The Ides of Perry Mason 43

 

On the 15^th of every month, we deal with a topic related to Our Favorite Lawyer.

It is better to be hated for who you are, than to be loved for someone you are not.

The Perry Mason show often presented talented actresses playing difficult women, hard to like but making us consider the perspectives of others and improving our emotional intelligence and empathy.

Francis Reid’s career did not take off until she was at the age – her mid-thirties -when most actresses retire. When she played Lucille Forrest in The Case of Golden Venom (1965), she was well-cast a woman in her 50s who had seen a thing or two, not all of them sweet and light. After a year in Europe she returns to her native California burg, where her son had been killed in what the authorities determined was a hunting accident. She believes her son was murdered by somebody still living in town. She wants revenge, but the bitter desire to mete out payback is eating her up. She keeps her anger stoked and hot. Her anxiety worsens her sciatica to the point where she’s taking a folk remedy (snake venom) to relieve it. Her hardness makes her all too willing to alienate her neighbors, which in a small town is big deal because you can’t find other people your age to hang with. She even lashes out at Paul Drake who is trying to help her. Of course, she ends up defended by Perry Mason when somebody is killed with snake venom. Later in her career Francis Reid spent about 30 years on the daytime drama Days of our Lives, winning some Emmys too.

With her natural auburn hair and light blue eyes, the young drama student Lee Meriwether was crowned Miss America in 1954. In 1965, she appears in two episodes The Case of the Frustrated Folk Singer (1965) as secretary Natalie Graham and The Case of the Cheating Chancellor (1965) as artist Evelyn Wilcox. As secretary Natalie, she was cast against type, playing a small part as a cold-hearted assistant in a greedy fraud perpetrated against our girlfriend Bonnie Jones. As artist Evelyn, the part gives her a chance to stretch out as the smart but dumb other woman who believed the cheating dog when he promised he'd divorce his current wife. Evelyn lashes out at Perry and Paul in a memorable scene. After they leave, she yanks a sheet off a bust she sculpted of the cheating dog, caresses it, and cries. It’s really pitiful; we wonder what a smart, talented woman would see in a cheating cur that was an academic bully and cheating husband. “Love has no pride when there's no one but myself to blame,” indeed.

Stage-trained Louise Latham always looked a little tired, as if burdened with problems ranging from cats that wouldn’t mind their manners to husbands that were away cheating every weekend. In fact, she played the haggard wife Shirley in The Case of the Cheating Chancellor mentioned above. The scene where she blames herself for his adultery provides a poignant moment. In The Case of the Careless Kitten (1965), she plays Aunt Matilda Shore, whose husband Franklin disappeared with a floozy of a secretary. And Matilda is still sorely pissed, so much so that she makes herself and everybody else miserable. The scene where, in her unappeasable anger against fate, she is voicing the objections that all cat detesters feel but never dare express is pure gold. This probably one of the best episodes of the series for the performances of Latham, the ubiquitous Allan Melvin, and the Persian named Monkey.