The Chris Farley Show: A Biography in Three Acts Read online

  So I got outta here, didn’t go to meetings, didn’t get a sponsor, didn’t do anything that they told me. And guess what? I got back to New York and started doing a lot of drugs. I thought, if I don’t drink in front of people, they’re not gonna know I’m high. I thought I was fooling everyone, and I was fooling no one.

  That Christmas, after a real bad bender, my apartment was just totally ripped out. I’d ripped apart drawers, everything was on the floor, because I’d been looking for something. “Oh, what’s this? Is it in here? No?” Crash! “Where’s this?! What’s that?! Oh fuck!” So Christmas, coming home to surprise my parents, what a lovely gift I was. They put me in a detox for a couple of days.

  The whole rest of that season I did the outpatient thing, which was a complete joke. I would comply with them and say,“I’m really trying hard.” Meanwhile I always had a thing of urine in my pocket just in case they tested me. God, what an ass, asking my friends for their urine. “Kevin, yeah, you got that, uh, urine?” Jesus. Everyone knew I was using. I just remember a horrible dismay. I was crying all the time, because I could not stop. I couldn’t imagine a life with sobriety, because drugs and alcohol were the only thing that was my friend. I knew I was in trouble.

  I came back to Shoemaker. I decided to make sure they knew that I was trying. “By God, I’m your boy, boss. I’m trying. Pluggin’ away!” So I screwed around and complied in treatment again, and didn’t take it serious. I wasn’t listening, and that’s what you gotta do about this disease, because it’s hell to stop.

  I got outta there thinkin’ I was cured. La di da! Didn’t last even as long as I did the first time out, and by that time I had almost thrown in the towel. I went out to California to do some work the next summer. I got into another rehab out there. It was like every time I turned around I was in friggin’ rehab. God, it sucks! But I kinda started takin’ this one serious, because I was like, “I don’t wanna come back here, man.” The door was open just a little bit. I was sick of using, and I knew I was gonna be fired very soon. I didn’t want that because SNL was everything I’d worked for.

  They told me to go to Fellowship New York, a halfway house that had just opened. So I went there and this time I was gonna finish it, you know, give it a real shot. I was frightened of going to recovery meetings. Because what if I couldn’t do it? That’s what would really suck.

  I was glad to be sober, but after ninety days people weren’t patting me on the back anymore, sayin’ “Good job on that sobriety! Go get ’em!” People just expected it. And why shouldn’t they expect me to be sober? I’m working for them. But I wanted the pats on the back, and they weren’t doing that.

  That ninety-day mark was a real tough one for me. After a bad day at read-through, the writers didn’t write me into the show, and I was going back and forth. I used. I did five bags of heroin. Then I came back and told my boss. I thought if I was honest with him, you know? That’s another manipulating tool. “I’m being honest with you, so you won’t fire me, right? Because I’m trying. Can’t you see I’m trying?” All that bullshit.

  So, I lost my job for about a week. I kept begging and crying, the same manipulative things. Finally he gave me my job back, but he sent me to this place in Alabama, which was kind of like a boot camp. It was exactly what I needed, a good kick in the rear end. They told me stuff like “You’re arrogant. You’re complying.” They made me cry every single day. They’d say that if you pick up drugs and alcohol, you’re a baby. I didn’t like to be called a baby. I didn’t like to be called arrogant. I didn’t like to be called all those things that I was.

  It was around Christmas time, too. Man, what a horrible place to be over Christmas, you know? Hearing “Have yourself a merry little Christmas . . .” when I’m in a stinky hospital ward. But I did things in this treatment that I didn’t do before, like making sure I made my bed every day. I practiced what I would be doing on the outside. I prayed to God in the morning to please keep me sober that day, and then I’d thank Him for keeping me sober every night.

  So I got outta that thing in Alabama. I got a sponsor. I got a home group. I was reading from the Big Book. I went to a morning meeting every day at seven-thirty. I got involved, because I know I can’t stay sober without these things, without going one hundred percent. But I can stay sober when I do. And sobriety’s good, man. Sobriety’s not carrying around urine jars—that’s a real treat. It’s not waking up in a horrible apartment with everything broken in it. I have a nice apartment now that’s all taken care of. I make my bed every day. I do the things that I did in treatment. I have a very healthy fear of getting high, and I have to take it serious, man. Because if I don’t, I’m gonna use, and I cannot use again. I hate that shit. God, I hate it. I hate being a slave to that shit.

  The ninety-day mark was a real kicker for me, again. I remember it was on St. Patrick’s Day. I like to have an icy cold Guinness on St. Patrick’s Day. I’m Irish! I have to drink, right? And I remember pacing back and forth in the rain outside a bar, crying. I was so scared, and I was just crying and crying and praying to God to help me. Then I stopped. I remembered that I don’t have to drink. I called the halfway house, went to a meeting, and I did what I had to do. And today I have one year, six months, and six days. That’s the most time I’ve ever had. And I can do this. I know I can do it.

  We all can do it.

  CHAPTER 2

  Madison, Wisconsin

  GREG MEYER, friend:

  We were all sitting in the library one afternoon—me, Chris, Dan Healy, Mike Cleary, a bunch of guys. We’re sitting at this table, and Chris is just cracking us up. Finally, he gets up to go to class, and as he’s leaving somebody says, “He’s going to be on Saturday Night Live.”

  Everyone at the table just nodded. "Definitely."

  Chris Farley’s grandfather Donald Stephen Farley worked as an executive with the A&P supermarket company in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He lost everything he had in the 1930s Depression and returned to his family’s home in Madison, Wisconsin. There he joined his brothers in a hardware business that sold machine parts and services. One of those services was laying asphalt roads, a lucrative field in the booming infrastructure build-out following World War II. Hanging out their shingle as Farley Oil, the brothers bought and sold road-paving contracts. They were middlemen, salesmen. They bid on contracts with state and county officials and in turn brokered the services of the crews that laid the actual roads.

  Donald’s son Tom Farley, the second-youngest of six, applied for a special driver’s license and began driving for the family business at the age of fourteen. Later, at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., he discovered his calling in the game of politics. He soon found himself president of the campus Young Republicans and a frequent dinner guest of Wisconsin senator Joseph McCarthy.

  During his senior year, Tom met Mary Anne Crosby, the daughter of an established Boston family and a student at Marymount College. Upon graduation, he moved back to Madison to attend law school at the University of Wisconsin, the first step in his plans to seek a career in law and a future in elected office. Mary Anne followed him to the Midwest, and they married in 1959.

  The following year, Donald Farley suffered two massive heart attacks. He could no longer run the family business or support a family. With two parents, several siblings, a wife, and a new daughter depending on him, Tom had little choice. With only one year of law school remaining, he quit, shelved his dreams, and for the next thirty years plowed his expensive East Coast education and considerable personal charm into selling asphalt.

  He sold a lot of it.

  As a partner in Farley Oil—and later owner of his own company, Scotch Oil—Tom Farley was very successful. He became well known across the state, thriving in a business run entirely on his boisterous laugh and hearty handshake. His success gave him the means to provide for his family, which in the Irish Catholic tradition would soon grow quite large. Tom and Mary Anne’s daughter, Barbara, was born in 1960; Tom Jr. a ye
ar after that. Two years later, on February 15, 1964, at 3:34 P.M., Mary Anne gave birth to her second son, Christopher Crosby Farley. He weighed eight pounds, fifteen ounces. Next came Kevin Farley in 1965, and then finally John, the youngest, in 1968.

  Although Tom Farley, Sr., had grown up in a middle-class pocket of Madison proper, when it came time to make a home of his own, he moved to the Village of Maple Bluff. Maple Bluff was, and is, an idyllic slice of affluent twentieth-century suburbia. Clustered on the eastern shore of Madison’s Lake Mendota, it is home to the governor’s executive mansion as well as the stately residence of one Oscar Mayer, proprietor of a local luncheon meat and hot dog concern. There, among Maple Bluff’s treecanopied lanes and rolling green lawns, Tom and Mary Anne raised their children. Over the next fifteen years they lived in four different homes, each one bigger than the one before. The last had a commanding lake-front view. Growing up, Chris would lack for little in the way of material comfort. The Farleys lived well. On paper, at least, it looked like the American Dream.

  TOM FARLEY, brother:

  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.

  KEVIN FARLEY, brother:

  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.

  TOM FARLEY:

  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.

  KEVIN FARLEY:

  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.

  TOM FARLEY:

  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.

  KEVIN FARLEY:

  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.

  JOHN FARLEY, brother:

  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.

  KEVIN FARLEY:

  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.

  TOM FARLEY:

  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.”

  KEVIN FARLEY:

  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.

  TOM FARLEY:

  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.

  KEVIN FARLEY:

  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.