Something like national mourning took hold of the US - once people had connected the name with the voice - when the comic actor Phil Hartman was shot in his sleep by his wife of 11 years, Brynn.
After the killing at the end of May, Brynn, who had a history of drug and alcohol problems, fled to the home of Ron Douglas, a friend to whom she confessed what she had done. Douglas confiscated her handgun and drove her back home. But, as they waited with the couple's two children for police to arrive, Brynn locked herself in the bedroom with Hartman's corpse and turned a second gun on herself.
As the prosperous Los Angeles neighbourhood of Encino awoke to find its thoroughfares choked with police cars, coroner's vans and Barbie-doll TV anchors, half-asleep Americans nationwide squinted at their TVs and collectively asked: "Who?"
If Hartman wasn't a household name, it was because his prodigious gifts as an imitator were supported by total self-erasure. In commercials and animated movies, he was usually present only as a voice. Everybody in the US had heard his voice - or rather his many voices - a thousand times. Hartman was behind characters in the TV cult cartoon series The Simpsons - has-been actor and breathless infotainment pitchman Troy McClure ("You may remember me from such sex-instruction tapes as `Mr and Mrs Erotic American' . . .") and Lionel Hutz, attorney-at-law, almost surreally ignorant of the ways of American jurisprudence ("Habeas Corpus, Your Honour?")
He was also the longest-serving veteran of NBC's comedy clearing house Saturday Night Live, on which he appeared from 1986 to 1994, and which was enriched, in the otherwise comically lean years of its run, by the ever-dependable Hartman.
SNL showcased Hartman's impossibly varied gallery of impersonations, many of them downright eerie. He nailed politicians (Clinton, Ted Kennedy), entertainers (Sinatra, Nicholson, Liberace), newsreaders, talkshow hosts, sharky studio bosses, icons (Santa, Jesus, Frankenstein) and characters of his own, such as the suit-wearing, slope-headed Unfrozen Caveman Lawyer. For the last four years, he had starred as a sneery broadcaster in his own critically rated TV show, NewsRadio.
It's impossible to imagine NewsRadio without Hartman, though the producers say the show must go on. What will happen to 3rd Rock From The Sun, whose cliff-hanging season finale featured Hartman in a pivotal role, is anyone's guess.
When those half-awake viewers made the connection between such roles and photos of the out-of-make-up Hartman, their faces clouded with disbelief and disappointment. They'd only just figured out who he was and realised how much they loved his work - and now he was dead.
Friends said the Hartman marriage was characterised by frequent fights and reconciliations, often sparked by Brynn's volatile temper - "slapping, throwing, kicking, screaming", to quote a family friend - which was ascribed to drug problems. Another anonymous acquaintance told reporters that Brynn, a 41-year-old former model who'd recently changed her name from Vicky Jo, was treated for her addictions as recently as a year ago and seemed to have conquered them. But an autopsy revealed traces of alcohol, antidepressants and cocaine in her bloodstream.
"She had trouble controlling her temper," said Steven Small, a close friend and lawyer who had handled two divorces for Hartman. "They had a pattern of arguing at night and he would go to sleep and everything would be alright in the morning. I think he felt safe going to sleep and he just shouldn't have. I think she just lost control. Still, everyone's looking for a sign because it's bizarre how something like this could happen."
There were few signs - unsubstantiated, contradictory rumours, some of impending divorce or another woman, other stories emphasising the couple's devotion and Hartman's plans to ease up on work so he could have more family time. If there was another woman, she hasn't surfaced, and suggestions of divorce were scotched by several friends who said the Hartmans had recently undergone successful marriage counselling and were closer than ever.
Co-workers did not have a bad word to say about Hartman. The Simpsons executive producer Mike Scully was distraught: "Phil was tremendous fun to be with. The minute he said hello, you were laughing."
And Steve Martin, who worked with Hartman on Sgt Bilko, House Guest and Coneheads, added: "I don't know if Phil knew how beloved he really was."
Hartman was born in Canada in 1948 but grew up in Connecticut and Los Angeles. After studying graphic design, he worked briefly in advertising and record sleeve design (he designed the logo for Crosby Stills and Nash and the sleeve for Steely Dan's Aja).
IN the late 1970s he joined the LA improvisational comedy group the Groundlings, where he met Paul Reubens, better known as Pee-Wee Herman. Reubens failed an audition for Saturday Night Live but continued to work with Hartman, who conscripted Pee-Wee's Big Adventure and was a regular guest on the barking-mad Pee-Wee's Playhouse. After SNL, Hartman was in demand for commercials, which he said were the foundation for his multi-million-dollar fortune.
Being Canadian offers a clue to Hartman's genius. It has long been the case that, because of a sort of "integrated apartness", Canadians often make more quintessential, perhaps even more "authentic" Americans than Americans themselves - Neil Young, John Candy, Mike Myers, Michael J. Fox are among those who come to mind. But take note of other clues. His dad was a salesman (a cypher for the emptiness of American life since Arthur Miller's Willy Loman) and Phil spent years adrift in a corporate advertising environment. As an impersonator, Hartman was most successful essaying cheerfully oleaginous charlatans, including politicians, talkshow hosts, rightwing televangelists, lawyers and semi-criminal authority figures.
Hartman had a mercilessly fine-tuned ear for the cadences of liars and hucksters, two types who dominate US media and politics. The acute level of observation and scorn he brought to his skewering of such figures is perhaps the main reason he was so widely mourned.
Outside the Encino house on the morning of the deaths, TV reporters babbled about "closure", "the healing process" and "terrible tragedies" as the bodies were removed. Despite the grimness of the scene, no one who watched could have escaped the feeling that their emptiness had already been savagely satirised by the man in the body bag.