by Tom Farley
The binge that started at the Four Seasons lasted about four days, calling friends and picking up strangers and bringing them along. By the end of it I went up to the suite and there were all these food-service carts everywhere, ashtrays overflowing. After that Chris crashed for a few days, slept it off, and took it easy.
FR. TOM GANNON:
Chris called and asked if we could get together to talk. I said, “Sure, I’ll come up to the apartment and we’ll have mass together.”
“I’d love that,” he said.
So I went up, we had a long talk, I gave him confession, and we said a mass. Then we went out to dinner, came back to the apartment, and talked some more. He went on about his addiction and how bad he felt about where he was headed, both personally and professionally, and what he should do with his life. I had to be careful about bringing up his father, because he was always very sensitive when you did. I suggested he dedicate himself to going to daily mass, not because that would help with his addiction but because it might give him a safe, grounded place from which he could rededicate himself to treatment.
We both agreed that the rehab programs were getting him nowhere. I think he went to every rehab program known to man; he must have spent about half a million dollars on them. He had all the lingo down, but he didn’t have the reality down. People have to internalize those twelve steps and make them their own, and Chris wasn’t doing that.
I left around midnight. As I was driving home I just thought, this kid is going down the tubes. I had a deep foreboding. I came so close to turning the car around, going back, taking him to my place and keeping him there for a couple of days. But you can’t do that. He’s a grown man with his own free will, and what can you do?
TOM ARNOLD:
There was opportunity to cut Chris’s money off at the end. You can commit somebody, legally commit them and cut off all their access to their funds. It came up with the people at Brillstein-Grey. They proposed it, but you have to get the family signed off on it. Ultimately it was his father’s decision, and his father wouldn’t go along.
TED DONDANVILLE:
Gurvitz wanted to send him away for a year, the most hard-core approach possible. But Chris’s dad was like, “Chris is a grown-up. He can make his own decisions.” And in a way his dad was right. If it wasn’t Chris’s decision to go, sending him there wouldn’t accomplish anything.
TIM O’MALLEY:
By the time I got to Chris that December, everyone was telling me, “Forget it. We’ve tried. Just give up.”
And I said, “You guys didn’t give up on me, why should I give up on him?”
The last ten days of his life he called me every day. It was a slow, horrible thing. He’d call at five, six in the morning and plead with me to meet him at the Pump Room.
I’d say, “No, I am not going to meet you at a fucking bar. I will pick you up and take you to a meeting.”
“I don’t want to go to a meeting. Everybody recognizes me. I get bothered.”
“Fine. I’ll take you to a halfway house where people are so bottomed out that they don’t care who’s sitting next to them.”
But he still wouldn’t go. And it was the same thing every day. He’d call, we’d pray together. He kept saying, “Please, I need your help. I need your spiritual guidance.”
I said, “Chris, all I got is what I got. I can’t do anything for you unless you want to go to a meeting. You gotta start over, and you can start today.”
“I can’t start over.”
“Yes, you can.”
“No, I can’t.”
And it was the same conversation every day.
JILLIAN SEELY:
That Saturday, he asked me to come over, and we hung out. We made Christmas cookies together, went to a meeting. Then on Sunday he called me and I picked him up and we went to my Christmas party. We sang karaoke. I have a picture of the two of us that night as we walked into the club, and we were both sober. Then, by the end of the night, he had started drinking and someone snapped another picture of us. It’s the last picture of the two of us together, and you can see the difference.
At the end of the party, I said, “Chris, it’s time to go.”
He was with a bunch of girls, and he was like, “No, no, I’m gonna stay here.”
My friend and I told him he really needed to leave, and he got defensive, saying “You’re not the boss of me,” and all that. So we left, and he went out with all these people drinking. That was the last time I saw him.
TIM O’MALLEY:
Monday morning, I stopped by his apartment on my way to a meeting to see if he wanted to go. We got in an argument about this Fatty Arbuckle project. He was obsessed with doing it, but his managers had brought him into a meeting and told him he couldn’t do it until he’d been sober for two years, otherwise no one would insure him. He didn’t think that was fair. To me, that was the first time he’d been fired in his life, for real, where someone actually said no to him. I said, “Chris, this is good. It’s good that you’re going to let go of this.”
“But it’s going to get made without me.” He had the script and he showed it to me, and he was like, “I have to do it.”
“The Fatty Arbuckle movie is not a reality,” I said. “It’s just a script on your desk. You’ve got to learn how to not drink. Nothing else comes before that.”
“But it’s different for me. I’m famous.”
“Bullshit. You’re no different from me. You’re just an Irish fucker who can’t stop drinking. This movie is not real. What’s real is your torture. You’ve got to start from ground zero and fix it.”
“I can’t do it again.”
“Yes, you can. I did it, and I had nothing. I had no career. I had no success. If I can do it, you can do it. You have even more to live for.”
“But you’re strong, and I’m weak.”
“Fuck that. I’m as weak as you are.”
“But my dad says . . .”
“Fuck your dad. If it were up to me you wouldn’t do any work at all for a year. You stay here and you get sober and you work your steps and just get a grip on how to live.”
And that’s where I left it. That Fatty Arbuckle movie, that was the line in the sand. Either you get sober or you get dead.
TIM HENRY, friend:
On Tuesday, Johnny and Teddy and a bunch of guys from Chicago were meeting for lunch at Gibson’s. Chris was late, and everyone was getting annoyed. We all had jobs to get back to. I ended up going to the Hancock to get him. Some mysterious girl was there, a joint burning in the ashtray. I was worried, but even though it’s so obvious that the inevitable is next, you still don’t believe that it’s going to happen.
TED DONDANVILLE:
During lunch, Chris was adamant. “This is it,” he said. “No more fucking around. We’ve got another couple weeks to party over Christmas, and then that’s it. We’re gonna get sober, rent the house in Beverly Hills, get to work on The Gelfin. No more fucking around.”
He told me he wanted me to hire a trainer, a personal chef; he was going to get back in shape. And those plans were made. I’d rented the house. I was asking around to find a trainer and a chef. Chris had every intention of going back to work in January.
TIM HENRY:
I drove home that day and called Tommy and said, “Chris says he’s cleaning up and getting serious after Christmas, but this is a new low.”
“I know,” Tommy said. “I get these calls all the time.”
TOM FARLEY:
I asked Johnny after the fact, you know, “How could you sit there and drink with him?”
And Johnny was like, “What’re you gonna do? Chris was already rolling when he got to the table.” That’s when Johnny just left. He couldn’t take it anymore.
TED DONDANVILLE:
I know Johnny had a lot of guilt about what he could have done, should have done. But Chris knew the deal. And you have to remember, there was a physical fear when it came to standing up to Chris, not just an em
otional one. He was bigger than you. Johnny said to him once, “You’re sick. You’ve got to stop this.” And Chris almost ripped his head off.
When Chris would relapse, all his friends in recovery would abandon him for the sake of their own sobriety. I understand it on one level, having now quit drinking myself, but in some ways it seems perverse. When he needed them the most, they were gone. Johnny and I were the only two people close to Chris who still drank, so we were the only ones around to look after him when he relapsed.
The problem was that even though Johnny and I were heavy drinkers—we could go eight, nine hours—there was always a point where Chris just wore us out. That night, we’d been drinking since Gibson’s. It was around two in the morning, and we were at the Hunt Club. These guys wanted Chris to come and party with them at this place up in Lincoln Park. Of course Chris was up for it, but Johnny and I couldn’t take it anymore. We had to get off. I said I was going home, and Chris told me to get a room at the Ritz-Carlton, across the street from the Hancock, said he wanted me nearby. He told me to take care of the bill, and he took off with those people. And that was the last time I ever saw him alive.
JOHN FARLEY:
Chris was going to go all night, and I said, “I’m not doing this with you.” I had to get away from it. It was making me ill. Chris and I had been living together at the Hancock, and the vibe had just gotten terrible. He wasn’t sleeping at night, and it was a mess. There was stuff everywhere. I was like, eh, I shouldn’t be here. That was the other big what if: if only I had stayed. But whatever he was going through, I thought he just needed to be left alone. Plus, I wasn’t getting any sleep. So I went with Teddy and checked into the hotel.
TIM O’MALLEY:
Chris called me around five o’clock Wednesday morning. I said, “Chris, I’m sleeping. What is it?”
He said, “I really need your help, please.”
I didn’t know what to do. He had been calling me every day, and we’d been having the same endless conversation. He wanted me to meet him at the Pump Room, again. He said Joyce Sloane was going to be there. I told him that I wouldn’t meet him at a bar. I said, “I’m coming downtown tonight for a meeting at six o’clock. Call me if you want to go.” And he never called.
JOYCE SLOANE, producer, Second City:
We had a lunch date at the Pump Room, me and Chris and Holly Wortell. I had talked to him the night before to confirm the date, and the last thing he said to me was “I’ll see you tomorrow.”
HOLLY WORTELL:
Joyce and I met there at noon, and we waited and waited and waited.
JILLIAN SEELY:
I got a call from a friend around ten-thirty. She said, “I saw Chris out last night. He was in really bad shape.”
So I called. He picked up on the speakerphone. I could tell he was out of it. I heard somebody laughing in the background. I said, “Who is that?”
“It’s nobody. It’s nobody,” he said.
He asked if he could call me back. I knew he wasn’t going to. I said, “Chris, do me a favor and just stay in tonight. Please do not go out.”
“Okay, okay, I won’t go out.”
“Okay.”
“I love you.”
“I love you, too.”
“I’ll call you back in an hour.”
CHAPTER 15
The Parting Glass
FR. MATT FOLEY:
That night I was in Xochitepec, this small mountain village in Mexico. It had no roads and no electricity, and it was about a seven-hour walk from my parish. I was on a journey with a missionary team. We would walk to a town and spend a day ministering to the people there. Then we’d sleep on the floor of the chapel, wake up the next day, and journey on to the next town.
Sleeping in the chapel that night, I dreamt that I was surrounded by my old Marquette rugby friends. We were all talking about someone we had lost. It was such a vivid dream that it woke me out of a deep sleep. I got up and walked outside. There was this big, full moon, and I just stood there and looked up at the sky for the longest time, trying to figure out what this dream meant.
The next day we celebrated mass and then walked several hours to our truck and drove to a village called Santa Cruz, where there was a phone line. There was a message telling us that we had to come home, immediately. And to be out on a journey like that and to get a message that you had to come home, it could only mean one thing. It meant that someone had died.
After Ted and Johnny went home, Chris stayed out, partying with his newfound companions. As Tuesday night surrendered to Wednesday morning, he left the Hunt Club, hit a few more bars, and eventually wound up at the home of a commodities broker in Chicago’s Lincoln Park neighborhood, where the party was in full swing until sunrise and beyond. Chris’s host offered to hire a call girl for him. According to tabloid accounts of her story, she arrived at the party around eleven A.M.
In midafternoon, having missed his lunch with Joyce Sloane and Holly Wortell, Chris went with the escort back to her apartment. There he joined her and a friend, smoking crack cocaine and snorting heroin for several hours. Chris called a car service to take them to dinner, but when the car arrived she suggested that he was too worn out to go to a restaurant and that they should just go back to his apartment in the Hancock Center. They did.
Once Chris got home, his brother John called and invited him to dinner with Ted Dondanville and friends at their hotel. Chris declined. He stayed in the apartment, where his binge continued into the night. At that point, Chris had been awake for four days, ever since Jillian Seely’s party Sunday night. At ten-thirty Wednesday evening, he took Jillian’s phone call, assuring her that everything was fine and that he would call her back.
Chris and the escort began arguing over money. Around three in the morning, she decided to leave, collected her things, and headed for the front door. Chris stood up to follow her and collapsed in the middle of his living room. She turned around, walked back over, and knelt down next to him. He was having trouble breathing. She stole his watch, took pictures of his body, stood up, and walked away. Before passing out, his last words to her were “Don’t leave me.”
On her way out, believing Chris to be safely unconscious, she stopped by a side table in the foyer. She took out a pen and a piece of paper and left him a short note, saying that he was just so much fun, and she’d had such a lovely time.
TED DONDANVILLE:
Johnny and I woke up on Thursday. I needed something out of Chris’s apartment, but I didn’t have my keys. Johnny had a set, so we checked out of the hotel and he came with me to the Hancock on his way to Second City.
JOHN FARLEY:
Teddy and I walked in and saw him on the floor. At first, of course, I thought he was joking. Then I realized he wasn’t. I dropped to the ground beside him and started giving him CPR. That didn’t work. I turned to Ted and told him to call 911. He ran to the phone and called for an ambulance. He told them it was for Chris Farley. That was a mistake.
JILLIAN SEELY:
I was at work and they pulled me aside and told me there were these reports going around. I didn’t believe it. I went to the Hancock and tried to get the doorman to let me up, but he wouldn’t. I kept calling different phones in the apartment. Eventually Ted picked up. I said, “Are they giving Chris CPR? Is he okay? Is he going to be okay?”
He said, “Jillian, it’s not a good time. We’ll call you later.”
I sat in the lobby. Nobody was telling me what was happening. I started getting hysterical. All these news crews started showing up. The EMS teams were coming through the lobby, but they were coming through really slow, taking their time, like there was no more emergency.
JOHN FARLEY:
The paramedics arrived. They tried to revive him, but they couldn’t do anything. When they pronounced Chris dead, Teddy knelt down and put a rosary in his hand.
TED DONDANVILLE:
The media latched onto it: “He died clutching a rosary. It’s a sign!” But, no, I put
it there. I told Johnny I’d handle everything with the paramedics and the cops, and he should go in the other room and call his parents before the story broke.
JOHN FARLEY:
I went into the back room and called my dad. That was horrible. That was the worst phone call anyone could ever make.
KEVIN FARLEY:
I was in my apartment in L.A. I had just rehearsed Tom Arnold’s show that morning. I came home around noon, and there were all these messages on my machine. They all said there was something wrong with Chris, and I needed to call home. I called Dad immediately. He answered the phone, and I said, “What’s wrong with Chris?”
There was a very long pause. “We lost him.”
The room started spinning, and I hit my knees. I didn’t believe it. My mind wouldn’t even go there. I was lying there, half crumpled on the floor, when Tom came in the front door and said, “We’re gonna help you.”
PAT FINN, friend:
It was raining the day he died. It doesn’t rain much in L.A., but this was one of those days where it just poured. My wife and I had gone out to lunch with our two little girls and we’d just come home. I was outside with the girls, playing in one of the puddles in the street. My wife came back out of the house and told me I needed to come inside. There were twenty-six messages on the answering machine.
