Blake, Dunne, and Capote

Where to begin on Robert Blake? I was struck, reading various obituaries, by 1) just how long he’d lived; 2) just how many different periods of his long life seemed touched by crime (abuse in his childhood, the In Cold Blood role, struggles with addiction/rage in the seventies, the murder of an alleged grifter wife, Bonny Lee Bakley, he evidently didn’t want to marry in the first place); and 3) just how many of the headlines iterated on “Baretta star accused of killing his wife.”

I might think about the obit-lede algo more than the average citizen, granted, but this is in fact what stuck with me about the coverage. A couple heds refer to Blake as “actor,” and a few others mention In Cold Blood or Lost Highway, but mostly it’s Baretta, a TV show that by definition would have been a comedown for a former film “name” in that era — and that on top of that is a weird go-to reference given how goddamn hard it is to, say, track down an episode of the show for a Dennis Quaid podcast.