John Belushi, 25 Years Later
John Belushi died 25 years ago Monday. CNN looks back at his legacy.
When a force of nature like John Belushi is lost, 25 years isn’t time enough to ease the grief or erase the laughter.
Actor-comedian Richard Belzer still dreams about him from time to time, the unselfish friend and “impish genius” who devoured life. John Landis, who directed Belushi in “Animal House” and “The Blues Brothers,” is still angry at him for dying foolishly and young.
“Saturday Night Live” creator Lorne Michaels feels an obligation to “restate the obvious,” that Belushi was profoundly talented and part of the show’s creative DNA.
By most measures, the round comic with the sharp edges left a small body of work when a drug overdose killed him at age 33 on March 5, 1982. But his TV, movie and music performances proved influential, hitting the baby-boomer sweet spot and surviving despite pop culture’s truncated attention span.
Belushi burst the seams of comedy alongside like-minded performers and writers energized by the social upheaval of the 1960s and ’70s. He helped join humor and pop music in a lasting romance and brought renewed attention to Ray Charles, Aretha Franklin and other R&B giants.
He etched out the start of a promising acting career, and his best movies reshaped industry expectations by catering to newly empowered young consumers and pushing comedy into the blockbuster realm.
His legacy also includes the bleak Hollywood cliche of destructive behavior, now as much on display as ever with the revolving-door rehab stints of Britney Spears and Lindsay Lohan.
For Belushi, his tragic death overshadows but can’t diminish his gifts.
Endlessly versatile, he inhabited the samurai deli guy, Joe Cocker, Captain Kirk and more on “Saturday Night Live.” He gave us Bluto (“Food fight!”) and Jake Blues, on a mission from God to save music. Always, there was a hint of intelligent mischief, if only in a masterfully lifted eyebrow.
In 1978, on the eve of his 30th birthday, Belushi had the No. 1 movie with “Animal House,” the No. 1 record (with partner Dan Aykroyd), “Briefcase Full of Blues” and was the heart of television’s hottest show.
“No one had broken through like he did,” said Bernie Brillstein, Belushi’s manager.
He was an amazing talent. Unfortunately, he wasted it.
The comedian was found dead on March 5, 1982, in a hotel bungalow at the Chateau Marmont hotel on the fabled Sunset Strip. Cathy Evelyn Smith, a drug dealer and user who was convicted of injecting Belushi with a fatal dose of heroin and cocaine, served 18 months in prison.
“If you have a lot of money in your pocket, you will attract a lot of women, you will attract a lot of followers and you will attract a lot of drugs,” Brillstein said. “The hangers-on job is to keep the king happy. They will never tell them they’re in danger of losing what they have.”
Belushi didn’t consider himself an addict despite increasingly prodigious drug use, said Tanner Colby, co-author of the 2005 biography “Belushi” (written with Belushi’s widow, Judith Belushi Pisano). “John Belushi, deep down, was a stable guy who knew who he was, had a lot of confidence, wasn’t superficial but with no great internal trouble,” Colby said. “I think that what happened to him was largely due to fame. For a year and a half, he was as big as Elvis.”
Becoming suddenly rich and famous certainly constitutes and amazing change. Others have managed to handle that transition, though. Unfortunately, Belushi couldn’t.
It’s interesting to wonder what would have happened had he lived to fulfill his potential.
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�John Belushi, deep down, was a stable guy who knew who he was, had a lot of confidence, wasn�t superficial but with no great internal trouble,� Colby said. �I think that what happened to him was largely due to fame. For a year and a half, he was as big as Elvis.�
John Belushi was never as big as Elvis — and I’m not even an Elvis fan. And had he been a nameless junkie, no one would have gone to prison for what he did to himself. Indeed, having recently read an account of his death, it’s amazing he didn’t die sooner. He was daily putting enough drugs in his system to kill ten people.
The CNN article reeks of the sort of sentimentality typical of SNL alumni, rather than something a competent journalist would write. And then it goes them one better: [He] “brought renewed attention to Ray Charles, Aretha Franklin and other R&B giants.” That suggests, ridiculously, that Ray Charles and Aretha Franklin had somehow faded into obscurity. The writer succeeds in one swell foop at racially patronizing both Belushi and two of the greatest singers of the past 100 years.
And Tanner Colby is kidding, right? Very stable. No internal trouble. A regular buddhist monk. Oddly enough, in a 2005 interview, Colby gave a different picture of Belushi.
http://www.dead-frog.com/archives/2005/12/belushi_book_tanner_colby.php
“Our book captures all three sides of John, I think. Thereâ��s the hardworking actor dedicated to his craft, thereâ��s the warm, generous and lovable guy who was everybodyâ��s best friend, and then thereâ��s the wild and self-destructive John who was racked by his own insecurities and driven to extremes. Wired focused exclusively on the third, but even then Woodward didnâ��t portray it accurately because you canâ��t understand it without the contrast of the other two.”
When Belushi died, I gave in to sentimentalism, too, and looked down on his brother Jim as a lightweight hanging on his brother’s coattails. I have since revised that estimate, and think better of Jim Belushi.
John Belushi probably did “fulfill his potential.” He was a talented guy, but Charlie Chaplin he wasn’t. He did not have the sort of talent to justify so much hype. I don’t know what was decisive in protecting Belushi from scrutiny: his dying young, or a sycophantic press. That writers and reporters got overwrought at his death and lost their minds was bad enough, but for them to remain delusional 25 years later, suggests they need to find another line of work.