You Might Remember Me The Life and Times of Phil Hartman

by Mike Thomas

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  For my parents

  He has achieved success who has lived well, laughed often, and loved much; who has gained the respect of intelligent men and the love of little children; who has filled his niche and accomplished his task; who has left the world better than he found it, whether by an improved poppy, a perfect poem, or a rescued soul; who has never lacked appreciation of Earth’s beauty or failed to express it; who has always looked for the best in others and given the best he had; whose life was an inspiration; whose memory a benediction.

  —Bessie Anderson Stanley, “Success”

  “I like my vagina.”

  —Phil Hartman as Charlton Heston, reading from Madonna’s book, Sex

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Introduction

  Transcript

  Part One

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Part Two

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  Bibliography

  Index

  Photographs

  Also by Mike Thomas

  About the Author

  Copyright

  Introduction

  For eight increasingly successful seasons Phil Hartman was an integral part of NBC’s venerable sketch show, Saturday Night Live, so much so that colleagues there called him “The Glue.” Fellow cast member Jan Hooks coined the term, and along with her, Dana Carvey, Kevin Nealon, Dennis Miller, Victoria Jackson, Jon Lovitz, and Nora Dunn, Phil helped save the show from almost certain ruin in the mid-80s. In the process, he joined a pantheon of SNL MVPs that includes John Belushi, Dan Aykroyd, Eddie Murphy, Carvey, and a handful of others. In fact, according to SNL’s creator and executive producer Lorne Michaels, Phil may well be the leader of that pack. As he once mused, “Phil has done more work that’s touched greatness than probably anybody else who’s ever been here.”

  At Fox’s long-running animated hit The Simpsons, where he spent eight years from 1990 to 1998, Phil did such distinctive voice work for so many memorable episodes (53)—as dunderheaded shyster attorney Lionel Hutz, clueless D-list actor Troy McClure, and numerous other minor characters—he came to be regarded by the program’s inner circle of writers, showrunners, and permanent players as an honorary member of their elite group. They revered him to such an extent that after Phil died, Hutz and McClure were retired in his honor. No one, Simpsons creator and die-hard Phil fan Matt Groening knew, could inhabit those roles in quite the same way. “He was a comedy writer’s dream,” Groening once wrote. “Phil could get a laugh out of any line he was given, and make a funny line even funnier. He nailed the joke every time, and that made all The Simpsons writers worship him.”

  NBC’s witty workplace sitcom NewsRadio also benefitted tremendously from Phil’s portrayal of the intelligent, arrogant, and aggressively self-centered broadcaster Bill “the Real Deal” McNeal. Executive producer and head writer Paul Simms created the character with Phil in mind, and Phil’s sudden absence left a huge void that was never filled. “I can’t count the number of times at table reads when they would first read that week’s script with some line that was just filler, but Phil would get a laugh,” Simms says. “I don’t even know how. If I knew how, I would be a genius. He really could help even the silliest material. And as a writer, you find you want to write for the characters that make everything funny a little bit more.”

  And yet, Phil’s life has long been overshadowed by his death. Which is only natural—after all, he was adored by millions and slain in his prime. But what happened in the early morning hours of May 28, 1998, when Phil’s third wife Brynn shot him three times as he slept before taking her own life, should not supersede all that came before it. Like any human being Phil was a complex puzzle, and that tragic episode but one piece in a box of many.

  While his work on Pee-wee’s Playhouse, SNL, The Simpsons, and NewsRadio is well known, until now details of his earlier formative years have emerged only in dribs and drabs, and many of them not at all. His feelings of neglect and guilt while growing up with a developmentally disabled younger sister in Canada; his avid surfing and ceaseless spiritual questing; his visual artistry and rock ’n’ roll road-tripping; his relationships with the women he loved and the reasons that love was lost—all of those subjects and more are explored in the pages that follow. So, too, are never-before-told stories from the set of SNL, accounts of Phil’s frequent jaunts to his paradisaical getaway Catalina Island, and previously unpublished accounts of his final days.

  In researching and writing Phil’s story over the course of nearly three years, I tried to understand and present him as much more than a highly gifted and widely beloved comedic performer, or the still-mourned victim of a terrible crime. He was and is all of those, certainly, but he was also a deeply sensitive man who loved life and reveled in nature; an eminently approachable and even gregarious public figure who was privately reserved and enigmatic; a loyal friend and generous collaborator. As a friend of his once observed, “There is a small room in Phil that no one will ever get to.”

  This book is a key to—or at least a reverse peephole through—its previously locked door.

  Judge: Mr. Cirroc [pronounced Keyrock], are you ready to give your summation?

  Cirroc: It’s just “Cirroc,” your Honor. [He approaches the jury box.] And, yes, I’m ready. Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, I’m just a caveman. I fell in some ice and later got thawed by some of your scientists. Your world frightens and confuses me. Sometimes the honking horns of your traffic make me want to get out of my BMW and run off into the hills. Or whatever. Sometimes when I get a message on my fax machine, I wonder, “Did little demons get inside and type it?” I don’t know. My primitive mind can’t grasp these concepts.

  (Transcript courtesy of snltranscripts.jt.org)

  I need no blessings, but I’m counting mine.

  —David Gilmour, “This Heaven”

  Prologue

  May 27, 1998

  On hiatus from his NBC sitcom NewsRadio, Phil drove his white Mercedes coupe to a Holiday Inn at Sunset Boulevard and the 405 Freeway. Arriving around 11:30 A.M., he picked up good pal and fellow outdoorsman Britt Marin, and the two of them motored down to Schock Boats in Newport Beach to buy supplies for their Boston Whalers. Phil needed a cooler for the seventeen-footer he’d recently purchased. During the roughly sixty-mile drive, they smoked dope and talked about life. Death, too—ghosts, spirits, the hereafter. Phil said he believed in spirits and that some of them were too disturbed to migrate from here to eternity. He was sure, however, that his spirit would make the trip without a hitch. Reiterating something he’d mentioned a couple of years earlier, Phil reminded Marin that whenever the time came, he wanted his ashes to be sca
ttered in fifteen to twenty feet of water around a natural monument called Indian Rock, located in California’s Emerald Bay off the coast of Phil’s beloved getaway Catalina Island. Marin made his own preference known as well: If he died first, Phil should place his ashes in a large gel cap and set it at the summit of Diablo Peak on Santa Cruz Island. During the next wet season, Marin reasoned, the gel cap would dissolve and Marin’s remains would flow down into his favorite canyons below.

  Phil asked him, “What makes you think you’re going to die before me?”

  Chapter 1

  Phil, early 1950s, outside 225 Dufferin Ave. in Brantford. (Courtesy of the Hartmann family)

  There were already three children—a brother and two sisters—when Philip Edward Hartmann made his debut, all five pounds of him, on September 24, 1948, at Brantford General Hospital in Brantford, Ontario, Canada, then a barely century-old town settled by a collective of Iroquoian Indian tribes not far outside Toronto. Most famously the former home of telephone inventor Alexander Graham Bell and located on the banks of Ontario’s Grand River, Brantford also produced The Lone Ranger actor Jay Silverheels, electron microscope inventor James Hillier, and several pro hockey legends, most famously Wayne Gretzky.

  Until Phil (or Phippie, as he was also called) was nearly nine, the Hartmann clan lived in tight quarters at 35 Lancaster Street and then 225 Dufferin Avenue. The latter dwelling, a 100-year-old brick cottage on a street lined with chestnut trees, had a small living room to the left as you entered through the front door and two bedrooms on the right. A kitchen and dining room occupied the rear, and as offspring multiplied, Phil’s parents Doris and Rupert built an addition with another bathroom and more bedrooms on the home’s northwest side. The house was out of place amid its rather upscale surroundings.

  “We were the poorest people in the neighborhood,” Phil’s older sister Martha says. Vacations were out of the question and everything, she remembers, “was kind of a financial struggle.” But their mother and father always appeared nattily attired and even belonged to a nearby country club. “There wasn’t a lot of money,” Martha says, “but [they] always looked really nice. And I felt proud that they were my parents.” Still, Phil’s oldest brother John says attempts to appear “more affluent than we really were” probably fooled no one.

  Beginning when Phil was very young, his parents dreamed of making a new start in the United States. Their aspiration to do so began in 1950, when Phil was around two and they received an exciting offer from Doris’s great uncle Hubert Haeussler. A Detroit resident, avid University of Michigan fan, and successful businessman (in retirement, Haeussler would serve as a tour guide for and goodwill ambassador of sorts to his city’s foreign visitors), he invited them to drive with him to Pasadena for the January 1, 1951, Rose Bowl matchup between U of M’s Wolverines and the California Golden Bears. Thrilled at the prospect of vacationing, an expensive undertaking they never attempted with their growing brood, Doris and Rupert motored down to the Motor City from Brantford, joined up with Haeussler, and then headed west.

  When the trio arrived in Pasadena, California, with its near-perpetual sunshine and easygoing vibe, Rupert and Doris were immediately smitten. Who cared (well, besides Haeussler) that U of M bested the Golden Bears in a hard-fought 14–6 victory? This palm-tree-lined paradise, they decided, was their future home. Or somewhere close to it, anyway. Getting there was just a matter of how and when. Exuberant, Doris and Rupert “came right back and took out their papers,” Phil’s oldest sister Nancy recalls, in eager anticipation of imminent relocation. And they talked up the Golden State to all who’d listen, spurring some to relocate there ahead of them. Then Doris found out she was pregnant again. Daughter Sarah Jane was born in late October, with son Paul following in December of 1953. Nearly four years passed before the Hartmanns migrated south of the Great White North to make a better life.

  * * *

  In a 1997 interview with Hollywood Online, Phil spoke of growing up in a family that “struggled to make ends meet.” He went on to explain that his inability to shed excess weight during adulthood stemmed from scrambling for his share of grub during those lean early years. The craft services tables at his various television and film jobs would become a particular weakness, for he’d find it almost impossible not to partake of free meals. “Hot dogs, donuts—bring in the pizza and the fried chicken,” he quipped. “I came from a family where you needed a fork in your hand to reach for some food.” Oddly enough, according to Martha, there was a social upside to the Hartmanns’s simple lifestyle: “The neighbors loved our family. They loved that we weren’t spoiled and they wanted us to hang out with their kids so maybe something would rub off on them.”

  Those neighbors, the Taylors, had two boys named John and Tom (the latter was Phil’s age) and a house that dwarfed the Hartmanns’ cottage-like abode. As a youngster, Phil strolled into the Taylors’ place at will, as no one in the low-crime area locked the doors of their homes or cars. Martha remembers that one day, as the Taylors were seated at their long table and silently eating breakfast, Phil wandered in and proclaimed, “Good morning, all you happy people!” He had heard the phrase on a local radio broadcast and it struck him as funny. The neighbors “burst out laughing. It made their day.” In another instance of Phil’s scampishness Nancy was asked to check on him and his younger brother Paul (five years Phil’s junior) outside. Doris sometimes tethered the boys to a clothesline so they wouldn’t run off if left unsupervised. And it usually worked. But when Nancy went to look for them, she found only Phil’s tiny swimsuit—still attached to the rope. Phil himself had wriggled out of it and ran off “stark naked” down the street.

  When Phil was in elementary school, he nearly went blind, no thanks to brother John’s errant Red Rider BB gun. “You’ll shoot your eye out!” went the typical parental admonition, and in some cases it was true. “I had the scare of my life when I was shooting at a Popsicle stick that I had put on the windowsill of a little room Phil and I lived in with our brother Paul,” John says. “The BB hit the Popsicle stick and ricocheted off it. Phil was walking up behind me and he screamed and had his hand over his eye. And I thought, ‘Oh, my God, I’ve blinded my brother!’ And I’m freaking out. He’s screaming and crying and yelling, ‘Ow! My eye!’ and I run over and I pull his arm away and his eye was there. I’d anticipated seeing it shot out. It was like horror and relief in the same breath. Inhale and exhale.”

  Thinking quickly, John pulled Phil aside and whispered one of his earliest business propositions:

  “Don’t tell Mom about me shooting you in the eye.”

  “Yeah?” Phil wondered what came next.

  “And I will take care of you for the rest of your life.”

  Phil pondered the pitch for a moment and said, “What if I die first? Who will take care of you?”

  “Don’t worry,” John promised, “the big brother always dies first.”

  * * *

  Another near miss occurred at the post office in tiny downtown Brantford. As Phil would remember it during a visit decades later, John shoved him inside the building’s revolving door and gave it a mighty spin. Unable to match its velocity, Phil stumbled headfirst into a glass windowpane, which cracked as if smacked by a stone. Fearful they’d be tossed in the clink for damaging public property, both boys quickly split the scene.

  A far safer haven was Brantford’s only movie theater, where Phil first encountered such big-screen stars as the sultry Marilyn Monroe and Gregory Peck as the whale-obsessed Captain Ahab in John Huston’s Moby Dick. The latter made such an impression that Phil and his best friend John Taylor acted out scenes from the film, pretending to harpoon the Hartmanns’s dog, Mike, with a broomstick and feeding each other dialogue.

  Behind the Hartmann house, beyond a patio and white wooden lounge chairs, was a long and grassy yard filled with tall mulberry bushes. On the other side of them sprouted a well-tended vegetable patch. The so-called victory garden was a holdover from the rationing da
ys of World War II, when growing one’s own produce not only aided war conservation efforts but saved money. As John recalls, the Hartmann plot yielded strawberries, carrots, lettuce, and green beans. “One of the agonies of our youth was that instead of running off and playing on the weekends, we had to go out and weed the garden,” he says. Abutting the yard was a vacant no-man’s-land where neighborhood kids dug holes and made underground huts for, as John puts it, “real and imaginary rivals” in an era when “war was the subtext of all life.” There was, he says of those Hiroshima-shadowed days, “massive paranoia” about atom bombs dropping from on high.

  Not far beyond the no-man’s-land, at the foot of a long hill, was a potato field that belonged to the castle-like Ontario School for the Blind. Opened in 1872 and later renamed the W. Ross Macdonald School, the institution offered traditional studies as well as manual and vocational training to hundreds of students. In winter and on holidays the Hartmann children and other kids from the neighborhood sometimes went sledding and romped on its hilly grounds. During school breaks, they sneaked onto the premises at night to play in barns on the property. The bravest (or most foolhardy) mischief-makers scampered up and slid down the winding slides of rocket-shaped fire escapes. “We goofed around up there even though we knew it was off limits,” Nancy says. “We never got caught, but we did come close.”

  Because he was too young to participate in such hijinks, Phil palled around with his brown teddy bear, Jackie, and proved exceedingly easy to care for. “He’d just hang out with you, whatever you were doing,” says Martha, who became Phil’s primary guardian when Nancy was called to other duties. Quiet and introspective, Phil increasingly longed to be noticed—most of all by Doris. As he’d confide to Martha in their adulthood, his younger years were spent vying for the attention and affection of their tough and entrepreneurial mother and to a lesser degree their traveling salesman father. Martha, it turned out, had always felt the same way. “When Phil and I talked, we were kind of on the same page about being raised not feeling important,” she says. As Phil told late-night host David Letterman decades later, “It was pretty desperate. Couldn’t get a lot of attention. That’s why I’m craving it so much now.” Despite his goofy grin and joshing tone, it was true.