Straight Talk About a Rocky, Drug-Filled Past

“John Belushi’s ghost is coming,� a student whispered, creating a noisy buzz among her classmates as they gathered for assembly Friday at Hollywood High School.

A dark-haired woman, once one of the most notorious people in Los Angeles, began her spiel:

“It was March 5, 1982, when I got into a world of trouble. John Belushi was found dead at the Chateau Marmont, and how I got there was by a long circuitous route.

“I had been a walking dead person. I don’t want that to happen . . . to any of you,� said Cathy Evelyn Smith, the woman who witnesses said injected drugs into Belushi during the comedian’s final binge.

Nearly a decade after she was released from prison and deported for her role in Belushi’s death, Smith returned to Los Angeles to confront her demons.

Now 50, Smith says she has been clean and sober for six years, working as a legal secretary in her hometown in Canada.

Recently, Smith won a temporary visa from the Immigration and Naturalization Service, which relented on its zero-tolerance policy toward convicted drug offenders, granting her request to visit on humanitarian grounds.

After Belushi’s death, Smith was the most sought-after interview in Hollywood. But she spent her week here in relative obscurity, pushing a nonprofit organization called Forward Step, which seeks to teach values to school-age youngsters that will help them to resist drugs and life’s other pitfalls.

Officials with Forward Step and people who have known her for years believe that Smith has some hard-learned lessons to share about the less glamorous side of the drug lifestyle.

The recent overdose death of actor Chris Farley, another “Saturday Night Live� alum who idolized Belushi, showed Smith she still has a message to get out, she said.

“Take charge. Take responsibility. Be accountable. Keep one eye on the horizon.� She added that the path she was on leads to “an early grave, an institution, a dumpster. That’s where you end up.�

Friends suggested that Smith petition the INS for permission to travel to Los Angeles. She was stunned when the agency granted the visa, no questions asked.

For Smith, a former roadie and backup singer, the journey has brought back a tangle of surprisingly powerful emotions and memories--not all of them good.

“It’s really cathartic in a way,� she said during an interview, smoking a cigarette--the one vice she still allows herself. “It leaves me vulnerable to a lot of things I thought I’d taken care of.�

Still, she said, facing her demons was an important part of putting the past behind her.

In the interview, Smith spoke about her early days in rock ‘n’ roll, the thirst for drugs that drove her and Belushi, and her commitment to try to persuade others not to make the same mistakes.

Occasionally, tears came to her eyes and a quaver to her gravelly voice as she talked about Belushi and other friends who had succumbed to drugs.

When she mentioned them by name at the Hollywood High assembly, the blank expressions on the student’s faces showed that, as far as this generation was concerned, these former entertainment legends might as well have not existed.

The students at Hollywood High wanted to know how long she had been stoned. Her answer was slow in coming.

“It starts with the littler things. . . . I started smoking and I guess you can consider that a drug. It’s addictive like a drug. There was heroin and the cocaine, it just didn’t seem to stop.� Smith stopped and the question was asked again.

“How long? My whole life, since I was 14,� she said haltingly.

Smith, a fresh-faced beauty who dropped out of high school at 16, first came on the music scene in Toronto in the 1960s.

Once Known for her ability to nurse performances from drunk or stoned rockers, Smith said she never saw her own addiction coming.

She did a few stints in rehab, leaving one program just as Belushi flew into Los Angeles for that fateful binge.

“Five days of partying, more of the same every day,� she said, replaying that week in March 1982.

“John was like a runaway train. He’d get up and he’d be on the phone wanting some more blow.� But Smith said she now knows that she was as helpless against her own addiction as Belushi was against his.

Smith said she didn’t hit rock bottom until that last party with Belushi. Limos delivered bundles of cash, she recalled. Others delivered bundles of drugs. When the party was over, Belushi was lying dead of an overdose in Bungalow 3 at the West Hollywood hotel.

Smith was pursued by the tabloids for a year after Belushi’s death. She finally talked--she says after the reporters got her drunk and high at a Toronto bar.

Her misguided and, she maintains, misquoted remarks that she had administered the fatal “coup de grace� led to a grand jury indictment for second-degree murder 13 months after Belushi’s death.

She pleaded no contest to a reduced manslaughter charge and drug offenses. Superior Court Judge David A. Horowitz sentenced her to three years in state prison.

To this day, Smith maintains that someone else furnished Belushi with the fatal overdose, a combination of cocaine and heroin known as a “speedball.� She was singled out for prosecution, Smith said, “because I was the only one left standing.�

She said she knows she didn’t kill Belushi. “John did what John wanted to do,� she said.

No matter whether history portrays her as a killer or a scapegoat, Smith knows she was a junkie. She has done her time for Belushi’s death. She’s still paying for a lifetime of addiction.

And now, one high school assembly at a time, she is also seeking a little redemption.