He's Still Chevy Chase (And You're Not)

''I mean, nobody prepares you for what happens when you get famous, and I didn't handle it well,'' he says (though his childhood in a wealthy, highly driven New York society family had certainly prepared him for money, which may be why he still has more than his share). ''I was a young, new, hot star and I had the unbelievable arrogance of Ty Webb [the golfer in 'Caddyshack'], the guy who says, when asked how he kept score, 'According to height.' As time went on, the strident narcissism and arrogance slowly diminished. But it was definitely there. I'm older now. And a big crybaby.''

Chevy Chase is, indeed, older. He's 60 -- Chevy Chase is sixty! -- and he walks with a stiff, rolling gait, the product of decades of pratfalls and whacks to the groin. He's a little puffier. The long, lean preppy face is now round, and made rounder by big, owlish glasses. Wearing olive tennis shorts, white sneakers, and an Italian racing cap, Chase looks like nothing more than the goofy dad next door. And as Cydney, a student at Princeton, comes sauntering into the pool house of their home, rolling her eyes at her father and the journalist dim-witted enough to want to talk to him, it's clear that's exactly what he is.

It's only when you stroll through his house -- a comfortable sprawl, piled high with books and packed with overstuffed couches -- that the Chase legacy is revealed. He dusts off $6 million movie contracts from the mid-1980s, smiles at old photos from movies like ''Three Amigos,'' ''Caddyshack,'' and ''Fletch,'' and laughs to the point of tears at an old letter he had framed from Michael O'Donoghue to The San Francisco Herald. (The letter is not only too profane to reprint here, it's probably too profane to reprint in Hustler.) Leafing through the old pictures with presidents and correspondence with stars, it all comes rushing back. Chevy Chase is a comedy god.

''Chevy in a room is one of the funniest people I have ever, ever seen in my life. And I've been around almost everyone who is funny in the last century,'' says Buck Henry. Lorne Michaels agrees: ''You can't imagine the beginnings of ''Saturday Night Live'' without Chevy,'' he says. ''He was the absolute center of the show. The way that he's funny [can] rub people the wrong way. But he has a great heart.''

Wandering through his house, shooing off the chickens and dogs and cats that meander in the yard, past the tennis court and the barn that serves as the office he shares with Jayni, Chase tells terrific stories. Like the time he got in a fistfight with Bill Murray. ''It was Belushi that started it, I found out later, by bad-mouthing me to Murray. But he got his, because while we were swinging at each other, he was in the middle and was the only one who got hit! I would have won the fight. Absolutely. I'm taller. I have a longer reach. And I had to fight a lot when I was a kid.'' About Belushi, ''you couldn't really call John a genius. He was more of a brick. A brick with hair on his back. I used to say [professorial voice], 'I brought him here. I pulled him out of the water and shaved his back and gave him books.''' Of course Chase also loved Belushi's outrageousness, a quality he admires as well in the work of the Farrelly brothers, particularly ''There's Something About Mary.'' ''When I saw Cameron with that sperm in her hair, I thought, 'Well, now we're getting somewhere!' That was one of the funniest things I've seen in a long time.''

Chase's anecdotes have a well-worn, romantic feel, and in the intervening pauses, you can tell that he misses the old days -- and that he's a little at loose ends. His children are raised. His home life is just fine. And just how much can a guy play jazz piano anyway? Sweeping his hand past the four cars in his driveway, a trio of eco-friendly Priuses and a Mercedes S600 -- ''I'm supposed to drive the Prius,'' he says in a conspiratorial whisper. ''But the Mercedes is much nicer'' -- he confides that his kids have been pushing him to get out of the house. Maybe start working again. It's not something he thinks is totally crazy. He spent a month out in L.A. this spring taking meetings. He fired his old agent and hired some new kids to represent him. Buried the hatchet with Bill Murray, whom he'd never really squared with after the fight. He even shot a small part opposite Naomi Watts in Ellie Parker and is aiming for a role opposite Jim Carrey, a comedian he greatly admires. But more than anything else, he discovered people in Hollywood not only remember him. They like him.

''All these young people running these studios and independents, I didn't know any of them!'' he says. ''But they were all in some sort of awe or whatever about seeing me. 'Where have you been? What have you been doing? God! We grew up on your films!' I was really received well, as opposed to when I was there last.''

Laraine Newman, Chase's friend of three decades, likes to say that he has awful demons but a wonderful heart. Those demons killed him in Hollywood. But if anything is going to bring him back, it will be his heart.

''You know, everybody has disasters,'' says Steve Martin, a friend from '''Three Amigos.'' ''And then you have a hit and then the disasters don't matter. So, if you think about it, everybody is just one hit away from being exactly where they were. Chevy is one hit away. It will happen. He'll get that hit. And he'll be back.''