Gail Patrick

 ( 1911 Births ) 

She visited the studio officials by herself and asked to negotiate. She said that she must have $75 a week instead of the customary $50 and that she would not accept the standard 12-week layoff provision. "I also read the fine print and blacked out the clause saying I had to do cheesecake stills", Patrick recalled in a 1979 interview. "In the back of my mind I had this idea I could never go home to practice law if such stills were floating around".

Her physical attractiveness helped her win top billing occasionally, as in King of Alcatraz (1938) and Disbarred (1939), both directed by Robert Florey—but she most often played romantic rivals. She appeared in more than 60 movies between 1932 and 1948. Some of these roles include Carole Lombard's spoiled sister in My Man Godfrey (1936), Ginger Rogers's rival in Stage Door (1937), and Anna May Wong's competitor in Dangerous to Know (1938). Patrick played Cary Grant's second wife in My Favorite Wife (1940), with Irene Dunne, and helped Leo McCarey write the judge's lines in the second courtroom scene.

During the summer of 1951, Patrick hosted Home Plate, a postgame interview show at Gilmore Field that immediately followed television broadcasts of the Hollywood Stars home games on KTTV. She and her third husband, Cornwell Jackson, adopted a daughter in 1952, and a son in 1954.

Cornwell Jackson was the literary agent for attorney-author Erle Stanley Gardner, creator of the fictional criminal defense attorney Perry Mason. After a series of disappointing Warner Bros. films and a radio series he despised, Gardner had refused to license the character for any more adaptations, but Patrick won the author's trust. She had maintained her network in show business and shared Gardner's love for the law. Patrick, Jackson, and Gardner formed a production company, Paisano Productions, of which she was president. Patrick developed the television series Perry Mason and sold it to CBS, where it ran for nine seasons (1957–66) and earned the first Silver Gavel Award presented for television drama by the American Bar Association. Gail Patrick Jackson was its executive producer. She was one of the first women producers.

Longtime CBS executive Anne Nelson, who handled contract negotiation and other business affairs for CBS, called Patrick "my adversary in business, but my friend in life". In a 2008 interview, Nelson reported that Patrick was the only female executive producer in prime time during the years Perry Mason was on the air. "Women today won't believe that things were that tough", Nelson said, "but Gail was alone in her bailiwick, and I was the only female executive not in personnel at CBS at the time". Nelson said that years later, Patrick told her she had written up the contract herself, and that it was so wild and favorable to Paisano Productions that she had no idea CBS would accept it. "But we bought it", Nelson said. "And it has been a very big financial success, not only for CBS, but also for the Paisano partners over this many years".

Patrick also developed a half-hour Paisano Productions series based on Gardner's Cool and Lam stories. A pilot directed by Jacques Tourneur aired on CBS in 1958, but a series did not materialize.

Patrick served two terms (1960–62) as vice president of the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences and as president of its Hollywood chapter. She was the first woman to serve in a leadership capacity in the academy, and its only female leader until 1983.

Her home, a gated estate of nearly seven acres on La Brea Terrace in Los Angeles, was occasionally a shooting location for Perry Mason, beginning with the third season. The mansion was built in 1911 for Dustin Farnum. Patrick purchased it from the estate of writer-producer Mark Hellinger after his death in December 1947.