The Chris Farley Show: A Biography in Three Acts (15 page)

On June 16, 1991, worried that the management at
SNL
would hear of the incident, Chris checked himself into the Hazelden recovery facility in Center City, Minnesota. It was the first time he sought treatment for his addiction.

Red Arrow camp counselor Fred Albright once observed, in his unique Wisconsin vernacular, that “Chris was extremely complex, and yet as easy to understand as a ripe watermelon.” The doctors and therapists at Hazelden, in somewhat more sophisticated language, came to the same conclusion. Their diagnosis of Chris would come as no surprise to anyone who’d ever spent five minutes with the boy:

Diagnosing the problem was easy. But unlocking it and treating it would prove to be a complex proposition indeed. After twenty-eight days, Chris checked out of Hazelden, but the program had accomplished little, and his destructive behaviors quickly resumed.

That fall, Chris returned to New York for the 1991-1992 season, his second, on
Saturday Night Live
. He moved from his apartment near Times Square to a place near Riverside Drive on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. Along with Chris Rock, Chris was promoted from featured player to repertory player, and escalators in his contract pushed his salary from $4,500 to $6,500 per show. That year, Adam Sandler, David Spade, and Rob Schneider graduated from the writers’ room to join Tim Meadows as full-fledged featured players.

Despite the unusual influx of so many new performers,
Saturday Night Live
still belonged very much to its senior members. Kevin Nealon took over the Weekend Update desk from the departing Dennis Miller; Mike Myers’s long-running “Wayne’s World” sketch had spawned a hit movie; and Phil Hartman and Dana Carvey would dominate the coming election year with their lauded takes on Arkansas governor Bill Clinton, President George H. W. Bush, and feisty contender Ross Perot.

Chris, always happy to be a team player, continued to do his best in small, supporting parts, such as Todd O’Connor in the “Super Fans” sketches and as Jack Germond in the
McLaughlin Group
parodies. He took on starring roles in now-classic sketches like Robert Smigel’s “Schmitt’s Gay.” And veteran writers Jim Downey and Tom Davis saw a unique side of Chris underneath all of his wild-man antics and brought it brilliantly to life in Chris’s signature piece, “The Chris Farley Show.”

Through all of this, most of the cast and crew of
Saturday Night Live
failed to see the true nature of Chris’s spiraling addiction. But over time, deep cracks began to appear in the wall he had built up between his personal and professional lives. It soon became readily apparent to all that Chris Farley was headed for a serious reckoning.

Saturday Night Live
had really changed. The smell of marijuana no longer hit you when you stepped off the elevator; that sort of thing just wasn’t tolerated anymore. However, Fiddler’s Green was a bar down on Forty-eighth Street. It was the nearest watering hole to the seventeenth floor. Not literally. There was the Rainbow Room and one other really high-end restaurant that sort of frowned on long-haired, bearded comedy writers dashing in for a quick Rémy Martin. But Fiddler’s Green was an Irish bar, like a real Irish bar. A lot of NBC people, mainly the union guys, they’d go there to drink. So it became a convenient place to duck out to. Around ten-thirty at night, when everyone else was eating candy bars and drinking coffee, you’d excuse yourself, grab your copy of
The Gulag Archipelago
, say you had to take a dump, and then sprint up Forty-eighth Street to get booze.

Chris discovered this fairly early on, and so I had the experience, on more than one occasion, of running into him there. I’d see him doing shots of tequila, literally throwing the shots back in a way that made me cringe. I like drinking, but you can’t drink like that. He was going for oblivion. On one such night I told him, “Chris, don’t go back to the office. Don’t let them see you like this.”

“Okay,” he said.

Twenty minutes later we were both back in the office. He was obviously drunk in front of these younger writers, and it was funny to them. He would entertain them and they would all laugh. But if you were aware of what was going on, it wasn’t so funny. He would slap himself so hard that you could see the mark on his face, and that would get a laugh from those writers, but I would see the mark on his face, and I just saw disaster.

We saw him drinking, but then everyone was drinking, so who cares? I started to notice it was a problem more when I’d leave him at night. I’m a lightweight when it comes to that. I couldn’t keep up, and he’d get angry when I’d leave him at the bar. He’d start getting mad that I wouldn’t stay and drink with him. Like, really mad.

Then I started noticing that when we would walk down the street, strangers at sidewalk bars and restaurants would recognize us from the show and go, “Hey, Spade and Farley! What’s up! Come and have a drink with us.”

And Chris would go, “Okay.”

I’d be like, “Are you kidding?”

Even the people at the table, who’d been half joking, they were like, “Wait, he’s actually coming over?”

And so he would go drink with random people. Then the drugs kicked in and it escalated.

In Chicago, everybody socialized and drank at a bar after the show. And that’s just part of Chicago; there’s a bar on every corner. In New York, he made more money and the drugs got harder. That was the big difference.

He got high and we didn’t, so he stayed away a lot.

I had a different perspective than most. I saw things that other people didn’t see. I eventually became a writer, but when Chris got to the show I was still a receptionist. I would answer the phones until eight or nine at night and then stay late and write jokes to try and get them onto Weekend Update. Sometimes I was there until four, five in the morning. I’d be hunched over a desk in some dark office and I’d hear the elevator, and Chris would come in with some shady-looking characters, people I’d never seen before. They’d go back into some office, turn on some music, and I wouldn’t see or hear from them for a couple of hours. I didn’t know what was going on, nor was it my place to say anything.

Then there was one incident where an office got messed up, and I got yelled at the next day. They thought I’d done it because I was the only person there that late. Turned out it was Chris and a bunch of these people. That was really the beginning. That was when I was like, oh, he’s doing
other
things, beyond the norm.

I remember seeing him being a little more sweaty in sketches. His moods would change more. When he first showed up he was that lovable Chris guy. Then you started to see sides of him that were a little more irritated, more impatient.

Tom Davis was the first one at the show to say something.

And when Tom Davis is the one doing the intervention on you, that’s when you know you’re in trouble.

He got me and Sandler and Spade and we all went over to Chris’s dressing room. We sat him down and said, “You’re hurting yourself, and you need to stop.” We were young. We didn’t know much about interventions. We just told him that we loved him and we didn’t want to watch him doing this to himself, and that it was time to grow up.

Chris and I had stayed close through college, and I moved to New York about nine months after he did. We tried to do an intervention in New York pretty early on. Me, Tom Farley, and Kevin Cleary all went to lunch at P.J. Clarke’s. We tried to say to him that we loved him and we were worried about him, and he just didn’t want to hear any of it. It was very confrontational. “Who are you guys to judge me?” That sort of thing. It wasn’t easy. Kevin, Mike Cleary’s brother, was the other big part of Chris’s life in New York. Kevin died on 9/11, but in those days the three of us were always together.

Kevin was Chris’s sounding board for the first three years of
SNL
. They were incredibly close. Kevin and I never went a day without talking to each other at least once, and so the few times we did go two, three days without talking, it was always because of Chris. And Kevin would never, ever talk about it. All he’d say was, “I had to deal with something.”

Any time I was called in to bail out Chris, Kevin Cleary was there. I couldn’t deal with Chris without Kevin, but I know Kevin bailed Chris out several times without me. He was the guy. He kept the pieces together.

Right before Christmas during Chris’s second year on the show, Erin Maroney called me and said I needed to come down to Chris’s apartment. He’d trashed the place. Kevin and I went over, and it was a mess. Chris stumbled out and was like, “What’s up with you guys?” Trying to play it off like it was nothing.

Erin had also called Al Franken, so he came as well. Franken had a talk with him, but he was still pretty out of it. Franken also said he knew some people at Smithers, a rehab facility in New York, that he could get Chris in there. But I called my dad, and he said, “Just get him home. Get two tickets and fly him home and we’ll deal with it here.”

I got him up to my apartment in Westchester. My wife drove us to the airport. This was on a Sunday. I got him on the plane, this little puddle jumper. He immediately said to the stewardess, “Gimme a screwdriver.” So I gave him one. That’s what they tell you to do. Give them anything they want to keep them pacified until you can get them to the rehab facility, to avoid a confrontation. So he drank the screwdriver and then just crashed out in his seat. There were some mechanical problems, and we sat out on the tarmac for an hour. He was out cold the whole time. Finally, they came on and said the flight wasn’t going anywhere any time soon, and we all had to deplane back to the terminal. I woke him up and dragged him down the stairs out onto the tarmac. He looked around and said, “Damn, looks just like Westchester.”

“Chris, it is Westchester. We haven’t gone anywhere.”

“Oh.”

We went back in. There was no bar in this tiny airport, so there was nothing to do but sit. Chris started getting loud, like, “What’s going on here? Why are we just sitting here?” And I kept trying to keep him quiet. We waited for another hour, and then finally they canceled the flight entirely. I called my wife. She came back to pick us up. After we got home, she took our daughter and said, “Look, I’m going to my sister’s while you figure this out.”

So she took off, and Chris went inside and just crashed in our bed to sleep it off. It was a long, long night. I called home and told my parents he’d be a day late. I took him back to the airport the next day, but I didn’t go with him. I had to go back to work, so I just put him on the plane. I figured by that point he could fly home by himself.

Chris rolled off the plane in Madison, and of course the first thing out of my dad’s mouth: “Hey! You look great! That a new blazer?” No acknowledgment of the problem. No discipline. No nothing. Refused to deal with it. It was only at my mother’s insistence that he agreed to check him in to the local hospital for a few days, and then, after Christmas, after the incident at the hotel, they sent him back to Hazelden.

Around Christmas, me and my girlfriend were in Chicago, and we went out with Chris and Robert Smigel. They’d just done the halftime show at the Bears game at Soldier Field. We went out to the Chop House, and Chris was getting into it pretty hard. He was just ripping it up. Smigel eventually left, because Chris was too much to handle. I took him back to his room at the Westin Hotel. I said, “Chris, just go to bed. Let’s just go to bed and sleep this off.” And I left him in his room, assuming that he would stay there.

Chris called me up and said, “Come and meet me at Carly’s.” So I went and met him. That night he got really drunk really fast. People around us were starting to leave. It wasn’t fun anymore. It was trouble. We got out onto Wells Street and I said, “Chris, where are you staying?”

He told me his hotel, which was downtown. Even if I’d told the cab-driver where to go, I doubt Chris could have made it back. So I went with him and got him up to his room. I didn’t think I could leave him alone, so I said, “Can you call your brother? Where is he?”

“I don’t know.”

Then Chris got into the minibar, taking out all the little bottles and just shooting them. I yelled,
“Chris, stop it!”

He downed a few more of them, and then he looked up at me and sort of lunged at me. I stepped aside, but his momentum kept him careening forward. Now, we were about fifteen stories up in this high-rise hotel, and the room had these large picture windows that started about four feet up, went all the way to the ceiling and ran the whole width of the room. Under the window was this waist-high radiator. Chris ran smack into the plate-glass window and smashed right through it. His body was hanging out at a ninety-degree angle, and if not for this radiator that caught him at his waist, he would have crashed right through and fallen to the street below.