Later in my office, I received the toxicological report and was startled by one finding. Holden had died with .22 percent alcohol in his blood, more than double the .10 percent which is the legal definition of driving under the influence of alcohol by the California Vehicular Code. Had alcohol contributed to his death in some way? I called Charles Wilson, the chief of homicide detectives in Santa Monica, and asked him if he would join me and my staff in a visit to Holden’s apartment.
His apartment seemed to have been inspired by the Hong Kong setting of his film Love Is a Many-Splen-dored Thing. All the furnishings were Chinese, with black-lacquered heavy wood tables, brass-based lamp fixtures and rich Oriental carpets. Holden had exquisite taste in interior decoration. And he was an exceptionally tidy man. Nothing in the apartment seemed out of place—except in the bedroom where he had died.
Charles Wilson had brought another detective with him, and they told me that murder didn’t seem to be in the picture. “There were no weapons,” Wilson said. “And we dusted for fingerprints. There were none except Holden’s in the apartment.”
I surveyed the bedroom. One of Holden’s fine rugs, oyster white with blue trimming and about three by six feet in dimension, was crumpled near the bed. Such a meticulous man would not have done that intentionally. Had he slipped on the rug? “Where was he lying?” I asked.
“Where the rug is,” Wilson said, “beside the bed.”
On the bed itself I saw dried bloody Kleenex tissues. I counted eight of them.
The table next to the bed was crooked, another jarring note in such a neat apartment. Apparently it had been jammed at an angle against the wall. In fact, there was a gash in the wall where the corner of the table had struck it. I asked the detective to lift the heavy teakwood table. He couldn’t do it. I wanted an idea of the exact weight because it would establish how much force had been applied to move it.
In the kitchen we found an empty quart bottle of vodka in a trashcan, and a partially empty bottle on the counter. I presumed that the contents of those bottles accounted for the .22 percent alcohol reading in the toxicological report on Holden’s blood.
From the clues in the apartment, it was obvious to me how Holden had died. Intoxicated, he had tripped on the rug and lunged forward, his forehead striking the corner of the table next to the bed with such force that it had been driven into the wall. His death was an accident. But what made it even more poignant—and pointless—was that the actor had not lost consciousness. Instead, he had opened the drawer of the table in which the Kleenex box was kept, removed some tissues and tried to stanch the flow of blood from the gash in his forehead. He had time to use eight, one after the other.
In the autopsy room, by gauging the amount of blood loss, I had estimated that Holden lived at least half an hour or more before he lost consciousness. And during that time, I suspected, alcohol had played its usual deadly role, preventing him from responding properly to an emergency.
Sober, Holden would probably have telephoned for assistance, or gone next door to alert a neighbor. The telephone was so close to the scene of the accident that there were drops of blood on it. Intoxicated, he lay there on the bed until the blood loss caused him to lose consciousness. And in Holden’s case, there was another evil factor at work. Alcohol dilates the capillaries, promoting bleeding, and also inhibits the normal blood-clotting mechanism in an open wound. William Holden bled to death.
Still I had tormenting questions. For one, why had his death gone unnoticed for four days? A woman I knew, Shirley Goldinger, the Director of Consumer Affairs in Los Angeles County, lived next door to Holden, and she gave me a possible answer. Holden was an intensely private person, she said. They had been neighbors for six years, but had only a nodding acquaintance.
Newspaper obituaries of Holden would later make special note of his sense of privacy. All his life he had refused, in interviews, to talk about his politics, his family or his lifestyle. In 1971 he had told a reporter that he had always resented the “ground rule of thirty years ago, when you did anything to get your name in the paper with Hedda Hopper or Louella Parsons.”
Such a private person would hesitate before calling for help, I thought. That was probably another factor which led to his death—and also explained why no one was alarmed when he didn’t appear in public for several days. No doubt Holden’s associates and friends respected his desire for solitude and never bothered him or asked questions.
Bill Martin, the manager of the apartment building, had discovered the body. At my request he joined us in Holden’s apartment and told me, “Sure, we were worried. He had been in here for days without coming out.”
“How long?”
“I don’t know for sure, but it was more than a week. I got concerned, so I played a little game.”
I was startled. “A game?”
“Yes—to see how he was doing. I knocked on his door and pretended there was trouble in his electrical wiring. He let me in, and I worked on a light fixture, then told him it was okay and left.”
“What did you see?”
“I suspected he had been drinking, but he was okay. Then some days later he was still here, and I was really worried. So I came back.”
Standing outside the door of the apartment, he relaxed, he told us, because he could hear the television inside and thought Holden must be all right. But when the actor didn’t respond to his knocking, he quickly became alarmed again and used his passkey to open the door.
William Holden perished of a wound which should not have been fatal. There had been ample time to summon help, and even if medical attendants found him unconscious after the summons they could have saved him by modern medical techniques, including blood transfusions. That was why the actor’s death angered me. I felt that it precisely demonstrated the terrible danger of alcohol, which is, without doubt, the most popular and most deadly drug ever conceived. One out of every four deaths we autopsy in Los Angeles is alcohol-related.
Holden’s death also delineated sharply a great dilemma which faces all medical examiners in this country. Should we tell what we learn from the dead to help the living, or should we try to hide the facts to protect family and friends from embarrassment? I have always believed that our mission is to “tell it like it is.” But when I did that in the Holden case, I stepped into an abyss.
The newspaper story which began a professional crisis for me ran on Wednesday, November 18, 1981, in the Los Angeles Times under the headlines “HOLDEN DIED FROM BLOOD LOSS. Actor Cut Head in Drunken Fall, Coroner Reports.”
The story described my re-creation of the accident, but it was the two words “drunken fall” which started Hollywood talking. Friends of Holden resented it, and they were inflamed even more when the Times published a follow-up story on the case which emphasized Holden’s alcohol problem: “MANNER OF HOLDEN’S DEATH TROUBLES FRIENDS, FANS.” The subhead read: “Rich and Famous, Yet Alone and Intoxicated.”
A backlash was perhaps inevitable, and letters charging both me and the Times with invasion of Holden’s privacy started to arrive at the newspaper, commencing with one from no less a personage than Daryl F. Gates, the Chief of Police. The two Times news stories had focused “sharply on a theme that characterized the deceased as a drunken recluse,” he wrote. “Bill Holden can no longer defend himself. Without doubt the character assassination is still terribly worrying for his friends and family. In my view what the Times did is snooping at its worst.”
Another Times reader, Theodore Taylor, aimed his wrath directly at me: “The indignity of [Holden’s] death was … exploited down to the last gory detail by Coroner Thomas Noguchi, who seems to run for his forensic personal publicity kit if the celebrity has passed on in other than a hospital bed.”
But a few days later the opposite side was heard from, in letters written by those who had suffered because of alcohol abuse. A typical writer was Stephen Setzer:
I am currently in my second week of an alcohol rehabilitation program after fourteen
years of misery as a confused alcoholic… . I don’t agree with the comments of others that [Holden’s] state of drunkenness should have been hidden from the public. I feel that if this information inspired even one alcoholic to seek help, it is worth reporting, and that Holden would have wanted it so.
I was caught in the middle of the controversy, a controversy that was aggravated when, only ten days later, a pretty, dark-haired actress drowned accidentally in the rain-swept waters off Catalina Island. My report on Natalie Wood’s death caused even more criticism to erupt, and there seemed to be little I could do or say to defend myself or my principles. I thought ruefully that if I were a medical examiner in some remote part of the country the world would have little interest in me or my cases. But I was not. I was in Los Angeles, where, if the bulk of the work of the Forensic Science Center often went unnoticed, headlines erupted when the deaths I investigated were those of world-famous celebrities. Now I was dubbed by the Hollywood wags “Coroner to the Stars.” And as if to confirm that description of my work, less than five months after the deaths of William Holden and Natalie Wood another famous star fell into my jurisdiction.
13
* * *
Medical Examiner’s Case No. 82-3036
* * *
John Belushi
A chilly night on Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood. Young people stood outside the Roxy, a rock ‘n’ roll bar, waiting patiently to get in. For the attraction that night, March 4, 1982, was not only the music but the presence of three celebrities who were idols to many of America’s youth. Robert De Niro, Robin Williams and John Belushi sat at a long table near the stage, laughing and enjoying themselves.
Belushi was considered almost unique as a funny man for his portrayal, among other characters, of the “slob” in such youth-oriented films as National Lampoon’s Animal House and on the television show Saturday Night Live. As he himself once described that character: “He says it’s okay to screw up. People don’t have to be perfect. They don’t have to be real smart. They don’t have to follow rules. They can have fun.”
Belushi was following such a credo that night—to the hilt.
At 11:15 P.M., a curly-haired young woman pushed her way through the crowded bar to their table. Cathy Smith was carrying a bag which contained, it would later be reported, the “goodies”—drugs. Then, at about 1 A.M., Belushi left the bar, trading jokes with some fans in the parking lot. The manager of the club was worried because he thought Belushi was too drunk to drive, but a “friend” offered to take him home.
“Home” was the Chateau-Marmont Hotel, located on a hill above Sunset Boulevard, its Moorish towers and turrets barely visible through trees which block the view of motorists below. Because it offered a sense of seclusion in the very heart of Hollywood, it was a favorite hostelry for visiting celebrities.
Belushi was staying in Bungalow 3, on the north side of the hotel. On the morning of March 5, he was lying naked on white sheets in the bedroom of the bungalow, curled up on his right side. The room was hot, but he wasn’t perspiring. John Belushi, the lovable comic, the carefree “slob,” the idol of the young, was dead at thirty-three.
What had happened during the hours of the night after Belushi left the Roxy, laughing and happy? Was Belushi, as his wife insisted, a man who didn’t use heroin and, instead, was victimized by a “druggie” one vulnerable night? Or was he, as the LAPD insisted, just another addict who injected himself once too often? Almost all his friends would later add another provocative dimension to the mystery. Belushi was deathly afraid of needles. As his partner Dan Aykroyd said, “Belushi hated even getting his finger pricked for a blood test.”
From the viewpoint of forensic science, John Belushi’s death would be one of the most challenging in my experience. There were clues I wanted to pursue that might resolve the question of murder or self-injection in his case as well as in other similar ones. But, by coincidence, my own symbolic “death” as Los Angeles County’s Chief Medical Examiner occurred on the very morning Belushi’s body was found.
That morning I had arrived at the office of Harry Hufford, the Chief Administrative Officer of the county, to discuss the annual budget for the Medical Examiner’s department. Instead, I was abruptly informed that the Board of Supervisors had met in executive session and decided that I should resign as Chief Medical Examiner, the post I had held for fifteen years. Hufford said that if I left quietly I would be shifted to another medical position in a county hospital at the same salary.
I told him no.
“Why not, Tom?”
“It’s not a job to me, Harry,” I said. “It’s my life.”
As I left Hufford’s office, it seemed to me that the nightmare of the 1969 Civil Service hearings was about to recur. I walked the broad halls of the County Administration Building numb, feeling nothing. A gray-haired woman saw me and said to her companion, “It’s Dr. Noguchi.” I pretended I didn’t hear her and pressed on toward the pay telephone in the lobby. My face had become recognizable everywhere. And that, I knew, may have been part of the problem.
There was another problem. In the wake of the controversies over the William Holden and Natalie Wood cases, the Los Angeles Times had carried a series of articles very critical of me and my management of the Medical Examiner’s Office, articles that inspired the Board of Supervisors to launch an investigation of my stewardship. But the forensic scientists whom the Board retained to conduct the impartial investigation had cleared me. Their official conclusion was that I was doing an “excellent” job, considering the well-known shortage of funds and personnel. And at about the same time, my peers had voted me president-elect of the National Association of Medical Examiners. Yet the Board of Supervisors had decided to ask for my resignation.
I picked up the telephone to call my office, my mind still on Hufford’s demand. Rita O’Connor, my secretary for thirteen years, answered excitedly. “Dr. Noguchi, John Belushi has died!”
My first reaction was the thought, Just what I need at this point. Holden, Wood and now another famous performer named Belushi—and another media hassle if his death turned out to be controversial. But then I quickly realized I still had a job to do. “Where did it happen?”
“The Chateau-Marmont Hotel. The staff people are just leaving now.”
“I’ll join them there,” I said, and hung up the phone.
Belushi’s body was found by William Wallace, a physical therapist, who had shown up at Bungalow 3 at noon for his scheduled massage of Belushi. Wallace immediately summoned a hotel security guard, and the two men moved Belushi to the floor, where they unsuccessfully attempted mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. Medics called to the hotel then employed portable electronic equipment to stimulate the heart, but to no avail. John Belushi was dead.
When police arrived at the scene, they could not figure out what had happened to the actor. His body was unmarked, and there was no indication of a struggle in the room. No weapons were found, no sleeping pills or suicide note, and no drug paraphernalia. In fact, paramedics told police, Belushi’s body showed no evidence of fresh needle marks. After observing the lead pads attached to Belushi’s chest from the electrocardiograph equipment the medics had used in an attempt to revive him, and the large bulk of the actor’s body, police told the reporters clamoring for information outside the hotel that John Belushi had apparently died of a heart attack or choked on some food.
I drove toward the scene along Sunset Boulevard, the old Strip that winds from central Los Angeles to the luxury palaces of the Pacific Palisades. Two centuries ago, it had been a trail for mule trains carrying cargo to and from the ocean; later it was the pathway that motion picture pioneers like Cecil B. De Mille followed from the city to the hills of Hollywood to begin their great industry under the sun. Later still, the hippies had made most of the Strip in Hollywood their own province. Now they were gone, but their spiritual descendants still “owned” the Hollywood section. And along with them, I knew, were prostitutes, hustlers, winos, drug p
ushers—and murderers.
The murders—and all unexplained deaths—were my prevailing memory of this famous boulevard. How many times had I traveled the Strip racing to the scene of a homicide, from the crowded tenements of the downtown Mexican barrio to the green-lawned estates in exclusive Bel-Air? One day it could be a dope addict, stabbed to death in a downtown alley. The next, a world-famous actress named Marilyn Monroe, a possible suicide. The Strip had led to death for the rich and the destitute alike. Today it led me to the Chateau-Marmont and the body of John Belushi.
A policeman stood behind a barricade across the road that curved off Sunset to the hotel, arguing with reporters who were pleading to get through.
“Any statement, Dr. Noguchi?” they called out to me, thrusting microphones into my face through the open car window. “Was it murder?” “The police say it’s a heart attack. Any comment?”
I told the reporters I had no comment and drove up the road to Belushi’s bungalow.
My investigation began as I walked past a little fence into the patio in front of Bungalow 3 and looked around carefully. The area was clean and bare. A policeman greeted me at the doorway, then ushered me through a living room into a bedroom on the north side of the bungalow. The decedent lay naked, face up, on the floor beside the bed. I looked at his body from a few feet away, and realized something odd. Belushi appeared to be in his early thirties. It is rare for someone that young to die of a heart attack.
The Coroner Series Page 18