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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