My cousin, Chris: Ford CEO Jim Farley opens up about his relationship with Chris Farley

DETROIT — To the world, he was Chris Farley, the beloved, larger-than-life comedian who was known for crashing through tables or squeezing into jackets several sizes too small for his frame — anything he could do to make people laugh.

To Ford Motor Co. CEO Jim Farley, he was his cousin Chris, the hilarious kid he grew up with whom he watched rise to fame on “Saturday Night Live” and shine in movies such as “Tommy Boy,” while away from the spotlight he struggled with drug and alcohol addiction.

Jim, a self-described “hard-nosed dude,” doesn’t often speak publicly about Chris. “He’s like a fifth drawer that I rarely open,” he says, during a video interview from his Detroit residence in late January.

But on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of “SNL,” NBC’s late-night sketch comedy series that rocketed Chris to superstardom, Jim cracked open that drawer to share stories and memories of his cousin, who died tragically of a drug overdose in 1997 at age 33.

Jim has hundreds of stories of Chris, some of which are fit for public consumption, many of which are not, he says.

There was the time, at the family cottage in northern Michigan, when Chris swiped all the decorations from the wall of a Harbor Springs bar — black-light paintings of panthers and the like — and the next morning, family members awoke to find them spread out all over the house.

Or the time when Jim and Chris took a red-eye flight from Los Angeles to attend their grandmother’s funeral but missed their connecting flight because Chris was escorted out of Chicago O’Hare International Airport at 5:30 a.m., after dropping his pants and getting into a food fight at a Cinnabon.

“Chris always got in trouble, but it was innocent,” says Jim, who said Chris had a habit of crashing family cars and blaming deer for jumping out at him in the road, even if that was never the case.

“It was very childlike, these ‘live in the moment, let’s have fun’ type of mannerisms he had. He was always very physical, and he always loved taking over the bar, taking over the family function, taking over the airport if he could.

“He was always performing,” he says. “Always.”

The funny cousin

That goes back to the summertime family reunions where the Farleys would gather in Madison, Wisconsin.

Jim was born in Buenos Aires and moved with his family to Greenwich, Connecticut, at an early age. In the summers, they’d travel to Madison, where the Farleys were centered, and that’s where he’d spend time with Chris, his father’s brother’s kid, who was only a year and a half younger than him.

Those family reunions were large, boisterous occasions, and Jim and Chris were two of more than two dozen cousins running around.

“We have a pretty typical Irish family. Lots of emotions, competition and booze,” he says. “So it all made for lively reunions.”

Lively, sure, but also a bit of a pressure cooker. The Farleys are a driven family, where everyone is expected to succeed at a high level.

“There are a lot of Type-A personalities in my family,” says Kevin Farley, Chris’ younger brother. “You were expected to work hard. You were expected to go into business and do the entrepreneurial thing. That’s the way it was.”

Jim, the son of a banker, was well on his way to a distinguished, high-level auto career. Chris, on the other hand, wasn’t always sure on which path he was headed.

He was a gifted athlete, a member of his high school wrestling team who had taken ballet classes early in life, and he was skilled on the basketball court.

But he wasn’t the sharpest student, and he had difficulty holding down a job. Jim’s father, James, the oldest of his six siblings, took particular pleasure in grilling his nephew about what he was going to do with his life.

One summer, Chris had been kicked out of school at Marquette University, and he was fired from his job as a lifeguard.

“My dad goes, ‘You got kicked out of your college, or you flunked out. And then you couldn’t even hold a job as a lifeguard in Madison at the public beach. What the hell are you going to do with your life?’” Jim says. “Chris answered, ‘Oh, Uncle Jim, I’m going to be a comedian.’ ‘What’s that? Oh, you make people laugh for money?’ ‘Yeah, for money.’ ‘OK, let’s see what you can do.’”

It was then on Chris to make the family laugh, the whole family, a task he was usually up to.

‘Live from New York …’

The Farleys were used to Chris cracking them up, but it wasn’t until 1990 when he made the leap from Second City in Chicago to “SNL” that they realized he was more than just the guy that stole the show at family reunions.

“We were all like, ‘WHAT?’ Chris is going to ‘Saturday Night Live?’” Jim says. “In our family, it was like, of course, he’s funny. But other people think he’s funny, too? We didn’t know. We had no idea. We knew he was our funny cousin, but we didn’t know he was going to be a world-class comedian.”

Jim remembers going to tapings of “SNL” and watching Chris bring down the house.

He was there the night Chris did Matt Foley, Motivational Speaker, for the first time, bellowing about “living in a VAN down by the RIVER! ” so loudly that he made co-star David Spade crack up mid-sketch.

But what Jim knew that no one else in NBC’s Studio 8H did was the character was based on Chris’ friend Matt Foley, a Catholic priest from Marquette. Or that when he did “The Chris Farley Show,” a talk-show sketch where Chris would interview superstar guests and self-consciously beat himself up over his line of questioning, that character suggestion came from Chris’ father, Tom.

“He and his father were extremely close, and a lot of his comedy came from riffing with his father,” Jim says.

“Tommy Boy,” Chris’ 1995 comedy about a pair of brake-pad salesmen hitting the road in the Midwest, is largely based on Chris’ relationship with his father, who sold asphalt to county commissioners in Wisconsin and would often recruit his sons to join him on the road.

“At least half of ‘Tommy Boy’ came from those trips on the road with his dad,” Jim says.

Farley took “SNL” and Hollywood by storm, and his popularity exploded. He was recognizable everywhere, and the world became his audience.

But as Chris’ star got bigger, so did his problems.

Struggles with fame

As much as he loved making people laugh, the pressure to always be on, to live up to the expectations of others, weighed on him, and he coped by abusing drugs and alcohol.

“He was so overwhelmed, it was really hard for him,” says Jim, who points to photographer Chris Buck’s 1994 photo of Farley, where he’s wearing a crown on his head and looking dejected, as an encapsulation of Chris’ inner conflict.

“He would really struggle with the pressure. On the one hand, (fame) gave him a great way to touch a lot of people’s lives with comedy, which really made him happy. He loved people coming up to him and telling him about how he made their life a little better because they had a snicker or a laugh,” he says. “But at the same token, the pressure was a lot because he had to always be funny on the spot.”

As his fame grew and the people around him started to change, Jim — a high-ranking executive at Toyota at the time, brought on to launch the Scion brand — became a reality check for Chris. He was nearby, as they were both living in Southern California, and Chris would often stay with Jim at his place in Santa Monica.

“I was the straight guy,” Jim says. “I was the business guy that was there to support Chris, to be his older cousin. I never really found the Hollywood thing attractive at all. I was suspicious that Chris would be surrounded by people who enabled him in a negative way. So my role wasn’t to hang out with those people or be friends with them. My role was, ‘Hey Chris, let’s get out of here as quick as possible.’ And it wasn’t very easy because Chris loved those moments.”

Kevin says Jim was good for Chris.

“Jim was one of those guys in L.A. that Chris could trust because he was family,” he says. “They were in two different worlds because Chris was surrounded by Hollywood people, and Jim was on the business side of things. Jim would talk to Chris about living a healthy life, and he would point out ways Chris could take care of himself. They were very good with each other, and Chris would listen to Jim.”

In Los Angeles, it was often Jim who Chris would call for help when he needed it. It was Jim who Chris would call to get him a priest; a good Catholic boy, Chris found comfort and peace in religion. If Chris was going on Jay Leno’s show, he’d call Jim to go with him. And it was Jim who would take Chris to rehab facilities and visit him while he was inside, trying his best to get clean.

But when Jim’s job with Toyota pulled him to Europe in 1995, he could no longer act as a gatekeeper, and that’s when Chris went off the deep end.

Jim remembers exactly where he was when he heard the news. He was driving to work in Brussels in December 1997, passing by NATO headquarters, when it came across the radio that Chris had died. It was one week before Christmas.

“I heard it on the news. I didn’t even hear it from my family,” Jim says. “‘Chris Farley has died in Chicago.’ I was like, ‘What?‘ It was totally devastating.”

He never got the chance to say goodbye, or to be around him as the Farley family reunions were passed on to the next generation.

“I wish he had met my children because he was so amazing around kids,” says Jim, a father of three children with his wife, Lia. “He would have been such a great uncle. Uncle Chris. He would have been just fantastic. My kids adore him, but they never got to know him.”

He still mourns the loss of his cousin, but he doesn’t do it alone.

After Adam Sandler released his tribute song to Chris in 2018 — he performed it on “SNL” in 2019 — Jim was able to personally thank the comedian for the heartfelt tearjerker.

“I saw (Sandler) at a pool in Maui, and I said, ‘Thank you for honoring Chris.’ He said, ‘It’s what I should do,’” Jim says. “It was a beautiful gift. Is there not a more beautiful gift from a friend than that?”

Preserving his memory

Jim was hired at Ford in 2007 and became CEO in 2020. Apart from his job, he regularly volunteers at the Pope Francis Center in Detroit, picking up a mop or scrubbing out an oven with a wire brush, whatever needs doing on any given day.

He’s donated not only his time but his money to the organization, and when the center opened a new campus in 2024, the Rev. Tim McCabe, the Pope Francis Center’s president and CEO, asked Jim if he would like to dedicate a space at the new building.

Jim chose not to do something in his own name, but to dedicate a classroom that holds Narcotics Anonymous and Alcoholics Anonymous meetings for people in recovery in Chris’ honor.

“Jim has a real heart for caretaking, and it was his mission to take care of Chris,” says McCabe, who has gotten to know Jim well over the last few years. When Jim told him he wanted to dedicate the space to Chris, “I was surprised but not surprised,” McCabe says. “It’s who Jim is.”

The words “DEDICATED TO THE MEMORY OF CHRIS FARLEY” are spelled out in black lettering on the wall of the classroom, and McCabe says they’re always a head-turner for visitors.

For Jim, it’s a point of pride, and he knows how warmly his cousin would have felt about it.

“He would love the fact that there’s people right now in downtown Detroit at the Pope Francis Center dealing with their addiction in the Chris Farley room,” he says.

A life unedited

As much as Jim tries to keep his Chris drawer closed, it’s always at least a little bit open.

He says he’s considering doing an episode about Chris on his podcast, “Drive with Jim Farley,” later this year. And he says in a recent business meeting, a U.S. senator pulled out his phone and showed him a picture of his grandson and asked, “Doesn’t he look just like Chris?”

“He would be really happy to know how people still think about him. Not his addiction, not his downfall, but his comedy,” says Jim, 62. “He would love the fact that people are still watching ‘Tommy Boy.’”

Jim says he has just one piece of memorabilia from Chris, a signed “Tommy Boy” press kit from the night of the film’s March 1995 premiere. “He asked me to hold it because he had an extra signed one, and out of complete coincidence, I ended up keeping it. It’s the only thing I have of his,” he says.

The reason Chris and his comedy live on is because it was uninhibited, Jim says.

“Chris was a complete unedited human. He was made to make people laugh, but he did it in an unedited way,” he says. “When something came in his head, he just did it. And, of course, he’s beloved for that because we’re all edited. Everything in our lives is edited.

“It turned out that was his gift,” Jim says. “Everyone could relate to Chris, and everyone was astonished in the lack of limits in his physical comedy. That’s why other people were laughing during his skits. ‘What are you doing, Farley?’ We all kind of fell in love with the guy because that’s not how life is for most of us.”