CHAPTER 7
LOVERBOY, band:
Everybody’s workin’ for the weekend.
Everybody wants a new romance.
Everybody’s goin’ off the deep end.
Everybody needs a second chance, oh.
Chris Farley’s life was going in two wildly different directions at once. With "Chippendales,” "Super Fans,” and a number of solid turns in supporting roles, he had established himself as one of the standouts at Saturday Night Live. But his problem with drugs and alcohol had worsened severely. Around the office, Chris was always happy and hardworking, determined and focused. The sloppy, crazy party guy showed up at social functions here and there, but he was no longer a nightly fixture. Chris, knowing what was at stake, had learned how to hide his problem. And safely hidden, it festered.
The summer following his first year on the show, Chris returned to Chicago and dropped by Second City to see his old friends. He had clearly been using and was in no condition to perform. The cast pleaded with him not to go onstage, but during the improv set he burst out from behind the curtain anyway. The audience greeted him with a huge cheer. But as he began to stumble his way through a scene, his inebriation was obvious to everyone. People began to boo. After one scene, an audience member yelled, “Get the drunk off the stage.” Even in his failed stand-up comedy routines at Marquette, Chris had at least come off as affable and good-natured. He had never suffered wholesale rejection quite like this. The crowd’s reaction cut deep.
On June 16, 1991, worried that the management at SNL would hear of the incident, Chris checked himself into the Hazelden recovery facility in Center City, Minnesota. It was the first time he sought treatment for his addiction.
Red Arrow camp counselor Fred Albright once observed, in his unique Wisconsin vernacular, that “Chris was extremely complex, and yet as easy to understand as a ripe watermelon.” The doctors and therapists at Hazelden, in somewhat more sophisticated language, came to the same conclusion. Their diagnosis of Chris would come as no surprise to anyone who’d ever spent five minutes with the boy:
Chris’s inclination is to be compliant. . . . Whenever Chris has been confronted for not meeting unit expectations he has apologized and assured that this will not happen again, [but he] does not appear to be willing to fully accept responsibility for his behavior. . . . Chris allows his fear to dictate the terms of his recovery. . . . Chris has identified that his use of humor serves the function of diverting attention from issues that may be painful. . . . that it’s with humor that his family deals with conflict and pain. . . . Chris sees his life and his drinking as a benefit to his work as a comedian, and this may complicate his motivation to get help for these issues. . . . [Aftercare issues include] compulsive overeating, possible obsessive compulsive behavior. . . .
Diagnosing the problem was easy. But unlocking it and treating it would prove to be a complex proposition indeed. After twenty-eight days, Chris checked out of Hazelden, but the program had accomplished little, and his destructive behaviors quickly resumed.
That fall, Chris returned to New York for the 1991-1992 season, his second, on Saturday Night Live. He moved from his apartment near Times Square to a place near Riverside Drive on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. Along with Chris Rock, Chris was promoted from featured player to repertory player, and escalators in his contract pushed his salary from $4,500 to $6,500 per show. That year, Adam Sandler, David Spade, and Rob Schneider graduated from the writers’ room to join Tim Meadows as full-fledged featured players.
Despite the unusual influx of so many new performers, Saturday Night Live still belonged very much to its senior members. Kevin Nealon took over the Weekend Update desk from the departing Dennis Miller; Mike Myers’s long-running “Wayne’s World” sketch had spawned a hit movie; and Phil Hartman and Dana Carvey would dominate the coming election year with their lauded takes on Arkansas governor Bill Clinton, President George H. W. Bush, and feisty contender Ross Perot.
Chris, always happy to be a team player, continued to do his best in small, supporting parts, such as Todd O’Connor in the “Super Fans” sketches and as Jack Germond in the McLaughlin Group parodies. He took on starring roles in now-classic sketches like Robert Smigel’s “Schmitt’s Gay.” And veteran writers Jim Downey and Tom Davis saw a unique side of Chris underneath all of his wild-man antics and brought it brilliantly to life in Chris’s signature piece, “The Chris Farley Show.”
Through all of this, most of the cast and crew of Saturday Night Live failed to see the true nature of Chris’s spiraling addiction. But over time, deep cracks began to appear in the wall he had built up between his personal and professional lives. It soon became readily apparent to all that Chris Farley was headed for a serious reckoning.
TOM DAVIS:
Saturday Night Live had really changed. The smell of marijuana no longer hit you when you stepped off the elevator; that sort of thing just wasn’t tolerated anymore. However, Fiddler’s Green was a bar down on Forty-eighth Street. It was the nearest watering hole to the seventeenth floor. Not literally. There was the Rainbow Room and one other really high-end restaurant that sort of frowned on long-haired, bearded comedy writers dashing in for a quick Rémy Martin. But Fiddler’s Green was an Irish bar, like a real Irish bar. A lot of NBC people, mainly the union guys, they’d go there to drink. So it became a convenient place to duck out to. Around ten-thirty at night, when everyone else was eating candy bars and drinking coffee, you’d excuse yourself, grab your copy of The Gulag Archipelago, say you had to take a dump, and then sprint up Forty-eighth Street to get booze.
Chris discovered this fairly early on, and so I had the experience, on more than one occasion, of running into him there. I’d see him doing shots of tequila, literally throwing the shots back in a way that made me cringe. I like drinking, but you can’t drink like that. He was going for oblivion. On one such night I told him, “Chris, don’t go back to the office. Don’t let them see you like this.”
“Okay,” he said.
Twenty minutes later we were both back in the office. He was obviously drunk in front of these younger writers, and it was funny to them. He would entertain them and they would all laugh. But if you were aware of what was going on, it wasn’t so funny. He would slap himself so hard that you could see the mark on his face, and that would get a laugh from those writers, but I would see the mark on his face, and I just saw disaster.
DAVID SPADE:
We saw him drinking, but then everyone was drinking, so who cares? I started to notice it was a problem more when I’d leave him at night. I’m a lightweight when it comes to that. I couldn’t keep up, and he’d get angry when I’d leave him at the bar. He’d start getting mad that I wouldn’t stay and drink with him. Like, really mad.
Then I started noticing that when we would walk down the street, strangers at sidewalk bars and restaurants would recognize us from the show and go, “Hey, Spade and Farley! What’s up! Come and have a drink with us.”
And Chris would go, “Okay.”
I’d be like, “Are you kidding?”
Even the people at the table, who’d been half joking, they were like, “Wait, he’s actually coming over?”
And so he would go drink with random people. Then the drugs kicked in and it escalated.
TIM MEADOWS:
In Chicago, everybody socialized and drank at a bar after the show. And that’s just part of Chicago; there’s a bar on every corner. In New York, he made more money and the drugs got harder. That was the big difference.
CHRIS ROCK:
He got high and we didn’t, so he stayed away a lot.
STEVEN KOREN, writer:
I had a different perspective than most. I saw things that other people didn’t see. I eventually became a writer, but when Chris got to the show I was still a receptionist. I would answer the phones until eight or nine at night and then stay late and write jokes to try and get them onto Weekend Update. Sometimes I was there until four, five in the morning. I’d be hunched over a desk in some dark office and I’d hear the elevator, and Chris would come in with some shady-looking characters, people I’d never seen before. They’d go back into some office, turn on some music, and I wouldn’t see or hear from them for a couple of hours. I didn’t know what was going on, nor was it my place to say anything.
Then there was one incident where an office got messed up, and I got yelled at the next day. They thought I’d done it because I was the only person there that late. Turned out it was Chris and a bunch of these people. That was really the beginning. That was when I was like, oh, he’s doing otherthings, beyond the norm.
KEVIN NEALON:
I remember seeing him being a little more sweaty in sketches. His moods would change more. When he first showed up he was that lovable Chris guy. Then you started to see sides of him that were a little more irritated, more impatient.
TIM MEADOWS:
Tom Davis was the first one at the show to say something.
TOM DAVIS:
And when Tom Davis is the one doing the intervention on you, that’s when you know you’re in trouble.
TIM MEADOWS:
He got me and Sandler and Spade and we all went over to Chris’s dressing room. We sat him down and said, “You’re hurting yourself, and you need to stop.” We were young. We didn’t know much about interventions. We just told him that we loved him and we didn’t want to watch him doing this to himself, and that it was time to grow up.
TODD GREEN:
Chris and I had stayed close through college, and I moved to New York about nine months after he did. We tried to do an intervention in New York pretty early on. Me, Tom Farley, and Kevin Cleary all went to lunch at P.J. Clarke’s. We tried to say to him that we loved him and we were worried about him, and he just didn’t want to hear any of it. It was very confrontational. “Who are you guys to judge me?” That sort of thing. It wasn’t easy. Kevin, Mike Cleary’s brother, was the other big part of Chris’s life in New York. Kevin died on 9/11, but in those days the three of us were always together.
MIKE CLEARY, friend, Edgewood High School:
Kevin was Chris’s sounding board for the first three years of SNL. They were incredibly close. Kevin and I never went a day without talking to each other at least once, and so the few times we did go two, three days without talking, it was always because of Chris. And Kevin would never, ever talk about it. All he’d say was, “I had to deal with something.”
TOM FARLEY:
Any time I was called in to bail out Chris, Kevin Cleary was there. I couldn’t deal with Chris without Kevin, but I know Kevin bailed Chris out several times without me. He was the guy. He kept the pieces together.
Right before Christmas during Chris’s second year on the show, Erin Maroney called me and said I needed to come down to Chris’s apartment. He’d trashed the place. Kevin and I went over, and it was a mess. Chris stumbled out and was like, “What’s up with you guys?” Trying to play it off like it was nothing.
Erin had also called Al Franken, so he came as well. Franken had a talk with him, but he was still pretty out of it. Franken also said he knew some people at Smithers, a rehab facility in New York, that he could get Chris in there. But I called my dad, and he said, “Just get him home. Get two tickets and fly him home and we’ll deal with it here.”
I got him up to my apartment in Westchester. My wife drove us to the airport. This was on a Sunday. I got him on the plane, this little puddle jumper. He immediately said to the stewardess, “Gimme a screwdriver.” So I gave him one. That’s what they tell you to do. Give them anything they want to keep them pacified until you can get them to the rehab facility, to avoid a confrontation. So he drank the screwdriver and then just crashed out in his seat. There were some mechanical problems, and we sat out on the tarmac for an hour. He was out cold the whole time. Finally, they came on and said the flight wasn’t going anywhere any time soon, and we all had to deplane back to the terminal. I woke him up and dragged him down the stairs out onto the tarmac. He looked around and said, “Damn, looks just like Westchester.”
“Chris, it is Westchester. We haven’t gone anywhere.”
“Oh.”
We went back in. There was no bar in this tiny airport, so there was nothing to do but sit. Chris started getting loud, like, “What’s going on here? Why are we just sitting here?” And I kept trying to keep him quiet. We waited for another hour, and then finally they canceled the flight entirely. I called my wife. She came back to pick us up. After we got home, she took our daughter and said, “Look, I’m going to my sister’s while you figure this out.”
So she took off, and Chris went inside and just crashed in our bed to sleep it off. It was a long, long night. I called home and told my parents he’d be a day late. I took him back to the airport the next day, but I didn’t go with him. I had to go back to work, so I just put him on the plane. I figured by that point he could fly home by himself.
Chris rolled off the plane in Madison, and of course the first thing out of my dad’s mouth: “Hey! You look great! That a new blazer?” No acknowledgment of the problem. No discipline. No nothing. Refused to deal with it. It was only at my mother’s insistence that he agreed to check him in to the local hospital for a few days, and then, after Christmas, after the incident at the hotel, they sent him back to Hazelden.
KEVIN FARLEY:
Around Christmas, me and my girlfriend were in Chicago, and we went out with Chris and Robert Smigel. They’d just done the halftime show at the Bears game at Soldier Field. We went out to the Chop House, and Chris was getting into it pretty hard. He was just ripping it up. Smigel eventually left, because Chris was too much to handle. I took him back to his room at the Westin Hotel. I said, “Chris, just go to bed. Let’s just go to bed and sleep this off.” And I left him in his room, assuming that he would stay there.
HOLLY WORTELL:
Chris called me up and said, “Come and meet me at Carly’s.” So I went and met him. That night he got really drunk really fast. People around us were starting to leave. It wasn’t fun anymore. It was trouble. We got out onto Wells Street and I said, “Chris, where are you staying?”
He told me his hotel, which was downtown. Even if I’d told the cab-driver where to go, I doubt Chris could have made it back. So I went with him and got him up to his room. I didn’t think I could leave him alone, so I said, “Can you call your brother? Where is he?”
“I don’t know.”
Then Chris got into the minibar, taking out all the little bottles and just shooting them. I yelled, “Chris, stop it!”
“No!”
He downed a few more of them, and then he looked up at me and sort of lunged at me. I stepped aside, but his momentum kept him careening forward. Now, we were about fifteen stories up in this high-rise hotel, and the room had these large picture windows that started about four feet up, went all the way to the ceiling and ran the whole width of the room. Under the window was this waist-high radiator. Chris ran smack into the plate-glass window and smashed right through it. His body was hanging out at a ninety-degree angle, and if not for this radiator that caught him at his waist, he would have crashed right through and fallen to the street below.
He hung there for a few seconds. Then he lurched back in, and I screamed—his arm was sliced open all the way from his shoulder to his wrist.
And at that moment I sort of lost all my emotions. I said, “Chris, we have to go to the hospital right now.” I walked over to the phone, I dialed the hotel operator, told them there’d been an accident in one of the rooms and they needed to call an ambulance. I grabbed Chris and said, “Let’s go.”
“I want to put my jacket on first,” he said.
“No, let’s go.”
“I wanna put my jacket on!”
So I said okay, helped him put his jacket on, we walked out, got in the elevator, went downstairs, and there were three security guys waiting for us. They hadn’t called an ambulance, because they said they didn’t know exactly what the situation was. I said, “Well, someone’s been hurt, and we need one right now! I could sue this whole hotel!”
I walked outside and hailed a cab. We got in, and I said, “Northwestern Hospital. Emergency room. Immediately.”
We took off and drove as fast as we could to the hospital. I remember the last block was a one-way going the wrong way. The cabbie stopped and turned and looked at me, and I said, “Just go.”
He took off going the wrong way on this street, did a U-turn, and got us to the emergency room. I got Chris out, took him in, and did what I could to fill out the paperwork to get him admitted. Someone came up to me and said, “Isn’t that the guy from Saturday Night Live?”
I said, “Yes. Please keep this quiet and tell the next shift to keep it quiet.”
“Absolutely.”
I sat there for a while. Then I asked if I could see him. They were calling in a specialist to look at him, but they said I could go in and visit first. I walked into his room, and the curtains were drawn on either side of his bed. I pulled them aside and looked in and he was lying there. His arm was laid out and the muscle was just hanging open. With his other hand he was just lifting up the flap of skin and poking around and looking inside. I told him to stop. He was still inebriated, and obviously in some state of shock.
The doctors came in. I went back to the waiting room and called the family. Then, when they started to arrive, I went home.
KEVIN FARLEY:
Holly called, and I went to see him. He was sitting there, still hammered, with his arm all bandaged up. He had already tried to sneak out of the hospital that morning to go get a bottle of vodka. I looked him in the eye and said, “Chris, you can’t do this anymore. You’ve got to sober up. It’s time to sober up.”
After slicing his arm open in Chicago, Chris agreed to go back to rehab, but it was a brief visit. He returned to New York—too soon, in the eyes of many—to get back to work on the rest of the SNL season. He joined an outpatient program, but used and manipulated the system beyond the point of any real effectiveness. Chris’s near-death experience in the hotel may not have opened his eyes to the full extent of the problem, but it did open plenty of others’. When he returned to New York, his arm tied up in stitches and swathed in bandages, his friends and his family could ignore the problem no longer.
TOM FARLEY:
When I walked into his apartment that Christmas and saw that it was trashed, that was the first time I woke up to the reality of the problem. I was a big drinker, and what had brought my behavior under control was having a wife and settling down; she just wouldn’t tolerate it. And here Chris had this really nice girlfriend. They seemed to have a nice relationship. When I saw that she wasn’t doing the same for him, that’s when I realized his problem was of a whole different order.
Mom had known for a while. She saw it way before everyone, but after that night, seeing his apartment and putting him on the plane, that’s when I started going over to Mom’s camp.
JOHN FARLEY:
No one educated the rest of the family for a long time, and we didn’t educate ourselves. I’ve got seven years sober now, but at the time? Recovery? What was that? I didn’t know. I was chugging beers right alongside Chris, saying, “Gee, sucks for you.” It was like Chris had a net thrown over him, and he was taken away from the party, but the party just kept on going.
KEVIN FARLEY:
The first step is to recognize it and to talk about it, and when Chris almost went out the window we at least started to talk about it. We all acknowledged that Chris had a problem. Except for Dad. He would never even mention the incident. And of course there was no discussion that Dad’s drinking might be a problem. Never.
Then, it’s one thing to talk about it. It’s another thing to do something about it.
CHARNA HALPERN:
I got a phone call from Chris’s manager, and he said, “I know that you have some kind of hold on Chris. You gotta talk to him. And you gotta talk to his family, because we don’t know what to do anymore.”
So I called Mr. Farley and said, “We’ve really got to help Chris. When he comes home, he can’t drink. And you can’t drink, either, because it’s so much a part of your relationship.”
And Mr. Farley said, “I don’t have to quit drinking. I’m not the one with the problem. Del Close stopped drinking. If he managed to do it, Chris is gonna have to do it.”
“Yes, but he can’t,” I said. “Maybe we can help him if we all stop drinking.”
“I’m not gonna do that.”
FR. MATT FOLEY:
You liked Mr. Farley. You really liked the guy, but his world was very black and white. He was very caring, but there was the right way and the wrong way with him. There was no middle ground.
Growing up, we were always told you can be critical inside the home, but don’t ever bring it out in the street. That’s an Irish Catholic thing, a clan thing. In Chris’s case that aversion to dealing with matters openly would be even more multiplied, because if Chris had an eating and a drinking problem, that would mean somebody else in the room had an eating and a drinking problem.
TOM FARLEY:
Chris was sent back to rehab, but it was really more of a quick fix. Get him in, patch him up, and send him back on the road. Nothing was really accomplished by it. But when he went back to the show in January with his arm covered in bandages, it was a wake-up call for everyone else, too. Nobody could hide from the problem anymore.
TOM DAVIS:
The story was that he’d gone through a plate-glass door, not a high-rise hotel window. That story was accepted at the time, because, well, going through a plate-glass door is bad enough on its own.
Chris knew that he had fucked up and that he was going to have to answer questions about what had happened. He was not unintelligent. He was very aware of all these forces swirling around him. Rather than have rumors floating around, he chose to reveal the problem to us, to go on the offensive about it and try and make a joke out of it.
He came into the writers’ room and took his shirt off and went “Behold! ” doing this shticky, horror-movie kind of thing. We all saw the Frankensteinian stitches up his arm—and nobody laughed. It was horrific. It was maybe the first time that those young guys didn’t give Chris a laugh when he wanted it. We were all just like, “Holy shit . . . oh, fuck.”
JIM DOWNEY:
Farley always reminded me of the lyrics to that old Irish wake song, “The Parting Glass”: “All the harm e’er I’ve done, alas! it was to none but me.” That was Farley. I don’t think he knowingly ever hurt another person in his life, and, quite honestly, the drug problems are not remotely the first thing that I think of when it comes to Farley; I think of him being goofy and funny around the office. I didn’t notice that it affected his work at all.
MIKE SHOEMAKER:
It was never a problem in the office, and it was never to the point where it was an embarrassment, ever. You knew that he was drinking, but he was always functional. And there were never problems Saturday night when the show went to air.
TIM MEADOWS:
The only time he would drink too much and it would be noticeable and annoying was at the party after the show every week. And he was never an angry drunk, which is kind of an easier drunk to diagnose. That person obviously needs help. But Chris would just get sloppy and tell you how much he loved you, and he wanted to hug you and make you laugh. What I think, and this is just my opinion, is that he would drink when he got home after work every night, after read-through and after rehearsal.
TODD GREEN:
He may not have let on anything up at 30 Rock, but those times in New York, those were rough. He was over at Kevin Cleary’s a lot, either trying to hold it together or coming off a binge. I know Erin dealt with a lot of the fallout, too.
KEVIN FARLEY:
Chris wanted to marry Erin. He even bought a ring. And she was just a super person, had a lot of patience. But she couldn’t handle the ups and downs. I think she was probably scared to death. Who wouldn’t be?
TOM FARLEY:
I couldn’t tell you exactly when, but at some point the relationship was just over. She was staying with him a lot, and then she wasn’t anymore. He’d gotten that ring, but I don’t know if he ever even proposed. Ultimately that was never in the cards.
TODD GREEN:
Erin was so young then. I mean, she was a kid. But she really tried to help him. I remember going up to her parents’ place in Westchester—me, Kevin Cleary, and her—and trying to figure out how we could help Chris. We just talked and looked at each other like, “What are we going to do?” Not a whole lot was accomplished.
It’s funny. Mrs. Farley would call me and say, “If there’s anything you can do to help him . . .” And, naturally, I would do anything, but you’re so ill equipped at that age. The gravity of it is enormous and really beyond your understanding. You just think, I’m his friend and I’m different and Ican get through to him.
Labor Day after his second year on the show, Chris and I went up to Newport and stayed with his cousin. He was holding it together, but I knew he was using. He cleaned up a bit, and we went into town, where we ate at the Black Pearl, which is the restaurant where his dad and his mom went on their first date. Chris called his parents to tell them he was there, and he was really happy about it. He seemed leveled out, and I was trying to rationalize it in my head. Oh, he’s okay. Things are better now. Things like that.
But when we got back to New York, I dropped him off at his apartment on the Upper West Side. As I pulled away, I looked back down the street. I saw him turn away from his front door and hop in a cab going downtown, and I knew where he was going.
TOM ARNOLD:
I’d seen a sketch Chris had done on Saturday Night Live where he impersonated me when I was married to Roseanne. It was very funny. I talked to some of the other guys from the show, and they said, “Oh, you have to meet Chris. You guys have a lot in common.” So Roseanne and I went on and we hosted the show and I realized that Chris and I had an extra lot in common; I’d been sober since December 10, 1989.
Chris came out and we spent some time together. He worked on my HBO special, and he did stuff on Roseanne. As I got to know Chris, Lorne Michaels talked to me about him, saying he was afraid Chris had a problem, was kind of caught up in the Belushi thing.
In September of 1992, Chris was staying with me and Roseanne for a week. I had a show called The Jackie Thomas Show, and he came in and played my brother and, you know, I could tell. There were times when he didn’t want to be around me at all. He disappeared a couple nights. We shot the show Friday night—he was great on the show, by the way—and after the taping I said, “Hey, why don’t you come upstairs to my office real quick before you take off back to New York.”
“Sure,” he said.
He came up, and me and Rob Lowe and some other guys did an intervention on him. Everybody told him how much they loved him and how they were worried about him and how we wanted him to go to rehab right now. He said, “Well, I’d like to go back to New York first.” Which, you know, is a classic addict thing to say. “I just want to go back and get my clothes and stuff.” What they mean is: “I want to go see my dealer to get high before I go in.”
We said, “Well, you know, when you go into rehab, they give you other drugs that kind of detox you from the drugs you’re on now, so it’ll get you fucked up.”
“Oh, really?” he said. “So you’re telling me if I go right now to this place, I can get fucked up?”
“Yeah, pretty much, for a couple days.”
“Well, let’s go.”
So we all drove down there, and he went in.
TOM FARLEY:
After Tom Arnold’s intervention, Chris finally seemed to get serious about it. He stayed at a facility out there, came back, and spent time at Hazelden’s New York inpatient facility. Then he moved to this halfway house that had just been opened. It was on Sixteenth Street and Second Avenue. It was transitional housing for people trying to regain their footing in society. I wasn’t even allowed in there. He might have had a room, but I believe it was just a bunch of cots in the basement, and they had their meetings upstairs. He was living there full-time and going to perform on national TV every week.
TODD GREEN:
Kevin and I met him over there a lot. At the time it was like, “Holy shit. This is where Chris is living?” But Chris liked it. He was glad to have it.
AL FRANKEN:
When he was living at Hazelden, he’d bring guys from the halfway house to see the show. Chris came to me a lot, because I often wrote about twelve-step stuff. I would talk to him about it and encourage him to go to meetings and stay on the program. I understood the ins and outs of the program, because I go to Al-Anon, which is for family members and friends of alcoholics. Chris knew I believed in the program, and he believed in it, too. And that’s the aspect of this that people may not know. He tried. He really tried.
TODD GREEN:
It was a cycle. There were times when he was in really good shape, but other times there would be so much pressure to drink, and he’d ask me and Kevin to take him home; he was incapable of pulling himself out of a social situation that was bad.
ALEC BALDWIN:
I’ve done a lot of drug and alcohol rehabilitation work, privately, with friends over the years. Chris knew that, and so he really reached out to me for a brief period of time. I talked to him after a show and said, “Here’s my phone number. I want you to call me.”
And his persona offstage was exactly like the “Chris Farley Show” sketch. He was like, “Whoa, this is your phone number? And it’s okay if I call it?”
“Yes, Chris. It’s okay. Just call me, and we’ll talk about whatever you’re going through.”
That lasted for a couple of months. He’d call and we’d talk. Then he’d go back to his old habits, and we’d stop.
DAVID SPADE:
Everyone wanted to take care of Chris. The hosts would hear about the problem, and they’d say, “Can I take you to lunch?” And I think Chris liked the attention of that more than the actual conversation. I used to do an imitation of Chris going, “Alec Baldwin, are you in recovery? We should go to lunch.”
“Okay.”
“Tom Hanks, you’re in recovery, we should go to lunch.”
“No, I’m not.”
“Well . . . do you do drugs?”
“No.”
“Are you afraid of the dark?”
“No.”
“Have you ever seen a scary movie?”
“Yes.”
“Me, too! Let’s go talk about it.”
FR. MATT FOLEY:
He wanted to find a nice woman, go and live in the suburbs, and start a family and be like everybody else. I think he felt if he did that he could escape it. But to stay in the environment he was in, he was never going to. They find you, those people. They always find you.
One time I came to visit New York, and Chris sent a driver to pick me up. The driver didn’t know who I was. He’s just going off about Chris’s women, and how he always hooked Chris up with hot girls. All this wild and crazy stuff. Then halfway through the ride he says, “So what do you do?”
“I’m a priest.”
Well, the conversation came to a dead halt after that. I’m not naïve, certainly, but it was a window into the kind of world Chris was in. How do you not find trouble in that world?
ALEC BALDWIN:
Chris’s problem was that everywhere he went, people thought he was Falstaff. Chris was going to be the jolly fat man who would hoist a beer with you and snort a line with you. Everywhere he went someone was shoving a mug in his hand.
MICHAEL McKEAN, castmember:
While we were filming Coneheads, I was talking to Lorne, and one of us mentioned the fact that Chris was keeping clean at the time, and Lorne said, “Yeah, he’s being good. That’s the deal. We’ve already done the fat guy in the body bag.”
TOM DAVIS:
I said to him once, “Chris, you don’t want to die like Belushi, do you?”
And he said, “Oh, yeah, that’d be really cool.”
And I actually started crying. I wept for him. He said, “Davis, you’re crying.”
“Yes, Chris. I’m crying for you.”
He said, “Wow. Thanks, man.”
I didn’t say you’re welcome.
TODD GREEN:
I never bought in to the fact that Chris was obsessed with Belushi. The press just seemed to make such a huge thing about it. I watched Animal House with Chris. I watched Saturday Night Live with Chris. Sure, we all thought Belushi was great, but I can’t ever remember Chris being obsessed with the guy.
MIKE SHOEMAKER:
I think he romanticized Belushi’s death, but that’s not the same thing as having a death wish. Chris also wanted to be what Belushi couldn’t be. He wanted to have the Chris Farley story be its own story. So I think he was of two minds on it.
LORNE MICHAELS:
Chris romanticized Belushi’s life and his death, to a certain degree, but I told him there was nothing romantic about it. I said, “John missed most of the eighties, all of the nineties, and I don’t think that was his intention.” I was pretty brutal with Chris. I mean, we buried John.
KEVIN FARLEY:
When Chris finally cleaned up, the difference was that for the first time Lorne looked him in the face and said, “I will fire you. I’m not going through another Belushi, and I will fire you.” And he meant it.
STEVEN KOREN:
Chris had really been doing well. He’d been clean for a while. Then we were doing the Glenn Close show just before Christmas. We were in the middle of this read-through, and Chris had written a sketch. I thought it was hilarious, but Chris didn’t seem to think it went well. We had a half-hour break in the middle of the meeting, and Chris just didn’t come back for the second half.
TOM FARLEY:
Chris left the show and went over to Hell’s Kitchen and scored some heroin.
DAVID SPADE:
I found a bunch of bags of coke or heroin in a drawer in our office. I said, “What are these?” I didn’t even know.
He said, “Get the fuck out of here!”
And he kicked me out of our office. Adam came in and asked what was going on. I said, “Farley’s out of it, and there’s some shit in there. I don’t know what it is.”
Chris was pretty good with Adam, so Adam said, “Let me talk to him.”
Adam went in the office.
“Fuck you, Sandler! Get out of here!”
Adam came back out and said, “That didn’t work too good.”
I said, “Let’s talk to Marci and see what she can do.”
Marci came in and said, “Where’s Chris?”
“Fuck you, Marci!”
She said, “I’m telling Lorne.”
JIM DOWNEY:
Lorne said, “I think we have to fire him.”
TOM ARNOLD:
Lorne called me. He said, “Chris relapsed. He’s in his office, weeping. He’s crying out for help so loudly that we can hear him out in the hallway.”
LORNE MICHAELS:
It was a very adolescent cri de coeur, an attempt to play on everyone’s sympathies. But as soon as I heard it was heroin, I was having none of it. I had been through it with John, and I wasn’t doing it again.
MIKE SHOEMAKER:
I don’t remember Chris actually being fired. He was suspended. But we never said “Empty your office.” Because then what could Chris do but go on a binge? But it was severe, and there was an ultimatum attached. Either you come back clean or you don’t come back. We never said, “You’re outta here,” because the problems always manifested when he was “out of here,” because this was the only thing he cared about.
TODD GREEN:
The week he was kicked off, he watched the show with me and Kevin at Kevin’s apartment. It killed him not to be on.
JIM DOWNEY:
I just sat there in the meeting with Chris, being somewhat cold about the whole thing. It was easier than being warm, and probably more effective. He would start to shake and cry, and I would just tune it out. It was a manipulation. He was trying to get your sympathy so you’d let it slide. He had plenty of people wanting to play that motherly role, and he needed people to say, “This is real simple: Fix the problem or you’re out.”
LORNE MICHAELS:
I basically just told him, “This is what it is, and I’m really, really disappointed. And you have to get some help, because this is not a problem that you can solve by yourself.”
I don’t know where I had heard about the place in Alabama, but I thought it was exactly what he needed. It was a real stripped-down, no-nonsense place. I had also seen enough of the Hollywood version of rehab where nothing actually happens. I wanted a place to get his undivided attention. That and the threat of losing the show were the only things that could do it.
TODD GREEN:
Kevin Cleary and I drove him to the airport. That was really hard. It was right before Christmas, and that was always an important time of year for Chris, to be with his friends and his family. No matter where any of us were, we always made it a point to be together in Madison for Christmas. So it was just heartbreaking knowing he was going away to spend it in Alabama at the kind of place he was going to.
We were driving to LaGuardia and it was really quiet in the car, and the song “Bad” by U2 came on. And while we were sitting there, listening to this song, Chris out of nowhere just asked, “What’s this song about?” And it wasn’t like Chris to ask something like that. Kevin and I were like, oh shit. We didn’t really know what to say, so we just told him. “It’s about trying to save a friend who dies from a heroin overdose.”
“Oh.”
Nobody said anything else. We just sat back and listened to the rest of the song. We got to the airport, and in those days you could still walk with someone all the way to the gate, so we went through security with him and walked through the terminal to meet his plane. After we said good-bye he walked over to the gate, and, right at the entrance to the jetway, he stopped and looked back at us for a moment. He had this deadly serious expression on his face. He gave us a thumbs-up, turned around, and walked onto the plane.