by Tom Farley
So Del told Chris about this therapy. “You need this,” he said. “Try it. It works.”
And Chris was like, “Nah, that’s too permanent.”
PAT FINN:
We were at a bar in Chicago once, Chris and me and his dad. Chris’s dad goes, “Finner, you want a beer?”
“Oh yeah that’d be great, Mr. Farley.”
“Christopher?”
“Uh, yeah. Thanks, Dad,” Chris says.
“All right,” he tells the bartender. “Two Old Styles for Finner, and a coupla Old Styles for Christopher. And I’ll have a scotch. Tall glass. Rocks. Leave the bottle.”
The guy just kind of stares at him. Mr. Farley stares back. Then he finally turns around to get the drinks.
I go, “Wow, Mr. Farley, really? What are we, in the Old West?”
“Look, Finner,” he says. “I like scotch, and when I want a drink, and this bartender’s talkin’ to his gal pal down at the end of the bar, I’m not gonna wait for him. So I get a bottle, and I can have scotch whenever I want it. On top of that it’s kind of fun to see what they charge me, because they never know how many shots are left in the bottle.”
TOM GIANAS:
When his dad would come to the shows, they’d go to That Steak Joint, which was this steak restaurant right next door to the theater. They had this thing called the Trencherman’s Cut, which was this ungodly cut of meat, just an unholy-size piece of Chicago beef. You would buy it for the table and eat it family style. When Chris and his dad would go, they’d each order one.
TIM MEADOWS:
His father used to tease him if he couldn’t finish his. It was funny to see Chris when his parents came to town, because it was the only time you’d see him dressed up. The pressed shirt, the sport coat, the slacks. He’d have a haircut and a shave. He wanted everything to go right.
TIM O’MALLEY:
He was still a kid. His parents paid his rent for him. We told him to save some money and pay his own rent so he’d feel more responsible for himself. “But my dad wants to pay for everything,” he’d say.
JOE LISS:
It was like they were still treating him like a kid at college, and he was embarrassed of it, or tired of it. He would get these care packages from his mother, and he would get visibly angered by them. She would send him food and slippers, new clothes from Brooks Brothers, and he’d be like, “Aw, dammit.” But if you looked at his private life, you were like, “Chris, you need new clothes. You need a cleaning lady.”
HOLLY WORTELL:
One time I tried to get Chris to open a bank account. He didn’t have one. He would just cash his checks and have cash on hand. He was very generous, would buy everybody drinks, but he wouldn’t save anything. I said to him, “Look, just walk with me up the street and open up an account.”
“No.”
“Chris, you can’t just spend all your money. You’re spending all your money on food, drugs, and alcohol. You have to put some away for rent and bills and savings.”
And he wouldn’t do it. He would not set foot in the bank with me.
JILL TALLEY:
We all took turns bringing him home. I remember being shocked that he didn’t really have anything, nothing that you would associate with a home. It was really sparse, just a bare mattress and a big trash bag full of clothes. That was it.
JOEL MURRAY:
I had an apartment above Los Piñatas, this Mexican place by Second City. I always believed that Joyce Sloane had something to do with Farley all of a sudden having the apartment next to me. She knew that I would watch out for him.
He was like Pigpen from Peanuts. We had mice, too. The mice would come through my apartment and stop and give me this look, like “We’re just on our way over to Farley’s place.”
JOYCE SLOANE, producer:
He always talked about how he wanted a girlfriend, and I said to him, “Do you think you could bring a girl up there? To that apartment? You gotta clean it up.”
I tried to tell him that Bluto was just a character John Belushi played in Animal House; that wasn’t what he was really like. When John’s widow Judy was in town, I introduced him to her, and I said, “Do you think a lady like this would’ve been married to him if he was really that character that you saw?”
I thought that was a good thing to do, to let him know what John was really like. It didn’t sink in, obviously. So I hired a cleaning woman for him to try and fix his place up. She came every week.
TIM O’MALLEY:
For all the trouble, everyone wanted to take Chris under his wing. The alumni that came in, like Bill Murray, would just adopt him immediately. It just oozed out of him: “Love me. Please love me.” He got so much love. He got a ton of it. I don’t know how he was even able to process it.
DAVID PASQUESI:
It was pretty obvious that there were problems for Chris from the word go. I don’t think we realized that it was as detrimental as it was, but we could all see it. Then there was some odd behavior that was a bit obsessive-compulsive. We just thought it was weird, and we were right. That was some weird shit.
JOE LISS:
Before he put his pants on, he’d lick the tip of the belt, then the buckle, then he’d put on his pants. Before he went onstage, he’d touch the floor twice, touch the wing of the stage twice, and then go on. Every time.
BOB ODENKIRK, cast member:
I cannot express to you how much he licked everything. He’d open his wallet and lick everything inside it, the pictures, the money. He had to lick his shoelaces to tie them. He’d lick his finger and touch the stair, lick the finger, touch the stair, and do it all the way up the staircase. It was totally nuts.
HOLLY WORTELL:
One night I was onstage, and I said a cue line for Chris to enter. He should have been standing right at the door, but I could see him off in the greenroom, and that meant he had to go all the way down the corridor backstage and enter from the other side. I remember thinking, he’s got to cover all that distance, touching every door twice, touching every stair twice, touching all the coats twice. It’s going to be an hour before he gets there.
One day we were walking down the street, and he kept bending down and touching the sidewalk twice, touching the parking meters twice. I said to him, “Chris, why do you do that?”
And he said, “I’m just trying to even everything up.”
JOE LISS:
He was superstitious, too. There was this Ouija board backstage. “Get that thing out of here!” he’d say. He was afraid of it. So, of course, someone took the Ouija board and put it on his pile of props in the back. “Who did this?!” he yelled. Then he took a towel—he wouldn’t touch it with his hands—and he picked it up and threw it aside.
TIM MEADOWS:
I was surprised by Chris’s faith. He’d go to mass all the time. I always admired that about him. I grew up in a Christian household, but once I got to Chicago I didn’t go to church anymore. I just prayed whenever I wanted something.
HOLLY WORTELL:
We would do charity gigs sometimes where they would pay us a hundred dollars, which was huge for us; the most we ever made was $435 a week. But whenever we would do those charity shows, Chris was the only person in the cast who turned down the money. He would always say, “Please keep this and make sure it gets to the people you’re helping.”
JUDITH SCOTT:
He had a moral code, a sense of right and wrong. There was something in him that was correct and proper and Midwestern. If we were in a meeting and somebody’s idea got shot down, Chris would immediately take up for that person and defend them.
HOLLY WORTELL:
In a show, you do the scenes, the director gives you notes on those scenes, and then you build on that the next night. I was so excited that I was going to get to work with Del Close, but what I came to learn was that Del hated women, didn’t think they were funny, didn’t want them in the show. At a certain point I was like, “What is this guy doing? He’s not coming up wit
h any ideas. He’s not pushing us. He’s not doing anything.” He would say to us, “No notes after the show tonight.”
Then, after several weeks, Chris came to me and said, “Holly, I know I shouldn’t be saying this, but I’ve just got to tell you something.”
“What?”
“When Del says we aren’t having notes after the show, we are. We’re all going over to Joel’s apartment, and he’s giving us notes. Del says that you and Judith are evil witches and you’re trying to ruin our show.”
And what was happening was that Judith Scott, Joe Liss, and myself, who hadn’t worked with Del over at the ImprovOlympic, would go home every night, not knowing what was going on, and Chris, Tim Meadows, Joel Murray, and David Pasquesi were all going over and working on the show with Del. For Chris to go behind Del’s back and betray him was huge. Chris would never go against any authority figure, but he did it because he felt what Del was doing to Judith and me was wrong.
JILL TALLEY:
Once in a blue moon I’d make it to church, and I would always see Chris there. I always got the biggest kick out of watching him come back from taking communion, because it was like he knew everyone there, all the parishioners. He’d nod and smile at them, and they all really liked him. The priests really liked him, too. He was very much a part of that community. It was just a pious, quiet side of him that you’d never know unless you saw him there. Then, fourteen hours later, I’d be carrying him home from a bar and putting him to bed.
FR. MATT FOLEY:
Chris and I would sit and talk all night. He would ask me about God, about faith. His biggest questions always related to his struggles with evil, with his addictions. Drugs were Satan, to Chris. Fighting that took a lot out of him.
HOLLY WORTELL:
When he was drunk, he might do or say something he shouldn’t have done. But one day he told me, “I went to church and I confessed, and now it’s over so I can do it again.”
And I said, “Chris, I’m Jewish. But I’m pretty sure that’s not how your religion works. That doesn’t even make sense.”
One night, Matt Foley came to see the show, and the three of us went out after. I said to Matt, “I have to ask you this. Chris says if you sin and go to church and confess and say your Hail Marys, then you can just do it again.”
And Matt said, “No, of course you can’t do it again. You have to try not to do it again.”
I punched Chris in the arm and said, “See?”
FR. MATT FOLEY:
There are two ways to look at confession. One is to say, “I’m in a state of grace. God has blessed me, but in the midst of that greatness I have treated my brother or sister poorly and need to make atonement.”
The flip side is to say, “I’m a sinner. I’m not worthy. I have to find Christ to find my way out of my natural state, which is sin.”
I’m not sure which side Chris worked from, but I suspect it was the latter. “I am not worthy to receive You, but only say the word and I shall be healed.” That’s what Chris believed. And that’s not wrong, but it needs to be balanced with an understanding of the good side.
Chris was grateful for each day of the life God had given him. He never saw himself as an equal of God, and many times we do. A lot of our humanism is very arrogant. It says, “I’m God. I’m equal to God.” Chris was never like that. He stood in awe of God.
BOB ODENKIRK:
He saw things in a very simple way, good and evil, right and wrong. I was raised Catholic, too. I can remember being scared of the devil, of hell. It’s real in your head.
One time at Second City, Chris was violently drunk at a party. He was picking up these chairs and throwing them across the room. Me and my girlfriend brought him back to his place, and he started throwing the furniture there, too, chucking it across the room. Then he just stopped, looked over at me, and said, “Odie, do you think Belushi’s in heaven?”
It was sad, and chilling, and I didn’t know how to answer him. It made me think that those myths that you live with as a kid, they don’t always help you when you’re an adult. They don’t help you deal with grown-up things.
Even as Chris’s personal troubles began to mount, his professional fortunes only grew. Every night the audience favored him more and more. His reputation began to draw interest from the talent scouts at Saturday Night Live as well as representatives at Brillstein-Grey, the power-house management firm in Beverly Hills. In the spring of 1990, Chris was signed by Brillstein’s Marc Gurvitz, who would manage him for his entire career.
On March 24, 1990, Saturday Night Live flew Chris to New York to attend a taping of the show and to have an informal meeting with executive producer Lorne Michaels. It was the first solid indication of their interest in him and of things to come. At the same time, work had begun on Chris’s third Second City revue, Flag Smoking Permitted in Lobby Only. For this show, producer Joyce Sloane brought in Tom Gianas, a young director from outside the Second City universe. Gianas in turn hired actress Jill Talley and SNL writer Bob Odenkirk to join the cast. It was a fortuitous meeting for all. At Gianas’s request, Odenkirk helped Chris create the signature character that would take him to Saturday Night Live and beyond.
TOM GIANAS:
When you’re lined up to direct a show at Second City, you just go in and watch the performers. You make notes, jot down inspirations. Night after night, I would go there to work and make notes, and every time I saw him onstage, he transformed me from a director into an audience member; I forgot to take notes. I would just sit back and laugh and laugh and laugh. That’s never happened to me before or since.
I’ve worked with a lot of great people over the years, from Jack Black to Steve Carell, and this is something I can only say about Chris: From the moment he stepped onstage, the audience was completely invested in him. There was just a sense of “He’s gonna cause trouble, and I want to be here when it happens.”
When I arrived, he was doing the Motivational Speaker guy, but it wasn’t as a motivational speaker yet, because that idea didn’t exist. It was just that guy, in a million different contexts, usually a coach, or maybe an angry dad. It would destroy the audience every night. I said to Odenkirk, “We cannot open the show without that character.”
And that’s when Bob came back with a sketch about a family with pot-smoking kids who hire this Motivational Speaker, a guy who lives in a van down by the river, is thrice divorced, and uses the complete disaster of his life as an example of what not to become.
BOB ODENKIRK:
I sat down to write it, and the sketch came out pretty much whole the way it was done. I handed it to Chris, and watching where he took it was insane.
TIM O’MALLEY:
Chris could never remember his lines during rehearsal. He’d get so amped up with the energy of that character, doing the hips and the arm-pumping thing. He screwed it up every night for eight weeks. Odenkirk and Pasquesi sat down with him and went over and over his lines. He was like, “This is hard. This is like learning the Our Father.”
Then, on opening night, we were all worried he was going to screw it up—and he nailed it. When he came offstage, I said, “Why the hell did you finally get it tonight?”
“Big game,” he said. “Coach is here.” Del was in the audience.
FR. MATT FOLEY:
I was in the audience that night. When he said, “My name is Matt Foley, and I am a motivational speaker!” I was probably as red as a beet. I smiled and slid down a little further in my chair.
After the show we went and hung out in a bar for a time. Chris told me that he was never going to change the name, that it was always going to be Matt Foley. I’m honored by it still.
TOM GIANAS:
To this day, it’s got to be the funniest thing I’ve ever seen. It never stopped making me laugh, and that’s rare.
NATE HERMAN:
Chris was never captured in either movies or TV as good as he was onstage. He was too explosive. He just seems flat in all those movies. It’s
like watching a large wild animal in a cage.
BOB ODENKIRK:
The Matt Foley sketch was basically the same every night, but he was always on the edge of that character, forgetting his lines, making up new ones, changing the blocking. He was never content to mimic last night’s performance, which a lot of actors do. Sometimes, you try to make the performance fun and surprising again for the people onstage, who might be a little tired of it. Chris was doing a great show for the audience, but he was doing a completely different show for the rest of the cast. I can picture it in my head right now like it was yesterday. Night after night I’d stand there, four feet away from him, and just watch in complete awe.
