You Might Remember Me The Life and Times of Phil Hartman (4 page)

Upon exiting Wright with the class-voted title of “Happy-Go-Lucky Girl” (classmate and future Charles Manson disciple Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme co-won the category “Personality Plus” with another student), Phil entered Westchester High on W. Manchester Avenue, amid a thriving residential community that sprang from what had been acres of bean fields. Increasingly in need of cash to support his surfing hobby and other teen necessities, he earned extra scratch by tricking out his peers’ trendy three-ring binders (they were clad in a blue denim-like material) with funky designs. He often sketched at home, too, on pads of paper and on far more expansive surfaces. In his La Tijera bedroom, part of one wall and the adjacent ceiling eventually bore a pencil sketch of Auguste Rodin’s renowned sculpture “The Thinker.” Phil jokingly described it to friends as “Oedipus contemplating the death of Rex.”

Berardinelli, one of Phil’s first pals in the area, lived across an alley from the Hartmanns in a house that cost around $33,000—average for those parts. The two met in art class and began hanging out. As Phil’s comedic sensibility continued to evolve, Berardinelli remembers, he often staged small-scale private and public performances during which he mimicked popular comedians of the day. “I just had to open the gate, walk across the alley, and go over to Phil’s house to be entertained,” Berardinelli says. John Hartmann was also a witness. In 1961, struggling to make ends meet as an underpaid junior agent at the William Morris Agency, he briefly moved back home to La Tijera and bunked with his younger brothers. It was there that he began to truly appreciate Phil’s humor. “Phil and I would collect material and try to crack each other up,” he says. “The goal was to get my father pissed off by laughing. Phil made me laugh so hard that my father would pound on the wall and say, ‘Stop that laughing in there!’ I would be shoving a pillow down my throat and Phil would be laughing at the trouble I was in.” Jim Jones saw it, too, in the imitations Phil often did. Walter Brennan, who played Amos McCoy on TV’s
The Real McCoys,
was a favorite—made even funnier when Phil uttered things in character that were totally out of character such as “Goddammit, Lucas!” (as Amos addressing his son Luke). Or “Dag-nabbit, Pepenis!” (As Amos addressing farm hand Pepino). And so on.

But Phil wasn’t all yuks all the time. His often hidden sober side emerged when he felt a close kinship with someone or shared a profound life experience. On at least one occasion a conversation with Berardinelli went beyond goofing and girls to pondering what then, during the height of America’s Cuban Missile Crisis, seemed like the very real possibility of obliteration from on high. As the guys sat in Berardinelli’s car one evening, they had a long heart-to-heart about life and death. “This was like the start of World War III,” Berardinelli says of those tension-filled days. “President Kennedy kind of drew a line in the sand and it was a scary time.”

Perhaps as something of an antidote to the gathering darkness, Phil’s humor was nearly always on display. Far from being the “man of a thousand voices” he’d one day become, his stable of impressions gradually grew to include, besides Brennan, big-screen badass John Wayne. Stand-ups Stan Freberg, Shelley Berman, Bob Newhart, and Jonathan Winters entranced him as well, and he listened to their bestselling albums studiously. During get-togethers with friends, as in the bedroom with brothers John and Paul, Phil performed popular comedy routines verbatim. And while he admired the stammer-punctuated musings of Newhart and the improv-influenced stylings of Berman (who perfected the art of sit-down stand-up from his perch on a stool), the frenetic genius Winters was far and away Phil’s favorite. Before long, he had Winters’s improvised meandering and otherworldly characters down pat.

He must have been immensely pleased, then, to find someone who worshipped the great comic as much as he did. John Sparlan Holloway, nicknamed “Sparkie,” had taken a liking to Phil’s John Wayne impression in their homeroom class and soon they were palling around. An ROTC cadet and future firefighter, Holloway became one of Phil’s closest confidants and remained so for decades to come. “We were devoted [Winters] fans, so once we got to know each other and found out Jonathan Winters was going to be on [a show], we would sit down and plan that out,” Holloway says. “We’d even have a party and get offended that people were still talking when Winters was on.”

They also spent long stretches lounging in cushy black La-Z-Boy recliners at Holloway’s house, where they played records and watched television on his parents’ RCA console. Just for kicks, they turned off the sound on old movies—Hitchcock flicks or
Casablanca,
for instance—and substituted their own silly dialogue. That Holloway was typically game for playing along with Phil’s theatrical shenanigans only strengthened their friendship. One memorable stunt starred Phil as then-president Lyndon B. Johnson and Holloway as one of LBJ’s stone-faced bodyguards. Accompanied by several other school chums, they began at Westchester’s junior quad and made their way toward the senior one. With Phil behind them, fake LBJ musclemen barreled through unwitting students, shouting “Secret Service! Make way for the President of the United States!” Onlookers were baffled, Holloway recalls, because Phil wasn’t yet well known for his imitative abilities. When they arrived at a small stage on the senior lawn, Phil and his sunglasses-sporting cadre ascended a few steps and continued their guerilla performance. Surrounded by a grim-faced security detail, fake LBJ addressed puzzled spectators in his heavy Texas drawl: “Ma fellow Amerrkins, we do not want wohw. We just want to kill all the Nee-gruz.” (“There were a disproportionate number of blacks serving in the military and Vietnam,” Holloway explains, “so it was satire.”)

When they weren’t disturbing the peace, Holloway and Phil bonded over other mutual interests such as cigarette smoking (which they both soon vowed to quit), fast cars (muscle car king Carroll Shelby’s nearby dealership was of particular interest) and their own version of Mad Libs that involved stringing together random words from magazines to form nonsensical phrases. A game called “squiggles” was popular as well. Holloway drew a random squiggly line in red and Phil turned it into a wacky drawing, complete with caption.

To earn cash for dating and smoking and surfing and driving, both got jobs at different locations of a local fast-food chain called Woody’s Smorgasburger—Phil as a grill chef, Holloway as a busboy. Phil also did a stint at Zaff’s Marina Fountain, a surfer hangout in upscale Playa del Rey. Outside of school and work during their junior and senior years, he and Holloway cruised around in Phil’s two-tone blue 1952 Chevy coupe. (Far more devotee than tinkerer when it came to automobiles, Phil never took his father’s advice to go into “body-fender” work. Reasoned Rupert, “People are always crashing cars.”) A seventeenth-birthday gift from Mom and Dad, the Chevy’s keys came hidden in a large but otherwise empty box. Phil jazzed up his mean machine with strips of window fringe called “dingle balls” and adorned its exterior with tiny moons. A chick magnet if ever there was one—not that he needed such bait.

“He could have gone out with anybody,” says Berardinelli, who was more introverted and fared less well on the female front. “And he was a good-looking guy. But it was his personality. He was Mr. Personality. And he was entertaining; he could hold court anytime he wanted. People were drawn to him.” Paula Johnston (now Grey) of Westchester and Kathy Kostka (now Constantine) of Playa del Rey were two of the beauties who caught his eye. With a litany of extracurricular activities that included drama, cheerleading, and student government, and a boyfriend who captained the football team, Paula hung with the so-called “popular” crowd of which Phil was eventually a part, if only in a transient way. Initially something of a theater nerd, he began floating between disparate social groups with ease. One day he was shooting the breeze with jocks, the next he was rehearsing for a school play with fellow thespians. Besides drama, his extracurricular social circle expanded via his participation in art production, the
Westchester Comet
school newspaper (for which he drew cartoons), student government (the senate) and the Boys’ League (whatever that was). “Phil kind of hung with the people that were going places,” Berardinelli says. “I don’t know if I’d call them ambitious. They were just people who kind of had their act together. And they dressed nicer, you know? But Phil could transcend any group.”

Part of him, though, would have preferred to live in another era, and it was around this time he began channeling the rhythms and riffs of hard-bitten detective types from the thirties and forties—Philip Marlowe–esque characters who pondered crimes while slugging down bourbon in dark and smoke-filled offices. Who spoke in cynical rat-a-tat-tat phrases and cavorted with dangerous dames. They were everything Phil wasn’t, which made them all the more appealing.

After an extended period as friends at Westchester High, Phil and Paula considered taking their relationship to the next level. The escalating intensity of Phil’s feelings for Paula are evident in yearbook notes that range from praising her as “about the sweetest girl I have ever known” (1964) to hoping God made her “every wish come true” (1965) to, senior year, expressing “how jazzed I am on you” and his desire “to get to know you a whole lot better.” Still, Paula says, “there wasn’t a lot of chemistry there. It was the old high school ‘let’s kiss and see what we’ve got,’ and nothing came of it.”

Kathy, however, had a “crush” on Phil from the get-go as well as a stronger romantic bond with him. Phil even accompanied her and her family on boat trips to Catalina Island. Like Paula, Kathy was struck by Phil’s charisma and his onstage prowess during school drama productions. And he seemed equally at home with material lowbrow or high. “He could do comedy, but he could also do Shakespeare!” she says. “And that just blew my mind.” He was also the only person she knew in their age group who smoked dope. Self-imposed periods of dormancy notwithstanding, he would do so with ever increasing enthusiasm throughout his life. The grade of weed got better, too.

A couple of times, in spring of 1965 and again senior year, Phil, Kathy, Phil’s Lil’ Abner co-star Judy Thompson, and some other friends appeared on the top-rated and nationally syndicated teen dance party
The Lloyd Thaxton Show,
which emanated from the studios of KCOP-TV in Los Angeles. To convey an idea of its tone, in one episode host Thaxton opened the program perched on a stationary bicycle and lip-syncing (quite skillfully) to “Getaway” by Georgie Fame and the Blue Flames as he briskly pedaled to nowhere. During their appearances, Phil also lip-synced while grooving to the tunes of such famous guest artists as Donovan and Peter Paul and Mary. “If there was something theatrical to do, he would do it,” Kathy says. “And this gave him a platform.”

But Phil’s constant questing for new experiences proved an impediment to his budding love life. In junior year drama class, for which Kathy signed up mostly to overcome her shyness, Phil fell hard for another girl. (He frequently fell, and often hard.) This frustrated Kathy, who had feelings for him and instead was relegated to playing chief consoler when Phil needed nurturing. “It went on and on and on, and he was always having his heart broken,” she says. “But Phil always wanted what he couldn’t have.” He also liked the drama that invariably arose in those situations. And because he regarded the world with an artist’s critical eye, she says, he was “definitely looking for perfection. And that’s why I don’t think he could ever fully land anywhere with anybody.”

When Kathy and Phil had a go at dating their senior year, it proved more difficult than she had anticipated. He needed to be needed, she says, and he told her in no uncertain terms that she had fallen short in that department. Another impediment was Phil’s ever-present veneer—an invisible mask he wore that made it hard to tell where his performer persona ended and his everyday one began. “Phil always liked getting outside of himself,” she says. “He’d always get into a role and I’d lose the Phil that I knew. That was always very interesting for me. Because I knew him at a different level, where we talked and talked and talked. I kind of knew his heart and knew who he was, which I don’t think a lot of people did.” When Phil let his guard down, as he often did with Kathy in the absence of others, it all came pouring out. “He would tell me whatever he was thinking,” she says. “His insecurities, his fears, his ambitions. He was deep and he was very serious.”

Although the teenage Phil exuded ever more self-assuredness and possessed many enviable abilities, Kathy thought he seemed skittish in his own skin and always searching for the next best thing. “I used to call him the True Believer,” she says, “because he kept trying to embody something else, and then he’d go for it all the way. All of a sudden he’d want to be a Zen guy, and he’d study that for a while and be really into it and just jump in with both feet.” That would be his M.O. for many decades to come, whether in the realm of work, relationships, or hobbies: jumping in with both feet. It applied to his spirituality as well. Both early on and down the road, Phil’s endeavoring to comprehend the universe and his place in it was ongoing and could quickly change course. “I don’t know where he finally ended up,” Kathy says, “but I never saw him really take something on and keep [at] it.”

*   *   *

On June 17, 1966, Phil graduated from Westchester with (as per the description on his diploma) “a Major Sequence in Art—College Preparatory.” That evening, he celebrated with fellow classmates at a formal dance on the Disneyland grounds. “As a senior in high school, I made the conscious choice to become an art major instead of pursuing acting,” he said in 1991. “It was largely because my brother [John] had attempted to be an actor and I was exposed to the slimy underbelly of Hollywood life. It was important to me to make a living, because I wanted independence. I didn’t want to get into a career that involved a lot of effort for no return, period.” As he noted in a two-and-a-half-page yearbook inscription to Judy Thompson, he had also changed and matured. He’d experienced “bitterness and sorrow” but was salved by fond remembrances from their “awkward, innocent” past. If ever Thompson—whom he deemed “deep and mature in mind”—wanted to talk, Phil was all ears and ready to “give my thoughts and myself to you.”