The Chris Farley Show: A Biography in Three Acts (36 page)

Chris knew what he had to do. He knew what he had to do to stay sober—and he chose not to do it. He told me why. He made me promise that I would never tell anyone why, and I never will. But maybe three months before he died, he was in a rehab in L.A. He called me late one night and told me why he wasn’t going to stay sober anymore, and, at that point, we both knew what that meant. The thing is, Chris actually had great willpower, and great strength. Once he decided something, it was done.

Any idea that Chris wanted to die is bullshit. Chris was so full of life, and he had a boundless enthusiasm for everything and everyone. He enjoyed his life and savored it and was full of hope for the future.

When I saw him in those last weeks, he gave me the
Gelfin
script and told me he was getting sober and going back to work. When I picked him up to go to my Christmas party, I caught him practicing his karaoke in the mirror just to make sure he’d do a really good job. When he called his mom that night, he was telling her how happy and excited he was about taking her back to Ireland next year. And when I talked to him on the phone three days later and he said, “I’ll call you back in an hour,” I don’t think he thought that was the last time anyone would ever hear from him.

I don’t buy that it was a death wish, that it was a slow suicide. I just don’t. You have to discount anything Chris might have said to people, especially to women. How was he trying to manipulate them? How was he trying to play on their sympathies?

The only thing was he said to me once, “Do you ever feel like you’re doomed?” But I think that’s something we all might say at some time or another. So I don’t think you can look at what he was saying. You have to look at what he was doing. What he was doing was playing with fire and the consequences be damned, but he was also making a lot of plans for the future.

The binge that started at the Four Seasons lasted about four days, calling friends and picking up strangers and bringing them along. By the end of it I went up to the suite and there were all these food-service carts everywhere, ashtrays overflowing. After that Chris crashed for a few days, slept it off, and took it easy.

Chris called and asked if we could get together to talk. I said, “Sure, I’ll come up to the apartment and we’ll have mass together.”

“I’d love that,” he said.

So I went up, we had a long talk, I gave him confession, and we said a mass. Then we went out to dinner, came back to the apartment, and talked some more. He went on about his addiction and how bad he felt about where he was headed, both personally and professionally, and what he should do with his life. I had to be careful about bringing up his father, because he was always very sensitive when you did. I suggested he dedicate himself to going to daily mass, not because that would help with his addiction but because it might give him a safe, grounded place from which he could rededicate himself to treatment.

We both agreed that the rehab programs were getting him nowhere. I think he went to every rehab program known to man; he must have spent about half a million dollars on them. He had all the lingo down, but he didn’t have the reality down. People have to internalize those twelve steps and make them their own, and Chris wasn’t doing that.

I left around midnight. As I was driving home I just thought, this kid is going down the tubes. I had a deep foreboding. I came so close to turning the car around, going back, taking him to my place and keeping him there for a couple of days. But you can’t do that. He’s a grown man with his own free will, and what can you do?

There was opportunity to cut Chris’s money off at the end. You can commit somebody, legally commit them and cut off all their access to their funds. It came up with the people at Brillstein-Grey. They proposed it, but you have to get the family signed off on it. Ultimately it was his father’s decision, and his father wouldn’t go along.

Gurvitz wanted to send him away for a year, the most hard-core approach possible. But Chris’s dad was like, “Chris is a grown-up. He can make his own decisions.” And in a way his dad was right. If it wasn’t Chris’s decision to go, sending him there wouldn’t accomplish anything.

By the time I got to Chris that December, everyone was telling me, “Forget it. We’ve tried. Just give up.”

And I said, “You guys didn’t give up on me, why should I give up on him?”

The last ten days of his life he called me every day. It was a slow, horrible thing. He’d call at five, six in the morning and plead with me to meet him at the Pump Room.

I’d say, “No, I am not going to meet you at a fucking bar. I will pick you up and take you to a meeting.”

“I don’t want to go to a meeting. Everybody recognizes me. I get bothered.”

“Fine. I’ll take you to a halfway house where people are so bottomed out that they don’t care who’s sitting next to them.”

But he still wouldn’t go. And it was the same thing every day. He’d call, we’d pray together. He kept saying, “Please, I need your help. I need your spiritual guidance.”

I said, “Chris, all I got is what I got. I can’t do anything for you unless you want to go to a meeting. You gotta start over, and you can start today.”

“I can’t start over.”

“Yes, you can.”

“No, I can’t.”

And it was the same conversation every day.

That Saturday, he asked me to come over, and we hung out. We made Christmas cookies together, went to a meeting. Then on Sunday he called me and I picked him up and we went to my Christmas party. We sang karaoke. I have a picture of the two of us that night as we walked into the club, and we were both sober. Then, by the end of the night, he had started drinking and someone snapped another picture of us. It’s the last picture of the two of us together, and you can see the difference.

At the end of the party, I said, “Chris, it’s time to go.”

He was with a bunch of girls, and he was like, “No, no, I’m gonna stay here.”

My friend and I told him he really needed to leave, and he got defensive, saying “You’re not the boss of me,” and all that. So we left, and he went out with all these people drinking. That was the last time I saw him.

Monday morning, I stopped by his apartment on my way to a meeting to see if he wanted to go. We got in an argument about this Fatty Arbuckle project. He was obsessed with doing it, but his managers had brought him into a meeting and told him he couldn’t do it until he’d been sober for two years, otherwise no one would insure him. He didn’t think that was fair. To me, that was the first time he’d been fired in his life, for real, where someone actually said no to him. I said, “Chris, this is good. It’s good that you’re going to let go of this.”

“But it’s going to get made without me.” He had the script and he showed it to me, and he was like, “I have to do it.”

“The Fatty Arbuckle movie is not a reality,” I said. “It’s just a script on your desk. You’ve got to learn how to not drink. Nothing else comes before that.”

“But it’s different for me. I’m famous.”

“Bullshit. You’re no different from me. You’re just an Irish fucker who can’t stop drinking. This movie is not real. What’s real is your torture. You’ve got to start from ground zero and fix it.”

“I can’t do it again.”

“Yes, you can. I did it, and I had nothing. I had no career. I had no success. If I can do it, you can do it. You have even more to live for.”

“But you’re strong, and I’m weak.”

“Fuck that. I’m as weak as you are.”

“But my dad says . . .”

“Fuck your dad. If it were up to me you wouldn’t do any work at all for a year. You stay here and you get sober and you work your steps and just get a grip on how to live.”

And that’s where I left it. That Fatty Arbuckle movie, that was the line in the sand. Either you get sober or you get dead.

On Tuesday, Johnny and Teddy and a bunch of guys from Chicago were meeting for lunch at Gibson’s. Chris was late, and everyone was getting annoyed. We all had jobs to get back to. I ended up going to the Hancock to get him. Some mysterious girl was there, a joint burning in the ashtray. I was worried, but even though it’s so obvious that the inevitable is next, you still don’t believe that it’s going to happen.

During lunch, Chris was adamant. “This is it,” he said. “No more fucking around. We’ve got another couple weeks to party over Christmas, and then that’s it. We’re gonna get sober, rent the house in Beverly Hills, get to work on
The Gelfin
. No more fucking around.”

He told me he wanted me to hire a trainer, a personal chef; he was going to get back in shape. And those plans were made. I’d rented the house. I was asking around to find a trainer and a chef. Chris had every intention of going back to work in January.

I drove home that day and called Tommy and said, “Chris says he’s cleaning up and getting serious after Christmas, but this is a new low.”

“I know,” Tommy said. “I get these calls all the time.”

I asked Johnny after the fact, you know, “How could you sit there and drink with him?”

And Johnny was like, “What’re you gonna do? Chris was already rolling when he got to the table.” That’s when Johnny just left. He couldn’t take it anymore.

I know Johnny had a lot of guilt about what he could have done, should have done. But Chris knew the deal. And you have to remember, there was a physical fear when it came to standing up to Chris, not just an emotional one. He was bigger than you. Johnny said to him once, “You’re sick. You’ve got to stop this.” And Chris almost ripped his head off.

When Chris would relapse, all his friends in recovery would abandon him for the sake of their own sobriety. I understand it on one level, having now quit drinking myself, but in some ways it seems perverse. When he needed them the most, they were gone. Johnny and I were the only two people close to Chris who still drank, so we were the only ones around to look after him when he relapsed.

The problem was that even though Johnny and I were heavy drinkers—we could go eight, nine hours—there was always a point where Chris just wore us out. That night, we’d been drinking since Gibson’s. It was around two in the morning, and we were at the Hunt Club. These guys wanted Chris to come and party with them at this place up in Lincoln Park. Of course Chris was up for it, but Johnny and I couldn’t take it anymore. We had to get off. I said I was going home, and Chris told me to get a room at the Ritz-Carlton, across the street from the Hancock, said he wanted me nearby. He told me to take care of the bill, and he took off with those people. And that was the last time I ever saw him alive.

Chris was going to go all night, and I said, “I’m not doing this with you.” I had to get away from it. It was making me ill. Chris and I had been living together at the Hancock, and the vibe had just gotten terrible. He wasn’t sleeping at night, and it was a mess. There was stuff everywhere. I was like, eh, I shouldn’t be here. That was the other big what if: if only I had stayed. But whatever he was going through, I thought he just needed to be left alone. Plus, I wasn’t getting any sleep. So I went with Teddy and checked into the hotel.

Chris called me around five o’clock Wednesday morning. I said, “Chris, I’m sleeping. What is it?”

He said, “I really need your help, please.”

I didn’t know what to do. He had been calling me every day, and we’d been having the same endless conversation. He wanted me to meet him at the Pump Room, again. He said Joyce Sloane was going to be there. I told him that I wouldn’t meet him at a bar. I said, “I’m coming downtown tonight for a meeting at six o’clock. Call me if you want to go.” And he never called.

We had a lunch date at the Pump Room, me and Chris and Holly Wortell. I had talked to him the night before to confirm the date, and the last thing he said to me was “I’ll see you tomorrow.”

Joyce and I met there at noon, and we waited and waited and waited.

I got a call from a friend around ten-thirty. She said, “I saw Chris out last night. He was in really bad shape.”

So I called. He picked up on the speakerphone. I could tell he was out of it. I heard somebody laughing in the background. I said, “Who is that?”

“It’s nobody. It’s nobody,” he said.

He asked if he could call me back. I knew he wasn’t going to. I said, “Chris, do me a favor and just stay in tonight. Please do not go out.”

“Okay, okay, I won’t go out.”

“Okay.”

“I love you.”

“I love you, too.”

“I’ll call you back in an hour.”

CHAPTER 15

The Parting Glass

That night I was in Xochitepec, this small mountain village in Mexico. It had no roads and no electricity, and it was about a seven-hour walk from my parish. I was on a journey with a missionary team. We would walk to a town and spend a day ministering to the people there. Then we’d sleep on the floor of the chapel, wake up the next day, and journey on to the next town.

Sleeping in the chapel that night, I dreamt that I was surrounded by my old Marquette rugby friends. We were all talking about someone we had lost. It was such a vivid dream that it woke me out of a deep sleep. I got up and walked outside. There was this big, full moon, and I just stood there and looked up at the sky for the longest time, trying to figure out what this dream meant.