Captain Phil Harris (23 page)

“After that,” Russ said, “we took advantage of everything we could, whether it was starting a coffee company or striking a deal with a beer company.

“The Discovery contracts were pretty rigid. They didn’t give us a lot of opportunities, and I understand and respect why Discovery does that. They need to protect their brand. But to this day, it’s still a burr under my saddle that we didn’t get a chance to take advantage of all the endorsements and all the publicity we could have had because of Phil’s exposure on the show.”

Just as Phil poured all of his emotions into his role as captain, he did the same with his celebrity status. And it wasn’t always pretty.

Russ worked on one endorsement deal that seemed promising, but there were still problems to be worked out. He made the mistake of telling Phil about it before a contract was signed.

Hearing only the positive side of the proposal while ignoring the negatives, Phil bragged to friends about his new sponsor and all the money he was going to get. Instead, the deal collapsed.

“When I would tell him a deal had fallen apart,” said Russ, “he would just stare at me while sliding down in his seat.”

Phil had definite ideas about his business activities, and they didn’t always coincide with Russ’s game plan. The result was ongoing friction that often seemed to leave Russ with one foot out the door.

It’s hard to say what was greater, the number of times Phil fired Russ or the number of times Russ quit. Sometimes, Phil would yell, “You’re fired!” and Russ would respond, “Too late, I already quit.”

It was like New York Yankees owner George Steinbrenner and manager Billy Martin. Steinbrenner hired and fired Martin five times. Phil and Russ exceeded that total, but, their friendship always remaining intact, they would soon get back to business.

Along with Russ, Phil needed a lawyer for his contract negotiations. As with everything else he did, he had a unique modus operandi when it came to hiring people.

The first time he saw Ed Ritter, a young, eager Seattle attorney, it was in 2008 in a courtroom in Monroe, Washington, near Phil’s Lake Stevens home.

Actually, it was Ed who first spotted Phil. The lawyer was in the courtroom to take care of some paperwork for his firm, but the room was empty when he arrived. Except, that is, for a rough-looking customer sitting all alone off in one corner.

A huge fan of
Deadliest Catch,
Ed was almost certain it was the famous Captain Phil Harris.

I’m going to go up and say hi to him, Ed thought. The worst he can do is punch me in the face.

Hesitantly, Ed approached Phil and asked, “Are you who I think you are?”

Phil turned a searing glare on the man standing in front of him in a three-piece suit, and, instead of responding to the question, asked one of his own: “Are you a lawyer?”

“Yes,” was all Ed said. It was all he had time to say. Once he replied in the affirmative, Phil jumped up, got a firm grip on Ed’s vest, and dragged him out into an adjacent hallway.

While the startled Ed tried to smooth out his disheveled clothes, Phil said, “I need a good lawyer to get rid of these tickets. A good lawyer will go in there and get them dismissed. So, are you a good lawyer?”

Phil didn’t like having a license plate on the front of his Corvette, so he removed it, figuring the one on the back was sufficient. When he was stopped for driving at his usual pace, meaning above the speed limit, he had been given two tickets, one for the missing plate and one for speeding.

Familiar as Phil was to him, Ed was still intimidated by the large and demanding figure in front of him. Nervously, Ed told Phil that he thought he could handle the situation.

“Okay, do it,” said Phil, “and after that, we’ll talk.”

Ed marched back into the courtroom and, when the judge arrived, the lawyer got the charges dismissed on a technicality after spotting an irregularity in the way the police officer had filled out the tickets.

Feeling pretty good about himself, Ed marched back out to the hallway, his look of intimidation replaced with one of confidence.

“Got it done,” he said with a smile.

Surely that would calm Phil down.

Not exactly. Again he grabbed a chunk of Ed’s vest and, this time, dragged the attorney down the hallway and out to the parking lot.

“All right, you’re my guy,” Phil said. “Any kind of legal work, I’m coming to you.”

Ed was so excited about being connected to someone he regularly saw on TV that he told Phil he’d work for free. But deep down, although Ed gave Phil his phone number, he figured he would never see Phil again.

That night, Ed’s phone rang. It was Phil.

“What’re you doing?” he asked.

“Just sitting here at home with my wife,” said Ed.

“Where do you live?”

Phil came over and spent three hours at Ed’s house. Brenda, Ed’s wife, couldn’t believe this star was actually in her living room sitting next to the TV on which he appeared weekly. Both of the Ritters quickly realized the guy they saw on the tube was just a character on a program.

“The TV show made Phil look like a big, burly, mean kind of guy,” Ed said, “someone you couldn’t approach. In reality, he was just as nice as can be. No bragging, very humble.”

For the first year of their relationship, Ed, as he had promised, worked for nothing. He wasn’t concerned because, as he had hoped, he wound up profiting anyway by getting involved in some of Phil’s growing business concerns and through the many others Phil sent Ed’s way. Then, after the first year, Phil directed his bookkeeper to call Ed’s office to find out how much Phil would have owed had Ed been charging his normal rate. Phil then sent a check for that amount.

While Russ and Ed both loved working with Phil, they knew they were constantly battling his limited attention span.

“When I talked about anything legal with Phil,” Ed said, “he’d usually be sitting in a chair. As I started to explain some business matter to him, he would begin to slide down and his eyes would roll to the back of his head. You only had a five-minute window to talk about what you needed to discuss. That was it. Then he was gone mentally. There were a number of times when he fell asleep while I was talking
to him about some legal issue for which I needed his approval. He’d start snoring and I’d have to lean across the table and shake him.”

Russ, too, knew the drill. “When I got him on the phone to talk business, it was only for ninety seconds,” Russ said. “You could measure it with an egg timer. You had to get everything in as fast as you could, because, after a minute and a half, his attention had been exhausted.

“Like clockwork, he would come up with the same old excuse. ‘I gotta go,’ Phil would tell me. ‘There’s a cop behind me. I’m going to get pulled over. I’ll call you later.’ ”

He would never call back.

“It got to be a joke,” said Russ. “When I would get hold of him on a plane, he would say, ‘Can’t talk. A cop just pulled up behind me.’ ”

Ed and Russ just laughed it off. They, like everybody else from his shipmates to his multitude of fans around the world, were charmed by Phil.

“He had charisma,” said Tony Lara, who sailed with Phil for many years. “He had that goofy little giggle and a way about him that everybody seemed to like no matter what he did or said.”

Tony saw that firsthand in an incident that still has him shaking his head years later. He and Phil had gone into a marine supply store in Dutch Harbor.

“They had messed up an order we had placed,” Tony said.

The manager, a woman, came over to explain what had happened. Phil didn’t want to listen, preferring instead to blast the lady verbally. He called her a bitch, and that was the nicest word he used in a string of expletives.

“I was so embarrassed that I covered my head,” Tony said.

Finally, Phil stormed out to smoke a cigarette.

That left Tony alone with the manager. Looking out the window at Phil, she said, in all seriousness, “Isn’t he just the nicest guy?”

Tony was flabbergasted.

“What did I just miss?” he wondered. “If I had said all that and behaved like that, they would have thrown me in jail.”

Not Phil.

“Some people have got it,” said Tony, “and some people don’t. Phil had it.”

Phil Harris, ever the rock star.

I’ve never been that close to death.

—Phil

For most of his life, Phil Harris charted his own course. Undaunted by laws, untouched by fear, unimpressed by cautionary tales, he followed his inner compass, plowing through the harsh elements of both the Bering Sea and everyday life seemingly without concern.

He was a crab boat captain.

He was a father.

He was a womanizer.

He was a chain-smoker, an alcoholic, a drug user, a fast and furious lover of cars and motorcycles, and a man with eating habits that would make Michelle Obama cringe.

But Phil made no apologies for his lifestyle. Instead he justified it by portraying his vices as virtues.

As Phil slid into middle age, the wild urges of his youth still tugged at him. Johnathan Hillstrand, co-captain of the
Time Bandit
along with his brother Andy, still laughs about the time he and Phil were speeding down a highway after both had become
Deadliest Catch
stars.

“He was the only guy I know who would pass me a cigarette when we’re doin’ a hundred miles an hour on our Harleys,” said Johnathan.
“I wasn’t even thinking about smoking a damned cigarette, but here came Phil, easing over while saying, ‘Here, dude.’

“For the longest time, I wondered how the hell he got it lit. Turned out, he’d installed a lighter on his bike.”

On one occasion, Phil, accompanied by the Hillstrands, came to L.A. for a five-day visit. While in town, Phil contacted
Deadliest Catch
producer Thom Beers, whose studios are in Burbank. Knowing the fishing trio hadn’t rented a car, and in possession of a fleet of vehicles from his
Monster Garage
reality show, Thom offered Phil a ’96 Chevy Impala Super Sport.

He didn’t have to offer twice. Off the group raced, and Thom didn’t hear from them over the next four days. Then, finally, he got a call from Phil.

“Hey, Thom,” Phil said, “we had to leave town in a hurry. Would you mind getting someone to pick up your car?”

“Not a problem,” said Thom. “Where is it?”

“Uh . . . it’s at the Sahara in Vegas.”

When Thom got the car back, he found tar in the form of footprints on all the windows, as if somebody had been walking on them.

He couldn’t imagine what the three captains had been doing, and he never asked.

•   •   •

The good times continued to roll for Phil even as his sons entered adulthood and developed a wild streak of their own. Both had joined him on the
Cornelia Marie—
Josh starting in 2001, Jake four years later. Phil was keenly aware that turning his sons into crab fishermen, subjecting them to the stress inherent in the job, could push them into addiction as well. Phil wanted to steer them down a different path. And he thought he could do so, without reforming to become a role model, by alleviating some of the pressures of crab fishing, especially for the younger, smaller Jake.

Remembering the lack of respect he had encountered as the
captain’s son on the
Golden Viking,
Phil wanted to spare Jake that indignity when he came on board the
Cornelia Marie.
So Phil made it clear to everyone that Jake was working for the deck boss and would not, under any circumstances, go over the boss’s head to get a favor from Daddy.

Still, Phil wanted the crew to know that, despite his five-foot-eight, 145-pound frame, Jake was one tough kid. And to prove his point, Phil loved to tell the story about the game of chicken he had played with his younger son when Jake was a rebellious teenager.

It was a common game in the bars of Dutch Harbor. Two crabbers would put their forearms side by side, skin on skin, while a third would drop a lit cigarette between them. The man who flinched first was the loser, the weaker man in the eyes of his peers.

That was the test Phil challenged Jake to take. And, as Phil told his crew with pride in his voice, it was he, not Jake, who had flinched first.

But as much as Phil tried to protect Jake and Josh from the intensity of life on the Bering Sea, they sank more and more into a drunken state as they grew older and entered their twenties.

“We were the ones partying all the time,” said Josh, “totally out of control.”

How could they have turned out any other way after watching their father stagger through outrageous incident after outrageous incident for years without suffering for it? Because Phil was surrounded by enablers, there were rarely any consequences for his actions.

For example, at a house party he threw, Phil, having already had too much to drink, lurched out of the house, saying to no one in particular, “We need to go get some more beer.” He hopped into his truck parked in front of his house, told Josh and a few of his buddies to jump into the bed of the vehicle, jammed it into reverse, and crashed right into an arriving guest’s new Camaro.

Out stepped one of Phil’s friends, six-foot-six with a frame like a bodybuilder.

“This guy was massive, one of the biggest men I’ve ever seen in my life,” said Josh.

He calmly walked over to the truck and, in a voice as threatening as his appearance, said, “I just bought this car three hours ago, Phil.”

The look on Phil’s face went from menacing to meek.

“Are you going to kick my ass?” he asked, looking up at the hulk standing in front of his window.

“N-a-a-w,” was the reply. “We’ll just say I got hit at the grocery store.”

Party on.

Josh remembers driving down a Bothell street one day with his dad when Phil suddenly pulled over to the curb and told his son to stay in the car.

He then jumped out and intercepted a man walking down the street. The two started talking in front of a liquor store that had a large window looking out on the street. The conversation became more animated, especially on Phil’s side. Finally he stopped, tilted his head for an instant at a weird angle, grabbed the man, and threw him through the window into the store.