THE SUFFERING OF A FOOL

By GINIA BELLAFANTE

For a man infamous for his overbearing appetites, Chris Farley spent his last Sunday in notable sobriety. He attended evening Mass at Chicago's St. Michael's Catholic Church, which he had visited twice weekly while making his start as a comedian. Sunday had always been a favorite church day for him, as was Tuesday, when there were special prayers to the Blessed Virgin Mary. After the service on Dec. 14, Brother Patrick Concidine of St. Michael's remembers Farley's asking whether "we still had the Mass every Tuesday. I assured him that we do, and he said he would try to get back here." Then the actor made his way to the nearby Old Town Ale House, where he drank a bottle of Miller Genuine Draft. He never made it back to St. Michael's. On Thursday, Dec. 18, Farley's 300-lb. body was discovered by his brother at the actor's Chicago apartment, on the 60th floor of the John Hancock tower. He was only 33.

While autopsy results were withheld pending results of drug tests, it is clear that Farley's life was ravaged by his obsession with excess. His comic persona, honed to a sweaty, self-mocking perfection on NBC's Saturday Night Live from 1990 to 1995 and in such hit films as Beverly Hills Ninja, was of the ne'er-do-well party guy, the angst-ridden outsider, the addled but lovable omnivore. But that proved to be true life as well, reflecting a fierce appetite for beer, cocaine and heroin, food and women. He went through drug- and alcohol-rehab clinics, Alcoholics Anonymous meetings and weight-loss centers with little success. He once sneaked out of Santa Monica's Pritikin diet facility to inhale desserts with Tom Arnold. He was a universal addict.

Farley's final months were a rapidly accelerating death spiral. During the making of the as yet unreleased Almost Heroes with Matthew Perry, says producer Denise Di Novi, Farley "had to attend A.A. meetings every day. He was always trying, but with Chris it wasn't that he had just one problem. It was a constant daily battle, fighting his demons." By the time Farley was providing the voice for the title character in Shrek, an animated film from DreamWorks, studio partner Jeffrey Katzenberg was taking no chances. He put the comic under 24-hour bodyguard during recording to make sure he remained sober. Katzenberg and his associates were at times themselves taking drinks out of Farley's hands. (Based so closely on Farley, Shrek must now be completely reconceived.) The weeks from the end of October appear to have been a monstrous series of alcoholic-and-eating binges. "Around Thanksgiving," says Di Novi, "he was really heavy, even heavier than he's been the past couple of years." On Wednesday, he was up till 3 a.m., imbibing Jack Daniels-and-Cokes, finishing off the night with his two brothers at a Christmas party at the Hunt Club, where he was a regular. At one point, he did his Wolfman Jack impersonation and then asked, in a little-boy voice, "Don't you think I'm being funny?"

His friends had always given him "the Talk." Sheldon Patinkin, artistic consultant of the famed Second City comedy troupe, where Farley got his start, says, "He seemed to be hell-bent. I told him, 'You're drinking yourself to death. You're destroying your brain cells, and pretty soon you'll find it hard to be funny.'" Says Patinkin: "He knew it, and he'd agree, but he couldn't stop." Equally concerned was Farley's mentor Dan Aykroyd, who worried about the young comedian's idolization of another self-destructive SNL comic, Aykroyd's friend John Belushi, who died of a cocaine-and-heroin overdose in 1982, also at 33. Aykroyd says, "When I saw him in bad shape, I brought up John and River [Phoenix]." Meeting Farley in Toronto last summer, Aykroyd says, "I laid into him about what kind of pills and powders show up at nightclubs that are lethal. I said it many times to him: he was playing with death if he did this, and look who went before him." But, says Aykroyd, "I can't buy that he wanted to emulate Belushi this much."

"He had all the performer's vices," says a former SNL writer who was fond of Farley. "He was always on." Adulation helped ease that anxiety, but that drug was of limited efficacy. Says friend and former SNL cast member Rob Schneider: "If you need love from everybody, it feels good, but eventually the nightclub audiences go home, eventually the TV shows are over and the movies end, and you've got to live with yourself." Schneider adds, "Everybody loved him, but ultimately that wasn't enough, because he didn't love himself."

--Reported by Julie Grace/Chicago, Kim Masters and Jeffrey Ressner/Los Angeles

With reporting by JULIE GRACE/CHICAGO, KIM MASTERS AND JEFFREY RESSNER/LOS ANGELES