Rant #3,091: Keep Your Eye On the Sparrow

We lost two people during the past few days, two more celebrities who made a great impression on me in my childhood that left their mark but are now gone, hopefully to a better place.

One was an actor, one was an athlete, but they do share one attribute during their lives: they were the top stars in franchises where the best years of that franchise were in the rear-view mirror when they had their glory days.

One rebounded from that, before falling once again, and the other kind of fell and didn’t get up.

Let’s look at Mickey Gubitosi first.

That name doesn’t ring a bell?

How about the name Robert Blake?

One and the same person.

Blake was best known for his role on the TV show “Baretta,” where he played a detective who worked outside of the system to solve his cases, all with a parrot perched on his shoulder.

Blake wasn’t even the first choice for the role.

Tony Musante, another veteran actor, played the same character in the first iteration of this show, then called “Toma,” but it bombed.

Producers still believed in this lone-wolf, quirky character, and Blake—off a couple of fine movie roles, such as “In Cold Blood” and “Electra Glide in Blue” was tapped for the role, and the rest is history.

He became one of TV biggest stars from the early 1970s through the mid 1980s, and subsequently starred in a number of other shows, but none with the impact or popularity of “Baretta.”

He gained the reputation as being impossible to work with, and often appeared on Johnny Carson’s “The Tonight Show” looking to further stir controversy, once wearing a belt with a buckle showing a man and a woman copulating, which had to be blurred out so as not to offend people.

And then he impregnated a younger woman, had a child who gave him direction in his life, but ended up getting entangled—and then exonerated—for his ten divorced wife’s murder—Blake married her after their one night stand led to the woman getting pregnant, and the woman made it difficult for him to see his young daughter--and he was never able to regain his popularity in a case where the public had deemed him guilty even though he was found innocent.

But before all that, he was simply Mickey Gubitosi, the cute little kid who pretty much became the focus of the last few years of the “Our Gang” shorts after Spanky, Alfalfa and Darla became too big, literally, for their britches.

Gubitosi was the primary star during the later MGM years of the series, when the major studio took over these shorts and made some of the most horrible 15-minute films that could ever be made.

And all through them they had the character of Mickey, who whined himself away in these shorts … even Blake said they were hard to watch.

The once vaunted kids series had gone into the garbage pail, and leading the Gang into this abyss was Blake, who kind of became the heir apparent to Spanky, but could never fill his boots.

Blake, or Gubitosi, did not want to be there—he said he was forced into acting by his parents—and you could tell by his performance.

But he was able to rebound as an adult actor, only to fall into another abyss later on, even though he was acquitted of the murder of his wife.

Then we had Joe Peotone, again, a vaunted prospect as a teen--this time with baseball—who almost lost it all when he was with some scurrilous characters and got shot within an inch of losing his life.

He survived, and when he came to the New York Yankees as a big prospect, people began saying that he was the next Joe DiMaggio and that the Yankees had the next Italian star—and he was a native New Yorker too!

Pepitone came to the Yankees and was a major player for them during their latter dynasty years, and he stayed with them through the end of those years into seasons where the Yankees barely competed.

Although he was a fine ballplayer and had an excellent career—he won multiple Gold Gloves as a first basemen and made several All-Star teams--there was always an eye on him, because he still hung out with the wrong people even into adulthood and his playing days.

He actually became most famous to the general public for being one of the first athletes to use a blow dryer in the clubhouse, to try to sustain his rapidly balding hairline, and the idea was so popular that clubhouses with extra outlets for hair care products became the norm.

Finally, the Yankees tired of his antics on and off the field, shipped him to the Houston Astros, and later, he was one of the first American ballplayers to play in Japan.

In Japan, his antics continued. Even with a huge salary at the time, “Pepi” and the Japanese culture never meshed, he feigned injury, and the word “Pepitone” actually was absorbed into the Japanese language, meaning someone who was lazy.

He came back to the states, but still hung out with disreputable characters, and was jailed in the 1980s when his car was pulled over for running a red light and cocaine was found in the back seat.

Incredibly, Yankees owner George Steinbrenner had a big heart for him—as opposed to previous Yankees owners who wore thin of his antics both on and off the field--and hired him right out of prison to be a Yankees instructor.

In later years, he and the Yankees pretty much came to forgive and forget, and he became a fixture at Oldtimers Day games and as a coach in spring training.

Peptone also lived in my community, and I would see him at times being human and doing what we all do, including buying groceries and going to the post office.

He drove a beat-up car that he must have purchased during his glory years of the early to midi 1960s, and he always had a bleached blond at his side.

I believe he relocated to Florida a few years back, but he was certainly one of the most colorful Yankees of his generation … but you had to wonder if he had just conducted himself a little better, what he really might have been.

Blake and Pepitone … two celebrities from my Baby Boomer youth who just left us, who reached high water marks during their careers, but if circumstances were just a little different, could have really scaled the heights of their professions and not suffered such dramatic falls as they did …

R.I.P., to both of them.