Chris Farley labeled his brand of physical comedy as “Everybody laughs when fatty falls down.” And he lived in manic pursuit of that laughter, even if it meant making his ample, unhealthy body the butt of his humor.
In his signature “Saturday Night Live” bit as one of the Ditka-loving Superfans, he’d choke on a pork chop and gorge himself until he had to punch his chest to restart his heart. He’d also crash through props, hit the floor, mimic seizures and act as if his veins were about to burst.
His real life often mirrored his onstage antics. Farley, his head jerking and arms flapping wildly, looked like he couldn’t stop performing. He weighed about 300 pounds, and his health was further compromised by drinking and taking drugs.
His binges and stays in substance- and food-abuse facilities were well-publicized. Former “SNL” writers Al Franken and Bob Odenkirk remembered that producer Lorne Michaels repeatedly suspended Farley from the show to get him to clean up.
“When he got into trouble, Lorne would say, `You can’t do the show, you have to go to rehab,’ ” said Franken. “This happened at least twice, where he was basically told, `You don’t have a job anymore unless you go away and get help.’ This was not something where people around him ignored (his problem). It wasn’t something where he ignored it. It was something he didn’t have power over.”
For every attempt at sobriety there was the subsequent fall off the wagon. Friends constantly feared the 33-year-old performer’s excesses would kill him.
So when he was found dead Thursday in a condo in the John Hancock Center, it was a shock, but not a surprise.
“People in the industry knew that Chris was not having a good last year-and-a-half,” said Andrew Alexander, executive producer and owner of Second City, the improvisation and sketch comedy theater company that helped to hone Farley’s comedy skills.
“It’s something that was expected at some point, but just to have it happen is a sad thing to deal with,” said James Grace, a friend of Farley’s who acted with him at Chicago’s ImprovOlympic in the late 1980s.
The Cook County medical examiner’s office is awaiting toxicology report results before announcing a cause of death. But among those who knew Farley, there’s little suspense as to what killed him. No one could pinpoint the exact moment Farley got on the path that led him to both professional success and self-destruction.
And no one could say what truly drove him there–be it insecurity, lack of self-control or just a hedonistic desire to experience all he could. (His family in Madison, Wis., declined to comment). But most agree that he’d begun his journey long ago.
“I really, truly believe that he didn’t change who he was and what he wanted,” Grace said.
“From the very first time I met him, we always talked about `Saturday Night Live’ and the early stuff with (John) Belushi and Second City, and he followed that route exactly as he planned it. In a way this wasn’t a surprising turn either.”
Class clown
As Farley’s classmates from Edgewood High School in Madison followed his career, what they saw on the big and small screens was merely an extension of the Chris they had known for years.
“Chris Farley in his personal life was the same as Matt Foley (his crazed, greasy-haired motivational speaker character from `SNL’),” said John Ellis, a family friend and part-time comedian who later took classes with Farley at Second City in Chicago. “Farley believed he was the same guy on and off the stage,”
Farley already had the reputation for doing anything to get a laugh, be it sticking his bare butt out of a school bus window or exposing his growing belly to lunchroom crowds. (Edgewood’s yearbooks revealed that Farley’s weight increased with each passing year.)
His antics carried over to his social life. Friends remember a night he had a date scheduled after a football game. To mask that he barely played, he dived repeatedly into the mud.
His teachers said drugs weren’t an issue with Farley, whom they dubbed a class clown. “You could never get mad at him,” said Bob Shannon, Farley’s junior-year chemistry teacher. “He’d come back and look at you, and he’d have that pouty face on.”
`The warmest feeling’
“Chris would run full blast into a snowbank and pretend like he was tripped by the snow just to make three people laugh,” recalled Pat Finn, a friend from Marquette University who joined Farley at Chicago’s ImprovOlympic.
They played rugby, traded jokes and eventually signed up for a college variety show that drew an audience of about 1,000.
“We didn’t really prepare, which was pretty much our style, but went up and decided to kind of improvise it,” Finn said. “We did a spoof of `The Dating Game,’ and I played a cool guy and Chris played the nerd. I went out, and Chris came out second and tripped on the way out, and the place went nuts.
“The wave of laughter was just the warmest feeling we’d ever had. We did it and somehow wrapped it up and left the stage, and he just turned and said, `This is what we’re going to be doing for the rest of our lives.’ “
Soon after Farley joined ImprovOlympic, he was pestering director Charna Halpern at a show to let him perform. “He said, `I want to be on stage, I want to be on stage now, I’m going nuts,’ ” she recalled. “He nagged me so much that I got very angry, and I said, `You could get on my stage right now, and if you screw up you’ll never get on my stage again.’ I thought that would scare him off, but he got right on the stage and was wonderful.”
“He didn’t have to learn how to be honest and intelligent on stage, because he didn’t know any other way to be,” said Del Close, who coached Farley at ImprovOlympic and also directed him at Second City. “He didn’t put on a different persona to walk on stage and improvise. Improvising was just a seamless continuity with his regular life.”
Like when he was in college, Farley was known as a party animal, but he wasn’t alone. “At that time everybody was playing really hard,” said Grace, who now teaches at ImprovOlympic in Los Angeles. “Just eventually, people get older and stop playing so hard–and some people don’t.”
`Public sacrifices’
“When he was at Second City, I remember one guy who was following him around, driving him around, giving him pot,” Halpern said. “He’d hang out at the theater door and offer to drive him places and give him drugs so he could say he hung out with Farley. There were people crawling out of the woodwork to try to hang out with celebrities. That would happen to Belushi too. There’s a lot of scum around.”
The pressures of being a comedic actor probably didn’t help.
“In a comedy it’s all you,” said director Harold Ramis, a Second City veteran who knew Belushi well and Farley just casually. “If it’s not funny, there’s nothing worse than that, and people are cruel about it.”
“I feel bad for comedians,” said Jamie Masada, who owns Hollywood’s Laugh Factory comedy club. “Any time that they’re off the stage, they say hello to somebody (and that person will) say, `Tell us a joke, tell us this.’ “
Close complained, “There is, in effect, this whole industry dedicated to turning you into your public image. The thing that bothers me is that they assume making a lot of money is going to compensate for this. In the meantime there are tremendous psychic and physical dues to pay.
“All celebrities and certainly comedians tend to wind up being public sacrifices, and I’m getting tired of it. He’s my third fat guy to die on me: Belushi, Candy, Farley. Will my fat students please quit dying on me?”
`Clean and sober’
Franken said Farley’s case differed from Belushi’s, who died of a drug overdose in 1982, “because with John we really didn’t know that much about addiction. This was something where the people around Chris kept trying, and Chris kept trying, and he would go into rehab and he would come out, and sometimes he’d be really healthy, and he’d be a little less self-effacing than usual, a little stronger.
“The mask that he wore was the guy who hit himself in the head and said, `I’m so stupid,’ and that’s a mask that people really loved. But to know the other Chris, the Chris that could stand up for himself and was really smart, that was really Chris too.”
Dennis Dugan, the Wheaton native who directed Farley in “Beverly Hills Ninja,” said the actor was in tip-top shape as he performed his own martial arts stunts for the movie. “He was absolutely 100-percent clean and sober from the beginning when I first met him, until the end of the picture,” he said.
But the relapses became inevitable. “He’d been to some group therapy sessions and he’d go away for a month (to a program), quit drinking, lose 65 pounds and look beautiful,” said Halpern, who remained friends with Farley. “Then he’d go away to do a movie, and he’d come back heavier. The people who cared for him weren’t around to take care of him when he was off working, just the people who would say yes to anything he wanted.”
More than pratfalls
Farley recently had been contemplating a turn away from his wacky comedies to star in a biography of troubled silent-screen star Fatty Arbuckle, who was tried for murder, acquitted and became widely despised. “I think he was on the verge of making a big breakthrough,” Close sighed.
Former Second City comedian Jeff Garlin agreed there was more to Farley than just his pratfalls. “Chris Farley would have still been funny had he weighed 190 pounds and he didn’t drink and he didn’t smoke and he didn’t do anything that was bad for him,” he said. “The sad thing is he didn’t believe that, and he didn’t know that.”
He added that the actor was obsessed with Belushi’s “dark side . . . I know people he told that he was going to die at 33,” the age Belushi died.
Yet most memories of Farley involve his sweet nature. Franken recalled how the actor repeatedly accompanied him to visit a terminally ill 14-year-old boy in a New York hospital and wound up entertaining the entire kids’ cancer ward. “We’d leave after that, and Chris would just start crying,” Franken said. “All through this period he was struggling with 12-step stuff and wondering what kind of service he was doing, and I remember thinking that by doing his career, he was able to come to this ward and it meant something to these kids.”
“He didn’t lack for love from people,” Halpern said of Farley, who never married. “He and his family were so close. He was a good friend, he was sensitive, he was always there for people, apologizing if he hadn’t called you in a while.”
She insisted that it wasn’t demons that drove Farley’s compulsions. “I think he felt like when he walked into the room, he had to be the life of the party because they expected it of Chris. The funny thing was he was like that anyway. He was the funniest, rowdiest person in the room.
“He lived and played hard. Chris was not an unhappy person, even at the end. He was having the time of his life. He had it all, a bit too much.”
