Orson Bean (born Dallas Frederick Burrows; July 22, 1928 – February 7, 2020) was an American film, television, and stage actor and comedian. 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]
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]
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
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
In 1952, Bean received his first national exposure when NBC Radio revived its hot-jazz series The Chamber Music Society of Lower Basin Street. This burlesque of stuffy symphonic and operatic broadcasts featured dixieland jam sessions, with 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" as host. Bean's august, bemused delivery belied the fact that this eminent professor was only 23 years old. Bean also hosted a Lower Basin Street half-hour TV special, which aired on Sunday, June 15, 1952 at 5:30 p.m.[16]
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".[17][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
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."(Per the Los Angeles Times, Sullivan "noting that 'it was Campbell Soup that did the blacklisting, not CBS.'")[2]
Bean appeared as a patient in the final two episodes of 7th Heaven's seventh season in 2003. In 2005, Bean appeared in the sitcom Two and a Half Men in an episode titled "Does This Smell Funny to You?", playing a former playboy whose conquests included actresses Tuesday Weld and Anne Francis. He appeared in the 2007 How I Met Your Mother episode "Slapsgiving" as Robin Scherbatsky's 41-year-old boyfriend, Bob.[24] In 2009 he was cast in the recurring role of Roy Bender, a steak salesman, who is Karen McCluskey's love interest on the ABC series Desperate Housewives.[citation needed] At the age of 87, Bean in 2016 appeared in "Playdates", an episode of the American TV sitcom Modern Family.[25] He appeared in a 2017 episode of Teachers (TV Land, season 2, episode 11, "Dosey Don't"). He appeared at the age of 89 as a doctor in the Superstore episode "Delivery Day" in 2019. In 2020, Bean appeared in the Netflix series Grace and Frankie, as the rascally character Bruno, a potential green card spouse for Joan-Margaret, in the episode "The Scent" (S6E10). It was Bean's final television performance.[26]
Game shows
Doing stand-up comedy and magic tricks, and passing on wit and wisdom, he became a regular on I've Got a Secret, What's My Line?, and To Tell the Truth. He appeared on game shows originating from New York. He was a regular panelist on To Tell the Truth[1] in versions from the late 1950s through 1991.[7] He appeared on Super Password and Match Game, among other game shows. He hosted a pilot for a revamped version of Concentration in 1985;[27] it was not picked up, but elements carried over to Classic Concentration with Alex Trebek, primarily the theme, graphics and announcer Gene Wood.
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][29][30][31] 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][32] 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 (for about three months) on a farm commune in Victoria, Australia.[33][34]
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.[35] For many years, Bean and Mills played roles in First Lutheran's annual production of A Christmas Carol; Bean played Ebenezer Scrooge.[36]
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
On February 7, 2020, while crossing Venice Boulevard in the Venice section of Los Angeles, Bean died from complications of a traffic accident. He 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 him 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][39]
^ abcInterview with Orson Bean, "Johnny Carson 1974 05 10 Jack Palance", The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson, first telecast on NBC on May 10, 1974; copy of full episode of the late-night talk show posted by Elfreda Arredondo on YouTube, a subsidiary of Alphabet Inc., Mountain View, California. Retrieved September 30, 2017.
^Fryman, Pamela (November 19, 2007), Slapsgiving (Comedy, Romance), Josh Radnor, Jason Segel, Cobie Smulders, Neil Patrick Harris, Bays Thomas Productions, 20th Century Fox Television, retrieved December 13, 2020
