You Might Remember Me The Life and Times of Phil Hartman

by Mike Thomas

  Bryn also claims that Phil could be jarringly bellicose before going onstage. “He could really shout and yell. I heard him scream at people to get out of the way when he made his way through the SNL stage doors. ‘Clear that doorway! Clear that doorway!’” And they always did.

  When Bryn groused to his boss, makeup supervisor Jennifer Aspinall, that Phil was “cocky and rude,” she told him not to be offended. When she had extended her hand to shake Phil’s, he’d spat on it. If it was his idea of a joke, she didn’t get it. Although Aspinall was stunned by Phil’s reaction, soon enough the two of them made up and began chatting over coffee. Phil told her about his gun collection and even when he’d banked his first million dollars. “That was a big deal,” she says of the latter. “I remember him feeling like that was a big turning point.”

  In the cramped makeup room, where he typically shared space with Carvey, Nealon, Schneider, and sometimes Myers, Phil was always more comfortable with a male makeup artist. “We’re in a very intimate space, and there are people who are more comfortable hanging out with a guy than hanging out with a girl,” Aspinall says. “Touching someone to the degree that makeup people touch their actors, especially on a show like [SNL] where you’re doing so many quick changes, is just a very intimate experience. Phil preferred guy-guys.” The one who’d been assigned to Phil before Aspinall took over had been just that—and, as such, a Phil favorite. When he left, Phil was deeply dismayed. And so, after a few weeks of dealing with him herself, Aspinall sensed Phil’s preference and assigned him to Bryn.

  His high-stakes job at a major network that depended on ratings for advertising revenue was certainly one source of mood-altering stress, but some of Phil’s darker moments at SNL also stemmed from troubles with wife Brynn—not that he often allowed his personal and professional worlds to collide. Most of the time, he compartmentalized his on- and off-camera lives to such a degree that few people knew more than basic and typically sunny details about his family, his cars, his hobbies.

  * * *

  On Saturday, February 8, 1992, Phil became a father for the second time—to a blond-haired daughter named Birgen Anika, whose birth was announced on the air that night by SNL guest host Susan Dey. Phil left 30 Rock to attend the birth, Lorne Michaels says, and was back before the show ended. As Dey locked her arm in Phil’s during the show’s closing moments and proclaimed the good news for all to hear, he tried and failed to stifle tears. He choked up, too, when he called Lynne Stewart to tell her how hopelessly smitten he was with his little girl. “I didn’t fully experience my capacity to love until I had children,” Phil later said. “And then I sensed this complete unconditional love in myself.”

  Not long after that joyous occasion, however, Phil’s mood again turned grim. Early one Saturday night, he dropped into Bryn’s makeup chair at SNL and vented. “Well, Norm, looks like the wife is gonna divorce me!” he said in a voice that sounded more like one of Phil’s smarmy characters than Phil himself. At first, Bryn thought he was kidding; Phil’s pale complexion convinced him otherwise. According to Bryn, Phil and “the wife” had just finished arguing by phone, which sometimes happened before eight P.M. dress rehearsals, and Phil was in no condition to perform. Uncharacteristically, he even flubbed some lines during the pre-show taping. “She would push his buttons,” Bryn says. “Sometimes it was major, sometimes it was minor.” Bryn thought it best not to further agitate Phil in his already agitated state. Fortunately, only simple makeup was required for an “Anal Retentive Chef” sketch—which Bryn says Phil uncharacteristically botched during dress rehearsal. The reason strolled in around ten P.M., ninety minutes before air time, wearing a sexy black cocktail dress: Brynn. She and Phil argued in front of the eighth-floor elevators, and then Phil returned to the makeup chair for a pre-broadcast touch-up. “Looks like I staved it off this time, Norm,” a disheveled Phil blurted.

  Whether Phil’s workaholic ways played any part in Phil and Brynn’s tiff that evening is anyone’s guest, but it was always a bone of contention between them. Brynn wanted him home more often. There were two kids now, and she had help from a nanny—after Birgen was born, Brynn hired a succession of them, all female and all plump (Hartmann men, Phil’s niece Ohara Hartmann says, aren’t attracted to plump women)—but Phil’s long hours at work caused resentment and friction. “Phil had a weird marriage,” Chris Rock has said. “He was always going through some shit with it, and I never liked to spend time with them as a couple. Every now and then, he’d talk about it. I remember him saying, ‘OK, if I lose half my shit, I’ll have to be on [SNL] another three years.’”

  Brynn craved more communication as well as more paternal involvement from Phil, and she let him know it—not always at convenient moments. When Paula Grey (formerly Johnston) visited New York with her now ex-husband, Phil hooked them up with tickets to SNL. “We were going to meet up with him afterwards and go to the staff party,” she says. “And he called me after the show and he said, ‘I’m really sorry. I can’t meet you for the party because I’m having problems with Brynn and this is the one time we can find where we can get together and talk about things.’”

  During an SNL sketch in which Phil had to wear a bald cap that required twenty or so minutes to properly fit and secure, Norman Bryn went looking for him after Phil failed to show up at the makeup room. As Bryn approached Phil’s dressing room door, he could hear him talking on the phone. Bryn knocked anyway. When Phil answered, he seemed to be in a flustered state. Bryn reminded him about the bald cap. Phil told him he’d be along shortly. The door shut. “They were having one of their tiffs,” Bryn says, claiming he could hear Phil’s end of an “animated discussion” with Mrs. Hartman from the outside. “She’d nailed him before dress rehearsal and he came to the chair in a very bad mood—and more annoyed that I had come to get him.”

  There were breezier makeup room chats, too—about classic movies or Phil’s fear that parodying certain powerful show business figures—Walt Disney chief Michael Eisner and Tonight Show sidekick McMahon, to name a couple—could adversely affect his career. “He was afraid of Michael Eisner,” Bryn says. “And he was afraid that playing him adversely, playing him like an idiot on a sketch we did, would affect his career. He was afraid that Eisner, who was very powerful, could make a phone call and ruin your career.” As with Aspinall, Phil and Bryn also talked about guns. According to Bryn, Phil described his Walther PPK .38-caliber semiautomatic pistol (often toted by European police and easily concealed) and “joked” about his wife’s pistol, which Phil said she’d brought to L.A. from Minnesota. As a public figure prone to kidnapping threats and “Manson-style home invasions,” Bryn says, Phil confided that he felt safer having firearms around the house.

  * * *

  Shortly before Mother’s Day in early May 1992, another Hartman—make that Hartmann—joined the cast of SNL, if only for one night: Phil’s seventy-two-year-old mom Doris. Having been flown in with Rupert from San Diego (avid golfers, they were then living on the course at Shadowridge Country Club in the San Diego suburb of Chula Vista) to New York’s JFK airport a week or so early, they were put up at the Omni Berkshire and ferried via limo (“at our beck and call all week,” she later bragged) to 30 Rockefeller Center, where Doris rehearsed and was made ready for her close-up. Gathering with the mothers of hosts and cast members past and present—including Billie Carvey, Marlene Jackson, Bunny Myers, Jeri Sweeney, Kathleen Nealon, Rose Rock, and Mary Anne Farley, the latter of whom became a close friend and pen pal—she taped a tribute called “All the Best for Mother’s Day,” which aired on May 10. Doris’s paycheck, minus taxes and other deductions, came to $691.50, which she planned to spend on “something really special.” “It was a really good group of ladies,” Mary Anne Farley says, “and Doris was like the mother hen of us all. She took care of us. And she was sort of a pro. We’d say, ‘Oh, we’re so nervous, we just can’t do this,’ and she’d calm us all down. She was just a great, great lady.”

  During their
stay in New York, Phil introduced his parents to Phil Donahue (at Donahue’s insistence) and showed them some sights, including the Statue of Liberty. Doris and Rupert also attended The Will Rogers Follies and spent time with their grandchildren, three-year-old Sean and ten-week-old Birgen. “It’s been the thrill of a lifetime,” Doris said afterward. “Philip kept saying, ‘Mother, I’m going to bring you to New York.’ And he did.” In a short, typed thank-you note, Michaels told her, “You’ll always be welcome at Saturday Night Live. P.S. Now we know who the real talent is in the family.” Doris and her fellow comedy matrons returned the following May for a repeat performance.

  * * *

  That summer, Phil was appointed honorary sheriff of Encino—a post previously held by John Wayne and other area luminaries. He also continued his work on The Simpsons, contributed to a few other animated projects, and played small roles in two movies: CB4 (with Chris Rock and Khandi Alexander) and So I Married an Axe Murderer (with Mike Myers). A bit part in Coneheads (with Dan Aykroyd and Jane Curtin) was forthcoming. “My name is John Johnson. But everyone here calls me Vicky,” Phil announces as a humorless and possibly psychotic Alcatraz park ranger in So I Married an Ax Murderer. While leading a tour group through the infamous prison, he stops to tell a story about the convict Machine Gun Kelly, who in a “jealous rage” cut out the eyes of his “bitch” with a makeshift knife, “or shiv.” Vicky’s history lesson continues: “And as if this wasn’t enough retribution for Kelly, the next day he and four other inmates took turns pissing into the bitch’s ocular cavities. [Beat, tone brightens.] This way to the cafeteria!”

  Come September, Phil was back in New York for SNL’s eighteenth season. Thanks in part to Carvey’s departure midway through, Phil shone more than ever before. Another character of his had caught on, too. During the latter half of season seventeen, he’d achieved some measure of breakout success playing a mean Frank Sinatra. Literally—the guy was an asshole. And very funny in the way that assholes who don’t care they’re assholes can sometimes be. Unlike erstwhile cast member Joe Piscopo’s more respectful and far less belligerent portrayal of the Chairman of the Board, Phil’s Frank was all venom and swagger. “The Sinatra family was not happy with the impression Phil was doing at all,” Piscopo claimed in Live from New York.

  Phil’s Sinatra debut, in a sketch written by Bonnie and Terry Turner, was inspired by a letter from Ol’ Blue Eyes to then-reluctant pop star George Michael that was published in the L.A. Times (Sample excerpt: “And no more of that talk about ‘the tragedy of fame.’ The tragedy of fame is when no one shows up and you’re singing to the cleaning lady in some empty joint that hasn’t seen a paying customer since Saint Swithin’s day.”). In it, Carvey played a self-infatuated Michael (“Look at my butt!”) opposite Phil’s Frank. In a few other Sinatra outings, Phil ring-a-ding-dinged with Hooks alongside her cloyingly earnest (and, thus, quite hilarious) Sinead O’Connor with Tim Meadows’s Sammy Davis and again as the secret lover of First Lady Nancy Reagan. (Phil played Ronald Reagan as well.)

  Most notably, he scored big as the be-tuxed host of a cockamamie talk show called “The Sinatra Group.” Dreamed up by Robert Smigel and based on PBS’s The McLaughlin Group, it stars a bald and morose Hooks as O’Connor (whom Sinatra refers to as “Sinbad” and “Uncle Fester”), guest star Sting as a surly and scowling Billy Idol, Chris Rock as marble-mouthed rapper Luther Campbell, and Mike Myers and Victoria Jackson as grinning Sinatra sycophants Steve Lawrence and Eydie Gorme.

  Billy Idol: I think you’re a bloody, stupid old fart!

  Frank Sinatra: You’re all talk, blondie! You want a piece of me? I’m right here!

  Billy Idol: Don’t provoke me, old man.

  Frank Sinatra: You don’t scare me. I’ve got chunks of guys like you in my stool!

  When Ol’ Blue Eyes himself caught wind of the sketches, he picked up the phone and called his youngest daughter, Tina, for her take. She told him it was cool to be parodied on SNL and then phoned Lorne Michaels’s office to request videos of Phil’s Sinatra bits for her dad. When Phil ran into Tina on a couple of occasions, he was thrilled to hear that Frank got a kick out of his work.

  But even Phil’s Sinatra did relatively little to goose his SNL, and thus his overall showbiz, profile. An impression as opposed to an original invention, it was no Church Lady and it was no Wayne Campbell. Rising to that level, or anywhere close, would require someone even more powerful than the Chairman of the Board.

  Chapter 12

  Phil as Bill Clinton on SNL, 1992. (Credit: Makeup by Norman Bryn, www.makeup-artist.com, photo copyright Norman Bryn, all rights reserved)

  On October 12, 1992, during the second episode of season eighteen and shortly after Phil filed paperwork in L.A. to legally change his last name from Hartmann to Hartman, controversial Irish pop star Sinead O’Connor appeared as SNL’s musical guest and sang Bob Marley’s protest song “War” a capella. “We have confidence in the victory of good over evil,” she intoned, staring directly into the camera with an I-mean-business expression. As she uttered the word “evil,” O’Connor held up a photo of Pope John Paul II and tore it two, four, then eight pieces before tossing the shreds toward a stunned audience and proclaiming, “Fight the real enemy.” On orders from the show’s director, Dave Wilson, the applause sign remained dark and silence enveloped Studio 8H. Along with many others, Phil thought O’Connor’s actions were uncalled for and distasteful. Not only did she disrespect the Catholic faith and its adherents, she cast a pall on whatever comedy came after—including a sketch called “Sweet Jimmy, the World’s Nicest Pimp.”

  At dress rehearsal, O’Connor had used the picture of a child, thus setting up her live shot. Then, on air, she whipped out the Pope glossy to audience gasping. Phil was standing in the wings with the next week’s guest star, Joe Pesci, watching it all unfold on a monitor. “Fuckin-A!” he exclaimed when the Pope shredding commenced. Pesci was equally floored, hissing, “What the fuck is the matter with that bitch!” Smigel was in the wings as well and remembers everybody “just avoiding her” afterward. Besides inappropriately flaunting her religious and political views, he says, O’Connor broke one of live television’s unofficial rules: Don’t surprise the producers. “If that happens too many times, then there won’t be a live show. That’s how we looked at it and I think that’s how Lorne looked at it. It’s something that’s precious and rare, allowing something to go on totally live and to live with the kinks and the flaws. And I think Lorne was really afraid that it was going to inspire copycats in musical acts—that kind of thing.”

  When the show ended and everyone gathered onstage during the closing credits, as per SNL custom, Phil stayed back in the shadows. At the time, he wasn’t quite sure why. In retrospect, it became clearer. “I realize that in her country it is very repressive in regards to women’s rights, and I understood her motivation,” he told journalist Bill Zehme a year afterward, in an unpublished 1993 interview. “But I do think it was just ill placed. The Church, for better or for worse, represents a moral absolute. It’s a moral touchstone, and I don’t think you should attack that.”

  Appearing on the Letterman show that same month, Phil’s thoughts on O’Connor’s desecration began on a serious note and devolved into shtick: Proclaiming he had been “hurt and offended” by her pushing a political agenda, he nonetheless allowed that her feelings on this “volatile issue … the whole idea of women’s rights”—(she was actually protesting the sexual abuse of children)—were justifiable. “We were taught from childhood: You do not tear up a picture of the Pontiff,” he said, beginning to crack wise. “If you have a choice between doing it and not doing it, what you do is not. And in school, similarly, the nuns taught us with the Catechism: You do not put Hitler mustaches on the twelve Apostles.” He was so “angry” after O’Connor’s stunt, Phil went on, that he now felt “an urge for vengeance.” His plan, if O’Connor ever had “the guts” to perform in New York again, was to leap onstage while she sang and “tea
r up a photo of Uncle Fester. I’ll see how she feels.”

  Downey recalls that religion was also to blame the only time Phil argued against speaking lines with which he disagreed. “Phil came to me and he was really upset,” Downey says, and not because the October 1988 presidential debate sketch in question—in which Phil plays an extremely jaded version of news anchor David Brinkley and guest star Tom Hanks is ABC News anchor Peter Jennings—was unfunny.

  “You’re offending people,” Phil told Downey. But what was so offensive? Downey wondered. There were no dirty words, no attacks on specific groups. “It was the strangest thing. And we sort of had to tone it down. But even then, it was one of the few times he was not very good on the show.”

  Jennings: Well, David, throughout your career, you’ve been known for your cynicism, but certainly you haven’t lost that much faith in the presidency.

  Brinkley: Well, Peter, as I get older, I find I’ve lost faith in a good many things—country, family, religion, the love of a man for a woman. I’ve reached a point where it’s struggle to get up in the morning, to continue to plow through a dreary, nasty, brutal life … of terrible desperation … at the end of which we’re all just food for maggots.

  Usually, though, Phil was chilled out and unflappable; it took a lot to get him worked up. Lovitz, for one, would try—and always fail. Sometimes Phil even played along, as in this phone bit they did offstage.

  Lovitz: Hello, is Brynn there?

  Phil: Who is this?

  Lovitz: It’s her lover, Bob.

  Phil: Oh, hello, Bob. Hold on.

  Lovitz: No, Phil, it’s me, Jon!

  Phil: Oh! Jon. Thank God! I didn’t recognize your voice.

  Lovitz: That’s because this is Bob.