You Might Remember Me The Life and Times of Phil Hartman

by Mike Thomas

  In a chat with the Houston Chronicle, Phil offered another theory. The “little freak show of very isolated individuals,” he said, could “get raunchy, sexually ambiguous. There’s no contesting the quality of it, but from a strictly marketing standpoint you can see that it has somewhat limited appeal. We have a hard-core, sort of cult following that I think will stick with us wherever we go. But the masses, I don’t [think] they’ve picked up on it.”

  Phil was careful not to grouse publicly about his lot, however. He’d bitched openly in the past—about SNL and NewsRadio—and each time he had regretted the whiny-seeming candor of his comments. “This prime-time life has made me a multimillionaire,” he said, “and I have a great career going. It’s the equivalent of a wartime colonel complaining about the mission the general has sent him on. It’s just not appropriate behavior.” If NewsRadio went away, and he hoped that wouldn’t be the case, it would “just open up other opportunities for me.”

  While he was still in network limbo, Phil dubbed an English-language voice part (that of black cat JiJi) for Disney’s reissue of the Japanese film Kiki’s Delivery Service, and reteamed with his SNL work wife Jan Hooks to play her kidnapping boyfriend Randy on the two-part finale of NBC’s 3rd Rock from the Sun. It was his second appearance on the prime-time comedy—co-created and written by former SNL scribes Bonnie and Terry Turner—since 1996. Brynn even got a non-speaking part as “Venusian #1.” One night after work, Hooks, Phil, and Brynn went out for drinks. “You know,” Brynn told Hooks, “if anything ever happens to me, you should marry Phil.” Brynn was kidding, Hooks says. But it wasn’t an entirely outlandish notion.

  On April 23, Hooks received word that her father had died after a very brief illness. Phil was the first one to stop by her dressing room with words of consolation. He also sat with her quietly while she “screamed and sobbed.” Only one week later, it was Phil’s turn to mourn. On April 30, his father Rupert passed away at the age of eighty-three in Lake San Marcos, California, after a three-year battle with Alzheimer’s disease. Seven of his children (Sarah Jane was not present) were at the hospital to say good-bye before he was removed from life support. It was the first time in a long while they all had gathered. Afterward, they ate and drank at the country club where Doris and Rupert had played countless rounds of golf. “We talked about how we were all going to be better about spending time together and being a family,” Jane Hartmann says. Phil covered the tab.

  The siblings assembled once again, on May 8, for Rupert’s funeral mass at St. Mark’s Catholic Church. All of them but Phil. “Is your brother coming?” some attendees asked Jane, who thought Phil might have stayed away to avoid upstaging their father. But Ohara Hartmann says work on Small Soldiers is what kept Phil from attending. “I was angry,” Ohara says. “I was like, ‘Why isn’t he here?!’”

  “But he paid for everything,” she adds wryly. “If you pay for the funeral, I guess going is optional.”

  Phil also kept his word to Lovitz, who was then shooting a sitcom pilot for ABC. Phil had promised to act in it, and he didn’t disappoint despite Lovitz’s imploring that he not worry about showing up in light of Rupert’s death. Phil not only showed up, he stayed late into the night for pickup shots. “I could just see him smiling at me with pride,” Lovitz later recalled. “It just made me feel great. I remember that night feeling I was no longer his younger brother, [that] we’re equals. It was such a comfort having him there.”

  Two days after Rupert’s funeral, on Sunday, May 10—Mother’s Day—Doris Hartmann spent the first of several nights with Phil and Brynn in Encino. With Doris’s encouragement, Brynn went out and bought a $5,000 bracelet for herself. “Go ahead,” Doris told her. “It’s Mother’s Day.” Phil, she knew, probably forgot. But when Brynn showed off her purchase to Phil, he turned to Doris and said, “We need to take it back.” Doris knew he meant it. Phil liked to spend money on himself but could be penurious when it came to spending it on others. Then again, Britt Marin says, Phil was about to buy Brynn a new Mercedes.

  * * *

  Unlike most of his previous summers since fame came, the summer of 1998 was going to be carefree and rife with relaxation. Phil made sure of that by turning down work and renting a house in Malibu’s Latigo Canyon, which he’d done previously. Throughout May, he and Brynn went out with friends and even sang karaoke (the B52’s “Love Shack”) at a birthday party. They also had dinner with director Rob Reiner, during which Brynn supposedly brought up the subject of guns. According to Ed Begley Jr., who says he heard the story from Reiner himself, Reiner (long a gun control advocate) asked Brynn if having a firearm at home was a good idea. She said it was—that it made her feel safer. They also spoke about the importance of listening. “I’m a really good listener,” Phil remarked. Brynn shot him a look and countered, “No, you’re not.”

  As Brynn told Christine Zander, she already had the thing she wanted most: to be married with children. But especially after moving back to L.A. in 1994, Brynn began to yearn for more—in particular, the acting career she’d forsaken to raise a family. “This is nothing he ever said to me, but I think Phil was the kind of guy that really wanted a wife to take care of things,” Zander says. “He wanted to have a beautiful home and he wanted it to be kept well and he wanted a mother for his children. And Brynn filled those roles perfectly.” Even so, Zander adds, “I don’t think she felt enough attention and adoration and support for the things she wanted to do outside of the family in a career.”

  That May, Brynn reportedly tried to check into rehab again—this time at the celebrity-frequented Promises in Malibu—but there were no vacancies. (Zander, who talked to Brynn during this period, recalls no mention of Promises.) In the meantime, she booked a his-and-hers “Endless Courtship” spa package to enjoy with Phil at an establishment near their home. While friction between them seemed to be dissipating, things could still get tense. (As a friend later put it, “They were just trying to get through the month of May.”) When Brynn got amped up and shaky, Phil stayed calm and collected, hardly ever raising his voice. That drove her nuts. “He would never tell me crap,” says friend Wink Roberts, “but he was going into detail about how he would fight with Brynn, and how she would want to fight and argue right before he went to sleep. And a lot of times he would pretend like he was asleep, just to avoid the argument.” Roberts asked him why he stayed in the relationship if it was so rocky. Maybe he needed to end it and redo everything and go get happy again. But Phil wasn’t hearing it. Rehab might work, he replied. And he loved his kids too much to be forcibly separated from them. He had no choice but to maintain an optimistic outlook.

  As Phil described his situation to friend Steve Small, “I go into my cave and she throws grenades to get me out.” Phil also told Small that he sometimes had to restrain Brynn. When things heated up, Sean and Birgen typically retired to their bedrooms and closed the doors.

  “They had the worst combination of the drugs they used [as] the antidote to their difficulties,” Julia Sweeney says. “For Phil it was getting more relaxed and more detached, and for Brynn it was more getting hyped up and more volatile.” Their substances of choice, she says, only intensified the clashing between already opposite personalities. “She was definitely high-energy, and this is without doing coke,” Sweeney says of Brynn. “She kind of had a nervous, brimming edge to her, and Phil was like, ‘Hey, man, it’s all gonna be fine.’ And then when they got frustrated with each other, Phil would smoke pot and she would do cocaine. So just imagine!”

  Lately, Brynn had grown more mercurial in her moods. When she was up, she was really up. When she was down, she was way down. She also had a temper that could flare without warning and that caused her to lash out. At other times she would go into her bedroom and lock the door, stewing in silence and not bothering to open it when someone knocked. It didn’t help that over the past couple of months her drinking had increased both away from and at home—mostly beer and wine, though typically not in great quantities,
the bottles and cans often left strewn about.

  In early April, hoping to alleviate her growing unhappiness, she’d also begun taking the antidepressant Zoloft. Marketed by Pfizer since 1991, the so-called “selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor” is prescribed for depression and has also been used over the years to treat obsessive-compulsive disorder, anxiety disorders, panic disorders, post-traumatic stress disorders, and other psychiatric afflictions. A titration “starter” kit (dosage unknown) was given to Brynn in late March by Encino psychiatrist Arthur Sorosky (now deceased), who cared for Sean. Whether or not he warned Brynn to avoid drinking alcohol, as the precautionary statement on a typical prescription insert would have noted, is not clear, but she could tell from the start that it wasn’t the right medication. It made her feel more nervous and agitated than usual, as though she wanted to jump out of her skin. From a medical perspective, she may have been experiencing a side effect known as akathisia, which outspoken psychiatrist Peter Breggin has described as “being tortured from within … like the screeching of chalk down a board, only it’s going down your spinal column.” Brynn also began suffering from nausea, diarrhea, and sleeplessness. Extended naps during the day to make up for restless nights did only so much good.

  After one week, she stopped taking Zoloft and stayed off it for more than a month on the advice of a doctor because she had undergone a simple procedure on her nose (whether it was cosmetic or medically necessary is unclear). On May 24, Brynn called Sorosky to report her worsening symptoms, which included deepening feelings of depression. He recommended that she cut her original dosage in half. Whether she had begun taking Zoloft again at full dosage before that call or resumed at half dosage afterward is also undetermined.

  * * *

  Phil dealt with some inner turmoil of his own that month, much of it related to his father’s recent death and Phil’s augmented sense of mortality. In early May he gave an interview to the Catholic News Service. Strangely, in light of his long-lapsed Catholicism, he conveyed a seemingly renewed sense of religiousness—or perhaps he was merely tailoring his words for the publication as he tailored his act for a specific venue. “[O]ur faith prepares us for what lies ahead, and tells us that it’s a mystery to us, and we tremble before that mystery,” Phil told the writer. He also mused about the meaning of death, saying his “faith has guided me to believe it’s a rebirth. We are set free from the mortal coil, and we’ll see wonders beyond our imagination. We’ll get close to the Creator. I’ve believed that all my life even when I’ve questioned other aspects of my faith. I’ll be there with my father in heaven.”

  On or around May 25, Floyd Dozier went to spend an afternoon with Phil at his rented house in Malibu. While strolling down the beach and deep into a conversation about the nature of human existence, they came upon a dead seal that had washed ashore. Their talk then turned to dying and the hereafter. “He was very pensive that day,” Dozier says.

  Phil was pensive, too, when he spoke with Cassandra Peterson by phone during that same period. Peterson’s dad had died not long before Rupert, and so they fell into a discussion about their late parents, their kids, and the fickle nature of life: one minute you’re here, the next you’re gone. “We got very heavy and very deep and talked and talked and talked,” Peterson says. Before they hung up, Phil said something that Peterson remembers vividly “almost word for word”: “If I die tomorrow, I would know that I have had a better life than anyone could have ever dreamed of having. It has so far outweighed my expectations. I’ve got a beautiful wife, two beautiful children, and I’m the luckiest man alive.”

  Despite recent sad events in his life and the challenges facing his wife (not to mention his marriage), there were many reasons to chin up. After briefly getting the axe, NewsRadio had been renewed for another season. The Simpsons, as usual, brought him nothing but joy—even when he failed to get a fat pay bump along with the regular cast members. “I’ve probably done fifty of the two hundred episodes,” he said, underestimating by three, “but it’s the one thing that I do in my life that’s almost an avocation. I do it for the pure love of it.” And actually, life on the home front was slowly improving as well, or so Phil claimed. Late in the month, when Steve Small called to check in and see how things were going with Brynn, Phil was upbeat. Couldn’t be better, he told Small. Everything was working out.

  Brian Mulhern got the same sense. Around May 26, he and Phil were on the phone discussing a movie screenplay they were writing together. Phil was also giving Mulhern a career pep talk, telling him to hang in and that a break would come eventually. His tone was bright. In the middle of their rap session, for a reason Mulhern could not discern, Phil began to laugh. When Mulhern asked him why, Phil said, “Brynn just flashed me!”

  “They were joking around and being playful,” Mulhern says. “He seemed like he was on cloud nine.”

  I have spent my life seeking all that’s unsung.

  —The Grateful Dead, “Attics of My Life”

  Chapter 15

  Phil on Catalina Island, 1990s.

  May 27, 1998

  Upon arriving in Newport early that afternoon to procure some boat supplies for their Boston Whalers, Phil and Britt Marin stopped to chat up a gorgeous woman sitting just outside Schock Boats. All of them watched a jellyfish bloom in the water nearby. Then they toured a few boats and talked with a saleswoman. When it came time to place their respective supply orders, the man in charge was temporarily off-site, so Marin and Phil ate lunch at the popular Cannery restaurant on Newport Boulevard while they waited for him to return. Marin paid.

  * * *

  Meanwhile, back in Encino, the Hartmans’ nanny Lorraine picked up Sean and Birgen from school at Los Encinos Elementary. When she returned to the Hartman house at around three P.M., Brynn was there with the new housekeeper Gigi. She’d reluctantly fired the family’s former maid, whom the kids liked, after the woman damaged portions of the kitchen (including the floor) and stuffed dirty clothes into a cupboard.

  * * *

  Around 4:30 P.M. Phil and Marin headed for home, and an hour or so later Phil dropped his pal off at Sunset and the 405. They made tentative plans to meet up the next day, Thursday, at Phil’s summer rental house in Malibu. He and Marin would catch some waves in the morning followed by tennis in the afternoon. On his way back to the Ponderosa, Phil stopped off at West Marine boat store in Encino to buy a few more supplies.

  Returning home around six P.M., Phil told Lorraine he was tired. He also asked Brynn where they were going that evening for their date night. They’d been trying to spend more quality time together, and date night was part of that effort. Informed the outing was actually scheduled for Thursday, Phil asked Brynn if it would be all right for him to swing by his hangar at the Van Nuys airport, where he kept his plane, Ferrari 355 GTB, and other toys. He’d be gone only about an hour. Brynn said fine. When he left, she confided to Lorraine that Phil had been elusive lately and who knew what time he’d return. Brynn then began sorting through and discarding old videotapes with the housekeeper. She may also have sipped from a can of beer. Afterward, she went to buy clothes for Birgen at an upscale children’s boutique called Ragg Tattoo, located close by on Ventura Boulevard. Back a half hour or so later, she walked out to the pool to check on the kids and then went to exercise, either in the Hartmans’ home gym in a room off the garage or at Bodies in Motion just minutes away and also on Ventura.

  * * *

  A while before Phil rolled in from Van Nuys around eight P.M., Brynn asked Lorraine if she could stay a bit longer than usual that night so Brynn could have drinks with a friend, Christine Zander (although Brynn didn’t mention her by name), at Buca di Beppo restaurant just up the block. A UCLA student at the time, Lorraine was typically at the Hartman house from around three P.M. to seven P.M. Monday through Friday—sometimes later. But since Brynn had given her no advance warning, Lorraine declined because she needed to study for finals. Soon, though, she reconsidered and said she could stay.
Brynn seemed pleased and gave Lorraine the OK to leave when Phil pulled in.

  At around 7:30 P.M., Brynn emerged wearing dark jeans, black boots, and a pinstriped navy blue blazer. After saying good-bye to the kids, telling them she’d probably be home before their bedtimes, she headed for the garage and got into her dark-green Jeep Cherokee for the thousand-foot trip to Buca di Beppo.

  Soon after Brynn exited, Phil entered. Lorraine told him Brynn had gone out with “a girlfriend,” though she wasn’t sure whom. They talked for about fifteen minutes, after which Phil took a dip in the pool with Sean and Birgen. They were all laughing when Lorraine left.

  Just up the street, Brynn and Zander played catch-up at Buca di Beppo’s small bar. They hadn’t seen each other in a couple of months. Over the next two hours, Zander had two glasses of wine and Brynn two Cosmopolitans (fruity vodka martinis) with half a beer chaser. They ordered no food. During the course of their conversation, the 5' 9", 125-pound Brynn groused about having gained weight recently on account of a temporary workout lull following her minor nose surgery. Eventually, talk turned to her flagging sex life with Phil. But while that part of their marriage wasn’t great, Brynn told Zander that they were getting along better lately and becoming closer friends. Brynn also voiced disappointment about her career. She had just turned forty and, aside from a couple of barely noticeable TV shots, a blip on the big screen, and the unfinished movie script with Guitar, she’d never accomplished anything as an actor or a writer.