You Might Remember Me The Life and Times of Phil Hartman (30 page)

*   *   *

Starting in January 1998, Phil spent the next few months finishing the fourth season of
NewsRadio.
Brynn, too, was busy working on a project with her friend Sheree Guitar. They’d met in 1995 at their kids’ school, where they both volunteered at the library. For the next few years, they worked together on a movie script called
Reckless Abandon
. The story of murder and mayhem that ensues after two women become ensnared in a drug smuggling ring, it contains circumstances and characters based very loosely on Brynn’s life. A vicious drug dealer even is named Omdahl—Brynn’s maiden name. When Brynn showed a draft to Phil shortly before her fortieth birthday in April, he gave it his stamp of approval and said he’d help shop it around. He even agreed to play one of the main characters (the husband who is killed by a drug gang while trying to find his kidnapped wife) if it was ever produced. Guitar says Brynn was “elated beyond belief.”

But Phil’s enthusiasm might have been manufactured. When he popped into Lewis’s dressing room one day at
NewsRadio,
Brynn’s script in hand, he was sheepish and apologetic. “Brynn wrote this,” he told her. “Could you maybe read it and have your agent take a look?” Lewis agreed, but thought Phil seemed “embarrassed to have to ask. It was kind of like, ‘Look, I don’t know if it’s any good. I’m trying to make her happy yet again.’”

*   *   *

At the beginning of April, around eight
P.M.
, a neighbor who lived kitty-corner to the Hartmans called 9-1-1 to report that she’d heard five gunshots that seemed to emanate from their house on Encino Boulevard. Upon walking outside her own home, the neighbor also smelled gunpowder. Two female LAPD officers responded to the call but were unable to determine where the shots originated.

*   *   *

In keeping with his core philosophy, Phil maintained an attitude of gratitude while continuing to embrace what he knew was a charmed life. He had plenty of money, a slew of engrossing hobbies, a beautiful family, and an enviably solid career. He also knew his value like never before. “I am a name,” he said, “and a name means that I’m well-known within the industry and respected as someone who can deliver.” Julia Sweeney, for one, took note of his amplified swagger. “He was not humble anymore, I’ll tell you that,” she says. “He was more concerned about his career and what was going to happen next.” Now that the work came to him, Phil was happy to point out it was simply a matter of choosing what would most effectively take him to the next level.

NewsRadio,
he had concluded only three years into his stint, was not it. As ratings kept dropping, Phil decided he was ready to move on. “I wish I were still on
SNL,
frankly,” he told one journalist. To another, he admitted, “I’m forty-eight and up to my eyeballs in midlife crisis. The first few years of Bill McNeal still felt fresh to me, because I was expanding and learning about the character. But after three years, we’ve pretty much explored the depth of this guy.” If the show lasted and NBC made him an offer he couldn’t refuse, Phil added, of course he’d stay on board after his five-year contract expired. But that would mean a huge pay bump, one “unjustified by my position as an ensemble player in a mid-pack series. I don’t want to stay somewhere just to get a paycheck.”

As season four of
NewsRadio
wound down, Phil claimed to have fielded some “enticing” offers that he’d been forced to decline because of his NBC obligations. He now also had several more films to his credit, including
Jingle All the Way
(with Arnold Schwarzenegger) and
Sgt. Bilko
(with Steve Martin), which Phil promoted on
The Oprah Winfrey Show
in Chicago. During his time on the set playing Sgt. Bilko’s aptly named nemesis, Major Colin Thorn, Phil and Cathy Silvers (daughter of the original Bilko, Phil Silvers) had a heart-to-heart. On a lunch break one day, as she recounts in her 2007 book
Happy Days, Healthy Living,
Silvers joined Phil, Martin, Dan Aykroyd, and Chris Rock at a table:

Phil seemed sad that day and I asked him if he was alright.

Phil replied, “I’m alright, Catherine—thanks so much for asking. How are you, my dear?” …

“I am not so fine, Phil. My husband and I are probably going to divorce, and we have two kids. I thought we had a great marriage, but he just doesn’t seem to get the Hollywood wife deal, I guess. I am kinda down, and here I am shooting a comedy and trying to be funny.”

Phil admitted, “You know, Catherine, I am going through a similar thing at home. Brynn loves me and the kids and, God knows, she has everything in the world.” He pulled out pictures of his boats and homes and cars and let us all look through them. “I have given her everything a woman could ever hope for, but she just isn’t happy. I just don’t get it, either.”

Phil had played the president of the United States in director Joe Dante’s 1997 HBO satire
The Second Civil War,
and now he was about to hit big screens yet again as the impatient and materialistic Phil Fimple in Dante’s digitally animated feature
Small Soldiers.
“Both of the guys he played for me were assholes, there’s no doubt about it,” says Dante. “And it was something that obviously came easily to him, because he played that part in other pictures. What impressed me on this film, however—because he was surrounded by a lot of really good dramatic actors, like James Coburn and James Earl Jones—was how good a dramatic actor he was. I had thoughts of putting him in very serious roles.”

Well aware of his status as an “intermediate level” celebrity, Phil still held out hope for a breakout part, be it dramatic or comedic. As he confided in a 1997 interview, he was “cautious of the fact that very few people in comedy have careers after age fifty. I think there’s a notion in our society, and it may be valid, that people aren’t as funny when they get older. It’s a stigma still attached to the rebelliousness of youth. I do believe that sooner or later I’ll get those great roles like Gary Sinise’s part in
Forrest Gump
or Tommy Lee Jones’s as Two-Face in
Batman Forever.
”

One early-stage project that had him jazzed was a feature-length Three Stooges film, with Phil in the role of Moe Howard—the sensible grown-up of the zany trio, naturally. “What’s redeeming about this project is that those numbskulls never held a grudge,” he said in
Canadian Cigar Lifestyles
magazine. “They expressed their hostility by beating each other silly and then moved on. Emotions were always expressed and then cleared like an Etch A Sketch.”

*   *   *

NewsRadio
wrapped season four in early spring of 1998. Its fate hung in the balance, to be determined when NBC announced a new fall lineup in mid-May. Having hopped time periods twice more (from Tuesdays to Wednesdays and back to Tuesdays) and sunk even lower in the ratings (to a dismal fifty-fifth place overall), it nonetheless remained popular among eighteen-to-twenty-four-year-olds. But it would need a much wider appeal to survive, and that appeal remained elusive. Phil attributed part of the show’s lagging to its going head-to-head with Brett Butler’s hit
Grace Under Fire
. “Our show is popular in the major markets,” he said, “but all those trailer parks across America were tuning in to the ‘Hillbilly Bride.’”

In a chat with the
Houston Chronicle
, Phil offered another theory. The “little freak show of very isolated individuals,” he said, could “get raunchy, sexually ambiguous. There’s no contesting the quality of it, but from a strictly marketing standpoint you can see that it has somewhat limited appeal. We have a hard-core, sort of cult following that I think will stick with us wherever we go. But the masses, I don’t [think] they’ve picked up on it.”

Phil was careful not to grouse publicly about his lot, however. He’d bitched openly in the past—about
SNL
and
NewsRadio
—and each time he had regretted the whiny-seeming candor of his comments. “This prime-time life has made me a multimillionaire,” he said, “and I have a great career going. It’s the equivalent of a wartime colonel complaining about the mission the general has sent him on. It’s just not appropriate behavior.” If
NewsRadio
went away, and he hoped that wouldn’t be the case, it would “just open up other opportunities for me.”

While he was still in network limbo, Phil dubbed an English-language voice part (that of black cat JiJi) for Disney’s reissue of the Japanese film
Kiki’s Delivery Service,
and reteamed with his
SNL
work wife Jan Hooks to play her kidnapping boyfriend Randy on the two-part finale of NBC’s
3rd Rock from the Sun.
It was his second appearance on the prime-time comedy—co-created and written by former
SNL
scribes Bonnie and Terry Turner—since 1996. Brynn even got a non-speaking part as “Venusian #1.” One night after work, Hooks, Phil, and Brynn went out for drinks. “You know,” Brynn told Hooks, “if anything ever happens to me, you should marry Phil.” Brynn was kidding, Hooks says. But it wasn’t an entirely outlandish notion.

On April 23, Hooks received word that her father had died after a very brief illness. Phil was the first one to stop by her dressing room with words of consolation. He also sat with her quietly while she “screamed and sobbed.” Only one week later, it was Phil’s turn to mourn. On April 30, his father Rupert passed away at the age of eighty-three in Lake San Marcos, California, after a three-year battle with Alzheimer’s disease. Seven of his children (Sarah Jane was not present) were at the hospital to say good-bye before he was removed from life support. It was the first time in a long while they all had gathered. Afterward, they ate and drank at the country club where Doris and Rupert had played countless rounds of golf. “We talked about how we were all going to be better about spending time together and being a family,” Jane Hartmann says. Phil covered the tab.

The siblings assembled once again, on May 8, for Rupert’s funeral mass at St. Mark’s Catholic Church. All of them but Phil. “Is your brother coming?” some attendees asked Jane, who thought Phil might have stayed away to avoid upstaging their father. But Ohara Hartmann says work on
Small Soldiers
is what kept Phil from attending. “I was angry,” Ohara says. “I was like, ‘Why isn’t he here?!’”

“But he paid for everything,” she adds wryly. “If you pay for the funeral, I guess going is optional.”

Phil also kept his word to Lovitz, who was then shooting a sitcom pilot for ABC. Phil had promised to act in it, and he didn’t disappoint despite Lovitz’s imploring that he not worry about showing up in light of Rupert’s death. Phil not only showed up, he stayed late into the night for pickup shots. “I could just see him smiling at me with pride,” Lovitz later recalled. “It just made me feel great. I remember that night feeling I was no longer his younger brother, [that] we’re equals. It was such a comfort having him there.”

Two days after Rupert’s funeral, on Sunday, May 10—Mother’s Day—Doris Hartmann spent the first of several nights with Phil and Brynn in Encino. With Doris’s encouragement, Brynn went out and bought a $5,000 bracelet for herself. “Go ahead,” Doris told her. “It’s Mother’s Day.” Phil, she knew, probably forgot. But when Brynn showed off her purchase to Phil, he turned to Doris and said, “We need to take it back.” Doris knew he meant it. Phil liked to spend money on himself but could be penurious when it came to spending it on others. Then again, Britt Marin says, Phil was about to buy Brynn a new Mercedes.

*   *   *

Unlike most of his previous summers since fame came, the summer of 1998 was going to be carefree and rife with relaxation. Phil made sure of that by turning down work and renting a house in Malibu’s Latigo Canyon, which he’d done previously. Throughout May, he and Brynn went out with friends and even sang karaoke (the B52’s “Love Shack”) at a birthday party. They also had dinner with director Rob Reiner, during which Brynn supposedly brought up the subject of guns. According to Ed Begley Jr., who says he heard the story from Reiner himself, Reiner (long a gun control advocate) asked Brynn if having a firearm at home was a good idea. She said it was—that it made her feel safer. They also spoke about the importance of listening. “I’m a really good listener,” Phil remarked. Brynn shot him a look and countered, “No, you’re not.”

As Brynn told Christine Zander, she already had the thing she wanted most: to be married with children. But especially after moving back to L.A. in 1994, Brynn began to yearn for more—in particular, the acting career she’d forsaken to raise a family. “This is nothing he ever said to me, but I think Phil was the kind of guy that really wanted a wife to take care of things,” Zander says. “He wanted to have a beautiful home and he wanted it to be kept well and he wanted a mother for his children. And Brynn filled those roles perfectly.” Even so, Zander adds, “I don’t think she felt enough attention and adoration and support for the things she wanted to do outside of the family in a career.”

That May, Brynn reportedly tried to check into rehab again—this time at the celebrity-frequented Promises in Malibu—but there were no vacancies. (Zander, who talked to Brynn during this period, recalls no mention of Promises.) In the meantime, she booked a his-and-hers “Endless Courtship” spa package to enjoy with Phil at an establishment near their home. While friction between them seemed to be dissipating, things could still get tense. (As a friend later put it, “They were just trying to get through the month of May.”) When Brynn got amped up and shaky, Phil stayed calm and collected, hardly ever raising his voice. That drove her nuts. “He would never tell me crap,” says friend Wink Roberts, “but he was going into detail about how he would fight with Brynn, and how she would want to fight and argue right before he went to sleep. And a lot of times he would pretend like he was asleep, just to avoid the argument.” Roberts asked him why he stayed in the relationship if it was so rocky. Maybe he needed to end it and redo everything and go get happy again. But Phil wasn’t hearing it. Rehab might work, he replied. And he loved his kids too much to be forcibly separated from them. He had no choice but to maintain an optimistic outlook.