You Might Remember Me The Life and Times of Phil Hartman

by Mike Thomas

  And so, despite her personal issues and possible motives, definitive reasons for why Brynn took her husband’s life and then her own remain frustratingly elusive.

  * * *

  Ten days after SNL aired a June 13 tribute to Phil that included some of his greatest sketches and was assembled by Robert Smigel, Hartmann family members met with LAPD Robbery/Homicide detective Dave Martin, who filled them in on investigation details and addressed their concerns. On the subject of Ron Douglas and the extent of his involvement, Martin shot down reports that painted Douglas as being “some type of real villain … When I talk to him, I don’t get that impression.” Paul went so far as to laud Douglas for stepping up in a very tense situation and getting Sean out of the house. Shortly after that meeting, the Studio City stuntman was dropped as a suspect. He had simply been in the wrong place at the wrong time.

  Brynn, of course, was a key topic as well. Although Paul and Doris wondered what role the emotion hatred might have played in her shocking actions, Doris also called Brynn “the most gracious little lady that I had ever met.”

  She was far less kind about the voracious media.

  “I think they’re taking a lot of care for an eighty-year-old mother to hear that her son’s [had] his head blown [off], you know? Especially when we just lost Dad [four] weeks before. We didn’t need that. I think the media should really be called on the carpet by the police. They have no business…”

  Paul interjected. “It’s freedom of the press, Ma. It’s part of the Constitution. Can’t fight that.”

  “Oh.” Doris seemed surprised.

  “It’s OK, Mom,” John said. “That’s part of the system.”

  “Well, I just think it’s wrong and I think someone should fight it,” she replied.

  “You can’t change the Constitution,” Paul emphasized. “Freedom of the press is freedom of the press.”

  “But you don’t have to participate,” John added.

  “We didn’t,” Doris said.

  “We’re not in the papers, we’re not on TV,” John continued. “Because we didn’t play the game.”

  “And you think it’s all right?” Doris asked. “Now, what if I had fallen with a heart attack in shock? Would you have been upset about it?”

  “Yes, I would,” John told her. “And I’m upset about the whole thing, Mom. But you’ve gotta understand that we have to deal with realities … It’s over now, at least. You’re going to hurt for a long, long, long, long time. But at least we don’t have to go through court and [Brynn] being tried in front of us [as] the kids are crying out … So it’s been handled the way it should be. The police cannot control the press. It is a Constitutional right that you get the benefit of every day—believe me. If we didn’t have freedom of the press, we’d have big trouble like they do in places where they don’t. It’s like a double-edged sword. When they print nice things about Phil, it feels good. When they print horrible stuff, it feels bad. Now, they thrive on the horrible stuff. They sell more papers if it’s horrible.”

  “That’s because people have this thing about misery loves company,” Paul said. “People are miserable, and when they see more misery than they’re experiencing [themselves], it makes them feel good. It’s a real simple thing, you know?”

  “Mom, you just have to ignore it,” Mary urged, “because its all bull … Let’s focus on the positive and the good.”

  John agreed. “We have to move forward and have a life. That’s what Phil would want us to do.”

  * * *

  The biggest tribute to Phil was held on July 14 at L.A.’s Paramount Theatre, a former 1920s movie palace. Scores of friends, acquaintances, family members, and colleagues gathered to pay homage, including First Brother Roger Clinton and his Secret Service bodyguards. Several people who were especially close to Phil personally or professionally shared funny and touching memories of him. Jon Lovitz, the emcee, went first and humorously shot down rumors that Phil was gay. He also spoke of working with Phil on SNL, Phil’s curiosity and enthusiasm and the fact that he was never jealous or envious. Next to the term “joie de vivre” in the dictionary, Lovitz remarked, was a picture of his late friend—the man he called his “idol” and “mentor.”

  “The day after Phil died, I looked up at the sky and there was a rainbow around the sun,” Lovitz said. “And it was so unusual they talked about it on the radio. An expert said it was sunlight reflecting off of ice crystals in the air, and I knew it was Phil. And he may be gone, but he’s still my friend.”

  Lovitz then addressed Phil’s children directly: “Sean and Birgen, they’re still your parents and they can still hear you, and I still feel him inside of me.”

  As he continued, Lovitz spoke of a girlfriend’s twelve-year-old son, Charlie, who had died of cancer. When Lovitz had guest-starred on NewsRadio in 1996, he told Phil about the boy and how excited Charlie was about life despite his grave illness. “Are you afraid to die?” Charlie was asked. “No,” he replied, “I’m just glad I could be here.” When Phil heard that, Lovitz remembered, he “burst out crying and tears just flew out of his eyes. And he’s like, ‘Yeah, that’s what I’m talking about. That’s how I feel about life.’”

  Lovitz went on to read Henry Van Dyke’s poem “Gone from My Sight,” which employs sailing as a metaphor for dying. It reminded him of Phil, he said, and was helping him through his grief.

  I am standing upon the seashore. A ship at my side spreads her white sails to the morning breeze and starts for the blue ocean. She is an object of beauty and strength. I stand and I watch her until at length she hangs like a speck of white cloud, just where the sea and sky come to kneel with each other. Then someone at my side says, “There, she is gone.”

  Gone where?

  Gone from my sight, that is all. She is just as large in mast and hull and spar as she was when she left my side. And she is just as able to bear her load of living freight to her destined port. Her diminished size is in me, not in her. And just at the moment when someone at my side says, “There, she is gone,” there are other eyes watching her coming and other voices ready to take up the glad shout, “Here she comes!

  Purposely or not, Lovitz omitted the poem’s three concluding lines:

  And that is dying …

  Death comes in its own time, in its own way.

  Death is as unique as the individual experiencing it.

  Following a montage of his best comedy moments, Jan Hooks—Phil’s waltz partner in their “Love Is a Dream” sequence and his co-star in so many other sketches—took to the stage and, choking back tears, addressed Phil through a letter she had written.

  “My dear sweet Sandy,” she began, calling Phil by a nickname she’d given him at SNL based on the color of his hair. “How I wish I could have one more dance with you.” Hooks thanked him for his steadfastness as an acting companion, praised his consistent commitment to character, and marveled at his grace under pressure. She lamented his violent death, too, but felt confident he was at peace.

  When Paul Simms’s turn came, he talked about Phil’s smiling fortitude in the face of mildly rigorous stunts he was made to perform, such as painting his entire body blue and being suspended from wires as though he was floating in outer space. One of those stories elicited a laugh from either Sean or Birgen, Simms says, which made him feel a bit better.

  Jay Leno spoke of his and Phil’s Jack Benny banter—backstage at The Tonight Show, in restaurants, or wherever they happened to encounter one another: “Oh, Jay!” “Oh, Phil!” He recalled, too, the time they talked about their deceased fathers and the way Phil could save even the worst sketches from fizzling. “There are certain people you want to grow old with,” Leno said, “and he was one of those people.”

  During John Hartmann’s turn at the microphone, he spoke of his and Phil’s joint birthday blowouts (they were both born in late September) and the time he almost shot out young Phil’s eye with his new Red Rider BB gun. Of emigrating from Canada and farting contests in th
eir boyhood bedroom. And, as ever, he did not shy away from darkness, prompting one friend to remove Sean and Birgen from the room.

  While Brynn might not have been “the very best wife or the very best mother,” he said, neither should she be defined as a killer. On the contrary she should be praised for her “grace.” As for what it all meant—the tragedy of May 28, the shattered lives in its wake—John was matter-of-fact.

  “Nothing. It means nothing. It’s just what happened one day in the West. They were victims of the same accident. There is no one to hate and no blame to be laid. I beg you to forgive her. So put this incident in your past and close the door. Forget—if you can.”

  Doris Hartmann closed out the tribute, thanking her children for their support and the various people who had helped Phil throughout his life and career. “My whole family basked in the limelight and grace of Phil’s life,” she said. “It was wonderful. Now the light is out and an awkward night has fallen on our time. And we will never be the same.”

  As she left the stage, singer-songwriter Jackson Browne—there at the request of his old acquaintance John Hartmann—sat at a piano and played his melancholy ballad “For a Dancer.” He wrote the song for a friend of his who died in a fire, Browne has said. The friend was a dancer, an ice skater, a tailor, a painter, and a sculptor—a real Renaissance man. “He had this great spirit,” Browne recalled, “and when he died, it was a tragedy to everyone that knew him.”

  Keep a fire for the human race

  Let your prayers go drifting into space

  You never know what will be coming down

  Perhaps a better world is drawing near

  And just as easily it could all disappear

  Along with whatever meaning you might have found

  Don’t let the uncertainty turn you around

  Go on and make a joyful sound!

  Into a dancer you have grown

  From a seed somebody else has thrown

  Go on ahead and throw some seeds of your own

  And somewhere between the time you arrive

  And the time you go

  May lie a reason you were alive

  But you’ll never know.

  As mourning for Phil continued in the months after his death, some business realities had to be dealt with as well. First and foremost, NBC and the folks at NewsRadio had to figure out whether to continue the series or pull the plug. At the network’s hit comedy 3rd Rock from the Sun, Phil had appeared in the season finale and was due to return for the next season’s opener, but his part had to be rewritten and recast. Over at The Simpsons, creator Matt Groening and other show honchos—stunned and heartbroken when they heard the awful news—decided to honor Phil by retiring his characters. Lionel Hutz and Troy McClure, in particular, would be sorely missed. Since Groening had also cast Phil in his new Fox animated series Futurama—for which Phil had come in to audition about a week before his death, even though Groening and executive producer David Cohen told him it was unnecessary—shifts would have to be made there, too. The show’s character Zapp Brannigan, to be voiced by Phil, was taken over by The Ren & Stimpy Show’s Billy West and performed in the same arch style Phil had originally intended. Another character, Philip J. Fry (also voiced by West), is Phil’s namesake. A planned sequel to the Sony PlayStation game Captain Blasto, which hit stores in early May and features Phil’s voice in the title role, was scrapped as well.

  On the film front, Joe Dante’s animated–live action hybrid Small Soldiers was due out from Dreamworks on July 10. Already in the can, with Phil in the central role of toy soldier–beleaguered suburban dad Phil Fimple, its TV promos were recut to exclude Phil so as to avoid associating real-life tragedy with make-believe comedy. A temporary Small Soldiers ride at Universal Studios was also revamped to exclude Phil’s audio portion. His co-star, Kirsten Dunst, tearfully rerecorded her portion.

  NBC and NewsRadio, however, were in the biggest quandary of all. By that point the show’s ratings had plummeted, and now its lynchpin was gone. A week or so after Phil died Simms invited the cast and various other show staffers over to his Bel Air home. There, they swapped Phil stories and—with a nudge from show producer Brad Grey—Simms spoke to the group. “Well,” he began, “Phil’s dead.” Wincing soon gave way to laughing. Simms also conversed privately with Grey, assistant producer Julie Bean, and director Tom Cherones about how best to handle the shocking turn of events. “Tom, to his credit, was very forceful,” Simms says. “He said, ‘We’ve got to keep doing the show. It’s not about people’s jobs. It’s not about the money.’ He basically said, ‘[Brynn] killed Phil. We can’t let her kill the show, too.’ And that sort of meant something to me.”

  It soon became clear that the most logical actor to replace Phil on NewsRadio was Lovitz. Not only had he guest-starred a couple of times, he was Phil’s close friend. “It would have felt too weird, somehow, to bring in someone who was a brand-new person,” Simms says. “At least with Lovitz, we felt like there was still some connection to Phil. Somehow it made sense in the bigger picture.” According to Simms, during a gathering at the home of musician and Phil’s friend David Foster shortly after Phil died, Dennis Miller cracked, “Lovitz, it looks like you finally got some work now that Phil made room for you.” Lovitz, Simms recalls, was aghast.

  Simms’s next and even greater challenge was to craft the first episode of NewsRadio’s fifth season, wherein Bill McNeal’s absence would need to be explained. “I don’t think anyone ever wants to write a so-called very special episode of TV,” he says. “And it was an impossible one to figure out how to write.” Wanting to avoid sappy-maudlin at all costs, Simms jokes that he went for “an enlightened version of maudlin.”

  During the shooting of “Bill Moves On,” it was difficult for cast members to fully contain their still-raw emotions, which of course risked killing the comedy. Likewise, during the writing process, Simms knew he couldn’t wallow in melancholy or moroseness. So he decided to extinguish McNeal in one of the most common ways possible: a heart attack. “At least in the fictional world, we could make it so that he died peacefully,” Simms says.

  At the start of the episode, which aired September 23, station manager Dave Nelson (played by Dave Foley) frets that his eulogy for Bill had gone on way too long and just plain sucked. He is not disabused of these notions. For inspiration, Simms drew directly from his own angst over having to speak at Phil’s Paramount tribute in July. Simms was also very mindful that each character should have a spotlight moment to say what Bill—and by association, Phil—really meant to him or her. He solved that by having Foley read funny letters McNeal had penned to each of his colleagues. “I remember when I was writing it, thinking, ‘This is half writing and half wish fulfillment,’” Simms says. “I sort of put into Phil’s character’s mouth [Phil himself] sort of comforting everyone from beyond. It felt like even though his character had gone, his voice was still there one last time.”

  * * *

  That summer, Paul Hartmann set off for the San Francisco area to visit renowned psychiatrist Eugene Schoenfeld, whom he’d tracked down through one of Phil’s friends. Formerly known as “Dr. Hippocrates” when he wrote a widely circulated newspaper column about sex and drugs from 1967 to 1979, Schoenfeld is a veteran physician and bestselling author who provides expert-witness testimony about the effect of drugs in civil and criminal cases.

  Aside from offering Schoenfeld the chance to hang out with some of his brother’s remains, an opportunity Schoenfeld accepted, Paul asked the doctor to analyze Brynn’s toxicology report. After doing so, Schoenfeld opined that Zoloft could have been a culprit in the deaths of Phil and Brynn.

  He has since changed his mind and now thinks the Pfizer settlement was likely an attempt by the company to stave off more negative press. Schoenfeld has also altered his original opinion about the effect of Zoloft on Brynn’s actions. In short, it had little if any impact. “The toxic mix was the cocaine and alcohol,” he says. “And a very bad mix is alcoh
ol, cocaine, guns, and emotional turmoil.” The author of Jealousy: Taming the Green-Eyed Monster, Schoenfeld has studied many cases where that beast raged out of control and wrought havoc. “Jealousy feeds on itself,” he writes. “The more jealous we are, the more insecure we feel. The more insecure we feel, the more liable we are to experience jealousy … Jealousy is essentially a protective reaction based on survival instincts. A solid sense of self-esteem allows us to distinguish between true and false threats of loss.”

  Which isn’t to dismiss Zoloft’s potentially serious side effects or the impact it may have had (even at very low levels) on Brynn’s behavior.

  Not long after his first visit with Phil and at Paul’s request, Schoenfeld scattered some of Phil’s ashes under the Golden Gate Bridge. Phil’s remains would make their way to several other spots before the year was through.

  Chapter 19

  Phil, Catalina Island, 1990s. (Photo by Steven P. Small)

  September 24, 1998

  Nearly four months after his death on what would have been Phil’s fiftieth birthday, thirty or so close friends and family members boarded a sixty-four-foot yacht, Mantis, at Dana Point to scatter his ashes in the waters of Emerald Bay off Catalina Island. Part of Brynn’s remains came along as well.

  In the preceding months, Paul Hartmann had kept part of Phil’s remains on his farm in Aguanga, California, and divided the rest among several of Phil’s friends for scattering at his brother’s favorite spots around the country. From his catamaran, Wink Roberts sprinkled Phil along the Malibu shore. More of Phil went to former Rockin Foo band member Ron Becker in New Mexico and to the top of California’s Mounts Whitney and San Jacinto.