Controversy has never been known to hurt ratings. Blood Feud's creators, of course, defend their show. "We bent over backward to ensure an accurate portrayal of events," says co-producer Joel Glickman. "We also sought the cooperation of the Kennedy family, but they declined." Adds scriptwriter Robert Boris, "I'm just sorry that Mrs. Kennedy would make these statements without having seen the show." (A spokesman for Sen. Ted Kennedy confirmed that neither he nor Ethel Kennedy had seen Blood Feud before its public airing.) "We were fair and honest with both Kennedy's and Hoffa's characters," Boris continues. "We didn't bow to the myth of Camelot or any other myth."
Blood Feud's star was more blunt. "I think it is unfair of Ethel Kennedy or anyone else to judge our work without having seen it," says Robert Blake, who points out that CBS has planned a six-hour miniseries based on Kennedy family hagiographer Arthur Schlesinger's Robert Kennedy and His Times, probably more favorable to RFK. "As for James P. Hoffa, he has written a book about his father which he wants to get published. Before Blood Feud he spoke to me about playing his father in a film version of it."
The forthrightness is typical—and one of the reasons Blake, now 49, had been in a jobless 18-month skid before the Hoffa role. "My life was a mess," recalls Blake. "I was going through a rough divorce, I was getting off booze, and I had a million enemies. By rights I should be off doing bit parts in spaghetti Westerns. But I wound up instead with this chance to play Hoffa. It was heaven-sent.
"I understand a guy who went out and got arrested 18 times in one day to get his union going," says Blake. "Jimmy was a street fighter, not a politician. Of course he did business with the Mob. But everybody did that—the FBI, other labor leaders. But the Kennedys didn't go after them. They went after the one guy whose anger would put them on the front page. Jimmy played right into the Kennedys' hands. Jimmy was programmed to self-destruct. Bobby Kennedy was too."
Ditto Robert Blake. His career has been so marked by ups and downs that he has been dismissed as a yo-yo. "A few years ago I was a big star with millions in the bank, a big house in the hills, horses and land," Blake says. "Now I'm in some cracker house in the Valley, trying to fix my own car! I'm struggling." His recent troubles started with the 1978 cancellation of Baretta, his hit ABC cop series that earned him $35,000 weekly and an Emmy in 1975. "For two years after that," he says, "I was like the guy in the bar who starts fighting people without knowing why. I insulted producers all over the place."
Sometimes on The Tonight Show. His passionate confessions to Johnny Carson—detailing drug, marital and emotional problems—became talk show legend. He blamed success for his first separation from his wife, actress Sondra Kerr, 40, in 1978. Then they reconciled, only to split again a year ago. "I took the kids [Noah, 18, and Delinah, 16] and went off to a ranch—just took the van out into the wilderness or rode my horses," says Blake. "By this time last year I had cooled down enough to look for work." And work, due to his pugnacious reputation, was hard to find. He finally landed Blood Feud only after agreeing to place his entire salary ("very short bread") in escrow until the film was completed. He picked up his check on the last day of shooting.
Whatever demons drive Blake surely had their birth in his bizarre childhood. Born Michael Gubitosi in Nutley, N.J., by 2 he was working in his parents' song-and-dance act, and he remembers being sent out at one point to steal his own milk. His family moved to L.A., and he became their sole support by 8, working in the Our Gang series, playing "Little Beaver" in the Red Ryder Westerns and bits in other movies. "I wasn't a child star," he once said, "I was a child laborer." (Blake still is estranged from his brother—his father died in the 1950s—and reportedly has spoken to his mother only once in the past 20 years.) Washed up as a teenager, he slid into the Army and drugs. He broke back into the business as a stuntman, won solid TV roles, then punched out a director. His acclaimed portrayal of a psycho killer in 1967's In Cold Blood precipitated yet another slide—and 10 years of therapy—before Baretta.
On the upswing again thanks to Blood Feud, Blake says, "I'm just starting up from the mess I made, but it does feel different. Now people don't avoid me in restaurants. They return my phone calls." Always a man of causes—Cesar Chavez's farm workers, anti-nukes—Blake again is helping kids in trouble with the law. He also has custody of his own children—Delinah attends high school locally, and Noah studies at Michigan's Interlochen School and has ambitions to become a jazz drummer. "I really wanted to do this for my kids—to show them that their old man could get up off the canvas," says Blake of his most recent turnaround. "I didn't want my kids to see me go out a loser. Someday their life will be tough. If they can remember that the old man could do it, they can call on that."
Saved by the Bell Reunion
The hookups, the meltdowns, the memoires
The case reveals what was really going on what they think of each other now!
