Raymond Burr

I've been DVRing Perry Mason reruns once and even twice a day now for several months.  I loved that series and Raymond Burr in it.  I watched Ironside as well but it never measured up to Perry Mason nor did those later-year special TV movies on the character.  As moral and honorable as Mason was, how many remember that Burr was one of the great movie villains in 64 big-screen movies?

He had a handsome face, piercing blue eyes and a beautiful baritone voice but he fought being overweight all his life and that fact would keep him from being a leading man in the movies.  Sad, perhaps, but that's the way it was and still is.  Overweight men had only one route open to them in dramas and that was as the bad guy.  And he was one of the best.

He was Canadian-born, in British Columbia outside Vancouver, in 1917.  He started life as a big boy... a whopping 12-pounder.  From early on he detested sports and exercise and not only loved to eat but loved to cook.  In his adult private life, especially after accumulating much wealth from his television work, he loved to throw parties and cook and folks cherished an invitation.

His father was a hardware dealer but it was his mother who was a pianist and music teacher who had the greatest impact on her eldest child.  He was clearly her favorite and their relationship was always very close.  He revered her and credited her with most things he held near and dear... performing, cooking, a sense of refinement, keeping one's head held high, a love of travel, privacy, a shared sense of humor.  They seemed to talk in code.  After the parents were divorced, Burr helped shepherd his younger brother and sister through life and they held him in the same loving place that their mother did.  (A side note: 33 years after his parents divorced, they remarried.)

For the five or so years that Burr lived with both of his parents, it was mainly in China.  After the divorce, his mother gathered up her brood and installed them in a Vallejo, California hotel that her father owned.  He attended a tony military academy in San Rafael where he was bullied due to his chubbiness.  His mother became a traveling music teacher.  It was the traveling part that lured her.  

He could have passed for Robert Taylor

He first acted around age 12 with a local stock company. He dropped out of middle school to help support the family.  It was his duty.  He wanted to do it.  Not one to have close friends and reluctant to join anything, it surprised some that he moved into the "Y" and life changed.  He became more outgoing although never forgetting for a moment that he was a private person.  He formed a theatrical group which spurred him on to thinking about looking for acting jobs.   He hired on as a jack-of-all-trades at a cattle and sheep ranch.

Finally came to move to Los Angeles where he enrolled at the famed Pasadena Playhouse, a breeding ground for neophyte showbiz types in numerous capacities.  Though aware of his liabilities, he felt that he had much to offer as an actor.  There would come a day when he would be an instructor at the Playhouse.

He needed to work while attending school.  He loved the outdoors and had developed a love for flowers, particularly orchids.  (One day he would be considered an authority on orchids.)  He got on with a conservation corps that, he said, taught him the value of hard work.

Soon he was bouncing back and forth between L.A. and New York for whatever acting jobs he could secure.   An enterprising agent was fond of Burr and luckily she had some pull at RKO.  The studio took one look at him and knew he'd be right for their film noirs.  He looked menacing and that voice could be downright scary but an added perk was that he was handsome enough to play semi-romantic parts.

Burr made too many C pictures to warrant any conversation.  His movie career didn't offer him the latitude to be picky about what he appeared in.  We'll just be hitting the highlights of his movie career.

He received 10th billing as a henchman in the grim San Quentin (1946) with real-life bad guy Lawrence Tierney in the lead.  The forties were filled with two of RKO's stocks-in-trade... noir and westerns.  Gee, they were my favorites, too, and it is how I discovered Burr.  My favorites were 1948's Pitfall (creepy stalking Lizabeth Scott), 1948's Station West (murderer in logging town) and 1949's Red Light (plotting murderous revenge on ex-employee George Raft). 

Menacing Lizabeth Scott and Dick Powell in Pitfall

In 1948 Burr surprised his friends by marrying Isabella Ward, an actress he met at the Playhouse.  Very little is known about her or the marriage and it didn't last long.  By most accounts Burr took the road traveled by many gay actors and married.  His family knew he was gay, so did close friends.  Hollywood whispered about it and the public was clueless.  

He knew he had to be careful if he wanted a career.  He knew he could be a most effective bad guy but there was no demand for a big homo bad guy.  Being gay was at the very heart of his rigid sense of propriety but he had his limits.  For one thing he would not participate in those studio-manufactured dates often designed to cover up actors' hidden homosexuality and/or to keep actors in the public light.

On the other hand... and this is far more grim... Burr had a great propensity for mythologizing his life.  He'd been at it a very long time.  He told some whoppers in school, often sugar-coated his early family life, oversold his résumés, military service, etc.  It hardly escaped him that he was employed in an industry that trafficked in illusion so why not make up something of his own?  Besides, he just plain didn't want to talk about most any truths that were personal which is why he never mentioned his wife to anyone.

But he did constantly mention not one but two other wives that never existed.  Yep, made them up out of whole cloth.  He claimed to have been married to an actress who was killed in the same 1943 plane crash that killed actor Leslie (Gone With the Wind) Howard.

Apparently not one to stop while he was ahead, he later claimed he was married a second time and she and their son were killed in an accident.  Not only was he out to hide the gay aspect of his life but he was peddling heartbreak and tragedy so horrific that others wouldn't ask him about it.  And if that's not enough, he said he didn't date because he was too grief-stricken to love again.

The fifties certainly became his decade, producing his most famous work.  And he tore into it with a vengeance.  He wanted to make lots of money to thoroughly enjoy the kind of life he'd long envisioned.  Film buffs certainly remember him in A Place in the Sun (1951), where as a prosecuting attorney he is technically a good guy who goes about his work in a decidedly thuggish manner.  He was excellent as a deported crime boss in Mexico making life hellish for Robert Mitchum and Jane Russell in His Kind of Woman, also '51.

In 1952 he beat Frank Sinatra to a pulp in Meet Danny Wilson and was duplicitous as Julie Adams' husband in Horizons West.  He was a smarmy letch in the 1953 film noir Blue Gardenia where Anne Baxter thinks she has killed him with a poker for physically manhandling her.  It had plot devices eerily similar to some future Perry Masons.

He was a journalist who alerts the public to the animal shenanigans in the 3D Gorilla at Large (1954) before taking on his most famous movie role.  Alfred Hitchcock obviously knew the sense of terror Burr would bring to Rear Window, also '54. He went all grey to play Lars Thorwald a morose man who has killed his wife and realizes he is being watched by neighbor Jimmy Stewart through his telephoto lenses. 

My favorite scene is watching through Stewart's apartment into Burr's apartment across a courtyard.  We see through open windows Stewart's girlfriend Grace Kelly rifling through Burr's apartment for evidence while we also nail-bitingly observe the menacing Burr coming down his hallway, about to open his door and discover Kelly.  Stewart, meanwhile, is beside himself with terror.

In 1956 Burr costarred in Great Day in the Morning, a colorful western set in Denver.  Playing Jumbo Means, he loses his gambling-saloon-hotel to Robert Stack in a fair gambling loss.  Of course he vows revenge because he's the bad guy.  That same year he played a psychotic kidnapper of a police captain's daughter in Cry in the Night.  It was a good B noir but became more famous for a completely different reason.

The daughter, in question, is 17-year old Natalie Wood.  Burr was 38 and even with the age difference and frankly the absurdity of it all, someone cooked up a romance between the two.  The man who zealously guarded his private life was now club-hopping, flashbulbs popping, pearly whites gleaming, his massive arms around her doll-like waist.  They even professed their love.

Maybe the public bought it but Hollywood was snickering.  Most jawed about who came up with this ludicrous idea.  They ruled out the makers of the film because they publicly, at least, ridiculed it as well and asked Burr and Wood to knock it off.  It could have been her or her people.  She thrived on those flashbulbs, was on the brink of her horny adulthood and she loved gay men.  

I'm suggesting, again, that Burr was behind it all.  What gay guy in the 50's couldn't use a little heterosexual rumor or two now and then?  Keep 'em guessing.  Part of the allure.  Smoke and mirrors.
But there was talk about using Burr in a new television series called Perry Mason.  Everyone had great hopes for it.  He wasn't a shoo-in because Fred MacMurray and Efrem Zimbalist's names were also being bandied about.  Oh, yes, there was also a matter of his weight.  He had lost some 50 pounds making the rounds with Wood but the studio wanted more.

I say, along with all this, he invented this newest female love interest story.  Despite often wondering if Perry was, in fact, supposed to be gay (in the face of Della obviously loving him), after awhile it was obvious Perry had no romantic scenes ever.  

Around the time of the start of Perry Mason, Burr completed Crime of Passion (1957) in which he menaced Barbara Stanwyck.  Damn, they were a great match.  It would turn out to be his final film noir and his last bad guy role.  

RB and RB... Burr and Benevides

Great wealth is not all Perry Mason provided Burr.  It also provided him with a life partner, Robert Benevides.  He was in an episode and they formed a relationship soon after.  He was 13 years younger than Burr and they were together some 35 years.  The two had a great deal in common and Benevides seemed to be a great influence on Burr and a great comfort to him.

In 1960, for some reason I can't fathom, on a break from his hit series, he made Desire in the Dust, one of those sultry southern sex sizzlers with Joan Bennett and Martha Hyer.  Burr was the patriarch of questionable repute and far better than the material he had to work with.

In 1965 the couple bought Naitauba, a 4,000-acre island in Fiji.  Burr would collect seashells (his vast collection was apparently most impressive), indulge in his love of fishing and boating and reading during the times they actually lived there.  It was one of the locations where he grew his beloved orchids.

Perry Mason (the original series, that is) ended in 1966 and the following year he signed up to play a wheelchair-bound chief of detectives in Ironside which played for eight years.  In 1978 he played in a few episodes of one of my favorite miniseries, Centennial.

He continued to work in various TV and some movie projects until the end of his life but most of them were Perry Mason TV movies.  Of course he brought along his ever-loyal secretary, Della Street, or rather Barbara Hale, a dear, dear friend and the only other living cast member from the original series.

Burr (and Benevides) concentrated more on their personal lives and it was a glorious life for both of them.  Their orchid business was thriving and much the same could be said about his love of wine.  It was only natural they should open a winery.

Entertaining in their home made them both happy.  The wine flowed, the orchids festooned the house and gardens, the food ravaged the senses.  His love of socializing was bested only by his extreme generosity with his friends in terms of giving away much of his money.  He became known and respected for his philanthropy.

Those closest to him noticed a far happier and more open man in his later years than in his earlier years.  No question Benevides gets most of the credit and yet as late as a year or two before his death, Burr was still spinning the tale or at least going along with it that he had two wives and a son, all of whom died tragically.  How curious is that?  Notable obituaries include his fictional wives and son.

Burr was dealing with cancer toward the end of his life.  He even put off treatment for it so he could complete his final Perry Mason movie.  He passed away at his ranch in Sonoma, California, in 1993 at age 73.  Robert Benevides is still alive.

I saw Burr once.  We were in our own cars.  I was stalled in traffic and he was waiting to go into some little studio on LaBrea just south of Sunset in Hollywood.  

I attended parties in L.A. where we would sometimes play a game. There are variations of it but we basically were given the question of which five actors/actresses, dead or alive, would we like to have intimate conversations with over drinks and dinner.  I was surprised one time when another participant and I both named Raymond Burr as one of the five.

I confess I always found him to be a fascinating man.


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