At Home in the Vineyard, John Belushi Found Peace

CHILMARK, Mass. -- The first time Judith Belushi Pisano went to Martha's Vineyard, she was accompanied by the man who would become her first husband, a then-little-known actor named John Belushi. It was his first visit, too.

They were in the their early 20s, high school sweethearts from the Chicago suburbs. It was 1974. "Saturday Night Live," which would make Belushi a household name, was a little more than a year away.

Belushi had moved to New York to be in National Lampoon magazine's off-Broadway revue, "Lemmings." Pisano had moved to New York to be with Belushi. For their summer vacation, they drove up to New England.

"A friend outside of Boston said, `Well, are you going to go to Martha's Vineyard?' " Pisano recalls, sitting behind the wheel of her stepdaughter's Saab. She has to speak up because the radio's on and the muffler's growly.

"So we get to the Woods Hole ferry. `Can we get a reservation?' `Not with your car you can't.' Well, it still seemed like a cool idea -- an island, a ferry -- so we said, let's go. We got to Vineyard Haven and rented a car. We just started driving, with no idea where we were going or what was up. But we thought, isn't this great? And it just got greater and greater."

When people think of the Vineyard, they tend to associate it with eminent figures such as Robert McNamara, the former secretary of defense, or playwright Lillian Hellman. Certainly not with the likes of Belushi, a raging-id wild man of comedy best known for characters like Bluto Blutarski, in "National Lampoon's Animal House," Joliet Jake Blues, of the Blues Brothers, or various samurai incarnations on "SNL."

But on that first trip Belushi fell in love with the Vineyard. "This is where I like being me," he once said. Pisano loved it, too. They bought a beachfront house here in 1979 (from McNamara, no less). After Belushi died of a drug overdose in Los Angeles in 1982, it was in Abel's Hill Cemetery here that he was buried (his grave is near Hellman's).

Pisano, 54, lived in New York for several years after Belushi's death, then returned to the island and bought a new house, in Vineyard Haven, in 1986. She remarried in 1990. Her husband was a fellow islander, Victor Pisano, a television executive and restaurateur. The Pisanos have four children: three daughters from his first marriage, and a son.

In the off-season, things slow down on the Vineyard. But they haven't for Pisano, not this year, anyway. She and her husband have just opened an art gallery in Vineyard Haven, the Belushi Pisano Gallery; and she's co-author, with Tanner Colby, of "Belushi: A Biography," a lively oral history published in November.

Pisano decided to do the book four years ago, when she turned 50. After Belushi's death, she'd conducted interviews for a special that aired on MTV. She used that material, as well as more recent interviews, for her text.

"There's always something going on to do with John," Pisano says. She and the other Blues Brother, Dan Aykroyd, are partners in the House of Blues chain of nightclubs. There's licensing of his image, and he remains a frequent presence on "SNL" retrospectives.

CONSTANT REMINDERS

It's a gray, blustery day, and Pisano is driving a reporter and photographer to various sites on the island associated with Belushi. She's dressed in High Winter Casual: an anorak and vest, boots, jeans with a hole in each knee, and a Popeye-perfect rain hat.

Just how perfect is revealed when Pisano gets out of the car in Menemsha to pose outside a fish market she and Belushi used to frequent. The skies open. It's the meteorological equivalent of an "Animal House" food fight. Things are even worse a few minutes later when there's more picture-taking, at Lucy Vincent Beach, here in Chilmark.

Pisano has a lot of nervous energy, which can make her seem a little loosey-goosey. She tends to talk fast, so her flat Chi-cargo vowels rattle around. She laughs a lot and jokes a lot, which underscores how informal and selfdeprecating she is -- the jokes tend to be at her own expense. Pisano's also quick, smart, capable. This is a woman, after all, who ran with some of the funniest people in America for much of a decade and had little trouble keeping up (Pisano does a very good Aykroyd imitation).

After helping start the art department at National Lampoon, Pisano was a producer on "The National Lampoon Radio Hour." She collaborated on two bestselling feminist humor collections, "Titters" and "Titters 101," and designed the Blues Brothers albums and a related book, which she helped write. She wrote a memoir after Belushi's death, "Samurai Widow," and set up a foundation in his memory, now called the Second Chance Foundation, largely devoted to Vineyard recipients. All proceeds from the gallery go to the foundation.

"My life is very full and active," Pisano says, "and with four kids there's not a lot of room in my mind. But, I have to say, I probably think of John, if not daily, then very close. Again, just because there's so much business tied around him. I could be in line and the person ahead of us could order `Cheeseburger, cheeseburger,' or say, `But nooooo!' . . . So I have lots of reminders."

Not that Pisano needs reminding. "We met in high school. I was 15, going on 16, he was 17, going on 18. There's a song about that," she deadpans.

What drew Belushi to the Vineyard isn't hard to explain, Pisano says. "It's comfortable. It's inviting. It's embracing. It's invigorating. As he always said, you get a good night's sleep here. The air is fresh. I remember he said, `We're going to be really old. Being here is the key to living to an old age. Look around you. Look at all these old people. This is where people come to live to be old!' "

A DIFFICULT VISIT

Belushi, who died at 33, is buried only a few minutes from the house he and Pisano owned.

"We were driving by here the last time we were on the island," Pisano says, pulling up to the cemetery. "And I said, `I'd like to be buried here.' He said, `I'd like to have a Viking funeral.' "

Pisano gave that serious thought when Belushi died, but his mother objected. Instead, Pisano observed the first anniversary of his death by setting on fire a dinghy that held various Belushi mementoes, then putting it out to sea near Gay Head.

The gravesite is simple: a bench, a large beach stone bearing the name "Belushi," and a Puritan-style headstone with skull and crossbones and his dates. So many people visited the site it was moved from the center of the cemetery to over near the entrance.

Visitors still come, Pisano says. "They leave things. Stones are the big things, but there are cigarette butts and liquor and recently I found a doobie. People will leave coins, too, or a penny or whatever. I say, why not leave dollars!"

This is the one time Pisano's high spirits fade. Asked if she wants to join the reporter and photographer at the gravesite, she says she'd rather stay in the car.

It's a momentary melancholy. By the time Pisano is driving by Martha's Vineyard Airport, she's telling a story about Belushi asking the pilots of a private jet he was about to board if they'd mind waiting so he could catch the last set at a nearby nightclub, the Hot Tin Roof. They said that was fine; the plane had been chartered for him, after all. So Belushi invited them along, too.

He ended up onstage, singing a few songs before winging off to Hollywood. "That was John," Pisano says with a smile and shake of her head.