You Might Remember Me The Life and Times of Phil Hartman

by Mike Thomas

  * * *

  Phil spent a fair amount of time high above sea level that summer on his way to earning enough in-flight hours to get his pilot’s license during Thanksgiving vacation late the following fall. Boats were fun but slow; he wished to master a mode of transportation that would allow him to travel to Catalina Island and back in far less time than it took to motor twenty-six miles across the sea. And seeing as Brynn often told him and close friends of hers that Phil spent too much time away from home, this was a perfect remedy—not to mention another toy with which to tinker. By October 1994, after many months of typically exhaustive research—and more than a year before he was certified to fly on his own upon completing at least forty flight hours, half of them solo—he spent high five to low six figures on a French-made TB200 Tobago XL GT by Socata. With its white top, gray bottom, and dark-orange body stripes, the handsome single-prop model—tail number N3057D—had a 200-horsepower Lycoming 10-360AIB6 piston engine, fixed tricycle landing gear, and room for four in its spacious cabin. As Phil gushed in an endorsement letter to the manufacturer a few years post-purchase, “This airplane is simply a delight. I appreciate it for its docile handling characteristics and its outstanding performance. And I’m especially pleased with its overall design. This is an aircraft that is very pleasing to the eye. It’s a modern, fresh design. I appreciate the gull-wing doors and the well-designed cockpit.”

  Phil’s college and surfing pal Clif Potts owned a Cessna 182 Skylane at the time and shared Phil’s burgeoning enthusiasm for flying. “You’re aware of something greater than yourself, a power,” Potts says. “You’re driving this ball of energy. The same thing with surfing—there’s a place in the wave that’s like the power point and you can move into it and ahead of it and back behind it, but you are connected to it in order to be able to do what you’re doing.” On a more surface level, Phil thought it “a superb diversion that gives one a sense of competence and skill” as well as “a way to get away from it all, because it’s completely absorbing.”

  As Phil explained when he guested on Conan O’Brien’s show, his attraction to airplanes sprang partly from his love of John Wayne’s World War II movies, such as 1942’s Flying Tigers. “The hardest part of flying isn’t the flying,” Phil noted. “It’s the radio communications.” He then affected the deep voice and nonsensical but official-sounding lingo of a pilot: “Learjet 3057 Delta inbound Sepulveda Pass with information Joliet. Roger 3057 Delta, make right traffic before 1-6 right before five Delta.… Spark 555 roger, sparking double nickel double nickel…”

  When he wasn’t bound for Catalina’s tiny Airport in the Sky, where he kept a white Volkswagon Golf (used) not far from the runway, Phil loved to read up on his new hobby and practice his landings (“touch-and-go’s”). He most often used the Tobago for Catalina trips, though, and as usual Britt Marin was his most frequent co-pilot to Avalan and Two Harbors. Together they made numerous trips from the mainland, always with a stash of primo weed on board for toking in-flight and upon landing.

  Tearing through the wild blue yonder was an entirely different and far more intense experience than Phil had ever known. “He liked coming and going from the Airport in the Sky,” Marin remembers. “Because it’s kind of a tricky approach and takeoff. If you came in short you’d slam into a cliff, and if you didn’t take off in time you’d fly off of one.” An “excellent pilot” in Marin’s estimation, Phil loved to fly between the Van Nuys airport (where he stored his plane in a hangar with his sports cars) and Catalina, purposely putting his nimble craft into stalls along the way. Every time he did so, its nose dipped and an alarm sounded. Still, Marin trusted him completely. “He was very methodical in applying the rules of flying,” Marin says. “He’d put the manual in his lap to go through procedures. And he’d also say, ‘Hey, Britt, pay attention here and you’ll learn how to fly,’ so I did. I never got a license or anything, but I know how to fly a plane.”

  Lovitz later remarked that after Phil had been flying only a short time, he already seemed like “a veteran pilot of twenty years for United Airlines.” Tracy Newman was similarly struck with his proficiency and commitment to safety, qualities that helped to temper mounting terror when she took to the skies for her one and only flight with Phil at the helm. “We could have been going down, dying,” she says, “and I still would have had confidence in him.”

  * * *

  As Phil eased into his post-SNL life, there was also more time to be a dad—though he was never around nearly as much as Brynn would have liked. Dozier observed that Phil’s tendency to disengage physically and emotionally at home “kind of applied to the kids, too. I think he adored his kids. Most parents do. I’ve heard from other people and seen video of him playing with the kids, which I know he did a lot. But usually when I came over, Phil and I would just disappear into his office.” John Hartmann spoke of Phil the dad during his 2004 CNN interview with Larry King. “I’m sure that the kids would [have wanted] to have more time [with him] and I’m sure Phil would have wanted to work out more time for them. But he loved them and they loved him and they probably would have appreciated more attention.”

  When they were together, clowning was common. “We play a lot of silly games and we’re kind of a silly family,” Phil said. “We like to have a lot of laughter, but I don’t think I’m special to them because I’m a comedian. I just like to feel that I’m a participant in their lives, not so much the center of it.” As such, he devised improv games, assisted with puppet shows, splashed around in the backyard pool and went on family outings. Sean (“Seany”) was the more serious and introspective of Phil’s children. He was also one hell of an artist, Phil liked to brag—better than Phil ever was at the same age. Father and son often played “squiggles,” the drawing game Phil had invented with Sparkie Holloway decades back, and stored their completed pictures in a folder. Phil’s wackier side came out in the sunny and extroverted Birgen (“Birgey”). One of their favorite daddy-daughter activities was theatrical in nature. “Do your happy face,” he’d tell her. She beamed. “Now do your sad face.” She moped. “Now do your angry face.” She glowered. But her “handsome face” was the one that always made him laugh hardest.

  As ever, though, it was Brynn who did most of the parenting. From infancy on she spent the most time feeding and diapering and nursing the kids through sickness. She volunteered at their school library and shopped for their clothes and planned their birthday parties. She recorded milestones of their childhoods—first cold, first laugh—in a journal. A nanny was often on hand, as was a housekeeper, but Phil’s escalating absenteeism continued to provoke Brynn’s ire. If there was one complaint she voiced (to family, to friends), that was it. “I thought she was a fantastic mom,” Sweeney says. “But she was such a contradiction because [of how] she looked. I knew [her and Phil] when they first met, and then she was having a baby and I was thinking, ‘Oh, God, should women like this really have kids? They shouldn’t,’” Sweeney jokes. “They should really just be this look. This look takes a hundred percent of someone’s time. There’s no kid that should come into this when you have a mom who looks like that.’”

  Despite her insecurities, Brynn struck Sweeney and a friend of theirs, now-former SNL writer Christine Zander, as a great mother in every way. She was patient, caring, engaged. “And it didn’t seem fake, like, ‘Now I’m in public, so I’m going to show you what a good mom I am,” Sweeney says. “It seemed real. Every interaction I saw, which was a lot—I spent whole days at their house—was admirable.”

  As a friend, Zander says, Brynn was “a very sweet and goofy woman” who was exceedingly generous and always had an ear for someone else’s problems. “She wanted all of her friends to be happy”—a state that Brynn herself found increasingly elusive. At one point she became so fed up with Phil’s disappearing act, Sweeney says, that she began talking about filing for divorce. But an attorney friend had said to wait until her marriage hit the ten-year mark, Brynn confided. A solid decade together, c
ombined with the fact that she and Phil had two kids, would assure Brynn of a generous settlement. Sweeney couldn’t be sure, but she thought Brynn might have just been blowing off steam. “She totally loved him,” Sweeney says. “I think she really loved him.” But as far as Brynn could tell, her less emotionally demonstrative and often passive husband was growing less and less interested—in her, in them. He was no longer glamourized. No longer bursting with joy.

  “Brynn needed to have somebody look at her like that. Not just the world, but a guy,” Sweeney says. “And I think eventually Phil didn’t care as much; he wasn’t looking at her like that anymore. It happens in any marriage. You’re not going, ‘Oh, my God!’ anymore. And along with other things, that was a really painful thing for her. He wasn’t as excited to be with her as he had been. And I just felt so sad. Also, I thought, ‘God, Phil doesn’t even see that Brynn is also one of those girls who’s also pretty interesting.’ You’d think ‘he’s got a gold mine,’ because he married her for her looks—and not even so much for her looks, but for how the world looked at him when he was with her. And then that wears off, because it wears off. If it were me, I’d go, ‘Oh, my God, and I accidentally also married an interesting person.’ But I don’t think he could see that.”

  * * *

  Besides the Mulherns, Woodard, Maxwell, and Gallen, Dawna Kaufmann says Phil also approached her about writing for The Phil Show. Kaufmann’s original notion, which she claims Phil liked, was a Jack Benny–type program with Phil as the Benny-esque ringmaster and Brynn as herself. “Brynn loved me, because no one else was saying, ‘I’m going to write for you both,’” Kaufmann says. After Phil promised to bring Kaufmann’s ideas and sketches (written on spec) to his managers at Brillstein-Grey, weeks went by with no feedback. Kaufmann called him and asked what was happening. Phil told her she’d sit in on a meeting very soon. “And then,” Kaufmann says, “I couldn’t get him on the phone. I couldn’t get his attention.” Kaufmann contacted Brynn for insight; Brynn had none. That Phil was also having conversations with others, including the Mulherns, was unknown to Kaufmann. “It was my idea and we were working together,” she says. “But that was Phil. It wouldn’t have surprised me if he was making little deals on the side with [other] people. That’s not a good thing about him.”

  With SNL behind him and The Phil Show in what seemed like eternal limbo, Phil began to feel adrift. He still did commercial work and episodes of The Simpsons (besides McClure and Hutz, his voices on the show had grown to include Moses, Johnny Tightlips, a Mexican wrestling announcer, Smooth Jimmy Apollo, Charlton Heston, and a host of others). He even did some bit parts for The Ren & Stimpy Show. But the absence of a regular gig made him anxious. When Martin Short’s NBC sitcom tanked (in the fall of 1994, after only three episodes), Phil told David Letterman, “I got scared. I shouldn’t say got scared. Well, for several weeks I shivered in the corner naked with the lights out. That’s not fear. It could have been the flu bug.” Seriously, though, the process of launching his own program had proved to be more Sisyphean than Phil had anticipated. And so it came as something of a relief when NBC passed on The Phil Show while at the same time offering its would-be star an opportunity to return to ensemble acting and his former network in an NBC sitcom pilot called NewsRadio.

  Created by former Letterman and The Larry Sanders Show writer Paul Simms, a Harvard graduate then only in his late twenties, the pilot script (shot in the late fall of 1994) struck Phil as a cut above typical fare when he initially perused it in the offices of Brillstein-Grey. It apparently mattered not that his character, arrogant broadcaster Bill McNeal, had maybe a dozen lines in the entire episode. And while he was then being courted for the lead role in another sitcom on which he would play the father of two kids, Simms’s craftsmanship and the fact that he’d created McNeal (an intelligent but insufferable schmuck) specifically for Phil ultimately won out. “One thing I’ve learned from my tenure at Saturday Night Live is that good writing is what it’s all about,” Phil said. “And this one just punched through.” From a more career-oriented perspective, if the show got picked up, Phil could return to doing what he did best: being a comedic actor-for-hire. Spurred by encouragement from Dana Carvey, he took the job.

  * * *

  Before long, NewsRadio was green-lighted and Phil was back in the NBC fold at a healthy salary of $50,000 per episode. That totaled out at $350,000 for the truncated first season—which began airing on Tuesday nights in March 1995 and consisted of just seven episodes—and more than $1 million when NBC re-upped for an additional twenty-one episodes that began airing when season two picked up that September. Not bad for an ensemble player on an unproven show in 1995, though in ensuing years Phil’s grumbling that he should earn more reportedly fell on deaf ears. That two of his managers, Brad Grey and Bernie Brillstein, also produced the show probably didn’t help matters.

  Scene from NewsRadio: Dave Nelson and Bill McNeal talk in the offices of WNYX-AM:

  Dave: In the first place, why would you ask for a raise so big that it would cripple the station?

  Bill: Greed.

  Dave: And what has that greed gotten you?

  Bill: Money.

  Dave: And what can that money ultimately buy?

  Bill: Happiness. But stop trying to cheer me up.

  But Phil was no Bill. He was truly happy to be back—and not only for the paycheck, though it was bigger than he could believe. Just being free again to do his thing, unfettered by network red tape, thrilled him. “I don’t feel like it has as much risk as a show with my name on it,” he told Entertainment Weekly. “If it tanks, they usually put the blame on the label.” With The Phil Show, he admitted in another interview, “I would’ve been sweatin’ blood each week trying to make it work.” Simms also got the sense that Phil relished his suburban home life and hobbies. He wasn’t ready to retire, but neither was he interested in repeating the late nights and hectic pace of SNL. After all, he was forty-seven now—at least a decade older than anyone in the NewsRadio cast except for co-star Stephen Root, who was only a few years his junior—and uninterested in last-minute road trips or on-set drama. “There were more than a few times when things would come up and these younger cast members would be upset about something,” Simms says. “And Phil was always the one going, ‘Guys, we’re very lucky and doing a great job. I’ve been through it all. Everyone just relax and try to enjoy every day.’ So he was a good stabilizing influence.”

  Because NewsRadio marked the first time since his Chick Hazard days that Phil had played the same character week after week, director James Burrows had some initial reservations about his hiring. But after Burrows and Phil met, Simms says, concerns evaporated. Phil was definitely the right man for the job.

  Set at the number two radio station in New York, WNYX-AM, NewsRadio features a cast of eccentric characters that includes (besides Phil’s McNeal) a mega-rich owner (Jimmy James, played by Root), a neurotic station manager (Dave Nelson, played by Dave Foley), a beautiful and highly competent reporter (Lisa Miller, played by Maura Tierney), a goofball reporter (Matthew Brock, played by Andy Dick), a party-girl secretary (Beth, played by Vicki Lewis), a smart and gorgeous news anchor (Catherine Duke, played by Khandi Alexander), and a tough-guy maintenance man (Joe Garrelli, played by Joe Rogan).

  “[Phil] knew everybody’s name on the set from the boom operators to the grips to the newest people,” Andy Dick said in 1998. “He would give me all kinds of advice. He called me the most of anyone when I was in rehab recently for thirty days. He called me all the time. I’m also in therapy, and on the set I would rehash my whole therapy session with Phil because I felt he could give me a second opinion. He would give me the emotional second opinion.”

  The set was freewheeling, laid-back, and atypically democratic. And ratings mattered not in the early going, only doing solid work. But it took several months for Phil, who toted around scripts with his scenes neatly tabbed, to fully gel with the cast and acclimate himself to a workplace that w
as as relaxed and team-oriented as SNL had been stressful and cutthroat. Even into his second season, he clung to a sort of battle mentality. “We had to kind of beat Phil up the first couple of years,” Root says. “He came from Saturday Night Live, where you had to fight like a tiger to get your stuff on. Whereas you came into our thing and somebody went, ‘Oh, that’s funny. Why don’t you use this, Phil?’ And he’d go, ‘What are you talking about? You’re giving me jokes?’ He was completely not used to that. So we really had to go, ‘Phil, Phil, just go back to zero. We’re all going for one goal here.’ And then he got it and it was just the best.”

  When Vicki Lewis watched Phil perform, she “sensed in him a rage … I don’t know many men who don’t have that, but I could see that under the surface. He never raged at anybody, but he had a strong point of view and he could get frustrated and put his foot down. He seemed too smart to me and too logical to me, at times, to be an actor. And I think that’s what made him particularly funny in the way that he was funny.”

  In the early days, Simms says, some of the actors complained that Phil seemed to be getting special treatment—because he was getting special treatment. But Simms says it had nothing to do with Phil’s ties to Brillstein-Grey, which produced NewsRadio in partnership with Universal Studios, and came entirely from him. “Maybe I’m old-fashioned,” he says. “We were a bunch of kids and he was a grown-up, and you show some respect. Also, I probably rewarded him a little more in ways, because you want to reward the guy who’s calm and cool when people are flipping out about whatever the problem of the day is.”

  As a favor to director Tom Cherones, who arrived about halfway through season two and stabilized operations (until then different directors came and went, with a somewhat disorienting effect), Phil occasionally acted as bullhorn. “I don’t like to shout,” Cherones says, “but he would do it for me. So whenever anyone would be laughing and joking [between scenes], he would be the one to say, ‘Stop playing, boys and girls! Let’s do the work!’” Between takes, Phil doodled on Bill McNeal’s desk blotter.