Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, February 20, 1993 TAG: 9302200235
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 2 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: SUSAN KING LOS ANGELES TIMES
DATELINE: HOLLYWOOD LENGTH: Medium
A HEALTHY ROBERT BLAKE MAKES IT BACK
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 is a crisp Monday morning, and the compact, muscular actor sits on the edge of a white chair in the living room of his ranch-style home here, 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 at 9 p.m. on WDBJ (Channel 7). 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."
Blake says he 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."