You Might Remember Me The Life and Times of Phil Hartman (27 page)

Despite her insecurities, Brynn struck Sweeney and a friend of theirs, now-former
SNL
writer Christine Zander, as a great mother in every way. She was patient, caring, engaged. “And it didn’t seem fake, like, ‘Now I’m in public, so I’m going to show you what a good mom I am,” Sweeney says. “It seemed real. Every interaction I saw, which was a lot—I spent whole days at their house—was admirable.”

As a friend, Zander says, Brynn was “a very sweet and goofy woman” who was exceedingly generous and always had an ear for someone else’s problems. “She wanted all of her friends to be happy”—a state that Brynn herself found increasingly elusive. At one point she became so fed up with Phil’s disappearing act, Sweeney says, that she began talking about filing for divorce. But an attorney friend had said to wait until her marriage hit the ten-year mark, Brynn confided. A solid decade together, combined with the fact that she and Phil had two kids, would assure Brynn of a generous settlement. Sweeney couldn’t be sure, but she thought Brynn might have just been blowing off steam. “She
totally
loved him,” Sweeney says. “I think she
really
loved him.” But as far as Brynn could tell, her less emotionally demonstrative and often passive husband was growing less and less interested—in her, in them. He was no longer glamourized. No longer bursting with joy.

“Brynn needed to have somebody look at her like that. Not just the world, but a guy,” Sweeney says. “And I think eventually Phil didn’t care as much; he wasn’t looking at her like that anymore. It happens in any marriage. You’re not going, ‘Oh, my God!’ anymore. And along with other things, that was a really painful thing for her. He wasn’t as excited to be with her as he had been. And I just felt so sad. Also, I thought, ‘God, Phil doesn’t even see that Brynn is also one of those girls who’s also pretty interesting.’ You’d think ‘he’s got a gold mine,’ because he married her for her looks—and not even so much for her looks, but for how the world looked at him when he was with her. And then that wears off, because it wears off. If it were me, I’d go, ‘Oh, my God, and I accidentally
also
married an interesting person.’ But I don’t think he could see that.”

*   *   *

Besides the Mulherns, Woodard, Maxwell, and Gallen, Dawna Kaufmann says Phil also approached her about writing for
The Phil Show.
Kaufmann’s original notion, which she claims Phil liked, was a Jack Benny–type program with Phil as the Benny-esque ringmaster and Brynn as herself. “Brynn loved me, because no one else was saying, ‘I’m going to write for you both,’” Kaufmann says. After Phil promised to bring Kaufmann’s ideas and sketches (written on spec) to his managers at Brillstein-Grey, weeks went by with no feedback. Kaufmann called him and asked what was happening. Phil told her she’d sit in on a meeting very soon. “And then,” Kaufmann says, “I couldn’t get him on the phone. I couldn’t get his attention.” Kaufmann contacted Brynn for insight; Brynn had none. That Phil was also having conversations with others, including the Mulherns, was unknown to Kaufmann. “It was my idea and we were working together,” she says. “But that was Phil. It wouldn’t have surprised me if he was making little deals on the side with [other] people. That’s not a good thing about him.”

With
SNL
behind him and
The Phil Show
in what seemed like eternal limbo, Phil began to feel adrift. He still did commercial work and episodes of
The Simpsons
(besides McClure and Hutz, his voices on the show had grown to include Moses, Johnny Tightlips, a Mexican wrestling announcer, Smooth Jimmy Apollo, Charlton Heston, and a host of others). He even did some bit parts for
The Ren & Stimpy Show.
But the absence of a regular gig made him anxious. When Martin Short’s NBC sitcom tanked (in the fall of 1994, after only three episodes), Phil told David Letterman, “I got scared. I shouldn’t say got scared. Well, for several weeks I shivered in the corner naked with the lights out. That’s not fear. It could have been the flu bug.” Seriously, though, the process of launching his own program had proved to be more Sisyphean than Phil had anticipated. And so it came as something of a relief when NBC passed on
The Phil Show
while at the same time offering its would-be star an opportunity to return to ensemble acting and his former network in an NBC sitcom pilot called
NewsRadio
.

Created by former Letterman and
The Larry Sanders Show
writer Paul Simms, a Harvard graduate then only in his late twenties, the pilot script (shot in the late fall of 1994) struck Phil as a cut above typical fare when he initially perused it in the offices of Brillstein-Grey. It apparently mattered not that his character, arrogant broadcaster Bill McNeal, had maybe a dozen lines in the entire episode. And while he was then being courted for the lead role in another sitcom on which he would play the father of two kids, Simms’s craftsmanship and the fact that he’d created McNeal (an intelligent but insufferable schmuck) specifically for Phil ultimately won out. “One thing I’ve learned from my tenure at
Saturday Night Live
is that good writing is what it’s all about,” Phil said. “And this one just punched through.” From a more career-oriented perspective, if the show got picked up, Phil could return to doing what he did best: being a comedic actor-for-hire. Spurred by encouragement from Dana Carvey, he took the job.

*   *   *

Before long,
NewsRadio
was green-lighted and Phil was back in the NBC fold at a healthy salary of $50,000 per episode. That totaled out at $350,000 for the truncated first season—which began airing on Tuesday nights in March 1995 and consisted of just seven episodes—and more than $1 million when NBC re-upped for an additional twenty-one episodes that began airing when season two picked up that September. Not bad for an ensemble player on an unproven show in 1995, though in ensuing years Phil’s grumbling that he should earn more reportedly fell on deaf ears. That two of his managers, Brad Grey and Bernie Brillstein, also produced the show probably didn’t help matters.

Scene from
NewsRadio:
Dave Nelson and Bill McNeal talk in the offices of WNYX-AM:

Dave:
In the first place, why would you ask for a raise so big that it would cripple the station?

Bill:
Greed.

Dave:
And what has that greed gotten you?

Bill:
Money.

Dave:
And what can that money ultimately buy?

Bill:
Happiness. But stop trying to cheer me up.

But Phil was no Bill. He was truly happy to be back—and not only for the paycheck, though it was bigger than he could believe. Just being free again to do his thing, unfettered by network red tape, thrilled him. “I don’t feel like it has as much risk as a show with my name on it,” he told
Entertainment Weekly.
“If it tanks, they usually put the blame on the label.” With
The Phil Show
, he admitted in another interview, “I would’ve been sweatin’ blood each week trying to make it work.” Simms also got the sense that Phil relished his suburban home life and hobbies. He wasn’t ready to retire, but neither was he interested in repeating the late nights and hectic pace of
SNL.
After all, he was forty-seven now—at least a decade older than anyone in the
NewsRadio
cast except for co-star Stephen Root, who was only a few years his junior—and uninterested in last-minute road trips or on-set drama. “There were more than a few times when things would come up and these younger cast members would be upset about something,” Simms says. “And Phil was always the one going, ‘Guys, we’re very lucky and doing a great job. I’ve been through it all. Everyone just relax and try to enjoy every day.’ So he was a good stabilizing influence.”

Because
NewsRadio
marked the first time since his Chick Hazard days that Phil had played the same character week after week, director James Burrows had some initial reservations about his hiring. But after Burrows and Phil met, Simms says, concerns evaporated. Phil was definitely the right man for the job.

Set at the number two radio station in New York, WNYX-AM,
NewsRadio
features a cast of eccentric characters that includes (besides Phil’s McNeal) a mega-rich owner (Jimmy James, played by Root), a neurotic station manager (Dave Nelson, played by Dave Foley), a beautiful and highly competent reporter (Lisa Miller, played by Maura Tierney), a goofball reporter (Matthew Brock, played by Andy Dick), a party-girl secretary (Beth, played by Vicki Lewis), a smart and gorgeous news anchor (Catherine Duke, played by Khandi Alexander), and a tough-guy maintenance man (Joe Garrelli, played by Joe Rogan).

“[Phil] knew everybody’s name on the set from the boom operators to the grips to the newest people,” Andy Dick said in 1998. “He would give me all kinds of advice. He called me the most of anyone when I was in rehab recently for thirty days. He called me all the time. I’m also in therapy, and on the set I would rehash my whole therapy session with Phil because I felt he could give me a second opinion. He would give me the emotional second opinion.”

The set was freewheeling, laid-back, and atypically democratic. And ratings mattered not in the early going, only doing solid work. But it took several months for Phil, who toted around scripts with his scenes neatly tabbed, to fully gel with the cast and acclimate himself to a workplace that was as relaxed and team-oriented as
SNL
had been stressful and cutthroat. Even into his second season, he clung to a sort of battle mentality. “We had to kind of beat Phil up the first couple of years,” Root says. “He came from
Saturday Night Live
, where you had to fight like a tiger to get your stuff on. Whereas you came into our thing and somebody went, ‘Oh, that’s funny. Why don’t you use this, Phil?’ And he’d go, ‘What are you talking about? You’re giving me jokes?’ He was completely not used to that. So we really had to go, ‘Phil, Phil, just go back to zero. We’re all going for one goal here.’ And then he got it and it was just the best.”

When Vicki Lewis watched Phil perform, she “sensed in him a rage … I don’t know many men who don’t have that, but I could see that under the surface. He never raged
at
anybody, but he had a strong point of view and he could get frustrated and put his foot down. He seemed too smart to me and too logical to me, at times, to be an actor. And I think that’s what made him particularly funny in the way that he was funny.”

In the early days, Simms says, some of the actors complained that Phil seemed to be getting special treatment—because he
was
getting special treatment. But Simms says it had nothing to do with Phil’s ties to Brillstein-Grey, which produced
NewsRadio
in partnership with Universal Studios, and came entirely from him. “Maybe I’m old-fashioned,” he says. “We were a bunch of kids and he was a grown-up, and you show some respect. Also, I probably rewarded him a little more in ways, because you want to reward the guy who’s calm and cool when people are flipping out about whatever the problem of the day is.”

As a favor to director Tom Cherones, who arrived about halfway through season two and stabilized operations (until then different directors came and went, with a somewhat disorienting effect), Phil occasionally acted as bullhorn. “I don’t like to shout,” Cherones says, “but he would do it for me. So whenever anyone would be laughing and joking [between scenes], he would be the one to say, ‘Stop playing, boys and girls! Let’s do the work!’” Between takes, Phil doodled on Bill McNeal’s desk blotter.

Like Simms, Lewis was also respectful of Phil’s grown-up status and says he was never begrudged his absence from group shenanigans. When, for instance, several cast members and writers stayed up all night drinking and screwing off following an awards show or after a season wrapped, Phil was not part of their gathering. And when late morning came and they were all “sweating like rapists” and spontaneously en route to Las Vegas for more gleeful cavorting, Phil was nowhere to be found. When he did stick around, it was never for long. Occasionally he used Brynn as an out—not just from after-hours antics, but in general—announcing in a wisecracking way that he had to “get home to the old ball-and-chain.”

In keeping with his elder statesman status, he also gave Lewis investment advice. “This doesn’t last,” he told her when the show got rolling and actors began to buy clothes and cars and homes. “I was very young emotionally and it was my first sitcom, so I tended to revere him,” she says. “And that kept me from being comfortable.” Phil also “set a healthy boundary,” whereas some of his colleagues’ boundaries—Lewis’s included—were less defined. “It was almost like the first time we had had fun in a group in our lives,” she says. But the tight bonds that formed sometimes were detrimental to outside relationships. Bringing significant others around the set was awkward, Lewis recalls, “because they didn’t fit in and nobody went out of their way to let them in.”

While Phil began
NewsRadio
as a star of some renown thanks to his long stint on
SNL,
he was a dedicated ensemble player from the start. So were the rest of his cohorts, all of whom were quick studies that could hold their own in any given scene. Phil knew it and was delighted. He’d logged enough time as The Glue. “Not since
Taxi
has there been a show with so many performers capable of just waltzing out there and swatting one out of the park,” he proclaimed not long after the show began airing. There’s a lot of affection between the cast members, too, which is another thing you can’t take for granted. Everyone seems to genuinely like and respect each other, so it’s a very pleasant work environment.”

Phil had a big hand in making it so. Playful and lighthearted, but with a comic’s cynical edge, he kidded around with cast and crew alike, proclaiming, “This is the money shot!” or “Watch and learn!” Phil’s
CB4
and
Greedy
co-star Khandi Alexander was often paired with him in the set’s raised and glassed-in broadcast booth. Over time they developed an easy rapport in which shit-giving was frequent. “This has to be taken in the right tone,” says Alexander, who is black, by way of introducing a Phil anecdote. “We were in the fishbowl and the whole show was going on, so we would stay in character and have our own show up there to keep us interested. And I remember one time in particular, Phil was just staring at me and it was driving me crazy. Like, ‘What are you staring at?’ And he just looked at me and went, ‘You know, looking at you makes me long for slavery.’” At which point Alexander laughed like hell.