The Chris Farley Show: A Biography in Three Acts

by Tom Farley

  HOLLY WORTELL:

  I used to have to hold my cheeks with my hands because my face hurt from trying so hard not to laugh.

  TIM MEADOWS:

  Just watching him adjust his tie, or hitch up his pants, was enough to make you lose it. He’d get closer and closer to your face every night when he was saying his lines. I played the son. He started picking me up and tossing me up in the air, flipping me around. Then out of nowhere he’d kiss me. He just had a ball doing it.

  JILL TALLEY:

  He was so into the character that he’d be swinging his head around and his glasses would go flying off. Then he’d proceed to act like he couldn’t see for five minutes, stumbling around looking for his glasses, and that would become the scene. Funny things would just happen organically. Even if he did the script word for word, it felt new every night.

  BOB ODENKIRK:

  I just remember thinking, no one else in the world will ever be able to do this character.

  TIM MEADOWS:

  After Farley left for SNL, Ian Gomez filled in for him. Every night he tried to do a different character to make that scene work, and he could never do it. Finally we said, “We gotta cut it.”

  TOM GIANAS:

  The night that SNL came to scout him, he was nervous but confident. I remember saying to the cast, “The set’s yours. You can put up whatever you want tonight.” I wanted Chris’s strongest pieces to go up so he’d have a good shot at it.

  TIM MEADOWS:

  We had a great show that night. And it was great for me. Chris and I worked so well together. That helped me get noticed, and I got hired at SNL about six months later.

  JILL TALLEY:

  He was nervous about SNL. He went back and forth with everyone. “What should I do?” He called his parents, his priest, the entire cast. We were all like, “What do you mean, ‘What should I do?’ You take it.”

  But he went round and round on it. Chris had his apartment, his bars, his church, and Second City right in this little four-block radius. That was his world, and I don’t know that he ever really left it. He was scared to leave that behind, to leave his family, to leave everything he’d ever known.

  KEVIN FARLEY:

  I was at the airport when Chris left. Chris was crying, and Dad was crying. It was sad to watch. When you’re from the Midwest, you don’t really ask for the spotlight. You just have your Sunday Packers game and that’s about as exciting as it gets. But I think Dad knew, we all knew, that after this nothing would ever be the same.

  PAT FINN:

  I got married the Saturday of Chris’s first night on the show, and he was all bummed out that he wasn’t going to get to be in the wedding. He called me early in the week and was just apologizing profusely because he had to miss it. “Maybe I can make it,” he said. “Get them to put me on next week.”

  “No! You’re doin’ the show!” I said.

  “I know. I sorta got to. I mean, I shouldn’t ask if I could skip it, right?”

  “Chris. C’mon. It’s Saturday Night Live!”

  “No, but it’s your wedding.”

  And that’s the great thing about Chris: SNL was his dream, but if he could have skipped that first show to make my wedding, he would have.

  The night of the ceremony, we were all at the Hilton. At ten-thirty, with everyone out on the dance floor and the wedding in full swing, about ten of us, including me in my tux and my wife in her wedding dress, snuck out and went over to the bar in the hotel and watched Chris make his debut on Saturday Night Live. It was so strange, so surreal. We’d all grown up with this show, and Chris was the first one we’d ever known to join those ranks. Just a few weeks before, he’d been hanging out in our apartments, and now he’d made it.

  CHAPTER 6

  Super Fan

  CONAN O’BRIEN, writer:

  When Chris first got to the show, I met him hanging out in the conference room outside Lorne’s office. He was dressed kind of like a kid going to a job interview. We chatted for a bit. I liked him right away.

  I came in and out of that conference room several times during the day, and Chris was still waiting. Lorne would do that to you, make you wait a long time. At the end of the day, I was feeling bad for him, so I said, “Hey, kid. I’ll show you around the studio," and I led him on kind of a mock tour where I pretended to be in charge of everyone. Chris fell in and started playing along with me. After that I left and went home. I came back to work the next day, and Chris was still waiting outside Lorne’s office.

  He had this energy, even when he was sitting there waiting for his meeting, rocking back and forth in his ill-fitting sports jacket with his tie all pulled off to the side. He seemed really earnest about doing the show. You just had the feeling that he was going to be a lot of fun and he belonged here. It was like the show—and I don’t mean this to sound condescending—but it was like the show had been given this new golden retriever puppy.

  From the day he arrived at Saturday Night Live, Chris Farley was already suffering comparisons to the other outrageous, larger-than-life figure in SNL history: John Belushi. When Chris died seven years later, eerily, at the same age as Belushi, those comparisons became gospel. In truth the two men shared far more differences than similarities. Still, in life and in death, Chris has borne the accusation of trying too hard to follow in Belushi’s footsteps—an accusation with varying shades of truth. Yes, Chris looked up to and admired his predecessor, but whatever influence Belushi’s ghost had on a young Chris Farley paled in comparison to the truly dominant forces in his life: his father, his family, and his faith. As far as drugs and alcohol went, Chris’s bad habits were very much his own, seeded in his DNA and showing up at keg parties long before Belushi’s demise. And if Chris followed Belushi in more positive ways, he was hardly alone.

  In the comedy epidemic of the twentieth century, John Belushi was Patient Zero. The twin blockbuster successes of Saturday Night Live and National Lampoon’s Animal House fundamentally changed the landscape of being funny. Movie studios began churning out huge blockbuster comedies like Ghostbusters and Beverly Hills Cop. Stars like Eddie Murphy, Mike Myers, and Jim Carrey beat a well-trod path from sketch-comedy cult status to Hollywood fame and fortune. Second City and ImprovOlympic grew from regional theaters into multiheaded corporate enterprises, churning out hundreds of aspiring comedians every year and spawning scores of other schools and venues across the country. Chris Farley and his friends were the first generation born into and weaned on that era. Their reverence for it and obsession with it was the common denominator that bound them together.

  It all began in 1975 when producer Lorne Michaels assembled the original cast of SNL and took to the air live from New York every Saturday night. Following his departure in 1980, producer Dick Ebersol took over the show. Ebersol presided over some difficult years but also cultivated the stardom of Eddie Murphy and assembled the all-star cast of Billy Crystal, Christopher Guest, and Martin Short.

  In 1985, Lorne Michaels returned. The show needed new direction, and he needed a job. After a rocky start, he went back to the drawing board in 1986 and assembled the cast—Dana Carvey, Phil Hartman, Jan Hooks, Nora Dunn, Jon Lovitz, Kevin Nealon, Victoria Jackson, and Weekend Update anchor Dennis Miller—that would breathe new life into the show. Mike Myers came aboard in ’89, but otherwise no visible changes where made, or needed, for the rest of the eighties.

  Then, in the fall of 1990, a slow transition began to take place. Nora Dunn and Jon Lovitz left; Chris Farley and Chris Rock entered. Far younger than the established cast, the two became fast friends and soon found themselves sharing an office. Farley and Rock were the only performers added that fall. Tim Meadows, Chris’s Second City cast mate, would come on board at midseason.

  Back in the writers’ room, Jim Downey, a freshman writer in SNL’s early years, had assumed the reins of head writer and producer. At the core of the writing staff was a group that had led the resurgence from the show’s mid-eighties nadir: Robert Smigel, Ja
ck Handey, Bob Odenkirk, and Conan O’Brien. Meanwhile, Tom Schiller, Al Franken, Tom Davis, and Marilyn Suzanne Miller—also veterans of the show’s original writing staff—had all come back for an additional go-round. Added to that was a very young team of stand-up comedians—Adam Sandler, David Spade, and Rob Schneider—whose age and sense of humor would ultimately bring about a generational shift at the show. Both on camera and off, SNL found itself with a varsity squad and a junior-varsity squad. It was an odd mix of talent, but it worked well. For a while.

  Chris arrived in New York in October. His older brother, Tom, had lived in the city for many years, and together they found an apartment for Chris on Seventh Avenue, just north of Times Square and right around the corner from the show’s Studio 8H in Rockefeller Center. The canyons of midtown Manhattan were a striking contrast to the cozy comforts of Chicago’s Old Town, but Chris soon discovered the Carnegie Deli, St. Malachy’s Church on West Forty-ninth Street, and a fine Irish pub called The Fiddler’s Green, all within a small walking radius. He had made his home again, scarcely able to believe what that new home was. As many latter-day SNL writers and performers have said, anyone who works at the show is a fan of the show, first and foremost. And Chris was surely that.

  ROBERT SMIGEL, writer/coproducer:

  I was a coproducer as well as a writer, and so I got to go with Lorne to Chicago to scout the Second City show. Hiring Chris was probably the easiest casting decision Lorne’s ever had to make. In all the shows I scouted before or after, I’d never seen anybody leap out at you from the stage the way Chris did. Lorne hired him the next day.

  JIM DOWNEY, head writer/producer:

  There was so much buzz about Farley that our checking him out was almost pro forma. It was kind of automatic.

  LORNE MICHAELS, executive producer:

  I’d had something of a concern that maybe he was too big, personality-wise, to play on television. Theatrically, he was sort of playing to the back of the house. But after we saw him, there really wasn’t much doubt.

  ROBERT SMIGEL:

  Lorne invited me to be in on his meeting with Chris. Chris showed up, and he was in full altar-boy mode, lots of “yes, sirs” and bright-eyed alertness. He was so transparently on his best behavior that you kind of had to laugh and wonder if it was inversely proportional to his worst behavior. Lorne talked about the show and what would be expected of him, and Chris just kept sweetly nodding his head in agreement. Lorne had been told, at that point, about Chris’s problems. I don’t remember exactly what he said, but he told Chris, in so many words, that it wouldn’t be tolerated. He even said something to the effect of “We don’t want another Belushi.”

  LORNE MICHAELS:

  It wasn’t presented to us that Chris had any sort of problem, just that he was still a little young and liked to party too much.

  TOM FARLEY:

  All the cast and writers were sort of strolling in over the course of that first week. Chris immediately gravitated to this younger, newer crowd of writers and actors: Rob Schneider, Adam Sandler, and David Spade. They were coming on as writers. The only two new cast members were Chris and Chris Rock. They got all the press.

  DAVID SPADE, cast member:

  I had done four shows as a writer/performer. Then it was summer break, and when I got back Farley and Rock came on as featured players. Sandler came about six months later.

  I met Chris the first day, walking over from the Omni Berkshire, where SNL had put us up. I saw him downstairs, and I’d heard about him. We talked and then we walked over to 30 Rock together. I thought he was funny. He was a nice Wisconsin dude, a genuine, sweet guy. I was out from Arizona. I’m not really a bad guy. We just gravitated to hanging out all the time and stayed buddies ever since.

  MARCI KLEIN, talent coordinator:

  I first met him the day he started. He was wearing this English driving cap and looking very Irish. He was very quiet and deferential, very nervous, like I was the person in charge or something, which I thought was funny, because I wasn’t. He would get so nervous; that was one of the things that was really charming about him.

  CHRIS ROCK, cast member:

  We both got hired the same day, which was probably one of the greatest days of my life. We were the new guys, and they threw us together. The funny thing was that everyone was worried about me—I lived in Brooklyn and didn’t want to move to Manhattan, because I couldn’t park on the street and I couldn’t get a cab. I said it in the Live from New York book: Two guys named Chris both get hired on the same day and share an office. One’s a black guy from Bed-Stuy and one’s a white guy from Madison, Wisconsin. Now, which one is going to OD?

  KEVIN FARLEY:

  When he got the show it was sort of strange, kind of scary in a way. Chris always liked the camaraderie of Second City, so a high-pressure situation like Saturday Night Live seemed mean and cutthroat. Dad was nervous. We all were. Chris could barely flush the toilet. How was he going to handle fame and television and New York City?

  TOM FARLEY:

  I was working at Bear Stearns in those days, at Forty-sixth and Park. Chris and I went out to lunch one day, and afterward I had to go back to work. We were standing on Park Avenue, right where it goes into the Met Life Building. Chris asked me about some good places to go shopping. I pointed him in the direction of Fifth Avenue. Then he said, “Look, I don’t have any money. I’m staying at this fancy hotel, and I’ve got this nice, big salary, but I haven’t gotten paid yet.”

  So I went to a cash machine, got out $160, gave it to him, and went back to work. I got a call about a half hour later. “Uh, Tommy, I had a little problem,” Chris said.

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “Well, I went up to Fifth Avenue like you told me and I was walking down the street and I saw these guys playing cards.”

  And I was like, oh no. “What did you do?” I said.

  “Well, these guys were playing cards for money, and they were winning.”

  “Yeah, okay.”

  “And the guy looked at me and he said, ‘Where’s the card? Take a guess. How much you got, buddy?’ And I said, ‘I got $160.’ And he said, ‘Well, put it down.’ ”

  “Let me guess, you lost the whole nut.”

  “Uh, yeah . . . can I get some more money?”

  So I went and met him at the cash machine and said, “Don’t do that again. Stay away from the guys playing three-card monte.”

  He said, “But I don’t understand. How were all those other guys winning?”

  “They were all part of the scam, Chris.”

  “Oh.”

  AL FRANKEN, writer:

  Chris was very shy and self-effacing when he showed up. That never really changed too much, though he did get less shy. He was also one of these guys who came in with an incredible amount of respect for what had gone before him. He was just genuinely awed to be there, and wanted to know everything about the show. I don’t want to name names, but some people would come in saying, “I was destined to be here! Get out of the way, old man!” That was not Chris.

  CHRIS ROCK:

  You could just tell he was funny. Normally you meet a guy, and you’re automatically skeptical about him. You’re basically not funny until proven otherwise. But there was something about Farley where you could tell he was funny when he said hi.

  TOM FARLEY:

  Chris called me up the first week he was there and said, “Hey, they’re going to film me for the opening montage. Do you want to come down and watch?”

  I said, “Sure. Where are you doing it?”

  “Well, you can pick anywhere you want,” he said, “so I was either going to do the steps of St. Patrick’s Cathedral or McSorley’s Ale House.” Two very telling choices, and no question as to which one won out.

  “Which is it going to be?” I asked.

  “McSorley’s.”

  So I met him down there at like two A.M. on a Tuesday night after it closed. We kept drinking beer after beer during the shoot. “
Draining our props,” as we called it. We were up till five in the morning.

  My parents came into town for the first show. We had a blast showing them the whole New York thing. They stayed at the RIHGA Royal. We went to Gallagher’s Steak House, which was Dad’s favorite. Dad stayed in the hotel. He didn’t go to the show. With his weight it was just too much trouble. So we all went to the dress rehearsal and then went back to the room to watch the live show together.

  KEVIN FARLEY:

  We were just excited as hell. It was sort of surreal, sitting there waiting for his first scene. Kyle MacLachlan was the host, and they did this Twin Peaks parody. Chris was the killer. He really didn’t have anything to say, any real laugh lines in the sketch, but of course he found a way to milk a few laughs by giving a look or drawing a word out. It’s strange to see your brother on national television. I just sat there going, “This is weird.”

  TOM FARLEY:

  I remember walking out of Rockefeller Plaza after the first show on our way to the after party. There were all these limos lined up. Chris said, “Wow! Look at all those limos! Ain’t that something?” Pause. “I wonder if we can get a cab.”