You Might Remember Me The Life and Times of Phil Hartman (25 page)

“Um, well, no, I’m not OK. Do I remember right—you have a guest room above your garage?”

“Do you have a friend?”

“No, it’s for me. Brynn and I—it’s bad, it’s very bad. We’ve split up and I can’t stay there in the house.”

“Come over, buddy. We’ll go there right when we’re done with work. I’ll give you a key.”

But Phil never came, Begley says, though he doesn’t know why and didn’t ask. Perhaps Phil and Brynn kissed and made up. Perhaps not. Whatever the case, “He never stayed one night in that room.”

Although Phil was spared most of their vitriol and even complimented in some cases, reviewers were again unkind and
Greedy
died a quick death upon release in early March 1994.

*   *   *

While Begley was privy to brief flashes of Phil’s travails with Brynn, Phil increasingly gave his ex-wife Lisa an earful—about Brynn’s object-throwing temper tantrums, her cosmetic surgeries (which included facial and breast), and what Phil perceived as Brynn’s controlling nature. She was even furious when he got fan mail, Phil claimed. As if he could help that. He disliked it, too, when Brynn stood in his shadow. He disliked it when anyone stood in his shadow, even pals, though it wasn’t an easy shadow to slip. “He wanted to be connected to people who were his peers,” says Floyd Dozier, then a software development manager to whom Phil gave grief for blending into the background at movie premieres and other public events. “He wanted me to relate to him—and [other] people—as equals. In fact, I think I did most of the time, but we weren’t operating in the same arenas. The more famous he got, the more I felt like an outsider, and the more awkward I felt at his social events when someone asked, ‘So Floyd, what do you do?’” Brynn may have felt likewise. “She always wanted to be an actress, and I think she was kind of jealous that he was,” Ohara Hartmann says. “But she was also a very talented artist. She’d sit down to color with the kids and I’d say, ‘Oh, my gosh, Brynn, that’s amazing. You should take classes.’ And she went, ‘Well, I’ll never be like Phil.’ She was just someone who wasn’t fulfilled.”

*   *   *

Much to Lorne Michaels’s dismay—or so claimed a gossip item in the New York
Daily News
that Phil subsequently shot down—Phil announced that the 1993–94 season of
SNL
(his eighth) would be his last. The younger guard, though respectful of his status, was increasingly crowding him out. More important, he wanted to work on new projects, including a revival of
The Phil Show.
And so he bided his time and gave it his all, playing Clinton and Larry King, Michael Eisner and Frank Sinatra, creepy U.S. senator Bob Packwood, and (to his great delight) Jesus Christ while newer cast mates like Farley, Sandler, Tim Meadows, and David Spade soaked up ever more of the spotlight.

As the season wore on, Phil was indeed featured in fewer and fewer sketches—sometimes only one or two per show, and nothing especially memorable except for his old standby characters, or maybe his Ned Land (a role made famous by Kirk Douglas) opposite Kelsey Grammer’s Captain Nemo in a parody of
20,000 Leagues Under the Sea
. His work, as always, was never less than solid, but it seemed subtle and almost quaint in contrast to Sandler’s be-caped and clowning Opera Man or Farley’s hilariously spastic motivational speaker Matt Foley, who lived “in a van down by the river!” “It wasn’t just what was going on on-camera; I think he felt like he didn’t have peers off camera,” says Smigel, who left
SNL
in 1993 to become head writer at NBC’s then fledgling
Late Night with Conan O’Brien.
“I think he probably felt more like an island.” Carvey and Lovitz weren’t there anymore, either. And Jan Hooks was merely in and out for guest shots. Of Phil’s original writing crew, Downey and Franken remained, but Zander, Handey, and the Turners exited around the same time as Smigel. There was also this:
SNL
is a pressure cooker, even for the coolest of cats.

New cast member Sarah Silverman felt it, too, and was delighted when Phil approached her about writing a sketch for them to do together. “This moment of paternal encouragement randomly collided in my brain with an odd bit of trivia I’d recently picked up: that flies live for only twenty-four hours,” she recalled in her 2010 memoir
The Bedwetter.
So she wrote a piece in which she and Phil were flies—one older, one younger—on a wall. At the end, as fly-Phil lies dying, the shot cuts to video of a dog shitting. “Go get it,” fly-Phil tells his young charge. “It’s beautiful.” And though the sketch didn’t survive past dress rehearsal, Silverman says, Phil “gave it his all. A lot of cast members would just bail on things they didn’t want to go through. But he was very sweet about it.”

Jay Mohr was also among those who regarded Phil as an avuncular figure and something of a living legend among the veterans who remained. “He certainly stood out from the pack,” Mohr says. “He didn’t put on airs. He wasn’t a snob or anything. But you could just tell. It would be like if you’re on a football team, and the star quarterback walks in. He just carries himself differently. Phil wasn’t sittin’ around with Farley and Tim Meadows and Sandler, making fart jokes and trying to curry favor with the writers. You had to write for Phil. If Phil was in your sketch, it had a much better chance of getting on the air because there really wasn’t anything he couldn’t do.”

Phil later admitted he was “emotionally stressed” throughout his entire
SNL
run. “The rejection and backstabbing could be painful, but the hardest thing was competing against your friends for airtime.” And from a purely creative standpoint, the shows were getting less sophisticated. “There’s less political satire. The younger audience loves Adam Sandler,” Phil told
Entertainment Weekly
in early 1994. “He appeals less to the intellect and more to that stand-up sensibility of ‘Let’s go out there and be insane.’ I like Adam Sandler, but that’s not my kind of comedy, so, yeah, in a way it makes me feel like, ‘Well, it’s time for me to go.’” Months afterward, much to Michaels’s displeasure, he likened his departure to getting off the
Titanic
before it sank.

Despite his disappointment with Phil for being so publicly impolitic, Michaels understood what was going on. Leaving
SNL
was “very emotional for Phil,” he says. “I honestly never took it [as] a real insult or anything. Saying good-bye to the show was really hard for him. I think he underestimated how attached he was.” The firmer the attachment, Michaels says, the more forceful the detachment. “It’s how people break up. They pick a fight.” Not long after, Phil “apologized profusely” to everyone he’d insulted.

During his
Later
appearance with Greg Kinnear, he was equally sanguine about the prospect of leaving his professional home of many years. Asked if it “bothered” him that he’d depart without a big-time breakout character to his credit, Phil affected a deeply hurt look and replied in a high-strung tone, “You mean does it bother me that I’m a loser? Is that what you’re saying? No, no,” he went on, chuckling nervously, “I enjoy that. I enjoy the obscurity that I’ve had. Why should I be concerned that twenty-year-olds are running off and making two-hundred-million-dollar movies?” Then he dropped the act. After watching Dana Carvey launch a film career with the extremely successful
Wayne’s World
, and Lovitz land a role in the enormously successful
A League of Their Own
, Phil admitted his confidence took a hit. But once he stopped comparing his career with anyone else’s, those feelings of insecurity went away. “In truth, I am very happy with the kind of career I’ve had on
Saturday Night Live
,” he said. “I haven’t had that breakout character that went to the stratosphere and ended up on a T-shirt or a coffee mug or something. But I’ve done a lot of work that I’m very proud of, and I get fan mail from people who say I’m still their favorite person on the show. Not that that’s the requirement.

“Look, this is comedy. I’m having the time of my life. I got this job when I was in my mid-thirties [actually, he was thirty-eight]. I had decided to quit acting and suddenly this dropped in my lap. So I see it all as a gift, and I think that’s the way we should look at this life.”

He wasn’t taking any chances with his post-
SNL
career, though. So before making his escape, Phil began formulating an exit plan.

*   *   *

Sometime in the fall of 1993, in his
SNL
office (#1719) at 30 Rock, Phil received a packet of comedy-writing samples from two Greenville, Rhode Island–based brothers named Brian and Kevin Mulhern. They’d seen him talking about
The Phil Show
(then targeted as a mid-season replacement for the spring of 1994) on a Letterman appearance and were eager to contribute material.
The Phil Show,
as Phil described it some months later, would “reinvent the variety form the way David Letterman reinvented the talk show” via “a hybrid, very fast-paced, high energy” format “with sketches, impersonations, pet acts, and performers showcasing their talents.” He also envisioned having “an interracial cast of at least two or three males and females.”

However, since both Mulherns were then only in their early twenties and short on experience (Kevin was still in college; Brian worked as a pharmacy technician and radio station intern), they figured nothing would come of it. “We had made so many submissions [elsewhere] and gotten no response, so we were basically just wasting a lot of postage,” Kevin says. Then Phil called and left a message. Their mother retrieved it, not knowing who this Phil Hartman guy was, and passed it along. They phoned him back the next day. Phil dug their samples, he told them, and wanted to meet them in person to further discuss possible writing roles on his show. Thrilled, the siblings soon headed to New York and 30 Rock, where they hooked up with Phil and pitched him ideas in his
SNL
dressing room. “When Brian and I walked out, we’re like, ‘What the hell does he need us for?’ Kevin says. “‘He
doesn’t
need us! I hope he hasn’t realized that.’”

During their brief meeting with Phil in New York, Brian remembers, Phil was eager to make Brynn a central part of his new venture. “There was a lot of talk about her and her role,” Brian says of discussions then and thereafter. “He was hell-bent on making that happen and making her a cast member and trying to get her career off the ground. That was the one thing that kind of had a nepotism feel to it.” Brynn, Phil gushed, was a beautiful, statuesque, talented actress with whom he had “great chemistry” that would “translate well over the airwaves.” Although the brothers pushed for Jan Hooks to star alongside Phil, Hooks wanted to stay in New York rather than relocate to L.A., where
The Phil Show
would shoot. “He definitely had [Brynn’s] best interests at heart,” Brian says, “and he was hopeful for her that this would work.”

While Phil finished out his final season on
SNL,
he and the Mulherns worked on sketch ideas. Most of them played to Phil’s proven strength as the Man of a Thousand Voices—or at least a hundred:

Frank’s Place:
Phil plays the Chairman hosting a talk show from his home in Palm Springs.

Hollywood Babylon:
Phil plays a gossipy Tony Curtis.

Happening L.A.:
Phil plays “Bobby Vaneare,” a showbiz cheeseball who wears metal-tipped cowboy boots and a leather jacket with fringe.

Collage:
Phil plays an approximation of PBS talk show host Charlie Rose refereeing a bunch of loudmouths.

Inside the Third Reich:
Phil plays Hitler’s “personal architect” Albert Speer, who somehow abides his evil bosses’ bad behavior in the name of career advancement.

Hollywood Tribute:
Phil plays “a Beverly Hills matron” who interviews people famous and obscure and not at a charity event—just because.

Rescue 911:
Phil, as William Shatner, hosts a parody of the reality television show.

Bosun Bob’s Kartoon Korner:
Phil plays Bob, a 1950s throwback, who doodles, plays with puppets, and raises weighty political issues.

Edge of Love:
A soap opera parody with well-coiffed stars.

Hell’s Kitchen:
Phil plays New York–based PI Chick Hazard solving ridiculous cases involving monsters, aliens, and mummies.

Ed McMahon’s World of Weirdness:
Phil plays the former
Tonight Show
sidekick as the host of a bizarre interview program.

Action Figure Theater:
Exactly that—action figures doing theater.

Lightman:
Phil reprises his light-wearing, mind-reading Groundlings character.

Phil’s feedback on the Mulherns’ contributions was always upbeat and constructive. Often, he left critiques and updates on their answering machine. “Way to go, guys,” he praised in one. “It makes me feel great to know that I’ve got buddies who can deliver, and it bodes well for your future, I might add.”

Early in 1994, Phil added Joel Gallen (with whom he shared a talent manager in Brillstein-Grey’s Sandy Wernick) to the
Phil Show
’s team as executive producer. His old Groundlings pal Tom Maxwell and Maxwell’s writing partner Don Woodard were in talks to be the show’s head writers. “It looks like we’re making some incremental progress,” Phil said in another message to the Mulherns. Once Maxwell, Woodard, and Gallen were “in place,” they could “work out an overall strategy and start staffing up for the pilot.” Things looked more promising by the day.

“He really felt like this was going to be his big solo break,” says Gallen, who thought likewise. “It had so much potential to be a really groundbreaking, unique sketch comedy show from a different point of view.”

*   *   *