“His Wife Died in a Plane Crash… His Son Died of Leukemia! But After His Death, the Shocking Truth About Raymond Burr Was Revealed”

 

Raymond Burr and the Secret Life Behind His Hollywood Image

For decades, Raymond Burr was one of the most recognizable faces on American television. Millions knew him as the brilliant defense attorney Perry Mason, the character who seemed almost impossible to defeat in the courtroom. Later, audiences watched him as the determined detective Robert T. Ironside. His career stretched across film, television, radio and theater, making him one of the defining television actors of his generation.

But behind the imposing public image was a private life that remained largely inaccessible to the public.

After Burr's death in 1993, questions surrounding his personal history became the subject of renewed investigation. In particular, biographer Michael Seth Starr's 2008 book Hiding in Plain Sight: The Secret Life of Raymond Burr argued that much of the tragic family history Burr had described to journalists was fabricated. Starr portrayed Burr as a gay man who had maintained an elaborate public story about wives and a child in order to protect his private life and career in an era when being openly gay could seriously damage a Hollywood actor's professional prospects.

The story is remarkable not simply because of the deception, but because of how successfully Burr maintained his privacy while becoming one of the biggest stars on television.

The man America knew

Raymond William Stacy Burr was born on May 21, 1917, in New Westminster, British Columbia. His parents divorced when he was young, and he eventually grew up in California. Before becoming a major actor, Burr worked a variety of jobs and developed his interest in theater.

His imposing physical presence and deep voice initially made him particularly effective in darker film roles. During the 1940s and early 1950s, he appeared frequently as villains, criminals and intimidating authority figures. His film credits eventually included notable productions such as Rear Window.

Then came the role that transformed his career.

In 1957, Burr became Perry Mason in the television adaptation of Erle Stanley Gardner's popular legal stories. The series became a huge success, and Burr's performance turned him into a household name. He won Emmy Awards for the role, and Perry Mason ultimately became one of the defining courtroom dramas of American television.

When Perry Mason ended its original run in 1966, Burr did not disappear from television. Instead, he took on another iconic role: wheelchair-using San Francisco detective Robert T. Ironside in Ironside, which ran for eight seasons.

For viewers, Burr represented authority, intelligence and confidence.

Off camera, however, he was remarkably private.

The family story

During his lifetime, Burr sometimes spoke about a series of devastating personal tragedies.

According to the biography Hiding in Plain Sight, Burr claimed that he had been married more than once and that he had suffered the deaths of wives and a son. One story involved a wife who supposedly died when her aircraft was shot down during World War II. Another described a wife who allegedly died from cancer. Burr also spoke about a son, Michael, who supposedly died of leukemia at the age of 10.

These stories were not simply mentioned once. They became part of the biographical narrative surrounding Burr.

In fact, they were repeated by newspapers and magazines, and some of the claims even appeared in accounts published after his death. The Washington Post's 1993 obituary, for example, repeated the story of the plane crash, the cancer death and the son's leukemia.

That illustrates just how convincing Burr's public story had become.

There is, however, an important historical complication: not every source agrees on the details of Burr's marriages and family history.

Some older reference works and contemporary obituaries presented the marriages and the son as genuine. Later biographical research by Starr argued that the tragic wives and child were inventions. The publisher's description of Starr's book explicitly says that the wives and Michael did not exist.

So the popular claim that "none of it ever happened" comes primarily from later biographical research, rather than from a universally uncontested historical record.

Why would an actor invent such a painful history?

The explanation offered by Starr is connected to the Hollywood culture of Burr's era.

Today, a celebrity's private life can become public within minutes. In Burr's prime, however, the entertainment industry operated differently. Actors could protect their personal lives more effectively, while homosexuality was heavily stigmatized in American society and within the entertainment business.

Starr's research concluded that Burr was gay and that he maintained a fictional heterosexual biography partly to protect himself. CBS's account of Starr's research quotes the biographer describing the actor as someone who feared that disclosure could damage or even destroy his career.

ABC News similarly described Starr's biography as documenting Burr's secret gay life and his invented story about a wife and son who had died.

It is important to remember that Burr himself never publicly made the kind of declaration that would settle the question in his own words. Much of what is now written about his sexuality comes from biographical research, people who knew him, and evidence concerning his long-term relationship with Robert Benevides.

That distinction matters when looking back at historical figures.

Robert Benevides

The most significant part of Burr's private life appears to have been his relationship with actor Robert Benevides.

The two met while working on Perry Mason. Benevides was also an actor, although he eventually moved away from acting and became involved in production and business ventures.

According to Starr's research, Burr and Benevides remained together for more than three decades. Their relationship was largely private, particularly during Burr's years of greatest fame.

They shared much more than a home.

The pair developed businesses connected to their interests, including an orchid nursery and a vineyard in California. They also maintained a private island in Fiji, where Burr could retreat from the pressures of Hollywood. Starr's biography describes their shared business interests and their life together in California and Fiji.

A 1993 Washington Post profile published shortly after Burr's death also described Benevides as Burr's companion of three decades and noted that he was with Burr at the actor's Northern California ranch near the end of his life.

Their relationship therefore lasted for decades—far longer than Burr's public accounts of his supposed marriages.

The people around Burr knew something was different

One of the most intriguing elements of the story is that some people close to Burr apparently knew very little about the wives and child he claimed to have had.

A 1993 People magazine article reported that some of Burr's longtime associates had never met any of the supposed wives and that even his publicist had little personal knowledge of them. At the same time, Benevides was described as Burr's constant companion and business partner for more than 30 years.

This secrecy was evidently maintained extremely carefully.

Burr was known to be generous, sociable and capable of hosting large gatherings, yet he kept certain aspects of his life firmly separated from his public identity. Starr interviewed more than 30 people who had known or worked with Burr for his biography, including several of his professional colleagues.

The result was an unusual contradiction: millions of people felt they knew Raymond Burr because they watched him every week, while relatively few people knew the details of the man behind the television characters.

A career built on reinvention

In some ways, the mystery surrounding Burr's personal life mirrored his professional career.

Before Perry Mason, he was often cast as a villain. His size, voice and intense screen presence made him ideal for intimidating roles.

Then he became the hero.

As Perry Mason, he played a calm and highly competent lawyer who defended people accused of crimes. The character became so strongly associated with Burr that it is difficult to separate the actor from the role.

After that, he reinvented himself again as Ironside.

This ability to move between identities was one of the defining characteristics of Burr's career. But his private life involved an entirely different kind of performance—one that, according to Starr, was designed not for entertainment but for protection.

The price of living in the closet

It is difficult to understand Burr's choices without considering the period in which he lived.

Being gay was heavily stigmatized in mid-20th-century America. Hollywood actors could face professional consequences if their sexuality became public. Starr argued that Burr believed exposure could jeopardize the career he had worked so hard to build.

That context doesn't establish exactly what Burr felt privately, because he did not leave behind a complete public explanation of his decisions.

But it helps explain why someone might construct an alternative biography.

The fictional family story provided convenient answers to questions journalists might otherwise have asked.

Why wasn't a famous actor married?

Why didn't he have a visible family?

Why did he spend so much time away from Hollywood?

Why did he maintain such a private existence?

A tragic backstory could discourage further questions.

His final years

Burr continued working long after Perry Mason ended.

In the 1980s, he returned to the character that had made him famous through a series of Perry Mason television movies. Barbara Hale, who had played Della Street in the original series, also returned.

Even while his health deteriorated, Burr continued working. His final years were affected by cancer, and he died on September 12, 1993, at the age of 76. Contemporary reporting described his death and his final days at his California ranch.

Robert Benevides was among those closest to him during that period.

Burr's death marked the end of one of television's most enduring careers.

But it also began another chapter in the story of his private life.

What happened to his estate?

Burr left his estate to Robert Benevides.

That fact is documented in accounts of Burr's will and was significant because it reflected the importance of Benevides in Burr's personal and professional life. The will excluded Burr's relatives, and a later challenge to the estate was unsuccessful.

Benevides continued to operate the vineyard and maintain the interests the two men had developed together.

For many years, however, the full nature of their relationship remained something that was discussed only indirectly.

The contrast between Burr's public biography and his private life became increasingly apparent after his death.

A Hollywood secret that survived for decades

Perhaps the most remarkable part of the Raymond Burr story is not simply that he was a famous actor who was gay.

Hollywood history contains many stories of performers who concealed their sexuality.

What makes Burr unusual is the extent of the alternative biography that surrounded him.

According to Starr, Burr did not merely avoid discussing his private life. He created a narrative involving marriages, tragic deaths and a child who supposedly died young. That story was repeated so frequently that it entered mainstream biographies and even appeared in contemporary obituaries.

At the same time, the person who appears to have been closest to him—Robert Benevides—remained largely outside the public narrative.

For more than 30 years, they built a life together away from the cameras.

They shared a home, businesses, interests and eventually the final years of Burr's life.

Remembering Raymond Burr

Raymond Burr's legacy is therefore more complicated than the image of the stern lawyer standing in a courtroom.

He was an enormously successful actor whose performances became part of television history. He was also a private man who, according to later biographical research, went to extraordinary lengths to protect aspects of his identity.

Whether viewed as a story about Hollywood secrecy, the pressures faced by gay performers, or simply the mysterious private life of a major television star, Burr's biography reveals how different celebrity culture once was.

Today, audiences can watch Perry Mason and Ironside knowing considerably more about the person behind those performances than viewers did while Burr was alive.

But perhaps the most revealing part of the story is that the people closest to him were often the ones who knew the least about the public version of his life.

Burr spent decades convincing the world that he was someone he was not.

Yet at the same time, he appears to have built a genuine and lasting private life with Robert Benevides.

When Raymond Burr died in 1993, the television world lost Perry Mason and Ironside.

Behind those characters was a man whose personal story remained hidden for much of his lifetime—and whose carefully constructed public biography continued to be repeated even after he was gone.

Only later did biographical research begin to pull apart the story he had told the world, revealing the extraordinary distance between Raymond Burr, the television icon, and Raymond Burr, the private man.

Sources