You Might Remember Me The Life and Times of Phil Hartman (26 page)

As Phil’s days on
SNL
waned, his presence on the storied stage of Studio 8H remained greatly diminished. “He was upset by it,” Michaels says. “It was a time of turmoil. He had grown comfortable, and so had I. And at the same time, the network was being critical of us, so we were fighting on all sides.” Even on May 15, during his record-setting 153rd and final appearance as a regular cast member, he was unusually light—industry lingo for short on stage time. Except for a cold open with guest host Heather Locklear (Phil played her first of several sex partners) and his part as a besuited emcee in the show’s last sketch, a spoof of the Rodgers and Hammerstein song “So Long, Farewell” from
The Sound of Music,
he had little to do and there was no fanfare to trumpet his exit after eight exceptional seasons. But his final appearance was indeed memorable.

“So long, farewell … Hey, what am I chopped liver?” Chris Farley yawningly warbles in the guise of plaid-jacketed motivational guru Matt Foley. As he wearily plops down on the stage’s apron and sings, “I need … to sleep … in a van down by the river,” Phil emerges from the wings and sits beside him. Except for a spotlight shining on the two of them, Studio 8H is dark. Draping an arm over the slumbering man-boy as Farley rests his head on Phil’s chest, Phil addresses the small audience before him and the millions of viewers in TV land: “You know, I can’t imagine a more dignified way to end my eight years on this program.” Smiling, he then sings, in a faltering head voice, “Good-bye … good-bye. Good-byyyyyyyyyye.” The spotlight remains on Phil and Farley. Phil waves as the audience applauds. The camera zooms out as the spotlight shrinks.
Fin.

Afterward, Phil’s fellow cast members and others gathered backstage to present him with a special keepsake—a token of deep appreciation for his outstanding service. Phil had previously won an Emmy and an American Comedy Award, but the bottle of clear wood glue secured to a small pedestal that was bestowed by his peers that night immediately became his most cherished honor of all. As he had when daughter Birgen’s birth was announced on the show two years earlier, Phil tried and failed to stave off tears. “It meant as much as an Academy Award, because it symbolized how they felt about him,” says Norman Bryn, who was there. “And you could see that he was genuinely moved. There was a totally open, vulnerable human being there. Other than his falling apart during the night when Brynn really got to him, that was Phil as [emotionally] naked as I’d ever seen him.”

Michaels was unsurprised by Phil’s reserved but deeply genuine reaction. For eight years
SNL
had been “his life,” after all. “He loved it. And it’s the best work he ever did. He was not unaware of that.”

Chapter 13

Phil as Bill McNeal on the set of
NewsRadio
, 1995. (Photo © Alan Levenson/NBC/NBCU Photo Bank)

In the summer of 1994, Phil left an answering machine message for Brian and Kevin Mulhern regarding progress on
The Phil Show
. There were no new developments yet, he told them, because NBC was “preoccupied with the problems of the new season,” replacement shows were low-priority, and Phil himself had been busy with other work. Ideally, Phil said, he and a few other writers would begin outlining and scripting the program sometime in early October, after which the Mulherns could fly out to L.A. and join them. Nothing, however, was written in stone.

*   *   *

A couple of weeks after Phil bugged out of
SNL,
he spent a month or so shooting the comedy
Houseguest
in and around Pittsburgh with comedian Sinbad. Phil’s character, a well-off but somewhat dense lawyer and father of three, marked his first co-starring role in films. Director Randall Miller told the
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
that
Houseguest
was for Phil “a way to move into being a mainstream leading man,” just as the
The Jerk
had been for Steve Martin. And, in fact, Phil was then in talks to play the lead in a movie called
Secret Agent Man
, but that project ultimately fizzled.

When
Houseguest
wrapped in late June, Phil was able to devote more time to shepherding
The Phil Show
into existence. Frustratingly, as he made clear in his message to the Mulherns, NBC suits kept dragging their feet. “I think they were just worried,” Gallen says. “For some reason, they just never really felt like they had a shot to make it.” It couldn’t have helped that another
SNL
alum, Chevy Chase, was fresh off a disastrous stint on Fox’s
The Chevy Chase Show,
which lasted just five weeks and cost the network millions. Chatfests featuring Martin Short, Robert Townsend, and Paula Poundstone had flopped, too. Over at NBC, newish 12:30
A.M.
host and David Letterman successor Conan O’Brien’s quirky program garnered consistently low ratings, tepid-to-poor reviews, and teetered on the brink of cancellation. Granted, those folks were all late-night personalities, but if they couldn’t cut it during bedtime hours, how would the nontraditional
Phil Show
fare during prime time?

As Phil toiled to bring his vision to fruition, Brynn had a tiny career breakthrough of sorts when friend and director Rob Reiner hired her for his film
North,
which opened July 22, 1994. Appearing in only one brief scene as a diner waitress, she speaks a single line while serving beverages: “One Coca-Cola right here. And one Sex on the Beach.” Her close-up, such as it is, lasts approximately five seconds. In retrospect, though, she was probably fortunate; the $40 million comedy—written by Alan Zweibel and based on his novella of the same name—crashed big and earned what Zweibel later described as “a veritable avalanche” of scathing reviews. Roger Ebert’s was especially crushing. “I hated this movie,” he famously wrote-stabbed. “Hated, hated, hated, hated, hated this movie. Hated it. Hated every simpering stupid vacant audience-insulting moment of it. Hated the sensibility that thought anyone would like it. Hated the implied insult to the audience by its belief that anyone would be entertained by it.”

*   *   *

Phil spent a fair amount of time high above sea level that summer on his way to earning enough in-flight hours to get his pilot’s license during Thanksgiving vacation late the following fall. Boats were fun but slow; he wished to master a mode of transportation that would allow him to travel to Catalina Island and back in far less time than it took to motor twenty-six miles across the sea. And seeing as Brynn often told him and close friends of hers that Phil spent too much time away from home, this was a perfect remedy—not to mention another toy with which to tinker. By October 1994, after many months of typically exhaustive research—and more than a year before he was certified to fly on his own upon completing at least forty flight hours, half of them solo—he spent high five to low six figures on a French-made TB200 Tobago XL GT by Socata. With its white top, gray bottom, and dark-orange body stripes, the handsome single-prop model—tail number N3057D—had a 200-horsepower Lycoming 10-360AIB6 piston engine, fixed tricycle landing gear, and room for four in its spacious cabin. As Phil gushed in an endorsement letter to the manufacturer a few years post-purchase, “This airplane is simply a delight. I appreciate it for its docile handling characteristics and its outstanding performance. And I’m especially pleased with its overall design. This is an aircraft that is very pleasing to the eye. It’s a modern, fresh design. I appreciate the gull-wing doors and the well-designed cockpit.”

Phil’s college and surfing pal Clif Potts owned a Cessna 182 Skylane at the time and shared Phil’s burgeoning enthusiasm for flying. “You’re aware of something greater than yourself, a power,” Potts says. “You’re driving this ball of energy. The same thing with surfing—there’s a place in the wave that’s like the power point and you can move into it and ahead of it and back behind it, but you are connected to it in order to be able to do what you’re doing.” On a more surface level, Phil thought it “a superb diversion that gives one a sense of competence and skill” as well as “a way to get away from it all, because it’s completely absorbing.”

As Phil explained when he guested on Conan O’Brien’s show, his attraction to airplanes sprang partly from his love of John Wayne’s World War II movies, such as 1942’s
Flying Tigers.
“The hardest part of flying isn’t the flying,” Phil noted. “It’s the radio communications.” He then affected the deep voice and nonsensical but official-sounding lingo of a pilot: “Learjet 3057 Delta inbound Sepulveda Pass with information Joliet. Roger 3057 Delta, make right traffic before 1-6 right before five Delta.… Spark 555 roger, sparking double nickel double nickel…”

When he wasn’t bound for Catalina’s tiny Airport in the Sky, where he kept a white Volkswagon Golf (used) not far from the runway, Phil loved to read up on his new hobby and practice his landings (“touch-and-go’s”). He most often used the Tobago for Catalina trips, though, and as usual Britt Marin was his most frequent co-pilot to Avalan and Two Harbors. Together they made numerous trips from the mainland, always with a stash of primo weed on board for toking in-flight and upon landing.

Tearing through the wild blue yonder was an entirely different and far more intense experience than Phil had ever known. “He liked coming and going from the Airport in the Sky,” Marin remembers. “Because it’s kind of a tricky approach and takeoff. If you came in short you’d slam into a cliff, and if you didn’t take off in time you’d fly off of one.” An “excellent pilot” in Marin’s estimation, Phil loved to fly between the Van Nuys airport (where he stored his plane in a hangar with his sports cars) and Catalina, purposely putting his nimble craft into stalls along the way. Every time he did so, its nose dipped and an alarm sounded. Still, Marin trusted him completely. “He was very methodical in applying the rules of flying,” Marin says. “He’d put the manual in his lap to go through procedures. And he’d also say, ‘Hey, Britt, pay attention here and you’ll learn how to fly,’ so I did. I never got a license or anything, but I know how to fly a plane.”

Lovitz later remarked that after Phil had been flying only a short time, he already seemed like “a veteran pilot of twenty years for United Airlines.” Tracy Newman was similarly struck with his proficiency and commitment to safety, qualities that helped to temper mounting terror when she took to the skies for her one and only flight with Phil at the helm. “We could have been going down, dying,” she says, “and I still would have had confidence in him.”

*   *   *

As Phil eased into his post-
SNL
life, there was also more time to be a dad—though he was never around nearly as much as Brynn would have liked. Dozier observed that Phil’s tendency to disengage physically and emotionally at home “kind of applied to the kids, too. I think he adored his kids. Most parents do. I’ve heard from other people and seen video of him playing with the kids, which I know he did a lot. But usually when I came over, Phil and I would just disappear into his office.” John Hartmann spoke of Phil the dad during his 2004 CNN interview with Larry King. “I’m sure that the kids would [have wanted] to have more time [with him] and I’m sure Phil would have wanted to work out more time for them. But he loved them and they loved him and they probably would have appreciated more attention.”

When they were together, clowning was common. “We play a lot of silly games and we’re kind of a silly family,” Phil said. “We like to have a lot of laughter, but I don’t think I’m special to them because I’m a comedian. I just like to feel that I’m a participant in their lives, not so much the center of it.” As such, he devised improv games, assisted with puppet shows, splashed around in the backyard pool and went on family outings. Sean (“Seany”) was the more serious and introspective of Phil’s children. He was also one hell of an artist, Phil liked to brag—better than Phil ever was at the same age. Father and son often played “squiggles,” the drawing game Phil had invented with Sparkie Holloway decades back, and stored their completed pictures in a folder. Phil’s wackier side came out in the sunny and extroverted Birgen (“Birgey”). One of their favorite daddy-daughter activities was theatrical in nature. “Do your happy face,” he’d tell her. She beamed. “Now do your sad face.” She moped. “Now do your angry face.” She glowered. But her “handsome face” was the one that always made him laugh hardest.

As ever, though, it was Brynn who did most of the parenting. From infancy on she spent the most time feeding and diapering and nursing the kids through sickness. She volunteered at their school library and shopped for their clothes and planned their birthday parties. She recorded milestones of their childhoods—first cold, first laugh—in a journal. A nanny was often on hand, as was a housekeeper, but Phil’s escalating absenteeism continued to provoke Brynn’s ire. If there was one complaint she voiced (to family, to friends), that was it. “I thought she was a fantastic mom,” Sweeney says. “But she was such a contradiction because [of how] she looked. I knew [her and Phil] when they first met, and then she was having a baby and I was thinking, ‘Oh, God, should women like this really have kids? They shouldn’t,’” Sweeney jokes. “They should really just be
this look
. This look takes a hundred percent of someone’s time. There’s no kid that should come into this when you have a mom who looks like that.’”