by Tom Farley
TED DONDANVILLE:
I wouldn’t say Lorri wasn’t attracted to the fame and success, but she and Chris were genuinely close. She will tell you that they had this famous romance for the ages. Fact of the matter is, Chris had other girlfriends here and there. But I will give Lorri credit for being the most important woman in his life. That is certainly true. Unfortunately, of all the girls I saw Chris go out with, I didn’t think she was the healthiest or most stable.
DAVID SPADE:
Those two together, with Chris in a free fall, it was like nitroglycerine. I don’t know if Chris was in love with her. I know he spent tons of time with her, and she was okay with the other women, or whatever his famous life brought him, because they were “soul mates.” I was like, “Shit, is that how it works? I need me a soul mate. That’s awesome.”
LORRI BAGLEY:
Chris attracted control freaks. He made them feel wanted. And David is a control freak. If he’s not in control of a situation, he’ll just get out of it. It got ugly, and it was horrible for the two of them.
ERIC NEWMAN:
Every partnership has its problems. Costarring in a movie is hard. I think Chris and David really cared about each other, and they saw that they were good together. But I don’t think the quality of that movie was in any way affected by the deterioration of their relationship. While their problems may have impaired the process a little bit, that movie, in its DNA, was a turd.
FRED WOLF:
I grew up in New York City but then later moved to Pennsylvania, to the town where they filmed Deer Hunter, so you know how dreary that was. I would take the bus into Pittsburgh to watch the Marx Brothers movies. My dream had always been to work with a comedy team, and here I was. I thought Black Sheep could have been a repeat of Tommy Boy, but the missing ingredient remained missing. The movie isn’t atrocious. It opened bigger than Tommy Boy. Both of them were number one in the country, but the drop-off was a lot quicker because, ultimately, it wasn’t the same kind of movie.
Black Sheep wrapped in late summer, and Chris moved back to Chicago, taking up residence at his new apartment in the John Hancock Center, which he had bought after leaving Saturday Night Live. Also located in the Hancock Center was the radio studio of Erich “Mancow” Muller, a popular Chicago morning deejay. Chris frequently popped in at the show on his way in or out of the building. Along with regular drop-ins at Second City and ImprovOlympic, the show gave Chris a stage whenever he needed one.
That fall, a small group of people coalesced around Chris, forming a sometime entourage and de facto inner circle. Ted Dondanville stayed on as his personal assistant. Kevin and Johnny Farley had both moved to Chicago to take classes and perform at Second City. The brothers had never been very long apart, but now they found themselves all living in close proximity for the first time since high school. Chris also met a young woman, Jillian Seely. Seely herself had quit drinking several years before, and she was a great help to Chris. They attended recovery meetings together and became fast friends.
And naturally, any decent Chris Farley entourage needed to include a Roman Catholic priest. Sadly, Chris’s longtime confidant Father Matt Foley had left Chicago to do four years of missionary work in the small town of Quechultenango, Mexico. The two friends spoke by telephone often, but Chris needed spiritual guidance closer to home. In the months between filming Tommy Boy and Black Sheep, he had gone to Bellarmine, a Jesuit retreat house in Barrington, Illinois, just outside of Chicago proper. There he met Father Tom Gannon, who would meet with him and talk to him on the phone regularly over the next two years.
Meanwhile, preproduction work was already under way on Chris’s next film, Beverly Hills Ninja. He worked with the writers and producers on finalizing the script and took daily martial arts lessons from a teacher named Master Guo. For month after happy month, everything seemed fine.
JOHN FARLEY:
When I graduated from college, the family was driving back to Wisconsin from Colorado. I was the young sapling, had no clue what direction to take in life. I had Tommy on one side of me and Chris on the other. Tommy was saying, “Go into business.” And Chris was going, “Go into comedy.” They were kidding around, tugging back and forth on me.
I went back to Red Arrow Camp to be a counselor, basically piloted a ski boat all summer. Then I tried to get a job driving a Frito-Lay truck. They turned me down. Maybe it was my DUI. Maybe I was overqualified? But I doubt that. So then my mother was buying a new car, and I went with her. I thought, I like cars. Maybe I’ll sell cars. I asked about it. One of the salesmen took me aside and said, very seriously, “Son, this isn’t a job. This is a career. You’re makin’ a career move here.”
“Wow. Thanks.”
And I never went back. I figured, comedy, what the hell? I went to Chicago and did exactly what Chris did, started working at the Mercantile Exchange and started taking improv classes at night. Kevin got out of the asphalt business a year or two later when he saw how easily I’d gotten out of it.
KEVIN FARLEY:
I had worked with Dad for six years. In September of 1994, I packed my bags and moved down to Chicago. I lived on Johnny’s couch, got a running job at the Chicago Board of Trade, took classes at Second City, and worked as a host there, seating people and doing dishes.
Second City has a business theater, which is upstairs and is pretty lucrative; you can hire players from Second City to perform at your corporate events and write material for you. Eventually, they thought I had a little talent, and they sent me out on these corporate gigs. I got to make a living doing that.
JOHN FARLEY:
I did the corporate thing a bit, too, because it paid well, but mostly I was in the touring company.
KEVIN FARLEY:
Everyone in our family is funny. Mom’s hysterical. When you have a large family you want to have your own identity, so we all developed different senses of humor. We’re very similar in our mannerisms, but all unique. Johnny is out there. His mind works in a really dark but funny way. I’m a little more goofy and silly. Chris was just outlandish, in your face and raucous. Tom is very cerebral, and dry. Only he never got up onstage with it.
JOHN FARLEY:
If you had to break down the Farley brothers, I’m Chevy Chase, Kevin is Dan Aykroyd, and Chris is John Belushi. And Tommy is Garrett Morris.
TED DONDANVILLE:
I’ll be honest: Johnny and Kevin are often funnier than Chris in real life, in more normal ways anyway. Kevin Farley is the funniest guy in the world at a cocktail party. He tells stories, is very engaging. Tom and Johnny, too. The difference is when you put a spotlight on someone, there’s a very different kind of funny you need to deliver, and that’s where Chris was like Michael Jordan: He would always make the shot. But at the same time, a lot of people who’d meet Chris socially just didn’t get him.
JILLIAN SEELY, friend:
I met Chris buying a cup of coffee. I really didn’t know who he was. I remember he had an Elmer Fudd hat on, and he was wearing those electrician glasses he had. He looked like he was mentally retarded. He’d just finished Black Sheep and had moved into his apartment at the Hancock. I worked at a hair salon in the Bloomingdale’s building at 900 North Michigan Avenue, and he was there in the building with Johnny. I was looking at Chris and he was looking at me, and we both started smiling and laughing. He asked me if I would marry him, and then he introduced himself. “Hi, I’m Chris Farley.”
He asked me if I’d join him that night at a restaurant down the street. It was for John’s birthday, I think. I showed up, brought some friends, and we all hung out and had a great time. We ended up going to a restaurant that was open really late and just laughing and talking all night. The next day he called me at work at around nine in the morning and said, “Hey, I noticed last night that you don’t drink.”
“Yeah, I quit a long time ago,” I said.
“Me, too.”
He told me a little bit about his problems, and then he asked if I would go to
a meeting with him later that night. I said sure. We went to the meeting and then went out to dinner, and we just clicked. From that day on we just started hanging out all the time. We laughed our asses off together.
The thing that was great about being with Chris was that he started all of his conversations with “How was your day? What did you do?” Nobody does that anymore. That’s why Chris was so different from most people. He was not selfish at all when it came to being a friend. We would stay up until three, four in the morning, opening ourselves up to each other, even when we were complete strangers to each other. To this day I don’t know why. I’ve had friends who made me laugh and friends I could have really serious talks with, but I’d never had all of that in the same person like I did with Chris.
KEVIN FARLEY:
We always thought Jillian was super nice. They did hit it off right away.
JOHN FARLEY:
At the time we were busy setting up his apartment at the Hancock building. It was crazy, because the Hancock building is literally a retirement community. That and the studio for Jerry Springer. Chris was the only young person in the building. “Dad says it’s the best place in town,” Chris said. And maybe it was, back in the sixties, but the people who were hip when they moved in were the only ones still there.
KEVIN FARLEY:
Whenever Chris was in Chicago we would meet and go out to dinner at the Cheesecake Factory, or the Chop House, or Gibson’s. Things were clicking with his career. It was a really good time. Nobody was worried about him.
TED DONDANVILLE:
At that point, sobriety was just part of his routine. It wasn’t a chore or a burden. It was a balanced part of his life. We weren’t hanging out at raging keggers or anything, but we’d go out to things where there was liquor served. People would buy him shots and he’d accept them graciously. Then he’d hand them to me and say, “Here, Ted. You do it.”
Even when he was enraged or in a foul mood, he’d just go to a meeting, get himself together, and come back calmer. In the Second City days, drunk or sober, he was always a comedian without a stage, always fucking around. Now he was very much in control of himself. He didn’t need to prove something to somebody all the time. He could turn on the comedian when he needed to be there.
JOHN FARLEY:
Chris and Ted, honest to God, were like Felix and Oscar. They were the Odd Couple. Just to watch them interact was hysterical. Chris lived to give him hell, and Ted was like, “Whatever.”
Chris would hide things and then demand them from Ted, just for fun. They’d walk out the front door and Chris would go, “Where’s the little, you know, my recording thing I need?”
“I didn’t see it,” Ted would say
“You didn’t see it? Well, let’s go back and look for it then!”
Then Chris would go back in and wait while Ted looked for the thing and say, “Look! Here it is under the couch!”
“Uh, okay.”
“You idiot! Let’s go!”
It was fun for Chris to beat up on him like you would a little brother, but Ted could ride out all of Chris’s mood swings without even a blip in his pulse rate. He just didn’t care. If you put Chris in real terms, he was a company making millions and millions of dollars, and Teddy was in charge. It was like, Holy Lord, this ship is headed for the rocks and nobody’s at the wheel.
KEVIN FARLEY:
To be an assistant to a star like that, you’ve got a lot of people calling you all the time—agents, heads of studios. It’s not an easy job. Chris would get frustrated with Ted, because oftentimes Ted wasn’t as thorough as he needed to be. But they were friends, so that’s why there was never really any employer-employee etiquette to be observed.
TED DONDANVILLE:
Chris was such a people pleaser that he’d give everyone what they wanted, always be so deferential. But he had just as much ego and just as much of a temper as anyone. All of that negative energy had to get channeled somewhere, and it got channeled to Kevin, Johnny, and me. He’d never let anyone else see that side of him, and so we’d take the brunt of it. But we also understood it for what it was, blowing off steam. Any outburst was immediately followed by a shower of apologies.
JOHN FARLEY:
Teddy was a good companion, and honest. He comes from more money than Chris or any of us had ever seen, so he didn’t give two shits about Chris’s money or his fame. He was just doing it for fun. He was probably the most trustworthy guy Chris could have had by his side. And we all had fun together. We’d go to Second City, work out at the gym. Chris was really into his martial arts training for Beverly Hills Ninja.
TED DONDANVILLE:
Master Guo had been a karate champion in Communist China and had defected. He didn’t speak very good English, and he only weighed about a hundred and ten pounds, but he was an amazing teacher. He and Chris used to do this thing where they’d stand shoulder width apart, clasp one hand, and then push and pull, and the first one to have a foot pulled off the ground would lose. Chris outweighed his teacher more than two to one, but the guy got Chris off his feet every time, without even trying. He was the real deal. But he was very impressed with Chris for what a fast learner he was. This was the football player in him coming back.
Thinking back on it, the martial arts training was something Chris lacked later on, namely a hobby, something to keep him occupied. It was a noteworthy time in that there was nothing too noteworthy about it. He was sober and happy and having a good time. It was never that way again.
JOHN FARLEY:
None of us saw it coming.
TED DONDANVILLE:
Chris was going to have a Christmas party at the Hancock, but first he had to go to New York to attend a screening of Black Sheep. For whatever reason, in the days before he left for New York, he started getting angry. He always had a temper, but this was a little more consistent, and more fierce. It was a gathering storm.
Then a rewrite of Ninja came back, and it really sucked. Following right on that, I was filming some of his training to send in to the screen-writers to come up with jokes, but the battery died on the camcorder halfway through the training session. Afterward, we went to look at it and it was all fucked up. Chris went into a rage, yelling and screaming and ranting about this goddamned script. He left Chicago really pissed off.
LORRI BAGLEY:
I picked him up in New York. The car came and got me, and I went to the airport to meet him. We were going to stop by the hotel and then go and have dinner. He got into the limousine, and as we drove off we started talking about work. And while we were talking it was like a black cloud came over him. I saw the Chris I knew literally disappear, just vanish into this distant world. I said, “What’s going on?” But he had checked out.
We went by the hotel and then got back in the car to go and have dinner. Chris was quiet for a moment. Then he turned to me and said, “Kitten, I’m drinking tonight.”
ACT III
CHAPTER 12
Raising the White Flag
TED DONDANVILLE:
That first relapse, that was the big one. The rest were just dominoes.
Chris Farley had been sober for three years. At a time when his commitment had never seemed stronger, he gave it all up with one drink on the flight from Chicago to New York. As news of the relapse spread, Chris’s friends and family all asked the same question: why? Some felt it was the gathering stress and anxiety over his career. Others felt that Chris had never successfully dealt with every aspect of his compulsive and addictive behaviors, most notably with regard to food. Still others felt that Chris’s sobriety had always relied too much on external motivators, like the threat of losing his job at Saturday Night Live. Whatever precipitated the relapse, it happened. And it was devastating.
LORRI BAGLEY:
I started crying. “No, you’re not,” I said. “You’re not going to do that, and you’re not going to do it with me.”
“I’ve already started. That wasn’t water I was drinking in the ho
tel. It was vodka,” he told me.
We went to dinner, and he started drinking martinis. After that, we went to the Rainbow Room. Steve Martin was there. Chris was acting like a madman. I thought I could get him through the night, call Ted the next morning and find his sponsor, and see where to take him.
I got him back to the hotel room. He was drinking and crying. Then he said he was going to this spot in Hell’s Kitchen to get drugs. I said, “If you want to go there, I’m going with you, and then you need to take me home because I’m not going to play with that.”
We got in the limo, went to this place, and he went inside while I waited outside. After a minute I got nervous and went in after him. He looked at me and said, “Get me out of here.”
So he left without doing anything, and I took him back to the hotel. He just kept drinking and crying and talking about the voices in his head. He kept saying, “How do you turn off the voices in your head? They’re in my head. How do I get them out?”
I finally fell asleep as the sun was rising. When I woke up I called his name, and he wasn’t there. I waited and waited, not knowing what to do. About an hour and a half later, I started getting ready to go, and he came in with sunglasses on. I could tell he hadn’t been to sleep, and he was way too calm and mellowed out from what he’d been the night before. He was on something.
