You Might Remember Me The Life and Times of Phil Hartman (13 page)

Chapter 7

Phil as Chick Hazard, Groundlings, early 1980s. (Photo by John H. Mayer)

Just as his marriage to Lisa was disintegrating, Phil’s career was improving. In 1981, on the advice of Tracy Newman, he’d signed with the William Morris Agency—first as just a voice-over client—and soon began landing more commercial jobs as well as bit parts in films. Until late 1986, his screen credits alternated between Hartmann and Hartman. “We were living together and playing around with numerology,” Lisa says, “and he had always been interested in possibly changing his name.” For one, Phil thought Hartmann with two n’s looked too Jewish and wanted to avoid any hiring bias or pigeonholing that might hurt his chances of getting work. He also told Lisa that he’d been shuffling letters in his name to manipulate its numerology value and thus affect his professional fate. By dropping the second N, he discovered, he’d go from a five to a three, which represented the pinnacle of creativity.

In late 1983, having shifted his focus to writing rather than acting, Phil began working with Michael Varhol and Reubens to dream up and script a future Pee-wee Herman movie. Reubens’s first stab (with Gary Panter) had tanked at Paramount, but Warner Bros. showed interest and paid a healthy advance that was split three ways. Phil wrote in a short note to Lisa:

Our movie deal came in! 150K!! Front money right away!! I LOVE YOU! Ya Big Sweeter.

Converging at Reubens’s home, a converted garage in L.A.’s Miracle Mile district furnished (as Varhol remembers it) mostly with cardboard packing boxes, the trio brainstormed by writing ideas on three-by-five index cards and tacking them to a wall: Pee-wee as an astronaut; Pee-wee as a magician’s assistant. Early in 1984, the guys moved into offices rented for them by Reubens’s manager Richard Abramson. Owing to his ongoing romantic travails—he and Lisa were legally separated in early February—Phil often found it hard to concentrate.

Letter from Lisa to Phil, early 1984:

Plaz—

I don’t know what to suggest anymore but separation. You tell me you love me. You tell everyone else too, but I feel like a prize Dalmatian you leave out on the porch. You call me a “black hole” and I am too demanding when all I want, have ever wanted, is my husband to take pleasure in me who wants all the passion we can have and then too is sufficient without me. I need to be your true partner. I need to “dive in.” You accuse me of ratcheting things up—I agree. I would rather ratchet to the top and fall than piss around in the middle going nowhere. Perhaps a pause is what we need, a stopper in the stream that will allow the water to fill up, father to flow over or push aside the obstruction we feel. Please think about what we need. Not what we want. If we return to the source as the “I Ching” always talks about, we can find fresh water, a new well.

We need simplicity and joy—it’s all gotten so dark and muddy.

I know you resist this—Please don’t
for us
.

If we can’t find a way to enjoy our lives
together
, I don’t want to continue. I feel as if I am letting go in a way. That breaks my heart, but it is happening. I am tired. I won’t cease loving you. I will relegate it to the part of my soul where all my other disappointments live.

I will grieve but I will move on.

This is not a threat or an ultimatum. It is the painful reality I face.

I love you,

Me

Please talk to me
♥
Bloonda.

In Phil’s letters to Lisa, which were shorter and in which he addressed her as “Bleentl” and “Bloonda,” he expressed his desire to be with her and his concern for her happiness.

They were soon separated, Lisa had begun seeing another man, and Phil was crushed. As Varhol remembers it, he came in one day and, “in a very low-key way,” announced his impending divorce. “It was very surprising to me,” Varhol says, “and it affected Phil’s concentration at that point in terms of the writing process.” Phil never talked about it after that initial revelation.

“He was a beautiful soul,” Lisa says. “That was the hardest thing of all: leaving all of that irreplaceable specialness because the frustration of getting it only in glimpses, like a sunny day in Scotland, was too much.” She dropped ten pounds from her already “too-skinny” frame after they parted, and had plenty of crying jags inside the walk-in freezer at Muse during her shifts. Though Phil was equally upset over the failure of his second marriage, his private anguish was hidden in public.

At Pee-wee Central, however, his distractedness was becoming a distraction. “Paul would call me up during the writing [of
Big Adventure
] and complain about Phil a lot,” Varhol says. “When the three of us were doing the rewrite, I was really into it and Paul was into it and Phil would sometimes be sort of tuned out, sort of daydreaming. And sometimes Paul would go, ‘What do you think, Phil?’ And Phil would be caught off-guard.” Even so, his presence was far more advantageous than detrimental. Besides his creative contributions, Varhol says, Phil had a grounding effect on Reubens. When the mercurial performer flew off the handle or into the ether creatively, Phil calmed him down and tugged him back to earth. “I remember one time, Paul was talking about how he couldn’t wait to get famous so he could start hanging out with Spielberg, and Phil and I were looking at each other and rolling our eyes,” Varhol says. “When Paul got into this world domination phase—and he was deadly serious about this—Phil did a very funny Ed McMahon voice and routine. ‘Right you are, Mr. Herman! You are correct, sir!’ And he would break Paul’s spell.” Phil’s Pee-wee impression, which Varhol deems “the world’s worst … a mealy-mouthed Uriah Heep Pee-wee,” was similarly effectual in leveling with laughter. Quietly, Phil’s resentment of Reubens grew.

*   *   *

In early May, after settling on a Pee-wee movie story line that involved Herman moving in with his rich uncle and saving the town’s swimming hole, Phil, Varhol, and Reubens pitched the concept to Warner Bros. head Robert Shapiro, who hated it. “He wanted to fire us on the spot,” Varhol says. “As a matter of fact, after Paul did the pitch, Shapiro walked out of his office for, like, ten minutes. When he came back, he said, ‘Paul, I want you to stay, and you guys can go’—meaning Phil and I. So I walked out to the parking lot with Phil and said, ‘What do you think just happened?’ And he goes, ‘I think we just got fired.’” Fortunately, that wasn’t the case. Varhol says Reubens fought for the project and them in the process, winning his team another chance to produce something the boss wouldn’t loathe. “Paul was very astute about certain showbiz things,” Varhol says. “And I know that if Paul thought we were going to get fired and he would have to start from zero again, it wasn’t really in
his
best interest, either.”

So the tweaking and brainstorming continued, eventually yielding a premise that stuck: Pee-wee’s super-fancy bike gets swiped and he sets off to recover it. Hilarity ensues. Varhol contends the idea was his. “Paul has described it as a eureka moment that
he
had, and it wasn’t that way at all.” And it was Phil, he says, who came up with the bike’s memorable description:
It’s a classic with fat whitewall tires, a sparkling two-tone paint job and options galore. Mud flaps, headlights, a personalized license plate hanging from a hand-tooled brown-leather seat.

Their pitch green-lit, Phil and Varhol were tasked with penning an early draft of
Pee-wee’s Big Adventure
while Reubens embarked on a countrywide twenty-two-city tour with Paragon. Phil, though, was more artistically deferential to Reubens than Varhol would have liked. “Every time I’d make a suggestion, Phil would say, ‘Let’s wait for Paul,’ and I realized this wasn’t going to work out,” he says. “So we basically decided to hopscotch scenes, where Phil would write some and I would write some. We went through the outline and I said, ‘OK, Phil, you write
these
scenes and I’ll write
these
scenes.’” Before long, they produced a first draft of ninety-three pages. Upon Reubens’s return in early July, he read the script with fresh eyes before the trio revamped it from start to finish.

*   *   *

Perhaps soothingly for the diversion it provided, his break-up with Lisa wasn’t the only thing weighing on Phil’s mind. Besides the Pee-wee film, he was in early planning stages for an hour-long Chick Hazard show at the Groundlings Theatre. Set at the 1932 Los Angeles Olympics, it was scheduled to run during L.A.’s prestigious Olympic Arts Festival, beginning in June 1984. The wide-ranging, ten-week celebration mostly preceded athletic competitions and featured, as per a
New York Times
account, “more than 400 performances by 145 theater, dance and music companies, representing every continent and 18 countries.”

“A basic premise for the Festival is that art is not a form of propaganda but an instrument of truth, an opportunity to put aside differences and rejoice in being alive,” festival director Robert Fitzpatrick wrote at the time. “The Festival seeks neither to preach nor to dictate a hierarchy of taste. Participating countries have agreed to this premise. Governments that might have preferred more traditional representatives of their cultures respected the artistic integrity of the Festival and provided substantial support for artists of untraditional bent.”

Chick Hazard’s road to the Olympics began with Lynne Stewart. Then a member of the Groundlings board, she encouraged Phil to submit a proposal to the festival committee, and the committee (to Phil’s surprise) approved it. “We tried very hard to raise the bar,” the show’s producer, Craig Strong, says. “The production values were much higher than in a usual Groundlings presentation. The period costumes were accurate and funny, but not over the top, and the comedy references were accurate to the period.”

It was Chick’s, and Phil’s, widest theatrical exposure yet, and patrons flocked to Melrose Avenue for an evening of improvised intrigue with a comic twist. More than a way to promote the Groundlings, the production as Phil saw it was a chance to shine individually. Although he drove a black Porsche Carrera convertible (purchased used) and earned a solid living—“Phil always had a little bit more money than everyone else did,” Strong says—nearly a decade into his Groundlings tenure nothing momentous had happened in his career. Promoted in part on Phil-designed fliers that featured a be-hatted Chick rendered in black-and-white with a bright-yellow banana gun held near his head,
Olympic Trials: A Chick Hazard Mystery
opened in early June 1984 and ran through mid-August. It was a hit from day one. Directed by Maxwell and staged at the cost of $25,000, its cast of eight supporting players included Stewart, Katz, Mayer, and future
Simpsons
voice actress Tress MacNeille, among several others. “What was great about the
Olympic Trials
production is that it was much more grounded in reality than the [original] Chick Hazard sketches, which were a little more freewheeling,” says fellow Groundling Randy Bennett. “And Phil’s research on L.A. in 1932 was so impressive that he could just spew out these facts … He knew all of that history.” In the four or five weeks of rehearsal leading up to opening night, Strong remembers, drama abounded, mostly involving actor egos. HBO wanted to purchase the rights to their Chick production, and “there was a huge fight among company members because we had not created any contract. And so it was, ‘Who owns this material?’” The sale was nearly stopped but finally approved, though not without plenty of contentiousness. Phil himself was “very shy, uncomfortable” during a long contract conversation with Strong at Phil’s home in Sherman Oaks.

In addition to the sticky contract business, Bennett and Strong say, Phil had trouble asserting his authority. He was always the nice guy everyone loved—the fun and generous and joshing hail-fellow-well-met. But as the lead actor of and a financial partner in this high-profile Hazard show, there were times when he needed to lay down the law more than he did. “Things would spin out around him,” Strong says, “and he didn’t want to be the bad guy.” As in other life scenarios, Phil dealt poorly with other people’s emotions and nearly always shrank from confrontation. “He had the creative sense and he knew how to help get the best out of people onstage, but anything administrative was not his forte,” Bennett says. “And sometimes he would [tell people] things that were not possible, so it put the producers and director in a very awkward position.” Even before the Olympic festival began, Tracy Newman got the impression that Phil was uneasy about choosing who would and would not be in a scene on any given night. “People would get mad at him for that,” she says, “and Phil couldn’t have been nicer.” Perhaps more significantly, owing to his imploding marriage with Lisa and his ping-ponging back and forth between Chick rehearsals and Pee-wee writing sessions, Phil’s attentions were ever more divided and his anxiety high.