Wednesday, March 29, 2006

Phil Hartman II: The 12th Man

I had just learned to drive when I met Phil. No need for such a skill in Toronto, home of the streetcar and taxis for important events. Michael taught me the basics in his silver Audi Fox (stick shift, thanks forever) in the parking lot of Love's Restaurant on Pico Boulevard. I was not a natural and probably contributed to the car's early demise, gears grinding and stuttering under my terrified handling. But if I was to make a go of the film business I had to learn so before long we were puttering down Pico to my reward every Sunday: brunch at a cafe on the beach. It took us about an hour to drive there because I white-knuckled it all the way and never went over 25 miles an hour.

Life in Los Angeles had it share of terror, much of it I hid. One should never just pull up roots and move to a new country and try to break into the movie business in Hollywood when you were as niave and unconscious as I was. I use that word because I truly was in many ways unaware of the effect I had on people and what they meant to me when it came to it. I might have been pretty, I might have been kind, and I might have been clever, but if I was it was news to me.

What I knew for certain though, and had been from the time I could put one cohesive idea together with another one, was that much of my energy was devoted to observing the world and the fascinating arena of other people's behavior. Not my own, mind you, my missteps when it came to relationships were testament to that, but when it came to the the gigantic 3-D puzzle of human interactions, I was (and still am) a consummate connoisseur.

That was the main reason I was so attracted to Phil. For those of you who've had a true comic in your life you know what I'm talking about. There was nothing sexual about this attraction, it was more like the fascination of having a movie screen playing constantly in your view with characters unfolding out of your daily life, served up for your amusement. Phil was like me in many ways but we differed in one major aspect. While I observed quietly, filing and storing away tidbits of exprience to use later in my writing, Phil improvised his way through life by quickly integrating his observations into an ongoing comedy routine which included stand-up jokes delivered with feet spread apart and an imaginary (or real) cigar in hand, sly wisecracks that were often came under the radar, as impermanent as ether, and best of all, full-on impersonations of any number of famous people that he used to deliver barbed political or social satire.

My first few connections to Phil were at events or large parties and he came solo. I'd heard he was married but until we had him over for dinner some weeks later I'd yet to meet the elusive Lisa. They arrived for cocktail hour dressed to the nines - Phil always came to our parties wearing a suit and his wife was wearing heels and something Madonna-ish (as we all were in those days with lots of black tulle & big, messy hair). They'd come over from the Valley where they lived in a modest house bought with Phil's earnings as a graphic designer. I learned later his brother was in the music business and he often designed album covers for his clients.

Phil, burly and solid with a square head and curly hair, looked good in a suit, there was something faintly reminiscent of the 50's man about him. And yet, when he was beside the women in his life he appreared to shrink. Lisa was predictably attractive, self-assured, and more than a little aloof. As we chatted before sitting down to dinner Phil seemed uneasy, nervous. He had an expression that I soon learned to recognize: a kind of embarrassed thick-headed grin that masked his vulnerability.

"What's going on with those two?" I asked Michael in the kitchen. He shrugged. Michael cared little for the drama in relationships (even though at this point he was trying to extricate himself from a business partnership that had homoerotic undertones and was soon to turn very nasty). Once back in the living room I tried to engage Phil but he was shifting around, almost hopping from foot to foot. He kept trying to put his arm around Lisa but she shrugged him off.

Right about then I began to realize how much alike Phil and I were. We were both lousy at picking our mates and it was apparent that both of us were in mismatches. And Phil was about to lose wife number two and at a time when his career was starting to take off which must have been all the more debilitating to his ego.

When the other guests had left, Phil hung around as he usually did at parties, seeking out the last of his audience when the embers of the fire were burning low and the brandy came out. He didn't want to be alone. Didn't like being alone. Lisa sat apart and bored in a corner while he stood, one hand on the fireplace mantle, regaling Michael and I with stories until she had glared at him one too many times and they made their exit.

When he turned at the door we had our first moment of true connection. There was something about Phil that just made you want to reach out and enfold him. Like me, he was a middle child, affable and eager to please. But he had no idea how to get into the skin of someone who would really cherish him, truly let him be. He was destined to attach himself to others who would drag him down.

I felt an overwhelming, motherly sympathy for him. It was hard to believe that someone has kind and sweet as he was should be so unappreciated. And here I was, oh wise one, watching it from the peanut gallery, oblivious to my own narrowing path.

For my part, I'd made a bargain and I felt compelled to stick to it.

Next: Pee-wee's Big Adventure takes shape and fame looms for some.

Tuesday, March 21, 2006

Phil Hartman I: A Friend in Need

Sometime in the 1990's:

The last time I saw Phil Hartman we were lining up to see a movie in Sherman Oaks. Phil was already a star, he'd been on Saturday Night Live for most of the eight seasons he eventually booked there, and I had just crawled up from the couch at a friend's place where I was crashing for a few weeks. I got in line behind him - surprised that he'd be there like everyone else, patiently waiting his turn to have his ticket torn and stepping into another line for popcorn, not expecting any special treatment, and not one to avoid crowds and screen films at home. That was Phil. At least the Phil I knew.

He was a big guy, broad shouldered with a thick neck and scruffy reddish hair. Quietly minding his own business, he had just been standing there when I dutifully got into line behind him and even as recognition dawned for a while I did nothing but stare at his back. I'd been in self-imposed exile and now seeing him I was inside the light of the life I'd had owned before my fortunes had fallen, and down I went as if I were tumbling off a cliff with every image of that time together clearly toppling alongside me. We shuffled forward toward the entrance and I hesitated, feeling shy. Hair unkempt, I'd twisted it into a quick elastic for a trip out into the world from the depths of self-pity where I'd been holed up for months trying to sort out the mess my life had become. We were worlds apart by then, even though only a year or so had passed since we'd last had dinner together. It seemed forever. After a moment of indecisiveness, the ridiculousness of it all got to me and I tapped him on the shoulder. He turned around, a broad smile of recognition lighting up his face.

"Well, hello there," he drawled. He always sounded like he was imitating Jack Benny and the familiarity of it was wrenching. He turned his body halfway toward me, I reached out to touch his arm and then I saw her.

Brynn. She stepped into view and snaked her hand onto his other arm, big-ass Valley wedding rings flashing. With a firm grip she started to pull him back. Hey!

She gave me a cold glance, and her grip tightened.

"Brynn, you remember......" but she cut him off. "Sweetheart, we have to go," she said firmly.
Not like the last time. Then you had to be polite. To pay attention.

Phil was still the same. His good-natured charm never wavered, even when she was pulling on him, her tendrils like the Lady of The Lake.

My face must have been pale, no makeup, no glamour. I'd thrown jeans and a hoodie on at the last minute and pulled what I had around me tighter. It was a fall night and the snap! in the air made us all withdraw a little, watch the cold ground. Not the friendliest of nights. For a moment we stood eye to eye - a shadow of our past keeping just the ghost of a placemark held fast by shared memories.

"Come on!" Brynn said with a hiss. He shrugged and smiled apologetically. You don't belong. This town can be like that.

She had me to rights and there was nothing I could do. He turned away and they moved ahead of me in line as if we had never met, never been friends, never, never, never.

Welcome to Hollywood.


Several years earlier:

If I told you that I really wanted to quit the business you'd have laughed at me because I was still just a kid and nowhere near being burned out. It was the fear of being burned out, of seeing raspy-voiced women in production jobs at the studio who had become pack-a-day smokers and looked as if they hadn't slept in weeks. I'd been working at MGM as a television production coordinator for a year. A year and one month when I decided to marry Michael, a writer with a movie deal, and throw my romantic dreams out the window. Jaded and fearful I felt so much older than I was and I didn't realize how much growing up I still had to do. I wanted to make films, not hackneyed television series with the kind of actors who back then could never, ever transition like they do now to making films. This was the ebb of the era populated by the likes of Michael Landon and James Brolin, of big-haired women with long red nails who populated nighttime soaps about rich Texans and fictitious Vineyards, and who had big enough shoulder pads and enough makeup to, as the song goes, "make a monkey look good."

During our whirlwind engagement and wedding plans Phil Hartman came into our lives. He was Paul Reuben's (Pee-Wee Herman) friend from The Groundlings, where they had enjoyed local success as comic performers before teaming up with Michael to write Pee-wee's Big Adventure on spec for Paramount. To me Phil was old, probably around 36 (wow, so very old) and had been knocking around the business for so long that even he had given up hope of ever really making it. That's what made Phil so interesting and endearing, because he was really, really talented. A brilliant comic and spot-on mimic with a quick wit, he had the kind of goofy charm and insatiable need to make people laugh that quickly made him your inseperable companion and tour guide for the love of living.

When Phil and I realized we were both Canadians, our bond was securely formed and I quickly fell in love with the joy he brought into our world.

Next: Our Philly, Part II


Thursday, March 09, 2006

Roger Keith Coleman VI: Remember Me

The other night I woke up with a start to the knowledge that I owed Doug Richardson some money. He's a screenwriter I knew many moons ago who helped me out when I came back from Canada in 1990 with a few strings missing from my marionette. He and his partner had just gotten a million bucks from Disney for a screenplay called Hellbent for Leather (which was never, made by the way) and he was feeling quite flush at the time. When he wrote me the check he said it would be a gift but I insisted it be a loan to be paid back some day. I had every intention of paying it back. I'm not a welsher.

That's the funny thing about memory. It's quite subjective. And selective. I don't like to think of myself as a deadbeat on a loan from a friend but that's what I appear to be at the moment and it got me to wondering about Roger Keith Coleman's diary, which was a powerful study in denial and how the reshaping of memory gave way to the rebirth of a kinder, gentler man. It got me thinking about why the subconscious has such control over the tricker parts of our nature, and just how self-aware we really are when it comes right down to it.

Coleman was a case in point. Until this meeting with Sharon and the gift of his diary I had only others' opinions as my guide for the who Coleman was. Here in the boardroom with a movie deal at stake, I was privy to a more personal relationship with him. Sharon Paul sat there silently while I flipped open the top page and started to read; I could feel her presence as she willed me to concentrate on his words and not on the snappy deal-making that was occupying Paul and Kitty down the row. A stack of plain paper without a way to keep it together, the diary was carefully typed on an electric typewriter, double spaced, with no corrections or hand-written notes in the margins.

My clearest memory of the experience of reading it first under Sharon's watchful gaze and then later at home was that the whole thing seemed, well, clean. There was as much white space in the economy of words as there was on the spotless copy. I don't know how many revisions he went through before giving it up to public view but the placid surface of his story was so convincing that I at first glance I began to doubt my initial suspicions. I suppose that was the brilliance of the man, because his simplicity and straighforwardness was what one would expect from an uneducated blue collar joe who'd never ventured outside his isolated mountian hometown. His transparency was compelling and I understood then why so many people had become his advocate.

But read something with enough stillness around you and eventually the subtext will make its presence known like some mysterious shadow puzzle. Great writers know how to tap into this river and weave the visible and invisible into a cohesive current that speaks to the truth of the experience. All of us are better critics than we may realize, for we do recognize and experience the unfolding events with the same keen grasp with which they were written, and the circle is complete. The act of writing is merely a conduit to what is happening all around us in everyday life. It is the world of another captured through a shared look, decisions made, futures altered.

And by the same token, when something is out of sync, forced, or manipulated, a warning bell goes off and we eventually disconnect. Unless our subconscious has another plan in mind for us....

In the presence of Sharon Paul, who had so much invested in the truth of these words, I saw at first only the surface of his thoughts and felt the real weight of his situation: The helplessness, frustration and an almost paralysing lassitude one gets when something is too big to overcome. He seemed a quiet, unassuming man who took his pleasure from the simplest of everyday moments, whose memory of his life growing up was blameless and generous to people whom you couldn't help feel were never the same way toward him. It was humbling.

And then, little by little, something of the shadow began to appear - what became clearer as I read through the days and weeks of meticulous entries was that Sharon lived in every word - clearly this effort had started in earnest once he had awakened inside her love and trust. This was a person who would believe in him. His little brown sparrow nesting in the narrow view outside his cloistered life, a memory of something so distant he must have wept with joy to find it again. And slowly, through the process of observing the life he wished he had once had he truly was becoming the man who was open and sincere, who sought emotional connection and reveled in the complex beauty of intimacy shared.

But it was a dream and I really began to see it in the few days that I had to meditate on the subtle messages in his writing. This was not the person he had been before his personal redemption. Someone without a conscience, driven by rage and fear. A serial rapist, establishing a pattern of stalking and preying on women from a very early age. In the end what I experienced was a methodical, almost painful focus down on what remained to him: the simplicity of his spare life in prison and the love of Sharon, another Lost Cause. She could never have him, and in his heart of hearts, he knew he would never have her.

Roger Keith Coleman was executed on May 20, 1992. He died a martyr, a man loved and waiting for redemption after death. Whatever darkness had been his life for so many years must have been well and truly buried because I really do believe that he trusted those who said he would someday be vindicated.

He and Sharon were allowed one visit together without glass between them. He was shackled to a chair. She sat on his lap and they held each other, nuzzled, and kissed. He wrote about every detail, every close whisper, every breath.

When Paul and I accompanied Kitty and Sharon out of the offices of Arnold & Porter, I took a small argillite box I'd been given the day I left Haida Gwaii by the people who knew how much I was hurting, how much I wanted to stay. Argillite is very precious to the Haida people, found only in remote mountainous areas of their island home, it is a soft, luminous black stone, easy to carve. On the small box an eagle mask relief was inset with abalone from the nearby sea.

"The sky is crying," my adopted Naani had said to the grey, rainy day of my departure. Inside the box was a silver heart. I wanted Sharon to have it. I wanted to get on with my life so it was time to let it go to someone who would need it until her time had come to move on.

We parted. Three days later, after Coleman had been executed and taken for burial, Kitty called to tell me that Al Pacino's company had been awarded the rights to his story. A movie was never made. His diary was never published.

In January of this year, DNA tests from a small sample saved by his faithful followers was finally tested. To their shock it proved to be his semen taken from the body of Wanda Fay McCoy, left dead on the floor of her small home with her neck cut from ear to ear.

When asked to comment on the findings, Sharon Paul, who now lives quietly in Seattle said that no matter what the results said, she still believed Roger was innocent.