The Chris Farley Show: A Biography in Three Acts

by Tom Farley

  “Green.”

  Great fucking idea. Green footprints, that was Chris.

  MARILYN SUZANNE MILLER:

  I would write songs and musical numbers for SNL, and when Kelsey Grammar was host I wrote a sketch called “Iron John: The Musical.” Chris sang in that one, and he came up to me after the performance and said, “I love those musical things. I just love them. I really want to do more of them.”

  Musical numbers are very emotional things, and it’s a very childlike desire to want to have that kind of honest, sincere outlet. He wanted to share as much of himself with the audience as he could. He was not a great singer, as I recall. During the rehearsals, beads of sweat would literally drip down his forehead as he was trying comically hard to hit all his cues and hit all his notes. He so much wanted to succeed. And when you see a young guy working like that, with sweat running down his forehead, that’s kind of a wonderful thing. When the old cast would get laughs, we were practically counting them. We were very calculating. Chris wasn’t a calculated performer. He was out there for the love.

  IAN MAXTONE-GRAHAM:

  They have a meeting with the host every Monday night, and there were always two jokes that we used to do every single week. Let’s say Kevin Bacon was the host, and Tom Arnold was set to host the next week. Lorne would announce, “Everyone, this week’s host is Kevin Bacon.” And everyone would applaud.

  Then Al Franken would say, “ And next week: Tom Arnold.” And everyone would applaud much louder. That was the little icebreaker they’d do to set the host at ease and poke fun at him a bit.

  The other thing that would always happen was that at the very end of the meeting, Farley would jump in—kind of like that determined kid on the football team that’s never won a game—he’d jump in and say, "C’mon, let’s do it this time!” It was always very funny and sort of combined his childish eagerness with great comic timing and a great sense of the moment.

  ALEC BALDWIN:

  When you were on the set with Chris, he’d be giggling and pinching you and saying, “Where you want to go after the show, man?” It was like being in homeroom in high school. There’s a quotient of people at Saturday Night Live for whom the show is like operating an elevator. We go up. We go down. What’s the big deal? Then there were the people like Chris who made it their mission every week to make it the best show possible, and enjoy it.

  ROBERT SMIGEL:

  Just seeing Chris at the door of my office would put a smile on my face. He radiated this earnestness, and he really believed in the work that he did. Chris was also unique among comedians in being so open about his faith and spirituality. Most people in this industry are so caught up in being sarcastic or casually ironic that they’re loath to admit that they actually care about anything. Admitting that you believe in God is the same as admitting that you like Bob Seger. Okay, even I’m not crazy about Seger. But I like Springsteen, and even Bruce is just too earnest for lots of comedy writers to give it up for.

  CONAN O’BRIEN:

  There are a lot of us in comedy who are a lot more Catholic than anybody knows. Our Catholicism is sort of under our skin. People were surprised at the depth of Chris’s faith; to me it made perfect sense. A lot of people think that they’re mutually exclusive. How can you be dancing in a Chippendales thong and going to mass at the same time? But if you’re Catholic you think, of course that’s how it works.

  TOM FARLEY:

  Pretty early on, Chris told me he’d found this church, St. Malachy’s. “They call it the Actors’ Chapel,” he said. He totally ate that up. In his mind it was this place where all these old Broadway stars and vaudevillians had come to mass and prayed and found guidance. The first time I went with him, these old ladies who were sort of scattered about the pews would break out with the most beautiful voices during the hymns. They’d really belt it out, and you could picture them singing in their old musicals and operas. It was really special for Chris in that way.

  MSGR. MICHAEL CRIMMINS, priest, St. Malachy’s:

  He used to come on Tuesdays and Thursdays to the noon mass. He went to confession regularly. He’d bring his mother and his family to mass whenever they were in town.

  Sister Theresa O’Connell was really his mentor and spiritual adviser. She knew him well. Unfortunately, she’s passed on, and they kept their relationship very private. But she suggested to him that he volunteer through our Encore Friendly Visitors Program, and he did.

  SIOBHAN FALLON:

  Chris lived close to me, and we went to the same church, Holy Trinity on the Upper West Side. He’d go to St. Malachy’s from work and Holy Trinity on the weekends. As he did everything big and great, he’d be in the back of church, praying intensely, bowed down in this dramatic position, practically kicking himself over whatever he’d done the night before. I’d say, “Hi, Chris.”

  And he’d say, “Well, God’s gonna be mad at me this time!”

  I have no doubt that Chris is sitting pretty up in heaven, entertaining everybody. He was a good guy. He’s taken care of. You can say that addiction is a selfish disease, but Chris wasn’t selfish. He always looked outside of himself. At that stage of someone’s career, in your twenties and early thirties, you’re so selfish and so self-consumed—especially actors. I think you’d be hard pressed to find anyone at that age who was thinking about anything other than getting themselves ahead. And so for Chris to be doing the work he was doing was amazing.

  TIM MEADOWS:

  A kid from the Make-A-Wish Foundation came to SNL once to meet Farley. I got to see that, but I had no idea that he was a part of this program at St. Malachy’s. He never talked about it. I was one of his best friends, and I didn’t know about it until after he’d passed away.

  NORM MacDONALD:

  It was amazing at the funeral to hear people talking. It was like, “My God, this is a person I never knew.”

  SR. PEGGY McGIRL, executive assistant, Encore Community Services:

  Whenever he came here he was very regular and without any airs. He had a quiet way about him; he didn’t like to have any attention focused on him at all. His main concern was just to be there to help the seniors. We have parties twice a year for people who are homebound, seniors and people with disabilities. One is in the spring and the other is around Halloween. If Chris was in town, he was always there.

  KEITH HOCTER, volunteer, Encore Community Services:

  I met Chris through the parties at St. Malachy’s. We worked the door together. He was just extremely friendly, not at all hung up about who he was, and he was pretty famous by that point. He just showed up and did what the rest of us did, which was whatever the sisters told us to do.

  For a lot of the seniors, this was their big social event of the year. The party would have about a hundred and fifty people. A lot of them were in wheelchairs and walkers, and back then the church didn’t have an elevator. The party was in the basement, and the only way down was this old, narrow set of stairs. It had one of those side-rail lifts, but the thing never worked.

  Chris and I and the other volunteers, we’d each grab a corner of the wheelchair, tip them back, and then just talk to them and keep them calm while we took them down. We never dropped anybody; I guess that’s the first measure of success. And we never had anyone freak out on us, either. Half of our job was to get them down safely. The other was to make them feel good while we were carrying them down. Then, at the end of the evening, we would stay and, one by one, help carry them all back up to the street again.

  JOHN FARLEY:

  One time we were in Chicago, coming back from filming this HBO special where Chris had this quick little cameo. As we get out of the limo at Chris’s apartment, there’s an old woman standing on the corner, begging for a quarter to get on the bus. Two minutes later, she finds herself in the back of a limousine with a hundred dollars in her hand. And Chris tells the limo driver, “Take her anywhere she wants to go.”

  The next day the same driver comes back to pick Chris up, and he
says, “Do you have any idea where that woman wanted me to take her? Please, let’s not do that again.”

  ALFRANKEN:

  Tony Hall is a former congressman from Dayton, Ohio. His son Matt had leukemia, and a mutual friend asked me to go and visit him at Sloan-Kettering. The second time I went there I said, “Who’s your favorite cast member on SNL?” It was Chris. So I asked Chris if he’d come and visit him, and he did.

  Matt just loved it. His parents are very Christian, especially his mom, and Chris and I were just swearing up a storm. Matt laughed. His mom didn’t know whether to be happy or shocked or what.

  After we’d spent a while with Matt and said good-bye, Chris went around and visited every single kid in the cancer ward. He stayed there and entertained every last one of them. Then at the end of the day, as we were walking out of the hospital, Chris just broke down and started sobbing. I think it was all sort of wrapped up with his own issues that he was dealing with at the time. I said to him, “Don’t you see how much joy you bring to these people? Don’t you see what you just did, how valuable that is?”

  Chris went back and visited Matt again. When they had Matt’s funeral, I went, and they had made a bulletin board of “Matt’s Favorite Stuff.” In the middle of it was a photo of him and Chris from that day.

  FR. JOE KELLY, S.J., priest, St. Malachy’s:

  He believed that comedy was a ministry of its own. Anything that made people laugh was worthwhile. But at the same time, he wanted a little more than that. He was a bit of a disturbed guy. I’m talking personally, now. A bit of a disturbed guy.

  He used to come up to my room here, just to sit and chat and talk about different things, especially about how important the Friendly Visitors Program was to him. He felt that without the program, without the work he did here, his life wouldn’t have much meaning. Doing what he did here gave him a purpose outside of some of the trivial work he was doing in entertainment.

  Anybody who’s constantly making a fool of himself and getting laughs out of those crazy facial gestures and so on, very often they’re hiding something they don’t want to face themselves. I think that was the case with Chris. He was a much deeper person than he let on. One gift he had was the ability to make people laugh. The other gift he had was himself. Just being the person he was was a gift for others. And I don’t think he realized that for quite some time.

  SR. PEGGY McGIRL:

  We have a residence, a converted hotel, that is now a home for the homeless and the mentally ill, and Chris used to visit a man named Willie. He also spent time with another resident, a woman named Lola, but it was mostly Willie.

  Willie was about seventy years old, and he had been homeless before coming to our residence. Chris took Willie out to dinner every week, and to famous restaurants. Chris treated him as an equal, always. He would take him to Broadway shows, take him out to ball games. If Chris was walking down the street on the way to his office, he’d stop in to see how Willie was doing. Whenever he had to go away for work, he’d send Willie postcards, and whenever he came back he always brought Willie a souvenir. They were friends for over five years.

  TODD GREEN:

  On the one-year anniversary of Chris’s death, St. Malachy’s was having a memorial mass for him, and I went with Tommy and Kevin Cleary. There was an elderly black guy there with a Chicago Bulls hat on. He was not quite homeless, but clearly one step away from it. He stood up to speak. He said his name was Willie, and he talked about Chris and about all the things he had done for him, all the time Chris had spent with him. Kevin, Tommy, and I, we just looked at each other—we had no idea.

  The man spoke for a little while longer. Then he started to break down crying. He said, “This hat, this is the last thing Chris ever gave me, and I really miss him.”

  SR. PEGGY McGIRL:

  After Chris passed, Willie became very quiet. Eventually, some time later, he moved back down south to be with his family, to let his family take care of him. Whatever problems had put him on the street and made him homeless, he overcame them and went back home.

  When you receive love, it releases you from the things that trouble you. Just knowing that someone cares about you can give you strength and courage. And I always believed that it was Chris’s love for Willie, and the things he did for Willie, that finally set him free.

  CHAPTER 9

  The Magic Sixty-six

  FR. TOM GANNON, S.J., friend:

  People always ask me what kind of guy Chris Farley was, and I say, “Go and see Tommy Boy.” That’s Chris Farley.

  In the summer of 1991, director Penelope Spheeris was working at Paramount Studios, preparing to shoot a feature-film version of "Wayne’s World,” Mike Myers’s popular Saturday Night Live sketch about two kids with a cable-access television show. Lorne Michaels approached her about using Chris Farley in the movie. Chris was still a relative unknown. He had only one year of television under his belt, and Spheeris had no idea who he was. But, she says, “Lorne told me we should give him a part because he’s going to be the biggest thing ever.” On that recommendation she cast him sight unseen as a security guard at the movie’s Alice Cooper concert. As film debuts go it was a small one, but Chris carried it off well.

  Wayne’s World, meanwhile, carried off buckets and buckets of money. The low-budget comedy shattered everyone’s expectations, earning $121 million at the box office. Paramount immediately ordered up Wayne’s World 2, as well as another SNL franchise movie, Coneheads.

  SNL alum Dan Aykroyd sat down with writer Tom Davis, and the two began drafting the story of Beldar and Prymatt Conehead as a movie. Aykroyd, impressed by what he’d seen in Chris on television, wrote a part for him as Ronnie, the love interest of young Connie Conehead. Over the following year Chris took on other supporting roles, as a roadie in Wayne’s World 2 and as a security guard in Adam Sandler’s Airheads.

  By the end of Chris’s fourth year on Saturday Night Live, he was hands down a cast favorite, and Lorne Michaels felt that the young star was ready to carry his own feature—an original story, rather than another SNL franchise picture. Drawing on personal experience, Michaels laid out the central premise of the plot: a father who dies too soon and a son forced to take on responsibilities for which he is not prepared. SNL writers Bonnie and Terry Turner took on screenwriting duties, and Paramount bought the idea immediately, based largely on the casting of Chris Farley and Rob Lowe as brothers.

  Very little of the original concept and script made it to the screen. The Turners’ draft was largely discarded, and SNL writer Fred Wolf wrote the bulk of the final screenplay, receiving no credit for it. Wolf wrote most of the story on the fly while director Peter Segal and producers Bob Weiss and Michael Ewing scrambled at record speed to get the film off the ground.

  The story that ultimately emerged was that of young Tommy Callahan, heir to a Midwestern auto-parts manufacturer. When Tommy’s father dies, he has to make his dad’s annual sales trip to save the company and his hometown. Joining him on the trip is his late father’s assistant, Richard Hayden, played by the acerbic David Spade. Lorne Michaels had paired up the two close friends on a hunch that their complementary talents might make them the best comedy duo since John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd hit the screen in Blues Brothers, fifteen years earlier. Brian Dennehy took on the role of Big Tom Callahan, with Bo Derek as his bride. Doc Hollywood’s Julie Warner was cast as Chris’s love interest, Michelle Brock. Aykroyd played the heavy, a competing auto-parts magnate named Ray Zalinsky. And Kevin and John Farley also turned up in small roles as their older brother endeavored to give them a leg up in show business.

  Few on set knew it at the time, but they were working with Chris at the single high point of his life. He was confident and self-assured, and it showed in his performance. Thanks in no small part to Chris’s commitment, Tommy Boy lives on today as a minor classic, a staple of cable-TV comedy, and a brief glimpse of what might have been.

  BOB WEISS, producer:

  I got a call from J
ohn Goldwyn at Paramount saying, “We have this picture. Would you come in?”

  “Do you have a script?” I asked.

  “No.”

  “Whaddya got?”

  “We’ve got thirty pages and a release date.”

  “Okay.”

  So I met with Lorne, and a lunch was set up at the Paramount commissary for me to meet with Chris.

  He sat down at lunch, and he was really like an enthusiastic kid. He was just thrilled about being there and wasn’t jaded in any way. How refreshing it was to have someone like that inside the Paramount commissary. You told him any piece of what was going on and it was “great.” It was “cool.” It was “exciting.” And that’s infectious. You can build on that.

  Originally, there was another director involved. I acquainted him with the facts of our shooting schedule, and he left the picture; he was afraid his head would explode. Then Pete Segal agreed to come on board.