You Might Remember Me The Life and Times of Phil Hartman (35 page)

Mark Pierson shared some memories, as did Maxwell, who mentioned Phil’s ever-changing looks during their time together on Melrose. One year he was a surfer dude talking about “bitchin’ waves,” the next he was a cowboy driving a pickup truck. And one day, when Maxwell offhandedly suggested he and Phil get the hell out of town, join the Merchant Marines, and travel to South America, Phil thought for a few seconds and replied in all seriousness, “Yeah. Let’s do it.”

Lovitz also spoke. According to Strong, he made a point of telling everyone that he thought Phil had been sleeping when Brynn shot him—that he had died without feeling any pain. Others have expressed the same hope. “From the wounds on Phil, it went fast,” investigating detective Dave Martin told members of the Hartmann family some weeks later. “Phil was dead instantly.
Instantly
. And my theory is that from the position in his bed, he was probably sleeping and he never knew what happened.” The brutal truth, though, is that no one knew—and no one knows—which shot came first. Not the detectives, not the coroners—no one but Brynn.

*   *   *

The next morning, June 4, 1998, friends and relatives of Phil and Brynn (including their children, Sean and Birgen) arrived at the imposing gates of Forest Lawn Memorial-Park and Mortuary in Glendale, California. The final resting place of George Burns and Gracie Allen, Jimmy Stewart, and Humphrey Bogart—and, more recently, pop star Michael Jackson—it is so legendary a locale that even Pope John Paul II dropped by during his visit to L.A. in 1984.

A media throng had already formed and photographers tried to capture images of the mourners. And though they were barred from tailing the funeral procession, a couple of them tried and failed to sneak in. (Security was so tight, in fact, that John Hartmann’s ex-wife Lexie was detained until her identity could be confirmed.) After passing an initial checkpoint, cars and limousines were allowed to proceed up a tortuous main road, past lush landscaping and rows upon rows of flat grave markers, to Forest Lawn’s venerable Church of the Recessional, where Phil and Brynn would be memorialized. Built in 1932, the handsome 150-seat stone structure is situated on a precipice that overlooks the Los Angeles skyline. A replica of the tenth-century Parish Church of St. Margaret in the Sussex, England, village of Rottingdean, where the novelist and poet Rudyard Kipling once resided, it is also a popular wedding spot—one that takes its name from Kipling’s poem “Recessional.”

God of our fathers, known of old—

Lord of our far-flung battle-line

Beneath whose awful hand we hold

Dominion over palm and pine—

Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet,

Lest we forget—lest we forget!

Cresting a hill where the church stands, the limousines took turns pulling into a white tent that shielded disembarking passengers from telephoto lenses in helicopters overhead—and wherever else prying eyes might lurk. The Hartmann and Omdahl families, along with other invited guests, sat in dark-wood pews under an arched wooden ceiling. Displayed up front, backlit by a tripart stained-glass window, were large photographs of Phil and Brynn as well as urns containing their ashes

“The dust had not settled and there were a lot of intense feelings going around,” John says. “It was pretty awkward. But I think, by then, the families had more or less accepted their roles, and they were tough. You can’t walk away and you have to deal with it. It was very strained, and I think it might have seemed very bizarre to the [outside] observer.”

As they trickled in, attendees received limited edition copies of a hand-drawn program made by John’s current wife Valerie. Printed on thick stock, with a parchment insert, each one of a hundred was numbered in pencil—a special keepsake from this sorrowful occasion. On its cover, four porpoises encircle the earth. Inside the earth is a blue sea from which leap four more porpoises in perfect alignment. In a blue sky whose horizon melds with the sea, four stars twinkle. Four: Phil, Brynn, Sean, Birgen.

A Service of Memory for Phil and Brynn Hartman
, it reads in large font on front. On back is a passage from John 13:34: “A new commandment I give unto you, that ye love one another.”

On the left inside page in script font:

A
SERVICE OF
M
EMORY

FOR

P
HILIP AND
B
RYNN

H
ARTMAN

Philip Edward Hartmann

1948–1998

Brynn Hartman

1958–1998

Mourners also received prayer cards with a portrait of Phil on one side and a famous passage from University of Oxford divinity professor Henry Scott Holland, titled “Death Is Nothing at All,” on the other. Someone had sent the uplifting words—delivered by Holland during a May 1910 sermon following the death of England’s King Edward VII—to Doris after Rupert’s passing, and she thought them an apt tribute to her middle son.

Death is nothing at all.

I have only slipped away to the next room.

I am I and you are you.

Whatever we were to each other,

That, we still are.

Call me by my old familiar name.

Speak to me in the easy way

which you always used.

Put no difference into your tone.

Wear no forced air of solemnity or sorrow.

Laugh as we always laughed

at the little jokes we enjoyed together.

Play, smile, think of me. Pray for me.

Let my name be ever the household word

that it always was.

Let it be spoken without effect.

Without the trace of a shadow on it.

Life means all that it ever meant.

It is the same that it ever was.

There is absolute unbroken continuity.

Why should I be out of mind

because I am out of sight?

I am but waiting for you.

For an interval.

Somewhere. Very near.

Just around the corner.

All is well.

Omitted was this final portion: “Nothing is hurt; nothing is lost/One brief moment and all will be as it was before/How we shall laugh at the trouble of parting when we meet again!”

The ceremony, rife with elements of the Catholic Mass that Phil had long ago ceased to attend (“Connie Omdahl and I
insisted
on having a priest,” Phil’s sister Nancy says, referring to Brynn’s mother), began with a song performed by famed rock musician and Phil’s acquaintance of many decades Graham Nash, whom Phil had come to know during his tenure at Hartmann & Goodman. Strapping on an acoustic guitar, Nash began to play his poignant solo composition “Simple Man.” Written as a lover’s lament, it was suddenly imbued with new meaning at this funeral for a friend.

I am a simple man

And I play a simple tune

I wish that I could see you once again

Across the room, like the first time.

I just want to hold you,

I don’t want to hold you down

I hear what you’re saying

and you’re spinning my head around

And I can’t make it alone …

During his homily, Friar James Cavanagh assured gatherers that Phil and Brynn were together and at peace in heaven. Not everyone believed it.

As part of John Hartmann’s eulogy, in which he directly referred to the tragic events of May 28, he read a poem he’d penned the previous week after things calmed down a bit and there was time to think. In it, to the puzzlement of some, he referenced the Bear Clan of Native American mythology (the Omdahls), wolves (the Hartmanns), and a three-legged dog (John himself). Its first stanza set the tone:

There lays a puzzle upon the bed

Where a pair of bloods have run out red.

She placed her rubies upon his head

To eclipse the life and light he shed

The night our shooting stars fell dead.

Helping to close the ceremony as he’d begun it, Nash again took up his guitar, stood at the chapel’s center, and sang the well-known Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young hit “Teach Your Children.” It was quite a difficult performance, Nash says, even for a veteran of the stage. He chose the song “because it epitomized the idea of passing along information to [Phil’s] kids and from his kids.”

Teach your children well

Their father’s hell did slowly go by

And feed them on your dreams,

The one they picked, the one you’ll know by.

Don’t you ever ask them why

If they told you, you would cry,

So just look at them and sigh

and know they love you.

Afterward, other family members were invited to speak. Greg Omdahl did so, and Nancy Martino made brief remarks as well. During Paul Hartmann’s remembrance, he foreswore future use of the surfer slang “killer waves.” He and Phil had caught them plenty of times at California’s choicest spots, but the term was now too colored with dark meaning. More prayers followed before the memorial came to a close; mourners filed out into the sunshine and eventually made their way back down the long and winding road. Some of them would converge again at other tributes to Phil in the weeks and months ahead.

Chapter 18

Phil in his dinghy near Catalina, 1990s.

On Monday, June 8, the L.A. coroner’s office released its toxicology report on Brynn. Phil’s body was clear of harmful substances, but based on stomach, urine, and blood analyses, Brynn’s contained cocaine, alcohol (a blood level of .11 percent) and two components of Zoloft—desmethylsertraline and sertraline—in what the coroner’s chief investigator, Craig Harvey, described in the media as “therapeutic levels.” “Between the cocaine and alcohol, the two of them most definitely intensified the other’s effects,” he told CNN. “The Zoloft is kind of a wild card.”

John Hartmann has a different view that he says was informed by the L.A. coroner himself, who told him “cocaine was not even a factor. Although I think he doesn’t understand cocaine, because cocaine is downright evil. He said it was the Zoloft and the alcohol. There are heavy admonitions on Zoloft: ‘Do Not Mix with Alcohol.’ And he said when it hit her brain it exploded, she didn’t know what she was doing, she didn’t know why she did it, and I accept that as true.” But L.A.’s then–chief forensic toxicologist (and now forensic laboratories chief) Joseph Muto calls that conclusion “unfounded.”

Also found at the Hartman home were numerous prescription medications in Brynn’s name: phentermine (an appetite suppressant), methocarbamol (a muscle relaxant), Daypro (an anti-inflammatory), Augmentin (an antibiotic for bacterial infections), diazepam (the same as Valium, for anxiety), minocycline (an antibiotic), cyclobenzaprine (another muscle relaxant), and Zovirax (an antiviral).

As Muto informed police some days later, according to investigative reports, the level of Zoloft found in Brynn’s system when he examined her was “very low.” So low, in fact, that had this not been a high-profile case, he probably wouldn’t have bothered to report the results. Asked about this remark more recently, however, Muto is genuinely confounded. “I would never say that something wasn’t worth mentioning if it weren’t a high-profile case,” he says. “Whatever we find is worth mentioning.”

In May 1999, about a year after Phil and Brynn died, Zoloft maker Pfizer would be named in a wrongful death lawsuit brought by Brynn’s brother Greg Omdahl on behalf of Sean, Birgen, and Phil’s and Brynn’s estates—of which, in their respective wills, Omdahl was named executor. Arthur Sorosky, the doctor who gave Brynn samples of the antidepressant, was sued as well. In Pfizer’s case, the pharmaceutical giant was accused of marketing a drug that, Omdahl’s lawyers claimed, contributed to Brynn’s erratic behavior (part of the torturous and potentially suicide-related condition akathisia from which she might have suffered, but which then did not appear in precautionary statements on Zoloft package inserts) and ultimately violent actions.

“Brynn Hartman did not have a major clinical depression,” the suit alleged in part. “She was dealing with some situational ‘stressors’ in her life and may have thought she needed a ‘pick-me-up,’ and one might argue that she had a chronic, low-grade condition like dysthymia; but she did not have major clinical depression. And, yet, as a result of Pfizer’s aggressive over-promotional activities, she was given Zoloft.”

Describing akathisia in a July 1999 article on
Salon.com
, Peter Breggin, psychiatrist and outspoken opponent of various psychiatric drugs, explained that it could drive someone “into extreme states of irritability, anger, and frustration. People can become more depressed and more despairing; their impulse control loosens and they do stupid things. So the violent impulses that an ordinary person would control come pouring out or even appear for the first time.”