Same Story, but New Script in Blake Trial

The wrongful-death lawsuit against Robert Blake, which is expected to wrap up today with closing arguments, lacked the high stakes of the criminal case, which ended in March with the actor’s acquittal in the murder of his wife, Bonny Lee Bakley.

The two-month civil trial covered familiar ground, with Bakley’s family trying to show that Blake killed his wife to get control of their baby daughter, Rosie. Blake countered that he loved Bakley, despite her sordid past, which included selling nude pictures of herself to members of a lonely hearts club, and suggested one of the men in the club she scammed might have killed her.

But the second trial made up for the lack of drama with the celebrity fireworks missing from the first.

For eight days, Blake, 72, who didn’t testify in the criminal trial, took the witness stand to deny he had any reason to kill his wife, or to hire anybody else to do it.

He turned the courtroom into his version of a Lee Strasberg acting class, displaying anger, empathy, melancholy, crudeness and humor in hard-boiled slang right out of a 60-year acting career that included the “Our Gang” series, “In Cold Blood” and the 1970s TV detective series “Baretta.”

The civil trial was “a bad location job.” Lawyer Eric J. Dubin, who represents the Bakley family, was engaged in a “tchotchke routine.” Death was the “boneyard” or the “wrong end of the dirt.” Jail was “the cement box.”

Coming upon his wife bleeding to death, Blake testified he shook her and said, “Wake up, toots.”

Christian Brando, son of the late film legend Marlon Brando, took on the role of Blake’s foil. Brando, who had been cleared by police of involvement in Bakley’s death, repeatedly invoked his 5th Amendment right to refuse to answer questions about his romantic relationship with Bakley.

Bakley died May 4, 2001, two blocks from Vitello’s restaurant in Studio City, where the couple had dined. Blake said he went back to the restaurant to retrieve a gun, and returned to find his wife bleeding in his sports car.

The Bakley family is suing to have Blake held civilly responsible for her death. A Burbank jury has to find Blake was more likely than not to blame for the killing to award the family damages.

Blake testified he thought he could help Bakley turn her life around because he shared with her a troubled childhood. Bakley had been molested, Blake said, and stole luggage from airport carousels to make money.

He danced on street corners during the Great Depression to earn money for his family while enduring beatings from an alcoholic father. He hid one of his few childhood possessions -- a cap gun -- under his pillow.

He said the 44-year-old Bakley was smart and charming, with an IQ “around 150,” and compared her life of pornography and grifting with a Greek tragedy written by playwright Aeschylus, who declared that wisdom comes “through the awful grace of God.”

Blake said that he loved Bakley but was not “in love” with her.

“Poets have written sonnets for a thousand years about being in love,” he said. “A lot of people say, ‘I love my husband, I love my wife,’ but I believe they really mean they’re in love with their husband or wife, which is quite different from loving your dog.”

At the same time, Blake painted Bakley as reprehensible. He testified she once offered him her teenage daughter for sex, and said he warned her that anti-Jewish slurs wouldn’t go over well in Hollywood. He also suggested that the Bakley family was involved in dealing drugs.

As Bakley’s adult children, Holly and Glenn Gawron, looked on, Blake testified that his wife was a bad mother who let their baby develop a severe diaper rash and constipation. Asked why he kept going back to Bakley after an earlier pregnancy scare, Blake said she was the kind of woman he liked: one who would satisfy him and “get back on the bus.”

But Blake reserved his angry outbursts for the lawyers, particularly Dubin, whom the actor called “sonny,” “junior” “chief” and “liar.” Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge David M. Schacter repeatedly told Blake to “cool down.”

“Let your lawyer earn his living,” Schacter said.

Brando was called to the stand by Blake’s lawyer to bolster their contention that other Bakley associates wanted her dead.

The unemployed 47-year-old laborer served time in state prison for fatally shooting his sister’s boyfriend. But Brando’s testimony turned out to be a supporting role -- without the support. He repeatedly took the 5th Amendment to keep from answering questions about, among other things, a taped phone conversation in which he told Bakley “someone’s going to put a bullet in your head.”

Brando’s lawyer later said his client avoided testifying to keep his life from again becoming tabloid fodder.

At one point, Brando stepped off the witness stand, gestured at Blake and mouthed the word “guilty” in full view of the jury, one juror told court personnel. The judge will decide after the trial whether to cite Brando for contempt.

On Wednesday, Blake returned to the witness stand for a final curtain call. He testified he wanted to set people straight that he wasn’t the angry, seething man that the Bakley family says he was.

“Normal people make a living with their cortex,” the actor said. “My emotions are at my fingertips.”