The Chris Farley Show: A Biography in Three Acts

by Tom Farley

  You look at all the pieces of Chris’s life, his father, his mother, his brothers, his life growing up, his work—everything. You look at all that and maybe some things are off or a little dysfunctional, but at the end of the day it’s his responsibility. It’s not like I didn’t sit with him a dozen times where he looked me in the eye and knew what he had to do to stay sober. You can’t blame your circumstances, and after a certain point you can’t even blame your father. You can’t blame him; you have to have compassion for him. It all comes down to you, and you’ve got to be a man about it.

  LORRI BAGLEY:

  Chris knew that to be himself, to be healthy, he’d have to pull away from the family, and he couldn’t do it. He said he couldn’t do it. But you have to cut the emotional umbilical cord at some point. Some American Indians have a ritual where you’re not allowed to be a part of the tribe until you leave, go out in the wilderness, rename yourself, and come back. Then you’re accepted as a man. But we don’t have that in our culture. That’s why families in the country are falling apart, and why women have to deal with all this Madonna/whore bullshit. It’s because men don’t grow up, and Chris never grew up.

  ERICH "MANCOW” MULLER:

  That May, Chris Rock was performing in Chicago. Farley called me and said, “I’ve broken out of prison. I’m out. I want to go see my boy Chris Rock!” Chris broke out of rehab to go to this show. I met him at his apartment, and I was begging him not to drink. I was sitting there, going, “No. No, Chris. Please.”

  He said, “Just a little splash.” That’s how it started off, a Coke with a splash of whiskey—and I mean just a drop. Then an hour later it turned into a glass of whiskey with a splash of Coke. We went to the concert to meet Tim Meadows and his wife, and I spent the whole night fighting him.

  TIM MEADOWS:

  We went backstage after the show to see Rock, and Farley was drunk, fooling around in front of these girls. We’d been talking about going out for dinner after the show, but Rock and I looked at each other, and I said, “I can’t do it. I can’t be around him anymore like this.”

  Rock said, “Yeah, I know what you mean. I’ll take care of him tonight.”

  CHRIS ROCK:

  He was so fucking drunk, drunk to the point where he was being rude and grabby with girls. He would go too far and you’d call him on it, and he’d give you his crying apology, the Farley Crying Apology. We probably had about four of those that night.

  I remember dropping him off at his apartment. He wanted me to come up and see his place, and I just didn’t have it in me. He was so fucked up. I just couldn’t go up there. And as I drove away, I knew. It had gotten to that point. I knew that was the last time I’d ever see him alive.

  JILLIAN SEELY:

  I was waiting for Chris to pick me up for the Chris Rock show, and I got a phone call from him saying there weren’t enough tickets and so I couldn’t go. That was Sunday. Then Tuesday I got a call at nine o’clock at night from a nurse at the Northwestern psych ward. Hazelden had to send him to the hospital to get sober before they’d let him back into treatment.

  Chris got on the phone. “I’m really scared,” he said. “I totally relapsed on Sunday and went back to treatment, and they made me come here. Will you come and see me?”

  So I went over to Northwestern. I went up to Chris’s room, and I heard him go, “Hey, hey, in here.”

  He was in the bathroom blowing his cigarette smoke into the air vent. I looked down at this stainless-steel paper towel rack, and there were lines of cocaine on it. Chris had gotten one of the hospital staff to bring him coke in the detox ward.

  I said, “I’m totally telling on you.” I went out into the hallway and started yelling, “Chris is doing cocaine in his room!”

  They came in and restrained him. He was screaming at me, “You’re a fucking narc! I hate you!” It was like a scene out of a bad movie. It was horrible, really horrible.

  KEVIN FARLEY:

  The fact that Chris was able to score cocaine inside the detox ward was just insane. When you’re famous there aren’t any rules. That’s when I knew things were getting bad. He was in a mental ward. You couldn’t get any lower than that.

  As a kid, when he watched The Exorcist, he was terrified of the idea that something evil could take over your body, possess you, and make you do things you can’t control. Here he had this thing that was eating away at him from the inside, and he was powerless to stop it. And that scared the living shit out of him.

  FR. TOM GANNON:

  On the surface, the Farleys are a wonderful family. They’re loving. They’re supportive. They’re there for one another. I didn’t get to know the father. Met him once, maybe. Spoke to him on the phone a couple of times. And I suppose I have to be honest; I didn’t care for him that much. Whereas the mother is a lovely person, caught in the same vortex as the rest of them.

  And therein lies the key to the problem: They didn’t know how to manage Chris. When it’s all said and done, I don’t know that they were any more or less dysfunctional than any other family, but Chris’s personality was so outsized that it sort of took over. It’s that old story from his childhood, when the nuns said that Chris didn’t know the difference between somebody laughing with him or laughing at him. That played out in the family as well. At what point do you draw a line that this bizarre behavior is too much to handle?

  TOM FARLEY:

  Nobody ever thought of the problem in terms of Chris’s health or the idea that he could die. Mom maybe had some premonitions of disaster but didn’t talk about it. No one talked about it—and that was the problem. My parents’ reaction was always the same: “Chris is out of control.” Or “Dammit, how could he do this? He’s going to ruin his career.”

  And the motivations were always external, like getting fired from Saturday Night Live. It was always concern about the symptoms and never the disease, which none of us genuinely understood. But Chris wasn’t “out of control”; he was sick. And his sickness was just so deep and so entrenched.

  TOM ARNOLD:

  It’s harder for some people, and I don’t know what it would’ve taken for Chris to really, truly hit bottom. The absolute worst I ever saw him was at a Planet Hollywood opening in Indianapolis that July. It was the bad Chris. I mean, he was just so fucked up. He had his shirt up over his head and people were taking pictures. Kevin was with him. I said to Kevin, “You better get him out of here. I’m gonna fuckin’ tackle him, ’cause I have had it.”

  KEVIN FARLEY:

  Jillian and I were trying to get him out of the bar, but he didn’t want to leave. And at that point I couldn’t control him. Either he’s going to take a swing at me and we can get into a fight there in front of the cameras, or I can go home. We’d flown in on a private jet that night, so Jillian and I left and took it back together.

  JILLIAN SEELY:

  We were really quiet on the plane. We were both so sad that Chris had started drinking again. The next day I got a phone call around noon. I thought it would be Chris, calling from Indianapolis, confused and wondering why he’d been left behind and maybe having learned a bit of a lesson. But he was like, “Hey, what’s going on? I’m back in Chicago. Want to get lunch?” The plane went right back for him and picked him up. No consequences for his actions at all.

  But his behavior at the party made the Enquirer and the entertainment TV shows. And then that profile in US magazine came out a few weeks later. It was a pretty hard-core article.

  TOM FARLEY:

  That was the first time there had really been any public exposure of Chris’s problems, which is pretty amazing when you look back on it. At that point, he was really staring at the abyss; it looked like he was going to lose it all. Brillstein-Grey went into damage control mode, trying to clean up the press.

  They also sent Chris back to Promises in Malibu and made him start seeing this therapist in L.A. The sessions Chris had with this guy weren’t really therapy sessions; it was more this guy telling Chris what he
had to do, and why, if he wanted to save himself. He really got into Chris’s noggin. He hit him in a weak spot, that superstitious thing that he always had. He was telling Chris there was this other side to him, this other being inside him that was bent on destruction. That really played to a lot of Chris’s fears, and I don’t think it was helpful at all. I think he just confused the boy.

  FR. TOM GANNON:

  Chris thought of his addiction in terms of good and evil, that drugs were the devil’s way of controlling him, and I tried to steer him away from that way of thinking, because it isn’t very helpful. Like many Irish Catholics, Chris’s spirituality was sort of a mix between religion and superstition.

  TOM FARLEY:

  He told me that heroin was the devil. “I’ve seen the devil, Tommy.” That’s what he told me after he’d tried it.

  LORRI BAGLEY:

  Chris told me that every time you do heroin, you can feel it take a part of your soul.

  KEVIN FARLEY:

  Chris would talk about his addiction in those terms, because that was the vocabulary he had for it. A lot of people laugh at that concept, but I think it’s as good a framework as any. What is a demon? A demon is something that wants you dead. And whatever was in possession of Chris certainly wanted him dead.

  FR. MATT FOLEY:

  Chris knew all too well that addiction was a disease. He and I had endless talks about it. He needed to separate himself from the shame that he felt. He needed to learn how to forgive himself and accept forgiveness from others. But I can relate to his thinking. I struggle with temptation every day, as do we all. There is no blessing that comes out of drugs and alcohol, and in that sense they’re evil.

  TIM O’MALLEY:

  They say that you should go back to your faith when you get sober, but it’s up to the individual the role that their faith plays. How did I survive? How did I not run myself off the road when I was driving around in my underwear looking for crack? I’d have to say it was God. But a lot of people don’t go back, because they feel so burned by the nuns and the priests.

  I don’t think Chris ever got a chance to really clarify or learn properly some of the ways to sort out your life. So I think he used religion and did the best he could with it, still trying to be a good Catholic boy using the garbage we were taught by the nuns, the angel on one shoulder and the devil on the other. It’s a fifth-grader’s view of spirituality.

  FR. TOM GANNON:

  Chris was caught in a transition in Catholicism between an old-church approach to faith and a newer way of thinking. The old view of spirituality was that life was like climbing a mountain. You have to fight onward and upward, climbing with your spiritual crampons until you reach the top—and that’s perfection. You pass the trial and you pass the test and you get so many gold stars in your copybook. Then you come before the heavenly throne for judgment, and maybe you’ve got a couple of indulgences in your back pocket in case your accounting was wrong.

  But that kind of faith only gets a person so far. Your spiritual life isn’t like climbing a mountain, waiting to find God at the top. It’s a journey, full of highs and lows, and God is there with you every step of the way, in the here and now and in the hereafter. The first approach is really a whole lot of smoke and mirrors. It’s only the second one that allows a person to grow, but that second view is hard for people to get ahold of unless they get in touch with themselves.

  Chris didn’t feel that he was worthy of God’s love. He felt he had to prove himself. Well, you’re never going to get very far in any relationship with that kind of belief. Imagine if you had to prove yourself to your spouse every single day; that’s not the way love works. In all of our talks, that was the one thing I really tried to work with him on, adjusting to this different idea of faith, but he never really moved from one to the other. It’s hard. It takes a long time to come around to that way of thinking, and Chris just ran out of time.

  CHAPTER 14

  Fatty Falls Down

  CHRIS FARLEY:

  The notion of love is something that would be a wonderful thing. I don’t think I’ve ever experienced it, other than the love of my family. At this point it’s something beyond my grasp. But I can imagine it, and longing for it makes me sad.

  In January of 1997, Chris Farley had the number-one movie in America and a ninety-day sobriety chip of which he could rightly be proud. A mere seven months later, all of that seemed an impossible memory.

  On August 1, Chris’s relapse at Planet Hollywood triggered a small whirlwind of negative press, capped by the September issue of US magazine with its profile, aptly titled “Chris Farley: On the Edge of Disaster.” Not only had the reporter been witness to Chris’s relapse and subsequent escape to Hawaii, Chris himself, in full heart-on-sleeve mode, had divulged a year’s worth of personal therapy in just a few short interviews. Even Chris’s friends and manager Marc Gurvitz had given frank assessments of Chris’s condition. The piece was a public relations nightmare.

  On August 8, Chris checked into Promises, an upscale recovery facility in Malibu, California. He stayed until the end of the month. On September 1, he checked out for a brief opportunity to go back to work, flying to Toronto to film a small cameo in Norm MacDonald’s feature film Dirty Work, about a guy who goes into the revenge-for-hire business to help raise money for a friend’s operation.

  Chris stayed clean during his shooting days—he always did—but he would vanish at night, and in general he did not look well. Norm found Chris’s behavior unusual; he had never seen his friend under the influence before. He openly questioned Chris as to whether or not it was a good idea for him to continue working, but Chris insisted that he was fine and that, after such a long professional drought, he was grateful for the opportunity. At that point, Shrek was an ongoing concern, and the Fatty Arbuckle biopic was still alive somewhere, but Chris’s inability to get insured had effectively stalled his career. The only producer willing to give him a shot was Brian Grazer at Universal, who wanted Chris for a film called The Gelfin, which would begin filming in January with newly minted star Vince Vaughn.

  On September 10, Chris’s part in Dirty Work wrapped and it was back to Promises in Malibu. By this point he had cycled through a dozen rehab facilities in under twenty-two months, and the routine treatments had reached a point of diminishing returns. He knew the system better than most of the counselors assigned to his case. Institutions that once frightened Chris now merely bored him. The constant physical strain of using and drying out frayed his nerves. And the long, dark nights spent alone in strange beds ate away at what little reserve of humanity he had left.

  Chris was convinced—or, more aptly, had convinced himself—that there had to be answers elsewhere. On his tenth day at Promises, fed up with the whole ordeal, he went down to the basement, flipped the master circuit breaker, and cut the power for the entire facility. Once the lights were restored, the security team found Chris lounging in the common room, naked, quietly leafing through old magazines. “You found me!” he proclaimed. The police were called, and he was asked to leave.

  A now-familiar pattern played itself out, and by mid-October Chris swore he was ready to recommit himself to sobriety. He rented a house in Los Angeles and asked Kevin to move in with him. Kevin now had four years sober on his own, and Chris thought his brother would be able to take him to meetings and keep him on track.

  In truth, no one could keep Chris on track but Chris, but there was one place where he had managed to stay sober and happy: his old job at Saturday Night Live. Marc Gurvitz called SNL producer Lorne Michaels. They agreed that having Chris come back to host might help him in some way to deal with his problems. But the week Chris arrived in New York, he wasn’t just having problems, he was having a full-blown meltdown. The results, broadcast live on national television for millions to see, were not pretty.

  KEVIN FARLEY:

  He was gasping for air by that point. I lost him for three days. It was the weekend before he was supposed to host Saturday
Night Live, and he was just gone. I was staying at the house, and Marc Gurvitz was calling me, saying, “Where’s Chris? We’ve got to get him on a plane. Lorne expects him in New York.”

  I told him I had no idea where Chris was. For all I knew, Chris could have died that weekend. He was with Leif Garrett, of all people. Leif fucking Garrett, and some other losers. When Chris finally showed up, high on heroin after three days missing, Leif came into the house and was like, “Your brother’s so fucking funny, man.” I almost took him out right there, but I was so sad and spent with the whole situation that I just didn’t have the energy to punch him in the face.

  That whole weekend was so sad and out of control. I think Chris planned it that way, to be gone right up until he had to leave, so that there would be no chance of anyone having an intervention and sending him back to rehab. He was planning on carrying the party right on to New York; it rolled right into SNL, and the result was a complete disaster.

  LORNE MICHAELS:

  The decision to have Chris come back and host wasn’t made because he was red hot in show business and it would be great for the show. I think it might have been some desire of mine to help him get back in touch with a time in his life when he was happy. When he was at the show, he knew what the rules were, and I felt it might help him to come back.