The Chris Farley Show: A Biography in Three Acts (28 page)

At that point, sobriety was just part of his routine. It wasn’t a chore or a burden. It was a balanced part of his life. We weren’t hanging out at raging keggers or anything, but we’d go out to things where there was liquor served. People would buy him shots and he’d accept them graciously. Then he’d hand them to me and say, “Here, Ted. You do it.”

Even when he was enraged or in a foul mood, he’d just go to a meeting, get himself together, and come back calmer. In the Second City days, drunk or sober, he was always a comedian without a stage, always fucking around. Now he was very much in control of himself. He didn’t need to prove something to somebody all the time. He could turn on the comedian when he needed to be there.

Chris and Ted, honest to God, were like Felix and Oscar. They were the Odd Couple. Just to watch them interact was hysterical. Chris lived to give him hell, and Ted was like, “Whatever.”

Chris would hide things and then demand them from Ted, just for fun. They’d walk out the front door and Chris would go, “Where’s the little, you know, my recording thing I need?”

“I didn’t see it,” Ted would say

“You didn’t see it? Well, let’s go back and look for it then!”

Then Chris would go back in and wait while Ted looked for the thing and say, “Look! Here it is under the couch!”

“Uh, okay.”

“You idiot! Let’s go!”

It was fun for Chris to beat up on him like you would a little brother, but Ted could ride out all of Chris’s mood swings without even a blip in his pulse rate. He just didn’t care. If you put Chris in real terms, he was a company making millions and millions of dollars, and Teddy was in charge. It was like, Holy Lord, this ship is headed for the rocks and nobody’s at the wheel.

To be an assistant to a star like that, you’ve got a lot of people calling you all the time—agents, heads of studios. It’s not an easy job. Chris would get frustrated with Ted, because oftentimes Ted wasn’t as thorough as he needed to be. But they were friends, so that’s why there was never really any employer-employee etiquette to be observed.

Chris was such a people pleaser that he’d give everyone what they wanted, always be so deferential. But he had just as much ego and just as much of a temper as anyone. All of that negative energy had to get channeled somewhere, and it got channeled to Kevin, Johnny, and me. He’d never let anyone else see that side of him, and so we’d take the brunt of it. But we also understood it for what it was, blowing off steam. Any outburst was immediately followed by a shower of apologies.

Teddy was a good companion, and honest. He comes from more money than Chris or any of us had ever seen, so he didn’t give two shits about Chris’s money or his fame. He was just doing it for fun. He was probably the most trustworthy guy Chris could have had by his side. And we all had fun together. We’d go to Second City, work out at the gym. Chris was really into his martial arts training for
Beverly Hills Ninja
.

Master Guo had been a karate champion in Communist China and had defected. He didn’t speak very good English, and he only weighed about a hundred and ten pounds, but he was an amazing teacher. He and Chris used to do this thing where they’d stand shoulder width apart, clasp one hand, and then push and pull, and the first one to have a foot pulled off the ground would lose. Chris outweighed his teacher more than two to one, but the guy got Chris off his feet every time, without even trying. He was the real deal. But he was very impressed with Chris for what a fast learner he was. This was the football player in him coming back.

Thinking back on it, the martial arts training was something Chris lacked later on, namely a hobby, something to keep him occupied. It was a noteworthy time in that there was nothing too noteworthy about it. He was sober and happy and having a good time. It was never that way again.

None of us saw it coming.

Chris was going to have a Christmas party at the Hancock, but first he had to go to New York to attend a screening of
Black Sheep
. For whatever reason, in the days before he left for New York, he started getting angry. He always had a temper, but this was a little more consistent, and more fierce. It was a gathering storm.

Then a rewrite of
Ninja
came back, and it really sucked. Following right on that, I was filming some of his training to send in to the screen-writers to come up with jokes, but the battery died on the camcorder halfway through the training session. Afterward, we went to look at it and it was all fucked up. Chris went into a rage, yelling and screaming and ranting about this goddamned script. He left Chicago really pissed off.

I picked him up in New York. The car came and got me, and I went to the airport to meet him. We were going to stop by the hotel and then go and have dinner. He got into the limousine, and as we drove off we started talking about work. And while we were talking it was like a black cloud came over him. I saw the Chris I knew literally disappear, just vanish into this distant world. I said, “What’s going on?” But he had checked out.

We went by the hotel and then got back in the car to go and have dinner. Chris was quiet for a moment. Then he turned to me and said, “Kitten, I’m drinking tonight.”

ACT III

CHAPTER 12

Raising the White Flag

That first relapse, that was the big one. The rest were just dominoes.

Chris Farley had been sober for three years. At a time when his commitment had never seemed stronger, he gave it all up with one drink on the flight from Chicago to New York. As news of the relapse spread, Chris’s friends and family all asked the same question: why? Some felt it was the gathering stress and anxiety over his career. Others felt that Chris had never successfully dealt with every aspect of his compulsive and addictive behaviors, most notably with regard to food. Still others felt that Chris’s sobriety had always relied too much on external motivators, like the threat of losing his job at
Saturday Night Live
. Whatever precipitated the relapse, it happened. And it was devastating.

I started crying. “No, you’re not,” I said. “You’re not going to do that, and you’re not going to do it with me.”

“I’ve already started. That wasn’t water I was drinking in the hotel. It was vodka,” he told me.

We went to dinner, and he started drinking martinis. After that, we went to the Rainbow Room. Steve Martin was there. Chris was acting like a madman. I thought I could get him through the night, call Ted the next morning and find his sponsor, and see where to take him.

I got him back to the hotel room. He was drinking and crying. Then he said he was going to this spot in Hell’s Kitchen to get drugs. I said, “If you want to go there, I’m going with you, and then you need to take me home because I’m not going to play with that.”

We got in the limo, went to this place, and he went inside while I waited outside. After a minute I got nervous and went in after him. He looked at me and said, “Get me out of here.”

So he left without doing anything, and I took him back to the hotel. He just kept drinking and crying and talking about the voices in his head. He kept saying, “How do you turn off the voices in your head? They’re in my head. How do I get them out?”

I finally fell asleep as the sun was rising. When I woke up I called his name, and he wasn’t there. I waited and waited, not knowing what to do. About an hour and a half later, I started getting ready to go, and he came in with sunglasses on. I could tell he hadn’t been to sleep, and he was way too calm and mellowed out from what he’d been the night before. He was on something.

I told him, “I thought that I could handle being around you if you started using again. I thought I’d never leave you no matter what, but I can’t be around this. It’s just too much.” And I left and went home.

Chris called me and said, “Tommy, you want to go and see a sneak preview of
Black Sheep
in New Jersey?” I said sure. He was staying at the Four Seasons, so I stopped up there. He looked fine to me. The limo was going to pick us up any second, and Chris was getting into the minibar, filling his pockets with the little bottles. I said, “Chris, what are you doing?”

“Oh, I’m just getting a couple of these for the limo driver,” he said. “They like that.”

And after three years of sobriety, I actually let myself think that was okay. I just didn’t for the life of me think he could be lying. We got in the limo and drove out to Jersey.

We were up in the screening room, waiting for everyone to filter into the theater. At one point he said, “I gotta go to the bathroom.” I did, too, so I went with him. We got to the men’s room, and it was this small, janitor’s closet kind of thing. I followed him in anyway. He was like, “What are you doing?”

“I gotta go to the bathroom,” I said.

We’re brothers, for God’s sake. I’d been in the bathroom with him hundreds of times. But all of a sudden he’s like, “Get out. I can’t . . . I gotta go by myself.”

I thought that was very strange, but I left him to it. Then we watched the movie, and we were driving somewhere else, and, same thing, “I gotta go to the bathroom.” So we pull over and he goes in someplace to use the bathroom. And, of course, what he was doing was drinking. I certainly didn’t see him give away any of his little bottles. I didn’t put two and two together until the next day when I got a call from Dad, saying, “What the hell happened?”

“What do you mean?”

“Chris trashed his hotel room at the Four Seasons and did three thousand dollars’ worth of damage.”

And then it was back to rehab.

When I got the call in Chicago that he had relapsed, it was devastating; devastating to me, devastating to him, and devastating to everyone in the family. He took so much pride in his sobriety, more than any of the movies or work he’d ever done, more than any other success in his life. Those three years were his crowning achievement.

Chris and I had been hanging out every day, and then right around Christmas he disappeared off the face of the earth. He called me early in the morning on New Year’s Eve. He said, “Hey, it’s Chris.”

“Hey,” I said, “why haven’t you called me?” I was pissed.

“I relapsed.”

“You’re lying,” I said. “I don’t believe you.”

We had talked so much about his sobriety, and I was so confident in him that I really couldn’t imagine it.

He said, “I really want to see you. Will you come and meet me at a meeting?”

There was a meeting that morning. I went with him. He told me about the relapse and the screening. He said that he’d fucking hated
Black Sheep
, that it was just
Tommy Boy II
, only worse.

That screening didn’t help. He saw one shitty movie that he’d made, and then he really started worrying that, with
Ninja
, he was working on a second one.

Beverly Hills Ninja
was a script that had been around, and around. Several stars had turned it down. Chris himself had passed on it a number of times. But negotiations for the film had taken a dramatic turn the previous summer, while filming for
Black Sheep
was still under way. Sensing Chris’s impending stardom,
Ninja’s
producers got very aggressive. They offered him an ungodly salary, and that changed the whole equation. Chris was still reluctant, and his managers were vehemently opposed, regardless of the payday. But Chris’s dad counseled him otherwise, essentially saying, “You don’t turn down that kind of money.” Show business is not the asphalt business, but in this as in all things Chris listened to his father. He signed on to play Haru, an infant boy orphaned in Japan and raised to fulfill a prophecy as the Great White Ninja. Through a series of slapstick setups and wacky misadventures, Haru makes his way to California and solves a crime. Shakespeare it wasn’t.

Chris had rationalized his taking the film by saying it would make a good kids’ movie. Another big factor in the decision was simply his confidence. The story was one big, long pratfall, and Chris’s abilities as a physical comedian had never failed to deliver huge laughs. But Chris’s other major asset was his Midwestern Everyman appeal. Dressing him in martial arts garb and giving him hokey, Zen-sounding dialogue was not a good fit, and it flopped onscreen.

The project was not without its bright spots. It did turn out to be a successful children’s movie. Chris Rock was struggling professionally at the time, and Farley used the movie to lend his
SNL
friend a helping hand. But all things considered, it was a serious detour.

Following his stint in rehab, Chris flew to Hollywood in January of 1996 and started production on the film. He stayed clean throughout the shoot, determined not to let the relapse derail his three years of hard-fought sobriety. But the change in him was obvious to everyone on the set. His anxiety was rapidly eclipsing his boisterous amiability, and the strength and serenity he’d possessed just a few weeks before had all but vanished.

At that point, Chris could have done almost anything, career-wise, and for him to do a movie where he offered himself up as “the fat guy” I felt was a recipe for psychic disaster. I don’t want to sound overly dramatic by saying that that movie killed him, but the decision to do it was Chris surrendering a creative part of himself. He was raising the white flag to easy Hollywood mediocrity. I know that he hated himself for saying yes.