You Might Remember Me The Life and Times of Phil Hartman

by Mike Thomas

  “I demanded that she be protected,” John says of his stern efforts on Doris’s behalf. “I said, ‘Don’t make me play hardball with you. I’ve spent my life fighting record companies on behalf of artists, and if you think I care more about you than I do my mother, you’d better not challenge me.’ And they did, and I let ’em have it. And I let ’em have it in a vicious, vicious way. And so they don’t like me. I knew there’d be a price, but what do I care? In all honesty, I was never close to them. They’re good people and they did a brilliant job with the children as far as I’m concerned—under horrid circumstances.”

  At the time, using his will as a guide, various publications placed the value of Phil’s estate at only $1.2 million. But attorneys say that number almost certainly represents just a fraction of his assets not held in what’s called a revocable trust (used to avoid a probate court hearing and for tax-saving purposes). The amount would rise as assets—including Phil’s house, cars, boats, motorcycle, and plane—were sold off in the ensuing months. According to instructions in his will, there were to be distributions for living expenses and schooling, with the remainder paid to Sean and Birgen in equal portions starting when each turned twenty-five and ending ten years later if and only if a bachelor’s degree was obtained from “a four-year university accredited by the Western Association of Schools and Colleges or some comparable nationally recognized organization.”

  In general, though, civility ruled during the strange and strained converging of clans. “I wanted to be mad,” says Phil’s older sister Martha, who fought the urge to ask Brynn’s parents, “Why did your daughter have to do this?” “We treated them all with respect. Of course, they were scared to death. They didn’t know what they were coming to.”

  Outside, journalists and paparazzi were ready to pounce. A couple of them even made their way over to Catalina Island, where Debbie Avellana—Phil’s acquaintance from Armstrong’s restaurant—did her best to evade their most tabloid-ish inquiries. Namely, this one: Was Phil leading a gay lifestyle? Avellana scoffs now as she scoffed then. “Like you could pull off something like that around here, where the houses are five feet apart and you know how many times your neighbor pees,” she says. “There is no walk of shame here. We’re proud.”

  As John Hartmann later described the increasingly surreal atmosphere in which he and his family were forced to exist, “Reporters descended on our world like locusts, and they were insatiable. We became a form of prey and were forced into hiding to conceal our tears and protect the dignity of our family at a very difficult time. We were all dazed in the first days following the tragedy and any statement would have projected only anger and pain … There was no flavor that would turn that pill sweet.”

  * * *

  On the day Phil was murdered, his former Groundlings co-star Phyllis Katz got a call from her friend in New York wondering if Katz had heard the news about Phil. She had not. She turned on her television—and left it on for hours, until Katz could take no more. Not knowing where else to go, she drove to the Groundlings Theatre on Melrose with the hope that some of Phil’s other former cast mates might have the same notion. They did not. So Katz just sat in the office, wondering what to do next. Then the phone rang. It was Laraine Newman, who was calling from the gathering at Jon Lovitz’s house. As she and Katz talked, they devised a plan—at Newman’s suggestion—to honor Phil at an invite-only Groundlings send-off. Word soon went out.

  Starting late afternoon on Wednesday, June 3, the Groundlings Theatre began filling up. Paparazzi were stationed outside on Melrose but barred from entering. Before long all of the venue’s ninety-nine seats were occupied by family members (including John and Paul Hartmann and Paul’s wife Christie), friends, and former colleagues. Lorne Michaels and Steve Martin sat together. Marcia Clark of O. J. Simpson trial fame was there, too. “Tom Maxwell and I were standing in the lobby,” Katz says, “and the doors opened and all these people came in. And there were people who hadn’t spoken to each other in years, people who had had arguments, people who left the Groundlings disgruntled and had said, ‘I’m never going into that building again!’ All of these things were forgiven and forgotten, because people were there to say good-bye to Phil.”

  As Craig Strong remembers the proceedings, “It was typical Groundlings: over-the-top funny, over-the-top drama, over-the-top egos trying to outdo one another with their stories about Phil.” Strong also recalls some “bizarre stuff” from Paul Reubens, one of many speakers. Randy Bennett has the same memory. “He and Phil were always on and off, and he was trying to say something about this [being] his fault and that he was a terrible friend. On the one hand it was like, ‘Oh, Jesus, Mary and Joseph!’ And on the other hand it was so tragic. It was so heartbreaking that he had let this enormous friendship go by the wayside.”

  Mark Pierson shared some memories, as did Maxwell, who mentioned Phil’s ever-changing looks during their time together on Melrose. One year he was a surfer dude talking about “bitchin’ waves,” the next he was a cowboy driving a pickup truck. And one day, when Maxwell offhandedly suggested he and Phil get the hell out of town, join the Merchant Marines, and travel to South America, Phil thought for a few seconds and replied in all seriousness, “Yeah. Let’s do it.”

  Lovitz also spoke. According to Strong, he made a point of telling everyone that he thought Phil had been sleeping when Brynn shot him—that he had died without feeling any pain. Others have expressed the same hope. “From the wounds on Phil, it went fast,” investigating detective Dave Martin told members of the Hartmann family some weeks later. “Phil was dead instantly. Instantly. And my theory is that from the position in his bed, he was probably sleeping and he never knew what happened.” The brutal truth, though, is that no one knew—and no one knows—which shot came first. Not the detectives, not the coroners—no one but Brynn.

  * * *

  The next morning, June 4, 1998, friends and relatives of Phil and Brynn (including their children, Sean and Birgen) arrived at the imposing gates of Forest Lawn Memorial-Park and Mortuary in Glendale, California. The final resting place of George Burns and Gracie Allen, Jimmy Stewart, and Humphrey Bogart—and, more recently, pop star Michael Jackson—it is so legendary a locale that even Pope John Paul II dropped by during his visit to L.A. in 1984.

  A media throng had already formed and photographers tried to capture images of the mourners. And though they were barred from tailing the funeral procession, a couple of them tried and failed to sneak in. (Security was so tight, in fact, that John Hartmann’s ex-wife Lexie was detained until her identity could be confirmed.) After passing an initial checkpoint, cars and limousines were allowed to proceed up a tortuous main road, past lush landscaping and rows upon rows of flat grave markers, to Forest Lawn’s venerable Church of the Recessional, where Phil and Brynn would be memorialized. Built in 1932, the handsome 150-seat stone structure is situated on a precipice that overlooks the Los Angeles skyline. A replica of the tenth-century Parish Church of St. Margaret in the Sussex, England, village of Rottingdean, where the novelist and poet Rudyard Kipling once resided, it is also a popular wedding spot—one that takes its name from Kipling’s poem “Recessional.”

  God of our fathers, known of old—

  Lord of our far-flung battle-line

  Beneath whose awful hand we hold

  Dominion over palm and pine—

  Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet,

  Lest we forget—lest we forget!

  Cresting a hill where the church stands, the limousines took turns pulling into a white tent that shielded disembarking passengers from telephoto lenses in helicopters overhead—and wherever else prying eyes might lurk. The Hartmann and Omdahl families, along with other invited guests, sat in dark-wood pews under an arched wooden ceiling. Displayed up front, backlit by a tripart stained-glass window, were large photographs of Phil and Brynn as well as urns containing their ashes

  “The dust had not settled and there were a lot of intense feelings going around
,” John says. “It was pretty awkward. But I think, by then, the families had more or less accepted their roles, and they were tough. You can’t walk away and you have to deal with it. It was very strained, and I think it might have seemed very bizarre to the [outside] observer.”

  As they trickled in, attendees received limited edition copies of a hand-drawn program made by John’s current wife Valerie. Printed on thick stock, with a parchment insert, each one of a hundred was numbered in pencil—a special keepsake from this sorrowful occasion. On its cover, four porpoises encircle the earth. Inside the earth is a blue sea from which leap four more porpoises in perfect alignment. In a blue sky whose horizon melds with the sea, four stars twinkle. Four: Phil, Brynn, Sean, Birgen.

  A Service of Memory for Phil and Brynn Hartman, it reads in large font on front. On back is a passage from John 13:34: “A new commandment I give unto you, that ye love one another.”

  On the left inside page in script font:

  A SERVICE OF MEMORY

  FOR

  PHILIP AND BRYNN

  HARTMAN

  Philip Edward Hartmann

  1948–1998

  Brynn Hartman

  1958–1998

  Mourners also received prayer cards with a portrait of Phil on one side and a famous passage from University of Oxford divinity professor Henry Scott Holland, titled “Death Is Nothing at All,” on the other. Someone had sent the uplifting words—delivered by Holland during a May 1910 sermon following the death of England’s King Edward VII—to Doris after Rupert’s passing, and she thought them an apt tribute to her middle son.

  Death is nothing at all.

  I have only slipped away to the next room.

  I am I and you are you.

  Whatever we were to each other,

  That, we still are.

  Call me by my old familiar name.

  Speak to me in the easy way

  which you always used.

  Put no difference into your tone.

  Wear no forced air of solemnity or sorrow.

  Laugh as we always laughed

  at the little jokes we enjoyed together.

  Play, smile, think of me. Pray for me.

  Let my name be ever the household word

  that it always was.

  Let it be spoken without effect.

  Without the trace of a shadow on it.

  Life means all that it ever meant.

  It is the same that it ever was.

  There is absolute unbroken continuity.

  Why should I be out of mind

  because I am out of sight?

  I am but waiting for you.

  For an interval.

  Somewhere. Very near.

  Just around the corner.

  All is well.

  Omitted was this final portion: “Nothing is hurt; nothing is lost/One brief moment and all will be as it was before/How we shall laugh at the trouble of parting when we meet again!”

  The ceremony, rife with elements of the Catholic Mass that Phil had long ago ceased to attend (“Connie Omdahl and I insisted on having a priest,” Phil’s sister Nancy says, referring to Brynn’s mother), began with a song performed by famed rock musician and Phil’s acquaintance of many decades Graham Nash, whom Phil had come to know during his tenure at Hartmann & Goodman. Strapping on an acoustic guitar, Nash began to play his poignant solo composition “Simple Man.” Written as a lover’s lament, it was suddenly imbued with new meaning at this funeral for a friend.

  I am a simple man

  And I play a simple tune

  I wish that I could see you once again

  Across the room, like the first time.

  I just want to hold you,

  I don’t want to hold you down

  I hear what you’re saying

  and you’re spinning my head around

  And I can’t make it alone …

  During his homily, Friar James Cavanagh assured gatherers that Phil and Brynn were together and at peace in heaven. Not everyone believed it.

  As part of John Hartmann’s eulogy, in which he directly referred to the tragic events of May 28, he read a poem he’d penned the previous week after things calmed down a bit and there was time to think. In it, to the puzzlement of some, he referenced the Bear Clan of Native American mythology (the Omdahls), wolves (the Hartmanns), and a three-legged dog (John himself). Its first stanza set the tone:

  There lays a puzzle upon the bed

  Where a pair of bloods have run out red.

  She placed her rubies upon his head

  To eclipse the life and light he shed

  The night our shooting stars fell dead.

  Helping to close the ceremony as he’d begun it, Nash again took up his guitar, stood at the chapel’s center, and sang the well-known Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young hit “Teach Your Children.” It was quite a difficult performance, Nash says, even for a veteran of the stage. He chose the song “because it epitomized the idea of passing along information to [Phil’s] kids and from his kids.”

  Teach your children well

  Their father’s hell did slowly go by

  And feed them on your dreams,

  The one they picked, the one you’ll know by.

  Don’t you ever ask them why

  If they told you, you would cry,

  So just look at them and sigh

  and know they love you.

  Afterward, other family members were invited to speak. Greg Omdahl did so, and Nancy Martino made brief remarks as well. During Paul Hartmann’s remembrance, he foreswore future use of the surfer slang “killer waves.” He and Phil had caught them plenty of times at California’s choicest spots, but the term was now too colored with dark meaning. More prayers followed before the memorial came to a close; mourners filed out into the sunshine and eventually made their way back down the long and winding road. Some of them would converge again at other tributes to Phil in the weeks and months ahead.

  Chapter 18

  Phil in his dinghy near Catalina, 1990s.

  On Monday, June 8, the L.A. coroner’s office released its toxicology report on Brynn. Phil’s body was clear of harmful substances, but based on stomach, urine, and blood analyses, Brynn’s contained cocaine, alcohol (a blood level of .11 percent) and two components of Zoloft—desmethylsertraline and sertraline—in what the coroner’s chief investigator, Craig Harvey, described in the media as “therapeutic levels.” “Between the cocaine and alcohol, the two of them most definitely intensified the other’s effects,” he told CNN. “The Zoloft is kind of a wild card.”

  John Hartmann has a different view that he says was informed by the L.A. coroner himself, who told him “cocaine was not even a factor. Although I think he doesn’t understand cocaine, because cocaine is downright evil. He said it was the Zoloft and the alcohol. There are heavy admonitions on Zoloft: ‘Do Not Mix with Alcohol.’ And he said when it hit her brain it exploded, she didn’t know what she was doing, she didn’t know why she did it, and I accept that as true.” But L.A.’s then–chief forensic toxicologist (and now forensic laboratories chief) Joseph Muto calls that conclusion “unfounded.”

  Also found at the Hartman home were numerous prescription medications in Brynn’s name: phentermine (an appetite suppressant), methocarbamol (a muscle relaxant), Daypro (an anti-inflammatory), Augmentin (an antibiotic for bacterial infections), diazepam (the same as Valium, for anxiety), minocycline (an antibiotic), cyclobenzaprine (another muscle relaxant), and Zovirax (an antiviral).

  As Muto informed police some days later, according to investigative reports, the level of Zoloft found in Brynn’s system when he examined her was “very low.” So low, in fact, that had this not been a high-profile case, he probably wouldn’t have bothered to report the results. Asked about this remark more recently, however, Muto is genuinely confounded. “I would never say that something wasn’t worth mentioning if it weren’t a high-profile case,” he says. “Whatever we find is worth mentioning.”

 
In May 1999, about a year after Phil and Brynn died, Zoloft maker Pfizer would be named in a wrongful death lawsuit brought by Brynn’s brother Greg Omdahl on behalf of Sean, Birgen, and Phil’s and Brynn’s estates—of which, in their respective wills, Omdahl was named executor. Arthur Sorosky, the doctor who gave Brynn samples of the antidepressant, was sued as well. In Pfizer’s case, the pharmaceutical giant was accused of marketing a drug that, Omdahl’s lawyers claimed, contributed to Brynn’s erratic behavior (part of the torturous and potentially suicide-related condition akathisia from which she might have suffered, but which then did not appear in precautionary statements on Zoloft package inserts) and ultimately violent actions.

  “Brynn Hartman did not have a major clinical depression,” the suit alleged in part. “She was dealing with some situational ‘stressors’ in her life and may have thought she needed a ‘pick-me-up,’ and one might argue that she had a chronic, low-grade condition like dysthymia; but she did not have major clinical depression. And, yet, as a result of Pfizer’s aggressive over-promotional activities, she was given Zoloft.”

  Describing akathisia in a July 1999 article on Salon.com, Peter Breggin, psychiatrist and outspoken opponent of various psychiatric drugs, explained that it could drive someone “into extreme states of irritability, anger, and frustration. People can become more depressed and more despairing; their impulse control loosens and they do stupid things. So the violent impulses that an ordinary person would control come pouring out or even appear for the first time.”

  According to police records, Muto explained that the high level of cocaine in Brynn’s urine could indicate use over a day or day and a half prior to her death. The level of cocaine in her blood also signified a recent ingestion. And while the postmortem amount in her system was not inordinately high, Muto said at the time, it would have been “extremely high” were the results backed up (extrapolated) four to five hours. Today, though, Muto insists that extrapolating the levels of cocaine in Brynn’s system makes absolutely no sense to him. “You can’t even do that,” he says. “How do I know what she was doing? That’s speculation.” There is, he adds, no way to tell when Brynn used cocaine (it has a short half-life but can linger in the urine for days) or how much she ingested, and thus no way to determine how high she might have been at the time she killed Phil.