Baretta Season 4

[Francisca Noggles]

AnthonyVincenzo "Tony" Baretta is an unorthodox plainclothes police detective (Badge #609) with the 53rd Precinct in an unnamed, fictional city. He resides in Apartment 2C of the run-down King Edward Hotel with Fred, his Triton cockatoo. A master of disguise, Baretta wears many while performing his duties. When not working he usually wears a short-sleeve sweatshirt, casual slacks, a brown suede jacket and a newsboy cap.

Baretta is often seen with an unlit cigarette in his lips or behind his ear. His catchphrases include "Don't do the crime if you can't do the time", "You can take dat to da bank" and "And dat's the name of dat tune." When exasperated, he occasionally speaks in asides to his late father, Louie Baretta. He drives a rusted-out Mist Blue 1966 Chevrolet Impala four-door sport sedan nicknamed "The Blue Ghost" (license plate 532 BEM). He frequents Ross's Billiard Academy and refers to his numerous girlfriends as his "cousins".

Upon watching Blake in the 1973 film Electra Glide in Blue, then ABC executive Michael Eisner contacted him about doing a police series, which culminated in Baretta. Blake was given creative control in most aspects of production.[7]

The theme song, "Keep Your Eye on the Sparrow", was written by Dave Grusin and Morgan Ames; initially an instrumental, lyrics were added in later seasons that were sung by Sammy Davis, Jr. Every episode of Baretta began with the song, which contained the motto, "Don't do the crime if you can't do the time." According to Blake, studio executives did not want Davis's vocals for the theme song for fear that audiences would think Baretta was a black series. Blake threatened to leave production if Davis's recording was rejected. His bosses relented.[9]

The song was released as a single in Europe in 1976, reaching number one in the Dutch Top 40 as "Baretta's Theme". The music for the theme song was performed by Los Angeles-based Latin influenced Rock band El Chicano. El Chicano also released the song as a 45 and also as a track on one of their albums. The Baretta theme song by El Chicano was a huge hit in many countries including Turkey, Malaysia, Singapore, France and The Philippines.

On April 27, 1977, Blake announced that he would leave after completing his contractual run on the show for the season. "I proved everything I had to prove," he said. Through his efforts, he said, Baretta became the only midseason replacement to win an Emmy.

In a 1996 TV interview with Tom Snyder, Blake stated that he hated being committed to the series and compared it to screwing a gorilla. "Baretta was a terrible experience," Blake stated, "you do a series so you can work with giants [in film]."[12]

After its initial run in syndication beginning in 1979, the series later re-appeared on TV Land in 1999 as part of a package of series licensed from Universal. MeTV aired reruns of Baretta on Saturday afternoons in 2007. It was also aired on WKAQ-TV.

In Taskmaster Live, a 2016 show at the Edinburgh Festival contested by five television executives, Jeff Ford, the UK Managing Director of Fox Networks Group and SVP and Content Development Manager for Europe and Africa, described Baretta as a "lesser known 1960s vehicle".

In the Barney Miller episode "Copycat", Detective Arthur Dietrich tells a copycat criminal that cops and committing a crime are not like they are depicted on television, and ends by saying, "And dat's the name of dat tune."

In the film Reservoir Dogs, protagonist Mr. Orange steels himself before meeting main antagonist Joe Cabot by saying "You're not gonna get hurt. You're fucking Baretta. They believe every fucking word 'cause you're super cool."[14]

In the Party Down episode "Investors Dinner" (2009), the opening scene is an argument about why Tony Baretta is named so, with two characters arguing that it's because he carries a Beretta pistol.

Blake's career spanned decades and included memorable roles in the "Our Gang" shorts (which became known as "The Little Rascals"), the 1967 film adaptation of Truman Capote's "In Cold Blood" and ABC's 1970s cop show "Baretta," for which he won an Emmy and a Golden Globe. But Blake's devotion to acting was eclipsed by the death of Bonny Lee Bakley in 2001. The aspiring actress, then 44, was shot outside a restaurant while at dinner with her husband.

Blake started out as an extra on "Our Gang." He revealed during an early '90s appearance on "The Joan Rivers Show" how he earned a speaking role for the series he appeared on from 1939 to 1944. He was credited as Mickey Gubitosi, and his character was also named Mickey.

"One day a little kid couldn't say a line, and I had seen that if you get in front of the camera and talk, people give you attention," Blake said to Rivers. "And I said, 'Man, I can say that! I can say that!' "

His breakthrough role came in 1967 with the Oscar-nominated "In Cold Blood," based on Truman Capote's book. Blake portrayed Perry Smith, who with Richard Hickock killed a couple and their two children in a burglary in 1959.

Blake turned from criminal to cop in "Baretta," which premiered in 1975 and lasted four seasons, as Detective Tony Baretta, but told "20/20" in 2019 that his perfectionism kept him from enjoying the role. "I drove myself crazy," he said. "Every script had to be better. Every direction had to be better. Every casting had to be better."

In 1985, Blake starred on the short-lived NBC series "Hell Town," centered on a priest who heads a church on LA's East side. Blake told "20/20" the workload for the series he created proved too much. "I thought I was doing God's work. I was crazy," he said. "I had a nervous breakdown on camera, and I walked off the set, and I walked off the show."

Blake also said in the same interview that his parents hated him from conception. Blake claimed he was the result of his mother's affair with Giacomo's brother, Tony, who split when Elizabeth became pregnant.

"She hated what was in her stomach because it belonged to Tony, and Tony had deserted her," Blake said. "Jimmy (Giacomo) hated what was in here (points to stomach) because he knew it was Tony's, and I knew that both of them hated me."

In the interview, Blake recalled his "lunatic father" moving the family to Los Angeles when he was 4. Blake's success in show business only intensified his father's hatred, the actor told Rivers: "The more success I got, the more he wanted to kill me."

"My father was a psychotic man. He tried to kill me," Blake said. "My mother was no better. ... They locked me in closets. They beat me up. They made me eat like a dog on the floor." Blake said in the interview that his mother withheld affection, and the first time he recalled being touched was on the set of 1942's "Mokey" when his on-screen mother, Donna Reed, hugged him. "I almost died" from the shock, Blake said. "I felt so good, I couldn't even breathe."

His troubled self-image continued into adulthood. Blake said on "20/20" that he lost part of his sanity whenever he didn't have a job. "I was always at least 50% self-destructive, but when I wasn't working, I couldn't stand the way I felt. Bipolar? I was tri-polar. I was quad-polar. Who the hell knows what kind of polar I was? I had 35 different feelings in five minutes. I was nuts when I was away from the camera."

Blake was married three times, but reiterated his inadequacy to Rivers when reflecting on his first union with actress Sondra Kerr (1961 to 1983), with whom he had two children: Noah, now an actor, in 1965, and Delinah Blake Hurwitz, a psychology professor, a year later.

"She put up with a great deal," Blake told Rivers. "I never was a good husband. I never was a good father. I never was a good friend. I was never good at anything. I never learned how to be anything. I was nothing until I went in front of the box when I was 2, and that's all I ever was."

Blake crossed paths with Bonny Lee Bakley in 1999 at a jazz club. Bakley longed to be known, her longtime friend Christina Scheier told CBS News in 2002, hoping she'd marry into fame and fortune. "She went to see Tom Jones, Frankie Valli, and she really stalked Frankie," Scheier said. Bakley had a relationship with Marlon Brando's son Christian. Bakley told Christian he impregnated her, but the child turned out to be Blake's. Rose was born June 2, 2000. Blake and Bakley were married from November 2000 until her death on May 4, 2001.

That evening, the couple dined at Vitello's, an Italian restaurant in Studio City, California. After eating, Bakley waited in the car while Blake returned to the restaurant to retrieve a gun he'd forgotten. When he returned to the car, he said he found Bakley shot. Although Blake could not be connected to the murder weapon, a pair of former stuntmen said the actor tried to hire them to murder Bakley. Blake faced charges of murder with special circumstances and two counts of soliciting murder.

Blake was acquitted in March 2005, but he was found liable for Bakley's death months later in a civil suit filed by the victim's four children. Blake was ordered to pay $30 million, but that judgment was reduced to $15 million in 2008.

Blake became heated when Piers Morgan brought up Bakley during a 2012 interview to promote his memoir, "Tales of a Rascal: What I Did for Love." "Why would I marry her if I was going to kill her?" Blake asked. "I could've hired somebody to kill her when she was in Tibet or someplace. She drove all over the country. I could've hired somebody to follow her for 10 months and make her disappear so nobody would ever find her, for Christ's sake. I would go out to dinner with her to kill her?"

In September 2019, Blake began uploading a video series titled "Robert Blake: I ain't dead yet, so stay tuned ..." to his YouTube channel. In Episode 33, released Jan. 13, 2022, Blake said he felt at ease thinking about the end of his life.

"When I croak, I hope I do it fast, clean and get it over with," he said. "The one thing I don't want to do is spend a lot of time in a hospital somewhere, with people coming to visit me and trying to cheer me up, when I much rather they brought a gun and just popped me in the head when I wasn't looking at 'em."

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