The Chris Farley Show: A Biography in Three Acts (14 page)

I used to say that he was the son that John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd never had. When Chris was a kid, he used to tape his eyebrow up to try and figure out how Belushi did it.

It was very shortly after he arrived that he asked me about Belushi. I could tell by the gleam in his eye that he was very excited to find out as much as he could. I don’t recall exactly what I told him. I guess I told him a lot. But there was an immediate bond, and he wanted to be in one of my films to take part in that heritage.

Chris would come up to me and say, “You knew John. What was he like? How did he dress? Just tell me everything you knew about him.” He just had this reverence, and it was always about real minutiae.

He always idolized Belushi, but when I looked at him I saw more of Aykroyd and Murray.

Chris would always throw in bits or accents inspired by the older guys, more Bill Murray than anyone. He stole his “Da Bears” character from Aykroyd. Todd O’Connor, that’s basically Aykroyd’s Irwin Mainway, that cheesy salesman who sold all the dangerous toys.

I had moved to Chicago in 1982 to take improv classes with the Second City Players Workshop. Today it seems you can take them anywhere, but back then that was the only place to go.

I was always a huge sports guy, and I wanted to see all the iconic Chicago sports landmarks, so not long after I moved there I went by myself to a Cubs game at Wrigley Field. I just walked up to the box office about a half hour before game time and said, “Give me the best ticket you’ve got.” It was right behind the dugout, so I was pretty excited.

But during the game I noticed that the fans in the crappiest seats— the bleachers—were the ones having all the fun. I got a better look at them outside the ballpark after the game. They had their Cubs T-shirts on over their collared, button-down shirts; it was like a uniform. They all seemed to wear aviator sunglasses, which had been out of style for a good five years. And they all had these big walrus mustaches, which I think to them were some sort of symbol of virility, probably passed on from Dick Butkus to Mike Ditka. They had a swagger to them, even though at the time all their teams pretty much sucked, which made the whole thing funnier.

Years later, at
Saturday Night Live
, there was a writers’ strike that shut us down after February. Bob Odenkirk and I decided to go back to Chicago and do a stage show we’d talked about. The original sketch as we did it then was three of these guys sitting on a porch, talking about the Bears. It was more absurd, just guys talking about stuff and the conversation always going back to “and I’ll tell ya who else will be riding high come January. A certain team known as . . .
da Bears.
” It was a hit in Chicago, but we never thought about doing it on
SNL
. Too local, we figured.

Then in 1991, Joe Mantegna hosted, and Bob suggested we do it. To make it more accessible, we set it in a sports bar and made it a parody of the Chicago sportswriters show, only with these ridiculous fans and their outrageous predictions given as sincere, cogent game analysis. Their idea of predicting an upset was to say that the Bears would only win by thirty points, instead of seven hundred.

Jim Downey is from Joliet, Illinois, and he was really insistent that the Chicago accents be dead-on. He felt that was really important to the joke. The only person in the cast who could really do the accent was Chris. Mike Myers could do a pretty decent accent, because he’d lived there awhile. Downey actually thought my accent was the best, and he wanted me to play the third guy.

So we did that original sketch with Mantegna. It did well, and that, I thought, was it. But it caught on in Chicago. A popular deejay named Jonathon Brandmeier played excerpts from it all the time. By spring the Bulls were headed for their first championship, and, coincidentally, George Wendt was hosting our season finale. It made sense to do another one. It was fine, but in Chicago it had a life of its own. “Da Bulls” was suddenly the rallying cry of the team. It’s funny, because I had never thought of it as a catchphrase. In the scripts, it was always spelled “the Bulls”; the “da” just came out in the delivery.

That summer in Chicago, Michael Jordan was honored by Comic Relief. George, Chris, and I were invited to do the Super Fans onstage with Jordan at this benefit at the Chicago Theater. Jordan had a lot of fun doing it and got comfortable with the idea that he could do comedy. That led to him hosting the season opener in the fall, where we did another one. It just took off from there. I think we did eight or nine in total.

It was fun to do on the show, but we had even more fun doing things at Chicago events. Chris and I started doing predictions every Thursday night for the local Chicago NBC affiliate. We’d tape them via satellite from 30 Rock in New York. Chris’s managers never liked the idea of his doing these Chicago appearances if he wasn’t getting paid, so he only did a few. I always thought that was ridiculous. Some of them were once-in-a -lifetime experiences.

When the Bears made the playoffs, in December of ’91, Chris, George Wendt, and I actually stood at the fifty-yard line at Soldier Field and made a pregame speech. Half the fans went nuts and half were just weirded out, I think. Then they let us stay and watch the game on the field. I felt like a moron wearing my costume out there during the game, but I wasn’t going to pass up the chance to watch from the sidelines.

At halftime they had a contest where they let kids try and make a field goal from a tee on the ten-yard line. Quite spontaneously, they asked us if we wanted to participate. We said sure, and suddenly on the PA it was, “Ladies and gentlemen, we direct your attention to our additional contestants.”

We let Chris take the first kick. He lined up to make the field goal, took a running start and then slipped and nosedived right into the mud. The whole stadium went crazy. George and I didn’t know what to do. We’d let the funniest guy go first, and now we had no way to top it. I figured the only thing I could do was to try and actually make the kick. So, with beer in hand, I lined up and kicked the ball and somehow I made it. The crowd loved it.

Then it was George’s turn, and by now he’d figured out a topper. He had Chris snap the ball to me. Then instead of placing the ball down, we ran a “fake” and I lateraled to George. I “blocked” Chris, and George ran it in for a touchdown, as the announcer called it on the PA. That was just so much fun. The stadium was packed, and everyone was cheering and going crazy for a fat guy running ten yards. It was one of those perfect moments in life, where all your hard work comes together in a way that’s better than anything you could have imagined.

It was a great time during those first couple of years. We were young. We all had money, we lived in New York, and we were on
Saturday Night Live
. We would always have dinner after the read-throughs. Saturday nights after the show we would hang out. We all played golf. We’d go to movies. We got invited to a lot of stuff, basketball games, baseball games. We all immediately bonded with each other.

We just had fun. There was a lot of McDonald’s, a lot of going out to eat, a lot of watching MTV. We’d watch the musical guests rehearse. “Let’s run down and see Pearl Jam.” We got to see a lot of the grunge stuff before it really took off; all those bands made their first appearance on
SNL
.

More and more, the older cast members started to realize we had our own little west wing going on with Spade, Farley, and those other guys. You’d go over and there’d be
Playboy
magazines lying around and it’d be a bit of a mess. They’d all be talking about what models they’d gotten laid with, and then you went into Dana or Phil’s office and they’d be talking about their 401(k).

We would just hang out and get in trouble. We shared an office, me and Chris. You’d have to go through our office to get to another little office for Rock and Sandler. There was always Smigel around, or whoever else. We were all back there, screwing around and staying up late, trying to write and think of ideas and brainstorm and do whatever you gotta do to stay alive on that show.

You just spend so many hours there, and so much time of your life. We were all sort of the same age. We were all always together. It’s just inevitable that this group forms. We go to the party, then hang out at somebody’s apartment, and the next thing I know, it’s six A.M. and Chris and Adam are crashing in my living room.

The guys at
SNL
, they were like Chris’s new rugby team. Not nearly as wild but a lot of fun, and they gave Chris that fraternity atmosphere that he always thrived in. And then, somewhere along that first year on the show, Chris started dating Lorne’s assistant, this girl named Erin Maroney. Erin was great, just a lot of fun. And I thought it was the start of a whole new thing for Chris, a really good direction. It was the first time I’d seen him in a real relationship, you know, ever.

We’d always be outside Lorne’s office waiting for whatever, so we had a lot of interaction with Erin. Chris would hide underneath her desk, and he’d pop out and surprise her when she got back. He flirted with her all the time, and it paid off. They started dating. Erin was very cute, very sweet.

She went back to Wisconsin with him once, and she’d tell hilarious stories about what it was like around that dinner table. She’s kind of a preppy East Coast girl and there she is with seven Farleys fighting over chicken and steak, and the mother’s passing around a “yuck bag” where they throw all their extra bones and corncobs. I don’t think I ever would have put those two together, but I think she saw through all the other stuff to see that he was a good guy and a fun guy, and as history shows sometimes that’s enough.

Chris was in love with Erin. He talked about her all the time. She was very smart. Actually, she had the best line ever. They were all flying back from Los Angeles to New York, and Chris kept coming up and talking to Lorne, sucking up. So, after the third or fourth time he came by sucking up to Lorne, she turned to him and said, “Pace yourself, Tubby. It’s a long flight.” I think that’s why he loved her. A funny woman who’s attractive
and
smart, now that’s what you want.

Chris really wanted to end up with an Irish Catholic girl that his family would approve of—and Erin fit the bill. Despite the fame, and despite the access he had to all these beautiful women, he really just longed for, as he would say, “a nice Irish gal.” He was in love with the idea of them together.

It was the first time I’d ever seen him in a serious relationship. It was surprising. I could see why he was attracted to her. They both had a similar sense of humor. She was also very cute, just had a really sweet personality, and she’s really funny. I really liked that time of his life, because it was nice seeing him with someone who cared about him. He had someone who was actually going to make a home for him.

He saw in Erin someone who liked him for who he was. They would go to mass together on Sundays. He took her home to meet his parents, and I know she did the same. Her mother loved Chris. I think they just genuinely liked and cared for each other. But it was always more of a brother-sister thing than a boyfriend-girlfriend thing, from my perspective.

Basically, that first year, we only had each other. And we all had one thing in common: We couldn’t believe that we were doing this show. The people from
Saturday Night Live
, they were our heroes. It’s like if you dreamed of being a Major League Baseball player and you got your chance to do it— only there’s really only one baseball team in the country, and they’ve drafted you.

After the first season wrapped in May, we had this party at the restaurant downstairs at Rockefeller Center. A bunch of us went back up to the office for a little after party. Then, about four in the morning, Farley and I were both leaving at the same time. We were waiting for the elevator, and he said, “Timmy, can you believe this is our life?”

I said, “Chris, I think that every day.”

Then he just grabbed me, and hugged me. He couldn’t believe where his life was going.

CHAPTER 7

The Place in Alabama

LOVERBOY,
band:

Everybody’s workin’ for the weekend.
Everybody wants a new romance.
Everybody’s goin’ off the deep end.
Everybody needs a second chance, oh.

Chris Farley’s life was going in two wildly different directions at once. With "Chippendales,” "Super Fans,” and a number of solid turns in supporting roles, he had established himself as one of the standouts at
Saturday Night Live
. But his problem with drugs and alcohol had worsened severely. Around the office, Chris was always happy and hardworking, determined and focused. The sloppy, crazy party guy showed up at social functions here and there, but he was no longer a nightly fixture. Chris, knowing what was at stake, had learned how to hide his problem. And safely hidden, it festered.

The summer following his first year on the show, Chris returned to Chicago and dropped by Second City to see his old friends. He had clearly been using and was in no condition to perform. The cast pleaded with him not to go onstage, but during the improv set he burst out from behind the curtain anyway. The audience greeted him with a huge cheer. But as he began to stumble his way through a scene, his inebriation was obvious to everyone. People began to boo. After one scene, an audience member yelled, “Get the drunk off the stage.” Even in his failed stand-up comedy routines at Marquette, Chris had at least come off as affable and good-natured. He had never suffered wholesale rejection quite like this. The crowd’s reaction cut deep.