The Peculiar Truth about Raymond Burr’s Fake Wives

• Raymond Burr achieved fame as Perry Mason, a defense lawyer who always got to the truth of every crime. Ironically, Burr’s published accounts of his own real life often rang false.

• May 1917: Raymond Burr was born in New Westminster, BC, a suburb of Vancouver. His father worked as a hardware salesman. His stay-at-home mother made a little extra money teaching piano. Those facts check out.

• Burr told interviewers that when he was age six his family moved temporarily to China. Then they returned to Canada. That didn’t add up. Why would a Canadian hardware salesman uproot his wife and kids to go to China?

• Young Raymond’s parents divorced, and his mother took her three kids to Vallejo, California, a city in the Bay Area.

• He claimed he went off on his own to New Mexico in 1929 and was hired to work on a ranch. Yet Raymond would only have been twelve years old, so that story doesn’t seem realistic. Yet Burr claimed that he was such a big kid for his age that the ranch hands thought he was a teenager.

• At age 17, Burr claimed that he left the ranch to join a theater troupe in Toronto. How he got there from New Mexico was highly dubious. He also stated that the acting group toured the world to such faraway locales as England, Australia, and India. Given it was the height of the Great Depression, that story seemed like pure fiction. Also, there were no traces of any such troupe ever existing.

• Here’s what is true: Raymond Burr was a large man. He stood six feet tall, had broad shoulders, and weighed between 210-250 pounds.

• Also true: As a result of his size and deep baritone voice, he began his acting career in radio. Because he was so large and intimidating, he often got cast as a movie bad guy.

• His first role as a lead actor came opposite Anne Bancroft in the awful B-movie Gorilla at Large, which was shown in 3D.

• Burr’s next big movie became a classic - the original Godzilla. However, he didn’t appear in the Japanese version. The US distributors wanted an American man to star. So they hired Burr and reshot scenes with him and other Japanese actors, none of whom were in the original film.

• The contract stated that they could only hire Burr for one day. According to him, that’s what they did - the filming went nonstop for a full 24 hours. That was what Burr told interviewers. A good story for the press, but it was probably bullshit.

• Shortly thereafter, he got cast as Perry Mason. But with one caveat. He had to lose weight. Burr was too fat. So he dropped the pounds and became a TV legend.

• Perry Mason ran on CBS from 1957-66, one of the most watched shows in history. With fame came fans, and Raymond Burr’s fans wanted to know all about his personal life… like whether or not he was married.

• Here’s what he told the press: In the 1940s, he and an actress named Isabella Ward were wed in Los Angeles. Two months later, she split from him and left California. No reason was given. That might have been true.

• Then Burr remarried, or so he said, to a woman named Annette Sutherland. He said she died in the same airplane crash that took the life of actor Leslie Howard. Small problem: There was no one named Annette Sutherland onboard that flight.

• Then Burr doubled down and claimed that he and the mysterious Ms. Sutherland had a son together. The press asked the whereabouts of the child. Burr said he died. Leukemia took his only son years earlier, and just before the boy died Burr took him on a cross country trip to see America. All very loving and sweet. But complete bullshit.

• Fame brought more pressure for him to reveal his private life, so Burr created yet another phony marriage story. He claimed another wife named Laura Morgan died of cancer.

• Hedda Hopper, the queen of Hollywood gossip, knew the truth about Burr but kept his secret for years.

• If you hadn’t already guessed, he was secretly gay. But to come out as gay in that era was career suicide. So he made up wild stories that, for some reason, nobody cared about.

• Then he starred in the TV series Ironside where he sat in a wheelchair every show, got fat, and nobody bothered to ask about his private life or his mysterious dead wives, none of whom ever existed.

• After retiring from showbiz, Raymond Burr and his gay lover went off to Sonoma, California to become vintners. ALSO:

• The name of Burr’s character in Godzilla was Steve Martin.