John Belushi: Wrong Time, Wrong Place, Wrong People

The night before Cathy Evelyn Smith was seen across the country as the “Belushi Mystery Woman” on ABC’s 20/20, her attorney, Robert Sheahen, was standing in front of St. John’s Hospital in Santa Monica. He had a problem: While he had been upstairs in the maternity ward visiting his wife and their two-day-old baby, Sheahen said, his client had wandered off. But it was all right. She was alone, on foot and inebriated. She wouldn’t get far.

“She called me from a pay phone and said she was drinking in a bar in an alley behind the hospital,” the attorney explained, climbing into his car. “We’ll find her.”

We pulled off Santa Monica Boulevard and then made a hard right on Arizona into a neighborhood of stucco apartment buildings. Sheahen pointed to the first alley on the left: “Let’s try in there.”

The alley was a concrete driveway between the banks of apartment buildings. It was dark, lined with garages and garbage cans. Who the hell would look for a bar in a deserted alley in Santa Monica? I began to ask.

“That looks like her,” Sheahen said, pointing ahead. The headlights illuminated a pair of flabby thighs encased in white stretch pants tucked into high-heeled cowboy boots. Floating above was a woman’s broad, florid face coated with sweat-congealed makeup.

“You come to take me for a ride?” Cathy Evelyn Smith asked, grinning sloppily and pitching forward off the narrow shoulder of the man upon whom she had been leaning. He was about 50, with tattooed forearms and silver hair greased straight back from a scarred forehead. The man raised an open palm as if to say hello, then quickly released the woman and brought up his other hand in a gesture of surrender.

“I was just bringing her back,” the man said. “I didn’t touch her. I swear to God.”

“I have to go,” Smith told the man. “It’s been fun.”

Sheahen climbed out of the car and poured his client into the front seat, where she came to rest with her head against the dashboard. Cathy Smith turned and, peeking through a thatch of brittle, broken brown hair, leered suspiciously.

“Where the fuck am I?” she wanted to know. Her own question struck her as hilarious, and she doubled over with laughter.

The place she had just come out of, a white shed with painted windows, lacked not only a sign but even an obvious entrance. It was, to strain a euphemism, a private club.

“I saw these three black guys standing up here, smoking a joint, and I figured there had to be something going on. ‘Is it cocktail hour yet?’ I asked ’em. ‘Is it five o’clock yet?’ They told me it was quarter to five, but I said, ‘What the hell, startin’ early’s better than startin’ late.'”

It was quarter after seven now. “It’s been a very rough week for Cathy,” her attorney pointed out. “She’s understandably dejected and disconsolate.”

“I’m disconsolate as hell,” Smith said with a laugh so harsh it silenced everyone in the car.

We headed to a motel for the world premiere interview with the 34-year-old fugitive from the press.

Thirteen Days earlier, on the afternoon of March 5th, Cathy Evelyn Smith had appeared driving the wrong way into the one-way exit of the Chateau Marmont Hotel on Sunset Strip behind the wheel of John Belushi’s rented red Mercedes. It was an arrival that made national news, because at that moment, a hundred feet away, Belushi lay naked and dead on the floor of his $200-a-day bungalow. The police who had cordoned off the area were reflexively insisting it had been “death from natural causes.” But the phalanx of media ghouls massed behind the police line already suspected, correctly, that Belushi had died of a drug overdose. So when the unidentified woman in a blue and gray jogging suit was led away in handcuffs to a black and white patrol car, she was followed by dozens of TV and tabloid reporters looking for a break in the story.

The media was distracted for a while when Belushi’s widow, Judy Jacklin, told the Chicago Sun Times that her husband had been with Robert De Niro and Robin Williams on the night of his death. However, De Niro’s agent said the actor “absolutely was not in Belushi’s room” in the early morning hours of March 5th. Williams’ agent confirmed that Williams and Belushi were together the night before Belushi died, but said, “I really don’t know” if Williams later visited Belushi at the Chateau Marmont. Both De Niro and Williams were unavailable for comment.

If the “mystery woman” were booked on a drug charge, according to certain well-placed sources, the list of potential material witnesses would include an astonishing array of the entertainment industry’s biggest stars. The Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD), however, would reveal no other names besides Cathy Smith’s. And they declined to file any criminal charges against her. Police reluctantly confirmed that Smith had turned over a syringe and a spoon that she had taken from Belushi’s bungalow on the morning of his death. And “technically,” Smith’s “possession of drug paraphernalia was a crime,” conceded Russ Kuster, a detective in the Hollywood Division. “But we wouldn’t have even known about that stuff if she hadn’t told us,” Kuster added. “She cooperated fully.”

If Smith had provided Belushi with the drugs he used to overdose, or if she had helped put the needle in his arm, Kuster said, “There would have been grounds, technically, for a charge of manslaughter. But we have no evidence of that.”

Had the other people who were present during the early morning hours of Belushi’s overdose been questioned?

“Look,” Kuster said, “nobody, least of all someone famous, is gonna cop to a drug charge where there’s no real evidence.”