by Tom Farley
MIKE SHOEMAKER:
I think he romanticized Belushi’s death, but that’s not the same thing as having a death wish. Chris also wanted to be what Belushi couldn’t be. He wanted to have the Chris Farley story be its own story. So I think he was of two minds on it.
LORNE MICHAELS:
Chris romanticized Belushi’s life and his death, to a certain degree, but I told him there was nothing romantic about it. I said, “John missed most of the eighties, all of the nineties, and I don’t think that was his intention.” I was pretty brutal with Chris. I mean, we buried John.
KEVIN FARLEY:
When Chris finally cleaned up, the difference was that for the first time Lorne looked him in the face and said, “I will fire you. I’m not going through another Belushi, and I will fire you.” And he meant it.
STEVEN KOREN:
Chris had really been doing well. He’d been clean for a while. Then we were doing the Glenn Close show just before Christmas. We were in the middle of this read-through, and Chris had written a sketch. I thought it was hilarious, but Chris didn’t seem to think it went well. We had a half-hour break in the middle of the meeting, and Chris just didn’t come back for the second half.
TOM FARLEY:
Chris left the show and went over to Hell’s Kitchen and scored some heroin.
DAVID SPADE:
I found a bunch of bags of coke or heroin in a drawer in our office. I said, “What are these?” I didn’t even know.
He said, “Get the fuck out of here!”
And he kicked me out of our office. Adam came in and asked what was going on. I said, “Farley’s out of it, and there’s some shit in there. I don’t know what it is.”
Chris was pretty good with Adam, so Adam said, “Let me talk to him.”
Adam went in the office.
“Fuck you, Sandler! Get out of here!”
Adam came back out and said, “That didn’t work too good.”
I said, “Let’s talk to Marci and see what she can do.”
Marci came in and said, “Where’s Chris?”
“Fuck you, Marci!”
She said, “I’m telling Lorne.”
JIM DOWNEY:
Lorne said, “I think we have to fire him.”
TOM ARNOLD:
Lorne called me. He said, “Chris relapsed. He’s in his office, weeping. He’s crying out for help so loudly that we can hear him out in the hallway.”
LORNE MICHAELS:
It was a very adolescent cri de coeur, an attempt to play on everyone’s sympathies. But as soon as I heard it was heroin, I was having none of it. I had been through it with John, and I wasn’t doing it again.
MIKE SHOEMAKER:
I don’t remember Chris actually being fired. He was suspended. But we never said “Empty your office.” Because then what could Chris do but go on a binge? But it was severe, and there was an ultimatum attached. Either you come back clean or you don’t come back. We never said, “You’re outta here,” because the problems always manifested when he was “out of here,” because this was the only thing he cared about.
TODD GREEN:
The week he was kicked off, he watched the show with me and Kevin at Kevin’s apartment. It killed him not to be on.
JIM DOWNEY:
I just sat there in the meeting with Chris, being somewhat cold about the whole thing. It was easier than being warm, and probably more effective. He would start to shake and cry, and I would just tune it out. It was a manipulation. He was trying to get your sympathy so you’d let it slide. He had plenty of people wanting to play that motherly role, and he needed people to say, “This is real simple: Fix the problem or you’re out.”
LORNE MICHAELS:
I basically just told him, “This is what it is, and I’m really, really disappointed. And you have to get some help, because this is not a problem that you can solve by yourself.”
I don’t know where I had heard about the place in Alabama, but I thought it was exactly what he needed. It was a real stripped-down, no-nonsense place. I had also seen enough of the Hollywood version of rehab where nothing actually happens. I wanted a place to get his undivided attention. That and the threat of losing the show were the only things that could do it.
TODD GREEN:
Kevin Cleary and I drove him to the airport. That was really hard. It was right before Christmas, and that was always an important time of year for Chris, to be with his friends and his family. No matter where any of us were, we always made it a point to be together in Madison for Christmas. So it was just heartbreaking knowing he was going away to spend it in Alabama at the kind of place he was going to.
We were driving to LaGuardia and it was really quiet in the car, and the song “Bad” by U2 came on. And while we were sitting there, listening to this song, Chris out of nowhere just asked, “What’s this song about?” And it wasn’t like Chris to ask something like that. Kevin and I were like, oh shit. We didn’t really know what to say, so we just told him. “It’s about trying to save a friend who dies from a heroin overdose.”
“Oh.”
Nobody said anything else. We just sat back and listened to the rest of the song. We got to the airport, and in those days you could still walk with someone all the way to the gate, so we went through security with him and walked through the terminal to meet his plane. After we said good-bye he walked over to the gate, and, right at the entrance to the jetway, he stopped and looked back at us for a moment. He had this deadly serious expression on his face. He gave us a thumbs-up, turned around, and walked onto the plane.
ACT II
CHAPTER 8
A Friendly Visitor
TOM SCHILLER:
He was a kind of secret, angelic being who tore too quickly through life, leaving a wake of laughter behind him. As corny as that sounds, it’s the truth.
For the next three years, Chris Farley stayed clean and sober. At Lorne Michaels’s behest, he had spent the entire Christmas break at a hard-core, locked-down rehab facility in Alabama. Unlike the celebrity resort and spa recovery units of Southern California, this joint was one step above prison, and it was staffed by, in the words of Tom Arnold, “a bunch of big black guys who didn’t take any of Chris’s shit.” And it worked.
Chris’s puppy-dog personality and endearing sense of humor had allowed him to weasel his way out of just about any difficult situation he’d faced in the past. But the people in Alabama weren’t having any of it. And, finally, Chris wasn’t having any of it, either. He realized he could no longer bullshit everyone, and he knew it was his last chance to stop bullshitting himself. He took the program seriously, took its message to heart, and took a new direction in life when he returned to New York. He moved into an apartment on the Upper East Side in the same building as Dana Carvey. A year later he would move back downtown to a new apartment on Seventeenth Street, a place chosen specifically for its proximity to his old halfway house and its steady availability of meetings and support groups. As the hoary cliché goes, Chris was a changed man. He was calmer, more thoughtful, and more focused.
He was also funnier. Chris missed the first show of 1993, but he was soon back in full swing, and over the following year he would establish himself as the show’s new breakout star. That February, the writers resurrected “The Chris Farley Show,” this time with one of Chris’s childhood idols, former Beatle Paul McCartney. The very next week Chris got to share the stage with returning SNL legend Bill Murray. The coming months brought some of Chris’s most memorable characters, including the blustery Weekend Update commentator Bennett Brauer, the outlandish man-child Andrew Giuliani, a ravenous Gap Girl, and the titular heroine of Adam Sandler’s “Lunchlady Land.”
And on the second-to-last show of his third season, with Bob Odenkirk’s blessing, Chris dusted off an old script lying around from his Second City days and brought it in to the weekly read-through. It was a hit, both at the table and on the air. That Saturday night, with one unforgettable performance, the ph
rase “van down by the river” assumed its permanent place in the national lexicon.
STEVEN KOREN:
Chris had been doing the Motivational Speaker character at Second City, but I didn’t know what it was. Since Bob Odenkirk had already written it, they just needed a writer to babysit it through production, check the cue cards and all that. It was never anyone’s favorite job to get. Little did I know.
So I was sitting there watching the rehearsal, making sure the camera angles were right, and I said to Chris, “You know, you’re gonna hurt your voice talking like that. Are you sure you want to do the voice that way?”
He was like, “Don’t worry, Steve. I got this one down.”
That was a good lesson for a young writer: just trust the actors. When he did it live the place exploded.
DAVID SPADE:
In rehearsal, he’d done the thing with his glasses where he’s like, “Is that Bill Shakespeare? I can’t see too good.” But he’d never done the twisting his belt and hitching up his pants thing. He saved that for the live performance, and so none of us had ever seen it. He knew that would break me. He started hitching up his pants, and I couldn’t take it. And whenever the camera was behind him focusing on me, he’d cross his eyes. I was losing it.
Once we started laughing, Chris just turned it on more. And we’re not supposed to do that. Lorne doesn’t like it at all, but Chris loved to bust us up. Sometimes after the show he’d say, “All I’m trying to do is make you laugh. I don’t care about anything else.”
NORM MacDONALD, writer/Weekend Update anchor:
Lorne didn’t like us cracking up on air. He didn’t want it to be like The Carol Burnett Show. He hated that. When people crack up on Saturday Night Live, it’s normally fake, because we’ve already done the sketches and rehearsed them so much. But it was always Chris’s goal when it was live on air to make you laugh, to take you out of your character, and he always succeeded. You could never not laugh.
He would do little asides, especially to Sandler, even if Sandler wasn’t in the sketch. One time Chris was in a Japanese game show sketch, and when he went to write down his answer for the game, he just took a big whiff of the Magic Marker and did a look to Sandler off camera. Sandler wasn’t even in the sketch, but if you watch the tape you can hear him laughing offscreen.
MICHAEL McKEAN:
It was nice to share the stage with that kind of manic energy. For one thing, you knew the focus was elsewhere. No one was watching me. I could have sat down and eaten a sandwich during some of the sketches we did together.
CHRIS ROCK:
You never really shared the stage with him. It was always his stage, and deservedly so. The weird thing is that nobody got mad about that. There’s a lot of competition on that show, but no one was competing with Farley. We’d all get upset if someone else had a sketch on and we didn’t, but I can’t think of one person who was ever upset about Chris getting a sketch on. No one ever complained.
ALEC BALDWIN:
Whenever I was watching Chris perform I would think, “How do I get where he’s at? How do I get to be as funny and as honest and as warm?” There are comics that I’ve worked with who are the most self-involved bastards you’ve ever met in your life, and they can’t fake the kind of decency Chris had. Chris was someone who was very vulnerable; it was a card he played. It was a tool in his actor’s repertoire, and yet it was something totally genuine. Even when he plays Matt Foley, and he’s hectoring people in this totally overbearing way, there’s a tinge of the character’s own neediness. Even underneath that, there’s Chris.
KEVIN NEALON:
He was so fallible. People just felt for him. Women felt protective of him, because they could tell he wasn’t watching out for himself. And men related to all his anxieties and imperfections.
LORNE MICHAELS:
One time we were in the studio, and Chevy Chase came by. Chris was practicing one of his pratfalls. He showed it to Chevy, and Chevy said, “What are you breaking your fall on?”
Chevy always had something to break his fall; you plan these things out. But Chris had watched Chevy and bought the illusion of it. How do you fall? You just fall on the ground and you don’t mind the pain, because that’s the price of doing it. So there was an honesty and a straightforwardness in him that people responded to.
NORM MacDONALD:
What I would do with Chris, when it came to writing a sketch, was just listen to him and observe him. There was this one thing he did. He’d tell a story—and I’m not doing this justice—but he’d tell a story like, “Anyways, Norm. Did I tell ya I seen my friend Bill the other day, and I says to him, I says, I look him right in the eye and I says to him, I says, I says to Bill, I says to him, get this, what I says to him is I says, get this, what I says, you won’t believe what I says to him, I says . . .”
And of course the joke was that he’d never get to what he’d actually said to the guy. And Chris could keep this going for twenty, twenty-five minutes straight. He’d do it two hundred different ways. It would just get funnier and funnier and funnier. When you can reduce something to four words and be funny for twenty-five minutes without an actual joke or a punch line, that’s genius. It’s not even really comedy anymore. It’s almost like music, like jazz variations.
I always liked comedians who just keep repeating things until nobody’s laughing anymore, but then they take it so far that eventually it’s funnier than it was in the beginning. There are only a couple of performers on the planet who can do that. Andy Kaufman could do it, and Chris Farley could do it.
So I had him do it on Weekend Update. Lorne had decided that the “I says to the guy” segment would last for thirty seconds, which I knew would never work. At dress, I told Chris to do it for four minutes. So he did, and it was just like I thought. People weren’t laughing for a while, but then right as he hit the four-minute mark it was really starting to kill. That’s when I realized he should have done it for eight minutes.
But he never got to do it on air, because Lorne went ballistic on me that I’d let Chris go so far over time. I tried to explain to Lorne that it wasn’t funny for thirty seconds, but Chris understood it completely.
ALEC BALDWIN:
There are people who are smart in a way that has no applicability to performance, but Chris’s brains and his quickness inside of performance were amazing. He knew exactly how to scan a line, exactly what inflection to have, how to time it, what expression to make. A great performer is someone who puts together a half a dozen things in an instant, and Chris was one of the most skilled performers I’ve ever seen in that respect. And he knew that his opportunity would come. He wasn’t sitting there, calculating how he was going to trump you or dominate the scene. He just patiently waited for his moment and then arrived fully in that moment.
STEVE LOOKNER, writer:
When it came to performing in your sketches, Chris was never some egotistical guy who was going to take your material and do it however he wanted to. He wanted to make sure he was getting the sketch the way you wanted it.
FRED WOLF, writer:
The highlight of my career, still, was the first sketch I got on at Saturday Night Live, this thing called “The Mr. Belvedere Fan Club.” Chris had a big turn in that sketch where he played a crazy person obsessed with Mr. Belvedere . He brought down the house. Afterward he came up to me, saying,
“That was funny. Thanks for the good stuff.” I couldn’t believe that about him. To me, it was the other way around. I should have been thanking him.
DAVID MANDEL, writer:
He always went out of his way to make sure people knew what material was yours, that they were your jokes, and he was just the guy who said the lines.
IAN MAXTONE-GRAHAM, writer:
I worked on some of the Motivational Speaker sketches, because Bob Odenkirk was gone by then. Matt Foley was very much Chris’s character, but Chris was also very loyal. We always had to call Bob up and read it to him over the phone and get his bles
sing.
SIOBHAN FALLON, cast member:
There was always an air of competition at Saturday Night Live. At read-through, people would purposefully not laugh at something even though it was funny, because they wanted something else to make it on the show. But Chris would laugh no matter what. If it was funny, he gave it a big, big laugh. He didn’t discriminate. He was honest.
NORM MacDONALD:
I don’t think Chris knew how to hate. I’d feel bad sometimes, because I’d be complaining and I’d go, “You know who sucks?” And I’d go off about so-and-so, some guy on the show. And Chris would immediately go, “I think he’s funny, Norm. Why don’t you like him?” So then I’d just feel like a jerk.
DAVID MANDEL:
The show was in a very weird spot at that time. During the election year, everything was Phil Hartman and Dana Carvey doing Clinton and Bush and Perot. Chris was a full cast member, and incredibly popular, but in those sketches he’d just do small, memorable turns as Joe Midwestern Guy. Al Franken and I wrote the sketch where Bill Clinton goes jogging and stops in at McDonald’s. In that one Chris played Hank Holdgren from Holdgren Hardware in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin. In a lot of those small supporting roles I think you saw the road not taken for Chris. If he hadn’t found comedy, you could totally see him being the friendly hardware-store guy.
