You Might Remember Me The Life and Times of Phil Hartman

by Mike Thomas

  Three years into motherhood and six into Phil’s SNL stint, Brynn was still searching for herself. “She was kind of struggling with her identity, from what I could gather,” Hooks says. “It was, ‘I’m a model. No, I’m an actress. No, I’m a mother with children and a wife. No, I’m a writer.’ And those are the kinds of things that are perfectly natural and normal when you’re in your twenties.” Born in 1958, Brynn was no longer in her twenties. “Like so many people in L.A., her appearance was very important to her,” Hooks says. “And not in a bitchy way. She was very sweet. But you could tell she wanted to look pretty and wanted pretty things. There was always a kind of deer-in-the-headlights quality about it.”

  Julia Sweeney had met Brynn back in California, and the two became friends after Sweeney moved to New York for SNL. “And it was funny,” Sweeney says of the pairing, “because the way she looked is not who I would normally be friends with. She had this kind of high-end call girl look about her that was really almost cartoonish, frankly. It’s such a cliché to say, but she had a heart of gold. She was a complex person and I found her fascinating—her story in life.” When Brynn dropped by SNL, Sweeney remembers, “It was like an Amazon woman walked in—in the best possible way. She was so tall and beautiful. Sometimes I would just start laughing, because we knew each other. Like, ‘Oh, my God, Brynn, people aren’t even going to watch the show because you happen to be standing here.’ And I think that was really important to Phil.”

  “He needed to be with a knockout,” she says. “That was something I was so naïve about. I didn’t understand that part of Hollywood, where it is as important as getting on Saturday Night Live or being a known name to have somebody that everyone turns their head [to see] when they walk into the room.”

  * * *

  Sometime that summer Phil and Lisa happened to cross paths on the set of an L.A. commercial production where both of them had business. Burying the hatchet over Brynn’s venomous letter, they had lunch and talked for a few hours at Lisa’s apartment. “He apologized,” Lisa says. Before long, she says, “I started being his crying towel—the person he would complain to about Brynn.”

  Mostly, though, he was discouraged about SNL, from which he began planning his May 1991 exit in order to pursue other opportunities—whatever those may be. “I think he was frustrated at times,” Odenkirk says. “He would often write these sketches that played very well at read-through, and maybe didn’t play as well in front of the live audience.” Mike Myers sat next to Phil at many of those read-throughs. As he recalled in Live from New York, Phil was uncommonly committed and “would never tank your piece. Afterwards you would just hear ‘Glue, Glue, Glue’ from people around the read-through table. And then someone would always have to tell Phil, ‘They’re not saying boo, they’re saying glue.’”

  In his 1991 interview with Stanley Moss of Bomb Magazine, Phil admitted to sometimes feeling “cheated” while performing for the audience that occupied Studio 8H. Most often it was comprised largely of invited “elitist friends of the staff who sit and observe the show rather than getting involved.” They should instead get “real people” to watch, Phil concluded. He told Moss that he felt well utilized at SNL and loved being a professional “clown” who provided a diversion from the grind. “People need to take a few moments and let go and escape from the burden of their day-to-day lives. It’s important for everybody to get light about life because you can worry yourself into terminal illness.”

  But Phil admitted, too, that he felt like a mere “cog in the machine” and needed to “take that next step.” His feeling of lagging behind was partly exacerbated by the exit of Myers, who in February 1992 made his first big box office splash in Wayne’s World. Co-starring Carvey and spun-off from their recurring hit SNL segment, it was number one for five weeks in a row and took in nearly $120 million domestically on a $20 million budget. “From the start, really, I’ve been overshadowed by others on the show,” Phil told another interviewer, “and so it’s something that I had to get used to.”

  Phil reveled in his versatility but also longed to have a signature character—one that would catapult him to the next level. “I don’t think it caused him a lot of angst, because he was the cool guy and so stable,” says Julia Sweeney, who went on to have a breakout character of her own in the sexually amorphous “Pat.” “If anything did come out about his frustration, that was it.” As Phil’s dissatisfaction grew during their time together in New York, Sweeney says, “It wasn’t like it sullied his attitude at all. It was just there.”

  Even so, there were plenty of shining moments to come. Jack Handey’s inspired creation Cirroc, the “Unfrozen Caveman Lawyer,” provided several. Its wonderfully bizarre premise: “One hundred thousand years ago, a caveman was out hunting on the frozen wastes when he slipped and fell into a crevasse. In 1988, he was discovered by some scientists and thawed out. He then went to law school and became … Unfrozen Caveman Lawyer.” There was even talk of a “Caveman Lawyer” movie spin-off. “He really wanted [it] to be big,” Sweeney says.

  Cirroc’s courtroom spiel is equal parts faux humility and cynical maneuvering. “Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, I’m just a caveman … Your world frightens and confuses me … When I’m courtside at a Knicks game, I wonder if the ball is some sort of food they’re fighting over.”

  “Phil had a total bullshit thing going,” Handey says admiringly. “Lorne Michaels said it reminded him of Bill Murray—that fake, unctuous sincerity. He knew how to play an oily guy.”

  Tonight Show spoofs with Carvey went over well, too. After Bonnie and Terry Turner penned the first one, Johnny Carson fan Robert Smigel took over and made the characters edgier, their dialogue darker. “I had a really strong take on what I wanted to do with Johnny, and Dana had some great observations,” Smigel says. But, he adds, the bits never would have worked as well without Phil’s over-the-top McMahon. “Dana would do all these subtle, observant riffs on Carson, and the audience would not really laugh. They would laugh at Ed validating them. ‘Yes! You are correct, sir!’”

  McMahon was always a good sport about the parodies. So was Carson, mostly, even when things got a little weird, a little wild. He was fine, for instance, with a sketch that aired in May of 1991—“The Carsenio Show”—that portrayed him as a hopelessly square Arsenio Hall knockoff (complete with spiky hairdo, double-breasted suit, and slang wholly unsuited to an older white man) while simultaneously mocking Hall’s hipper-than-thou persona. Until then, however, SNL had reportedly been temporarily blacklisted by Carson after airing a fall 1990 Tonight Show send-up in which Carson (Carvey) comes off not only as unhip but somewhat doddering while talking with his guests Susan Dey (Jan Hooks) and Hall (Chris Rock). “Lorne liked the idea of Johnny mixing up The Partridge Family with The Brady Bunch,” Smigel says of Hooks’s role as Dey, the former Partridge Family star. “And it was funny, but Johnny took it as [us] saying that he was senile. It had the effect of making him take the sketch more personally, even, than had it just been Arsenio.”

  In May 1992, only days before Carson himself bid a final adieu after three decades on the air, Phil and Carvey shot a cold opening in which Carson and McMahon celebrate their long run by saying whatever is on their minds.

  Johnny: Boy, I gotta tell you, this feels good—just to say what you wanna. It feels good, doesn’t it, Ed?

  Ed: Yes.

  Johnny: Now, is there anything you wanna say? Just get off your chest? Go right ahead.

  Ed: [looks at Johnny, his expression growing serious] You’re the one who had the drinking problem. [Smiles and laughs.]

  Hiyoooooooo!

  As Phil’s sidekick days wound down, he began polishing an impersonation that would, at long last, earn him the notice that had so far been elusive. When Phil first appeared as then-Arkansas governor William Jefferson Clinton in a March 1992 sketch called “Star Trek Democrats”—with Carvey as former California governor Jerry Brown and Franken as U.S. senator Paul Tsongas—the audience went
nuts even before he opened his mouth. “He kind of captured that self-satisfied charmer who knows he’s going to charm you,” Smigel says. “It must have been a huge rush, because he never got to enjoy a lot of that.” In the end, Phil’s Clinton furiously destroys his podium after a Trekker in the crowd (Chris Farley) informs him that Leonard Nimoy (Mr. Spock) has endorsed Tsongas. Though the real Clinton was known to have a temper, Phil never again played him angry in seventeen appearances that followed. Come-hither sexy, yes, but never angry. It was a portrayal to which Clinton himself took only a partial shine. Phil claimed not to mind.

  Meanwhile, on May 22, 1992, Carson abdicated his Tonight Show throne. When he’d announced his plans during a broadcast the previous spring, a storied behind-the-scenes battle to fill his seat commenced. Ultimately and famously, comic and Tonight’s longtime permanent guest host Jay Leno won. At some point thereafter, Phil was invited to play a more regular role on the program. There is disagreement, however, on what exactly that role was. “I remember him calling me up and telling me he’d been offered the gig as Jay Leno’s sidekick on the new Tonight Show,” John Paragon says. Ecstatic, Paragon urged his pal to take the job. Not only would it entail far fewer hours than Phil was logging at SNL, it would finally enable him to resettle in California and do whatever else he wished to do on the side, be it acting or sailing. Nonetheless, Paragon says, “He was really on the fence about it.” Phil’s reluctance, he thinks, stemmed partly from his ambivalence about being a second banana.

  Leno, though, says no such offer was made. “We never asked Phil to be a sidekick. That never even came up, so I’m not sure where that came from.” There were talks with SNL about having Phil on Tonight now and then to play Clinton, Leno says, but that didn’t sit particularly well with Michaels or Downey, the latter of whom thought Leno’s crew was being overly aggressive about borrowing ideas from SNL. He was also irked when the show inquired about using Phil on a semi-regular basis as Jay’s comedic foil. If Phil did his Clinton shtick on The Tonight Show and on SNL, its impact would inevitably be diminished. Even worse, the lack of context (Phil as Clinton in a random appearance alongside Leno, say, as opposed to in a political sketch) and the use of writers who were unfamiliar with the nuances and rhythms of SNL characters would surely be calamitous as well.

  “Phil was not necessarily the person you wanted ad-libbing out there,” Downey says. “He was not like a Bill Murray type who was great on his feet. He was a great performer, but [not] when he had to improvise if there was a technical problem or we lost cue cards or something. I remembered seeing him doing an impression on Donahue one time and sort of cringing. He had written it himself. I used to write those things and he hadn’t consulted with me and given me any heads-up … The impression was good. I just didn’t think his material was very good. And when Lorne told me that Phil wanted to do Leno as a regular thing, where he would be doing characters like he’d done on [SNL], we were kind of concerned.”

  When Downey and Michaels expressed their concern to Leno, who understood completely, Phil remained puzzled. He was “kind of thick in certain ways,” Downey says, and “kind of bewildered as to how there could be any objection.”

  But if Phil was supposedly never offered a permanent Tonight Show post, Michaels (who today says the Leno job was never a serious proposition) seemed to indicate otherwise during a late-summer interview with Playboy. “Now, I would hate it if Phil Hartman left [SNL],” he told writer David Rensin. “Phil has done more work that’s touched greatness than probably anybody else who’s ever been there. Would he be paid more if he were Jay Leno’s sidekick? Of course. There are probably thirty or forty other jobs that would pay me more. I’m not trying to make us sound heroic, I’m merely trying to say that I think we both know this is what we do best.”

  The NBC brass must have known it, too, for they signed Phil to an exclusive three-year contract that included the network’s commitment to a pilot plus several more episodes (six or seven—accounts vary) of his own prime-time program. “I’m sure it was something I encouraged the network to do,” Michaels says, “because I wanted him to stay at NBC.”

  The Phil Show (its working title) would be what Phil described as a “completely unpredictable,” film-noirish, half-hour variety extravaganza. Shot on film with no live audience, it would “totally shake up the whole idea of what it is to do a TV show.”

  “I want to be able to come on as Trump or Sinatra or Saddam Hussein if I want,” he said in the 1991 interview with Moss. “I think technically and artistically, it’s gonna be fun, but nobody will ever accuse it of being the same old crap.” But like many shows in development, it went nowhere fast. On the up side, a revised version of the Mr. Fix-It script Phil had originally written for Victor Drai in 1984 looked like it might finally get made—if director Robert Zemeckis could find backing for the black comedy. No easy task, that. The studios were skittish, and for good reason: Phil’s screenplay was (as per his own description) “sort of a merger of horror and comedy, like Beetlejuice and Throw Momma from the Train. It’s an American nightmare about a family torn asunder. They live next to a toxic dump site, their water supply is poisoned, the mother and son go insane and try to murder each other, the father’s face is torn off in a terrible disfiguring accident in the first act. It’s heavy stuff, but it’s got a good message and a positive, upbeat ending.”

  Screenwriting, of course, didn’t butter Phil’s bread. SNL did. And with a presidential election looming, incumbent George H. W. Bush and his chief challenger Clinton became bigger targets than ever for Carvey, Phil, and the SNL writers. If Clinton won, Carvey told his friend, it would “put you on the map.” There were many months to go before that might happen, however, and so Phil bided his time and spread his glue liberally. Increasingly, he reveled in his “Glue” status and was acutely aware of how colleagues on the show perceived him. Hooks, who left in the spring of 1991 to join the cast of CBS’s Designing Women, is one of them. “He didn’t flaunt it,” she says of Phil’s Glue-ness, “but oh, yeah, he knew.” Newer players, like Sweeney, Chris Farley, Chris Rock, David Spade, and Adam Sandler all looked up to him as a sage of sorts and an avuncular figure—a guy who’d been around the block. “Phil was a mentor,” Rock told Playboy. “He was the most prepared guy at Saturday Night Live. He could also show you about the good life. Sometimes he’d call me into his office and say, ‘Hey, look at this picture of my new boat. Hey, here’s the house I’m buying. You work hard, you can get this, too.’” Jay Mohr, who joined the cast in 1993, “never heard any gossip about him, positive or negative. Ever. From anyone. He was easy like Sunday mornin’. He just came in and got it done and left. He was like a closer in baseball.”

  To the sweet and eager-to-please Farley, Phil was a big brother and father figure combined. “How’m I doin’, Glue?” Farley would ask as he plopped down in the makeup chair next to Phil’s. “He kept an eagle eye on Chris, which was good,” Farley’s mother Mary Anne says. “And Chris listened to him, which was even better.” Older brother Tom Farley Jr., who spent time with Chris and Phil at SNL, thinks the two got along so well in part because of their down-to-earth personalities. They palled around a bit off the clock, too, making treks to the ponds of Central Park, where Phil loved to watch and operate toy sailboats. They also went skiing in Stowe, Vermont. Concerned that his oversize co-star wouldn’t be able to keep up, Phil was initially reluctant to invite him along. When they arrived in Stowe, however, the Wisconsin-bred Farley—whose boyhood winters were filled with skiing and hockey—tore up the slopes to Phil’s great surprise. On another occasion, Phil squired a gaggle of Farleys—Tom, his then-wife, their very young daughter, Chris, and mother Mary Anne—to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where he proceeded to act as docent. “I was blown away by the guy’s intelligence,” Tom says of Phil’s off-the-cuff tour. “He was teaching us: ‘Everybody knows about Rembrandt, but this guy here was a contemporary, and look what he did that was different than Rembrandt.’ And I’m lik
e, What?”

  Back in the cauldron of 30 Rock, Phil was always a source of strength and confidence for Farley and others. “David Spade told me once that you had to work with the writers to make sure that you were in the sketch,” Tom Farley says. “And Phil didn’t have to do that.” Meanwhile, though, young bucks like Spade, Adam Sandler, Rob Schneider, and Chris Rock were doing whatever they could to be seen. As ever, Phil stayed out of the fray.

  “The worst things happened behind the scenes: the competitiveness, the heartbreak of working very hard on something and then having it cut, and not knowing if somebody had sabotaged it or not,” he once said. “There was a lot of intrigue. It was a very politically charged arena, and anyone who’s been willing to discuss it truthfully talks about the dark side. But I tend to focus on the good part.”

  In retrospect, Downey says, observers might have regarded Phil’s buoyant demeanor somewhat warily, figuring it was easy for him to be Mr. Happy-Go-Lucky by dint of his consistent screen time and lighter workload. “He never had to lobby, to struggle, to make demands, to complain because he had absolutely nothing to complain about.”

  As SNL makeup artist Norman Bryn wrote in his memoir, Phil went “to great lengths to foster” his nice-guy status. But, Bryn adds, he didn’t always treat the crew as he did his fellow actors. Now and then, under pressure from within and without, Phil’s cracks showed. “I’ll never forget my first meeting with him,” says Bryn, who transformed Phil into Clinton, McMahon, Frankenstein, and others. “I met him for a pre-tape one afternoon and I started to put some straight makeup on him, and I’m trying to chat him up and get some idea of his personality. And he snaps, ‘Broad strokes! We use broad strokes here!’ Because I’m not putting on the makeup quickly enough for him.

  “He was quite fussy about his makeup,” Bryn says. “He didn’t want the makeup to be a joke. He wanted it to be part of the character, but he didn’t want that to get the laugh. He wanted film-quality makeup, and that was difficult in a live television situation.”