HOLY SHIT a star is born JAMES WIDDOES, co-star, Animal House:

I was around for most of the summer and started to hear the buzz. The most interesting thing I heard was not from anybody in show business; it was from an investment banker that I used to play tennis with. One day he said to me, “What’s the deal with this Animal House?”

“What are you talking about?” I asked. Apparently, in the year since we’d shot the movie, National Lampoon’s stock had gone from $2.50 to around $17.

“I dunno,” I said. “Maybe it’s good.” O n July 28, 1978, National Lampoon’s Animal House premiered in New York City. It was an offbeat, outcast little movie that no one had ever heard of and that nobody really cared about. It featured a cast of complete unknowns and a guy from a TV show called Saturday Night Live.

As one of SNL’s Not Ready For Primetime Players, John Belushi had already achieved a good measure of fame and success. Years of steady and ambitious progress had taken him from the stages of Chicago’s Second City to the downtown New York comedy scene to the NBC studios at Rockefeller Plaza. But the cult stardom of late-night TV was nothing compared to the cultural phenomenon that Animal House was about to become. Recordbreaking crowds lined up around the block to see it. Near riots broke out in theaters. Toga parties and food fights erupted across the country. That fall, Greek fraternities, practically on life support after years of decline, suddenly watched their membership soar. Animal House took the country by storm, and riding the crest of the wave was John as Bluto, the impish rabble-rouser, the anarchic everyman, the animal. Director John Landis described Bluto as a cross between Harpo Marx and the Cookie Monster. A closer appraisal would also include a healthy dose of John Wayne and Elvis. Bluto wasn’t just the life of the country’s party. Bluto was the guy you trusted. Bluto was your new best friend. And so, by extension, was John.

Just as the Animal House craze was reaching its peak, another of John’s inspired creations was also about to explode. Four years earlier, in a dive bar in Toronto called the 505 Club, John and fellow future SNL performer Dan Aykroyd decided they wanted to form a band. They even had a name. At the time, the two men lived in separate cities—separate countries, even—and had known each other for less than twelve hours. But John was never one to bother much with the details, or let them get in his way.

By the summer of ’78, the Blues Brothers had gone from personal pet project to full-blown musical and evangelical revival. Amateur gigs at downtown New York clubs had led to a stint as the warm-up band for Saturday Night Live, which had led to a spot as actual musical guests on the show, which had led to a record deal for a live album, which now led to a nine-night stand opening for Steve Martin to sold-out crowds at the Universal Amphitheater in Los Angeles, California. On September 9, 1978, at 8:30 PM, thousands of A-list celebrities and screaming, toga-wearing fans came together to witness…what? A band? A comedy routine? Nobody really had any idea. It turned out to be something closer to alchemy. When John walked into the Universal Amphitheater that night, he was one of the most promising young actors in America. When he walked out, he was something else entirely. If the place had had a roof, the Blues Brothers would have blown it clean off.

Fame is not an exact science. The only readily available explanation for John Belushi’s universal appeal is that no one had ever really been John Belushi before, at least not on that scale. He was just an ordinary guy, only extraordinarily so. Most celebrities get put on a pedestal. John got put on a barstool, and everyone in the country lined up to buy the next round. The following month, Saturday Night Live’s audience swelled to as many as nineteen million viewers per week, its highest ratings yet. With average ticket prices of around two dollars, Animal House was pulling in over a million dollars a day. The live album Briefcase Full of Blues hit stores the first week of December, sold a million copies before Christmas and racked up two million more before its run was over. Born in a hard-luck ethnic enclave in Chicago, this firstborn son of working-class Albanian immigrants suddenly found himself holding on to a rather large brass ring. And when he woke up on the morning of his thirtieth birthday, January 24, 1979, a mere six months after Animal House premiered, John Belushi had the number-one late-night television show in the country, the number-one selling album on the Billboard charts, and the number-one highestgrossing film comedy of all time. It was a trifecta the country had never seen before—and has never seen since.

SEAN DANIEL, Universal Studios executive* : In the beginning, Animal House was this odd little movie that nobody paid much attention to. I’d sit in the screening room watching the dailies that were coming back from Eugene, Oregon, and for the first week or so I was more or less by myself. After a few days a couple more people began to show up. A week later it got a little more crowded. By the time the shoot was halfway over, the daily screenings were packed. Everyone was remembering their own fraternities, their own days in college. When all the executives started to say, “I knew a guy just like Bluto,” that’s then I knew we had something. A few months before it was released, we had our first preview in Denver. It was a nervous time for all of us. John wanted to know how it was going to play, and he was waiting anxiously by the phone in New York. *See Cast of Characters index (p. 282) for complete details People went crazy. I was shocked. I’ve never seen anything like it. John Landis and I ran out into the lobby afterwards, found a pay phone and called John. There was maybe half a ring before he grabbed it.

JUDITH BELUSHI PISANO, wife : John just about levitated from his chair when the phone rang. He immediately began drilling them for all the specifics: “Did they laugh when they saw the Delta house?” “Did they boo at the Omegas?” “Did they cheer for the Deathmobile?” And of course, “Did they like Bluto?” John was just so excited. He hung up and did a little “happy dance” around the room.

PETER RIEGERT, co-star, Animal House: I called Landis and asked him how it went. “Listen to this,” he said. He played me an audiotape of the screening. You couldn’t hear any dialogue; all you heard was laughing, screaming, cheering and whistling.

IVAN REITMAN, producer : If they could’ve torn the seats out of the theater, they would have.

JUDITH BELUSHI PISANO: Right up to the night of the premiere, neither John nor I really had any idea how big it was going to be. John didn’t even own a suit. Wanting to do it up right, we went to some place on Madison Avenue and had him fitted for one. Mitch Glazer and Laila Nabulsi came up to our suite an hour or so before we needed to leave. We were all laughing and excited with anticipation. We took a few photos, got in a limo and headed to Radio City Music Hall. It was all very lighthearted and intimate. Then we got to the theater and that was it: the crowds, the photographers, the lights. From that point forward our lives were never really the same.

BERNIE BRILLSTEIN, manager : The New York premiere can only be described as lunacy in an enclosed space. None of us expected it. The hype was generating someplace none of us knew about.

JAMES WIDDOES: I didn’t see much of John at the after party. We went in there and everybody just got completely pulled apart from each other. There was no question that this was John’s night, that all the stars had aligned for him.

JUDITH BELUSHI PISANO: The premiere was not a typical Hollywood promotional affair. It was a real party. John and some of the other actors got up and joined the band onstage. It was all very sloppy, but no one cared. John was the man of the night. People kept hitting him in the arm. Nice goin’, man! By the time we got back to the hotel, he was complaining that his arms hurt.

MARK METCALF, co-star, Animal House: I went to the premiere in Westwood with Joan Hackett, an actress friend of mine. After the movie I said to her, “It’s kind John and Judy before the Animal House premiere of derogatory toward women, don’t you think?” She said, “Mark, this movie is derogatory toward everybody. It’ll be a huge success.”

MITCH GLAZER, writer : The night that Animal House opened, he got me to drive around with him to movie theaters to see all the mania. When we got to the Sutton we were going in just as people were coming out. All these kids who’d just seen Bluto on the big screen suddenly walked right into him outside the lobby. They went crazy. They were all asking for his autograph; one of them gave him a bottle and asked him to break it on his head. John was so excited about it, in a way that only a kid would be.

SEAN DANIEL: He used to call me from the Waverly Theater in New York and say, “It’s packed in here. I just talked to the manager, and he says he sells out every night!” Then, just to drive the kids crazy, he’d run down the aisle, jump in front of the screen and dash out the exit door.

AL FRANKEN, writer, SNL: One night after Animal House was first out, John insisted on getting a limo and going around Manhattan with me and Tom Davis, just to see the lines around the blocks at theaters. At that point I think he took on a little bit of Bluto as his persona.

SEAN DANIEL: Nobody looked better in a toga than Bluto. People embraced him as this protector and this friend. Bluto was a genuinely good guy who stood up for what was right, who took on straight, dull, rigid America—and was fearless about it. All around the country people spontaneously began to have toga parties. We got beer distributors to sponsor them, but we couldn’t keep up; it was all happening on its own. On occasion, John would call a radio station where we knew one of these toga parties was happening, and people would go completely nuts because he was on the air.

JOHN LANDIS, director : Bluto originally wasn’t a big part, and isn’t a big part. It’s a real ensemble piece, and has a lot of fine actors. But it was great for John in that it has terrific entrances and exits for Bluto. Bluto sort of comes on, is charming and funny and gets off. The whole structure of the film centers on Tom Hulce and Stephen Furst, Pinto and Flounder. They carry the story, but John is the one you remember. The script wasn’t designed for Bluto to burst through. John burst through.

CHRIS MILLER, writer, Animal House: John and I lived near each other in the Village and one morning we decided to get breakfast at a place called Al and Dan’s Luncheonette, this funky, old-fashioned place on Bleecker Street. I met him at some spot near where we both lived. We had to walk about a block and a half to get to Al and Dan’s. With all of the fans, it took us an hour. He was like your best friend from high school, just a guy you could have a laugh with. I could always close my eyes and see John as one of those guys from the locker room from when I played sports growing up. Everybody knew somebody like him, or wanted to know somebody like him. John just raised it to an art form. –Tom Brokaw 6 BELUSHI

MICHAEL KLENFNER, Atlantic Records executive : I walked down the street once with Muhammad Ali, and the only thing that was even close to walking down the street with Ali was walking down the street with John. He stopped traffic. It was just pandemonium. People wanted to touch Jake Blues. They wanted to see Blutarsky. They wanted a piece of him. He was an everyman. He was the guy who did what they wanted to do. He could squirt Jell-O out of his mouth, put on a suit and tie, knock out a killer blues song and then dance with another heterosexual man and make it look sexy.

SEAN DANIEL: He enjoyed the success of Animal House. He was happy for the other actors and the writers, because a lot of those guys had come up together. And I think he liked that it was the biggest thing in New York. While on one hand it was getting harder to live the life he might have wanted to, at that moment I think he really liked being king.

JOHN LANDIS: When we were in Chicago doing press for the movie, he went out with Tim Matheson and the producers to a bunch of blues clubs. John just went all night long. The next morning we had to take the door of his hotel room off its hinges so we could get in, wake him up and get him out to do the press rounds. It was a great time for John, but it was a lot for him to handle. He didn’t have much of an off switch.

The first week of September, just before the Universal Amphitheater shows, John and I checked into LaCosta, the famous health spa outside San Diego, so he could relax and clean out. One morning we found ourselves in a swimming pool doing water calisthenics with a bunch of older men. “Arms over your head! Now bend your knees!” John was bored to tears. He couldn’t stand it. Then he glanced over at the guy standing next to him in the pool, and it was William Holden, the William Holden. John couldn’t get over it. He kept asking him to do lines from Sunset Boulevard.

Holden had a good sense of humor about it all, and he took a liking to us. We ended up having a few meals together, listening to his stories about what it was like in Hollywood and how he’d handled it. John was captivated. “Don’t take it personally,” Holden said. “The press will knock you down, but you just have to get back up. Then you’ll be a hero all over again. Just take it all for what it’s worth. They’re good to you when you’re on top, but once you start to slip a little they’ll try and tear you down. Most of the press are scum. They’re vampires. They’ll suck you dry, and they’ll hate you if you die in your sleep.”

“Why’s that?”

“Because it’s bad copy.”

* * *

LAILA NABULSI, producer : The night of the Animal House premiere, Universal had gotten John a suite at the Sherry Netherland Hotel. Mitch, Judy and I were all up there getting ready when John said, “I have a present for you. We’re going to do the Blues Brothers— as a real band. We’re going to open for Steve Martin for nine nights at the Universal Amphitheater, and we’re going to record it for a live album.”

And we just sat there like, “We are?”

“Yeah!” he said. “Judy, you’re gonna design the whole look of the band and the album. Mitch, you’re gonna write the liner notes and the legend of the Blues Brothers. And Laila, you’re going to be the president of the band.” That’s how it all started. It was a way for John to create this little family by giving us all jobs to do. It was pretty funny when you think about it because none of us had any experience whatsoever in the music business.

BERNIE BRILLSTEIN: Steve Martin was at the height of his career, and his agent, Marty Klein, needed an opening act for this gig. He called me and asked if the Blues Brothers would do it. “Of course they’ll do it,” I said. The place was already sold out, and I knew Steve would attract the people who wanted to see John and Danny. “I can only pay seventeen thousand for all nine nights,” he said. That was birdseed, but I didn’t care. I thought of it as an investment in the future; so did John, who used $100,000 of his own money to record the gigs because the record company’s money was too slow to arrive. John and Danny used the $17,000 to pay the band.

LAILA NABULSI: A lot of people thought that it was kind of a joke. I don’t think people realized that John could really pull it off. We knew what we were doing, but nobody else really had any idea.

Plus, we were all TV people, so we weren’t really doing it the way it’s usually done. We had this very funny sense of “blues aesthetic.” When we got to LA, we all had to go to Rent-A-Wreck and get old, beat-up bluesmobiles, everybody had to wear black, everybody had to have blues nicknames, that sort of thing. We were definitely putting on a show.

MITCH GLAZER: The look and the wardrobe were a nice protective device for John and Dan. They’re actors, and to get up as musicians, live, in front of 6,000 people and the cream of the LA celebrity world, well, it took balls.

JUDITH BELUSHI PISANO: As much as John loved being an actor and a comedian, at heart his fantasy was to be a rock and roll star. The danger of the whole Blues Brothers enterprise, that was the kind of pressure he thrived on.

MICHAEL KLENFNER: John, in my opinion, was very, very nervous. This was his first time playing with a real band in front of a big audience, and many of the folks at Atlantic Records did not believe in this on any level. They thought it was a novelty, but it wasn’t. We had our bandleader, Paul Shaffer, the best musician I’ve ever seen, period. We had Steve Cropper and Donald “Duck” Dunn, the legendary rhythm section of the Memphis Stax/ Volt movement. We had Matt “Guitar” Murphy. We had the entire horn section from the Saturday Night Live band, the best studio guys in New York. We’d brought in Tom Scott, the saxophone player, who was a real West Coast gunslinger kind of a guy. And then we had the best fucking drummer in the world. Steve Jordan played the drums like somebody had an electric cattle prod up his ass. Once he was in the pocket you’d need a gun to get him off time.

MITCH GLAZER: I had just given John a hug backstage. Then Judy and I went out and sat together. In those days the amphitheater was still open, and it was one of those perfect, beautiful, breezy Los Angeles nights. I was sitting there surrounded by every important person in the entertainment business when all of a sudden it occurred to me that this could all go horribly, horribly wrong. But the second they cranked into “Can’t Turn You Loose,” all of those thoughts just vanished.

JUDITH BELUSHI PISANO: We looked out over the audience and saw a sea of Blues Brothers hats and T-shirts—and we just kind of laughed. It was like: they exist now. John had this dream, and now it was real. When Jake and Elwood walked onstage, it hit me. I was really overwhelmed, and I actually had to fight back the urge to cry.

BERNIE BRILLSTEIN: After the last rehearsal I had said, “Now, John, don’t just casually saunter out to the center of the stage. Universal Amphitheater’s really large.”

He just looked at me and said, “I make the greatest entrances since Jimmy Durante.” That opening night he did three cartwheels out to center stage, and the place went wild. Half of the audience had togas on, half were dressed up as the Blues Brothers, and everyone else had arrows through their heads. It was a time like no other.

DANNY KORTCHMAR, musician: As soon as the band hit the opening tune and the guys came out from the side of the stage—John doing his cartwheels and Danny holding his briefcase—it was all over. It was history. The audience went up for grabs. And nobody knew. As a matter of fact, a lot of people thought they were going to die a terrible death. But it worked because the band was so excellent and the show had been so well rehearsed, and because John and Danny were sincere. It was one of the few times that you knew right away this was going to become an institution. Not just a successful music effort, an institution.

LAILA NABULSI: I think we put to rest any idea that it was a joke. It was the love of the music that was driving John. He didn’t want it to be stupid.

MICHAEL KLENFNER: The first show was so hot they could have just taken that, mixed it and put it out. And each show just got tighter and better. I remember thinking to myself, how the fuck is Steve Martin gonna follow this? They took a very long time with the set change for the audience to cool off. And every night it seemed like they took longer and longer.

ROBIN WILLIAMS, actor : It was a wild night. They tore the place up. Most of the time comics open for bands, but this time the band opened for the comic. It was a pretty dangerous combination to have this huge burst of energy and then send out after them one lone man with an arrow.

DAN AYKROYD, partner in crime : Steve Martin was very gracious. He was really one of the pivotal guys behind getting us started. He loved the act and loved us and gave us his opening venue. It was incredible that he let this powerhouse band go out and blow the audience away and then came on and did an hour and a half of comedy.

DANNY KORTCHMAR: Everyone was backstage. All the players in town. Everybody I knew that could make that gig made it. They wanted to be a part of it. What made it so fun and different was that it was just as big a party for John and Danny as it was for the audience.

BILLY BELUSHI, brother : I was going to college in California at the time, so I got to go to the first Blues Brothers show. Saturday Night was pretty big, so in my world John was a star, but of course that’s not how I related to him. It was pretty amazing to be backstage, but the best part was just to see John so happy. Afterwards, I stuck with Judy and the people at their table. John was in so much demand that I didn’t really get to spend much time with him.

MICHAEL KLENFNER: The second night I took Mick Jagger with me. The whole show he kept turning to me and saying, “Fucking John’s brilliant. I didn’t know he could move like that.” And on and on about Danny and the band. Backstage, John and Mick had what was basically a musician’s discussion—John had become a credible musician, a blues singer, not just a crazy guy who did these little skits on TV. And that was very important for him.

MITCH GLAZER: When I look back on that whole week at Universal, it’s kind of a perfect, golden moment. But there was also a lot of pressure on John then. That was the same week that the deal for 1941 came down. Every director in Hollywood was lining up backstage at the Amphitheater, mixing congratulations with business, and he was starting to look a little worn from the attention. It wasn’t just a celebration for him; it was also the next test.

JIM BELUSHI, brother : Ours was the classic second-generation immigrant family. We really believed in that idea of the American Dream, the ability to succeed on your own terms. John had worked extremely hard for years in order to make it, and in doing so he’d almost completely isolated himself from the family. After I congratulated him, I said, “John, I’ve handled the family for years. I’ve been the guy explaining why you never All of the musicians had thought that Danny and John were going to make fun of what they did for a living, make a mockery of it. One night I sat next to Joe Cocker in the third row. He actually looked nervous. Three songs in he turned to me and said, “Oh, okay. He’s doing this for real.” –Jim Belushi write and you never call. I’ve done my part, and now it’s your turn.”

“You’re right,” he said. “I’ll take it from here.” After that night he called everybody in the family and fixed them up financially. He bought Mom and Dad a ranch so high in the California mountains that Dad said it made him feel he was living back in the hills of Albania. John was suddenly back in touch and stayed that way, but the change was so dramatic and forceful that it scared everybody half out of their wits.

BERNIE BRILLSTEIN: As the box office for Animal House climbed, John started getting movie offers. Among the callers was Steven Spielberg. He’d met John during the first season of Saturday Night Live, and they’d immediately liked each other. Spielberg’s film was 1941, a comedy spoof about a Japanese military strike on the California coast during World War II. I got a call from Mel Sattler, the head of business affairs at Universal Pictures. He said, “Animal House is huge and we’ve got to have Belushi.” “You don’t have him,” I said. “There are no options on his deal, and I’ve got calls for him coming in from everywhere.” After Animal House I could get just about anything I wanted for John because he’d hit like a fucking rocket, but I figured we’d end up at Universal out of loyalty. They’d brought John to the dance. I said, “Look, Belushi made thirty-five grand on Animal House, and you guys are making millions. Now everyone’s coming after him. But I’m a loyal guy. You took a shot with him. Here’s what I’ll do. Send me $250,000 today. Call it a bonus. And I won’t make a deal with another studio until you make me a three-picture offer. If I like it, he’s yours.” Mel messengered the check to my office. It was so easy I figured I should have asked for a million.

John didn’t completely grasp how much money it was. Around that same time, he and Judy wanted to rent a brownstone downtown in the Village for $1,800 a month. He asked me, “Do you think Judy and I can afford it?” “Yes,” I said, “I think you can.”

Then, in the meeting at Universal with Sattler, I said, “I’m going to walk outside for ten minutes. When I come back, give me your best numbers.” I never asked for anything, in part because I really had no idea what to ask for. When I walked back in they laid out the numbers: Three pictures. $350,000 for the first, which would be 1941. $500,000 for the second. $750,000 for the third. And the $250,000 just for listening, plus per diems and all the usual star perks. So obviously I took it.

MITCH GLAZER: We were all sitting in a screening room at Universal watching Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood. It was a whole bunch of us. Landis had invited us there as a bit of a diversion for John, which he needed. John had some fun grunting along with Toshiro Mifune, but the spirit in the room was subdued. The red phone light blinked and it was for John. There was a brief, muffled conversation. Then, fifteen minutes later, the phone started blinking again. John picked up.

After the movie was over, John and I headed over to a taco stand outside the Universal lot for a chili dog. It was one of those brown, smoggy Los Angeles afternoons. The whole time John had a strange smile on his face. Finally we stopped on an overpass that bridged this rusty little stream. “I got the Spielberg movie,” he said. “I think this means I’m set. I mean, I don’t ever have to worry about money again.” He leaned over the concrete wall, looking down at the stream.

I told him, “It’s an old tradition to throw a penny in there for luck.”

He reached in his pocket and pulled out a crumpled twentydollar bill, arched his eyebrow and smiled. Then he started slowly tearing the twenty and tossing little bits of green confetti out over the ditch. “Thank you, LA,” he said quietly. “Thank you, Hollywood.”