«We’ve met before, haven’t we», at the party in a villa at the beginning of Lost Highway, a painted, eyebrowless character with the piercing gaze of a slicked-back Mephistopheles (referred to in the credits as the “Mystery Man”) approached saxophonist Fred Madison (Bill Pullman) with this phrase. The following is known: “We have already met somewhere and it was at your house and besides, you will laugh, I am there at the moment. Call me !” The actor’s name was Robert Blake and he just died at his home in Los Angeles after a long battle with heart disease, his niece, Noreen Austin, told the Hollywood Reporter. Lost Highway dates from 1997 and it is the story of a man accused of having murdered his wife, the “riddler” being in fiction a kind of evil double of Madison who himself, right in the middle of the film , becomes someone else.
“Weapon of stars and high rollers”
What is less known is that Blake’s wife, Bonny Lee Bakley was killed by two bullets fired at close range on May 4, 2001 as she waited in her car parked near a restaurant where the couple had just had dinner, the actor having returned inside to, he later told police, retrieve a gun he had accidentally forgotten. Needless to say, suspicion falls very quickly on the actor who will then be suspected of having ordered the crime to a former understudy. As Philippe Garnier said in Release at the time, the police had also found at Blake’s “a significant quantity of ammunition, as well as two Smith & Wesson, 38 and 40 caliber, and the inevitable Glock 40 caliber, the weapon of stars and gamblers”. But no trace of powder had been found on Blake at the time of the events. The victim, Bonny Lee Bakley, was herself in trouble with the law for a rich past as a celebrity con artist, multiplying false identities and married a dozen times, dabbled in shady affairs with Frankie Valli, Dean Martin and Jerry Lee Lewis or Christian Brando, son of Marlon Brando.
Blake will spend a year in jail before being acquitted and then again found responsible after a civil trial with the obligation to pay 30 million dollars to the four children of the victim.
“I lived on sleeping pills and junk food”
“Born Mickey Gubitosi, in New Jersey, Blake finds himself at age 5 in the MGM series of Little Rascals, wrote Garnier, then playing Little Beaver, Red Ryder’s redskin sidekick, in the eponymous soap opera, or even a Mexican child in John Huston’s Treasure of the Sierra Madre. Alcoholic father, absent mother, the actor has the troubled adolescence of many child-actors. He said he was locked in closets, beaten, sexually abused and forced to eat on the floor (his father committed suicide in 1955 at the age of 48). In 1967, Richard Brooke chose him to play Perry Smith, one of the two killers in In cold blood according to Truman Capote then he interprets the role of an Indian in Tell them Willie Boy of Abraham Polonsky or the policeman Electra Glide in Blue by James William Guercio. In 1986, he played the role of a priest working in a difficult district of Los Angeles in the series Hell Town, which he initiates but from which he resigns after a few episodes, disappearing from the radar: “I lived on sleeping pills and junk food. I was overweight. My face was puffy and I had old sad eyes. I got into the limo to go to Hell Town every morning, and I was so tense I had trouble breathing. One morning I realized that I was only days – maybe hours – away from putting a gun in my mouth and pulling the trigger.” will he tell the Los Angeles Times in 1992.
Blake never found his way back to the sets after his legal troubles were completely ruined by legal fees and the twists and turns of the case, Lost Highway appearing in the agonizing guise of the mystery man as a precipitate of damnation and his very last appearance on screen.