You Might Remember Me The Life and Times of Phil Hartman

by Mike Thomas

  Like Simms, Lewis was also respectful of Phil’s grown-up status and says he was never begrudged his absence from group shenanigans. When, for instance, several cast members and writers stayed up all night drinking and screwing off following an awards show or after a season wrapped, Phil was not part of their gathering. And when late morning came and they were all “sweating like rapists” and spontaneously en route to Las Vegas for more gleeful cavorting, Phil was nowhere to be found. When he did stick around, it was never for long. Occasionally he used Brynn as an out—not just from after-hours antics, but in general—announcing in a wisecracking way that he had to “get home to the old ball-and-chain.”

  In keeping with his elder statesman status, he also gave Lewis investment advice. “This doesn’t last,” he told her when the show got rolling and actors began to buy clothes and cars and homes. “I was very young emotionally and it was my first sitcom, so I tended to revere him,” she says. “And that kept me from being comfortable.” Phil also “set a healthy boundary,” whereas some of his colleagues’ boundaries—Lewis’s included—were less defined. “It was almost like the first time we had had fun in a group in our lives,” she says. But the tight bonds that formed sometimes were detrimental to outside relationships. Bringing significant others around the set was awkward, Lewis recalls, “because they didn’t fit in and nobody went out of their way to let them in.”

  While Phil began NewsRadio as a star of some renown thanks to his long stint on SNL, he was a dedicated ensemble player from the start. So were the rest of his cohorts, all of whom were quick studies that could hold their own in any given scene. Phil knew it and was delighted. He’d logged enough time as The Glue. “Not since Taxi has there been a show with so many performers capable of just waltzing out there and swatting one out of the park,” he proclaimed not long after the show began airing. There’s a lot of affection between the cast members, too, which is another thing you can’t take for granted. Everyone seems to genuinely like and respect each other, so it’s a very pleasant work environment.”

  Phil had a big hand in making it so. Playful and lighthearted, but with a comic’s cynical edge, he kidded around with cast and crew alike, proclaiming, “This is the money shot!” or “Watch and learn!” Phil’s CB4 and Greedy co-star Khandi Alexander was often paired with him in the set’s raised and glassed-in broadcast booth. Over time they developed an easy rapport in which shit-giving was frequent. “This has to be taken in the right tone,” says Alexander, who is black, by way of introducing a Phil anecdote. “We were in the fishbowl and the whole show was going on, so we would stay in character and have our own show up there to keep us interested. And I remember one time in particular, Phil was just staring at me and it was driving me crazy. Like, ‘What are you staring at?’ And he just looked at me and went, ‘You know, looking at you makes me long for slavery.’” At which point Alexander laughed like hell.

  On another occasion, Phil—whom Alexander deems “the most childlike in spirit” of her cast mates—took her for a spin in his big white Mercedes. Even though the neighborhood around Sunset Gower Studios was sketchy, Alexander remembers, Phil was seemingly oblivious to the blight and blasted his Radiohead tunes through open windows with nary a care in the world. “You’re like, ‘Excuse me! Excuse me! You’re white! Your car’s white! It’s a bad neighborhood! Get me out of here!’” she says, recalling her words of warning. “No connection. None.” Phil just joked that he was safer with her along. “I just remember him being so rude!” Alexander says with a laugh. “Very Bill McNeal with a foxy black chick.”

  In early March 1996, Los Angeles Daily News TV critic Phil Rosenthal called NewsRadio (which had by then moved to a much tougher time slot between eight and nine P.M. on Sundays) “a hit waiting to happen” and declared that its cast was “quietly becoming one of television’s top comedy ensembles.” Although it was then ranked only thirty-ninth among prime time shows, it fared extremely well with the 18-to-49-year-old crowd that advertisers adore. Added Rosenthal, “Its stories are ordinary: Christmas bonuses, gossip, sloppy desks, office romance, and who’s going to get that big promotion. And yet it always finds the inherent humor.”

  Simms recalls that Phil was a breeze on the set and took issue with his lines only once. And once again, as with James Downey at SNL, his pushback stemmed from content he considered religiously offensive. “He was very apologetic and kind about it,” Simms says, “and he said, ‘I’d rather have a different line, because there’s all sorts of different people in America [who] believe in stuff. And even though it’s funny to us, to someone else that could be a really important thing.’ So we changed the line.” Phil’s delivery, as usual, was right on target.

  “I always find it kind of pretentious when actors talk about their instrument or their voice,” Simms has said, “but he did seem like he had a logical approach to it and knew the eighteen different pitches of voice he could do and all that. It was almost like a robot, in the best possible way.”

  * * *

  Later in March, a couple of weeks after finalizing his last will and testament in Beverly Hills (Brynn got everything in the event of her husband’s death, their children if she failed to survive), Phil jetted east to host SNL. It was his first time back since exiting the show in May 1994, and he’d been looking forward to it “like a tiger looks forward to eating Siegfried and Roy.” Hitting the ground running, he opens with a monologue that pokes fun at his Master of a Thousand Voices reputation. When Phil can barely get a word out without slipping into an impression, he grows despondent, bolts from the studio, and shuts himself in his dressing room. “Leave me alone!” Phil yells when Tim Meadows knocks. Then, talking to his reflection in the mirror: “Phil can’t finish the monologue … because I don’t know who Phil is … Who are you?”

  Sketch-wise, he’s all over the place like in days of old: as Charlton Heston, Frank Sinatra, Frankenstein, a cop, Cirroc the Unfrozen Caveman Lawyer, and name-dropping drama coach Bobby Coldsman (“This is something, this is nothing. This is something, this is nothing.”). In a bit that was cut during dress rehearsal but appeared later on, Phil plays a seemingly docile codger named “Uncle John,” who swills booze and snorts cocaine while recording a radio ad for his famous buttermilk pancakes. “I miss it very, very much,” Phil said of SNL prior to his host appearance that month. “If SNL was done in L.A., I would never leave.”

  The next day, Fox aired an episode of The Simpsons titled “A Fish Called Selma,” in which a jobless Troy McClure courts and then marries Marge’s chain-smoking drag-of-a-sister Selma to improve his public image and revive his career. It was by far Phil’s most significant McClure portrayal to date.

  Selma: Is this a sham marriage?

  Troy: Sure, baby. Is that a problemo?

  Selma: You married me just to help your career?

  Troy: You make it sound so sordid. Look, don’t we have a good time together?

  Selma: Yes, but—

  Troy: Don’t you have everything you ever wanted here? Money, security, a big hot flat rock for Jub-jub?

  Selma: But … don’t you love me?

  Troy: [Sincerely] Sure I do. Like I love Fresca. Isn’t that enough? The only difference between our marriage and anyone else’s is, we know ours is a sham.

  Selma: (Beat, Tentative) Are you gay?

  Troy: Gay? I wish! If I were gay there’d be no problem. No, what I have is a romantic abnormality—one so unbelievable that it must be hidden from the public at all costs. You see—

  Selma: Stop. You’re asking me to live a lie. I don’t know if I can do that.

  Troy: It’s remarkably easy! Just smile for the cameras and enjoy Mr. Troy’s Wild Ride! You’ll go to the right parties, meet the right people. Sure, you’ll be a sham wife—but you’ll be the envy of every other sham wife in town! So whad’ya say, baby?

  She considers for a second and lights a smoke.

  Selma: Tell me again about Mr. Troy’s Wild Ride.

  Troy puts his
arm around Selma. She smiles.

  With Phil’s career again on the upswing, Brynn decided to give acting another try—and not just with lessons. Betty McCann, Phil’s primary agent at William Morris, tried to assist Brynn at his behest. They’d send her out on some auditions, McCann told him. But Brynn “wasn’t very dependable,” McCann says, “and she really didn’t score anything. Her ego was going south.” Inexplicably, McCann says, Brynn even failed to provide basic but essential tools of the trade such as headshots. “We needed pictures and she’d say, ‘OK,’ and then she wouldn’t bring them over.” (A friend says Phil hooked her up with someone who could provide them.) Puzzled, McCann called Phil: “Do you think Brynn really wants to do this?” He wasn’t sure.

  Steve Small, Phil’s attorney friend from his graphic design days, thinks part of Brynn’s frustration came from her need to be recognized as more than a mother and the wife of a star. Aside from acting, Phil told him, Brynn wanted to learn how to play the piano and sing. “She saw a path similar to his, where she would be recognized and as famous as him,” Small says, “but I don’t think he ever encouraged that or gave her the impression that he was behind her.”

  John Hartmann’s take is based on a hard truth he proffers to students in the college courses he teaches about the business of music entertainment. “Brynn came to L.A. to be a star,” he says, “and she got sucked down the black hole of broken dreams. She was in search of a path to stardom. And she urged and egged Phil to get her parts or introduce her to people or advance her career—which he attempted to do up until the point that he realized she wasn’t talented.”

  * * *

  So as to keep himself interested and his NewsRadio character interesting in episode after episode, Phil plumbed what he considered to be a much more complex personality than McNeal might have had in the hands of another actor—certainly more complex than that of dunderheaded news anchor Ted Baxter (played by Ted Knight) on The Mary Tyler Moore Show. McNeal wasn’t stupid and clueless like Baxter, just intensely self-absorbed, willfully out of touch, and—as Phil described him—“rife with inadequacies.” Phil’s formula for playing such a creep? Simple: “I just take myself and remove any ethics and character. All of us are capable of a low ebb from time to time. It’s just that Bill lives there.”

  SNL had been hectic and draining, and Phil found that NewsRadio—at least at the start—was no cakewalk by comparison. It was actually overwhelming and exhausting, much more so than he had anticipated. And when he finally got a breather, he found himself tending to other business he’d been forced to shelve while shooting. As he settled into a groove, however, he found the hours much more family-friendly and thought the workload slightly tougher than “a week of trout fishing.”

  Brynn vied for his attention as well, but Phil never gave her enough. Publicly, everything was always peachy keen between them—or at most harmlessly frustrating. “I’m a lucky man,” Phil told the audience at 30 Rock during the opening monologue of his second SNL hosting appearance in less than a year, on November 23, 1996. (The monologue’s running gag is his many commercial endorsements.) “But I’d be nothing without my lovely wife Brynn. Our anniversary’s comin’ up, and I want to buy her a diamond necklace, just to show her what’s important to me. Family, friends, good times, Michelob … That should cover the necklace!”

  Several months after their anniversary, in April, Brynn would turn thirty-nine. Career-wise, she had no prospects. Disappointment mounted. Not only did Brynn feel isolated and housebound, she began to suspect that Phil was cheating on her. Marriage counseling helped little, in part because Phil wasn’t all that keen on it. Sometimes Brynn went solo. Their sex life was on the downslide, too. But somewhere, underneath it all, love lingered. Says Britt Marin, “Phil used to tell me that even though they had marital problems, he still loved her and he was hoping to work things out.”

  Chapter 14

  Phil, circa 1990s. (Courtesy of the Hartmann family)

  When Phil had appeared on The Howard Stern E! Interview show in November 1992—the same program on which he’d talked about his falling-out with Paul Reubens—Brynn joined him partway through. It wasn’t the most comfortable chat (at one point Brynn sat, reluctantly, on Stern’s lap and kissed him), but it was somewhat telling. Being his usual nosey self, Howard wondered whether Brynn loved Phil for his fame. She denied it. He also inquired, with comical indelicacy, if she’d ever “worked nude.” She told him no, but mentioned her stint as a swimsuit model. That, of course, piqued Stern’s interest, leading Phil to jokingly wish aloud that “I could show you my wife’s body.” Stern was all for it. Said Brynn, who’d been relegated to mere spectator, “I have no voice here.”

  Five years after that awkward exchange, whatever thrill had existed between Phil and Brynn was gone—or certainly on its way out the door. Increasingly, when Brynn tried to initiate sex, Phil rebuffed her. And lately, she was always the initiator. Steve Small says Phil could be both withdrawn and “tone-deaf” when it came to his interactions with Brynn. One time, while visiting Phil at a summer home he’d rented in Malibu (the waters off its beach had a modest-sized point break where Phil rekindled his interest in surfing), they were walking down the beach when Phil revealed that Brynn was mad at him. Small asked why, and Phil told him that after a female neighbor had dropped by to visit, Phil had turned to Brynn and said, “Wow, she has great-looking tits.” Small was aghast and not at all surprised that Brynn had reacted poorly. Phil didn’t get what the big deal was. “He was such a curmudgeon,” Small says. “Everything was around Phil and she was kind of an accessory.”

  On another occasion Small got a phone call from Phil after Small had visited him and Brynn in Encino. Phil was audibly upset. “What did you say to Brynn?” he asked. At first Small was unsure what Phil meant. He then recalled a brief conversation he’d had with her after Brynn answered the Ponderosa phone one day and began asking questions about her husband. During their chat Small told her there was “a very small room inside Phil that no one would get to.” It was merely a casual observation, he says, “but apparently it amped her up quite a bit to the point where he was upset with me for saying that. She was very fragile.”

  Britt Marin was later stunned to learn, though he isn’t clear on how, that Brynn had become so suspicious of his and Phil’s Catalina getaways that she’d hired (or so he was told) a private investigator to secretly snap photos of them as they lounged on and off the island. “I think Brynn thought that we were gay, which we were not,” Marin says. Craig Strong and Randy Bennett, Phil’s Chick Hazard business partners and each other’s longtime life partners, got the sense that Brynn harbored disdain for homosexuals. Although Phil was known to impersonate a flamboyantly gay John Wayne on the deck of his boat; although he once described a dream he’d had about George Bush and Kirk Douglas getting it on; although he struck a stereotypically “gay” pose with fellow actor Kelsey Grammer for the cover of L.A. Magazine (excoriating letters to the editor followed)—not to mention the Coke ad that never aired due to his overly effeminate hairdresser shtick—Phil’s views on sexual orientation were ostensibly more broadminded. “So much of television has to do with the politics of sexual relationships,” he said in that L.A. Magazine story, published in May 1996. “The gay community has always had a delightful sense of sarcasm about sexual mores. Unfortunately, to a large segment of our society, gay people are viewed as sexual outlaws … God forbid a straight person should acknowledge that there are pleasures associated with their anus. That’s a big, big door that people don’t want to open.”

  “Phil had a very soft, feminine side to him,” Strong says. “And I think [Brynn] may have thought that Phil had had [gay] relationships.” After Phil and Brynn married, Bennett contends, “all the gay Groundlings were sort of pushed out of his life as much as possible. I think Brynn was threatened, and I know other people felt that way as well.” And though it “upset Phil,” Bennett says, “he was not going to confront her about stuff like that.�
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  As for other women, Marin says none came to his attention in all the time he spent with Phil—which was a lot. In fact, Marin adds, Phil even was careful not to get overly familiar with female fans he met while out and about—including those who asked to board his boat at Catalina Island. If Brynn knew, he knew, she’d have a fit. “Phil never strayed,” John Hartmann contends. “He was a very unique cat. ‘Good’ is the best word to describe him.”

  As Phil told Conan O’Brien that year—jokingly, as always, but with more than a hint of truth: “I am up to my elbows in a midlife crisis, let’s be honest. I can’t cheat on my wife; she’s psychic. If I look at another woman, she comes home [and says], ‘Who’s Laura?’ I go, ‘I didn’t get a name!’ She’s a Sagittarius, you know.… So I buy toys.” (Coincidentally or not, Phil’s pal Leno has long employed a similar line, once joking, “It’s cheaper to have thirty-five cars and one woman than one car and thirty-five women.”)

  As John Hartmann and Floyd Dozier tell it, acquaintances of Phil and Brynn (a couple) once tried to make a quick buck—many bucks, actually—by framing Phil for having an extramarital affair. One night after dinner, according to Dozier’s telling, these people suggested the four of them visit a nearby strip club called the Body Shop—the same establishment Phil had dropped by with Lynne Stewart after seeing Platoon in 1986. When Phil consented to getting a lap dance, the story goes, a hidden video camera supposedly caught all the sordid action from somewhere overhead. Not long thereafter, John says, Phil and Brynn arrived home to find a manila envelope nailed to their garage door. Inside was a videotape of Phil at the Body Shop and a note demanding $25,000 to stop its dissemination. “Phil had no problem with its being released,” John says, because the blonde sitting next to Phil—the one who seemed to be enjoying herself—was Brynn. Nonetheless, Phil hired a private investigator (“He looked like Luca Brasi from The Godfather,” Dozier says) that put the matter to rest and destroyed the master tape.