You Might Remember Me The Life and Times of Phil Hartman

by Mike Thomas

  Lisa wondered: Why was he letting this happen? Couldn’t they see a therapist and work things out? She loved him, he loved her, but the situation was beyond horrible. And now they’d brought another person into it, one who treated Lisa well and whose heart she had broken in her naïve belief that Phil could and would change. In spite of their differences and the considerable friction between them, she adored him and Phil her. “We’re soul mates. That’s just the way it is,” he remarked, a bit too nonchalantly for her taste. Not exactly, she replied. Not if they couldn’t find a way to mend their shattered bond. So she moved out again and they lost touch for many years.

  * * *

  Sometime in late 1984 or early 1985, Phil hooked up with a movie producer named Victor Drai. It was through Drai—whose films include The Woman in Red and Weekend at Bernie’s, and for whom Phil was writing a dark comedy titled Mr. Fix-It (destined for MGM, where Drai had a development deal)—that he met a statuesque blonde named Brynn Omdahl at a party Drai threw at his Hollywood home. She’d been lamenting that there were “no nice guys in Hollywood,” and wanted to find a winner. “She was such a sweetheart,” Drai says. And though he knew she had done drugs in the past, “she was a totally straight girl” during that period.

  Brynn’s given name was Vicki Jo. She had also been Brindon Cahn and, during a short-lived first marriage back in her hometown of Thief River Falls, Minnesota, Vicki Jo Torfin. The daughter of an engineer-turned-father (Don) and a retail shop owner mother (Connie), she had dropped out of high school, done some modeling in Minneapolis, and lived in Arizona before heading out to L.A. (like so many other young and comely women before her) to make it in show business. Early on, she also modeled fashion swimsuits for Catalina Swimwear. (“Think California sunshine,” reads promotional verbiage for the century-old company. “The glamour of Hollywood starlets. The smile of Miss America.”) By the early 1980s, though, Brynn’s career aspirations had stalled and her recreational use of alcohol and cocaine had escalated. A stay at the famed Hazelden addiction treatment and recovery center helped her get clean. One former acquaintance, Hanala Sagal, says she and Brynn began attending Alcoholics Anonymous meetings during that period, some of them at Beverly Hills Presbyterian Church on the corner of Rodeo Drive and Santa Monica Boulevard. The Rodeo meetings, Sagal says, were Brynn’s favorite. “That’s the kind of meeting she liked to go to. The kind where your eyes wander around to see if there’s a famous alcoholic in the room.” They also had beauty maintenance in common, Sagal recalls, driving each other to appointments for such minor cosmetic procedures as facial peels. “She was always doing things to herself, like I was, trying to look good and stay young.”

  When Phil met Brynn, he may well have been at his most vulnerable state in years. His marriage to Lisa had collapsed, his triumphant run during the Olympic Arts Festival had failed to boost his career, and acting jobs were scarce. In light of his anguish over personal and professional shortcomings, the attention from and affections of a statuesque blonde would have gone a long way toward bolstering Phil’s deflated self-image. Whatever the reason, he was once again glamourized.

  And once again, not everyone was comfortable with his choice of mates. Victoria Bell—Carmen Pluto from the Groundlings—had briefly met Lisa and some of Phil’s other girlfriends, all of whom seemed “fun and silly and kind of kooky. So when Brynn came into the picture it was kind of like, ‘Hmm, that’s a dangerous woman for Phil.’ She just didn’t seem like the kind of woman that we had seen him attracted to over the years.” He was attracted, though—and strongly. But their relationship was bumpy from the get-go. A friend of Phil’s, actor Ed Begley Jr., remembers inviting Phil and Brynn to the home he shared with his then-wife in Ojai, California, about seventy miles from L.A. They would arrive around noon for lunch and then, that evening, all four of them would dine at a nice restaurant in town. But noon came and went with no sign of Begley’s guests. There went lunch. When it got to be around seven P.M., he knew dinner was dead as well. At around nine P.M., Begley’s phone rang. It was Phil. Here is Begley’s re-enactment of their conversation:

  “Ed, it’s Phil. Ohhh, I’m so sorry. We were headed there and I couldn’t call because it was just too bad. Brynn, this woman I’m dating—we got into a horrible fight on the way there. Horrible! We’d just split up and I had to take her back home. We are, of course, not coming out. I’m so sorry to do this to you, but you have no idea how contentious it was. That’s why I could not call.”

  “Phil, Phil, take it easy. As long as you’re OK. I was worried about you on the highway, on that windy road to Ojai, that’s all. You’re OK?”

  “Well, I won’t say I’m OK. We split up. I can’t do this.”

  “I totally understand. Come on your own whenever you want, Phil. I’d love to see you.”

  Phil never made it to Ojai, but before long he and Brynn were back together. They weren’t done fighting, though—or splitting up before making up and reuniting. As their relationship evolved, a pattern emerged.

  * * *

  Amid Phil’s mounting frustration about his seemingly stagnant career, and in the way that only mothers with blind confidence in their progeny can do, Doris Hartmann encouraged her middle child to keep his chin up—everything would work out for the best. She told him other, less heartening things, too. A psychic Phil’s sister Martha had visited confirmed it, predicting that Phil would be “very successful.” Doris underlined “very.” She told him other, less heartening things too, namely that life’s clock was ticking and Rupert was “depressed” he didn’t know his kids better. Doris, though, knew that neither he nor she could turn back time—that it was “too late to make amends for all the things we should have said and didn’t—all the things we said and shouldn’t have.”

  As Doris advised, Phil forged onward. He spoke with a casting boss at ABC, who told him (as Lisa had years earlier) that a return to acting school might be just the thing to help him transcend mere characterizations and find the funny in Phil Hartman. Tony Danza and Ted Danson were playing versions of themselves with great success on Who’s the Boss and Cheers, respectively, and Phil would do well to follow their leads. But he wasn’t buying it. Even before Katz had tried to coax him out at the Groundlings, being himself—or even a close facsimile thereof—had never been Phil’s forte. As he told the L.A. Times in 1993, “I wasn’t that secure with myself. I felt vulnerable trying to be anything close to myself on stage or in front of a camera. I felt more comfortable being buried in a person. The deeper the burial, the better.” Meanwhile, he watched friends and former colleagues become famous.

  Reubens, for one, was already nationally known and about to break big thanks to his tour and multiple appearances on NBC’s The Late Show with David Letterman. Lovitz, too, was on the rise. In a development that surprised some, Phil’s Groundlings mate and recent voice co-star in the Disney animated film The Brave Little Toaster was selected to join Saturday Night Live during its 1985–86 season. If there was jealousy on Phil’s part, Julia Sweeney failed to sense it. More than a few people, though, were puzzled by Lorne Michaels’s decision to hire Lovitz over Phil. “I remember one of the times Lorne was at the Groundlings, standing in the back watching a show, and I was standing next to him,” Tracy Newman says. “And I said, ‘Are you here for Phil?’ Because I was watching the show and thinking, ‘If I were him, I would [take] Phil.’ But he was interested in Jon Lovitz. And I remember thinking, ‘What a fool. What a fool.’ Not that Lovitz isn’t funny. I like Lovitz, too. But to stand back there and watch a guy like Phil Hartman and not see how valuable he would be.…” Randy Bennett was also bewildered. “The fact that Lovitz got on Saturday Night Live and Phil didn’t was an enormous shock. I love Lovitz, don’t get me wrong, but come on.” Even Lovitz himself was surprised. The very idea of auditioning for SNL struck him as “ridiculous,” he has said. But Michaels—who says Lovitz first came to his attention in the bigscreen comedy Last Resort—was obviously impressed by what he saw. So wer
e Al Franken and Tom Davis. As Lovitz later recounted, they came to the Groundlings in search of “a Tom Hanks–looking leading person.” Franken even told Lovitz outright, “You were everything we weren’t looking for in one person, but you were funny.”

  Robert Smigel, who began writing for SNL in 1985, recalls that when Michaels returned that year as executive producer after a five-year hiatus (in the process taking back control from executive producer Dick Ebersol, who had been charged with fixing the fractured show after a lame 1980–81 season), he was “looking for people who were outside the box. A guy who’s going to pick Robert Downey and Randy Quaid and Anthony Michael Hall,” Smigel says of the ’85–’86 season’s individually talented but creatively dysfunctional cast members, “is not really looking for Phil Hartman in that particular year. And he was taking a risk. I think maybe Lorne wanted to challenge himself.”

  Michaels, though, says Phil could have joined SNL if he wanted to. But he opted out. “He wasn’t passed over. It was his decision.” Not only was Phil still embroiled in his divorce from Lisa at the time, Michaels recalls, he simply didn’t want to leave his comfortable life in L.A. for the bustle of New York.

  As per Michaels’s edict (after a thorough housecleaning and the threat of cancellation), starting the following season (1985–86) there would be more emphasis on ensemble work, and no actor would earn more than another. He also planned to revive the “live” component that he believed had diminished under Ebersol by way of more prerecorded material. “It became a television show,” Michaels has said of SNL during his extended absence. “There’s nothing wrong with it being a television show, but I think it was something more.”

  * * *

  Back in Pee-wee land, Phil and his original Roxy cohorts—namely, Lynne Stewart, John Paragon, and John Moody—were relegated to minor on-camera roles in Big Adventure (Phil played a reporter, Paragon a movie lot actor, Stewart a Mother Superior, and Moody a bus clerk). But Phil’s part in the movie’s creation and subsequent box office success (it grossed $4.5 million on opening weekend—enough to cover the $4 million budget—and has to date earned ten times that amount) cannot be underestimated. True, by mid-August of 1985, when Big Adventure was showing on nearly 900 screens across America, Pee-wee’s profile had risen considerably. And, true, budding director Tim Burton (then little-known but mega-talented) and composer Danny Elfman (ditto) imparted their respective magic touches. But according to Varhol, Big Adventure “couldn’t have happened without [Phil] for a number of reasons.” His writing was chief among them.

  As Phil told radio broadcaster Howard Stern in 1992, “I wrote a lot of the scenes.” Of course, since Big Adventure was a team effort, it’s nearly impossible to pinpoint which ones are Phil’s alone. But Varhol remembers at least a few portions that bear his co-scribe’s distinctive stamp. Besides the inspired description of Pee-wee’s tricked-out bike, Varhol says some of Phil’s other contributions include snappy action synopses (e.g., “Pee-wee stands pie-eyed and slack-jawed”) and part of Pee-wee’s now-famous “rebel” monologue through which he coolly informs his love interest, “There’s a lotta things about me you don’t know anything about, Dottie. Things you wouldn’t understand. Things you couldn’t understand. Things you shouldn’t understand.”

  In late October 1985, Phil and Paragon accompanied Reubens to New York, where Pee-wee was slated to host Saturday Night Live on November 3. Reubens and his manager, Richard Abramson, had gotten the OK from Lorne Michaels for Phil and Paragon to serve as additional writers. The arrangement was and remains atypical. In contracts finalized afterwards, Paragon and Phil were each paid $1,750 for their contributions. “Pee-wee was really hot and we hadn’t done the show yet,” Abramson says. “When they said they wanted him to host, I told Lorne that it would be very difficult for other people to write for Pee-wee. It was a specific character; it wasn’t like bringing Justin Timberlake on and you could write a few things and put him in different roles. Pee-wee had a specific voice.”

  On their first day at 30 Rockefeller Plaza, in a conference room that lacked enough chairs for all who were present, Michaels introduced Phil, Paragon, and Reubens to SNL’s writers. Being that many of them were Pee-wee Herman fans and the show was Thanksgiving-themed (easy to parody), smiles and laughter abounded. Paragon, for one, felt welcome despite his outsider status. Al Franken and Tom Davis were particularly laid-back and helpful, he says. And Michaels was extremely involved from day one. His TV baby had almost died during his time away, and public opinion was at an all-time low. Critics were especially unkind—one famous headline declared “Saturday Night Dead!”—and ratings reflected the show’s shrinking viewership and diminished status. “Many of the cast members and writers seemed nervous,” Paragon says, “like they had all been threatened before. I was told that Lorne had a way of punishing and rewarding. He would pull a sketch or replace an actor in a sketch, depending on whether or not they pleased him—like Captain Bligh. My experience was that he was totally hands on and a control freak. There was no doubt about whose show it was.”

  After seeing Phil in action—he was funny in writing meetings and easy to work with—Michaels expressed his admiration to Abramson. Abramson told him, in effect, “You ain’t seen nothin’ yet.”

  * * *

  In preceding months, Phil’s career had begun to gain some traction. Since signing with William Morris, he’d landed minor voice parts on a short-lived TV series titled The Dukes, Tom Selleck’s hit show Magnum P.I., and an instantly forgettable cartoon called The 13 Ghosts of Scooby-Doo. A few small movie roles also came his way, albeit in generally panned flicks such as Last Resort (with Charles Grodin), Jumpin’ Jack Flash (with Whoopi Goldberg) and Three Amigos! (shot in Simi Valley, not far from Phil’s home, with Steve Martin, Martin Short, Chevy Chase, and Lovitz). Phil’s biggest score during that stretch was the animated television series Dennis the Menace, for which he voiced George Wilson (as an approximation of Paul Ford’s Colonel John T. Hall from The Phil Silvers Show, aka Sgt. Bilko), Dennis’s father Henry Mitchell, and his dog Ruff. He did sixty-five episodes in all. “It was one of those ironic things,” Phil told CNN host Larry King in 1993, “where as soon as I quit acting I started getting every part I went up for … Because I was relaxed. A casting director and producer can smell the desperation of someone who really needs the job, and I started going on auditions and not caring if I got it. I was relaxed, natural.”

  Reluctantly, Phil also committed to reprising his Kap’n Karl role—renamed, less quirkily, Captain Carl—for a Saturday morning kids’ series Reubens was doing for CBS called Pee-wee’s Playhouse. The colorful and frenetic program’s cast also included Stewart (back as Miss Yvonne), Paragon as the voice of Pterri and Jambi (“Mekka lekka hi mekka hiney ho!”), future big-screen luminary Laurence Fishburne as Cowboy Curtis, and future Law & Order veteran S. Epatha Merkerson as Reba the mail lady. The eye-catching set—populated by Chairry the talking chair, Globey the talking globe, Magic Screen, Mr. Kite, and a gaggle of wonderfully odd-looking puppets—was once again designed by Gary Panter (with assists from Wayne White, Ric Heitzman, and many others). Zippy original sound track music came courtesy of award-winning songsmiths Mark Mothersbaugh (of the techno-pop band Devo), Todd Rundgren, and Elfman, among others. Pop star Cyndi Lauper (credited as “Ellen Shaw”) sang the Playhouse theme song.

  “I really had to twist Phil’s arm to get him to do the first season in New York,” says Abramson, who produced Playhouse with Reubens. “He really didn’t feel like doing it. I think he felt left out of [Big Adventure], but he did create this character [Captain Carl] and he did really well with it. So he came to New York and we all had a good time.” In late July or early August, not long after Phil finished work on the Blake Edwards comedy Blind Date, he and Varhol flew east together and headed to the Playhouse set. When they arrived, tension and temperatures were high. “Both of us couldn’t wait to get out of there,” Varhol says. “It was hot as hell. And Paul was in a very bad mood
. Rich Abramson was pretty nuts at the time, too.” Over the next few months, Phil also became increasingly perturbed—with Reubens in particular. “There clearly was resentment on both sides,” Abramson says. “Phil was more of a B-type personality. But there came a point when he was like, ‘Why isn’t Paul treating me better?’”

  * * *

  The break that had come Phil’s way a couple of months prior, in mid-1986, made everything else—the bit parts in movies, the cartoons, the commercials, Big Adventure, Playhouse—seem small by comparison: another chance to audition for Saturday Night Live. In a nearly eleven-minute set, he earned rare laughs in a typically laugh-less setting (Michaels, in particular, is known to be nearly mirthless when spectating) while showcasing an array of characters. Donning a jauntily cocked fedora and lighting a cigarette, he led off with Chick Hazard (“My life was rapidly going down the porcelain convenience. I could barely afford cigarettes, whiskey, and food. Looked like the food was gonna have to go.”) Next came a fast-talking commercial pitchman followed by impersonations of Jack Benny, John Wayne, and Jack Nicholson—as done by “the funniest man in Germany, Gunter Johann.” He then did a brief bit about marijuana use among teens before Phil slipped on his dark Nicholson shades and launched into a Jack-enhanced scene from Hamlet.