Live From New York - James H. Miller [132]
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.