Where funny people can have fun (![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} ukexseme) wrote in ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/community.gif){kind=small} ohnotheydidnt,@ 2008-05-27 12:08:00 |
|
Raymond Burr and p33n: a love story
It turns out that Raymond Burr, who played fifties TV icon Perry Mason, was a total 'mo. A newly-published Burr biography, Hiding in Plain Sight: The Secret Life of Raymond Burr, chronicles both Burr's real love life and the goofy lie he used to cover it up.
Burr invented a fake wife and son he said had died, and used his busy schedule as a way to explain why he hadn't remarried. He claimed he had met and eloped with Scottish actress Annette Southerland, who gave birth to their son Michael Evan in 1942. But Annette soon died, Burr said, in the same plane crash that claimed the life of Gone With the Wind star Leslie Howard on June 1, 1943, while the son later succumbed tragically to leukemia.
Totally made up! No Annette Southerland was on that plane, nor is there any other sign of her existence, or of sickly little Michael Evan.
Imaginary girlfriends weren't rare in old-school Hollywood, but Burr went the extra mile in whipping up such an elaborately detailed fantasy. Meanwhile, according to the new bio, Burr and his lover Robert Benevides were partners for 35 years.
Burr was a minor character actor when he began telling this story, but once Perry Mason became a big hit, the dead-wife-and-son routine was repeated time and again. Raymond could have ended it all right then and there, blaming the mix-up on an overeager studio publicist or on his youthful showbiz naïveté. But he chose to continue perpetrating the fabrications by refusing to address them.
He would answer the inevitable queries about his supposed marriage by reciting the facts of his brief (real) marriage to one Isabella Ward (which had ended in annulment). If the questioning went any further in relation to Annette Sutherland or their son, he would beg off with a terse, "I don't discuss that."
"I am an unmarried man, as opposed to a single man," he lectured one reporter in November 1957. "I don't want to seem to avoid giving direct answers, but I've played attorneys so many times I'm getting to be a curbstone lawyer."
Source: ABC news
It turns out that Raymond Burr, who played fifties TV icon Perry Mason, was a total 'mo. A newly-published Burr biography, Hiding in Plain Sight: The Secret Life of Raymond Burr, chronicles both Burr's real love life and the goofy lie he used to cover it up.
Burr invented a fake wife and son he said had died, and used his busy schedule as a way to explain why he hadn't remarried. He claimed he had met and eloped with Scottish actress Annette Southerland, who gave birth to their son Michael Evan in 1942. But Annette soon died, Burr said, in the same plane crash that claimed the life of Gone With the Wind star Leslie Howard on June 1, 1943, while the son later succumbed tragically to leukemia.
Totally made up! No Annette Southerland was on that plane, nor is there any other sign of her existence, or of sickly little Michael Evan.
Imaginary girlfriends weren't rare in old-school Hollywood, but Burr went the extra mile in whipping up such an elaborately detailed fantasy. Meanwhile, according to the new bio, Burr and his lover Robert Benevides were partners for 35 years.
Burr was a minor character actor when he began telling this story, but once Perry Mason became a big hit, the dead-wife-and-son routine was repeated time and again. Raymond could have ended it all right then and there, blaming the mix-up on an overeager studio publicist or on his youthful showbiz naïveté. But he chose to continue perpetrating the fabrications by refusing to address them.
He would answer the inevitable queries about his supposed marriage by reciting the facts of his brief (real) marriage to one Isabella Ward (which had ended in annulment). If the questioning went any further in relation to Annette Sutherland or their son, he would beg off with a terse, "I don't discuss that."
"I am an unmarried man, as opposed to a single man," he lectured one reporter in November 1957. "I don't want to seem to avoid giving direct answers, but I've played attorneys so many times I'm getting to be a curbstone lawyer."
Source: ABC news
