(WENN)

Damn, no wonder why he’s seemed so uptight in his later years. Chevy Chase has revealed that he was basically tortured by his mom when he was a tyke.

“I lived in fear all the time – deathly fear,” Chase says in a new authorized biography, “I’m Chevy Chase . . . And You’re Not,” by Rena Fruchter, out next month from Virgin Books. It reveals that Chase’s concert-pianist mother, Cathalene, was a “very unhappy woman” who suffered from depression and panic attacks that could set her off at a moment’s notice. They had her locking young Chevy in a closet for hours at a time and waking him up in the middle of the night to slap him “continually and hard, across the face,” Chase tells the author. “I don’t remember what it was for, or what I had done.”

One of her other brutal punishments was to whip Chase over a period of days. “She would say to me, ‘Ten lashes on the backs of your legs every day for a week at 5 p.m.’ How can you hold on to that kind of anger against your kid?” Chase relates to Fruchter. “I knew I was a ‘bad boy,’ but I didn’t know that everybody wasn’t punished the same way I was.”

Wow, burn in hell, lady. Was she crazy because her parents spelled her name “Cathalene”? Who spells it that way? People who work in a mine? Anyway, I used to think Chevy Chase was really cranky after the stardom sorta dried up but now well, hang in there, buddy. Ouch.