You Might Remember Me The Life and Times of Phil Hartman

by Mike Thomas

  For a while, though, Brynn persisted in her as yet unfounded concern. When Victoria Jackson visited the Hartman home, likely in the latter half of 1997, she was pulled aside by Brynn and told something overly intimate, something she didn’t want to hear: Brynn suspected Phil of cheating. “I thought it was very inappropriate, because I didn’t really know them that well,” Jackson says. “It was such a private thing. She’s telling me something about [hearing] a woman calling on the phone, but the woman hung up when she would answer.”

  Although Stewart and Brynn were friends, and Stewart admired Brynn’s humor, beauty, generosity, and energy, she’d heard from others about Brynn’s “jealous streak.” “[But] she was never jealous of me,” Stewart says, “because she knew what good friends [Phil and I] were and that I had never had an affair with her husband, even when she wasn’t married to him.”

  From talks with Phil and observations of him and Brynn together, Cassandra Peterson developed a much more critical opinion. Brynn, Phil told her, was angry and jealous “because she felt that he was blocking her career as a screenwriter.” In his book Jealousy, San Francisco–area psychiatrist Eugene Schoenfeld describes the emotion:

  Jealousy is not envy … Envy is somehow more passive than jealousy, wistful rather than grief-stricken, more pique than anger.

  Jealousy and envy are both unpleasant, but envy is like getting stung by a mosquito or, at worst, a bee. It hurts but it’s not overwhelming. Jealousy can be like having a rusty jagged knife stuck in your gut and—depending on the circumstances—slowly twisted. You rarely hear of people killing because of envy.

  The components of jealousy are fear or anticipated grief, a loss of self-worth, a stirring of early feelings of insecurity, and anger directed at a loved one or whoever is diverting his or her attention. Usually one or two of these components are felt more than the others.

  Brynn would also make snide comments about her kids, Peterson says, and often put Phil down in public. “I saw that so many times. It just made me go, ‘How could a guy like this be with a woman like this? I don’t get it.’”

  During Jackson’s Encino visit, Brynn mentioned that she was fearful of losing Sean and Birgen in a divorce, and that she was attending Narcotics Anonymous meetings for cocaine abuse. She had “slipped,” Brynn admitted through tears during an early 1997 phone call to her sister Kathy Wright in Wisconsin.

  Kathy knew what “slipped” meant: a drug relapse, most likely with cocaine. Brynn had also started drinking again socially—beer, margaritas—in the months leading up to it, and drinking made her want to snort coke.

  * * *

  On May 11, 1997, Mother’s Day, Brynn went out that evening after a holiday get-together and returned in less than pristine condition the next morning. Phil was furious and demanded she see her psychologist before checking into the Sierra Tuscon rehab clinic in Arizona. They fought like hell, but Brynn ultimately agreed to his demands and left the next day. Partway through her first week in treatment, though, she called Christine Zander to say she missed her kids and wanted out. Also, Brynn insisted she didn’t need rehabilitating. After she returned home, Zander says, “I don’t think cocaine was discussed anymore. Or her addiction.”

  On at least one occasion Phil expressed great concern about Brynn to his mother, Doris. “I’ve been out of my mind,” he told her during a phone conversation Doris later recalled. “Brynn’s been gone all day. She keeps phoning me and telling me she’s coming home. She wouldn’t come home. I didn’t know where she was. Mother, I actually got down on my knees and prayed to God that she’d return safely.”

  “Where is she now?” Doris asked him.

  “She’s sleeping it off,” Phil replied. “Mother, I’ve told her this and I’m going to tell her again. Now this is the honest-to-God truth: If she does this again, I’m out of here and I’ll take the kids with me. She can have everything. I don’t care. But I’m not going to live with someone who can’t control drugs and alcohol.”

  Mostly, though, he kept details about Brynn’s problems and their eroding relationship close to the vest, only hinting at turmoil in his typically joshing way and sugarcoating the bitterness beneath while focusing on lighter topics. “He liked to brag,” says Jay Kogen. “He always used to like to brag about what he bought and what he had and brag a little bit about money and brag a little bit about parts he was doing … I think at a certain point he was interested in being perceived as somebody who was successful and doing good stuff and doing well. He would talk about how well his life was going, most of the time. Never anything negative, almost never anything problematic. Except very occasionally, if there was trouble in his marriage, he would say, ‘Oh, it’s not easy being married.’ But very rarely.”

  Those in whom Phil fully confided were few. His ex-wife Lisa was one of them—unbeknownst to Brynn, who, Phil cautioned, could never know of their get-togethers. Despite its many problems—the arguing, the communication breakdowns—he was resigned to stay in his marriage, Lisa says. “She’s freaking me out with all this plastic surgery,” Phil exclaimed of Brynn. And yet, as a former Hartman nanny would later assert, Phil encouraged at least some of it because he “thought her face was too round and wanted her chin to be more square.”

  Much to Lisa’s dismay, Phil seemed utterly—stupidly, she thought—unconcerned that Brynn owned a gun. “You are asking for it,” Lisa warned. “You are crazy if you let her have a gun.” Phil was blasé. Brynn would never do anything harmful with it, he assured. It was simply for protection because she was often home alone with the kids.

  “Phil, do not let her have a gun,” Lisa says she implored. “Take that gun away!”

  Again, Phil brushed off her apprehension: “Nothing’s ever going to happen.”

  Brynn was getting help in rehab, Phil told concerned parties, they were going to couples counseling (when Phil went) and everything would be fine. And they were indeed trying to make things right, Ohara Hartmann says. “I don’t know whether it was stubbornness or Catholicism or just love, but they worked hard at the relationship and she was unhappy. It was kind of mind-boggling to him. He was someone who loved life, and they had a lot of blessings.”

  Small thinks Phil’s tone-deafness also came into play when dealing with Brynn’s addictions. He had little understanding of her situation and “was confident that, through the strength of his personality, he could pull her through her dependencies.” Which indeed demonstrates a poor understanding of the albatross addiction truly is. In his insightful book Clean: Overcoming Addiction and Ending America’s Greatest Tragedy, author and journalist David Sheff writes:

  The view that drug use is a moral choice is pervasive, pernicious, and wrong. So are the corresponding beliefs about the addicted—that they’re weak, selfish, and dissolute; if they weren’t, when their excessive drug taking and drinking began to harm them, they’d stop. The reality is far different. Using drugs or not isn’t about willpower or character. Most problematic drug use is related to stress, trauma, genetic predisposition, mild or serious mental illness, use at an early age, or some combination of those. Even in their relentless destruction and self-destruction, the addicted aren’t bad people. They’re gravely ill, afflicted with a chronic, progressive, and often terminal disease.

  Brynn did not go with Phil when he returned to Brantford that July. The purpose of his visit—the first since he’d left as a young boy forty years earlier—was a gala celebration during which Phil and two other prominent Brantford natives (NHL player Doug Jarvis and scientist-inventor Dr. James Hillier) were immortalized on the town’s new Walk of Fame. “Phil Hartman couldn’t be here tonight,” Phil joked during the presentation ceremony. “He’s at a similar event honoring Jay Silverheels” [the actor who played Tonto on The Lone Ranger]. He also asked for impression requests from the crowd, which came to include Bill Clinton, Charlton Heston, and (perhaps a first for Phil) boxer Mike Tyson. On a more serious note, Phil attributed his success to “a lifetime of love and support fro
m my mom and dad, and it means so much to my family and myself to know that our name will be woven into the history of this town forever.”

  Back at NewsRadio, which started taping its fourth season late that summer, Phil quietly and selectively shared his domestic problems with Khandi Alexander and Vicki Lewis, the latter of whom was then living with her actor boyfriend Nick Nolte and dealing with his problematic drug use. When Phil arrived on the set one week with scratch marks on his face, their origin was only intimated to Lewis. But she knew. When he showed up oddly unshaven and unkempt because he’d slept on his boat, she knew then, too. “How do you do this?” he asked her. Like him, she had no answer.

  Joe Rogan winced at the pattern of fighting and reconciling that Phil and Brynn seemed to follow. “He just kind of thought that every relationship got ugly and then you made up and then got ugly and then you made up,” Rogan later said. After an especially nasty episode during which Phil had sought refuge on his boat, Rogan said, Phil’s tone was disingenuously upbeat when he announced a reunion: “I’m back with my blushing bride!” Congratulations abounded, but Rogan thought, “Oh, fuck. That’s not good. It’s a disaster.”

  Lewis says Phil never wore his emotions on his sleeve and was very private about revealing any discord at home. The only reason she knew was because they shared “a similar horror.” At a Golden Globes party one year, Lewis remembers, both of their mates began drinking when both were supposed to be sober. She and Phil exchanged worried looks. And late in 1997, at a NewsRadio Christmas party, Phil and Brynn got into a public squabble. “He was being lovely and she was being really loudly caustic about him,” Lewis says. “Like, ‘Oh, he’s so fucking funny!’ And it was shocking to see, because you saw a little window into how she could get.”

  On December 31, 1997, the Hartmans hosted a small New Year’s Eve soiree at their home. Family and friends, including some of Phil’s entertainment world colleagues, were invited. Comedic actor Andy Dick, who co-starred with Phil on NewsRadio, was among them. Even then Dick’s struggle with substance abuse was no secret, and later that evening a close confidant of Brynn’s saw her and Dick enter the master bathroom and lock the door behind them. This confidant feared the worst—that Brynn was inside doing drugs—and began banging on the door, screaming for Brynn to come out. She did not.

  Roughly a decade later, in July 2007, Dick appeared on comedian Tom Green’s Internet talk show TomGreen.com Live. When the issue of Phil and Brynn and drugs arose, he grew foggy in recounting “whether I gave Phil Hartman’s wife cocaine.” He also said this: “Look, if you’re looking to … get drunk, you’re gonna go to a bar. If you’re looking for drugs, you’re gonna go to somebody who you think does blow. She is somebody that, that night, wanted to get high. ‘Oh, he must have it. Do you have any?’ ‘Yeah, maybe I do.’ … I didn’t know aaaaaanything about her past. I didn’t know any of that.”

  The incident sparked a long-simmering feud with Jon Lovitz that would culminate in a 2007 fracas at the Laugh Factory comedy club in West Hollywood. According to Laugh Factory owner Jamie Masada, Lovitz “picked Andy up by the head and smashed him into [a] bar four or five times, and blood started pouring out of his nose.” Lovitz himself gave a similar account in the media.

  * * *

  Starting in January 1998, Phil spent the next few months finishing the fourth season of NewsRadio. Brynn, too, was busy working on a project with her friend Sheree Guitar. They’d met in 1995 at their kids’ school, where they both volunteered at the library. For the next few years, they worked together on a movie script called Reckless Abandon. The story of murder and mayhem that ensues after two women become ensnared in a drug smuggling ring, it contains circumstances and characters based very loosely on Brynn’s life. A vicious drug dealer even is named Omdahl—Brynn’s maiden name. When Brynn showed a draft to Phil shortly before her fortieth birthday in April, he gave it his stamp of approval and said he’d help shop it around. He even agreed to play one of the main characters (the husband who is killed by a drug gang while trying to find his kidnapped wife) if it was ever produced. Guitar says Brynn was “elated beyond belief.”

  But Phil’s enthusiasm might have been manufactured. When he popped into Lewis’s dressing room one day at NewsRadio, Brynn’s script in hand, he was sheepish and apologetic. “Brynn wrote this,” he told her. “Could you maybe read it and have your agent take a look?” Lewis agreed, but thought Phil seemed “embarrassed to have to ask. It was kind of like, ‘Look, I don’t know if it’s any good. I’m trying to make her happy yet again.’”

  * * *

  At the beginning of April, around eight P.M., a neighbor who lived kitty-corner to the Hartmans called 9-1-1 to report that she’d heard five gunshots that seemed to emanate from their house on Encino Boulevard. Upon walking outside her own home, the neighbor also smelled gunpowder. Two female LAPD officers responded to the call but were unable to determine where the shots originated.

  * * *

  In keeping with his core philosophy, Phil maintained an attitude of gratitude while continuing to embrace what he knew was a charmed life. He had plenty of money, a slew of engrossing hobbies, a beautiful family, and an enviably solid career. He also knew his value like never before. “I am a name,” he said, “and a name means that I’m well-known within the industry and respected as someone who can deliver.” Julia Sweeney, for one, took note of his amplified swagger. “He was not humble anymore, I’ll tell you that,” she says. “He was more concerned about his career and what was going to happen next.” Now that the work came to him, Phil was happy to point out it was simply a matter of choosing what would most effectively take him to the next level.

  NewsRadio, he had concluded only three years into his stint, was not it. As ratings kept dropping, Phil decided he was ready to move on. “I wish I were still on SNL, frankly,” he told one journalist. To another, he admitted, “I’m forty-eight and up to my eyeballs in midlife crisis. The first few years of Bill McNeal still felt fresh to me, because I was expanding and learning about the character. But after three years, we’ve pretty much explored the depth of this guy.” If the show lasted and NBC made him an offer he couldn’t refuse, Phil added, of course he’d stay on board after his five-year contract expired. But that would mean a huge pay bump, one “unjustified by my position as an ensemble player in a mid-pack series. I don’t want to stay somewhere just to get a paycheck.”

  As season four of NewsRadio wound down, Phil claimed to have fielded some “enticing” offers that he’d been forced to decline because of his NBC obligations. He now also had several more films to his credit, including Jingle All the Way (with Arnold Schwarzenegger) and Sgt. Bilko (with Steve Martin), which Phil promoted on The Oprah Winfrey Show in Chicago. During his time on the set playing Sgt. Bilko’s aptly named nemesis, Major Colin Thorn, Phil and Cathy Silvers (daughter of the original Bilko, Phil Silvers) had a heart-to-heart. On a lunch break one day, as she recounts in her 2007 book Happy Days, Healthy Living, Silvers joined Phil, Martin, Dan Aykroyd, and Chris Rock at a table:

  Phil seemed sad that day and I asked him if he was alright.

  Phil replied, “I’m alright, Catherine—thanks so much for asking. How are you, my dear?” …

  “I am not so fine, Phil. My husband and I are probably going to divorce, and we have two kids. I thought we had a great marriage, but he just doesn’t seem to get the Hollywood wife deal, I guess. I am kinda down, and here I am shooting a comedy and trying to be funny.”

  Phil admitted, “You know, Catherine, I am going through a similar thing at home. Brynn loves me and the kids and, God knows, she has everything in the world.” He pulled out pictures of his boats and homes and cars and let us all look through them. “I have given her everything a woman could ever hope for, but she just isn’t happy. I just don’t get it, either.”

  Phil had played the president of the United States in director Joe Dante’s 1997 HBO satire The Second Civil War, and now he was about to hit big screens yet aga
in as the impatient and materialistic Phil Fimple in Dante’s digitally animated feature Small Soldiers. “Both of the guys he played for me were assholes, there’s no doubt about it,” says Dante. “And it was something that obviously came easily to him, because he played that part in other pictures. What impressed me on this film, however—because he was surrounded by a lot of really good dramatic actors, like James Coburn and James Earl Jones—was how good a dramatic actor he was. I had thoughts of putting him in very serious roles.”

  Well aware of his status as an “intermediate level” celebrity, Phil still held out hope for a breakout part, be it dramatic or comedic. As he confided in a 1997 interview, he was “cautious of the fact that very few people in comedy have careers after age fifty. I think there’s a notion in our society, and it may be valid, that people aren’t as funny when they get older. It’s a stigma still attached to the rebelliousness of youth. I do believe that sooner or later I’ll get those great roles like Gary Sinise’s part in Forrest Gump or Tommy Lee Jones’s as Two-Face in Batman Forever.”

  One early-stage project that had him jazzed was a feature-length Three Stooges film, with Phil in the role of Moe Howard—the sensible grown-up of the zany trio, naturally. “What’s redeeming about this project is that those numbskulls never held a grudge,” he said in Canadian Cigar Lifestyles magazine. “They expressed their hostility by beating each other silly and then moved on. Emotions were always expressed and then cleared like an Etch A Sketch.”

  * * *

  NewsRadio wrapped season four in early spring of 1998. Its fate hung in the balance, to be determined when NBC announced a new fall lineup in mid-May. Having hopped time periods twice more (from Tuesdays to Wednesdays and back to Tuesdays) and sunk even lower in the ratings (to a dismal fifty-fifth place overall), it nonetheless remained popular among eighteen-to-twenty-four-year-olds. But it would need a much wider appeal to survive, and that appeal remained elusive. Phil attributed part of the show’s lagging to its going head-to-head with Brett Butler’s hit Grace Under Fire. “Our show is popular in the major markets,” he said, “but all those trailer parks across America were tuning in to the ‘Hillbilly Bride.’”