Playboy Interview: Robert Blake

In January of 1975, a brooding, combative actor named Robert Blake made his debut in the title role of ABC-TV's "Baretta"--and within four months, he'd nailed down the stardom that had eluded him throughout the course of a lifelong show-business career. Now in its third season, "Baretta" differs little from the rest of TV's urban shoot-'em-ups, save in this respect: Blake's violent detective approaches his job as if he were a closet social worker. Baretta's greatest pleasure--aside from thwarting the baddies and baiting his bosses--lies in straightening out the confused lives of the show's various victims, and on most episodes, everyone's a victim, including the hero himself. Still, Blake's bravura portrayal of this singular, streetwise hawkshaw won him a well-deserved first-season Emmy, and if he managed to skip the following year's televised award ceremonies, no one in the entertainment field was particularly surprised. It was, after all, perfectly in keeping with the ongoing legend of Robert Blake, Hollywood pariah.

Arguing with producers, decking directors, alienating his fellow actors, Blake has earned his reputation as a difficult man to work with. Now 43, he has been a performer for more than four decades, during which industry executives have often questioned his temperament, but never his talent. Born Michael Gubitosi, Blake was in a family song-and-dance team as a tot. He broke into films in 1939, when he began appearing in the "Our Gang" series. In the mid-Forties, he played Little Beaver in the "Red Ryder" serials and also took part in several features. His first, in 1943, was "Andy Hardy's Double Life"; in 1945, he appeared with Jack Benny in "The Horn Blows at Midnight" and, in 1948, he played the Mexican boy who sells Humphrey Bogart a newspaper in "The Treasure of the Sierra Madre." In the Fifties and Sixties, Blake increasingly turned to TV, and when not a punk for "The FBI," he was often employed in the same capacity on a slew of sagebrush sagas, among them "Rawhide," "Wagon Train," "Bat Masterson," "Laramie" and "Have Gun, Will Travel." Maintaining a continuing, if increasingly hostile, relationship with the motion-picture business, Blake took part in such cinematic turkeys as "Revolt in the Big House," "Battle Flame," "The Purple Gang" and "Town Without Pity." He finally hit it big in 1967, when he starred in the film version of Truman Capote's "In Cold Blood." Stardom seemed to be his for the asking--but Blake, depressed by his role as executed killer Perry Smith, dropped out of acting for two years. He resurfaced in "Tell Them Willie Boy Is Here," which marked the first of four successive box-office bombs in which he'd be featured. By the time "Baretta" went on the air, Robert Blake's career was badly in need of a tune-up.

To interview television's most volatile performer, Playboy sent free-lancer Lawrence Linderman to meet with Blake at Universal Studios, where he was hard at work filming this year's "Baretta." (Linderman had an assist from Karen Colaianni Johnson, who posed some additional questions in another session.) Linderman reports:

"It's always difficult to really know what any actor is like, because, being actors, they dissemble without apparent effort. Of course, being journalists, we try to see beneath all the mock self-deprecation and heartfelt self-adulation, and we then take our best shot. On Robert Blake, my best shot is this: The guy's a sentimental pushover, a pussycat. That's not to intimate for even a fraction of a second that he doesn't have claws; he does and, when riled, he'll curl up in a ball and strike out fiercely at whatever's bugging him at the moment--and, for Blake, those moments continue to pop up far too often. Even so, there's an endearing innocence to the guy that is, I think, at the heart of his finest performances.

"In the meantime, he's pugnacious as hell. In his shitkicker boots, he stands about 5'9" and weights in around 170 pounds. He dresses in standard Baretta garb--hackie hat, football jersey and jeans. When not in the jersey, he favors dark T-shirts, the better to show off his biceps. Blake began lifting weights to beef up for the part of Perry Smith. At his peak, he could bench press 250 pounds, which makes him strong enough to crush his beer cans in one hand.

"Blake has since stopped working out and his exercise these days is restricted to riding 125-c.c. dirt bikes in the desert. The last time he rode a street machine, he was knocked cold after he and his 650-c.c. Triumph went flying off Mulholland Drive and down the side of a steep hill. Blake was revived by what he thought was blood running down his face, but when he opened his eyes, it turned out to be transmission oil--dripping from his cycle, which was perched in the branches of a tree directly overhead. Recalling the incident, he told me, 'It was like Louie upstairs was saying, "Next time, I'm gonna drop the motherfucker on you." That's when I quit.'

"When we began taping, it quickly became clear that Blake lives on an emotional roller coaster; there were few moments during our hours of conversation when he wasn't either irate, giggling or deeply moved. Since he had lately reserved his biggest cannonballs for video executives (and announced in late March that he was leaving 'Baretta' when his contract ran out at the end of the 1977--1978 season in order to concentrate on feature films), it seemed logical to open the interview by asking him about his troubled romance with television."

[Q] Playboy: Judging by your frequent complaints about television, you seem to have risen to the top of an industry you truly detest--or is that just a pose?

[A] Blake: It ain't no act, but it's nothin' personal, either. I don't like any institutions, whether they're the Ford Motor Company, the Government, the Catholic Church--or the television industry. Television is one terrible, bullshit, inhuman world, and everybody who does a series on TV and cares about what he does has gotta be unhappy on TV. The reason for that, pardner, is that as soon as you go on the air, your series becomes a thing called product. No matter how much of Universal's money gets spent making Baretta, or how good I try to make it or how bad it turns out, Universal gets about the same price from ABC as it does for any other show it makes. Which is why they tell me, "Be like The Six Million Dollar Man--it comes in on time, it's cheap and it's no trouble. We don't want your noise about quality, we don't give a shit about that, 'cause all it does is cost us money, time and heartache."

[Q] Playboy: How do you respond to that?

[A] Blake: I can understand it. If Universal gets $400,000 from ABC for each episode of Baretta and I spend $420,000, they're in a hole. So they'll come up to me and say, "What're you fuckin' around for? Make the piece of shit for $300,000 and we get to pocket $100,000 to start with."

[A] On the other hand, if you make a film, they'll say, "Gee, let's put all the heart we can in it, because it's only one shot and we want to look great." In films, you go through all the preparations to get laid and you finally get to do it. But in television, you never get laid. You keep fuckin', all right, but nothin' ever happens.

[Q] Playboy: You've been talking as if you run Baretta, not merely star in it. Is that the case?

[A] Blake: Yeah, and it's probably due to the way Baretta got started. In '74, I signed a contract with Universal to make four TV movies, two of which would be pilots. I got there in the middle of the TV season and ABC was then in the shit-house and trying to figure out a way to impiove its ratings. A guy named Michael Eisner was running ABC's program department and when he found out I'd signed with Universal, he called 'em and said, "You got Blake under contract, right? Put him in a midseason replacement."

[A] Well, Universal had a defunct detective series named Toma that had run on ABC, and Eisner agreed that if the studio could deliver me and Roy Huggins--a name producer--he'd go with the idea of Toma for a pilot. In other words, ABC told Universal to put me into a detective show, and that's all there was to it. For the next four or five weeks, I went around town rounding up friends of mine to be producers, directors and writers, and, along with them, I invented Baretta.

[Q] Playboy: What were the people at Universal doing while you were conducting your private talent search?

[A] Blake: They weren't doing jack shit. Once they got the ABC commitment for 12 episodes, they didn't give a fuck whether I did a remake of Columbo or Donald Duck. From the day I got here, I've done everything there is to do on Baretta. The job fell to me because Baretta is a bastard child. On other successful shows, the people who created 'em stay there and love 'em, baby 'em and take care of them. But nobody was home when I walked in, so me and guys like photographer Harry Wolf, executive producer Bernie Kowalski and director Don Medford had to keep inventing the show as it went along. The first 12 shows were like an anthology; every episode was very different from the previous ones, because we were reachin' and findin' and fuckin' around. It wasn't until the following season that we got it solidified into something I knew I liked.

[Q] Playboy: Didn't the Universal executives object to your assumption of power?

[A] Blake: Oh, sure. They had directors under contract that they wanted to use for the show, but I told 'em to forget it; I knew better people, and that was gonna be that. Listen, Universal does hundreds of shows a year, and it's all just so much sausage to them. I only had one shot, and it was gonna be my shot, so I told 'em to get the fuck out of my way.

[Q] Playboy: Did they take kindly to that?

[A] Blake: They didn't take to it at all. They threatened me with just about everything they could think of, but you gotta expect that when you're screwin' around with millions of dollars. And believe me, there's much more money in television than there is in the movie industry. You'll find a couple of movies here and there that gross $40,000,000, but on a day-to-day basis, the millions involved in TV are fuckin' astronomical. And when you're in people's pockets for that kind of scratch--and those kinds of pockets always belong to people who are successful--you're gonna come up against some trouble. When you go up to the 15th floor of Universal's black tower and tell 'em you're gonna do it your way, they're sittin' there saying, "You got a total of 16 and a half hours on the air and you're gonna do it your way? Listen, you'll do whatever the fuck we tell you to do."

[A] I wasn't very fancy in answering 'em: I told 'em one of us would be goin' out the fuckin' window and that I'm pretty tough. I mean, that's what it got down to. There were times when we were shooting and they were around, and I'd say. "Now, either I'm leaving this set or you're leaving, but before that happens, you and me are gonna be all over the fuckin' floor and one of us in gonna stay there--bloody." That kind of thing went on till about the middle of the second season and, at that point, I think most of 'em just gave up.

[Q] Playboy: How were you able to prevail?

[A] Blake: Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, 'cause I'm the meanest mother-fucker in the valley. I did tell one guy on the 15th floor that I was gonna throw him out the window, and I threatened to punch people on the set more than once. Every time they got dirty, I got dirtier. I'd go on The Tonight Show and tell the whole world how full of shit Universal was, until whenever they heard I was goin' on with Johnny Carson, they'd get paranoid, and that's a mild word for it.

[A] But there's also this to remember: Them people up there ain't scared of nothin'. Trust me: They ain't scared of nothin'. They have more tools, more weapons, more know-how and more manpower than you could ever imagine. It just so happens that I was holdin' better cards than they were. Baretta was a mid-season replacement, ABC needed it fast and Universal found itself dealin' with an old, scarred war vet, not some wide-eyed bimpy-dimp from out of town.

[Q] Playboy: Hasn't all this merely served to add to your reputation as a perennial enfant terrible?

[A] Blake: I'd say that there's all kinds of bullshit about me goin' around right now, probably because Cher isn't having a baby and there's nothing else to write about. I just heard a story from Samantha Eggar about how I fuck every chick I work with, and she didn't hear that once, she heard it 40 times. Ain't that interesting? I'm the same guy I was two years ago, and back then, nobody even accused me of fucking a turtle. Hollywood used to be very colorful; Bogey would go to a restaurant and punch somebody out, but not too much is happenin' right now, so you get all this noise about Blake's being undisciplined. It's all bullshit.

[Q] Playboy: Have you never punched out a director?

[A] Blake: Well, yeah, I hit a director once-- a long time ago.

[Q] Playboy: What happened?

[A] Blake: He fell down.

[Q] Playboy: Thanks for the lucid explanation. Would you care to fill us in on the details?

[A] Blake: Sure. After he fell down, a water bottle landed on him. The last thing I remember was him lyin' there with this big, five-gallon jug on his chest and water splashing out onto his face and the guy going glug-glug-glug. It happened on a TV show. I was playing the son of a very old actor and he happened to be holdin' everything up because he couldn't remember his lines. We were so far behind schedule because of him, in fact, that the network sent some suits down to the set to see what was wrong, and when they got there, this prick of a director points a finger at me! I actually saw him do it: The network guys are yelling at him and he's pointing at me, so I go right up to 'em and say, "I'm ready to go. I ain't havin' no fuckin' problems. I know my jokes and I'm ready--let's shoot."

[A] Well, the suits take a walk and the director starts yellin' at me, saying how dare I walk over to him while he's talkin' to the executives, yadayadayada. I said I knew what he told them, and then we really started yellin' at each other, until something clicked in my head and I told him to get away from me. The best thing I could do was leave, so I started over to the door, but the guy followed me, which was a mistake. As I opened the stage door, he put his hand on my shoulder--and I turned around and dumped him. And that was the end of that. Then I got fired from another show because they didn't like what I was doin' and, after that, I wound up not working for a couple of years, so I taught acting for a living. And then I went back to work.

[A] But all this talk about me being some kind of monster is a load of shit. If you go to some of the people I've worked with--directors like John Huston, Lewis Milestone and Richard Brooks, or a producer like Mike Frankovich--you'll find out that I'm a fairly professional, disciplined worker. But because I'm now in an environment that gives rise to mediocre work from mediocre people, I've become a madman.

[Q] Playboy: In what sense?

[A] Blake: It's like being the coach of a football team. If the team is shitty, the coach has gotta go crazy to get 'em stoked up. And if the team is great, he lays buck and cools it. If I bring in a writer I know is good and he does shitty work for Baretta, I go crazy. If a director's no good, I fire him. Or try to make him better. I do the same thing to actors. If one of 'em comes on the set and treats Baretta like it's just another job, he gets my foot up his ass.

[Q] Playboy: Do you ever think that you're unrealistic in terms of what you demand from people you hire?

[A] Blake: I think I'm very realistic, and you'd be surprised how 99 percent of them people measure up to their capacities and are pleased for having done so. And want to come back. Believe me, the problem with television has nothing to do with money, or time, or even the limitations of the people involved in it. TV's real limitation comes from the industry's prevailing attitudes. It's like you could go to Detroit and find people workin' on assembly lines who are capable of building beautiful, handmade cars--if you were to put firecrackers up their asses and stoke 'em up to their full potential. But it doesn't happen in Detroit, for much the same reason it doesn't happen on television.

[A] At the same time, though, I think that the best things on TV today, like The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman and Harvest of Shame, are better than anything done during the Playhouse 90 period that everyone always talks about. The real trouble is that the chasm between the best and the worst of TV has been spreading out; today, you get a lot worse things on the air than you used to. But the best keep gettin' better.

[Q] Playboy: Are you sure you're not a paid lobbyist for the National Association of Broadcasters? Or do you just have very high hopes for television?

[A] Blake: I do have great hopes for TV, and you probably think that's strange because of all the drivel written about me. I also have great hopes for humanity, for America, for me. I'm really a very positive person, and 90 percent of the time, I see an almost unrealistic, positive side of life.

[Q] Playboy: Doesn't that lead to terrible downers ten percent of the time?

[A] Blake: Well, I probably get worse depressions than most people--but the highs are a bitch! But, yeah, I get down, and sometimes it's pretty bad. Three years ago, I wound up in a fuckin' hospital, starin' at the walls and askin', "What's the matter?"

[Q] Playboy: What was the matter?

[A] Blake: I had reached the end of a period of tremendous hope and energy--and tremendous mistakes that I made--in the film industry. About four years ago, I killed myself actin' in a film called Electra Glide in Blue. When you give your blood for a film, takin' no money because you believe in it, and then you see a release campaign filled with shit, well, it's kind of upsettin'. Electra Glide should've been released quietly and simply, like the small film it was, and if it had the dignity of a Marty or the outrage of an Easy Rider, you could trust the audience to find out. Instead, the producers tried to sell the American public with such horseshit that as soon as people walked into a theater, they had to be disappointed, because they were walking in with a grudge.

[Q] Playboy: Are you referring to the heavy publicity build-up given to Electra Glide's director, James William Guercio?

[A] Blake: Right. I still have a copy of the movie poster in my office, and on the top, it says something like "America's Greatest New Director!" I remember going over to see Electra Glide the night it opened in Westwood. In the lobby was a 12-foot picture of Guercio wearing jodhpurs and riding boots and holdin'a whip. That shocked even my tender soul, so you can imagine what it did to people in the theater, who were sayin', "What kind of shit is this?"

[A] The American people, man, they're wonderful. They're not dumb and they're not naïve. You can't fool them fuckin' farmers in Iowa, which is what most of the folks in Hollywood would like to believe. It doesn't work that way. America survives because of Iowa, not in spite of it.

[A] Anyway, that's the story of Electra Glide. My next film, Busting, was gonna be commercial. It was comedy, I was gonna be workin' with Elliott Gould--who's a hell of an actor--and I needed a movie, if I wanted to stay in the industry. It was all bullshit. Busting was a bigger mistake than Electra Glide.

[Q] Playboy: Is that one of acting's major occupational hazards--picking the wrong film to appear in?

[A] Blake: Sure, but if you're an artist, you're not gonna bat a thousand anyway. Van Gogh and Modigliani had periods of brilliance; writers do, actors do, and so do directors. John Huston, for example, got together with Bogart and made four or five great films, but he also made a ton of shit. Orson Welles had a golden age and then made junk afterward. Richard Brooks, who directed In Cold Blood, is very creative, but, like most of us, he's his own worst enemy. I love him, so I think I can say this: He picks the worst projects to get involved in. Sometimes, I want to go up to him and say, "Richard, what's the matter with you? You're a brilliant, sensitive, creative throwback to another era, and there ain't many of you left. What the fuck are you doin'?" I mean, he'll go from making a great picture like In Cold Blood to something like Dollars, with Warren Beatty and Goldie Hawn. In the meantime, he'll pass up films he had first shot at, like The Godfather and Patton. I think the thing that affects him and me and most of us is that we're self-destructive and about half nuts; and so we do the bidding of the Devil that lives within us--and we wind up making trash.

[Q] Playboy: Isn't there a way to protect yourself from that?

[A] Blake: Hey, nobody goes into something thinking it's gonna fail or wanting it to fail. Somehow or other, you justify whatever the hell you're doing. Listen, I was just as positive about making Busting as I was about making In Cold Blood.

[Q] Playboy: Were you offered parts in better films than Busting?

[A] Blake: Yeah, but I hadn't gotten the parts I wanted. I was number two in line for Lenny and number two in line for The Godfather; I was becoming Mr. Second String Charley around town. Instead of just sayin', "Well, fuck the movies, I'll do a play or go on television," I kept thinkin', No, I gotta be a movie actor. If Busting is the only thing in front of me right now, I'll do it. I'll make it great!

[Q] Playboy: A few years ago, there was some publicity about your playing Cesar Chavez in a film. Whatever happened to those plans?

[A] Blake: People are finally comin' to me now, sayin', let's do it. But it's old hat now. It's like two years ago, I was killin' myself tryin' to make a movie of a book called, I think, Company Man, which was a really flaming analysis of the CIA. And people were tellin' me I was gonna get shot. And they started, you know, followin' me around and roustin' my car and buggin' my telephone and all this shit.

[Q] Playboy: Who was doing that?

[A] Blake: The federales. You know, there was a time, two years ago, when people like Mort Sahl were being banned from national television if they would mention the CIA, even if it wasn't in a derogatory sense. But the CIA is a straw man; it's a bone that's been thrown to the American public and everybody takes a poke at it. Now everybody talks about the CIA; even Bob Hope's makin' jokes about it. And now, somebody comes to me and says, "Gee, I've got this wonderful exposé on the CIA." I mean, who the fuck cares, you gutless bastard? Where were you two years ago? It's the same way with Cesar Chavez. His people are doing so well now, relatively, that any contribution a film might make would be almost minimal. You'd be tryin' to show everybody that you're makin' a contribution, instead of makin' a contribution, and, really, what you're doin' is just kinda jackin' off.

[Q] Playboy: Do you have a better chance of working some of those themes you're concerned about into a Baretta script than into an undeveloped film project?

[A] Blake: I wanted to do something on the show that dealt with the My Lai theme, where people just do what they're told. They lose sight of the fact that they have their own consciences. So I devised a show about a motorcycle gang that was doin' hits, and one of the guys comes to Baretta and offers to cop out. There was one scene with considerable sex in it, but it was a very valid element about this girl in the gang who was using her body to further her own ends. And the network said, "You can't use this," and "You can't show America that teenage motorcycle gangs are being hired to kill." They missed the whole point, that it was a story about the importance of respecting your own conscience. They don't care if sex or violence, for example, are integral to the plot or gratuitous. They make no fuckin' distinction at all.

[A] And it's not just the studios or the networks. The FCC doesn't care what the statement is, either. It doesn't care if The Six Million Dollar Man tells everybody that fascism is the best form of life. All they care about is tits and ass and gunshots. They are totally irresponsible.

[Q] Playboy: Surely, you admit that Baretta has its share of gunshots. In fact, it was singled out by the National Citizens Committee for Broadcasting, which tied it with Baa Baa Black Sheep as the third most violent show on television. Do you think that was a fair rating?

[A] Blake: I think you can take practically any dramatic show on television and pick what you want out of it. I was commended by the Federated Italo-Americans for portraying a positive image of Italian Americans on television. I have letters of commendation from the National Association for Retarded Citizens for the work I've done in Baretta, thanking me for helping their cause. I wouldn't lump Baretta with Baa Baa or any of the shows that rely on violence. What I think is monstrous is that kids watch a show like Donny & Marie, which is total fantasy. It's like a June Allyson-Van Johnson movie, where the guy ain't got no cock. It's all plastic, total make-believe. And they spoon-feed the kids that this is Americana, which I think is ugly. Monstrous!

[Q] Playboy: Nevertheless, there is a concerted campaign being waged against violence on television. It was the subject of a recent Newsweek cover story, which quoted, among other people, Richard E. Palmer, president of the American Medical Association. Dr. Palmer said, "TV has been quick to raise questions of social responsibility with industries which pollute the air. In my opinion, television ... may be creating a more serious problem of air pollution."

[A] Blake: I think the A.M.A. should keep its dirty nose out of my business and clean up its own filthy back yard. I would like the head of the A.M.A. to say air pollution's not as bad as airwave pollution to parents who have children who are dying of cancer from the smog. I would like him to tell that to me; I lost two uncles from the filth and the puke in the air. But the A.M.A. is guilty a thousand times over. Doctors say they'll find a cure for cancer. Find a prevention for it, you motherfuckers! Get the poison out of our food and we won't have cancer. Aha, but there's no money in that, is there? There's money in cutting cancer out of your belly, but there's no money in keeping you from getting it.

[Q] Playboy: As we recall, we were talking about violence on TV. You're a father; do you feel it has a bad effect on children?

[A] Blake: In my personal opinion, no. I grew up on cowboy movies, in which people were slaughtered every weekend, and I found it a marvelous release. When I was very sick emotionally, I used to go to the Roller Derby and watch the violence there.

[A] It is true that the young people of America are in very, very serious trouble. We, the citizens of this country, have put them in serious trouble, and we all feel guilty about it. But nobody wants to tackle the real issues, so they set up straw men, like TV violence.

[A] Now, if you go into the middle of the Mexican community in Bakersfield, where they're struggling for better wages under the leadership of Chavez, you don't find young people with dope problems or alcohol problems, because they have a thing the world calls purpose. You go to the ghetto, there's no purpose. You go to Beverly Hills High School, there's no purpose. And life without purpose becomes meaningless, and in comes dope and all the rest of it. What's happened to the youth of America is they've watched their leaders slaughtered on the streets on television and they've become impotent. They've been brought up to believe all you do is make money and build a boat in your back yard and live happily ever after, and they know that's a hypocritical lie.

[A] But getting back to this business with the A.M.A. and the P.T.A. and the other groups that are talking about violence on television. Violence on TV is not the issue here. The issue is censorship. It's fascism. In the old days, the McCarthy era, Bogart, Garfield and all of them people went to Washington and said, "Hey, you motherfuckers, you can't do this to us. There's a thing called freedom." But now, and quote me on this carefully, if a young woman or a young man from UCLA gets a few hundred thousand dollars together to make a film, that film cannot be released in America unless it is submitted to Jack Valenti and his people at the Motion Picture Association for a rating. They cannot run it anyplace without a rating; the theaters won't book it and the projectionists won't run it.

[Q] Playboy: Now, wait. The film can be released; it just cannot be given a G, PG or R rating, which are M.P.A.A. trademarks. Which means, in practice, that most theater owners will treat the film as if it were X-rated.

[A] Blake: But when Valenti says, "I don't like this movie, give it an X rating so children won't see it," who the fuck is he? Who is anybody to say that?

[Q] Playboy: Valenti will be the first to point out that he personally does not rate any films; a seven-member ratings board does.

[A] Blake: Whoever does it, it's censorship. You must be able to have the good with the bad, on television, in movies, in magazines, books. You can't have Roots unless you allow The Six Million Dollar Man. You cannot have Harvest of Shame unless you allow Starsky & Hutch. If you destroy the one, you destroy the other.

[Q] Playboy: A few moments ago, in talking about your own battles with television's powers that be, you mentioned a show you wanted to do about a motorcycle gang. Have you been squelched on any other story ideas?

[A] Blake: I was gonna incorporate the snuff-films theme in a Baretta show, and they beat me on it. They used to import those films, where the culmination is that the girl is actually killed onscreen, from South America, but now they make 'em here.

[Q] Playboy: Haven't snuff films been exposed as phony?

[A] Blake: There are a lot of real snuff films around. Private films that people have in their houses. All these freaks. You know where a lot of 'em are? In Washington, D.C. There are two films floating around the Hollywood circuit, you know, the coke-fiend nuts. The Manson family was not unique; there are freakies in the very high upper echelons of Beverly Hills.

[A] Anyway, I was gonna have Baretta go into the pornographic-film world as an actor and investigate all that. What I shoulda done was written a dummy script about skin flicks and made it funny that Baretta's gonna be in a skin flick. And then, I shoulda shot what I wanted and told them to go fuck themselves, 'cause once they got $350,000 in it, what are they gonna do?

[Q] Playboy: For whatever reasons, you haven't made a feature-length film since Busting. Do you think that picture did irreparable damage to your movie career?

[A] Blake: It did as far as I was concerned, because when I saw it, I wondered what the fuck I was doing in it. I really didn't intend to become part of the macho-homosexual film syndrome, but in Busting, me and Gould were like Newman and Redford riding off in the sunset together. It made me think of that beer commercial that tells you to grab for all the gusto you can and, meanwhile, nine guys are huggin' each other in the background. There's probably been 125 boy-meets-boy pictures in the past few years, and all of a sudden, I was in one of them, dancing through a piece of fluff with a theme 25 times weaker than anything we've ever done on Baretta--somethin' about dope and how we're gonna catch the big score when it comes to town. I reject scripts like that every day on TV. Yet there I was.

[Q] Playboy: Did you wonder how you got there?

[A] Blake: Well, later, when I was lyin' in that hospital bed, I figured it all out. For a few years, I'd been going downhill, downhill, downhill--tryin' to hold on to my ego, my dignity, my self-respect and my philosophy that there's hope, that everything's gonna turn out right. But nothin' had been turnin' out right, and when you go for month after month like that, you get like a dog that's locked in a room; it can't go out and fight with other dogs or get laid or anything, so it starts chewin' on its own paws and crackin' up. Same with me; I found myself sittin' in our back room and tellin' my wife, "I'm wasted. I don't know what the fuck is wrong with me. I got sugar diabetes or a heart attack or cerebral palsy or Something--and I'm wiggin' out. Get me to a fuckin' hospital."

[A] This was after Busting went down and after I'd lost some parts I wanted, like playing Billy Rose in Funny Lady. I'd been going in and out of agents' offices, asking them to please handle me. I was also gettin' involved with shits like publicists and making the rounds of Hollywood parties. When you really start gettin' insecure and you get caught up in that brass ring of I gotta make it, I gotta make it, well, if you're a chick, you end up runnin' into a producer's office, takin' off your clothes and sayin', "I'll do anything." I was the same kind of whore. When I looked at Busting, I said to myself, "Jesus Christ, why don't you get yourself a pimp?"

[Q] Playboy: How long were you in the hospital?

[A] Blake: About two weeks. I checked into Cedars Sinai, and the first three or four days I was there, I didn't do anything. Then I told 'em to check out everything on me that they knew how to check out.

[Q] Playboy: Did you think you were physically ill?

[A] Blake: No, but I wanted to get that out of the way so that I couldn't play games with myself about it. They did the whole thing--electrodes on my head, blood tests every hour for three days and lookin' me up, down, over and under. When they got through, they told me I have the blood pressure of a 16-year-old boy and the constitution of a horse. Once that part of it was over, I had them take me off the tranquilizers and sleeping pills, and then I just sat there and tried to get to the center of myself. And I did.

[A] I realized I was on an incredible treadmill. One agent after another, one meeting after another, one thought after another about how I could get this or that part, strategies like trying to get Ray Stark on my side--he was the producer of Funny Lady--phone calls, begging, pleading, maneuvering. I'd gotten caught up in the madness of Hollywood--without any center to myself. Even before I got out of the hospital, I knew what I had to do.

[Q] Playboy: Which was?

[A] Blake: Not to let myself get caught up in that cycle again. I was very scared when I left Cedars Sinai, but I promised myself there were three things I'd never do again. One, I would never again walk into any office with my hat in my hand. Two, I would never be professionally involved with agents or anybody who didn't want for me what I wanted. And, three, that I was gonna work.

[A] When I got out of the hospital, I had no agent, so I went to an old manager I knew named Jerry Levy and told him, "Jerry, you got two months--eight weeks, counting from today--to make me the best deal you can in television. You can either make yourself half a million dollars by pulling it off or nothing." And he went out and did it. Three months later, I started shooting Baretta.

[Q] Playboy: What do you think would've happened to you if Baretta hadn't come along?

[A] Blake: I would've gotten something else--a small part in a film that had some dignity, or I would've gone into theater. I once did 26 weeks of The Connection in Los Angeles, and even though I have no love for the theater--I get bored with something once I've done it--I was ready to go to Arizona and do boy-meets-girl. If that's where they wanted me, that's where I would've gone. But it happened that I had a good handle in the television world. Being on the Carson show had put me up there in the Q ratings, which is a thing where interviewers ask people who they'd like to see on TV.

[Q] Playboy: You've been on with Carson a great deal. Do you enjoy doing The Tonight Show?

[A] Blake: Oh, uh, well, there's a certain enjoyment in facing death, periodically. There's no experience I can describe to you that would compare with doin' The Tonight Show when he's on it. It is so wired, and so hyped, and so up. It's like Broadway on opening night. There's nothing casual about it. And it's not a talk show. It's some other kind of show. I mean, he has such energy, you got like six minutes to do your thing. And you better fuckin' do it. And you better be good. Or they'll go to the commercial after two minutes. And when they come back, you'll be over in the recovery room with Spanky there. What's his name?

[Q] Playboy: Ed McMahon.

[A] Blake: Yeah. They are highly professional, highly successful, highly dedicated people. And that's their fuckin' thing. And you don't fuck with it or take it lightly. If you're goin' on there to be funny, you better be fuckin' funny, man. The producer, all the federales are sittin' like six feet away from that couch. And they're right on top of you, man, just watchin' ya. And when they go to a break, they get on the phone. They talk upstairs, they talk to--Christ, who knows? They talk all over the place about how this person's going over, how that person's going over. They whisper in John's ear. John gets on the phone and he talks. And you're sittin' there watchin', think-in', What, are they gonna hang somebody? And nobody says shit to you. And then the camera comes back again. And John will ask you somethin' else or he'll say, "Our next guest is...."

[Q] Playboy: Besides your exposure on Baretta and talk shows, you're often seen on the tube in STP commercials. How do you deal with the accusation that by doing those endorsements, you're selling out?

[A] Blake: Nobody's ever said anything to me about it one way or the other. But I do the commercial because I think it's a very good career move, because of the money and because I've been using the product myself for 30 years. Those are the three very simple reasons why I do it.

[Q] Playboy: In view of the constant feuding among you and ABC-TV and Universal, do you think you made the right decision by going into TV rather than holding out for film or the theater?

[A] Blake: Yes, definitely. Doin' the show has been a wonderful fuckin' experience. It's my baby; I gave birth to it, it's all mine and I'm proud of it. It's put a tremendous amount of meat on my bones, and I feel 100 feet taller than I ever felt before. I've learned a ton about who and what I am, how to handle myself and other people, how to run a set and a company, how to gain people's respect--it's been a huge plus for me that way. And I love the character of Baretta. I fashioned it out of all the heroes I've ever had--Leo Gorcey, Garfield, Bogart, gangsters I knew as a kid, all kinds of crazy people, and fantasies I had when I was little. For instance, Baretta has a saying, "My old man used to tell me, 'If you can't do the time, don't do the crime.' " As a kid, I always fantasized that I had a father who'd give me all kinds of great sayings to live by. In reality, my father didn't give me jack shit, but it's fun to throw things like that in. It's fun to have Baretta wearing the clothes I wear, fighting for the underdog and going up against the establishment. Most of it I believe--and Tony Baretta is a way for me to get it out.

[Q] Playboy: Do you have any sense of vindication about making it to the top?

[A] Blake: In some very small, petty ways, yes. I'm not a big person in a lot of ways. There's some motherfuckers out there I told 20 years ago, "I'll show you, you cocksuckers," and now, someplace, they're alive and know that I showed 'em, and, yeah, that means something to me. Unfortunately, there's plenty of those things in my life. In my bigger moments, I like to think that I'm not petty and that I don't hold grudges, but I know myself better than that.

[A] But now, I also know--know!--that if you've got the guts and the courage, you can go on a sound stage and make a movie, and the fuckers can't stop you. I'm out from under their thumb and it feels great. It feels so good that about a year ago, I took out a full-page ad in the trade papers tellin' that damn director William Friedkin and the rest of his troops to take Friedkin's picture and shove it up his ass.

[Q] Playboy:That wasn't a very nice thing to do--or was it?

[A] Blake: Listen, Friedkin and his people all came at me about being in their remake of The Wages of Fear. All right; we have a meeting, they ask me to read the script, they say, "Gee, we want you," and all that kind of shit. And then, suddenly, it gets very foggy and I'm being told, "Well, we'll let you know," and all that kind of shit. So I thought about it and I decided to call them and tell 'em to go fuck themselves--and I couldn't get 'em on the phone. So I did it in the papers, which have become Hollywood's new communication medium. You want to wish somebody happy birthday, you take out an ad in Variety and The Hollywood Reporter. My ad to Friedkin said, "Put The Sorcerer where the sun never shines. Peace & Love, Robert Blake."

[Q] Playboy: Doesn't the fallout you get from such stunts bother you?

[A] Blake: Nope. I got a line from Capote on my wall at home and it's a wonderful answer to your question: "The dogs bark, but the caravan moves on." Whoever the dogs are that bark at me, it don't amount to a row of ratshit in a storm. Capote and I, by the way, are very close friends now.

[Q] Playboy: A lot of people would find that an unlikely combination. Do you?

[A] Blake: Not at all. See, people don't know me worth a shit. Truman and I have more in common than most people I've met in my life. I admire the guy, respect him and identify with him. In fact, in some ways, I consider myself very much like him.

[Q] Playboy: Such as?

[A] Blake: He's very much his own man. After inventing his own bootstraps, he pulled himself up by them and then took a piece of this fuckin' world and bit it off and chewed it up and digested it. The guy's got balls the size of your head. He never takes a step back, I don't care who's standing with him toe to toe; he just don't take no shit from nobody about nothin'. And he's a genius when it comes to creating. Half the writers in the world try to write like him.

[A] Funny thing is, I never knew Capote at all during the filming of Cold Blood. He was totally preoccupied with what the picture was all about, and it was sort of like being around a ghost.

[Q] Playboy: What do you mean, what the picture was all about? Was there some hidden significance?

[A] Blake: It's part of an actor's job to interpret the unconscious of the author. What I felt Truman was really writing about in Cold Blood was this: Everybody knows what a murderer is a millionth of a second after he pulls the trigger. But what is he a millionth of a second before he pulls the trigger? I don't think anybody has an answer to it. It's not as simple as asking what makes a person kill or what the neurotic elements are that lead a person to become a murderer.

[Q] Playboy: But don't you think murder has become as accepted a part of our national life as our annual 45,000 or so automobile-accident deaths?

[A] Blake: Yeah, but these things have a way of going back and forth, very much like our attitude toward capital punishment. From the day Cold Blood hit the screen to the Gary Gilmore business, nobody was executed in the United States, but now, the scales are turning again and capital punishment's coming back. The same with abortion. A few years ago, everybody was for it. Yes! It's a woman's right to kill the baby if she wants to! Well, what about the baby's rights? Fuck the baby's rights! Well, what about the husband's rights? Doesn't he have a half interest in that kid? Fuck the husband's rights! And just as we all start thinkin' that's the way it's gonna be, 'cause the Supreme Court says so, all of a sudden we're hearing a rumble of Hey, fuck the Supreme Court! And so now it's turning again and we'll see where it goes. I guess that's one of the reasons we never wind up following a Hitler, because somehow or other, it all turns, sometimes for good, sometimes for no good. Right now, it's turning in favor of capital punishment, and I don't think that's good at all.

[Q] Playboy: Why not?

[A] Blake: Where human beings are concerned, I don't believe in killing at any time, under any circumstances. I don't believe in killing old folks by taking the tubes out of their arms and I don't believe in killing babies before they get a chance to fight back. If we believe there's more divinity in a human being than in a chair, there's no circumstance that allows for killing. Now, I can conceive of me killing somebody, but that's because I'm a human being, not God, and I'd hope that somebody would stop me from doing it. All I'm saying is that it's wrong and that I feel strongly about it. And I think that's why I did Cold Blood. I went through a very sick period in my head afterward, because I couldn't get rid of it. But that was my own fault. Capote, I think, is still grappling with the whole thing.

[Q] Playboy: Do you plan to work with him in the future?

[A] Blake: I'd like to, but Capote just dips in and out of the movie business occasionally, which is unfortunate. I'd love to go up to him and George C. Scott and say, "Listen, you guys, we only live once and dead's dead and it don't come back again, so let's do somethin' together before they plant us." But the industry is so complicated that it probably won't happen, and that's sad. It gets sadder when I realize there's a lot of other people I'd also love to work with.

[Q] Playboy: For example?

[A] Blake: I kinda hate to pinpoint names, because people who aren't mentioned will find a way to get unhappy, but I can tell ya that there are some directors, writers and actors I'm almost desperate to work with. I'd like to be in something by Frank Pierson, who wrote Dog Day Afternoon. I'd like to be in a movie directed by Hal Ashby, who did The Last Detail, Shampoo and Bound for Glory. I get the feeling when I see a Hal Ashby film that the guy's got what I need and that I got what he needs. And that he ain't really gettin' what he needs, but since I got it, if we ever work together, the fuckin' flames will fly. I get the same feeling about Martin Scorsese.

[A] Women: I want to do a film with this woman Wertmuller, and I'd like to work with Liza Minnelli. I feel that if we made a picture together, it could be like Garfield and Lana Turner, 'cause she's got some of the magic that Hollywood's lost. She hasn't lost it, though. Neither has Ashby, although he's fuckin' around with losing it. Maybe it's my optimistic cocker-spaniel nature talkin', but I always feel there's a pony in the horseshit somewhere and I'm anxious to get out there and tangle ass.

[Q] Playboy: When will all this start happening?

[A] Blake: When I get done with Baretta. I've got a job to do and I'm gonna finish it and then move on to the next phase of my life--making movies.

[A] As far as Baretta is concerned, I'll do what I gotta do and get out. TV isn't gonna be my way of life, with me using that annual three-month production hiatus to make some eight-week piece of shit somewhere and then come back for another season. I got a very strong hardon to do a certain two or three films, and I'm gonna do 'em. And you can take that to the fuckin' bank and collect interest on it.

[Q] Playboy: Essentially, you direct yourself in Baretta. Do you plan to direct films as well as act in them?

[A] Blake: It feels like that's a part of my old age. If I wanted to, right now, I could stick my name all over Baretta, but I've never taken credit for writing or directing any of the shows. Or I could go out and do what I consider to be jackin' off--get a Columbo, or go to Dennis Weaver when I've got three weeks off and ask him if I could direct a McCloud and then he could direct a Baretta, and we'd all live happily ever after. I don't wanna do that, but in the meantime, I'm writing and directing and sharpening and honing and figuring and learning--and I'm putting it all away, and one of these days, you'll see an old gray-headed fuck named Blake on a sound stage somewhere, making a film with some kids.

[A] But I'll never direct a film that I act in. I've always done my best acting under intense creative conflict, where, if you have an idea for something, you've gotta show the director that it's better than his idea, or else you do it his way. Bein' a producer kind of worries me, because when a director's working for you, it's very easy to say, "We'll just do it my way," and then you lose that magic of having to prove you have a better idea.

[Q] Playboy: Do you practice that kind of creative conflict on Baretta?

[A] Blake: Sure I do. The problem there is that I get sticks sittin' in the fuckin' director's chair; I don't even know what the hell their names are and I don't care. It's not right to work that way, but the show's gotta keep rollin'. I gotta get the fucker in the can, period.

[A] But I also know what good film making is like, because I had the wonderful advantage of having been around John Huston when he was directing his father. The two of them would fight like hell. Walter would tell him, "You prick, I don't care if you're the director--this idea is better," and then they'd go through the process of finding out which idea was better. When I proved to Richard Brooks that this was the way a scene in Cold Blood should go, or when he proved to me it should go that way, we both wound up knowing it was done right.

[Q] Playboy: In Hollywood, doesn't that pass for insurrection?

[A] Blake: No, at least not in the Hollywood I know. As an actor, you gotta watch which directors you work with, and I don't wanna work with directors who think they know everything. Directors like that are punks with no scars on their ass; babies who wear little black vests and snort their little coke and say, "I know."

[A] Insurrection to me is when a Barbra Streisand decides she's the producer and the director and holds all the strings and has a bunch of puppets doing whatever the fuck she says. That, to me, is going the wrong way with a God-given talent. I think that when you hire on as an actor, you have to say, "OK, you're the producer, you're the director and you're the writer, and I'm ready to show you all that I can make a contribution." Film must be a collaborative effort.

[Q] Playboy: Ideally, that may be true, but considering that Hollywood's biggest pictures of the last decade have been pallid acting vehicles--from Love Story to Jaws to King Kong--does all the torment and desire really matter?

[A] Blake: All right, cards on the table: You're talkin' about my people and I'm glad they're makin" films, and I'm glad there's an industry. And I'm glad there were guys like Garfield and Bogart to get their feet in the door and smash it open so that I could be here. I know that maybe 80 percent of the films now done in Hollywood are Pepsi Generation films--here today and gone tomorrow--but I'm not sure that's inconsistent with the rest of America. You buy a bicycle for your kid and it lasts six weeks and then falls apart. We buy clothes that fall apart, houses that fall apart and marriages that fall apart. I wish I had the poetry to describe exactly what I mean, but about all you can say is that we're living in a very temporary generation.

[Q] Playboy: What does that mean in terms of motion pictures?

[A] Blake: It's almost like you pay $3.50 to see a movie and while you're watching it, the film self-destructs; the images themselves just come off the celluloid and disappear as the movie is being shown. And by the time you walk out of the theater, you can't even remember what the film was about. Movies have become that temporary.

[A] I have a very personal feeling about what's happened to Hollywood, because I grew up watching and working with some of the great ones, and I saw what they cared about. Hollywood films used to be permeated by a kind of universal quality of humanity, and they used to reflect what could or should be. That whole thing is missing now. It was still there, though, through the Kennedy years. Hollywood was then turning out On the Beach and Dr. Strangelove, and even the lighter pictures, like the Doris Day--Rock Hudson comedies, were well made. But in the last ten years or so, our movies have suddenly lost their gism, their come, and they don't give birth to anything. It's like they've lost the heart, the balls, the tears, the caring, the Jewish quality they used to have.

[Q] Playboy: Do you think that might have to do with the film industry's being taken over by conglomerates?

[A] Blake: That's a big part of it. When Hollywood was a young toy, the massive conglomerates weren't interested in it, so the film industry was run by some silly creative nuts who were considered childish by the money guys. The suits would sit behind their desks and say, "Who the hell is Charlie Chaplin but some little dink who runs around making nonsense pictures?"

[A] But when movies became a big money-making proposition, the conglomerates moved in, the studios went on the stock exchange and producers stopped talking about making movies--and started talking about product, dividends, output, growth and all that shit, instead. And Hollywood began to change. One result is that movies that were made then aren't being made now. A few months ago, I saw Patton on TV, and George C. Scott was fuckin' brilliant in it. But you could see all the cheapness of that movie. In one scene, a German plane is being shot at and you see a little smoke coming out of the tail--and then the plane disappears behind a hill and there's a ball of fire. If Patton had been made 30 years ago, 50 planes would've crashed on camera. And don't think you'll ever see 90,000,000 Romans coming over the hill again, like in Ben Hur. The moneymen's dictates have altered all those kinds of things. People who don't know their ass from Ninth Street, who made it big in shoes and computers and hotels, are now tellin' moviemakers what films to make. It's turned into a lot of crazy bullshit.

[Q] Playboy: What about actors--have they changed as well?

[A] Blake: I don't think human potential changes just because of the era it's born into. The new Tracys and Bogarts and Garfields and Bette Davises are out there; the problem is that they're being asked to give nothing. I have no quarrel with the talent that's around. My quarrel is with the way it's being trained and how it's being minimized. Lemme tell you something, pardner: When it comes to being a successful actor, talent counts for maybe one tenth of one percent, 'cause if you're even half good, you can do acting with your fuckin' left hand behind your back. It's knowing how to get the gig that matters; who to talk to, how to maneuver, how to maintain yourself on a set--all that kind of stuff. When you finally get down to the point where somebody yells, "Roll 'em!," you're home free. It's the rest of the bullshit that'll kill ya.

[Q] Playboy: Do you really believe acting is that easy?

[A] Blake: Well, it must be hard for some people, judging by the way they talk about it. It's not hard for me. Whether it's good or not is another question. I never studied at the Actors Studio; Lee Strasberg wouldn't let me study at the Actors Studio. I wanted to, but he said, "No, you'll never be able to act--get out of here." Fuck him, too.

[Q] Playboy: You've probably already set the all-time Playboy Interview record for telling various people to fuck off, and we're not through talking. Why all the anger?

[A] Blake: I used to think it was the result of having an asshole for a father, being a kid actor and all that, but I'm beginning to think that anybody around today who isn't pissed off is either dead or a moron. The way things are, I'm not sure that anger and paranoia aren't a nice, normal state of health. I like my rage. I like bein' pissed off. I like lookin' at all the shitty things that are happening to me and my family and my country. I hope I never lose that.

[Q] Playboy: If it's any comfort, your detractors believe there's not a chance in the world of that's ever happening.

[A] Blake: They're probably right. I think if I ever had a barium photograph taken of my insides, I'd probably be slopping off the edge of the frame with anger. I'm lucky it's channeled into acting, because I could just as well have gone into robbing banks.

[Q] Playboy: You indicated a few moments ago that you had a lot of trouble with your father. In what way?

[A] Blake: I was pretty well fucked by a pretty sick household. Not that everybody doesn't have a sad story to tell, but we happen to be talkin' about me, and I'm not cryin' the blues, because I beat my parents--and fuck 'em. And I'm glad I beat 'em. But before that happened, when I was being beaten, it was a pretty shitty life. My father was a tyrant who'd come in at three o'clock in the morning and beat the shit out of me because he couldn't get laid, or whatever craziness was going on with him. My mother was nobody to turn to for mother love, for physical contact, for comfort, to dry your eyes or wipe your nose, that kind of thing. My father, meanwhile, never did nothin' much; he was on the WPA during the Depression and, after that, mostly, I supported him. Not mostly--entirely.

[Q] Playboy: Beginning when?

[A] Blake: When I was two years old. Me and my brother and sister--my parents were in it, too--had an act called The Three Little Hillbillies, and I was singing and dancing. I was born in Nutley, New Jersey, and we used to play political outings around there. Aldermen would invite people to the park and give them hot dogs and beer and clams to get their votes, and pickpockets, jugglers, monkey acts and all kinds of entertainers would wander through the crowd trying to pick up a buck. My father would bang on the guitar and we would sing and dance, and people would throw money. We did that to eat, and when there wasn't nothin' left to eat, we drove out to Hollywood in a 1928 car and started doin' our act in casting offices. I got to be an extra at MGM, workin' mostly on the Our Gang series, and one day I caught a break: They had some little asshole there who couldn't say his lines right, so I walked right up and told the director, "Shit, I can do that." And I did it. I got into the Our Gang thing for the last five years of the 15 or so that it ran, and during that time, I made something under $100 a week, plus what I got for being in some features. I worked the Our Gang series from the time I was five till I was ten.

[Q] Playboy: Whatever happened to the rest of the gang?

[A] Blake: Most of the kid actors I knew are dead now, from dope, or shot in half with shotguns. From Our Gang, Froggie is dead. Alfalfa got shot and killed. Scotty Beckett is dead. Bobby Driscoll, another kid actor, died about nine years ago on junk in New York. The fear that I could end up that way haunted me for years: I was positively maniacal about being identified as a kid actor.

[Q] Playboy: What kind of memories does that period of your life in Hollywood conjure up?

[A] Blake: The good parts were working with Garfield on Humoresque and Bogart in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, and also being in movies with Eddy G., Wallace Beery and Laurel and Hardy. A healtheir kid would've had a fantastic time, but for me, it was only a marginal experience. It's gonna be hard for a relatively healthy person to understand what I'm really talking about here, 'cause you almost have to be really sick and neurotic to know what it's like to get up every morning and spend the day beatin' the shit out of yourself. This may be a bad parallel, but if you took a kid and chained him to a stove for ten years, and then, all of a sudden, you took him outside one day and gave him a bicycle, it wouldn't be fantastic, 'cause he wouldn't be able to relate to it. But it would be much better than being chained to the stove. I felt like that all through the years I made the Our Gang comedies, and then, in the Red Ryder series, it was the same thing all over again. I mean, it was better than going to public school and having them little pricks pull my pants off and call me names and spit at me and piss in a jar and throw it at me. But, on the other hand, it wasn't wonderful. Am I makin myself clear?

[Q] Playboy: It's certainly clear that you had an unhappy childhood. Did things improve after you left Red Ryder's side?

[A] Blake: In some ways, yeah. When I was about 15, I went to Italy and France to do a picture with Tyrone Power and Orson Welles called The Black Rose. This was right after World War Two had ended, and at that time, most people in Europe loved all the young GIs. So under the guise of bein' a sailor, I started fucking and learned how to drink. When I got back, I graduated from the studio high school--somehow, I skipped a year and got out when I was 16--and then I left home and never went back.

[Q] Playboy: What did you do?

[A] Blake: Oh, I stayed around Hollywood. I was in and out of acting, doing mostly TV--Roy Rogers, Wild Bill Hickok shows, that kind of thing. I also was doin' a lot of physical work, 'cause when I was younger, I'd always been happiest that way. When I was unloadin'90-pound cement bags in the freight yards, I used to go home and fall into bed and I wouldn't give a fuck whether my father wanted into hit me in the head got not. I'd just fall asleep. Anyway, I stayed around town until I was 19, and then I went into the Army--which turned out to be a fuckin' nightmare.

[Q] Playboy: What was the nightmare about?

[A] Blake: It was about two years long, that's what it was about. I was sent up to Alaska to be part of an experimental Infantry unit that was testing coldweather gear for GIs in Korea; they'd give us new parkas and stuff and tell us to start marching in the ice. I was crackin' up pretty good by then. One night in the barracks, I had my bayonet out and was tryin' to kill six guys, and they finally carried me away. Another time, some fuckin' lieutenant didn't like the way I'd arranged my footlocker for an inspection, so I picked it up and threw it out the window. We were up on the third floor, and when I looked out the window, the footlocker had gone all the way down through about 12 feet of snow and left a big hole. I told the lieutenant it looked like a giant had taken a piss in the snow, and I started laughin' about it. He didn't think that was funny, which made me laugh even harder, 'cause he didn't have no sense of humor. So they carried me away again.

[Q] Playboy: Where did they take you those times?

[A] Blake: For the bayonet number, they carried me to the captain's office and I stayed there till morning, guarded by MPs. My C.O. put everybody through a lot of paperwork and red tape to keep me from being court-martialed, and I was back in the company the next day. The second time was different; they put me in the nuthouse.

[Q] Playboy: For laughing about that footlocker?

[A] Blake: Yeah, well, you gotta understand that I cracked up: I didn't stop laughing. The whole fuckin' world got really, really funny and stayed that way. I did about a month in the hospital. They had me on some drugs and I began seeing a psychiatrist for the first time. The man was a total asshole. They wheeled me around in a wheelchair and I realized that if I acted straight with the guy, I'd get the job of pushing the other guys around in wheelchairs, which I did. After I got back to the company, it wasn't too long before I got court-martialed for thievery and sent to the stockade.

[Q] Playboy: What did you steal?

[A] Blake: Gas. We were out on maneuvers one night, and me and six or eight other guys were freezin' to death in our tent because we'd run out of gas for the stove. Meanwhile, the fuckin' C.O.'s tent had four gas cans outside it; you'd turn the gas can upside down outside the tent and run a hose through to the stove inside. Rather than freeze my ass off. I stole a can of the C.O.'s gas, and we all stayed warm that night. The next morning, though, some prick in our tent copped out on me, and I got sent to the stockade for three months. A priest who used to come by and talk to guys in the stockade got me out after only a month, and he also got me transferred to a Special Services unit in Anchorage. It was a helluva change of duty: I wrote and directed musicals and put officers' wives in the productions and then fucked 'em. I got out of the Army when I was 21, and then the shit really hit the fan.

[Q] Playboy: What was the trouble?

[A] Blake: Everything. I was absolutely not a kid anymore, and I couldn't hide behind the things that had helped me get through life when I was a kid--the sets and the studios and the Saturday matinees, and not having to face not getting fucked, and not having to compete for any chicks. A lot of childhood things that had sustained me were no longer there and I was as close to being in a living hell as I ever want to get. Man, this is so hard to explain, because if you don't know what it's like to sit in a room for days on end by yourself, afraid to walk outside, how can you really understand what was happening to me? I couldn't do anything. I was afraid of everything.

[Q] Playboy: How bizarre did things get?

[A] Blake: That's hard to say. Wanting to kill yourself is pretty bizarre; it may not be as bizarre as walking down the street wearing a dress and earrings, but it'll do. I couldn't even get myself to go into a drugstore and buy a pack of razor blades to cut my wrists with. I was scunged. Suicide, though, was not my main thrust. I throw that in only as the end product of being totally incapable of coping with myself and my environment. I hated myself, hated everything, felt useless and worthless, had no friends, no love, no career, no education, no parents and no tomorrows. It all added up to no nothing.

[Q] Playboy: That's the way you felt?

[A] Blake: That's the way it was. And that's when I went to the shithouse: I started using dope. I got fucked up with horse and cocaine for a couple of years before both of 'em became colorful or fashionable, and I lived in a world of gangsters who wore pinstripe suits, guys you met in a sewer to make a buy. Before too long, I got more into their world. I'd always been kind of a marginal hood, and after I got out of the Army, I blossomed into a real one. I started buyin' and sellin' dope, pickin' it up in Las Vegas and Mexico.

[Q] Playboy: Did you make big money as a dealer?

[A] Blake: I supported myself, that's all. I'd make $400 or $500 on a deal, and I had enough to eat, sleep and have a car. I wasn't cool, thought: I wasn't really playing the role of the dope dealer. In a way, I'm glad it was there, 'cause it was better than suicide or some other alternative, but I really don't condone fucking with dope. I hate it and I don't even take aspirin now. But in those days, there were no free clinics, there were no Synanon-type organizations, there was no alternative society, and the only psychiatric help offered to sick people was to put 'em in chains and lock 'em away in a basement somewhere.

[Q] Playboy: Were you reluctant to try therapy?

[A] Blake: No. I started thinking about it when I was 15, and when I was in the Army, I read Freud and all of Karen Horney's books, and then stole every book on psychiatry from the post library. When I was around 23, I went to live in the San Fernando Valley with a friend who was going to acting class, and he used to bring girls home to work on scenes. One day, a beautiful blackhaired actress named Virginia Leith showed up at the pad. She was older than me and was working in films, and after a while, Virginia took me to Jeff Corey's acting class. It was kind of a Tea and Sympathy number, because after I was in class, she then took me to therapy. The worst thing you can do is force somebody into therapy when he's not ready for it, but Virginia knew that I'd tried everything and was at the end of my string, and one day she simply said to me, "Jesus, you're a perfect candidate for therapy. It'll work for you, Robert, because you're ready." And she took me to this guy and she was right: I was ready.

[Q] Playboy: How long did it take you to come out of your tail spin?

[A] Blake: The first two years, it was mostly a matter of trying to stop hurting myself and getting to the point where I had enough hope to develop a little self-love. I remember the first monumental step I took in therapy. I remember the very day it happened, everything that led up to it and how hard it was to do. For five or six weeks, the head man and I had been discussing what, of everything I could think of, I'd like to be able to walk out of his office and do. Actually do; things like wanting to have a girlfriend didn't count. At first, I wanted to be able to go into a restaurant and eat, but then it narrowed down to walking into a store and buying a candy bar--and not being afraid of the person behind the counter. I used to break into a cold sweat when I had to buy food at a grocery store, so I'd wait till three o'clock in the morning and go to the Hollywood Ranch Market, where I'd pick up something in a panic, put my money down and then run out.

[A] Again, it's hard for normal people to understand what that's like, but there're a lot of people in the world who are there and know what it's like. When I was finally able to go into a restaurant and feel like I had a right to pick up a menu and order a meal, Christ, it was like becoming a brain surgeon. I started doin' that and a whole lot of other things in the middle of my second year of therapy, and comin' into the third year, I was strokin'. I was studyin' acting full time, doin' plays, workin', goin' to college at night and fuckin' everything that walked. I was cookin'!

[Q] Playboy: Do you ever worry that you might lapse back into that state of fear?

[A] Blake: Nope. Whenever I feel that I'm at the end of the road and that I'm gonna be back in a hospital bed somewhere, I just throw all my shit into my four-wheel-drive van and take off by myself--away from my family, away from everybody. I got a big enough engine in that van to get away from the fuckin' Third Army, and I drive up into the Sierras or some other mountains, and I can't do it often enough.

[Q] Playboy: What do you do when you're on the road?

[A] Blake: I don't know; what does a yogi do when he's doing nothing? I might spend a day lyin' on a fuckin' rock or lookin' at flies, or I might hike for a couple of miles to some lake and go fishing. I just get childish and do whatever the fuck I want. It's really not where I'm going, it's what I'm going away from.

[Q] Playboy: What does your wife think about your cutting out?

[A] Blake: She understands it. Sometimes, we'll go on an organized adventure with the troops for a day or two, but usually, I don't want anybody to go with me.

[Q] Playboy: Is the time you have with each other at a premium, now that you both have careers that are going strong?

[A] Blake: Yeah, but it's healthy, rich, fuckin' time. Sondra quit acting for about six years after the kids were born and began again about two years ago, and she's doing well. The only pain in the ass about it is that people always want to know if she uses a whip and a chair to tame the madman. If anybody wants to know, out marriage started out as a fuckin' 14-carat disaster, but it's been all uphill ever since.

[Q] Playboy: Why a disaster?

[A] Blake: Most people we knew thought, and I believe rightly so, that we wouldn't last six months. I was nuts, she was nuts, and we spent a lot of our time hiding from the world, driving around for days and living in a little dump. When we weren't doing that, we'd get into terrible, sick fights and days of torturing each other with a lot of unhealthy dependency; because we weren't able to live our own lives, we were being consumed by our neurotic needs rather than by our love. I expected all the things I didn't get as a kid from her, and all of the things she needed, she expected from me, and, indeed, I tried to give them to her.

[A] Sondra's childhood was probably worse than mine; at least mine had an up side--the acting, the fairy tales, the pat on the ass from the directors. She didn't have those safety valves. Sondra was forced into ballet. As a child, she had no rewards and it was just a terrible scene. And so there we were. At the beginning, our marriage seemed to be based on layers of sickness that almost smothered the basic thing between us: We were soulmates.

[A] But I've always been a long-shot player, and I love a challenge. I'm terribly, terribly competitive. I can't walk away from a fight, and I've had to give up the motorcycle track on weekends, because I'd go up there and kill myself trying to beat everybody else out. My love for Sondra also became a challenge--not the marriage, just the belief that my love could survive. That it was real, that I believed in it, that I knew it came from the center of my soul and that hers was the same. Together, I thought we could overcome all the bullshit and long odds, and because that spirit also existed in Sondra, our marriage went uphill.

[Q] Playboy: She has appeared twice on Baretta. Will you be making films together?

[A] Blake: Who do ya think we are, Eli Wallach and Anne Jackson? I ain't never gonna work with Sondra again; I had enough of that shit. When she was on the show, oh, it was a tremendous pain in the ass. I couldn't concentrate on anything but her. Is she all right? Where is she? Does she have to pee? No, thank you, I don't want nothin' to do with it. Nothin'!

[Q] Playboy: At the moment, at least, you seem to be enjoying your stardom a great deal. Has your success in Baretta changed your life?

[A] Blake: Not a helluva lot. I know that my wife and kids have a few bucks, but we still live in the same house I bought years ago for $30,000 on a Cal-Vet loan, and I still do the same things I used to do. I'll tell ya, as I approach the point where I might be able to do what I want--make the films I want to make--I get more frightened about it. It's like that cliché about never meeting your dreams because they'll disappoint you. Within the next year or so, my situation is gonna get down to where I can say, "All right, bigmouth, you've been waitin' and talkin' all this time--now do it!"

[Q] Playboy: Having thrived on being an outsider for so much of your life, do you think there's a chance you might become the kind of film star who bitches and moans about the pain and suffering actors must go through?

[A] Blake: In the first place, I'm still an outsider. I still wake up every mornin' wondering if I got the job or not. My friends are always tellin' me, "Relax, you got the job," but that's very difficult for me to do. I have the wrong kind of ego for TV work; I figure that if the next show is a bomb, everybody's gonna hate me and I'll be history. Psychologically, I'm always in the Warsaw ghetto.

[A] In the second place, acting isn't suffering. Orson Welles once said that a movie set is the greatest electric train you can give to anybody, and it's true. Acting allows you to have the joys and privileges of fuckin' around with your soul and your psyche, while most poor shlubs have to punch a time clock. If you can imagine that you're a little kid and you're going into your father's closet--or your mother's close--and you can put on any kind of clothes and makeup that you want and then just go fuckin' bonkers, when you get it in its proper context, that's what acting's all about.

[A] And, believe me, I don't delude myself into giving it more importance than it actually has. I'm very aware that the sky is falling and that there are people like Cesar Chavez out there who arereally tangling ass with the blood-and-gut issues of this world. I never forget who Ché Guevara was or who Kennedy or Gandhi were and where they were going--and where we all have to go--but, meanwhile, I'm living my life. And I'm living it the way I always have. I always figured that I was an outsider, that I was left-footed, that I heard my own drummer and that I was Saturday's child--and nothing has changed any of that. I never have been a joiner, I never have been a follower, I never have been a leader and I never will be. I never will feel like my ass is made out of candy, either. And that's the name of that tune.

"There's all kinds of bullshit about me goin' around right now, probably because Cher isn't having a baby and there's nothing else to write about."

"I probably get worse depressions than most people--but the highs are a bitch!"

"Violence on TV is not the issue here. The issue is censorship. It's fascism."

"I'm glad there were guys like Garfield and Bogart to get their feet in the door and smash it open so that I could be here."

"Wanting to kill yourself is pretty bizarre; it may not be as bizarre as walking down the street wearing a dress and earrings, but it'll do."

"My friends are always tellin' me, 'Relax, you got the job,' but that's difficult for me to do.... Psychologically, I'm always in the Warsaw ghetto."