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<Archive Obituaries> Raymond Burr (September 12th 1993)

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Bill Schenley

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Sep 13, 2005, 8:14:32 PM9/13/05
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Burr, The Star Haunted By His Lost Love Affair;
He Thought Perry Mason Robbed Him Of Marriage To Natalie Wood

Photo: http://www.meredy.com/burr05.jpg

FROM: The London Daily Mail (September 14th 1993) ~
By Shaun Asher

Hw was one of the world's best-known actors, instantly recognisable in
any country with a TV station - but Raymond Burr never forgave the
show that made him wealthy and successful.

The 76-year-old star, who has died in his sleep after a long battle
against cancer, said recently: 'I've made a lot of mistakes in my life
and done things I regret. But if I could live it over again, the only
thing I would not do is the Perry Mason show.'

It wasn't just that someone proud of his acting skills, who made
nearly 100 films and held his own with some of Hollywood's greatest
performers, was dismissed as front-man of two marathon whodunit
series, Perry Mason and Ironside. Behind Burr's surprising and
embittered admission lay the heartache of a love that might have been.

Because Perry Mason, Raymond Burr always believed, killed his last
chance of a happy marriage.

His first wife, British actress Annette Sutherland, died in a
mysterious World War II plane crash along with actor Leslie Howard,
and the Burrs' only son Michael died of leukaemia, at ten. Burr's
second marriage, in 1947, was over within a few years, and he lost his
third wife, Laura Andrina Morgan, to cancer in 1955.

Raymond Burr felt himself under some kind of curse. Then in 1955, when
he was nearly 40, he made a now-forgotten movie called A Cry In The
Night, starring as an American version of The Collector, a psychopath
stalking and kidnapping a teenage beauty.

His leading lady was Natalie Wood, at 17 young enough to be his
daughter; but attracted from the first, they were soon deeply in love.

Studio executives, grooming Natalie as a dewy, all-American girl next
door, were aghast and told Natalie and her family that if the
relationship continued, it would wreck her career. Burr was warned
off, too, with implicit threats of being blacklisted even if the
'inappropriate' romance did not alienate the public.

Gradually, unwillingly, they were forced apart. Their love lasted for
two years, increasingly fragile and tenuous - until in 1957 Burr
became Perry Mason and pressure of work ended the affair.

He never married again, mourning with hindsight the sacrifice of his
three greatest ambitions outside showbusiness. 'If I was ever going to
have another marriage, and a family life, and father children again,
it would have to have been done during those Perry Mason years.'

Instead, the actor from British Columbia, Canada, soared into orbit as
one of the first international stars made by television. The original
Perry Mason, despite its relentless format of a lawyer who never lost
a case and always cross-examined the killer into a witness-box
confession in time for the closing commercials, ran for nine years and
300 episodes, until 1966.

After that came a nine-year stint as Ironside, the crippled detective
cracking cases from his wheelchair - ironically, towards the end of
his life Raymond Burr returned to a wheelchair, riding in one when he
left hospital to die at his California vineyard home at Dry Creek.

He was a big man, both physically - the painstakingly dieted, slimline
edition was still 15 stone - and in lifestyle. During the Seventies,
career on hold after being doubly typecast in a brace of long-running
shows, he didn't just retire to a tropical isle but bought his own in
the South Pacific.

If he couldn't raise his own family, then he'd treat the population of
Naitobi, bought for $ 100,000, as his clan. Burr, 6ft 2in tall and
some 20 stone at the time, both revelled in and sent up his role of
island chief, sometimes wearing fanciful uniforms complete with a pith
helmet.

More seriously, he poured his own money into improving his 'kingdom'
and making life easier and healthier for its citizens. And he indulged
a new hobby, gaining a world reputation as an orchid breeder and
creating 3,000 new varieties.

Yet he was no marooned millionaire: he flew to America or Europe to
see the latest plays and upheld his reputation as a gourmet by
exploring the finest restaurants. And although he sold his realm for $
1.5 million in 1983 - homesick for his adoptive California and wanting
to resume a full-time career in his 60s - he made little money on the
deal.

Raymond Burr's frustrated dream of a stable home with a loving wife
and children was a reaction to his own childhood. His parents broke up
when he was six, and at 13 he left school to support his mother and
younger brother and sister, with earnings of 16 1/2p a day as a New
Mexico ranch-hand. Back in California, he looked after his siblings
while his mother worked as a cinema organist.

He had always loved the stage and got his start with a Canadian
repertory company, touring Britain when he was 19 and spending a year
in Paris as cabaret singer.

Nothing came easily - his overnight success was decades in the making.
Four years after moving to New York to conquer Broadway, he was still
waiting - and when he did win a part, he had to spend several days in
the same clothes because his hotel had locked him out for not paying
his rent.

His first Hollywood movie was cancelled by the time he got there.
Dispirited, he enlisted in the wartime U.S. Navy, emerging in 1945 at
a corpulent 24 stone. Cigarettes helped him lose weight, but hooked
him on a 60-a-day addiction. Actually the weight helped him win early
film parts, stressing his physical presence as, literally, a heavy in
scores of films.

He was the killer menacing bedridden photographer James Stewart in
Hitchcock's classic Rear Window. And on the way to Perry Mason, he
co-starred with everyone from John Wayne to Godzilla.

Yet after countless portrayals of hulking, brutish villains, Burr
emerged as perhaps the most enduring Good Guy of American TV, an
unbeatable, unflappable crusader for justice. He established a new
record for career longevity when Perry Mason was revived in a string
of award-winning TV specials, the last recorded only weeks before his
passing.

It meant that 34 years after going into court for the first time,
Raymond Burr was still brooding over the guilty party, blue-eyed stare
relentless, until they told the truth.

Cancer kept attacking him, leading to operations, radiation therapy
and the removal of one kidney. The actor surmounted those reverses in
copyright Perry Mason style. 'So I've lost a kidney, big deal,' he
joked to surgeons, on coming out of the anaesthetic.

He refused to turn his face to the wall and whimper over the
inevitable. 'I may be on borrowed time, but I still have plenty of
living to do,' he declared - and only a month afterwards he went into
the studios to play Mason one more time.

And while he held the character responsible for ending the love affair
of his life, Burr recognised Perry Mason's power and influence over
untold millions as well as himself. Typically, as he sat in his vinery
home and the future could be measured in days, Burr accentuated the
positive:

'God, I've been lucky! If I hadn't been an actor, what would I have
done? I've probably been able to touch more people as an actor than
anything else. I've enjoyed that.'

At his direction, there will be no funeral, just a simple cremation.
As for the epitaph, Raymond Burr spoke it for himself.
---
Photo: http://www.triviatribute.com/images4/raymondburr2.jpg
---
Saving The Day, Once A Week;
Raymond Burr, The Giant Of TV Lawyers

FROM: The Washington Post (September 14th 1993) ~
By Tom Shales, Staff Writer

Marshal Dillon represented the law. Eliot Ness represented the law.
Even Sheriff Andy Taylor represented the law. But Perry Mason was the
law, and Raymond Burr was Perry Mason.

"The day we finished 'Perry Mason' -- nine years, okay, big success --
they said the betting was, by our executive producer, that I would
never work another day in my life," Burr recalled during a 1986
interview. "Because I was so identified with Perry Mason."

Some actors are forever joined at the hip to one particular role, and
a few turn those roles into icons. That's what Burr did with Mason.
One became the other. On television in the '50s and '60s, and then
again in the '80s and '90s, Burr's Mason was more than Erle Stanley
Gardner's fictitious lawyer come to life; he was the avenging hulk of
justice, an almost godlike figure who defended only the innocent and
always cowed the guilty into confession.

Burr died of cancer late Sunday in Sonoma County, Calif., at the age
of 76, having lived a remarkably long time for a man who spent most of
that life overweight. He weighed 12 3/4 pounds at birth, Burr said in
1986, and grew up chubby in British Columbia.

"When you're a little fat boy in public school, or any kind of school,
you're just persecuted something awful," Burr recalled.

And yet Burr's girth helped make Mason the hugely imposing figure that
he was, barreling down on suspects and culprits as they sat squirming
in the witness chair, chastising them in his stentorian baritone,
pursuing suspects around Los Angeles in a big Detroit car that became
a kind of lawmobile. Here was an incorruptible figure to renew one's
faith in the legal system and also to counter the badly smudged image
of the great American attorney.

Ironically, Burr was first considered not for the role of Mason but
for that of Hamilton Burger, the hapless prosecutor who seemed never
to win a case. It was 1957, and Burr had a history of playing heavies
in films, most notably the obsessive prosecutor in George Stevens's "A
Place in the Sun" and a brooding ax murderer in Alfred Hitchcock's
"Rear Window."

In "Window," Burr was the mysterious figure across the way whom James
Stewart and Grace Kelly suspected of having chopped up his wife and
carried her out of the apartment in suitcases. And they were so right.

There were many other films, few of them notable. Burr sometimes ended
up not as the villain but as straight man to a monster, as in "Bride
of the Gorilla" or, more illustriously, in the Americanized adaption
of the Japanese creature classic "Godzilla, King of the Monsters,"
imported in 1956. Burr's scenes, with a few Japanese actors joining
him, were shot in Hollywood and inserted into the completed film.

He played a reporter named Steve Martin who watched from various
sound-stage windows as Godzilla stomped all over Tokyo.

About the time he said yes to appearing in 1985's "Perry Mason
Returns," which went on to become the highest-rated TV movie of the
year, Mason also said yes to the producers of a cheapie feature called
"Godzilla 1985," in which he reprised the role of the alarmed and
ubiquitous reporter.

"Ah, for the first one I got paid a great deal of money for one day's
work," Burr recalled. "The second one was also shot in one day, and I
got a great deal of money for that. When they asked me to do it a
second time, I said, 'Certainly,' and everybody thought I was out of
my mind.

"But it wasn't the large sum of money. It was the fact that, first of
all, I kind of liked 'Godzilla,' and where do you get the opportunity
to play yourself 30 years later? So I said yes to both of them."

Perry Mason returned with such resounding success that NBC
commissioned producer Fred Silverman, who had talked Burr into
resuming the role, to make more Mason movies. The 26th, "Perry Mason:
The Case of the Killer Kiss," will air Oct. 22.

This will, sadly, be Perry's Last Case. Or at least Raymond's. And who
would ever want to try to follow him in the role he owned? An attempt
to do a hip, updated, "young" Perry Mason, with another actor in the
lead role, flopped ignominiously in 1972.

Although Burr was so identified with Mason that people sought him out
for legal advice, and despite those who said he'd never work again
when "Mason" finally finished its long run on CBS, Burr surprised
everyone, except perhaps himself, by starring in yet another hit
series as yet another dauntless law enforcer, "Ironside," from 1967 to
1975. NBC later did a TV-movie sequel to that one too.

In person, Burr was a man of energy and enthusiasm who wanted you to
know he had many interests beyond acting and television. He saw
himself as a citizen of the world and loved planning utopian projects
like a global TV network linked by satellites. He prided himself on
the wide variety of friends he had made in fields other than show
business.

He showed no resentment about his identification with Perry Mason, as
actors sometimes do when roles make them famous, but remembered the
years of making the series as arduous.

"I had no life outside of 'Perry Mason,' " Burr said, looking back.
"And that went on 24 hours a day, six days a week. I never went home
at night. I lived on the lot. I got up at 3 o'clock every morning to
learn my lines for that day, and sometimes I hadn't finished shooting
until 9 o'clock. I had a kitchen, bedroom, office space, sitting room,
all of that, on every lot I ever worked on."

In TV markets all over the country, and on cable networks, "Perry
Mason" reruns go on, sometimes at 4 in the morning, sometimes at 1 in
the afternoon. People look to television for blessed reassurance, and
that is one thing Raymond Burr gave them. For Perry Mason, things
always worked out all right, and they worked out pretty well for
Raymond Burr too.
---
Photo: http://www.meredy.com/burr03.jpg
---
FROM: The Independent (September 14th 1993) ~
By Kenneth Bain

Raymond Burr, actor: born New Westminster, British Columbia 21 May
1917; married Annette Sutherland (died 1943; one son deceased), 1947
Isabella Ward (marriage dissolved), 1950 Laura Morgan (died 1955);
died Geyserville, California 12 September 1993.

In post-war Hollywood, Raymond Burr was the archetypal ''heavy''. With
his brooding presence, powerful physique and deep resonant voice, he
seemed built for menace - as Hitchcock was to recognise and exploit in
Rear Window (1954). Burr's film career began in 1946 when he was 29.
In 10 years he appeared in over 50 Hollywood B-feature quickies with
improbable titles like Ruthless (1948), Tarzan and the She-Devil
(1953), Casanova's Big Night (1954), Please Murder Me (1956) and
Desire in the Dust (1960). In 1948, there was a new one every six
weeks. All unmemorable, they scarcely seem a preparation for what he
was to become - a leading television star for a third of a century.

Raymond Burr was born in New Westminster, British Columbia, and is
said to have weighed 123 4 lb at birth. His father ran a hardware
store, his mother played the church organ and their son began life in
a strict Presbyterian home. The unexpected break-up of his parents'
marriage when he was seven was the first of many personal tragedies he
was to suffer throughout his life. He grew up in Vallejo, California,
and at 13 left to work as a shepherd in New Mexico, earning 25 cents a
day. At 19, he was in Toronto having joined a summer theatre and in
1941 he made his Broadway debut in the musical Crazy with the Heat.

In 1957, Burr launched the first of what was initially to be a short-
term television series of adaptations of Perry Mason stories by Erle
Stanley Gardner - court dramas of a defence attorney, Perry Mason, who
never lost, often against improbable dialectic odds, and a District
Attorney who never won. From 1957 to 1965, the annihilation of the
prosecution proceeded through a total of 245 50- minute episodes. They
may have been formalised and their outcome at times contrived, but
they were tautly written and hugely popular. As one commentator wrote,
''the characters were welcome in everyone's living-room . . . Its
mystery plots were complex but generally capable of being followed.
The show gave something of the satisfaction gained by crossword
addicts.'' Burr won two Emmys, one for the 1958-59 season and one for
the 1960-61 season, as best series actor - and there were still 32
years to go.

The Perry Mason stories were to become part of the developing folklore
of world-wide television. Their influence on small-screen court drama
was incalculable. For millions of viewers, each episode had
credibility, the common touch and - in the end - justice for all. In
achieving that, Burr and Perry Mason were one.

Burr changed gear and role play in 1967. He became Chief Ironside, the
wheelchair crime sleuth with his band of young staff investigators.
Notably for the time, one of them was black. Ironside ran to 177
50-minute episodes, followed by eight full-length films. The weekly
episodes became compulsive viewing wherever they were screened. They
are still rerun in all sorts of unlikely corners of the television
world.

The Ironside basic set was simple and functional. It never altered.
Neither did Burr's dominance and control of what went on. Together
with his business partner, Robert Benevides, Burr had founded Harbour
Productions mainly for Ironside. But he would always listen to his
team and they would often reshoot for instant improvement in story
line or action. He was severe on himself in the cutting-room. If he
was an actor with a somewhat limited range, his powerful voice and, as
the years went by, great heavy shoulders, chest and frame, lent
natural physical authority to his scenes. Through both Perry Mason and
Ironside, he radiated warmth, decisiveness and integrity.

The filming schedule was always punishing. Burr would be up by 3.30am
and out on to the Los Angeles freeway to beat the worst of the traffic
and smog. It was there that he would begin to read his lines for the
day's shooting. Often he did not reach home until 10pm. This could go
on for months. It was no wonder that the annual lure of a South
Pacific island retreat was initially so irresistible.

Naitauba is a semi-accessible island of only three square miles in the
eastern seaboard of Fiji. Historically, it has both Fijian and Tongan
influences. The original owner was Gus Hennings - half German, quarter
Fijian and quarter Tongan. He was the son of an early German consul by
a niece of King Thakombau, the Tui Viti (''King of Fiji'') of
pre-cession Fiji. Hennings had built up a flourishing copra plantation
on the island where he, his family and his labourers were the only
inhabitants. Attracted by its pedigree, Burr bought it in the 1960s.

Once a year when there was a break in filming, Burr would fly down
from Los Angeles by Air New Zealand's trans-Pacific route to Nandi in
western Fiji, take an internal flight to Taveuni in the east and then
embark in his open launch for a half-day slog through rolling seas to
Naitauba. It was a far cry from Claridges where Burr liked to stay in
London; but at Naitauba he favoured his guests with the same flawless
hospitality, whether he was in residence or not. All found the peace
and comfort of the isolation he relished.

C.P. Snow came to the end of his monumental Strangers and Brothers
series of novels in 1970. Burr was a fan of his and interested in
meeting him. Snow was an Ironside watcher and saw the possibility for
television collaboration. At the time, Burr was considering a medical
series, Snow a novel about a surgeon's life. In 1974, they met at
dinner in the London flat we occupied off Kensington Church Street.
Snow was accompanied by his wife, the novelist Pamela Hansford
Johnson. Burr came alone. His entrance was unexpectedly theatrical: he
wore a scarlet- lined cape over black evening dress. Our
eight-year-old daughter looked at him with disappointment. This was
not what she had expected. ''I thought you would come in your
wheelchair,'' she said shyly. ''I didn't know you could walk.'' He
patted her head and smiled. ''I'm sorry. I'll come in my wheelchair
next time.''

Burr had a quality of mind, range of knowledge and humanity not always
apparent from his television performances. Notwithstanding - or
perhaps as a consequence of - their widely differing backgrounds and
ways of life, he and Snow were instantly attracted to each other: Burr
the communicator, Snow the questioning listener. They remained in
touch for some time, but their collaboration failed to materialise.

Because of his world-wide mailbag and indirect influence, Burr was
consulted from time to time by the State Department. Here was a role
he yearned to perform in the real world - recognition beyond the
camera and the screen. He offered himself to Fiji and for a decade or
so he had ready access to the prime minister, Ratu Sir Kamisese Mara.
But there were maverick qualities in both men, and the relationship
never quite prospered.

The 1987 military coups in Fiji put paid to it. By this time, Burr had
sold Naitauba. The Fiji Sun daily newspaper - his principal business
enterprise at the time - collapsed and died in the face of
intimidation from the military regime, its editor detained and
deported. There were issues of principle, notably censorship, against
which it had fought unavailingly. This was the end of Burr's overt
support for the cause of South Pacific multiracial sanity and
tolerance in a strident world - and of his belief in his capacity to
help sustain it. Thereafter, he concentrated on the cultivation and
export of orchids from his horticultural showplace which he called
''The Sleeping Giant'' at the foot of the hills near Nandi
international airport; and in sponsoring and bringing to Los Angeles
and San Francisco young Fijians whom he judged to be worth wider
skills training and opportunity.

His last public act of generosity to Fiji had come just before the
military intervention. From his personal collection in San Francisco,
he sent four large oil paintings by air in support of ambitious local
plans to mount a retrospective exhibition of the South Pacific work of
the Australian portrait artist Mary Edwell-Burke.

Raymond Burr's personal life was afflicted by tragedy. He was married
three times, all ill fated. In 1943 his first wife was killed in an
air crash, when flying over Portugal. The aircraft was believed to
have been shot down. The actor Leslie Howard also perished in the same
crash. His second marriage ended in divorce. He married for the third
time in 1950. This too had a tragic outcome when his new wife died of
cancer at the start of a delayed honeymoon. Much earlier, his only son
- from his first marriage - had died of leukaemia at the age of 10.

It was cancer, too, that brought an end to Raymond Burr's own vigorous
life. At the age of 76 and grievously ill he none the less managed to
complete the filming of a new Perry Mason film, The Case of the Killer
Kiss: it will be broadcast next month.
---
Photos: http://www.tvder60er.de/bilder/p_mason.jpg

http://images.easyart.com/i/prints/rw/lg/2/2/Celebrity-Image-Raymond-Burr-227783.jpg

http://www.northernstars.ca/lsphotos/burr.jpg

Raymond Burr in art:
http://www.eyfellsandeyfells.com/famousfaces/ff-rayburr-lg.jpg


Charlene

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Sep 13, 2005, 8:25:11 PM9/13/05
to

Bill Schenley wrote:
> Burr, The Star Haunted By His Lost Love Affair;
> He Thought Perry Mason Robbed Him Of Marriage To Natalie Wood

>From glbtq.com:

Burr, Raymond (1917-1993)

For millions of television viewers worldwide, actor Raymond Burr will
always be identified with Perry Mason, the character he played in a
long-running courtroom drama series, but in his career, which spanned
five decades, he played a variety of roles in radio, television and
film and on the stage. He was also an avid breeder of orchids and the
owner of a winery.

Quite apart from his importance as an accomplished actor, however, Burr
has a particular significance in glbtq history for his response to the
pressure he faced as a gay actor in a homophobic culture. It is clear
that he felt the need to hide his homosexuality by carefully
constructing (if not inventing out of whole cloth) a biography in which
he seemed to conform to the heterocentric norms of the 1950s, when he
rose to prominence as an actor.

Raymond William Stacy Burr was born in New Westminster, British
Columbia, on May 21, 1917. When he was six, his parents, William Burr,
a hardware dealer, and Minerva Smith Burr, a pianist and music teacher,
divorced, and the boy and his mother moved to Vallejo, California,
where his maternal grandfather owned a hotel.

Burr was sent to the nearby San Rafael Military Academy but, with the
onset of the Great Depression, dropped out at the age of thirteen to
help support the family. In the ensuing years he had various jobs,
working on a sheep and cattle ranch, at a U.S. Forest Service weather
station and in China, as well as doing surveying and sales work.

Burr also began doing occasional acting jobs at the age of twelve. He
appeared on the stage in Canada, England, and Australia and also sang
at a nightclub in Paris. He eventually worked on Broadway, appearing in
Crazy With the Heat in 1941 and The Duke in Darkness in 1944.

After service in the Navy, Burr headed for Hollywood and soon won his
first film role in Mervyn LeRoy's Without Reservations (1946). The
intense and physically imposing Burr was often cast as a villainous or
intimidating character. Notable among his early work were his
performances as a district attorney in George Stevens' A Place in the
Sun (1951) and as the murderer in Alfred Hitchcock's Rear Window
(1954).

In the course of his career, Burr had significant roles in over sixty
cinematically-released films and almost forty made-for-television
movies. His work included dramas, westerns, monster movies, and even
comedies such as Ken Finkleman's Airplane II: The Sequel (1982).

In 1955 Burr was asked to audition for the part of district attorney
Hamilton Burger in a planned television series based on the Perry Mason
mystery novels of Erle Stanley Gardner. Burr insisted on trying out for
the title role as well. Impressed by Burr's performance, Gardner chose
him to play the lead.

Perry Mason ran from 1957 until 1966. Burr won two Emmy awards (1959
and 1961) for his work on the popular series, and he became one of the
highest-paid actors in television at the time. Burr returned to the
role of the clever defense attorney in 1985, making over two dozen
Perry Mason movies for television in the next eight years.

Burr starred in two other television series, the hit Ironside
(1967-1975) and the flop Kingston: Confidential (1977), and appeared in
several miniseries.

When it came to his private life, Burr has been described as "the most
secretive of men." Reference sources state that he was married three
times and had a son, but it is unclear how much of this information is
true.

According to various accounts, Burr's first wife was Annette
Sutherland, an English actress whom he married in 1941 and who
supposedly died in the same plane crash as actor Leslie Howard when, on
June 1, 1943, during World War II, the aircraft, en route from Lisbon
to London, was shot down by the Germans.

At the very least, the story about Sutherland's death is a fabrication.
There were only three adult females on the list of passengers and crew
of Howard's ill-fated flight, and Annette Sutherland (or Burr) was not
among them.

Burr's second marriage, which can be documented, was in 1947 to
Isabella Ward. The union was annulled after a few months.

The name of Burr's third wife is given as Laura Andrina Morgan, who
allegedly married Burr in 1953 and died of cancer in 1955.

The putative son of Burr and Sutherland, Michael Evan Burr, is said to
have died of leukemia at the age of ten in 1953. In a rare public
comment on his personal life, Burr claimed to have taken time off and
traveled around the United States with his son in the last year of the
boy's life.

Reports from Burr's closest associates cast doubt on the account. John
Strauss, his publicist since 1953, said that Burr "never mentioned any
wives or a son" and that he was in fact working steadily during the
time when he claimed to have been on the road with his son. In
addition, Burr's sister, Geraldine Fuller, said that neither she nor
her mother ever saw Burr's son. None of Burr's longtime friends seems
to have met any of his wives.

Despite the suspicious biography and occasional efforts to portray Burr
as romantically linked to various actresses, including Natalie Wood,
industry insiders were aware of his homosexuality. In 1961 Hedda
Hopper, gossip columnist and mother of William Hopper, a co-star on
Perry Mason, wrote to tell Burr that she had received a compromising
letter about him but said that she would not divulge the information,
promising to "stand up and swear anything for [him]."

In 1963 Burr and his partner, Robert Benevides, an actor whom he had
met on the Perry Mason set, bought Naitaumba, an island in Fiji. There
they pursued their shared interest in breeding orchids, a hobby that
they turned into a successful business, Sea God Nurseries.

They also ran a cattle ranch and worked to improve the lives of the 150
residents of the island, building houses, a church, and a school. Burr
sponsored the publication of the first dictionary of the Fiji language
and also provided money to send the island's youngsters to school, a
practice that he continued even after he and Benevides sold the island
in 1983.

By 1980 Burr and Benevides had moved their orchid business to a farm in
the Sonoma valley of California. In the early 1980s Burr donated two
greenhouses and a portion of the orchid collection to the California
State Polytechnic University-Pomona.

In the decade that followed, he and Benevides donated thousands more
plants, and in 1992 they gave the university a collection of art and
antique furniture valued at $1,100,000. Other gifts made by Burr and
Benevides include theater and law school scholarships.

In the 1980s Burr and Benevides became interested in grape-growing and
wine production. Vines were planted on their northern California farm
in 1986, and their first vintage was produced in 1990.

At the same time both men were involved in the making of Perry Mason
television movies, Burr as the star and Benevides as a producer. By the
early 1990s, however, Burr was in failing health due to cancer. In
August 1993 he completed his last film, Perry Mason: The Case of the
Killer Kiss, after which he retired to the farm, where he died on
September 12, 1993.

Although Burr had not wanted it, Benevides decided to name their
business the Raymond Burr Vineyards as a tribute to his partner of
thirty-five years.

--

wd41

deb...@comcast.net

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Sep 13, 2005, 8:29:46 PM9/13/05
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Portland TV channel 12 has been showing "Perry Mason" continously since
1968! I just caught an episode from 1958 I found kind of interesting,
because it had a female judge during the trial at the end of the
episode! Pretty progressive for a 1958 TV show!

Brigid Nelson

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Sep 13, 2005, 9:58:11 PM9/13/05
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They've really been digging into the stash this summer. I've seen
*two* new-to-me episodes one of which starred David McCallum as a
naive french man, the other featured Ryan O'Neil.

brigid

The first rule is to keep an untroubled spirit. The second is to look
things in the face and know them for what they are - Marcus Aurelius

robertc...@yahoo.com

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Sep 13, 2005, 10:45:57 PM9/13/05
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If you watch "Perry Mason" enough, the formulaic nature of the show
becomes unmistakable. You can practically set your watch by the time
certain events take place. All shows are like this more or less, but in
this one the formula is particularly noticeable.

Not that I ever cared. Raymond Burr and the rest of the cast were so
top-notch that they managed to overcome the plots and the rest of the
creakiness in the show.

Speaking of the cast, I remember William Tallman, who played Mason's
courtroom nemesis Hamilton Burger, making a commercial about the
dangers of cigarette smoking. Tallman was dying of cancer at the time
after years of smoking.

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