You Might Remember Me The Life and Times of Phil Hartman by Mike Thomas

Once he had, the wheels began to turn. Instead of aping the artist’s style exactly, Young suggested, why not omit the dust and draw a single horse using as few lines as possible? Phil loved the idea, retired to his studio, and before long he’d produced a dozen different versions. Young and Phil chose the winner together.
    Done in an entirely different style, Phil’s portrait of America was loosely based on the work of enormously popular American illustrator and painter Maxfield Parrish, who plied his trade in the first half of the twentieth century, was revered by Norman Rockwell, and was fond of rich colors. Parrish, too, was a darling of the rock ’n’ roll set. One of his paintings appears on Elton John’s Caribou. Another was adapted for the Moody Blues’ 1983 album The Present. “[Phil] would always come back with way more than I had even imagined and blow us all away,” John says. “Each situation was unique. With America’s Greatest Hits, he did it all on his own. He came with what he presented as roughs for the cover. The band immediately said, ‘That isn’t the rough; that’s the cover.’ He probably knew that was going to happen, but was being modest.”
    But it wasn’t all toil at H&G, described by John as “an extremely happy place.” Says Goodman, “We really believed in the people that we worked with. We cared about them a great deal and they cared about us. You couldn’t call it a job.” As befitted H&G’s rock ’n’ roll environment, a steady stream of groupies flowed in and out of the offices; pot was plentiful (“There wasn’t a time that I walked into that office that someone didn’t offer me a joint,” rock photographer Henry Diltz says) and corporate bullshit minimal. In keeping with the spotlight-loving side of his bifurcated personality, Phil served as a sort of in-house jester. On one occasion, Diltz recalls, Phil trotted out a comedy bit he’d been working on starring a German John Wayne. And when, toward the end of Phil’s stint, a young aspiring actress named Daryl Hannah stopped by to be photographed by Diltz (he snapped her early publicity stills), Phil suddenly popped into the frame wearing a curly red fop wig. Hairbrush in hand, he proceeded to affect the voice and mannerisms of a fey and fussy English hairdresser. “It turned into this half-hour bit,” John Hartmann told Larry King in 2004. “Everybody in the office gathered to see Phil do his thing.” Goodman likens Phil to a comedic gunslinger: “If you weren’t careful, he could drop you to your knees, convulsed in tears.”
    Phil had been at his H&G drafting table for only a couple of years, though, when he began to grow creatively if silently restless. He was constantly under the gun to meet deadlines and cooped up inside when he preferred to be out. Consequently, as stir-craziness worsened, he began searching for what he later termed a “psychological release.” As luck or fate would have it, one awaited him just minutes down the road.

 
    Chapter 5

    Phil as Lightman, Groundlings, late 1970s. (Photo by John H. Mayer)
     
     
    By the mid-1970s Phil had established himself as a top-notch graphic designer and was making a decent living at it. He’d conjured fanciful album art for Poco, America, and Crosby, Stills & Nash. He’d even bought himself a little house on Norwich Avenue in Sherman Oaks, where he hung John Wayne’s first studio portrait on his bedroom wall and planted azalea bushes that never grew quite right. Besides his work for Hartmann & Goodman, he began tinkering around with ideas for a comic strip based on the exploits of a masked aviation hero named “Don Patrol.”
    But the long and solitary artist’s hours wore on him. Despite his introspective nature, Phil craved more frequent human contact and feedback from a live audience, be it on a beach or in a theater. He also yearned for creative diversion—“a social outlet” that would enable him to expand his artistic horizons,