by Mike Thomas
Phil dubbed his new haven the Ponderosa (after the Cartwright family’s ranch on TV’s Bonanza), and he gradually adorned it with ornately framed paintings (many of them purchased at estate sales) of urban and pastoral landscapes: the ocean crashing against rocks; a dark forest; a river running through a canyon; a cow grazing in the stream of a grassy wooded area; an old-time village; a quaint city scene; a churning ocean lapping a rocky beach beneath an overcast sky. Except for summers, when Phil returned to L.A. for movie and voice work and to chill out by or in his beloved Pacific, the home was often vacant for the next four years.
Victoria Jackson, who visited Phil’s Encino spread a couple of times in the ’90s, was struck both by how handsome the place was and how oddly close it sat to such a buzzing intersection. “I thought, ‘If I was a millionaire, I would have a more remote, hidden, gated estate that was a little bit farther away from the riffraff,’” she says. “I remember coming through the open [back] gate, and I said to Phil, ‘Man, you leave your gate open?’ And he said something like, ‘Oh, yeah. We’re just down-to-earth folk.’ Here he was a block away from Ventura, where there’s homeless people, and he had an open gate. And I thought that was kind of sweet.”
To create and recreate in solitude, Phil fashioned a writer’s den for himself above the garage in a 700-square-foot nook that had previously been maid’s quarters. Over the years, he packed the space with guitars (one acoustic and two electric models—a Stratocaster and a Gibson), artwork, and a computer on which he played Flight Simulator. He sometimes smoked cigars up there, too, though he preferred to do his stogie puffing (mainly on weekends) near the ocean with some sort of libation—a beer, a scotch, or a glass of wine—in hand while he watched the waves roll in. More than a few joints were fired up in his Ponderosa retreat as well, much to Brynn’s chagrin. “She hated it,” says John Hartmann, who now and then shared a doobie with Phil. Dozier, too, recalls being put off by Phil’s penchant for pot, but not because he had anything against marijuana. “I’d talk to him on the phone, and he’d say, ‘I’m not doing anything. Let’s hang out,’” Dozier says. “So I would go over to his house and he’d be smoking pot and was kind of spaced out. And I’d get on his case. I remember one time in particular, I said [sarcastically], ‘Thank you so much for your presence, Phil.’”
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Although Phil was now more valuable than ever at SNL, his preponderance of utility roles—president of the United States, senator, policeman, Garth’s convenience store-owner dad in a “Wayne’s World” sketch—did little to boost his profile. That changed slightly when he appeared as Gene, the Anal Retentive Chef—a fey and persnickety man who owns a homemade tape dispenser cozy and disposes of refuse only after properly packaging it in paper towel, tinfoil, and a stapled brown-paper bag so “it won’t leak onto the other garbage.” Created by Terry and Bonnie Turner, it was Phil’s first original character that really stood out. Despite future Anal Retentive iterations, however, it failed to catch fire like Carvey’s Church Lady (“Isn’t that special?”) or Myers’s Wayne Campbell (“Schwing!”). Perhaps a memorable catchphrase would have helped—not to mention a more competitive edge. But when it came to comedy, Phil was more manatee than shark. At SNL, that was a blessing and a curse.
He was never “light” in shows, as the TV parlance goes, but neither was he a defining presence. “He wasn’t clamoring to be the star,” Schiller says, noting that Phil’s ego “seemed more subdued” than those of his cast mates, “but naturally so—not on purpose. Because he was a good guy and had a good soul.” As Phil would later remark, “All of us know performers who feel it’s their destiny to become big stars. I feel it’s my destiny to do good work.”
Schiller also sensed that Phil “wasn’t clinging to [SNL] as his only vehicle for success,” which in turn imbued his performances with a rare confidence. “He was good and he knew it,” Handey says. And except for one instance, when Phil asked not to appear shirtless (he refused to be shirtless) in a scene with Sharon Stone, “He didn’t seem needy like some actors are. He was never, like, sweaty. He was Mr. Unruffled.” Then again, Handey says, “Maybe his versatility came back to bite him. Maybe it was a curse in disguise.”
Toward the start of season fifteen, in late 1989, Signorelli directed Phil in another commercial parody—this time for a comically high-fiber breakfast cereal called Colon Blow. Thought up by Al Franken, it stars Phil as an initially skeptical consumer whose colon is about to be obliterated. Featuring the voice-over work of John Henry Kurtz, the spot employs camera trickery (namely, a “front surface mirror”) to achieve its desired effect. After Phil fails to guess how many bowls of his favorite oat bran cereal it would take to equal the fiber content of just one bowl of Colon Blow, Kurtz tells him: more than 30,000. At which point a pyramid-shaped mountain of bowls erupts from below and carries a screaming Phil skyward. “Wow! I think I get the picture!” he exclaims. “Colon Blow must be the highest-fiber cereal on the market!” Um, wrong. That would be Super Colon Blow. Cue second eruption.
Budgetary constraints necessitated the eschewing of pricey special effects, including an exploding floor and walls. Optical illusion, therefore, was key. “I showed Phil the rig and he said, ‘Sure,’ and he climbed up on top of a ten-foot-high tower of real bowls, which was reinforced,” Signorelli says. “He was strapped into a chair that was kind of catawampus. And he actually had a little safety rope around him, which would have not saved his life had he fallen. Thank God he didn’t. And we then, on cue, pumped fifty-five gallons of oil into an oil drum to counterbalance him, and he kind of crept to the ceiling. I matched that to a tiny image that was sitting alongside of him at the other end of the studio. So the bottom of that [pile] isn’t really there and he’s not really on top of it.”
“He was always game,” Signorelli adds. “That was the best thing about Phil. It was a real Harold Lloyd kind of approach to the physicality.”
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On January 5, 1990, while Phil was in California during holiday break, he drove to 300 Los Angeles Street in downtown L.A. and demonstrated his ability to speak, read, and write in English during the multipart naturalization exam required to become a U.S. citizen.
Back in New York, throughout the remaining four months of SNL’s sixteenth season, Phil’s glue had its usual bonding effect as he continued to yearn for a standout role. Carvey already had Garth, George H. W. Bush, Church Lady, and musclehead Hans. Myers had Wayne Campbell and the bizarre TV host Dieter on “Sprockets.” But Phil’s time would come. Meanwhile, he found a new outlet for his comedy skills and vocal talents: an animated show about a dysfunctional yellow family and their fellow yellow townsfolk in a soon-to-be-famous place called Springfield. At first Phil regarded his gig on Fox’s animated comedy The Simpsons as just a lark. Before long, it became much more.
Chapter 11
Phil as voice of Troy McClure, 1990, The Simpsons. (Photo: The Simpsons™ © 1990 Twentieth Century Fox Television. All rights reserved.)
On June 29, 1990, the year he became a client of the powerful Brillstein-Grey management agency, Phil pulled into the lot of Twentieth Century Fox Studios on West Pico Boulevard in Los Angeles and headed for the Darryl F. Zanuck ADR (Automated Dialogue Replacement) stage—a rather shabby subterranean space where the burgeoning cast of characters on The Simpsons was given voice. Created by cartoonist and animator Matt Groening, and developed for television with Sam Simon and James L. Brooks, the smart, topically relevant (especially given the long lead times for animation) and edgy-for-its-time program was launched as a series of shorts on The Tracey Ullman Show in 1987. It wasn’t until mid-December 1989 that a then-fledgling Fox Network began broadcasting half-hour episodes to a mix of cheers and jeers. The former soon drowned out the latter.
Phil’s first day of Simpsons duty, then, was barely six months into the show’s inaugural year and in service of an episode—“Bart Gets Hit by a Car”—that was set to air around the halfway point of season two, on Januar
y 10, when The Simpsons had yet to become anything resembling the pop-culture institution or economic juggernaut it has long since been. Nancy Cartwright, who voices the brash and bold young troublemaker Bart Simpson, was among the first to encounter Phil when he reported for duty to play lame-brained shyster attorney Lionel Hutz.
Lisa Simpson: You’re a latter day Clarence Darrow!
Lionel Hutz: Uh, was he the black guy on The Mod Squad?
Aside from their shared gig, both he and Cartwright were parents to young children, and as they got to know each other better Phil sometimes displayed photos of then-two-year-old Sean. “It was very easy to talk to him about his family,” Cartwright says. And when she talked, Phil listened. “He was interested in the person who was sitting beside him, rather than trying to be the showman.” Though he “didn’t mind sharing his personal life,” Cartwright never knew or asked if there was more to it than he divulged. “I never felt it was really my business to delve too far,” she says.
On the subject of fatherhood, however, Phil was unbridled. “He was just gushing [about] how much he loved that time,” Cartwright says. “And I got a sense that when he wasn’t working, he could sort of take off that entertainer hat and just be a dad.” She sensed correctly, though as more work came his way—not to mention the temptation of more expensive and intensive hobbies—Phil spent fewer and fewer days at home, much to Brynn’s mounting dismay.
Simpsons writer and former Groundlings student Jay Kogen says he suggested Phil for the Hutz role because of his “great, strong voice.” Phil’s growing popularity on SNL—where he’d soon begin playing another slippery and much hairier counselor who only pretended at stupidity—was a plus as well. A couple of other Simpsons writers, Al Jean (who went on to be a Simpsons showrunner) and Mike Reiss, certainly thought so. Both were fans of the Hartman-Lovitz SNL cast and both told then-showrunner Simon that Phil could easily fit the bill. “At that time, there was sort of an internal debate on the show about whether to use well-known voices, or have everybody be a lesser-known voice actor,” Jean says. “Especially in terms of guest stars. And so this was kind of an exception to that, but we pushed for Phil, and later for Jon [Lovitz]. We said, ‘Look, these guys are funny. We should get them on the show.’” But when Phil agreed to guest star, Jean heard secondhand, it was with one caveat: he’d only do it once. Perhaps due to his long run on Dennis the Menace, Phil’s interest in being an animated voice had apparently waned. In any case, Jean says, “We didn’t take him at his word.”
A bit later that summer, Phil returned to Fox for another session in the Zanuck studio (on the heels of Lovitz, who’d just been in to voice bitter geek tycoon Artie Ziff) and another portrayal of another hilarious boob. Only this time he was charged with playing a washed-up film (and possibly soft-porn) actor named Troy McClure for an episode called “Homer vs. Lisa and the 8th Commandment” that was set to air February 7, 1991. (He also voiced four minor characters.) McClure—whose handle was derived from the first name of one real-life B-movie actor and the surname of another (Troy Donahue and Doug McClure)—is a vain and clueless dunderhead in love with the sound of his own voice. His first appearance is brief but memorable.
Troy [in a radio announcer-type voice]: Hello, I’m Troy McClure. You may remember me from such movies as Cry Yuma and Here Comes the Coast Guard. But today I’d like to tell you about a pleasant-tasting candy that actually cleans and straightens your teeth.
Phil spent the next eight years as McClure, usually in short scenes but in one case as the focal point of an entire episode (“A Fish Called Selma”), and he quickly came to adore his animated alter ego more than any other character in his arsenal. “I would love nothing more than to play Troy McClure in a live-action film,” he said well into his Simpsons tenure. “I’ve suggested it to the show’s producers. If they don’t want to do it, I may even buy the rights and do it myself.” (For the record, McClure in his thirty-two appearances between 1991 and 1998 said “You may remember me” another nine times, “You might remember me” ten, and “You probably remember me” just once. There, that’s settled.) The long and comically undistinguished list of his film, documentary, and telethon work came to include Driving Mr. T, Smoke Yourself Thin, Suddenly Last Supper, Let’s Save Tony Orlando’s House!, and The Erotic Adventures of Hercules.
As he had at the Groundlings with Phil’s Chick Hazard and his “bon vivant guy in a glasses and suit,” Jay Kogen saw Phil’s affinity for Old Hollywood—or at least his perception of it—used as creative fodder, this time in animated form. Once again, Phil was borrowing a sensibility from decades past and bringing it into the modern day. “He had a real star quality,” Kogen says. “But I felt it was an old-timey star quality. He was a sharp dresser. Even offstage, he always sort of resembled some sort of weird combination of a 1950s intellectual and Jack Benny.”
The comedic effect of McClure was due in large part to the fact that Phil, as ever, played it utterly straight while imbuing the role with what came to be his trademark hybrid of obliviousness, arrogance, and earnest insincerity. “It’s kind of a generic, authoritarian, theater-trained voice that we all grew up hearing connected to commercials or in performance,” says Hank Azaria, whose Simpsons roles include gruff bartender Moe Szyslak and the chipper convenience store owner Apu Nahasapeemapetilon. Writer and former showrunner Mike Scully describes Lionel Hutz as “this combination of overconfidence and incompetence. He never doubted his ability in the courtroom for some reason, even though he had no idea what was going on.”
In one instance, Hutz and McClure appeared in the same episode. Reiss was directing. “Suddenly it became a little embarrassing for Phil,” he says. “He was changing one of the voices. Lionel Hutz didn’t sound like Lionel Hutz anymore, because he was trying to differentiate these two characters.” For Azaria, the tonal sameness spoke to an unfussy approach that works to the characters’ advantage. “In all my voices, I try to think of something weird, a hook, a strange way they’ll sound. For Phil it was like, ‘Nope. It’s just going to be as down-the-middle as possible.’ But that made it genius.”
For Matt Groening, Phil’s golden pipes and acting chops were only part of his allure. “In Phil’s voice, in his body language, in the twinkle in his eye, you could sense a performer fully enjoying himself,” Groening wrote in 1998. “Phil was digging the acting process while he was in the middle of it, and the fact that many of Phil’s characters were so blatantly consumed by a hilariously smarmy insincerity just added to the audience’s enjoyment. You could always tell Phil was having a blast performing, and that he enjoyed his fellow actors’ performances as well.”
While The Simpsons became an increasingly significant part of Phil’s life, the job was also a relative cinch. No long days on a set, no memorizing lines, no waiting for scenes to be lit. Sometimes, he recorded portions from multiple scripts during the same session. “He was just a machine,” Reiss remembers. “He would embarrass you as a director, because he would come in and nail everything on the first take.” There were times when they’d allot two hours for Phil’s work on three different episodes, Reiss adds, and he’d “be in and out in fifteen minutes.”
Moreover, when Phil came to recording sessions (“records,” in showbiz speak) “it didn’t feel like he was a special guest star,” Kogen says. “He fit in with our cast in a way that was different than if Penny Marshall or Danny DeVito came in to do a voice. With Phil, it was much more friendly. He quickly began feeling like a regular, even though he wasn’t.” And though Phil only occasionally showed up for table reads, he invariably killed. “He really was the acid test of humor,” Reiss says. “If Phil wasn’t getting a laugh with it, it just wasn’t good.”
* * *
Life got hectic again after Phil jetted back to New York in early fall for the start of his fifth season on SNL. Beforehand, under the direction of Jim Signorelli, he shot a new opening sequence with his cast mates. In Phil’s portion, he’s sitting at the table of a swanky and dimly
lit restaurant or club. His chair is red and so is the phone beside him. Phil wears a black suit jacket, a white dress shirt, and a tie. Facing him, but never the camera, is a mystery woman with long blond hair: Brynn. Though she is still, the earring dangling from her right lobe incongruously swings back and forth. Hanala Stadner Sagal, Brynn’s friend from rehab, says the only time she spoke with Brynn during the SNL years was shortly after that opening aired. “Check out how my earring is swinging,” Sagal says Brynn told her, explaining that she kept trying to face the camera but was directed to face Phil instead. As SNL makeup artist Norman Bryn writes in his memoir, Makeup & Misery: Adventures in the Soap Factory, the same story was “told widely around SNL.” Signorelli, though, has a different take: “Having been the man in charge there, I don’t think we ever had to go over and put a hand on her shoulder and say, ‘Brynn, it’s not about you.’ I think it was just that she thought it was a couple at a table. I don’t think anybody ever said, ‘Lean out.’”
