Amanda LePore – The WOW Report

Obsessed with this music video.

And this song. And Chance the Rapper. And Travis and the Lights. And that it’s FRIDAY!

Francis and the Lights released the music video for their song May I Have This Dance featuring Chance the Rapper and, honestly, its made me fall even more in love with the melodic jam.

The minimalist music video is truly a wonder. Honestly, until the end, it’s pretty much just Chance the Rapper dancing in a giant room and it’s so charming. Adorable. I think I’m in love with this.

If you haven’t heard the track yet, prepare yourself. Watch and listen to the music video below and be prepared to have it on repeat pretty much all weekend.

May I Have This Dance, Chance the Rapper & Travis and the Lights?

burr

May 21, 1917– Raymond Burr:

“Never gaining a good reputation is not nearly as painful as losing one.”

Perry Mason reruns have been playing on a Portland, Oregon television station every day for the past 49 years. No another American station has continuously broadcast Perry Mason as long as KPTV, where the show debuted in syndication just 15 days after ending its nine year run on CBS. It’s among the least expensive shows to buy, even as KPTV has moved from showing it on film reels to one-inch tapes to digital tapes, and now streaming digital with closed captioning. Station Manager Patrick McCreery:

“Most markets don’t want it; they figure that with high-definition digital sets and 5.1 stereo sound, what viewer is going to want to watch an old black and white show? We’ve found very loyal viewers. It’s the linchpin of our daytime programming.”

Living deeply in the closet is not a special club in Hollywood, but the backstory of Raymond Burr’s career holds special interest to me. Typecast as a “heavy” when he first landed in Hollywood after WW II, his imposing presence and brooding demeanor made him a perfect choice for a bad guy in film noir and crime dramas. Burr perfectly played the chilling homicidal husband across the courtyard from Jimmy Stewart’s Greenwich Village apartment in Alfred Hitchcock’s classic Rear Window (1954), and the district attorney who took apart Montgomery Clift’s testimony in A Place In The Sun (1951).

Burr was never an A-List film actor. He became a great big star in the brand new medium of television with two different series taking up most of two decades of his career. As the title character lawyer on Perry Mason (1957-66) and as the wheelchair bound detective on Ironside (1967-75), he became one of television’s highest paid actors and best known faces. Burr returned to his most famous role in 1985 for the beginning of another decade-long run of made-for-television specials beginning with Perry Mason Returns. That means Burr played Perry Mason in four different decades! Extraordinarily popular, writer Earl Stanley Gardner cranked out his Perry Mason books by the dozens. Plus, there were Perry Mason dolls, lunchboxes and board games. Even Ironside had action figures.

Because of the era in which he lived and worked, public knowledge of his gayness would most certainly have ruined Burr’s career. He remained intensely private to the very end. Burr put in an enormous amount of energy in order to remain in the closet. The efforts it took to live the lie had their toll on him physically and psychologically. He believed he could safeguard his privacy by creating an imaginary history to hide his gayness and his long relationship with fellow actor Robert Benevides, 13 years his junior, who he had met on the set of Perry Mason in 1957. He went to the trouble to invent two dead wives, a dead son, and then fabricate reports of his military service during WW II to fill out those blank spaces in his biography. He retold the tales for so long and so often that they even found their way into his obituaries.

In the 1950s, Burr was “romantically” linked to actor Natalie Wood. They were genuinely fond of each other and they remained friends until her very mysterious death in 1981.

Burr used his long hours on the set as a convenient excuse whenever the subject of marriage was brought up by colleagues or the press:

“I am an unmarried man, as opposed to a single man. 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. It’s a good thing I am not married because I’m working eighteen hours a day and sometimes don’t come home from the studio at all.”

Burr was in nearly every scene of all 271 episodes of Perry Mason. He had to memorize more than 15 pages of dialogue every day. The courtroom scenes were especially tough to shoot. He usually slept about four hours a night at the studio during the week, getting up just before daybreak to go over that day’s lines. A cute young actor, Paul Kennedy, stayed with him, working as his “dialogue director”. Perry Mason became very popular and CBS went to great lengths to make their star happy, giving him a furnished three-room bungalow for him on the lot, complete with all the amenities, including Kennedy and a personal secretary, Bill Swann, a “former concert singer”.

“Let’s just say that the part isn’t conducive to leisurely living the way I once knew it. I only hope that I can regain my own identity, once I decide that Perry Mason and myself have come to the parting of the road. Perry Mason has become a career for me. All I know is that I work, eat and sleep Perry Mason. It’s a lucky thing I’m not married now. No woman would understand my work schedule.”

On his rare time off, Burr would volunteer for USO tours in Korea and military bases around the Western USA. I am not certain what sort of act he had or how he could compete with Ann-Margret for the sailor’s and soldier’s attention. On one of the tours, Burr brought back a souvenir sailor named Frank Vitti, described by the gossip rags as “Burr’s nephew”. Vitti lived at Burr’s house in Malibu, where, apparently, he had his own bedroom. Later, Vitti became the curator of Burr’s Beverly Hills art gallery.

Burr dealt with the press by seldom granting interviews. When a magazine would do a feature on Burr’s personal life, it was always a “Raymond Burr At Home” story featuring his petting zoo in Malibu, and the gourmet meals he cooked for his close friends. Burr always said that he way too busy to date anyone anyway.

The Perry Mason cast was extremely close, noted as one of the tightest-knit ensembles in showbiz. Burr treated Barbara Hale, William Talman, Ray Collins, and William Hopper (son of gossip queen Hedda Hooper) as family. Burr was especially close to Hale, who played Perry Mason’s assistant Della Street on all nine seasons of the series and 30 television movies. She left this world just 16 weeks ago, at 94-years old.

Burr with Hale

His coworkers had to have known about Burr’s gayness and protected him. Hopper had extra incentive to ensure Burr was not the subject of gay rumors. Maybe because he worked in television instead of films, but Burr seemed to have avoided the scrutiny brought to Rock Hudson, Montgomery Clift and Cary Grant.

Throughout his life, Burr was unfailingly generous to charities and he gave away much of his time when he wasn’t keeping his grueling work schedule. He was known to be very popular on the set and especially kind to guest-stars and crew. Although he didn’t know him, when Burr heard that character actor George Stone was sick, nearly blind and unable to find work, he hired him to play the Perry Mason court clerk, a role that only required Stone to sit at a desk and look busy. When makeup artist Irving Pringle collapsed on the set from a hemorrhaging ulcer, Burr drove him to the hospital and stayed all night at his side. When he heard about a little girl who had been horribly burned in an accident, and that she had requested an autographed photo of her hero Perry Mason instead of a letter from President Eisenhower, Burr flew to the East Coast to visit her in the hospital. He was furious when press photographers showed up for the event and refused to let his picture be taken.

Burr and Benevides shared a passion and a business for orchids, which they bred on their private island in Fiji. Later they owned and ran a successful vineyard in Sonoma. At their home in Palm Springs, the couple was known to throw all-male pool parties along with their pal Rock Hudson. The couple was together for 36 years. When Burr was diagnosed with that damn cancer in spring 1993, he threw a series of goodbye parties at their place in Sonoma and then took that final curtain call in September. Benevides continues to run the Raymond Burr Winery.

“I don’t have much of an ego, but I have a great deal of confidence!”

Perry Mason, Best Theme Song Ever?

Photograph by DxPho

May 21, 1979– The White Night Riots

On this day, inside a jury room in San Francisco, 12 people had been deliberating whether to find former City Supervisor Dan White guilty of murdering Mayor George Moscone and openly gay City Supervisor Harvey Milk on the morning of November 27, 1978. White’s attorney mounted what became famously known as the “Twinkie Defense”, arguing that White had temporarily gone murderously nutty because of the sugary snacks he had consumed.

The jury rendered its verdict, finding White guilty of the lesser charge of manslaughter, saving him from getting the death sentence.

The pain and shock over the assassinations of the pair of beloved progressive politicians was still simmering, and the LGBTQ residents, as well as straight friends and allies, were angered and outraged by the outcome of White’s murder trial.

Thousands of people descended on The Castro to take part in a planned march to the Civic Center, where another large crowd had already gathered to protest the jury’s decision.

Photograph by Daniel Nicoletta

As evening came, emotions boiled over and the crowd surged the building, smashing windows, trying to break through the front doors of the courthouse. A line of police cars parked nearby were set on fire, sending smoke and fire into the night sky.

In retaliation, the police raided Elephant Walk, a gay bar in the heart of The Castro. The culmination of these events became known as the White Night Riots. It took decades before the chasm between police and the city’s LGBTQ community would be repaired.

Not all the protesters were part of the mayhem. A line of people had locked arms in front of City Hall in an attempt to hold back the crowd from doing further damage to the building. The events marked the last time that San Francisco’s gay citizens would be afraid to stand up and fight for their rights.

State Assemblyman Tom Ammiano, then a public school teacher, took part in the events of that night:

“We were in no mood. This guy had killed a hero of ours and a friend of ours and he got treated like he had shoplifted. Dan White was a former cop and he got away with murder. In a strange way I am grateful that when the verdict came out people were not just silent. I am glad we were so vocal. I just thought it taught us you cannot be too docile. You really do have to be strong.”

Mark Leno, an openly gay man now serving in the California State Senate:

“The White Night Riots were the culmination of many changes that were impacting the city at that time. It was as if it all came to a head through the outrage of the injustice of Dan White’s sentence. It was a jolt to the civic fabric as if we had to experience all of that to be able to move forward to become the city that we have become today. The experience I had at that time continues to inform my public office today. That we have had to fight for every right that we have gained and we have had to be vigilant every step of the way so as not to ever lose anything we have again.”

The next morning gay leaders convened in a committee room in the Civic Center. Openly gay City Supervisor Harry Britt, who had replaced Milk made it clear that nobody was going to apologize for the riots. Britt:

“Harvey Milk’s people do not have anything to apologize for. Now the society is going to have to deal with us not as nice little fairies who have hairdressing salons, but as people capable of violence. We’re not going to put up with Dan Whites anymore.”

The next day, May 22, would have been the 49th birthday of Harvey Milk. San Francisco city officials had considered revoking the permit for a rally planned for that night, but decided against, fearing that it could sparking more violence. Officials stated that the rally could channel the community’s anger into something positive. Police were placed on alert by Mayor Diane Feinstein, and my hero Cleve Jones worked on contingency plans with the police department. More than 20,000 people gathered on Castro and Market Streets. The crowd created a peaceful celebration of Milk’s life. They danced to disco, drank beer, and sang a tribute to Milk.

Five months later, on October 14, 1979, more than 100,000 people marched in a Gay Rights On Washington DC event. Many marchers carried portraits of Milk. The rally, an event that Milk had helped to organize, became a tribute to his life.