You Might Remember Me The Life and Times of Phil Hartman (10 page)

Groundlings co-founder Tracy Newman—who went on to write for
Cheers
and
Ellen
, and co-create ABC’s sitcom
According to Jim
—was especially taken with Phil’s unwavering commitment to the work. He had those qualities right from the start, she says, even when his skills were raw. “I don’t know if he understood it intellectually, but maybe he understood what he wanted to see, so he knew how to do it,” she says. “There’s nothing that makes an audience more comfortable than a committed performer, and he was the most extreme committed performer. It also made him really desirable in terms of being onstage with him … Because it didn’t really matter what you did. He never said ‘no’ onstage and he always made you look good.”

Although Phil was no genius in Newman’s eyes, nor was he especially original in his approach or characters, his utter commitment begat brilliance. Groundlings cast member and teacher Phyllis Katz talks of Phil going “to his own planet” while performing, during the process of which there was “no room for monitoring himself.” Onstage, she says, his normally reserved personality was turbo-charged. An uncanny ability to exist in the moment and an instinct for knowing when to remain still or underplay a part also helped Phil’s sketches shine. Audiences quickly took note.

But offstage, some observed, Phil’s magnetism diminished. “There was no there, there,” Tracy Newman says, though not pejoratively, of Phil’s search for his own identity. Moreover, he often seemed preoccupied and could come across as distant or disconnected. “The first time I saw him onstage it was obvious that he was a star. But as a person, no.” Former Groundling John Paragon attributes some of that distance to the fact that Phil led a separate and in ways more grown-up life outside the theater. He had a full-time job doing important and nationally regarded work when most of his compatriots were laboring at temp gigs or waiting tables.

And Phil was always immersing himself in various books or practicing other disciplines—sailing, guitar playing, and whatever else piqued his interest. “He’d have a character, and he’d also have this wealth of technical knowledge [about that character],” Katz says. “Or, if he didn’t know and was making it up, you couldn’t be sure.” When it came to his beloved sailing, however, Phil never had to fake it. “Sometimes on weekends he’d just go to the beach and rent a boat,” Katz remembers. “It was cheap, and he said it brought him peace.”

Because everyone at the Groundlings regularly participated in workshops, Phil learned from those who came before him such as Austin, (Tracy) Newman, Katz, and Maxwell. “They may be competitive but they’re also very supportive,” Paul Reubens (aka Pee-wee Herman) has said of his former troupe. “The opposite of that was the Comedy Store, where everyone’s out for themselves. The Groundlings was a workshop with people who wanted everyone else to succeed.” Impressively for Phil’s lack of experience, characters and sketch ideas generally came easily though rarely performance-ready.

And no matter what scene he was in, you could always count on Phil to make it sing. Alan Cranis, who managed the box office, recalls Maxwell’s quipping about Phil’s indispensability. If he could put Phil in a concrete box to keep him safe from accidents or illness, Maxwell said, he would. That value as a utility player, someone who could be counted on in all scenarios, would eventually serve Phil well in other professional endeavors. “He really belonged in England, where even the butler character is worked out in detail,” Tracy Newman says. “It didn’t matter what role Phil was playing, he would get out there and do it to the best of his ability and with a great deal of depth.”

One of the funniest pieces Dozier saw Phil perform had its debut during a so-called “scene night,” when material was showcased for an invite-only audience. This was pre-1979, when the theater had yet to be approved for paid public consumption. As a result, attendees were asked to sign waivers releasing the group from any liability should they become injured while on the premises—by, say, a crazed sniper named Norman Garrison. Played by Phil as a sweaty, twitchy, sleep-deprived nutcase clutching a vintage World War II carbine and wearing authentic soldier’s garb, the jarring and offbeat Garrison nearly caused hemorrhaging. “I remember laughing so hard I couldn’t breathe,” Dozier says. “It’s the first time I saw people actually rolling in the aisles.”

As Phil began to shine onstage, John Hartmann talked up his younger brother to contacts around town. “It was our mission to get Phil discovered,” John’s ex-wife Lexie Slavich says. “And so we would [meet with] every agent and producer that we could get our hands on, we’d wine and dine them, then we’d go to the Groundlings and watch the show. And afterwards, we’d take them to meet Phil.”

*   *   *

In time, as its newness wore off, Phil increasingly saw the Groundlings as more than a mere escape or diversion; it became a stepping-stone. “We were young and we were creative and we were energetic and we thought we were all going to be stars,” Katz says. “If you’re creative, you burn to create. And here, we had the opportunity to do it.” Phil never voiced that specific ambition, she says, but it was definitely there. You could see it and sense it in his devotion to the work.

At first, that work was deeply collaborative and the actors were more consistently supportive of each other’s efforts. But as time wore on, Katz says, the dynamic began to change. Phil wasn’t immune to the shift. “I thought he became less friendly and more competitive and more interested in his own work and less interested in the work of his group,” she says. Which might have had something to do with the increasingly large shadow cast by
Saturday Night Live.
“At the Groundlings, the goal is to get on
Saturday Night Live,
” alumnus and former
SNL
cast member Julia Sweeney has said. “That’s what everybody wanted to do.” Reubens has expressed similar sentiments. “
SNL
was always a big force at the Groundlings,” he told the
Hollywood Reporter.
“Just something that we all kind of were like, ‘If you’re successful, this might be an option.’” And though
SNL
wasn’t Phil’s primary or even secondary goal, he certainly wanted to advance his career. “Phil wanted to break into show business any way he could,” says friend Mark Pierson, who met Phil in the early seventies in Malibu and was among those who improvised with him during off-hours at the Malibu Cinema. “He was really pining for it. As successful as his life was doing graphic art, he wanted it so much.”

*   *   *

As a Groundlings instructor, Phyllis Katz made a point of drawing her students out of their respective comfort zones to perform scenes and characters that did not come naturally. Phil always had the toughest time playing himself. “You really have to bare yourself to get out of a character and just play a scene as yourself,” Katz says. “But Phil was not much of a personality. He was like a chameleon.” Others, including Maxwell, noticed the same quality. “He was a person who loved inhabiting other personas,” Maxwell says. “So he was very comfortable assuming characters and really committing to them and doing impressions. That’s what he would gravitate to, even in life.”

Even offstage, costumes were key. One year Phil would drive a pickup truck, dress in all black, and perm his hair so it resembled an Afro of sorts. Eighteen months later he’d get his hair straightened, wear Hawaiian shirts, and drive a sports car. “He once called me up and said, ‘I think I should tell you something before the show opens tonight: I’ve shaved my head,’” Maxwell remembers. “He was kidding, but that would be something he could have done.” During another sartorial phase, he wore an impeccably tailored British suit—in brick red. As one former colleague puts it, “Phil was very vain and consumed by his appearance.”

*   *   *

Had he tried to be a stand-up comic instead of a sketch actor, Tracy Newman thinks, Phil might have struggled “because he didn’t have a point of view as a human being.” Not onstage, anyway. He was most comfortable and at his performing best when cloaked or otherwise obscured by a crazy wig, a different voice, or the rakishly cocked hat and drab trench coat of one Chick Hazard. The Raymond Chandler–esque private dick was born of a goofy greeting Phil left on his answering machine. After hearing it, Maxwell suggested he use it as the basis for a new character. Phil had also included a Chick Hazard bit on his 1978 comedy album,
Flat TV.
The early effort, lost for a quarter-century after its recording, includes fake news segments,
Tonight Show
spoofs, a sketch about football/masturbation, and commercial parodies. Among the latter is a spot for something called Nescocaine. “Why not enjoy a delicious cup of Nescocaine?” Phil asks as the hopped-up announcer. “Or a second? Or a third? Hell, why not snort it right out of the jar?!”

Hazard, though, was poised to be Phil’s first breakout character, and at the Groundlings it became far more three-dimensional—literally and figuratively. Hazard’s voice, look, and patter all were honed in workshops before the noirish P.I. debuted during the Groundlings’ first show on Melrose in late April 1979. With advisement and encouragement from Maxwell and others, the witty dick perfected his act and soon became an all-around favorite. Phil loved to play him, cast members loved to play with him, and audiences invariably roared their approval. Hazard sketches were showstoppers from their inception, and not only because they capped performances. Quick-talking and tightly wound, the all-business Hazard rarely smiled and spoke hard-boiled staccato sentences in a rat-a-tat-tat cadence. (“I was a sucker for long legs. I wanted to shinny up one of hers like a native boy looking for coconuts.”) Every Hazard bit—always launched with a Chick monologue that conveyed crucial exposition—was a largely improvised murder mystery, with recurring characters and on-the-spot role assignments chosen by Phil. Lynne Stewart played a suspect named Missy. “You’re going down for this, Missy!” Chick would exclaim, whereupon Stewart dropped to her knees as if to fellate him. Chick (sotto voce and glancing around nervously): “Not now!”

“Phil would dictate the scenes as he went along,” Paragon recalls. “And as he would walk in, he would label the names of all the people onstage and who they were.” Since Phil was known to be virtually unflappable onstage, Paragon often tried to crack him up mid-scene. Once, as a be-tuxed and big-assed “forties hitman” type named Nick Camaro, Paragon used his outsized backside as a tray to serve Hazard a drink. (“Cocktail, Chick?”) While attempting to suppress his laughter, Phil snatched up the libation, chugged it down, and then flung his glass to the ground.

Victoria Bell (then Carroll) also attempted to throw Phil off his game via anatomical distraction. As his voluptuous female foil, a sexy 1940s vixen named Carmen Pluto, she initially appeared onstage with an era-appropriate dress and gardenias in her hair—nothing too risqué. “Then I heard through the grapevine that he really liked sexy lingerie,” the award-winning costume designer says of Phil, who was then single. “So I made myself a nude leotard with black lace over it—a black chiffon negligee. And I wore black hose with the garter belt. And Phil knew nothing about it. So he started to introduce my character: ‘There she was, Carmen Pluto, the atomic blonde bombshell…’” When the lights came up, Phil swung around to see Bell standing there with one stocking-clad gam (like something he might shinny up in search of coconuts) propped on a chair. In a split second, Bell recalls, he turned to the audience and said, “One look at Carmen and my cock shot down my pant leg like a snake through a vacuum cleaner.” So much for throwing Phil off his game.

“We thought of him as a big star, even though he wasn’t known outside of that [world],” Groundlings alum and
Saturday Night Live
cast member Jon Lovitz, one of Phil’s best friends, told an interviewer of Phil’s years on Melrose. As he recalled much later, “We’d all be sitting on the floor laying out the scene: ‘Okay, Phil, you’re a shoe salesman.’ The lights would go down and come up, and we were just waiting. We knew whatever he was going to say was nothing you could ever imagine or think of. Then he would say it, and our jaws would drop open. He could do any voice, play any character, make his face look different without makeup. He was the king of the Groundlings.” Maybe so, but as Newman notes there were several others back then who displayed the same charisma and “brilliance” as Phil in their own ways. “It’s confidence that makes a person charismatic most of the time,” she says. “And the way confidence plays out is with commitment onstage. People are drawn like moths to the flame. They’re drawn to the brightest light.” By dint of his formidable skills and copious stage time, Phil was often that light.

More than a few former cohorts say he was artistically generous besides. “He wanted everybody to succeed,” says friend and former Groundling Randy Bennett. “He didn’t like to see people left behind.” Phil proffered valuable advice, too, both as a teacher and a colleague. Case in point: Every year at Christmastime, starting in 1981, the nearby Crystal Cathedral hosted holiday blowouts featuring live animals, flying angels—the works. So Groundling Doug Cox wrote a parody of the extravaganza featuring facsimiles of Sandy Duncan as the Little Shepherd Boy and Eurythmics rocker Annie Lennox as the Virgin Mary. Phil was a Wise Man—as played by Frank Sinatra. For several years, Cox says, “it really killed.” Emboldened by its success, he decided to mock the traditions of another Christian holiday: Easter. “We were rehearsing it and we thought, ‘Oh, this is gonna kill. They’re gonna love this,’” Cox says. “And we did it once and it just totally, totally died.” In retrospect, he thinks, promoting the availability of a Crucifixion-themed drink—the Rusty Nail—at the Groundlings bar was perhaps a bit much. Phil doing a Sinatra-esque Pontius Pilate probably didn’t help. “The audience just hated it,” Cox says, but he and his cohorts finished what they’d started. Afterward, seeing that Cox was in the dumps, Phil walked up to him and offered the following insight: “You can make fun of Christmas, Doug, but you can’t fuck with the Resurrection.” And they never did again.