by Mike Thomas
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In time, as its newness wore off, Phil increasingly saw the Groundlings as more than a mere escape or diversion; it became a stepping-stone. “We were young and we were creative and we were energetic and we thought we were all going to be stars,” Katz says. “If you’re creative, you burn to create. And here, we had the opportunity to do it.” Phil never voiced that specific ambition, she says, but it was definitely there. You could see it and sense it in his devotion to the work.
At first, that work was deeply collaborative and the actors were more consistently supportive of each other’s efforts. But as time wore on, Katz says, the dynamic began to change. Phil wasn’t immune to the shift. “I thought he became less friendly and more competitive and more interested in his own work and less interested in the work of his group,” she says. Which might have had something to do with the increasingly large shadow cast by Saturday Night Live. “At the Groundlings, the goal is to get on Saturday Night Live,” alumnus and former SNL cast member Julia Sweeney has said. “That’s what everybody wanted to do.” Reubens has expressed similar sentiments. “SNL was always a big force at the Groundlings,” he told the Hollywood Reporter. “Just something that we all kind of were like, ‘If you’re successful, this might be an option.’” And though SNL wasn’t Phil’s primary or even secondary goal, he certainly wanted to advance his career. “Phil wanted to break into show business any way he could,” says friend Mark Pierson, who met Phil in the early seventies in Malibu and was among those who improvised with him during off-hours at the Malibu Cinema. “He was really pining for it. As successful as his life was doing graphic art, he wanted it so much.”
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As a Groundlings instructor, Phyllis Katz made a point of drawing her students out of their respective comfort zones to perform scenes and characters that did not come naturally. Phil always had the toughest time playing himself. “You really have to bare yourself to get out of a character and just play a scene as yourself,” Katz says. “But Phil was not much of a personality. He was like a chameleon.” Others, including Maxwell, noticed the same quality. “He was a person who loved inhabiting other personas,” Maxwell says. “So he was very comfortable assuming characters and really committing to them and doing impressions. That’s what he would gravitate to, even in life.”
Even offstage, costumes were key. One year Phil would drive a pickup truck, dress in all black, and perm his hair so it resembled an Afro of sorts. Eighteen months later he’d get his hair straightened, wear Hawaiian shirts, and drive a sports car. “He once called me up and said, ‘I think I should tell you something before the show opens tonight: I’ve shaved my head,’” Maxwell remembers. “He was kidding, but that would be something he could have done.” During another sartorial phase, he wore an impeccably tailored British suit—in brick red. As one former colleague puts it, “Phil was very vain and consumed by his appearance.”
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Had he tried to be a stand-up comic instead of a sketch actor, Tracy Newman thinks, Phil might have struggled “because he didn’t have a point of view as a human being.” Not onstage, anyway. He was most comfortable and at his performing best when cloaked or otherwise obscured by a crazy wig, a different voice, or the rakishly cocked hat and drab trench coat of one Chick Hazard. The Raymond Chandler–esque private dick was born of a goofy greeting Phil left on his answering machine. After hearing it, Maxwell suggested he use it as the basis for a new character. Phil had also included a Chick Hazard bit on his 1978 comedy album, Flat TV. The early effort, lost for a quarter-century after its recording, includes fake news segments, Tonight Show spoofs, a sketch about football/masturbation, and commercial parodies. Among the latter is a spot for something called Nescocaine. “Why not enjoy a delicious cup of Nescocaine?” Phil asks as the hopped-up announcer. “Or a second? Or a third? Hell, why not snort it right out of the jar?!”
Hazard, though, was poised to be Phil’s first breakout character, and at the Groundlings it became far more three-dimensional—literally and figuratively. Hazard’s voice, look, and patter all were honed in workshops before the noirish P.I. debuted during the Groundlings’ first show on Melrose in late April 1979. With advisement and encouragement from Maxwell and others, the witty dick perfected his act and soon became an all-around favorite. Phil loved to play him, cast members loved to play with him, and audiences invariably roared their approval. Hazard sketches were showstoppers from their inception, and not only because they capped performances. Quick-talking and tightly wound, the all-business Hazard rarely smiled and spoke hard-boiled staccato sentences in a rat-a-tat-tat cadence. (“I was a sucker for long legs. I wanted to shinny up one of hers like a native boy looking for coconuts.”) Every Hazard bit—always launched with a Chick monologue that conveyed crucial exposition—was a largely improvised murder mystery, with recurring characters and on-the-spot role assignments chosen by Phil. Lynne Stewart played a suspect named Missy. “You’re going down for this, Missy!” Chick would exclaim, whereupon Stewart dropped to her knees as if to fellate him. Chick (sotto voce and glancing around nervously): “Not now!”
“Phil would dictate the scenes as he went along,” Paragon recalls. “And as he would walk in, he would label the names of all the people onstage and who they were.” Since Phil was known to be virtually unflappable onstage, Paragon often tried to crack him up mid-scene. Once, as a be-tuxed and big-assed “forties hitman” type named Nick Camaro, Paragon used his outsized backside as a tray to serve Hazard a drink. (“Cocktail, Chick?”) While attempting to suppress his laughter, Phil snatched up the libation, chugged it down, and then flung his glass to the ground.
Victoria Bell (then Carroll) also attempted to throw Phil off his game via anatomical distraction. As his voluptuous female foil, a sexy 1940s vixen named Carmen Pluto, she initially appeared onstage with an era-appropriate dress and gardenias in her hair—nothing too risqué. “Then I heard through the grapevine that he really liked sexy lingerie,” the award-winning costume designer says of Phil, who was then single. “So I made myself a nude leotard with black lace over it—a black chiffon negligee. And I wore black hose with the garter belt. And Phil knew nothing about it. So he started to introduce my character: ‘There she was, Carmen Pluto, the atomic blonde bombshell…’” When the lights came up, Phil swung around to see Bell standing there with one stocking-clad gam (like something he might shinny up in search of coconuts) propped on a chair. In a split second, Bell recalls, he turned to the audience and said, “One look at Carmen and my cock shot down my pant leg like a snake through a vacuum cleaner.” So much for throwing Phil off his game.
“We thought of him as a big star, even though he wasn’t known outside of that [world],” Groundlings alum and Saturday Night Live cast member Jon Lovitz, one of Phil’s best friends, told an interviewer of Phil’s years on Melrose. As he recalled much later, “We’d all be sitting on the floor laying out the scene: ‘Okay, Phil, you’re a shoe salesman.’ The lights would go down and come up, and we were just waiting. We knew whatever he was going to say was nothing you could ever imagine or think of. Then he would say it, and our jaws would drop open. He could do any voice, play any character, make his face look different without makeup. He was the king of the Groundlings.” Maybe so, but as Newman notes there were several others back then who displayed the same charisma and “brilliance” as Phil in their own ways. “It’s confidence that makes a person charismatic most of the time,” she says. “And the way confidence plays out is with commitment onstage. People are drawn like moths to the flame. They’re drawn to the brightest light.” By dint of his formidable skills and copious stage time, Phil was often that light.
More than a few former cohorts say he was artistically generous besides. “He wanted everybody to succeed,” says friend and former Groundling Randy Bennett. “He didn’t like to see people left behind.” Phil proffered valuable advice, too, both as a teacher and a colleague. Case in point: Every year at Christmastime, starting in 1981,
the nearby Crystal Cathedral hosted holiday blowouts featuring live animals, flying angels—the works. So Groundling Doug Cox wrote a parody of the extravaganza featuring facsimiles of Sandy Duncan as the Little Shepherd Boy and Eurythmics rocker Annie Lennox as the Virgin Mary. Phil was a Wise Man—as played by Frank Sinatra. For several years, Cox says, “it really killed.” Emboldened by its success, he decided to mock the traditions of another Christian holiday: Easter. “We were rehearsing it and we thought, ‘Oh, this is gonna kill. They’re gonna love this,’” Cox says. “And we did it once and it just totally, totally died.” In retrospect, he thinks, promoting the availability of a Crucifixion-themed drink—the Rusty Nail—at the Groundlings bar was perhaps a bit much. Phil doing a Sinatra-esque Pontius Pilate probably didn’t help. “The audience just hated it,” Cox says, but he and his cohorts finished what they’d started. Afterward, seeing that Cox was in the dumps, Phil walked up to him and offered the following insight: “You can make fun of Christmas, Doug, but you can’t fuck with the Resurrection.” And they never did again.
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Phil’s magnetism, though far more understated offstage than on, proved effective on the dating front within the Groundlings ranks as well. Stewart has called him the group’s “resident sex symbol,” and others concur. Phil was “a jock” on the female front, Jaye P. Morgan says. “He loved women, but he was always in trouble.” Newman employs a marine metaphor: “He was a big fish in a little pond right away,” she says, “because he was really good-looking, very funny, and really, really gifted. And women flock to that.” Even those with whom he wasn’t romantically involved gave him wider social boundaries, allowing him to do and say things that would get other guys slapped or worse. “Hartman would go further than anybody,” Stack says. “But nobody’s getting away with that other than Phil Hartman.” Groundlings co-star Edie McClurg laughingly recalls how Phil “loved to grab my tits.” And because only the ladies’ dressing room had a sink, Phil would “saunter in and start washing up. And you could always feel his eyes looking down the mirrors to see what state of dishabille we were in. He was a horny guy, but not in a dirty way. He really appreciated women.”
Even onstage he retained a certain politesse, making himself the buffoonish target of sexual jokes. For instance, when the va-va-voom-y Carmen Pluto commented on the .45 caliber pistol Chick Hazard appeared to be packing, he replied that it had previously been a .22. The hapless shtick was a ruse, though, as Phil was never hard up for companionship. For a long stretch, friend John Mayer says, he “had a lot of time to freelance. It was like the old Dean Martin saying, where Dean told a reporter, ‘I’ve never chased women in my life. But the way I look, a lot of them chased me. And I have to confess, sometimes I didn’t run fast enough.’ Phil never said that, but I’m sure that was him.” Which is to say, as Mayer puts it, Phil got “a lot of action.” Not that he bragged about it like some dime-store lothario. “I think one of the things that made him charming to the women was that he was discreet,” Mayer says. “He was not the kiss-and-tell sort.”
Only in retrospect have some friends surmised that Phil’s “infatuation with beauty,” to re-deploy Lester Brown’s description, and his predilection for attractive mates from whom he invariably drifted was more than the mere rakish folly of a man who loved women; it was his Achilles’ heel.
Chapter 6
Phil as Kap’n Karl and Paul Reubens as Pee-wee Herman at Roxy Theatre, West Hollywood, 1981. (Photo © Abe Perlstein)
Chick Hazard was but one of several standout characters to stalk the Groundlings stage during Phil’s time with the troupe. A petulant and somewhat effeminate man-child named Pee-wee Herman—created in a workshop led by Phyllis Katz, developed in an outside class led by Gary Austin, and skillfully embodied by Paul Reubens starting in the late 1970s—got his share of spotlight, too. He was based at least in part on a hack comic Austin had seen at the Comedy Store stand-up club, located nearby on Sunset. “He looked like Sirhan Sirhan,” Austin says, and he was less funny.
“At first he was incredibly offensive,” Austin says of Pee-wee, who dressed in a slim-fitting light-gray suit, a red bow tie, white patent leather shoes, his hair slicked like a squeaky-clean schoolboy’s. “He was like a thirteen-year-old spoiled kid. Very aggressive.” Pee-wee even pelted audience members with mini Tootsie Rolls before the character was softened a bit to make him more palatable, and soon he became one of the Groundlings’ biggest draws.
“Paul Reubens had such enormous power as a performer that he was instantly enamored by all the people who worked at the Groundlings,” Phil later said, stumbling over syntax. “Pee-wee was just one of several fully realized characters that Paul could do. His gift was beyond anything I’ve ever seen.” As both Phil and Reubens were drawn to talent, they soon became friends as well as artistic cohorts. In many ways they were yin and yang. As easy as Phil was to work and get along with, Reubens was more temperamental and could be off-putting. They complemented each other well—for a while, anyway. “Paul’s concerns were visceral and Phil was able to stand back,” Tracy Newman says. “He didn’t have that visceral anger.”
In late 1980, Groundling Cassandra Peterson (who would become famous as Elvira, Mistress of the Dark) introduced Reubens to her producer and writer friend Dawna Kaufmann. Kaufmann had showbiz contacts galore. When a late-night sketch-music concept she had developed for CBS fell through, she envisioned staging “a big kiddie comedy show for people of all ages.” But she needed someone to host it. After seeing Pee-wee in action on Melrose, where at first he performed short interstitial bits between set changes, she thought he was the perfect man-child for the job. They met for dinner the next night to talk further, and talk soon turned to action. In December 1980, aided by what Kaufmann says was an $8,000 loan from Reubens’s parents (Reubens himself has confirmed a loan but not the amount), they began the process of casting and work-shopping their new venture—what Kaufmann described to Inside Pee-wee’s Playhouse author Caseen Gaines as a “live pilot” they hoped would catch the eyes of industry muckety-mucks and become a weekly late-night series. Phil was the first to come aboard, as salty dog sailor Kap’n Karl—named after Kaufmann’s father.
One night in Kaufmann’s apartment he sang a ditty that became the gruff-but-lovable pirate’s signature tune: “Oh, a sailor travels to many lands/Any place he pleases/And he always remembers to wash his hands/So’s he don’t get no diseases!” Then and there, she knew they had the beginnings of a hit. Of course, Kaufmann and Reubens needed more than just Phil to flesh out Pee-wee’s maniacally magical world. “Paul knew he needed help onstage,” says Kaufmann, now a true-crime journalist. “He couldn’t do the whole thing by himself.” Fortunately, their future cast was all in-house. Forsaking his trademark physicality for life in a box, John Paragon came aboard as Jambi the Genie. Additional players included Edie McClurg as Hermit Hattie, John Moody as Mailman Mike, and Lynne Stewart as Kap’n Karl’s dream girl—“the most beautiful woman in Puppetland”—Miss Yvonne. Phil did double duty as the voice of Mike’s puppet pal Monsieur LeCroq.
Offstage, Kaufmann says, she and Phil began seeing each other casually, and Kaufmann sometimes hung out at his home in Sherman Oaks. On one memorable occasion, Phil insisted on showing her his “gun collection,” which then (according to records) included only one registered model: a Colt .45-caliber pistol purchased in August 1980. At first Kaufmann thought he was kidding, because Phil leaned left politically and guns seemed anathema to his liberal viewpoints. But he wasn’t kidding at all, she says, and even suggested they visit a firing range together. “He was really delighted about it, bragging. If I was a gun nut, I probably would have said, ‘Hey, cool. What does this one do?’ But I just got so scared and weirded-out that I said, ‘That’s it, I’m never going to spend another night here.’ And I never did.” They stopped dating in short order.
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Promoted via funky posters and flyers created by now renowned artist Gary Panter (who was also in
charge of Pee-wee production design), midnight performances of The Pee-wee Herman Show began on February 7, 1981, and continued on Fridays and Saturdays at the Groundlings Theater for several months. In those opening weeks especially, Kaufmann says, the room was often heavily papered. Which is to say tickets were given away, always strategically, to celebrities and anyone else in showbiz who might be in a position to help raise this unique (if unproven) venture to the next level. One night Martin Scorsese and Robert De Niro (then shooting The King of Comedy) were in the crowd, the next Penny Marshall and George Carlin. For many of the show’s actors, including Phil, it was the greatest exposure of their careers.
“[T]here would be twenty or thirty people in the audience for the [Groundlings] late show, and during that show the lobby would fill up,” Reubens later told the Hollywood Reporter. “’Cause my show was sold out. We had a waiting list of hundreds of people. It created a little bit of an awkward situation for me within the Groundlings because I had this extremely happening and successful show and we still weren’t selling out the late show.”
While Reubens and Kaufmann worked on a script with director Bill Steinkellner, Phil and his cohorts contributed ideas and honed their onstage personas. “Phil improvised his scene with Paul, Lynne improvised her scenes,” Paragon says. “I improvised my scenes. And we helped write each other’s parts. It was very collaborative. There was no jealousy or envy. There was no competition.” In a 2004 story for L.A. Magazine, Reubens grew wistful when recalling that simpler time. “The thing I remember more than anything,” he said, “was sitting in my ratty car—just me, Phil, and John Paragon, the three male stars of the show, on top of the world, talking and laughing and fantasizing and projecting about what would happen soon.”
In the spring of 1981, when The Pee-wee Herman Show had outgrown its Melrose incubator, production shifted to L.A.’s famed Roxy Theatre on Sunset Boulevard, where the public was welcomed, actors were paid a handsome $25 per night, and the next several months saw plenty of packed houses. Now the stakes were getting real. As a result, some of the show’s principal cast members say, the enterprise became more businesslike and Reubens along with it. But he never messed with Phil, whom Paragon says possessed “amazing strength” and was “probably the only person who ever stood up to Pee-wee.” Others agree. Aside from having had a successful career in graphic design—one he could fall back on should this acting thing cave in—Phil quickly became a central player in Pee-wee’s world. “He really was too important for Paul to mess with,” says Kaufmann. And because Reubens “couldn’t alienate him,” Phil had more leverage. When Phil missed a show one evening and Edie McClurg’s brother filled in, Kaufmann says, he knew all the lines “but you could just tell the energy, the humor, the twinkle wasn’t there. And so it wasn’t an easy role to assign to someone else.” Gary Panter’s now ex-wife Nicole—then a punk world denizen and budding impresario—sensed it as well. “Phil had other irons in the fire that looked like they were going to go somewhere. That’s what I think gave him the backbone to not give a shit about what Paul thought.” Hired as the show’s unofficial “cool consultant,” Nicole also played the part of Pee-wee’s friend Susan. “Paul’s leverage with people had to do with, ‘This is the show that’s going to make you,’ and I don’t think Phil ever believed that.”
