Western Sieve - How Robert Blake Is Not O.J. Simpson

by Joey Sweeney

Does Robert Blake get a cheering section? And if he does, is it because white people are still pissy about O.J.?
And if they are, is Robert Blake the best they can come up with? And if they aren't running Blake up the aw-shucks-he's-just-an-excitable-boy flagpole then why is everyone, me included, so media-saturated with his bloated, blank face and yet so willing to get ready to make excuses for the guy?

The answer is sad, but it's simple: If in fact he is the guilty party, Robert Blake had the good fortune--if you can call it that--to take the life of someone potentially even more fundamentally horrible than himself.

And how we're reacting to this says more about us than it does about our heroes in The People vs. Robert Blake in that it's not much more than a new set of coordinates filed into an age-old Hollywood potboiler: Washed-up so and so up and does in chisler after years of haranguing and emotional shakedown.

It's straight out of Jim Thompson. And yeah, you can wax and wane on the similarities between Blake and O.J. all the live-long day: Volatile relationship, most likely rooted in fading celebrity. Hangers-on desperate to aid fading celebrity in an act that will most certainly assure permanent resident status in the glow of said celebrity, however pale and deformed. And what about the poor child, subjected to a firestorm of media hounding, potential foster-child status (yeah, right) and a lifelong pall of murder hanging over every college application and first date for years and years to come?

True enough, the Blake case has almost everything. But two things are lacking: One is sympathy and the other is respect.

O.J. had the Goldmans and the Browns--media-savvy mourners who spent every day for years extolling the snow-white virtues of the deceased to all who would listen. Not only did they give face to the victims, but they shored up a lot of PR holes as well. Seldom was heard a disparaging word about either Nicole Brown or Ron Goldman.

But flip them with Bonny Lee Bakley and the difference is shocking. Here is a villain of staggering Linda Tripp-ish proportions. Beak Bakley's nose a little more and you've got two ladies who, had one lived and the other one taken a different path, could've starred as twin moms in an Olsen Twins vehicle.

Both women might have preyed on the weak, the vain and the pathetic, but this Bakley lady takes the cake. The case against her gets stronger with each passing article or profile--and don't kid yourself, buster, this trial is gonna be all media, all the time--more so than that of even the man standing accused of taking her life.

By all accounts Bakley was a stalker of low-level celebrity and a hanger-on with a somewhat sick predilection for those whom time, talent and the spotlight had passed by, a woman whose dream date on any given day might have vacillated between Tom Wopat and Robert Wagner. An early-'80s prime time fetishist, if you will.

Sadder still is that she succeeded, in a way that almost reminds one of Peter Sellers except it's neither funny nor droll, in worming her way into the lives of these people--people who couldn't even get on the Love Boat or Hollywood Squares. Damaged Hollywood goods.

While Blake will be tried for murder, Bakley will have the book thrown at her for bad taste and witchy ways. And neither will emerge victorious. And here's the second part: respect.

Whether you loved him or despised him you must admit that the entire world, in the very moment O.J. faced his new career as a suspect and where Blake finds himself now, wanted to give the Juice a little respect. Here was a man who inspired people, his supporters said. A man who broke barriers, walked the walk, shook all the right hands and, in the end, knew how to act. Only that last bit could be said for Blake, and even that seems like a gimme at this point.

Americans will point a disinterested finger at Robert Blake for the same reasons some folks argued that Simpson could never have possibly been involved in a crime of such horrifying violence.

They'll point to a posh Hollywood address. To a bygone glory day. To a man insecure enough to surround himself with hangers-on but vain enough to think he could get away with murder. But that, I'm afraid, is where the similarity stops.