Recent article on Chevy Chase - Honest and brutal
gigohead
which really shed light on Chevy. Basically it was about how Chevy was
a total prick during his rise and how he burned many in Hollywood. He
was not a very happy person.
But that changed when he was brutally "roasted" in 2001 and Paul
Schafer told Chevy what a bastard he was for many years and that he
had no friends. He changed after that and he came into becoming a
better person. It's a great article, probably the most honest and
forthcoming the magazine has ever written about anyone!
Hope anyone doesn't mind, I cut and pasted it.
gigohead
------------------------------
He's Still Chevy Chase (And You're Not)
''SNL'''s first breakout star laughs about his disappearance. Chevy
Chase struck comedy gold with ''Caddyshack,'' ''Fletch,'' and
''Vacation,'' but then he crashed and burned. Here's what happened by
Daniel Fierman
Chevy Chase recalls the precise moment he hit bottom. It happened in
front of unflinching television cameras, as he sat alone on a dais
with his eyes masked by tinted sunglasses. Offered a hundred grand by
Comedy Central to do a televised Friars Club roast, Chase was
introduced to his place in history. And it was brutal.
He'd been roasted before, way back in 1990, and the place had been
packed. Paul Newman, Robert De Niro, and Richard Pryor were there. The
hall had been populated by a galaxy of well-wishers, movie stars,
comedic geniuses, and beautiful girls -- all ready to lovingly trash
the smart-ass behind ''Saturday Night Live'''s ''Weekend Update'' and
classics like ''Caddyshack'' and ''Fletch.'' In the grand tradition of
the Friars, it had been harsh but sweet, and Chase had left happy. So
when he was offered the chance to do it again in 2002, he said sure.
He donated the hundred grand to his wife Jayni's favorite charity and
showed up in a fine mood.
What happened next was so awful that people who were there -- from
audience members to Comedy Central staffers -- still have difficulty
talking about it. Chevy Chase walked on stage and realized that almost
none of his friends had shown up. He was led to a red overstuffed
chair, where he blinked into the television cameras -- first stunned,
then angry, then devastated -- as various basic-cable personalities
and B-list comics marched to the podium and trashed him. Total
strangers telling him that his movies were crap, his talk show was a
comedy abortion, he had never been funny. Total strangers giggling
about his addiction to drugs. There was no warmth in their comments.
No real affection. Because after years of silence from Chase -- and
hundreds of thousands of words written about his behavior during the
late '70s and early '80s -- a consensus had emerged about the man.
Everyone agreed without even having to think about it: Chevy Chase was
a bastard.
He sat there in front of the world as it sank in for the first time.
This was how he was remembered. This was his legacy. And when it was
all over, he stood up, took a few bilious -- and dreadfully unfunny --
shots at his tormentors, and finally stared dead into the camera and
uttered two words: ''That hurt.'' He fled the theater and went
directly to his hotel room.
Paul Shaffer, the emcee of the roast, left the hall concerned and
called Chase. Told him he was coming up to his room. Sat with Chase on
the bed for hours, trying to figure out what had happened, why he was
so loathed, what went so wrong. And then, finally, Shaffer told Chase
what he needed to hear. ''Paul said, 'Chev, I could tell you were
hurt. I could tell that. And I just want you to know that when you
were on 'Saturday Night Live,' you were generous to a fault. To
everybody. Everybody loved you.'''
Shaffer left and Chase sat by himself in the dark. Crushed.
The ugly truth is that a lot of people don't love Chevy Chase. They
don't even like him. You hear it in their gently damning praise,
off-the-record slams, pointed nonanswers, and firm no comments. This
isn't really surprising, because apparently the man possesses a truly
spectacular talent for pissing people off. And at the height of his
success he wantonly torched bridges and offended friends, often
without even knowing it.
''My first impression of Chevy was that he was really good-looking,
but kind of mean,'' says Laraine Newman, who worked with Chase during
his time at ''SNL'' and has been friends with him since. ''He teased
in the way that a big brother would, [aiming for] exactly what would
hurt your feelings the most. I say this as someone who loves him. And
loves him a lot.''
''He's a Philip Roth character, except that he's not very Jewish!''
laughs Buck Henry, who also met Chase on ''SNL.'' ''Even when he's
giving you a compliment you just want to kill him. It's very strange
and it's out of his control, not unlike Tourette's. It just made you
shake your head.''
So when Chase fell in the late 1980s, he fell far, fast, and onto a
bed of rusty nails. Truth be told, the quality of his work had been
declining for a long time. Whereas once he saw the best scripts and
got the juiciest paychecks -- complete with perk packages and
stipulations that his name be at 75 percent the size of the title on
screen -- by 1988 Chevy Chase was the kind of actor who'd star in junk
like ''Caddyshack II,'' ''Christmas Vacation,'' ''Nothing but
Trouble,'' and ''Fletch Lives.'' It wasn't that he wasn't funny
anymore. Or even that he didn't know how bad the movies were. He just
didn't have any options -- or goodwill -- to draw from.
''I'd say I've done only five movies in my life that were any good,
but that was a particularly bad time,'' he says over a cabernet in a
gloomy corner of the Polo Lounge in Beverly Hills. ''There was a whole
slew of ''Cops and Robbersons,'' just films that didn't measure up,
that didn't stand for anything comedically. They were purely for a
paycheck. So I thought, 'Ah, let's try something new.' So I went to
Fox with this late-night show.''
''The Chevy Chase Show'' would become a cautionary tale of legend. The
show that Chase pitched to Fox was actually pretty interesting,
inspired by one of his heroes, 1950s television pioneer Ernie Kovacs.
What he had in mind was a variety act, something branded by spitting
nastiness and sly sketches, featuring only the occasional guest. The
debut episode, for example, was supposed to have seen the host get
bitten by a rattlesnake and nearly die within the first five minutes.
Slowly, though, those kinds of ideas were peeled away. First Fox nixed
shooting on a soundstage, claiming they didn't have enough parking for
a studio audience. Then they secured a theater in L.A. and furnished
it with a set that looked remarkably like the ones used by Leno and
Letterman. The programming team scheduled Chase's show at 11 p.m. on
the rationale that it would give him a jump on the competition, but
also conveniently placing him opposite the evening newscasts. And
then? Then they advertised, plastering the country with gigantic
pictures of their grinning star with a huge space between his two
front teeth -- an obvious challenge to David Letterman -- complete
with the tagline ''Ready to Fill the Late Night Gap.''
''This whole program of pitting me against David and Jay.... I didn't
want that at all,'' Chase sighs. ''I didn't want guests. I didn't want
to do the same thing they did. It wasn't my gig. But it just turned
into the same exact kind of talk show that they do. I've never really
gotten into this with any writer, but it threw me into a depression
that I had never had before. I couldn't be extemporaneous, only bored
and frightened at the same time. I needed cards. Cue cards! My best
work was always with my back up against the wall, improvising. It was
just awful. I didn't know what was going on with me and I wasn't
getting the right kind of help -- you know, medication. And I was
clueless! I didn't know Queen Latifah from Queen Elizabeth. I thought
she might be a queen! I had 12 writers, none of whom could make me
laugh. I don't know. Maybe nothing would have made me laugh at that
time. It was an ugly mess.''
His first guest was his old friend Goldie Hawn, whom he poignantly
danced with before the episode was over. The show was savaged by
critics and gleefully mocked by his peers. (Michael O'Donoghue, the
legendarily scabrous ''SNL'' head writer, kept a tape of the show by
his bedside until he died in 1994.) Schadenfreude ran red in the
streets. Rumors of cancellation ran rampant.
On Oct. 8, 1993, five weeks into the humiliating run of ''The Chevy
Chase Show,'' its host was on the way to a party. It was Chase's 50th
birthday, and his wife, Jayni, had rented the ballroom at the Beverly
Hilton hotel for a massive gala. All of Chase's friends were there.
Movie stars. Famous singers. Family. Well-wishers. Hangers-on. Jayni
had even gotten the band from the show to be the musical act. On his
way into the ballroom for the big ''Happy Birthday to You'' entry,
Chase felt a tap on his shoulder. It was his agent, CAA legend Mike
Ovitz. Your show, Ovitz told him, has been canceled.
Then Ovitz told Chase to go tell the band.
Chevy Chase was done. Full stop. He kicked around Hollywood for a
couple of years, but no one would have him. He battled depression, and
embarrassingly got picked up for drunk driving in 1995. And finally,
he decided just to get out of town.
''It was the best thing,'' he says. ''I had plenty of money. It was
time to move on. Start thinking in terms of your children [Chase has
three daughters] and what they face day to day, living in that place
with nothing but blond, blue-eyed movie-star wannabes and no seasons.
This was in their formative years, just before puberty and
adolescence, a tough period of hormonal overactivity that we guys
don't go through. We just get hair on our d--- and want girls for the
rest of our lives.''
So he moved his family back home. They bought a country house an hour
outside his native Manhattan and built a life. He spent more time with
Jayni, his wife of 22 years, whom he'd met on the set of ''Under the
Rainbow,'' a terrible movie about the attempted assassination of FDR
and the making of ''The Wizard of Oz.'' The time he's spent at home
shows in his kids. All of the Chase girls -- Cydney, 21, Caley, 19,
and Emily, 15 -- are pleasant, sharp, and funny; Dad thinks Emily is
the one who inherited his knack for comedy. He bought a few pianos,
scattered them around, and set about teaching himself jazz. Chase
would still occasionally get picked on, most notably by Howard Stern,
who prank-called him at five one morning in 1992 after Chase made some
mildly deprecating comments about Stern on CNN. Chase tried to be
polite, but Jayni picked up the phone and started screaming. ''When my
wife loses her temper, whoo!'' says Chase, fluttering his hand in
front of his face. ''What can I do?'' Stern has been playing that tape
mercilessly for years.
Other than that, though, Chase wasn't much abused. Just gently
forgotten. He likes to say that most of his old friends are dead --
Belushi, Gilda Radner, ''National Lampoon'''s Doug Kenney -- but the
truth is that after 1993 he lost touch with almost everyone he was
close to. People like Steve Martin, Laraine Newman, and Paul Shaffer
all say they barely talked to him in those years. He was politically
active, helping with Jayni's environmental charities and fund-raising
for the Democrats. (He lives near the Clintons and calls Bill, well,
Bill.) The only time his name would pop up was in books like Tom
Shales and James Andrew Miller's ''Live From New York,'' an oral
history of ''Saturday Night Live'' that painted him as brilliant,
arrogant, and casually cruel. (When asked about the book, particularly
some nasty comments made by Will Ferrell, Chase shoots back, ''You
wanna see his apology letter?'') He took a few roles in minor movies.
Some of them were -- purely incidentally, from his point of view --
successful. He marvels at the $1.5 million check he got a few months
ago for residuals on ''Snow Day.'' ''I did a picture about a talking
goose, too,'' he laughs. ''I don't know what happened to that one. I
think they're looking for distribution in Canada.'' And he had an
awful lot of time to think about that Comedy Central roast, and the
night spent with Shaffer in a hotel room in New York.
The Return of Chevy Chase
''I mean, nobody prepares you for what happens when you get famous,
and I didn't handle it well,'' he says (though his childhood in a
wealthy, highly driven New York society family had certainly prepared
him for money, which may be why he still has more than his share). ''I
was a young, new, hot star and I had the unbelievable arrogance of Ty
Webb [the golfer in 'Caddyshack'], the guy who says, when asked how he
kept score, 'According to height.' As time went on, the strident
narcissism and arrogance slowly diminished. But it was definitely
there. I'm older now. And a big crybaby.''
Chevy Chase is, indeed, older. He's 60 -- Chevy Chase is sixty! -- and
he walks with a stiff, rolling gait, the product of decades of
pratfalls and whacks to the groin. He's a little puffier. The long,
lean preppy face is now round, and made rounder by big, owlish
glasses. Wearing olive tennis shorts, white sneakers, and an Italian
racing cap, Chase looks like nothing more than the goofy dad next
door. And as Cydney, a student at Princeton, comes sauntering into the
pool house of their home, rolling her eyes at her father and the
journalist dim-witted enough to want to talk to him, it's clear that's
exactly what he is.
It's only when you stroll through his house -- a comfortable sprawl,
piled high with books and packed with overstuffed couches -- that the
Chase legacy is revealed. He dusts off $6 million movie contracts from
the mid-1980s, smiles at old photos from movies like ''Three Amigos,''
''Caddyshack,'' and ''Fletch,'' and laughs to the point of tears at an
old letter he had framed from Michael O'Donoghue to The San Francisco
Herald. (The letter is not only too profane to reprint here, it's
probably too profane to reprint in Hustler.) Leafing through the old
pictures with presidents and correspondence with stars, it all comes
rushing back. Chevy Chase is a comedy god.
''Chevy in a room is one of the funniest people I have ever, ever seen
in my life. And I've been around almost everyone who is funny in the
last century,'' says Buck Henry. Lorne Michaels agrees: ''You can't
imagine the beginnings of ''Saturday Night Live'' without Chevy,'' he
says. ''He was the absolute center of the show. The way that he's
funny [can] rub people the wrong way. But he has a great heart.''
Wandering through his house, shooing off the chickens and dogs and
cats that meander in the yard, past the tennis court and the barn that
serves as the office he shares with Jayni, Chase tells terrific
stories. Like the time he got in a fistfight with Bill Murray. ''It
was Belushi that started it, I found out later, by bad-mouthing me to
Murray. But he got his, because while we were swinging at each other,
he was in the middle and was the only one who got hit! I would have
won the fight. Absolutely. I'm taller. I have a longer reach. And I
had to fight a lot when I was a kid.'' About Belushi, ''you couldn't
really call John a genius. He was more of a brick. A brick with hair
on his back. I used to say [professorial voice], 'I brought him here.
I pulled him out of the water and shaved his back and gave him
books.''' Of course Chase also loved Belushi's outrageousness, a
quality he admires as well in the work of the Farrelly brothers,
particularly ''There's Something About Mary.'' ''When I saw Cameron
with that sperm in her hair, I thought, 'Well, now we're getting
somewhere!' That was one of the funniest things I've seen in a long
time.''
Chase's anecdotes have a well-worn, romantic feel, and in the
intervening pauses, you can tell that he misses the old days -- and
that he's a little at loose ends. His children are raised. His home
life is just fine. And just how much can a guy play jazz piano anyway?
Sweeping his hand past the four cars in his driveway, a trio of
eco-friendly Priuses and a Mercedes S600 -- ''I'm supposed to drive
the Prius,'' he says in a conspiratorial whisper. ''But the Mercedes
is much nicer'' -- he confides that his kids have been pushing him to
get out of the house. Maybe start working again. It's not something he
thinks is totally crazy. He spent a month out in L.A. this spring
taking meetings. He fired his old agent and hired some new kids to
represent him. Buried the hatchet with Bill Murray, whom he'd never
really squared with after the fight. He even shot a small part
opposite Naomi Watts in Ellie Parker and is aiming for a role opposite
Jim Carrey, a comedian he greatly admires. But more than anything
else, he discovered people in Hollywood not only remember him. They
like him.
''All these young people running these studios and independents, I
didn't know any of them!'' he says. ''But they were all in some sort
of awe or whatever about seeing me. 'Where have you been? What have
you been doing? God! We grew up on your films!' I was really received
well, as opposed to when I was there last.''
Laraine Newman, Chase's friend of three decades, likes to say that he
has awful demons but a wonderful heart. Those demons killed him in
Hollywood. But if anything is going to bring him back, it will be his
heart.
''You know, everybody has disasters,'' says Steve Martin, a friend
from '''Three Amigos.'' ''And then you have a hit and then the
disasters don't matter. So, if you think about it, everybody is just
one hit away from being exactly where they were. Chevy is one hit
away. It will happen. He'll get that hit. And he'll be back.''
(Posted:08/04/04)
Lola
> Hope anyone doesn't mind, I cut and pasted it.
>
> gigohead
This was a terrific article. Thanks for posting it. A lot of comedy
comes out of a really dark place, and Chevy Chase is clearly no
exception.
-- Lola