You Might Remember Me The Life and Times of Phil Hartman (3 page)

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Though Nancy and John (born in early 1939 and late 1940, respectively) were considerably older than Martha, Phil, and Paul, the Hartmann kids had at least one thing in common aside from shared DNA. They called it “Egg Latin,” a nonsensical language that had become something of a fad in Brantford. Translating words from English involved placing “egg” in every syllable before the vowel and after the consonant. For instance, Phil became Pheggil and Hartmann Heggartmeggann. Phil and company found it especially handy for cussing around their parents without getting busted. “Fegguck yeggou! Eggat sheggit!’”

The
actual
words had no quarter in their staunch Catholic household. Doris (a formerly Methodist convert), Rupert, and their entire brood attended Latin Mass every Sunday morning at nearby St. Basil Church. On weekdays, the kids went to St. Basil Elementary and Brantford Catholic High School. Both were within walking distance. “We had a very prominent prayer life in the family,” Nancy says.

The Hartmann clan’s piety trickled down from Rupert, the son of a devout mother (Helen) who prayed fervently, often with rosary beads in hand. Reserved and stylish, with a pencil-thin mustache like Errol Flynn’s and Brylcreemed hair that was often topped by a feathered fedora, Rupert was an Air Force veteran sans wings (he saw no combat due to peritonitis from a ruptured appendix) and possessed a dry but clever sense of humor. Born in New Hamburg, Ontario, Rupert traversed Canada as a beverage deliveryman for Coca-Cola and covered territories that included the Six Nations Indian Reserve. “He was not an aggressive salesman, but he was brilliant, so he could talk you into anything,” John says. When it came to matters of discipline, a glance from Rupert and the mere words “Do you want me to get the belt?” did wonders to quell misbehavior. “My father was not a heavy-handed man by any means, and it was always just a threat,” Nancy says. “He really had a very gentle nature. I recall very few times when I was disciplined that way and I’m sure the other kids would say the same thing. He was the type of guy who could give you The Look and you knew. Nobody wanted to get The Look from Dad, because we loved him and we didn’t want to ever disappoint him.”

“There was a different mind-set about how you treated children in those days,” John says. “If you were bad, you got punished. You got beaten. And my father hated to do it, I know, but if my mother said that ‘John was bad and he’s got to have a spanking,’ the spanking consisted of his leather belt across your butt. And it was a real beating. Today you’d get arrested for it; your kid would turn you in.”

As far as Paul knows, Phil was whipped only once, after they’d moved from Canada and as the result of a baseball mishap. In general, he says, Phil steered clear of misbehavior at home, thus sparing himself lashings and groundings. “He never got in trouble for anything,” Paul says. “He knew what he had to do to achieve what he wanted, and he adhered to the rules and conditions as much as possible and just did it. He never put himself in jeopardy. That was part of his philosophy. It wasn’t necessary to do that to have fun.”

Back to the baseball mishap: Paul was catching and Phil was batting. As he took his backswing, the bat struck Paul in the face, breaking his nose and knocking out teeth. The younger Hartmann went running home. When Rupert saw his bloodied boy, he was as concerned with Paul’s wounds as he was with the cost of mending them. “Any time you got hurt and it meant going to see a doctor, that cost money,” Paul says. “With eight kids, if everybody gets hurt once a month, that’s X amount of dollars. That doesn’t work out.” Hence the belt. Typically, though, Rupert was a sweet soul who, as John puts it, “never let us down. He always had a job. He always took care of business. He always was there.”

Unlike Doris, who came from modestly educated blue-collar stock, Rupert was raised in a clan of spiritually and intellectually enlightened overachievers. His sister the sister, Mary Andrew (Eugenia), was a respected psychologist and nun who taught at Ottawa University and later the Sorbonne in Paris. “She was a brilliant woman who was very prominent in her order,” John says. Rupert’s priest brother, Edward, was the dean of men at Assumption University in Windsor, Ontario, and a Royal Canadian Air Force chaplain during World War II. Another sister, Clarice, taught high school. Their father John, Phil’s paternal grandfather, was a business entrepreneur who ran a popular tavern as well as the Alpine Hotel in Brantford. John Hartmann (grandpa’s namesake) claims that during World War II, when one’s German heritage was potentially problematic, their grandfather would perch outside his lodge, shotgun in hand, to keep potential marauders at bay. “He was a tough guy and a severe guy,” John says. “You look at photos of him and go, ‘Wow, this is a serious cat.’”

The low-key and traditional Rupert, who walked the line between humorousness and seriousness, was decidedly more laid-back. While he was often introverted in public and around Doris, others recall his coming alive in private. He especially liked to spend time with his boys. When Phil and Paul were younger, he toted them along on various errands. And since Doris never drove, Rupert frequently played chauffeur, shuttling his progeny to doctor’s appointments, school, and wherever else they needed to go.

What few in his family or circle of friends knew was this: Rupert was a drinker, sometimes a heavy one, but he kept his imbibing largely hidden from view. John recalls seeing his dad inebriated only once, when he was fifteen or sixteen, in Canada. “Come with me!” Doris told her eldest son, leading him to the back of their house. “Open the bathroom window.” So John pushed up the window and peered inside. There, passed out on the floor, was Rupert. “I freaked,” John says, “and I started to cry. And my mother said, ‘Oh, shut up! Just get in there and unlock the door!’” John did as he was told. Later on, Phil poked fun at Rupert’s drinking in a sketch that depicted Doris as the stern taskmistress standing over a blacked-out Rupert, who clutched an empty bottle in his hand. Doris and Rupert both laughed and thought it was funny.

Years afterward, John came across a letter Doris had written in the 1980s telling Rupert in no uncertain terms that he was an alcoholic and she was tired of walking on eggshells around him. Now that their last child (Barbara Jane) had left home and Doris had fulfilled her duties as a mother, there was no reason they should continue living together. After Rupert promised he’d quit—by going cold turkey and without the benefit of drugs or Alcoholics Anonymous, John says—Doris gave him another chance. Rupert, John says, kept his word.

When Phil was eight, in March 1957, after a formal visa presentation in Niagara Falls the previous November, half of the Hartmanns—Rupert, Nancy, baby Paul, and Mike the dog—finally left Canada. Their first stateside stop was Monmouth, Maine, where they’d spend the summer. Doris, Martha, and Phil met up with them in June after the kids were done with school. Sarah Jane did not make the trip, and John stayed behind briefly to paint the house on Dufferin (a condition of its sale). “It was a sad parting,” he told the
Brantford Expositor
of his family’s uprooting, “but also an exciting adventure.”

Chapter 2

Phil, age nine, St. Rose Elementary School in Lewiston, Maine. (Courtesy of the Hartmann family)

Having taken a job selling roofing supplies for a company called Ruberoid, Rupert settled his family into a rented four-bedroom tract house on Cochnewagon Lake. The “incredible little cottage,” as John describes it, had a sink pump, no running water and only the lake for bathing. It was there the Hartmann clan began acclimating to their new country. “It wasn’t even a one-horse town,” John says. “It wasn’t even a one-goat town. I don’t even recall a store.” There was, however, a pea-canning factory whose runoff drained into the lake, and a magnificent old Victorian building that housed the Gilbert and Sullivan Festival Theatre, where that summer Nancy worked in the box office and John sold librettos.

In September, just before school started, they packed up again and left for Lewiston, Maine, where Phil entered St. Rose Elementary and the family inhabited a drafty old farmhouse just outside town at 866 Main Street. Most of the kids were felled by the flu that winter, and Mike the dog died after a car struck him on the highway. The Hartmanns remained pet-less from that day forward.

Next up for the nomadic clan: Meriden, Connecticut, and the bottom floor of a two-story duplex at 31 Wall Street. Its upstairs inhabitants—an Italian cop and his wife—fed their housemates hearty dishes from the homeland. But that stay, too, was short-lived. At long last, in early 1958, Rupert and his brood set off for California, where he had secured work as the western states sales representative for Whirlpool. As with the family’s Canada-to-Maine trek, a few of the kids stayed behind to finish school and joined the early arrivers—Rupert, Nancy and Paul—later on in the L.A. suburb of Garden Grove.

One of the best things about their rented home at 7348 West 82nd Street—particularly for ten-year-old Phil and his five-year-old charge Paul, whom he watched over much as Nancy and Martha had him in Brantford—was that Disneyland in Anaheim was within walking distance and cost only a nominal fee for admittance. Sometimes it cost nothing, Paul says, courtesy of a family friend with connections. Knott’s Berry Farm in Buena Park was close by as well, offering rides, live shows, and what Nancy remembers as “the best darn fried chicken west of the Mississippi.”

Soon enough, the family outgrew its Garden Grove home and moved yet again—this time to a three-bedroom, one-bathroom cottage in Westchester, forty minutes or so away. There, in the shadow of an expanding Los Angeles International Airport, Phil and Paul attended St. Anastasia Elementary School. Fortunately, they were able to stay enrolled when the family transitioned to a larger ranch-style place at 8648 La Tijera Boulevard, where Doris set up her artist’s easel on the patio or in one corner of the dining room and painted when limited time allowed. Featuring a walled-in backyard, a handsome patio connecting the house and garage, four bedrooms and two bathrooms, the dwelling and many others in its well-maintained middle-class neighborhood would one day be razed to make way for a new jet runway. Phil’s sister Mary was born on La Tijera, in October 1960. The youngest, Barbara Jane (called Jane), came six years later. Until then, after much wandering, the family stayed put.

When twelve-year-old Phil began attending Westchester’s Orville Wright Junior High in seventh grade, he befriended a kid named Jim Jones. Both of them were Boy Scouts. In early February 1960 the Crescent Bay Area Council made Phil a certified Tenderfoot Scout, and his Troop 77 spent weeklong summer stints earning merit badges, hiking, and sleeping in tents with wooden floors at Camp Emerald Bay on Catalina Island, twenty-six miles off the L.A. County coast. “Water was a big part of it,” Jones says of their camping excursions, during which merit badges were handed out for mastery of sailing and distance swimming, among other disciplines. Jones can’t recall if Phil was present when a group of boys sneaked off (inadvisably) to the nearby garbage dump, where packs of Catalina’s indigenous wild boar population gathered to feast at night, but says that may well have been the case in light of his playful personality. “Phil wasn’t a bad kid, but he was a jokester,” Jones says. “He could entertain everybody and come up with crazy stuff, but not go too far.”

By the time Phil was thirteen or so, with the help of Rupert’s shuttling, he’d taught himself to surf and soon became a regular at several L.A.-area beaches, including Dockweiler, Ballona Creek, Hermosa, Rincon, and Malibu. It was at one of those locations where he first dispensed wave-riding wisdom to brother Paul and then set him on a board to have at it. Paul rode that maiden wave all the way to the beach, where Phil stood drop-jawed and obviously jealous. As Phil got older, secured his own transportation, and moved closer to the water, his love of the sport and its philosophical underpinnings only deepened.

Art, too, became an ever more time-consuming hobby as he grew more confident of skills passed down from his artistically inclined mother and grandmother. Looking back, Paul thinks his and Phil’s semi-regular jaunts to Disneyland and the iconic characters they encountered there might have sparked Phil’s interest in cartooning, which blossomed during his two years at Orville Wright. “Phil could draw anything,” schoolmate Ettore Berardinelli says. Wright is where he got his first taste of theater, too, studying Shakespeare and Molière in drama class, where meeting girls was every bit as important as learning the stage classics. He also won the lead role in Wright’s production of
Li’l Abner.
Appropriately enough for a budding artist, the musical (which had its Broadway debut in 1956) is based on Al Capp’s long-running comic strip of the same name.

Grade-wise, Phil scored mostly B’s and C’s in English, social studies, math, “electric shop,” metal shop, Algebra II, art, music, and senior drama, with only two A’s—for physical education, in which he also earned a couple of C’s—tossed into the mix. Marks for “work habits” and “cooperation” were almost all “Satisfactory” or “Excellent.” The only classes for which he apparently was somehow uncooperative and thus earned an “Unsatisfactory” were mixed chorus during both semesters of eighth grade and social studies that same year. His work habits in the latter subject were equally underwhelming.