The Chris Farley Show: A Biography in Three Acts (16 page)

He hung there for a few seconds. Then he lurched back in, and I screamed—his arm was sliced open all the way from his shoulder to his wrist.

And at that moment I sort of lost all my emotions. I said, “Chris, we have to go to the hospital right now.” I walked over to the phone, I dialed the hotel operator, told them there’d been an accident in one of the rooms and they needed to call an ambulance. I grabbed Chris and said, “Let’s go.”

“I want to put my jacket on first,” he said.

“No, let’s go.”

“I wanna put my jacket on!”

So I said okay, helped him put his jacket on, we walked out, got in the elevator, went downstairs, and there were three security guys waiting for us. They hadn’t called an ambulance, because they said they didn’t know exactly what the situation was. I said, “Well, someone’s been hurt, and we need one right now! I could sue this whole hotel!”

I walked outside and hailed a cab. We got in, and I said, “Northwestern Hospital. Emergency room. Immediately.”

We took off and drove as fast as we could to the hospital. I remember the last block was a one-way going the wrong way. The cabbie stopped and turned and looked at me, and I said,
“Just go.”

He took off going the wrong way on this street, did a U-turn, and got us to the emergency room. I got Chris out, took him in, and did what I could to fill out the paperwork to get him admitted. Someone came up to me and said, “Isn’t that the guy from
Saturday Night Live
?”

I said, “Yes. Please keep this quiet and tell the next shift to keep it quiet.”

“Absolutely.”

I sat there for a while. Then I asked if I could see him. They were calling in a specialist to look at him, but they said I could go in and visit first. I walked into his room, and the curtains were drawn on either side of his bed. I pulled them aside and looked in and he was lying there. His arm was laid out and the muscle was just hanging open. With his other hand he was just lifting up the flap of skin and poking around and looking inside. I told him to stop. He was still inebriated, and obviously in some state of shock.

The doctors came in. I went back to the waiting room and called the family. Then, when they started to arrive, I went home.

Holly called, and I went to see him. He was sitting there, still hammered, with his arm all bandaged up. He had already tried to sneak out of the hospital that morning to go get a bottle of vodka. I looked him in the eye and said, “Chris, you can’t do this anymore. You’ve got to sober up. It’s time to sober up.”

After slicing his arm open in Chicago, Chris agreed to go back to rehab, but it was a brief visit. He returned to New York—too soon, in the eyes of many—to get back to work on the rest of the
SNL
season. He joined an outpatient program, but used and manipulated the system beyond the point of any real effectiveness. Chris’s near-death experience in the hotel may not have opened his eyes to the full extent of the problem, but it did open plenty of others’. When he returned to New York, his arm tied up in stitches and swathed in bandages, his friends and his family could ignore the problem no longer.

When I walked into his apartment that Christmas and saw that it was trashed, that was the first time I woke up to the reality of the problem. I was a big drinker, and what had brought my behavior under control was having a wife and settling down; she just wouldn’t tolerate it. And here Chris had this really nice girlfriend. They seemed to have a nice relationship. When I saw that she wasn’t doing the same for him, that’s when I realized his problem was of a whole different order.

Mom had known for a while. She saw it way before everyone, but after that night, seeing his apartment and putting him on the plane, that’s when I started going over to Mom’s camp.

No one educated the rest of the family for a long time, and we didn’t educate ourselves. I’ve got seven years sober now, but at the time? Recovery? What was that? I didn’t know. I was chugging beers right alongside Chris, saying, “Gee, sucks for you.” It was like Chris had a net thrown over him, and he was taken away from the party, but the party just kept on going.

The first step is to recognize it and to talk about it, and when Chris almost went out the window we at least started to talk about it. We all acknowledged that Chris had a problem. Except for Dad. He would never even mention the incident. And of course there was no discussion that Dad’s drinking might be a problem. Never.

Then, it’s one thing to talk about it. It’s another thing to do something about it.

I got a phone call from Chris’s manager, and he said, “I know that you have some kind of hold on Chris. You gotta talk to him. And you gotta talk to his family, because we don’t know what to do anymore.”

So I called Mr. Farley and said, “We’ve really got to help Chris. When he comes home, he can’t drink. And you can’t drink, either, because it’s so much a part of your relationship.”

And Mr. Farley said, “I don’t have to quit drinking. I’m not the one with the problem. Del Close stopped drinking. If he managed to do it, Chris is gonna have to do it.”

“Yes, but he can’t,” I said. “Maybe we can help him if we all stop drinking.”

“I’m not gonna do that.”

You liked Mr. Farley. You really liked the guy, but his world was very black and white. He was very caring, but there was the right way and the wrong way with him. There was no middle ground.

Growing up, we were always told you can be critical inside the home, but don’t ever bring it out in the street. That’s an Irish Catholic thing, a clan thing. In Chris’s case that aversion to dealing with matters openly would be even more multiplied, because if Chris had an eating and a drinking problem, that would mean somebody else in the room had an eating and a drinking problem.

Chris was sent back to rehab, but it was really more of a quick fix. Get him in, patch him up, and send him back on the road. Nothing was really accomplished by it. But when he went back to the show in January with his arm covered in bandages, it was a wake-up call for everyone else, too. Nobody could hide from the problem anymore.

The story was that he’d gone through a plate-glass door, not a high-rise hotel window. That story was accepted at the time, because, well, going through a plate-glass door is bad enough on its own.

Chris knew that he had fucked up and that he was going to have to answer questions about what had happened. He was not unintelligent. He was very aware of all these forces swirling around him. Rather than have rumors floating around, he chose to reveal the problem to us, to go on the offensive about it and try and make a joke out of it.

He came into the writers’ room and took his shirt off and went “Behold! ” doing this shticky, horror-movie kind of thing. We all saw the Frankensteinian stitches up his arm—and nobody laughed. It was horrific. It was maybe the first time that those young guys didn’t give Chris a laugh when he wanted it. We were all just like, “Holy shit . . . oh, fuck.”

Farley always reminded me of the lyrics to that old Irish wake song, “The Parting Glass”: “All the harm e’er I’ve done, alas! it was to none but me.” That was Farley. I don’t think he knowingly ever hurt another person in his life, and, quite honestly, the drug problems are not remotely the first thing that I think of when it comes to Farley; I think of him being goofy and funny around the office. I didn’t notice that it affected his work at all.

It was never a problem in the office, and it was never to the point where it was an embarrassment, ever. You knew that he was drinking, but he was always functional. And there were never problems Saturday night when the show went to air.

The only time he would drink too much and it would be noticeable and annoying was at the party after the show every week. And he was never an angry drunk, which is kind of an easier drunk to diagnose. That person obviously needs help. But Chris would just get sloppy and tell you how much he loved you, and he wanted to hug you and make you laugh. What I think, and this is just my opinion, is that he would drink when he got home after work every night, after read-through and after rehearsal.

He may not have let on anything up at 30 Rock, but those times in New York, those were rough. He was over at Kevin Cleary’s a lot, either trying to hold it together or coming off a binge. I know Erin dealt with a lot of the fallout, too.

Chris wanted to marry Erin. He even bought a ring. And she was just a super person, had a lot of patience. But she couldn’t handle the ups and downs. I think she was probably scared to death. Who wouldn’t be?

I couldn’t tell you exactly when, but at some point the relationship was just over. She was staying with him a lot, and then she wasn’t anymore. He’d gotten that ring, but I don’t know if he ever even proposed. Ultimately that was never in the cards.

Erin was so young then. I mean, she was a kid. But she really tried to help him. I remember going up to her parents’ place in Westchester—me, Kevin Cleary, and her—and trying to figure out how we could help Chris. We just talked and looked at each other like, “What are we going to do?” Not a whole lot was accomplished.

It’s funny. Mrs. Farley would call me and say, “If there’s anything you can do to help him . . .” And, naturally, I would do anything, but you’re so ill equipped at that age. The gravity of it is enormous and really beyond your understanding. You just think,
I’m
his friend and
I’m
different and
I
can get through to him.

Labor Day after his second year on the show, Chris and I went up to Newport and stayed with his cousin. He was holding it together, but I knew he was using. He cleaned up a bit, and we went into town, where we ate at the Black Pearl, which is the restaurant where his dad and his mom went on their first date. Chris called his parents to tell them he was there, and he was really happy about it. He seemed leveled out, and I was trying to rationalize it in my head. Oh, he’s okay. Things are better now. Things like that.

But when we got back to New York, I dropped him off at his apartment on the Upper West Side. As I pulled away, I looked back down the street. I saw him turn away from his front door and hop in a cab going downtown, and I knew where he was going.

I’d seen a sketch Chris had done on
Saturday Night Live
where he impersonated me when I was married to Roseanne. It was very funny. I talked to some of the other guys from the show, and they said, “Oh, you have to meet Chris. You guys have a lot in common.” So Roseanne and I went on and we hosted the show and I realized that Chris and I had an extra lot in common; I’d been sober since December 10, 1989.

Chris came out and we spent some time together. He worked on my HBO special, and he did stuff on
Roseanne
. As I got to know Chris, Lorne Michaels talked to me about him, saying he was afraid Chris had a problem, was kind of caught up in the Belushi thing.

In September of 1992, Chris was staying with me and Roseanne for a week. I had a show called
The Jackie Thomas Show
, and he came in and played my brother and, you know, I could tell. There were times when he didn’t want to be around me at all. He disappeared a couple nights. We shot the show Friday night—he was great on the show, by the way—and after the taping I said, “Hey, why don’t you come upstairs to my office real quick before you take off back to New York.”

“Sure,” he said.

He came up, and me and Rob Lowe and some other guys did an intervention on him. Everybody told him how much they loved him and how they were worried about him and how we wanted him to go to rehab right now. He said, “Well, I’d like to go back to New York first.” Which, you know, is a classic addict thing to say. “I just want to go back and get my clothes and stuff.” What they mean is: “I want to go see my dealer to get high before I go in.”

We said, “Well, you know, when you go into rehab, they give you other drugs that kind of detox you from the drugs you’re on now, so it’ll get you fucked up.”

“Oh, really?” he said. “So you’re telling me if I go right now to this place, I can get fucked up?”

“Yeah, pretty much, for a couple days.”

“Well, let’s go.”

So we all drove down there, and he went in.

After Tom Arnold’s intervention, Chris finally seemed to get serious about it. He stayed at a facility out there, came back, and spent time at Hazelden’s New York inpatient facility. Then he moved to this halfway house that had just been opened. It was on Sixteenth Street and Second Avenue. It was transitional housing for people trying to regain their footing in society. I wasn’t even allowed in there. He might have had a room, but I believe it was just a bunch of cots in the basement, and they had their meetings upstairs. He was living there full-time and going to perform on national TV every week.

Kevin and I met him over there a lot. At the time it was like, “Holy shit. This is where Chris is living?” But Chris liked it. He was glad to have it.

When he was living at Hazelden, he’d bring guys from the halfway house to see the show. Chris came to me a lot, because I often wrote about twelve-step stuff. I would talk to him about it and encourage him to go to meetings and stay on the program. I understood the ins and outs of the program, because I go to Al-Anon, which is for family members and friends of alcoholics. Chris knew I believed in the program, and he believed in it, too. And that’s the aspect of this that people may not know. He
tried.
He really tried.