When the news of his death broke, it was all the more shocking because Phoenix had portrayed such a clean image, and seemed, more than most young Hollywood actors, to have his life under control. His friends and family did not, on the whole, speak to the press about the matter and have continued to maintain a dignified silence about it ever since.
Critics, however, have discussed it a great deal and have been struck by the uncanny similarities between the stories told in many of his movies and his own life – in particular, the way he died so suddenly, and tragically, at such a young age. River Phoenix, who had everything to live for, tragically died at a time when he had fame, money, friends and at 23, supposedly plenty of time to enjoy it. Instead, his untimely death was surrounded by scandal, which his family have worked their hardest to survive.
Robert Blake
‘This really was a story out of a bad novel,’ CNN legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin commented when details of the scandal surrounding actor Robert Blake began to emerge. Blake had been arrested for the murder of his wife Bonnie Lee Bakley, but just how contorted their relationship had been was not generally known until news of the incident reached the media. And, indeed, once the story was out, it really did seem extraordinary that such a tale of deception, stupidity and callous behaviour between two people could ever have taken place.
A rising child star
Robert Blake, most famous for his role in the US television series Baretta, was born Michael Gubitosi on 19 September 1933 in Nutley, New Jersey. He was one of three children, with a brother James and a sister Giovanna. His father Giacomo, an Italian immigrant, who worked as a die setter in a can factory. His mother, Elizabeth, performed with her son James as a song and dance act. Later, coached by their mother while still very young, the three children began performing together as a group called The Three Little Hillbillies. In 1938, the family moved to California, where Elizabeth began to find work for the children as movie extras.
When he was only six, Michael began to act in MGM movies, appearing regularly in shorts such as Our Gang. Eventually, he became the lead character in the series, and by the time he was ten, he was a seasoned actor. He found a new stage name, Bobby Blake, and started to work in westerns and comedies, appearing with Humphrey Bogart in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre.
A troubled childhood
His career flourished, but he later claimed that his childhood had been miserable due to the fact that his father was an alcoholic and was often violent towards him. He got into trouble at school for fighting and was expelled, after which he ran away from home, eventually joining the army.
After his spell in the army, Blake returned to California with the intention of becoming a serious actor. As Robert Blake, his career in TV and movies was extremely successful, and he made a name for himself playing tough, violent characters whose lives were in emotional turmoil. During the 1970s, he became a household name as Tony Baretta, the undercover detective in the TV series Baretta, whose motto was ‘don’t do the crime if you can’t do the time’ – a phrase that was, ironically, to become apt to his personal life in later years.
Lonely hearts swindle
In 1962 Blake married actress Sondra Kerr and the couple had two children. However, during the 1980s the couple divorced and Blake’s career also began to wane. In 1999, he met Bonnie Lee Bakley. Bakley had an extremely unsavoury past as a con woman. For many years, she made a living running a lonely hearts scheme, sending naked pictures of herself to men and promising to visit them for a fee. She had numerous brushes with the law, and had been under investigation for fraud. In several cases, Bakley swindled men out of their savings and made a good deal of money out of her scam, allowing her to buy land and property. She used some of her ill-gotten gains to fund a career as a Hollywood entertainer, using the stage name Leebonny, however, this was largely unsuccessful.
By all accounts, Bakley was obsessed with celebrity status, and made it her business to date famous men whenever she could. At the time when she met Blake, Bakley was dating Christian Brando, the son of Marlon Brando.
Marriage Trap
After having only known Blake for a short period of time, she told him she was pregnant, but she couldn’t be sure who the father was. When a DNA test determined that Blake was in fact the father, Blake agreed to marry her. The reasons for this remain under dispute, but the outcome was that, after the marriage, Blake set Bakley up in a small guest house next to his home in the San Fernando Valley. Rumours circulated that Blake wanted the child to give to his eldest daughter to raise, which – as it turned out – is exactly what happened in the final outcome.
Bakley’s history as a wife and mother left a lot to be desired, to put it mildly. She had been married ten times and Blake was her tenth husband. She had two children by her second husband, Paul Gawron, who was also her cousin. She also had a daughter whose father she claimed was Jerry Lee Lewis, the rock ‘n’roll star, even naming the child Jeri Lee Lewis after him. Her fourth child, a girl, was initially named Christian Shannon Brando, and later renamed Rose Lenore Sophia Blake.
Shot in the head
Not surprisingly, Blake soon fell out with his new wife. It was rumoured that Blake bitterly regretted the marriage, hated Bakley and was desperate to get rid of her. On 4 May 2004, he took her out to dinner at Vitello’s Restaurant on Tujunga Boulevard in Studio City. After the meal, Bakley was found sitting in a car parked round the corner from the restaurant – she had been shot in the head. When questioned, Blake’s excuse was hardly reassuring; he said that he had not been present when Bakley was killed because he had gone back to the restaurant to fetch a gun that he had left lying on the table there.
On the face of it, there seemed to be a clear motive as to why Blake should want to murder Bakley. He had a history of violence and Bakley had tricked
him into marriage through her pregnancy, or so he claimed. However, despite the circumstantial evidence against him, the situation was not, in fact, as clear cut as it appeared. First of all, it was difficult to find hard evidence that Blake had actually shot his wife as there were no witnesses to the actual murder. In addition, her past history as a con woman meant that there were a lot of men who might want to kill her – men that she had lied to, swindled money out of and become sexually involved with. Many claimed that Bakley had had a voracious, some would say perverted, sexual appetite and it was argued that this might have laid her open to violence by numerous ex-lovers. Not only this, but according to the defence lawyers in the case, Bakley was a drug addict who had in the past used her older daughter as a prostitute to earn money to fuel her addiction. This meant that there were many people who had, allegedly, been victims of Bakley’s selfish behaviour in her desperate desire for drugs, money, sex and celebrity status.
Ex-lover’s prison record
There was one past lover who looked, like Blake, as though he could have had something to do with the murder. Christian Brando, whom Bakley was dating when she met Blake, was noted for his out-of-control behaviour. In fact, he had served eight years in prison for the manslaughter of his half-sister’s lover. The Christian Brando case was well known and had shocked America, because his father was one of the country’s most famous actors, Marlon Brando. When details of the incident came out, they revealed just how far the Hollywood star’s family life had descended into chaos. Like Blake, Christian Brando was part of a Hollywood B list of celebrities renowned for their wild behaviour, and the stories that surrounded his life involved the usual litany of dysfunctional families, drugs, drink, sexual abuse and violence. So it was not unreasonable to suspect that Christian Brando, whom Bakley claimed had fathered her baby, might have been incensed by her behaviour and taken revenge.
‘A miserable human being’
Despite the uncertainties and lack of evidence, Blake was charged with the murder of his wife Bonny Lee Bakley. However, when the case came to trial, largely because of the complications mentioned above, the prosecution was unsuccessful. On 16 March 2005,
Blake was found not guilty. Blake had also been charged on two counts of hiring a former stuntman to murder her. He was cleared on one of these charges, and the other was dropped after the deadlocked jury finally came to a decision and acquitted him.
After the trial, many commentators felt that the decision had been unfair. Los Angeles District Attorney Steve Cooley went so far as to call the jury ‘incredibly stupid’ and gave his opinion that Blake was a ‘miserable human being’. However, none of this altered the fact that Blake was allowed to go free. On 18 November 2005, Bakley’s children sued Robert Blake in a civil trial, claiming that he was responsible for their mother’s death. This time, the charge stuck, and Blake was found liable for her wrongful death. He was ordered to pay a fine of 30 million dollars. Since then, Robert Blake has filed for bankruptcy, but Bakley’s children believe that this is just a ploy to evade payment of the fine, and that he is hiding his money. To date the conflict continues, as Blake seeks a retrial of the case and continues to claim that he is penniless.
Rob Lowe
The American actor Robert Lowe is perhaps best known today for his role as Sam Seaborn in the popular TV series West Wing. During the 1980s, as one of the so-called ‘Brat Pack’ of good-looking young actors, he made a series of movies that increased his already high profile. However, in 1988 his career hit a low patch when it was revealed that a videotape was circulating which showed him having sex with two young women. It later transpired that one of the young women was underage, and even though he argued that he did not realise this at the time, he was shunned by powerful elements in the film world for a considerable period after the scandal hit the headlines.
The golden boy
Robert Hepler Lowe was born on 17 March 1964 in Charlottesville, Virginia. He was the son of a lawyer, Charles Lowe and a teacher, Barbara Hepler. While he was growing up, his parents divorced and Lowe and his brother were brought up in the Episcopalian church. His mother moved the children around, first to Dayton, Ohio, and then to Los Angeles, where Lowe attended Santa Monica High School, making friends with a number of other young would-be actors. These included Sean Penn and Robert Downey Jnr, while living next door to them was the Sheen family. Not surprisingly, Robert, who was a good-looking boy, gravitated towards acting as his chosen career.
When he was 19, he was cast in the TV show Thursday’s Child. His big break came in 1983, in Francis Ford Coppola’s The Outsiders, which also launched the careers of other big names in the film world, such as Tom Cruise and Patrick Swayze. By his early 20s, Lowe had the kind of life most people can only dream of – he was good-looking, he was rich, he dated women like Princess Stephanie of Monaco and Nastassja Kinski and on top of that he was a film star. But then, he made a big mistake.
A ‘lesbian clinch’
Lowe was involved in politics and he attended the Democratic convention in Atlanta, campaigning on behalf of Michael Dukakis. While he was there, he met two women in a nightclub and took them to his hotel for a sex session. What he did not know, he claims, was that one of the girls was only 16 and had got into the club under false pretences.
At the hotel, he filmed the two women in what the media dubbed a ‘lesbian clinch’, but what the actor did not foresee was that the women would steal the tape from him. A year later, the mother of the youngest girl found out about the tape and sued him. Since the girl was only 16, she was underage by the law of Georgia, which forbids lesbian sex until the age of 18.
As it turned out, the case did not come to court. Lowe settled out of court with the girl’s mother and completed a term of community service as punishment. However, that was not the end of the matter because the tape was later released by pornographer Al Goldstein, which further harmed Lowe’s career. The ‘Sex Video’, as it became known, appeared on Lowe’s filmography on the Internet, and was jokingly called the best film he had ever made. For a while, it seemed that the episode had tarnished his film career to such a degree that he was no longer in demand. Offers from the major studios dried up and he was forced to take small parts in television to keep his head above water.
Addictions to alcohol and sex
Lowe himself saw the episode as a watershed in his personal life. As he tells the story, it was a wake-up call to end a life which had been blighted by an addiction to alcohol, sex and constant partying. It was during this time that he met his future wife, make-up artist Sheryl Berkoff. Initially, she was dating Emilio Estevez, another member of the Brat Pack, who had been a friend of Lowe’s at school. She and Lowe had a one-night stand together, but later fell out when Lowe admitted this liaison to Estevez. However, when the scandal of the Atlanta tape hit the headlines, Sheryl befriended Lowe and stuck by him as he became the butt of humour for actors and directors in the film world and the media pundits. At her request, Lowe entered a rehabilitation clinic for alcohol and sex addiction. The couple married in 1991, after he promised her that he would give up the lifestyle that had led to these problems. Today, they have two children, Edward and John.
After the scandal, Lowe slowly began to rebuild his career. As he grew older, he was cast in parts that demanded more from him and he began to relish the fact that he was no longer just playing a handsome hunk. He began to land comedy roles, in films like Wayne’s World and Austin Powers, and also had a spot presenting Saturday Night Live, which showed that he had a quick sense of humour.
His most successful part was the character Sam Seaborn in West Wing, written by Aaaron Sorkin. He said of the part, ‘Sam has been a gift, in that Aaron was smart enough to see that you can be a handsome person as well as a brain. He has never traded on the sexuality of the character. If I had been on Ally McBeal, I would have been seen coming out of the shower on the first show’. Like Lowe, Sorkin himself was no stranger to scandal; at various times he had been arrested for being in possession of marijuana, mushrooms and crack cocaine.
The West Wing became one of the most popular shows on American television, but disputes arose over the way Sorkin wrote the shows. Lowe felt that his character was being marginalised and eventually left the series. He was quickly followed by Sorkin, and after their departure the show’s rating plummeted. Lowe returned for two more episodes and then moved on. He produced and starred in two more drama series, but neither of these managed to engage the public. Later, he returned to working with Sorkin, in a play in London’s West End. He also starred in several mini-series.
Today, Lowe sees himself as being very lucky, in that not only was he able to regain his acting career after the scandal, but he also made drastic changes in his personal life that, he says, have brought him great happiness.
When interviewed about his past life, Lowe admitted that he regrets nothing, saying, ‘I wouldn’t be where I am today without my mistakes. Particularly my mistakes. Exclusively my mistakes.’ Rob Lowe seems to have learned how to survive a scandal and the once, so-called ‘good time boy’ seems to have manage to have fixed himself firmly in the affections of his fans.
Lana Turner
The sultry film star Lana Turner, whose heyday was in the 1940s and 1950s, had a turbulent love life, both on and off screen. As she once put it succinctly, ‘I liked the boys, and the boys liked me’. She had seven husbands and many lovers, and scandal and rumour were very much part of her life. However, there was a scandal that reached epic proportions when she and her 14-year-old daughter, Cheryl, became involved in the murder of her lover Johnny Stompanato, a Los Angeles gangster, with whom she had a characteristically stormy relationship.
Father murdered for money
The story of Lana Turner was a rags-to-riches one which epitomised the excitement of Hollywood in its glory days. She was born Julia Jean Mildred Frances Turner in Wallace, Idaho, on 8 February 1921. Her father, John Virgil Turner, was a miner from Tennessee, and her mother Mildred Frances Cowan, was a 16-year-old girl from Alabama. Growing up, Lana was known as ‘Judy’ and her parents struggled to make a living, eventually moving to San Francisco to try and improve their lif
e. Shortly after moving, her father was murdered after winning a small sum of money in a craps game. Apparently, he had stuffed his winnings in his sock and was found dead on a street corner. His murderer was never caught.
Lana and her mother, who was now suffering health problems, moved to Los Angeles. By the age of 16, Lana was attending Hollywood High School, and one day, instead of taking her usual typing class, she decided to go down to the Top Hat Café on Sunset Boulevard for a soda. It turned out to be the best decision she ever made.
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