Pants on Fire, Raymond Burr

Raymond Burr is best known as Perry Mason, Erle Stanley Gardner’s, legal beagle. After nine seasons, tired of the role and repetitive episodes, the cast bailed and the season finale highlighted both the executive producer Gail Patrick, and the original author, Gardner in small cameo roles. About five years later, Ironsides was created with just Perry and his trusty gal Friday, Della Street sans his sidekick Paul Drake; it didn’t last. I had never really watched the either show, but it conversation it came up and I decided to take a flyer and see what was it about Raymond Burr that made him and Perry “nick” as the saying goes.

 The magic of Blarney

Burr was born in New Westminster, British Columbia, near Vancouver. His father, Joseph, was a hardware dealer, and his mother a pianist and music teacher. They had relocated from Ulster, Ireland as part of the Canadian Gold Rush. Other Burr family members joined him, including his brother Benjamin and Hugh. Joseph settled in New Westminster, as it was the original capitol of British Columbia. The city, named by by Queen Victoria after her favorite part of London, is twelve miles southeast of Vancouver on the banks of the Fraser River. It became the hub for the Cariboo gold rush and business boomed.

Joseph Burr got a steady job at the new penitentiary and married Mary Jane. Their their eldest son William married Minerva Smith who was born in Chicago 1893, but move back to Canada for the gold boom. During WWI, the newly married Smiths moved to California and the Burr’s followed with their three children. Alas the California expedition did not pan out for Bill Burr and they were back in New Westminster. Raymond by his own account as a “big boy,” weighing twelve and three-quarter pounds at birth and “growing.”¹

Does his chart show us anything about Raymond, or why his portrayal of Perry Mason was so darned good?

There is no birth time for Burr, just the date on Astro.com of May 21, 1917. So reading Michael Seth Starr’s book Hiding in Plain sight, Applause Theatre Book Publishers c. 2009,¹ I have rectified Burr to 06 Libra or Esoteric Symbols on the blackboard ¹↓ from Gavin McClung’s Hyperion Symbols. This symbol highlights how Burr’s public and private life were wildly discordant.

He has a preponderance in the ninth house, rather à propos for a man who played lawyers for the bulk of his career, and highlighting his own interest in justice and integrity. His Line of Motivation is conjunct via the Ptolemaic orbs Marc Jones used; so too is his Line of Vitality.

Because his ascendant is Libra and ruled by Venus, the green planet has a strong effect on his overall chart and here we see it conjunct his South Node, suggesting the importance of love and being loved meant to Burr. This was noticeable in his life because of his tendency to overindulge and feel “unloved” from his increasing size, and thus both the role of Perry Mason and its popularity and Bob’s constancy meant a lot to him. This is probably his greatest motivation for staying with the show as before that all his roles in movies were as “heavies” bad guys, shysters and schemers. Perry was a total role reversal for Ray; here he was the “good guy” who got to play tricks on the district attorney and trump the prosecutor at the end.

Burr is a bucket with a Uranian handle found in its own sign of Aquarius. Uranus rules electronics and the airwaves and it was a natural for Burr, who struck out in the theatre, to make a splash in television. His preponderance in the ninth house made him naturally interested in the law and its effects on families. As Thomas Leitch in his “Perry Mason: TV Milestones” book notes,

The most obvious reason for Perry Mason’s prodigious popularity is the program’s most frequently noted feature: its dependence on a dramatic formula that varied remarkably little over its television life.

Every episode began with a trouble family, or a quasi-family group (families are ruled by Cancer and for Burr it is in the ninth house of legal affairs) , an innocent threatened with expulsion from the domestic circle (Saturn ) and a murder for which the innocent was arrested (South Node in Cancer 8th house).

Each accused kept Mason (Uranus in the fourth for his courtroom appearance) whose wily legal strategies in and out of the courtroom won the client’s release and often a confession in the witness box to boot. (Pluto in Cancer in eighth house creating a total metamorphosis of the innocent, sort of Le Miserable like.)

Thomas Leitch, Perry Mason: TV Milestones, Wayne State University Press, 2005

Case closed

Reviewing the chart and looking over the role of Perry, Burr used his chart to its utmost, in fulfilling his destiny. Burr’s Moon in Gemini gave him the ability to have a double life, but unlike the great comedian W. C. Fields who also misled his public about his feelings about boys, Burr is always a staunch ally of children in Perry Mason. He tells the young Billy Mumy “no matter the time or where I am, if you need me, call me” in the Case of the Shifty Shoebox, and the boy does, running into the courtroom, interrupting the proceedings with important news.

As for Field’s famous quip in the Bank dick “here’s a nickel go play in traffic kid”, both Fields and Burr are notable for leaving a substantial amount of their fortunes to the welfare of foundling boys. It just was not much of a surprise for Burr but it is a happy ending.

Footnotes:

1. Starr, Michael Seth, Raymond Burr: Hiding in Plain Sight, c. 2009, Applause Publishing. 280 pp.
   Starr has done several of these expose: Art Carney, Ringo Starr and William Shatner are among the most notable. Most of the reviews complain of the poor writing; sorry to say that’s almost always the case in these books — for a good example look at the Kitty Kelly oeuvre. ↩︎

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