Not Young, Still Restless (5 page)

And then, of course, Barbara and I worked together for five episodes on a project in which she costarred as the inimitable Della Street with my beloved friend Raymond Burr in the title role of a series called
Perry Mason
.

R
aymond Burr and I had stayed very much a part of each other’s lives ever since he was kind enough to do the screen test with me that inspired Universal to offer me a contract. You wouldn’t guess it from looking at him, but he was a fun, funny, playful man who loved to laugh and loved a good practical joke even more.

I’m not sure this is common knowledge about Ray, but it should be: he served in the navy in World War II, was honorably discharged when a piece of shrapnel lodged itself in his stomach during the Battle of Okinawa, and was awarded the Purple Heart. He expressed his lifelong loyalty to our armed forces by traveling anywhere in the world he was needed and whenever he could to entertain the troops.

One night after filming on a
Perry Mason
episode, and shortly before he left to visit the troops at an army base in Japan, Ray was surprised with a beautiful trophy, a thank-you from one of the many charities he generously supported. He was very proud of that trophy, as he deserved to be. He was also very aware of the fact that I was on the set. He’d played more practical jokes on me than I could count, and he knew it was a guarantee that sooner or later, I would retaliate. So when I walked over to give him a congratulatory hug, he immediately hid the trophy behind his back and refused to show it to me.

“Why won’t you let me see it?” I asked with all the innocence in the world.

“You don’t want to see it, you want to steal it,” he answered.

To be honest, I’m not sure that thought had occurred to me until he suggested it. But once he planted the idea in my head, it became an obsession as the celebration on the set progressed. Ray kept an eye on me, I kept an eye on that trophy, and finally, just for an instant, the opportunity presented itself. I grabbed the trophy, slipped it to one of the stagehands, and told him to hang on to it for me and keep it hidden from Ray. Getting a huge kick out of being part of whatever the joke was, the stagehand promptly disappeared with the trophy until I retrieved it from him at the end of the evening. In the meantime, of course, Ray was beside himself when he discovered that his brand-new trophy was missing, and he marched straight over to me and demanded that I give it back. I was able to tell him in all honesty that I didn’t have it, opening my purse and turning my jacket pockets inside out to prove it. He didn’t believe for an instant that I didn’t have something to do with the disappearance of his award, and he watched me like a hawk until he finally gave up and headed home. A few minutes later I headed home too, trophy safely in hand, plotting the most effective way to return it to him. By the time I pulled into my driveway, I knew exactly what to do.

Everett, my brother-in-law, was in the army. Since Ray was visiting an army base in Japan in three days, it was too perfect a situation to pass up. I called Everett and told him what I was up to, and he was delighted to help. After a half hour on the phone discussing the details, we hung up and Everett began making all the arrangements.

First thing the next morning, a courier picked up the trophy and delivered it to the nearest army base, where it was put on a transport plane that left a few hours later for Japan.

Once it arrived in Japan, the trophy was taken straight to the base commander, who sent it out to be engraved with an inscription I’d personally requested, a sentiment I knew Ray would have chosen if the situation had been reversed: the Japanese translation of the simple words “Fuck you.”

Ray’s plane landed the next day. He was driven straight to the base, where the commander and a huge, enthusiastic audience of soldiers were waiting to greet him, all of them in on the joke. Ray came striding onstage to be presented to the troops, and after shaking his hand, the commander gave a brief, stirring speech about how deeply the soldiers appreciated his traveling such a long distance to entertain them and assure them that they were loved and appreciated back home.

“And as our way of saying thank you,” he concluded, “it’s my honor to give you this heartfelt token of our esteem.”

With which he withdrew the trophy from behind his back and extended it to Ray, who gaped at it in stunned silence while the troops gave him a standing ovation.

When he was finally able to form words again, he turned to the commander and asked, “Where the hell did you get this?!”

The commander had memorized his lines perfectly. “It was flown in especially for you by someone you know, who also composed the inscription.” He ceremoniously read the engraved inscription, first in Japanese as printed, and then in English, while the troops cheered and applauded again and Ray began laughing so hard he could hardly breathe.

He remembered and treasured that practical joke until the day he died. I still cherish it too, not just because of the thought and effort that went into it but also because of the great love and friendship that inspired it in the first place.

At the risk of transforming this book into
The Raymond Burr Story
, I do want to add a tale that illustrates what a loyal, generous man he was for those of us he thought of as family.

There was a time during the
Perry Mason
years when Bill Williams and Barbara Hale’s marriage hit a rough patch, as all marriages do. (Look up “rough patch” in the dictionary and you’ll see a picture of me and my ex-husband. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves.) Barbara’s career was thriving, while Bill’s career seemed to be on the decline through no fault of his own—executives in this town don’t always have the most vivid imaginations, and too many of them couldn’t get past Bill’s Kit Carson persona and rediscover what a wonderful actor he was. It’s not only among actors that an imbalance of success can cause stress in a marriage, particularly when both people are in the same business. So it’s understandable, maybe even inevitable, that Bill was resenting Barbara for many things, including not being home enough, and Barbara was resenting Bill for many things, including his resentment of her commitment to a job that brought her so much joy and a steady paycheck.

Barbara wasn’t in the habit of bringing her problems to work. She was never anything less than a true professional. But the cast and crew started noticing that she wasn’t her usual outgoing, funny, bawdy self on the set and instead was spending most of her time alone in her dressing room. She told everyone, including me, that she was “fine,” but none of us were buying it and all of us were concerned.

It was Ray who guessed what was wrong and did something about it. Without prying or insinuating himself into his dear friends’ marriage, he quietly pulled a considerable number of strings and used some of his considerable clout to see to it that Bill Williams began working both in front of and behind the camera and feeling like a success again.

Barbara and Bill’s marriage lasted and thrived for forty-six years, from 1946 until his death in 1992. Obviously most of the credit for that goes to them, but when trouble hit, Ray was right there quietly helping them through it.

So next time you happen across one of my five
Perry Mason
episodes, or, for that matter, one of my three episodes of Raymond Burr’s later hit series
Ironside
, I hope you’ll enjoy them even more knowing that you’re watching close friends who loved working together and loved playing together even more.

The 1950s were busy, exciting, stimulating years. I shot more than forty TV episodes, on such classic series as
The Twilight Zone
,
Wanted: Dead or Alive
,
Maverick
, and
The Millionaire
. I guest-starred in more than a dozen films. (One of them,
Plunder Road
, was recently featured in a film noir festival in Palm Springs, which I was honored to attend. As any actor will tell you, it’s always impossible, while you’re in the middle of making a movie, to predict whether you’re working on a hit or a complete flop. For
Plunder Road
to reemerge more than fifty years after it was shot and be considered a classic in its genre couldn’t have been a more pleasant surprise.)

A
cting was my priority, my joy, and my nourishment. My personal life was a lovely bonus—I had more than my share of fun, and that was all I was looking for. Between being fiercely independent and not having the slightest interest in compromising a career I’d worked so hard to establish, I didn’t consider myself a viable candidate for the demands of a serious relationship. I still knew with “absolute certainty” that I would never get married and I would never have children (I know, I know, let’s not talk it to death). But I wasn’t about to let those self-imposed conditions stand in the way of a good time, and what luck, I happened to be surrounded by exciting, talented, available people who were as ready to have a good time as I was.

You might remember my nonnegotiable rule with Charles Clark that I was going to be a virgin when I got married. Well, at some point I realized what an impractical rule that was for a normal, healthy woman who had no intention of ever getting married. So what can I say, one night some combination of opportunity, curiosity, trust, and hormones inspired me to lose my virginity to Lyle Smith, director of the Stockton productions of
Naughty Marietta
and
Song of Norway
. It was sweet and natural and enjoyable but not earth-moving—I wasn’t disappointed, and I certainly didn’t regret it, but I did wonder afterward why I’d been so adamant about “saving myself” for something that turned out to be not that big a deal after all.

It seemed logical to leave myself open to sexual possibilities in Hollywood, which was, to understate it, rich with opportunities for a successful, confident, extroverted woman in her twenties. I wouldn’t say I had an active “love” life. It was more of a “genuine fondness” life, and sometimes something as simple as a “wow, do I find you attractive” life—exactly right for what I did and didn’t want.

I never considered these encounters as affairs, even when they happened with some regularity. “Affairs” implied “entanglements” and/or “expectations” as far as I was concerned, and most of the men involved were friends I had no intention of losing just because our emotional intimacy occasionally expressed itself physically. In fact, some of them, in that uncomplicated long-ago pre-AIDS era, were friends who happened to be gay. (And yes, they were gay
before
I slept with them—and to the best of my knowledge I never inspired anyone to switch sexual preferences.)

Some of them you’ve never heard of, which I know doesn’t make for interesting reading. Some of them you have heard of, and I feel a little sophomoric and name-droppy listing them like this. But you’d feel cheated if I held out on you, and I can’t say I’d blame you. So . . .

David Janssen. Dennis Weaver. Robert Taylor (didn’t see that one coming, did you?). Hugh O’Brian, almost (we’ll just leave it at that). And, maybe predictably, all things considered, Raymond Burr.

O
ne of the great luxuries when you live in Los Angeles is when you happen to have friends who live at the beach and love to throw dinner parties. The beach at night, with the moon reflecting off a calm ocean, is like a long, gorgeous exhale. Add good food and good company and it’s about as perfect as an evening can get.

I was lucky enough to have one of those friends. When he invited me to his beach house one night for a dinner party, I said yes in spite of the fact that he had an agenda—he wanted to fix me up with someone, and he was sure we’d like each other. I was never a fan of blind dates, but I would have said yes if he’d asked me to come clean up after his dogs if it meant dinner overlooking the ocean.

I arrived fashionably late and was happy to be greeted by a roomful of people I knew and liked. The only exception was a man so impossibly handsome he took my breath away. He was tastefully and impeccably dressed; he exuded confidence and charm. I closed my eyes for a quick, silent prayer: “Please, God, if he’s not my blind date, at least let him be here alone.”

My prayer was answered moments later when our host took the impossibly handsome man’s arm and led him straight to me. It was immediately apparent that the attraction was mutual.

“Jeanne Cooper,” our host said with an enthusiastic smile, “Harry Bernsen.”

Chapter Three

Just Wild about Harry

H
ere’s my theory about what happens when we women meet someone to whom we’re too attracted for our own good: I don’t think it’s a matter of not noticing the red flags that signify this relationship is
not
a good idea. I think we notice them and, because those red flags don’t mesh with what we think we want, we come up with euphemisms for them, to trick ourselves into believing they’re part of what makes him interesting.

There was one red flag after another with Harry. It took me years to stop renaming them and start getting honest with myself about this man I thought I wanted.

And as superficial as it sounds, the truth is, there wouldn’t have even been a second date if he just hadn’t been so damned handsome.

H
arry Bernsen was born and raised in Chicago, one of four very competitive brothers. Their father was a successful real estate investor who owned several properties on the Loop until he lost everything in the 1929 stock market crash. Their mother would hang a framed portrait on the wall of whichever son had given her the most money that week. It was usually Harry, who lived with her well into his twenties. (Red flag: a mama’s boy who should have been out of the house and on his own long before then. The euphemism: how sweet that he gets along so well with and takes such good care of his mother.) He served in the armed forces as a marine before moving to Los Angeles, drawn to show business like a moth to a flame.

His mother had converted from Catholicism to Christian Science, some of which Harry adhered to with remarkable commitment—he didn’t drink coffee, tea, or alcohol, he didn’t smoke, he didn’t gamble, and he couldn’t have been less interested in drugs. (Red flag: a long list of principles that fails to include anything resembling a faith-based moral compass. The euphemism: what a clean-living, disciplined man!)

He spent a lot of time traveling as a kind of road manager and merchandiser for such popular acts as Martin and Lewis (starring Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis), Guy Lombardo, and Burl Ives before becoming an incredibly gifted agent with the Jaffe Agency. I so admired his talent and found his gift of gab so addictively stimulating that I bragged to anyone who would listen that Harry Bernsen could sell ice to an Eskimo. It took me longer than it should have to realize that I was one of the Eskimos.

He was charming, he was funny, and he had an audacious self-confidence that I found wildly attractive until the novelty wore off and I discovered that “audacious self-confidence” was my euphemism for “massive ego.”

From the very beginning, my family disliked him. My predictable take on that: “They just don’t know him like I do.” Besides, his mother and I couldn’t stand the sight of each other, so how much did family opinions really count anyway? (There were actually family members of Harry’s whom I adored, but we’ll get around to them later.)

The bottom line is, I’m the first to admit that I fell into a trap to which we women are vulnerable much too often: I found (or imagined) enough good qualities in him that I was convinced I could nurture them into the spotlight and drive the less admirable ones into the darkness forever and ever. I’ll never understand why it seemed like such a good idea at the time, but it was my choice and my responsibility. Or, as one of my favorite wise women, Judge Judy, puts it so inarguably, “You picked him.”

I did mention that he was incredibly handsome, though, right?

I
t was a wild, exciting ride at the beginning. My career was going beautifully, I had a loyal and gifted group of friends, and there was a new man in my life who not only seemed to respect but also even to understand and encourage what I did for a living. And when his love of gamesmanship revealed itself very early on, I didn’t think that much of it. I’d been around the block a time or two myself by then, so I’d learned how to play my part in a few of those games myself.

“Call me,” he whispered as we ended our first night of passion at my apartment.

“I will,” I promised as I kissed him one more time and watched him walk away, already looking forward to seeing him again.

I waited a day or two before I called—never a good idea to look too eager or too available, after all. Finally I picked up the phone and dialed.

A woman answered. His mother, it turned out. Harry wasn’t in, she told me, as terse and unfriendly as she could be. She wasn’t sure when he’d be back, and yes (with a thoroughly inconvenienced sigh), she would tell him I called.

Twenty-four hours later, when I hadn’t heard from him, I called again. Same icy woman, same result, and I’d officially reached my phone call quota.

A couple of weeks went by. I was a little disappointed, but I didn’t have that much invested either, and I had work to focus on, so it was easy to shrug and move along. I also had another dinner party to look forward to, with my pal Patrick Clement, at that same beach house where Harry and I met, so it wasn’t as if my social life was suffering either.

There were a lot of people at that party, but I spotted Harry across the room as soon as we walked in the door. He was with a date. He probably thought I was too, although Pat and I were just good friends, nothing more. It didn’t take Harry long to slip away from his date and catch me alone on the deck while Pat was inside getting our drinks.

He greeted me with a simple, “I thought you were going to call me.”

“I did,” I said. “Twice. You weren’t there.”

“Call again.”

“You call me.” I smiled and left him there on the deck by himself, and it was no accident that I left the party that night without giving Harry my phone number.

Game, set, and match.

I won’t even pretend it surprised me that he got my number from our host and called first thing the next morning. And there it is, the touching story of how Harry Bernsen and I became a couple.

W
e actually had a lot going for us when we started out together. We both loved to laugh and had very similar senses of humor. We both loved going to parties, drive-in movies, and the theater. We were both committed to our careers and both spoke fluent “show business,” so we were genuinely interested in each other’s answers to the question “How was your day, dear?” He admired my work, and I admired his, especially when he became an agent, and a brilliant one, at the Jaffe Agency with the highly respected Phil Gersh. He thought I looked gorgeous in an evening gown, and I thought he looked gorgeous in a tuxedo.

A year after we started seeing each other, Harry moved in with me.

His mother never forgave me for taking her darling twenty-eight-year-old baby boy away from her. But she didn’t like Harry’s three sisters-in-law either, all of whom I loved, so I took her disdain as a compliment and happily avoided her like the plague.

L
iving with Harry meant that I was now deeply invested in believing he was fabulous, and because I hate to be wrong, I didn’t pay nearly enough attention to any evidence to the contrary. It’s that red flag thing I was talking about earlier. Facing those warning signs meant admitting that I couldn’t trust my own judgment, and somehow that felt more threatening to my sense of security than anything Harry could do to me . . . or so I thought.

I was really eager for my sister, Evelyn, my brother, Jack, and their respective spouses to meet him now that we’d officially set up housekeeping. They met him. They didn’t like him one bit. In fact, from that first meeting on, they were only interested in coming to visit when Harry was out of town.

He didn’t seem to care much for them either, or anyone else I was close to whose status didn’t impress him, for that matter. That gregarious life of the party I’d spent a year dating was suddenly likely to turn sullen and pout his way through any social gathering that wasn’t his idea and/or his guest list. Of course, it became easier to let him have his way than to run the risk of his being rude to my friends and family, so I cooperated more than I should have. Unbeknownst to me until much, much later, he was also screening my phone calls, only passing along messages from people of whom he approved.

And then there was my beloved woody convertible. I had that car when Harry and I met, and I adored it so much that I’d probably still have it to this day if it weren’t for him. But Harry, image-conscious to a fault, felt strongly that as a successful Hollywood actress, I should always be seen in nothing less than a chauffeur-driven town car instead. I put up a halfhearted fight, but again, to keep peace, and because it didn’t occur to me that he was up to something, I finally agreed to it . . . after which Harry promptly sold my woody convertible and used the money to pay off a debt to his brother.

So there I was, without my own car anymore, seeing less and less of my close friends and family, and having my phone calls and messages carefully screened without even knowing it. Or, to put it another way, becoming more isolated and less independent but still grimly determined to prove that my investment in Harry Bernsen was worth the time and effort I’d put into him.

And no one was more surprised than I was when it turned out to be worth all that and more. (Didn’t see that coming, did you?)

T
here’s nothing quite like the words “you’re pregnant” when you’re not expecting them to shock you into an instant reevaluation of your life.

To be honest, I had no business being as shocked as I was. I’d been sexually active and irresponsible about it for years, apparently assuming that not intending to have children was all the birth control I needed. I’d honestly started to think that maybe I couldn’t get pregnant. And after a year and a half with Harry, neither of us using any protection at all, I believed his claim that he’d been told he would never be able to father a child.

Of course, my single actress friends and I had talked many times about whether we wanted children. We were almost unanimous in our position that children could and should wait until later in our lives, when our careers were either well established or over. Our theory was that a combination of a career and children meant that inevitably, sooner or later, one or the other would have to come first, and none of us would have put our careers ahead of our children. So the idea of children was always coupled with another abstract idea: someday.

All of which was blown right out of the water with the news that I was pregnant (as was that theory that career women can’t be good, attentive mothers, needless to say). And to my amazement, I found pregnancy to be one of the warmest, fuzziest, most fulfilling experiences I’d ever had. By sheer instinct, decades before there was such a wealth of information available, I became the most health-conscious pregnant woman you’ve ever seen. I maintained a very strict diet, helped considerably by the fact that while I’d had several pregnant friends whose cravings consisted of things like hot fudge sundaes and angel food cake, I lucked out—all I craved throughout that pregnancy and the two that followed were tomatoes. I gained so little weight that I never even had to invest in maternity clothes, and I was able to work until two weeks before I delivered.

Corbin Dean Bernsen was born on September 7, 1954. It was such an easy delivery that the nurses had to wake me up to tell me he’d arrived. At the time, it was common practice for nurses to whisk newborns away after birth. However, baby Corbin was inexplicably kept from me for a few hours after he first entered this world.

I couldn’t understand for the life of me, nor could I get anyone to explain, why the nurses were so obviously avoiding bringing my son to me. I wanted to see him, and I wanted to see him
now
, or someone had better damned well give me a good reason why not.

Finally, trying to calm me down and reassure me that Corbin was a fine, healthy baby and there was nothing to worry about, a nurse told me that Harry had asked them not to show him to me because he was “deformed.”

I predictably went berserk, offered a few thinly veiled threats if there were any further delays in my holding my child, and informed the nurses (along with probably most of the hospital and a few low-flying planes) that they had no right to let Harry’s orders override mine.

They brought Corbin to me. Even before I first laid eyes on him, I knew that whoever it was who said there’s no love like a mother’s love for her child knew what they were talking about. He was breathtaking. Obviously Harry was too busy and too mystified by babies in general to experience the same overwhelming joy. Baby Corbin couldn’t have seemed more alien to his father than if he’d been born with antennae. The “deformity” that had so horrified Harry was nothing but a hematoma on his head, presumably from a collision with my pelvic bone and not all that uncommon. It went away in a couple of months, but until it did, Harry actually wanted me to either postpone letting people meet our firstborn son or keep a blanket over his head when showing him off. I would have preferred a more devoted, adoring reaction, but not for a moment was I about to let Harry Bernsen diminish my awe of this little six-pound miracle. Needless to say, I proudly introduced Corbin to everyone I knew, without a blanket on his head, and dared Harry to try to stop me.

I think that was the first time I became aware of what turned out to be one of Harry’s most insidious modus operandi. He supposedly didn’t want me to see my baby because his so-called deformity would upset me. On a much broader scale, unbeknownst to me for far too long, “Don’t tell Jeanne. It will upset her” was almost a mantra when he was trying to manipulate someone, seduce someone, or borrow money.

A typical money-borrowing scheme went a little something like this: when hitting up a friend for a $25,000 loan, rather than be truthful about why he wanted the money, he would and did say, “Please don’t tell Jeanne I confided in you about this—it would upset her—but I’m afraid she had a mental breakdown and blew $25,000 on an insane shopping spree without telling me . . .” Many years later he even borrowed money to bail our daughter out of jail. But to keep the lender from finding out that our daughter didn’t need bail money because she’d never been in jail or ever in trouble in her life, he added, “Don’t tell Jeanne. She doesn’t know anything about this, and she’d be devastated.”