The Hollywood Book of Death: The Bizarre, Often Sordid, Passings of More than 125 American Movie and TV Idols

by Parish, James Robert

  Through his Groundlings contacts, Hartman met Paul Reubens (a.k.a. Pee-Wee Herman), and when that innovative, offbeat comedian began his TV shows in the 1980s, Phil was part of them. (Hartman also cowrote Herman’s 1985 feature, Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure.) In 1986 Hartman could be seen in such big-screen features as Jumpin’ Jack Flash and Three Amigos.!—still billed as Philip E. Hartmann. Also that year, he met Brynn, who was 10 years his junior and came from Thief River Falls, Minnesota. Born Vicki Jo Omdahl in 1958, she had dropped out of high school to wed her school sweetheart. The marriage didn’t work out and she went to Los Angeles in 1980 to be a model. She changed her name and look (via plastic surgery) and hoped for a career in show business. Acquaintances would later note that whenever Brynn drank or did any form of drugs, her self-esteem would plummet. It also came out that she had an obsession about someday being married to a well-known comedian and had flirted with several in Los Angeles.

  In this landmark year of 1986, Phil was asked to join the cast of Saturday Night Live. Excited by the opportunity, he and Brynn moved to New York City. (They were married in November 1987 and would have two children, Sean and Birgen.)

  Phil Hartman and his wife, Brynn, at a Los Angeles charity event.

  © 1992 by Albert L. Ortega

  On SNL Phil created skits with other troupe members, including Dana Carvey, Chris Rock, Jan Hooks, and Kevin Nealon. During his eight seasons on the air, Phil would become known for his sharp impressions of such personalities as Frank Sinatra, Liberace, Ed McMahon, Phil Donahue, and Bill Clinton. Hartman wrote many skits for SNL during his tenure. (He would receive an Emmy nomination in 1987 and an award in 1989 for his scripting contribution to the series.)

  By 1994, Phil, at age 46, was the oldest performing member of the SNL troupe. That spring, he decided to leave the show, after having done 153 grueling episodes of the series. The Hartmans moved back to southern California and settled in Encino, an upscale suburb in the San Fernando Valley. Hartman nicknamed the $1.4 million, four-bedroom, ranch-style home “The Ponderosa.”

  Hartman’s film career continued with supporting roles in featherweight big-screen comedies like Greedy (starring Michael J. Fox, 1994), Stuart Saves His Family (an Al Franken vehicle, 1995), Sgt. Bilko (with Tom Arnold, 1996), and, best of all, a sizeable part in Jingle All the Way, starring Arnold Schwarzenegger (1996). When not on the soundstages, Phil—now quite well-to-do—indulged his various passions, which included cars, planes, and boats; range shooting; and marksmanship. At one point, he was named honorary mayor of Encino.

  Brynn was becoming increasingly dissatisfied with being the non-famous partner in the marriage, “stuck” with being a homemaker. To ease her frustration and mounting insecurity, the gentlemanly Phil tried to engineer acting assignments for her. But she continued to pressure him about their disparate lives and careers, which made him withdraw from the situation, and this frequently led to a fight. During this period, Brynn worked on a screenplay (a narrative about infidelity and drugs) that she couldn’t sell. Later she became involved in a small stage production, Spoiled Women, but left the show before it opened. Meanwhile, Phil had the high-profile and lucrative gig on NewsRadio. As if he wasn’t busy enough already, he agreed to handle several different voices on the hit animated TV series The Simpsons, including those of attorney Lionel Hutz and washed-up educational-filmstrip actor Troy McClure.

  As the months passed, there was less and less communication between the adults in the Hartman household. By the late 1990s, Brynn reportedly was getting drunk and using assorted drugs frequently. Unhappy as the situation was, she would not consider divorce. Phil, on the other hand, was coming to the conclusion that this was their only option. In the spring of 1997, Brynn went to an Arizona rehab center, but she couldn’t seem to kick her dependencies.

  A year later, in May 1998, Phil had just completed the movie Small Soldiers (1998) with Denis Leary and was looking forward to a relaxing vacation. But Brynn was determined to return with Phil to her Minnesota hometown for a friend’s wedding. Hartman reportedly told friends that his wife was getting violent and physically abusive.

  That same month, Brynn had agreed to enter Promises, a fashionable rehab center in Malibu. She had been in a highly emotional state lately because she saw her 40th birthday (which had occurred in April) as a dangerous turning point in her life. On Tuesday, May 26, she phoned a friend about seeing a mutual pal in a play that was due to open soon. The next weekend was the weekend of Memorial Day, and Brynn made plans for her and Phil to spend Monday at a luxurious spa.

  On Wednesday, May 27, Brynn met a girlfriend at 8:00 P.M. for a drink at a bar (Buca di Beppo) near her home. She had two drinks and left about 9:45 P.M., when she received a call from Hartman saying he was now back at their house. Brynn returned home at about 10:00 P.M., and she and Phil got into an argument over her drinking. The confrontation continued in the kitchen for about 20 minutes. During the fight, one of their children awakened and called out in fear about their raised voices. Brynn went to comfort the child, promising that she and Phil would never divorce. After that, the couple continued their escalating argument. Later in the night, after Phil took his turn at comforting their distressed daughter, he retired to the bedroom, where, wearing boxer shorts and a T-shirt, he went to sleep in the king-sized bed.

  Meanwhile, Brynn was slamming through the house looking for any evidence that might prove her suspicions that Hartman was having an affair. (Reportedly he had met someone in recent days, but had not been dating before then, despite the rockiness of his marriage to Brynn.) Enraged, Brynn finally crept into the bedroom and shot her husband three times—twice in the head and once in his side—while he lay sleeping.

  The distraught woman, still clad in pajamas, then left the estate and drove to the Studio City home of her longtime friend Ron Douglas, a stuntman. As later recounted, she was nearly incoherent by this time. She informed him that she had shot Phil. He didn’t believe her at first, but eventually followed her back to her home. During the drive Brynn called another unidentified person from her cell phone to make the same confession. After Douglas saw Hartman’s corpse in the bedroom, he called 911 at 6:23 A.M.

  About 6:30 A.M. the police arrived at the grisly scene, just as Douglas was removing Sean from the house. Brynn had by this time barricaded herself in the bedroom with her husband’s body. As the police officers rushed in to escort a terrified Birgen from her bedroom to safety, Brynn took out a second handgun, lay down on the bed beside her dead spouse, and, moments later, aimed the gun at her head and pulled the trigger. It was later determined that she had a high level of alcohol in her system at the time, as well as traces of cocaine and Zoloft, an antidepressant. Shortly before killing herself, Brynn had called her sister in Minnesota and sobbed hysterically into the phone, “Tell my kids I love them more than anything and I always loved them, and Mommy doesn’t know what happened, she’s just very sorry.”

  After the Hartmans’ bodies were released by the police, they were cremated, their ashes to be scattered over Catalina Island’s Emerald Bay. (Months later Phil’s younger brother Paul would tell a tabloid newspaper that he had custody of his brother’s ashes, which he kept in a small ornamental wooden box.) On June 4, 1998, a private service was held at Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Glendale, California. The two Hartman children were in attendance along with other family members. (Phil’s father, age 83, had passed away just weeks before the tragedy.) Thereafter they went to Wisconsin to live with Brynn’s sister and her husband.

  The Hartmans’ property was sold for approximately $1.23 million, almost all of which passed to their orphaned offspring. In a case of eerie foresight, the will provided $50,000 for whatever person volunteered to become the children’s guardian in the event of both Hartmans’ untimely deaths.

  On June 13, 1998, Saturday Night Live aired a special tribute to the late Phil Hartman, culled from his eight seasons on SNL. As for NewsRadio, the network finally decided to give the production another
season, with Jon Lovitz stepping in to fill the void. When NewsRadio began its fifth season on September 23, 1998, the episode (entitled “Bill Moves On”) was devoted to the mourning of the Bill McNeal character, who had died of a heart attack. The installment’s plotline—wry and touching but not overly sentimental—focused on how the dysfunctional staff at WNYX was dealing with Bill’s passing, now that the memorial service had come and gone.

  For lovers of inspired comedy and comedic imitation, Phil Hartman will be long missed and even longer remembered.

  Sal Mineo

  [Salvatore Mineo Jr.]

  January 10, 1939–February 12, 1976

  Compact, charismatic Sal Mineo was perpetually stereotyped in his movie roles as the sensitive juvenile delinquent. An Emmy winner, and twice nominated for an Oscar, he unfortunately never got much beyond his career successes in the 1950s as a teen idol. By the 1970s his professional life was floundering. Then, just as his career was reviving (thanks to his stage work), he was murdered one evening in West Hollywood, killed by the sort of disturbed young man he had so often played on camera.

  Sal was born Salvatore Mineo Jr. in 1939, one of four children of a Sicilian immigrant couple. His father Sal Sr., who came from Sicily as a teenager, made caskets for a living. His mother Josephine, who was a go-getter and a strong believer in the power of education, did much to push young Sal toward making the most of any opportunity that came along. When the boy was nine, he and his sister Sarina (age six) were offered a chance to enroll in a midtown Manhattan dance school, where they took tap, singing lessons, and drama. By the time he left that class, Sal knew that the world of entertainment was for him. He was later enrolled in a professional school for show-business children.

  With his Italian good looks, young Sal was cast on Broadway in Tennessee Williams’s The Rose Tattoo (1951), where he had one line—“The goat is in the yard.” Next he was an understudy in the musical The King and I, but soon graduated to playing the young prince to Yul Brynner’s king. He made his screen debut playing the young version of Tony Curtis’s character in Six Bridges to Cross (1955). It was his role as Plato, the confused delinquent in Rebel Without a Cause (made in 1955 and starring James Dean and Natalie Wood), that won Mineo an Oscar nomination as Best Supporting Actor and ensured his fame.

  With his newfound success, Sal bought his family a fancy home in Mamaroneck, New York. As a teenage heartthrob, he tried a recording career, and his song “Start Moving” was a hit. But the rest of the 1950s saw him stuck in a casting rut as the screen’s most appealing street rebel. Occasionally, he got a chance to play someone different on camera, such as a Native American brave in Tonka (1959) or a drum-playing musician in The Gene Krupa Story (1959). Sal’s career peaked with his Oscar-nominated role as the Zionist terrorist in Exodus (1960).

  Offscreen Mineo generally preferred men, but in the limelight he had publicity-engineered “romances” with an assortment of starlets, such as Tuesday Weld and Joey Heatherton. He did seem to have genuine feelings for his Exodus costar, Jill Haworth, with whom he shared a beach home for a time.

  By the end of the 1960s, Sal’s acting roles were few and far between, and he turned to stage directing. He supervised a controversial new production of Fortune and Men’s Eyes (about homosexuality and rough life in prison) in Los Angeles and off-Broadway in New York City. His last movie role was as one of the simians in Escape from the Planet of the Apes (1971).

  In the fall of 1975, Sal starred in P.S. Your Cat Is Dead in San Francisco, playing a bisexual burglar. On the night of February 12, 1976, he was returning home to his West Hollywood apartment from a rehearsal of the upcoming L.A. production of P.S. Your Cat Is Dead, which was to costar Keir Dullea. In the alley behind his apartment building, he was waylaid by an unknown assailant. A neighbor heard him shout, “Help! Help! Oh my God.” Raymond Evans rushed to his aid, giving him mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. But by the time the paramedics arrived, it was too late. According to the coroner, Mineo “died of a massive hemorrhage, due to the stab wound of the chest that penetrated the heart.” A witness came forth later, stating he saw a long-haired blond Caucasian male fleeing the scene. Robbery was ruled out as a motive, since Mineo’s wallet had not been taken. Other theories suggested that Sal had died as a result of a bad drug deal, or that he had been stabbed by a jealous lover.

  (Left to right) Mark Rydell, Sal Mineo, John Cassavetes, and James Whitmore acting tough in Crime in the Streets (1956).

  Courtesy of JC Archives

  With the crime still unsolved, a funeral service for the 37-year-old Sal was held at Holy Trinity Roman Catholic Church in Mamaroneck, New York, five days after the murder. Among those attending were Jill Haworth, Desi Arnaz Jr., Michael Greer, and Rebel Without a Cause director Nicholas Ray. Mineo was buried at the Cemetery of the Gate of Heaven in Valhalla, New York, next to his father’s grave.

  Two years later in a Michigan prison, 21-year-old African-American Lionel Ray Williams, a career criminal, supposedly bragged to his cellmate that he had killed Mineo and that it had been easy to do. The Los Angeles police were already looking into a potential Williams-Mineo connection because of prior statements made by Lionel’s ex-girlfriend, who had been arrested in Los Angeles on charges of alleged criminal behavior. She was hoping that supplying information about Williams and Mineo would help to smooth over the current charges against her. She told law enforcers that on the night of Sal’s murder when the news flashed on TV, Williams (then her boyfriend) had told her, “That’s the dude I killed.” (In fact, not long after Mineo had been murdered, Williams had been detained by the Los Angeles police on robbery charges and possible connection with the Mineo homicide case. But the police were pursuing the jealous-lover and the blond-Caucasian-fleeing-from-the-scene-of-the-crime theories, so they let Williams go.)

  Williams, who had a disturbing record of arrests and brutality toward victims, was tried for Mineo’s murder (as well as several counts of armed robbery). Eventually, he was convicted of second-degree murder and received a sentence of 51 years to life. The trial judge categorized Williams as “a sadistic killer” who “if released . . . will no doubt kill again.” Despite the (circumstantial) evidence presented at the high-profile trial, Williams insisted he hadn’t killed Mineo.

  Eleven years after Lionel Ray Williams’s conviction, he was paroled in July 1990. Soon afterward he was arrested yet again, this time for alleged robbery and other charges. In the course of his police interrogation he reportedly said, “I killed Sal Mineo,” which countered his prior protestation of innocence. He served more time for his latest criminal charges, but by the late 1990s was paroled yet again. He still insists he is innocent in the Sal Mineo murder case.

  Today, although two TV documentaries have aired and a full-length biography has been published on the life and death of Sal Mineo, the shocking murder of this charismatic star still remains a puzzle to the many people who have intensively studied his complex case.

  Dr. Haing S. Ngor

  March 22, 1940–February 25, 1996

  Dr. Haing S. Ngor holds the very unfortunate distinction of being the only Oscar-winning actor to have been later murdered. This well-educated individual, a physician in his own country, had never acted before he was cast in The Killing Fields (1984). But it was felt that his horrendous real-life experiences in his native Cambodia qualified him for a key assignment in that graphic movie about the bloodbath that occurred when a communist guerilla group, the Khmer Rouge, took over Cambodia’s capital, forced everyone into labor camps, and banned all institutions, including stores, banks, religion, and the family. How ironic that Ngor, having emigrated to the United States as a refugee, should be shot to death outside his Los Angeles apartment.

  He was born in 1940 in the small farming village of Samrong Yung, some miles south of Phnom Penh, the capital of Cambodia. His father was Chinese and his mother was Khmer. (The Khmer are the people who make up the majority of the Cambodian population; they also live in a section of sout
heast Thailand and the Mekong Delta of Vietnam. The Khmer Republic was the prior, official designation of Cambodia.) Cambodia was a war-torn country while Ngor was young, and he frequently had to work in the fields or sell produce. Despite poverty and adversity, his family managed to send him to school. After studying at a local Chinese institution, Ngor completed high school in Phnom Penh in a French lycée. During this schooling, he lived in a Buddhist temple along with the monks. He attended medical school in the capital, graduating with specialties in gynecology and obstetrics. As a young physician he ran his own clinic in Phnom Penh and also served as a medical officer in the government army.

  In April 1975, the Khmer Rouge overran Phnom Penh. Ngor was among the many intellectuals forced to hide for fear of being dispatched to “reeducation camps” or perhaps killed. To survive, he held a variety of jobs, including working as a cabdriver. He only practiced medicine in secret. But eventually he was imprisoned, horribly tortured, and put into forced labor. During this time, his mother was sent to a jungle prison camp where she died, while his father, brother, and sister-in-law were executed. Three years later, on June 2, 1978, Ngor’s wife Huoy died in childbirth because proper medical care was denied her. Ngor—who had been forced to dig canals, farm, haul soil, and build huts in a labor camp for 12 to 14 hours each day—was a witness to the ongoing bloody executions and purges conducted by Pol Pot, the Cambodian Communist leader.

  In May 1979, he escaped to freedom accompanied by a niece he had rescued. They walked many miles to a refugee camp in Thailand. For nearly a year he worked as a medical technician in Khao I-Dang, a Thai city. In August 1980, Ngor flew to the United States. He lived first in Columbus, Ohio, then moved to Los Angeles to be near relatives. He worked at odd jobs (including as a night watchman) while learning English at school. By November 1980 he had become a caseworker with the Chinatown Service Center, helping southeast Asian refugees find employment.