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He took the chevy to the levee.
Chevy Chase, 82, is the subject of the new CNN documentary, “I’m Chevy Chase and You’re Not” (Jan 1 at 8 p.m. ET).
The documentary covers the controversial comedy legend’s career, from his rise on “SNL” in 1975 to his fall when getting unceremoniously ousted from “Community” in 2013.
It also details everything in between, including his three marriages, his reputation for being “difficult,” his cocaine use, his movie star career in films like “Caddyshack” and the “National Lampoon’s Vacation” franchise, and more.
Here are the biggest bombshells.
His mom allegedly abused him
Chase’s mother and father divorced when he was around four, he said, and they both remarried. The comedian alleged that his mother, Cathalene Parker, was abusive.
Chase’s wife, Jayni, 68, who he’s been married to since 1982, said that the first time the couple spent the night together, “The first time I went to wake him up, he shuddered. He explained ‘my mother would wake me up slapping me,’ from the time he was a little guy.”
Onscreen, Chase called his mother, who died in 2005, an “out of control woman.”
The “National Lampoon’s Vacation” star noted that he looks back on his mother and thinks, “I feel sorry for her. She had her own issues. But, she was physically abusive to me.”
His cocaine use
Alan Zweibel, who was an “SNL” writer from 1975 to 1980, said, “to help stay up as we made money, people were doing drugs.”
Chase’s former original “SNL” co-star Dan Aykroyd said, “I tried every powder and pill. We all did back then.”
Journalist James Anderew Miller said onscreen, “the person they worried about the most was Chevy. He was doing a lot of drugs.”
Alan Greisman, a producer who said he spent a “lot of time” with Chase in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s, recalled an incident when they were in Hawaii together.
“He had somebody ship him….coke in a special shaving cream can, which he could twist in a certain way and get to the coke.”
Onscreen, Chase confirmed that anecdote, noting, “every so often, we’d have some cocaine flown in from the mainland. Mail’s here!”
His brother, Ned Chase, recalled an incident when he visited Chevy in Los Angeles, and there were about eight people sitting around a circular table.
“In the center of the table there was a lazy Susan,” and on it, “There was a pyramid. That pyramid was cocaine,” he recalled.
While they were making Chase’s 1981 movie “Modern Problems,” producers Michael Shamberg and Alan Greissman recalled an incident where “the night before” they were scheduled to begin filming. Chase told them, “I’m not doing the movie, you have to fix the script.”
Greissman recalled that they went to see Chase and, “we start to go over the script, page by page, and Chevy pours coke on the table and starts sniffing it, as though you’re supposed to be having a rational discussion about movie…and he’s just snorting coke like there’s no tomorrow.”
Shamberg noted that Chase didn’t offer to share the drug.
“Who does cocaine alone, in front of other people?” he said.
“I prefer to be liked”
Chase has a reputation for being “difficult.” Shamberg said, “Chevy….you don’t wanna work with him because he can be so unpleasant and so gratuitously mean. And I don’t think he knows that he is. It’s an instinct.”
Former “SNL” cast member Garrett Morris, 88, noted, “he might have been nasty to the other people, but he and I were like that,” and crossed his fingers, in a gesture to signify closeness.
Zweibel said that he believes it’s gotten worse as Chase has aged.
“The old Chevy could make you laugh putting you down. And there was a little bit of a wink there, so you were in on the joke. Now, it just comes off as mean.”
Onscreen, Chase said, “I don’t know what to say about the people who don’t like me, except f–k em. What can you say about something like that? I can’t say they’re misunderstanding me. Because maybe they’re not, by their standard. I just prefer to be liked, not disliked — like all of us.”
Chase’s daughter said the “Community” cast was mean to him
Jay Chandrasekhar, a comedian and actor who was a director on the NBC show “Community,” worked with Chase in many of the NBC show’s episodes, and was present when Chase was fired in 2013.
Chandrasekhar noted that he and Chase would argue “about how he was delivering a line, and it would get heated. And the next day, he’d come in and be rubbing my belly and telling me Riichard prior stories. I loved it.”
He noted, “there was a little bit of negativity around Chevy and the rest of the cast.”
The director explained that the show often did Chase’s scenes first so that he could leave the set.
“Community” was created by Dan Harmon and ran from 2009 to 2015, and starred Joel McHale, 54, Donald Glover, 42, and Yvette Nicole Brown, 54. Chase was ousted in 2012 after allegedly using a racial slur on set.
Chase’s wife, Jayni, noted that during his time on the show, “for the first time, it was clear to him that he was the old fart. His cast mates, they were so much younger, and they were just living a very different life.”
Erik Kritzer, Chase’s manager, said that Chase was “unprotected” from his cast mates ridicule on that set. “And every time I spoke to anyone, no one really did anything.”
“It was out in the open that Chevy Chase was a little difficult on ‘Community,’ and I’m being nice,” Chandrasekhar said. “People were talking about it, enough that Dan [Harmon] did that thing at the wrap party.”
When Chase brought his wife and daughter Caley, 40, to a wrap party, he got heckled.
“My dad was super excited to bring me and my mom to the wrap party,” Caley recalled. “And we walk in, and Dan, he had had some drinks…”
Jayni recalled that Harmon, “starts railing on Chevy on the microphone.”
Caley said that Harmon, “had gotten the whole cast and crew to yell, ‘F–k you, Chevy.”
Caley added, “I’m there. He’s showing his daughter, ‘this is the show I did.’ And we walk into ‘f–k you, Chevy.’”
She said, “That’s rough, and mean.’”
Eventually, Harmon was fired from the show in 2012.
Caley said, “There was a mini war with them,” but she recalled that Chase and Harmon “made up. And then my dad said ‘I won’t come back without Dan.’ It was crazy.”
Getting ousted from “Community“
Caley alleged that Chase’s character was getting written to be “more and more bigoted. And he was getting upset about it.”
Chandrasekhar said, “I was there directing, the night Chevy Chase got fired from ‘Community.’”
He claimed that Harmon wrote Chase’s character, “a blackface hand puppet routine. The character is a little tone deaf…Had it been Chevy in his heyday, he would have been totally fine, right. He said something to Yvette, I know there was a history between those two, around race.”
Both Brown and Chase “stormed out,” he recalled, and Brown wouldn’t return unless Chase apologized.
Chandrasekhar said that when Chase returned, the former “SNL” star said, “‘Hey man, I didn’t say anything. You know, I used to call Richard Pryor the N-word, he called me a honkey, and we loved each other.’”
The director recalled that he asked Chase to apologize to Brown, and Chase replied, ‘for what?’”
Someone on set leaked “that there was a racial incident” to The Hollywood Reporter “at 2 in the f–king morning,” he recalled, noting that there were around 75 extras there that day.
Chase then had a “meltdown,” and went “storming onto the set, and goes ‘who f–ked me over? One of you motherf–kers said to The Hollywood Reporter…my career is ruined. I’m ruined, f–k all of you.’”
Allegedly drinking on the job
Chase’s wife Jayni recalled that she used to buy a “six pack” of organic red wine when he was on “Community.”
“And after about four days, it was gone,” she said onscreen. “I pointed it out to Chevy probably five different times…..And then he didn’t like me pointing it out to him, because the beast of addiction starts taking over.”
She said that he was “not an alcoholic” for “all those years” that he was married to her.
“But alcoholism is a whole different level, it really takes over, and that was hard for him to stop,” she explained. “Chevy was functional, I didn’t realize it right away.”
Their daughter Caley, who was living with Chase at the time, was the one who raised a red flag.
“She finally said ‘Mom, I think he’s drinking on set.’”
Heart failure and “back from the dead“
In 2021, Chase was hospitalized for five weeks for heart failure.
“Something was wrong, and he couldn’t explain to me what was wrong,” Jayni recalled. “So, we go to the ER. His heart stops. During those years he was drinking, he got cardiomyopathy; when the heart muscles get weaker, and they can’t pump as much blood out with each beat.”
Chase’s longtime friend, Peter Aaron, said that doctors placed Chase in a coma for “maybe eight days.”
Caley shared that the doctors “warned us: ‘We might not get him back. We don’t know how present he’ll be. Prepare yourselves for the worst.’”
Chase has since recovered, but Caley said, “He has basically come back from the dead.”
He was “hurt” to be excluded from “SNL50“
Chase attended “SNL50” in February, which was a star-studded celebration of the show’s 50-year anniversary.
Past cast members such as Jane Curtin, Amy Poehler, Adam Sandler, Chris Rock, Eddie Murphy, Will Ferrell, and more all attended, and many of them participated in sketches.
According to Chase, he was also supposed to participate, and he was “hurt” that he didn’t.
“They told Chevy up until that day that there were two bits, they were going back and forth. Then there was no bit,” said Jayni.
Michaels recalled, “There were a couple versions of [weekend update] and we went back and forth on that. There was also a caution from somebody I don’t want to name that Chevy wasn’t as focused.”
Chase said that it was “kind of upsetting, actually.”
Onscreen, he noted, “And this will probably be the first time I’m saying it. But I expected that I would’ve been on the stage too with all of the other actors. When Garrett [Morris] and Laraine [Newman] went on the stage there, I was curious as to why I didn’t. No one asked me to. Why was I left aside?”
Bill Murray did a bit onstage for “Weekend Update” during the special, and Chase questioned why the “Ghostbusters” star was “there” while Chase was not.
“I don’t have an answer for that. I did bring it up once in a text to Lorne [Michaels] and then took it back. I said: ‘okay, I take it back. It’s silly.’ But it’s not that silly. Somebody’s made a bad mistake there. I don’t know who it was, but somebody made a mistake.”
He concluded: “They should’ve had me on that stage. It hurt.”
English (US)