Part 16 (1/2)
JIM BELUs.h.i.+:.
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 Belus.h.i.+ died. That was the end of that. I couldn't smoke in the office openly anymore. No more of that s.h.i.+t. As long as we were a hot show, I felt I could get away with it. But when Belus.h.i.+ died, and then everyone started having babies, that was the end.
JOE PISCOPO:.
When Belus.h.i.+ died, rest his soul, everybody stopped. All the drugs stopped. I always got such a kick out of that.
d.i.c.k 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 ma.s.sive 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 n.o.body knew what to do. n.o.body 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 Belus.h.i.+ 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 G.o.d, 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.
John's funeral was great theater. It was our first funeral together, and there were TV cameras, and it's like, ”Whoa. There's nothing funny going to happen and these cameras are here.” And Danny did the motorcycle thing, and the night before I think we'd gone out on John's property and fired shotguns at the moon and stuff and tried to do something sort of epic that involved howling and sort of displaced rage.
G.o.d, the song James Taylor sang - chills. ”Walk Down That Lonesome Road,” you know that one? It's chilling. He sang it with his brothers and a sister, I think. All the press and everything were at a fencepost like a hundred yards away. When he sang that song, it was just, ”Ooooh okay. That is the lesson, I guess.”
Whenever I hear it, I'm right back there at John's grave.
EDIE BASKIN, Photographer: Right after John died, People magazine called me and asked, ”Do you have some pictures of John when he was doing the sketch with the powdered sugar doughnuts?” They wanted me to give them pictures of John with powdered sugar all over his nose so it looked like he was doing c.o.ke. I said, ”You're sick. Good-bye.”
GARRETT MORRIS, Cast Member: One time I saw his picture in People magazine, and he was like a balloon. I thought, ”Oh my G.o.d.” I couldn't believe it. I was worried about his heart or his circulatory system. During the previous two years or so, I was thinking he personally didn't like me, because he was saying a lot of things that just were uncharacteristic. And then when I saw the picture in People, I began to realize what had happened.
The way I found out he died was an L.A. Times lady got my number and had the nerve to call me and tell me he was dead and then try to elicit a response. She didn't take into account at all that it broke me up. I said to her, ”Look, I don't want anything about drugs or anything.” And she said, ”Well, I don't let people put restrictions on my interviews.” And of course I hung up, because I didn't want to have AT&T sue me for using words like - well, ”motherf.u.c.ker” is not a four-letter word, it's a twelve-letter word, but I was going to call her a motherf.u.c.ker at least twelve times.
TIM KAZURINSKY:.
The day Belus.h.i.+ died, I went in to help out with making calls, because I was very good friends with the Belus.h.i.+ family. John and I were supposed to have had dinner on March third, to celebrate my birthday, and he was in L.A., and he killed himself March fifth. So there were a bunch of us up there, and guys were crying, and I was going to call Second City to get hold of Jim so they could get a medical unit over to John's mother, because she had a bad heart. They wanted somebody that knew CPR to be there with defibrillator panels when she was told the news.
So I'm off making calls trying to find Jim Belus.h.i.+. I run back into one of the executive's offices on the floor and the executive's on the phone making arrangements for funeral stuff and he has tears in his eyes - and he is leaning over his desk snorting c.o.ke! And I went, ”What the f.u.c.k are you doing?! Jesus! You're making funeral arrangements for a dead man and -” You know, it was almost laughable. I get sick when I think about it.
PENNY MARSHALL, Guest Performer: None of us knew about the other life he had, if he had that life - or if he was just starting or experimenting. All of us were smoking gra.s.s and doing c.o.ke once in a while. We did what we did, but it wasn't like he was more abusive than anyone else. We knew there were drugs, but he had a whole different set of friends, I think, that none of his good friends knew about. He didn't do any more than anybody else unless a fan came up and he wanted to be bold. Fans would just come up and hand him a gram. He represented that to them, a wild person. My fans wrote with crayon on lined paper; I had different fans. But we never saw needles, we never saw heroin, we never saw any of that s.h.i.+t.
LARAINE NEWMAN, Cast Member: I was at my house in Los Angeles when I heard that John had died. A friend of mine called me on the phone and said, ”Hey, did you know that guy John Bell-utchee?” And I said, ”Yeah.” ”Well, he's dead.” And I remember being annoyed that the guy didn't even know how to p.r.o.nounce John's name and then hanging up and turning on the TV and seeing all the coverage and it being so unreal. This was the first time that someone I was close to had died. And unfortunately it wasn't going to be the last. So it was unreal to me. I just couldn't believe it - the sight of a covered body being carried out of the Chateau Marmont, and me knowing that that shape had to be him. And the sordid image that the details elicited in my mind, you know, of probably all the shades being drawn and here was this woman giving him a fix and letting him die. Whether she knew he'd OD'd before she left or not, it's just so hideous.
CARRIE FISHER:.
John had offered me some drugs once, and I said, ”John, should you be doing this?” and he said, ”Do you want some or not?!” And I just thought, ”You know what? I can't do this. I am not a cop, and he is three times bigger than I am.” Danny was always trying to get him to stop. We all were. But you couldn't stop him, you couldn't stop him. You couldn't have stopped me. I always think about people who say, ”We should have blah, blah, blah.” You can't. As much as you'd like to think so, you can't.
The thing I regretted about John was that he hadn't had a scare, he hadn't had some sort of overdose, or hospitalization or something, some warning. He just went straight to death.
TIM KAZURINSKY:.
Having grown up in the sixties, I was kind of done with my drugs by the seventies. And so here it was the eighties, and I particularly hated cocaine. And whenever a new s.h.i.+pment arrived on the floor, I would come in and see everybody grinding their teeth. I came in one day and pretty much the whole floor was just craving it heavily, and I went, ”Oh, this is not good. I'm going to write at home.” Because everybody was running into my office with gigantic pupils and grinding teeth saying, ”I've got an idea.” And you know, I've always found that cocaine causes constipation of the brain and diarrhea of the mouth. In the time it would take to sit and listen to people's idiot ideas while they were c.o.ked up to the t.i.ts, I could get more work done at home. It seemed like the secretaries, the PA's, everybody, was tooted that particular day, so I just took off. A couple of friends of mine who were Chicago writers, I called their wives and said, ”I got your husbands hired on the show and I really don't want to send them home in body bags. You have to come to New York and stop them, because they are doing way too much c.o.ke.” And they did. They came and took care of their guys.
JIM BELUs.h.i.+:.
John would have been happy that I made it onto Sat.u.r.day Night Live, but he actually wanted me to be a dramatic actor. When I started at Second City, I called him and said, ”I got in at Second City.” There was a long pause on the phone. He goes, ”Uh, shouldn't you be at Goodman Theater or something, be more like a dramatic actor?” I said, ”I'm really enjoying this here.” He said, ”You're a better actor than me, don't you think you should be, like, doing drama?” I said, ”I can probably do both, John.” He goes, ”Okay.” That was it.
BRIAN DOYLE-MURRAY:.
John and I were quite close. He had replaced me at Second City when I left initially. I lived on his couch in New York City for six months. He was bigger than life. No matter what he did, he didn't think he would die. When he died, Lorne asked me to say something at the end of the show, because we had been together a long time. I recounted this one incident: He and I were walking down Bleecker Street and it was snowing and he had one of those hood things up. And a truck hit him and it flipped him into the air and he rolled up against the curb. And he just jumped right back up. An ambulance came and took him to the hospital. And he was fine. I mean, he got hit hard by a truck. And no problem. So I thought he was pretty indestructible.
DAVID SHEFFIELD:.
I did go to a party one time at the Blues Bar. It was 1980. Belus.h.i.+ had done a guest spot on the show. We walked in. Robin Williams was behind the bar pa.s.sing out beers. And Belus.h.i.+ stood at the door as we walked in and looked me up and down and said, ”Who the f.u.c.k are you? I don't recognize you.” He said, ”Did you bring any beer?” I said, ”No, but I got a J.” ”Oh, all right, come on in.”
LORNE MICHAELS:.
When I got the call from Bernie, I was at Broadway Video. I had lost my father suddenly when I was fourteen - he was only fifty. It was a big surprise. So I feel like since then I've always been prepared for the worst. It was easier for me to go into a withholding mode. I dealt with John's family, and Judy and I arranged for airplanes to get everybody there. It was the first time in my life I had ever chartered airplanes. When I walked out of my office, there were cameras and lights everywhere.