You Might Remember Me The Life and Times of Phil Hartman

by Mike Thomas

  What Phil failed to tell Peterson, and what may have provoked his ire, was this: Brynn was two months pregnant. Perhaps just as important, as he’d told his Groundlings pal Tim Stack, Brynn was definitely the one for him. This time, it was for real. For good. In private as in public, he made no secret of his feelings for her. “I love you, Brynn. I’m in love with you,” Phil gushed in an early romantic letter. “I’ve never had a relationship that had so much promise for success. I feel like the luckiest man alive that you’ve chosen me as a mate.”

  They wed on November 25, 1987, a day before Thanksgiving and during an extended SNL break, in a small New York ceremony. Phil wore a light-brown suit and dark tie, Brynn a white dress, white pearls, and a strand of white flowers in her hair. Afterward, a reception was held at an upscale restaurant in Manhattan, and a couple of weeks later Phil headed back to 30 Rock for three more weeks of SNL before he was L.A.-bound on a month-long holiday break. Among his characters during that stretch were Reagan (giving a movie-themed limo tour of Washington, D.C., to Danny DeVito’s puzzled Mikhail Gorbachev), the film critic Roger Ebert (reviewing holiday porno flicks with fellow balcony dweller Gene Siskel), Donahue, and Frankenstein. Throughout his SNL run, Frankenstein remained one of Phil’s all-time favorites to play. And it was always a crowd-pleaser. In a late 1987 sketch, as part of a three-member panel that also includes Tonto (Lovitz) and Tarzan (Nealon), the nearly mute monster growls two-word answers such as “Fire bad!” and “Bread good!” in response to probing questions from a talk show host played by Nora Dunn. But just as the sketch nears its end, Phil pulls a quasi–Harvey Korman circa The Carol Burnett Show and breaks up on camera—a rarity. It’s essentially a repeat of the Groundlings episode featuring Chick Hazard and Paragon’s big-assed gangster Nick “Cocktail, Chick?” Camaro, only this time on a widely watched national broadcast. Frustrated by his inability to stop laughing, Frankenstein-Phil bolts from his chair, growls, “Fire bad! Fire bad!,” and bursts through a flimsy backdrop. Moments later, he re-enters via the same jagged hole, still growling “Fire bad!” and lumbers toward the camera with arms outstretched. The outlandish premise is what got him first. He then began thinking about how ridiculous it must have looked from the audience’s perspective to see Frankenstein laughing, which made him laugh even more. That never happened again. Not live, anyway. “When I watch the show and I see people do that, it bugs me,” Hooks says. “‘Cause if we had done that regularly, we would have been fired.”

  * * *

  Not long after the 1987–88 season began, Lorne Michaels hired a couple of writers named Bob Odenkirk and Conan O’Brien. While staffers Bonnie and Terry Turner, Jack Handey, Al Franken, and Robert Smigel wrote much of Phil’s material, Odenkirk and O’Brien contributed occasionally. In one of Odenkirk’s favorite early sketches, initially written by Franken (possibly with an assist from Phil), Phil’s character enters a subway car packed with people and tearfully introduces himself as a down-and-out Vietnam vet with two kids to support. Any help would be much appreciated, he says, and then doffs his hat to collect donations. After he traverses one car length, the cap filling with cash and change, his mood suddenly shifts from morose to upbeat. He’s not really a hard-luck Vietnam vet, but a local actor doing promotion for a play about that very subject. Any donations to support the production would be much appreciated. Phil and his hat make another pass. Upon arriving where he’d begun, Phil undergoes yet another transformation—from friendly actor to a jittery “psychotic” who’s having a tough time due to “government cutbacks.” “I’m not violent,” he assures freaked-out passengers while moving through for collection number three, “just a little crazy.” Moments before the sketch ends, Phil morphs again. He’s actually (no, really) a mugger, and this is a stickup. Hat out, money in, sketch done.

  In the original version, as Odenkirk remembers it, a series of different people walked through the car with similar spiels in “pretty much the same order.” It was Odenkirk’s idea that Phil should do all of them instead—a joke turn that, in Phil’s hands, made a good sketch great. The sometimes “very possessive” Franken knew it and gave Odenkirk full credit.

  That same year, Phil and Hooks co-starred as a just-released ex-con named Mace (Phil, in a sleeveless white T and boxer shorts) and his motel room hooker (Hooks, in a nightgown and painfully bored expression), who are repeatedly interrupted by a Peeping Tom (Kevin Nealon, who also wrote the scene). Every time Mace tries to put the moves on his comically uninterested date, Nealon shows up outside their window, prompting Mace to loudly and repeatedly threaten him (but nothing more) with murder by gun. Like Odenkirk’s subway sketch, it goes on for several minutes past today’s typical three- or four-minute cutoff, which usually worked to Phil’s advantage. Slow-building scenes allowed him to develop a character more fully, which better showcased his acting chops, which in turn enhanced the overall comedic effect. “I think he would have done fine in any era of the show,” Downey says, “but there were certain things that I’m really glad we were allowed to do—pieces that were long enough [in which] you got to see Phil’s subtlety on display.”

  * * *

  Across the board, colleagues agree, working with Phil was a breeze. But off-camera and off-stage, few of them could see past his hail-fellow-well-met veneer. “He was always kind of in character,” O’Brien recalled not long ago. “The Phil I knew … would come in and I’d say, ‘Hi, Phil,’ and he’d be like [jaunty voice], ‘Keep ‘em fine, boys!’” Odenkirk, who was struck by Phil’s mature and calm demeanor in a roiling cauldron of twenty-something angst, regarded him as “a dad who was at peace with the world but also a little bit distant—a little bit Reaganesque in his way. He didn’t put his heart on his sleeve all the time for everybody to bat around.”

  As Downey tells it, O’Brien was also somewhat puzzled by Phil’s apparent cluelessness about how the sausage was made. “Conan used to tell me that Phil would call him up and say, ‘Hey, Conan, you wanna go skiing?’” Phil’s plan: They could drive to Middlebury, Vermont (about five hours away), on Monday and be back in time for read-through on Wednesday. O’Brien then had to explain his job and its responsibilities. As a writer on the show, he told Phil, he was obliged to write sketches. That was how the actors had material come Wednesday. If he and his fellow scribes went skiing Monday through Wednesday, those sketches would not exist. Phil: “Oh, so you don’t wanna go?”

  “[Phil] didn’t live to be onstage,” Downey says. “That was what he did as a living, and he enjoyed it. But his life was about the whole package, which very much included leisure time.”

  * * *

  Shortly after Brynn gave birth to a son, Sean Edward, in June 1988, Phil’s second wife Lisa—with whom he’d reconnected and begun talking by phone every few months—sent Phil and Brynn a congratulatory card. On its cover was a baby in a high chair illuminated by the light of an open refrigerator. Inside, as Lisa recalls, her handwritten sentiments went something like this: Dear baby, welcome to the world, you’ve chosen great parents. I hope you have a fantastic life and get lots of brothers and sisters and everything you ever wanted. And if you ever need anything, you’ve got an auntie in me. “Just sweet, totally sweet,” Lisa says.

  The note Brynn sent to her in response was anything but.

  “I got back four pages of the most vitriolic vituperation, threatening my life, telling me if I ever came near her child she’d kill me, calling me every name in the book, telling me I’d better keep my hands off her husband or she’d come and rip my eyes out,” Lisa says. “Just insane. She never knew me. She never met me. She never knew anything about me.” Alarmed, Lisa called Phil to alert him, but he already knew. Brynn was furious, he said, and he was partly at fault. When Brynn had asked Phil if she and he were soul mates, Phil had answered honestly—too honestly: “No.” Instead, inexplicably, he told Brynn that he and Lisa were soul mates. When Lisa heard this, she was dumbfounded. Was he stupid? she wondered aloud. Moreover, why was Brynn’s rage directe
d at Lisa if Phil’s comment is what sparked it? “I said, ‘Not only do you have your head up your ass, your wife is a scary creature,’” Lisa recalls. Phil, though, warned her not to contact him through “them” ever again. He also told her, “You should have seen the letter she wanted to write.” That gave Lisa pause. Phil knew what Brynn wrote and he let her send it? Ugh. They deserved each other. Phil should have protected Lisa from that hideousness and didn’t. She hung up. They didn’t speak again for almost two years.

  Phil was nearly forty when Sean was born, and the two formed an immediate bond. When friend and Cassandra Peterson’s then-husband Mark Pierson spoke with Phil soon after Sean’s birth, they had a “deep” conversation about parenthood and life in general. “He was going through that transition of getting over his hang-ups with his [own] father,” Pierson says, “and on the high road with his son. You know, a new beginning.” Nonetheless, Brynn was Sean’s primary caretaker—and by all accounts a highly competent and doting one—from the start as work consumed more and more of Phil’s time. Brynn was there to nurse Sean through his first cold, to feed him and change him and keep him safe in the big city. As Phil’s star rose, so did her frustration and resentment.

  Throughout his third season of SNL—during which, in March 1989, Phil appeared in Chevy Chase’s widely panned sequel Fletch Lives (Ebert: “[O]ne more dispirited slog through the rummage sale of movie clichés…”)—he played mostly generic roles (businessman, waiter, soldier, a guy named Dan), including one that paired him with guest star John Larroquette as the co-host of a call-in show titled the Gay Communist Gun Club. Phil was tapped to play a Kennedy for the first time, too—Senator Ted—in the sketch “Dukakis After Dark.” A parody of Hugh Hefner’s ultrahip 1960s program Playboy After Dark, it features Lovitz as photo op–challenged presidential hopeful Michael Dukakis in rarely seen Cool Mode as Phil’s beer-chugging Kennedy drunkenly hits on Dukakis’s wife Kitty (Hooks). Once again, Hooks says, Phil nearly came unraveled. There was also “A Trump Christmas,” with Phil and Hooks as Donald and Ivana Trump. Phil played the Donald by knitting his brows and spouting a ceaseless stream of words in a cockamamie New Yorkish accent.

  The two shifted gears from comedic to semi-dramatic for a tonally unique short film by Tom Schiller called Love Is a Dream. Its title comes from a song that Bing Crosby recorded for Billy Wilder’s 1948 film The Emperor Waltz. “Not putting them down, but we were around all of those stand-up comics [at SNL] who wanted a quick, cheap laugh,” says Hooks, who did theater in Atlanta before moving to New York. “And Phil and I were kind of different animals in a way. We were comic actors instead of comics.” Drama-tinged roles, therefore, weren’t much of a stretch. Featuring top-notch cinematography by Neal Marshad, Love was shot on film in a small studio in downtown Manhattan and unfolds like this: After an older security guard (Phil, his face initially unrevealed) lets an elderly woman (Hooks) into a bank vault (located in TriBeCa), she pulls out a safety deposit box and opens it on a nearby table to inspect the contents: a bejeweled tiara and necklace carefully wrapped in velvet. Setting the tiara on her head, she is transported back in time to her younger days, where she encounters an equally spry Phil in an old-time soldier’s uniform. Adorned with a red sash across the chest and epaulets on the shoulders, the getup causes him to resemble a toy soldier in The Nutcracker. By using only primary hues, Schiller and Marshad are able to approximate a Technicolor effect à la The Wizard of Oz. As Phil and Hooks dance to an orchestrated melody in three-quarter time (a small string ensemble plays nearby), both lip-sync to a prerecorded track. Since the original tune features only Crosby’s singing, Schiller found a female vocalist to perform Hooks’s portion. Channeling Crosby once again, this time in tone and not temperament, Phil begins:

  Love is a dream, yet it’s so real

  Hard to explain, just how you feel

  “I always liked to take the comedians from that show and put them into sort of bittersweet roles,” says Schiller, to whom Phil touted his lip-syncing abilities before shooting began. During Schiller’s first stint on the show, in early 1978, he wrote and directed the now-iconic short film (a “Schiller’s Reel”) Don’t Look Back in Anger, wherein an elderly-looking John Belushi takes viewers on a guided tour of his cast mates’ graves and describes how they died. The sole survivor, he dances among their tombstones. “So it’s not exactly jokey, or a laugh-a-minute,” Schiller says of his style, “but it shows another side of their acting ability that I perceived in [Phil]. I thought he had a lot of depth and sweetness.” And Hooks, Schiller adds, was a perfect counterpart. “Phil was a gentleman and she was a gentle lady. They weren’t crass. They weren’t showbiz types, climbing to the top. That’s why they had fun on the shoot, because it was away from Studio 8H, they got their own costuming, they were the stars. There was no one else telling them what to do. And it wasn’t just laughs every two lines.”

  Some years later, Schiller wrote and directed Phil in another lesser-known short called Laura. It stars cast member Melanie Hutsell as a restaurant hatcheck girl and Phil as the singing driver of a horse-drawn carriage. When Hutsell steps outside the restaurant in a female patron’s fancy fur-collared cape, Phil’s carriage rolls by and splashes her borrowed garment. The two then embark on a romantic buggy ride through Central Park. As with Love Is a Dream, some point to it as evidence that Phil could have become a solid dramatic actor in the vein of Breaking Bad’s Bryan Cranston or any number of comedic types who’ve made the leap.

  Besides traditional sketches and Schiller’s wonderfully surreal Love Is a Dream production, Phil’s third season saw him star in the first of several SNL commercial parodies directed by Jim Signorelli, who had previously guided Phil and other Groundlings in an Elvira production with Cassandra Peterson. Phil’s debut Signorelli spot—with Hooks, Carvey, and several others—was a spoof called “Compulsion.” A send-up of Calvin Klein’s uber-sultry ads for its perfume Obsession, the parody stars Hooks as a neat freak who compulsively scrubs her house (even during fancy soirees) with “the world’s most indulgent disinfectant” from Calvin Kleen. Phil plays the tuxedoed and vaguely French narrator, melodramatically wondering aloud, “What was the greater transgression: loving her, or abiding her immaculate madness?”

  * * *

  During time off, Phil’s SNL exposure proved lucrative on the commercial front. He had long done local radio spots on the side, but now the exposure was getting broader and the money bigger. Starting in the late eighties and continuing for the remainder of his career, there were national on-camera ads and voice-overs for (in no particular order) TGI Friday’s, Bell Atlantic Yellow Pages, Cheetos, M&Ms, Pot Noodle Soup (UK only), CDi, 1-800-Collect, Slice (in which he peddled soft drinks to schoolkids), McDonalds, and Coke, among many others. The latter, in particular, earned him big bucks for little work: a reported $1.2 million for McDonald’s (he was a vegetarian at the time and throughout much of his life, especially when he grew thick around the middle) and $600,000 for Coke, which never aired a spot that featured (as Phil’s William Morris agent Betty McCann remembers it) Phil as a flamboyantly gay dog groomer with pink hair and a canine to match. “They were nervous about that one,” McCann says.

  * * *

  Reviews were mixed at the start of SNL’s 1989–90 season—Phil’s fourth, and his first as a performer only. “The current cast is as good as SNL has seen since the originals,” declared a review in the St. Petersburg Times. Time magazine wasn’t so sure. “Laughs are still coming,” read the subhead on one story, “but the old gleam is gone.” Phil, though, was shining more than ever. Just prior to the season’s start, on September 17, 1989, he’d shared an Emmy for outstanding writing in a variety or music program. (Despite nominations for writing and individual performance in 1987 and 1998, respectively, it would be the only one of his career.) Jack Handey was present in the writers’ room afterward when Phil—holding a glossy of him clutching his infant son with one hand and his Emmy trophy with the other—turned to Lovitz and
cracked, “Hey, Jon. Check it out: Here’s two things you’ll never have!”

  Neither would Lovitz own a sprawling and rustic home like the one Phil had purchased for $1.4 million only a month earlier. Located at 5065 Encino Avenue in the celebrity-dotted town of Encino, about a dozen miles from Hollywood in the San Fernando Valley, it was for him a welcome refuge from the glitz and glam without being too isolated. “Someone will inevitably ask where you live, and I say ‘Encino,’” Phil told the L.A. Daily News in 1997. “Then you get that Beverly Hills glaze,” he added, affecting a robot-like monotone. “‘Pariah. Must escape. Don’t want loser dust on my Armani.’” But he liked the conveniences there and the family-friendly vibe.

  Coincidentally or not, Phil’s fellow Brantfordian Wayne Gretzky also took up residency in Encino. Kirstie Alley and David Crosby lived in the vicinity as well, and Dana Carvey’s house was only a short walk away. Among the area’s natural attractions are the Sepulveda Dam and Recreation Area—which an article in the L.A. Times described as “a green haven for wildlife and outdoor enthusiasts” (Phil!)—and the Los Encinos State Historic Park.

  Phil put $420,000 down on his 4,019-square-foot English cottage–style home, located less than a thousand feet from bustling Ventura Boulevard. Situated on a corner lot, the low-slung ranch-style dwelling boasted chestnut-colored wood siding, hand-hewn Ponderosa Pine ceiling beams, solid pine doors, a large brick kitchen island with built-in burners, and a library with floor-to-ceiling shelves. Its master bedroom (one of four) was bigger than Phil’s entire pad in Sherman Oaks (which he sold for $250,000 four months later), and the yard—handsomely landscaped and tropically lush—was shaded from searing California sun by a host of sycamores, oaks, redwoods, and Chinese elms. “I’m really having buyer’s remorse about this,” he confessed to his friend Chad Stuart. “Did I spend too much money?” Inspired by his SNL boss Michaels, who became a close friend and sometime vacation companion, Phil even took up gardening. “Really, it’s a wonderful thing, just as an allegorical representation of life,” he told writer David Rensin in 1991. “How, if you put something in the proper soil, it does so much better.” To Phil, good gardening was “a metaphor for proper planning and doing things right. Paying attention to detail.” “I think he saw that that was, for me, a sort of counterpoint to a life of stimulation and stress,” Michaels says. “That there was something that balanced things.”