You Might Remember Me The Life and Times of Phil Hartman

by Mike Thomas

Phil: What?! Why I oughta …

  According to Phil’s former Pee-wee cohort Dawna Kaufmann, who was hired as an SNL writer for the ’92–’93 season, Phil also appeared the model of calm when Brynn stopped by one day to visit and mingle. Kaufmann liked Brynn, but thought her kind of odd—especially on this occasion. “The first time she showed up at the office, we were all in the big conference room, and she comes in and starts sitting on all the guys’ laps and kissing them and putting her tongue in their ears,” Kaufmann says. “And everyone thought, ‘Oh, isn’t that funny?’ And I thought, ‘How could she do this to Phil? This is so humiliating to him.’ And he’s laughing like he didn’t care. How could you not care?”

  * * *

  As the 1992 election drew nearer Phil’s Clinton impersonations became more frequent as more political sketches got airtime. On Sunday, November 1, Phil and Carvey hosted a politically themed clip show titled “Presidential Bash.” Besides Clinton, Phil also portrayed the vice presidential debate-bungling Admiral James “Who am I? Why am I here?” Stockdale, out on a joyride with Ross Perot (Carvey). It had originally aired a week before, and afterward calls had flooded into SNL from military vets who thought the sketch disrespectful. Smigel says Phil never seemed reluctant to play the part, but that he later expressed some guilt about mocking the former Vietnam prisoner of war and subsequent Congressional Medal of Honor recipient.

  Two days later, on November 3, when the silver-tongued Democrat from Arkansas—already nicknamed “Slick Willie”—beat out Republican incumbent George H. W. Bush for the most powerful post on Earth, Carvey’s prediction came true: Phil won, too. “Phil was incredibly excited that he was going to get to be the president,” Smigel says. “In a way that you wouldn’t expect, because he was so laid-back. He’d seen Dana be George Bush and how important that was to Dana’s career.” Phil even wrote a personal letter to President-elect Clinton, Smigel says, “trying to be very serious and thoughtful” about his new responsibility. “In the overall scheme of his life,” Phil said, “we’re either a thorn in his side or a finger tickling his ribs.” In the overall scheme of Phil’s life, Clinton’s installation as leader of the free world was a game changer.

  “I don’t think we’ll be particularly vicious at first,” Phil told The Boston Globe in late November, a few weeks after Clinton’s election, of the “choice gig” that was now his for at least the next four years. “When Bush took office, we gave him one hundred days to establish a persona. Dana Carvey’s take on Bush evolved from Bush’s quirky traits—‘It’s bad! It’s baad’ and the manic hand gestures. So far Bill hasn’t given me any broad hook.”

  Eleven days after America voted the real guy into office, a torch of sorts was passed in a so-called “cold open” (prior to SNL’s opening credits) that featured Carvey as a vanquished George Bush calling up campaign contributors to apologize for letting them down.

  Bush’s assistant, Marybeth: Sir, I almost forgot: it’s 11:30, and President-elect Clinton is about to go on CNN.

  Bush: Well, thank you, Marybeth. [Bush picks up remote control and turns on television. The U.S. presidential seal appears onscreen.]

  Announcer: Ladies and gentlemen: the President-elect of the United States. [Shot dissolves to a grinning Clinton]

  Clinton: Live, from New York, it’s Saturday Night! [The audience cheers; Bush shakes his head glumly and slumps in his chair.]

  Bush: I—I—I used to say that!

  Then came December 5, 1992. Until then, Phil’s most successful Clinton portrayal to date had been pre-election, when he played the then-governor bragging about Arkansas’ dismally low literacy rate. This was not that—by a long shot.

  Scene: President-Elect Bill Clinton [Phil] and two Secret Service agents [Kevin Nealon and Tim Meadows] jog into a Washington, D.C., McDonald’s.

  Clinton: All right, boys, let’s stop here for a second. I’m a little parched from the jog.

  Secret Service Agent #1: Sir, we’ve only been jogging for three blocks. Besides, Mrs. Clinton asked us not to let you in any more fast food places.

  Clinton: I just want to mingle with the American people, talk with some real folks. And maybe get a Diet Coke—or something.

  Secret Service Agent #1: Fine. But please don’t tell Mrs. Clinton.

  Clinton: Jim, let me tell you something. There’s gonna be a lot of things we don’t tell Mrs. Clinton about. Fast food is the least of our worries.

  So begins the most memorable Clinton sketch of Phil’s SNL tenure and arguably the show’s history. Stopping by a McDonald’s to chat with real people about real issues, Phil’s cartoonishly bubble-assed president-elect—wearing a University of Arkansas sweatshirt, a Georgetown baseball cap, and his usual sex-you-up expression—snarfs down portions of an Egg McMuffin, a McLean sandwich, a McDLT, a Chicken McNugget, french fries, a Filet ’O Fish, a hot apple pie, a soda, a milk shake, and a young boy’s discarded pickles while discussing loans for small businesses and college students and holding forth on the nefarious doings of Somali warlords. In the process, he nearly chokes and is saved by a sip of soda from sketch participant Rob Schneider.

  “Phil Hartman was another one of the go-to guys,” Schneider has said. “He was such a good character actor that he would get lost in something and didn’t really pop as hard in movies as, like, Adam Sandler or some of the other guys or Eddie Murphy because he was just great as characters. People just saw him as that character. But he was a guy you could depend on to do anything. And … he never fluffed. You never saw him stumble his words or not be able to get it out or not go for it.” Even on the verge of real-life choking in a make-believe scenario, Phil “never cracked.”

  Largely as a result of Phil’s utter commitment, the sketch killed. Not only that, after six years of mostly blending in, he finally stood out—in a big way. “I became a recognizable face and somewhat of a household name,” he said in explaining the Clinton Effect, “and the whole nature of show business changed. I didn’t have to go out and look for work anymore. Work came to me.”

  Carvey to Phil, 1993: You are Clinton. That’s why when people go, “Are you going to try and do Clinton?” I go, “Well, the guy already is Clinton.” He does him perfectly, so what is the point?

  Phil: We’re close in age. We’re close in weight. Bulbous noses, big jaws. Kind of bigheaded stocky guys.

  Carvey: He’s considered a stud.

  * * *

  Clinton had been difficult to nail at first, Phil admitted to The Washington Post, “because he really fits the mold of the polished pol—he’s very studied.” So, too, was Phil—watching tapes of Clinton’s debates and other appearances, making “little drawings of his hand gestures” and perfecting his subject’s unique speech patterns until they felt right in the throat. “I’m loath to take credit for it,” he told the Toronto Star, referring to his voice-manipulating abilities, “because I don’t even know what it is. It’s some kind of intellectual facility that just allows you to hear something and realize what muscles in your throat to tweak, where you have to pitch it.” In Clinton’s case, Phil seized on his allergies, which caused post-nasal drip and gave his voice a slight scratchiness.

  Costume-wise, owing to his self-described “Mr. Potato Head” quality and the fact that he and Clinton shared similar facial features, Phil took a minimalistic approach that required little more than a suit, a lush silvery wig, and some basic makeup that highlighted the tip of his nose and lightened his eyebrows. Clinton’s hand gestures were essential, too. “Clinton has beautiful hands [and] long fingers,” Phil said in explaining his Clinton approach for the umpteenth time. “He uses the old stock political gesture, what I call the ATM card in the ATM machine. It’s less intimidating than a fist or a finger point. It’s almost like he’s handing you something.… When all these elements coalesce, you can create the illusion of this personality.” While his pal Carvey did caricatures, and did them well, Phil was more concerned with realism—getting so close, he once said, “that it allows the
audience to suspend disbelief.”

  Norman Bryn, whose makeup handiwork helped Phil become Bill for a couple of seasons at SNL, calls Phil “an ideal Clinton. He was getting a wig made for himself and he was going to pick up a lot of what he called ‘quick extra money’ doing what Dana was doing [with Bush].” At the time, Carvey commanded a healthy fee in the tens of thousands to perform his Bush shtick. Phil hoped to clean up, too, earning extra dough at Clinton’s expense.

  But while his portrayal of Clinton was often less than flattering, Phil insisted he wasn’t out to get the guy. On the contrary, Phil liked him and felt they were in some ways kindred spirits. “He opposed the Vietnam War like I did,” Phil told USA Today. “He tried marijuana. He didn’t inhale. I did.” The kindred thing wasn’t exactly mutual. During Phil’s 1993 appearance on CNN’s Larry King Live, he once said, the show’s producers tried and failed to have Clinton call in. Instead, Bubba sent over a signed photo with the inscription, “To Phil Hartman—You’re not the president, but you play one on TV and you’re OK—mostly.” The word “mostly” was underscored with a squiggly line, which Phil interpreted to mean, You’re all right, but I definitely have my eye on you, because you cross the line. Later on, in fact, Phil claimed he was shut out of White House events and other functions as a direct result of his Clinton skewering.

  After meeting Clinton at a New York fund-raiser, Phil told David Letterman, “I found out the hard way that he really doesn’t like what I do.” The overseas crowd apparently was skittish, too. After being invited to perform for Queen Elizabeth, Prince Philip, and other fancy-pants figures at the annual Royal Variety Performance in London, Phil claimed the prime minister’s office “got concerned” due to [here, Phil affected a stodgy accent] “‘a longstanding relationship with the United States. We certainly don’t want to jeopardize our relationship.’ And so they called the White House and [the White House] went, ‘No! Not Hartman! No! No!’ So they put the kibosh on it and it was very disappointing.”

  Curiously, Phil told another interviewer that the president had proclaimed to “get a kick out of what we did on SNL.” He also revealed that Clinton and his staffers had supposedly watched tapes of Phil’s impersonations during the 1992 presidential campaign. Then again, the most pointed barbs flew only after Clinton took office. In any case, it wasn’t Phil’s job “to be the president’s best friend,” he confided to NBC host Bob Costas—though he still felt “a twinge of guilt” about doing his impression. He also told Costas this, half-jokingly or not, of his comedic targets: “I think deep down you want to kill the person, at least in my case.”

  But at least Clinton let Phil know where he stood. Other celebrities Phil played weren’t so forthcoming, and it bothered him to know they might be offended. Whenever Carvey channeled radio personality Casey Kasem, Phil said by way of example, Kasem sent a thank-you gift. Phil got squat from the folks he lampooned. More disturbingly, he also received some “really scary militia kind of stuff” from dismayed viewers. As Phil was well aware, his Clinton jabbing tended to be more personal than political owing to Phil’s own liberal leanings. Instead of mocking Clinton’s stances on education or taxation, for example, Phil focused on his overeating or his lady killing.

  * * *

  By 1993 the money on SNL was, as Phil put it, “starting to get real”—possibly as much as $30,000 a week. It was still short of prime-time star pay, but combined with his growing revenues from national television ads and earnings from The Simpsons, it was enough to keep Phil in swell duds and random toys and nice cars. Over the years his ever-growing mini-fleet of automobiles came to include a white Mercedes S-Class coupe, a Porsche Carrera 4, a 1961 Bentley, and a white Ferrari 355—all except the Mercedes purchased used but in sparkling condition. Phil was even more enamored of his boats, from which he loved to fish and in which he made increasingly frequent trips to Catalina Island with a friend or two in tow when his schedule allowed. During summer hiatus work lulls, he made jaunts about once a week. “You just can’t believe how beautiful it is,” he marveled. The one and only time he brought Brynn and the kids there, friend Steve Small says, large swells on the open sea made their journey over quite unpleasant. “I’m sure it wasn’t planned, but it was as though he arranged it so that he could go whenever he wanted to,” Small says with a laugh.

  Phil initially made the Catalina trip on a twenty-five-foot Egg Harbor boat, christened Anika after daughter Birgen’s middle name, which means grace, gracious, or favor in several languages. He then switched to a thirty-six-foot Boston Whaler that topped out at 50 knots in calm water, 20 in choppy. (Later, Phil also bought a used seventeen-footer that he kept at Catalina.) On at least one occasion a pod of dolphins surfaced and began leaping alongside the boat. Often, he floated at a remote spot called Lover’s Cove, at the island’s more developed east end, and fed spray cheese to swarms of calico bass in a protected portion of Avalon Harbor. Just off shores where pirates, Spaniards, and Chumash Indians had dwelled in the 1700s, Phil also liked to moor his boat, kick back and chill out while blasting Neil Young’s 1992 album Harvest Moon from the boat’s speakers. Or he’d buy a can of spray cheese and feed it to swarms of Calico bass in a protected portion of Avalon harbor. In video footage of one excursion Phil does a 360-degree pan with his camera, catching glimpses of the clear greenish water, recreational boaters, and Indian Rock. “I think I’m gonna like it here in Emerald Bay,” he says jauntily to no one in particular. “It’s a happy place.”

  Phil was also an avid snorkeler (especially at the island’s Long Point, his favorite snorkeling spot) and scuba diver, with all the latest gear and a philosophical appreciation for the sport. “It’s so transcendental,” he once explained. “It’s like going to another dimension.”

  Mark Pierson accompanied him to Catalina on a few occasions, and Small made the journey six or seven times, but Britt Marin was his most consistent companion on less crowded summer weekdays and during the off-season. They hiked for miles, marveling at the island’s glittering steatite rock formations and unsullied wilderness. They scuba-dived and snorkeled. They dined at the venerable (and now shuttered) Armstrong’s Seafood Restaurant and Fish Market, overlooking the marina and bay in Avalon. They smoked pot at the Wrigley Memorial & Botanic Garden.

  Since 1990, Chicago’s Wrigley family—the chewing gum magnates—has ruled Catalina, which hosted spring training from 1921 through 1952 for their Chicago Cubs baseball team. By the time Phil began regularly visiting again, the Wrigley’s Santa Catalina Island Conservancy controlled 86 percent of the property. Phil wanted to retire on Catalina, he often said, maybe get a condo in the upscale section of Hamilton Cove. That was the life. The quiet life.

  As extroverted as he was onstage, on-camera, and in the public eye, in private Phil would often shut down and seem largely absent in his presence. “I wouldn’t say Phil was depressive,” Dozier says, “but I think he suffered a little bit of depression at times.” When Dozier dropped by Phil’s Encino home to hang out and watch old movies, there were long stretches of silence between the two, punctuated mostly by Phil’s remarks about actors, directors, awards, and the like. “I would begin to think, ‘He’s not talking or anything. Maybe he wants to be left alone,’” Dozier says. “And I’d say, ‘Well, I guess I’ll go,’ and he’d look at me and say, ‘Oh, no, don’t go!’”

  They had a similar dynamic on the open water. One afternoon, as they were cruising slowly downwind with their shirts off and the sun beaming brightly, Phil tugged his hat over his eyes and said, “You know what I like about you, Floyd? You don’t talk too much.” Phil’s tone was joshing, but Dozier knew he was serious. Some things, Dozier replied, were just better left unsaid. Ohara Hartmann, the daughter of Phil’s older brother John and at one point a part-time caretaker to the Hartman kids in Encino, also noticed Phil’s penchant for quietude. “He had a way of being what you would expect, kind of the Saturday Night Live guy,” she says. “But the real Phil to me was kind of quiet, the shy middle c
hild. During some of my best times with him, we just sat there, not really talking about much of anything.”

  * * *

  Phil resumed his duties as honorary sheriff of Encino that summer, 1993, and spent most of August shooting Greedy. The big-screen comedy—written by the Happy Days team of Lowell Ganz and Babaloo Mandel—co-stars Ed Begley Jr., Michael J. Fox, and the legendary Kirk Douglas, and was Phil’s meatiest movie role to date. As a nasty schemer named Frank, he plays one of several conniving relatives who attempt to scam their rich Uncle Joe (Douglas) out of his $20 million fortune. “I love to play weasels,” Phil once said. “I just want to be funny, and villains tend to be funny because their foibles are all there to see.”

  During Greedy’s filming, Begley recalls, Phil agreed to bring Brynn along for a dinner outing. It would be just the three of them, as Begley was newly divorced. But about halfway through shooting, Phil rang Begley at his home in Studio City. He wasn’t calling about their dinner plans. Here, once again, is Begley’s reenactment of the exchange—almost a decade after the Ojai incident:

  “Ed, can I talk to you?”

  “Of course. You’re OK?”

  “Um, well, no, I’m not OK. Do I remember right—you have a guest room above your garage?”

  “Do you have a friend?”

  “No, it’s for me. Brynn and I—it’s bad, it’s very bad. We’ve split up and I can’t stay there in the house.”

  “Come over, buddy. We’ll go there right when we’re done with work. I’ll give you a key.”

  But Phil never came, Begley says, though he doesn’t know why and didn’t ask. Perhaps Phil and Brynn kissed and made up. Perhaps not. Whatever the case, “He never stayed one night in that room.”

  Although Phil was spared most of their vitriol and even complimented in some cases, reviewers were again unkind and Greedy died a quick death upon release in early March 1994.

  * * *

  While Begley was privy to brief flashes of Phil’s travails with Brynn, Phil increasingly gave his ex-wife Lisa an earful—about Brynn’s object-throwing temper tantrums, her cosmetic surgeries (which included facial and breast), and what Phil perceived as Brynn’s controlling nature. She was even furious when he got fan mail, Phil claimed. As if he could help that. He disliked it, too, when Brynn stood in his shadow. He disliked it when anyone stood in his shadow, even pals, though it wasn’t an easy shadow to slip. “He wanted to be connected to people who were his peers,” says Floyd Dozier, then a software development manager to whom Phil gave grief for blending into the background at movie premieres and other public events. “He wanted me to relate to him—and [other] people—as equals. In fact, I think I did most of the time, but we weren’t operating in the same arenas. The more famous he got, the more I felt like an outsider, and the more awkward I felt at his social events when someone asked, ‘So Floyd, what do you do?’” Brynn may have felt likewise. “She always wanted to be an actress, and I think she was kind of jealous that he was,” Ohara Hartmann says. “But she was also a very talented artist. She’d sit down to color with the kids and I’d say, ‘Oh, my gosh, Brynn, that’s amazing. You should take classes.’ And she went, ‘Well, I’ll never be like Phil.’ She was just someone who wasn’t fulfilled.”