Forget Callahan Auto Parts, the CEO of Ford Is Chris Farley’s Cousin

In Tommy Boy, Chris Farley’s Tommy Callahan tries to make good by running the family auto parts business. If Tommy Boy really needed help learning the ropes, he should have just reached out to Farley’s real-life cousin: Ford Motor Company CEO Jim Farley.

Jim, like other members of the Farley family, has a treasure trove of Chris stories — not all fit for public consumption. “He’s like a fifth drawer that I rarely open,” Jim recently told The Detroit News. But Saturday Night Live’s 50th anniversary seemed like a good time for the auto exec to share a few tales about his famous cousin.

“Chris always got in trouble, but it was innocent,” says Jim. “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.”

Chris’ fun may have been childlike but pants-down Cinnabon fights at Chicago’s O’Hare Airport are serious grown-up hijinks. Jim said Chris had a habit of crashing family cars and dubiously blaming deer for the damage. He recalled another time when Chris, visiting the family cottage in northern Michigan, pulled off a heist at a local bar. He snatched the tavern’s collection of tacky black-light paintings, then decorated the house while family members were sleeping. 

Jim’s straitlaced father, James, wasn’t impressed. After Chris got the boot from Marquette and lost a summer job, he grilled his nephew about his future. “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?’” 

“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.” 

“Okay, let's see what you can do.”

Uncle Jim and most of the extended Farley family were still surprised when Chris turned up on SNL. “We were all like, WHAT? Chris is going to Saturday Night Live? In our family, it was like, of course, he’s funny. But other people think he’s funny, too?”

As Chris got sucked into a world of fame and professional partying, Jim became a West Coast big brother figure. “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,” Jim says. “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.”

In the mid-1990s, Jim’s job in the auto industry took him to Europe. He was in Brussels driving to work in 1997, one week before Christmas, when the report came on the radio. “I heard it on the news. I didn’t even hear it from my family: ‘Chris Farley has died in Chicago,’” Jim says. “It was totally devastating.”

Years later, Jim thanked Adam Sandler for the Chris Farley tribute song that he performed on SNL in 2019. “It was a beautiful gift,” says Jim. “Is there not a more beautiful gift from a friend than that?”