In all the important ways, Woodward’s book is apparently reliable. Judy Belushi quarrels with some dates and interpretations, but basically, the facts are there and documented. Their real difference is over the interpretation of the facts. Beginning with the same man and the same life, Judy Belushi sees a lifestyle, and Bob Woodward sees the progression of a disease.
Was John Belushi an addict? Friends shy away from the word, and yet on the evidence in Woodward’s book he was a classic addict, a textbook case of drug and alcohol abuse. You don’t get much worse and live, as indeed he proved.
The protests over Woodward’s unflinching portrait of Belushi’s last days reminds me (not with a smile) of an old Irish joke. The mourners are gathered around the dead man’s coffin.
“What did he die of?” one asks the widow.
“He died of the drink,” she says.
“Did he go to AA?”
“He wasn’t that bad.”
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