There Was A Lot Of Wild Stuff In The Chevy Chase Documentary, But The Cocaine In The Shaving Cream Can Took The Cake

It would take longer than I’m Chevy Chase And You’re Not’s hour and 37 minute runtime to unpack everything that gets said, explained, and is still often left unexplained about the enigmatic comedian. One thing that is very clear about the SNL star and occasional guest host is that he got famous during a rampant era of drug use and abuse, and I can’t stop thinking about one shaving cream can story after watching.

I’m not a person that could tell you literally everything about every cast iteration of Saturday Night Live, but Tom Shales and James Andrew Miller’s Live From New York is one of my favorite books, and I did know a thing or two about Chevy Chase and his career following his run on late night TV. I specifically came of age in this industry during the era of Chase’s Community run ending and the drama that followed, so I know a bit about how the comedian developed a difficult reputation (and continued to do so with the release of the doc). But I can’t remember ever having heard or read this cocaine story before.

Chevy Chase Allegedly Brought Cocaine In A Shaving Cream Can

Cocaine came up pretty early in I’m Chevy Chase…’ SNL writer Rosie Shuster mentions Gilda Radner used to call it “the devil’s dandruff” and Dan Aykroyd admits everyone did it in the cast, though he “didn’t much like the coke.” Cut to Chevy Chase, who was allegedly the biggest user of the stuff around set, and “the person that they worried about most.”

If you haven’t watched the doc, the story in question came from Alan Greisman, a producer who spent considerable time with the funnyman. He mentioned one wild story about them spending time together in Hawaii that I can’t remember ever hearing about the comedian’s drug use, noting:

Chase confirmed the story, noting he'd ship the drugs from the "mainland" to Hawaii, and cracking a "mail's here" joke. His fellow SNL stars also said Tuesday became the late night on set to get the writing ready for late night TV, and that was the night where the drug use was most rampant. The seventies were a wild time at 30 Rock (so were the '80s), and it sounds like it was Chevy Chase who was often bringing the party.

Yet, people like Goldie Hawn and more also spoke about Chevy Chase’s softer side, how he would put her kids to bed, and show her empathy when she was a single mom in Hollywood. More on his multi-faceted personality has been explored in plenty of media in the past. Or, as the director of the doc noted, interviewing him wasn't "freakin' easy."

Chevy Chase Has Been Clear About How Drugs Came Into Play When He Got Famous

In the doc, Chevy Chase says being famous “made no difference” to him, but years ago he tried to explain how getting famous on Saturday Night Live at 32 was a “wonderful” thing from one standpoint, but also a “frightening” thing from another. This contrarian point of view I think really helped me to understand the person he is, or seems to be in I’m Chevy Chase and You’re Not. Years ago he told the aforementioned to Shales and Miller:

Chase also said in Live From New York that he has always been living “this kind of dualism,” a dualism “between the marvelous magic of becoming accepted” and “a lingering sense that one doesn’t deserve it.” It almost sounds like a weird sort of famous person’s survivor’s guilt. Meanwhile, he did also share one piece of advice Lorne Michael once gave him about coke.

Eventually, Chevy Chase’s partying ways in his younger days caught up with him, and his new documentary goes into the heart failure incident he faced in 2021 that left him in bad shape and with subsequent memory issues. His daughter Caley admitted he was still drinking before the incident, though he’d stopped using cocaine after a rehab stint in the ‘80s.