Live From New York - James H. Miller [135]
So I’m off making calls trying to find Jim Belushi. 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 coke! And I went, “What the fuck 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 grass and doing coke 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 shit.
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 pronounce 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 shipment 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 coked up to the tits, 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