Word: belushi
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Stunning revelations, televised press conferences, racy conjecture about the hours before death-all are trademarks of Los Angeles County Medical Examiner Dr. Thomas Noguchi. But when Actor John Belushi, 33, was found dead in a Hollywood hotel bungalow, the "coroner to the stars" was uncharacteristically circumspect. He remained silent as the first ugly details of Belushi's .death drifted into print, and finally issued only a terse written announcement of his findings: "The deceased died of an overdose due to intravenous injections of heroin and cocaine. Both cocaine and heroin were found on the premises...
Noguchi's tight-lipped discretion was not the result of a spontaneous personality change. Rather, the five-member Los Angeles County board of supervisors had ordered him two months ago to confine his reports to strictly physiological data and refrain from "sensationalism and editorializing." Three days before Belushi's death, the board expressed its displeasure more firmly and voted unanimously to seek the coroner's resignation. Noguchi refused to quit his $69,000-a-year job, and so the supervisors late last week upped the ante by suspending him for a month. The board seems intent...
...battle to remove him intensified, Noguchi relapsed into his customary loquaciousness with the press. He said that given free rein, he would have hinted days earlier at the unnatural causes of Belushi's death. Noguchi referred to the use of the cocaine-heroin mixture by its street name-speedballing-and said that the dose would have killed Belushi even if he had been less paunchy and dissipated. The comedian's death had its public aftermath in the East as well. Actor Dan Aykroyd led the funeral cortege on Martha's Vineyard astride a Harley-Davidson motorcycle...
...last two films, Continental Divide and Neighbors, Belushi played ordinary guys beset and attracted by extraordinary eccentrics. He might have been announcing that Animal John was also a mensch, but it is more likely he was simply expanding his range toward more traditional character parts. After a few years of shooting stardom, Belushi was inching to ward mid-life without another climax immediately in view. Now it has found him. In his early days with Lemmings, he had mocked celebrity burnout with the All-Star Dead Band - Jimi Hendrix, Brian Jones, Jim Morrison, Janis Joplin. Less than a decade later...
DIED. John Belushi, 33, brilliant, anarchic comedian and improviser on TV (Saturday Night Live) and in movies (Animal House); of undetermined causes; in Hollywood (see SHOW BUSINESS...