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Perry Mason is back in pop culture thanks to a new, star-studded HBO mini-series—during Pride Month, too! Okay, that connection may seem bizarre at first, as a retro criminal defense attorney and Pride seemingly don’t go hand in hand. Perry isn’t a queer icon like RuPaul or Ellen or Elton—but the kids getting into HBO’s Perry Mason should know their history and know the character’s place within the gay canon. Perry Mason deserves a little recognition during Pride because of the actor most associated with the role: Raymond Burr, one of the first—if not the first—gay actors to ever star in the lead role of a successful TV series.
Burr is far from the only actor to play Mason, a character that debuted in the pages of mystery novels starting in 1933. Warren William and Ricardo Cortez, and Donald Woods played the attorney in a film series in the ’30s, Monte Markham (a.k.a. Blanche Devereaux’s gay brother) played him in a short-lived ’70s TV revival, and Matthew Rhys is the current Mason. But none of those actors are as tied to the role as Raymond Burr, who played the character in 271 TV episodes and 26 TV films. Burr is Perry Mason, forever—unless Matthew Rhys plays the character until 2056.
The longevity and success of Burr as Perry Mason is more than enough to make the man a legend. That’s not even taking into account his stint as the lead of the cop drama Ironside. Between Perry Mason and Ironside, Burr was a constant presence on television from 1957 to 1975. Burr was also gay, and he achieved a level of notoriety on television that was unrivaled by every other gay TV actor of the era(s)—and like all of his gay peers, Burr was also deeply closeted.
To put Burr’s imposing stature in context, of course there were closeted gay actors working on television when Burr landed the lead role of Mason in 1957. Hayden Rorke (I Dream of Jeannie), Richard Deacon (The Dick Van Dyke Show), and Paul Lynde (Bewitched) could be spotted in various live TV plays, variety shows, and short-lived sitcoms of the decade. Sheila Kuehl had a regular role on The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis, and Maurice Evans starred in a number of TV movies in the ’50s. Closeted queer actors were getting work, but they weren’t in the lead. And then there was Raymond Burr, a hard-working character actor who helped define the film noir villain in the 1940s and then became the most famous attorney in America with Perry Mason in the ’50s.
Compared to many of his peers who were content to be reported on as “confirmed bachelors” and leave it at that, Burr—and most likely his surely harried publicist and manager—concocted a truly titanic tale of heterosexuality so tragic that no one dare question it… even though Burr clearly had the same male live-in “companion” for over 30 years.
There’s the truth: Burr was, in fact, legally married to approximately one woman. He married Isabella Ward, an actress, in January 1948. The two met five years earlier at the Pasadena Playhouse, where he was a teacher and she—two years his junior—a student. They separated just a few months after getting married, and she moved back to Baltimore. Their divorce was finalized in 1952, and neither married again; Ward’s 2004 obituary doesn’t even mention the marriage.
And then there are the lies: as detailed in New York Post TV critic Michael Starr’s book Hiding in Plain Sight: The Secret Life of Raymond Burr, the first lie-wife debuted as part of a movie studio bio furnished alongside the 1946 film San Quentin. In it, Burr is described as a widower whose wife died in a plane crash four years prior. In subsequent interviews, Burr (or perhaps his people) would embellish the story, giving her a name (Annette Sutherland) and claiming that she was on a passenger plane that was shot down by Nazis—the same plane crash that killed 1930s film idol Leslie Howard. No one named Annette Sutherland was aboard that plane.
Ward, Burr’s actual wife, never heard him mention Sutherland during their brief relationship—and she definitely never heard about the son that Burr alleged to have had with Sutherland! Yep, in the late 1950s, Burr added a dead son to his personal mythology, one that was born in 1943 just before his first wife’s death in a plane crash. This son, Michael Evan Burr, died of leukemia in 1953—but not after Burr took a year off from his career to take little Michael Evan on a cross-country trip. Ward—remember, Burr’s only wife—never met or even heard of Michael Evan even though Burr claimed to have been a single father to a 5-year-old at the time they married. As for that yearlong break he took to show Michael Evan the country? Burr filmed eight movies and seven TV episodes from 1952 to 1953. Some break!
As if portraying himself as a widower with a dead son was not tragic enough, Burr added a second dead wife to his narrative in 1959 while working on Perry Mason. The story he told his co-star Barbara Hale was that he married a woman named Laura Andrina Morgan in 1955. Morgan, according to Burr, was dying of cancer and wanted to be married before she passed, so Burr said sure—and then she passed away. But Burr’s marriage to Morgan doesn’t line up with what he was actually doing in the mid-’50s: entertaining the troops in Korea and “dating” Natalie Wood.
During that time, Wood was regularly set up on very public dates with a number of closeted actors in order to get the 18-year-old starlet in front of the cameras and to dissuade tabloids from running rumors about certain men being a certain way. Burr was one of them, but the movie studios preferred pairing Wood with closeted heartthrob Tab Hunter.
Burr’s life changed in 1960, when a 30-year-old actor named Robert Benevides delivered a script to the Perry Mason star. Burr took a liking to Benevides, who had himself spent the late ’50s jumping from guest role to guest role trying to start an acting career. Benevides and Burr became inseparable, and the Perry Mason crew noticed. Perry Mason director Arthur Hiller later recounted a story about how a pair of workers he’d recommended to Burr came back fully shook: when they arrived at Burr’s abode, he answered the door in a pink bathrobe. Scandal!
An actual scandal nearly blew up Burr’s spot in 1961, when the notorious tabloid Confidential got word from New York City drag queen Libby Reynolds that they’d hooked up with Burr after a bartending shift in the Village. When the story ran, however, it was framed as Burr kissing a female impersonator under the impression that they were a woman. It’s speculated that Burr or his people paid money to tone down the story from “Raymond Burr hooks up with gay male bartender” to “Raymond Burr unknowingly kisses a drag queen.”
Bathrobes and tabloids behind them, Burr and Benevides made their relationship work from the moment they met in 1960 until Burr passed in 1993. They even went from life partners to business partners in 1963, when Burr suggested that Benevides—constantly fraught over his languishing acting career—switch to working behind the scenes. They formed Harbour Productions, which produced Ironside, and Benevides was credited as a production consultant on the Perry Mason TV movies of the ’80s and ’90s.
The couple turned their passion for orchids into Sea God Nurseries, which operated in a number of locations, and they started a vineyard in California’s Dry Creek Valley. Oh, and they bought an island in Fiji in 1965 and sold it almost 20 years later. When Burr passed away in 1993, Benevides was by his side. He willed his entire estate to Benevides.
Prior to meeting Benevides, Burr’s life story was defined by unspeakable tragedies—twice a widower and a grieving father—all of them made up in order to keep people from who Burr really was. After meeting Benevides, Burr lived a life that seemed like a fantasy—buying an island, an international orchid business, over 30 years with the love of his life—but it was all true. In Burr’s case, his truth was gayer and greater than his fiction.
