You Might Remember Me The Life and Times of Phil Hartman (29 page)

“Phil had a very soft, feminine side to him,” Strong says. “And I think [Brynn] may have thought that Phil had had [gay] relationships.” After Phil and Brynn married, Bennett contends, “all the gay Groundlings were sort of pushed out of his life as much as possible. I think Brynn was threatened, and I know other people felt that way as well.” And though it “upset Phil,” Bennett says, “he was not going to confront her about stuff like that.”

As for other women, Marin says none came to his attention in all the time he spent with Phil—which was a lot. In fact, Marin adds, Phil even was careful not to get overly familiar with female fans he met while out and about—including those who asked to board his boat at Catalina Island. If Brynn knew, he knew, she’d have a fit. “Phil never strayed,” John Hartmann contends. “He was a very unique cat. ‘Good’ is the best word to describe him.”

As Phil told Conan O’Brien that year—jokingly, as always, but with more than a hint of truth: “I am up to my elbows in a midlife crisis, let’s be honest. I can’t cheat on my wife; she’s psychic. If I look at another woman, she comes home [and says], ‘Who’s Laura?’ I go, ‘I didn’t get a name!’ She’s a Sagittarius, you know.… So I buy toys.” (Coincidentally or not, Phil’s pal Leno has long employed a similar line, once joking, “It’s cheaper to have thirty-five cars and one woman than one car and thirty-five women.”)

As John Hartmann and Floyd Dozier tell it, acquaintances of Phil and Brynn (a couple) once tried to make a quick buck—many bucks, actually—by framing Phil for having an extramarital affair. One night after dinner, according to Dozier’s telling, these people suggested the four of them visit a nearby strip club called the Body Shop—the same establishment Phil had dropped by with Lynne Stewart after seeing
Platoon
in 1986. When Phil consented to getting a lap dance, the story goes, a hidden video camera supposedly caught all the sordid action from somewhere overhead. Not long thereafter, John says, Phil and Brynn arrived home to find a manila envelope nailed to their garage door. Inside was a videotape of Phil at the Body Shop and a note demanding $25,000 to stop its dissemination. “Phil had no problem with its being released,” John says, because the blonde sitting next to Phil—the one who seemed to be enjoying herself—was Brynn. Nonetheless, Phil hired a private investigator (“He looked like Luca Brasi from
The Godfather
,” Dozier says) that put the matter to rest and destroyed the master tape.

For a while, though, Brynn persisted in her as yet unfounded concern. When Victoria Jackson visited the Hartman home, likely in the latter half of 1997, she was pulled aside by Brynn and told something overly intimate, something she didn’t want to hear: Brynn suspected Phil of cheating. “I thought it was very inappropriate, because I didn’t really know them that well,” Jackson says. “It was such a private thing. She’s telling me something about [hearing] a woman calling on the phone, but the woman hung up when she would answer.”

Although Stewart and Brynn were friends, and Stewart admired Brynn’s humor, beauty, generosity, and energy, she’d heard from others about Brynn’s “jealous streak.” “[But] she was never jealous of me,” Stewart says, “because she knew what good friends [Phil and I] were and that I had never had an affair with her husband, even when she wasn’t married to him.”

From talks with Phil and observations of him and Brynn together, Cassandra Peterson developed a much more critical opinion. Brynn, Phil told her, was angry and jealous “because she felt that he was blocking her career as a screenwriter.” In his book
Jealousy,
San Francisco–area psychiatrist Eugene Schoenfeld describes the emotion:

Jealousy is not envy … Envy is somehow more passive than jealousy, wistful rather than grief-stricken, more pique than anger.

Jealousy and envy are both unpleasant, but envy is like getting stung by a mosquito or, at worst, a bee. It hurts but it’s not overwhelming. Jealousy can be like having a rusty jagged knife stuck in your gut and—depending on the circumstances—slowly twisted. You rarely hear of people killing because of envy.

The components of jealousy are fear or anticipated grief, a loss of self-worth, a stirring of early feelings of insecurity, and anger directed at a loved one or whoever is diverting his or her attention. Usually one or two of these components are felt more than the others.

Brynn would also make snide comments about her kids, Peterson says, and often put Phil down in public. “I saw that so many times. It just made me go, ‘How could a guy like this be with a woman like this? I don’t get it.’”

During Jackson’s Encino visit, Brynn mentioned that she was fearful of losing Sean and Birgen in a divorce, and that she was attending Narcotics Anonymous meetings for cocaine abuse. She had “slipped,” Brynn admitted through tears during an early 1997 phone call to her sister Kathy Wright in Wisconsin.

Kathy knew what “slipped” meant: a drug relapse, most likely with cocaine. Brynn had also started drinking again socially—beer, margaritas—in the months leading up to it, and drinking made her want to snort coke.

*   *   *

On May 11, 1997, Mother’s Day, Brynn went out that evening after a holiday get-together and returned in less than pristine condition the next morning. Phil was furious and demanded she see her psychologist before checking into the Sierra Tuscon rehab clinic in Arizona. They fought like hell, but Brynn ultimately agreed to his demands and left the next day. Partway through her first week in treatment, though, she called Christine Zander to say she missed her kids and wanted out. Also, Brynn insisted she didn’t need rehabilitating. After she returned home, Zander says, “I don’t think cocaine was discussed anymore. Or her addiction.”

On at least one occasion Phil expressed great concern about Brynn to his mother, Doris. “I’ve been out of my mind,” he told her during a phone conversation Doris later recalled. “Brynn’s been gone all day. She keeps phoning me and telling me she’s coming home. She wouldn’t come home. I didn’t know where she was. Mother, I actually got down on my knees and prayed to God that she’d return safely.”

“Where is she now?” Doris asked him.

“She’s sleeping it off,” Phil replied. “Mother, I’ve told her this and I’m going to tell her again. Now this is the honest-to-God truth: If she does this again, I’m out of here and I’ll take the kids with me. She can have everything. I don’t care. But I’m not going to live with someone who can’t control drugs and alcohol.”

Mostly, though, he kept details about Brynn’s problems and their eroding relationship close to the vest, only hinting at turmoil in his typically joshing way and sugarcoating the bitterness beneath while focusing on lighter topics. “He liked to brag,” says Jay Kogen. “He always used to like to brag about what he bought and what he had and brag a little bit about money and brag a little bit about parts he was doing … I think at a certain point he was interested in being perceived as somebody who was successful and doing good stuff and doing well. He would talk about how well his life was going, most of the time. Never anything negative, almost never anything problematic. Except very occasionally, if there was trouble in his marriage, he would say, ‘Oh, it’s not easy being married.’ But very rarely.”

Those in whom Phil fully confided were few. His ex-wife Lisa was one of them—unbeknownst to Brynn, who, Phil cautioned, could
never
know of their get-togethers. Despite its many problems—the arguing, the communication breakdowns—he was resigned to stay in his marriage, Lisa says. “She’s freaking me out with all this plastic surgery,” Phil exclaimed of Brynn. And yet, as a former Hartman nanny would later assert, Phil encouraged at least some of it because he “thought her face was too round and wanted her chin to be more square.”

Much to Lisa’s dismay, Phil seemed utterly—
stupidly,
she thought—unconcerned that Brynn owned a gun. “You are asking for it,” Lisa warned. “You are crazy if you let her have a gun.” Phil was blasé. Brynn would never do anything harmful with it, he assured. It was simply for protection because she was often home alone with the kids.

“Phil, do not let her have a gun,” Lisa says she implored. “Take that gun away!”

Again, Phil brushed off her apprehension: “Nothing’s ever going to happen.”

Brynn was getting help in rehab, Phil told concerned parties, they were going to couples counseling (when Phil went) and everything would be fine. And they were indeed trying to make things right, Ohara Hartmann says. “I don’t know whether it was stubbornness or Catholicism or just love, but they worked hard at the relationship and she was unhappy. It was kind of mind-boggling to him. He was someone who loved life, and they had a lot of blessings.”

Small thinks Phil’s tone-deafness also came into play when dealing with Brynn’s addictions. He had little understanding of her situation and “was confident that, through the strength of his personality, he could pull her through her dependencies.” Which indeed demonstrates a poor understanding of the albatross addiction truly is. In his insightful book
Clean: Overcoming Addiction and Ending America’s Greatest Tragedy,
author and journalist David Sheff writes:

The view that drug use is a moral choice is pervasive, pernicious, and wrong. So are the corresponding beliefs about the addicted—that they’re weak, selfish, and dissolute; if they weren’t, when their excessive drug taking and drinking began to harm them, they’d stop. The reality is far different. Using drugs or not isn’t about willpower or character. Most problematic drug use is related to stress, trauma, genetic predisposition, mild or serious mental illness, use at an early age, or some combination of those. Even in their relentless destruction and self-destruction, the addicted aren’t bad people. They’re gravely ill, afflicted with a chronic, progressive, and often terminal disease.

Brynn did not go with Phil when he returned to Brantford that July. The purpose of his visit—the first since he’d left as a young boy forty years earlier—was a gala celebration during which Phil and two other prominent Brantford natives (NHL player Doug Jarvis and scientist-inventor Dr. James Hillier) were immortalized on the town’s new Walk of Fame. “Phil Hartman couldn’t be here tonight,” Phil joked during the presentation ceremony. “He’s at a similar event honoring Jay Silverheels” [the actor who played Tonto on
The Lone Ranger
]. He also asked for impression requests from the crowd, which came to include Bill Clinton, Charlton Heston, and (perhaps a first for Phil) boxer Mike Tyson. On a more serious note, Phil attributed his success to “a lifetime of love and support from my mom and dad, and it means so much to my family and myself to know that our name will be woven into the history of this town forever.”

Back at
NewsRadio,
which started taping its fourth season late that summer, Phil quietly and selectively shared his domestic problems with Khandi Alexander and Vicki Lewis, the latter of whom was then living with her actor boyfriend Nick Nolte and dealing with his problematic drug use. When Phil arrived on the set one week with scratch marks on his face, their origin was only intimated to Lewis. But she knew. When he showed up oddly unshaven and unkempt because he’d slept on his boat, she knew then, too. “How do you do this?” he asked her. Like him, she had no answer.

Joe Rogan winced at the pattern of fighting and reconciling that Phil and Brynn seemed to follow. “He just kind of thought that every relationship got ugly and then you made up and then got ugly and then you made up,” Rogan later said. After an especially nasty episode during which Phil had sought refuge on his boat, Rogan said, Phil’s tone was disingenuously upbeat when he announced a reunion: “I’m back with my blushing bride!” Congratulations abounded, but Rogan thought, “Oh, fuck. That’s not good. It’s a disaster.”

Lewis says Phil never wore his emotions on his sleeve and was very private about revealing any discord at home. The only reason she knew was because they shared “a similar horror.” At a Golden Globes party one year, Lewis remembers, both of their mates began drinking when both were supposed to be sober. She and Phil exchanged worried looks. And late in 1997, at a
NewsRadio
Christmas party, Phil and Brynn got into a public squabble. “He was being lovely and she was being really loudly caustic about him,” Lewis says. “Like, ‘Oh, he’s so
fucking
funny!’ And it was shocking to see, because you saw a little window into how she could get.”

On December 31, 1997, the Hartmans hosted a small New Year’s Eve soiree at their home. Family and friends, including some of Phil’s entertainment world colleagues, were invited. Comedic actor Andy Dick, who co-starred with Phil on
NewsRadio,
was among them. Even then Dick’s struggle with substance abuse was no secret, and later that evening a close confidant of Brynn’s saw her and Dick enter the master bathroom and lock the door behind them. This confidant feared the worst—that Brynn was inside doing drugs—and began banging on the door, screaming for Brynn to come out. She did not.

Roughly a decade later, in July 2007, Dick appeared on comedian Tom Green’s Internet talk show
TomGreen.com
Live
. When the issue of Phil and Brynn and drugs arose, he grew foggy in recounting “whether I gave Phil Hartman’s wife cocaine.” He also said this: “Look, if you’re looking to … get drunk, you’re gonna go to a bar. If you’re looking for drugs, you’re gonna go to somebody who you think does blow. She is somebody that, that night, wanted to get high. ‘Oh, he must have it. Do you have any?’ ‘Yeah, maybe I do.’ … I didn’t know aaaaaanything about her past. I didn’t know any of that.”

The incident sparked a long-simmering feud with Jon Lovitz that would culminate in a 2007 fracas at the Laugh Factory comedy club in West Hollywood. According to Laugh Factory owner Jamie Masada, Lovitz “picked Andy up by the head and smashed him into [a] bar four or five times, and blood started pouring out of his nose.” Lovitz himself gave a similar account in the media.