Show Business: Overdosing on Bad Dreams

A new book casts dim light on the life of John Belushi

By the time that John Belushi finally bought it, in the winter of 1982, he had already made a considerable and enthusiastic investment in his own destruction. He had also bought, whole, every sorry, second-rate dream of success that American pop culture has to offer: the performer as outlaw, the outlaw as sha man; self-immolation as the fulfillment of a creative spirit that burns too hot to contain or understand; drugs as recreation, revelation and social challenge, a turn-on for talent, a tip sheet for personal apocalypse. He died, really, of the cumulative effects not only of the cocaine and heroin that had swollen his brain and bloated his heart but of all these bad dreams.

From the time he got his first taste of success in the early '70s, performing in Chicago with the improvisational troupe Second City, Belushi's life was an increasingly frenetic series of binges, punctuated by bouts of intense work. At the end there was no way out, and no help for him.

That is the way his life reads, anyhow, in Bob Woodward's mildly sensational, ultimately senseless account, Wired: The Short Life and Fast Times of John Belushi (Simon and Schuster, $17.95). The book, kicked off with a front-page serialization launch and favorable review in the Washington Post, where Au thor Woodward heads up the investigative reporting staff, is drawing the kind of hoopla usually kindled by more conventional show-biz behemoths; an excerpt has also appeared in Playboy. Like some Hollywood superproduction, the book boasts a long list of cameo appearances by stars (Jack Nicholson, Robin Williams, Robert De Niro, Carrie Fisher and miscellaneous The Rolling Stones) whose presence has nothing of importance to contribute save what agents and producers like to call "name value."

Indeed, the entire book is basically an exercise in casting: get the country's star investigative reporter to tackle "the unanswered questions" about the grubby death of America's favorite counterculture co median. The fact that the co-author of All the President's Men and The Final Days was on the case invested Belushi's life with a weight and dimension it lacked when he was busy living it. It turns out, however, that there are no unanswered questions that matter. So everyone comes up short: Belushi's widow and his sister-in-law, who first enlisted Woodward in the project; the author himself, who does a considerable amount of vamping and page filling by re-creating old Belushi routines from Saturday Night Live; and any reader who hopes to learn some lesson from Belushi's death or is even curious to know why it matters.