The 15th of every month until I don't know when I will post a review of a Perry Mason mystery. For the hell of it.
Note. This is another appreciation of an actress that appeared in more than a couple episodes of the Perry Mason TV series. For Patricia Barry, see here.
Lisa Gaye
Auburn-haired. Green eyes. Dancer’s poise. Don’t say “ravishing” until you’ve seen Lisa Gaye. More like “entrancing” because she brought to characters a scent of wildness. The viewer got the feeling that she would be more than a handful if she felt that wasn’t getting what she felt she had coming in the way of attention, admiration, jewels, travel, and the high life. Little wonder she often played the fierce beauty in Perry Mason.
In her first episode, The Case of the Guilty Clients (1961), with passionate strains of Argentina and Ireland coursing through her, her character Lola Bronson is blessed and cursed with a fervent soul. Her husband Jeff says in Argentina, when he saw Lola come riding up looking like a goddess on horseback, he fell in love the minute he saw her. That they became a lovely couple deeply involved with each other we don’t doubt for a second. Unfortunately, as is sometimes the case with ardent souls, the marriage was tempestuous. In divorce court, Lola says that Jeff put her over his knee and spanked her at a barbeque because she messed up the steaks. Though she calls him a sadist during the divorce proceedings, later at the trial where defendant Jeff is facing the gas chamber, Lola stands up and loudly claims that she killed the vic while Jeff cuts her off, claiming he lied about never being in the house, that he shot the vic. Devoted souls indeed. Though we’re thankful we don’t know couples that are liable to spank each other at a barbeque, we’re happy such sweethearts exist.
In her second outing, The Case of the Travelling Treasure (1961), Gaye plays gangster moll Rita Magovern. Her crook husband Karl is excellently portrayed by Arch Johnson, who brings to the role just the right mix of loud bad temper, unreasoning tyranny and violence restrained only by the fact he is confined to a wheelchair due to a broken leg. In a nice noir moment after Karl gets his just deserts via poison, Rita frankly admits to Perry and Paul that she’s “one of those women who always love the wrong man,” and that Karl was “planning a half million dollar robbery, and he wouldn't even give me enough to pay the gas bill.” We sympathetically suspect that she just wants a quiet modest life with all the bills paid on time, whether or not funded by ill-gotten gains isn’t her department.
In The Case of the Two-Faced Turn-a-bout (1963), she plays Alyssa Laban, the daughter of a Slavic immigrant caught up in the political troubles back in his old Balkan home. Even in black and white, those green eyes call to mind the comely charmers of Kyiv. Putting to use her talent with accents, Gaye also has down-pat the whole brooding, smoldering, quietly melancholy and turbulent manner (this writer’s Slavic genes connected with the part, anyway). No wonder the guest star Hugh O’Brian tries to claim her at the end, in the unlikely event that she’d be willing and happy to be carried off like a trophy to mark a victory in the cold war. As if. This is one of the episodes without Raymond Burr for a reason that has been lost in the mists of time. Loyal fans say contract dispute. Rude fans say recovery from liposuction.
In The Case of the Wednesday Woman (1964) Gaye’s character, Joyce Hadley, is a stock Mason baddie, the secretary who is also an ambitious conniver. Despite her smart and relentless scheming, we feel that she is more sinned against than sinning. She is harassed at work by a lab technician nerd. She is blackmailed into sex by a creep played by smoothie Douglas Dick, who often played handsome heartless cads on Perry. Also monstrous was Queen of the B Movies, Marie Windsor, who studied the Stanislavski Method under avatar Maria Ouspenskaya. In fact, the outstanding feature in this episode is that all the characters are monsters doing a lot of harm to themselves and others. But they all think they are carrying out the best decisions they can given the circumstances. Watching this episode is like kicking over a rock and watching all the disgusting little roaches scurrying about eating drinking screwing plotting thinking they got a real good bead on things. Yuck.
The Case of the Nautical Knot (1964) is interesting because it has two noteworthy actresses besides Gaye. In a part not as expansive as we’d like, our subject’s character Pamela Blair acts as tempting bait to a guy who is so inattentive he doesn’t even notice he’s the object of feminine wiles. Pamela Blair plays Assistant Bad Girl to Barbara Bain’s Mean Girl, a catty socialite that has no respect for nurses and first responders. Bain has that kind of shiny exquisiteness brightened up with lots and lots of money. In contrast to the splendor of the two society women, we have the third actress, Anne Whitfield. Her blonde freshness, open manner, and unique face with easy-to-read, kind of dopey blue eyes made her a must to cast for ‘girl next door’ parts. She was well-cast to be the goody-goody nurse who ends up accused of murder.
The appeal of this episode is the solid story, which was a relatively rare phenomenon by season eight. A second unusual point is the vic was a harmless old guy, not at all the usual despicable brute that had it coming, such that he’d be rushed to his eternal desert of, hopefully, slow roasting. Finally, what’s really odd is that Perry is called as a prosecution witness by Burger.
In her last episode, The Case of the Vanishing Victim (1966) she plays bad girl Laraine Keely. In the scene that reminds us how much the writer were flailing for ideas by season nine, Mason enters Laraine's apartment while she is showering. We get a shot of her drying her calves and ankles. Be still, beating heart, think only of deplorable pandering to low audience desires. Wearing only a towel, Laraine is angry to find him there, scolds him for being a masher while unflappable Perry in unfailing polite, as usual, this not being the first time he has disturbed a female en déshabillé in her own pad. In a huff, she exits to dress. While Perry is tossing her place for evidence, Laraine sneaks out and drives away. A tough shrewd one, for sure.
What a precarious career acting is. Especially for actresses over 30 years old. Despite her success in television, by the late 1960s, her career just stopped. She said in an undated interview, “There were shows I never did—‘Bonanza’, ‘Star Trek’, yet when I’d watch them on TV, I would say to myself ‘I could have done that!’ … I couldn’t walk through the door at Paramount—so I changed agents. Then, it was like I never worked again!”
She moved to Texas to raise her daughter and be closer to family. She worked as a receptionist for 19 years at a local religious television station and sang in the Evangelistic Temple Church’s choir. Lisa Gaye passed away in 2016, at the age of 81, in Houston.
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