You Might Remember Me The Life and Times of Phil Hartman (19 page)

Phil was nearly forty when Sean was born, and the two formed an immediate bond. When friend and Cassandra Peterson’s then-husband Mark Pierson spoke with Phil soon after Sean’s birth, they had a “deep” conversation about parenthood and life in general. “He was going through that transition of getting over his hang-ups with his [own] father,” Pierson says, “and on the high road with his son. You know, a new beginning.” Nonetheless, Brynn was Sean’s primary caretaker—and by all accounts a highly competent and doting one—from the start as work consumed more and more of Phil’s time. Brynn was there to nurse Sean through his first cold, to feed him and change him and keep him safe in the big city. As Phil’s star rose, so did her frustration and resentment.

Throughout his third season of
SNL
—during which, in March 1989, Phil appeared in Chevy Chase’s widely panned sequel
Fletch Lives
(Ebert: “[O]ne more dispirited slog through the rummage sale of movie clichés…”)—he played mostly generic roles (businessman, waiter, soldier, a guy named Dan), including one that paired him with guest star John Larroquette as the co-host of a call-in show titled the
Gay Communist Gun Club.
Phil was tapped to play a Kennedy for the first time, too—Senator Ted—in the sketch “Dukakis After Dark.” A parody of Hugh Hefner’s ultrahip 1960s program
Playboy After Dark,
it features Lovitz as photo op–challenged presidential hopeful Michael Dukakis in rarely seen Cool Mode as Phil’s beer-chugging Kennedy drunkenly hits on Dukakis’s wife Kitty (Hooks). Once again, Hooks says, Phil nearly came unraveled. There was also “A Trump Christmas,” with Phil and Hooks as Donald and Ivana Trump. Phil played the Donald by knitting his brows and spouting a ceaseless stream of words in a cockamamie New Yorkish accent.

The two shifted gears from comedic to semi-dramatic for a tonally unique short film by Tom Schiller called
Love Is a Dream.
Its title comes from a song that Bing Crosby recorded for Billy Wilder’s 1948 film
The Emperor Waltz.
“Not putting them down, but we were around all of those stand-up comics [at
SNL
] who wanted a quick, cheap laugh,” says Hooks, who did theater in Atlanta before moving to New York. “And Phil and I were kind of different animals in a way. We were comic actors instead of comics.” Drama-tinged roles, therefore, weren’t much of a stretch. Featuring top-notch cinematography by Neal Marshad,
Love
was shot on film in a small studio in downtown Manhattan and unfolds like this: After an older security guard (Phil, his face initially unrevealed) lets an elderly woman (Hooks) into a bank vault (located in TriBeCa), she pulls out a safety deposit box and opens it on a nearby table to inspect the contents: a bejeweled tiara and necklace carefully wrapped in velvet. Setting the tiara on her head, she is transported back in time to her younger days, where she encounters an equally spry Phil in an old-time soldier’s uniform. Adorned with a red sash across the chest and epaulets on the shoulders, the getup causes him to resemble a toy soldier in
The Nutcracker.
By using only primary hues, Schiller and Marshad are able to approximate a Technicolor effect à la
The Wizard of Oz.
As Phil and Hooks dance to an orchestrated melody in three-quarter time (a small string ensemble plays nearby), both lip-sync to a prerecorded track. Since the original tune features only Crosby’s singing, Schiller found a female vocalist to perform Hooks’s portion. Channeling Crosby once again, this time in tone and not temperament, Phil begins:

Love is a dream, yet it’s so real

Hard to explain, just how you feel

“I always liked to take the comedians from that show and put them into sort of bittersweet roles,” says Schiller, to whom Phil touted his lip-syncing abilities before shooting began. During Schiller’s first stint on the show, in early 1978, he wrote and directed the now-iconic short film (a “Schiller’s Reel”)
Don’t Look Back in Anger,
wherein an elderly-looking John Belushi takes viewers on a guided tour of his cast mates’ graves and describes how they died. The sole survivor, he dances among their tombstones. “So it’s not exactly jokey, or a laugh-a-minute,” Schiller says of his style, “but it shows another side of their acting ability that I perceived in [Phil]. I thought he had a lot of depth and sweetness.” And Hooks, Schiller adds, was a perfect counterpart. “Phil was a gentleman and she was a gentle lady. They weren’t crass. They weren’t showbiz types, climbing to the top. That’s why they had fun on the shoot, because it was away from Studio 8H, they got their own costuming, they were the stars. There was no one else telling them what to do. And it wasn’t just laughs every two lines.”

Some years later, Schiller wrote and directed Phil in another lesser-known short called
Laura.
It stars cast member Melanie Hutsell as a restaurant hatcheck girl and Phil as the singing driver of a horse-drawn carriage. When Hutsell steps outside the restaurant in a female patron’s fancy fur-collared cape, Phil’s carriage rolls by and splashes her borrowed garment. The two then embark on a romantic buggy ride through Central Park. As with
Love Is a Dream,
some point to it as evidence that Phil could have become a solid dramatic actor in the vein of
Breaking Bad
’s Bryan Cranston or any number of comedic types who’ve made the leap.

Besides traditional sketches and Schiller’s wonderfully surreal
Love Is a Dream
production, Phil’s third season saw him star in the first of several
SNL
commercial parodies directed by Jim Signorelli, who had previously guided Phil and other Groundlings in an Elvira production with Cassandra Peterson. Phil’s debut Signorelli spot—with Hooks, Carvey, and several others—was a spoof called “Compulsion.” A send-up of Calvin Klein’s uber-sultry ads for its perfume Obsession, the parody stars Hooks as a neat freak who compulsively scrubs her house (even during fancy soirees) with “the world’s most indulgent disinfectant” from Calvin Kleen. Phil plays the tuxedoed and vaguely French narrator, melodramatically wondering aloud, “What was the greater transgression: loving her, or abiding her immaculate madness?”

*   *   *

During time off, Phil’s
SNL
exposure proved lucrative on the commercial front. He had long done local radio spots on the side, but now the exposure was getting broader and the money bigger. Starting in the late eighties and continuing for the remainder of his career, there were national on-camera ads and voice-overs for (in no particular order) TGI Friday’s, Bell Atlantic Yellow Pages, Cheetos, M&Ms, Pot Noodle Soup (UK only), CDi, 1-800-Collect, Slice (in which he peddled soft drinks to schoolkids), McDonalds, and Coke, among many others. The latter, in particular, earned him big bucks for little work: a reported $1.2 million for McDonald’s (he was a vegetarian at the time and throughout much of his life, especially when he grew thick around the middle) and $600,000 for Coke, which never aired a spot that featured (as Phil’s William Morris agent Betty McCann remembers it) Phil as a flamboyantly gay dog groomer with pink hair and a canine to match. “They were nervous about that one,” McCann says.

*   *   *

Reviews were mixed at the start of
SNL
’s 1989–90 season—Phil’s fourth, and his first as a performer only. “The current cast is as good as
SNL
has seen since the originals,” declared a review in the
St. Petersburg Times. Time
magazine wasn’t so sure. “Laughs are still coming,” read the subhead on one story, “but the old gleam is gone.” Phil, though, was shining more than ever. Just prior to the season’s start, on September 17, 1989, he’d shared an Emmy for outstanding writing in a variety or music program. (Despite nominations for writing and individual performance in 1987 and 1998, respectively, it would be the only one of his career.) Jack Handey was present in the writers’ room afterward when Phil—holding a glossy of him clutching his infant son with one hand and his Emmy trophy with the other—turned to Lovitz and cracked, “Hey, Jon. Check it out: Here’s two things
you’ll
never have!”

Neither would Lovitz own a sprawling and rustic home like the one Phil had purchased for $1.4 million only a month earlier. Located at 5065 Encino Avenue in the celebrity-dotted town of Encino, about a dozen miles from Hollywood in the San Fernando Valley, it was for him a welcome refuge from the glitz and glam without being too isolated. “Someone will inevitably ask where you live, and I say ‘Encino,’” Phil told the
L.A. Daily News
in 1997. “Then you get that Beverly Hills glaze,” he added, affecting a robot-like monotone. “‘Pariah. Must escape. Don’t want loser dust on my Armani.’” But he liked the conveniences there and the family-friendly vibe.

Coincidentally or not, Phil’s fellow Brantfordian Wayne Gretzky also took up residency in Encino. Kirstie Alley and David Crosby lived in the vicinity as well, and Dana Carvey’s house was only a short walk away. Among the area’s natural attractions are the Sepulveda Dam and Recreation Area—which an article in the
L.A. Times
described as “a green haven for wildlife and outdoor enthusiasts” (Phil!)—and the Los Encinos State Historic Park.

Phil put $420,000 down on his 4,019-square-foot English cottage–style home, located less than a thousand feet from bustling Ventura Boulevard. Situated on a corner lot, the low-slung ranch-style dwelling boasted chestnut-colored wood siding, hand-hewn Ponderosa Pine ceiling beams, solid pine doors, a large brick kitchen island with built-in burners, and a library with floor-to-ceiling shelves. Its master bedroom (one of four) was bigger than Phil’s entire pad in Sherman Oaks (which he sold for $250,000 four months later), and the yard—handsomely landscaped and tropically lush—was shaded from searing California sun by a host of sycamores, oaks, redwoods, and Chinese elms. “I’m really having buyer’s remorse about this,” he confessed to his friend Chad Stuart. “Did I spend too much money?” Inspired by his
SNL
boss Michaels, who became a close friend and sometime vacation companion, Phil even took up gardening. “Really, it’s a wonderful thing, just as an allegorical representation of life,” he told writer David Rensin in 1991. “How, if you put something in the proper soil, it does so much better.” To Phil, good gardening was “a metaphor for proper planning and doing things right. Paying attention to detail.” “I think he saw that that was, for me, a sort of counterpoint to a life of stimulation and stress,” Michaels says. “That there was something that balanced things.”

Phil dubbed his new haven the Ponderosa (after the Cartwright family’s ranch on TV’s
Bonanza
), and he gradually adorned it with ornately framed paintings (many of them purchased at estate sales) of urban and pastoral landscapes: the ocean crashing against rocks; a dark forest; a river running through a canyon; a cow grazing in the stream of a grassy wooded area; an old-time village; a quaint city scene; a churning ocean lapping a rocky beach beneath an overcast sky. Except for summers, when Phil returned to L.A. for movie and voice work and to chill out by or in his beloved Pacific, the home was often vacant for the next four years.

Victoria Jackson, who visited Phil’s Encino spread a couple of times in the ’90s, was struck both by how handsome the place was and how oddly close it sat to such a buzzing intersection. “I thought, ‘If I was a millionaire, I would have a more remote, hidden, gated estate that was a little bit farther away from the riffraff,’” she says. “I remember coming through the open [back] gate, and I said to Phil, ‘Man, you leave your gate open?’ And he said something like, ‘Oh, yeah. We’re just down-to-earth folk.’ Here he was a block away from Ventura, where there’s homeless people, and he had an open gate. And I thought that was kind of sweet.”

To create and recreate in solitude, Phil fashioned a writer’s den for himself above the garage in a 700-square-foot nook that had previously been maid’s quarters. Over the years, he packed the space with guitars (one acoustic and two electric models—a Stratocaster and a Gibson), artwork, and a computer on which he played Flight Simulator. He sometimes smoked cigars up there, too, though he preferred to do his stogie puffing (mainly on weekends) near the ocean with some sort of libation—a beer, a scotch, or a glass of wine—in hand while he watched the waves roll in. More than a few joints were fired up in his Ponderosa retreat as well, much to Brynn’s chagrin. “She hated it,” says John Hartmann, who now and then shared a doobie with Phil. Dozier, too, recalls being put off by Phil’s penchant for pot, but not because he had anything against marijuana. “I’d talk to him on the phone, and he’d say, ‘I’m not doing anything. Let’s hang out,’” Dozier says. “So I would go over to his house and he’d be smoking pot and was kind of spaced out. And I’d get on his case. I remember one time in particular, I said [sarcastically], ‘Thank you so much for your presence, Phil.’”

*   *   *

Although Phil was now more valuable than ever at
SNL,
his preponderance of utility roles—president of the United States, senator, policeman, Garth’s convenience store-owner dad in a “Wayne’s World” sketch—did little to boost his profile. That changed slightly when he appeared as Gene, the Anal Retentive Chef—a fey and persnickety man who owns a homemade tape dispenser cozy and disposes of refuse only after properly packaging it in paper towel, tinfoil, and a stapled brown-paper bag so “it won’t leak onto the other garbage.” Created by Terry and Bonnie Turner, it was Phil’s first original character that really stood out. Despite future Anal Retentive iterations, however, it failed to catch fire like Carvey’s Church Lady (“Isn’t that special?”) or Myers’s Wayne Campbell (“Schwing!”). Perhaps a memorable catchphrase would have helped—not to mention a more competitive edge. But when it came to comedy, Phil was more manatee than shark. At
SNL,
that was a blessing and a curse.

He was never “light” in shows, as the TV parlance goes, but neither was he a defining presence. “He wasn’t clamoring to be the star,” Schiller says, noting that Phil’s ego “seemed more subdued” than those of his cast mates, “but naturally so—not on purpose. Because he was a good guy and had a good soul.” As Phil would later remark, “All of us know performers who feel it’s their destiny to become big stars. I feel it’s my destiny to do good work.”