Live From New York - James H. Miller [56]
AL FRANKEN:
Yes, there were some people on the show doing coke. I don’t like to get into this. John died of it. He had a problem, he got addicted. We didn’t know about that, we didn’t know at the time. When I say “we,” I mean Americans didn’t know what cocaine did, and about addiction, and that kind of thing.
DAN AYKROYD:
The powders and the pills were never attractive to me. It was just John. One of the nights when he played Silverman — that was pure blow. Pure blow, yeah. It made me angry. God knows I poured a lot of it down the toilet. But there were times when he was clean, and then of course there were times when he was at his peak — you know, the Joe Cocker stuff. And he really took the work seriously. It’s just that he had an addiction.
He would also get screwed-up on pain killers. We were doing a lecture in Rhode Island once and he jumped off the stage and shattered his shin. It was a Catherine the Great sketch, and he had a long, long wig. He was really fucked-up that day.
RICHARD DREYFUSS, Host:
I remember that during the final dress rehearsal, John Belushi couldn’t stand up. He’d been like falling around and mumbling and forgetting everything. I thought, “Whoa boy, this won’t be great. He’ll never make it through this show.” Then the show came around and he was perfect, he was incredible, and I remember being astounded by that, because at the time I was very admiring of anyone who could take drugs better than I could.
BILL MURRAY:
John was great. John was very good to all of us. He was tough on the hosts, though. The better an actor the host was, the sicker Belushi would be. He would be at death’s door. He would be hours late and at death’s door, and he would come in in a robe, unable to speak. He’d have doctors in his dressing room. It would be just incredible. And the host would be thinking, “Belushi isn’t even going to show up, he’s too sick even to work” — and then John would come out on the show and just blast them away. He would sucker-punch guys that just didn’t see it coming. And the more actorish they were, the worse they got it.
If it had been someone who’d won an Academy Award or something, they didn’t have a chance and you knew it. Somebody would write a great sketch for them, and Belushi would be in it, and he’d rehearse it at sort of like 40 percent, too sick to really work, coughing into Kleenexes and pockets full of Kleenex. They’d be out there on the set waiting to rehearse and he’d come in assisted, and in a robe and looking like hell, barely speaking and coughing the whole time, and just completely distracted. Just like barely alive. And he’d be that way pretty much through dress. The doctors would be there. You’d be waiting for him during the run-through and the dress rehearsal. You’d smell vaporizers from his room. He had the smell of Vicks VapoRub and salves and creams and all sorts of medicines — and he would come out and just kill. Just kill.
I think he did it to Richard Dreyfuss. He did a Dreyfuss impression the week before Dreyfuss hosted. He did Dreyfuss in The Goodbye Girl: “I don’t like the panties hanging on the rod.” He just hated the performance in the movie, and he did it the week before the guy got there and murdered it, just murdered it.
There was no point in warning the host. They had too much anxiety anyway. They’d run to the next sketch going, “What happened? What happened to my sketch?” He would come out of nowhere, off his deathbed — and he was on his deathbed a couple times a year. And, you know, it was, “He’s been doing the Blues Brothers all week and he just came back from rehearsal last night and he hasn’t slept.” He had things with names — bronchitis and all that — and he had the Dr. Feelgood guys there giving him shots and stuff. It was delightful.
LARAINE NEWMAN:
We did this one sketch about fishing in Alaska, and right before we went onstage