Forty years ago: John Belushi, ‘Second City’ and ‘Saturday Night Live’ alum, found dead in Los Angeles

This story was written by Sallie Gaines based on reports from Aaron Gold and Andy Knott in Chicago and Ronald Yates in California, and originally ran in the Chicago Tribune on March 6, 1982.

Actor John Belushi, who went from Chicago’s Second City to television and movie stardom, died in a Los Angeles hotel Friday. He was 33.

The comedian, who became a national hit on TV’s original “Saturday Night Live” and in the movie “Animal House,” died in a bungalow he had rented at the Chateau Marmont Hotel along Hollywood’s Sunset Strip.

Lt. Dan Cooke of the Los Angeles Police Department said a heart attack was a possible cause of death. He said an autopsy would be performed, probably this weekend. A security guard at the hotel said it appeared that Mr. Belushi had choked on some food.

“It appears to be death by natural causes,” Cooke said. “The detectives here found nothing to make it seem suspicious.”

(Editor’s note: A coroner’s report later concluded Belushi died of “acute cocaine and heroin intoxication.”)

Cooke said one of Mr. Belushi’s friends, later identified as his physical trainer, William Wallace, found the comedian’s naked body at 12:15 p.m. on a bed in the bungalow. Wallace, who often traveled with the comedian during filming, trained Mr. Belushi for some of the scenes he did in the film “Continental Divide.”

Mr. Belushi appeared to have been dead for two or three hours when Wallace arrived, Cooke said.

“He tried to administer mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, and the paramedics were called,” Cooke said.

A woman who arrived at the bungalow while police were there was handcuffed and taken to a police station for questioning. Police, who did not identify the woman, said she was a potential witness and the handcuffs were just standard procedure.

Cooke said the woman apparently was with Mr. Belushi when he woke up on Friday morning. He said she was questioned for four hours late Friday and then was released.

“We had to question her because initially we didn’t knew her involvement, so she was taken into custody,” Cooke said. “We’ve determined she had no criminal involvement, so we are releasing her.”

(Editor’s note: Cathy Evelyn Smith was sentenced to three years in prison in 1986 for injecting Belushi with a fatal dose of cocaine and heroin. She was released in 1988.)

“When she woke up this morning,” Cooke said, the woman found Mr. Belushi “breathing heavily. He had some nasal congestion. She asked him if he was all right and he said, ‘Yes.’

“She gave him a glass of water and she left an hour later, thinking Mr. Belushi was OK.”

Cooke said the woman signed a room-service receipt for breakfast at 8 a.m.

Homicide detective Tony Diaz said the woman may have been the last person to see Mr. Belushi alive.

A source at Mr. Belushi’s public relations firm in Los Angeles speculated that the woman who later arrived at Mr. Belushi’s bungalow driving his Mercedes-Benz was Wallace’s wife, Smoky. The woman didn’t know the actor was dead when she arrived, police said.

It was not unusual, when Mr. Belushi was in training, for Wallace or his wife to be with him around the clock to keep him from breaking training.

Mr. Belushi, who lived in New York with his wife, Judith, checked into the hotel last Sunday. He was in Los Angeles to make a movie.

Bruce Beckler, a hotel gardener and day security guard, said the hotel desk manager became concerned Friday morning because Mr. Belushi didn’t answer his phone.

“We knew he was in his room because he checks out with the desk if he leaves,” Beckler said. “We suspected something was wrong.”

He said the assistant hotel manager asked him to check on Mr. Belushi.

“When I got there, his friend Bill (Wallace) was there already,” he said. “I asked, ‘Is Mr. Belushi OK?’ He says, ‘No, he’s dead.’ I said, ‘We’ve got to do something,’ and the paramedics were summoned.”

Judith Belushi, who was in New York when she learned of her husband’s death, was joined by actors Dan Aykroyd and Tim Kazurinsky. Aykroyd was Mr. Belushi’s comedy “Blues Brothers” partner and a star in “Saturday Night Live.” He also costarred in the film “Neighbors.” Kazurinsky followed Mr. Belushi in Second City and later joined the case of “Saturday Night Live.”

Mr. Belushi’s sister, Marian, who lives in Chicago, asked a doctor to join her in the western suburb of Addison, where their mother was staying. Marian Belushi said she didn’t want to tell her mother about the death without a doctor being present.

Mr. Belushi’s father, Adam, and younger brother, Billy, were at the Julian, Calif., ranch the comedian had bought for them several years ago. The family has maintained an apartment in Addison for trips to the Midwest.

The other Belushi star, Jim, who was also a Second City actor, was at Chicago’s Shubert Theatre, where he is starring in “The Pirates of Penzance,” when he learned of his brother’s death. He went ahead with Friday night’s show because “John would have wanted me to,” a theater spokesman said. No special observance was made of Mr. Belushi’s death.

First word of Mr. Belushi’s death came from his public relations agency in Los Angeles.

“Yes, he’s dead. He died here,” said Laurie Johnson of the firm Solters, Roskin and Friedman, which represented him.

Funeral arrangements were incomplete, but it was believed that services would be in Chicago or at Mr. Belushi’s second home in Martha’s Vineyard, Mass.

(Editor’s note: The funeral and burial took place in Massachusetts.)

Patent on the outlandish was ticket to stardom

This story written by Gene Siskel and Larry Kart originally ran in the Chicago Tribune on March 6, 1982.

There are some people to whom stardom in the movies comes immediately. By dint of a look or an emotional presence they immediately speak to millions.

John Belushi was one of those people. His moment for movie stardom came at the beginning of his first film, “National Lampoon’s Animal House” (1977), in the role of John “Bluto” Blutarsky, the campus pig who majored in food fights and toga parties.

In the middle of a fraternity rush party, a drunken Bluto takes a guitar from the hands of a wimpy classmate who is singing an insipid song about giving his true love a flower. After listening to the sugarplum music, Bluto fixes the singer with an arched eyebrow, grabs the guitar, and smashes it against the fraternity house wall. Audiences went wild, and “Animal House” became what was then the top-grossing comedy of all time.

THAT was Bluto. That was Mr. Belushi, a marvelous physical comedian who appeared to be on a lifelong mission to wreck everything that smacked of pretense and pomposity.

“I hate to admit it,” Mr. Belushi said in a Tribune interview at his New York home last August, “but it’s true. I am Bluto.”

In addition to Bluto, Mr. Belushi’s stardom derived from his TV appearances on “Saturday Night Live” in such characters as a Samurai warrior, a killer bee and a violent TV news commentator.

He was a member of the first “Saturday Night Live” cast in 1975 and one of the original “Not Ready for Prime Time Players,” along with Dan Aykroyd, Garret Morris, Chevy Chase, Jane Cutin, Laraine Newman, and Gilda Radner.

He was the show’s top physical comedian, with his partner Dan Aykroyd handing the more cerebral material. Belushi was the one who did a spastic impersonation of rock singer Joe Cocker. And as the show’s hysterical news commentator, he added a phrase to a generation’s lexicon: “But nooooo.”

Along with Aykroyd he invented the characters known as the Blues Brothers, a soul-singing duo who wore black suits, black hats, and black sunglasses. Aykroyd was the blues freak who turned Mr. Belushi on to the music that was born in part in Chicago.

Mr. Belushi was born in Chicago on Jan. 24, 1949, the child of Albanian immigrants.

Growing up in Wheaton, he exhibited the same frantic energy that later distinguished his comedy. At Central High School, he was captain of the football team and participated in wrestling, baseball, track, forensics, and music. He was a drummer in the school band and Homecoming King in 1967.

He married his high school sweetheart, Judith Jacklin, on New Year’s Day, 1976. They divided their time between a brownstone home in Greenwich Village and a summer house in Martha’s Vineyard, Mass. They had just purchased the New York home and were in the process of renovating it.

After he graduated from Wheaton Central High School in 1967, he and two friends founded their own improvisational comedy troupe.

Performing for a $1 admission charge at a Universal Life church and sharing a $35-a-week apartment, Mr. Belushi and his friends, Steve Bashekas and Tino Insana, were invited to audition at Second City in 1971. Mr. Belushi was accepted and immediately made the most of his big break.

“You did eight performances a week,” Mr. Belushi once told an interviewer, “so you didn’t have to get desperate. They expected you to fail a third of the time, and you learned to write on your feet. From Del Close (a frequent Second City director and one of the gurus of improvisational comedy) I learned what’s good and what’s cheap. You can pull out cheap jokes on the stage when you’re dying, but you can’t write them in — or depend on them.”

What Mr. Belushi was able to depend on at Second City, and throughout his career, was a sublimely physical, almost animalistic sense of humor.

It was at Second City that Mr. Belushi’s gifts developed, and among the characters he created during his brief but explosive stay there was the Samurai warrior that became one of his trademarks on “Saturday Night Live.”

Then, in 1972, an editor of National Lampoon took in one of Mr. Belushi’s performances and asked him to join the cast of the magazine’s stage show, “Lemmings.” It was a somewhat different type of humor than Second City’s — hipper, nastier, more politically aggressive and more drug-oriented.

But Mr. Belushi continued to rely on the methods he had learned back in Chicago — the give-and-take of improvisation (both onstage and in writing sessions) and the ability to instantly establish a powerful presence and then maintain it no matter how intense the onstage competition became. With two graduates of Second City’s Toronto troupe — Aykroyd and Radner — in the cast of “Lemmings,” Mr. Belushi was surrounded by performers who knew what he was up to and gave him a run for the money.

From “Lemmings,” where he developed his devastating takeoff on rock star Joe Cocker, it was on to “Saturday Night Live,” thanks to producer Lorne Michaels, who was one of the writers for the National Lampoon show.

Long-haired and uncharacteristically subdued during much of the first season of “Saturday Night Live,” perhaps because the initial spotlight fell on Chevy Chase, Mr. Belushi eventually found characters into which he could pour his burly, macho passion.

As soon as Hollywood cast him in the spectacularly successful “Animal House,” Mr. Belushi became a larger-than-life part of the “Saturday Night Live” cast, a fact that was frequently acknowledged in skits where he played a puffed up, egomaniacal star.

But now the “Saturday Night Live” scene that lingers in the mind is the one in which, as a gray-haired old man, he walked through a “graveyard” and gazed down at the tombstones of all his fellow “Saturday Night Live” performers.

“And they always thought,” Mr. Belushi said, “that I would be the first to go.”

The Bluto characterization in “Animal House” made Mr. Belushi a star with international appeal and gave him a pipeline to young people everywhere. For example, “The Blues Brothers,” in which he and Aykroyd tore apart Chicago, earned one-third of its profits outside of the United States.

Mr. Belushi’s film career consists of seven films: “Animal House,” “Old Boyfriends,” “Goin’ South,” “1941,” “The Blues Brothers,” “Continental Divide” and “Neighbors.”

That list contains two certified hits, “Animal House” and “The Blues Brothers;” two likable but commercially tepid pictures, “Continental Divide” and “Neighbors;” and two artistic and box-office bombs, “1941″ and “Old Boyfriends.”

The temptation may be to hold back on any extreme praise of Mr. Belushi, considering the apparent brevity of his career. But if one were to total the hundreds of live appearances he made at Chicago’s Second City comedy theater and add the dozens of “Saturday Night Live” television shows, it could be argued that John Belushi truly was a major comic actor of his time.

At the time of his death, his professional goal was to continue to broaden his range as an actor. In “Continental Divide,” his second-to-last film, made in part in Chicago, Mr. Belushi attempted romantic comedy for the first time in the movies; and most critics agreed that he did a credible job. In a word, he was lovable in the role of a supposedly gruff Chicago newspaper columnist.

In “Neighbors,” his last film, Mr. Belushi chose to extend himself by taking on the tole of the film’s most serious character, an uptight, burned-out businessman who liked to lose his mind in front of a TV set.

“I want to try to play every kind of part I can,” Mr. Belushi said in an interview. “Serious things and comic things.”

Movie stardom can be measured in many ways. Did he stop traffic wherever he went? Yes, people were always shouting out to him tag lines from his latest role. “Toga! Toga!” and “Food Fight!” they yelled after “Animal House.” People on the street did love him.

Another measure of movie stardom is the ability of the actor to sell tickets to any film, regardless of its quality. Few if any actors have ever passed that test, and Mr. Belushi did have his share of bombs.

However, one other test of stardom Mr. Belushi passed with flying colors — that was the sense of anticipation and joy that greeted his first appearance in a film. You just felt that something funny was going to happen. A comic explosion was coming.

Stars have an aura, and John Belushi certainly had that.

Likability was an important factor, but that explanation fails to acknowledge his performing ability. Plenty of likable people are not movie stars. That’s where his considerable acting experience came in.

Asked recently to explain why he and his Second City cohort, Bill Murray, were among the top comedians in the nation, Mr. Belushi gave credit to his Second City training.

“We’re not stand-up comedians. We don’t tell jokes. I’m lousy at telling jokes. What we learned at Second City was how to act with others in comic and dramatic situations. That’s what the movies are all about, and that’s why I think we were able to make the transition from stage to TV to film.”

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