NEED TO KNOW
- A new documentary about Chevy Chase dives into his addiction to cocaine in the early ’80s
- Friends say it got ugly, and there was a time when he’d openly do the drug during meetings
- His wife Jayni recalls an intervention, where he admitted he had a problem and went to the Betty Ford Center
The new CNN documentary I’m Chevy Chase, and You’re Not (premiering Jan. 1) reveals a side of the comedic actor that perhaps not a lot of fans know about, including a past addiction to cocaine.
“We spent a lot of time together in the late ’70s and early ’80s. He was uniquely funny and pretty crazy. When we were in Hawaii, he had someone ship him many ounces of coke in a shaving cream can, which you could twist in a certain way and get to the coke,” recalls film producer Alan Greisman, who worked with Chase on 1981’s Modern Problems and 1985’s Fletch, in the documentary.
“Every so often we’d have some cocaine flown in from the mainland,” Chase adds with a chuckle. ” ‘Mail’s here.’ ”
His brother Ned Chase recalls visiting Chevy, now 82, in L.A. and going to a restaurant with a circular table. “There were about six to eight of us around the table, and the only person I knew was Chevy. But in the center of the table, there was, like, a lazy susan, and there was kind of a pyramid. That pyramid was cocaine,” Ned says.
The addiction eventually took its toll, and Chase became more erratic and difficult to work with.
When he was about to start filming Modern Problems, about a harried man whose life winds up in a crazed, drug-fueled spiral, friends say it mirrored his personal life. He’d take meetings about the movie while doing lines of cocaine — and not offering it to anyone else in the room.
“We’d start to go over the script page by page, and Chevy pours coke on the table and starts sniffing it,” Greisman says. “We were supposed to be having a rational discussion about a movie you were going to do, and he’s just snorting coke like there’s no tomorrow.”
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Jayni Chase, 68, the actor’s wife of 43 years, says their ENT doctor called her one day and asked her to come in. “He explained to me that Chevy was addicted to cocaine,” she recalls.
Jayni set up an intervention with her husband, where he admitted he had a drug problem. Chase went to the Betty Ford Center to get help, but only stayed for a week, and while he’d occasionally have relapses, for the most part he stayed clean. The documentary also explores Chase’s struggles with depression and, later, alcohol dependency, as well as his battles with costars on Saturday Night Live and Community, the NBC sitcom on which he appeared from 2009–14.
“I realized he was getting a six-pack of organic red wine, and after about four days, it was gone,” Jayni says of his issues with alcohol while working on Community. “I pointed it out to Chevy, probably five different times, and he would roll it back. And then he didn’t like me pointing it out to him because the beast of addiction starts taking over.”
“Chevy was functional,” she continues. “I didn’t realize it right away. Caley [one of their three daughters] did. She finally said, ‘Mom, I think he’s drinking on set.’ ”
The documentary doesn’t only focus on Chase’s dark side. Former colleagues discuss what they loved about working with him, including his Vacation wife Beverly D’Angelo, and Goldie Hawn, his costar in the 1978 rom-com Foul Play.
“He cared,” says Hawn, who, in the documentary, recalls an especially tender moment with her son Oliver when he was a young child. “And that’s the other part of the wild man, the man who fell over everything, the man who had faux pas. The really funny, wacky, crazy guy also has a deep heart.”
“The thing about fame is that it doesn’t really change you, except everything around you changes,” D’Angelo says.
I’m Chevy Chase and You’re Not premieres Jan. 1 at 8 p.m. ET on CNN.
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