FOUND A GRAVE

John Belushi

John Belushi was born in Humboldt Park, a neighborhood on the West Side of Chicago, Illinois. His mother, Agnes Demetri (Samaras), was the daughter of Albanian immigrants, and his father, Adam Anastos Belushi, was an Albanian immigrant, from Qytezë. John was raised in Wheaton, a Chicago suburb, along with his three siblings: younger brothers Billy and Jim and his sister, Marian. Belushi was raised in the Albanian Orthodox church. He attended Wheaton Central High School, where he met his future wife, Judith Jacklin.

Early career
After starting his own comedy troupe, in 1971 he was asked to join the cast at The Second City. At Second City, he met and began working with Dan Aykroyd. He was cast in National Lampoon Lemmings, a parody of Woodstock, which played Off-Broadway in 1972.

In 1973, Belushi and Jacklin moved together to New York where Belushi worked for National Lampoon magazine’s The National Lampoon Radio Hour, a half-hour syndicated comedy program where he was a writer, director and actor. Jacklin became an associate producer for the show, and she and Belushi were married on December 31, 1976.

1975–1979
Belushi became an original cast member of the new television show Saturday Night Live (SNL) in 1975. His work at SNL included Samurai Futaba, and, with Aykroyd, the characters Jake and Ellwood Blues known as The Blues Brothers. In 2011 Jane Curtin stated that while at SNL Belushi would deliberately sabotage the work of women writers and comics. During his tenure at SNL, he was heavily using drugs and alcohol which affected his performance and caused SNL to fire him a number of times.

Belushi left Saturday Night Live in 1979 to pursue a film career. Belushi made four more movies; three of them, 1941, Neighbors, and most notably The Blues Brothers, were made with fellow SNL alumnus Dan Aykroyd.

Other movie projects
Released in September 1981, the romantic comedy Continental Divide starred Belushi as Chicago home town hero writer Ernie Souchack, who gets put on assignment researching a scientist studying birds of prey in the remote Rocky Mountains.

At the time of his death, Belushi was pursuing several movie projects, including Moons Over Miami and Noble Rot. While the first was being shopped around to different studios and producers, the latter was a script that had been adapted and rewritten by himself and former Saturday Night Live writer, Don Novello in the weeks leading up to his death.

Starting in 1980, after seeing them perform in several after hours New York City bars, Belushi had become a fan and advocate of the punk rock band Fear and brought them to Cherokee Studios to record songs for the soundtrack of Neighbors. Blues Brother and guitar player Steve Cropper, along with producing partner and Cherokee owner Bruce Robb, worked on a number of music projects with the two comedian/musicians, including the band Fear and later Aykroyd’s movie Dragnet.

Death
On March 5, 1982, after showing up at his hotel for a scheduled workout, his trainer, Bill Wallace found Belushi dead in his room, Bungalow 3 at the Chateau Marmont on Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood, California. He was 33 years old. The cause of death was an overdose of cocaine and heroin, a drug combination also known as a speedball. In the early morning hours on the day of his death, he was visited separately by friends Robin Williams and Robert De Niro, each of whom left the premises, leaving Belushi in the company of assorted others, including Catherine Evelyn Smith. His death was investigated by forensic pathologist Dr. Ryan Norris, among others, and, while the findings were disputed, it was officially ruled a drug-related accident.

Two months later, Smith admitted in an interview with the National Enquirer that she had been with Belushi the night of his death and had given him the fatal speedball shot. After the appearance of the article “I Killed Belushi” in the Enquirer edition of June 29, 1982, the case was reopened. Smith was extradited from Toronto, Ontario, arrested and charged with first-degree murder. A plea bargain reduced the charge to involuntary manslaughter, and she served fifteen months in prison.

Belushi’s wife arranged for a traditional Orthodox Christian funeral which was conducted by an Albanian Orthodox priest. She also recruited the couple’s good friend, James Taylor, who postponed the European leg of his current tour to come and sing his haunting ballad, ‘That Lonesome Road’, at the morning gravesite service. He has been interred twice at Abel’s Hill Cemetery in Chilmark on Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts. A tombstone marking the original burial location has a New England classic slate design, complete with skull and crossbones, that reads, “I may be gone but Rock and Roll lives on.” An unmarked tombstone in an undisclosed location marks the final burial location. He is also remembered on the Belushi family stone marking his mother’s grave at Elmwood Cemetery in River Grove, Illinois. This stone reads, “He gave us laughter.”