August 21, 1989 | “John Belushi,” says his biographer, Bob Woodward, “really was representative of the ‘70s, in that period of excess. In that excess of excess.
“If you attempt to write about, or figure out, what happened in the ‘70s, he’s part of it… Quick. Explosive. Personality and humor. A sense that nothing is sacred. That’s him.
“I was attracted to him in part because, just like in the reporting we did on Nixon, nothing was sacred. In the reporting of the ‘70s on Vietnam and Watergate, nothing was sacred. And in the show business culture, Belushi represented that same element. I’m very much a kindred spirit.”
But only up to a point.
Belushi was jolted by a sudden, heady rush of multi-media fame, and couldn’t cope. He blazed a self-destructive path down the fast lane, drinking and drugging, until a companion named Cathy Smith provided him with a lethal mixture of heroin and cocaine.
Woodward and fellow reporter Carl Bernstein became superstars of the journalism world with their Pulitzer Prize-winning stories about Watergate for The Washington Post. Woodward saw himself portrayed on screen by Robert Redford in All the President’s Men. Yet Woodward, unlike Belushi, survived and thrived.
“Yeah,” says Woodward, ”I’m sure that, in part, being in the spotlight for a while, at a young age, drew me to Belushi. Because I saw the parallel there. And, to be honest with you, you can’t help but think, gee, there but for the grace of God go I.
“That could have been me. . .”
John Belushi is still very seriously dead, but his wild life and fast times have not stopped making headlines. Consider the continuing saga of Wired, Bob Woodward’s best-selling, highly controversial biography. Woodward began an investigation of Belushi’s 1982 death by drug overdose at the request of the entertainer’s widow, Judy, who suspected there was more to the case than the official police report. Who would be better qualified to find the truth, she figured, than the man who helped uncover Watergate?
Woodward, a self-confessed straight-arrow, was raised in Wheaton, Ill., Belushi’s birthplace, but never met Belushi personally. So he was able to approach his investigation objectively, with no preconceptions about his subject or the people in his orbit. Methodically, relentlessly, he conducted hundreds of on- and off-the-record interviews, plunging into the depths of the Los Angeles drug culture, journeying to the upper levels of the entertainment industry. In the end, he didn’t uncover any evidence of a conspiracy to withhold facts about Belushi’s death. But he did create a brutally frank, harrowingly detailed portrait of a man who lived too fast, drugged too much and died too young.
It was not the portrait that Belushi’s widow, and many of his closest associates, wanted to see.
“It reads like a pulp, trash, garbage kind of tabloid thing,” said Dan Aykroyd, Belushi’s close friend and collaborator, when Wired first appeared in 1984. “If you want to be depressed and want to get downed out for a week, then it’s great reading for you. But otherwise, there’s no positive warmth or feeling of the warmth and humor that John had in it at all. It’s completely devoid of the spirit of his greatness.”
Judy Belushi gave countless interviews to announce she had been betrayed by Woodward, claiming the reporter had promised a sympathetic account of her late husband, then published an exploitative drugs-and-doom tome }that reads like that crazy marijuana movie, Reefer Madness.”
“It’s factual,” said Bill Murray, another Belushi intimate, “but it’s also sensational.”
Producer Edward S. Feldman, whose credits range from Witness to Hot Dog, disagreed. In his view, Wired is relentlessly honest book about an extraordinarily talented comic actor who also happened to be a drug addict surrounded by enablers. Belushi’s survivors couldn’t accept the bad news, so they attacked the messenger.
“When Bob Woodward came to Hollywood to write his story,” Feldman says, “everybody talked to him. Because they thought they were talking to Robert Redford.” By the time they realized they were talking to an investigative reporter, not a movie star, it was too late for them to edit their own revelations.
Feldman was so impressed by Woodward’s Wired, he optioned the book for filming. Not surprisingly, friends and business associates of Belushi threatened to sue Feldman and his partner, Charles R. Meeker, if they went ahead with the movie.
Worse, according to the producers, they had to cope with interference from Creative Artists Agency, the talent agency that once represented John Belushi, and continues to represent many of his closest friends. “From the beginning of the writing period,” Feldman says, “the CAA issued an edict, that no one [represented by] their agency would co-operate in the making of the picture. And so the entire picture was made without the engagement or the use of one CAA client.”
Spokesmen for CAA have denied Feldman’s charge. They also denied Feldman’s claim that, when Wired finished filming as a $13.5-million independent production, CAA pressured distributors not to release the film.
“We were proposing to distributors,” said Charles Meeker, “that they would distribute the film with our investors putting up the distribution expenses… We were asking to rent somebody’s distribution system, with no risk to the distributor.”
Earlier this year the Los Angeles Times ran a story indicating CAA had forced New Century Pictures, an independent distributor, to renege on an agreement to release Wired. Sources at New Century were quoted as saying that, if they released the film, their company risked the loss of important film projects already in the works with CAA. Once again, CAA denied the charges.
The story has a happy ending, sort of: Taurus Films, working in financial partnership with International Video Entertainment, has agreed to give Wired its long-delayed theatrical launch. The movie opens Friday at a theater or drive-in near you. “We’re particularly pleased that the time has come when the film is going to be available for the public to view,” says Meeker. “And I think the film will speak for itself.”
Still, the question remains: What will audiences say when they speak about the film?
Most of the U.S. and Canadian journalists at the 1989 Cannes International Film Festival last spring were, at best, frostily polite. A few were openly hostile. During a press conference just minutes after the Wired world premiere, the producers, two of the stars — newcomer John Chiklis as John Belushi, Patti D’Arbanville as Cathy Smith — and Bob Woodward met the press in a Palais des Festivals auditorium. If you looked closely enough at their faces, you could see them flinch.
A Toronto scribe set the tone with his first question, claiming he nearly upchucked his breakfast during the final moment of Wired. No, the reporter wasn’t horrified by Belushi’s drug-overdose death. But he was outraged by the movie’s depiction of the death scene, a fantasy in which Bob Woodward (played by actor J.T. Walsh) is actually present as Belushi sounds his death rattle. In the last second of his life, the movie’s Belushi grabs the reporter by the lapels and screams: “Breathe for me, Woodward!”
It’s a typically surrealistic touch in a movie that combines grimy realism and Frank Capra-style fantasy, with seriously unsettling results. On screen, Wired begins with Belushi in the Los Angeles morgue, astonished to discover he has just died. His panic only increases when he meets Angel (Ray Sharkey), a Puerto Rican drug addict who O.D.’d years earlier, and now takes other drug victims on guided tours of their messed-up lives.
As Belushi and Angel rummage through Belushi’s tumultuous career and troubled private life, Bob Woodward enters the story. He arrives in Los Angeles to write about the late entertainer, and sticks around to uncover many of the same sorry truths that Belushi and Angel unveil. It ends in a bungalow of the Chateau Marmont Hotel, where Cathy Smith gave Belushi his final, fatal injection. Woodward keeps a sort of death watch, witnessing events that, of course, he never really saw.
During the Cannes press conference, Woodward and the producers tried to joke their way through an uncomfortable situation. How did he feel about being depicted as a major player in the John Belushi saga? “Well,” said Woodward, “I wish they’d found someone younger with a little more hair… I proposed a love scene with Patti D’Arbanville, but the producers reminded me that it had not happened in reality.”
Woodward earned some laughs, but won few hearts and minds. Ultimately, he took a more serious approach to discussing the movie’s highly stylized treatment of Belushi’s life and death. “The movie renders the themes of my book with utter clarity,” he said. “And it is based on the premise — the correct one, I believe — that, somehow, Belushi had to witness or see what happened in his life. Because in real life, he was on drugs most of the time, and he had very little awareness of this.”
Twenty-four hours after the press conference, Bob Woodward had a working lunch on the beach of a posh Cannes hotel. Two other people were at his table: Critic Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times, and me. Ebert vividly recalled the days when John Belushi was a local celebrity, a main attraction at the Second City comedy club. Woodward listened intently as Ebert spoke.
“I used to drink with him,” Ebert said. “One thing that I question in the movie is — and I know probably why these choices were made —Belushi says he’s a social drinker. Well, Belushi was a drunk who turned to drugs to control his alcoholism.”
Ebert says Belushi opened his after-hours Blues Bar because he was thrown out of other after-hours clubs in Chicago. “And he was a Jack Daniels kind of drinker — the bottle right to the mouth. He was an alcoholic long before he tried drugs.”
“I’m embarrassed to say I didn’t know that,” Woodward said.
“I’ll never forget one night,” said Ebert. “It was in the Blues Bar, during the filming of The Blues Brothers. Belushi was bartending and he was drinking Jack Daniels out of the bottle. And at one point, he was very drunk, and he was trying to kind of shout or act himself into sobriety. And he put his hand on either side of the area behind the bar where they have the ice, where they scoop out the ice — and he just stuck his whole head in there, in the ice, for about 30 seconds. And then he came up, shouting ‘Whaaaa-ahhhhh!’
“This is one of the seven or eight danger signals of alcoholism.”
Woodward shook his head, in the manner of someone hearing his worst suspicions confirmed.
“I was really naive, I guess,” Woodward said, “but my expectation was, the people I talked to about Belushi would read the book, and say, ‘Yeah, that’s true — we didn’t do enough to save this man we loved. And we should have done more. Yeah, he was responsible, but there should be a little introspection in the community.’
“But, instead of any introspection, there was a hysteria to deny it, or to show I didn’t portray the good side, the fun side, the humane side of John Belushi.
“Well, that’s the problem they had, not that I had. I would ask, ‘Tell me about the good times,’ and then they would remember the bad times, because they were so vivid. It’s like Roger telling me the story about Belushi sticking his head in the ice. If I’d used it in my book, it would have been another example of Belushi’s being out of control, and nuts. It would have been, ‘See, Woodward is saying that not only was he a drug addict, he was an alcoholic…’”
Pause. Long enough so that, if you listened closely enough to the conversation on a tape recording afterwards, you could hear waves lapping the nearby beach.
“You need to have good friends,” Woodward finally said. “To put it in a trite kind of way.
“I’ve always had people kind of knocking me down, rather than giving me money to go out and buy drugs or cars or whatever. They were always saying, ‘Stay in the newspaper business. That’s what you are, that’s what you try to do. Don’t try to convert yourself to something else. Be careful, you’re not such hot shit.
“I think I have better friends, and people who gave me better advice, adults, than John Belushi ever did.”
