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Biographer Michael Starr has written Hiding in Plain Sight: The Secret Life of Raymond Burr, a biography of Raymond William Stacey Burr, the Canadian-born, Emmy-winning actor and vintner, best known for his roles in the television dramas Perry Mason and Ironside.

Raymond Burr, who played Perry Mason in the wildly popular television show “Perry Mason” and later in “Ironside,” lived a secret gay life in Hollywood when such a revelation would destroy a career. Burr invented a biography for himself that included a wife and son who’d died, and used his busy schedule as a way to explain why he wasn’t married. But Burr and his partner, Robert Benevides, had a relationship for 35 years that was secret to most of the world except for a handful of close friends.

Read an excerpt from the book below:

The number of magazine features and newspaper interviews focusing on Raymond’s personal life grew as Perry Mason became more and more popular. The public was interested in this veteran actor who, save for what was portrayed in the media as his brief dalliance with Natalie Wood, had one of those faces everyone knew but couldn’t quite match with a name. That was all changing now. Certainly Raymond’s face was familiar, but now the tragic tale of his dead wife and dead son assumed a life of its own. Once Perry Mason took off, the dead-wife-and-son story 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 marriages by reciting the facts of his brief union with Isabella Ward. If the questioning went any further in relation to Annette Sutherland or, God forbid, son Michael, he begged off with a terse, “I don’t discuss that.”

Raymond’s grueling Perry Mason shooting schedule would have made it difficult for him to have a romance with a member of either sex. So he used his long hours on the set as a convenient excuse whenever the subject of remarrying was raised. “I am an unmarried man, as opposed to a single man,” he lectured one reporter in November 1957. “A bachelor, according to the dictionary, is a man who has never been married. An unmarried man is not married at the moment. Many of these terms have fallen into disuse.”

Okay, the reporter, pressed, but there’s no wife waiting for you when you return home from the studio? “That is correct and it’s a good thing because I’m working eighteen hours a day and sometimes don’t come home from the studio at all,” he answered. “I don’t want to seem to avoid giving direct answers”—which is exactly what he was doing—

“but I’ve played attorneys so many times I’m getting to be a curbstone lawyer.”

It’s a good bet that had Raymond been married, his wife would have had a difficult time understanding his growing relationship with Robert Benevides, a young actor Raymond met on the set of Perry Mason. The handsome Benevides, thirteen years Raymond’s junior, had a small role in the 1957 sci-fi flick Monster That Challenged the World (billed as Bob Benevedes) but was having trouble finding steady work. He and Raymond hit it off immediately, reportedly after Robert delivered a script to Raymond, and their attraction to each other grew. Before too long, Robert—”a nice fellow and very cordial all the time,” said Art Marks—

was running errands for Raymond.

Read more here.