How a biography of Hollywood comedian John Belushi laid bare Watergate legend Bob Woodward's journalistic failings.

Earlier this month, during an interview with Politico, Bob Woodward came forward to claim he’d been threatened in an email by a “senior White House official” for daring to reveal certain details about the negotiations over the budget sequester. The White House responded by releasing the email exchange Woodward was referring to, which turned out to be nothing more than a cordial exchange between the reporter and Obama’s economic adviser, Gene Sperling, who was clearly implying nothing more than that Woodward would “regret” taking a position that would soon be shown to be false.

A rather trivial scandal, but the incident did manage to raise important questions about Woodward’s behaviour. Was he cynically trumping up the administration’s “threat,” or does he just not know how to read an email? Pretty soon, those questions tipped over into the standard Beltway discussion that transpires anytime Woodward does anything. How accurate is his reporting? Does he deserve his legendary status?

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I can offer some interesting answers to those questions. Thirty-one years ago, on March 5, 1982, Saturday Night Live and Animal House star John Belushi died of a drug overdose in Los Angeles. Two years after Belushi died, Bob Woodward published Wired: The Short Life and Fast Times of John Belushi.

Belushi, who despised Richard Nixon, was a big Woodward fan, and after he died, his widow, Judy Belushi, approached Woodward in his role as a reporter for the Washington Post. She had questions about the LAPD’s handling of Belushi’s death and asked Woodward to look into it. He took the access she offered and used it to write a scathing, lurid account of Belushi’s drug use and death.

Many of Belushi’s friends and family denounced it as biased and riddled with factual errors. “Exploitative, pulp trash,” in the words of Dan Aykroyd. Wired was so wrong, Belushi’s manager said, it made you think Nixon might be innocent. Woodward insisted the book was balanced and accurate. “I reported this story thoroughly,” he told Rolling Stone. Woodward was given the benefit of the doubt. Belushi’s reputation never recovered.

Twenty years later, in 2004, Judy Belushi hired me, then an aspiring comedy writer, to help her with a new biography of John, this one titled Belushi: A Biography. I handled most of the legwork, including all of the interviews and most of the research. Over the course of a year, page by page, source by source, I re-reported and rewrote one of Bob Woodward’s books.

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Wired is an anomaly in the Woodward catalog, the only book he’s ever written about a subject other than Washington. As such, it’s rarely cited by his critics. But Wired’s outlier status is the very thing that makes it such a fascinating piece of Woodwardology. Because he was forced to work outside of his comfort zone, his strengths and his weaknesses can be seen in sharper relief.

Wired is an infuriating piece of work. There’s never a smoking gun like an outright falsehood or a brazen ethical breach. And yet, in the final product, a lot of what Woodward writes comes off as being not quite right — some of it to the point where it can feel quite wrong. Getting the facts is only part of the equation. You have to present those facts in context and in proportion to other facts in order to accurately reflect reality. It’s here that Woodward fails.

Over and over during the course of my reporting I’d hear a story that conflicted with Woodward’s account in Wired. I’d run back to Woodward’s index, look up the offending passage, and realize that, well, no, he’d put down the mechanics of the story more or less as they’d happened. But he’d so mangled the meaning and the context that his version had nothing to do with what I concluded had actually transpired. Take the filming of the famous cafeteria scene from Animal House, which Belushi totally improvised on set with no rehearsal. What you see in the film is the first and last tme he ever performed that scene. Here’s the story as recounted by Belushi’s co-star James Widdoes:

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One of the things that was so spectacular to watch during the filming was the incredible connection that [Belushi] and Landis had. During the scene on the cafeteria line, Landis was talking to Belushi all the way through it, and Belushi was just taking it one step further. What started out as Landis saying, “Okay, now grab the sandwich,” became, in John’s hands, taking the sandwich, squeezing and bending it until it popped out of the cellophane, sucking it into his mouth, and then putting half the sandwich back. He would just go a little further each time.

One source, shocked by Woodward’s blindness to context and nuance, joked he now wondered if Nixon was innocent

Co-star Tim Matheson remembered that John “did the entire cafeteria line scene in one take. I just stood by the camera, mesmerized.” Other witnesses agree. Every person who recounted that incident to me used it as an example of Belushi’s virtuoso talent and his great relationship with his director. Landis could whisper suggestions to Belushi on the fly, and he’d spin it into comedy gold.

Now here it is as Woodward presents it:

Landis quickly discovered that John could be lazy and undisciplined. They were rehearsing a cafeteria scene, a perfect vehicle to set up Bluto’s insatiable cravings. Landis wanted John to walk down the cafeteria line and load his tray until it was a physical burden. As the camera started, Landis stood to one side shouting: “Take that! Put that in your pocket! Pile that on the tray! Eat that now, right there!” John followed each order, loading his pockets and tray, stuffing his mouth with a plate of Jello in one motion.

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First off, Woodward wrongly calls the cafeteria scene a rehearsal, when half the point of the story is that Belushi pulled it off without ever rehearsing it once. Also, there’s actually nothing in the anecdote to indicate laziness or lack of discipline on Belushi’s part, yet Woodward chooses to establish the scene using those words. The implication is that Belushi was so unfocused and unprepared that he couldn’t make it through the scene without the director beside him telling him what to do, which is not what took place.

The wrongness in Woodward’s reporting is always ever so subtle. SNL writer Michael O’Donoghue — who died before I started the book but who videotaped an interview with Judy years before — told this story about how Belushi loved to mess with him:

I am very anal-retentive, and John used to come over and just move things around, just move things a couple of inches, drop a paper on the floor, miss an ashtray a little bit until finally he could see me just tensing up. That was his idea of a fine joke. Another joke he used to do was to sit on me.

When put through the Woodward filter, this becomes:

A compulsively neat person, O’Donoghue was always picking up and straightening his office. Frequently, John came in and destroyed the order in a minute, shifting papers, furniture or pencils or dropping cigarette ashes.

Again, Woodward’s account is not wrong. It’s just … wrong. In his version, Belushi is not a prankster but a jerk.

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Then there’s an anecdote related to me by Blair Brown, Belushi’s co-star in Continental Divide. On the day they were to film the movie’s love scene, Belushi, not known for his matinee good looks, was terribly nervous. Here’s what happened, in Brown’s words:

He was clearly nervous about doing [a love scene]. He just lay there in bed trying to think up all the funny names for penis that he could. … We were weeping with laughter it was so funny. … He was just stalling and stalling and stalling because he was so nervous.

Here’s the scene as written in Wired:

John was very nervous preparing for the shooting and kept making jokes, trying to get them to remember all the known names for the male sex organ. … Brown didn’t mind the conversation, but she thought it was an inappropriate prelude to a love scene.

Twenty years later, Brown was still upset at how Woodward had portrayed it in Wired. “It was my first experience of getting tricked by a journalist,” she said. “He had taken the facts that I told him, and put an attitude to them that was not remotely right.”

Wired is like that throughout. Like a funhouse mirror, Woodward’s prose distorts what it purports to reflect, and misses the bigger picture. Belushi’s nervousness about doing that love scene in Continental Divide was an important detail. When that movie came out, it tanked at the box office. After months of fighting to stay clean, Belushi fell off the wagon and started using heavily again. Six months later he was dead. Woodward missed the real meaning of what went on.

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Woodward’s detractors like to say that he’s little more than a stenographer — and they’re right. In Wired, he takes what he is told and simply puts it down in chronological order with no sense of proportionality, nuance or understanding.

Woodward is worse than a mere stenographer. Like a funhouse mirror, his prose distorts what it purports to reflect, and misses the bigger picture

John Belushi was a recreational drug user for roughly one-third of his 33 years, and he was a hard-core addict for the last five or six, from which you can subtract one solid year of sobriety. Yet in Wired, which has 403 pages of narrative text, the total number of pages that make some reference to drugs is something like 295, or nearly 75%. Shouldn’t a writer also be interested in what led his subject to this substance abuse in the first place? Wired is like a biography of Buddy Holly that only covers time he spent on airplanes.

Of all the people I interviewed, SNL writer and current Sen. Al Franken, referencing his late comedy partner Tom Davis, offered the most apt description of Woodward’s one-sided approach to the drug use in Belushi’s story: “Tom Davis said the best thing about Wired,” Franken told me. “He said it’s as if someone wrote a book about your college years and called it Puked. And all it was about was who puked, when they puked, what they ate before they puked and what they puked up. Nothing happened but people puking.”

There’s little doubt that the drug stories Woodward uses actually happened. But he just goes around piling up these stories with no regard for what is actually relevant. At one point, Woodward stops the narrative cold to document a single 24-hour coke binge for the better part of eight pages. It’s not a key moment in Belushi’s life, but it takes on an outsized weight in Wired’s narrative simply because Woodward happened to find the limo driver who drove Belushi around and witnessed the whole thing. Meanwhile, the funeral of Belushi’s grandmother — which was the pivotal moment when he hit bottom, resolved to get clean, and kicked off his year of hard-fought sobriety —is glossed over in a mere 42 words. Woodward has an unmatched skill for digging up information, but he doesn’t know what to do with that information once he finds it.

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After Wired was published, Woodward said to Rolling Stone that there was some warmth to Belushi that he “didn’t capture,” but he also passed the buck to his sources, saying he tried to get them to “talk about the good times” but kept getting horrible drug stories or stories that didn’t in his estimation reflect the true Belushi. I spoke to almost all of those same sources myself. Not only did Belushi’s contemporaries offer colourful tales of a beloved if troubled and complicated man, they themselves are some of the greatest writers, performers and storytellers of the last quarter-century. They tell good stories. The problem was the filter those stories were put through.

Granted, stories evolve over 20 years of telling. Surely there were people who were mad at Belushi in 1983 who prefer to look back on him fondly today. And if it were one or two people disputing Woodward’s characterizations, you might chalk it up to rose-tinted glasses. But when person after person remembers, specifically, what Woodward outright mischaracterized, a pretty clear pattern begins to emerge.

It’s also easy to discount Wired by saying that Woodward just doesn’t have a sense of humour and was out of his depth writing about a comedian. And that’s true as far as it goes. But the stories aren’t really about comedy so much as they’re about human beings interacting, which is a lot of what goes on at the White House, too. The simple truth of Wired is that Bob Woodward, deploying all of the talent and resources for which he is famous, produced something that is a failure as journalism. And when you imagine Woodward using the same approach to cover secret meetings about drone strikes and the budget sequester and other issues of vital national importance, well, you have to stop and shudder.

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