The Chris Farley Show: A Biography in Three Acts

by Tom Farley

  KEVIN FARLEY:

  When he would get into trouble, even as a kid, it was like something would take control of him that he couldn’t help but cut up and make people laugh, even though he knew he’d get in trouble for it. And he’d look back at whatever stupid thing he’d just done and be like, “Why did I do that? Why did I get myself in detention just to get a laugh out of Dan Healy?”

  NICK BURROWS:

  The thing is, he was accepted by his friends and the other kids without all the crazy behavior. Quite frankly, he didn’t need it. But he felt that he needed it. Someone at Marquette told me a story about a time on a Monday morning on campus. It was a dreary winter morning, and Chris all of a sudden just broke out running, dove into a snowbank, and started kicking his legs out in the air. Now, why would he feel compelled to do that?

  GREG MEYER:

  He was always insecure about his weight. He’d project this attitude of not caring to everyone, but among the inner circle of guys, he talked about it quite a lot. He said it was the worst thing in his life.

  TOM FARLEY:

  At some point, Chris started getting into his share of fights. We were at a basketball game in Stoughton, Wisconsin. I was there with a girl, and word came up through the bleachers that Chris was down, just beaten and bloodied. Someone had called him a fatty, and that was enough for Chris to go off. We took him to the hospital and patched him up. Ruined my date.

  HAMILTON DAVIS:

  He was always fighting his weight, and I mean bad. He wanted to get with the guys who were lifting weights, would play any sport. He just wanted that weight off him so bad. We were both big guys. One summer he was a cookie, working in the kitchen, and I was a counselor, and we went on this diet together. We lost a bunch of weight, thirty pounds or so. He looked great. Chris always wanted to be mainstream, getting a girl and all that.

  KIT SEELIGER, girlfriend:

  I met Chris freshman year in high school. We had a lot of classes together, and we were pals. For Valentine’s Day, Edgewood would do carnation sales. You could buy them for your girlfriend or whatever, and sophomore year Chris bought me one and gave me a box of candy. I think, as far as high school goes, we were boyfriend and girlfriend then. I was a late bloomer. I didn’t have boys beating down my door, by any means, and maybe I felt safe to him. I’m sure that probably had something to do with it.

  We talked on the phone a lot. Then as we got a little bit older we’d go out on dates and so forth. Chris was pretty insecure when it came to dating and girls, but the fact that we were friends beforehand made it a little bit easier. When his parents took him out of Edgewood and sent him to La Lumiere, that’s when our relationship was probably the most serious. We talked on the phone probably every single night. We wrote long letters, back and forth to each other once or twice a week. We’d end each letter by writing, “I miss you so much,” and it was a game to see how many o’s you could put in the word “so.” It was all pretty innocent, really. For the most part, we were just good friends. I know he told me things that he never told his guy friends. He would say he loved me, and things like that, things I know he never admitted to his friends that he’d said.

  Then, the summer going into senior year, Chris broke up with me. I was shocked. But it was after a time when he had started standing me up. My mom couldn’t stand Chris. She’d get so angry at the thought of my waiting around for him. But around the time we broke up, things were really taking a turn for the worse.

  PAT O’GARA:

  Toward the end of Chris’s junior year, we were at a party one night at Pete Kay’s house. Chris and I were downstairs in the basement all alone. I was drinking something. Chris had a bunch of beers, and he was just slamming them. I was like, “What are you doing? Slow down. This is ridiculous.”

  But he went and got drunk. I remember the next football practice on Monday he kept telling everyone, “O’Gara got me drunk!” He actually told one of the assistant coaches, who was like, “What the hell’d you do to Farley?”

  That’s how it all started.

  TODD GREEN:

  For the first two and a half years of high school, Chris was adamantly against drinking or doing drugs of any kind. Totally and completely.

  ROBERT BARRY:

  Chris didn’t drink until he was a junior, but the minute he did it was all over. I don’t ever remember a time when I could sit down with Chris and have “a beer” and have a conversation. It was balls to the wall, all the time.

  KEVIN FARLEY:

  The first time he got drunk, he came in, woke me up, and got into a fight with me. Then he woke up in the morning and didn’t remember it, and I was like, “Whoa. What’s wrong here?”

  It was the first sip he ever had, and there was a complete personality change. Everybody was drinking in high school, but nobody I knew had the kind of reaction he had. Chris was a fun guy, an outgoing guy, and it turned him into kind of a monster. It was like pouring gasoline on a fire. And I don’t think he liked it. He didn’t like being that guy, but at the same time he craved it.

  And nobody talked about it. You don’t narc on your brother. All I knew was that everyone went out to the football games and went drinking. That’s what you did. We just thought, hey! Chris is so crazy! And there were other guys just as hard-core as he was, passed out at parties and all that.

  He got in trouble a couple of times, but for the most part it just slid by. We had these bedrooms downstairs where it was real easy to sneak out of the house. You could come and go, and you had plenty of time to clean yourself up before you went upstairs and saw the folks. I don’t know how much they knew what was really going on. They didn’t know. They didn’t want to know.

  TOM FARLEY:

  Drinking was okay in our house. There was alcoholism on my mom’s side of the family. On my dad’s side, well, it was Wisconsin. You drank first and asked questions later. Our father was “a couple of tumblers of scotch a night” guy. From early on, we all knew what five o’clock meant. It was all right out there in the open.

  The drinking age was eighteen, which effectively made it sixteen, so for us to go out and drink in high school was no big deal. All you did in Madison on Friday nights was cruise around, eat, drink, and then everyone would end up at Rocky’s Pizza. Whenever we went out, Dad would call us into the living room and dole out twenty-dollar bills to all of us. “C’mon in here!” he’d say. “Here you go. Buy a round for the boys on me!”

  “But we’re only seventeen.”

  “Be careful!”

  We’d all walk out the door, head right down to Vic Pierce’s liquor store, and charge a six-pack on Dad’s account. You were ready to go. Chris was very generous, and Dad always made sure we had the means to be generous. It was part of being a Farley.

  TODD GREEN:

  Mr. Farley always made you feel like a million bucks as soon as you walked in the door of that house. It was always, “Hey! How ya doin’?!” All the Edgewood guys, we loved Mr. Farley, loved him.

  DAN HEALY:

  You heard all these stories about Mr. Farley being friendly with Joseph McCarthy and all these very powerful, conservative people in Wisconsin. He talked it and walked it.

  TOM FARLEY:

  My dad created an image for himself. He was always dressed in a custom-tailored blue blazer and slacks, perfectly starched shirt and tie. It was always, “Hey, Dad looks great! Check out his new blazer!” And, of course, no comment that the blazer was a size sixty-five because Dad was hitting four hundred pounds.

  ROBERT BARRY:

  He was an overwhelming personality. Just a loud, gregarious guy. His whole business was going around schmoozing people all over the state, and he was very good at it. The Farleys had this image they projected, living in Maple Bluff, having the status symbols. They would do a lot of different things to cover their problems up. But when you look at the family now, you can see how much of a façade it all was.

  JOHN FARLEY:

  Maple Bluff was a fantasyland, a place w
here there weren’t any consequences. What we’d do in the Farley household, back in the eighties, back when everyone drank, was we had fun. We’d party and laugh. We’d put on little comedy sketches with each other. We weren’t trying to be comedians; we were just doing what came naturally and what we liked to do, just joking around. Didn’t know drinking was bad for you. Didn’t have a clue. We grew up in a time and a place where at five o’clock every day, everyone would break out the cocktails. We thought it was normal. Put a gun to our heads, we thought it was normal.

  TOM FARLEY:

  We lived in a make-believe world. We were living with the elephant in the room—the literal elephant in the room—that no one wanted to talk about. My dad weighed six hundred pounds by the time he died. But Dad wasn’t overweight. Dad didn’t drink too much. Dad was just Dad. We didn’t talk about it among ourselves, and we certainly didn’t talk about it with anyone else.

  Mom was really the only one to acknowledge what was going on with Chris. She was the voice in the wilderness, and for years there was nobody else on board with her.

  “What’s wrong with Chris?”

  “Your mother and I are handling it.”

  And that was as far as it went for a long, long time. Nobody was willing to face the truth. Nobody confronted Chris about his problem, because doing so would have meant acknowledging that Dad had a problem—that we all had a problem.

  CHAPTER 3

  An Epiphany

  DICK WENZELL:

  As an actor, it took me a long time to learn how to let the character take me over, to lose myself in it. I think Chris figured that out very early in life, and he could hide himself by being anybody else that he wanted to be.

  After Chris’s expulsion and subsequent stint at La Lumiere prep school, he was allowed to return to Edgewood for the whole of his senior year. He graduated in the spring of 1982 with little direction beyond a vague sense that he might one day work in the family business. But Chris’s father firmly believed that all of his children should receive a Catholic education, and so Chris found himself enrolled at Marquette, a Jesuit university in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

  Though Chris’s grades did not make the cut for admission, they did qualify him for the university’s Freshman Frontiers Program, a preliminary summer school in which students could earn their way into the incoming class. Together with high school friend Dan Healy, Chris entered the program, passed, and began regular course work in the fall.

  It has been said that college is less a place for academic achievement and more a rite of passage through which to discover oneself. By that standard, Chris’s years at Marquette were a ringing success. As always, he won friends easily, especially among the Marquette rugby team—the gung-ho, gonzo athletes who would become his ad hoc fraternity. Given the preferences of his father, and lacking any clear ones of his own, Chris started out in the business studies program. Bored and disinterested, he did not do well. However, as his understanding of his talents grew, he changed course and dedicated himself to a career in acting and comedy. Though his early attempts at performance were frequently clumsy, Chris kept at it with a dedication he had previously shown only in his football uniform.

  As a Jesuit institution, Marquette teaches its students to pursue knowledge and personal growth not only for their own self-advancement but also for the glory of God and service to others. Chris’s four years in Milwaukee would give him the opportunity to do precisely that.

  JIM MURPHY, friend:

  When he first came to Marquette, he was a very preppy guy. Super preppy. He would always have his hair combed and always had polo shirts and khakis and Top-Siders. Then over time he would take those Ralph Lauren button-down oxfords and he’d rip the sleeves off. Then, in the next phase, the khakis became army fatigues and the oxfords turned into flannel shirts. It was the same thing everyone did in college. We all kind of came in as one thing and left as another.

  FR. MATT FOLEY, friend:

  The first time I saw Chris was on the rugby pitch. I was the president of the rugby team, and a sophomore. He was a freshman. He was wearing some kind of obnoxious chartreuse-colored polo shirt with argyle shorts and gym shoes. I was drawn to him right away because I thought, oh, this poor soul is going to get his ass kicked. The guys on the rugby team are a little rough, and here comes the preppy, portly kid. But he hustled and made many friends in no time because he was such a classic character.

  One of the great things about Chris was that he was so very generous. Marquette would play Madison every year in rugby, so we went out there that fall. We’d been drinking all day, and Chris was like, “Let’s all go over to my place!”

  We get there, and Mr. Farley and Mrs. Farley are just the most gracious hosts. All these drunk, dirty rugby guys are running around their house—this is around one in the morning—and Mrs. Farley is going, “Oh, you boys! Let me make some sandwiches.” And she just brought out all these beautiful sandwiches.

  We rode back to Milwaukee in the back of a pickup, freezing our asses off. It had a camper top on it, but it wasn’t very warm. The bars in Madison closed at one, but the bars at Marquette didn’t close until three. You could close the bars in one town and still make it to close the bars in the other. That’s the rugby mentality at its finest.

  KEVIN FARLEY:

  When I got to Marquette, Chris had only been there two years, and he was already a legend, flat out the funniest guy on campus, and that really grew out of the rugby parties. The Avalanche was a typical Milwaukee bar. That’s where the rugby players would go party after their games. It had a great jukebox and a couple of pool tables. They had fifty-cent Red, White and Blue beers. When you finished your bottle, you threw it against the back wall of the bar.

  Chris started doing this thing after the games: naked beer slides. Everyone in the bar would pour out their beer and he’d take off all his clothes and take a running start and slide across the bar like Pete Rose coming into home base. The Avalanche is long gone, but people still do it. It’s something of a Marquette tradition. People have built a legend around it.

  JIM MURPHY:

  It got to a point where every team coming in to play Marquette had heard about the beer slides and wanted to see them. Chris would start to take his clothes off, going, “Aw, man. Why do I always have to do this?” But he’d kind of set the tone early, and he always had to live up to himself.

  PAT FINN, friend:

  Any time during a game that there was a lull, or any opportunity for a laugh, you’d just look over at Chris. One game, we file in for this line out. Everyone is waiting for the inbound pass. Chris kind of looks over and then pulls up his pants into his ass like a thong. The whole other team just turns and stares, like, “What the hell’s with this guy?” Then, with the whole team distracted, Chris takes the pass and gets about twenty yards on the play. He was always hilarious.

  DAN HEALY:

  Freshman year of college, a group of us had done a road trip for some winter festival. It was freezing, snow everywhere, and we were goofing around, diving and playing in the snow. And while we were all screwing around, Chris just stopped cold. He stopped, and he turned to me and said, “I think I can make people laugh.”

  He’d had an epiphany, literally. He was starting to realize that he had this ability, a calling in life.

  FR. MATT FOLEY:

  He saw his talent as a gift from God—there’s no doubt about that. I went away to seminary after his freshman year, but one thing I found fascinating about him in those two semesters was that he had a tremendous faith life, devoted and disciplined. He was not evangelical; he didn’t preach about it, but it was something in the fiber of his soul.

  At Marquette, there’s the Joan of Arc Chapel, this beautiful chapel brought over stone by stone from Europe, and they have a daily mass. Inevitably, you would find Chris there, disheveled and partied out and just sort of scruffy. There’s not a doubt in my mind that he was in church more than any other student on that campus, at least three or fou
r times a week.

  PAT FINN:

  After I met Chris, we signed up for a class called the Philosophy of Humor. We thought, could there be an easier A? I don’t know why we thought that, since we’d never gotten an A before. Truth be told, Chris got a D. But Father Nauss, who taught the class, gave us each a copy of “A Clown’s Prayer.” The last lines go, “Never let me forget that my total effort is to cheer people, make them happy, and forget momentarily all the unpleasantness in their lives. / And in my final moment, may I hear You whisper: ‘When you made My people smile, you made Me smile.’ ” It meant a lot to us, and we kept it in our wallets.

  There were times, for instance, when Chris and I’d be on the highway, going through a tollbooth. He’d do a bit in front of the tollbooth taker, and it’d make the guy laugh. At first you were kind of like, oh, that was a little weird. But on the other hand it was like, you know, he just made that guy’s day. That guy’s gonna go home and tell his wife, “Yeah, this big guy came through in a car today and did this thing with the steering wheel . . .”

  One of the cool things about Chris, and one of the noble things about Chris, is that if he made somebody’s day better, if he could ease the pain and sadness in the world just a bit, that was why he felt he was here.