Dat’s the End of Dat Tune

How one thinks about actor Robert Blake probably depends on his or her age. If they came up in the 1970s, as I did, their principal recollection will likely be of his starring role in the ABC-TV crime drama Baretta. If, on the other hand, they’re “Millenials,” then their only memories of Blake may be of him seated in a courtroom, charged with murdering his wife, Bonny Lee Bakley. In either case, they’ll have paid attention to this news posted yesterday in Deadline:

Robert Blake, the controversial actor who won a Lead Actor Emmy for Baretta and starred in films including In Cold Blood and Lost Highway before a murder trial ended his career, died today of heart disease in Los Angeles. He was 89.

Born into an Italian-American family in Nutley, New Jersey, Blake (originally named Michael James Gubitosi) apparently suffered an abusive childhood and ran away from home at age 14. His parents had moved their brood to Los Angeles in 1938, and Blake was only 5 years old when he began his acting career, appearing in the 1939 MGM film Bridal Suite with Robert Young (later of Marcus Welby, M.D. fame). He went on to feature in a succession of Our Gang comedy shorts, co-star as Little Beaver in Republic Pictures’ Red Ryder movies, and act alongside Humphrey Bogart in Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948). As an adult, Blake was cast in such films as Pork Chop Hill (1959), In Cold Blood (1967), and David Lynch’s Lost Highway (1997).

On television, Blake was seen early on in everything from The Adventures of Wild Bill Hickok and Have Gun—Will Travel to Naked City and The F.B.I. He reportedly turned down the chance to portray “Little Joe” Cartwright on Bonanza, leaving Michael Landon to step into those boots, instead. Blake’s headliner involvement in Baretta began in 1973, after actor Tony Musante declined to continue in his starring role as an undercover New Jersey cop in ABC’s Toma, and that popular show was retooled to substitute Blake as another plainclothes police detective, Anthony Vincenzo “Tony” Baretta. As The New York Times recalls in its Blake obituary, Baretta “lived in a run-down hotel, had a pet cockatoo named Fred and used disguises—waiter, wino, janitor, barber—to chase bad guys.” He operated out of the 53rd Precinct in a never-named U.S. city, and introduced such catchphrases as “Don’t do the crime if you can’t do the time,” “And dat’s the name of dat tune,” and “You can take dat to da bank” into the English lexicon.

Robert Blake captured a 1975 Emmy Award for his performance on Baretta, as well as a 1976 Golden Globe.

After Blake left Baretta in 1978, he returned to the silver screen in Coast to Coast (1980), Second-Hand Hearts (1981), and Money Train (1995). NBC-TV cast him as Southern California private eye Joe Dancer in three pilot films—The Big Black Pill (1981), The Monkey Mission (1981, written by Robert Crais), and Murder 1, Dancer 0 (1983)—that it hoped would spawn a regular series, yet it never did. Blake finally returned to weekly television in 1985’s Hell Town, this time playing “a hard-living Catholic priest at a church in a crime-ridden neighborhood on the east side of Los Angeles.” Like Baretta, Hell Town boasted a theme sung by Sammy Davis Jr., but it lasted only 13 episodes.

The actor hoped to make a Hollywood comeback, explains the Associated Press, “but he never recovered from the long ordeal which began with the shooting death of his wife, Bonny Lee Bakley, outside a Studio City restaurant on May 4, 2001. The story of their strange marriage, the child it produced and its violent end was a Hollywood tragedy played out in court.

Once hailed as among the finest actors of his generation, Blake became better known as the center of a real-life murder trial, a story more bizarre than any in which he acted. …

In a 2002 interview ... while he was jailed awaiting trial, he bemoaned the change in his status with his fans nationwide: “It hurt because America is the only family I had.”

He was adamant that he had not killed his wife and a jury ultimately acquitted him. But a civil jury would find him liable for her death and order him to pay Bakley’s family $30 million, a judgment which sent him into bankruptcy. The daughter he and Bakley had together, Rose Lenore, was raised by other relatives and went for years without seeing Blake, until they spoke in 2019. She would tell People magazine that she called him “Robert,” not “Dad.”

The AP notes that, sadly, the once-wealthy Blake “wound up living on social security and a Screen Actor’s Guild pension.”