At a pretrial hearing for the Robert Blake murder case last month, there was no rush for courtroom seats. No crowd of spectators. No cable TV talking heads dissecting every motion.
There was, however, the man on the cell phone who got on the elevator with the celebrity defendant--the man who kept right on talking, oblivious to Blake, who himself kept right on talking about roll-your-own tobacco to a few cohorts.
And there was Gloria Garrison. A Jehovah's Witness, Garrison sat outside the Los Angeles Superior Court in Van Nuys, California, handing literature ("Hellfire: Is It Part of Divine Justice?") to passersby. When informed Blake stood no more than a few yards away from her, quietly smoking away a mid-morning break, Garrison was unfazed.
"I hadn't even noticed," Garrison said.
The trial of the century the Blake case isn't.
Jury selection is scheduled to get underway in earnest on Monday in Van Nuys. And while the stakes are high--the actor is accused of murdering his wife--interest is not. At least not yet.
"It's not Kobe Bryant. It's not Michael Jackson. It's not Martha Stewart," said Harvey Levin, creator/executive producer of TV's Celebrity Justice, and veteran Los Angeles legal reporter.
It's also not Winona Ryder (shoplifting), Courtney Love (assorted drug and assault charges) or Catherine Zeta-Jones (prosecution witness in the trial of an alleged stalker)--other recent Hollywood cases to play to packed courtrooms.
And, most of all, Robert Blake is not O.J. Simpson.
"O.J. was a B-list guy, but it was an A story," Levin said. "It was a soap opera."
The 1995 double-murder trial had sex, race and gavel-to-gavel TV coverage. The murder victims, Simpson ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson and waiter Ron Goldman, were young and attractive. The fortysomething football-hero defendant was handsome and familiar.
The Blake case, being played out only minimally in front of the cameras, is also about sex--Blake wed veteran scam-artist Bonnie Lee Bakley after their fling produced a daughter--but it's just not sexy.
Consider the cast: "A homeless, toothless person difficult to understand when intoxicated," a character from one of the defense's alternative killer scenarios; a crew of grizzled ex-stuntmen whom the prosecution alleges were sought out by Blake to kill Bakley; Bakley herself, an "unsympathetic, unattractive victim" in Levin's words; and Blake himself, a 71-year-old defendant a quarter-century past his prime as the Emmy-winning star of TV cop show Baretta.
None of this diminishes the significance of the case--a woman is dead, and a child lost her mother and possibly her father--but, in a show-biz town where sizzle sells, and nipped-and-tucked sizzle sells better, it doesn't do a lot for its appeal.
"I think one of the things that people like watching is--and I hate to say it--they like good-looking victims, and they like good-looking defendants," said Levin.
During the pretrial hearing on Oct. 14, the only person getting high marks for her appearance was Lea D'Agostino, famed in the 1980s for her prosecution of the deadly Twilight Zone: The Movie on-set accident. D'Agostino stopped in briefly to check out the proceedings.
"You know Lea," an elderly courtroom observer leaned in and said. "She's over here all the time--she's always dressed well."
In a cream suit, D'Agostino was dressed well, although Blake's latest attorney, M. Gerald Schwartzbach, also made an impression in a bow tie.
Not making an impression, at least not on the unaligned gray-haired trial watcher--about the only person there not a reporter or Blake crony--was Blake himself.
"He's really aged," the man said, a statement that could be applied not just to Blake's appearance, but his lengthy run as suspect and defendant.
By the time the Blake trial begins, possibly on Dec. 6, it will have been more than three years since Bakley's shooting death, more than two years since Blake's arrest and initial innocence plea, and nearly a year since jury selection began the first time around--a process aborted when Blake parted ways with his third attorney.
"We are all anxious for the trial to proceed as quickly as possible," a quite-serious Schwartzbach told the court on Oct. 14.
If the lack of a sexy defendant and victim has tempered interest, then the drawn-out proceedings have only cooled the story further.
"The [press] turnout for this trial date is clearly smaller than it was the last time [in January]," L.A. Superior Court public information officer Allan Parachini said.
As of mid-October, Parachini said only 10 members of the media intended to attend the trial continuously. Yes, he expected the day of the verdict to be as busy, if not more busy, than the day of the verdict in the Winona Ryder trial. And, no, he didn't expect a repeat of the O.J. Simpson circus because the O.J. Simpson circus, he said, was "an aberration."
To movie producer Larry Thompson, the Blake case is an aberration, too.
"I don't know how many celebrity murder trials there are," Thompson said, ticking off the names of Simpson, Blake and silent-movie comedian Fatty Arbuckle (who actually was tried for manslaughter)--and stopping there. "There aren't a lot of celebrity murder trials."
"[So] when you say, 'Is [the Blake case] as big as...?' I'm telling you, it's big," Thompson said.
Noted in one press release as "The King of TV Bios," Thompson, whose credits include TV-movies about Sonny and Cher, and Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz, has more than a passing interest in the Blake case--he's mounting a film on the subject, Dying for Stardom: The Absolutely Unbelievable True Story of Bonnie Lee Bakley. Shooting is to begin next April.
As the title indicates, Bakley, not Blake, the nominally famous person, is the star part. The role is yet uncast; Steve Railsback (Helter Skelter) is set to play Blake.
Thompson, who bought the rights to Bakley's story last year from the woman's sister, Margerry Bakley, has no trouble articulating the film's selling points. "It's the study of a tragic human," he said. "Whether or not Robert Blake pulled the trigger [the script doesn't draw a conclusion], her life had been an accident that was going to happen."
As a courtroom potboiler, Harvey Levin agrees the Blake trial has potential.
"He's not an A-list defendant," Levin said of Blake. "But the storyline is really interesting. I think this could really shape up to be a true murder mystery."
Thompson's betting that the public and media will eventually warm to the Blake trial--especially once the fixation over the murder trial of a Modesto, California, fertilizer salesman eases up.
"I think Scott Peterson's trial has swarmed over the media and made very little room for anybody else's trial," Thompson said.
Whether or not the white, hot spotlight ever arrives in Van Nuys, Gypsy Vic, the courthouse's resident guitar player, will be around, and he'll be, well, indifferent.
"I'm not really interested," Gypsy Vic said of the Blake trial. "I mean, I understand he's a celebrity...but he's just a nice guy to me."
It was Gypsy Vic's acoustic guitar that Blake strummed en route to a court date last February. Not to be confused for a sentimentalist, Gypsy Vic has since sold the instrument.
"I sell my guitar because people want to play that guitar--not because Robert Blake plays it, because they like that guitar and I actually sell it because I want to sell it to get [a] better one," Gypsy Vic said.
Lesson learned: The Blake case may not be Los Angeles' hottest ticket, but it can still move the merchandise.