You Might Remember Me The Life and Times of Phil Hartman

by Mike Thomas

  As 1969 dawned, Phil wound down his ski bumming and readied to cross the Pacific for school at the University of Hawaii—even though he had yet to be accepted. In order to partially replenish his ever-dwindling personal coffers before relocating, he put his van, Head skis, and acoustic guitar up for sale. “It’s Hawaii for sure,” he proclaimed in a letter to Holloway dated March 7. At the moment, he was preparing for his draft physical on which he would hopefully get a “1-Y,” which meant he’d be qualified for military service only in the event of war or national emergency rather than immediately available to serve like those who received a “1-A.”

  Upon letting his hair grow long and bushy “like Jimi Hendrix,” Phil decided it was a bit too extreme and chopped most of it off—down to an inch and a half. His facial foliage, however, was beginning to sprout anew, and soon he’d have another full-blown beard. But his scraggly, devil-may-care style blended in nicely with that of his shaggy new rock ’n’ roll friends, several of whom played in a Malibu-based band called the Rockin Foo. Managed by Phil’s brother John, the Foo took their handle from a Chinese symbol meaning joy, played what used to be described as “psyche garage country rock,” and were on the cusp of recording their first album. Meanwhile, the guys gigged around town (they played on bills with Alice Cooper in March) and elsewhere, cultivating a wider following. He’d seen them a couple of times, Phil informed Holloway, “and they are just super bitchen.” As it turned out, the Foo dug him, too.

  By early May, Phil had sold his van for $450 and received a tax refund of $121.31—hardly a fortune but enough to get him to Hawaii. If he ever left. The University of Hawaii persisted in “giving me the runaround,” he groused to Holloway, and the whole ordeal was making him anxious. He even reapplied, upon the school’s suggestion, as a foreign student, but that proved fruitless since he was already a permanent U.S. resident. So he waited. And waited. Nothing. Phil aimed to be an art major with a concentration in photography, he wrote, “if I can just get in the fucker.”

  * * *

  For a month or so Phil had been living with his brother John and the Foo clan—initially a trio made up of Lester Brown Jr., Michael “Raccoon” (Clark) and Wayne Erwin—in a small Hollywood house on North Fairfax, and traveling with them locally as one of two equipment managers. He also worked with college pal Wink Roberts at an advertising firm called the Boardroom, where Phil operated a stack camera and photo-typositor machine to create print ads for such clients as Telluride ski resort.

  That same year, after Kostka got married, Phil came to terms with the fact that he and she would never be an item. Upon learning of her engagement, Phil had tried to persuade Kostka not to get hitched, but to no avail. And maybe that was just as well. “I have been relieved of that big sex hang-up that I had with her,” he confided to Holloway, “and now we can be really close friends without my dick popping out of my pants. I realize now that’s really how I’ve always wanted it. Her married, I mean. Not my dick poppin’ out, you dirty jarhead.” Phil hadn’t heard from the draft board, either, so he assumed all was cool. It was about to get cooler.

  In late May, he fired off another missive to Vietnam. “This letter is going to flip you out, believe me,” it begins. On May 24, he’d made “a decision that will no doubt change my life.” Instead of attending the University of Hawaii, which still hadn’t approved his application and probably never would, he accepted an offer (a plea, really) from John to become a full-time Rockin Foo roadie. John was thrilled to have him on board and closer to home. When he first heard about Phil’s Hawaii plans, John says, “I felt this incredible sense of loss. And I said, ‘Don’t go to Hawaii. You’re just going to become a surf bum. Come with me—come and become a rock ’n’ roll bum.’” So Phil stayed put.

  It surely helped that he would earn a nominal fee for his toil, as the band had just received a $25,000 advance for their debut album on Hobbit Records. With part of the money, John leased a bigger home at 23758 Malibu Road. Featuring a yard, garage, patio, and detached front coach house, the three-bedroom pad was situated in the trendy and celebrity-dotted Malibu Shore Colony development and cost only $600 a month during the off-season ($1,700 during prime months). Originally constructed as a vacation home, it was poorly insulated and, Brown says, “built like a barn.” On the plus side, it had a fireplace and the location was unbeatable. “Right on the beach,” Phil wrote to Holloway, “a few steps away from the best surfin’ spot in California. FUCK!!” Best of all, he’d have his own dwelling: a detached ten-by-twenty, two-room cabana in back that had previously (supposedly) been occupied by Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys and whose rear-facing picture window looked out onto the Pacific. Paradise. “I have a job … for people I love,” Phil gushed in a late May letter. “In [re]turn, I get a house and a van and a beginning in the art field. Also all the thrill of really being on the inside of the rock scene. I’m a born long-haired man. That is the lifestyle I love. I have no qualms about the decision I made. It all seems like a dream, but it’s really real.”

  * * *

  When Kathy occasionally ran into Phil, she saw more than a wide-eyed rock ’n’ roll wannabe. “He was acting like he was already hot shit,” she says with a laugh. “And it was not the person I knew—down-to-earth Phil. He was somebody trying to portray a celebrity.”

  Well, there were groupies, and in one of his letters to Holloway Phil did a bit of good-natured bragging. “What is every kid’s dream in America?” he asked rhetorically, teasingly. His answer, tucked away in the bottom margin: “I balled a Playboy Bunny. I won’t give you the details in the mail, but pal it was beyond your imagination.” Still, even as he revealed and reveled in that momentous event, another young and free-spirited chick sat beside him—one of the many “groovy groovies” who wandered in and out of the Foo compound. Before long, though, Phil’s seed sowing would cease (for a couple of years, anyway) and he’d only have eyes for one.

  Chapter 4

  Phil, Malibu, early 1970s. (Photo by Steven P. Small)

  Malibu Colony in the 1960s was exclusive but unassuming in contrast to the pricey paradise it would become. There were stars and swell homes, as there had been since the 1930s, but far fewer of the behemoths that today occupy the area’s private beachfront plots. For a while, in fact, the Colony was served by only one bank (Bank of America) and one diner (the Malibu Diner). During the period Phil called it home, neighborhood luminaries included Steve McQueen, Henry Gibson, and Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor; the latter two rented singer Bobby Darin’s four-story house not far from Phil’s little cabana. I Dream of Jeannie and future Dallas star Larry Hagman lived close by, too, often lounging in his large Jacuzzi and playing Frisbee on the sand. For whatever reason, Hagman took a shine to Phil. Often with other mates in tow, they attended the Malibu Grand Prix together. They also spent much time soaking in Hagman’s hot tub and smoking pot. Back then, ganja was available in abundance—at the Foo house, a cake pan was always stocked with choice weed and rolling papers—and Phil readily partook. Nevertheless, says Foo member Michael Clark, “Even in those wild years when we were tripping on acid and smoking joints every five minutes,” Phil always demonstrated good sense and was “very much under control.” Adds John Hartmann, “He was not vulnerable to the fuel aspect of [drugs]. It was a toy, sometimes a tool, but it was never a fuel.”

  Ever the seeker and always thirsty for knowledge, Phil’s most recent spiritual discovery was the so-called Urantia Book, a copy of which he gave to Hagman but likely never read from cover to cover. (He was known to give people books that he himself had never read or merely perused.) Packed with more than two thousand pages, the dense tome—a mashup of science, religion, and philosophy—is said to have originated in Chicago between the mid-1920s and mid-1950s. Its 196 “papers” are divided into four parts and include “The Universal Father,” “The Evolution of Local Universes,” “The Mammalian Era on Urantia,” “The Social Problems of Religion,” and “The Mount of Transfiguration.” Despite
his growing spirituality, however, Phil was no holier-than-thou square. After all, this was the summer of ’69. The summer of rock ’n’ roll; the summer of peace and free love.

  Throughout June, July, and August, Phil and his musical mates played festivals in Seattle and Oregon as well as several gigs in the L.A. area and one—in early July, with Eric Burdon and Lonnie Mack—at Bill Graham’s famed Fillmore West in San Francisco. They motored to all of them in a dark blue Dodge van—Phil’s lucky van. During an outdoor event in Ashland, Oregon, the vehicle was parked in back of a college football stadium. While the Foo rocked outside, Phil rocked inside. “He got laid in the back of that van,” Les Brown says. For the rest of the day, Phil walked around singing a verse from the Doors’ song “The End”: “Meet me at the back of the blue bus.”

  Back in L.A., no injuries were sustained when Phil again stepped in to lend a helping hand (two, actually) during a Foo performance at Thee Experience. Owned by a Jimi Hendrix acquaintance named Marshall Brevitz, the short-lived venue regularly teemed with industry players and was a stepping-stone for many emerging artists (Burdon, Alice Cooper, Poco, Grand Funk Railroad, Joe Cocker) en route to packing arenas and stadiums. The building’s façade sported a massive mural of Hendrix’s head, with the entrance positioned over his mouth. One evening there, likely during the Foo’s three-night stand in late June (they’d already done stints in March and April), Hendrix himself made an appearance and sauntered onstage to jam. “The place was just electric,” Brown says. “Everybody’s going nuts.” Then drummer Buddy Miles, at the time a member of Hendrix’s “Band of Gypsys,” joined Hendrix and began thumping his bass drum with such force that its spurs broke. “Every time he hit the drum, it moved about a foot,” Brown says. Devoted roadie that he was, Phil sprinted onto the stage, got on his knees, and held the instrument in place for the song’s duration. Every time Miles whacked the drum, Phil’s shaggy hair flew up and then flopped down. “I’m surprised he could hear after that,” Brown says. “But he was so in awe.”

  In mid-August, when hundreds of thousands of revelers converged on Max Yasgur’s farm in Woodstock, New York, to trip on acid and groove to round-the-clock jamming, Phil and the boys were otherwise occupied; there was plenty to keep them busy in California and elsewhere. Late that year they shared a stage with Janis Joplin, the Byrds, and other rock gods at the Palm Beach International Raceway in Florida. The Foo also had a musically tepid but nonetheless eventful stay in New York City, where Phil heroically (supposedly) prevented a colleague’s potential incarceration. According to Brown, here’s how it went down: Just out of record company meetings, Brown received a concerned call from John Hartmann. “We’ve got a big problem,” John told him, and proceeded to explain that said colleague had been lounging in the lobby of his hotel when he became smitten with a pretty girl in one of the phone booths nearby. Naturally, then, he entered the glassed-in booth next to her and exposed himself. “The girl goes ballistic,” Brown says, “and she’s screaming and yelling.” Once again, it was Phil to the rescue. Grabbing the offending party, he whisked him out of the lobby and up a set of marble stairs that led to the mezzanine. En route, Phil tripped and fell and knocked out his front teeth.

  John Hartmann remembers the lost teeth but not much else. In the story he tells, there was no phone booth, no shrieking hottie, and no indecent exposure. “We had smoked a J in our hotel room,” he says, “and dropped a lot of floors to the lobby [in the elevator]. The cannabis and the loss of altitude made Phil black out. We were walking out the door and he twisted slightly to his right and fell into the wall, then did a header face-first into the cement. I was really scared for a minute. When I turned him over I could see he’d lost his two front teeth and was bleeding.” So they hustled up a dentist and got Phil some temporary caps, which he soon had replaced with artificial choppers. While all of this was going down, the band’s hotel room was burgled. C’est la vie. Says John, “We were wild and lived in a fantasy land inside the rock ’n’ roll bubble.”

  * * *

  As Phil’s digs in Malibu Colony were located some twenty miles from Westchester, the car-less roadie beach bum rarely went home to visit his parents. Besides, he was having too much fun spending hours each day surfing at the nearby Malibu Surfrider Beach, bedding female Foo fans in his tropical-themed bachelor pad (bamboo walls, oriental rug, colorful mosquito net canopy over a double bed), sketching in his ocean-view art nook, and schlepping amps to venues where he regularly encountered rock legends. “I have never been browner or healthier in all my days,” he wrote to Holloway. Just for grins, Phil also began drawing bawdy and looney comic strips based on Foo members and their exploits.

  More important to his budding career as a graphic artist, he designed cover art—a rustic rendering of the trio that resembles a wood etching—for the Foo’s fall 1969 debut album. (The band’s follow-up effort, after guitarist Ron Becker joined in 1971, also features Phil’s handiwork outside and in. An included six-page comic strip booklet, titled “The Foo Story,” tells a comical Genesis-inspired tale of the group’s creation.)

  “I feel like a real artist,” Phil wrote to Holloway. “Wow. Sheeeaaaat!”

  * * *

  Only a few months into his Malibu dream Phil passed Gretchen Lewis (now Gettis Blake) and her pet poodle Noodle on the beach by his shack, where they struck up a conversation. Gretchen lived with her affluent dentist father—a “pothead” devotee of astronomer Carl Sagan and philosopher Alan Watts—and his young second wife only three or four doors down. Just nineteen and not long out of high school in Florida, she then worked at an upscale clothing store called I. Magnin & Co. on Wilshire Boulevard. A former member of her high school’s men’s track and field team, Gretchen had previously been engaged to a javelin thrower—a “nice Jewish boy” with whom she’d broken up for lack of chemistry.

  After introducing themselves and making small talk, she and Phil grew more comfortable in each other’s presence and ended up hanging out on an ocean-carved sand ledge until well past sundown. “I’ve never met anyone like him in all my years,” Gretchen says. “You just felt like he was a lie detector. What you saw is what you got, but it wasn’t in a bad way—like, ‘take it or leave it.’ He was a genuine guy.” They parted ways that night without so much as a kiss. Upon meeting up the next day, however, “sparks flew.” Phil reached over to kiss her, “and all hell broke loose.” Almost immediately thereafter the two of them began spending virtually every night together in Phil’s cabana, which he described to Holloway as an “invigorating and a truly beautiful experience. I no longer have any sex hang-up, which had built up … and was beginning to flip me out. My hang-up was that I’d never had a girlfriend who dug sex as much as me. Well, I’ve met my match!”

  Gretchen had met hers, too. “I remember being in his [bed]room and things went on from a sexual standpoint that I didn’t even know existed before,” she says. “Just from the point of pure duration. I was a living bladder infection!” Before the year’s end, Gretchen was pregnant. But because she and Phil were so young and nearly broke, not to mention unmarried, “we both realized that this couldn’t happen.” So she had an abortion—which was then illegal in cases unassociated with rape, incest, or the mother’s health—with the help of her connected father. Phil, she says, seemed fine with it—or at least not distraught. “Whatever Catholic-ness there was [in him], practicality took over.”

  During the next several months, Gretchen sometimes accompanied Phil to Foo gigs that were close by. At home, they spent many hours together on the beach, in his oceanfront hut, and kicking around Malibu. The local Renaissance fest was a favorite annual jaunt, and they attended once as Robin Hood and Maid Marian. As he would in years to come, Phil made sure his costume suited the part, which in this case meant donning tights among other era-specific flourishes. “He was a masculine guy,” Gretchen says, “but not afraid of his feminine side.” She liked that. She loved him—for his supreme but easy confidence, lack of pretension, a
nd laid-back outlook on life. For being everything she was not. “He saw something in me that I didn’t know was there,” she says. “I had a ton of insecurities; he had none. He was as unabashed all the time as a human being could be.”

  About six months into their relationship, Gretchen became acutely aware of how much those around him also loved Phil and gravitated toward him: the band, random passersby on the beach, her sisters, her father. His “organic” magnetism, bolstered by his ever-present sense of humor, drew them into his often-wacky orbit. People wanted to be around him and they frequently asked him to perform. Phil never needed coaxing. “Whatever he felt like doing, he’d do,” she says of his public antics, which typically included celebrity impressions. “But it wasn’t the kind of thing where you’d look at him and say, ‘This guy’s a loon.’” On the contrary, she says, he was “a gamin”—a “happy little character” who brought out lightness in others. “We were never around people who were miserable or unhappy or fighting. You couldn’t be around us and have that happen.”

  On March 12, 1970, at the Malibu courthouse, Phil and Gretchen obtained a marriage license and exchanged vows in a no-frills civil ceremony. He was twenty-one, she twenty. A casual reception followed at her father’s house (he thought the world of Phil), where guests dined, danced, and mingled outdoors and around a massive picnic-like table in the sprawling living room. Phil and Gretchen barely knew themselves, let alone each other, but here they were embarking on a new life together—one that initially played out “like a fairy tale.”

  Not everyone viewed their pairing so rosily. Being older, with more life experience, Les Brown had his doubts from the start. “The unfortunate thing is that Phil was infatuated with beauty,” he says. “You get to a point in your life where the beauty becomes less important, but it takes a long time to get to that place. Let’s be frank about it: At that time, with the free love and all that, you screwed enough beautiful women and you were finally like, ‘OK, she’s pretty. Big deal. So what,’ and you start looking for people you can make some sort of connection with. But in order to make those connections, you have to be there. And that’s difficult for some people, especially actors [or in Phil’s case, aspiring actors], because they’re always being somebody else.” While he thought Gretchen was “a sweet girl,” if “a little spoiled,” Brown got the sense that “she wanted to take [Phil] away from the evils of rock ’n’ roll. Of course, there was a never-ending stream of ladies going through that [Foo] house, which must have driven her crazy.”