Tragedy Hit as Blake Faded Comfortably From Fame

In recent years, this was the life of actor Robert Blake: He shot pool at the Playboy Mansion. He jitterbugged at The Derby in Los Feliz, and listened to jazz at Lunaria in West L.A. and Jax in Glendale. They named a dish after him at Vitello’s, the neighborhood restaurant where he usually ate a couple of times a week.

He passed his days in the manner of an ex-TV star without a call time--exercising, reading and taking three-hour lunches, said his son, Noah. After a lifetime of investing wisely, Blake didn’t have to work. He could wait for the elusive, career-capping role. In the meantime, he talked about starting an actors studio and made the rounds of charity events. But the sociable Blake would also disappear for days, cocooning in his Studio City home or driving off to the desert.

Only a few months ago, when a young new manager of the Aroma cafe in Studio City met Blake, she didn’t know who he was. Blake made a joke about it, recalled Cathryn Farnsworth, the manager. “He said, ‘Oh, I helped make a parrot famous.’ ”

Until May 4, Robert Blake, 67, was just an aging star, edging slowly toward obscurity. But the killing of his wife that night on a street near Vitello’s has returned him to the spotlight and subjected his life to a degree of scrutiny he never faced as the lead actor of the 1970s TV show, “Baretta.” He has been questioned by police but is not identified as a suspect.

Two days after his wife’s death, Blake fled his Studio City house, possibly retreating to his daughter’s home in Hidden Hills and various other places. He has left others to explain who he is. It’s almost as if he’s died, and the anecdotes are now spilling out in the past tense.

He was the neighbor who let you know when your car had rolled out of the driveway, the old rogue who never stopped flirting, the eccentric who collected guns and jazz records.

Few people knew he had reconfigured his personal life, taking as his second wife a celebrity-obsessed grifter who was still on probation on their wedding day in November.

Couple Met at a Jazz Club

Almost none of Blake’s neighbors had even seen Bonny Lee Bakley, 44, who met Blake about three years ago at Chadney’s, the now-defunct jazz club and restaurant in Burbank. According to several eyewitnesses, Blake was there to hear his friend, jazz trumpeter and singer Jack Sheldon. Bakley had come with another group. At some point, Blake and Bakley struck up a conversation.

Bakley got pregnant soon after. Both she and Blake believed that Christian Brando, son of Marlon Brando, was the father until DNA tests proved it was Blake. He decided to marry her.

The ceremony at Blake’s house was a perfunctory affair, with Bakley in a mid-calf white dress and Blake dressed casually. About half a dozen friends, the groom’s lawyer and a civil officiant attended. There was no food, no champagne, and within days the bride returned to Arkansas to complete probation on a conviction of carrying false identification.

Blake’s grown children didn’t attend. Noah, 36, was less surprised by the marriage than he was by the news that his father had gotten a woman pregnant. “He was always telling me, ‘Wear condoms,’ ” Noah said.

The son never met his father’s second wife. “It was not uncommon for my dad and I to go long periods of time without talking,” he said. Since Bakley’s death, Noah Blake, a singer and actor, has been asked to dissect his father’s life.

In an an hourlong interview with The Times, he described a father who was sometimes affectionate, sometime unavailable, and always a character.

Robert Blake met Noah’s mother, actress Sondra Kerr, when he went backstage after seeing her in a play in Los Angeles. They married in 1961 in Kern County and had two children: Noah and a daughter, Delinah, 34, who is working on her doctorate in psychology, according to Barry Felsen, Blake’s longtime lawyer. The Blakes separated in 1982 and divorced a year later.

“The nature of their relationship was up, down, up, down,” said Noah. “They were both very opinionated. It wasn’t like ‘Ozzie and Harriet.’ ”

At first, after his divorce, Blake didn’t date much, his son said. “He’s never been one of those guys who juggles a whole bunch of women.”

But, by other accounts, Blake flirted relentlessly at sidewalk cafes and restaurants, pursuing women two and three decades younger.

That flirtatious streak would eventually entangle him with a woman who was aggressively searching out stars. Friends of Blake wondered why he would marry Bakley instead of simply paying child support.

“That’s not Robert,” said Felsen, who calls the couple’s relationship “a work in progress.” “He couldn’t have a child out there knowing she was being raised alone by Bonny Bakley.”

Noah Blake casts the marriage as an honorable act--actually committing to the woman you get pregnant. “How many billions of celebrities are out there trying to brush that crap under the table?”

Bakley went back to Arkansas after the wedding and returned in March, moving into the guest house Blake had built on his property. Earle Caldwell, the electronics installer and handyman who was drafted into service as a bodyguard, spent time with the couple.

“Their schedules are a lot different,” said Caldwell. “She’s a night person; he’s an early morning kind of guy.”

Caldwell said Blake wondered if Bakley was being shadowed by people, possibly as a result of her past. For years, she used classified ads to correspond with men, persuading them to send her money and airline tickets, according to Blake’s criminal attorney, Harland Braun.

“He was getting weird phone calls; there were people kind of hanging out by the house who clearly weren’t neighborhood kids,” said Caldwell. In the weeks before her death, Bakley, Blake and Caldwell went on a gambling trip to Arizona and Laughlin, Nev.

“He told me many times, ‘I’m 67 years old, I got this beautiful baby. As long as the baby’s happy, I’ll do anything. We’ll get this to work,’ ” recalled Caldwell.

When the couple showed up the night of Friday, May 4, at Vitello’s, co-owner Steve Restivo seated them in one of the two red leather booths near the front where Blake often ate. When alone, Blake liked a small table in the back, where he listened to live music. He would send over a double Remy Martin to the pianist.

On that Friday, Restivo asked him if he wanted his usual minestrone soup. The restaurateur checked on him later to find him sipping directly from the bowl. “I told him, ‘You’re more a Sicilian than my father.’ ”

In the foyer at Vitello’s, there are 200 autographed photos of celebrities--from Burt Reynolds to Candice Bergen to Adrienne Barbeau. It’s a tradition as old school as the veal parmigiana on the menu.

Blake is not on the wall. “He never wanted his picture up,” said Joe Restivo, the restaurant’s other co-owner.

Even in his neighborhood Blake didn’t flaunt his celebrity. To the residents of Dilling Street, where he has lived for 20 years, he was a curiosity, a sweet, eccentric man. In a neighborhood that casts itself as an intimate community in the sprawl of Los Angeles, Blake has played his part: friendly, responsible, quiet. A neighbor recalled seeing Blake in the glider swing in front of his house, singing sea chanteys to himself.

He seemed to have few guests. The strains of Frank Sinatra wafting from a music system sometimes drifted from the house.

“He wasn’t reclusive but he wasn’t overly caught up in his celebrity,” said Shari Bender, a home textiles designer who lived in the house east of Blake for five years until 1999. Blake attended Bender’s 30th birthday party, kissed her at midnight one New Year’s Eve and let her visit him at his house.

From Gubitosi to Blake

To the public, Blake remains “Baretta,” the streetwise cop with the cockatoo on his shoulder whose vernacular was part macho cop, part sensitive guy.

Blake’s son, Noah, said his dad’s tough guy persona has its bearing in reality, but “it wasn’t remotely close to the actual truth.”

Born in Nutley, N.J., in 1933, he came west with his parents, who were determined to get their children--Blake, a brother and sister--into the movies. As a child actor, he starred as one of the Little Rascals in “Our Gang” movie shorts and, at age 8, MGM changed his name from Mickey Gubitosi to Robert Blake. At 15, he landed a part in the 1948 film “The Treasure of the Sierra Madre.”

Years later, Blake would tell interviewers that his father, who died at 45, was an abusive alcoholic and his mother was an unaffectionate woman from whom Blake was estranged for 30 years before her death in the late 1980s. His fractured home life, however, didn’t stop him from growing into an adult actor of great promise.

At 34 Blake crafted what many say is his finest moment on screen with the tragic portrayal of murderer Perry Smith in the 1967 film adaptation of Truman Capote’s “In Cold Blood.”

In “Baretta,” which ran on ABC from 1975 to 1978, Blake played an urban cop who lived in a seedy hotel with his pet cockatoo, Fred. Blake created a new kind of cop chic, infusing his character with touches of Edward G. Robinson and John Garfield, heroes of Blake’s Hollywood youth. He wore lifts in his shoes and an apple cap from the 1930s.

“You would go to dailies and he would be marvelous; you couldn’t believe what you were watching,” said series creator Stephen J. Cannell.

But Blake hated the scripts and fought to change them. “While an episode was in production, it was a war zone,” said Roy Huggins, an executive producer on the series, “but as soon as the episode was finished, Bobby and I were friends.”

Off the show, he did his loose cannon routine on “The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson,” trashing “the suits” at ABC and the series. The Carson producers loved him, booking him “as often as we could get him without burning him out,” recalled Robert Dolce, a “Tonight Show” talent coordinator who befriended Blake.

Eventually, Hollywood wearied of the script battles and the personality clashes. Sympathetic observers considered him a talented actor who couldn’t take on a project without inhaling it, sometimes to the detriment of himself and those around him.

In 1985 Blake made an NBC TV movie, “Father of Hell Town,” that the network fashioned into a television series. Blake starred as a priest ministering to the streets, and also worked as the show’s executive producer. Self-inflicted pressure drove him to sleeping pills, junk food, and a fear that he would kill himself, he later said. “I would get in the limo to go to the ‘Hell Town’ location every morning and I’d be so uptight I could hardly breathe,” Blake told The Times in 1992.

In December 1985, after shooting 16 episodes, he abruptly begged out of the series and disappeared from the business. His relationship with a talent agency also ended about that time.

His son said his father has a history of severing ties with people whom he once held in high esteem. “He moves on. They’ve been demythologized in his mind. Most of the time that stuff was with therapists, agents.”

He reemerged in 1993 to play the title role in the TV movie “Judgment Day: The John List Story,” based on the true story of an accountant who murdered his family and got away with the crime for almost two decades. Blake hired veteran Hollywood publicist Lee Solters and relaunched himself as a wiser, more centered actor on the path back to self-possession through analysis and psychotherapy.

According to his attorney, Felsen, Blake has been sober for at least a dozen years.

His roles in the last decade have been few, but his outspokenness remains. In 1995, he publicly lamented having had a face lift. That same year, he played a transit authority chief in “Money Train,” a big-budget subway caper co-starring Wesley Snipes, Woody Harrelson and Jennifer Lopez. And he last appeared in the 1997 film “Lost Highway,” a moody thriller from “Twin Peaks” creator David Lynch.

But every few years, Blake has called writer-director Robert Boris about a remake of the cult hit “Electra Glide in Blue,” the 1973 film, written by Boris, which starred Blake as an Arizona motorcycle officer who uncovers a murder. Boris later wrote the script for the 1983 CBS TV miniseries “Blood Feud,” which earned Blake an Emmy nomination for his portrayal of Teamsters boss Jimmy Hoffa.

“Almost every time I went over [to his house], I didn’t feel a lot of people around,” said Boris. “It was one guy in this large house.”

In his neighborhood of rambling homes and big leafy trees, Blake’s dark wood house stands out for its starkness and slight disrepair. Even the white letters of the MATA HARI RANCH sign on the front of the house need repainting. A swing with dirty cushions sits up against the plain front of the house. Under the carport is an old black truck with the license plate “SAYZWHO.” There’s a purple van on the front lawn.

“He’s not an extravagant person,” said Felsen. “He doesn’t have a jet. He doesn’t fly to Europe once a month. He does not collect art.” Blake’s 1983 divorce records list various properties in Hidden Hills and Santa Monica, as well as his Studio City home.

People Rarely Came to Visit

The neighbors to his east recall that when they moved in, Blake offered his phone number and said to call if they ever needed help.

But Shari Bender, his neighbor, said, “He very rarely had people over and if he did, it was one or two. There was never a lot of activity at the house. He was not someone to have barbecues outside.”

One of the rare instances when Blake the neighbor revealed some of Blake the Hollywood star was a night of crisis on Dilling Street.

A man who turned out to be a migrant farm worker had been found dead at the bottom of Bender’s backyard pool on a fall night in 1999. As she sat crying on the curb, Blake walked over and sat beside her.

As police swarmed Bender’s house, neighbors brought out lawn chairs and kept Bender company. Blake pulled up a chair and joined them--the former TV cop, regaling worried neighbors with stories of real-life officers he had met and crime scenes he had visited. He deciphered the police lingo barked into the wee hours of the night. Even the uniformed officers came over to chat.

A neighbor wanted to work with him on a book about the Little Rascals, but Blake declined. In 1999, after telling the studio audience of comedian Roseanne’s talk show that he could teach anybody to act, the show’s producers wanted him back on the show to try it. He wasn’t interested.

Blake’s fade from the screen is unremarkable in an industry that tends to discard actors as they grow old. But he still gets “offers all the time,” according to Felsen, Blake’s attorney of 26 years.

“He’s often said he wants the third act of his career to be something people remember him for.”

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Times staff writers Andrew Blankstein and Kurt Streeter contributed to this story.