May 21, 1917– Perry Mason reruns have been playing on a Portland, Oregon, TV station every day for the past 47 years. No another USA station has continuously broadcast Perry Mason as long as KPTV, where the show debuted 15 days after ending its 9 year run on CBS. It’s among the least expensive shows to buy, even as KPTV has moved from showing it on film reels to 1-inch tapes to digital tapes & now streaming digital with closed captioning. Station Manager Patrick McCreery:
“Most markets don’t want it; they figure that with high-definition digital sets & 5.1 stereo sound, what viewer is going to want to watch an old B&W show? We’ve found very loyal viewers. It’s the linchpin of our daytime programming.”
Living deeply in the closet is not a special “members only” club in Hollywood, but the back-story of Raymond Burr’s career holds special interest. Typecast as a “heavy” when he landed in Hollywood after WW2, his imposing presence & brooding demeanor made him a perfect choice for a bad guy in film noir & crime dramas. Burr played the chilling homicidal husband across the courtyard from Jimmy Stewart’s Greenwich Village apartment in Hitchcock’s classic Rear Window (1954) & the district attorney who took apart Montgomery Clift’s testimony in A Place In The Sun (1951).
Burr was never an A-list film actor. He became a big star in the brand new medium of TV with 2 series taking up 2 decades of his career. As lawyer Perry Mason (1957-66) & the wheelchair bound detective on Ironside (1967-75), he became one of TV’s best paid actors & best known faces. Burr returned to his most famous role in 1985 for the beginning of another decade long run of made-for-TV specials beginning with Perry Mason Returns.
Throughout his life, Burr was unfailingly generous to charities & gave away much of his time, when he wasn’t keeping a grueling work schedule. He was known to be popular on the set & kind to cast members & crew.
Because of the era that he lived & worked in, knowledge of his gayness would have ruined Burr’s career. He remained intensely private to the very end. Burr put in an enormous amount of energy to remain closeted & the efforts took their toll physically & psychologically. He believed he could safeguard his privacy by creating an imaginary history to hide his gayness & his long relationship with fellow actor Robert Benevides who he had met on the set of Perry Mason in 1957. He went to the trouble to invent 2 dead wives, a dead son, & fabricate reports of his military service during WW2 to fill out the blank spaces in his biography. He retold the tales so long & so often that they found their way into his obituaries.
In the 1950s Burr was “romantically linked” to Natalie Wood. They were genuinely fond of each other & remained friends until her mysterious death in 1981.
Burr & Benevides shared a passion & a business for orchids, which they bred on their private island in Fiji. Later they would own & run a successful vineyard in Sonoma. At their home in Palm Springs, the couple was known to throw all-male pool parties along with their pal Rock Hudson. The couple was together 36 years. When Burr was diagnosed with that damn cancer in spring 1993, he threw a series of good-bye parties at the place in Sonoma & then took that final curtain call in September.
“I don’t have much of an ego, but I have a great deal of confidence!”
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