The Chris Farley Show: A Biography in Three Acts (17 page)

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.

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.

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.”

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?

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.

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.”

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Chris left the show and went over to Hell’s Kitchen and scored some heroin.

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.

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?”

She said, “I’m telling Lorne.”

Lorne said, “I think we have to fire him.”

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.”

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.

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.

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.

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.”

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.

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.

ACT II

CHAPTER 8

A Friendly Visitor

He was a kind of secret, angelic being who tore too quickly through life, leaving a wake of laughter behind him. As corny as that sounds, it’s the truth.

For the next three years, Chris Farley stayed clean and sober. At Lorne Michaels’s behest, he had spent the entire Christmas break at a hard-core, locked-down rehab facility in Alabama. Unlike the celebrity resort and spa recovery units of Southern California, this joint was one step above prison, and it was staffed by, in the words of Tom Arnold, “a bunch of big black guys who didn’t take any of Chris’s shit.” And it worked.

Chris’s puppy-dog personality and endearing sense of humor had allowed him to weasel his way out of just about any difficult situation he’d faced in the past. But the people in Alabama weren’t having any of it. And, finally, Chris wasn’t having any of it, either. He realized he could no longer bullshit everyone, and he knew it was his last chance to stop bullshitting himself. He took the program seriously, took its message to heart, and took a new direction in life when he returned to New York. He moved into an apartment on the Upper East Side in the same building as Dana Carvey. A year later he would move back downtown to a new apartment on Seventeenth Street, a place chosen specifically for its proximity to his old halfway house and its steady availability of meetings and support groups. As the hoary cliché goes, Chris was a changed man. He was calmer, more thoughtful, and more focused.

He was also funnier. Chris missed the first show of 1993, but he was soon back in full swing, and over the following year he would establish himself as the show’s new breakout star. That February, the writers resurrected “The Chris Farley Show,” this time with one of Chris’s childhood idols, former Beatle Paul McCartney. The very next week Chris got to share the stage with returning
SNL
legend Bill Murray. The coming months brought some of Chris’s most memorable characters, including the blustery Weekend Update commentator Bennett Brauer, the outlandish man-child Andrew Giuliani, a ravenous Gap Girl, and the titular heroine of Adam Sandler’s “Lunchlady Land.”

And on the second-to-last show of his third season, with Bob Odenkirk’s blessing, Chris dusted off an old script lying around from his Second City days and brought it in to the weekly read-through. It was a hit, both at the table and on the air. That Saturday night, with one unforgettable performance, the phrase “van down by the river” assumed its permanent place in the national lexicon.

Chris had been doing the Motivational Speaker character at Second City, but I didn’t know what it was. Since Bob Odenkirk had already written it, they just needed a writer to babysit it through production, check the cue cards and all that. It was never anyone’s favorite job to get. Little did I know.

So I was sitting there watching the rehearsal, making sure the camera angles were right, and I said to Chris, “You know, you’re gonna hurt your voice talking like that. Are you sure you want to do the voice that way?”

He was like, “Don’t worry, Steve. I got this one down.”

That was a good lesson for a young writer: just trust the actors. When he did it live the place exploded.

In rehearsal, he’d done the thing with his glasses where he’s like, “Is that Bill Shakespeare? I can’t see too good.” But he’d never done the twisting his belt and hitching up his pants thing. He saved that for the live performance, and so none of us had ever seen it. He knew that would break me. He started hitching up his pants, and I couldn’t take it. And whenever the camera was behind him focusing on me, he’d cross his eyes. I was losing it.

Once we started laughing, Chris just turned it on more. And we’re not supposed to do that. Lorne doesn’t like it at all, but Chris loved to bust us up. Sometimes after the show he’d say, “All I’m trying to do is make you laugh. I don’t care about anything else.”

Lorne didn’t like us cracking up on air. He didn’t want it to be like
The Carol Burnett Show
. He hated that. When people crack up on
Saturday Night Live
, it’s normally fake, because we’ve already done the sketches and rehearsed them so much. But it was always Chris’s goal when it was live on air to make you laugh, to take you out of your character, and he always succeeded. You could never not laugh.

He would do little asides, especially to Sandler, even if Sandler wasn’t in the sketch. One time Chris was in a Japanese game show sketch, and when he went to write down his answer for the game, he just took a big whiff of the Magic Marker and did a look to Sandler off camera. Sandler wasn’t even in the sketch, but if you watch the tape you can hear him laughing offscreen.