You Might Remember Me The Life and Times of Phil Hartman (2 page)

When the trio arrived in Pasadena, California, with its near-perpetual sunshine and easygoing vibe, Rupert and Doris were immediately smitten. Who cared (well, besides Haeussler) that U of M bested the Golden Bears in a hard-fought 14–6 victory? This palm-tree-lined paradise, they decided, was their future home. Or somewhere close to it, anyway. Getting there was just a matter of how and when. Exuberant, Doris and Rupert “came right back and took out their papers,” Phil’s oldest sister Nancy recalls, in eager anticipation of imminent relocation. And they talked up the Golden State to all who’d listen, spurring some to relocate there ahead of them. Then Doris found out she was pregnant again. Daughter Sarah Jane was born in late October, with son Paul following in December of 1953. Nearly four years passed before the Hartmanns migrated south of the Great White North to make a better life.

*   *   *

In a 1997 interview with
Hollywood Online
, Phil spoke of growing up in a family that “struggled to make ends meet.” He went on to explain that his inability to shed excess weight during adulthood stemmed from scrambling for his share of grub during those lean early years. The craft services tables at his various television and film jobs would become a particular weakness, for he’d find it almost impossible not to partake of free meals. “Hot dogs, donuts—bring in the pizza and the fried chicken,” he quipped. “I came from a family where you needed a fork in your hand to reach for some food.” Oddly enough, according to Martha, there was a social upside to the Hartmanns’s simple lifestyle: “The neighbors loved our family. They loved that we weren’t spoiled and they wanted us to hang out with their kids so maybe something would rub off on them.”

Those neighbors, the Taylors, had two boys named John and Tom (the latter was Phil’s age) and a house that dwarfed the Hartmanns’ cottage-like abode. As a youngster, Phil strolled into the Taylors’ place at will, as no one in the low-crime area locked the doors of their homes or cars. Martha remembers that one day, as the Taylors were seated at their long table and silently eating breakfast, Phil wandered in and proclaimed, “Good morning, all you happy people!” He had heard the phrase on a local radio broadcast and it struck him as funny. The neighbors “burst out laughing. It made their day.” In another instance of Phil’s scampishness Nancy was asked to check on him and his younger brother Paul (five years Phil’s junior) outside. Doris sometimes tethered the boys to a clothesline so they wouldn’t run off if left unsupervised. And it usually worked. But when Nancy went to look for them, she found only Phil’s tiny swimsuit—still attached to the rope. Phil himself had wriggled out of it and ran off “stark naked” down the street.

When Phil was in elementary school, he nearly went blind, no thanks to brother John’s errant Red Rider BB gun. “You’ll shoot your eye out!” went the typical parental admonition, and in some cases it was true. “I had the scare of my life when I was shooting at a Popsicle stick that I had put on the windowsill of a little room Phil and I lived in with our brother Paul,” John says. “The BB hit the Popsicle stick and ricocheted off it. Phil was walking up behind me and he screamed and had his hand over his eye. And I thought, ‘Oh, my God, I’ve blinded my brother!’ And I’m freaking out. He’s screaming and crying and yelling, ‘Ow! My eye!’ and I run over and I pull his arm away and his eye was there. I’d anticipated seeing it shot out. It was like horror and relief in the same breath. Inhale and exhale.”

Thinking quickly, John pulled Phil aside and whispered one of his earliest business propositions:

“Don’t tell Mom about me shooting you in the eye.”

“Yeah?” Phil wondered what came next.

“And I will take care of you for the rest of your life.”

Phil pondered the pitch for a moment and said, “What if I die first? Who will take care of you?”

“Don’t worry,” John promised, “the big brother always dies first.”

*   *   *

Another near miss occurred at the post office in tiny downtown Brantford. As Phil would remember it during a visit decades later, John shoved him inside the building’s revolving door and gave it a mighty spin. Unable to match its velocity, Phil stumbled headfirst into a glass windowpane, which cracked as if smacked by a stone. Fearful they’d be tossed in the clink for damaging public property, both boys quickly split the scene.

A far safer haven was Brantford’s only movie theater, where Phil first encountered such big-screen stars as the sultry Marilyn Monroe and Gregory Peck as the whale-obsessed Captain Ahab in John Huston’s
Moby Dick
. The latter made such an impression that Phil and his best friend John Taylor acted out scenes from the film, pretending to harpoon the Hartmanns’s dog, Mike, with a broomstick and feeding each other dialogue.

Behind the Hartmann house, beyond a patio and white wooden lounge chairs, was a long and grassy yard filled with tall mulberry bushes. On the other side of them sprouted a well-tended vegetable patch. The so-called victory garden was a holdover from the rationing days of World War II, when growing one’s own produce not only aided war conservation efforts but saved money. As John recalls, the Hartmann plot yielded strawberries, carrots, lettuce, and green beans. “One of the agonies of our youth was that instead of running off and playing on the weekends, we had to go out and weed the garden,” he says. Abutting the yard was a vacant no-man’s-land where neighborhood kids dug holes and made underground huts for, as John puts it, “real and imaginary rivals” in an era when “war was the subtext of all life.” There was, he says of those Hiroshima-shadowed days, “massive paranoia” about atom bombs dropping from on high.

Not far beyond the no-man’s-land, at the foot of a long hill, was a potato field that belonged to the castle-like Ontario School for the Blind. Opened in 1872 and later renamed the W. Ross Macdonald School, the institution offered traditional studies as well as manual and vocational training to hundreds of students. In winter and on holidays the Hartmann children and other kids from the neighborhood sometimes went sledding and romped on its hilly grounds. During school breaks, they sneaked onto the premises at night to play in barns on the property. The bravest (or most foolhardy) mischief-makers scampered up and slid down the winding slides of rocket-shaped fire escapes. “We goofed around up there even though we knew it was off limits,” Nancy says. “We never got caught, but we did come close.”

Because he was too young to participate in such hijinks, Phil palled around with his brown teddy bear, Jackie, and proved exceedingly easy to care for. “He’d just hang out with you, whatever you were doing,” says Martha, who became Phil’s primary guardian when Nancy was called to other duties. Quiet and introspective, Phil increasingly longed to be noticed—most of all by Doris. As he’d confide to Martha in their adulthood, his younger years were spent vying for the attention and affection of their tough and entrepreneurial mother and to a lesser degree their traveling salesman father. Martha, it turned out, had always felt the same way. “When Phil and I talked, we were kind of on the same page about being raised not feeling important,” she says. As Phil told late-night host David Letterman decades later, “It was pretty desperate. Couldn’t get a lot of attention. That’s why I’m craving it so much now.” Despite his goofy grin and joshing tone, it was true.

“I have met people over the years who felt it was their destiny to be a star, and I never had the confidence,” he’d confide to another interviewer. “I think it was just part of the insecurities that were engendered in me in my childhood, being a middle child in a large family.” Being “so withdrawn and so shy” and “just, really, a quiet observer of the stars within our family,” he also explained, “created a tension in me that made me need to be appreciated.”

In the Hartmann clan, Martha says, “You had to be kind of a problem or really great to get attention.” John filled the latter role and then some. Athletic, stylish, handsome, and popular with the girls—“He had a huge, huge ego,” Martha says—he naturally attracted a good share of notice, matriarchal and otherwise. “I think my mother favored me in a lot of ways,” he says, recalling how she surreptitiously gave him money despite the family’s strained finances.

At the opposite end of the spectrum was Phil’s younger sister, Sarah Jane. Born October 30, 1951, she was afflicted with a then unknown and long thereafter undiagnosed condition called Angelman syndrome. The rare neurogenetic disorder was first described in the mid-1960s by an English doctor named Harry Angelman and is characterized by hyperactivity, frequent laughing and smiling, stunted intellectual growth, and certain behaviors associated with autism, such as hand-flapping and language difficulties. While on vacation in Verona, Italy, Angelman happened upon a Castelvecchio Museum oil painting called “A Boy with a Puppet.” Its subject’s “laughing face and the fact that my patients exhibited jerky movements,” he said, spurred him to write about the curious condition. But the title of his article, “Puppet Children,” proved quite unpopular among parents. More disconcertingly, Angelman lamented, initial interest in his study waned quickly and it “lay almost forgotten” until the early 1980s.

Especially during the earliest years of her life, Sarah needed nearly constant assistance. Moreover, no hospital was equipped to properly care for her. So Doris made the decision: they’d keep her at home and do it themselves. That arduous undertaking lasted for a physically straining and emotionally draining half-decade, during which period Doris’s energies were almost singularly channeled into Sarah Jane’s care. Along with their mother, Nancy and Martha bore the brunt of Sarah’s caretaking. Phil watched and listened and absorbed. “She was really a handful,” remembers Nancy, whose Phil-sitting responsibilities were passed to Martha soon after Sarah’s birth. “For a long time we thought she was just deaf.” Her immune system was highly compromised, too. “She was in my room with me,” Nancy says, “and every time she’d get sick, there would be a convulsion and a trip to the hospital.”

Nancy suspects that Phil and eventually Paul “might have fallen through the cracks some days” because of Sarah’s dire condition. She required two people to dress and feed her. And her food had to be specially prepared beforehand due to an underdeveloped swallowing reflex. Because John was older than Phil and better able to process the chaos, he found Sarah’s disorder deeply disquieting. “It was a very,
very
hard thing to deal with. And I can’t say I dealt with it very well. My sister, Nancy, was a saint about it. My mother was a saint about it, too.”

Given the opportunity, Phil might have told Doris he was sorry.

“The only thing Phil ever said to me about Sarah Jane is he thought it was his fault,” John says. “You don’t know what it means when you’re little and you’re centered in your own universe, and he thought what was wrong with her had something to do with him.”

The stress of raising Sarah without professional assistance took its toll most acutely on Doris. “She was run through the ringer,” Nancy says, and eventually had “kind of a little breakdown and ended up in the hospital for a good long rest.” That’s when Rupert’s brother, Rev. Edward J. Hartmann, leveraged his role as the family’s “spiritual head” and demanded that Sarah enter a facility that was better equipped to address her various health issues. “We couldn’t keep her well,” Nancy says. “She picked up every bug that we’d bring home from school, and so she was in and out of hospitals all the time and she needed so much specialized nursing care. We just weren’t able to provide it.”

In later years, while married to his second wife, Phil occasionally discussed Sarah and the feelings of worry and shame he’d dealt with as a confused boy living with a sibling who was utterly helpless and seemed hopelessly damaged. Phil also lamented that because Doris kept having babies—daughters Mary and Barbara Jane came after Paul—throughout his high school years, Sarah’s absence did little to re-focus her gaze upon him since she remained preoccupied both with child rearing and one moneymaking venture or another to help fill the never-brimming family coffers.

The daughter of a seamstress and a rogue father who split when she was young, Doris Hartmann (née Wardel) hailed from the working-class Canadian town of Port Dover, on the banks of Lake Erie, where her mother Ethel ran a boarding house for fisherman. Prior to that Ethel worked in Detroit at the Florence Crittenton home for unwed mothers, making layettes (infant ensembles that included gowns receiving blankets, bonnets, and booties) and maternity clothes. Later, while living with her grandkids, Ethel made most of their apparel and even their underwear. “She could look at a dress and make it without a pattern,” Nancy says. “Just incredibly talented.” Ethel’s sister was similarly skilled. Their creativity was passed down to Doris.

A self-taught painter and sketch artist who always dressed smartly, Doris ran a beauty parlor out of the Hartmann home in Brantford using a converted space near the front entrance. Patrons sometimes bought her artworks, which she made during limited spare time and put on display. Eventually she relocated her business to a small building nearer to the center of town. Though never a gold mine, its profits nicely and necessarily supplemented her husband’s modest income. “She was in charge,” John says. “She was the one you’d consider tough.” His ex-wife saw the same quality, albeit in later years, remembering Doris as “incredibly creative, artistic, bright—and, boy, you didn’t want to cross her, because she’d let you know it and she’d tell you exactly what she thought.” John, however, can’t recall ever witnessing any overt friction between his parents. “It’s not Canadian to fight in front of others,” he says. “At the worst of times I never saw them fight or even argue. Doris ran the show and we all went along.”

She had a softer side, too, particularly when it came to her treasured boys and cherished clients. “She was a river to her people,” John says. “They came to her beauty parlor not just to get their hair done, but to get her advice and counsel and philosophical direction. She took care of a lot of people and got a lot of respect.” Adds Paul Hartmann, “My mother was a real entrepreneur. She could turn a garbage can into art. People in our family were always real diligent, hard workers. They knew the meaning of a good work ethic.”