Live From New York: An Uncensored History of Saturday Night Live (41 page)

Belushi’s death seemed tragic on many different levels. That his death was linked to drug abuse only reinforced the mistaken public perception that Belushi was some childish party animal, undisciplined and wild — much like the slobbish Bluto whom he played in his triumphant movie hit
Animal House.
But those who knew Belushi even superficially knew him as tender, sensitive, painfully vulnerable, and lovable. The only time Belushi and Bluto really resembled each other was during a scene in which Bluto tries to cheer up a despondent fellow frat boy. He romps, he mugs, he cracks a bottle over his head, and then he pantomimes a big happy grin, propping up the corners of his mouth with his fingers. The gesture recalls the sweet innocence of Harpo Marx.

Saturday Night Live
’s resident ensemble had been called the Beat-les of comedy, and now they had their own dead Lennon. They could never go back, never regroup, never be together again. It would never be just like it was.

In
Don’t Look Back in Anger,
a famous short film made by Tom Schiller for the show in 1977 and set sometime in the distant future, an elderly but dapper Belushi visits the wintry graves of fellow alumni and explains that though some predicted he’d be the first to go, it was in fact he alone who survived the intervening decades. And the reason? “I’m — a dancer!” he exclaims, just before launching into some sort of Greek-Albanian folk stomp. John’s death came well after the original Not Ready for Prime Time Players had disbanded, and yet it seemed to shut down this exclusive club once and for all.

ANNE BEATTS,
Writer:

I had a friend who was in Vietnam. We were talking about our experiences — his in the war, mine on the show. And it seemed somewhat equivalent. Then I said, “Well, but nobody died in mine.” And he said, “Yes, they did.” I thought about it for a second. “Oh. You’re right. They did.”

BARBARA GALLAGHER:

I ran into John at a restaurant in Los Angeles, where I’d moved. I didn’t want to go over to his table because I didn’t know what to expect. I hadn’t seen him in years. But he was really sweet. He came over to me and said, “You know what? I’m clean.” I said, “John, I’m so happy for you.” He said, “I am too. I’m on the right road again. Danny’s been my savior.” And then two months later, he was dead.

LORNE MICHAELS:

I’d lived at the Chateau Marmont for three years, so the irony of John dying there was, well, whatever. About two weeks before he died, I was out in L.A. for a movie meeting, and Buck Henry invited me to go with him to the Playboy Mansion. I had only been there once, and that was to ask Hefner to host the show. Buck said, “He shows his
Saturday Night Live
show every Saturday night in the screening room.” So I went there with Buck, and John was there. He was a little fucked-up but not crazy-man fucked-up, just a little fucked-up. And we were sitting in the screening room watching an Armand Assante movie. Hefner sat in the front row on the aisle and there was a little table with a bowl of popcorn on it next to his seat. I was sitting in the back with Buck. And John, to make us laugh, crept down the aisle and started taking popcorn out of Hefner’s bowl. So when Hefner would reach over, there would be less and less each time, because he wasn’t looking at it. It was a nice visual.

Later, in the game room, John and I talked. He was enormously effusive about
Noble Rot
, the script that Don Novello was writing for him, and how hilarious it was. It was very warm between us. Lots of hugs. It was good. It was the last time I saw him.

NEIL LEVY:

Exactly one week before John died, I was trying to get into the Ritz to see Mink DeVille, and I had forgotten my
Saturday Night Live
ID and the guy at the door would not let me in. And Belushi came by and says to the guy, “Do you know who this is?!” And the guy backed up in horror, because Belushi was really on a rant about his not letting me in. Then John grabbed me and took me in and took me right to the dressing room. I thanked him and then afterwards I wanted to thank him again, and Judy was sitting there and I asked her how he was and she said, “Not good.” I think this was just before he flew to L.A.

ROBIN WILLIAMS:

A friend came over and said, “Your friend John died.” I said, “Excuse me?” The night before, I had been told by a guy at a bar called On the Rocks that “John wants to see you over at the Mar-mont.” I went, “Okay, that’s weird.”

The next morning, they say he’s dead. And I had to go testify in front of a grand jury about what I’d seen — which was nothing. It was wild. I could never find that guy to ask why I was sent there. He had said that De Niro and John wanted to see us. When I got there I called Bob and he was like, “Not right now. I’m busy, okay?” Okay, great. It was weird — maybe a setup, maybe not. Maybe someone was trying to set up a big bust. Who the fuck knows?

The sadness is that John could have done anything. He loved music, but the fact is he could have acted and done some really great drama. Kind of like almost Elvis on that level. He was like a comic Brando. He had “the thing.” They just started to pull him out, because he started out doing those great comedies. He kicked ass in
Animal House.
Even in
1941
, you remember him as being this life force.

BERNIE BRILLSTEIN,
Manager:

I was one of the last people to see him alive. I gave him $1,800, but it wasn’t for drugs, it was for Bill Haley’s guitar. I owed him a birthday present and he said, “I just found out what you could get me,” because I didn’t know what to get him, his birthday had already passed, and he said, “I saw Bill Haley’s guitar at the Guitar Factory,” whatever it was, and I said, “How much is it? I’ll give you a check.” And he said, “Eighteen hundred dollars, but they only take cash.” And me being a moron, I gave it to him. He bought drugs with it that night. I always felt responsible, but he would have gotten it someplace else.

He used to come and say, “Give me a hundred dollars,” and I’d say, “I’m not going to give you a hundred dollars.” And he said, “It’s my money, I’ll call my business manager.” Okay. Because I used to get all his checks. So you see, there was no way to stop it.

JIM BELUSHI:

I trust Bernie Brillstein. I don’t think he’s the bad guy. I’m going to tell you a little something about my brother. I don’t care how strong-willed you are, after twenty minutes, you’d be doing whatever he wanted you to do. And you’d love it. He’d have you dancing on a cigarette machine in two hours. And loving it. He was just that powerful.

Did Bernie “enable” him? You know, we all enabled him, because we never knew what it was. Everybody was getting high. It was not a big deal. And then you turn around and say, “Did they enable Chris Farley?” No. They sent him into rehab seventeen times. That disease comes into your life, comes into your family’s life, and it slowly strangles until someone dies. If Bernie was an enabler, so were we all, because we were all under the spell of John’s charm, and none of us knew any better. We just didn’t know better. Remember, the Betty Ford Center started in 1982. It wasn’t popular to get cleaned out until after John died. He led us in comedy, he led us in film, and he led us into rehab. He was before all of us.

John ate up all his adrenaline. He ate it all up. He lived three lives. He lived to ninety-nine.

LORNE MICHAELS:

Bernie had to stop one of John’s cousins from taking a picture of John’s body naked. It was a fifteen-grand thing, to sell the picture. The guy’s argument was that John wouldn’t have cared.

BILL MURRAY:

John never gets enough credit from the world. John made that show possible in a way, because he brought all the people out from Chicago to do the National Lampoon Show and then the
Radio Hour
. I got the job from him on the
Radio Hour
. He brought all these people out. He was responsible for bringing a lot of those people to the party.

He was the best stage actor I’ve ever seen. He walked on the stage and you couldn’t look at anyone else. People that only knew him from television really missed something. Onstage he was a monster. He was an absolute bear. And he was brilliant. He had the ability to see what an improvisational sketch needed. He would enter scenes and “solve” them in ninety seconds. He was really gifted, really gifted. And obviously he lived life hard, but he lived well. You could have more fun with him — and as time went on, you had less of those moments with him because he was sort of spun out there in the world — but he could have more fun in the simplest situations than any person I’ve ever met of my ilk, you know — any entertainer type.

He ended his life like a rock-and-roller and an enormous celebrity, a big star, but in the simplest situations, he really shone. He really could find the essential in a moment and in an experience. He was something.

BOB TISCHLER:

It was horrible. John had been a really close friend of mine for years. He picked me to produce
The Blues Brothers.
He was horrible to a lot of people, but he had many sides to him, and he was always a great friend to me. When he died, it devastated me. I wasn’t surprised by it, because I had been with him through a lot. I used cocaine like everybody else used it. It was not a problem for me, but it was a real problem for him, and during the Blues Brothers years he would take just a little hit of cocaine and become an animal. And that was horrible.

When John died, it changed me. I gave up doing drugs. And I haven’t done any since.

TOM DAVIS,
Writer:

I was very open about smoking pot. I got away with it until Belushi died. That was the end of that. I couldn’t smoke in the office openly anymore. No more of that shit. As long as we were a hot show, I felt I could get away with it. But when Belushi died, and then everyone started having babies, that was the end.

JOE PISCOPO:

When Belushi died, rest his soul, everybody stopped. All the drugs stopped. I always got such a kick out of that.

DICK EBERSOL:

John got back into drugs the weekend Lorne married Susan. John’s movie
Continental Divide
had come out around Labor Day of 1981 with Blair Brown, and there were two diametrically opposed reviews. I can’t remember who was which. But either
Time
or
Newsweek
wrote that he was the new Spencer Tracy, and the other one wrote that the movie was a massive disappointment to all of John’s fans. And the box office showed the latter. And it was only a day later that John fell back into everything else; he had been clean for two or three years at that point. And it was pretty much downhill from there.

Lorne got married the weekend after Labor Day, and I remember John was out of control at Lorne’s wedding, which was held out at Lorne’s house in the Hamptons. And nobody knew what to do. Nobody would handle it. And I remember pleading with Bernie Brillstein to help me with John and he wouldn’t. And then finally I grabbed John and literally dragged him out of the reception, across Lorne’s lawn, into the downstairs bedroom, where I laid him down and he fell asleep. That was mid-September.

TIM KAZURINSKY:

Bob Tischler called to tell me John was dead. I ran into the office to help make calls and try to contact everybody in his family that I knew, and also get the Second City tribute going. I think Judy Belushi kept John alive maybe longer than he would’ve been. She had bodyguards. She had him watched, and her life became keeping drugs away from John, until she began to shrivel. How much can you do? Can you really watch somebody twenty-four hours a day? I think Judy fought the good fight. I don’t know that his agents, managers, and producers and bosses did as much as they could. At some point, you have to represent reality to the person in trouble.

JANE CURTIN:

It was very sad. But it wasn’t shocking.

CARRIE FISHER,
Host:

When we heard he had died, we were all waiting to find out what he had done. We didn’t know. And everyone was hoping it wasn’t their drug of choice. It was horrible. What I recall happening was, we were all in the room and we heard that it was heroin and it had been injected, and that was just farther than this group went. So everyone kind of breathed a sigh of relief — not because you weren’t distraught over his death, but because he had gone farther than anybody else went. One always hopes that things like that are cautionary tales, and they are not. I think I overdosed two years later.

BILL MURRAY:

When John died, it was like, “Oh God, what a drag this is going to be. What a drag this is.” And when they said he died of an overdose, my brother Brian said, “He died from four beers.” The guy was a real short hitter behind the bar. Really, four beers would put him into like an absolute delirium. He didn’t have a high threshold in some ways. Because he was a finely tuned instrument, it didn’t take much to set him a-kilter. The fact that he died was like, “Oh Christ, why’d you go and do that?”

When you’re with somebody who does stuff which is either incredibly pleasing, incredibly amusing, or incredibly disappointing in some way, you’re sort of glad it’s not you that did it, because it could have been any one of us goofing off somehow. We’ve all been through stuff, and we’ve pushed limits and crossed lines in order to establish where the line was, sort of, or to reestablish the line. So when he died, I think it was, “Okay, now someone has crossed this line here; where does that put us? Where does that leave us? What does that say?” Because he really was the icebreaker in so many ways. He was the first one to come to New York from Chicago of our group. He was the first one to do a lot of things. He really was a leader in so many ways that the idea that he was the first to die was probably not surprising. That he was the first to do anything was not a surprise. That’s really the truth.