belushi at the chateau -- 9/13/24

13 Sep 2024

belushi at the chateau -- 9/13/24

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Today's selection-- from Castle on Sunset by Shawn Levy. Comedian and actor John Belushi's last days.

“While Belushi was trashing his bungalow and himself, people around him were scheming to get him back to New York, where his wife, Judy, and his partner and best friend, Dan Aykroyd, felt they could help him get clean from drugs and resume working productively. Aykroyd could always bring out the best in Belushi; when he visited the Chateau during Belushi's previous stay, the pair were seen on a lark, staging a mock sword fight in the lobby lounge, using two-foot-long candles as weapons. He was busily working on a script, titled Ghostbusters, for the two of them to make together with another SNL alumnus, Bill Murray. But even tracking Belushi down to have a chat was becoming impossible. He darted around erratically from nightclubs to people's homes to restaurants to guitar shops to his favorite bathhouse to assignations with drug dealers, sometimes abandoning limousines he hired and driving off with some new acquaintance. When he was in the bungalow, he was often too addled to talk or answer the phone, or he was surrounded by clutches of sycophants and drug world people and hangers-on and unable to have a serious conversation. He was a wreck, and he was spinning beyond the reach of anyone who could help him.

“At Chateau Marmont, Belushi was occasionally seen in the company of Robert De Niro, who had returned to Los Angeles to look into some new film projects. The pair knew each other from lower Manhattan. De Niro had been a guest at Belushi's home, where a basement rec room was the scene of some wild late-night parties (at one, De Niro cut his hand so deeply that he had to go to the hospital for stitches). Since he had last visited the hotel to make the aborted Bogart Slept Here, De Niro had acquired the habit of keeping more or less on retainer an upper-floor penthouse at the Chateau, preferring to stay in the hotel after having some bad experiences with rental houses during recent working trips to Hollywood. His laundry was done by the hotel staff; his car was kept under a dustcover in the hotel garage; and he came and went unnoticed: a New York apartment dweller utterly at home in a place that felt like a Manhattan high-rise.

“On this visit, De Niro had been joined for a time by his young son and adolescent daughter. One afternoon, he took them to a party where they encountered Belushi snorting such quantities of cocaine and heroin that he had to excuse himself to go find a place to vomit. That sordid spectacle didn't stop De Niro, who was using cocaine himself in those days, from seeking Belushi's company regularly after the kids went back east. De Niro would occasionally come down from his suite to Belushi's bungalow to hang around, laugh, and party, or the two would bump into each other in the VIP rooms of various Sunset Strip restaurants and nightclubs and set off together on some sort of spree.

Belushi in 1976

“On Thursday night, March 4, De Niro was bopping around town with actor Harry Dean Stanton, and the two kept phoning Belushi to get him to come out and join them, first at Dan Tana's, an Italian restaurant favored by movie people, and then at On the Rox, the exclusive nightclub on the Sunset Strip where famous folks could get up to just about anything. Failing to raise him, they drove over to the Chateau to see if they could coax him into a bit of play. Instead, they found him—and his bungalow—in an awful state. The living room was a shambles—not sloppy, but actually trashed, as if in a rage. And worse, a flinty, hard-eyed woman named Cathy was lounging amid the discarded pizza boxes and wine bottles and dirty laundry as if she had some claim to the place and to Belushi himself. De Niro didn't like the look of her at all—he called her ‘trashy’ later and he was happy to leave when Belushi suggested that he and Stanton go back to On the Rox and return to the bungalow after the club closed.

“De Niro left, and when he returned to the Chateau a few hours later, it was to his own suite in the company of Stanton and a pair of women they'd met. There, he got a phone call from Robin Williams. The comedian had run into De Niro and Stanton at On the Rox, and they all agreed to meet up at Belushi's after Williams performed an unscheduled set at the Comedy Store, also right on the Sunset Strip (and, formerly, Ciro's). On the phone, De Niro told Williams that he was busy and that he should stop by Belushi's on his own. Williams did and, like De Niro, was creeped out by the scene, leaving after a few words and a little coke. After he left, De Niro, too, stopped in at the bungalow, entering through the sliding glass patio door. He had a few words and a few lines and then took some of the cocaine that was piled on the living room table and went back to his suite. It was some time past 3:00 a.m.

“At 8:00 a.m., a room service waiter delivered wheat toast, jam, and a pot of coffee to Belushi's bungalow; Cathy Smith, the woman whom De Niro had shied away from, signed for the order, had her breakfast, cleaned up the room, especially the drug paraphernalia, checked in on Belushi, who was snoring loudly in bed, and left.

“A little while later, the musical producer and manager Derek Power came knocking on the bungalow door while looking for Miles Copeland, manager of the rock trio the Police, who was himself staying in one of the hotel's bungalows. Power knocked several times without getting a response before realizing he was at the wrong door and moving along.

“At around noon, a taut, spry man walked through the grounds of the hotel, past the swimming pool, with a typewriter in his hand. The sky was clear, the air was warm, and the few sunbathers and lap swimmers who had come out to enjoy the weather took no notice of him: People were often passing through the pool area with musical instruments, wardrobe cases, cameras, easels-the clumsy stuff that creative folks use to make art.

“Maybe twenty minutes later, a second man came by, in a suit, rushing, but, again, nothing terribly odd, and, again, nobody paid much mind.

“But presently there were paramedics, moving with purpose, and then policemen, snooping about, and within an hour, outside the hotel grounds but creating an unignorable hum, television camera trucks and packets of paparazzi.

“Finally, one of the sunbathers wandered into the lobby, which was unusually active, and asked a hotel employee what was going on. He was told, in the understatement for which the Chateau had long been known, ‘There has been a slight disturbance.’ Presently, he learned that the truth was more than just ‘slight’ and far bigger than a ‘disturbance.’

“John Belushi had been discovered in a state of unconsciousness by the man with the typewriter, his personal trainer and bodyguard, Bill Wallace. Wallace had performed CPR on the comedian but wasn't able to rouse him. Because it was Hollywood, and agents mattered more than cops, Wallace had phoned Bernie Brillstein, whose offices were just down Sunset Boulevard at 9200—ten blocks away.

"’I'm having trouble waking John up,’ Wallace said, clearly agitated. Brillstein thought Belushi might be playing possum to avoid a meeting he was to have that day with Paramount executives, and he told Wallace that he'd send someone over. Wallace called again a few minutes later, in an even more stressed voice:

"’There's something really wrong with John!’ Brillstein had his secretary call a doctor, who recommended calling for paramedics, which she did, and then he ordered his assistant, Joel Briskin, to get over to the hotel, and he was the second man on the scene, the man in the suit who'd rushed past the pool.

“When he got inside the bungalow, Briskin found Wallace weeping, still trying to perform mouth-to-mouth resuscitation on Belushi. ‘Get out of here,’ Wallace hollered at him. ‘John's dead!’ Almost immediately, an ambulance arrived and EMTs assessed the comedian's state. They didn't even try to defibrillate him; he was, as Wallace had declared, gone. They called for the medical examiner, but they saw the needle marks on Belushi's arms: They knew he had died of an overdose.

“Brillstein, for his part, had left his office and driven to Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, where he assumed Belushi would be brought for treatment. He warned the staff that a major star had suffered an accident and was on his way and would require immediate care and, above all, privacy. And then he waited for news, which was painfully long in coming. He paced and smoked, his mind racing: He imagined that Belushi didn't need to come to the ER at all, or that he was taken to another hospital, or that it was the worst case possible and time wasn't of the essence, an outcome that he didn't want to believe.

“And then the call came from his office with the horrible news.

“He felt his body react with sweat and hollowness and a shudder that was ‘like a little stuttered giggle.’ He hung up and gathered himself sufficiently to act on next steps, a professional manager and problem solver in his bones. He called Dan Aykroyd and told him what had happened, point-blank, no sugar coating, instructing him to get to Belushi's house and tell his wife before the media got the story. And then he returned to his offices to deal with the aftermath of an unimaginable tragedy that almost everybody had seen coming and no one knew how to prevent.”