You Might Remember Me The Life and Times of Phil Hartman

by Mike Thomas

  In what is arguably the episode’s best sketch, Phil and Lovitz reprise their Groundlings scene featuring the movie mogul and the washed-up star of shoot-’em-up war flicks—essentially the same scene that had garnered them laughs on Melrose Avenue back in L.A. and at Phil’s SNL audition. This time around, though, it was polished to perfection. Set in 1947, it was also (as it had been at the Groundlings) an excellent showcase for Phil’s throwback sensibilities.

  Harry: You’re finished, Johnny!

  Johnny O’Connor: Don’t mince words!

  Harry: I think you stink!

  Johnny O’Connor: Listen, Harry, if you’re unhappy with my work, tell me now!

  Harry: You’re through, do you hear me, through! You’ll never work in this town again!

  Johnny O’Connor: Don’t leave me hanging by a thread! Let me know where I stand!

  Phil certainly had plenty of experience with showbiz rejection, having toiled mightily to gain notice until SNL came calling. He also played lame-brained brilliantly, often by melding ignorance with overconfidence to achieve his own breed of a comedic style he claimed to have borrowed from Bill Murray. “He’s been a great influence on me—when he did that smarmy thing in Ghostbusters, then the same sort of thing in Groundhog Day,” Phil said. “I tried to imitate it. I couldn’t. I wasn’t good enough. But I discovered an element of something else, so in a sick kind of way I made myself a career by doing a bad imitation of another comic.” But most of all, he adored Old Hollywood—its characters, its rhythms, its look, and its lingo. He was, as second wife Lisa put it, “a reluctant ’80s guy” who would have been thrilled to live and work three or four decades earlier during the heyday of John Wayne and author Mickey Spillane’s tough-talking fictional detective Mike Hammer. “Phil had an affinity for old movie stars, or at least the perception of what he thought old movie stars were like,” says comedy writer Jay Kogen, who saw Phil play many such characters at the Groundlings and worked with him later on The Simpsons. “Chick Hazard was like that. And there was a Groundlings improv [sketch] where Phil would come out as a sort of New York–Broadway 1950s bon vivant guy in glasses and a suit, and it felt like he was putting on this thing from the past but bringing it forward.”

  Above all, Phil relished the chance to do impressions. Not only were they fun to perform, they required full immersion. And, as at the Groundlings, he was never more content than when fully immersed. The experience, he once said, was “like a great natural high.” After a sketch ended, he’d “sort of snap out of it, like I’m waking from a dream.” Almost from the start of his SNL tenure, Phil had “this notion of myself as the man of a thousand faces, or a thousand voices.” His approach to them was simple: To the extent possible, he embodied the actual person rather than an exaggerated version. From a physical standpoint, as with Donahue, he studied tapes to glean mannerisms, gait, and other outward details. In imitating voices, which ultimately numbered more than seventy, he paid close attention to the place from which they emanated in his throat. The only ones that eluded him were Regis Philbin’s and Johnny Carson’s. Both soon wound up in Carvey’s expansive canon of caricatures, the latter complemented by Phil’s obsequious and occasionally boozy Ed “Hi-yo!” McMahon. “One of the reasons that Dana and I became best friends is because our approaches to the work were so different that we weren’t really competing with each other,” Phil said. And both were masters of disguise.

  Phil and Carvey were personally similar, too. Each grew up with many siblings (Dana four and Phil seven) and each had a tendency to compartmentalize and camouflage his pain or problems so as not to burden others. And despite their often offbeat on-camera personas and proclivity for performing, be it for a crowd of three or three hundred, each was reserved in person and exuded a seemingly natural regular guy–ness. (“In real life if I met you socially,” Phil once said, “I think you would find me to be a regular guy and perhaps more modest than you might imagine. But believe me, it would make for a better time for you, because we could take turns being the star of that encounter.”) Frugality was also a common trait, though each held different definitions of the term. While Carvey bought the least expensive house among those of his monied friends and lived below his means, Phil liked toys and researched potential acquisitions exhaustively before making a purchase. As his fortunes rose, his collection came to include boats, sports cars, a Harley-Davidson Fat Boy motorcycle, and even a plane. But such purchases required a level of financial solvency that was years off. And even then, John Hartmann says, Phil remained thrifty and “only spent money to avoid giving it to the tax man. Part of growing up poor, I suppose.”

  * * *

  Throughout his inaugural season, Phil had little time for anything outside of SNL. Although he and Lovitz tried “feverishly” (as Phil put it) to finish a movie script for Lovitz’s breakout character “The Liar,” life inside the comedy crucible at 30 Rock was even more hectic than usual owing to Phil’s contracted dual duties as a performer and writer. “The writers burn themselves out the first half of the week and the actors burn themselves out the second half,” he explained years later. Doing both, particularly since he was in so many sketches, proved too exhausting to sustain for more than a few seasons. But his solo creations—the ones that made it on the air, anyway—were few (a handful of Peter Graves parodies and a sketch called “Egg Man” in which Phil stars as a fragile sage-in-a-shell opposite a volatile Kathleen Turner), so maybe it was just as well. According to James Downey, however, Phil wrote relatively little after season one—but kept getting a fatter writer-actor paycheck. It was a source of consternation among his fellow cast members. “It could be awkward, and there were some frayed feelings at the beginning,” Downey says. “I think it eventually worked itself out, although maybe never during the time that people were actually at the show. But there was never any issue in terms of personal animosity. It was a sort of principled resentment of the situation and nothing to do with the way Phil acted.”

  As 1986 came to a close Phil once again appeared on movie screens from coast to coast, this time in the John Landis–directed and Lorne Michaels–produced/co-written comedy ¡Three Amigos! While the vast majority of screen time naturally goes to the Amigos themselves—Chevy Chase, Steve Martin, and Martin Short—Phil and Lovitz enjoy several spotlight moments as yes-men to cigar-chomping movie studio mogul Harry Flugleman (Joe Mantegna in full gruff tough mode). With his clipped dialogue and no-nonsense demeanor, Phil’s portrayal of Harry’s minion “Sam” is essentially a rehash of Chick Hazard, sans rakish hat and sporting a three-piece suit. Though it did well at the box office, Amigos was a critical flop. Roger Ebert awarded it a measly one star (out of four) and slammed the would-be farce for being, among other things, “too confident, too relaxed, too clever to be really funny.”

  Phil’s part as the brother of Bruce Willis’s character in Blake Edwards’s comedy Blind Date, which marked Willis’s big-screen debut, was already in the can and set for release in late March 1987. It, too, would garner more pans than praise. Additional voice-over opportunities arose as well, including a part in Disney’s DuckTales cartoon series and Hyperion Pictures’ animated adaptation of Thomas M. Disch’s popular children’s book The Brave Little Toaster.

  At SNL, Phil was fast becoming the go-to guy and a utilitarian player extraordinaire even though test marketing sporadically implemented by network suits when ratings slumped consistently showed him in last place among audience favorites. Downey wasn’t surprised, attributing Phil’s low likeability scores to his dearth of a clearly drawn persona like that of frequent winner Victoria Jackson. That explanation carried little or no weight with the network honchos who paid Phil’s salary. “If you like him you can keep him,” Downey says was the general attitude from on high. The popular sentiment was equally tepid. “If it had been up to America who was voted off the island, it would have easily been Phil.” Michaels, though, wasn’t worried at all and says Phil “was fine. The only person who ever scored high, in t
he first five years, was Jane Curtin. It’s not the value system we use here.”

  On the other hand, his creative cohorts were impressed and appreciative from the start. “He was the ultimate professional,” says Jackson. Downey agrees, saying that Phil was especially disciplined among his driven and talented peers. He was always on time, with his lines and blocking memorized, and almost never had trouble with character impressions or finding just the right tone to help sell the hell out of a writer’s piece at table reads. Considering that Phil regularly appeared in more sketches than anyone on the show, Downey was doubly impressed. “He would show up at read-through and he’d have a giant stack of scripts in front of him,” Downey says. “And the cast members to his left and right would have two or three pieces. But life’s not fair.”

  * * *

  As season twelve wore on, Phil’s value became increasingly apparent. “His skill was that he could kind of catch the rhythm of who he was working with,” Michaels has said of his fellow Canadian and frequent companion at SNL’s fabled post-show parties around town. “If he was working with Dana, he was completely different than if he was working with Jan Hooks. He would submerge. He could dominate or he could blend in.” Like Carvey and Dan Aykroyd, Michaels adds, Phil was “built for the show.” According to fellow cast member Mike Myers, another native of the Great White North, Phil “never gave up on a sketch.”

  “We both kind of came from the same place, which is we loved doing character and came from ensembles,” Myers, a former member of Second City in Toronto and Chicago, said in Live from New York. “I just worshipped Phil. I looked up to him. I think he’s one of the best character-based comedians ever … He was extremely, extremely supportive, and hilarious.”

  Because of that, SNL cohort Kevin Nealon has said, he had a bonding effect and kept the whole from crumbling. Nealon’s small office was located next to Phil’s, which came equipped (like all the offices) with an IBM Selectric typewriter on which Phil often wrote screenplays during lulls in his SNL work. (In later years, Phil had one of the show’s first personal computers.) Nearby were various implements of his wide-ranging hobbies: an easel for oil painting, an electric guitar and amp for teaching himself to play the blues. Later on, he learned to tie flies for fly-fishing. Brochures were common, too—for boats or whatever else he planned to buy.

  Appearing with a slew of starry guests—Sam Kinison, Candice Bergen, Robin Williams, William Shatner, Bill Murray, John Lithgow, Gary Shandling, Dennis Hopper, and others—Phil was initially relegated to largely generic roles: a waiter, a game show host, an emcee, random dudes. He was so many characters, in fact, that special meetings were held with Phil, Downey, the makeup artists, and costume designers to figure out how best to fine-tune the show’s rundown in light of Phil’s many transformations.

  More prominently, besides his early outing as Phil Donahue, Phil appeared as flamboyant Vegas showman Liberace and a cunning Ronald Reagan. The latter employs a doddering public persona to mask his razor-sharp intellect and evil genius. “The Red countries are the countries we sell arms to,” he explains to his staff as they sit before a map of the world. “The green countries are the countries where we wash our money. The blue countries…” He is interrupted by an aide, played by Dennis Miller, who informs the president that his 11:30 photo op has arrived: a little girl who sold the most Girl Scout cookies. Reagan: “Damn! OK, let’s get it over with. Everybody out! Move! Move!”

  Assisted by Downey, Franken, and George Meyer, Smigel co-wrote the sketch, whose premise came to him after comic actor Robin Williams played Reagan while hosting SNL in late November 1986 (Phil was “Aide #2”). “It was funny, but it was very typical, down-the-middle ‘Reagan is doddering,’” Smigel says. “It worked, but it just made me think, ‘What would be an original way to do Reagan?’” Several others had tried on the role by then—Harry Shearer, Randy Quaid, and Joe Piscopo among them—with only modest success. Smigel’s solution: take the opposite tack and make the Gipper a changeling who morphed from disingenuously folksy and good-hearted to whip-smart and deeply diabolical as circumstances dictated. Other SNL writers, including Al Franken and George Meyer, chipped in as well. Thereafter, Smigel says, the old doddering Reagan made a comeback. “I think we all felt like it was the shock of the new and to keep doing it would dilute the impact.”

  Some of Phil’s best sketches were performed with Hooks, his work wife. Throughout five seasons together (Hooks left in 1991), their characters were often married or somehow romantically attached: Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker; Donald and Ivana Trump; Donald Trump and Marla Maples; Bill and Hillary Clinton. “I loved Phil, even though it was only on-screen,” Hooks says. “But that bleeds into real life, too. It was a very unique relationship. I knew what it was like to kiss him and hug him. And even though it was only make-believe, it was real to me for that moment.”

  It was real to Phil as well. As Hooks recalled in Live from New York, “We were doing ‘Beauty and the Beast’ with Demi Moore and Jon Lovitz, a sketch about the two beasts going out on a blind date. Phil and I were in the backseat of a car making out; he was the Beast, I was the Beauty … At the end of it, they cut to the commercial, and Phil had to rush off and be, you know, whoever. But first Phil said to me, ‘You gave me a huge boner. Oh God. I’ve got to run!’”

  Because of his steadying influence on SNL and his rock-like presence in sketches that helped her deal with bouts of near-crippling stage fright, Hooks nicknamed Phil “The Glue.” Or simply, as some began referring to him, “Glue.” As Hooks told writer David Bianculli of the New York Daily News, Phil’s scene-bolstering presence also came from his ability to listen. “[H]e knew how to look you in the eye, and he knew the power of being able to lay back and let somebody else be funny.” Perhaps just as important, she says, he was never greedy for screen time and no role was too small. That attitude, which initially worked to his advantage, would also become a detriment.

  * * *

  At one A.M. Eastern, on May 23, 1987, Phil’s debut season of SNL came to a close and with it his longest stint by far on a non-animated national television show. Ratings were slowly increasing, reviews were more favorable, and the once-sinking ship was again seaworthy. In an Associated Press story headlined “Saturday Night is Alive and Well Again, Thanks to Lorne Michaels,” writer Kathryn Baker noted the breakout successes of Carvey and Lovitz, both of whom had achieved acclaim with popular characters (the Church Lady and Tommy Flanagan the Pathological Liar, respectively) and oft-repeated catchphrases (“Well, isn’t that special!” and “Yeah, that’s the ticket!”). “Waiting to be discovered is Hartman, the mainstay of the show, doing everybody from Reagan to Liberace to Phil Donahue to Peter Graves.”

  Michaels realized it, too.

  “I know the things that are more accessible or have a little more sugar in them that are instantly taken up by the public,” he said, “and real brilliant work doesn’t necessarily get appreciated until years later. That kind of ability to do five or six parts in a show where you’re playing support or you’re doing remarkable character work is different than doing [John Belushi’s] the ‘Samurai’ all the time or well-known or more popular characters.

  “Phil Hartman,” Michaels added, “is the least appreciated—except [at SNL].”

  Hooks always said that she and Phil were the show’s Clydesdales. While “show ponies” like Carvey and Lovitz pranced in spotlight and basked in applause, the Clydesdales often performed less glamorous tasks that were nonetheless crucial to the enterprise as a whole. “I don’t think I’m the guy that everybody just wants to fall in love with and cuddle up and take into their homes,” Phil admitted. “There’s something a little forbidding about me, a little unusual.”

  But deep down, in his “heart of hearts,” he longed to stand out as “something unique in the overall scheme of things.” And that day would come—if he had the patience to wait.

  Chapter 10

  On SNL set of “Love Is a Dream,” Phil, Tom Schiller
, Jan Hooks, 1989. (Photo © Neal Marshad Productions, www.marshad.com)

  A couple of weeks after Phil’s second season of SNL kicked off, during the days leading up to a Halloween episode featuring Phil’s former Groundlings co-star Cassandra Peterson (as Elvira, Mistress of the Dark; Dabney Coleman hosted), Peterson dropped by Phil’s office to chat. While she was there, he showed her a small jewelry box and opened it to reveal a diamond ring. The rock was for Brynn, Phil said. He was about to pop the question. In retrospect, Peterson says, her response to Phil’s surprising revelation was impolitic and insensitive: “Oh, God, no!” But he had to be kidding, right? Why marriage? Couldn’t they just live together for a while longer before taking the plunge? Phil, though, was deeply offended by Peterson’s reaction. “He got up from his chair,” she says, “and it’s the first time—and, I think, last time—I ever saw him angry. He walked over to the door, opened it and said, ‘I think you’d better leave now.’” Peterson’s profusion of apologies had no effect; she was banished. “He was very, very unhappy,” she says. They lost contact for years.

  While Peterson quickly realized her diplomatic gaffe, she stood—and stands—by her sentiments. Brynn just wasn’t right for Phil, who “seemed like he got into relationships really, really fast. It seemed like one day he was dating [someone] and the next day he was going to get married. He was head-over-heels and that was the only girl for him. I saw this happen several times. And [with Brynn], Phil had a lot to lose monetarily. I also didn’t care for her that much personally. All I can think about when I think of Phil is the word ‘authentic.’ And my feelings toward Brynn were: ‘phony.’”

  Peterson sensed that Brynn was intensely jealous of anyone—especially females—she deemed a threat to her relationship with Phil. “But first of all,” she says, “I was married. And even if I wasn’t, Phil and I were really more like relatives, so she had nothing to worry about. But she was kind of weird and cold. I’d met Phil’s other exes and liked them all. With this one, I was like, ‘Oh, my God.’”