The Chris Farley Show: A Biography in Three Acts

by Tom Farley

  “Here’s what it is," he said. “It’s me and Dad. We’re both really skinny, and we’re the coolest guys at the party, doing backflips all over the place and dancing up a storm to ‘Twisting the Night Away.’ That would be really cool."

  On January 11, 1997, Beverly Hills Ninja opened in theaters nationwide. Despite a unanimous critical thumping, it earned over $12 million on its first outing, topping the weekly box office. Following Tommy Boy and Black Sheep, it was Chris’s third-straight number-one film.

  That January also marked Chris’s third-straight month of sobriety. After staying clean during the principal photography of Edwards & Hunt, he’d relapsed again in September and, with varying degrees of failure, cycled through three separate rehab facilities over the next two months. Then, in late October, Chris showed definite signs of improvement. When he celebrated his ninety-ninth day of sobriety in Chicago with Tim O’Malley, there was cause for hope.

  But Chris’s confidence was on the wane. In New Orleans, Todd Green was expecting to meet Chris at the Super Bowl to watch the Green Bay Packers take on the New England Patriots. When Chris didn’t show, Todd called the Farley home in Madison, only to be told that the Super Bowl “wouldn’t be good for Chris right now.” Chris knew all too well what New Orleans’s French Quarter would look like after a Packers win (or, for that matter, a Packers loss). He had chosen to watch the game at the home of a friend instead.

  Despite making money, Beverly Hills Ninja was largely an embarrassment. It bombed with critics and disappointed even hard-core fans. Chris found himself at a professional crossroads. Hollywood had typecast him as the clown, and he had been fully complicit in that, playing the part whenever he was called upon to do so. But fatty could only fall down so many times. Fortunately, a project had arrived with the potential to take Chris in a new direction. Earlier that year, Bernie Brillstein had brought Chris together with screenwriter and playwright David Mamet, and together they’d agreed to collaborate on Chris’s first dramatic film: a biopic of Fatty Arbuckle.

  Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle was a silent-film star bigger in his day than Charlie Chaplin. He was on the receiving end of Hollywood’s first-ever million-dollar contract. He was also on the losing end of Hollywood’s first-ever sex scandal, being wrongly accused of sexually assaulting and fatally wounding a young woman. Arbuckle watched his career implode even as his innocence was proven in court. Brillstein was drawn to the story for its showbiz history and intrigue. Chris was drawn to it for the man himself. Arbuckle was a brilliant physical comedian who loathed his extra girth and outsized persona, despite having made it his professional stock-in-trade. After years of being made to play the crazy fat guy, Chris was being asked to play the guy behind the crazy fat guy. He was being asked to play himself, a role he rarely performed for anyone. Much like Jackie Gleason’s turn as Minnesota Fats in The Hustler, this was the role that would have fundamentally altered the course of Chris’s career.

  With the Arbuckle biopic ahead of him and ninety-nine days behind him, Chris was in good spirits. On the first weekend in March, the U.S. Comedy Arts Festival in Aspen, Colorado, was hosting a reunion of Saturday Night Live cast members, hosts, and writers. Several dozen stars from the show’s history attended, from founding fathers Chevy Chase and Steve Martin to freshmen Molly Shannon and Cheri Oteri. For Chris to share that stage was an honor beyond anything he could have imagined growing up. It should have been one of the highlights of his career. It wasn’t.

  JOHN FARLEY:

  I don’t know what the hell happened. I remember everything had been fine in Chicago, but on the flight to Aspen he was acting strange. He may have relapsed that morning, or the night before. I just remember sitting on the plane, thinking, oh no.

  CONAN O’BRIEN, writer, SNL:

  When we were in Aspen, you could tell that the trolley was barely making it around the curves.

  KEVIN FARLEY:

  When I arrived he was already well into it, drinking and doing coke. From there it was just a total disaster. Spade really looked after him that weekend.

  DAVID SPADE:

  I went to meet him in his room to go to dinner with Lorne, and when I got to him he was already so messed up. We walked into the restaurant, and it wasn’t just Lorne. It was Lorne, Steve Martin, Dan Aykroyd, Chevy Chase, and Bernie Brillstein, all these people that Chris looked up to at this really nice, formal dinner. I said, real quick, “Hey, Chris, come over to the bathroom. I gotta tell you something.” And I took him into the kitchen, out the back door into the alley, and I said, “We’re getting the fuck out of here. You can’t sit with these people in this condition.”

  These strangers showed up, and he started drinking with them. I tried to stay with him, but eventually I just had to go to bed. I was at lunch the next day, and he walked in. He was with the same people and obviously hadn’t gone to bed. They were all wired, and Chris’s eyes were rolling back. He said, “Davy. Davy, please stay with me. Don’t leave me with these people.”

  JOHN FARLEY:

  One day we had lunch at the restaurant on the top of the mountain. While we were eating, Chris started crying, saying, “I can’t stop. I just can’t stop.” He was crying his eyes out right in the restaurant. Chris wore his heart on his sleeve; he didn’t care one bit if he was crying in public, but people were starting to recognize him. We were like, okay, we’ve got to get Chris Farley off this mountain right now.

  BERNIE BRILLSTEIN:

  During the reunion, Chris was out onstage with about forty people from SNL. They were just telling stories, but Chris was crazed. I thought he was going to have a heart attack onstage. Finally, Dana Carvey quietly took him off.

  CHEVY CHASE, original cast member, Saturday Night Live:

  I read him the riot act that weekend. Everybody did. Chris was drunk and stoned and, on top of that, way overweight. I sat with him and I said, “Look, you’re not John Belushi. And when you overdose or kill yourself, you will not have the same acclaim that John did. You don’t have the record of accomplishment that he had. You don’t have the background that he had. And you don’t have the same cultural status that he had. You haven’t had the chance to get that far, and you’re already screwing yourself up.”

  He kept saying, “I’m just trying to level out.”

  That’s what he said he was doing with the drinking and the cocaine. It’s so silly. It means if you took nothing you’d be level already. Why take all this shit that’s killing you? And I told him that. I said, “I’ve experienced this. I’ve seen who dies. I’ve seen how far you think you can go, what you can take and what you can’t. You’re just going to end up being an overweight guy who could fall on his stomach and had one or two funny things in his career, but nothing that’s ever really stood out. You’ll be a blip in the New York Times obituaries page, and that’ll be it. Is that what you want?”

  BOB ODENKIRK, cast member, Second City:

  I was at a party for Mr. Show. Somebody came in and said, “Chris is out back. He wants to talk to you.”

  There was this skanky deejay guy, the kind of guy who hangs out in these party vacation towns. He’d tried to pass David Cross some cocaine earlier, so I knew who he was. I go out back, and there’s a limo. I go to the door and knock and the window rolls down. There’s Chris, and he’s packed in there with girls and hangers-on and this fucking scumbag who was pushing coke around. Chris is bloated and red-faced; he hasn’t shaved. We talk for a few minutes, but there’s really nothing to say at those times.

  I’d seen Chris fucked up before, but this time he looked as bad as anyone has ever looked. It was a horrible thing to watch. It’s one thing to shake your finger at a friend and say, “You’re gonna kill yourself.” It’s another thing to look at him and know he’s going to do it.

  TOM FARLEY:

  After Aspen, his managers said, “He’s going to rehab, and we’re serious this time. He’s going away for thirteen weeks and he’s not coming back— except to present at the Oscars.”
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br />   KEVIN FARLEY:

  Brillstein-Grey sent him back to the lock-up down south, but they thought it would be okay for him to go to the Oscars, under supervision, and present an award.

  TOM FARLEY:

  This woman who ran the facility said the only way they’d let Chris go was if he was there with someone from treatment. The next thing you know, she’s the one who’s going with him, and she made him pay her extra for her time, buy her first-class airfare, buy her a dress, and do the same for her daughter to accompany her. I don’t think that helped. It just made him feel used.

  KEVIN FARLEY:

  I thought she was really unprofessional about the whole thing. It was her opportunity to go to the Oscars; she basked in the limelight for a little while. We were in the hotel, and she started rummaging through Chris’s gift basket, looking at all the high-end cosmetics they put in there. And Chris was like, “What the fuck are you doing? Put that shit down. Don’t you think I might want to give that to my mom?”

  This woman just got way into it. “Ooh look, there’s George Clooney!” Who gives a fuck? Why don’t you do your job?

  TOM FARLEY:

  I didn’t get it. Chris’s managers were the ones busting him the hardest for fucking up at Aspen, and then two weeks later they were the same ones lobbying for him to come back and present at the Oscars. It was a money thing. The Oscars are exposure, and exposure means money. I guess they thought Chris needed it to help his career.

  TOM ARNOLD:

  Chris had a fear that his movies were starting to suck, and, you know, I know what that fear is like. But there’s always options if you’re talented.

  BERNIE BRILLSTEIN:

  A few months earlier, I’d taken him to New York to meet with David Mamet about the Fatty Arbuckle story. That story has always fascinated me, only because Arbuckle was innocent. Chris came to the meeting at a little restaurant down in the Village, and he was the good Chris, the well-behaved Chris, because he couldn’t believe that David Mamet even wanted to meet him. Mamet loved him. It was a great meeting. He said yes before we got up from the table, and he wrote it for Chris. To this day I know that it would have changed his career.

  TOM FARLEY:

  As soon as he heard little bits and pieces about Arbuckle’s life, he said, “This is me.” It was the whole idea that nobody understands the real person underneath. “I’m going to tell them about the real Fatty Arbuckle, and maybe they’ll understand the real Chris Farley.”

  ERICH "MANCOW” MULLER, friend:

  Chris had all these pictures of clowns in his hallway. He said that they frightened and fascinated him, and that he found them sad. When he was drinking he would always talk like Burl Ives and sing old Burl Ives songs. He’d go, “A little, bitty tear let me down, spoiled my act as a clown.” He’d sing that over and over and over.

  FR. TOM GANNON, S.J., friend:

  He felt his career was in trouble, and not just because of the drugs. The fatty-falls-down humor was beginning to take a toll. Sometime that year, he told me, “I can’t keep this up. I can’t keep falling down and walking into walls.” But people wanted him to keep doing the same thing, because it assured them financial success.

  BOB WEISS, producer, Tommy Boy:

  Chris had an idea of reinventing himself in a certain way that didn’t take into account very real forces in this industry, forces that can be tidal in nature.

  FRED WOLF:

  By that point, people were coming at Chris from every angle. They were trying to hire me in the hopes that they might make a deal with him. We went to dinner one night in New York, and he was telling me that he wanted to do movies like Nothing in Common, the Tom Hanks/Jackie Gleason movie. I was absolutely convinced that that was what he could do. We started throwing around some ideas, and we kept getting interrupted by fans coming up and saying, “Chris, I love you! You’re so funny.”

  And then as they would walk away, Chris would sigh and say, “But that’s all they want.”

  So we kept trying to have this very serious conversation about his career, but the fans just kept coming and coming and asking for lines from SNL or bits from Tommy Boy. They wouldn’t leave him alone.

  FR. TOM GANNON:

  One night we were at Gibson’s. People pretty much left him alone that night. But one couple came up and thanked him for his work and told him how much they loved him. Then they walked away and he turned to me and said, “They don’t really love me. If they knew me, they wouldn’t love me at all.”

  I said, “That’s not true, Chris. People do love you. They don’t love you the same way I do, or your family does, but they’re sincere. You bring a lot of happiness into their lives.”

  He got a lot of that kind of attention, but he didn’t get any nourishment from it, and so he felt he needed more of it all the time.

  LORRI BAGLEY:

  Chris would go to premieres and goof off on the red carpet, but then he’d complain that the business wouldn’t take him seriously. I told him, “Chris, when you stop playing the clown, they’ll stop treating you like the clown. They’ll take you seriously when you take yourself seriously.”

  PETER SEGAL, director, Tommy Boy:

  There were bidding wars for Chris on multiple projects, but most of them were not that good. He’d come to me with these scripts, and I’d turn them down. I kept saying, “No, Chris. That’s not a good one for you or for me.”

  So there was a tension between us, because he thought I didn’t want to work with him anymore. There was a long time when he wouldn’t return my phone calls, and so I sat down and wrote him a long letter. I told him the reason I was turning these projects down was because I believed his potential was so much greater. And I think he realized it, too. He eventually called me back to thank me for the letter.

  But I really meant what I’d said. I thought he could win an Oscar one day. I know people might think I’m crazy saying that, looking at his brief career, but I really believed in his talent. It was way beyond what he was showing.

  BRIAN DENNEHY, costar, Tommy Boy:

  Myself, I never understood why you’d want to be the twentieth-best dramatic actor in the movie business when you were already the best comedian in the movie business. But there is this impulse that comedians have to do serious work.

  Interestingly enough, I think with the right part and the right director Chris could have done it. There was a sadness and a vulnerability and a fear that existed in his face and in his eyes. Jackie Gleason had it, a sense that “the world can never take away the pain that I feel, pain that I know that I have, but that I don’t fully understand.” You can see a little bit of it in Tommy Boy, but he hadn’t even really begun to explore it.

  There are two ways to act, and some people are good enough to do both. One is to erect this very complicated, layered character around you in order to hide behind it, in order to disguise and protect yourself. It’s a kind of architecture. You’re creating a building. It may be a very impressive building, but it’s still a fucking building.

  The other way to act is to absolutely strip away everything that keeps you and your soul and your mind from the audience. You rip it away and say, “How much more of myself can I expose to help the audience understand this character?” It’s more difficult, and it’s more profound, because, ultimately, the real challenge of art is to understand more about yourself. And I think Chris could have done it. I think he would have done it, had he lived. But most comedians, in fact most actors, are not capable of that.

  With Tommy Boy, Black Sheep, and Beverly Hills Ninja, Chris had joined the ranks of elite Hollywood stars who could “open” a film—a certain core audience could be counted on to turn out for any Chris Farley movie. Even if Chris wasn’t thrilled with the reigning definition of “a Chris Farley movie,” it was an enviable place to be, and a strong place from which to make a bold, smart career move.

  But that spring, Chris’s dance card was strangely empty. As a rule, studios take out short-term insurance p
olicies on their lead actors to cover any possible interruptions in the production process. Many of those insurers were refusing to underwrite Chris’s films until he could once again prove his dependability. And so, while the Arbuckle project plodded along at the glacial pace of most Hollywood development deals, Chris was having trouble getting even a typical Chris Farley movie off the ground.

  In this troubled time one good project did come his way, a voice-over gig for a little animated movie called Shrek. In 1997, computer-animated movies were still in their infancy—Pixar’s trendsetting Toy Story had opened only eighteen months before—and so there was little reason to believe that this fun sideline project would go on to spawn one of the most popular, highest-grossing film franchises of all time. Chris took it on almost as a lark.

  Shrek was a popular children’s book by William Steig about an ornery yet good-hearted ogre who lives alone in the woods, cast out from the world. Jeffrey Katzenberg, head of DreamWorks Animation, had procured the film rights. Chris was his first choice to play the title role. According to everyone involved, Chris Farley’s Shrek was one of the funniest, most heartfelt performances he ever gave. Tragically, no one has ever heard it.