Orson Bean
Orson Bean (born Dallas Frederick Burrows; July 22, 1928 – February 7, 2020) was an American film, television, and stage actor. He was a game show and talk show host[1][2][3][4][5] and a "mainstay of Los Angeles’ small theater scene."[2] He appeared frequently on several televised game shows from the 1960s through the 1980s and was a longtime panelist on the television game show To Tell the Truth.[2] "A storyteller par excellence",[4] he was a favorite of Johnny Carson, appearing on The Tonight Show more than 200 times.[6]
Orson Bean
February 7, 2020 (aged 91)
- Actor
- comedian
- producer
- writer
1952–2020
4
In the 1960s, Bean remarked in an interview that he became known as a "neocelebrity who's famous for being famous" for his appearances as a panellist on television prime-time gameshows.[2]
Early life[edit]
Bean was born in Burlington, Vermont, in 1928, while his first cousin twice removed, Calvin Coolidge, was President of the United States.[7][8] Bean was the son of Marian Ainsworth (née Pollard) and George Frederick Burrows. His father was a founding member of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), a fund-raiser for the Scottsboro Boys' defense, and a 20-year member of the campus police of Harvard College.[2][9] Bean said his house was "full of causes". He left home at 16 after his mother died by suicide.[10]
Bean graduated from Rindge Technical High School in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1946.[11] He then joined the United States Army[12] and was stationed in Japan for a year.[13] Following his military service, Bean began working in small venues as a stage magician before moving in the early 1950s to stand-up comedy. He studied theatre at HB Studio.[14]
Stage name[edit]
In an interview on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson in 1974 Bean recounted the source of his stage name.[15] He credited its origin to a piano player named Val at "Hurley's Log Cabin", a restaurant and nightclub in Boston where he had once performed. According to Bean, every evening before he went on stage at the nightclub Val would suggest to him a silly name to use when introducing himself to the audience. One night, for example, the piano player suggested "Roger Duck," but the young comedian got very few laughs after using that name in his performance.[15] On another night, the musician suggested "Orson Bean" and the comedian received a great response from the audience, a reaction so favorable that it resulted in a job offer that same evening from a local theatrical booking agent. Given his success on that occasion, Bean decided to keep using the odd-sounding but memorable name. (Bean again told the story nearly verbatim on the Carson show September 23, 1976, but Carson appeared to not remember having heard it before.)[15]
Bean claimed that his name was a blend of the pompous and the amusing. He recalled that Orson Welles once called him over to a table and said, "You stole my name," and then dismissed him with a wave.[2]
Rising comedian[edit]
In 1952, Bean made a guest appearance on NBC Radio's weekly hot-jazz series The Chamber Music Society of Lower Basin Street, giving the young comic his first national exposure. The series, burlesquing stuffy symphonic and operatic broadcasts, had the host (always introduced as a doctor of music) reciting dignified commentary in jazz-musician slang. NBC had broadcast the series off and on since 1940, and it was revived for a 13-week run with "Dr. Orson Bean" now as full-time host. Bean's august, bemused delivery belied the fact that this eminent professor was only 24 years old.
For 10 years, he was the house comic at New York's Blue Angel comedy club.[2] In 1954, The New York Times noted in a review of The Blue Angel, Bean's delivery was always well played, even if a joke fell flat.[5] In the summer of 1954, he hosted a television show, Blue Angel, on CBS in which he served as emcee, introducing various acts at the simulated nightclub. Time Magazine, reviewing the show, called Bean "a quiet, wry, young comedian ... who has a happy way with a joke".[16][4] He "maintained a steady career since the 1950s and cut his teeth on and off Broadway before becoming a live-television staple."[2]
Temporary eclipse[edit]
Bean was placed on the Hollywood blacklist for attending Communist Party meetings while dating a member, but continued to work through the 1950s and 1960s.[2][5][8] "Basically I was blacklisted because I had a cute communist girlfriend," he said in a 2001 interview. He only stopped working in television for a year.[10] An appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show was cancelled due to his being on the blacklist and he was rendered persona non grata there for years because of it. Sullivan eventually relented and re-booked him, declaring that he was the master of his own show, not "Campbell's Soup."[2]
Theatre[edit]
On Broadway Bean starred in the original cast of Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? with Walter Matthau and Jayne Mansfield.[2] Then, in 1961, he was featured in Subways Are for Sleeping with Sydney Chaplin, for which he received a Tony Award nomination as Best Featured Actor in a Musical.[2][7] Bean performed in Never Too Late the following year. In 1964, he produced the Off-Off-Broadway musical Home Movies — which won an Obie Award.[17][18] And the same year, he appeared in the Broadway production I Was Dancing.[19] Bean starred in the musical John Murray Anderson’s Almanac.[2] He also voiced and sang the role of Charlie Brown on MGM's original 1966 concept album of the musical You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown,[20] and starred in Illya Darling, the 1967 musical adaptation of the film Never on Sunday.[7]
He was a chief creator and "mainstay" of The Pacific Resident Theatre in Venice, California.[2][4][5]
Film[edit]
Bean played the eccentric, foul-mouthed Dr. Lester in Spike Jonze's 1999 film, Being John Malkovich. He also appeared as a Holocaust survivor in the 2018 film The Equalizer 2[27] and as Meg Ryan's editor in Joe Dante's 1987 film Innerspace.
Personal life[edit]
Bean was married three times. His first marriage was in 1956 to actress Jacqueline de Sibour, whose stage name was Rain Winslow. Sibour was the daughter of French nobleman and pilot Vicomte Jacques de Sibour and his wife Violette B. Selfridge (daughter of American-born British department-store magnate Harry Gordon Selfridge).[2][28][29][30] Before their divorce in 1962, Bean and Jacqueline had one child, Michele.
In 1965, he married actress and fashion designer Carolyn Maxwell, with whom he had three children: Max, Susannah, and Ezekiel.[2][31] The couple divorced in 1981. Their daughter Susannah was married to journalist Andrew Breitbart from 1997 until his death in 2012. In the early 1970s Bean took his family on a sabbatical break from New York to live briefly on a farm commune in Victoria, Australia.[32][33]
Bean's third wife was The Wonder Years co-star Alley Mills. They married in 1993 and lived in Los Angeles until his death in 2020.[2] When Mills was baptized as an adult, Bean walked with her down to the beach so "Pastor Ken" from First Lutheran Church of Venice could baptize her in the waters of the Pacific Ocean.[34] For many years, Bean and Mills played roles in First Lutheran's annual production of A Christmas Carol; Bean played Ebenezer Scrooge.[35]
An admirer of Laurel and Hardy, Bean, in 1965, was a founding member of The Sons of the Desert. This international organization is devoted to sharing information about the lives of Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy and preserving and enjoying their films.[5]
In 1966, he helped found the 15th Street School in New York City, a primary school using the radical, democratic, free school Summerhill as a model.[5][36] Bean wrote an autobiographical account about his life-changing experience with the orgone therapy developed by Austrian-born psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich. Published in 1971, the account is titled Me and the Orgone: The True Story of One Man's Sexual Awakening.[5][37]
He was a distant cousin of President Calvin Coolidge.[2] In later life, "his politics turned more conservative" and he authored intermittent columns for Breitbart News.[2][7] He ventured the thought that being a conservative in 21st-century Hollywood was much like being a suspected Communist back in the 1950s.[2]
For much of his career and until his death, he was represented by the Artists & Representatives agency. In its brief statement after his death, they noted he was an "assiduous nurturer of rising talent".[4]
Death[edit]
On February 7, 2020, while crossing Venice Boulevard in the Venice section of Los Angeles, Bean was struck by the drivers of two vehicles, with the second driver striking him fatally.[4] The driver of the first vehicle did not see Bean and "clipped him and he went down", said Los Angeles Police Department Captain Brian Wendling. "A second vehicle's driver was distracted by people trying to slow him down; when the driver looked ahead, a second traffic collision occurred and it caused the death of Bean."[1][7][38]