Why John Belushi Died

Who is right about John Belushi?

Bob Woodward has written a book named Wired that portrays Belushi as a man out of control, whose life came to be ruled by cocaine and other drugs.

Judy Belushi, his widow, has attacked Woodward’s book for a number of reasons, of which the most heartfelt is: That’s not John in the book. Woodward’s portrait doesn’t show the life, the humor, the courage, the energy. He wasn’t just a junkie.

Yet the cops who removed his body from a bungalow at the Chateau Marmont on March 5, 1982, were brutally frank. He looked, to them, like just another dead junkie.

Judy Belushi remembers the good times. She argues that “drugs can be fun,” and that she and John had a lot of ups along with the downs. The difference was that John never knew when to stop. Woodward portrays a man who, at the time of his death, was throwing away a career and alienating key people in the movie industry by a pattern of uncontrolled drug abuse. Judy Belushi speaks of the pressures of show business, of John’s need to find energy and inspiration in drugs so that he could deliver what was expected of him.