You Might Remember Me The Life and Times of Phil Hartman (7 page)

Ever the seeker and always thirsty for knowledge, Phil’s most recent spiritual discovery was the so-called
Urantia Book,
a copy of which he gave to Hagman but likely never read from cover to cover. (He was known to give people books that he himself had never read or merely perused.) Packed with more than two thousand pages, the dense tome—a mashup of science, religion, and philosophy—is said to have originated in Chicago between the mid-1920s and mid-1950s. Its 196 “papers” are divided into four parts and include “The Universal Father,” “The Evolution of Local Universes,” “The Mammalian Era on Urantia,” “The Social Problems of Religion,” and “The Mount of Transfiguration.” Despite his growing spirituality, however, Phil was no holier-than-thou square. After all, this was the summer of ’69. The summer of rock ’n’ roll; the summer of peace and free love.

Throughout June, July, and August, Phil and his musical mates played festivals in Seattle and Oregon as well as several gigs in the L.A. area and one—in early July, with Eric Burdon and Lonnie Mack—at Bill Graham’s famed Fillmore West in San Francisco. They motored to all of them in a dark blue Dodge van—Phil’s lucky van. During an outdoor event in Ashland, Oregon, the vehicle was parked in back of a college football stadium. While the Foo rocked outside, Phil rocked inside. “He got laid in the back of that van,” Les Brown says. For the rest of the day, Phil walked around singing a verse from the Doors’ song “The End”: “Meet me at the back of the blue bus.”

Back in L.A., no injuries were sustained when Phil again stepped in to lend a helping hand (two, actually) during a Foo performance at Thee Experience. Owned by a Jimi Hendrix acquaintance named Marshall Brevitz, the short-lived venue regularly teemed with industry players and was a stepping-stone for many emerging artists (Burdon, Alice Cooper, Poco, Grand Funk Railroad, Joe Cocker) en route to packing arenas and stadiums. The building’s façade sported a massive mural of Hendrix’s head, with the entrance positioned over his mouth. One evening there, likely during the Foo’s three-night stand in late June (they’d already done stints in March and April), Hendrix himself made an appearance and sauntered onstage to jam. “The place was just electric,” Brown says. “Everybody’s going nuts.” Then drummer Buddy Miles, at the time a member of Hendrix’s “Band of Gypsys,” joined Hendrix and began thumping his bass drum with such force that its spurs broke. “Every time he hit the drum, it moved about a foot,” Brown says. Devoted roadie that he was, Phil sprinted onto the stage, got on his knees, and held the instrument in place for the song’s duration. Every time Miles whacked the drum, Phil’s shaggy hair flew up and then flopped down. “I’m surprised he could hear after that,” Brown says. “But he was so in awe.”

In mid-August, when hundreds of thousands of revelers converged on Max Yasgur’s farm in Woodstock, New York, to trip on acid and groove to round-the-clock jamming, Phil and the boys were otherwise occupied; there was plenty to keep them busy in California and elsewhere. Late that year they shared a stage with Janis Joplin, the Byrds, and other rock gods at the Palm Beach International Raceway in Florida. The Foo also had a musically tepid but nonetheless eventful stay in New York City, where Phil heroically (supposedly) prevented a colleague’s potential incarceration. According to Brown, here’s how it went down: Just out of record company meetings, Brown received a concerned call from John Hartmann. “We’ve got a big problem,” John told him, and proceeded to explain that said colleague had been lounging in the lobby of his hotel when he became smitten with a pretty girl in one of the phone booths nearby. Naturally, then, he entered the glassed-in booth next to her and exposed himself. “The girl goes ballistic,” Brown says, “and she’s screaming and yelling.” Once again, it was Phil to the rescue. Grabbing the offending party, he whisked him out of the lobby and up a set of marble stairs that led to the mezzanine. En route, Phil tripped and fell and knocked out his front teeth.

John Hartmann remembers the lost teeth but not much else. In the story he tells, there was no phone booth, no shrieking hottie, and no indecent exposure. “We had smoked a J in our hotel room,” he says, “and dropped a lot of floors to the lobby [in the elevator]. The cannabis and the loss of altitude made Phil black out. We were walking out the door and he twisted slightly to his right and fell into the wall, then did a header face-first into the cement. I was really scared for a minute. When I turned him over I could see he’d lost his two front teeth and was bleeding.” So they hustled up a dentist and got Phil some temporary caps, which he soon had replaced with artificial choppers. While all of this was going down, the band’s hotel room was burgled.
C’est la vie
. Says John, “We were wild and lived in a fantasy land inside the rock ’n’ roll bubble.”

*   *   *

As Phil’s digs in Malibu Colony were located some twenty miles from Westchester, the car-less roadie beach bum rarely went home to visit his parents. Besides, he was having too much fun spending hours each day surfing at the nearby Malibu Surfrider Beach, bedding female Foo fans in his tropical-themed bachelor pad (bamboo walls, oriental rug, colorful mosquito net canopy over a double bed), sketching in his ocean-view art nook, and schlepping amps to venues where he regularly encountered rock legends. “I have never been browner or healthier in all my days,” he wrote to Holloway. Just for grins, Phil also began drawing bawdy and looney comic strips based on Foo members and their exploits.

More important to his budding career as a graphic artist, he designed cover art—a rustic rendering of the trio that resembles a wood etching—for the Foo’s fall 1969 debut album. (The band’s follow-up effort, after guitarist Ron Becker joined in 1971, also features Phil’s handiwork outside and in. An included six-page comic strip booklet, titled “The Foo Story,” tells a comical Genesis-inspired tale of the group’s creation.)

“I feel like a real artist,” Phil wrote to Holloway. “Wow. Sheeeaaaat!”

*   *   *

Only a few months into his Malibu dream Phil passed Gretchen Lewis (now Gettis Blake) and her pet poodle Noodle on the beach by his shack, where they struck up a conversation. Gretchen lived with her affluent dentist father—a “pothead” devotee of astronomer Carl Sagan and philosopher Alan Watts—and his young second wife only three or four doors down. Just nineteen and not long out of high school in Florida, she then worked at an upscale clothing store called I. Magnin & Co. on Wilshire Boulevard. A former member of her high school’s men’s track and field team, Gretchen had previously been engaged to a javelin thrower—a “nice Jewish boy” with whom she’d broken up for lack of chemistry.

After introducing themselves and making small talk, she and Phil grew more comfortable in each other’s presence and ended up hanging out on an ocean-carved sand ledge until well past sundown. “I’ve never met anyone like him in all my years,” Gretchen says. “You just felt like he was a lie detector. What you saw is what you got, but it wasn’t in a bad way—like, ‘take it or leave it.’ He was a genuine guy.” They parted ways that night without so much as a kiss. Upon meeting up the next day, however, “sparks flew.” Phil reached over to kiss her, “and all hell broke loose.” Almost immediately thereafter the two of them began spending virtually every night together in Phil’s cabana, which he described to Holloway as an “invigorating and a truly beautiful experience. I no longer have any sex hang-up, which had built up … and was beginning to flip me out. My hang-up was that I’d never had a girlfriend who dug sex as much as me. Well, I’ve met my match!”

Gretchen had met hers, too. “I remember being in his [bed]room and things went on from a sexual standpoint that I didn’t even know existed before,” she says. “Just from the point of pure duration. I was a living bladder infection!” Before the year’s end, Gretchen was pregnant. But because she and Phil were so young and nearly broke, not to mention unmarried, “we both realized that this couldn’t happen.” So she had an abortion—which was then illegal in cases unassociated with rape, incest, or the mother’s health—with the help of her connected father. Phil, she says, seemed fine with it—or at least not distraught. “Whatever Catholic-ness there was [in him], practicality took over.”

During the next several months, Gretchen sometimes accompanied Phil to Foo gigs that were close by. At home, they spent many hours together on the beach, in his oceanfront hut, and kicking around Malibu. The local Renaissance fest was a favorite annual jaunt, and they attended once as Robin Hood and Maid Marian. As he would in years to come, Phil made sure his costume suited the part, which in this case meant donning tights among other era-specific flourishes. “He was a masculine guy,” Gretchen says, “but not afraid of his feminine side.” She liked that. She
loved
him—for his supreme but easy confidence, lack of pretension, and laid-back outlook on life. For being everything she was not. “He saw something in me that I didn’t know was there,” she says. “I had a ton of insecurities; he had none. He was as unabashed all the time as a human being could be.”

About six months into their relationship, Gretchen became acutely aware of how much those around him also loved Phil and gravitated toward him: the band, random passersby on the beach, her sisters, her father. His “organic” magnetism, bolstered by his ever-present sense of humor, drew them into his often-wacky orbit. People wanted to be around him and they frequently asked him to perform. Phil never needed coaxing. “Whatever he felt like doing, he’d do,” she says of his public antics, which typically included celebrity impressions. “But it wasn’t the kind of thing where you’d look at him and say, ‘This guy’s a loon.’” On the contrary, she says, he was “a gamin”—a “happy little character” who brought out lightness in others. “We were never around people who were miserable or unhappy or fighting. You couldn’t be around us and have that happen.”

On March 12, 1970, at the Malibu courthouse, Phil and Gretchen obtained a marriage license and exchanged vows in a no-frills civil ceremony. He was twenty-one, she twenty. A casual reception followed at her father’s house (he thought the world of Phil), where guests dined, danced, and mingled outdoors and around a massive picnic-like table in the sprawling living room. Phil and Gretchen barely knew themselves, let alone each other, but here they were embarking on a new life together—one that initially played out “like a fairy tale.”

Not everyone viewed their pairing so rosily. Being older, with more life experience, Les Brown had his doubts from the start. “The unfortunate thing is that Phil was infatuated with beauty,” he says. “You get to a point in your life where the beauty becomes less important, but it takes a long time to get to that place. Let’s be frank about it: At that time, with the free love and all that, you screwed enough beautiful women and you were finally like, ‘OK, she’s pretty. Big deal. So what,’ and you start looking for people you can make some sort of connection with. But in order to make those connections, you have to be there. And that’s difficult for some people, especially actors [or in Phil’s case, aspiring actors], because they’re always being somebody else.” While he thought Gretchen was “a sweet girl,” if “a little spoiled,” Brown got the sense that “she wanted to take [Phil] away from the evils of rock ’n’ roll. Of course, there was a never-ending stream of ladies going through that [Foo] house, which must have driven her crazy.”

Though Gretchen says she grew accustomed to the scene, bearing witness to it certainly darkened her worldview. “Oh, my God! If ever there was naïveté that went sour, it was mine,” she says. “I mean, the stuff I used to see go on in that house. Ultimately, you got used to it, but it was a constant revolution of women. Sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll.” In the process of trying to extricate Phil from that world, Gretchen encouraged him to get “a real job,” which at first he was hesitant to do. But it was increasingly necessary for their survival.

With only meager sources of income, the couple lived a bare-bones existence, moving from Phil’s cabana to a cramped one-bedroom apartment across the street and maintaining a fiscally conservative lifestyle with their white-and-orange tabby cat Russell (named by Phil after musician Leon Russell), black mutt Levi, and a king-sized waterbed. Still car-less, Phil shared Gretchen’s red VW bug, which was eventually replaced by a blue-and-white VW van. And though they kept their circle of intimates tight—two or three couples at most—Phil continually attracted admirers. “He wanted to be a comedian,” Gretchen says. “It was his passion. We had a lot of friends because he was so funny. People wanted to be around him, and they always wanted him to perform.”

Together with a friend who managed a movie theater in Malibu, Phil got his first taste of improvisation when the two of them staged comedy skits on weekends before and after screenings with pals Wink Roberts, Mark Pierson, and others. “It was such a small community back then,” Gretchen says, “that I’m surprised someone like Henry Gibson didn’t wander in there and discover Phil.”

Although the newlyweds were scraping by “paycheck to paycheck,” Phil’s ambition to succeed in showbiz outweighed his financial concerns. “Phil had such a strong desire to be what he wanted to be,” Gretchen says, “but he wasn’t going to prostitute himself to be that.” The highly connected John Hartmann might have helped, she says, but Phil was reluctant to accept assistance from anyone. Not that John offered any. “It was interesting when I’d hear him say, ‘I manage Sonny and Cher,’” she says. “But then the reality of it was, ‘Well, where are they? Bring them over.’ But that stuff just never materialized.”

At the time, John says, he was struggling himself and unaware of Phil’s dire circumstances, because Phil never said a word. Pride and principles prohibited him from doing so, as did a reluctance to make waves or put others out. And so, since freelance artistry was at best an inconsistent means of subsistence, Phil scored a design job with the Santa Monica ad agency Farrell-Bergmann, Inc. “It was kind of a low point,” says Phil’s attorney friend Steve Small, who at the time dated founder Bergmann’s secretary and worked across the hall. Both men shared an interest in photography and talked about it when they could. The agency was small and Phil earned low wages doing paste-ups for print ads. He didn’t last long there and was, Small says, happy to leave.