Bonny Lee Bakley: Hollywood Dreams and Nightmares

“Bonny,” a voice on the recording of a phone call between two friends asked. “Did you ever stop and try to figure out why you’re only attracted to famous people?”

Bonny’s answer was swift and seemed to come to her easily. “Being around celebrities makes you feel better than other people.”

And it was that feeling of happiness that Bonny Lee Bakley would chase her entire life.

Her journey started on June 7th, 1956, in Morristown, New Jersey, and right from the get-go, her life was rife with grief and abandonment. Her father, Edward J. Bakley, was an alcoholic and almost never around. And then her mother, Marjorie Lois Bakley, sent Bonny off to live with her mother in Glen Gardner, New Jersey, so Marjorie could focus on running her own business. 

There Bonny grew up with her siblings, seemingly lacking the sense of attention and affection that children need from their parents. 

When Bonny was only eleven, she and her sister stumbled upon a pool party run by a nearby nudist colony and Bonny got her first real fix of the limelight.

After that, Bonny often attended the parties and events held by this nudist colony and it was shortly after that that some of the other attendees began taking pictures of her. The darker undertones of this whole situation were lost on the young Bonny, who reveled in the sudden influx of attention from the adults around her and didn’t stop to ask what those pictures were being used for or who they were being sold to.

Perhaps spurred on by her popularity amongst the nudist colony, Bonny dropped out of school at the age of only sixteen. Her ambition was to become a model and to achieve this she moved to New York City so she could attend the Barbizon School of Modeling. 

It was there that she met the first of what would be a very long line of husbands. His name was Evangelos Paulakis and he was also a student at the Barbizon School of Modeling, but what sparked between the young couple was hardly a whirlwind romance. Evangelos needed a green card and Bonny was willing to help him get one… for a price.

The two struck up a deal and Evangelos paid Bonny to marry him. Bonny held up her end of the bargain just long enough to get her payout and then she divorced Evangelos. Shortly after that, Evangelos was deported and Bonny had a clean slate to work with.

Then, at only twenty-one years of age, Bonny married her second husband: her first cousin Paul Gawron. They had two children together and were married for a total of five years, making their union the longest that Bonny would ever have.

And it was during the next few years that Bonny would cement the most successful part of her career. Perhaps thinking back to those early days in the nudist colony, Bonny began selling nude pictures of herself and other women. This was before the time of the internet and smartphones. Bonny would take out ads in magazines and newspapers and people who wanted to buy her pictures would reach out and pay Bonny through the mail. Bonny would then send them the pictures or just simply keep the money and give them nothing in return.

Bonny set herself up quite nicely with her mail-order earnings. She managed to buy herself several properties, including a house just outside of Los Angeles which would come in handy for the next part of her journey.

Spurred on by her own success, Bonny moved to Hollywood to pursue a career in singing and acting. Bonny arrived in the beating heart of America’s entertainment industry with probably more than most in her shoes do. But like so many that had come before her, and the many others that would come after, Bonny found herself a small fish in a very big pond.

She didn’t manage to make much of a splash with her new career, but she always had the old one to fall back on.

Bonny expanded her business. She began forging driver’s licenses and checks, some of which were used to open PO boxes for her mail-order business, but some of them she sold. When she was picked up by the police in 1989, she also had drugs in her possession, although it’s hard to say for certain if she was dealing them herself.

Bonny was in and out of the court system for years. If she wasn’t in the courthouse marrying a new husband, she was usually bargaining her way out of another charge of forgery. On one occasion when she was arrested yet again, Bonny had five driver's licenses and seven social security cards in her possession. 

But despite the turbulence that seemed to follow Bonny wherever she went, she still hadn’t given up on making it big one day. It may have been that Bonny would never be famous in her own right, but that wouldn’t stop her from rubbing shoulders with celebrities and maybe, if she was lucky and persistent enough, she could even end up marrying one too.

Bonny had always been a fan of celebrities, but after moving to Hollywood, she seemed to take her love to a whole new level. She then began actively seeking celebrities out, hoping that one day the stars would align and her luck would turn.

She had her first brush with success in 1990 when she met Jerry Lee Lewis. Then in his fifties, the American musician who went by the nickname The Killer wasn’t exactly at the height of his career anymore, but he was still good enough for Bonny. The two met and three years later Bonny claimed that Jerry Lee Lewis was the father to her newborn daughter: a daughter Bonny named Jeri Lee just in case anyone was unsure of her parentage.

A DNA test later revealed that Jerry Lee Lewis wasn’t actually the father and Bonny left the young girl with her second ex-husband Paul so she could move closer to Hollywood.

There she met and allegedly had relationships with men like Dean Martin, Frankie Valli and Gary Busey, but it was in 1991 that Bonny would discover the target of her next big obsession: Christian Brando. The son of actor Marlon Brando, Christian was in the news a lot at the time for killing Dag Drollet, his sister’s ex-boyfriend.

Christian had attacked Dag after finding out that Dag was often violent towards Christian’s sister. Christian claimed that during a scuffle, the gun he had been holding accidently went off and killed Dag. Christian then pleaded guilty to voluntary manslaughter and spent five years in prison. It was during Christian’s incarceration that he began receiving fan mail and nudes from Bonny Lee Bakley.

The two struck up a connection and when Christian was released, that connection became physical. A while after that, Bonny found out that she was pregnant once again.

Bonny gave birth to another daughter and named her Christian Shannon Brando: a bold move to make when Bonny herself wasn’t exactly sure who the child’s father really was.

It turned out that during the time that Bonny became pregnant with her fourth child, she wasn’t dating one celebrity but two. The other man in question was actor Robert Blake and there was a good chance that Robert was actually the father to Bonny’s baby.

Unsure, and wanting to be, Robert insisted that tests were done to determine the child’s paternity and Bonny’s life was changed all over again once the results came back.

It turned out that Christian Shannon Brando wasn’t a Brando after all. She was a Blake.

Christian Shannon Brando became Rose Lenore Sophia Blake and a new agreement was struck up between her parents. Just happy to finally be an official part of a celebrity family, Bonny signed a prenup that would handover her rights as a parent to Robert if she were ever to file for a divorce. The stipulation was the same the other way around, but Bonny couldn’t sense the danger that clause could potentially put her in. She signed her prenup and married her tenth husband.

Bonny and baby Rose moved into Robert’s estate, although they were made to live in the neighboring guest house instead of living in the main house. 

It seemed like Bonny’s new marriage had hit the rocks before it had ever left the harbor.

Robert was suspicious of Bonny and her intentions and hired a private investigator to dig up any dirt he could on his new wife. The PI uncovered that Bonny was still running her mail-order business and was still selling her nudes.

The couple were now in a tight situation and trapped in an unsuccessful marriage. Neither could file for divorce without losing custody of their child to the other and neither of them wanted to do that.

But it was when the baby was only eleven months old that fate would intervene and solve the issue of custody for the newly formed family for them.

On May fourth, 2001, when Bonny was forty-four years old, Robert Blake took her out to dinner at his favorite restaurant: Vitello’s on Tujunga Avenue.

Dinner went well enough and it was only when Bonny was sitting in the car afterwards that Robert realized that he had forgotten his gun back at the dinner table. He left his wife in the car and went back to the restaurant to pick it up, but when he returned to the car, he was up a gun, but down a wife.

While Robert had briefly gone back to the restaurant, someone had approached Bonny and shot her twice in the head. She later died on her way to the hospital.

The gun that Robert had gone back to collect that day was quickly determined not to be the murder weapon and a city-wide hunt ensued. Ten days after Bonny was killed, the murder weapon was recovered from a bin close to the restaurant. It was an older Walther pistol, quite unique and a collector’s item, but the serial number had been filed away and there was no way for the investigators to trace it back to an owner.

Bonny was buried and four years later Robert sat in court, charged with her murder.

The prosecution argued and presented witnesses who claimed that Robert had approached them and tried to solicit their services in killing his wife. They put to the courts that Robert not only wanted Bonny gone to avoid losing custody of his daughter, but that he was furious with her too. She’d approached Robert and tricked him into fathering a child all so that she could finally attain her dream of becoming rich and famous.

The motive sounded solid enough, but Robert’s defense lawyers were able to chip away at the integrity of the prosecution’s witnesses and then they put forward their own theory. The defense argued that Bonny had been killed by a disgruntled customer, possibly one of the many men that she had conned out of money during her years running her mail-order business.

The courts agreed and Robert Blake was found not guilty of killing Bonny.

He was, however, found liable for Bonny’s wrongful death when Bonny’s three eldest children sued him in a civil trial. He was ordered to pay 30 million dollars in compensation. Shortly after that, Robert filed for bankruptcy, but the courts upheld the verdict after he filed an appeal. They did, however, cut his penalty down to 15 million dollars.