Utterly Clueless...

   My wife and I share a guilty pleasure: watching late night reruns of "Perry Mason". From the alliterated titles to the mind boggling plots to the acting that, at times, resembles Kabuki, there's no element we don't take great pleasure in. Not to mention of black-and-white-1950's-L.A. of it all.
    My personal favorites are the episodes where the plot is so convoluted that only an idiot savant could follow it and I find myself utterly clueless as to who did it. This is when Perry steps up, at the last moment, to explain it all to the judge or to the perpetually perplexed (but trusting) Della Street. And to me.

  So you can only imagine how excited I was when the former Raymond Burr estate in the Hollywood Hills came on the market with an asking price of $4,950,000. I raced to the scene of the crime faster than Hamilton Berger or  Paul Drake ever did (though Paul no doubt was delayed admiring his own reflection when passing mirrors).
  The entrance to the estate is tucked away on a dead-end, giving no clue as to what lurks behind. The path to the front door has a haphazard almost country sort of charm.  Yet shortly after entering the front door, I seemed to lose not only my bearings but any memory of how a normal house is laid out.
     I see plenty of bad layouts (though least frequently in older homes) but this one had me flat-out stumped.  As I looked for something resembling a major public room, I realized I felt as utterly clueless as I do during the most convoluted episodes of "Perry Mason". And where is Perry when you really need him?
     The main entry floor offers a very large living room, a smallish dining room and a very small kitchen, one that would be more appropriate in a guest house.  That's because the 'real' kitchen is on the floor below and, other than a restaurant sized stove, it has a depression era motif, with the emphasis on 'depression'. The only surprising element of this kitchen, actually, is that you have to walk through a bedroom to get to it.

   Why there are bars on the kitchen window I still haven't figured out, unless they're holding their cook hostage.
    The lower floor has some randomly located small bedrooms, including the one that leads right into the kitchen. This floor also has a small office and a den, which overlooks what we're told on the floor plan is the "theatre".

   Okay, maybe this is a theatre. But what's the show? The theatre leads to an "entertainment room" and a "game room" (game room seemingly defined as a room with an old tv, a bunch of DVDs and a lot of board games).
     Throughout the house there are hundreds of tsotchkes, some of which may be priceless but, again, here I was clueless. There are some wonderful pieces and some beautiful stained glass (which I prefer in cathedrals, but that's just me). But there is so much stuff everywhere that it rapidly becomes overwhelming and, well, sort of psychotic. The theme of the decorating is reminiscent of a style I first encountered in the house of my daughter's former ballet teacher- "Everything Looks Better Covered With a Shawl".

   There's also a lot of not-so-new carpet, which adds to the claustrophobia.  The crowning jewel of the house, however, is the Master Bedroom, which I guess is why it's at the top.

                           
     Over all these years of visiting great apartments and homes, there have been a precious few times where I've seen the concept of "overdone" taken to a level of brilliance. This is not one of  them. This just seems overblown. I kept peering around the bedroom corners, afraid Anne Boleyn might pop out from behind a tapestry. The concept here is clearly A Boudoir Fit For  a King. Or Queen?
      In his defense, I don't think Raymond Burr can be held responsible for a lot of this. The current owner, a music industry mogul who bought the house from Burr, has been here since 1983. According to building department records, several of the early owners created additions and served as their own contractors. Perry could have offered them the metaphor of "a lawyer who acts as his own attorney has a client for a fool.." but as they were already dead, nothing would have been gained.
        Burr bought the house in 1972 (although he had been renting it for several years before that). We do know from permit records that he did add glass greenhouses to the rambling property to raise his prized orchids.

    However, I never saw the grounds or the greenhouses; I fled, disoriented by the crazy layout and decor, wishing that Perry Mason would appear at the end of the driveway to kindly explain this all to me.
   And yet as I reviewed some of the property's historical documents, I started to think that, while Perry may have been a damned good lawyer, perhaps as a witness he would not have been as reliable. Take for example some facts extracted from his, or rather Raymond Burr's, "official" biography: He worked doing counterintelligence on a  Navy ship during World War II; the ship was hit by Japanese kamikaze planes. He suffered a shrapnel wound in his spine and won a Purple Heart. According to the biography, after.."recovering from the injury, Burr was ready to give his all to acting." This eventually resulted in his being cast as Perry Mason, though many reviewers argued that they found his "all" to be quite tiny.
   This pales next to the tragedies of his personal life as offered in this biography: His first wife, whom he was married in 1942, died in a plane crash in 1943. They had a son, but he gave custody of the child to her parents; the son died of leukemia in 1953. He married again from 1948 to 1952; that didn't work out so well, so he married again in 1954, but his third wife died of cancer within a year. Yikes. Burr's biography goes on to state that he lived "a quiet personal life on a remote Pacific island.." that he owned and died on his ranch in Northern California where he "raised sheep and cultivated grapes for wine." How serene.
    Yet no where in this biography is there any mention of Robert Benevides, whom the L.A. Times listed in their obituary of Burr as one of his survivors as well as his business associate and companion.
   Oh, Perry. Oh, Raymond. You've left me as clueless as ever.
Jamie Foreman