Murder most Hollywood

For 20 years, the acting career of Robert Blake has been in the doldrums. Now he's back in the headlines, for the worst possible reason ­ his wife has been murdered. It's been dubbed 'OJ ­ the Sequel'. But, argues Ryan Gilbey, could it just be a case of America losing sight of the distinction between fact and fiction?

Everyone in Hollywood wants to be famous for something. But the one tag that no one's competing for is "the new OJ". The story of how a faded, 67-year-old actor found himself being put forward for this entirely undesirable role in the wake of his wife's murder has most, but not all, of the elements that make a great, grim Hollywood scandal. It includes: sex, scams, celebrity, paternity disputes, parole violations, burnt-out careers and, horribly, the death of a woman who, whatever else is being said about her, was clearly not brimming over with joie de vivre.

For a long time it seemed that the celebrity ledger had finalised its entry for the actor Robert Blake. He would be known forever as the child star of the Our Gang movies from the 1930s and 1940s, who later turned in a chilling performance as one of the killers in the film of Truman Capote's In Cold Blood (1967). After cult success as the idealistic cop in Electra Glide in Blue (1973), Blake's career settled into the kind of somnambulant daze that can only come with landing the plum part in your own TV detective series. Just look at Angela Lansbury in Murder, She Wrote. For Blake, it was the mid-Seventies show Baretta, gritty for its time but as sure a sign that middle age had arrived as a paunch or a liking for garden centres. The eventual cancellation of the series, and his reliance on drink, drugs and parts in bad TV movies, still didn't jeopardise the American public's fondness for Robert Blake. The ink had already dried. The book was closed.

Until last month, that is. On 4 May, Blake and his wife, Bonny Lee Bakley, dined out at Vitello's, in a run-down corner of Studio City, Los Angeles. Blake had with him a gun, apparently at the insistence of Bakley, who had told him that she was in danger. After the meal, they walked the block to their car, where Blake realised that he had forgotten the weapon. In the time it took him to retrieve the gun from the restaurant and return to the car, Bakley had been shot in the head. She was pronounced dead on arrival at hospital.

For some weeks, detectives maintained that Blake was only a witness to the crime, but a LAPD spokesperson confirmed recently that the actor is now a suspect. Countless questions have surfaced about his behaviour on the night of 4 May. Why did he make a reservation at Vitello's when it was his regular haunt, and an establishment always happy to accommodate him? Why did he park in a secluded area a block away, instead of in Vitello's own well-lit car park? Particular incredulity has been reserved for the fact that Blake stopped for a glass of water between raising the alarm and checking on his wife's condition. The theory that he may have murdered Bakley at another location before moving the body has also been aired.

Then the digging started. Not her burial plot ­ that would be stalled for three weeks by the presence of camera crews, reporters and helicopters, whose mass stake-out at the funeral home ensured that Bakley's body could not be delivered. (She would eventually be interred in the Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Hollywood Hills, the celebrity cemetery that inspired Evelyn Waugh's satire of Californian madness, The Loved One.) No, the man doing the spadework was Blake's lawyer, Harland Braun, who scarcely waited for Bakley's heart to stop beating before beginning the process of contesting that she ever had a heart in the first place.

Braun had plenty of raw material to work with, and he has passed it around the US media so liberally that the border control between rumour and reality has been relaxed. Among the dirt being slung at Bakley's casket is the allegation that she sold nude pictures of herself by mail in exchange for gifts, plane tickets and cash, and that the scheme warped into a scam when Bakley went into the wedding business in a big way, duping 100 men into marriage. Braun claims that Bakley ran a "lonely hearts club", rushing vulnerable men into quickie weddings to scam them out of money before vanishing. Whether or not this is true, it throws up at least another 100 suspects to distract attention from Braun's client, even without the revelation that one condition of Blake's marriage to Bakley was that she ceased fraternising with any of the known felons whom she counted among her friends and associates. One of Bakley's not-so-gullible targets, who may emerge as a suspect, even ended a letter with the threat: "I had a hit out on my ex-wife's boyfriend. Don't even bother if [extortion is] your motive."

Braun has called Bakley a "packrat" ­ she kept everything connected with her life from the most insignificant receipt or note, and recorded all her phone conversations ­ but it is thanks to that obsessiveness that he now has a wealth of documentation of her idiosyncratic behaviour.

Braun's biggest chance of deflecting attention away from his client lies in playing the fame card. Bakley was a notorious celebrity addict, claiming to have had a child by Jerry Lee Lewis, and uncertain about the paternity of her young daughter, who was initially thought to have been fathered by Marlon Brando's son Christian, until DNA tests confirmed Blake's involvement. If there's one thing that makes a person seem pathetic and despicable, it's a hankering for the warm glow of someone else's success, not just because of the parasitic drive that creates such an appetite, but particularly because it reminds us of our own dependency on celebrity.

Scarcely less discreditable to Bakley were the apparent circumstances of her 1998 marriage to Blake. Braun has in his possession tapes of phone conversations that confirm his own diagnosis of Bakley as starstruck. Her voice is heard saying: "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." But who hasn't dreamed themselves into a Hollywood marriage once in a while? The clinical effectiveness of Braun's attacks on Bakley hinge on locating within the general public those feelings of self-loathing that are triggered by seeing in someone else the traits we despise in ourselves.

Braun could be forgiven for banking on that embarrassment to make the public condemn Bakley as a freak, to channel our discomfort at our own fantasies into disapproval for this ill-fated hanger-on who got what she ­ or, more to the point, we ­ deserved. Here was a woman who debated with a friend which man to pursue in her paternity claim; who would net her the most money, fame and notoriety ­ Robert Blake or Christian Brando?

It seems that Braun has been too enthusiastic in his attempts to discredit Bakley. It's one thing to kick someone when they're down ­ that's virtually the job description for an American lawyer ­ but to kick them when they're dead is less likely to be tolerated. Already (although he has not been charged and no one has produced any evidence against him) the tide of popular opinion is turning against Blake.

"Things don't add up," writes Mona from Indiana on an internet gossip site. "How does one forget a gun at a restaurant? Keys, cell phone, shades ­ those things one forgets. A deadly weapon? Puh-leeze!" Marcia Clark, chief prosecutor in the OJ Simpson trial, has predictably been canvassed for her opinions (although she has no special knowledge of the case). Asked who she thinks killed Bakley, Clark responds: "I think [Blake] did!" It's a proclamation that sits unhappily with her preference for juries "with memories that are clean, sharp and fair". But she gets one thing right. "Smearing the victim is not a good idea... I think it's going to be detrimental to Blake. It's going to wind up generating sympathy for Bakley. It looks desperate. It's making Blake look guilty and afraid. And, remember, he's no gem."

Even less welcome to Blake's ears than this reminder from Clark about allegations that he once threatened Bakley with violence is the uninvited support from Simpson himself. "I've got to admit," the Juice weighs in, "I was pretty fascinated when I first heard it. And my first reaction was an immediate feeling of compassion... Because I knew what he was about to go through. Don't watch TV, Robert. I know that watching TV is only going to frustrate him."

If the case gets to court, the defence would be advised to comprise the jury only of people who have not seen Lost Highway. David Lynch's 1997 film is an upsetting, very eerie picture. Blake played the villain of the piece, there was no disputing that, but this was not your common-or-garden cackling bad guy. As the Mystery Man, he wore chalky white make-up, greased back hair and a little black suit; his probing, insinuating eyes were buried in deep sockets. He tormented the film's main character, a saxophonist, by appearing to be in two places at once. Blake plays one of the most unsettling scenes in cinema with such unflustered confidence that you can't help feeling that you're in the presence of someone who is genuinely unhinged.

The details of the Bonny Lee Bakley case positively demand comparison with Lost Highway. In that movie, the saxophonist goes on to murder his wife after suspecting her of infidelity. If the hairs on the back of your neck are beginning to bristle, it's worth noting, too, that the saxophonist is being monitored by a stalker who delivers video tapes proving that he has been loitering outside, surveying the house. A matter of weeks before Bonny Lee Bakley's death, Blake's bodyguard had noticed a man watching the actor's house. The stranger appeared so frequently that the bodyguard even gave him a nickname ­ "Buzz", after his distinctive crew-cut.

The marriage did not display the signs of enduring devotion. There was no reception at their wedding because Bakley was needed back in Arkansas to honour her probation after a conviction for carrying false identification. This was a union built on fame, money and manipulation, in which Bakley quickly realised that celebrity was a temporary aphrodisiac, not an anaesthetic.

Another taped phone call reveals her telling a friend: "I thought, well, when I met Blake I kind of wanted him but I kind of didn't, because he wasn't, like, up to par with the looks. He's going to get even older and worse looking and I'm already in love with Christian [Brando]."

The pursuit of fame by association had got her into a jam long before she was murdered. But it is regrettable that her death will inevitably be rewritten as a chapter in the story of Robert Blake, whether he is convicted or remains suspended in that curious OJ Simpson limbo ­ acquitted but always in doubt, destined to be a Mystery Man to the last.