You Might Remember Me The Life and Times of Phil Hartman

by Mike Thomas

  Chapter 7

  Phil as Chick Hazard, Groundlings, early 1980s. (Photo by John H. Mayer)

  Just as his marriage to Lisa was disintegrating, Phil’s career was improving. In 1981, on the advice of Tracy Newman, he’d signed with the William Morris Agency—first as just a voice-over client—and soon began landing more commercial jobs as well as bit parts in films. Until late 1986, his screen credits alternated between Hartmann and Hartman. “We were living together and playing around with numerology,” Lisa says, “and he had always been interested in possibly changing his name.” For one, Phil thought Hartmann with two n’s looked too Jewish and wanted to avoid any hiring bias or pigeonholing that might hurt his chances of getting work. He also told Lisa that he’d been shuffling letters in his name to manipulate its numerology value and thus affect his professional fate. By dropping the second N, he discovered, he’d go from a five to a three, which represented the pinnacle of creativity.

  In late 1983, having shifted his focus to writing rather than acting, Phil began working with Michael Varhol and Reubens to dream up and script a future Pee-wee Herman movie. Reubens’s first stab (with Gary Panter) had tanked at Paramount, but Warner Bros. showed interest and paid a healthy advance that was split three ways. Phil wrote in a short note to Lisa:

  Our movie deal came in! 150K!! Front money right away!! I LOVE YOU! Ya Big Sweeter.

  Converging at Reubens’s home, a converted garage in L.A.’s Miracle Mile district furnished (as Varhol remembers it) mostly with cardboard packing boxes, the trio brainstormed by writing ideas on three-by-five index cards and tacking them to a wall: Pee-wee as an astronaut; Pee-wee as a magician’s assistant. Early in 1984, the guys moved into offices rented for them by Reubens’s manager Richard Abramson. Owing to his ongoing romantic travails—he and Lisa were legally separated in early February—Phil often found it hard to concentrate.

  Letter from Lisa to Phil, early 1984:

  Plaz—

  I don’t know what to suggest anymore but separation. You tell me you love me. You tell everyone else too, but I feel like a prize Dalmatian you leave out on the porch. You call me a “black hole” and I am too demanding when all I want, have ever wanted, is my husband to take pleasure in me who wants all the passion we can have and then too is sufficient without me. I need to be your true partner. I need to “dive in.” You accuse me of ratcheting things up—I agree. I would rather ratchet to the top and fall than piss around in the middle going nowhere. Perhaps a pause is what we need, a stopper in the stream that will allow the water to fill up, father to flow over or push aside the obstruction we feel. Please think about what we need. Not what we want. If we return to the source as the “I Ching” always talks about, we can find fresh water, a new well.

  We need simplicity and joy—it’s all gotten so dark and muddy.

  I know you resist this—Please don’t for us.

  If we can’t find a way to enjoy our lives together, I don’t want to continue. I feel as if I am letting go in a way. That breaks my heart, but it is happening. I am tired. I won’t cease loving you. I will relegate it to the part of my soul where all my other disappointments live.

  I will grieve but I will move on.

  This is not a threat or an ultimatum. It is the painful reality I face.

  I love you,

  Me

  Please talk to me ♥ Bloonda.

  In Phil’s letters to Lisa, which were shorter and in which he addressed her as “Bleentl” and “Bloonda,” he expressed his desire to be with her and his concern for her happiness.

  They were soon separated, Lisa had begun seeing another man, and Phil was crushed. As Varhol remembers it, he came in one day and, “in a very low-key way,” announced his impending divorce. “It was very surprising to me,” Varhol says, “and it affected Phil’s concentration at that point in terms of the writing process.” Phil never talked about it after that initial revelation.

  “He was a beautiful soul,” Lisa says. “That was the hardest thing of all: leaving all of that irreplaceable specialness because the frustration of getting it only in glimpses, like a sunny day in Scotland, was too much.” She dropped ten pounds from her already “too-skinny” frame after they parted, and had plenty of crying jags inside the walk-in freezer at Muse during her shifts. Though Phil was equally upset over the failure of his second marriage, his private anguish was hidden in public.

  At Pee-wee Central, however, his distractedness was becoming a distraction. “Paul would call me up during the writing [of Big Adventure] and complain about Phil a lot,” Varhol says. “When the three of us were doing the rewrite, I was really into it and Paul was into it and Phil would sometimes be sort of tuned out, sort of daydreaming. And sometimes Paul would go, ‘What do you think, Phil?’ And Phil would be caught off-guard.” Even so, his presence was far more advantageous than detrimental. Besides his creative contributions, Varhol says, Phil had a grounding effect on Reubens. When the mercurial performer flew off the handle or into the ether creatively, Phil calmed him down and tugged him back to earth. “I remember one time, Paul was talking about how he couldn’t wait to get famous so he could start hanging out with Spielberg, and Phil and I were looking at each other and rolling our eyes,” Varhol says. “When Paul got into this world domination phase—and he was deadly serious about this—Phil did a very funny Ed McMahon voice and routine. ‘Right you are, Mr. Herman! You are correct, sir!’ And he would break Paul’s spell.” Phil’s Pee-wee impression, which Varhol deems “the world’s worst … a mealy-mouthed Uriah Heep Pee-wee,” was similarly effectual in leveling with laughter. Quietly, Phil’s resentment of Reubens grew.

  * * *

  In early May, after settling on a Pee-wee movie story line that involved Herman moving in with his rich uncle and saving the town’s swimming hole, Phil, Varhol, and Reubens pitched the concept to Warner Bros. head Robert Shapiro, who hated it. “He wanted to fire us on the spot,” Varhol says. “As a matter of fact, after Paul did the pitch, Shapiro walked out of his office for, like, ten minutes. When he came back, he said, ‘Paul, I want you to stay, and you guys can go’—meaning Phil and I. So I walked out to the parking lot with Phil and said, ‘What do you think just happened?’ And he goes, ‘I think we just got fired.’” Fortunately, that wasn’t the case. Varhol says Reubens fought for the project and them in the process, winning his team another chance to produce something the boss wouldn’t loathe. “Paul was very astute about certain showbiz things,” Varhol says. “And I know that if Paul thought we were going to get fired and he would have to start from zero again, it wasn’t really in his best interest, either.”

  So the tweaking and brainstorming continued, eventually yielding a premise that stuck: Pee-wee’s super-fancy bike gets swiped and he sets off to recover it. Hilarity ensues. Varhol contends the idea was his. “Paul has described it as a eureka moment that he had, and it wasn’t that way at all.” And it was Phil, he says, who came up with the bike’s memorable description: It’s a classic with fat whitewall tires, a sparkling two-tone paint job and options galore. Mud flaps, headlights, a personalized license plate hanging from a hand-tooled brown-leather seat.

  Their pitch green-lit, Phil and Varhol were tasked with penning an early draft of Pee-wee’s Big Adventure while Reubens embarked on a countrywide twenty-two-city tour with Paragon. Phil, though, was more artistically deferential to Reubens than Varhol would have liked. “Every time I’d make a suggestion, Phil would say, ‘Let’s wait for Paul,’ and I realized this wasn’t going to work out,” he says. “So we basically decided to hopscotch scenes, where Phil would write some and I would write some. We went through the outline and I said, ‘OK, Phil, you write these scenes and I’ll write these scenes.’” Before long, they produced a first draft of ninety-three pages. Upon Reubens’s return in early July, he read the script with fresh eyes before the trio revamped it from start to finish.

  * * *

  Perhaps soothingly for the diversion it provided, his break
-up with Lisa wasn’t the only thing weighing on Phil’s mind. Besides the Pee-wee film, he was in early planning stages for an hour-long Chick Hazard show at the Groundlings Theatre. Set at the 1932 Los Angeles Olympics, it was scheduled to run during L.A.’s prestigious Olympic Arts Festival, beginning in June 1984. The wide-ranging, ten-week celebration mostly preceded athletic competitions and featured, as per a New York Times account, “more than 400 performances by 145 theater, dance and music companies, representing every continent and 18 countries.”

  “A basic premise for the Festival is that art is not a form of propaganda but an instrument of truth, an opportunity to put aside differences and rejoice in being alive,” festival director Robert Fitzpatrick wrote at the time. “The Festival seeks neither to preach nor to dictate a hierarchy of taste. Participating countries have agreed to this premise. Governments that might have preferred more traditional representatives of their cultures respected the artistic integrity of the Festival and provided substantial support for artists of untraditional bent.”

  Chick Hazard’s road to the Olympics began with Lynne Stewart. Then a member of the Groundlings board, she encouraged Phil to submit a proposal to the festival committee, and the committee (to Phil’s surprise) approved it. “We tried very hard to raise the bar,” the show’s producer, Craig Strong, says. “The production values were much higher than in a usual Groundlings presentation. The period costumes were accurate and funny, but not over the top, and the comedy references were accurate to the period.”

  It was Chick’s, and Phil’s, widest theatrical exposure yet, and patrons flocked to Melrose Avenue for an evening of improvised intrigue with a comic twist. More than a way to promote the Groundlings, the production as Phil saw it was a chance to shine individually. Although he drove a black Porsche Carrera convertible (purchased used) and earned a solid living—“Phil always had a little bit more money than everyone else did,” Strong says—nearly a decade into his Groundlings tenure nothing momentous had happened in his career. Promoted in part on Phil-designed fliers that featured a be-hatted Chick rendered in black-and-white with a bright-yellow banana gun held near his head, Olympic Trials: A Chick Hazard Mystery opened in early June 1984 and ran through mid-August. It was a hit from day one. Directed by Maxwell and staged at the cost of $25,000, its cast of eight supporting players included Stewart, Katz, Mayer, and future Simpsons voice actress Tress MacNeille, among several others. “What was great about the Olympic Trials production is that it was much more grounded in reality than the [original] Chick Hazard sketches, which were a little more freewheeling,” says fellow Groundling Randy Bennett. “And Phil’s research on L.A. in 1932 was so impressive that he could just spew out these facts … He knew all of that history.” In the four or five weeks of rehearsal leading up to opening night, Strong remembers, drama abounded, mostly involving actor egos. HBO wanted to purchase the rights to their Chick production, and “there was a huge fight among company members because we had not created any contract. And so it was, ‘Who owns this material?’” The sale was nearly stopped but finally approved, though not without plenty of contentiousness. Phil himself was “very shy, uncomfortable” during a long contract conversation with Strong at Phil’s home in Sherman Oaks.

  In addition to the sticky contract business, Bennett and Strong say, Phil had trouble asserting his authority. He was always the nice guy everyone loved—the fun and generous and joshing hail-fellow-well-met. But as the lead actor of and a financial partner in this high-profile Hazard show, there were times when he needed to lay down the law more than he did. “Things would spin out around him,” Strong says, “and he didn’t want to be the bad guy.” As in other life scenarios, Phil dealt poorly with other people’s emotions and nearly always shrank from confrontation. “He had the creative sense and he knew how to help get the best out of people onstage, but anything administrative was not his forte,” Bennett says. “And sometimes he would [tell people] things that were not possible, so it put the producers and director in a very awkward position.” Even before the Olympic festival began, Tracy Newman got the impression that Phil was uneasy about choosing who would and would not be in a scene on any given night. “People would get mad at him for that,” she says, “and Phil couldn’t have been nicer.” Perhaps more significantly, owing to his imploding marriage with Lisa and his ping-ponging back and forth between Chick rehearsals and Pee-wee writing sessions, Phil’s attentions were ever more divided and his anxiety high.

  Ten days or so before opening night, he decided to take a short leave of absence. “There was nothing we could do without him in the room, obviously, because he was in every scene,” Strong says. So they told him he was free to go—with one caveat: He’d check in by phone once a day. With that settled, Phil set off for a two-day writing retreat at Two Bunch Palms resort in Desert Hot Springs. Ensconced there in nature, he recharged his batteries, wrote what he had to write, and headed back to L.A. refreshed and ready. “He really pulled it all together and it all worked,” Strong says. “It was really tense, but under pressure he could really perform.”

  The Miami Herald, for one, mostly praised the production:

  Though its fluid improvisational nature results in flaws, Olympic Trials does for ’30s-style private eyes what Little Shop of Horrors did for monsters.

  The play has every requisite element: The private eye who talks and shoots fast and who drinks too much; the bleach-blond secretary in love with him; the Oriental opium den; decadent rich folks; the good-hearted ex-con. It’s also got sensual, melancholy, trombone-dominated music.

  The audience gets to supply the name of the victim, the site and method of his or her murder, his occupation, and important clues and other details that change nightly. Some of the resulting improv is rough, but some of it sounds as if the actors have rehearsed for ages.

  Nonetheless, Phil was soon disappointed to discover, no one who could help him professionally seemed to care.

  * * *

  After the Olympics festival, in addition to his scriptwriting, Phil remained engaged at the Groundlings by way of teaching. Among his students was Julia Sweeney, then a Columbia Pictures accountant with acting aspirations. Her first improv instructor had suggested she repeat the introductory class, so she signed up for another session that happened to be helmed by Phil. “I was in love with him immediately,” she says. He was charismatic, interesting, funny—an urbane gentleman like she’d never encountered. He was even friends with his ex-wife, Sweeney marveled of Phil’s relationship with Lisa post-split. “He was sort of like Cary Grant to me,” she says. “So my introduction to him was like this gateway into a world I’d only suspected existed.”

  Now and then, as rapt pupils hung on his every word, Phil told stories of his past life—including his stint designing album covers for rock legends. “But I have to say, it was not braggy,” Sweeney says. “Of course, it was braggy. We thought he was really in the business. He was a working show business guy, and I had never been around anybody like that.” He was a great teacher to boot, she says, explaining things simply and clearly, and regarded as something of a minor legend in his own time by male and female charges alike. “I think every girl was in love with him and every guy was in awe of him and wished that he was their friend,” Sweeney says. “That class was really powerful and really exciting.” During one of Phil’s most memorable improv drills, students were asked to morph into hybrids of their favorite cartoon characters and close family members who bugged them. “And really funny things happened,” Sweeney remembers. “I didn’t know you could use formulas like that to come up with funny things. I didn’t know there was logic behind it. And in some ways there isn’t—it’s really instinctive and impossible to explain, yet it’s funny. But there are some things that are really tried and true, and he would tell you about those.”

  And all the while he yearned for something more.

  Chapter 8

  Phil on his sailboat, early 1980s. (Photo by Lisa Strain-Jarvis)

>   In the fall of 1984, as he approached the age of thirty-six, Phil’s disillusionment with his dearth of progress on the acting front hit an all-time high and his thespian ambitions were jettisoned altogether. Auditions were soul sucking, he decided, and from a skill standpoint he felt unequipped to compete. “[Y]ou can only go on so many hundred cattle call auditions, and suffer so much rejection, before it takes its toll,” he once explained. Though it may have been exasperating at the time, he later seemed relieved not to have been selected as announcer for The Price Is Right: “‘You win the chain-link fencing, and the meat by-products! Congratulations!’ Can you imagine?” But if he could write or co-write a hit, Phil reasoned, doors would open that so far had remained closed.

  He remained morose about his second failed marriage, too. Both Lisa and Phil were “horrid” toward each other for many months after their separation, Lisa says, and they maintained a mutual disdain for several more months after Lisa signed (unwittingly, she now says) papers granting Phil an uncontested divorce that became official on May 23, 1985. But when the anger and resentment subsided, they began talking again. Talk led to sex led to an attempt at reconciliation. They should get back together and have babies, Phil told her. As with Gretchen, he still longed to have kids. That Lisa was now cheating on her current boyfriend with her ex-husband made the situation extra-sticky. “I was living with this other boyfriend and I wasn’t happy,” she says. “I really missed Phil. I was still really in love with him.” With strong reservations, she left her newish suitor and moved back into Phil’s house on Norwich. Disappointingly but not surprisingly, in a couple of weeks he reverted to his old ways—the emotional withdrawal, the antisocial tendencies—and all hope was lost.