by Mike Thomas
He also brought with him a list of sketch suggestions, such as Playhouse 90—“ninety-second dramas that are very intense. Like, ‘Johnny! Johnny! The cops are here!’ ‘Shut up! Shut up, will ya! I’m tryin’ to think!’” A “permutation” of the old radio-turned-television program You Are There, in which news anchor Walter Cronkite and others hosted from the sites of historical events, was another. He also wished to mock “obnoxious” Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous host Robin Leach. Among impressions Phil hoped to perform on SNL were Peter Graves, William Shatner, and Charlton Heston. “I can also do any dialect,” he announced confidently. “Go ahead, call out a dialect.” So someone yelled a request: “French.” Phil: “I don’t do that.” But he did—over-the-top French and Greek. Then he and Lovitz swapped lines as Master Sgt. Ernest G. Bilko (Lovitz) and Col. John T. Hall (Phil). An old Groundlings sketch was resurrected as well, with Lovitz playing a movie mogul named Harry and Phil a washed-up actor named Johnny.
Harry: You’re through! Do you hear me? Through! You’ll never work in this town again! Your life is finished!
Johnny: What’s the word on the street?
* * *
“I remember Lorne saying, ‘He’s been in the Groundlings eleven years. Don’t you think there’s a reason why?’ Lovitz recalled in The New York Times. “I told Lorne, ‘If you like me, you’ve got to like him. He’s better than me. He’s a genius.’” Laraine Newman offered high praise as well, telling Michaels that Phil had “the talent of Danny [Aykroyd] without the drama. You can’t go wrong.” It came as something of a shock to those who knew him, then—particularly in light of his career frustrations—that Phil was deeply ambivalent when SNL called with an offer. He was settled in L.A., writing screenplays, living quietly in Sherman Oaks. Being famous or merely better known would change his life drastically. Plus—and this was significant—he half-dreaded moving to New York and diving into SNL’s well-chronicled shark tank. “Phil was very laid-back,” Lovitz once explained. “He wasn’t competitive.” Julia Sweeney, who joined SNL in 1990, has said that his reluctance may have stemmed in part from age concerns. Phil would be thirty-eight at the start of his first SNL season, from a few to a dozen or more years older than his fellow cast members and writers. “I think he struggled with that,” Sweeney theorized, “feeling like maybe it was too late or something.” But after speaking with the famously flamboyant and straight-shooting producer Joel Silver, who reportedly told Phil he was nuts to pass on this chance of a lifetime, Phil accepted the job. Studio 8H at 30 Rockefeller Center in Manhattan awaited his arrival. “I always thought he was coming,” Michaels says, “so perhaps the agony of his decision was overplayed.”
Chapter 9
Phil as Frankenstein with Jon Lovitz (Tonto) and Kevin Nealon (Tarzan), SNL, December 16, 1989. (Photo by NBCU Photo Bank)
Soon after Phil accepted the offer to join SNL, he called his Groundlings mates Craig Strong and Randy Bennett to tell them he could no longer spend time on a project they’d all been working to mount in New York: an Off-Broadway play starring Chick Hazard. The show—titled The Greenwich Villains—was to be set in the late 1940s “Red Scare” era, and fund-raising efforts had already brought in around $25,000 from family and friends. New initiatives, they hoped, would raise substantially more. But now Phil had to focus on the highest-profile gig of his career, which meant putting the kibosh on Chick’s debut off the Great White Way. Then again, it was never a done deal—not even close. Financial problems stymied it from the start. “We had given up hope,” Bennett says. “No one could afford to lose this money.” Fortunately, Phil had a solution. As Bennett and Strong remember it, when he sold the rights for a Chick Hazard film to Universal, Phil insisted that his play investors be reimbursed as part of the deal. “This was Phil being a real gentleman,” Strong says of a bold move that could have scared off Universal. “He stood up and said, ‘I owe it to these people. They’ve invested in me and I want them to get their money back.’” Adds Bennett, “That’s unheard of in Hollywood. And we were so moved.” Unfortunately, as Phil himself admitted, he lacked the industry clout to get his Chick film made, and so it sat and sits on the proverbial shelf.
Toward the end of September, NBC alerted the media: Phil Hartman was the next Groundling to join SNL. By then he had found a small apartment in Midtown Manhattan for (as Floyd Dozier recalls) around $3,000 a month. Brynn hadn’t yet arrived; they had broken up when he left L.A. and Phil was still uncertain if they’d reunite. “He had a difficult decision,” says Lorne Michaels, who remembers Phil’s “agonizing over whether or not he was going to commit to Brynn. And he came down on the side of ‘I love her.’” When Phil flew back to L.A. while SNL was on break in early 1987, he and Brynn reconciled and she returned to live with him in New York. At Phil’s urging and despite the fact that he was earning the biggest salary of his career, Brynn got a receptionist or secretarial job to chip in for rent. She also signed up for acting lessons.
Besides the shelving of his Chick Hazard play, Phil’s joining SNL also meant he could no longer play Captain Carl on Pee-wee’s Playhouse. He was able to shoot only six episodes before leaving it behind for good, and insiders say Reubens was less than thrilled about losing one of his show’s most popular characters. It’s also worth noting that Reubens himself had tried and failed to get hired by SNL for the 1980–81 season; the job instead went to Gilbert Gottfried. “I knew I had to figure something out,” Reubens told L.A. Weekly in 2010, “or I knew I’d spend the rest of my life being the guy that almost happened.”
Years later, and with typical tact, Phil talked about their split. “We had kind of a falling-out way back when, and it’s too bad,” he said. “Because that part of my life [Pee-wee’s Playhouse] was a real turning point. We were doing work that changed the look of Saturday morning.”
Wistful though he often was in his public retrospection, on at least a couple of occasions Phil revealed his true feelings toward Reubens and the causes of their schism. Here is what he told NBC late-night host Bob Costas in mid-February of 1992, not long after Reubens ran afoul of the law and became tabloid fodder for allegedly masturbating in a Sarasota, Florida, adult movie theater—charges Reubens continues to deny:
He’s a complex guy and, I think sadly, a seriously wounded individual, and not just because of his recent problems. But he’s hiding some pain. And I guess I only say that so that people might show some compassion for him. But the greatest thing about him is that I think he’s a true genius and I think he’s a true artist … [S]o much of what you’ve seen of his work has been all him. And in a way, that’s his downfall, because he has an artistic temperament, where he wants to be the one who does it all, and he’s working in media like film and television that are highly collaborative and where you have to give up control to others—to art directors, to designers, to directors, to writers. And that didn’t come easy to Paul, because he has a personality that is more suited to a painter or a sculptor or something.
When prodded by Howard Stern late that year, Phil was less magnanimous. During their exchange, however, he chose his words carefully—almost as if on the witness stand. Telling Stern of their estrangement ever since he began on Saturday Night Live, Phil admitted that part of their differences lay in the fact that he felt financially shorted after having been a key part of the Pee-wee Roxy show, out of which grew Pee-wee’s Big Adventure and the Saturday morning CBS program.
“We had a contract,” Phil explained, “that said that we get three percent of whatever happens with this show.” Stern was stunned to hear that Phil hadn’t made a stink about it in court. But that wasn’t Phil.
“The truth is everybody was in love with Paul Reubens and his talent,” he said, “and I still remain a great admirer of his.
* * *
The truth was also this: although it had sagged in the ratings for a while after Michaels took his five-year sabbatical in 1980 and again in 1985 after the departure of stars Eddie Murphy, Martin Short, Christopher
Guest, and Billy Crystal, SNL remained a highly desirable destination for comedy types and a far better showcase for Phil’s comedic talents. Rather than being stuck as a single character (Captain Carl) week in and week out, he (like Aykroyd before him) became one of the most versatile players Michaels had ever hired. And he was happy for the excellent exposure. “This is Rockefeller Center, New York City, live comedy television,” he said in an interview that fall, shortly before his first season began. “There’s nothing like it.”
Phil’s early focus, however, wasn’t only on the work but where the work might take him. “There’s a lot of heat on me as a writer, and we figured with the exposure I’ll get on SNL, my acting will catch up with my writing in terms of saleability,” he told the L.A. Times a couple of weeks before his SNL debut. In another baldly careerist statement, he admitted that SNL was merely a stepping-stone to create “box office credibility so I can write movies for myself.” He was fully aware, though, that regaining popularity with viewers after the program’s abysmal eleventh season and several years of prior tumult wouldn’t be easy. When he’d visited SNL with Reubens and Paragon in late 1985, he said in the L.A. Times, “there was rather a feeling of mayhem. This year we feel like there’s a better shot at it. But, of course, we’re on the other side of being praised.”
As evidenced in his voice-overs for commercial spoofs and his portrayal of slick talk show hosts, celebrities, and many other types of characters (frequently minor ones), Phil’s knack for transforming himself to suit any context and his usual unwavering commitment to character—no matter how goofy or minor—proved invaluable. “So many people have a tendency to wink at the audience,” says Jan Hooks, who was also hired in 1986. “Phil never did that. He played it for blood.” A quality that surely helped set the boss’s mind at ease. In the wake of a thorough housecleaning that saw the jettisoning of several writers and many members of the prior season’s individually talented but creatively mismatched cast—Anthony Michael Hall, Joan Cusack, Randy Quaid, and Robert Downey Jr. among them—he was determined to get things back on track. “Everybody was coming in on eggshells, because word had gotten out that [the show] was very close to being cancelled,” Hooks says. “And so Lorne was like, ‘Don’t you guys embarrass me.’”
Whereas someone like Jon Lovitz was a type with limited versatility in terms of the roles he could credibly play (Donald Trump, for instance, would have been a stretch), Phil was an Everyman (“Mr. Potato Head,” as he liked to describe himself) who could become almost anyone. “When you are so average looking, when they put a wig on you and some glasses, if you alter your face and your voice in any way, you can look a lot different,” he explained during the Costas interview. Lovitz, on the other hand, could “look like people who have his coloring and maybe similar ethnic qualities. But it’s more difficult for him to do Phil Donahue than it would be for me. And I love that, because my favorite thing in the world is just doing a lot of different things.”
In the late ’80s, upon encountering Michaels at a party for SNL alum Gilda Radner, Tracy Newman asked him what it was like to have Phil on the show—all the while thinking to herself “I told you so.” She says Michaels replied, “Tracy, I don’t even have to go into work.” The implication, of course, being that Phil was exceptionally self-sufficient and needed no babysitting. Since SNL’s inception in 1975—as fans of the 2002 oral history Live from New York and other backstage exposés of the program know—that hasn’t always been the case. “It might have been a way of saying something nice about Phil,” Michaels says of his remark to Newman. “But I said I really did still have to come in to work.”
From his SNL debut, on October 11, 1986—one day after he popped up on movie screens in the Penny Marshall–directed Jumpin’ Jack Flash—Phil maintained a remarkably regular on-camera presence and glided smoothly between disparate roles. (He eventually became such a ubiquitous presence that David Letterman half-joked, “I was watching your program one weekend and it was 90 percent you. You were in everything.”) Although Phil’s first episode was hosted by actress Sigourney Weaver—fresh off of her Aliens hit and promoting another flick with Michael Caine—and included music by the pompadoured pop sensation Buster Poindexter, Madonna opened it with an effacing nod to SNL’s dismal run of late.
“As you may remember, one year ago tonight I hosted the premiere episode of Saturday Night Live. Therefore, NBC has asked me to read the following statement concerning last year’s entire season. Ready? ‘It was all a dream, a horrible, horrible dream.’ And now, to confuse you even further: Live, from New York, it’s Saturday Night!”
The first sketch after Weaver’s monologue, a mercifully brief relationship bit called “General Dynamics,” features Phil in a voice-over role. Hooks and Dana Carvey, both of whom became close friends of Phil offstage, are in it, too. “We were all virgins,” Carvey told then Rolling Stone contributor Bill Zehme. “Jan, Phil, and I had never done live television.” Phil added, “We didn’t know whether we were going to fall on our faces.”
Next comes Lovitz, reprising his Groundlings character the Pathological Liar, before Phil, Carvey, and Hooks (as dim-witted contestant Lane Maxwell and his perky competitor Marge Keister) return for a game show called Quiz Masters. Phil, predictably, plays host Bill Franklin. Owing to his jaunty bearing and stentorian tone, authority figures—announcers, hosts, fathers, teachers—quickly became his stock-in-trade, as he knew they would be from the start. From the first sketch Phil, Carvey, and Hooks did together, Smigel says, he and his fellow writers felt a surge of confidence. The show had been faltering, but now they “knew that everything was going to be OK. The show just felt completely different in the hands of these three people.” And overall, Michaels says, it was “a charmed cast.” A seasoned one, too. “A lot of them were people who had banged around for a bit. It wasn’t their first job. They’d all been out in the world and they knew how great an opportunity this was.”
During his debut Phil also appears—in a flashy red suit (from his sartorially swell Groundlings days?)—alongside Weaver as one of two record executives for whom Carvey, as fictional (and freshly rehabbed) British popster Derek Stevens, showcases half-assed, spontaneously composed tunes. “There’s a lady I know,” he sings earnestly, haltingly over a mournful melody plunked out on an upright piano. “If I didn’t know her/she’d be the lady [pause] I didn’t know.” Ultimately, you might recall, said lady winds up “choppin’ broccoli … choppin’ broccolehhhh.” (Interesting side note: When Weaver greets Carvey she reminds him they’d met “at the Roxy in 1981”—the year of Pee-wee.) And while Chick Hazard wouldn’t appear until November (in the first of two instances that were the only ones of Phil’s SNL run) a parody ad has Phil portraying fictional New York Deputy Commissioner Craig W. Doyle. It opens with Phil/Doyle kneeling before a bloody corpse at the scene of a homicide. Its premise: Murder someone in New York City and get an automatic ten weeks in jail—“no ifs, ands, or buts.” “So long, sucker,” Phil says in his best Big Apple–ish accent (comprised of perhaps 30 percent Chick) as a perp is hauled off to the pokey. “See you sometime in … late January.”
The next episode of Phil’s inaugural season (SNL’s twelfth) marked the debut of his first celebrity impersonation: talk show host Phil Donahue. To prepare, he watched tapes of Donahue in action, made drawings of his various postures and gestures, and was heavily coached on the character by SNL’s resident writing overlord James Downey. When it came to comedy, both shared the sensibility that less was more.
Wearing a lustrous white wig, large spectacles, and a dark suit, the fake Donahue’s play-to-the-cameras emotionality runs the short gamut from incredulous to exasperated as he questions women trapped in exploitive relationships—sometimes with one foot propped on a step, his face aimed downward and a microphone thrust out in front of him. Nora Dunn and Victoria Jackson lend a hand along with Hooks, Lovitz, and Nealon. “You women are exploited because you want to be exploited,” fake Phil posits to jeers from
the studio audience. “If I don’t exploit you, you’ll find someone else who will.”
Another fellow Canadian, Rosie Shuster, helped write the Donahue sketch with Al Franken and Tom Davis. (These days, Franken is a U.S. senator; Davis died in 2012.) Even when he first started, she says, Hartman came off as “very smooth and silky, but not in an unctuous way.” Neither did he “put a lot of ego into stuff.” This confidence born of experience—not to mention the knowledge that he could always go back to drawing were his showbiz career to tank—made him something of a calming presence among excitable and emotional young pups. “You could sit in a room with some of those guys and they would just be completely randy, acting out weird shit,” Shuster says. “And Phil would just observe more than being a wild participant. They would be like, ‘OK, does this shock you? How about this?’ Phil would not be that guy.”
“All these guys were young and hungry and, boy, they just wanted to get out there and show what they could do,” Hooks says. “Phil had that ambition, but he was a very stately man.” Or, as Shuster describes him, “the grown-up in the room.” Offstage and on.
In a spoof called “The Crosby Show,” co-written by Phil and Smigel, Phil plays paternalistic crooner Bing Crosby opposite guest host Malcolm Jamal-Warner’s Theo Huxtable. But instead of reasoning with his misbehaving children in the folksy style of Theo’s TV dad Cliff (portrayed on NBC by Bill Cosby), Bing jauntily summons them to the family library for a beating with his belt. As Phil’s brother Paul later noted, it was an instance of art imitating life—Bing’s and Phil’s—for to some degree Phil was channeling his father Rupert. “That was exactly how our household was,” Paul told Canada’s National Post. “If you screwed up, you were going to get the belt. And so, consequently, everyone toed a tight line.” Phil, he added half-jokingly, was “working out his neuroses on TV.”
