Raymond Burr was the first interpreter of Perry Mason, who now returns with a series. The actor camouflaged his s-xu@lity like other celebrities.
The HBO chain plans to start broadcasting what is called a remake in film jargon on June 22; that is to say, a version of an original series that in the first half of the 60s was a spectacular success: Perry Mason. The series will now be played by actors relatively unknown to the Spanish public. In the past, Raymond Burr embodied the protagonist. A good actor with a complicated life.
Before the series was filmed, Americans delighted in the novels of the very popular Erley Stanley Gardner, a writer who competed with the established Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler in terms of authors specializing in the police genre, with doses of "suspense" on many occasions. Gardner created that character, Perry Mason, an expert lawyer who won whatever causes he defended.
Taking these stories to television, they began to be broadcast in the United States through CBS, starting in 1957. Two years later, they were acquired by Televisión Española, which broadcast them until their end, in 1966. The circumstance occurred that the renowned novelist Stanley Gardner imposed on the director that Raymond Burr be Perry Mason and not the character of the prosecutor Hamilton Burger, as they had initially offered the actor, with a chubby face and a kind and serious air.
When Perry Mason inaugurated the programming of American series on TVE, there were very few appliances in our country, although already in the early 1960s, when a middle class began to take off, the "Six Hundred", which was acquiring household appliances, the number of households with televisions were growing.
Many citizens, without the possibility of acquiring them, were content to watch the programs while standing behind the windows of the establishments where they were exhibited. Or else in the towns, they sat on cattail chairs, also in front of the trades of that guild. Perry Mason then became the most-watched series, with significant audiences for the time. Consequently, its protagonist, Raymond Burr, was a favorite actor among those first Spanish viewers.
Raymond Burr was born in Canada in 1917, he settled in the United States, and in his youth, he worked on a ranch and was a seller of photographs, we suppose idol of the screen because he dreamed of one day being an actor, which happened at the end of the years 30. He managed to intervene with small roles in later "cult" films, such as A Place in the Sun and Rear Window. But it has already been said that his popularity would reach it with the Perry Mason series, which was broadcast in a lot of countries.
Raymond Burr's life would not be known until many years later, perhaps through reports and biographies when he was no longer in this world. For thirty-five years he was the lover of a young actor, Robert Benavides, whom he met during the Korean War. There, too, he became with another young man, Frank Vitti, whom he would present in Hollywood as his "nephew", but the romance with him was shorter.
Given that the society of that time, that of the 40s onwards, was very puritanical, in cinematographic environments it was not tolerated that a leading man or leading actor was what was later called "gay". And to cover that condition, Rock Hudson, for example, at the beginning of his popularity, was "married" to his secretary. It was also the case of Raymond Burr, who turned to Isabella Ward, who accepted, for money, perhaps? marry him in 1948. After a few months, "it was sung" that they would separate, but the marriage bond was maintained until their divorce in 1952. From then on, she could no longer keep up appearances, but the publications at the time, in collusion with film studios, silenced that situation. Scandals of that and another type, there were. But the yellow press was very different from that of later decades. He was silent.
When the Perry Mason series ended in 1966 with a total of two hundred and seventy-one episodes, the Universal company hired Raymond Burr for another series, Ironside, which was also a huge success, with a larger audience because, for example in Spain, already for those calendars in many houses there was no lack of television.
It so happened that in marginal areas, antennas were seen on the roofs of their poor homes. And it is that quite a few families preferred to go through difficulties but not deprive themselves of television, paid for in "comfortable" installments, from eighteen to thirty-six months. So, the new series that Burr starred in the second half of the '60s and early '70s was Ironside. There he was the San Francisco chief of detectives, a criminal lawyer who, disabled by war injuries, carried out his duties in a wheelchair. When in June 1970, exactly half a century ago, Raymond Burr arrived in Madrid invited by TVE, the reporter Felipe Navarro Yale (father of the now well-known novelist Julia Navarro), who limped and sometimes carried a cane, had the idea of going to the Barajas airport in a wheelchair, which surprised the American actor as soon as he entered the arrivals hall. Telerradio magazine then headlined on the cover: "Welcome, Mr. Ironside!"
Several episodes of a Perry Mason continuation were filmed in 1973, but only fifteen episodes were broadcast in the United States. Its protagonist was Monte Markham, who went unnoticed. And in 1985 Raymond Burr, already very obese, with an ashen beard and bushy mustache, returned to being the mythical lawyer. Twenty-six Perry Mason films, which were shot until the actor died in 1993, were a victim of liver cancer.
