Jubilant Blake Relishes His New Role as the Acquitted

In the 12-week murder trial, jurors never heard Robert Blake testify in his own defense.

But Wednesday, minutes after the jury acquitted him of charges that he killed his wife, Blake emerged from the Van Nuys courthouse with plenty to say.

Before a battalion of reporters and news cameras, the actor turned in a performance resembling the Oscar-acceptance speech that he has never had the opportunity to give during his 60-year acting career.

“My whole life is a blessing,” he said over the roar of news helicopters, “for all the times I should have been dead or not even born.”

For about 20 minutes, Blake held forth in unscripted and defiant jubilation.

It was a wandering monologue, at times elegant, at other times angry. Liberally employing 1950s Rat-Pack slang and streetwise double negatives, Blake conjured the spirit of his best-known role, the Emmy-winning 1970s television detective, Baretta.

The diminutive, 71-year-old New Jersey-born actor, nee Mickey Gubitosi, profusely thanked M. Gerald Schwartzbach, the Mill Valley lawyer who took over his defense early last year after three previous counselors had quit.

“He’ll never be rich and he’ll never be famous ‘cause he don’t know nothing about money,” Blake said of Schwartzbach, who stood beaming by his side throughout the news conference. “And he has no idea what to do with you people [in the media], but by God he can save lives and that’ll keep him warm on any cold night of his life.... [He] never lost focus. Genius is the ability to discern that which is important and to act upon it. That’s what Einstein said.”

Breaking into a Jewish accent, he recounted how Schwartzbach’s wife urged her husband to take the actor’s case. At that point, Schwartzbach turned to Blake and said with a laugh, “She’s not Jewish.”

He also thanked Schwartzbach’s young attorneys and the private investigators who “came in for short dough and long hours to save my life.... This small band of dedicated warriors saved my life.”

After enduring the trial mostly silently, Blake seemed to relish the opportunity to speak out.

At one point, sheriff’s deputies asked Blake’s entourage to wind down the news conference. But he pushed ahead. Later, he deflected reporters’ questions by saying, “Let me just run this down, then you guys can do whatever you want.” He then proceeded to speak uninterrupted for several more minutes.

His finances are now a shambles, Blake said.

“If you want to know how to go through $10 million in five years, ask me,” he said. “I’m broke. I need a job.”

“What did Johnny Cochran say? ‘You’re innocent until proven broke,’ ” he said. “By the time Gerry and his troops got here it was the bottom of the barrel. I was a rich man. I’m broke now.”

Still, Blake waxed wistfully about his future.

“I’m going to go out and do a little cowboyin’. You know what that is? Cowboying is getting in a motor home or a van or something like that and you just let the air blow in your hair and you wind up in some little bar in Arizona someplace.... You shoot one-handed nine-ball with some 90-year-old Portuguese woman who beats the hell out of you, and the next day you wind up in a park someplace playing chess with somebody, and you go see a high school play where they’re doing ‘West Side Story.’

“You just roam around and get some revitalization that there are human beings in the world, that there are people living their lives that have no agenda.”

He said he pined for a simpler time, the current one being marbled with deceit.

“You know the Mafia saying, ‘The enemy of my enemy is my friend.’ This world I’ve been in, it’s very much that way. People drift from one side to the other every five minutes, and you never know who’s on your side and who’s not on your side.

“In the past four, five years all of you have interviewed a great many people. You’ve interviewed friends, you’ve interviewed producers that worked for me, distant relatives and close immediate relatives. Well, guess what: They’re all liars, and about half of them are commode scum.”

For two years, Blake wore an electronic monitoring device so that authorities could keep track of his whereabouts. Blake turned the leg band into a prop at the end of his talk with the media.

Using film-industry jargon, he asked reporters: “Any one of you gaffers got a pair of dykes, cutters? Does any one of you guys have a tool kit with a pair of cutters?”

When wire cutters were passed to him, he cut off the electronic monitor that had been around his ankle since he was released on $1.5-million bail in 2003, after spending 11 months in jail. Schwartzbach held it up for all to see.

Finally, after asking, “Anything else?” the issue of his finances again came up.

“As I understand it, there’s no debtors prison in America,” Blake said. “And when Uncle Sam gets through with me, anybody that wants to can have whatever’s left. I told you I need a job. What do you think, I’m lying to you?”

Will you go back to acting? someone yelled out as he was about to depart.

“Well,” he said, “I haven’t made much money with a guitar.”