You Might Remember Me The Life and Times of Phil Hartman (18 page)

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.’”

What Phil failed to tell Peterson, and what may have provoked his ire, was this: Brynn was two months pregnant. Perhaps just as important, as he’d told his Groundlings pal Tim Stack, Brynn was definitely the one for him. This time, it was for real. For good. In private as in public, he made no secret of his feelings for her. “I love you, Brynn. I’m in love with you,” Phil gushed in an early romantic letter. “I’ve never had a relationship that had so much promise for success. I feel like the luckiest man alive that you’ve chosen me as a mate.”

They wed on November 25, 1987, a day before Thanksgiving and during an extended
SNL
break, in a small New York ceremony. Phil wore a light-brown suit and dark tie, Brynn a white dress, white pearls, and a strand of white flowers in her hair. Afterward, a reception was held at an upscale restaurant in Manhattan, and a couple of weeks later Phil headed back to 30 Rock for three more weeks of
SNL
before he was L.A.-bound on a month-long holiday break. Among his characters during that stretch were Reagan (giving a movie-themed limo tour of Washington, D.C., to Danny DeVito’s puzzled Mikhail Gorbachev), the film critic Roger Ebert (reviewing holiday porno flicks with fellow balcony dweller Gene Siskel), Donahue, and Frankenstein. Throughout his
SNL
run, Frankenstein remained one of Phil’s all-time favorites to play. And it was always a crowd-pleaser. In a late 1987 sketch, as part of a three-member panel that also includes Tonto (Lovitz) and Tarzan (Nealon), the nearly mute monster growls two-word answers such as “Fire bad!” and “Bread good!” in response to probing questions from a talk show host played by Nora Dunn. But just as the sketch nears its end, Phil pulls a quasi–Harvey Korman circa
The Carol Burnett Show
and breaks up on camera—a rarity. It’s essentially a repeat of the Groundlings episode featuring Chick Hazard and Paragon’s big-assed gangster Nick “Cocktail, Chick?” Camaro, only this time on a widely watched national broadcast. Frustrated by his inability to stop laughing, Frankenstein-Phil bolts from his chair, growls, “Fire bad! Fire
bad!,
” and bursts through a flimsy backdrop. Moments later, he re-enters via the same jagged hole, still growling “Fire bad!” and lumbers toward the camera with arms outstretched. The outlandish premise is what got him first. He then began thinking about how ridiculous it must have looked from the audience’s perspective to see Frankenstein laughing, which made him laugh even more. That never happened again. Not live, anyway. “When I watch the show and I see people do that, it bugs me,” Hooks says. “‘Cause if we had done that regularly, we would have been fired.”

*   *   *

Not long after the 1987–88 season began, Lorne Michaels hired a couple of writers named Bob Odenkirk and Conan O’Brien. While staffers Bonnie and Terry Turner, Jack Handey, Al Franken, and Robert Smigel wrote much of Phil’s material, Odenkirk and O’Brien contributed occasionally. In one of Odenkirk’s favorite early sketches, initially written by Franken (possibly with an assist from Phil), Phil’s character enters a subway car packed with people and tearfully introduces himself as a down-and-out Vietnam vet with two kids to support. Any help would be much appreciated, he says, and then doffs his hat to collect donations. After he traverses one car length, the cap filling with cash and change, his mood suddenly shifts from morose to upbeat. He’s not
really
a hard-luck Vietnam vet, but a local actor doing promotion for a play about that very subject. Any donations to support the production would be much appreciated. Phil and his hat make another pass. Upon arriving where he’d begun, Phil undergoes yet another transformation—from friendly actor to a jittery “psychotic” who’s having a tough time due to “government cutbacks.” “I’m not violent,” he assures freaked-out passengers while moving through for collection number three, “just a little crazy.” Moments before the sketch ends, Phil morphs again. He’s actually (no,
really
) a mugger, and this is a stickup. Hat out, money in, sketch done.

In the original version, as Odenkirk remembers it, a series of different people walked through the car with similar spiels in “pretty much the same order.” It was Odenkirk’s idea that Phil should do all of them instead—a joke turn that, in Phil’s hands, made a good sketch great. The sometimes “very possessive” Franken knew it and gave Odenkirk full credit.

That same year, Phil and Hooks co-starred as a just-released ex-con named Mace (Phil, in a sleeveless white T and boxer shorts) and his motel room hooker (Hooks, in a nightgown and painfully bored expression), who are repeatedly interrupted by a Peeping Tom (Kevin Nealon, who also wrote the scene). Every time Mace tries to put the moves on his comically uninterested date, Nealon shows up outside their window, prompting Mace to loudly and repeatedly threaten him (but nothing more) with murder by gun. Like Odenkirk’s subway sketch, it goes on for several minutes past today’s typical three- or four-minute cutoff, which usually worked to Phil’s advantage. Slow-building scenes allowed him to develop a character more fully, which better showcased his acting chops, which in turn enhanced the overall comedic effect. “I think he would have done fine in any era of the show,” Downey says, “but there were certain things that I’m really glad we were allowed to do—pieces that were long enough [in which] you got to see Phil’s subtlety on display.”

*   *   *

Across the board, colleagues agree, working with Phil was a breeze. But off-camera and off-stage, few of them could see past his hail-fellow-well-met veneer. “He was always kind of in character,” O’Brien recalled not long ago. “The Phil I knew … would come in and I’d say, ‘Hi, Phil,’ and he’d be like [jaunty voice], ‘Keep ‘em fine, boys!’” Odenkirk, who was struck by Phil’s mature and calm demeanor in a roiling cauldron of twenty-something angst, regarded him as “a dad who was at peace with the world but also a little bit distant—a little bit Reaganesque in his way. He didn’t put his heart on his sleeve all the time for everybody to bat around.”

As Downey tells it, O’Brien was also somewhat puzzled by Phil’s apparent cluelessness about how the sausage was made. “Conan used to tell me that Phil would call him up and say, ‘Hey, Conan, you wanna go skiing?’” Phil’s plan: They could drive to Middlebury, Vermont (about five hours away), on Monday and be back in time for read-through on Wednesday. O’Brien then had to explain his job and its responsibilities. As a writer on the show, he told Phil, he was obliged to write sketches. That was how the actors had material come Wednesday. If he and his fellow scribes went
skiing
Monday through Wednesday, those sketches would not exist. Phil: “Oh, so you don’t wanna go?”

“[Phil] didn’t live to be onstage,” Downey says. “That was what he did as a living, and he enjoyed it. But his life was about the whole package, which very much included leisure time.”

*   *   *

Shortly after Brynn gave birth to a son, Sean Edward, in June 1988, Phil’s second wife Lisa—with whom he’d reconnected and begun talking by phone every few months—sent Phil and Brynn a congratulatory card. On its cover was a baby in a high chair illuminated by the light of an open refrigerator. Inside, as Lisa recalls, her handwritten sentiments went something like this:
Dear baby, welcome to the world, you’ve chosen great parents. I hope you have a fantastic life and get lots of brothers and sisters and everything you ever wanted. And if you ever need anything, you’ve got an auntie in me.
“Just sweet, totally sweet,” Lisa says.

The note Brynn sent to her in response was anything but.

“I got back four pages of the most vitriolic vituperation, threatening my life, telling me if I ever came near her child she’d kill me, calling me every name in the book, telling me I’d better keep my hands off her husband or she’d come and rip my eyes out,” Lisa says. “Just insane. She never knew me. She never met me. She never knew anything about me.” Alarmed, Lisa called Phil to alert him, but he already knew. Brynn was furious, he said, and he was partly at fault. When Brynn had asked Phil if she and he were soul mates, Phil had answered honestly—too honestly: “No.” Instead, inexplicably, he told Brynn that he and
Lisa
were soul mates. When Lisa heard this, she was dumbfounded. Was he stupid? she wondered aloud. Moreover, why was Brynn’s rage directed at Lisa if Phil’s comment is what sparked it? “I said, ‘Not only do you have your head up your ass, your wife is a scary creature,’” Lisa recalls. Phil, though, warned her not to contact him through “them” ever again. He also told her, “You should have seen the letter she
wanted
to write.” That gave Lisa pause. Phil
knew
what Brynn wrote
and
he let her send it? Ugh. They deserved each other. Phil should have protected Lisa from that hideousness and didn’t. She hung up. They didn’t speak again for almost two years.