IF THE TARGET of Bob Woodward's latest investigative efforts had been a politician rather than as actor--and if the point had been to illustrate the seamy underside of Washington rather than Hollywood--nobody would have said anything. The backroom deals, the corruption, the slime of Captial Hill, i.e., the stuff that made Woodward big-time--that's okay for public consumption, the more so since Woodward and sidekick Carl Bernstein took that gloss off politicos for good with their reporting on Watergate in the early 1970s.

But somehow, the mistaken notion has taken root, among both critics and the general public, that the private lives of the glitterati of the entertainment industry are off-limits, at least in terms of the respectable press. We're not counting National Enquirer junk--or the apologia, enjoyable as it often is, that comes out of p.r. magazines like People or Rolling Stone. We're talking serious, nuts and bolts journalism, the kind that will look, say, at the life of a John Belushi with the toughness with which a seasoned political writer will look at Richard Nixon. Perhaps because it only serves to show how human the stars are, how frail they are like the rest of us, this kind of toughness seems unwelcome in our sometimes squeamish culture. This was made clear by the howls of outrage from the pundits and letter-writers that greeted the portions of Woodward's Wired: The Short Life and Fast Times of John Belushi that were printed several months ago in newspapers around the country.

Wired is tough and brutal. John Belushi, one off the funniest men to come along in the last decade, also happened to take a lot of drugs, as Woodward makes painfully clear. More drugs than most people think a hundred people could do in a lifetime. Belushi did them fast and frequently. One of his doctors, Woodward writes, put this down in a file about Belushi's medical history:

Smokes 3 packs a day.

Alcohol drinks socially.

Medications: Valium occasionally

Marijuna 4 to 5 times a week.

Cocaine--snort daily, main habit.

Mescaline--regularly

Acid--10 to 20 trips.

No heroin.

Amphetamines--four kinds.

Barbituates (Quaalude habit).

That was in 1976, five years before Belushi died of overdosing on cocaine and heroin--before he really hit the hard stuff.

Interest in the drug habits of the rich and famous, of course, is now passe. The dreary repetition of reports detailing the dope usage of rock TV, and movie stars is now an established feature of modern newspapers, and moreover, society has virtually accepted wholesale the social use of many once-forbidden and shadowy substances. If that had been the focus of Woodward's book--as apologists for Belushi who have read only shallowly claim--not only would Wired have amounted to a virtual rabbit-punch, but it would have been boring to boot.