Skidding Through Life in The Fast Lane

IF THE TARGET of Bob Woodward's latest investigative efforts had been a politician rather than as actor--and if the point had been to illustrate the seamy underside of Washington rather than Hollywood--nobody would have said anything. The backroom deals, the corruption, the slime of Captial Hill, i.e., the stuff that made Woodward big-time--that's okay for public consumption, the more so since Woodward and sidekick Carl Bernstein took that gloss off politicos for good with their reporting on Watergate in the early 1970s.

But somehow, the mistaken notion has taken root, among both critics and the general public, that the private lives of the glitterati of the entertainment industry are off-limits, at least in terms of the respectable press. We're not counting National Enquirer junk--or the apologia, enjoyable as it often is, that comes out of p.r. magazines like People or Rolling Stone. We're talking serious, nuts and bolts journalism, the kind that will look, say, at the life of a John Belushi with the toughness with which a seasoned political writer will look at Richard Nixon. Perhaps because it only serves to show how human the stars are, how frail they are like the rest of us, this kind of toughness seems unwelcome in our sometimes squeamish culture. This was made clear by the howls of outrage from the pundits and letter-writers that greeted the portions of Woodward's Wired: The Short Life and Fast Times of John Belushi that were printed several months ago in newspapers around the country.

Wired is tough and brutal. John Belushi, one off the funniest men to come along in the last decade, also happened to take a lot of drugs, as Woodward makes painfully clear. More drugs than most people think a hundred people could do in a lifetime. Belushi did them fast and frequently. One of his doctors, Woodward writes, put this down in a file about Belushi's medical history:

Smokes 3 packs a day.

Alcohol drinks socially.

Medications: Valium occasionally

Marijuna 4 to 5 times a week.

Cocaine--snort daily, main habit.

Mescaline--regularly

Acid--10 to 20 trips.

No heroin.

Amphetamines--four kinds.

Barbituates (Quaalude habit).

That was in 1976, five years before Belushi died of overdosing on cocaine and heroin--before he really hit the hard stuff.

Interest in the drug habits of the rich and famous, of course, is now passe. The dreary repetition of reports detailing the dope usage of rock TV, and movie stars is now an established feature of modern newspapers, and moreover, society has virtually accepted wholesale the social use of many once-forbidden and shadowy substances. If that had been the focus of Woodward's book--as apologists for Belushi who have read only shallowly claim--not only would Wired have amounted to a virtual rabbit-punch, but it would have been boring to boot.

BUT CLAIMS THAT Woodward misrepresented Belushi, that he explored his great excesses while ignoring his compassionate side, came off in the end as nothing more than the whines of entertainment industry pros who aren't used to dealing with real reporters, rather than flaks, who should have shut up when Woodward knocked on their doors. The point here is that Woodward approached his prey with the careful, methodical reporting with which he approached his more traditional, acceptable Washington targets--from the Nixon Administration to the Supreme Court. Just as All the President's Men or The Breinren offered a window on tablesus, broader than the subject at hand, Woodward uses Belushi as a lever to probe the entertainment industry, and the portrait he paints is more terrifying even than the one we expected to see. Not only does Woodward not treat Belushi unfairly--one gets the impression that he is in fact rather sympathetic to him--but charges to this effect miss the point. Woodward has provided a convincing and provocative, although sometimes less than analytical, picture of the intersection between the drug world and the entertainment world, irresistible pressures that could lead a mercurial talent like John Belushi to self-destruction.

The approach used to paint this depressing picture is straightforward narrative, an approach apparently out of style these days. Woodward, quite simply, wants to let the facts speak for themselves, and he describes in generally chronological order Belushi's rise from a Wheaton, III high-school wimderkind to ace comic of Chicago's comedy troupe Second City, to blubbering star of NBC's Saturday Night Live, to the mega-star of Animal House and half (with partner Dan Ackroyd) of the Blues Brothers, and finally to his death at age 33.

The book is written in the novel-like, no-attribution form that Woodward and Bernstein did much to popularize--and for which they took much flak--in The Final Days, their account of the end of the Nixon Administration. As American Lawyer editor Steven Brill has written, the style irritates formalist journalists who cringe if no "he recalled" or "she added" appears after an incident.

But Woodward resolutely states in the foreword that all dialogue is presented as it was recounted by the speakers, and the sources and often the direct quotations used to describe incidents are duly footnoted at the end of the book.

Any journalist can be lied to, but Woodward seems to have taken no undue liberties with his sources--there were many, and many of them big time--and it appears that he has doublechecked whenever possible. The complaints of Belushi's widow. Judy, that the author misrepresents her husband, just don't hold any water. It was she who turned Woodward on to the story, and she was subsequently interviewed more than 20 times for the book.

Woodward simply pried into Hollywood with the same tools he used to dissect the Nixon Administration. If nothing else, this is a fair book.

IT IS ALSO a devastating book. Woodward has assembled a ghastly array of anecdotes that could keep a number of kids scared out of their wits about drugs for life. The escalating pressures of stardom, and the unceasing demands of fans and industry moguls to be continually funny, indeed funnier than the last time out, made Belushi a sick wreck. And in the toxic environment of the New York-Los Angeles axis, there was little, apparently, that family or friends could do to make this wreck stop from disintegrating.

What started as a pleasant diversion when he was a young Chicago comedian turned into a hundreds-of-dollars-a-day habit when he was a big star in the late 1970s. Belushi did "blow" (cocaine) practically daily, and, as Woodward tells it, would go on all-night binges during which he would bounce from party to party be it West or Last Coast on a perpetual high. The high extended to the set of whatever movie he was filming--Animal House, The Blues Brothers, and Continental Divide, to name three--where he was combative, uncooperative, and finally wildly talented, which seemed to dissolve all the bitterness that his tantrums aroused.

Woodward is not interested in pronouncing judgment on Belushi for any of this. Instead, he recounts incident after incident, gory detail after party detail slowing up to excruciating exactness as he reaches Belushi's death in 1982. The tackle works, as we are forced into the role played by Beluchi's closes friends--that of agonized onlooker, unable to stop his self-destruction, loathful of his lifestyle yet curious and at times even fascinated by the man.

Because of his terse narrative style. Woodward has dome difficulty conveying what he thinks went wrong. Anecdotes suffice for him, and by and large this is enough. He quoted Belushi telling one of his doctors early on why he couldn't stop using the drugs:

"I give so much pleasure to so many people... Why can I not get some pleasure for myself? Why do I have to stop?... My whole file is being conducted for me, schedules are set, and I have to be there."

Later on In the book, however, as Woodward starts detailing the efforts of Belushi's wife and friends to get him to stop his binges, the lack of analysis by the author detracts from the power of the story. Woodward wants to show why they were unable to stop the downward spiral, but he leaves us wondering instead if it was lack of will on Belushi's part, on his friends' part, or simply the hyper-intensive. Hollywood scene that did him in.

STILL, WIRED remains an immensely powerful book. John Belushi was at the top of his profession when he o.d.'d, and so were many of the people depicted in this book, a lot of whom were caught up in the same kind of lifestyle. Just as the politicians whom Woodward once helped bring down, these stars exercise enormous influence over the lives of other people in America. And, in some ways, the task of role model, whether desired or not, gives some of these actors, singers, and comedians even more power. The truth--or at least a reasonable attempt to get at the truth--hurts. And the truth about John Belushi, a genuine comic genius, hurts a lot. But, just as in politics, to shy away from the truth would hurt even more.