The Most Happy Fella

By Joel Stein

Behind all of Phil Hartman's characters lurked the same guy: uptight, inflated, slightly annoyed, but just self-aware enough to be in on the joke. In his personal life too, the longtime cast member of Saturday Night Live and NewsRadio seemed to be one of the few who appreciated the humor of celebrity, keeping his life in balance and low-key: a home in the unglamorous San Fernando Valley, a position as honorary sheriff in his town and a steady income from his TV show, small movie roles and voice-overs. So what happened early last Thursday morning--the day after the comic tested a new speedboat--did not fit the role everyone was used to: Hartman, 49, dead on his bed, in boxers and T shirt, shot twice in the head around 2 a.m.; his wife Brynn Omdahl then killing herself as their kids (Sean, 9, and Birgen, 6) were being taken from the house at about 6 a.m. by an as-yet-unidentified male friend who had called in the police for help.

The Los Angeles Times reported that Brynn, 40, an ex-model who was Hartman's third wife, had first fled to the male friend's house and fallen asleep there after talking incoherently of murdering her husband. After removing a gun from her purse, the friend took Brynn back to her home at dawn. But as the kids were carried out, she locked herself in the bedroom with a second gun and shot herself in the head. The Times quoted a lawyer who handled Hartman's 1985 divorce as saying the couple "had a pattern of arguing at night, and he would go to sleep and everything would be fine in the morning." Not this time.

There was almost immediate speculation about Brynn's violent possessiveness and past substance abuse. Even as family members denied the rumors, friends began talking about the fault lines in the marriage as well as Brynn's troubled history with controlling her anger. "They had a really nice, well-put-together family," says Andy Dick, Hartman's co-star in NewsRadio. "For nine years, Brynn was sober. She had her addictions in check, and she was getting help and everything was great. I can only assume that Brynn relapsed. I know Brynn when she was sober, and the sober Brynn is not capable of what supposedly happened."

Hartman's friends never expected him to play the victim in a murder-suicide, and even after news broke of the deaths, they invariably used the word happy to describe him. For good reason. He had the summer off to spend with his family at a Malibu vacation home he was about to rent; his sitcom, NewsRadio, was renewed two weeks ago; and the film Small Soldiers, in which he has a sizable role, is due out in July.

Was happiness a facade? Says SNL producer Lorne Michaels: "I'm not sure how well people really knew him. There was much more to him than appeared on the surface. I don't mean he was hiding anything as much as he was always very cool and pro." For someone known for his smirking Jesus, Hartman had a surprising piety. As he dealt with his father's death from Alzheimer's disease in April, he told the Catholic News Service, "Our faith prepares us for what lies ahead and tells us that it's a mystery to us, and we tremble before that mystery."

Last week the media mystery of choice was Hartman's private life. But the gated house in Encino provided few clues, except to Hartman's groundedness. "I'm kind of surprised someone of his stature lived over here," said the owner of a nearby shopping mall after the murder. "This is the wrong side of Ventura Boulevard for a celebrity." The perspective pervaded his late-blooming career. After leaving SNL in 1994 and despite landing a deal with NBC to star in his own sitcom, Hartman chose to join the underrated ensemble show NewsRadio in 1995, a project he continually championed and protected. At the time he said, "I have succeeded beyond my wildest dreams--financially and the amount of fun I have in my life."

His goal, he said, was to be the comedic Gene Hackman, playing subtle roles that bring class and reality to projects. In a chat on America Online last year, Hartman said, "I'm kind of at an intermediate level of celebrity, where pretty much everybody knows who I am but I haven't had the big breakout role that will take me to the next level. Sooner or later it will happen." Instead, it happened in real life, in the kind of melodramatic role that Hartman had always avoided.

--With reporting by Cathy Booth/Los Angeles and Dan Cray/Encino

With reporting by Cathy Booth/Los Angeles and Dan Cray/Encino