You Might Remember Me The Life and Times of Phil Hartman (22 page)

Screenwriting, of course, didn’t butter Phil’s bread.
SNL
did. And with a presidential election looming, incumbent George H. W. Bush and his chief challenger Clinton became bigger targets than ever for Carvey, Phil, and the
SNL
writers. If Clinton won, Carvey told his friend, it would “put you on the map.” There were many months to go before that
might
happen, however, and so Phil bided his time and spread his glue liberally. Increasingly, he reveled in his “Glue” status and was acutely aware of how colleagues on the show perceived him. Hooks, who left in the spring of 1991 to join the cast of CBS’s
Designing Women,
is one of them. “He didn’t flaunt it,” she says of Phil’s Glue-ness, “but oh, yeah, he knew.” Newer players, like Sweeney, Chris Farley, Chris Rock, David Spade, and Adam Sandler all looked up to him as a sage of sorts and an avuncular figure—a guy who’d been around the block. “Phil was a mentor,” Rock told
Playboy
. “He was the most prepared guy at
Saturday Night Live.
He could also show you about the good life. Sometimes he’d call me into his office and say, ‘Hey, look at this picture of my new boat. Hey, here’s the house I’m buying. You work hard, you can get this, too.’” Jay Mohr, who joined the cast in 1993, “never heard any gossip about him, positive or negative. Ever. From anyone. He was easy like Sunday mornin’. He just came in and got it done and left. He was like a closer in baseball.”

To the sweet and eager-to-please Farley, Phil was a big brother and father figure combined. “How’m I doin’, Glue?” Farley would ask as he plopped down in the makeup chair next to Phil’s. “He kept an eagle eye on Chris, which was good,” Farley’s mother Mary Anne says. “And Chris listened to him, which was even better.” Older brother Tom Farley Jr., who spent time with Chris and Phil at
SNL,
thinks the two got along so well in part because of their down-to-earth personalities. They palled around a bit off the clock, too, making treks to the ponds of Central Park, where Phil loved to watch and operate toy sailboats. They also went skiing in Stowe, Vermont. Concerned that his oversize co-star wouldn’t be able to keep up, Phil was initially reluctant to invite him along. When they arrived in Stowe, however, the Wisconsin-bred Farley—whose boyhood winters were filled with skiing and hockey—tore up the slopes to Phil’s great surprise. On another occasion, Phil squired a gaggle of Farleys—Tom, his then-wife, their very young daughter, Chris, and mother Mary Anne—to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where he proceeded to act as docent. “I was blown away by the guy’s intelligence,” Tom says of Phil’s off-the-cuff tour. “He was teaching us: ‘Everybody knows about Rembrandt, but this guy here was a contemporary, and look what he did that was different than Rembrandt.’ And I’m like,
What
?”

Back in the cauldron of 30 Rock, Phil was always a source of strength and confidence for Farley and others. “David Spade told me once that you had to work with the writers to make sure that you were in the sketch,” Tom Farley says. “And Phil didn’t have to do that.” Meanwhile, though, young bucks like Spade, Adam Sandler, Rob Schneider, and Chris Rock were doing whatever they could to be seen. As ever, Phil stayed out of the fray.

“The worst things happened behind the scenes: the competitiveness, the heartbreak of working very hard on something and then having it cut, and not knowing if somebody had sabotaged it or not,” he once said. “There was a lot of intrigue. It was a very politically charged arena, and anyone who’s been willing to discuss it truthfully talks about the dark side. But I tend to focus on the good part.”

In retrospect, Downey says, observers might have regarded Phil’s buoyant demeanor somewhat warily, figuring it was easy for him to be Mr. Happy-Go-Lucky by dint of his consistent screen time and lighter workload. “He never had to lobby, to struggle, to make demands, to complain because he had absolutely nothing to complain about.”

As
SNL
makeup artist Norman Bryn wrote in his memoir, Phil went “to great lengths to foster” his nice-guy status. But, Bryn adds, he didn’t always treat the crew as he did his fellow actors. Now and then, under pressure from within and without, Phil’s cracks showed. “I’ll never forget my first meeting with him,” says Bryn, who transformed Phil into Clinton, McMahon, Frankenstein, and others. “I met him for a pre-tape one afternoon and I started to put some straight makeup on him, and I’m trying to chat him up and get some idea of his personality. And he snaps, ‘Broad strokes! We use broad strokes here!’ Because I’m not putting on the makeup quickly enough for him.

“He was quite fussy about his makeup,” Bryn says. “He didn’t want the makeup to be a joke. He wanted it to be part of the character, but he didn’t want that to get the laugh. He wanted film-quality makeup, and that was difficult in a live television situation.”

Bryn also claims that Phil could be jarringly bellicose before going onstage. “He could really shout and yell. I heard him scream at people to get out of the way when he made his way through the
SNL
stage doors. ‘Clear that doorway! Clear that doorway!’” And they always did.

When Bryn groused to his boss, makeup supervisor Jennifer Aspinall, that Phil was “cocky and rude,” she told him not to be offended. When she had extended her hand to shake Phil’s, he’d spat on it. If it was his idea of a joke, she didn’t get it. Although Aspinall was stunned by Phil’s reaction, soon enough the two of them made up and began chatting over coffee. Phil told her about his gun collection and even when he’d banked his first million dollars. “That was a big deal,” she says of the latter. “I remember him feeling like that was a big turning point.”

In the cramped makeup room, where he typically shared space with Carvey, Nealon, Schneider, and sometimes Myers, Phil was always more comfortable with a male makeup artist. “We’re in a very intimate space, and there are people who are more comfortable hanging out with a guy than hanging out with a girl,” Aspinall says. “Touching someone to the degree that makeup people touch their actors, especially on a show like [
SNL
] where you’re doing so many quick changes, is just a very intimate experience. Phil preferred guy-guys.” The one who’d been assigned to Phil before Aspinall took over had been just that—and, as such, a Phil favorite. When he left, Phil was deeply dismayed. And so, after a few weeks of dealing with him herself, Aspinall sensed Phil’s preference and assigned him to Bryn.

His high-stakes job at a major network that depended on ratings for advertising revenue was certainly one source of mood-altering stress, but some of Phil’s darker moments at
SNL
also stemmed from troubles with wife Brynn—not that he often allowed his personal and professional worlds to collide. Most of the time, he compartmentalized his on- and off-camera lives to such a degree that few people knew more than basic and typically sunny details about his family, his cars, his hobbies.

*   *   *

On Saturday, February 8, 1992, Phil became a father for the second time—to a blond-haired daughter named Birgen Anika, whose birth was announced on the air that night by
SNL
guest host Susan Dey. Phil left 30 Rock to attend the birth, Lorne Michaels says, and was back before the show ended. As Dey locked her arm in Phil’s during the show’s closing moments and proclaimed the good news for all to hear, he tried and failed to stifle tears. He choked up, too, when he called Lynne Stewart to tell her how hopelessly smitten he was with his little girl. “I didn’t fully experience my capacity to love until I had children,” Phil later said. “And then I sensed this complete unconditional love in myself.”

Not long after that joyous occasion, however, Phil’s mood again turned grim. Early one Saturday night, he dropped into Bryn’s makeup chair at
SNL
and vented. “Well, Norm, looks like the wife is gonna
divorce
me!” he said in a voice that sounded more like one of Phil’s smarmy characters than Phil himself. At first, Bryn thought he was kidding; Phil’s pale complexion convinced him otherwise. According to Bryn, Phil and “the wife” had just finished arguing by phone, which sometimes happened before eight
P.M.
dress rehearsals, and Phil was in no condition to perform. Uncharacteristically, he even flubbed some lines during the pre-show taping. “She would push his buttons,” Bryn says. “Sometimes it was major, sometimes it was minor.” Bryn thought it best not to further agitate Phil in his already agitated state. Fortunately, only simple makeup was required for an “Anal Retentive Chef” sketch—which Bryn says Phil uncharacteristically botched during dress rehearsal. The reason strolled in around ten
P.M.
, ninety minutes before air time, wearing a sexy black cocktail dress: Brynn. She and Phil argued in front of the eighth-floor elevators, and then Phil returned to the makeup chair for a pre-broadcast touch-up. “Looks like I staved it off
this
time, Norm,” a disheveled Phil blurted.

Whether Phil’s workaholic ways played any part in Phil and Brynn’s tiff that evening is anyone’s guest, but it was always a bone of contention between them. Brynn wanted him home more often. There were two kids now, and she had help from a nanny—after Birgen was born, Brynn hired a succession of them, all female and all plump (Hartmann men, Phil’s niece Ohara Hartmann says, aren’t attracted to plump women)—but Phil’s long hours at work caused resentment and friction. “Phil had a weird marriage,” Chris Rock has said. “He was always going through some shit with it, and I never liked to spend time with them as a couple. Every now and then, he’d talk about it. I remember him saying, ‘OK, if I lose half my shit, I’ll have to be on [
SNL
] another three years.’”

Brynn craved more communication as well as more paternal involvement from Phil, and she let him know it—not always at convenient moments. When Paula Grey (formerly Johnston) visited New York with her now ex-husband, Phil hooked them up with tickets to
SNL.
“We were going to meet up with him afterwards and go to the staff party,” she says. “And he called me after the show and he said, ‘I’m really sorry. I can’t meet you for the party because I’m having problems with Brynn and this is the one time we can find where we can get together and talk about things.’”

During an
SNL
sketch in which Phil had to wear a bald cap that required twenty or so minutes to properly fit and secure, Norman Bryn went looking for him after Phil failed to show up at the makeup room. As Bryn approached Phil’s dressing room door, he could hear him talking on the phone. Bryn knocked anyway. When Phil answered, he seemed to be in a flustered state. Bryn reminded him about the bald cap. Phil told him he’d be along shortly. The door shut. “They were having one of their tiffs,” Bryn says, claiming he could hear Phil’s end of an “animated discussion” with Mrs. Hartman from the outside. “She’d nailed him before dress rehearsal and he came to the chair in a very bad mood—and more annoyed that I had come to get him.”

There were breezier makeup room chats, too—about classic movies or Phil’s fear that parodying certain powerful show business figures—Walt Disney chief Michael Eisner and
Tonight Show
sidekick McMahon, to name a couple—could adversely affect his career. “He was afraid of Michael Eisner,” Bryn says. “And he was afraid that playing him adversely, playing him like an idiot on a sketch we did, would affect his career. He was afraid that Eisner, who was very powerful, could make a phone call and ruin your career.” As with Aspinall, Phil and Bryn also talked about guns. According to Bryn, Phil described his Walther PPK .38-caliber semiautomatic pistol (often toted by European police and easily concealed) and “joked” about his wife’s pistol, which Phil said she’d brought to L.A. from Minnesota. As a public figure prone to kidnapping threats and “Manson-style home invasions,” Bryn says, Phil confided that he felt safer having firearms around the house.

*   *   *

Shortly before Mother’s Day in early May 1992, another Hartman—make that
Hartmann
—joined the cast of
SNL,
if only for one night: Phil’s seventy-two-year-old mom Doris. Having been flown in with Rupert from San Diego (avid golfers, they were then living on the course at Shadowridge Country Club in the San Diego suburb of Chula Vista) to New York’s JFK airport a week or so early, they were put up at the Omni Berkshire and ferried via limo (“at our beck and call all week,” she later bragged) to 30 Rockefeller Center, where Doris rehearsed and was made ready for her close-up. Gathering with the mothers of hosts and cast members past and present—including Billie Carvey, Marlene Jackson, Bunny Myers, Jeri Sweeney, Kathleen Nealon, Rose Rock, and Mary Anne Farley, the latter of whom became a close friend and pen pal—she taped a tribute called “All the Best for Mother’s Day,” which aired on May 10. Doris’s paycheck, minus taxes and other deductions, came to $691.50, which she planned to spend on “something really special.” “It was a really good group of ladies,” Mary Anne Farley says, “and Doris was like the mother hen of us all. She took care of us. And she was sort of a pro. We’d say, ‘Oh, we’re so nervous, we just can’t do this,’ and she’d calm us all down. She was just a great, great lady.”

During their stay in New York, Phil introduced his parents to Phil Donahue (at Donahue’s insistence) and showed them some sights, including the Statue of Liberty. Doris and Rupert also attended
The Will Rogers Follies
and spent time with their grandchildren, three-year-old Sean and ten-week-old Birgen. “It’s been the thrill of a lifetime,” Doris said afterward. “Philip kept saying, ‘Mother, I’m going to bring you to New York.’ And he did.” In a short, typed thank-you note, Michaels told her, “You’ll always be welcome at Saturday Night Live. P.S. Now we know who the real talent is in the family.” Doris and her fellow comedy matrons returned the following May for a repeat performance.

*   *   *

That summer, Phil was appointed honorary sheriff of Encino—a post previously held by John Wayne and other area luminaries. He also continued his work on
The Simpsons,
contributed to a few other animated projects, and played small roles in two movies:
CB4
(with Chris Rock and Khandi Alexander) and
So I Married an Axe Murderer
(with Mike Myers). A bit part in
Coneheads
(with Dan Aykroyd and Jane Curtin) was forthcoming. “My name is John Johnson. But everyone here calls me Vicky,” Phil announces as a humorless and possibly psychotic Alcatraz park ranger in
So I Married an Ax Murderer.
While leading a tour group through the infamous prison, he stops to tell a story about the convict Machine Gun Kelly, who in a “jealous rage” cut out the eyes of his “bitch” with a makeshift knife, “or
shiv
.” Vicky’s history lesson continues: “And as if this wasn’t enough retribution for Kelly, the next day he and four other inmates took turns pissing into the bitch’s ocular cavities. [Beat, tone brightens.] This way to the cafeteria!”