The Chris Farley Show: A Biography in Three Acts (31 page)

On January 20, 1997, we hooked up at a party at the Hancock for a recovery club that’s here in Chicago. He had ninety-nine days. He was so happy, happiest I’d ever seen him. I watched him do backflips. He was doing actual backflips in the room. He was jumping and flipping and yelling, “I did it, Tim! Ninety-nine days! I did it! I did it!”

I was so thrilled for him that day. I was so fucking happy that I was crying.

He said, “I’m going to be here in Chicago for a while. If I keep checking in with you, will you help me?”

I took it as a request for sponsorship. He didn’t specifically ask me to sponsor him or spell it out like that, but I could tell he wanted help. So for a few weeks he’d call me, I’d pick him up and take him to meetings. He started to get it again. He was happy and it was fun and we could crack jokes and make fun of each other just like we used to.

And then he stopped calling.

CHAPTER 13

The Devil in the Closet

Chris said to me once, “You know what my dream is, Johnny?”

“What?” I said, thinking this was going to be some odd, Alice in Wonderland, through-the-rabbit-hole kind of thing. “What’s your dream?”

“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.

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.

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

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.

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.”

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.

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.

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?”

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.

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.”

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.”

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.”