The Chris Farley Show: A Biography in Three Acts (3 page)

When Chris came along, my grandmother insisted that my mom wasn’t going to be able to handle three kids at once, so this Spanish woman came to help the family. My first memory is this woman coming into our lives because of Chris. I always remember that Chris got special attention.

Maple Bluff was a great neighborhood. We were always outside playing, jumping in the leaves, riding our bikes, like kids do.

Chris was always popular, right off the bat. He always wanted to start up a game, get everyone together. We’d play kick the can or ghost in the graveyard, which was what we called hide-and-seek. I was the shy kid, and I was amazed at how he could make friends so easily. We changed schools a good bit, but no matter what school Chris went to, he always instantly had a new group of friends. Making people laugh was just instinctive. And also he looked to Dad. Dad was very outgoing. My parents always had parties, were very involved in the community. A lot of that carried over for Chris.

What I remember most from the earliest years are the Christmases we used to have. That was always a big event. Whenever the relatives came over we were sort of made to dress up and look nice, basically put on a show for the rest of the family, talking to all the aunts and uncles. Dad insisted on that.

It’s been explained to me by more than a few therapists that we exhibited a typical Irish Family Syndrome. The father is the bullhorn and the head of the family, but not really the head of the family. It’s really the mother who keeps everything together, and Mom always did. Our life was straight out of
Angela’s Ashes
, only, you know, with plenty of money. Dad always drove the big Cadillac. We were certainly well off by Wisconsin standards, or at least gave the impression that we were. There was a point when we were all taken out of the parochial schools and sent to public schools for a year. Dad had some excuse that, looking back, didn’t really hold water. But this was 1974, and Dad was in the oil business. He’d had a bad year and couldn’t keep up with the tuition. But he always kept up appearances that everything was fine.

Dad loved politics. He ran for school board at one point, but didn’t win. That was probably because he had all his kids in private school. They sort of hammered him on that. But we went out and put up signs for the race. Dad joined the board for Maple Bluff. It was a subdivision, but it had its own councils and so on. He enjoyed that immensely. He was a conservative man, politically, and very civic-minded.

Dad’s voice was a sonic boom. All he’d say was,
“It’s time to go to mass! Everybody in the car!”
and you’d scramble like it was a DEFCON 4 siren from the Strategic Air Command. You didn’t want to get on his bad side. He was very lenient, but with four hyperactive boys, somebody’s got to crack the whip sometimes. And when the whip would crack, it would crack hard.

He was very strict, but if you could get a laugh out of him, you were okay. And Chris knew that. One time Chris walked into Mrs. Jennings’s class at Edgewood Grade School and said, “Excuse me, Mrs. Jennings, where do I ‘shit’ down?”

She hit the roof and called my dad in for a conference. She told him what happened, and said Chris needed to be suspended. Chris was like, “I didn’t say it, honest.”

And Dad said, “Well, Chris says he didn’t say that. And if my son says he didn’t do it, then I believe him. You must have heard him wrong.”

So she backed down. Then, on the way home, Dad turned to Chris and went, “You said it, didn’t you?”

“Yeah.”

“I knew it.”

They both had a laugh over it, and that was it. He knew Chris had done it, but it was okay to laugh as long as nobody got hurt. Those kinds of incidents cropped up all the time.

As strict as Dad could be, when he decided it was time to have fun, it was time to have fun. We would pile into the station wagon and go shopping or out to mass. Sometimes we’d go out to the apple orchards to pick apples. The church bazaars my dad loved. He’d come in and say, “There’s a church bazaar out in Lodi!”

And we’d go, “Aw, jeez . . .”

And then we’d all get in the car and go all the way out to Lodi for homemade pies and such at this bazaar out in a farm field somewhere. The rituals of our house when we were young all centered around the family. There was never a time when we wanted to rebel and get away from it.

Family dinners were very important. We had a dinner bell. Anything we were doing anywhere in the neighborhood, we could hear this giant bell outside our kitchen. We’d stop what we were doing—setting fires, whatever—our heads would pop up like deer and we’d run home.

There were actually two bells. There was our dinner bell at six-thirty, and there was also a giant whistle that would blow through the entire neighborhood at five o’clock. It wasn’t from a factory. It wasn’t the emergency broadcast system. It was just a whistle that the town of Maple Bluff had. Why it went off every day at five we still don’t know. We assumed it meant it was time for all the families to start their cocktail hour.

Other than family, the one thing that was important to my parents was education, in particular a Catholic education. Some parents are really hard on good grades, but our parents cared more that we learned how to be good people, that we had big hearts and were kind. I don’t know of any better guy in the world than my dad, just in terms of being a strong, moral person. He always stressed that in us.

If Dad instilled anything in Chris it was this love of the underdog, for the kid that’s getting picked on. If we were driving down the road and you made a joke about some strange-looking homeless person out on the sidewalk, man, he’d lock those brakes up and the hand would come back. You didn’t dare do that.

My dad was very Catholic, and in Catholicism that whole idea of right and wrong, good and evil is very important. Chris was very aware of that from an early age. It all stemmed from
The Exorcist
. The mere fact that we’d seen that movie brought the devil into our house, and that started this whole superstition in Chris, not just of good and evil, but the literal, physical devil. He and I shared a bedroom for a time, and he was next to the closet; that just freaked the hell out of him. “Tommy, we gotta change beds,” he’d say. “Tommy, please. The devil’s in the closet.”

Every night for months after
The Exorcist
came out, he’d just show up in our room with a sleeping bag and crash on the floor between Johnny and me. It was sort of an unspoken thing. If you asked him why, he’d say, “Shut up, okay? I’m just sleeping here.” Chris was afraid of the dark, and he hated sleeping alone.

He was a very spiritual person, instinctively spiritual, and he’d always talk about it, so much so that he’d scare the crap out of you. As you grow up, even though you still call the devil by name, you begin to understand him as a spiritual idea, and a lot of people stop believing in the devil altogether, which, of course, is exactly what the devil wants. But Chris, he believed in the devil. He believed in hell, and it scared him.

He prayed to St. Michael the Archangel every night, because Michael was the one who’d thrown Lucifer out of heaven. It was more superstition than spirituality, to be honest. He read something once about the different ways your shoes land after you take them off means different kinds of luck. If your shoe was to one side, it was bad luck. If it was upright it was good luck, and so on. So every night I’d kick off my shoes, not caring where they landed, and Chris would say, “Tommy, pick up your shoe and set it right.”

“No.”

“C’mon.”

“No.”

“Please.”

“Do it yourself.”

And he’d get out of bed and go and move my shoes; he felt that strongly about it.

Growing up, Chris was wild and crazy and liked to have fun, and Tommy was more reserved. It really reflected, more than anything, the two sides of our dad. Dad would carry himself as this very professional gentleman, but he could also be this boisterous, crazy, laugh-out-loud kind of guy. And Tom and Chris were the two sides of that personality. To the extreme, really. John and I are somewhere in the middle.

Kevin was very focused, got decent grades. We called him Silent Sam, Steady Eddie. He just did his thing and did it well. John was the gopher. He was so much younger than the rest of us. He was always pleasing people, doing what it took to tag along. Still is to this day. As for myself, I was the brains in the family, which is really kind of sad. But I was Tom Farley, Jr., and everything that that entailed. My dad went to Georgetown, and so from day one the pressure was on me as the oldest son to live up to Dad’s expectations.

The expectations for Chris were that there were no expectations. He just kind of marched to his own drummer. One day Chris said, “I want to join the hockey team.” The next day he had a brand-new set of hockey gear, never mind that he couldn’t really skate that well. So there was full support for him in whatever he wanted to do, but no real expectation that he should fail or succeed.

Chris and I were always together, but I was trying my best to toe the line and he was effortlessly crossing over the line, trampling it with no consequences; it annoyed the crap out of me. And because he was always so funny, my friends would want him to hang around. I hated that.

What was most important to Chris, really, was that he made people laugh. Chris was always the fat kid. Kids can be pretty mean, and humor was his only weapon, from grade school on. He wanted to be a football player, and that meant being part of the popular crowd. He used his humor to do that.

I met Chris at summer camp, with all the other brothers. Tom was actually my counselor, and Johnny wound up being my best friend. You didn’t forget Chris. Even if I’d never seen him again after camp, I’d remember him. During mass, if the priest made the mistake of asking for audience involvement, Chris was right there. His hand would shoot up, and then he’d figure out whether or not he had something to say.

Red Arrow Camp was established in 1922, and was named after the Red Arrow Army, Second Division, from Wisconsin. It had originally been built as a logging camp in the nineteenth century. Some of the cabins date back to that time. It was a resident seven-week camp.

Chris always had some kind of stunt going. On Sundays they’d load all us Catholic boys into this old school bus and drive us into town. The girls’ camps would come to Sunday mass, too. Now, you’re never allowed to have candy at camp, but somehow one Sunday Chris has gotten ahold of these white tic tacs. He fills his mouth with them, and he’s walking up the aisle for communion so prayerfully, and when he gets in front of the girl campers he rolls his eyes back like he’s going to pass out and then he falls and hits his mouth on the side of the bench and spits out all the tic tacs. They go clattering across this wooden bench, and Chris is yelling, “Oh my God! My teeth!” The girls were just aghast. We were all laughing hysterically.

It was anything for a laugh, absolutely anything. They gave away all these awards for good behavior and accomplishments and such. Chris didn’t care.

He was our windup toy. You said it. He did it.

He didn’t win a lot of the awards, but because he was so funny they’d put him in the camp play, and he was the star. Chris would always credit Dick Wenzell with encouraging that in him.

Chris was strictly a jock, but he had a lot of charisma. Once I got him onstage, his connection with the audience was unbelievable. Not only could he project to the audience, he could also receive from them. Chris could take whatever the audience gave to him and build on it. He just did it naturally. Visiting parents would comment on how magnetic he was. And this was when he was ten years old.

The camp play was really a bunch of skits strung together. One year they did a takeoff on
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs
, and Chris played the villain. When they caught him, he told them they could do what they wanted to him as long as they didn’t step on his blue suede shoes. Then he launched into this Elvis impersonation that brought the house down.

Whatever the story was, they’d just drop him in there. He was such a crowd-pleaser that they didn’t even have to have a part for him. Just put him up onstage. One time he did “Hound Dog” dressed up like Miss Piggy.

When people ask “Where did Chris Farley get his start?” I say he got it at Red Arrow Camp. As a kid, he was just a miniature version of what he would become. Dick Wenzell used the expression “He was always onstage. ” And that was the case. A lot of it was a diversion, because down deep Chris was one of the most sensitive guys you’ll ever meet. Even though he came across as this kind of rough, gruff, jovial guy, you could hurt his feelings with just a word or two. Incredibly sensitive guy.

Chris was the very first guy I met at Edgewood. I grew up in Scarsdale, New York, and moved to Madison in high school. Edgewood can be a little clubby. For days, the rest of the kids didn’t even come near me. Then one day I was sitting in the commons, getting ready for football practice. Chris came up and said, “You’re the guy from New York? Hi, I’m Chris Farley.” He was the first person to make me feel comfortable being there.