The Chris Farley Show: A Biography in Three Acts by Tanner Colby, Tom Farley Page A

instance where I had an opportunity to exert some discipline over him, and I didn’t do it.

JOE LISS:
    Second City sees itself as a family, and we were a pretty codependent family, too. There could have been a big intervention from the cast, but it didn’t happen. We were all doing drugs.
    The one thing we did crack down on was drinking during the show. That wasn’t okay. One time I caught Chris in between sets. There’s the greenroom backstage, and then there’s another dressing room on the other side with a pass-through between them. I’m backstage, and I look down the pass-through and see Farley at his locker. He looks around, reaches into his locker, takes out a big tumbler, takes a big sip, and then hides it back in his locker.
    I’m like, “You motherfucker.”
    So I wait for Chris to leave and go and get a big box of salt from the kitchen. I take the drink, fill it with salt, stir it up and let it dissolve, put it back, and head back to the other room and wait.
    Chris comes back for the next show, reaches into his locker, gets the drink, takes another big sip of it and just does this beautiful spit take, spewing the drink all over. There was no more drinking during that show.

CHARNA HALPERN:
    We had a couple of meetings with Chris where Del Close told him about the clinic where he went through aversion therapy and stopped drinking. It’s a horrible process, like something out of The Twilight Zone . They shoot you up with this chemical and then they make you drink this watered-down alcohol until you vomit. Then they throw you back in your bed, and a couple of hours later they shoot you up and make you go through it again. They keep doing this until even the smell of alcohol makes you throw up. It sounds futuristic, but it works.
    So Del told Chris about this therapy. “You need this,” he said. “Try it. It works.”
    And Chris was like, “Nah, that’s too permanent.”

PAT FINN:
    We were at a bar in Chicago once, Chris and me and his dad. Chris’s dad goes, “Finner, you want a beer?”
    “Oh yeah that’d be great, Mr. Farley.”
    “Christopher?”
    “Uh, yeah. Thanks, Dad,” Chris says.
    “All right,” he tells the bartender. “Two Old Styles for Finner, and a coupla Old Styles for Christopher. And I’ll have a scotch. Tall glass. Rocks. Leave the bottle.”
    The guy just kind of stares at him. Mr. Farley stares back. Then he finally turns around to get the drinks.
    I go, “Wow, Mr. Farley, really? What are we, in the Old West?”
    “Look, Finner,” he says. “I like scotch, and when I want a drink, and this bartender’s talkin’ to his gal pal down at the end of the bar, I’m not gonna wait for him. So I get a bottle, and I can have scotch whenever I want it. On top of that it’s kind of fun to see what they charge me, because they never know how many shots are left in the bottle.”

TOM GIANAS:
    When his dad would come to the shows, they’d go to That Steak Joint, which was this steak restaurant right next door to the theater. They had this thing called the Trencherman’s Cut, which was this ungodly cut of meat, just an unholy-size piece of Chicago beef. You would buy it for the table and eat it family style. When Chris and his dad would go, they’d each order one.

TIM MEADOWS:
    His father used to tease him if he couldn’t finish his. It was funny to see Chris when his parents came to town, because it was the only time you’d see him dressed up. The pressed shirt, the sport coat, the slacks. He’d have a haircut and a shave. He wanted everything to go right.

TIM O’MALLEY:
    He was still a kid. His parents paid his rent for him. We told him to save some money and pay his own rent so he’d feel more responsible for himself. “But my dad wants to pay for everything,” he’d say.

JOE LISS:
    It was like they were still treating him like a kid at college, and he was embarrassed of it, or tired of it. He would get these care packages from his mother, and he would get