The Chris Farley Show: A Biography in Three Acts

by Tom Farley

  We became friends and started dating. Chris would hang out with us. She thought he was funny, and I didn’t mind that he’d come along. This happened a lot, and he’d always paw all over her, going, “You’re so purdy,” and all that. And I wouldn’t get mad, but I was like, “Dude, be a little more respectful, to me and her. C’mon with that shit.”

  Then sometimes Lorri and I would go do stuff, and I’d say, “You know, Chris isn’t doing anything this weekend. Can he come with us?”

  LORRI BAGLEY, girlfriend:

  Chris and I met because we were both best friends with David Spade. David and I had met, and we just clicked. We’d meet for breakfast, hang out after work. We even wound up living across the street from each other. Before Chris and I met, David would always say, “You’re just like Chris. The two of you are the same person.”

  “I want to meet him,” I’d say.

  “No, if you do, you’ll fall in love with him.”

  Men being men, I think David would have liked to date me, but for me it was just never like that. He asked me to go to the movies one night, and I said no, because I didn’t want to be alone in a movie theater with him. So he said, “I’ll bring Chris.”

  For a year, the three of us were just friends. We were like this fun-loving threesome that hung out together all the time. It was the most fun time of my life in New York. This was all about a year before Tommy Boy. I was a model, and I was doing Victoria’s Secret shoots, and Fred Wolf said, “We have to have a pretty girl in the movie. It should be you.” So I did the scene as the girl in the pool at the motel.

  After Tommy Boy, we all kept hanging out just like before. Chris and I had never really been alone. We were always with David or a group. But Chris would always do these little things, like pulling my chair closer to his at the dinner table—little things that said, “She’s mine.” One night after my acting class, we were all at the Bowery Bar, just dancing and having fun. Sandler was there. It got late, people were going home, and Chris wanted to go out some more. Sandler looked at us and was like, “You guys are baaaaad . . .” He saw the connection. So Chris and I went out alone. That was the first night he kissed me. He was a very good kisser.

  When it all first came up, Chris came to my apartment and said, “I have to work with David. Until I finish Saturday Night Live, we can’t see each other, because I can’t go to work every day and have that kind of stress.”

  I said I understood, and we stayed apart for like three days. We just couldn’t do it. David lived right across the street from me, on West Seventy-ninth, so that didn’t make it easy. One night there was an after party for the show. Chris didn’t go so he could come and see me, but it turned out David didn’t go, either. He came home and saw Chris in the car out front waiting for me to come down.

  I was getting ready to head out when David called me. “Is that Chris waiting for you downstairs?” he said.

  “Um . . . yeah.”

  “You fucking bitch.”

  And he hung up the phone.

  NORM MacDONALD:

  It drove a wedge between them. Chris wasn’t a ladies’ man like Spade was. Chris wanted to fall in love and be married. Spade’s the opposite. He’s a real playboy. Chris decided that Spade had a million girlfriends, so he could have just this one.

  TIM MEADOWS:

  Spade dates nothing but hot girls, still to this day. But for Farley she was a coup.

  DAVID SPADE:

  And that was the part that ultimately kind of pissed me off. I had brought him into the mix. I should have just kept it the two of us, but I always made sure Chris was involved, because he didn’t have anyone.

  FRED WOLF:

  I loved Lorri Bagley. She was great. It’s really fun to walk around with celebrities and see everyone’s reactions. But when we walked around and Lorri Bagley was part of it, she definitely did not detract from the excitement factor. She just had a stunning quality about her.

  TODD GREEN:

  She was so beautiful. Chris would just look at Kevin and me and shrug his shoulders like, “Can you fucking believe that I’m with this woman?”

  We were playing golf down in Hilton Head. Chris was down there at some diet clinic and a bunch of us went down every year to play golf. Chris was actually not a bad golfer, but he wasn’t having a good game. He was just getting frustrated. All day he kept muffing his drives and missing putts and getting more and more angry. Finally I said to him, “Farls, why are you so upset? You’re dating Kitty Kat.”

  He just howled. He did that really deep, guttural laugh he had. And for the rest of the entire round, every time he missed a shot he’d just shrug and say, “Hey, I’m dating Kitty Kat.”

  She was flighty, but she really cared for Chris, and she genuinely loved him.

  LORRI BAGLEY:

  Chris would tell me stories about his life before he was sober, and I just couldn’t picture it. He liked that. He liked that I couldn’t even imagine that side of him. He was so organized, and so hardworking. He’d wake up every morning and make his bed, go to his meeting. He had the neatest, cleanest apartment.

  And he was so romantic, always a gentleman. He would always walk on the street side of the sidewalk, always stand up when you left the table, and always stand up for you when you came back to sit down. He was very elegant that way, chivalrous, like someone from a different time. Once we were meeting for dinner in New York. We were supposed to meet at a certain time, and I got there forty-five minutes late. He had been outside waiting for me the whole time, just so he could be there to open the door and make sure he could pay for the taxi. I mean, who does that? That’s so much better than flowers.

  Although when he did buy me flowers, that was always special, too. I was in this phase where I was always changing my hair color, and whatever my hair color was, he’d match the roses to it. I always loved that. He never got just red. One time the florist messed up and sent me plain red roses. He was so upset he called and bitched them out. He just hated to be typical. He wanted there to be thought behind everything he did.

  Another time I was in Los Angeles, and we’d gotten into this huge fight. I said, “Okay, come out to L.A. and we’ll work things out.” I was staying at the Four Seasons. Every hour on the hour he sent something new. One hour it was flowers. The next hour it was a bottle of champagne. It went on for ten hours.

  And the first night I spent with him, he got up to go downstairs to get water. I was lying there without any clothes on. He went to his closet and got out his robe and came and wrapped it around me, just so I would feel safe. He was a beautiful man.

  While things were going well for Chris privately, Saturday Night Live had continued to suffer, and it was clear that major structural changes were needed. Early in the year, reporters had begun to take aim at the show’s shortcomings, and by season’s end the media had launched a full-fledged assault. Particularly derogatory was a New York magazine article by a reporter who had lived in and among the cast for several weeks. While the criticisms in the piece were not wholly without merit, its perspective was rather myopic, and its tone was unrelentingly foul. The magazine’s cover featured Chris wearing a television on his head—the poster boy for the death of Saturday Night Live. And the headline of the piece, “Comedy Isn’t Funny,” wasn’t exactly what Chris thought his legacy at the show would be.

  TIM HERLIHY:

  The stuff with the press that year was heartbreaking. Not only were they saying bad things, but Phil Hartman was saying things to TV Guide, and a lot of us were being misquoted here and there. The show was just being eviscerated.

  FRED WOLF:

  The worst hit piece was the New York magazine article. The guy who wrote that was living in our midst for at least half a season. He was around all the time. Then all this stuff came out and he just tore the show apart.

  NORM MacDONALD:

  The guy was really down on Chris in the article, but when Chris was telling stories in the writers’ room, this reporter was on the floor
. He was laughing like crazy. But the guy had the agenda to write this hit piece, and he was going to write it regardless. Even when he came there and found out that Chris was funny, it didn’t matter to him. And then to have Chris go to a photo shoot where they put a TV on his head and to put him on the cover—to put a guy through all that, completely unknowing of what you’re going to write about him, it was just low.

  Later, when Chris filmed Dirty Work with me, he was saying he felt bad that he and Sandler had “ruined the show.”

  I said, “No, Chris. That’s insane. They said that at the time, but you guys have all come out as the biggest comedy stars in the world.”

  MIKE SHOEMAKER:

  The irony is that Farley and Sandler were the poster boys for the show’s problems that year, and yet every week we’d do a show and they were the only ones getting laughs.

  JIM DOWNEY:

  What I didn’t like was the opportunism of the press. It was a lot of late hits and piling on after the whistle. Basically, to be honest, I just wanted out.

  MIKE SHOEMAKER:

  At the end of the season, everything was in limbo. Nobody knew who or what was coming back, management included. Nobody thought the show would be canceled, but we thought we might be. There was never a time when Chris and those guys were officially fired. Everyone just kind of instinctively knew it was time to move on. All the writers just left, every single one of them.

  DAVID MANDEL:

  I’d love to say it was an ax coming down, a real housecleaning, which is what SNL needed. But it was more that we were all just exhausted, working like dogs, and people began drifting away. If there was an ax, it was a very passive-aggressive ax, which is Saturday Night Live in a nutshell.

  KEVIN FARLEY:

  I don’t even know what word you would use to describe what happened at the end of that year. Weird? Crazy? The whole place runs on rumors and innuendo. But Chris had a lot of meetings with his managers, who told him he’d be fine stepping right into movies. I don’t think Chris was fired, and he didn’t exactly quit. He just never went back.

  LORNE MICHAELS:

  Chris’s head had been turned by the exposure he’d gotten from the movies. Starting back when he was in the first Wayne’s World, Chris was only on the screen for a minute, but the audience clearly knew him and liked him and was invested in him. Gurvitz and Brillstein were pressuring him to get out there. There was a Chris Farley business now.

  MIKE SHOEMAKER:

  There’s a sketch at the very end of Chris’s last show, written by Fred Wolf. It’s Chris and Adam and Jay Mohr and all those guys, playing themselves. They’re at the zoo and they’re screwing around, daring each other to jump into this polar bear pit. “I bet I can swim across the moat and back before the polar bear gets me.” That sort of thing. It was the last sketch that those guys ever did on Saturday Night Live, and I always remember it as sort of being a metaphor for their leaving the show. Everybody leaps into the polar bear pit, and, one by one, they all get mauled and eaten alive.

  CHAPTER 11

  The Polar Bear Pit

  NORM MacDONALD:

  When Chris left Saturday Night Live, it seemed like he wasn’t ready for Hollywood. There was the Cable Guy thing, the Beverly Hills Ninja thing. Hollywood was just ready to use a naïve guy in any way they could to make money. And Chris was naïve, but he certainly wasn’t stupid. He saw what was happening, and it hurt him a lot. Perhaps because of his faith, Chris had great confidence in human beings and their capacity for being good. And they’re not, really. Especially not in this town.

  Paramount Studios released Tommy Boy on March 31, 1995. Despite a lukewarm critical reception, it opened number one at the box office and went on to gross a respectable $32 million. Suddenly there was a lot of growth potential in the Chris Farley business.

  Paramount immediately ordered up, in essence, Tommy Boy II. No sequel ideas followed naturally out of Tommy Callahan’s story, but that was no obstacle. The movie’s basic formula was lifted, reupholstered, and set down in vaguely different circumstances—and Black Sheep was born. This time, instead of playing the screw-up son of a successful father, Chris played the screw-up brother of a successful politician. David Spade no longer played an uptight assistant helping Chris not ruin a sales trip; he played an uptight assistant helping Chris not ruin a gubernatorial campaign.

  Chris had signed a two-picture deal with Paramount, and the studio’s interpretation of his contract prevented him from taking on any other films so long as they presented him with a “viable” project by a certain date. Fred Wolf was hired to write the screenplay, and on that certain date, under the threat of a lawsuit, he was compelled to turn in whatever script he had. Then, literally at the eleventh hour, Wayne’s World director Penelope Spheeris was attached to direct.

  Chris was a valuable commodity coming out of Tommy Boy, and had many options from which to choose. Paramount shut them all down, including a part in the Farrelly brothers’ Kingpin and the lead in The Cable Guy (a project that would involve Chris in a wholly separate legal imbroglio).

  And so Chris was shoehorned into the thankless role of Mike Donnelly, a warmhearted but hapless counselor at a community recreation center who’s such a political nightmare he’s got to be put under wraps during his brother’s bid for the governor’s mansion. Ever the optimist, Chris was determined to make the best of it. He hired old Red Arrow friend Ted Dondanville to be his personal assistant and constant companion, and then turned his attention to trying to improve the film, bringing in several writers to punch up the script. He also sought out Tim Matheson and Bruce McGill. Matheson and McGill had starred as Otter and D-Day, respectively, in National Lampoon’s Animal House. Hoping their comedy talents would improve the film’s prospects, Chris used his newfound clout to bring them in for supporting roles.

  But no matter how hard Chris tried, Black Sheep was not going to be Tommy Boy. Despite the similarities, the film didn’t have the same director or the same producers. Nor for that matter did it have the same stars. The personal and professional chemistry of Chris Farley and David Spade had inspired Tommy Boy and come off beautifully on film. But the fabric of that relationship had begun to fray. Chris was receiving more attention, and more money, which would sow seeds of discontent in any partnership. And then there was the thing with the girl.

  LORNE MICHAELS:

  Black Sheep was an act of desperation by Paramount. Sherry Lansing felt that they missed it on Tommy Boy. They didn’t know what they had; they hadn’t marketed it well. Then after its release it got reevaluated. If nothing else, Sherry Lansing’s son Jack said Tommy Boy was his favorite movie ever. Suddenly they wanted another. I kept saying, “We don’t have one.”

  ERIC NEWMAN:

  When Lorne was making Wayne’s World 2, Mike Myers had written a script that the studio, for legal reasons, couldn’t proceed with. So Mike, as is his style, dug his heels in and said he wasn’t doing it. The reaction from Paramount was severe. They threatened litigation, and Mike found himself with no choice but to make the movie. That’s probably why Wayne’s World 2 turned out the way that it did.

  When there was a question about Chris doing Black Sheep, all the same people were involved, and it got really ugly again. Paramount was making threats. Chris’s people were really angry, and they should have been.

  DOUG ROBINSON, agent:

  Our interpretation of the contract was that Chris owed Paramount one of his next two movies. Their interpretation was quite different, and they were really firm about Chris not doing Cable Guy, or Kingpin, which was another possible project we had lined up for him. Chris was being considered to play the Amish kid, the part eventually taken by Randy Quaid. We really wanted him to do that. But Paramount was putting a lot of pressure on Chris, and he ultimately didn’t want to fight it.

  FRED WOLF:

  I got a call from an executive at Paramount saying that I had to deliver a finished script by midnight on Sunday, the last day Chris was contractu
ally allowed to get out of the movie. If I didn’t have a finished script—any finished script—they were going to sue me. I sat down and wrote forty-five pages that weekend. Eric Newman met me at Paramount at around eleven forty-five. We made copies and distributed them to the people at Paramount. They had their script, and they forced Chris to do it.

  DAVID SPADE:

  Now, we’re getting close to summer, and that’s the only time SNL cast members can shoot movies. I ended up going back in the fall, and Chris didn’t know at that point if he was going back or not.

  But that summer Chris was also offered $3 million to do Cable Guy, and the Paramount deal was for way, way less, probably under a million. The thing was, I didn’t owe Paramount anything. I didn’t have a two-picture deal. I could say no.

  So Chris comes to me at Au Bon Pain under 30 Rock on the way in to work. He sits me down and says, “Listen, I know they want you to do Black Sheep, and I owe them a movie and you don’t. So when you read the script, if you don’t like it then I’m free to go do Cable Guy.”

  “Right,” I say.

  “But if you say you want to do it, I have to do it, too.”