{"id":10189,"date":"2022-05-20T13:37:07","date_gmt":"2022-05-20T13:37:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/thecliffedge.com\/?p=10189"},"modified":"2022-06-14T15:01:24","modified_gmt":"2022-06-14T15:01:24","slug":"raymond-burr","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thecliffedge.com\/?p=10189","title":{"rendered":"Why Raymond Burr was called a potato baby"},"content":{"rendered":"

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By Ray Bennett<\/p>\n

LONDON \u2013 Nostalgia was very much in the air in 1986 when I met Raymond Burr, who was born 105 years ago today. He was in the thick of it. His two long-running series from the Fifties and Sixties \u2013 \u2018Perry Mason\u2019 and \u2018Ironside\u2019 \u2013 ran in syndication. \u2018Perry Mason Returns\u2019 had been the highest rated TV-movie of the previous year and a sequel did just as well.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

After he died aged 78 in 1993, stories emerged of how Burr had fabricated many details of his private life largely to shield the fact that he was gay. When I spent a couple of hours with him in the piano bar of the Mondrian Hotel in Los Angeles, that was not an issue. It was true that he was a world traveler, a gardener, a gourmet and a philanthropist. He was a wine expert, an authority on forestry, a grower of orchids and principal owner of a newspaper. Also, he was one of the most recognisable actors in the world.<\/p>\n

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Original ‘Perry Mason’ with Barbara Hale<\/p><\/div>\n

We met to talk about another NBC TV-movie \u00a0he’d made as Perry Mason, \u2018The Case of the Shooting Star\u2019 (with Barbara Hale, pictured top). It had been filmed in Canada as the producers liked the cost benefits of the Canadian dollar. There was a much deeper connection for Burr. He was born in New Westminster, British Columbia and although he moved to the United States when he was 6, the time and place of his birth had a profound impact on the man he would become.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u2018I was born during the famine right after World War I,\u2019 he said. \u2018Canada was really hit very hard because they had sent everything they had to England. It devastated the country. All the rose bushes were dug up and people planted potatoes. You lived on potatoes, macaroni and rice. Starch, all starch. When I was born, I was called a \u201cpotato baby\u201d. I weighed twelve and half pounds and weight has been a problem all my life.\u2019\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

He was aware that his size bothered some people. \u2018It completely destroys people when I get too heavy but my blood pressure is the same as when I was 20,\u2019 he said. \u2018I can still get up a hill faster than most. I am beginning to take it off, though. I\u2019ve lost about thirty pountds but it takes a lot before it shows on me. It has never been a consideration. Whatever I weighed, that was whatever I weighed.\u2019<\/p>\n

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Ironside<\/p><\/div>\n

The stifling legacy of Victorian British Columbia also left its mark. \u2018My father William, who worked as a hardware salesman, was a very provincial Canadian,\u2019 Burr said. \u2018He didn\u2019t agree with anything in the United States at all. He was a good person but he had his rules on the way he wanted to live his life. He did not deviate one day to the next. He had to have his meals exactly at a certain time of the day. He wouldn\u2019t get on a plane or a boat. My father hated trips while my mother loved them. She loved flying, boats or anything. She used to drive very well and she\u2019d take the three of us children on long trips.\u2019\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

His parents separated when Burr was six and divorced three years later. \u2019With a broken family, I was sort of a father to my brother and sister,\u2019 he said. \u2018My mother was a very great lady with a lot of guts. We moved to northern Californa but she always sent me back to see my father every year. They always were in love with each other. It was a great tragedy. All the women in my family had great strength \u2013 my grandmothers and great-grandmothers \u2013 some good strength and some not-so-good strength. Some overpowered their families. My father\u2019s mother lived to be 102. Six months after she died, my mother and father remarried and spent the last ten years of their lives together in California. You could never have gotten my father to do that while his mother was alive but he was able to break through enough, you know?\u2019<\/p>\n

Raising three children alone in the 1920s was not easy but Minerva Smith Burr was no ordinary woman. She taught music and opened music shops that became very successfil. \u2018She made a lot of money,\u2019 Burr told me, \u2018but then the Depression hit and nobody was buting pianos or records or sheet music. She lost one shop after another so she went back to school to get another degree so that she could get better teaching jobs.\u2019\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Burr said he spent summers working on a sheep and cattle ranch in New Mexico in order to bring home some money. They lived in a small cottage in an unfinished sub-division in the hills near Berkeley. The closer neighbours were a block away, an Italian family with three generations living together. \u2018They made bread, cheese and wine,\u2019 he said. \u2018I grew a garden and we traded vegetables, rabbits and chicken for good Italian wine and homemade Italian cheese. When we could splurge, we splurged, but we learned how to cook.\u2019\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

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Rear Window<\/p><\/div>\n

Later, they moved to an attic apartment in Berkeley, a three-storey walkup: \u2018We had no furniture but my mother had a concert grand piano. She didn\u2019t care about possessions. The one time I ever saw her fretful of anything was when they found the only way they could the piano up was from outside through the window. It went up on a pulley and when she saw her piano dangling on a rope over the street, it was the only time I ever saw her almost break down and cry. They got it in and we made furniture our of boxes.\u2019<\/p>\n

Minerva Smith Burr became a celebrated concert pianist. She played a huge Wurlizer pipe organ with the San Francisco Symphony every Christmas. The little attic apartment was the scene of many parties with visiting composers, musicians and opera stars.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Burr said he dreamed of a musical career for himself\u2019: \u2018I wanted to study with my mother because she was the best teacher but I never pushed her because I\u2019d hear her working until eight o\u2019clock at night teaching somebody and I thought, hell, let her have her time off.\u2019\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Instead, in the late 1930s, Burr joined the Civilian Conservation Corps, which was set up for unemployed young men to work in forests around America. He graduated into the forestry service and learned about water and soil conservation, planting trees and fighting fires. There was a payoff later when he became a United Nations adviser to the island nation of Fiji in the South Pacific.<\/p>\n

\u2018They wanted to plant pine trees and so we planted pine from the Caribbean on all the hills on the dry side of the island,\u2019 Burr said. \u2018They have great forests there but I was the one who fought for fire roads because they hadn\u2019t put in any fire roads. They said they were a tropical island with plenty of rain. I pointed out that fire would destroy the forest if they didn\u2019t have fire roads. They didn\u2019t build any until the hills burned and then they said, \u201cGet Burr down here.\u201d\u2019<\/p>\n

Burr spent a lot of time in Fiji. He had a thriving orchid business there and he owned a large part of the Fiji Sun newspaper. \u2018Everyone asked why would I leave a civilised place like California and go to a place like Fiji,\u2019 Burr told me. \u2018I said I was going to a much more civilised place. And it\u2019s true, I wasn\u2019t going from something, I was going to something. I\u2019ve said many times that there are beautiful beaches and palm trees all over the world but it depends upon who inhabits that part of the world as to whether or not it\u2019s a desirable place to go to. Fiji is one of them and Portugal is another. Two great, great countries \u2026 because of the people.\u2019\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

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Crime of Passion with Barbara Stanwyck and Sterling Hayden<\/p><\/div>\n

Burr had property in the Portuguese Azores and a farm in Dry Creek Valley, Sonoma County, in northern California where he lived when he was not working. All that came following the success of the original \u2018Perry Mason\u2019 when he was aged 40. After breaking into theatre in New York and finding success on radio, he became a busy film actor usually playing villains in movies such as \u2018A Cry in the Night\u2019, \u2018Rear Window\u2019 and \u2018Crime of Passion\u2019. When \u2018Perry Mason\u2019 came along in 1957, Burr immersed himself in it. In those days, each series had thirty-nine episodes every season and as the title character, Burr was in almost every scene. He lived at the studio, he said, \u2018Fortunately, I was not married and I wasn\u2019t a parent. I would have been the worst parent in the world and I would have been unmarried very shortly.\u2019<\/p>\n

Still, after nine years as the world\u2019s best defence attorney, he stepped into another title role as the paraplegic detective in \u2018Ironside\u2019, which ran from 1967 to 1975. This time, however, he also was a co-producer and he made sure his co-stars, Don Galloway and Barbara Anderson, saw plenty of action. He never spent a night in the studio. He did have to change some things.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u2018When I saw the first script, I thought it was a dreadful idea,\u2019 he said. It was sort of a cross between Batman and something. Ironside had a van with a complete forensic laboratory where you could solve any crime. He had a wheelchair with weapons in the arms. It took a while to get it around to being a good human story.\u2019\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

In the years since \u2018Ironside\u2019 he had one short-lived series (\u2018Kingston\u2019 in 1977), made seven movies and TV specials and toured England on the stage. \u2018I did not stop working at any time,\u2019 he said. He turned down the notion of revisiting Perry Mason for many years because it was always suggested as another one-hour series. \u2018I had no interest in doing another weekly show,\u2019 he told me, \u2018but I said I would do the show anytime if it were feature length. When Fred Silverman and Dean Hargrove came up with the plan of an occasional series of TV movies, I said that as long as they got Barbara Hale (pictured) then I would do the show.\u2019\u00a0 Hale had\u00a0played Mason\u2019s secretary Della Street in the old series. They went on to make a total of 27 Mason TV-movies.<\/span><\/p>\n

Burr was pleased that, unlike the original series, the Perry Mason TV-movies allowed time for some humour. \u2018Earle Stanley Gardner and his wife both had great senses of humour but our producers did not so you saw very little humour from Mason at all,\u2019 he said. \u2018This time, you will see more humour with each succeeding show.\u2019 Burr\u2019s great sorrowful eyes crinkled merrily. \u2018People forget that my first Broadway Show was a musical. I sang and danced and said funny things. Shakespeare isn\u2019t always Macbeth. Shakespeare is the Fool too.\u2019<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Ray Bennett LONDON \u2013 Nostalgia was very much in the air in 1986 when I met Raymond Burr, who was born 105 years ago today. He was in the thick of it. His two long-running series from the Fifties … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,6,1263,2257,15,1],"tags":[5210,4606,4605,5208,4604,5209],"class_list":["post-10189","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-film","category-interviews","category-memory-lane","category-recalling","category-television","category-uncategorized","tag-crime-of-passion","tag-ironside","tag-perry-mason","tag-barbara-hale","tag-raymond-burr","tag-rear-window"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thecliffedge.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10189","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thecliffedge.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thecliffedge.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thecliffedge.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thecliffedge.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=10189"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/thecliffedge.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10189\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10450,"href":"https:\/\/thecliffedge.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10189\/revisions\/10450"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thecliffedge.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10189"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thecliffedge.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10189"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thecliffedge.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10189"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}