Live From New York - James H. Miller [133]
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