything broken in it. I have a nice apartment now that’s all taken care of. I make my bed every day. I do the things that I did in treatment. I have a very healthy fear of getting high, and I have to take it serious, man. Because if I don’t, I’m gonna use, and I cannot use again. I hate that shit. God, I hate it. I hate being a slave to that shit.
The ninety-day mark was a real kicker for me, again. I remember it was on St. Patrick’s Day. I like to have an icy cold Guinness on St. Patrick’s Day. I’m Irish! I have to drink, right? And I remember pacing back and forth in the rain outside a bar, crying. I was so scared, and I was just crying and crying and praying to God to help me. Then I stopped. I remembered that I don’t have to drink. I called the halfway house, went to a meeting, and I did what I had to do. And today I have one year, six months, and six days. That’s the most time I’ve ever had. And I can do this. I know I can do it.
We all can do it.