The Uncomfortable Goodbye File: Robert Blake

And so close to International Women's Day no less.

Little Mickey Gubitosi…we hardly knew ye.

It was a weird quirk and once you noticed it, you’d never not notice it. No idea if it’s particular to guys who spent time in Federal Penitentiaries, but I noticed it for the first time with a guy who had spent time in a Federal Penitentiary. He never stood anywhere but next to you, looked you in the eye infrequently, and repeatedly put either his thumb, or index finger, into the center of your chest.

His eyes gave it away though as he was scanning the room — we had been bouncers then so it made sense — but the chest poke? Some form of prison yard echolocation. Just making sure that everyone in your car is in your car.

On the night of July 13, 1977 though, I was watching Baretta, a TV policier loosely based on the cop beyond corruption, Serpico, whose depiction in the film Serpico was an Al Pacino high point. A cop with a groovy demeanor, Baretta’s proximity to criminality is what made him an effective crime fighter and in procedural after procedural he, along with his talking bird Fred, and a coterie of broadly drawn Black characters, particular to the time, busted bad guys. Complete with catchphrases for the ages: “DAT’S the name of DAT tune” and “you can put that in your pipe and smoke it”.

But in the middle of doing so, on July 13, the television went black. So did the rest of the lights in the house. And the street. And the entire block, and of course, the rest of the city. It was a blackout and the streets in New York City were immediately aflame with the spirit of, no other way to put it, ecstasy? All while buildings burned, and everything that could be looted, got looted.

This was Kenneth Anger’s Hollywood Babylon in spades, the dirty backwash of failure and soured aspirations. No one looks good, sane or healthy and while everyone has reasons, they all start to smell like excuses.

At 15 my concerns were much more parochial though, and missing Baretta? Massive. Much more so than anything else that happened that night for me because Robert Blake, formerly Nutley, New Jersey’s Mickey Gubitosi, had some weird sort of totemic significance for me, for almost the entirety of my life. And as media crushes go, the bodybuilding Blake, that terrible de-latinization of his name and all, couldn’t have been more so for me.

From his time on the Lil Rascals, his bravura bow as one of the murderers in In Cold Blood, his cop in Electra Glide in Blue all a meditation on drugs, murder and infidelity, we grew up with Blake, himself a curious mix of muscle, and hurt. Befitting a guy who had been both sexually and physically abused by both of his parents. And his tuned-up performances on the late shows of the day, during which, his head swimming in a soup of whatever mood-altering material he could stuff in it, were Vietnam era models of how to fuck shit up.

Enough so that he started appearing less and less. Make no mistake, he was working. But most had stopped watching. And not until a late career resurgence courtesy of David Lynch’s Lost Highway where he played a demonic mystery man so particular to the Lynchian oeuvre, did anyone start to think/feel that he was back.

He had never left for me, it should be said, but for most he was back.

And almost as soon as he was back he was really back, albeit in a totally different way. Arrested for the murder of Bonny Lee Bakley, his wife of note. In the shadow of the OJ Simpson murder trial half a decade earlier, Blake’s was no “trial of the century”. The nine-time married Bakley, dressed down in the press as a white trash fortune hunter, had grift in her background, dalliances with other celebrities and near-celebrities, and much less show value than Nicole Brown Simpson (re: not nearly as attractive).

She was just a late career pick up for Blake who had returned to the restaurant where they had been eating one night, on the occasion of having left his gun there, then went back to his car where he found his wife. Shot dead.

Blake beat the criminal charges, but got hit with multimillion dollar fees after losing the civil trial. Bankruptcy followed and back to the thickets of shadow celebrity. And a quandary: hating wife abusers with a passion, how did/could I square myself with Blake?

Blake, at the age of 89, died from heart failure in Los Angeles. The tributes were scant, for good reason, the day after International Women’s Day, it was a bad look.

Never mind his miserable childhood, capped with his abusive father’s suicide. Never mind the years he spent addicted to either coke or heroin, or both. Or his time dealing drugs. Forget the fact that Bakley didn’t know whether the kid she was pregnant with was Blake’s or Marlon Brando’s kid Christian’s, himself also not too long out of prison for murdering his sister’s abusive partner. A fact, as it turns out, that may not have been true (the abuse, not the murder).

This was Kenneth Anger’s Hollywood Babylon in spades, the dirty backwash of failure and soured aspirations. No one looks good, sane or healthy and while everyone has reasons, they all start to smell like excuses.

And then you read that on Thursday Blake, at the age of 89, died from heart failure in Los Angeles. The tributes were scant, for good reason, the day after International Women’s Day, it was a bad look. Not even “probably”. Much more a “definitely.” No one’s celebrating an uxoricide, no matter how often you had cut it up with Spanky and Alfalfa.

But my thoughts kept turning and returning to the uncomfortable alchemy at work here. Bakley’s been dead. And deserved the more that she had left New Jersey and come out West for, and so desperately failed to get. Blake just died. And, outside of what was suffered at the hands of his parents, got all of what he deserved, and then some.

The murder sticks in my craw though. Especially when there’s this thing called divorce court. That and the fact that the $15 million Blake lost in the civil suit was way more than Blake would have had to pay Bakley.

But all of this, dirty water under a bridge now.

Crime done, time done. Memories and the catchphrase conclusion: “you can take that to the bank.”

Screen goes black. But this time the city remains lit.

So, a tribute? Or maybe half that? Almost.