Blood Cold
Fame, Sex, and Murder in Hollywood
For our own children, Jen, Amy, Kate, Fitz, and Andrea, and also for Megan and Nicholas … and for every child who deserves our love, attention and protection, no matter what
Overture
The calendar said spring, but winter still loomed.
On the overcast morning of the day when the police finally came for actor Robert Blake, Southern California’s familiar desert winds, the trademark palm trees and the steady sunshine that lit up the L.A. basin like klieg lights were all absent.
News helicopters were already hovering overhead. They had an unobstructed view of the street where Blake lived. His lavish home, which he owned jointly with his grown daughter, Delinah, was tucked away inside the gated community of Hidden Hills, and it was there that he was raising his twenty-two-month-old toddler, Rose Lenore Sophia. The copters stayed in place because all morning long, rumors of the sixty-eight-year-old actor’s impending arrest for the murder of Rose’s mother, Bonny Lee Bakley, had been leaking out of Parker Center police headquarters.
One news copter captured an aerial shot of the actor climbing into his beige Chevy Suburban for what appeared to be a routine trip to the store. Blake drove to a security gate checkpoint that kept the public—and the media—at arm’s length. Only when the former star of TV’s Baretta spotted the small convoy of news vans lying in wait just on the other side of the fence did he abandon his trip. He immediately made a U-turn and headed back home.
As the afternoon wore on, the number of copters, vans and reporters multiplied. From the sky, Blake could be seen out on his front lawn at one point, almost in defiance of the stalking camera crews. Since moving into the home the previous summer, he’d put up two swing sets and a playhouse in the yard for Rosie and a patio and porch swing, where he could relax while he watched her play. But as the whirlybird buzz matched the televised buzz spreading across the country, and as channel after channel sprouted talking heads who speculated on Blake’s fate, the dark, diminutive actor retreated inside the sprawling ranch-style house and shut the door. As close pal Mark Canavi once noted, Blake behaved much like a bear when under attack, withdrawing to his cave until the worst blew over.
But for Robert Blake, there was nowhere to hide on April 18, 2002. Police were already on their way.
“I am really surprised,” Harland Braun, Blake’s attorney, told CNN. “I got a call from the police just before they got to his house to have me call Robert and alert him that they were coming. He was shocked, but I just said, ‘Remain calm. Come on out and cooperate.’”
As the cold spring sun dropped toward the nearby Pacific Ocean, a convoy of police cars led by an unmarked white sedan rolled to a stop in front of the Blake home. Four LAPD officers climbed out, advancing en masse toward his front door. All four car doors remained wide open while the plainclothesmen entered the Blake residence, as though each officer knew that he would be returning momentarily, quarry in hand. Instead, the quartet remained inside for the better part of an hour. Blake stalled them long enough to call Delinah home from work early to watch the baby.
The car doors gaped. The copters hummed. To fill the dead air, TV commentators recounted what they could of the events leading to this moment. L.A. radio reporter Brad Pomerance—who grew up with both of Blake’s adult children, Delinah and Noah Blake—described the scene as surreal. “A lot of the homes have horses out there, and the whole place is pretty serene with lots of trees. It’s almost like a beautiful part of Texas,” he said. “Dr. Laura [Schlesinger] lives there, and so does one of the Jackson Five. It’s not a thoroughfare to anywhere, and a lot of people live there for that very reason. And then to all of a sudden have both gates shut so you’re closed off from the world and then to have helicopters circling, it’s pretty unnerving.”
By now the sky overhead was thick with news copters capturing every move down on the ground and broadcasting the scene across the nation. It was already prime time on the East Coast, where sitcoms were interrupted with news bulletins, but California was still coming up on its evening newscasts. News directors at every station in Southern California understood that the arrest of Robert Blake for allegedly killing his wife after nearly a yearlong LAPD investigation was a guaranteed showstopper.
TV experts began weighing in—video attorneys of every stripe, whose analysis of all things criminal became a running counterpoint to the play-by-play from Rather, Jennings and Brokaw. Comparisons to a similar LAPD celebrity arrest from eight years earlier were rife. The reprise of the O.J. Simpson case ricocheted from CNN to MSNBC to FOX and back again even before police hauled Blake out in handcuffs.
Simpson himself had offered up ironic advice to Blake months earlier via the syndicated TV show Extra!: Don’t take a polygraph test and don’t smear your dead wife, but above all, don’t turn on the television set. “I know that watching TV is only going to frustrate him,” Simpson explained, adding, “As far as I’m concerned, this man is innocent until a jury comes back and calls him guilty.”
Against the eerie aerial shot of the open-doored white sedan yawning in front of the Blakes’ manicured $1.4 million home, the linking of Blake to O.J. became irresistible to commentators, tele-attorneys, and news anchors alike.
“Now some of you, perhaps even most of you, are whispering to yourselves, ‘O.J.,’” said CNN’s Aaron Brown. “Yes, I hear that too. How this plays out over time, how media crazy we all go on this, what lessons we learned or didn’t are for another day. This is a well-known person and a case with lots of little twists and turns.”
Though acquitted in a sensational televised eight-month trial in 1995, Simpson had been subsequently found responsible for the death of his wife, Nicole, and her young friend Ron Goldman during a nontelevised civil trial, and while Simpson remained officially not guilty, the prevailing belief from coast to coast was that the ex-NFL running back, comic co-star of the Naked Gun film trilogy and airport broad jumper from countless Hertz Rent-a-Car TV commercials had literally gotten away with murder.
And now pundits wondered out loud: Was history about to repeat itself?
ABC News interrupted its broadcast just before six o’clock, Pacific Daylight Time, with a sky video of a handcuffed Blake in a green ball cap, dark trousers and clean white sweatshirt that declared I SURVIVED MALIBU CANYON across its back. He was passive—even friendly. As Harland Braun later explained, his client had spoken frequently over the months with detectives investigating Bonny’s death, and was fully prepared if this day ever came.
After Blake climbed into the rear of the waiting white sedan, all four doors finally slammed shut and the car drove off slowly through the pleasant suburban streets of Hidden Hills—hidden, appropriately enough, at the westernmost end of the sprawling San Fernando Valley. The car picked up speed as it ducked out a side gate, far away from the security checkpoint, where the news crew encampment was quickly dismantling. Few were fast enough to catch up to the unmarked police vehicle as it neared the Ventura Freeway and headed into rush-hour traffic, but copters never lost sight of the white sedan, prompting TV’s talking heads to comment again on the similarity to another media chase back in June 1994. O.J. Simpson had made a freeway run for the Mexican border, riding in a white Bronco that was also trailed by news copters, as well as more than a dozen police cars. Simpson finally made a U-turn and headed home to Brentwood, where he was taken into custody without further incident.
Unlike Blake, Simpson alone was charged with murdering his wife. According to police, Robert Blake had an accomplice. At the same time detectives were arresting a dark, diminutive and defiant Blake in Hidden Hills, another cadre of cops arrived at an apartment in Burbank, where Blake’s burly forty-six-year-old chauffeur and bodyguard lived. Earle Caldwell, the subservient handyman who had been at Blake’s side since he married Bonny eighteen months earlier, was charged with conspiring with Blake to kill her. A half head taller and more than half a hundred pounds heavier than Blake, Caldwell held his head high, but put up no resistance to police. His wraparound sunglasses and a black T-shirt with SEZ WHO? emblazoned over the heart pretty much said it all. In addition to arresting Caldwell, detectives hauled boxes, a shotgun and two gun cases out of his second-floor apartment.
As night fell over Los Angeles, the cars containing Blake and Caldwell both pulled up at the booking entrance at the rear of Parker Center. Blake faced a small army of men and women armed with boom mikes, Minicams, notepads and floodlights. As a star of film and television for most of his life, the one-time TV icon of the hit cop series Baretta was accustomed to media tumult, but this time there was no red carpet waiting, and the rude questions tossed at him could in no way be construed as celebrity softballs.
“What are you being charged with?”
“Mr. Blake, did the arrest come as a surprise?”
“Did you do it, Bob? Did you kill your wife?”
Robert Blake said nothing, keeping his blank eyes focused straight ahead and maintaining the self-imposed silence he’d kept since the day he buried Bonny Bakley ten months earlier.
Her May 25, 2001 funeral at Forest Lawn Cemetery had been Blake’s last public appearance. It was an odder quirk of fate that the unscrupulous celebrity-stalking Bonny Bakley finally wound up there. A shrewd groupie who had spent a lifetime trying to wedge herself into the Hollywood milieu now had a permanent berth on the artificially green hillside opposite the Hollywood sign and within sight of Warner Brothers, Disney and Universal studios. In his terse eulogy, however, Blake never once mentioned the irony to the cameras.
“It was [Bonny’s] will, her conviction, not mine, her dedication that brought Rosie into this world,” Blake pronounced solemnly over his dead wife’s grave, dramatically removing a white rose from the spray atop her casket. Cradling Rose in the crook of her arm, Delinah also plucked a flower off the casket and handed it to the toddler.
After that, Robert Blake never spoke publicly about Bonny or anything else again, and that didn’t change now that he had been arrested for her murder.
He kept his head bowed and continued walking, flanked by Ron Ito1 and Brian Tyndall, two LAPD detectives who had been investigating the case. For months they too had maintained their silence. Enduring speculation from both Harland Braun and a jaded L.A. news corps that the May 4, 2001, murder of Bonny Lee Bakley might never be solved, neither cop uttered a single substantive word about the case. During the early days of the investigation, the media flooded their offices in the elite Robbery Homicide division up on Parker Center’s third floor with calls wanting to know the status of the case. After a couple months had passed, the flood became a trickle. Summer gave way to fall, and fall to winter, but the detectives’ answer to the media was always the same: “The case remains under investigation.”
Indeed, the killing of Bonny Lee Bakley, forty-four-year-old groupie-cum-wife of actor Robert Blake, had evolved into the most expensive and, arguably, the most extensive investigation in LAPD history. Of the 584 murders committed in the nation’s second largest city during 2001, over half had gone unsolved, and police officials all the way to Chief Bernard Parks’ office were painfully aware that the murder of Bonny Bakley had been among those that officially remained a mystery. Though Bonny’s famous husband had been the obvious suspect from the start, the police had turned up no witnesses, no forensic evidence and no immediate clues that would fix the blame on Robert Blake beyond a reasonable doubt.
Indeed, the actor had behaved like a stricken and bereaved husband. While Bonny lay dying in an ambulance headed toward nearby St. Joseph’s Hospital, Blake alternately wept and vomited into the gutter half a block from the murder scene while delivering the following story to investigators:
Before they left Blake’s home for Vitello’s, a nearby neighborhood bistro, Bonny insisted that her husband pack one of his pistols because she believed someone had been stalking her. The couple parked beside a vacant house that was under construction on a side street and walked a block to the restaurant, which had been a Blake haunt for close to twenty years. They arrived around 8:30 P.M., and sat in a corner booth. Bonny ordered seafood and wine while Blake had chicken soup.
The couple ate, Blake paid the bill, adding a 25 percent tip, and they left at about 9:30 P.M., but when they got to his car, Blake discovered he’d left his .38 caliber handgun behind. He returned to the restaurant, retrieved the gun, asked for two glasses of water, drank them and left.
When he returned to his car, Blake found that in his brief absence, Bonny had been shot twice. After discovering his mortally wounded wife, Blake went to a house around the corner from Vitello’s parking lot and knocked. Actor/director Sean Stanek opened the door to a frantic Blake around 9:50 P.M. and, upon hearing his story, called 911. Then both men ran to the car, where Bonny lay slumped in the passenger seat. Blood was everywhere. Paramedics could not revive her. Bonny was declared DOA at St. Joseph’s Hospital at 10:15 P.M.
While Blake’s story seemed riddled with inconsistencies, after nearly five hours of questioning, police did not arrest him. They declined to even name him a suspect. Bonny’s autopsy was sealed, Blake’s Dodge Stealth was impounded and the murder weapon—a relatively rare 9 millimeter German military pistol called a Walther P38—was recovered from a nearby trash bin a couple of days later along with a pair of gloves.
But in the days, weeks and months that followed, neither Detectives Ito or Tyndall nor any of the other half dozen investigators who worked the case with them would even confirm that they had located the murder weapon. Stung by its rush to prosecute O.J. Simpson, the department wasn’t about to make the same mistake twice. Police Chief Parks, who had risen to the top of the department as an indirect result of the housecleaning the LAPD had undergone following the 1992 L.A. riots and the O.J. trials, urged the public and media to have patience.
“It’s a homicide that at least at this time has very few clues,” Parks told a local radio station two weeks after the murder. “It’s going to require an extensive amount of investigation.”
Asked if Blake was a suspect, Parks said, “No one’s been eliminated. It would not be an investigation if we just chose who should be a suspect and who shouldn’t.”
He vowed to provide whatever resources Robbery Homicide captain Jim Tatreau said his detectives needed to arrest, prosecute and convict Bonny’s killer. In the meantime, Parks muzzled everyone but his media relations officers, and after little more than two months of tabloid speculation, the mystery surrounding the murder of Robert Blake’s wife vanished from the headlines.
Over the following nine months, investigators traveled to twenty states, where they conducted more than 150 interviews and amassed 35,000 pages of evidence. They explored the seedy after-hours jazz joints on Beale Street in Memphis once haunted by starstruck Bonny Bakley and her gal pals; the High Sierra resort where Blake took Bonny—and Earle Caldwell—on a belated honeymoon just a week before she died; and the mean streets of northern New Jersey towns where Bonny and Robert Blake were both born into very different but equally dysfunctional families.
The detectives traveled to Montana, Vegas, Arkansas, New York, Mississippi, Phoenix and Florida, speaking with many of the men whom Bonny had bilked of money, property and insurance during a pornographic career that stretched over two decades. They interviewed transvestites, stuntmen, musicians, thieves, prostitutes, lawyers, bouncers and at least one professional Elvis impersonator. They waded hip deep into Bonny’s disturbing netherworld of phone sex, dirty pictures and gutter erotica and entered into Blake’s dark, obsessive and equally disturbing twilight zone—a bitter world of “what ifs” and missed opportunities that Blake himself called “the third act” of his fast-fading television and movie star’s life.
It was here, inside the tarnished imagination of the former child actor who refused to grow up and leave the stage, that Ito and Tyndall believed they finally found their killer. On April 18, 2002, the detectives concluded that the brooding screen persona that Little Rascal Bobby Blake nurtured into a lead role in the big screen adaptation of Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood and continued to cultivate for half a Hollywood century finally crossed over from tough guy fantasy to killer reality.
“Robert Blake shot Bonny Bakley,” Captain Tatreau told a hastily gathered news conference that Thursday night after Blake had been fingerprinted, photographed, booked and transferred to a holding cell. “We believe his motive is that Robert Blake had contempt for Bonny Bakley. He felt that he was trapped in a marriage that he wanted no part of.”
Outside Parker Center, after an hour-long meeting with his client, attorney Harland Braun held his own impromptu press conference. A veteran defense lawyer who first gained national recognition twenty years earlier successfully defending director John Landis in the Twilight Zone manslaughter case, Braun was as media savvy as any attorney in Los Angeles. He knew how to spin and he knew when he was being spun, just as he was at this very moment.
Braun vented his frustration over being kept in the dark about Blake’s arrest, which appeared to have been made just in time for the evening news. In answer to questions shouted at him about Blake’s reaction, the sandy-haired criminal defense veteran peered out over his trademark tortoiseshell half lenses and told reporters: “His main concern right now is his children.”
Ironically that’s how the whole saga had begun to unwind. Bonny Bakley had trapped Robert Blake by becoming pregnant with his child—the oldest trick in the starchaser’s book. But little did she know the difficulty he had in separating fantasy from reality.
Braun didn’t speculate though. He called it a night and bid the ladies and gentlemen of the Fourth Estate a good evening. It had been a long, cold, difficult day and the days to follow promised to be equally long, equally challenging and equally chilling.
1The detective is no relation to Los Angeles Superior Court judge Lance Ito.
ACT I
The Seduction
All the lonely people, where do they all belong?
—John Lennon
1
One hot summer night at the end of August, Robert Blake attended a birthday party for comedian Chuck McCann at Chadney’s Restaurant. A onetime steak and chop shop, the Burbank nightspot was located on a sliver of prime real estate directly across the street from the NBC studios, where Blake had once enjoyed many of his finest hours as a regular guest on the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson.
But it was now the summer of 1998. Carson was retired, and Chadney’s had long since gone to seed, just like many of its patrons. In its waning days, the downstairs level of the venerable old eatery still served as one of Southern California’s few well-known jazz venues2 and Blake had come to hear pianist Ross Tompkins accompanying renowned trumpet master Jack Sheldon. Observed Sheldon with affection, “Bobby’s always been a great fan.”
But Bonny Bakley wasn’t. She preferred doo-wop and rockabilly to jazz, Chubby Checker to Charles Mingus. She remembered Chuck McCann when he was younger, thinner and had more hair, hosting an afternoon kiddies’ show on TV in New York. That was back in the 1960s when Bonny herself was a kid growing up impoverished in rural northeast New Jersey. She watched McCann and she watched American Bandstand—two of her favorite after-school TV escape valves in a childhood that included incest, rape and regular beatings from an alcoholic father—a general Dickensian lifestyle that would have given Oliver Twist night sweats.
Now that Bonny was all grown-up, McCann seemed a lot older to her. So did the trumpet player and the dozens of other fogies who had gathered at Chadney’s to listen, schmooze and reminisce. They were flabby and wrinkled and showed their age—something that Bonny simply could not abide. She fought growing old, gracefully or otherwise. The old guys up on the dais with McCann and Sheldon weren’t bothered by age, though. They had come that night to remember how sweet it all was, and Robert Blake was very much a part of their crowd.
Bonny—or Leebonny, as she was known on the Hollywood party circuit—had come for entirely different reasons. She was powdered and perfumed and ready to romp and roll with a star. The forty-two-year-old bleached blonde lived in Memphis, but she’d been flying in and out of L.A. regularly since Dean Martin died on Christmas Day 1995. Martin had everything Bonny had been looking for in a man: money, celebrity and an insatiable sex drive. She stalked Martin at his favorite watering holes in Beverly Hills and West Hollywood. She’d finally managed to sidle up to the aging crooner at La Familia or the Hamburger Hamlet, where he ate once a week, and even got him to pose with her once for a snapshot. Bonny giggled about the moment with all her girlfriends, staying on the phone for hours the way bobbysoxers do when one has just been felt up for the first time by the captain of the football team. “He told me he loved my legs,” said best friend Judy Howell. “‘Wouldn’t you just love to hug those legs?’ he told me.” Bonny was jealous.
Bonny calculated that she was within weeks of seducing Dean Martin into dropping his trousers and making her his mistress. Thus, the day that the seventy-eight-year-old ex-Rat Packer finally expired from decades of inhaling martini-flavored cigarettes, Bonny wept as long and as loud back at home in Tennessee as did Martin’s ex-wife Jeanne in Beverly Hills, who maintained the death vigil at Martin’s bedside.
“Bonny took his dying real hard,” recalled Bonny’s ex-husband Paul Gawron. “She didn’t stop crying for a week.”
But despite her broken heart and bitter disappointment, Bonny had also fallen in love with Southern California. Her frequent visits to L.A. had given her a taste for the moderate weather and the perpetual sunshine. Los Angeles had none of the snow she’d grown up with in northern New Jersey, nor the smelly sauna heat of summertime in Memphis.
Throw in the celebrity-strewn night life, the thousands of horny, well-heeled septuagenarian males, and the loosey morality of an aging motion picture colony powered by the twin engines of Viagra and easy money, and Bonny thought she’d simply died and gone to grifter’s paradise.
She never did anything by halves, so she announced her decision to become an Angeleno as ostentatiously as possible. She paid $3,500 to rent a billboard on the Sunset Strip, where she displayed her smiling portrait and her phone number, should any bright young talent scout be shrewd enough to want to snap her up and sign her to a contract. None did, but Bonny Bakley had never been easily discouraged.
A year after Dean Martin’s death, she even purchased a house in Thousand Oaks just beyond the northernmost end of the San Fernando Valley, about an hour’s drive from downtown Los Angeles. She rented it out temporarily, though her eventual plan was to move her three children, ex-husband Paul, and her “mail order” business out to California.
Everyone Bonny knew agreed that her business was a natural for El Lay and the San Fernando Val-Lay in particular. As commemorated in the docudrama Boogie Nights (1997), the Valley had evolved over the last decades of the twentieth century into the capital of American pornography. At one time or another behind warehouse walls from Reseda to Canoga Park, any and all sexual behaviors—no matter how stupid, demeaning, or disgusting—had been recorded on tape. Twosomes, threesomes, gruesomes.… you name it, the Valley had filmed it.
Bonny Lee Bakley had never held down a real job—not because she was incapable, but because it became a point of honor not to. Jobs were for pinheads who couldn’t earn a living any other way. Bonny supported herself, her three children, her ex-husband and a variety of friends, relatives and hangers-on by selling lurid photos of herself and other women through the classifieds in the back of swinger publications. She further fleeced the lonely men who wrote to her by promising sex but ultimately swindling them out of whatever money, credit, insurance or property they had.
“In one word, I’d describe her as a thief,” said Gawron, her first cousin, second husband and father of three of her four children. “If she had put her mind on something else, she could have been a whiz. It’s just a shame that everything she did was crooked.”
Bonny started out in her teens with classifieds of the “lonely young thing seeking older man” variety, and soon she began creating her own database of prospective marks and branching out into a nationwide mail-order scam. She’d string her pen pals out as long as she could, milking them for everything from Greyhound bus fare or airline tickets to credit cards and money that she claimed she needed desperately for medical bills. There was a favorite aunt in the hospital or a sister who’d lost her welfare benefits and couldn’t scrape up enough to feed her newborn.
If her victims continued to respond, Bonny would run property, asset and credit checks to determine their net worth. On the bigger scores, she worked Social Security scams, juggling numbers and forging signatures so that checks meant for her victims were rerouted instead directly to her. In rare cases, she’d even marry a mark if she thought his personal fortune or life insurance policy was big enough.
“Don’t ask me how she did it,” said Gawron, who remained her partner in the mail-order business long after they were divorced. “I can’t even make a long-distance phone call.”
While Bonny worked the mailing lists and lonely-hearts ads to pay the rent, her ultimate goal was to land a celebrity. Her grandmother advised her early to get herself a tough little rich guy, like James Cagney or Frank Sinatra, and do whatever it took to hold on to him. Grandma suggested Elvis, but he up and died too soon.
Bonny tried becoming a celebrity herself for a while, but concluded it was just too much work. “If I’d kept romance out of my life, it would have been possible,” she said. “But I would have had to be like Katharine Hepburn and it was too hard. I kept falling for somebody. So I thought: ‘Why not fall for a movie star instead of being one?’ It’s more fun. I like being around celebrities. It makes you feel better than other people.”
As a teenager, Bonny felt a strong psychic bond with Frankie Valli, the lead singer for the 1960s pop group the Four Seasons. In her twenties she graduated from Valli to 1950s rock pioneer Jerry Lee Lewis. By her thirties she grew beyond childish rock and roll fancies and migrated to Hollywood, where fantasy was a way of life. Now she was in her early forties, and the same celebrity obsession had brought her to Chadney’s on this fateful Sunday evening.
A parade of ancients took the stage and made birthday cracks about McCann. “They did bits,” recalled Mark Canavi, a young stand-up impressionist who once worked as Robert Blake’s personal assistant and who accompanied him to the restaurant that night. It wasn’t a roast of the Dean Martin variety exactly. Bonny would have recognized that right away, having studied the Martin oeuvre well before she put her first moves on the old man. But there were still plenty of clever insults flying in Rickles fashion as the evening wore on.
Bonny had come with Will Jordan, a veteran New York comic who’d made a career of impersonating Ed Sullivan. Nearly twice her age, Jordan had been Bonny’s entrée to parties before. He asked her to come along this night because he didn’t drive and Bonny did. They’d known each other since she was seventeen, and while any romance between them had cooled long ago, Bonny still used him to get close to celebrities.
“They used each other,” said her sister Margerry. “Whenever Will needed a young woman on his arm for a party or something, he’d call Bonny.”
Jordan introduced her to Blake, who was in rare form that night. While everyone else wore evening clothes, Robert had on a sleeveless black T-shirt and jeans. He might have been facing his sixty-fifth birthday in less than three weeks, but his daily exercise regimen had paid off in a well-muscled torso and thick, tanned biceps. Add to that the face-lift he’d gotten five years earlier and the weekly dyeing ritual that kept his thinning gray hair thick and black, and—presto! Robert Blake was a virile young leading man once again.
Bonny had her own wrinkling to contend with. She’d just celebrated her forty-second birthday, and the flesh she’d depended upon to earn a living since she was a teenager had begun to lose its youthful vitality, drooping, swelling and gathering in folds. Prescription pills and fad diets helped, but only temporarily. She too had been through cosmetic surgery, and years of peroxide, dye and color rinse had left her hair as blowsy as a fright wig. When she let it go too long, she could see the occasional silver weed growing among her natural brunette roots.
When Canavi excused himself to the men’s room, Bonny followed him. She was waiting outside the door when he emerged.
“You’re with Robert Blake?” she asked.
Canavi nodded and smiled.
“Could I have his telephone number?”
Canavi was taken aback by her brass for a moment, but recovered enough to answer: “If you want his phone number, you’d better ask him yourself.”
Apparently she took his advice because when he returned from the bar, she was all over Blake. On this magic evening, deception seemed to work just fine for both Bonny and Robert. Bonny sidled up, giggling every time Blake opened his mouth. Blake sat up a little straighter, clowned a little more convincingly and fell into his surefire Baretta banter, peppering his punch lines with Jersey-esque “dese” and “dat’s.”
New Jersey was something they had in common. He was born north of Newark, in an older Italian neighborhood with tree-lined streets and a pub on every other corner. She was born farther west, out in Morristown, where the Irish and German riffraff mixed with the horsy crowd.
Blake and Bonny left early, and they left together, laughing and leering. Once they were alone in the parking lot, according to Bonny’s sister, Blake behaved like a teenager in heat. He was all over her before they even climbed into the front seat of his SUV. Bonny left her car behind at Chadney’s. Will Jordan would get back to the hotel somehow. He was a resourceful old coot. What was important right now was fending off Robert Blake’s advances, but not too hard.
“At every stoplight he’d stop and grab her and, like, make out with her,” said Margerry.
Blake mentioned nothing about prostate problems that occasionally made it hard for him to get an erection, and Bonny did not reveal that she wore a support corset to ease the pain of a slipped disc and keep her weighty breasts from sliding around like pudgy jellyfish. As they drove east, back toward Bonny’s hotel, it was summer and there was passion in the night.
Bonny was half naked before they even pulled into the parking lot of the Beverly Garland Holiday Inn. Named for the blond B-movie “scream queen”3 who appeared in My Three Sons, Gunsmoke, Remington Steele and a host of other TV Land chestnuts, the down market hotel was located at the crotch of the Hollywood and Ventura Freeways—the perfect spot for Bonny and Blake to consummate their passion. In fact, Robert took her right there, in the rear of his SUV. If the windows weren’t tinted it didn’t matter because they more than made up for it with aerobic breathing. By the time they finished rutting like happy, healthy terriers pent up far too long in separate kennels, the windows were damp with condensation.
Sated and happy, Bobby then said a fond good night. He did not offer, nor did she request, a service fee of any kind. Instead, they exchanged telephone numbers and promised to keep in touch. As her newest paramour drove off into the night, she saw his personalized license plate: SAYZWHO.
Bonny quickly made her way back to her room. She couldn’t wait to call her friends back home in Memphis.
2. But not for much longer. Four months later, just before Christmas 1998, torrential rains soaked the roof so badly at Chadney’s that it collapsed. A year later, Burger King applied for a conditional use permit to demolish the landmark nightclub and replace it with a drive-through restaurant.
3. Beverly Garland, born Beverly Lucy Fessenden, was probably best known as Fred MacMurray’s wife on My Three Sons (1960–72) and as Kate Jackson’s mother on Scarecrow and Mrs. King (1983–87). Her nickname came from a string of horror movies she made in the 1950s, including It Conquered the World (1956), Not of This Earth (1957), and The Alligator People (1959). Unlike many of her contemporaries, Garland learned early that even an actor steadily in demand rarely retires rich. In 1959, she married developer Fillmore Crank and built the Beverly Garland Hotel and Convention Center within blocks of Universal Studios. While she continues to act well into the twenty-first century, Garland’s fortune is grounded in real estate, not filmed fantasy.
2
By the end of the 1990s, Robert Blake no longer needed to work. Shrewd investing and a frugal lifestyle had ensured him a secure retirement.4 In late 1998, he made preparations to deed over a pair of homes he’d owned for years to Noah and Delinah, his two grown children from his first marriage. Meanwhile, he continued to live comfortably and alone at his self-styled “Mata Hari Ranch,” working out in his home exercise room each morning and dancing occasionally in the mirrored tap dancing salon next to his gym.
“He would get up in the morning at six A.M. and work out,” said Mark Canavi. “And he wouldn’t just work out. He would be in his gym for four hours, working on all kinds of stuff. He had a sauna in there, and he would listen to ragtime or jazz during the whole time. He loved Alice Faye, Doris Day, the Mills Brothers. He’d listen to this stuff for hours while he was working out.”
Blake avoided junk food and steered clear of drugs or excessive alcohol. He’d admitted years earlier that he was an addict and could never do anything in moderation. “If a Hershey bar makes me feel better, I’ll have a bathtub of them tomorrow,” he once told a reporter. “I stopped smoking twenty-five years ago, and just started smoking again a week ago, and I went to an A.A. meeting this morning. Anything that takes me out of how I feel, I abuse. I don’t give a fuck what it is—food, alcohol, nicotine, sleeping pills, uppers, downers, sideways, whatever. If it changes how I feel, I use a lot of it.”
So he stuck only to those addictions that he believed were good for him. No fast food. No lethargy. He might be getting older, but Blake refused to “lay around the house and become like a piece of Italian sausage,” as he told one acquaintance.
For the most part, Robert Blake kept to himself. His was the only place at the west end of Dilling Street that was surrounded by a six-foot wrought iron fence.5 Visitors were stopped at the locked front gate until they identified themselves. If the wiry actor lapsed into one of his infrequent glooms, he’d stay indoors and seldom open the door. Once, in a poem he liked to quote, he’d even described himself to friends as an old, blind bear, wandering the winter woods alone:
Too mean to die; too lost to care;
But show some caution, he’s still the bear.
Blake was no brooding hermit, however. Reclusive though he might be, he was just as often quite sociable. He smiled and waved at his Studio City neighbors when he came out to pick up the newspaper or the mail, and he could be heard in the front room on occasion playing his old Gibson guitar. He could be funny, cracking a joke or delivering a punch line, and he could also be dreamy, almost as though in a trance when he puttered around the yard or sat on the front porch. He’d glide on his porch swing and stare off into the distance, absently crooning sea chanteys or a cowboy lullaby.
Robert loved the desert. He often drove his Winnebago out to the Mojave on weekends. He’d stop in the middle of nowhere to inhale the clean air and soak in the heat. Though fast approaching seventy, Blake still loved to go biking aboard his Harley, opening up full throttle on the open road. He camped sometimes in the High Sierras and often took along one of his guns for target practice.
He went out regularly for walks around the neighborhood, usually with a pal like sixty-year-old actor John Solari, an ex-con who did time for burglary in both Attica and Sing Sing when he was younger. Blake wore a long black leather coat and he always packed a gun and kept it in his car on the floor beside his seat—a practice that didn’t bother Solari in the least. He’d grown up poor and Italian. He understood.
“Robert liked to dance and sing,” said Solari. “He always said if he could do it over, he’d be a singer.”
In town, Blake did a little clubbing for recreation. There was dancing at the Derby in the Los Feliz Hills or sometimes he’d shoot pool up at the Playboy Mansion, where he’d been welcomed as one of Hefner’s favored guests since his Baretta days. When musician pal Jack Sheldon played at L.A. area jazz clubs like Lunaria or Jax, Blake was there, shutting his eyes and nodding in rhythm to the beat.
Blake ate out a lot—sometimes at Frankie’s on Melrose or nearby Vitello’s, a favored Italian restaurant where he was so well-known to the Restivo brothers who owned it that they named one of their menu items for him: a $12.95 spinach and tomato pasta called “Fusilli e Minestra alla Robert Blake.” Dozens of actors had contributed autographed 8x10 glossies to the Restivos over the years, and they decorated every square inch of the entry to the restaurant, but Blake’s was not among them. His name might be printed on Vitello’s menu, but he maintained that he preferred keeping a low profile.
Blake’s guilty pleasure, whether eating out or in his own kitchen, was “gravy”—red sauce like the rich marinara Italian chefs drizzle over linguine. But on the whole, though, Blake watched the calories and developed a passion for fat-free health food. He did treat himself occasionally to a frozen dessert at Al Gelato’s on Robertson over in Beverly Hills or a bagel at a favorite coffee shop spot near Paramount Studios. Sometimes he met there or at Bob’s Donut Shop in Farmer’s Market to catch up on the weekly gossip with a loosely knit circle of other industry regulars. He flirted often with the idea of finding the perfect script that would crown his long and enviable career.
“People have always wanted him to do stuff,” said his son, Noah. “For reasons that I don’t know, he has chosen not to, or at least to work very infrequently in the last ten or fifteen years.”
From time to time, Blake attended stage plays or showed up at charity events, as did any number of other aging celebrities. He joined a regular Wednesday-night poker game for a while and passed much of the rest of his days and evenings defying his dyslexia by reading copiously. He collected old pocket knives, BB guns and pistols as well as books, and visited a nearby firing range to keep up his shooting skills. Mostly, he worked hard at enjoying retirement. Indeed, the angry young screen persona that Robert Blake had cultivated over two generations seemed from the outside to have finally mellowed into a comfortable decline. Along with several of Robert’s closer friends, Noah reckoned his father had lapsed into a kind of semipermanent nostalgia.
But nostalgia cuts both ways. There are triumphs and there are regrets. That may have accounted for the increase in his fits of gloom. Blake had taken to evaluating his life and career of late, and despite his many remarkable accomplishments, both always seem to come up wanting.
In one of his last TV appearances, on Roseanne Barr’s short-lived daytime talk show, Robert boasted that he could teach anybody to act. When Roseanne’s booker tried to get him to return and demonstrate on some nonactor from the studio audience, he declined. Boasts followed by retreats were not new to Blake. That was how he’d lived his life for more than half a century. As Robert himself might have observed in his best Baretta street cant, “Ya can lead a horse to water, but ya can’t teach ol’ dogs new tricks.” Combining two opposing ideas into one oddly wise adage was a Blake specialty.
Perhaps it was the nostalgia that made Noah believe his father when he talked about starting up an actors’ studio, much like the one that the blacklisted character actor Jeff Corey opened in L.A. during the 1950s. Blake never tired of waxing on about those days in the McCarthy era, when he joined other young rebels like James Dean, Rita Moreno and Jack Nicholson to study, stretch and tune his acting “instrument” at Corey’s Professional Actors Studio. It was a lofty-sounding institution, but it actually began quite modestly at the back of Corey’s garage up in the Hollywood Hills.
Noah, who’d struggled to follow in the old man’s footsteps since college, envisioned a father-son actors’ master class that would similarly tap into L.A.’s vast talent pool. But as was all too frequently the case, Robert Blake’s talk about opening an acting school was just that: talk. Noah wound up founding his own school without his father’s help.
“I never acted with him. I never acted near him,” said Noah, more weary than sour about his feckless famous father. “I was never on any of his shows. Basically, I never had anything to do with him, and that’s unfortunate, I think. It’s too bad.”
Noah wasn’t looking for a handout, just a hand up, like the one that Donald Sutherland gave to Kiefer, Lloyd Bridges gave to Jeff and Beau, or Martin Sheen gave to his boys Charlie and Emilio Estevez. “My dad always thought that helping his children would somehow cripple them, [keep] them from having to learn from ‘the struggle,’ which is very interesting,” said Noah. “As if my life wasn’t struggle enough, he had to impose some more.”
When Noah and his sister were growing up, Robert loved to defend both of his children against injustice, whether real or imagined, just so long as that injustice came from the outside world and not from inside the troubled Blake household. Robert and their mother, actress Sondra Kerr, were constantly at war, either with each other or their neighbors. They were both quick to condemn outsiders, sometimes on the flimsiest evidence. Like the cockatoo that had once kept Tony Baretta company, Blake always carried an invisible chip on his shoulder.
“Both him and my mother were very emotional,” said Noah. “I guess you could say ‘dramatic.’ That would be a good word. There was a lot of drama in our house. Lots of drama.”
As Noah told one old family friend, growing up was often “like a ride in an ambulance.” Because the adults seemed always to be at war, either with each other or the rest of the world, the children frequently found themselves drafted. Sometimes the target was Mom, sometimes Dad or sometimes any poor fool unlucky enough to knock at the wrong time at the front door.
According to Noah, neither of his parents hit him or his sister, but both were always wrought up, especially his father. Delinah developed her own wry self-confidence while Noah became sweetly diffident. There was no question that some of their parents’ angst spilled over on them.
“There was not a lot of distinction between the adults and the children in our house,” recalled Noah. “The roles were not very clear. My father would intermittently be very parental, and then not be a parent, and then basically just seem completely disinterested.”
Throughout his long career, Robert Blake never seemed to learn that shooting from the lip was not always the best means of public expression. “He’s definitely, you know, a type A kind of person,” said Noah. “He’s very opinionated. He’s never been shy about saying how he feels or what he thinks.” For instance, whenever the subject of child abuse came up during an interview or in one of his many appearances on the Tonight Show, Robert passionately invoked his own tortured childhood as an example of what happens when parents lash out rather than listen to their children. On the other hand, he didn’t mind titillating Carson’s audience with the revelation that he and Sondra had made love in front of their own children. How else were they going to learn, he wanted to know? As Noah put it, “Our family was like a twenty-four-hour crisis hotline.”
The Blakes fought constantly. When Sondra enrolled both youngsters in North Hollywood’s private Oakwood School along with other movie stars’ children, Robert soon threw a fit, pulled them out and sent them to public school. He felt they needed to learn how to cope with the great unwashed middle class, just as he had been forced to do as a troubled though privileged child star.
But no sooner had Noah and Delinah adjusted to public school than their volcanic father fomented another crisis. Noah meekly suggested that his class march to the theme from Rocky during sixth-grade graduation exercises. When the principal politely vetoed the idea, Robert blasted the hapless educator in a national magazine.
And so the pendulum swung, through junior high, high school and on into college. After Sondra and Robert finally divorced in 1982, the Blakes fought over which of them would get custody of Delinah. And through it all, Robert was either overattentive or utterly uninterested in what his children did with their lives. Noah blamed his father’s erratic parenting on his lousy upbringing. “He didn’t come to the table too well equipped when my sister and I came around,” he said.
Robert did get along far better with his daughter than with his son. Delinah was the apple of his eye. Blake even named one of his businesses Delinah Enterprises. Despite his early worry about spoiling her too much by sending her to private school, he continued to lavish star treatment on her well into her teens. For her eleventh birthday, Blake treated his little princess to dinner at venerable Chasen’s Restaurant in Beverly Hills—all because Deli had expressed a wish to eat at a “fancy” restaurant. But Blake didn’t stop there. He took the celebration up another notch by arranging to have actress Kate Jackson, then riding high as one of the stars of TV’s Charlie’s Angels (Deli’s favorite show), emerge on cue from Chasen’s kitchen singing “Happy Birthday” with a cake in her hands.
Deli responded in kind. She worshiped her old man and sided with him during the divorce. During one of Blake’s several separations from Sondra, his daughter came to visit him in his dressing room on the Universal lot. In a corner she found a statuette of a clownish character with outstretched arms and a silly expression on its face. A small plaque at the base read: I LOVE YOU THIS MUCH! Deli set the figure on her father’s desk and announced: “Daddy, you must keep this out at all times.”
The father-daughter love fest didn’t spare Delinah her own psychological challenges. In a 1983 interview that Blake gave TV Guide, he proudly announced that his daughter was a straight-A student and wanted to become a pediatric surgeon, but added that she had also been through psychotherapy. “Two years ago, shrinks told me she was neurotic,” he said. “Since then she’s pulled it back in place, got the show-biz kid out of her blood—doin’ great.”
With typical Blake bluster, he followed this report of his daughter’s mental health with a blast at the precarious behavior of others’ children. “Some of my movie friends, their kids’re wandering the street, sellin’ dope,” he said. “They got green hair. Green hair!”
As he grew older, in a 1995 interview with Detour Magazine