Could it be more sad? Chandler Bing would have said it sarcastically, choosing to hit the “be” for emphasis, an eccentricity of phrasing rarely employed by anyone before Friends and afterwards by everyone all the time. But no one is in the mood for sarcasm today. Matthew Perry, the man who was Chandler, is dead at the age of 54.
The scandalously early demise of a member of the sextet that starred in one of American television’s most successful and best loved sitcoms, a worldwide ratings phenomenon between 1994 and 2004, and a 236-episode testimonial to the optimism of youth, hits hard. As Perry observed, there was no dividing line between Friends and its audience, no fourth wall for Chandler, Ross, Joey, Rachel, Monica and Phoebe to crash. These friends in their unlikely Manhattan apartments were our friends too, resident in the small, fat-bottomed televisions in the corners of our flatshares.
Whatever irony the terrible, yet not exactly unexpected, news carries, it is the darkest kind. Friends’ subject, as announced in its title, was the intense relationships of young adulthood, the exploratory zone between the family you are born into and the one you have yet to create. Perry was discovered alone in the Jacuzzi of his home in Los Angeles on Saturday. “I’m a schmuck who’s alone in his house at 53, looking down at an unquiet ocean,” he wrote in his unforgivingly honest autobiography, published last year. At the end no one was there for him. His best friend was someone whose company he paid for: his assistant, Erin, whom he employed after meeting her in a rehab where she had been working. Not only was this female friendship with a lesbian blessedly free of the romantic tension that ruined most of the others in his life, he wrote, it allowed them to “talk about hot women together”. Critics accused Friends, Lovers and the Big Terrible Thing of self-pity. Maybe, but its author’s jokes punctured it often enough.
In the long run, if not right now, his gift for comedy will come to mind first. It was, said Lisa Kudrow, who played Phoebe, his jokes that uplifted spirits during the gruelling filming of the show’s titles (“Can’t remember a time I wasn’t in a fountain”). His language-changing delivery of Chandler’s deadpan sarcasm was devised not by a scriptwriter or director, but by Perry with two friends in his schooldays. Chandler is the show’s truth-teller, the rationalist, the one who doesn’t cry because he can quip; he is Clive James’s definition of humour, “common sense dancing”. And it was Chandler, who at Perry’s request, got the series’ final line: after Jennifer Aniston’s Rachel suggests the Central Perk habitués go for one last coffee, he replies: “Sure. Where?” Chandler Bing will not die for a very long time. My teenage daughters have seen each episode of Friends more times than even I have.
So far there is only speculation as to the cause of his death, but its expectation permeates Perry’s book. Its third sentence is “I should be dead” and the next is an invitation to consider what we are about to read as a “message from the beyond”. Far from being a typical showbiz memoir, it is a record of a war against the inevitable, battles fought in 6,000 Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, 65 detoxes (starting when he was 26), 15 rehabs and twice-weekly therapy for 30 years. The war was waged at a cost of more than $7 million.
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Perry seems to have taken every drug but heroin, whose reputation scared him too much, ranging from tobacco to OxyContin (see also the mini-series Dopesick and Painkiller), gained often with great stealth from multiple doctors who did not know of one another’s existence. In 2018 he almost died of an opiate-caused constipation that led to his colon exploding, 14 days in coma and nine months with a succession of colostomy bags (they kept exploding too). He wrote several variations of jokes about being full of shit. And that was just his digestive system. A doctor predicted that such harm had been done to his lungs by smoking, he would be dead by 60 if he did not give up. By the end of the book, he finally seemed to have won that battle, but even with huge resources of money, talent and fame on Perry’s side, the war was unwinnable.
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During the Friends decade, fans came to dread the return of a new season in case Perry’s appearance had changed yet again. Between series six and seven he lost three stone, eight pounds. During the run, he calculated his weight varied between around 9st 2lb and 16st. None of that, however, prepared us for his physical appearance on HBO’s Friends Reunion special two years ago. He looked wretched, his face grey and patchily covered by a bad beard. His diction was indistinct (he had not long before lost his front teeth while eating a slice of peanut-buttered toast). For the show’s outside shots he dressed funereally in a tie and black overcoat.
Plenty of sentimental tears were expended over its hour and three quarters, and at the end Perry was passed a torn Kleenex by Courteney Cox, who played Monica, the friend Chandler married. It looked inadequate to the emotions Perry was suppressing. “To me, I felt like I was going to die if they didn’t laugh,” he told his co-stars of their recordings before an audience. “And it’s not healthy for sure, but I would sometimes say a line and they wouldn’t laugh and I would sweat and just go into convulsions if I didn’t get the laugh I was supposed to get. I would freak out.”
Kudrow, shocked, protested that he had not told them at the time. “Oh yeah, I felt like that every single night,” he insisted.
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Perry’s is not, however, a story of murder by Friends. If he died alone, the Friends company was, by all accounts, remarkably cohesive and supportive. Aniston, whom he originally had a crush on, quickly converted the potential embarrassment into friendship and it was she who first, kindly, approached him about his drinking and shared their colleagues’ concerns for him. David Schwimmer, who in the early series was proving a particular hit with audiences as Ross, took Perry aside early on and suggested that all six should negotiate together to ensure equal pay. His comrades did what they could and he appreciated it. “Friends,” he wrote of the show’s ending, “had been a safe place, a touchstone of calm for me; it had given me reason to get out of bed every morning, and it had also given me reason to take it just a little bit easier the night before. It was the time of our lives.”
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No, his psyche was damaged not by Friends but by a childhood dominated by the early separation of his parents and the feelings of rejection and anxiety that caused. Aged five, he began regular trips by plane from Montreal where his mother, a press secretary to the Canadian prime minister Pierre Trudeau, lived and the home of his father, an actor and model, in Los Angeles. At their homes, he learnt to hide his feelings with jokes and fill conversational gaps with chatter. His addictive personality may even have had its origin in the medicine he was prescribed as a baby. He was not two months old when he was given phenobarbital, a major barbiturate, for his colic. Certainly, from his first downed bottle of white wine, aged 14, he was never far from pain killers of one sort or another.
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Chandler was a clown, but in many ways remarkably similar to the troubled man who embodied him, “a hider of true pain”, as Perry put it. There was a difference, however. Chandler, originally envisaged as the more distanced observer among the six, grew into a true protagonist with a heart and soul. In the last seasons Chandler even dropped his formulaic “could-there-be” s. He finds sincere, pragmatic rather than delusional love with Monica.
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The real man was scared by any such thing. He was a serial and double dater who fired girlfriend after girlfriend — including Julia Roberts — for fear they would get rid of him first. In a beautiful scene on Friends, Monica goes on her knees to express her great fortune in falling in love with her best friend, and Chandler tearfully completes the proposal. In real life, Perry commissioned a painting of a woman who had spent two years as a “friend with benefits”, but whom he now realised he loved. Having presented it to her, he at the last moment ducked out of asking for her hand. Instead, he wrote, he went into “Chandler f***ing Bing mode”.
Perry was no fool, and would be the first to say much of his behaviour defied reason. Near the end of his book he claimed he was calmer and no longer needed to put on a show. “I have made my mark. Now it’s time to sit back and enjoy it. And find true love.” Yet much earlier than that, he realised that fame was unlikely to fill the voids in his life and very likely to make unconscionable claims on his privacy. Of Friends, however he was proud, and nothing in his later career came close to equalling it.
Even if its plots were propelled by the romantic twists of a soap opera, Friends was a proper character-driven comedy. Perry’s is a proper tragedy, a life ended by addictions he fought manfully, but which were too much a part of him to be defied entirely. The only part of his book’s relentless self-analysis that needs to be challenged is his belief that he had been punished by God for a Faustian pact that he had prayed: “You can do whatever you want to me, just make me famous.” God, apparently, once appeared in his kitchen. Yet surely not even the god of the Old Testament would be so vindictive. Perry has passed now to his beyond. I hope he finds there a calm that exceeds even that offered by the show he helped make eternal.
