by Tom Farley
TOM GIANAS, writer:
When he got back, you could tell that things were bad. He was very tense, distracted and, well, fucked up. I don’t think Lorne expected that, otherwise he never would have let him host. We sure didn’t expect it. I still thought he was sober. We went out to dinner Monday night after the pitch meeting, and we were running interference with waiters all night, trying to keep liquor and booze away from him. And that lasted the whole week.
MOLLY SHANNON, cast member:
He was just indulging in everything: girls, Chinese food, drugs, booze, cold syrup. Everything.
MARCI KLEIN, talent coordinator:
By Tuesday night, I knew he was out of control. I had heard that he’d been going up to some of the newer cast members and saying, “Hey, let’s go out!” And a lot of the new cast, they really looked up to Chris, wanted to go with him and hang out with him. So I called a meeting with everyone. I met with them in the talent office, and I said, “Look, I know Chris, and I know what’s going to happen. If he wants you to go out, you’re not going. If any of you help him get drinks or liquor or anything, if you encourage him in any way, you are going to be a part of helping him die.”
TIM MEADOWS:
That was a fucking rough week. I tried to hang out with him as much as I could whenever he was at the show, because Chris would never do anything in front of me. But he started all that shit, like, “I’ve got to . . . go to my car for something.” He would make excuses to leave, and he’d come back and he’d be happy again. That whole week he had these total strangers hanging around.
TODD GREEN:
When Chris got to New York he shut everybody down. I wasn’t able to see him. Kevin Cleary wasn’t able to see him. I don’t think Tommy could even get to him, and the rumor mill was cranking.
TOM FARLEY:
It was Tuesday night at about five o’clock. I was working up in Greenwich, and I knew he was coming out to New York. I called my wife, and I said, “This is weird. He’s been here since Sunday, and he hasn’t even called me.”
She said, “Just get in your car and go down there.”
So I drove down to the Waldorf-Astoria where he was staying, and he had this bodyguard sitting outside the door. I went in, and Chris was like, “What’re you doing here?”
“I just wanted to see my brother,” I said. “I haven’t seen you in a while.”
“Okay, great. I’m just about to head over to Saturday Night Live. They’re writing tonight, and I’m going to go help come up with ideas.”
So we hopped in this limo downstairs that was supposed to take us over to 30 Rock. Mike Shoemaker had one of the NBC pages in the car to babysit Chris. Chris got in and said, “We’ve got to make a stop. I’ve got to pick up some friends on 110th Street.”
One Hundred and Tenth Street? Next thing I knew we pulled up at this place in Harlem. Chris went up and came out of this building with two women, looking exactly like what they were. They got in the car, and Chris said, “Okay, let’s go to SNL.”
This NBC kid looked over at me like, “Are you shitting me?”
I just shrugged. So Chris took these two hookers up to Saturday Night Live. It was Marci Klein’s birthday that night. They were all going out to the Havana Room later. Chris was hanging out with Tracy Morgan and Jim Breuer, talking to them about skits and stuff. I was stuck out in the lobby with these two girls, trying to make small talk. Then Chris went into Cheri Oteri’s room to talk with her for a while. I knew where the evening was going, and I knew we weren’t going to end up at Marci’s birthday party. I got up and knocked on Cheri’s door and said, “Chris, you know what, I’m outta here. I’m gonna get some sleep.” And I left.
The next day, I called up Kevin Cleary and told him about Chris, that he was just a mess. Kevin said to come back down to the city, we’d take Chris to lunch and have yet another intervention. So I left work, drove in, Kevin and I went to the Waldorf at around eleven-thirty and called up to the room. Chris answered the phone. I said, “Hey, I’m down in the lobby. It’s me and Kevin Cleary.”
And as soon as he heard those two names he knew what was up. Kevin Cleary was the one person in the world Chris could never bullshit. Chris said, “Yeah, yeah, I’m just waking up. Give me twenty minutes.”
We waited a half hour or so, called back up to his room, and there was a “do not disturb” on his phone line. I called the front desk and asked to be put through, but they said he’d left specific instructions not to be disturbed.
Kevin and I went out and had lunch and talked about what we could do, and that was it. I never saw him alive again.
NORM MacDONALD:
I had a sketch I wanted to do with him. The idea was that I’d play Fast Eddie Felson and he’d play Minnesota Fats and we’d play a really long game of pool, just like in The Hustler, only we’d never sink a single ball.
Chris told me to come to his hotel to work on the sketch, which was already kind of odd. Why wouldn’t we just write in the office? But I went to the hotel and he had this guy guarding the door, and then I went inside and he had tumblers of vodka and orange juice and there were girls there. He kept going in the other room.
Working on a sketch with Chris was never anything but a great delight, but his mind wasn’t working like it used to. There was all this self-doubt. He was very preoccupied.
I remember he said to me, “Sometimes, life seems so cruel.” He kept saying that: Life seems so cruel.
I said, “Why do you say that, Chris? You’re always laughing.”
“I don’t know,” he said. “I just want to die.”
I’ve heard people say that before, and it’s sort of a meaningless phrase. Maybe he meant it; I don’t know. I don’t know how people talk under the influence.
ROBERT SMIGEL, writer:
I wasn’t writing for the show full-time then. I was just doing the cartoons and occasionally faxing in a sketch idea. In this case, ESPN had asked me to do a “Super Fans” bit with George Wendt about Ditka becoming coach of the New Orleans Saints. When Chris hosted a few weeks later, I figured we could do something similar on the show, so I’d faxed in a version with Chris in it.
Chris’s condition was obvious as soon as he showed up. You can’t replace a host after the sketches are written and the sets are built, but that doesn’t happen until Thursday. And by Tuesday everyone knew how bad it was. Granted, pulling the host even on a Tuesday would have been a huge crisis, but I thought that’s what was needed: dire consequences and an inescapable, public humiliation. I thought Chris should be fired. That was the only thing that would teach him the same lesson that he’d learned when Lorne had suspended him and threatened to fire him four years earlier. I actually thought it was a gift opportunity, a chance to help a drowning friend. But I wasn’t a full-timer there, and I wasn’t part of making that decision.
NORM MacDONALD:
It was shocking to everybody that Lorne let the show go forward.
LORNE MICHAELS:
I don’t remember anybody threatening to resign over it. I don’t think that the show should be used as therapy, but there was no way for us, for me anyway, to get through to him in a conversation. That didn’t work anymore. If Chris couldn’t get it any other way, he could at least watch it on television. The thing he most cared about was the show. I think there was a feeling that the process of doing this, succeeding at it or failing at it, could be brutally honest with him in a way that he was no longer getting in a lecture.
MIKE SHOEMAKER, producer:
The truth is you’re so busy on that show that you just keep moving, and I think we all hoped that the old Chris would kick in and we’d be fine. I was also just mad at him. More than being worried, I was angry.
ROBERT SMIGEL:
That whole show is like watching a slow death march, but the cold open was just the worst.
TOM FARLEY:
I was in shock when I saw the opening sketch. It was Lorne and Tim Meadows talking about how Chris had kicked his dru
g problem and he’d be in perfect shape to host. Then Chris bursts in, and he’s obviously in terrible shape. They’d made jokes about Chris’s drinking before, but that was when he was sober and doing well. This was not funny at all.
TIM MEADOWS:
When that sketch was pitched at read-through, nobody knew that by Saturday it would no longer be a sketch but the real, honest truth. At the time I didn’t think it was in such bad taste, because that’s what we’d always done. We’d always been able to make fun of ourselves.
ROBERT SMIGEL:
They cut that opening sketch and the monologue out of the syndicated version of the show. When you see the reruns, it starts with the opening credits and goes straight into a sketch. I believe it’s the only time in the history of the show that’s been done.
NORM MacDONALD:
He blew out his voice in dress, and so the live show was just awful. He was like a marathon runner stumbling to the finish line before it even began.
MARCI KLEIN:
I said to Lorne, “I think he’s going to have a heart attack.”
TOM GIANAS:
He did this incredibly physical scene with Molly Shannon, a Mary Katherine Gallagher scene, and it was on right before the Motivational Speaker scene, where he played the coach of a spinning class. He was just huffing and puffing his way through the scene with Molly, sweating like crazy. And then, by the time he got to the Motivational Speaker scene, he was gone. It was really hard to watch.
NORM MacDONALD:
They did overuse him in the sketches, knowing what his condition was. In the heyday of SNL, back in the seventies, they’d get hosts who were completely drunk, and so they’d just write them out of the show. And this was a far more severe case than that.
I remember trying to stretch out Weekend Update. Chris had just done the Motivational Speaker, where they’d put him on a goddamned exercise bike just to make it that much worse. Lorne’s usually pretty tight on time, but I just tried to draw Update out as much as I could to give Chris a chance to rest.
MOLLY SHANNON:
We didn’t rehearse the Mary Katherine Gallagher sketch too much. And that’s worrisome if you’re doing a live performance that’s very physical. I was throwing him into tables and breakaway walls. He was throwing me around. We did this big dance. Physically, I was a little scared, because he was so big and he’d been drinking. But I felt, for both the dress rehearsal and the live show, the second the camera was on he was completely there. I was amazed by his performance under the circumstances. With such little rehearsal, and without paying much attention in rehearsal, we put him in front of the audience, and he pulled it all together.
LORNE MICHAELS:
The last time I spoke with Chris was at the party at the end of the show. It was around four A.M. after that very bumpy week. We talked about the show. We talked about his health. I said all the things I’d said before about the way he was living and about taking care of himself. He listened. He agreed. He beat himself up a little bit for my benefit. And I said in the most severe way I could, “You’ll never get away with it.”
“I know, I know.”
We hugged and said how much we loved each other. Then after we hugged, he looked at me with that look we all know so well, that smiling-boy look, and he said, “I was funny tonight, wasn’t I, boss?”
“Yeah, you were.”
Following his week in New York, Chris returned to Los Angeles to find that Kevin had moved out, refusing to enable his brother’s addiction any longer. Understanding Kevin’s need to protect his own sobriety, Chris let it go without any confrontation. Other than a brief visit at Thanksgiving, the two brothers would never speak to each other again.
On November 1, Chris flew to Naples, Florida, where he checked into the Willows rehab facility. He checked out at the end of the month and left to go home to Madison for Thanksgiving. He drank in his car on the way to the airport.
After spending the holiday with his family, Chris returned to Chicago for a brief stopover. He was on his way to the Jesuit retreat house at Bellarmine, a place he often went to find peace and quiet and spiritual refuge. He never made it.
JOHN FARLEY:
Chris got back to Chicago, and he and Ted and I were in the car. “Let’s go up to Bellarmine,” Chris said.
I said, “I don’t want to go to a Jesuit retreat house, Chris.”
I didn’t, and most people wouldn’t. I mean, it’s a nice place, but I wasn’t in the mood for three days of silent meditation. But I really thought Chris should go, because then he’d be safe, and no one would have to worry about him. You always worried about him when he was in town. It was always a pit in your stomach. I said, “You go up to Bellarmine. You can relax and everything’ll be safe. You won’t have these vultures around you.”
“Please go,” he said.
“I don’t want to go.”
So I walked away, thinking everything was fine. Then, later that night, I saw him coming around the corner in a bar. I thought, oh shit, he didn’t go because I didn’t go with him. That one stayed with me for a long time. Maybe if I’d taken him to the retreat everything would have been fine. Maybe maybe maybe.
TED DONDANVILLE:
I was supposed to go to Bellarmine with Chris, but then it was one drink, and then two, and then the trip was off. So now Chris needed to hide out, let people think he’d gone on this retreat so he could keep partying. He got a suite at the Four Seasons, right across the street from his apartment, and the party was on.
JILLIAN SEELY:
My hair salon was right downstairs from the Four Seasons. I went in that weekend, and the girls were like, “Chris just came down here in his pajamas with some random girl.”
I went straight up to his room. It was a mess. I said to him, “Chris, what are you doing?”
He had the Big Book in his hands, and he was saying, “Jillian, let’s get sober! I’ve got the book.”
I said, “Chris, if you read that right now, you’re going to go crazy. You can’t be drunk and reading from this.”
He got all freaked out and he went and grabbed a towel and threw it over the book to hide it, and then he said, “Come in the bathroom with me!” And he grabbed me and pulled me into the bathroom. He was just out of his mind.
Eventually, he calmed down a bit, and we talked a long time that night, about the rehabs, his father, his career. He told me about another movie he was doing. It was starting in February, with Vince Vaughn, called The Gelfin. He said, “Read this inside and out. I’m getting sober for the New Year, and you’re coming to L.A. with me to do this movie.”
He said to me, “Jillian, why don’t you relapse with me and then we can go through treatment together and get better for the New Year?”
I said, “No. I’m not going to start drinking just so that I can go to treatment with you.”
TED DONDANVILLE:
By the end he’d started thinking, oh, when I need to be sober I can go to rehab, and when I’m free to party, I can go party. He was picking his rehab spots based on which one was easiest, or which one was most comfortable. “Oh, I’m sick of this place, let’s try this place.” It was just not proper thinking. It was the thinking of an alcoholic.
LORRI BAGLEY:
I felt like I was supposed to save Chris, even though he told me that I wasn’t. He said, “I know what I have to do, and the only way I can do it is with me and with God.”
Chris knew what he had to do. He knew what he had to do to stay sober—and he chose not to do it. He told me why. He made me promise that I would never tell anyone why, and I never will. But maybe three months before he died, he was in a rehab in L.A. He called me late one night and told me why he wasn’t going to stay sober anymore, and, at that point, we both knew what that meant. The thing is, Chris actually had great willpower, and great strength. Once he decided something, it was done.
JILLIAN SEELY:
Any idea that Chris wanted to die is bullshit. Chris was so full of life, and h
e had a boundless enthusiasm for everything and everyone. He enjoyed his life and savored it and was full of hope for the future.
When I saw him in those last weeks, he gave me the Gelfin script and told me he was getting sober and going back to work. When I picked him up to go to my Christmas party, I caught him practicing his karaoke in the mirror just to make sure he’d do a really good job. When he called his mom that night, he was telling her how happy and excited he was about taking her back to Ireland next year. And when I talked to him on the phone three days later and he said, “I’ll call you back in an hour,” I don’t think he thought that was the last time anyone would ever hear from him.
TED DONDANVILLE:
I don’t buy that it was a death wish, that it was a slow suicide. I just don’t. You have to discount anything Chris might have said to people, especially to women. How was he trying to manipulate them? How was he trying to play on their sympathies?
The only thing was he said to me once, “Do you ever feel like you’re doomed?” But I think that’s something we all might say at some time or another. So I don’t think you can look at what he was saying. You have to look at what he was doing. What he was doing was playing with fire and the consequences be damned, but he was also making a lot of plans for the future.
