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Blood Cold
Fame, Sex, and Murder in Hollywood
By Dennis McDougal, Mary Murphy OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA
Copyright © 2002 Dennis McDougal and Mary Murphy
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-5040-0596-8
CHAPTER 1
One hot summer night at the end of August, Robert Blake attended a birthday party for comedian Chuck McCann at Chadney's Restaurant. A onetime steak and chop shop, the Burbank nightspot was located on a sliver of prime real estate directly across the street from the NBC studios, where Blake had once enjoyed many of his finest hours as a regular guest on the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson.
But it was now the summer of 1998. Carson was retired, and Chadney's had long since gone to seed, just like many of its patrons. In its waning days, the downstairs level of the venerable old eatery still served as one of Southern California's few well-known jazz venues and Blake had come to hear pianist Ross Tompkins accompanying renowned trumpet master Jack Sheldon. Observed Sheldon with affection, "Bobby's always been a great fan."
But Bonny Bakley wasn't. She preferred doo-wop and rockabilly to jazz, Chubby Checker to Charles Mingus. She remembered Chuck McCann when he was younger, thinner and had more hair, hosting an afternoon kiddies' show on TV in New York. That was back in the 1960s when Bonny herself was a kid growing up impoverished in rural northeast New Jersey. She watched McCann and she watched American Bandstand—two of her favorite after-school TV escape valves in a childhood that included incest, rape and regular beatings from an alcoholic father—a general Dickensian lifestyle that would have given Oliver Twist night sweats.
Now that Bonny was all grown-up, McCann seemed a lot older to her. So did the trumpet player and the dozens of other fogies who had gathered at Chadney's to listen, schmooze and reminisce. They were flabby and wrinkled and showed their age—something that Bonny simply could not abide. She fought growing old, gracefully or otherwise. The old guys up on the dais with McCann and Sheldon weren't bothered by age, though. They had come that night to remember how sweet it all was, and Robert Blake was very much a part of their crowd.
Bonny—or Leebonny, as she was known on the Hollywood party circuit—had come for entirely different reasons. She was powdered and perfumed and ready to romp and roll with a star. The forty-two-year-old bleached blonde lived in Memphis, but she'd been flying in and out of L.A. regularly since Dean Martin died on Christmas Day 1995. Martin had everything Bonny had been looking for in a man: money, celebrity and an insatiable sex drive. She stalked Martin at his favorite watering holes in Beverly Hills and West Hollywood. She'd finally managed to sidle up to the aging crooner at La Familia or the Hamburger Hamlet, where he ate once a week, and even got him to pose with her once for a snapshot. Bonny giggled about the moment with all her girlfriends, staying on the phone for hours the way bobbysoxers do when one has just been felt up for the first time by the captain of the football team. "He told me he loved my legs," said best friend Judy Howell. "'Wouldn't you just love to hug those legs?' he told me." Bonny was jealous.
Bonny calculated that she was within weeks of seducing Dean Martin into dropping his trousers and making her his mistress. Thus, the day that the seventy-eight-year-old ex-Rat Packer finally expired from decades of inhaling martini-flavored cigarettes, Bonny wept as long and as loud back at home in Tennessee as did Martin's ex-wife Jeanne in Beverly Hills, who maintained the death vigil at Martin's bedside.
"Bonny took his dying real hard," recalled Bonny's ex-husband Paul Gawron. "She didn't stop crying for a week."
But despite her broken heart and bitter disappointment, Bonny had also fallen in love with Southern California. Her frequent visits to L.A. had given her a taste for the moderate weather and the perpetual sunshine. Los Angeles had none of the snow she'd grown up with in northern New Jersey, nor the smelly sauna heat of summertime in Memphis.
Throw in the celebrity-strewn night life, the thousands of horny, well-heeled septuagenarian males, and the loosey morality of an aging motion picture colony powered by the twin engines of Viagra and easy money, and Bonny thought she'd simply died and gone to grifter's paradise.
She never did anything by halves, so she announced her decision to become an Angeleno as ostentatiously as possible. She paid $3,500 to rent a billboard on the Sunset Strip, where she displayed her smiling portrait and her phone number, should any bright young talent scout be shrewd enough to want to snap her up and sign her to a contract. None did, but Bonny Bakley had never been easily discouraged.
A year after Dean Martin's death, she even purchased a house in Thousand Oaks just beyond the northernmost end of the San Fernando Valley, about an hour's drive from downtown Los Angeles. She rented it out temporarily, though her eventual plan was to move her three children, ex-husband Paul, and her "mail order" business out to California.
Everyone Bonny knew agreed that her business was a natural for El Lay and the San Fernando Val-Lay in particular. As commemorated in the docudrama Boogie Nights (1997), the Valley had evolved over the last decades of the twentieth century into the capital of American pornography. At one time or another behind warehouse walls from Reseda to Canoga Park, any and all sexual behaviors—no matter how stupid, demeaning, or disgusting—had been recorded on tape. Twosomes, threesomes, gruesomes.... you name it, the Valley had filmed it.
Bonny Lee Bakley had never held down a real job—not because she was incapable, but because it became a point of honor not to. Jobs were for pinheads who couldn't earn a living any other way. Bonny supported herself, her three children, her ex-husband and a variety of friends, relatives and hangers-on by selling lurid photos of herself and other women through the classifieds in the back of swinger publications. She further fleeced the lonely men who wrote to her by promising sex but ultimately swindling them out of whatever money, credit, insurance or property they had.
"In one word, I'd describe her as a thief," said Gawron, her first cousin, second husband and father of three of her four children. "If she had put her mind on something else, she could have been a whiz. It's just a shame that everything she did was crooked."
Bonny started out in her teens with classifieds of the "lonely young thing seeking older man" variety, and soon she began creating her own database of prospective marks and branching out into a nationwide mail-order scam. She'd string her pen pals out as long as she could, milking them for everything from Greyhound bus fare or airline tickets to credit cards and money that she claimed she needed desperately for medical bills. There was a favorite aunt in the hospital or a sister who'd lost her welfare benefits and couldn't scrape up enough to feed her newborn.
If her victims continued to respond, Bonny would run property, asset and credit checks to determine their net worth. On the bigger scores, she worked Social Security scams, juggling numbers and forging signatures so that checks meant for her victims were rerouted instead directly to her. In rare cases, she'd even marry a mark if she thought his personal fortune or life insurance policy was big enough.
"Don't ask me how she did it," said Gawron, who remained her partner in the mail-order business long after they were divorced. "I can't even make a long-distance phone call."
While Bonny worked the mailing lists and lonely-hearts ads to pay the rent, her ultimate goal was to land a celebrity. Her grandmother advised her early to get herself a tough little rich guy, like James Cagney or Frank Sinatra, and do whatever it took to hold on to him. Grandma suggested Elvis, but he up and died too soon.
Bonny tried becoming a celebrity herself for a while, but concluded it was just too much work. "If I'd kept romance out of my life, it would have been possible," she said. "But I would have had to be like Katharine Hepburn and it was too hard. I kept falling for somebody. So I thought: 'Why not fall for a movie star instead of being one?' It's more fun. I like being around celebrities. It makes you feel better than other people."
As a teenager, Bonny felt a strong psychic bond with Frankie Valli, the lead singer for the 1960s pop group the Four Seasons. In her twenties she graduated from Valli to 1950s rock pioneer Jerry Lee Lewis. By her thirties she grew beyond childish rock and roll fancies and migrated to Hollywood, where fantasy was a way of life. Now she was in her early forties, and the same celebrity obsession had brought her to Chadney's on this fateful Sunday evening.
A parade of ancients took the stage and made birthday cracks about McCann. "They did bits," recalled Mark Canavi, a young stand-up impressionist who once worked as Robert Blake's personal assistant and who accompanied him to the restaurant that night. It wasn't a roast of the Dean Martin variety exactly. Bonny would have recognized that right away, having studied the Martin oeuvre well before she put her first moves on the old man. But there were still plenty of clever insults flying in Rickles fashion as the evening wore on.
Bonny had come with Will Jordan, a veteran New York comic who'd made a career of impersonating Ed Sullivan. Nearly twice her age, Jordan had been Bonny's entrée to parties before. He asked her to come along this night because he didn't drive and Bonny did. They'd known each other since she was seventeen, and while any romance between them had cooled long ago, Bonny still used him to get close to celebrities.
"They used each other," said her sister Margerry. "Whenever Will needed a young woman on his arm for a party or something, he'd call Bonny."
Jordan introduced her to Blake, who was in rare form that night. While everyone else wore evening clothes, Robert had on a sleeveless black T-shirt and jeans. He might have been facing his sixty-fifth birthday in less than three weeks, but his daily exercise regimen had paid off in a well-muscled torso and thick, tanned biceps. Add to that the face-lift he'd gotten five years earlier and the weekly dyeing ritual that kept his thinning gray hair thick and black, and—presto! Robert Blake was a virile young leading man once again.
Bonny had her own wrinkling to contend with. She'd just celebrated her forty-second birthday, and the flesh she'd depended upon to earn a living since she was a teenager had begun to lose its youthful vitality, drooping, swelling and gathering in folds. Prescription pills and fad diets helped, but only temporarily. She too had been through cosmetic surgery, and years of peroxide, dye and color rinse had left her hair as blowsy as a fright wig. When she let it go too long, she could see the occasional silver weed growing among her natural brunette roots.
When Canavi excused himself to the men's room, Bonny followed him. She was waiting outside the door when he emerged.
"You're with Robert Blake?" she asked.
Canavi nodded and smiled.
"Could I have his telephone number?"
Canavi was taken aback by her brass for a moment, but recovered enough to answer: "If you want his phone number, you'd better ask him yourself."
Apparently she took his advice because when he returned from the bar, she was all over Blake. On this magic evening, deception seemed to work just fine for both Bonny and Robert. Bonny sidled up, giggling every time Blake opened his mouth. Blake sat up a little straighter, clowned a little more convincingly and fell into his surefire Baretta banter, peppering his punch lines with Jersey-esque "dese" and "dat's."
New Jersey was something they had in common. He was born north of Newark, in an older Italian neighborhood with tree-lined streets and a pub on every other corner. She was born farther west, out in Morristown, where the Irish and German riffraff mixed with the horsy crowd.
Blake and Bonny left early, and they left together, laughing and leering. Once they were alone in the parking lot, according to Bonny's sister, Blake behaved like a teenager in heat. He was all over her before they even climbed into the front seat of his SUV. Bonny left her car behind at Chadney's. Will Jordan would get back to the hotel somehow. He was a resourceful old coot. What was important right now was fending off Robert Blake's advances, but not too hard.
"At every stoplight he'd stop and grab her and, like, make out with her," said Margerry.
Blake mentioned nothing about prostate problems that occasionally made it hard for him to get an erection, and Bonny did not reveal that she wore a support corset to ease the pain of a slipped disc and keep her weighty breasts from sliding around like pudgy jellyfish. As they drove east, back toward Bonny's hotel, it was summer and there was passion in the night.
Bonny was half naked before they even pulled into the parking lot of the Beverly Garland Holiday Inn. Named for the blond B-movie "scream queen" who appeared in My Three Sons, Gunsmoke, Remington Steele and a host of other TV Land chestnuts, the down market hotel was located at the crotch of the Hollywood and Ventura Freeways—the perfect spot for Bonny and Blake to consummate their passion. In fact, Robert took her right there, in the rear of his SUV. If the windows weren't tinted it didn't matter because they more than made up for it with aerobic breathing. By the time they finished rutting like happy, healthy terriers pent up far too long in separate kennels, the windows were damp with condensation.
Sated and happy, Bobby then said a fond good night. He did not offer, nor did she request, a service fee of any kind. Instead, they exchanged telephone numbers and promised to keep in touch. As her newest paramour drove off into the night, she saw his personalized license plate: SAYZWHO.
Bonny quickly made her way back to her room. She couldn't wait to call her friends back home in Memphis.
CHAPTER 2
By the end of the 1990s, Robert Blake no longer needed to work. Shrewd investing and a frugal lifestyle had ensured him a secure retirement. In late 1998, he made preparations to deed over a pair of homes he'd owned for years to Noah and Delinah, his two grown children from his first marriage. Meanwhile, he continued to live comfortably and alone at his self-styled "Mata Hari Ranch," working out in his home exercise room each morning and dancing occasionally in the mirrored tap dancing salon next to his gym.
"He would get up in the morning at six A.M. and work out," said Mark Canavi. "And he wouldn't just work out. He would be in his gym for four hours, working on all kinds of stuff. He had a sauna in there, and he would listen to ragtime or jazz during the whole time. He loved Alice Faye, Doris Day, the Mills Brothers. He'd listen to this stuff for hours while he was working out."
Blake avoided junk food and steered clear of drugs or excessive alcohol. He'd admitted years earlier that he was an addict and could never do anything in moderation. "If a Hershey bar makes me feel better, I'll have a bathtub of them tomorrow," he once told a reporter. "I stopped smoking twenty-five years ago, and just started smoking again a week ago, and I went to an A.A. meeting this morning. Anything that takes me out of how I feel, I abuse. I don't give a fuck what it is—food, alcohol, nicotine, sleeping pills, uppers, downers, sideways, whatever. If it changes how I feel, I use a lot of it."
So he stuck only to those addictions that he believed were good for him. No fast food. No lethargy. He might be getting older, but Blake refused to "lay around the house and become like a piece of Italian sausage," as he told one acquaintance.
For the most part, Robert Blake kept to himself. His was the only place at the west end of Dilling Street that was surrounded by a six-foot wrought iron fence. Visitors were stopped at the locked front gate until they identified themselves. If the wiry actor lapsed into one of his infrequent glooms, he'd stay indoors and seldom open the door. Once, in a poem he liked to quote, he'd even described himself to friends as an old, blind bear, wandering the winter woods alone:
Too mean to die; too lost to care;
But show some caution, he's still the bear.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Blood Cold by Dennis McDougal, Mary Murphy. Copyright © 2002 Dennis McDougal and Mary Murphy. Excerpted by permission of OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA.
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