The Chris Farley Show: A Biography in Three Acts

by Tom Farley

  TERRY ROSSIO, screenwriter:

  Chris was the number-one choice, and everyone was thrilled that he agreed to the project. For an animated feature his voice was perfect, very distinctive. Also, you know, Shrek kind of looked like Farley, or Farley looked like Shrek.

  The recording sessions were essentially everybody in the booth rolling off our chairs onto the floor, laughing our asses off. I brought my daughter, who was twelve years old at the time, to one of the sessions at the Capitol Records building. It was her first time ever coming in with me to work, and she concluded I had the best job in the world, listening to funny people be funny.

  ANDREW ADAMSON, director:

  The character of Shrek is to some degree rebelling against his own vulnerabilities. And I think that’s probably a reason Katzenberg went to Chris, because there was an aspect of that in him, covering vulnerability in humor and keeping people at arm’s length. Within minutes of meeting Chris you saw his vulnerability. Sometimes he would switch on this very gruff persona, and you realized it was because he felt like he was exposing too much.

  It didn’t make the final film, but at one stage there was a moment in the script where Shrek was walking along, singing “Feeling Groovy,” Simon and Garfunkel’s “Fifty-ninth Street Bridge” song. Chris was just so into it. When we were recording, I kind of got the impression that he wasn’t sure whether he was supposed to be doing a comedic take on the song or a sincere, heartfelt one. He was singing and putting himself out there in a way that was very touching. It made me see the longing in him to do something more genuine with his career. It made me feel bad, because we were in fact asking for a “funny” version. But that he was willing to give it to us, even though he felt so vulnerable about it, made it a very sad and touching moment.

  TERRY ROSSIO:

  We spoke about the essence or wellspring of Chris’s humor; much of it was the humor of discomfort. He would occupy a space of discomfort until it became funny. Shrek, in the Chris Farley version of the story, was unhappy at his place in the world, unhappy to be cast as the villain. So for me,

  Chris’s comedic persona was key to the creation of the Shrek character— a guy who rejected the world because the world rejected him.

  ANDREW ADAMSON:

  After Chris died, we all had personal thoughts about whether we could use his voice track and find someone to impersonate him to finish the film. We definitely thought about whether that was the appropriate thing to do, but ultimately we felt that we weren’t far enough along in developing the story and the character. The animation process depends a lot on the actor. His death was quite devastating, both personally and to the process of creating the film. We spent almost a year banging our heads against the wall until Mike Myers was able to come on board. Chris’s Shrek and Mike’s Shrek are really two completely different characters, as much as Chris and Mike are two completely different people.

  TERRY ROSSIO:

  They’re both great in their own way. Mike created a very interesting character, a Shrek who has a sense of humor that’s not that good, but it makes him happy. Chris’s Shrek was born of frustration and self-doubt, an internal struggle between the certainty of a good heart and the insecurity of not understanding things.

  ANDREW ADAMSON:

  I always found Chris a very fun person to be around. Containing him in a recording booth was a great challenge, but he was a very down-to-earth guy on a certain level. We had an enjoyable relationship. The drug problem didn’t impact his work at all, and to be honest, I had no idea it was happening. Everything I’d seen indicated that he had overcome those demons. He was going through rehab at the time and was very disciplined about it. Any other impressions I had were thirdhand and after the fact. I really felt like he was on an upward spiral.

  And Chris was—that week. But the next week he was back on a downward one, and who could say where he was going the week after that? By the time he finished voicing Shrek in early May, Chris’s ability to maintain his sobriety had all but vanished. His relapses started coming randomly, suddenly, and with alarming frequency.

  One of Chris’s counselors described him as having the most severe addictive personality he’d ever seen—this in several decades of helping patients. As Chris surrendered his hold on sobriety, his compulsive overeating ran rampant as well. Chris had fought a constant battle with his weight since childhood. Those who knew him well knew it was the bane of his existence. Given the severe health risks of obesity, Chris was doing almost as much damage to himself with food as he was with drugs and alcohol.

  After presenting at the Oscars on March 24, Chris had returned to rehab in Alabama, emerging sober to work on Shrek in April and early May. Following yet another relapse, he returned to the outpatient program at Hazelden Chicago on May 19. It accomplished little. June and July were spent in and mostly out of rehab, and by August the situation was catastrophic.

  Chris’s relationship with Lorri Bagley, rocky and unstable in the best of times, was severely broken. It never ended, but the blowouts got bigger and more explosive, and the separations grew longer and longer. Friends who were active in Chris’s recovery, like Jillian Seely and Tim O’Malley, did their best to keep him on the straight and narrow, but their efforts were increasingly frustrated. Chris would either insulate himself from his friends in order to use, or insulate himself in order not to use. He had so removed himself from his usual social networks that many assumed he was simply off somewhere else, stone sober and hard at work. Chris had never let the trappings of fame and success put any distance between him and his loved ones. But addiction finally succeeded where fame could not.

  ROBERT BARRY, friend, Edgewood High School:

  Toward the end Chris would go hang out with these Board of Trade guys in Chicago. They had tons of money and wanted to hang with celebrities. When he was in Chicago, Chris didn’t call up Dan Healy or me or the Edgewood guys anymore. He’d call up those people. I never even visited his place in the Hancock.

  FR. MATT FOLEY, friend:

  For the last three years I had been living in Mexico, doing missionary work. I talked to Chris and his parents on a regular basis, but then Chris stopped returning my calls. One of the last times I saw him was on a trip to Chicago. We went to work out at a health club there by the John Hancock building. After that we were supposed to hang out all day, but he basically wanted to get rid of me. He didn’t want me around because I would have told him he was full of shit.

  JOEL MURRAY, cast member, Second City:

  The people who loved him didn’t want him to drink, so he couldn’t be with us anymore. I’d invite him over to barbecues and stuff out in L.A., and I could tell that he had a whole other thing going on. It wasn’t a celebrity, big-shot kind of thing; it was an “I gotta go do this stuff that I don’t want to tell you about” kind of thing. He was the worst liar in the world, so he’d just kind of be evasive. Next thing you know he’s hanging out with nefarious types who just want to wind up the comedy toy, and that’s never good.

  DAVID SPADE:

  There’s no shortage of those sorts of people. I’ve talked to Aykroyd about Belushi, and it’s the same experience. Friends you’ve known for three days aren’t friends I want to hang with.

  I was working in TV, he was off doing his movies, and we’d just slowed down a little bit. It wasn’t Lorri. That was done with, but we’d been a little bit on the outs, and because of that I got a lot of shit toward the end about “Why weren’t you there for him?” But being that close, I dealt with it all the time. And in that situation, before the guy’s dead, he’s just kind of an asshole. Truth is, you get a junkie who’s wasted all the time and moody and angry and trying to knock you around, you say, “Okay, you go do that, and I’ll be over here.” I think that’s understandable.

  TED DONDANVILLE:

  Chris never had any animosity toward Spade at all; he had just respected Spade’s decision to walk away for a while. But after being all alone on Ninja and Edwards & Hunt, Chris starte
d to realize how much he needed his friend. It was like Mick Jagger after those first two solo albums—maybe it was good to have Keith Richards around.

  TOM FARLEY:

  I always told Chris, “You love humor, but look around at the people you’re with when you’re doing these drugs. These people have no humor in their lives. You keep this up and you will end up surrounded by people who are not your friends.” And that’s exactly what happened.

  NORM MacDONALD:

  Sometimes you’d see him with prostitutes. That was mostly at the very end, like when he hosted SNL. The amazing thing was how well he treated them. He really fell for them. He’d take them to dinner and treat them so sweetly. He’d treat them equal to any other person at the table. He’d introduce them to you as his girlfriend.

  TIM O’MALLEY:

  Escorts and strippers are just part of the deal when you’re lonely and lost. It’s like phone sex, trying to reach out and talk to somebody. Every phone book has a hundred phone numbers in it; you can always dig up someone to spend time with you.

  I went into his apartment one night, and he said, “Yeah, I relapsed last night. I had a pizza, and I figured since I’d relapsed on my OA program I’d have a bottle of scotch, and then I went to the Crazy Horse and I spent eleven grand.”

  “Jesus, you were giving the girls five hundred a dance?”

  “Yeah, how’d you know?”

  “Because I know how it goes. You were trying to get some girl to come home with you by overtipping her, and those girls don’t want anything but more money. First of all,” I told him, “separate your food program from your alcohol problem. Food’s not going to kill you tonight.”

  I hated the Overeaters Anonymous program for that, because if he relapsed on that he’d just go ahead and go the distance.

  KEVIN FARLEY:

  For Chris, by that point, every relapse meant going all the way. Some addicts will put a toe back in the water, but Chris would always dive back into the deep end. And that’s what happened when he went to Hawaii.

  DAVID SPADE:

  I was at the Mondrian in L.A., and Chris was there. He was doing an interview, and he had one of his sobriety bodyguards with him. It was kind of sad, because I hadn’t seen him in a while. He came over to my table— the bodyguard let him come over alone for a bit—he came over and he said, “Nobody cares about anything but Tommy Boy. Can we do another one? Can we do . . . something?”

  “Of course. There’s always scripts they want us to do. I didn’t know if you wanted to do anything anymore.”

  “We gotta do it, because that’s the only one that matters.”

  “Okay,” I said. “Let’s find something.”

  Then these two cute girls came over. They said, “Hey, come party with us. We’re in town with Spanish Playboy.” Or something ridiculous like that.

  Chris said, “I can’t.”

  “Oh, c’mon,” they said. “Just come up to our room for a bit.”

  Chris looked at me. I said, “I’ll cover for you. I can buy you about five minutes.”

  “Thanks, Davy.”

  He took off, and then the bodyguard came over and said, “Where’s Chris?”

  “He went to the bathroom.”

  “Which bathroom?”

  “There’s one in the hotel.”

  “You fucked this.”

  “Sorry.”

  It was the wrong thing to do, I know. But we’d had a really nice moment together, and I liked that. It proved that we were still close, could still be friends, and I wanted to help him out. But then they couldn’t find Chris. He disappeared, and it just turned into chaos.

  KEVIN FARLEY:

  US magazine was doing a big feature article on him at the time, and Chris was spending his days with this reporter. Chris woke me up in the middle of the night and asked me if I wanted to come down and take a whirlpool with these girls he’d met from Playboy. He’d already relapsed and started drinking. I said no and went back to bed. I figured he’d play in the Jacuzzi and then go up to his room and sleep it off. But I got up the next morning and found out he’d relapsed hard, bought these girls plane tickets and gone to Hawaii. When that US reporter showed up and there was no Chris, the shit hit the fan. Gurvitz had to put that fire out.

  When I talked to Chris about it later, he didn’t even remember going to Hawaii. He just woke up there. But when he called Dad from Hawaii, Dad was like, “Hey, you’re on vacation!” The level of denial at that point was just crazy.

  FR. TOM GANNON:

  You cannot understand Chris Farley without grappling with the relationship between him and his father. That was the dominant force in his life. He talked to his father every day on the phone, and was constantly trying to please him. And I think he did please him. But the family, which looked so normal on the outside, was terribly dysfunctional.

  ERIC NEWMAN:

  If you were a shrink, you could retire on that family.

  TIM O’MALLEY:

  The first people we know as God are our parents. And if you don’t get approval from your parents, eventually you can mature and find that from other places. But Chris was never able to do that. He was never able to find it from God or anyone else.

  TOM ARNOLD:

  Even when he was thirty years old, Chris would literally sit at his dad’s feet and tell him stories. I don’t think anything made him happier than to sit at the foot of his dad’s recliner and tell him stories about show business, or food.

  There were a couple other times where I went with Chris to the Taste of Madison, which is this festival in the city square where every three feet there’s a booth of a different kind of food. All the conversations Chris had with his dad that weekend were just “Hey, did you have that pork chop on a stick?” “Yeah, that was good. Did you get some of this?” You know, they were surface conversations, the kind I would have with my dad, the kind that don’t get really deep. Because if you get deep it’s pretty painful.

  KEVIN FARLEY:

  I think my dad was basically a happy guy, but he had an addiction to food and alcohol. And when you get to be six hundred pounds, you’re in such a hole that what are you going to do to get out? And that’s what depressed him. He was confused by it. He’d be like, “I don’t know how I got this big. I don’t know how this happened.” I watched my dad’s eating habits. Yes, he ate a lot, but was it proportional to the weight he gained? No way. Part of it had to be genetic.

  My father was handicapped, and when you have someone in your family with an illness, you want to do what you can to make them feel better. It wasn’t just Chris. We all wanted to make Dad happy, because we all knew he was on borrowed time.

  JOHN FARLEY:

  Then there’s the other element to it, not wanting to get skinny or sober because he didn’t want Dad to feel bad. Chris said that to me, that he should stay heavy for Dad.

  LORRI BAGLEY:

  Chris was very protective of his father. One night after I went with Chris to a meeting, he asked me if I wanted to meet his parents for dinner. When we were in the elevator going up to see them, Chris was like, “Look, my dad has this problem. Please don’t stare at him.”

  A year later, the first time I spent the night with Chris, he showed me a picture of his family from when he was a kid, and his father was so thin. I said, “What happened?” But Chris never really told me.

  CHARNA HALPERN, director/teacher, ImprovOlympic:

  I had a very intense night with him alone in my house once. We were listening to a Cat Stevens album, Tea for the Tillerman, and the song “Father and Son” came on. Chris started crying. Cried and cried and cried. He said, “I love my dad so much, and I don’t want him to die.”

  I said, “He probably feels the same way about you. You’re both in the same situation. You’re both alcoholics. You’re both overweight. Maybe you can help each other.”

  “Yeah, but we can’t,” he said. “It’ll never happen.”

  HOLLY WORTELL, cast member, Second City:r />
  His dad was of a different generation. They didn’t go to see “headshrinkers. ” Chris told me that his father finally agreed to go with him to this weight-loss clinic once. They were sitting in a group therapy session, and everyone was going around the circle talking about their issues with food. His dad just stood up and said, “Let’s go.” They got up and went outside, and his dad said, “We’re not like these people. They’ve got problems. That’s not us. We’re leaving.”

  FR. TOM GANNON:

  They walked out, checked in to a resort on an island off the coast of Florida, took out a room, and proceeded to go on a binge together. With that kind of enabling, the kid didn’t stand a chance. The father was in denial, but in all fairness, I don’t think the brothers were straight with the father, either. Dad knew about the drinking but not so much about the drugs. The father never accepted that Chris was a drug addict until the very end, even though the two of them talked every day. So there was a lot of posturing going on.

  TOM ARNOLD:

  It’s not his father’s fault, what happened to Chris. It’s not. Chris had access to every tool in the world. He went to the best treatment centers, had the best people being of service to him, reaching out to him.