BELUSHI BY THE BOOK

Biography Chronicles Actor's Spectacular Career

Tanner Colby was born the year "Saturday Night Live" debuted in 1975.

And he was just 6 years old when one of that show's brightest stars,
John Belushi, was found dead in a Sunset Boulevard bungalow after
overdosing on a lethal combination of cocaine and heroin.

So Colby, who grew up in Vestavia Hills and only knew Belushi from
old "SNL" reruns, might seem an unlikely choice to write "Belushi,"
the new biography about the larger-than-life pop-culture icon who
helped ignite a comedy revolution in the '70s.

But not to Judy Belushi Pisano, Belushi's widow and Colby's co-author
on the book.

The two met in the spring of 2001, when Colby came to visit Pisano at
her home on Martha's Vineyard to get her permission to use some tapes
from her late husband's old "National Lampoon Radio Hour."

Pisano connected with Colby's sense of humor, and she found a certain
symmetry in the fact that, nearly 20 years after Belushi died, Colby
was the creative director of the new "National Lampoon Radio Hour."

They stayed in touch, and three years later, Colby returned to
Martha's Vineyard to rummage through cardboard boxes full of old
photographs, videotapes and notes Pisano had tucked away in her
basement. The two agreed it was time to finish the book Pisano had
started two decades before.

"I hit one of those birthdays (50) that makes you wonder if there was
something you needed to finish," Pisano says. "I thought of those
tapes and wanted to do something with them.

"When Tanner got hold of the transcripts and started reading them, he
was really taken with them," she adds. "I think having someone who
was from another generation, who didn't grow up with all of this
(helped). He researched it impeccably."

Unlike Bob Woodward's "Wired," a grisly account of the partying and
drug-bingeing that would lead to Belushi's death, the Pisano-Colby
book is more a celebration of his life - a scrapbook filled with
personal photos and interviews with many of Belushi's partners in
comedy, including Dan Aykroyd, Robin Williams, Lorne Michaels and
Belushi's brother, Jim Belushi.

"After 'Wired' came out and after the way John died, that sort of
cast a cloud over a lot of his work, but when you read this book, you
see just how funny he was," Colby, who now lives in New York City, says.

"I mean, John's life was a lot of fun until it wasn't anymore, and I
think this book points out that it's OK to celebrate the good times
and not just dwell on the bad."

Belushi cast such a large shadow that "he was way too big for a
nutshell and pretty unwieldy for a book," his widow notes in the
book's forward.

How big? By the time Belushi turned 30, he had a ground-breaking TV
show ("Saturday Night Live"), a top-rated movie ("Animal House") and,
along with his buddy and fellow Blues Brother Aykroyd, a best-selling
album ("Briefcase Full of Blues"). He was "cheezborger, cheezborger."
He was Bluto. He was huge.

"He definitely was," Colby says. "Several of John's friends told me
when we were putting the book together that you'll never capture John
on the page."

Colby collected all of his and Pisano's interviews and strung them
together to present a chronological oral history of Belushi's life -
from growing up as the son of an Albanian immigrant in Wheaton, Ill.,
to his apprenticeship with Chicago's Second City comedy troupe to his
sudden ascent on "SNL" to the downward spiral that would lead to his
death at 33.

"A lot of interviewers ask me and Judy, 'What's new in this book?
What's the big revelation?'" Colby says. "And I say, 'What's new in
this book is John Belushi.' Because no one really knows who he is.

"There's the icon. There's Bluto. There's the wild-and-crazy drug
death on Sunset Strip. And that's pretty much eclipsed anything else
about the man.

"But there is so much more to the story," Colby adds. "John was just
warm, sweet, just really kind of a teddy bear in a lot of ways. ...

"He was really a lightning rod of a comedy revolution that happened
in the '70s. He was the energizer and the icebreaker that brought all
of those people together."

A short but good life

Pisano, who got remarried to writer-producer-restaurateur Victor
Pisano 15 years ago and has three stepdaughters and a son, says the
new book helps complete a healing process that began when she
published the memoir "Samurai Widow" in 1990.

"When I did 'Samurai Widow,' that helped me work through my mourning
process," she says. "That's what I was focusing on, being widowed and
trying to create for the reader what it was like to go through that
kind of loss."

That book was for her. This one is for her late husband.

"When you step back and look at John's life, he had a good life," she
says. "You can feel good for him. Overall, (there is) sadness that he
let himself get so deep into his troubles, but it's a done deal.

"All you can do is step back and take a deep breath and wait out the
sadness and then you see a person who was really energetic and gave a
lot to people and had a lot of interesting times in his life and
fabulous people around him.

"I'm getting a lot of good response," she adds. "People say things
like, 'It's made me feel like I've just spent time with him again,
and I'm mad at him again. Thanks for reminding us how funny John was.'"