Yesterday, I posted a message about something chilling that Robert Blake had said on a 1974 Tonight Show with Mr. Carson. Here's a message I got after that from Douglas McEwan…
I too watched that Carson show the other night, and posted remarks about his amazingly chilling remarks. However, your correspondent misquoted Blake's quote of Wally Cox's remark. When I was posting about it, I ran and reran the moment I was quoting to get the quote exactly right. Here is what Blake said: "You go ahead and you have your little caprice, have your little affair, and if the bed turns out to be a drag, you're lucky. You just walk away. And if it turns out to be terrific, you shoot her."
Note the important change is "You shoot her," not "You shoot your wife." In fact, in the full quote, it's not clear if Wally was referring to the wife or the girl friend, though it looks more to me like it meant the girl friend. Either way, it's a horrific "joke," especially when spoken by a future wife murderer, and seeing Johnny break up at it and hearing the studio audience laughing loudly at it was creepy icing on the creepy cake. Folks, HE MEANS IT!!!
On the show, Blake also said he'd worked with the Marx Brothers, though I'll be damned if I can find anything to back up that claim.
I met Blake back in 1972. And in 1973 he did me a solid without knowing it. He so pissed off Dick Whittington's then-radio-producer that said producer quit and the job became mine. So thanks Robert Blake. Your being a dick got me one of the best jobs I ever had.
I just ran the episode on my TiVo and Douglas quotes it accurately…and it sounds to me like Blake was saying (quoting Wally Cox) that if you cheat on your wife and you fall in love with the Other Woman, you shoot the Other Woman. Still, it's kind of an eerie foreshadowing.
For those who don't know: Dick Whittington was a Los Angeles radio personality from the sixties to the mid-nineties. He was very funny and very original and a lot of other radio guys were praised for things that "Sweet Dick" did first. He's retired now.
And I can't think of what Blake did with the Marx Brothers but I doubt he was lying. He also talked about working with Laurel and Hardy — which he did — and his account of that seemed accurate. He even remembered the name of the movie. Blake may have appeared with the Marxes in some live appearance or in some scene that got cut. He was certainly working on the MGM lot when they were. Thanks, Doug.