The Chris Farley Show: A Biography in Three Acts (33 page)

Escorts and strippers are just part of the deal when you’re lonely and lost. It’s like phone sex, trying to reach out and talk to somebody. Every phone book has a hundred phone numbers in it; you can always dig up someone to spend time with you.

I went into his apartment one night, and he said, “Yeah, I relapsed last night. I had a pizza, and I figured since I’d relapsed on my OA program I’d have a bottle of scotch, and then I went to the Crazy Horse and I spent eleven grand.”

“Jesus, you were giving the girls five hundred a dance?”

“Yeah, how’d you know?”

“Because I know how it goes. You were trying to get some girl to come home with you by overtipping her, and those girls don’t want anything but more money. First of all,” I told him, “separate your food program from your alcohol problem. Food’s not going to kill you tonight.”

I hated the Overeaters Anonymous program for that, because if he relapsed on that he’d just go ahead and go the distance.

For Chris, by that point, every relapse meant going all the way. Some addicts will put a toe back in the water, but Chris would always dive back into the deep end. And that’s what happened when he went to Hawaii.

I was at the Mondrian in L.A., and Chris was there. He was doing an interview, and he had one of his sobriety bodyguards with him. It was kind of sad, because I hadn’t seen him in a while. He came over to my table— the bodyguard let him come over alone for a bit—he came over and he said, “Nobody cares about anything but
Tommy Boy
. Can we do another one? Can we do . . . something?”

“Of course. There’s always scripts they want us to do. I didn’t know if you wanted to do anything anymore.”

“We gotta do it, because that’s the only one that matters.”

“Okay,” I said. “Let’s find something.”

Then these two cute girls came over. They said, “Hey, come party with us. We’re in town with Spanish
Playboy
.” Or something ridiculous like that.

Chris said, “I can’t.”

“Oh, c’mon,” they said. “Just come up to our room for a bit.”

Chris looked at me. I said, “I’ll cover for you. I can buy you about five minutes.”

“Thanks, Davy.”

He took off, and then the bodyguard came over and said, “Where’s Chris?”

“He went to the bathroom.”

“Which bathroom?”

“There’s one in the hotel.”

“You fucked this.”

“Sorry.”

It was the wrong thing to do, I know. But we’d had a really nice moment together, and I liked that. It proved that we were still close, could still be friends, and I wanted to help him out. But then they couldn’t find Chris. He disappeared, and it just turned into chaos.

US
magazine was doing a big feature article on him at the time, and Chris was spending his days with this reporter. Chris woke me up in the middle of the night and asked me if I wanted to come down and take a whirlpool with these girls he’d met from
Playboy
. He’d already relapsed and started drinking. I said no and went back to bed. I figured he’d play in the Jacuzzi and then go up to his room and sleep it off. But I got up the next morning and found out he’d relapsed hard, bought these girls plane tickets and gone to Hawaii. When that
US
reporter showed up and there was no Chris, the shit hit the fan. Gurvitz had to put that fire out.

When I talked to Chris about it later, he didn’t even remember going to Hawaii. He just woke up there. But when he called Dad from Hawaii, Dad was like, “Hey, you’re on vacation!” The level of denial at that point was just crazy.

You cannot understand Chris Farley without grappling with the relationship between him and his father. That was the dominant force in his life. He talked to his father every day on the phone, and was constantly trying to please him. And I think he
did
please him. But the family, which looked so normal on the outside, was terribly dysfunctional.

If you were a shrink, you could retire on that family.

The first people we know as God are our parents. And if you don’t get approval from your parents, eventually you can mature and find that from other places. But Chris was never able to do that. He was never able to find it from God or anyone else.

Even when he was thirty years old, Chris would literally sit at his dad’s feet and tell him stories. I don’t think anything made him happier than to sit at the foot of his dad’s recliner and tell him stories about show business, or food.

There were a couple other times where I went with Chris to the Taste of Madison, which is this festival in the city square where every three feet there’s a booth of a different kind of food. All the conversations Chris had with his dad that weekend were just “Hey, did you have that pork chop on a stick?” “Yeah, that was good. Did you get some of this?” You know, they were surface conversations, the kind I would have with my dad, the kind that don’t get really deep. Because if you get deep it’s pretty painful.

I think my dad was basically a happy guy, but he had an addiction to food and alcohol. And when you get to be six hundred pounds, you’re in such a hole that what are you going to do to get out? And that’s what depressed him. He was confused by it. He’d be like, “I don’t know how I got this big. I don’t know how this happened.” I watched my dad’s eating habits. Yes, he ate a lot, but was it proportional to the weight he gained? No way. Part of it had to be genetic.

My father was handicapped, and when you have someone in your family with an illness, you want to do what you can to make them feel better. It wasn’t just Chris. We all wanted to make Dad happy, because we all knew he was on borrowed time.

Then there’s the other element to it, not wanting to get skinny or sober because he didn’t want Dad to feel bad. Chris said that to me, that he should stay heavy for Dad.

Chris was very protective of his father. One night after I went with Chris to a meeting, he asked me if I wanted to meet his parents for dinner. When we were in the elevator going up to see them, Chris was like, “Look, my dad has this problem. Please don’t stare at him.”

A year later, the first time I spent the night with Chris, he showed me a picture of his family from when he was a kid, and his father was so thin. I said, “What happened?” But Chris never really told me.

I had a very intense night with him alone in my house once. We were listening to a Cat Stevens album,
Tea for the Tillerman
, and the song “Father and Son” came on. Chris started crying. Cried and cried and cried. He said, “I love my dad so much, and I don’t want him to die.”

I said, “He probably feels the same way about you. You’re both in the same situation. You’re both alcoholics. You’re both overweight. Maybe you can help each other.”

“Yeah, but we can’t,” he said. “It’ll never happen.”

His dad was of a different generation. They didn’t go to see “headshrinkers. ” Chris told me that his father finally agreed to go with him to this weight-loss clinic once. They were sitting in a group therapy session, and everyone was going around the circle talking about their issues with food. His dad just stood up and said, “Let’s go.” They got up and went outside, and his dad said, “We’re not like these people. They’ve got problems. That’s not us. We’re leaving.”

They walked out, checked in to a resort on an island off the coast of Florida, took out a room, and proceeded to go on a binge together. With that kind of enabling, the kid didn’t stand a chance. The father was in denial, but in all fairness, I don’t think the brothers were straight with the father, either. Dad knew about the drinking but not so much about the drugs. The father never accepted that Chris was a drug addict until the very end, even though the two of them talked every day. So there was a lot of posturing going on.

It’s not his father’s fault, what happened to Chris. It’s not. Chris had access to every tool in the world. He went to the best treatment centers, had the best people being of service to him, reaching out to him.

You look at all the pieces of Chris’s life, his father, his mother, his brothers, his life growing up, his work—everything. You look at all that and maybe some things are off or a little dysfunctional, but at the end of the day it’s his responsibility. It’s not like I didn’t sit with him a dozen times where he looked me in the eye and knew what he had to do to stay sober. You can’t blame your circumstances, and after a certain point you can’t even blame your father. You can’t blame him; you have to have compassion for him. It all comes down to you, and you’ve got to be a man about it.

Chris knew that to be himself, to be healthy, he’d have to pull away from the family, and he couldn’t do it. He said he couldn’t do it. But you have to cut the emotional umbilical cord at some point. Some American Indians have a ritual where you’re not allowed to be a part of the tribe until you leave, go out in the wilderness, rename yourself, and come back. Then you’re accepted as a man. But we don’t have that in our culture. That’s why families in the country are falling apart, and why women have to deal with all this Madonna/whore bullshit. It’s because men don’t grow up, and Chris never grew up.

That May, Chris Rock was performing in Chicago. Farley called me and said, “I’ve broken out of prison. I’m out. I want to go see my boy Chris Rock!” Chris broke out of rehab to go to this show. I met him at his apartment, and I was begging him not to drink. I was sitting there, going, “No. No, Chris. Please.”

He said, “Just a little splash.” That’s how it started off, a Coke with a splash of whiskey—and I mean just a drop. Then an hour later it turned into a glass of whiskey with a splash of Coke. We went to the concert to meet Tim Meadows and his wife, and I spent the whole night fighting him.

We went backstage after the show to see Rock, and Farley was drunk, fooling around in front of these girls. We’d been talking about going out for dinner after the show, but Rock and I looked at each other, and I said, “I can’t do it. I can’t be around him anymore like this.”

Rock said, “Yeah, I know what you mean. I’ll take care of him tonight.”

He was so fucking drunk, drunk to the point where he was being rude and grabby with girls. He would go too far and you’d call him on it, and he’d give you his crying apology, the Farley Crying Apology. We probably had about four of those that night.

I remember dropping him off at his apartment. He wanted me to come up and see his place, and I just didn’t have it in me. He was so fucked up. I just couldn’t go up there. And as I drove away, I knew. It had gotten to that point. I knew that was the last time I’d ever see him alive.

I was waiting for Chris to pick me up for the Chris Rock show, and I got a phone call from him saying there weren’t enough tickets and so I couldn’t go. That was Sunday. Then Tuesday I got a call at nine o’clock at night from a nurse at the Northwestern psych ward. Hazelden had to send him to the hospital to get sober before they’d let him back into treatment.

Chris got on the phone. “I’m really scared,” he said. “I totally relapsed on Sunday and went back to treatment, and they made me come here. Will you come and see me?”

So I went over to Northwestern. I went up to Chris’s room, and I heard him go, “Hey, hey, in here.”

He was in the bathroom blowing his cigarette smoke into the air vent. I looked down at this stainless-steel paper towel rack, and there were lines of cocaine on it. Chris had gotten one of the hospital staff to bring him coke in the detox ward.

I said, “I’m totally telling on you.” I went out into the hallway and started yelling, “Chris is doing cocaine in his room!”

They came in and restrained him. He was screaming at me, “You’re a fucking narc! I hate you!” It was like a scene out of a bad movie. It was horrible, really horrible.

The fact that Chris was able to score cocaine
inside
the detox ward was just insane. When you’re famous there aren’t any rules. That’s when I knew things were getting bad. He was in a mental ward. You couldn’t get any lower than that.

As a kid, when he watched
The Exorcist
, he was terrified of the idea that something evil could take over your body, possess you, and make you do things you can’t control. Here he had this thing that was eating away at him from the inside, and he was powerless to stop it. And that scared the living shit out of him.

On the surface, the Farleys are a wonderful family. They’re loving. They’re supportive. They’re there for one another. I didn’t get to know the father. Met him once, maybe. Spoke to him on the phone a couple of times. And I suppose I have to be honest; I didn’t care for him that much. Whereas the mother is a lovely person, caught in the same vortex as the rest of them.

And therein lies the key to the problem: They didn’t know how to manage Chris. When it’s all said and done, I don’t know that they were any more or less dysfunctional than any other family, but Chris’s personality was so outsized that it sort of took over. It’s that old story from his childhood, when the nuns said that Chris didn’t know the difference between somebody laughing with him or laughing at him. That played out in the family as well. At what point do you draw a line that this bizarre behavior is too much to handle?