Raymond Burr's Secrets Revealed

Raymond Burr solved many mysteries as TV lawyer Perry Mason and TV detective Ironside but it appears that one of the biggest unsolved mysteries involving the late actor ? his dubious claim that he had been married three times in real life ? can finally be put to rest.

"There was only one wife," Burr's sister, Geraldine Fuller, says on this Thursday's A&E Biography (8 p.m. ET, 9 p.m. PT). "I met her but I didn't care for her."

Burr, who led a secret gay life with long-time companion Robert Benevides right up until his death in 1993, had told reporters over the years that he had been to the altar three times: first, with a Scottish actress who was shot down in an airplane over the Atlantic by German attackers in 1943; second, to actress Isabella Ward, a 1947 marriage that was annulled after three months; and third, to Andrina Morgen, a 1954 marriage that ended tragically when she died of cancer. He also claimed he and Morgen had a son who died of leukemia at age 10. According to Fuller, only the short-lived marriage to Ward was for real.

"Raymond Burr was a puzzle," says Bob Thomas, who became friendly with the actor as a writer for the Associated Press. "You couldn't quite figure him out."

Still, Burr's closest friends didn't seem to mind his secretive ways. Says pal Marilyn Hedley Gozzano: "I think the way he survived in Hollywood all those years was through keeping this inner part of himself private and having this little secret place he could always go to."