Edgy MD wrote: ↑Fri Mar 10, 2023 4:38 pm He also made for an interestingly weird guest on Johnny Carson from his Baretta days and well beyond, regaling Johnny's audience with his Hollywood tales delivered wholeheartedly with out-of-date Rat Pack-y swinger slang, ending each of story with an emphatic Mickey Spillane-ish New Jersey-inflected topper like "And
that's the name of
that tune!"
Yeah, during a story about his less than ideal childhood (he claimed sexual abuse from
both parents) on a Carson appearance he blurted out that 'For a time I didn't know whether I was a boy or a girl'
in an era when few uttered that privately much less publicly. Sometimes it seemed tough to tell where Barreta left off and where Blake began (or vice versa) including those speech patterns. But, even
if it was hard to tell at times what was truth vs exaggeration, he did lead a wild early life: teenage runaway, car stealer, drug dealer, drug addict, etc. and wasn't shy about hiding it. Then adding in the
murder charge on the cusp of turning 70 and you realize that streak never really ended.
