Chris Farley: The Wild Ride and Sad End

The last time I saw Chris Farley was early last summer, in the middle of the night, at the Sky Bar, a breezy, cool, happening joint on Sunset Boulevard, in L.A. He eased on out of his limo as big as ever, in black engineer’s boots, a black suit and a spread-collar lime-green shirt, all of which prompted a very slick Hollywood-type bystander to say to him, “Hey, hey, right on. I like your style, man.” It was Farley’s slick, Hollywood-pleasing style. Normally he preferred sloshing around in a T-shirt, faded Calvin Klein sweatpants and Birkenstocks. Even so, he guffawed loudly, puffed out his chest, barreled inside to a table reserved for him, bought a cigar from a cigar-selling blonde and lit the thing up. I can’t remember what he drank, but it wasn’t booze, because he wasn’t boozing then, I don’t think. Nor was he drugging, I don’t think. He was in a fine, merry mood, having just come from a Lakers game, during which he’d made a wonderful spectacle of himself, emitting loud, stadium-size fart noises and shouting profanities. He had also just finished making a new movie, Almost Heroes, of which he was proud. He was thinking about making the Fatty Arbuckle story, of which he eventually might be even prouder, since it would feature him in his first dramatic role. And he was earning somewhere in the area of $6 million a movie. “I don’t know what the future holds,” he said. “All I know is, I’m good today. Real good.”

For a while we talked about his hero and Saturday Night Live predecessor, John Belushi. It was well known that Farley had been obsessed with Belushi, and people loved making much of this fact, since the two seemed to share a love of certain rather common excesses. Was he trying to be like him in some ways?

Farley tugged at his hair. “I don’t know,” he said. “I never met the man. Maybe I tried to be. But I don’t think so. Anyway, I’m fatter than him now.” He paused. “Did you know that he died at my age this year, at 33? Yeah. March 5, 1982.” He sucked on that cigar until it lit up his entire face, making of it a great big glowing pink orb. At times like this, he had the most pleasing and innocent of faces. He had none of that darkness so associated with Belushi, none of the addled, jaded irony. He looked happy. He looked expectant. He looked as though he was saying that when the clock finally clicked past his 34th birthday, then all this Belushi nonsense would fade away, because he would have outlived the man, and, finally, he would be out there all on his own.

He was quiet for a while. Then he excused himself from the table.

Five months later, on Dec. 18, his birthday still a ways off, he was found dead inside his rented 60th-floor high-rise apartment on Chicago’s Miracle Mile. In the days before his death, he was seen drinking at a bar called the Crobar and at a bar called Karma, at the Cheesecake Factory, at the Berghoff Cafe and at the Hunt Club, where he did a Wolfman Jack impression and let strippers drape themselves over his body. He’d arrived at the Hunt Club with his brother John. He said to a waitress, “Hey, pretty lady, can you get me and my partner a Jack and Coke?”

“He looked really bad,” the waitress later said.

On a Tuesday, he reportedly paid an exotic dancer named Autumn $300 to come to his pad and give him a lap dance. They were there amid his footballs and baseballs, his movie posters, his beloved cheesy clown art and the prized photo of him with Paul McCartney, from one of his favorite SNL sketches. He rolled a joint. He drank vodka and OJ. The girl danced. He seemed disoriented and unstable.

John Farley found him two days later sprawled in the apartment entryway, clad only in his pajama bottoms. It would be weeks before a toxicology report could state the official cause of death; in the meantime, it looked as though it could have been from any number of things: from drug or alcohol use, sudden heart failure, choking or a stroke. The press speculated on his problems with cocaine and heroin and reported that the police found a foil packet containing a white powder under his body and a couple of vials containing anti-depressants. No one could say anything conclusively, except that given Farley’s history, “[His] may have been the least-surprising premature death of a celebrity in show-business history,” as one Chicago columnist put it.

Then came all the words of those who had known him. It was an outpouring of love. He was called a “sweetheart” and a “great guy.” He was called a “force of nature.” He was said to be an actor who was just about to “open up and show us what he could do.” Said Lorne Michaels, his boss at SNL and producer of his first two movies, “When he was being funny, it made everything else that happened fade into the background. It was what made him special. And people loved him. I loved him.”

Indeed, almost everyone loved Farley, and it was a genuine love, not a Hollywood love. Of course, he could be a royal pain in the ass, what with his loudness and his farting and his occasional boorishness around women and his frequent backsliding when it came to his efforts to conquer his fondness for food and drink and drugs. But with Farley, you simply had to cast that stuff aside and hop on board, although it never hurt to try to get him to take it easy, to sober up, cut out the drugs and lose weight. Many people did just that over the years. But when Farley listened, it was often only for the briefest of moments. Then he had to go back to the business of being Farley, because that’s what he was mostly in the business of being.

During our few days together, Farley ate Swiss-cheese burgers with sides of macaroni and cheese, drank coffee with shots of espresso, smoked cigarettes, went shopping for a velvet smoking jacket at Rochester’s Big and Tall shop, passed by a Barneys clothing store (“I’d love to lose weight and shop in there”), ogled the girls, gave a Beverly Hills beggar $30, enumerated awful, hurtful childhood nicknames (“Fartley, Lard Ass, Tubby and, of course, Fatso was standard”), discussed the key to comedy (“You enter strong and you exit strong, and you’re going to be OK”), recalled his run-in with Hustler magnate Larry Flynt at the Oscars (“He said, ‘It’s good to see somebody make it that didn’t make it all the way through puberty.’ And I’m like, ‘Well, fuck you, asshole!'”) and talked about his terrors.

He was always terrified, he said. He was terrified of people and crowds, hence his outrageous behavior, as a kind of smoke screen. He was terrified of the way he sucked up to studio execs. He was terrified of telling a killer joke because of the silence that followed the laughs (“It’s the most terrifying silence you’ve ever heard”). He was terrified that his movies would do shitty business and he’d never work again. He was terrified that he’d never find a woman who would love him for himself and with whom he could have kids, which is what he wanted most. He was terrified that whacking off to porn movies would seal his fate in the afterlife. He was terrified that if he lost weight, he’d no longer be funny. He was terrified of always having to be “the most outrageous guy in the room.”

As we drove around town in his rented red convertible, he also talked about his health. I asked him whether he counted dying young among his fears.

“I’m good, I’m healthy,” he roared. “Hell, my dad’s healthy, and he weighs 650 pounds!” He snorted, then continued, talking in a quieter way. “I mean, there’s no control in life, is there? There’s only one who’s in control, and He’ll take me when He wants me. I don’t want to know about it. It’s none of my business. But when it happens, I just ask that it won’t be painful and that He forgives me my sins.” At that, Farley came forth with a whole bunch of laughter, as if that was the only response to all the sins he might need forgiveness for. “Oh, Lordy, Lordy, Lordy,” he said humorously.

We were driving up La Cienega Boulevard and stopped at a traffic light. Just then, Farley saw a man standing in the median strip, selling large bags of oranges. “Oranges!” he shouted with great happiness.

We just sat there. Farley seemed to be living inside some kind of crux moment, a moment of possible change unlike any he had so far seen. Earlier, he had allowed as how he was getting older and when you got older, sometimes some of the monster lusts — for whatever you lusted after during your years up until then — left you alone. He said I was seeing him at just such a moment, in a sweet spot of his life. “You either wear out of that stuff or you do it till you die,” he said. “I just wore out of it.”

I asked Farley about the heroin and cocaine rumors. He was silent. “Let’s just say I had my share of fun,” he said finally. “I worry about talking about this, because I worry about kids who might think, ‘Whoa, man, that’s cool!’ Because in some ways, that’s what I did with my hero, Belushi. I thought that this is what you have to do to be cool. But all that shit does is kill someone. It is a demon that must be snuffed out. It is the end.”