The Chris Farley Show: A Biography in Three Acts (27 page)

I sensed that there was something wrong with Chris and David, but I thought it was David not wanting to be the second banana.

You could feel the tension between them, believe me.

I was staying with Chris in his hotel room, and at the end of the shoot he would come back and see me and vent out all of his tension. “You’re the reason me and my best friend aren’t talking.” That sort of thing. It was hard.

It was about the girl, basically, and some underlying jealousy, too, which Spade actually handled very well. Spade was pissed off about how things went down with Kit Kat. I think it was one of those things where Spade thought she was his girl, but they weren’t really dating to begin with.

Dating, not dating, whatever. I don’t know what you want to call it. We were certainly hanging out a lot. I wasn’t her boyfriend, but we were very close. And I didn’t find out from them. It was an accident. For some reason, I wasn’t supposed to know. So if she and I weren’t dating, then why was I being kept in the dark? And whatever. The problems with Lorri were that I felt somewhat betrayed on both sides. I felt like, here’s my friend. I always made sure he got to hang out with us because he said he had no one else to be with, and to have that bite me in the ass later didn’t sit right.

I talked to Lorri about it a lot, and according to her, Chris was guilt-ridden over it. She says that she and David were never more than friends, but who knows how women revisit stuff.

Chris and I were just emotional, crazy people. Our relationship was always rocky. Up and down, like being on a ship at sea. David always used to say, “You two are going to kill each other.” The thing with Chris, the thing we had problems with, was intimacy. Any time you got close to him, if he let down his guard and really let you in, then he’d push you back out. As close as you got the night before, you’d be pushed that much further away the next morning.

Whenever Lorri would visit L.A., there was a standard pattern to it. They’d start talking on the phone a lot, then she’d come out and he’d send me away. For a couple of days it’d be full-time, lovey-dovey, baby-talk heaven. Then for a couple of days they’d begin to resemble a calmer, everyday, normal couple. I’d be invited back in—the third wheel added to their little bicycle—and we’d all hang out together. Then it’d start to disintegrate into some crazy-ass fight. I’d get a call from Chris in his hotel suite: “Come up. Come through the bedroom.” I’d go up and she’d be on the other side of his bedroom door, out in the suite, yelling and screaming, and Chris would be like, “Get her her own fucking room tonight and fly her back tomorrow.”

She’d fly back to New York, they’d ignore each other for a month or so, then the phone calls would start and the whole thing would crank up again.

In every part of his life Chris had a role to play. His relationships with people were always predicated on “What do
you
want?” And then he would be that for them. I actually tried to break all those different roles down. We’d fight about it, but then in the end he’d feel better that he didn’t have to play some part. I always felt that he could only really be himself with me.

People would never believe that we were together. They didn’t understand it, or questioned the reasons behind it. That was until they saw us together. They’d look back and forth between the two of us and say, “God, they’re like the same person.” One time he was going to do an interview. We were with his publicist in the car. She was like, “Chris, you’re so calm.” Then she looked over at me.

“Kitten makes me calm,” he said. He always said to me, “You’re the only girl I feel comfortable with. I’ve always been nervous and anxious around women, but not with you.”

I wouldn’t say Lorri
wasn’t
attracted to the fame and success, but she and Chris were genuinely close. She will tell you that they had this famous romance for the ages. Fact of the matter is, Chris had other girlfriends here and there. But I will give Lorri credit for being the most important woman in his life. That is certainly true. Unfortunately, of all the girls I saw Chris go out with, I didn’t think she was the healthiest or most stable.

Those two together, with Chris in a free fall, it was like nitroglycerine. I don’t know if Chris was in love with her. I know he spent tons of time with her, and she was okay with the other women, or whatever his famous life brought him, because they were “soul mates.” I was like, “Shit, is that how it works? I need me a soul mate. That’s awesome.”

Chris attracted control freaks. He made them feel wanted. And David is a control freak. If he’s not in control of a situation, he’ll just get out of it. It got ugly, and it was horrible for the two of them.

Every partnership has its problems. Costarring in a movie is hard. I think Chris and David really cared about each other, and they saw that they were good together. But I don’t think the quality of that movie was in any way affected by the deterioration of their relationship. While their problems may have impaired the process a little bit, that movie, in its DNA, was a turd.

I grew up in New York City but then later moved to Pennsylvania, to the town where they filmed
Deer Hunter
, so you know how dreary that was. I would take the bus into Pittsburgh to watch the Marx Brothers movies. My dream had always been to work with a comedy team, and here I was. I thought
Black Sheep
could have been a repeat of
Tommy Boy
, but the missing ingredient remained missing. The movie isn’t atrocious. It opened bigger than
Tommy Boy
. Both of them were number one in the country, but the drop-off was a lot quicker because, ultimately, it wasn’t the same kind of movie.

Black Sheep
wrapped in late summer, and Chris moved back to Chicago, taking up residence at his new apartment in the John Hancock Center, which he had bought after leaving
Saturday Night Live
. Also located in the Hancock Center was the radio studio of Erich “Mancow” Muller, a popular Chicago morning deejay. Chris frequently popped in at the show on his way in or out of the building. Along with regular drop-ins at Second City and ImprovOlympic, the show gave Chris a stage whenever he needed one.

That fall, a small group of people coalesced around Chris, forming a sometime entourage and de facto inner circle. Ted Dondanville stayed on as his personal assistant. Kevin and Johnny Farley had both moved to Chicago to take classes and perform at Second City. The brothers had never been very long apart, but now they found themselves all living in close proximity for the first time since high school. Chris also met a young woman, Jillian Seely. Seely herself had quit drinking several years before, and she was a great help to Chris. They attended recovery meetings together and became fast friends.

And naturally, any decent Chris Farley entourage needed to include a Roman Catholic priest. Sadly, Chris’s longtime confidant Father Matt Foley had left Chicago to do four years of missionary work in the small town of Quechultenango, Mexico. The two friends spoke by telephone often, but Chris needed spiritual guidance closer to home. In the months between filming
Tommy Boy
and
Black Sheep
, he had gone to Bellarmine, a Jesuit retreat house in Barrington, Illinois, just outside of Chicago proper. There he met Father Tom Gannon, who would meet with him and talk to him on the phone regularly over the next two years.

Meanwhile, preproduction work was already under way on Chris’s next film,
Beverly Hills Ninja
. He worked with the writers and producers on finalizing the script and took daily martial arts lessons from a teacher named Master Guo. For month after happy month, everything seemed fine.

When I graduated from college, the family was driving back to Wisconsin from Colorado. I was the young sapling, had no clue what direction to take in life. I had Tommy on one side of me and Chris on the other. Tommy was saying, “Go into business.” And Chris was going, “Go into comedy.” They were kidding around, tugging back and forth on me.

I went back to Red Arrow Camp to be a counselor, basically piloted a ski boat all summer. Then I tried to get a job driving a Frito-Lay truck. They turned me down. Maybe it was my DUI. Maybe I was overqualified? But I doubt that. So then my mother was buying a new car, and I went with her. I thought, I like cars. Maybe I’ll sell cars. I asked about it. One of the salesmen took me aside and said, very seriously, “Son, this isn’t a job. This is a career. You’re makin’ a
career
move here.”

“Wow. Thanks.”

And I never went back. I figured, comedy, what the hell? I went to Chicago and did exactly what Chris did, started working at the Mercantile Exchange and started taking improv classes at night. Kevin got out of the asphalt business a year or two later when he saw how easily I’d gotten out of it.

I had worked with Dad for six years. In September of 1994, I packed my bags and moved down to Chicago. I lived on Johnny’s couch, got a running job at the Chicago Board of Trade, took classes at Second City, and worked as a host there, seating people and doing dishes.

Second City has a business theater, which is upstairs and is pretty lucrative; you can hire players from Second City to perform at your corporate events and write material for you. Eventually, they thought I had a little talent, and they sent me out on these corporate gigs. I got to make a living doing that.

I did the corporate thing a bit, too, because it paid well, but mostly I was in the touring company.

Everyone in our family is funny. Mom’s hysterical. When you have a large family you want to have your own identity, so we all developed different senses of humor. We’re very similar in our mannerisms, but all unique. Johnny is out there. His mind works in a really dark but funny way. I’m a little more goofy and silly. Chris was just outlandish, in your face and raucous. Tom is very cerebral, and dry. Only he never got up onstage with it.

If you had to break down the Farley brothers, I’m Chevy Chase, Kevin is Dan Aykroyd, and Chris is John Belushi. And Tommy is Garrett Morris.

I’ll be honest: Johnny and Kevin are often funnier than Chris in real life, in more normal ways anyway. Kevin Farley is the funniest guy in the world at a cocktail party. He tells stories, is very engaging. Tom and Johnny, too. The difference is when you put a spotlight on someone, there’s a very different kind of funny you need to deliver, and that’s where Chris was like Michael Jordan: He would always make the shot. But at the same time, a lot of people who’d meet Chris socially just didn’t get him.

I met Chris buying a cup of coffee. I really didn’t know who he was. I remember he had an Elmer Fudd hat on, and he was wearing those electrician glasses he had. He looked like he was mentally retarded. He’d just finished
Black Sheep
and had moved into his apartment at the Hancock. I worked at a hair salon in the Bloomingdale’s building at 900 North Michigan Avenue, and he was there in the building with Johnny. I was looking at Chris and he was looking at me, and we both started smiling and laughing. He asked me if I would marry him, and then he introduced himself. “Hi, I’m Chris Farley.”

He asked me if I’d join him that night at a restaurant down the street. It was for John’s birthday, I think. I showed up, brought some friends, and we all hung out and had a great time. We ended up going to a restaurant that was open really late and just laughing and talking all night. The next day he called me at work at around nine in the morning and said, “Hey, I noticed last night that you don’t drink.”

“Yeah, I quit a long time ago,” I said.

“Me, too.”

He told me a little bit about his problems, and then he asked if I would go to a meeting with him later that night. I said sure. We went to the meeting and then went out to dinner, and we just clicked. From that day on we just started hanging out all the time. We laughed our asses off together.

The thing that was great about being with Chris was that he started all of his conversations with “How was
your
day? What did
you
do?” Nobody does that anymore. That’s why Chris was so different from most people. He was not selfish at all when it came to being a friend. We would stay up until three, four in the morning, opening ourselves up to each other, even when we were complete strangers to each other. To this day I don’t know why. I’ve had friends who made me laugh and friends I could have really serious talks with, but I’d never had all of that in the same person like I did with Chris.

We always thought Jillian was super nice. They did hit it off right away.

At the time we were busy setting up his apartment at the Hancock building. It was crazy, because the Hancock building is literally a retirement community. That and the studio for Jerry Springer. Chris was the only young person in the building. “Dad says it’s the best place in town,” Chris said. And maybe it was, back in the sixties, but the people who were hip when they moved in were the only ones still there.

Whenever Chris was in Chicago we would meet and go out to dinner at the Cheesecake Factory, or the Chop House, or Gibson’s. Things were clicking with his career. It was a really good time. Nobody was worried about him.