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Mancow remembers long friend Chris Farley


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Posted by chicagomedia.org on June 06, 2008 at 10:13:49:

Blood brother Mancow recalls Farley’s tragicomic life
BY MANCOW MULLER

“Hey Mancow! It’s Chris Farley! Let’s ...”

Erase.

“Hey, Cow! I’ve called before ...”

Erase.

“Why won’t you call me back I ...”

Erase.

There were 30 frantic messages to me on my home answering machine the night Chris Farley died. I never heard the full messages. Erase. How had it gotten to this point? Erase. He was a huge comedy star and had been a dear friend.

With a new book out about Farley, today’s reality reminds me of my fallen friend. Toward the end of his life I cringed at the thought of even talking to him. In those final messages there was a sound of real desperation in his voice. The next day he was dead. He was a comedic version of the Roman god Janus — one smiling public face rooted in this world and the other tearfully looking into the spirit world. Was he calling for help or did he just want me to be a part of that dramatic final act? I’ll never know.

Chris was found dead in the apartment where we had discussed the wonders of the universe. My father had died of cancer, and I’d written a best-selling book about his death that Chris both loved and feared. He told me repeatedly that his single biggest worry was having to bury his own dad. As it turns out, he didn’t have to worry about that.

The real shocker to people is that Farley had a deep Catholic faith. At times he would go to church almost everyday. Ecclesiastes 4:5 talks of sloth as “the slow suicide,” and that was not how it was to be for him. He prayed for the spirit to rein into his thirsty soul and crush his demons. We would talk for hours about our Heavenly Father and our earthbound ones as well. Chris would move about the apartment in an animated way like he was playing one-person charades. Sweating and massive, but amazingly graceful, he would act out childhood memories and impersonate his father. He was worried about his father’s enormous size and health and seriously could not fathom how I kept living after my own father’s passing.

“Everywhere there’s lots of piggies, Living piggy lives. You can see them out for dinner with their piggy wives.”

— The Beatles

In his best movie, “Tommy Boy,” there’s a scene where Farley’s talking to his dead movie dad on a sailboat. That was the Chris Farley I knew. That was his only truly “naked” real moment captured on film. He was different from any other comedian I’ve ever known. Everything else since his funeral feels like folklore.

Dan Aykroyd (who was in “Tommy Boy”) and others make money mimicking “chumps” like Chris Farley’s dad. Well, Chris loved those chumps! He didn’t feel he was brilliant and all his fans were mere rubes. He respected hardworking people and wanted them to laugh. At the height of his stardom I’d see him with the doormen, street cleaners, construction workers, or whomever. He’d suck in his gut. Bam! Down went his pants. Tumble over. Big fake embarrassment. Huge laughs. Repeat. Not for the “do-re-mi” but to make some poor guy’s day a bit brighter.

The fact that EVEtheWatcherNE, it seems, in the Windy City had a personal encounter is a real testimony to the man.

You think Dane Cook, Sarah Silverman or David Cross gives two s---s about you? They loathe you. They are part of this modern school of comedy where they do their lazy smug shtick and if you don’t guffaw then you’re the schmuck. They are great and you are simply the mouth-breathing mark who’s too stupid to understand just how great they think they are.

“Keep all your smart modern writers/Give me William Shakespeare”

— Ray Davies

Farley could break even the most indifferent. You would laugh. I saw the most world-weary among us have lifelong facades of distrust shatter and fall to the ground. A roly-poly man so childlike-silly that Lazarus-like laughs were commanded to come forth from people’s long-dormant, cobwebbed, humorless places. He was as subtle as a Packers fan with a foam cheesehead hat on at the ballet, but you had no choice but to laugh.

We would argue about Belushi. He worshipped at that idol. I never got it! I can’t watch “Hanoi” Jane Fonda, or listen to Gary “Rock and Roll” Glitter (the pedophile) or Michael Jackson. Character matters to me. Reading the book Wired and hearing firsthand stories from those who actually knew Belushi convinced me he was not to be admired. I would argue for Bill Murray being the funniest guy in “Saturday Night Live” history. Chris wouldn’t hear of it: “Belushi’s a comedy god!” And then I would argue that it didn’t matter because he was dead. Chris did cocaine because of all those Belushi stories he’d heard from “SNL” alumni. Damn them, because in my opinion they helped kill him.

In the Second City, the second most famed skyscraper is the John Hancock. Jerry Springer lives there, my radio station was there, and Chris Farley lived up above the clouds overlooking Lake Michigan. It also houses a Cheesecake Factory restaurant in its basement. So we worked, ate and hung out together.

We would hang in his clown-adorned apartment and he would order me to study the clown art. He would physically push my face closer by applying pressure to the back of my skull. “Look closer! I stare at these and they’re funny at first but then they become spooky and sad,” he’d say. I didn’t realize at the time prophetic those words would end up being.

Chris had a framed picture with Paul McCartney on the wall. “He’s a Beatle,” he would instruct with winking sarcasm. He would marvel at it and tell me how proud he was of it: “My favorite moment on ‘SNL.’ ” The gag was, during a regular segment called “The Chris Farley Show,” Chris would mention items off a celebrity’s resume and the star would sit there with a confused look and give a half-assed nod while waiting for a question that would never come. “Remember when you were with the Beatles? That was awesome!” Hilarious innocent fun.

There’s a great new book that takes its name from that sketch. It’s written by the Farley brother who was named after Chris’ dad, Tom, and some guy named Tanner Colby. Tanner interviewed me for the project and I was happy to oblige. Chris hated how the Second City and the ImprovOlympic “leeches” used his name to cash in, he told me. I hope I’m not doing that here. It’s disgusting to me how every celebrity becomes gay after they die when they can’t refute it. However, the book made me understand that I wasn’t alone in my feelings about Chris. Many of them conflicted and very ugly. Like: “Why is Stanley Tucci alive yet Chris Farley is dead, Lord?”

In my opinion, when Chris looked in the mirror he saw a fraud. Performers who never “make it” will never realize how lucky they truly are. Chris believed the illusion that fame would somehow cleanse him. He would constantly ask me if I thought he was funny. Chris was what is called “a natural.” Naturals never fully appreciate their gifts. He never had to work at “his craft” — he just was. As Marlon Brando never understood or appreciated himself and let himself go, Chris did the same, only at a much accelerated pace.

He was as out of place in this world as a Ringling Bros. clown would be walking down Michigan Avenue. He dressed in bright yellow and green and wore comical funky glasses. He had the kind of body no tailor could fit, his sleeves always too long and pants always too short. “Fat guy in a little suit,” he would sing, lurching forward to illustrate the point, his arms jutting from his suits like the “Lost in Space” robot’s emerging from its mechanical torso. His ties never seemed long enough. They constantly fought the losing battle to get past his belly. Perhaps he tied them that way because it was just funnier. No matter how constricting his suits looked, that boy could move. In his breakout role as a Chippendale dancer (opposite Patrick Swayze), or ice skating, or high kicking in “Beverly Hills Ninja,” he moved as gracefully as the ballerina hippos of Disney’s “Fantasia.” “This spruce goose can fly.”

He would waltz past the director’s chairs with his name on them from his various movies at his apartment’s “script room” to get another massive line of cocaine. It was there I first read an original script for “Shrek.” Chris would be heartbroken to know Mike Myers dubbed over his voice after his death with that same lame tired Scottish accent of his. “Shrek” was written for Chris and made in his image, for God’s sake! They replaced his voice because they didn’t want to depress people. As Chris had been squeezed out of “The Cable Guy” (for Jim Carrey) in life, the same happened in death with the movie “Shrek.” Shame on DreamWorks.

It was in the “script room” where we talked about the David Mamet-penned Fatty Arbuckle movie Chris dreamed of doing. I believe it would have been the role that would have cemented him as a major film actor. It was to be a serious movie about the silent film comedian who got ruined after he was accused of raping a woman to death.

From his tiny “script room,” there was a million-dollar view of Lake Michigan outside, and inside was a mountain range of cocaine only Scarface or a movie star could afford. No fat kid from Madison, Wis., ever prays for that when they grow up. No, that was a gift from Hollywood U.S.A. I never did cocaine with him. But after he died the lure of it was unbearable, and I wanted to. What is the attraction? He would joke that it kept him skinny. He was ashamed and embarrassed if I watched him do “the toot! The nose candy! The booger sugar!” He would ask me to look away. In his heart he hated that he had become a slave to addiction. Around the time Chris was born, there was a classic “Star Trek” episode called “The Doomsday Machine.” In that episode there is a destroyer of worlds that would snort up planets. When Chris did cocaine, in my mind’s eye I saw Chris as the “Doomsday Machine” vacuuming up cocaine and barrel rolling into oblivion.

I’d joke with him, in a deadly serious way, telling him “fatso comedians die young.” Like John Candy, the Stooge Curly and John Belushi. He’d “yes” me and then do more cocaine. One time he had this crazy idea we should become blood brothers. We sawed away with knives on our own hands. No blood. It was harder than we thought. We chickened out. The next time I saw him he had a friendship bracelet and tied it on my arm, telling me I was now his brother. He later joked that we were going steady and I was his boyfriend because of the bracelets. Mine stayed on for years after his death until it finally rotted off my arm. Fragments of it sit atop a framed photo of Chris in my office.

One blistering afternoon a typically fat Chicago cop on horseback dismounted and asked me if I wanted to see “something cool.” He produced from his wallet a picture. Sweat was in my eyes, making my vision blur. I really couldn’t figure out what I was looking at until I saw the friendship bracelet I had tied on Chris’ arm. He thought it was hilarious. “It’s your buddy!” He laughed. It took awhile to register. It was a pre-autopsy photo of Chris. He had foam rolling out of his mouth and nose. Poor Chris. Bastard cop. I went into the courtyard of the church across from the John Hancock Center and wept.

“A little bitty tear let me down, spoiled my act as a clown,” he would sing as Burl Ives over and over when we would be together. Over and over. He would then ask me for the 400th time if “Fatty falls down goes boom” would always be funny? “Always,” I’d reassure him, “and if it’s ever not funny it won’t matter anymore anyway.”

It’s hard for the twentysomethings who work on my radio show to believe that the now tedious Steve Martin, Eddie Murphy, Dan Aykroyd and Chevy Chase were ever funny, cutting-edge comedians. Wherever Chris Farley sent himself, heaven or hell, at least he never has to reinvent himself. His brand of humor will eternally bring laughs. The curse of his contemporaries is a slow tortured death by incrementalism.

Jesus, Jim Morrison, and Belushi all left this mortal coil around the same age as Chris. They all became bigger in death. Belushi’s last movies were stinkers. Chris has become smaller in death, and I can’t wrap my mind around that. There was humility to Farley’s work that far surpassed his idols. And for those of us in his generation, he blows Belushi away. If he and Belushi share the same afterlife space, I have a feeling Chris isn’t that interested in John after all. Chris always had an audience of just one anyway: his father.

One night Farley called me crazed. He had “broken out” of rehab and wanted to go see his good buddy Chris Rock live. “Stop by my house first.”

Stop by I did. Farley was filled with stories and nervous and excited to see his old “Saturday Night Live” buddies. We would be sitting with Timmy Meadows and his wife.

“Those guys did all the work! Sandler worked. Spade worked. I would just show up and fall down and act like a horse’s ass. I wish I could write like them.” He was lucid and fresh — but not for long.

“Just a splashy-poo for flavor,” he would say. I would tell him, “No booze, period.”

“Just a splash! A misting,” he countered. There he stood in his small apartment’s stand-up kitchen, and it did start out as just a drop of liquor to an entire can of cola. But I knew where it was heading and tried to shut it down. The bull was about to be set loose in the china shop.

Before we left his pad for the show it was reversed. A drop of soda per tumbler of heavy alcohol. He promised he wouldn’t do this again. Addicts lie. He was chugging “the hooch” like a kid just in from his backyard with a fresh glass of Kool-Aid.

I remembered my last conversation with one of his agents yelling at me. “Stop doing cocaine with my client!” I furiously told him that I didn’t do cocaine and that because Chris was worth so much money to him he should hire an ex-Marine to slug Chris every time he tries to take a swig.

I remembered those nights when I would leave him at 9:30, only to see him waiting for me when my radio show ended the next morning, geeked on something, talking a mile a minute, and a few times with one of his brothers in tow. They would look at me like I was the bad guy who enabled him. That wasn’t the case! How could I stop him? Those tsk-tsk looks from his brothers, and the New York Post running a front-page picture of me and Chris the day after he died kept me from his funeral. God, how stupid and selfish of me.

I remembered running into David Spade at the Four Seasons in Beverly Hills, only to get the distinct felling (to my surprise) Spade hated Chris Farley’s guts. Chris explained that he had stolen Spade’s girlfriend and their relationship had been rough ever since. Too bad, because that comedy team could have been classic. Apparently, Farley succeeded in taking that friend’s girl.

I remembered how we went to a bar that he had bragged about, located on Chicago’s party avenue, Rush Street. When we walked in they treated him like Jimmy Stewart in “It’s a Wonderful Life” in that nightmare alternate universe pub scene in Potterville. “Oh, no, not you again! Get the hell out!” There was lots of cursing. “After what you did here last time, don’t ever come back, punk!” When I asked Chris what he had done, he claimed no knowledge of it. He probably blacked out before his really nasty antics had cemented themselves in his noggin.

I remembered him picking up two really nasty hookers off the street in his limo. I refused to have sex with them, so he kicked them out and threw fistfuls of crumpled money out the window at them. “I wanted to see your weenie,” he joked. I think they were transvestites.

I remembered when we showed up at Chicago’s Admiral strip club where the doorman knew both of us but then refused us entrance for lack of identification. Chris went crazy and yelled at this minimum-wage puke how important he was. Very odd, based on the Chris I knew. But not that odd to many others.

Chris told me that the one famous Hollywood type who really tried to help him most was Tom Arnold. When I interviewed Tom in April, he basically told me in his rat-a-tat-tat style that Farley was a manipulating addict who was very aware of his talent and was abusive to many. “Fourteen rehabs and he was fat! You gotta pick your poison. Heath Ledger was younger and healthier than Farley, and look at what happened.” He went on to tell me some heartbreaking stories of how poorly he treated his brothers and those around him. He said Farley’s last three movies were awful and Chris knew it and was freaking out. He told me, “Don’t feel guilty about Chris. There was nothing any of us could have done.” Just as I had romanticized my father in death, have I done the same with Chris?

As the Eiffel Tower is to Paris, the Chicago Theatre’s vertical sign is to Chicago. As we walked past that landmark sign and into the Chris Rock show, Farley detoured straight to the theater’s bar. When we reached our seats, Tim Meadows seemed shocked to see us. He whispered, “What’s he on?” I told him booze. “Uh huh,” he said, disbelieving. They were very polite, but this was not the warm friendship Farley had billed it as. No time for chitchat, either, because Farley was back at the bar, only stopping along he way for those “yes, I am Chris Farley” moments and photos with fans.

He was up and down from his seat so often and running down the aisles that it was rude and distracting. This is not how one behaves at a dear friend’s show. In the alley next to the theater we met up with Chris Rock. He was as polite as Tim Meadows had been but kept his distance. Farley was kicking some trash at his feet and embarrassed. Farley knew Chris Rock could see right through his inebriation. The jig was up and I was there to witness it. Farley reminisced about the good ol’ days, including taking a leak out the window at 30 Rock where they worked on “SNL” together. Nothing. Chris Rock, the well-rehearsed professional on show night, had no time for the ramblings of this slob. When a sweating Farley went to hug him goodbye, it was heartbreaking. Reluctantly Rock obliged, but then he was off to wow a sold-out audience with his precise comedy, and “Fatty” was about to go get drunker and fall down a lot.

Next stop? The bathroom. We were the only white folk in the men’s room. It has those old-fashioned, floor-to-chest urinals that are splashless and superior to today’s. He pulled every black man away from the urinals as they were relieving themselves. “It’s true! They are huge,” he said as he gazed at their genitals. Right down the long row of urinals in this historic old theater’s men’s room. “Mancow! Look at the size of this one! It’s an anaconda, for Pete’s sake!” My stomach hit my heels. We were dead. You don’t pull men away from urinals midstream and comment on their privates. At least not in Chicago. “He’s gonna get his head bashed in against the porcelain!” I thought. What happened? They all laughed! If anyone other than Farley did that he’d have been killed.

We met two beautiful girls as we went up the stairs. We chatted them up and they were good to go. Then Farley dropped his pants and fell up the stairs. “Oopsy!” Chris slapped his forehead like the V-8 ad and said, “I’m so stupid!” Then he headed for the bar.

As the sad clown stumbled to the bar, I slowed and let the crowd envelop me and fell back only to get the hell out of there. “Whew,” I said as I hailed a cab and headed homeward. Waves of deep sadness rolled across me. Poor Chris was lost. It felt like a bar at closing time when the lights are turned on. The once-friendly staff now ushers you blindly out into the cold harsh morning. That’s how I felt as I ducked out and escaped the Farley Express. The party was over.

Chris Farley was the genuine article. A crazed funny out-of-control fat man. I’m a fraud. On the radio I give the illusion of being a fun-loving party guy. My bleak reality is that it takes discipline and extreme effort for me to seem so carefree. Getting up at 2:30 in the morning to do five hours of radio five days a week doesn’t allow me to walk the walk. I talk the talk, but I’m bed by 9 most nights.

That overdose ended his life but not our friendship. For me, it’s a one-sided journey that continues to confound as I head toward a twilight Farley didn’t care to live for. And somewhere in the back of my mind Chris is always singing sadly to me: “Little bitty tear let me down, spoiled my act as a clown.”


(Sun-Times)


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