You Might Remember Me The Life and Times of Phil Hartman (36 page)

According to police records, Muto explained that the high level of cocaine in Brynn’s urine could indicate use over a day or day and a half prior to her death. The level of cocaine in her blood also signified a recent ingestion. And while the postmortem amount in her system was not inordinately high, Muto said at the time, it would have been “extremely high” were the results backed up (extrapolated) four to five hours. Today, though, Muto insists that extrapolating the levels of cocaine in Brynn’s system makes absolutely no sense to him. “You can’t even do that,” he says. “How do I know what she was doing? That’s speculation.” There is, he adds, no way to tell when Brynn used cocaine (it has a short half-life but can linger in the urine for days) or how much she ingested, and thus no way to determine how high she might have been at the time she killed Phil.

And so, despite her personal issues and possible motives, definitive reasons for why Brynn took her husband’s life and then her own remain frustratingly elusive.

*   *   *

Ten days after
SNL
aired a June 13 tribute to Phil that included some of his greatest sketches and was assembled by Robert Smigel, Hartmann family members met with LAPD Robbery/Homicide detective Dave Martin, who filled them in on investigation details and addressed their concerns. On the subject of Ron Douglas and the extent of his involvement, Martin shot down reports that painted Douglas as being “some type of real villain … When I talk to him, I don’t get that impression.” Paul went so far as to laud Douglas for stepping up in a very tense situation and getting Sean out of the house. Shortly after that meeting, the Studio City stuntman was dropped as a suspect. He had simply been in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Brynn, of course, was a key topic as well. Although Paul and Doris wondered what role the emotion hatred might have played in her shocking actions, Doris also called Brynn “the most gracious little lady that I had ever met.”

She was far less kind about the voracious media.

“I think they’re taking a lot of care for an eighty-year-old mother to hear that her son’s [had] his head blown [off], you know? Especially when we just lost Dad [four] weeks before. We didn’t need that. I think the media should really be called on the carpet by the police. They have no business…”

Paul interjected. “It’s freedom of the press, Ma. It’s part of the Constitution. Can’t fight that.”

“Oh.” Doris seemed surprised.

“It’s OK, Mom,” John said. “That’s part of the system.”

“Well, I just think it’s
wrong
and I think someone should fight it,” she replied.

“You can’t change the Constitution,” Paul emphasized. “Freedom of the press is freedom of the press.”

“But you don’t have to participate,” John added.

“We didn’t,” Doris said.

“We’re not in the papers, we’re not on TV,” John continued. “Because we didn’t play the game.”

“And you think it’s all right?” Doris asked. “Now, what if I had fallen with a heart attack in shock? Would you have been upset about it?”

“Yes, I would,” John told her. “And I’m upset about the whole thing, Mom. But you’ve gotta understand that we have to deal with realities … It’s over now, at least. You’re going to hurt for a long, long, long,
long
time. But at least we don’t have to go through court and [Brynn] being tried in front of us [as] the kids are crying out … So it’s been handled the way it should be. The police cannot control the press. It is a Constitutional right that you get the benefit of every day—believe me. If we didn’t have freedom of the press, we’d have big trouble like they do in places where they don’t. It’s like a double-edged sword. When they print nice things about Phil, it feels good. When they print horrible stuff, it feels bad. Now, they thrive on the horrible stuff. They sell more papers if it’s horrible.”

“That’s because people have this thing about misery loves company,” Paul said. “People are miserable, and when they see more misery than they’re experiencing [themselves], it makes them feel good. It’s a real simple thing, you know?”

“Mom, you just have to ignore it,” Mary urged, “because its all bull … Let’s focus on the positive and the good.”

John agreed. “We have to move forward and have a life. That’s what Phil would want us to do.”

*   *   *

The biggest tribute to Phil was held on July 14 at L.A.’s Paramount Theatre, a former 1920s movie palace. Scores of friends, acquaintances, family members, and colleagues gathered to pay homage, including First Brother Roger Clinton and his Secret Service bodyguards. Several people who were especially close to Phil personally or professionally shared funny and touching memories of him. Jon Lovitz, the emcee, went first and humorously shot down rumors that Phil was gay. He also spoke of working with Phil on
SNL,
Phil’s curiosity and enthusiasm and the fact that he was never jealous or envious. Next to the term “joie de vivre” in the dictionary, Lovitz remarked, was a picture of his late friend—the man he called his “idol” and “mentor.”

“The day after Phil died, I looked up at the sky and there was a rainbow around the sun,” Lovitz said. “And it was so unusual they talked about it on the radio. An expert said it was sunlight reflecting off of ice crystals in the air, and I knew it was Phil. And he may be gone, but he’s still my friend.”

Lovitz then addressed Phil’s children directly: “Sean and Birgen, they’re still your parents and they can still hear you, and I still feel him inside of me.”

As he continued, Lovitz spoke of a girlfriend’s twelve-year-old son, Charlie, who had died of cancer. When Lovitz had guest-starred on
NewsRadio
in 1996, he told Phil about the boy and how excited Charlie was about life despite his grave illness. “Are you afraid to die?” Charlie was asked. “No,” he replied, “I’m just glad I could be here.” When Phil heard that, Lovitz remembered, he “burst out crying and tears just flew out of his eyes. And he’s like, ‘Yeah, that’s what I’m talking about. That’s how I feel about life.’”

Lovitz went on to read Henry Van Dyke’s poem “Gone from My Sight,” which employs sailing as a metaphor for dying. It reminded him of Phil, he said, and was helping him through his grief.

I am standing upon the seashore. A ship at my side spreads her white sails to the morning breeze and starts for the blue ocean. She is an object of beauty and strength. I stand and I watch her until at length she hangs like a speck of white cloud, just where the sea and sky come to kneel with each other. Then someone at my side says, “There, she is gone.”

Gone where?

Gone from my sight, that is all. She is just as large in mast and hull and spar as she was when she left my side. And she is just as able to bear her load of living freight to her destined port. Her diminished size is in me, not in her. And just at the moment when someone at my side says, “There, she is gone,” there are other eyes watching her coming and other voices ready to take up the glad shout, “Here she comes!

Purposely or not, Lovitz omitted the poem’s three concluding lines:

And that is dying …

Death comes in its own time, in its own way.

Death is as unique as the individual experiencing it.

Following a montage of his best comedy moments, Jan Hooks—Phil’s waltz partner in their “Love Is a Dream” sequence and his co-star in so many other sketches—took to the stage and, choking back tears, addressed Phil through a letter she had written.

“My dear sweet Sandy,” she began, calling Phil by a nickname she’d given him at
SNL
based on the color of his hair. “How I wish I could have one more dance with you.” Hooks thanked him for his steadfastness as an acting companion, praised his consistent commitment to character, and marveled at his grace under pressure. She lamented his violent death, too, but felt confident he was at peace.

When Paul Simms’s turn came, he talked about Phil’s smiling fortitude in the face of mildly rigorous stunts he was made to perform, such as painting his entire body blue and being suspended from wires as though he was floating in outer space. One of those stories elicited a laugh from either Sean or Birgen, Simms says, which made him feel a bit better.

Jay Leno spoke of his and Phil’s Jack Benny banter—backstage at
The Tonight Show,
in restaurants, or wherever they happened to encounter one another: “Oh,
Jay
!” “Oh,
Phil
!” He recalled, too, the time they talked about their deceased fathers and the way Phil could save even the worst sketches from fizzling. “There are certain people you want to grow old with,” Leno said, “and he was one of those people.”

During John Hartmann’s turn at the microphone, he spoke of his and Phil’s joint birthday blowouts (they were both born in late September) and the time he almost shot out young Phil’s eye with his new Red Rider BB gun. Of emigrating from Canada and farting contests in their boyhood bedroom. And, as ever, he did not shy away from darkness, prompting one friend to remove Sean and Birgen from the room.

While Brynn might not have been “the very best wife or the very best mother,” he said, neither should she be defined as a killer. On the contrary she should be praised for her “grace.” As for what it all meant—the tragedy of May 28, the shattered lives in its wake—John was matter-of-fact.

“Nothing. It means nothing. It’s just what happened one day in the West. They were victims of the same accident. There is no one to hate and no blame to be laid.
I beg you to forgive her.
So put this incident in your past and close the door. Forget—if you can.”

Doris Hartmann closed out the tribute, thanking her children for their support and the various people who had helped Phil throughout his life and career. “My whole family basked in the limelight and grace of Phil’s life,” she said. “It was wonderful. Now the light is out and an awkward night has fallen on our time. And we will
never
be the same.”

As she left the stage, singer-songwriter Jackson Browne—there at the request of his old acquaintance John Hartmann—sat at a piano and played his melancholy ballad “For a Dancer.” He wrote the song for a friend of his who died in a fire, Browne has said. The friend was a dancer, an ice skater, a tailor, a painter, and a sculptor—a real Renaissance man. “He had this great spirit,” Browne recalled, “and when he died, it was a tragedy to everyone that knew him.”

Keep a fire for the human race

Let your prayers go drifting into space

You never know what will be coming down

Perhaps a better world is drawing near

And just as easily it could all disappear

Along with whatever meaning you might have found

Don’t let the uncertainty turn you around

Go on and make a joyful sound!

Into a dancer you have grown

From a seed somebody else has thrown

Go on ahead and throw some seeds of your own

And somewhere between the time you arrive

And the time you go

May lie a reason you were alive

But you’ll never know.

As mourning for Phil continued in the months after his death, some business realities had to be dealt with as well. First and foremost, NBC and the folks at
NewsRadio
had to figure out whether to continue the series or pull the plug. At the network’s hit comedy
3rd Rock from the Sun,
Phil had appeared in the season finale and was due to return for the next season’s opener, but his part had to be rewritten and recast. Over at
The Simpsons,
creator Matt Groening and other show honchos—stunned and heartbroken when they heard the awful news—decided to honor Phil by retiring his characters. Lionel Hutz and Troy McClure, in particular, would be sorely missed. Since Groening had also cast Phil in his new Fox animated series
Futurama
—for which Phil had come in to audition about a week before his death, even though Groening and executive producer David Cohen told him it was unnecessary—shifts would have to be made there, too. The show’s character Zapp Brannigan, to be voiced by Phil, was taken over by
The Ren & Stimpy Show
’s Billy West and performed in the same arch style Phil had originally intended. Another character, Philip J. Fry (also voiced by West), is Phil’s namesake. A planned sequel to the Sony PlayStation game Captain Blasto, which hit stores in early May and features Phil’s voice in the title role, was scrapped as well.

On the film front, Joe Dante’s animated–live action hybrid
Small Soldiers
was due out from Dreamworks on July 10. Already in the can, with Phil in the central role of toy soldier–beleaguered suburban dad Phil Fimple, its TV promos were recut to exclude Phil so as to avoid associating real-life tragedy with make-believe comedy. A temporary
Small Soldiers
ride at Universal Studios was also revamped to exclude Phil’s audio portion. His co-star, Kirsten Dunst, tearfully rerecorded her portion.

NBC and
NewsRadio,
however, were in the biggest quandary of all. By that point the show’s ratings had plummeted, and now its lynchpin was gone. A week or so after Phil died Simms invited the cast and various other show staffers over to his Bel Air home. There, they swapped Phil stories and—with a nudge from show producer Brad Grey—Simms spoke to the group. “Well,” he began, “Phil’s dead.” Wincing soon gave way to laughing. Simms also conversed privately with Grey, assistant producer Julie Bean, and director Tom Cherones about how best to handle the shocking turn of events. “Tom, to his credit, was very forceful,” Simms says. “He said, ‘We’ve got to keep doing the show. It’s not about people’s jobs. It’s not about the money.’ He basically said, ‘[Brynn] killed Phil. We can’t let her kill the show, too.’ And that sort of meant something to me.”

It soon became clear that the most logical actor to replace Phil on
NewsRadio
was Lovitz. Not only had he guest-starred a couple of times, he was Phil’s close friend. “It would have felt too weird, somehow, to bring in someone who was a brand-new person,” Simms says. “At least with Lovitz, we felt like there was still some connection to Phil. Somehow it made sense in the bigger picture.” According to Simms, during a gathering at the home of musician and Phil’s friend David Foster shortly after Phil died, Dennis Miller cracked, “Lovitz, it looks like you finally got some work now that Phil made room for you.” Lovitz, Simms recalls, was aghast.