You Might Remember Me The Life and Times of Phil Hartman

by Mike Thomas

  Although receipts from the Roxy extravaganza barely covered costs, Kaufmann says, the popular production kept on keeping on in hopes that a tipping point was near. And soon enough, it came. Reubens and his handlers at the Agency for the Performing Arts (APA) struck a deal with HBO to film closing night with multiple cameras for the still-nascent cable network’s comedy series On Location. Marty Callner, a rising star in the music video and live comedy realms, was brought in to direct. Kaufmann was wary. “The whole idea was to run it for a long time and keep running it until we had an agreement as to where [on television] we were going to do it,” she says of her vision for a late-night kids’ program for adults. Not only did Reubens effectively quash that scenario with his HBO arrangement, Kaufmann and others contend, he served associates far smaller pieces of the Pee-wee pie than had originally been promised. Kaufmann says she was supposed to get 5 percent of the proceeds from anything Pee-wee-oriented that emanated from the Roxy show. Phil and other principals were to have a 3 percent stake. “For as much as I loved Phil, he would barely stand up for himself,” Kaufmann says. “He did not stand up for anyone else. And anyone will tell you this. He never, ever, ever stood up for someone else. He just took the path of least resistance.”

  Only years later would Phil grouse publicly about his allegedly shabby treatment, and only in the sparest terms. “There was a lot of fucking disappointment among all those people that worked so hard and tirelessly and got credit taken away from them for their contribution to making Paul Reubens a star,” says artist Richard Duardo, who did some artwork for the Roxy show with Gary Panter. “And Phil, for one, was hurt profoundly, deeply. So was Gary. Paul hurt the core group that really propelled him.”

  * * *

  Not long before Pee-wee and his gang of adult adolescents stormed the Roxy, Phil had begun dating a fiery woman who’d soon spur him to give matrimony another try. Her name was Lisa Strain (now Strain-Jarvis), a vim-brimming, self-possessed free spirit of twenty-three. She then worked as the personal assistant to a real estate developer and was, by her own admission, a handful—though not, she thought, in a bad way. They first encountered each other at a restaurant and music venue called Madame Wong’s in L.A.’s Chinatown district. “Can I dance with you?” Phil asked her, wiggling anxiously as she boogied solo. His manner was so genuine, his tone so eager that she couldn’t say no. “Dance,” she told him, and he did. When he’d had enough, Phil thanked her for the opportunity and returned to his friends. At closing time, while the band packed up its gear, Phil spied Lisa sitting at a table and again approached her. But when he asked if he could walk her to her car, Lisa declined. Having arrived with one of the musicians, she thought it only appropriate to leave with him, too. Phil, however, succeeded in procuring her phone number, which she spoke aloud for lack of a writing implement. Phil said he’d remember. She was sure he’d forget. To make certain that didn’t happen, Phil chanted her digits all the way home and rang her the next day.

  During their two-and-a-half-hour conversation, Phil asked Lisa out and she assented. He originally wanted her to accompany him to a wedding (Duardo’s) that coming Saturday in Santa Barbara, which struck her as too strange for a first date, so they went for sushi instead on Friday. “I remember the minute my heart opened to him,” she says. “We were driving up to this sushi place on Pacific Coast Highway and he got out of his car to pump gas and he left his wallet open on the seat. And he had his passport or some kind of picture of him as [a kid] when his family had emigrated from Canada. And I just fell in love with that little guy. When he got back in the car I said, ‘When was this?’ And he told me the story, and I said, ‘Oh, my God, what a little baby you are, it’s darling.’ He was just so dear.” After Phil dropped her off, he went home to Sherman Oaks and threw what he told Lisa was “the most amazing I Ching” called “The Marrying Maiden.” Oddly, for something Phil characterized as “amazing,” it symbolizes a younger woman under an older man’s guidance who enters the relationship as the man’s mistress or slave. As an Internet sage explains, “It is not the happiest period of your life. Circumstances dictate the terms. There is no freedom of action. No joy and satisfaction. You’ll have to sacrifice your desires for the sake of duty, or simply follow someone else’s will.”

  The next day, despite Lisa’s initial misgivings, they headed for the wedding in Santa Barbara. Things moved fast from there. A couple of weeks later, Lisa lost the lease on her apartment and, at Phil’s invitation, moved into his modest abode at 4656 Norwich Avenue in Sherman Oaks, whose $265 monthly mortgage he paid with earnings from voice-over work and proceeds from his graphic design projects. More romance ensued. “Phil was glamourized by people,” Lisa says, using Phil’s term for what amounted to a state of bewitchment. And he was definitely, hopelessly glamourized by her. (Phil marveled about Lisa to his co-star Lynne Stewart: “She doesn’t have an ounce of body fat!”) And although Lisa’s fierce independent streak sometimes left Phil wondering if she felt similarly, she was strongly attracted to him as well. “I was lovestruck,” she says. “And I wanted to be in love.” For his thirty-third birthday, in late September 1982, she surprised her beau with a helicopter trip to Catalina Island, where they stayed in “some dump” and had a swell time. Phil’s enchantment with the destination continued to grow. As he marveled to one interviewer in the 1990s, “You just can’t believe how beautiful it is.”

  In their bliss-filled courting months, though, Lisa was the object of his most intense affection (private and public) and he of hers. Nicole Panter recalls the lovey-dovey duo’s rather aggressive canoodling at the wedding of a mutual friend in Palm Desert. “They were pretty overtly sexual with each other all over the place,” says Nicole, who was accompanied by her then-husband Gary. “Lisa was in a Victorian-style dress that one is meant to wear slips and petticoats under. But she wore nothing under it—and it was a very sheer dress. And I remember Phil turning her around and saying to Gary, ‘Look at that ass!’ You could totally see her ass. I thought, ‘If I were the bride, I would send someone out here and ask her to put on something’—because it was definitely going to deflect attention from the bride. But you could tell they were both in a sort of full-on happy exhibitionist mode, which was kind of amusing. I’m just glad it wasn’t my wedding.”

  Phil and Lisa—whom he nicknamed “Royal” or “Royal Boom” or “Royal Boom the Electric Peach,” after the name of a company (Royal Electric) that was emblazoned on a vintage bowling shirt he bought for her—expressed their mutual adoration in love letters, too. Sometimes Phil, whom Lisa nicknamed “Plaz,” decorated his gushy missives with silly doodles—of hearts or little cartoon characters or a nude couple copulating after they’d lost weight and become sexy-buff. (Phil was always on the lookout for new ways to stay in shape.) In one, he called her his “electric peach.” In another he penned a cosmic ode to her awesomeness.

  Phil proposed to Lisa in late summer of 1982. He had asked her repeatedly, if informally, for months, but Lisa thought they weren’t ready. Finally and suddenly, she changed her mind. “If you asked me to marry you, I wouldn’t say no,” she told him one day as they motored down L.A.’s 405 Freeway. Pumped, Phil tore off at the next exit, stopped the car, and asked for her hand. No ring, no fanfare. He then did a numerological evaluation to determine the best wedding date, which turned out to be December 18. It was set.

  Letter from Lisa to Phil on his thirty-fourth birthday, September 24, 1982:

  My darling my love,

  This is the last birthday you’ll spend as a single man. To link my arm in yours, my life with yours is a sublime joy, a summer holiday. I know our love will be as the wind on a lake like this.

  Sometimes our sails will fill & we’ll speed off on a brisk current. Or it will be balm: soothing cool & serene. Whatever we have, it will be good because we give our goodness to each other. I’m so happy with you. So happy.…

  So, happy birthday my precious & may Jehovah give us thousands more together.

&nb
sp; I’ll love you forever,

  Lisa

  With Dozier as best man, Phil and Lisa dressed formally (Phil in a black tux with tails, Lisa in a form-flattering sleeveless white dress) and wed in a small backyard ceremony at the home of a friend on Chandler Boulevard in Sherman Oaks. Rock photographer Henry Diltz shot video of the nuptials, and a two-day honeymoon in Santa Barbara followed. Early the next year, on January 30, family and friends gathered again on Chandler for a larger reception—a “dancing brunch,” as Phil and Lisa dubbed it in a one-page invitation that was adorned with tiny cartoon cupids and 1950s-style images of couples in love. “Flamboyant attire” was requested, and a recording of the newlyweds’ vows was shown on a television for anyone who cared to watch.

  Phil continued to perform with the Groundlings on weekends, which always improved his mood and energy level. After being onstage, Lisa says, “He was really high and really happy. And he’d have to go eat something really bad. Like, he’d have malts and cheese chili burgers at one o’clock in the morning.” He also kept working on graphic design projects and did occasional radio and TV spots (the most significant being a local ad for Toyota wherein he played the well-coiffed scion of a rich old woman). Lisa, meanwhile, created neon installations and freestanding wood sculptures. They made quite the artsy pair. To earn a healthy bit of extra scratch ($2,500 a month, she says), four nights a week Lisa waited tables at the Hollywood hotspot Restaurant Muse on Beverly Boulevard. A scene that buzzed with showbiz somebodies, Muse was what one former employee described as “the quintessential Los Angeles restaurant of the ’80s. All white inside with gray booths and banquets, gray industrial carpeting on the floor, polished concrete in the bar area, and an amazing tank of tropical fish over the bar. Windows up high on the street side so it had a fairly dark interior during the day. An immense metal sculpture by Jonathan Borofsky hung from the ceiling and dominated the dining room.” Lisa’s earnings helped pay the mortgage and resupply the bathroom with “bum wad,” Phil’s name for toilet paper, the frequent shortage of which caused him to whine. He forbade Lisa from using his special shampoo, too, because Phil was “horrifically cheap.” “We never shared money,” Lisa says. “We always had separate accounts. If you’re keeping all that apart, you’re not really committed to the person, you’re not there for them hundred percent.”

  In the middle of a Muse shift one evening, Phil phoned Lisa at the restaurant. He’d soured on acting, he told her, and had decided to resume his previous career in graphic arts. (It wasn’t the first time he’d talked of tossing in the towel and it wouldn’t be the last.) Lisa couldn’t believe it and eventually talked him off the ledge. “Over my dead body,” she told him. She would pick up extra serving shifts, get a third job—whatever it took to keep him doing what he did best, what she was sure would make him a star. Her bolstering, she says, also took the form of constructive criticism that pulled no punches. He needed to take acting lessons, she advised, and learn how to bare his soul—to be real. Not only would it improve his psychological health, it would make him more professionally viable. At the Groundlings and elsewhere, Phil tended to play arch characters that often bordered on, and risked devolving into, caricature.

  His support for her theatrical aspirations, Lisa says, was far less enthusiastic. When she expressed a desire to begin acting—maybe even join the Groundlings—Phil was firmly and vociferously against it. “He was very, very disturbed about my wanting to be anywhere in a world where there’d be young guys around me,” she says. “Very possessive, but not in a jealous way.”

  Then again.…

  “I really embraced the marriage and that partnership,” Lisa claims. “And I was completely loyal to him. But he was jealous. He was really jealous. I remember him yelling at me in the car, just screaming at me on New Year’s Eve a month after we got married, because I had been talking to a guy I’d gone to high school with. He wasn’t even a boyfriend or anything. But when I saw him, it was fun, and so I spent probably forty minutes talking to him at this really boring party. And when Phil and I got into the car [afterward], he just freaked out about how I’d embarrassed him and how I was with this guy all night and blah blah blah. I’m like, ‘You are nuts. What’s wrong with you?’”

  Old-fashioned in many respects and, Lisa thinks, “a reluctant eighties guy,” Phil also became flustered when she ordered for both of them at a restaurant, or strutted her stuff with such sizzle that heads swiveled. And though he could burn up a stage like nobody’s business, Phil was otherwise subdued at home—the opposite of his spunky bride. “He was very boring to live with,” Lisa says. “He was brilliantly funny, but he didn’t want to do anything or go anywhere. His idea of a great night out was to go to Häagen-Dazs and get an ice cream and then drive up Ventura Boulevard and look at old cars in a lot. I was thrilled. Thrilled.”

  She gently needled, trying to coax Phil out of his shell: Hello! Hey, mister, what’d you do with my husband? Hey, mister, is my husband in there somewhere? Eventually sex all but ceased because, Lisa says, “I was just too demanding.” A poor excuse, she was sure. “I mean, come on! I’m a bodybuilding firecracker, adorable, 112 pounds of solid muscle. And I’m a punk rocker. I’m wearing miniskirts and tights and handcuffs in my ears and stilettos and vintage clothing and spandex everything and rubber skirts. That was the scene then and I embraced it. Not in a way that looked trashy; I always looked cute. But I was definitely a little sexpot. And it freaked him out. Of course he wanted it, but when he got it, it freaked him out. I overwhelmed him.”

  Phil let that be known—to Lisa and others. One day, as he and fellow Groundling Tim Stack sat in a theater board meeting together, Phil began talking (apropos of nothing) about his carnal tribulations—but in such a way that his genuine concern came off as flip. “I don’t know what to do,” he announced in a Charlton Heston–like voice, bringing the session to an extended and welcome halt. “Lisa wants to have sex eight, ten times a day! I need breaks. I like to watch television. I enjoy The Jeffersons.”

  The more Phil ignored her, the more Lisa sought solace in work.

  “He had sublimated his sexuality into his career—period,” she says. “He was a person without a high libido to begin with, and that’s normal. A lot of people don’t have a really powerful libido. Big deal.” He was also, she adds, “kind of an obsessive eater. So if there was free food, he had to have it, no matter [if] he was hungry or not. And that came from being a hungry kid. He had kind of an insatiable quality [regarding] certain things. Certainly when he wanted sex, he wanted sex, but when he didn’t you couldn’t get him to.”

  Sexual incompatibility was only part of their problem. Lisa’s need for constant engagement, Phil grumped, was getting on his nerves and distracting him from creating new material. “You just need to entertain yourself,” Phil told her. “Stop bothering me. You need to have a life.” But they were married, Lisa shot back. It was supposed to be their life. Together. Phil had sold her a vision of them as Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy, Claudette Colbert and Clark Gable, William Powell and Myrna Loy. They were going to be a Hollywood power couple with “this snappy, jazzy life.” But when would it start? Would it ever start? Phil’s extreme distance felt “emotionally abusive.” Lisa was “insatiable,” he snapped. “A black hole.” Nobody could make her happy, so why didn’t she just stop bothering him? Lisa told him, “Be careful what you ask for. Don’t push me too hard, because I will go.”

  Phil was sullen, told her she never really loved him anyway. But his refusal to argue or even to talk about issues drove Lisa crazy. He never wanted to make waves. Ever. Consequently, untended molehills became unscalable mountains. “One time we were arguing about a word and I was right, because I’m a word freak,” Lisa says. “So I jumped out of bed naked, went into the living room, grabbed this giant dictionary, and came back into the bedroom. And I was standing there with this huge book in my arms, and I looked up the word and I read it to him and he goes, ‘Yeah, so what.’ And I was so mad th
at I threw this huge dictionary at him and hit him in the head. Because he was so infuriating! He would just make you go grrrrr. ‘I can’t be married to you anymore,’ he’d say, and then he wouldn’t talk to you. He’d just go into the bedroom and go to sleep.’”

  In Lisa’s mind the death knell of their marriage sounded only a year into it, on a trip in late 1983 to celebrate their first anniversary. Here they were, back in lovely Santa Barbara, with a gym-toned Lisa romp-ready in stockings, garters, bikini underwear, a push-up bra, and high heels. “I remember he was lying on the bed and I climbed up on it and stood over him,” she recalls. “And he said, ‘Could you just stop?’ I said, ‘Yeah, I can stop. I can stop altogether, actually.’ And that was it, really. We lasted probably another six or seven months.” That New Year’s Eve, even as they smooched at midnight, she knew it was only a matter of time. Aptly enough, the final verse of that New Year’s staple “Auld Lang Syne”—an ages-old tune by Irishman Robert Burns that Phil always said was his favorite—summed up their situation pretty well: “We two have run about the slopes/and picked the daisies fine/But we’ve wandered many a weary foot/since auld lang syne.”