Robert Blake, born Robert Gubitosi ,whose acting career has spanned almost seven decades, is now playing the most difficult role of his life — murder defendant. He stands accused of killing his wife, Bonny Lee Bakley, a fame-crazed stalker.

Robert started out at 3 with his 2 siblings on the vaudeville circuit as the Three Little Hillbillies,and in Hollywood, Robert got a gig on "The Little Rascals," then as Little Beaver in the Red Ryder cowboy-and-Indian tales.(22 Films).

Blake appeared in almost 130 movies from 1939 to 1997, that included "Pork Chop Hill", "Electra Glide in Blue", ( recieving a Golden Globe nomination for best actor), "Tell Them Willie Boy Is Here", "In Cold Blood" ,major TV role, the tough-guy cop "Baretta," a gigantic hit.

Blake is considered a tough, good-looking guy with a boyish, mischievous grin who always dressed in black, had cellblock muscles and repeatedly told his Hollywood bosses where to get off.

There has been much lamentation of late that the country has been hijacked by religion. I agree. But everyone is talking about the wrong religion. The country was taken over a long time ago by the worship of fame and celebrity, a bizarre theology that kicked into high gear with the arrival of People magazine in 1974 and now corrodes every aspect of American life.

Nowhere are the problems that this worship poses more obvious, and troublesome, than in the career of Robert Blake, a great actor whose work was eclipsed long ago by his countless public appearances as "himself" — a tough, good-looking guy with a boyish, mischievous grin who always dressed in black, had cellblock muscles and repeatedly told his Hollywood bosses where to get off.

Blake, whose acting career has spanned almost seven decades, is now playing the most difficult role of his life — murder defendant. He stands accused of killing his wife, Bonny Lee Bakley, a fame-crazed stalker raised by a fame-crazed grandmother who fell in love with Blake while watching him talk street on Johnny Carson's show.

Bakley's grandmother was not alone. At one time, Blake was a major icon, adored by millions and generating ink spills of catastrophic proportions across the land. Today, in a culture that has reduced citizens to members of a "viewing audience," that believes style is substance and that actors are the characters they play, Blake may have trouble convincing a jury that essentially consists of fans, not peers, that he's innocent.

On trial for his life, he must now undo decades of work in which he has played killers and basked in the adoration of mobs who applauded him for being one — unlike, for instance, O.J. Simpson, whom a jury could not picture doing anything but carry a football and fly through airports in Hertz commercials. As Blake himself once told an interviewer, "Most people like me end up on death row, or in the graveyards, or in prison."

Blake was referring to his childhood of abuse at the hands of his father, but now that his prediction is on the line, his body of work as a film and television actor must be factored into the equation. He has appeared in dozens of films and television shows, turning in performances that were both stunningly spare and classic. "Don't give it to the audience," Blake once said. "Leave it to the audience."

He is perhaps the only remaining actor of his generation to have worked with Alfalfa and Rin Tin Tin as well as John Wayne, Claude Rains, Charlton Heston, John Garfield, Gregory Peck, Sidney Poitier and Spencer Tracy. In interviews, Blake has often credited Tracy for his acting style. "The two most important things in acting," Blake said Tracy told him, "are a child's imagination and a sense of truth."

Born in Nutley, N.J., in 1933 at the lowest point of the Depression, Blake — or Little Mickey as he was called then — came into show biz during the era of the child star. When Blake was 3, his father, James Gubitosi, a blacksmith, put his kids on the vaudeville circuit as the Three Little Hillbillies.

Soon, Gubitosi moved the family to Hollywood, where Shirley Temple and other diminutive, underage entertainers radiated America's future and made fortunes singing for their supper. It wasn't long before Mickey got a gig on "The Little Rascals," then as Little Beaver in the Red Ryder cowboy-and-Indian tales, and later as the street kid who sells Humphrey Bogart the winning lottery ticket in "The Treasure of the Sierra Madre," oddly prefiguring his shattering portrayal of Perry Smith in "In Cold Blood," who said to his partner Dick Hickock while the pair was on the run after killing the Clutter family, "Remember Bogart? … We could get us a couple of burros."

The lost boy

In the 1950s, Blake appeared in at least 15 films, including "Pork Chop Hill," a gritty black-and-white account of that futile and bloody Korean War battle that introduced audiences to one of the engaging characters in his actor's bag of tricks — a lost boy, here in the uniform of an Army private wandering through a blizzard of hissing machine-gun fire and exploding grenades. This lost boy would reappear in many of Blake's characterizations over the years.

It was in the 1960s and early '70s that Blake made his most memorable movies — a testament to the actor, the directors, writers and cinematographers of those movies as well as to the era that has often been cited as the heyday of American filmmaking.

In each of these movies, Blake was at the height of his acting powers, playing quintessential American characters who were self-reliant, explosive, tormented and stranded. This all added up to sex appeal, and in these movies, the dark, handsome and well-defined Blake had it in spades.

In "Electra Glide in Blue," a quasi-biker flick directed by James William Guercio and written by Robert Boris, Blake plays motorcycle cop John Wintergreen, a rugged, well-meaning Vietnam vet who patrols the Arizona desert while yearning for the homicide beat, so he can use his brains instead of pulling over hippies in vans. He gets his wish but runs into another problem — small-town corruption.

Finally, busted back down to the bike, he meets a brutal end on the highway to which all misfits are consigned, in the shadows of the spectacular red rocks of Monument Valley, Ariz. For his fine performance in this 1973 movie, Blake received a Golden Globe nomination for best actor.

In "Tell Them Willie Boy Is Here," a true story written and directed by Abraham Polonsky after he'd been blacklisted for 21 years, Blake plays a Paiute Indian who returns to the reservation near Twentynine Palms and resumes a romance with Lola (Katharine Ross). Lola's father disapproves of the relationship and attacks Willie Boy, who kills him in self-defense.

According to tribal law, Willie Boy can now claim Lola as his wife, but white lawman Christopher Cooper (Robert Redford) is pressured into charging Willie Boy with murder. Willie and Lola flee into the Mojave, pursued by the reluctant sheriff and a crowd of vigilantes. "You can't beat them," Lola tells Willie. "Maybe," he replies. "But they'll know I was here."

Blake's understated and subtle portrayal of the fugitive Indian who did not want to kill was a tribute to Willie Boy himself, a little-known 20th century Native American for whom there was no more time or space.

The masterpiece of Blake's career is his performance in "In Cold Blood." Just as the Truman Capote book on which the film is based is the font from which a sea of crime-related narrative nonfiction flows, this 1967 film is the progenitor of countless true-crime films, cop shows, "Cold Case," "American Justice," Court TV and even Dick Wolf's career. Although the film is now almost 40 years old, it still stands as one of the most chilling crime stories ever made.

Written and directed by Richard Brooks, "In Cold Blood," as the saying goes, is as serious as a heart attack. Tipping its stylistic hat to film noir and the morgue, it was shot in black and white, almost in documentary style, so faithful to Capote's book (itself a heightened version of reality) that it seems real.

The killing of the Clutters by Hickock and Smith is reenacted in the family's actual Kansas house; six of the jurors from the murder trial appear as themselves in the movie; spectators in the crowd scene outside the courthouse include some who had actually watched the killers arrive for their trial. Most important, Blake and Scott Wilson (who played Dick Hickock, the other half of the killing machine) conjure up frightening characters who seem real, so real that it's as if they just walked out of a jail cell and into your bedroom.

With his sad, abused and lost-child character now peering out from behind the skin of a desperate and lonely ex-con, Blake creates an American figure who is one for the ages — a narcissistic man/boy with fantasies of buried treasure, artistic desire and a killer's heart. "I thought Mr. Clutter was a very nice gentleman," his big-eyed and sincere character tells a preacher before he swings from the gallows. "I thought so right up to the time I cut his throat."

Two years ago, Anthony Hopkins visited Blake in jail, telling him that he studied his performance as Perry Smith before he played Hannibal Lecter.

Small-screen stardom

In the mid-'70s, at his peak in terms of critical acclaim, Blake chose the easy money and accepted a major TV role, the tough-guy cop "Baretta," kind of a caricature of the other tough-guy roles he had played. Once again, the gig oddly prefigured reality; in the pilot episode, Baretta's new wife was killed like Bakley outside an Italian restaurant.

"Baretta" was a gigantic hit and catapulted Blake into the upper tier of popularity. A litany of Blake-originated dialogue entered national speech, including the oft-uttered and perhaps now prescient "Don't do the crime if you can't do the time."

In the National Rummy, his fan-club newspaper, Blake wrote, "I'm an actor, and I'm not interested in becoming a 'personality' in the Hollywood sense of the word." But in fact Blake already was a "personality" and suggesting that he wasn't was a component of that gig, which he did regularly on "The Tonight Show." In 1978 he left "Baretta," and by 1980, with his persona sealed as a professional Joe Six-Pack, he slid into a thick fog of drugs and booze, making the occasional TV movie, including "Of Mice and Men," which he produced and starred in with Randy Quaid.

In 1997, Blake was once again involved in a strange bit of foreshadowing when he surfaced in David Lynch's "Lost Highway," a movie about a man accused of killing his wife. Here he played the ghoulish Mystery Man who laughs demonically when asked, "Who are you?" — suggesting layer upon layer of irony, from "Wouldn't you like to know?" to "Wouldn't I like to know?"

The idea of casting Blake as the face of death was hailed by art-house fans as cool, but really, Blake had gone from great to caricature to kitsch, another American talent sucked dry, and it was sad. As Blake himself might have said, though, "Dat's da name of dat tune."

And therein lies his problem: It wasn't really Robert Blake who said that, it was Baretta. No, maybe it was Blake doing Baretta doing Blake on a talk show. And what did he really mean?

Whoever it was, Blake is such a good actor that he's now trapped inside a hall of mirrors. At a recent pretrial hearing, he even confounded Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Darlene Schempp over the question of whether a recorded phone call should be admitted as evidence.

Blake said it showed his anger toward Bakley. Schempp said it was "conciliatory," not "threatening."

What Blake couldn't say in response was that sometimes people sound conciliatory when they are in fact angry. It's called acting and we all do it. But if he had said that, he would have sounded like a liar, when in reality he might have been telling the truth. Subtext may be mandatory on the stage, but it doesn't win acquittals.

For Robert Blake to convince a jury that he's innocent, he's going to have to supersede the Perry Smith/Baretta/ticked-off every-guy-who-hates-his-job that everyone thinks of him as and take on a character he has not yet played — a man wrongly accused of murder. If he can do this — deliver the performance of his life — he'll not only break the dreaded curse of Our Gang (Stymie was a longtime junkie, Alfalfa was murdered), he'll have a brand-new career — as a song-and-dance man, which he has often told interviewers was his dream all along.

He says he regrets not having been cast as Sky Masterson, the part immortalized by Marlon Brando in "Guys and Dolls." So far, the closest he's gotten is hooking up with Bakley, who had a fling with Christian Brando before she met Blake. But he evidently has a very good voice.

Shortly before Bakley was killed, he took her on a trip to the Sierra town of Three Rivers. One night, he and Bakley visited a local resident. "He seemed very sad," the resident told me a while ago. "He asked if he could borrow my guitar." The child star once known as Little Mickey strummed a few chords and began a song.

It was "Over the Rainbow."

Deanne Stillman covered the Robert Blake case for Rolling Stone. She is the author of "Twentynine Palms: A True Story of Murder, Marines, and the Mojave" (William Morrow).

For Mickey Gubitosi, it's the role of a lifetime
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