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Hollywood Spin
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Baretta's Blotter
Somewhere in between OJ and MJ, there’s MG, a.k.a Mickey Gubitosi, a.k.a. Robert Blake, the 71-year-old who now says he’s broke and needs a job.
Wednesday, March 16, 2005
By Richard Horgan
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Steve Grayson/Wireimage.com
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His biggest role in years
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He’s from Nutley, New Jersey and she was from nearby Morristown, New Jersey, so perhaps Robert Blake and Bonnie Lee Bakley were somehow pre-destined to get caught up in a Sopranos-style morass. But by the time she was born in 1956, he had long since changed his name from Mickey Gubitosi and, if you believe the lore, already gotten into a hair-trigger incident in Alaska with the father of a 16-year-old girl who wanted him strung up on statutory rape charges.
Even in the land of Hollywood, or more precisely Studio City, CA, Blake and Bakley were a B-level odd couple for the ages. A washed up TV star and a groupie from hell; a Baretta and a barracuda; Mystery Man and Uncredited. Or, to use another Tinseltown short form, it was Auto Focus meets The Day of the Locust.
Forget the questionable stuntmen, the weak prosecution case, the Barbara Walters interview and eight plus previous trips to the altar by Bakley. First and foremost, this is a tale dear to radio show host Tom Leykis’ heart, the story of what happens when a woman allegedly gets pregnant for the sole purpose of attaching herself to the monetary assets of the father-to-be.
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L.A. Superior Court
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A fellow circumstantial innocent
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It’s certainly the dynamic at play in this telephone conversation transcript, with Blake at one point angrily venting his Leykis 101 logic to Bakley: ‘You wanted to get pregnant for whatever reason, that’s what you did,’ he says. ‘You lied to me, you double crossed me, you double dealt me and that’s who you are… You swore to me on your life that no matter what, I didn’t have to worry, and that was a rotten, stinking filthy lie…Your period ended on August 20th and you were out here f*cking me on the exact day you were supposed to.’
On his 1975-1978 TV series Baretta, Robert Blake’s signature phrase was, ‘Don’t do the crime if you can’t do the time.’ This was pretty much inferred to Bakley years earlier by another Robert - Robert Moon - her second of countless husbands. As Moon put it to a reporter: ‘I told her years ago… Somewhere down the road, someone’s gonna kill her…’Cause she’s playing everybody.’
That road began at a party in 1999, where Bakley met Blake in much the same way that waitress Lana Clarkson bumped into producer Phil Spector at the Foundation Room of the House of Blues on the Sunset Strip. Two seeming blips on the older man-pretty available woman endless Hollywood party circuit that, for combustible reasons yet to be fully explained or understood, flared up into full-blown San Fernando Valley incidents.
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Seeing-Stars.com
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Dorothy Stratten's grave
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Much like the tragic murder-suicide involving Phil Hartman and Vicky Joe Omdahl, a.k.a Brynn Hartman, the benign north-of-L.A. environs where the Bakley tragedy played out only served to add a morbid In Cold Blood flavor to the whole affair. Even though Il Vitello’s restaurant and its immediate environs is just the other side of the hill from Hollywood, Beverly Hills and Bel Air, it might as well be Holcomb, Kansas, the locale of Truman Capote’s infamous Clutter farm reportage.
Blake was a child star, a boy who changed his name at age seven (!) in order to continue cranking out Our Gang shorts. So there is also that whole stench to the current verdict and trial that preceded it, the idea that - in this world of Gary Coleman radio commercials for a cash advance service and Michael Jackson pajama court appearances - Blake is yet another byproduct of the vice grip of fame and fortune served too early.
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Paramount Pictures
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A timeless Hollywood dynamic
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The next closest thing to being a screwed up child star is being the child of an even bigger star, you know, as in Christian Brando, the hard-luck son of the late Marlon. The fact that he was the third side of our killer B triangle – Blake, Bakley, Brando – is almost too much to wrap your head around. As you may recall, it was Bakley who as the woman in the middle back in 1999 was – at least for a brief moment – toying with the idea of telling Brando he was the father-to-be. That in turn, via yet another taped telephone conversation, generated a further variation of the familiar Bakley-directed refrain: ‘You have no idea what you do to people with this sh*t," said Brando to Bakley. 'Think about it. It gets close. You’re lucky, you know. I mean, not on my behalf, but you're lucky somebody ain't out there to put a bullet in your head!’
Last year around this time, another New Jersey native met with an untimely and decidedly sordid end. Robert Pastorelli, former regular on Murphy Brown and last seen in the current Be Cool, died on March 8th, 2004 of a heroin overdose. But it was the revelation by police about Pastorelli earlier last month that further cemented his sad saga to the murky world of Blake’s. At the time of his death, police explained, Pastorelli was a suspect in the murder of his 25-year-old girlfriend Charemon Jonovich, who had been found shot in the head inside the actor’s Hollywood Hills home back in 1999.
In fact, her death was right around the time that actor William Shatner found his 40-year-old wife Nerine Kidd floating in the pool of his Studio City home. Although the actor has rebounded remarkably from this terrible tragedy, there is no denying its inadvertent echo of the opening scene of the most famous take on stilted May-December Hollywood unions, Sunset Boulevard.
The brilliance of Billy Wilder, Charles Brackett and D.M. Marshman Jr.’s script, especially given that it was authored more than a half century ago, was inverting the traditional male and female sides of this Tinseltown equation. In so doing, they were able to capture with complete originality the inescapable scent of a once plush world gone slightly to seed.
Ironically, one of the few recent movies to really nail this whole aspect of Hollywood starred the man who played the role of Perry Miller in a small screen version of In Cold Blood thirty years after Blake did so on the big screen: Eric Roberts. In Star 80, an artist who was no stranger to the vagaries of fame and fortune - director Bob Fosse - also expertly showed how things can go horribly and spectacularly wrong when star-crossed lovers clash in the shadow of those infamous Hollywood Hills.
Not that long ago, one TV channel showed a young Robert Blake on The Tonight Show couch back in the early 1970s, as part of the overall Carson tributes, while another summarized his day of sitting in the Superior Court docket. Somewhere in between, there was no doubt a late night rerun of Baretta or Blake’s subsequent kick at the TV series can, Hell Town.
| As the lines between celebrity fiction, celebrity reality and fictionalized celebrity reality continues to blur, we start to experience a celebrity trial, a celebrity reality TV show and a celebrity break-up all in the same way. As one big meaningless yet compelling freak show.
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The next episode in the Robert Blake strand of the continuum will be something very much like the first couple of days of coverage this week of Martha Stewart’s monitored release. In other words, get ready for endless cable news rehash as well as live local L.A. news TV remotes from in front of Blake’s Studio City abode, where nothing will be happening but the reporter will be standing by nonetheless. Then, all that will be left is the shot of Blake playing golf with O.J. somewhere in sunny Florida.
| No doubt many people feel right now the same way that Los Angeles-based MSNBC commentator Michael Ventre does, in the face of another man who has apparently walked away from a blonde bombshell crime for simple lack of evidence. Or, a man who at the very least is probably culpable in some way for the crime. Our CSI theory about what happened that night: Baretta, after hiring someone to do the hit, panics and runs out to try and stop it. When he comes upon the crime scene too late, he sort of panics and runs back to the restaurant in a state of adrenalin-fueled confusion.
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In a weird way, Blake and O.J. Simpson together are a sort of twisted modern day inversion of the old 1958 Tony Curtis-Sidney Poitier drama The Defiant Ones. They are defiant about something that everyone else is pretty much already made up about. In the meantime, with the ink still drying on the Kobe Bryant civil court case settlement, there is for the moment a similar kind of coda on the books for Blake. Only he doesn’t have the benefit of youth, athletic compensatory structure or a live plaintiff. Still, that doesn’t necessarily mean that Blake really is ‘broke’ as he claimed on the steps of the courthouse today. In all likelihood, that could just be a pre-emptive strike for his next chapter of The Days of Our Celebrity Lives.
| So get ready to hear about the Blake-Bakley-Brando drama all over again, in the courtroom, on the news and in your morning paper. And then wonder about the irony of the star of Baretta reruns, now caught in his own procedural repeat.
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[Every Wednesday, Richard Horgan’s FilmStew.com opinion column “Hollywood Spin” takes a look at a notable entertainment industry personality, PR trend or salient industry topic. To reach the author, please click here. To view other recent columns by the author, please go to the Hollywood Spin Archives page.]
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