The Rage Within

Robert Blake seems to have exorcised the demons that have tormented him most of his life.

Blake, now 59, has kept out of the spotlight for the last seven years being, as he describes it, a “good parent” to himself. In 1986, the former Mickey Gubitosi walked away from show business. His troubled life finally caught up with him while shooting an episode of his NBC series “Hell Town.’

“I shouldn’t have been working,” says Blake. “I should have been tied up on an island somewhere lying in the sun. I was emotionally, physically and spiritually drained and exhausted--a bad marriage and divorce and madness of all kind.”

It’s a crisp Monday morning, and the compact, muscular actor sits on the edge of a white chair in the living room of his Studio City ranch-style home, reflecting on his past, and future. The picture-filled walls in virtually every room, even the bathroom, are testimony to his years on-screen, from the early days as a child actor in the “Our Gang” comedies, the “Red Ryder” Republic Westerns and such features as “Mokey,” “The Treasure of Sierra Madre” and “Humoresque.”

With the help of a therapist, Blake, who says he was abused as a child, has been getting his life in order. The actor, who won accolades as convicted murderer Perry Smith in 1967’s “In Cold Blood” and an Emmy in 1975 as ABC’s scrappy detective “Baretta,” has come to terms with his past.

“My father, when he died didn’t leave me a quarter,” Blake says, his voice tinged with bitterness. “He didn’t die, he killed himself. He left (his money) to his grandchildren. It turned out to be one guy, and he didn’t leave nothing to me because he was crazy. I was his caretaker and when I went off to the Army, he killed himself. But I am still here.”

And back to work.

Blake stars in the CBS thriller “Judgment Day: The John List Story,” airing Tuesday. List was a New Jersey accountant who, in 1971, murdered his wife, his domineering mother and his three children. Moving to Denver, List got another accounting job and remarried. The New Jersey police, though, never gave up their search for List. He eventually was caught in 1988, the day after his case was broadcast on Fox’s “America’s Most Wanted.”

When Blake decided last year that he was ready to return to work, he called network executives he previously had worked with, including CBS’s Jeff Sagansky and NBC’s Warren Littlefield. “I don’t have an agent or manager or nothing,” Blake says.

“Some scripts started coming and most of them were cops, ‘Baretta’ kind of jobs,” Blake says. “Everybody said, ‘Take them. Go to work.’ I said, ‘I don’t want to go back and be leaping from building to building.’ The reason I quit was I realized how terribly, terribly abusive I always had been to my career.”

Blake shakes his head. “As God is my witness, I used to get jobs and then go give them to an agent to negotiate. I swear on my children’s eyes. May they both go blind if I am lying to you! I went out and got ‘In Cold Blood’ all by myself. After I got the job, I went to an agent and gave it to him to negotiate. I wasn’t even nice enough to myself to have a lawyer do it.

“So when I decided to go back to work, I said I am not going back and do the same thing again. I don’t need the money, so a couple of offers came in. One was a ‘Poltergeist’ movie with Patty Duke.”

Blake turned it down. Then, he says, Sagansky called him about List. “He said, ‘I got this script and if you don’t do it, I will throw it away. I remember you did “In Cold Blood” and this is a story of a man who kills his whole family.’ He sent it to me. I said (to myself), ‘If don’t do this, I ain’t going to do nothing, because it is not very often anything comes like this on television. There was parts in movies and stuff (I was offered), but I didn’t want to go to work for 10 weeks on some movie and carry Warren Beatty’s bags.”

Blake’s eyes drift away from his visitor. “I am an actor,” he says emphatically. “It is the only thing I ever got any pride out of in my whole life. .... Anyway, I got the job (as List), then I lost it. I threw it away.”

He stares at the sofa. ‘It was like (it was) yesterday and the producer was sitting here in my front room with the writer,” he says. “I terrified everybody because I decided I was going to rewrite the script and all of these crazy things. (The producer) said, ‘Well, Robert. I think maybe this isn’t the right one for us to do together.’ I said, ‘You’re right.’ And that was that. The bad news is I still make mistakes, but the good news is that I see the mistakes very quickly. It wasn’t eight hours later that I went back and got the job again.”

Blake didn’t want to repeat the mistakes he had made throughout his career. “I never stopped working in my life,” he explains. “I never took very good care of myself. Whenever the phone would ring, I would say, ‘OK, I am going to work.’ I would do whatever it was. When I would do something that was a great experience, I would always follow it with a lot of terrible things.”

Playing List wasn’t difficult for Blake. “You have to love the person you are going to play,” he says. “You can’t say, well, this guy killed his family. I am going to play this ghoul. I have played a lot of people who killed. I have been on Death Row and played a lot of people on Death Row. You know, I have never met a murderer in my life. That’s because there ain’t any. There are people who crossed the line. Some of us don’t cross the line.”

People who have been abused, Blake explains, “always run the risk of destroying (themselves). There is no difference between murder and suicide. (List’s) life was over before he committed the act. He was dead before he killed his children. It is like the woman who puts her child in the street and rolls over it. You say, ‘How could she have done that?’ My conclusion is that she wasn’t there.”

The actor’s eyes drift away again. “There have been times when I wasn’t there,” he says slowly. “Long periods of time when I wasn’t there. There were times when I could have done such terrible things that I could make John List look like Donald Duck. But I got the breaks, and some people don’t get the breaks. When you are really badly abused, most people wind up living very dead lives or they wind up living in the graveyard or they wind up on Death Row. John List was no different than all of these people.”

Blake wants to give himself more breaks, but he has definitely ruled out doing a series again. “Doing a series is probably the most singular destructive thing I ever did in my life,” he says loudly. “Doing ‘Baretta’ was almost like putting a gun in my mouth and blowing my head off. Nobody does ‘In Cold Blood,’ and ‘Electra Glide in Blue’ and ‘Tell Them Willie Boy Is Here’ and then goes and does a series. You do a series on the way up or you do a series when you are on the way down. I would rather go downtown and stand on the street corner and do ‘Cyrano’ with a beer can in front of me with people dropping quarters, than do a series. I got money now. My kids are grown up. I could sit in this front room until hell freezes over. I don’t have to work.”

He stares off into space. “I don’t want to alienate people,” Blake says. “Even sitting here with you, I find myself at times drifting away from making contact with you and becoming that old, tough-guy ‘Baretta’ character. I start swearing. It is my way of winding up alone and getting people who start out liking me, not even liking me any more, so I can go back and make my parents happy and be all alone.”

So what will make him happy?

Blake looks intently at his visitor. “I want to act as best I can in the best environment I can,” he says calmly. “I want to be as good to myself as I can.”

“Judgment Day: The John List Story” airs Tuesday at 9 p.m. on CBS.