The Chris Farley Show: A Biography in Three Acts (32 page)

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.

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.”

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.