Hartman Phil - You might remember me: the life and times of Phil Hartman

The author and publisher have provided this e-book to you for your personal use only. You may not make this e-book publicly available in any way. Copyright infringement is against the law. If you believe the copy of this e-book you are reading infringes on the authors copyright, please notify the publisher at: us.macmillanusa.com/piracy.

For my parents

He has achieved success who has lived well, laughed often, and loved much; who has gained the respect of intelligent men and the love of little children; who has filled his niche and accomplished his task; who has left the world better than he found it, whether by an improved poppy, a perfect poem, or a rescued soul; who has never lacked appreciation of Earths beauty or failed to express it; who has always looked for the best in others and given the best he had; whose life was an inspiration; whose memory a benediction.

Bessie Anderson Stanley, Success

I like my vagina.

Phil Hartman as Charlton Heston, reading from Madonnas book, Sex

Contents

Introduction

For eight increasingly successful seasons Phil Hartman was an integral part of NBCs venerable sketch show, Saturday Night Live , so much so that colleagues there called him The Glue. Fellow cast member Jan Hooks coined the term, and along with her, Dana Carvey, Kevin Nealon, Dennis Miller, Victoria Jackson, Jon Lovitz, and Nora Dunn, Phil helped save the show from almost certain ruin in the mid-80s. In the process, he joined a pantheon of SNL MVPs that includes John Belushi, Dan Aykroyd, Eddie Murphy, Carvey, and a handful of others. In fact, according to SNL s creator and executive producer Lorne Michaels, Phil may well be the leader of that pack. As he once mused, Phil has done more work thats touched greatness than probably anybody else whos ever been here.

At Foxs long-running animated hit The Simpsons, where he spent eight years from 1990 to 1998, Phil did such distinctive voice work for so many memorable episodes (53)as dunderheaded shyster attorney Lionel Hutz, clueless D-list actor Troy McClure, and numerous other minor charactershe came to be regarded by the programs inner circle of writers, showrunners, and permanent players as an honorary member of their elite group. They revered him to such an extent that after Phil died, Hutz and McClure were retired in his honor. No one, Simpsons creator and die-hard Phil fan Matt Groening knew, could inhabit those roles in quite the same way. He was a comedy writers dream, Groening once wrote. Phil could get a laugh out of any line he was given, and make a funny line even funnier. He nailed the joke every time, and that made all The Simpsons writers worship him.

NBCs witty workplace sitcom NewsRadio also benefitted tremendously from Phils portrayal of the intelligent, arrogant, and aggressively self-centered broadcaster Bill the Real Deal McNeal. Executive producer and head writer Paul Simms created the character with Phil in mind, and Phils sudden absence left a huge void that was never filled. I cant count the number of times at table reads when they would first read that weeks script with some line that was just filler, but Phil would get a laugh, Simms says. I dont even know how. If I knew how, I would be a genius. He really could help even the silliest material. And as a writer, you find you want to write for the characters that make everything funny a little bit more.

And yet, Phils life has long been overshadowed by his death. Which is only naturalafter all, he was adored by millions and slain in his prime. But what happened in the early morning hours of May 28, 1998, when Phils third wife Brynn shot him three times as he slept before taking her own life, should not supersede all that came before it. Like any human being Phil was a complex puzzle, and that tragic episode but one piece in a box of many.

While his work on Pee-wees Playhouse , SNL, The Simpsons , and NewsRadio is well known, until now details of his earlier formative years have emerged only in dribs and drabs, and many of them not at all. His feelings of neglect and guilt while growing up with a developmentally disabled younger sister in Canada; his avid surfing and ceaseless spiritual questing; his visual artistry and rock n roll road-tripping; his relationships with the women he loved and the reasons that love was lostall of those subjects and more are explored in the pages that follow. So, too, are never-before-told stories from the set of SNL, accounts of Phils frequent jaunts to his paradisaical getaway Catalina Island, and previously unpublished accounts of his final days.

In researching and writing Phils story over the course of nearly three years, I tried to understand and present him as much more than a highly gifted and widely beloved comedic performer, or the still-mourned victim of a terrible crime. He was and is all of those, certainly, but he was also a deeply sensitive man who loved life and reveled in nature; an eminently approachable and even gregarious public figure who was privately reserved and enigmatic; a loyal friend and generous collaborator. As a friend of his once observed, There is a small room in Phil that no one will ever get to.

This book is a key toor at least a reverse peephole throughits previously locked door.

Judge: Mr. Cirroc [pronounced Keyrock], are you ready to give your summation?

Cirroc: Its just Cirroc, your Honor. [He approaches the jury box.] And, yes, Im ready. Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, Im just a caveman. I fell in some ice and later got thawed by some of your scientists. Your world frightens and confuses me. Sometimes the honking horns of your traffic make me want to get out of my BMW and run off into the hills. Or whatever. Sometimes when I get a message on my fax machine, I wonder, Did little demons get inside and type it? I dont know. My primitive mind cant grasp these concepts.

(Transcript courtesy of snltranscripts.jt.org)

I need no blessings, but Im counting mine.

David Gilmour, This Heaven

Prologue

May 27, 1998

On hiatus from his NBC sitcom NewsRadio, Phil drove his white Mercedes coupe to a Holiday Inn at Sunset Boulevard and the 405 Freeway. Arriving around 11:30 A.M. , he picked up good pal and fellow outdoorsman Britt Marin, and the two of them motored down to Schock Boats in Newport Beach to buy supplies for their Boston Whalers. Phil needed a cooler for the seventeen-footer hed recently purchased. During the roughly sixty-mile drive, they smoked dope and talked about life. Death, tooghosts, spirits, the hereafter. Phil said he believed in spirits and that some of them were too disturbed to migrate from here to eternity. He was sure, however, that his spirit would make the trip without a hitch. Reiterating something hed mentioned a couple of years earlier, Phil reminded Marin that whenever the time came, he wanted his ashes to be scattered in fifteen to twenty feet of water around a natural monument called Indian Rock, located in Californias Emerald Bay off the coast of Phils beloved getaway Catalina Island. Marin made his own preference known as well: If he died first, Phil should place his ashes in a large gel cap and set it at the summit of Diablo Peak on Santa Cruz Island. During the next wet season, Marin reasoned, the gel cap would dissolve and Marins remains would flow down into his favorite canyons below.

Phil asked him, What makes you think youre going to die before me?

Chapter 1