You Might Remember Me The Life and Times of Phil Hartman (14 page)

Ten days or so before opening night, he decided to take a short leave of absence. “There was nothing we could do without him in the room, obviously, because he was in every scene,” Strong says. So they told him he was free to go—with one caveat: He’d check in by phone once a day. With that settled, Phil set off for a two-day writing retreat at Two Bunch Palms resort in Desert Hot Springs. Ensconced there in nature, he recharged his batteries, wrote what he had to write, and headed back to L.A. refreshed and ready. “He really pulled it all together and it all worked,” Strong says. “It was really tense, but under pressure he could really perform.”

The
Miami Herald,
for one, mostly praised the production:

Though its fluid improvisational nature results in flaws,
Olympic Trials
does for ’30s-style private eyes what
Little Shop of Horrors
did for monsters.

The play has every requisite element: The private eye who talks and shoots fast and who drinks too much; the bleach-blond secretary in love with him; the Oriental opium den; decadent rich folks; the good-hearted ex-con. It’s also got sensual, melancholy, trombone-dominated music.

The audience gets to supply the name of the victim, the site and method of his or her murder, his occupation, and important clues and other details that change nightly. Some of the resulting improv is rough, but some of it sounds as if the actors have rehearsed for ages.

Nonetheless, Phil was soon disappointed to discover, no one who could help him professionally seemed to care.

*   *   *

After the Olympics festival, in addition to his scriptwriting, Phil remained engaged at the Groundlings by way of teaching. Among his students was Julia Sweeney, then a Columbia Pictures accountant with acting aspirations. Her first improv instructor had suggested she repeat the introductory class, so she signed up for another session that happened to be helmed by Phil. “I was in love with him immediately,” she says. He was charismatic, interesting, funny—an urbane gentleman like she’d never encountered. He was even friends with his
ex-wife,
Sweeney marveled of Phil’s relationship with Lisa post-split. “He was sort of like Cary Grant to me,” she says. “So my introduction to him was like this gateway into a world I’d only suspected existed.”

Now and then, as rapt pupils hung on his every word, Phil told stories of his past life—including his stint designing album covers for rock legends. “But I have to say, it was not braggy,” Sweeney says. “Of course, it
was
braggy. We thought he was really in the business. He was a working show business guy, and I had never been around anybody like that.” He was a great teacher to boot, she says, explaining things simply and clearly, and regarded as something of a minor legend in his own time by male and female charges alike. “I think every girl was in love with him and every guy was in awe of him and wished that he was their friend,” Sweeney says. “That class was really powerful and really exciting.” During one of Phil’s most memorable improv drills, students were asked to morph into hybrids of their favorite cartoon characters and close family members who bugged them. “And really funny things happened,” Sweeney remembers. “I didn’t know you could use formulas like that to come up with funny things. I didn’t know there was logic behind it. And in some ways there isn’t—it’s really instinctive and impossible to explain, yet it’s funny. But there are some things that are really tried and true, and he would tell you about those.”

And all the while he yearned for something more.

Chapter 8

Phil on his sailboat, early 1980s. (Photo by Lisa Strain-Jarvis)

In the fall of 1984, as he approached the age of thirty-six, Phil’s disillusionment with his dearth of progress on the acting front hit an all-time high and his thespian ambitions were jettisoned altogether. Auditions were soul sucking, he decided, and from a skill standpoint he felt unequipped to compete. “[Y]ou can only go on so many hundred cattle call auditions, and suffer so much rejection, before it takes its toll,” he once explained. Though it may have been exasperating at the time, he later seemed relieved not to have been selected as announcer for
The Price Is Right
: “‘You win the chain-link fencing, and the meat by-products! Congratulations!’ Can you imagine?” But if he could write or co-write a hit, Phil reasoned, doors would open that so far had remained closed.

He remained morose about his second failed marriage, too. Both Lisa and Phil were “horrid” toward each other for many months after their separation, Lisa says, and they maintained a mutual disdain for several more months after Lisa signed (unwittingly, she now says) papers granting Phil an uncontested divorce that became official on May 23, 1985. But when the anger and resentment subsided, they began talking again. Talk led to sex led to an attempt at reconciliation. They should get back together and have babies, Phil told her. As with Gretchen, he still longed to have kids. That Lisa was now cheating on her current boyfriend with her ex-husband made the situation extra-sticky. “I was living with this other boyfriend and I wasn’t happy,” she says. “I really missed Phil. I was still really in love with him.” With strong reservations, she left her newish suitor and moved back into Phil’s house on Norwich. Disappointingly but not surprisingly, in a couple of weeks he reverted to his old ways—the emotional withdrawal, the antisocial tendencies—and all hope was lost.

Lisa wondered: Why was he letting this happen? Couldn’t they see a therapist and work things out? She loved him, he loved her, but the situation was beyond horrible. And now they’d brought another person into it, one who treated Lisa well and whose heart she had broken in her naïve belief that Phil could and would change. In spite of their differences and the considerable friction between them, she adored him and Phil her. “We’re soul mates. That’s just the way it is,” he remarked, a bit too nonchalantly for her taste. Not exactly, she replied. Not if they couldn’t find a way to mend their shattered bond. So she moved out again and they lost touch for many years.

*   *   *

Sometime in late 1984 or early 1985, Phil hooked up with a movie producer named Victor Drai. It was through Drai—whose films include
The Woman in Red
and
Weekend at Bernie’s,
and for whom Phil was writing a dark comedy titled
Mr. Fix-It
(destined for MGM, where Drai had a development deal)—that he met a statuesque blonde named Brynn Omdahl at a party Drai threw at his Hollywood home. She’d been lamenting that there were “no nice guys in Hollywood,” and wanted to find a winner. “She was such a sweetheart,” Drai says. And though he knew she had done drugs in the past, “she was a totally straight girl” during that period.

Brynn’s given name was Vicki Jo. She had also been Brindon Cahn and, during a short-lived first marriage back in her hometown of Thief River Falls, Minnesota, Vicki Jo Torfin. The daughter of an engineer-turned-father (Don) and a retail shop owner mother (Connie), she had dropped out of high school, done some modeling in Minneapolis, and lived in Arizona before heading out to L.A. (like so many other young and comely women before her) to make it in show business. Early on, she also modeled fashion swimsuits for Catalina Swimwear. (“Think California sunshine,” reads promotional verbiage for the century-old company. “The glamour of Hollywood starlets. The smile of Miss America.”) By the early 1980s, though, Brynn’s career aspirations had stalled and her recreational use of alcohol and cocaine had escalated. A stay at the famed Hazelden addiction treatment and recovery center helped her get clean. One former acquaintance, Hanala Sagal, says she and Brynn began attending Alcoholics Anonymous meetings during that period, some of them at Beverly Hills Presbyterian Church on the corner of Rodeo Drive and Santa Monica Boulevard. The Rodeo meetings, Sagal says, were Brynn’s favorite. “That’s the kind of meeting she liked to go to. The kind where your eyes wander around to see if there’s a famous alcoholic in the room.” They also had beauty maintenance in common, Sagal recalls, driving each other to appointments for such minor cosmetic procedures as facial peels. “She was always doing things to herself, like I was, trying to look good and stay young.”

When Phil met Brynn, he may well have been at his most vulnerable state in years. His marriage to Lisa had collapsed, his triumphant run during the Olympic Arts Festival had failed to boost his career, and acting jobs were scarce. In light of his anguish over personal and professional shortcomings, the attention from and affections of a statuesque blonde would have gone a long way toward bolstering Phil’s deflated self-image. Whatever the reason, he was once again glamourized.

And once again, not everyone was comfortable with his choice of mates. Victoria Bell—Carmen Pluto from the Groundlings—had briefly met Lisa and some of Phil’s other girlfriends, all of whom seemed “fun and silly and kind of kooky. So when Brynn came into the picture it was kind of like, ‘Hmm, that’s a dangerous woman for Phil.’ She just didn’t seem like the kind of woman that we had seen him attracted to over the years.” He
was
attracted, though—and strongly. But their relationship was bumpy from the get-go. A friend of Phil’s, actor Ed Begley Jr., remembers inviting Phil and Brynn to the home he shared with his then-wife in Ojai, California, about seventy miles from L.A. They would arrive around noon for lunch and then, that evening, all four of them would dine at a nice restaurant in town. But noon came and went with no sign of Begley’s guests. There went lunch. When it got to be around seven
P.M.
, he knew dinner was dead as well. At around nine
P.M.
, Begley’s phone rang. It was Phil. Here is Begley’s re-enactment of their conversation:

“Ed, it’s Phil. Ohhh, I’m so sorry. We were headed there and I couldn’t call because it was just too bad. Brynn, this woman I’m dating—we got into a horrible fight on the way there. Horrible! We’d just split up and I had to take her back home. We are, of course, not coming out. I’m so sorry to do this to you, but you have no idea how contentious it was. That’s why I could not call.”

“Phil, Phil, take it easy. As long as you’re OK. I was worried about you on the highway, on that windy road to Ojai, that’s all. You’re OK?”

“Well, I won’t say I’m
OK
. We split up. I can’t do this.”

“I totally understand. Come on your own whenever you want, Phil. I’d love to see you.”

Phil never made it to Ojai, but before long he and Brynn were back together. They weren’t done fighting, though—or splitting up before making up and reuniting. As their relationship evolved, a pattern emerged.

*   *   *

Amid Phil’s mounting frustration about his seemingly stagnant career, and in the way that only mothers with blind confidence in their progeny can do, Doris Hartmann encouraged her middle child to keep his chin up—everything would work out for the best. She told him other, less heartening things, too. A psychic Phil’s sister Martha had visited confirmed it, predicting that Phil would be “very successful.” Doris underlined “very.” She told him other, less heartening things too, namely that life’s clock was ticking and Rupert was “depressed” he didn’t know his kids better. Doris, though, knew that neither he nor she could turn back time—that it was “too late to make amends for all the things we should have said and didn’t—all the things we said and shouldn’t have.”

As Doris advised, Phil forged onward. He spoke with a casting boss at ABC, who told him (as Lisa had years earlier) that a return to acting school might be just the thing to help him transcend mere characterizations and find the funny in Phil Hartman. Tony Danza and Ted Danson were playing versions of themselves with great success on
Who’s the Boss
and
Cheers,
respectively, and Phil would do well to follow their leads. But he wasn’t buying it. Even before Katz had tried to coax him out at the Groundlings, being himself—or even a close facsimile thereof—had never been Phil’s forte. As he told the
L.A. Times
in 1993, “I wasn’t that secure with myself. I felt vulnerable trying to be anything close to myself on stage or in front of a camera. I felt more comfortable being buried in a person. The deeper the burial, the better.” Meanwhile, he watched friends and former colleagues become famous.

Reubens, for one, was already nationally known and about to break big thanks to his tour and multiple appearances on NBC’s
The Late Show with David Letterman.
Lovitz, too, was on the rise. In a development that surprised some, Phil’s Groundlings mate and recent voice co-star in the Disney animated film
The Brave Little Toaster
was selected to join
Saturday Night Live
during its 1985–86 season. If there was jealousy on Phil’s part, Julia Sweeney failed to sense it. More than a few people, though, were puzzled by Lorne Michaels’s decision to hire Lovitz over Phil. “I remember one of the times Lorne was at the Groundlings, standing in the back watching a show, and I was standing next to him,” Tracy Newman says. “And I said, ‘Are you here for Phil?’ Because I was watching the show and thinking, ‘If I were him, I would [take] Phil.’ But he was interested in Jon Lovitz. And I remember thinking, ‘What a fool. What a fool.’ Not that Lovitz isn’t funny. I like Lovitz, too. But to stand back there and watch a guy like Phil Hartman and not see how valuable he would be.…” Randy Bennett was also bewildered. “The fact that Lovitz got on
Saturday Night Live
and Phil didn’t was an enormous shock. I love Lovitz, don’t get me wrong, but come on.” Even Lovitz himself was surprised. The very idea of auditioning for
SNL
struck him as “ridiculous,” he has said. But Michaels—who says Lovitz first came to his attention in the bigscreen comedy
Last Resort
—was obviously impressed by what he saw. So were Al Franken and Tom Davis. As Lovitz later recounted, they came to the Groundlings in search of “a Tom Hanks–looking leading person.” Franken even told Lovitz outright, “You were everything we weren’t looking for in one person, but you were funny.”