TV veteran who thrived in theater
ORSON BEAN, 1928 - 2020
Actor Orson Bean, a veteran television personality, all-around entertainer and master raconteur who worked on the small screen and in film while becoming a mainstay of Los Angeles’ small theater scene, has died.
Bean was hit by two cars and killed Friday in L.A., authorities said. He was 91.
The showman, a distant cousin of President Coolidge and father-in-law to the late conservative writer Andrew Breitbart, has maintained a steady career since the 1950s and cut his teeth on and off Broadway before becoming a live television staple.
Bean’s onstage antics included stand-up comedy and magic tricks as he made the rounds on game shows and late-night television. He was fondly remembered by baby boomers for bringing his wit and sophistication to “What’s My Line?,” “I’ve Got a Secret” and “To Tell the Truth” and guest-starring in variety series and talk shows, including “The Ed Sullivan Show,” “The Tonight Show starring Johnny Carson” and “The
Mike Douglas Show.”
Later in his career, he starred in “Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman,” “Being John Malkovich” and “Desperate Housewives” while racking up dozens of guest appearance credits.
Bean, who wrote several memoirs and a cookbook for cats, was briefly blacklisted, became a hippie, a peddler of a self-help method and a beloved Venice resident as he bolstered the local theater scene with wife Alley Mills. All along, his true passion was the stage, though he acquiesced to television, films and even commercials just to pay his bills.
“Make a living doing commercials or soap operas or tending bar — and then do theater,” he once told The Times. “People shouldn’t get into show business because they want to become stars or become rich; they should get into it because they can’t help but put on a show.”
Born in Vermont in 1928, Bean, whose real name was Dallas Burrows, grew up during the Great Depression in a cramped Cambridge, Mass., apartment that he shared with his volatile parents. Bean recalled his troublesome childhood in his one-man show “Safe at Home,” which was based on his namesake memoir. He noted that his parents’ lovemaking was as loud as their screaming fights, and his mother — a jealous type — had a penchant for sherry. She fell apart after his father left home and died by suicide the day after Bean refused her plea to visit her.
Bean, who said he peed on his cousin — sitting President Coolidge — when he was 6 months old, survived by building a wall around himself and developing a set of entrepreneurial skills that allowed him to make an early break from his mother’s boozy embraces. He began as a magician, mesmerizing the neighborhood kids with his tricks. He tested his sleight of hand on the professional circuit before switching to stand-up comedy when he returned from Japan after World War II.
Bean played small clubs near Boston and Philadelphia for a year before setting out for New York, which opened the doors to “The Ed Sullivan Show” and Broadway.
From 1950 to 1960, he was the house comic at the Blue Angel night club in New York, where he adopted the stage name Orson Bean after workshopping a few other monikers.
During his two decades in the Big Apple, Bean appeared on and off-Broadway in several starring vehicles such as the comedy “Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?” and the musicals “John Murray Anderson’s Almanac” and “Subways Are for Sleeping” with Sydney Chaplin. The latter production earned him a 1962 best supporting actor Tony nomination.
But the surge in his TV career dried up after he fell for a communist girl — one who “dragged me to a couple of meetings” — and he was blacklisted in the 1950s.
“I got a call from Ed Sullivan. I could feel the blood draining out of my face,” Bean told the Hollywood Reporter. “He said, ‘I have to cancel this Sunday.’ I had been on the show seven times. Overnight, I went from being the hot young comic at CBS to not working.”
Sullivan eventually booked Bean again, he said, noting that “it was Campbell
Soup that did the blacklisting, not CBS.”
In 1956, he married actress Jacqueline de Sibour and had a daughter named Michele before he and De Sibour split in 1962. He married again in 1965, this time to fashion designer Carolyn Maxwell, and had three children — Max, Susannah (wife of Breitbart) and Ezekiel.
After the March 1970 Weather Underground explosion happened around the corner from Bean’s home in Greenwich Village, he tried to relocate with his family to Sydney, Australia: “I turned 40 and ran away from home,” he told The Times in 1989. “I had a lot of money in the bank and I just spent it.”
They returned to the States about a year and a half later.
“I came back, pierced my ear, grew a beard, bought an old van, threw the kids in the back, and we lived like hippies for three years,” he said, noting in his 1988 autobiography that he also experimented with LSD.
After his second wife left him in 1981, he swirled into a life of booze, drugs and loneliness before moving from New York to L.A. to be closer to his kids.
“I did all this stuff, the drugs, getting my kisser on the tube, because I thought it would make me happy. But it didn’t work. I didn’t find happiness until I learned to surrender, to give up the crazy pursuit,” he said. He later wrote “Mail for Mikey” about his addiction and recovery.
He struggled with cash in the 1980s and morosely contemplated his inability to make his house payment.
“Then I rediscovered the one thing I’ve wanted out of life since I was a boy — to be the happiest son of a bitch alive. The next day my agent called with a job to do a commercial voiceover,” he told The Times in 1991, noting that he’d been making a fortune ever since.
Bean also became a spokesman of sorts for psychiatrist Wilhelm Reich’s self-healing theories of the “orgone box” on talk shows. He also wrote a book about the therapy technique, the humorous “Me and the Orgone: One Man’s Sexual Revolution.”
He moved to Venice in 1984, where he became an active community member, renovating homes and starring in local plays, including a few appearances at the Odyssey Theatre in West L.A. and 1991’s “Waiting for Phil” at the Richard Burbage Theatre.
In 1993, he published “25 Ways to Cook a Mouse: Whisker Liking Recipes for Your Gourmet Cat” and booked his longest television gig yet. He played Loren Bray, the cynical storekeeper on CBS’ “Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman,” which ran through 1998 before being made into a movie. While most actors would love to land a syndicated series, Bean merely regarded it as his “day job.”
“I love being on my TV show. But I honestly look at it as the day job that enables me to do this [work in the theater], which is where my heart is,” Bean told The Times in 1997. Bean said he’d “rather do theater for nothing than get paid to do my TV show” and he enjoyed the success but “never took it seriously.”
“I made up my mind I was going to walk that thin line between fame and oblivion. The only real benefit of being famous is being recognized by head waiters and getting good tables at restaurants. The rest is part ego trip and part inconvenience,” he told The Times. “Of course, [adulation] is one of the reasons you start doing this .... But once you get past that, the actual craft is there — and that becomes the fun.”
That credo echoed throughout the remainder of his career as he focused on his craft onstage and peddled whatever merchandise he had to in order to sustain his passion. He passed up a lucrative appearance in the 1980s and 1990s series “MacGyver” because he wanted work on Dario Fo’s political satire, “Accidental Death of an Anarchist,” at the Odyssey.
He performed on stages as obscure as the now-closed Richard Basehart Playhouse in Woodland Hills (reviving the 1964 musical “I Was Dancing” in 1993) and as prominent as the Odyssey (“Hess” in 1984 and “Symmes’ Hole” in 1988).
“It’s wrong to make a living off the theater,” he told The Times. “Theater should be supported, like redwood trees. You should make your living — whether you’re a writer or an actor or a director — in movies or commercials. But you do theater out of love. You can always make a living doing the other stuff.”
He met his third wife, “Wonder Years” actress Alley Mills, during an evening of play readings for new authors and she played his love interest on “Dr. Quinn.” The couple settled down in Bean’s homes on the Venice canals, where they were boosters of the community theater scene.
Well into his 80s, Bean starred in Steven Drukman’s “Death of the Author” at the Geffen Playhouse in 2014 and headlined his solo show “Safe at Home: An Evening With Orson Bean” at the Pacific Resident Theater in 2016.
The latter play, based on his memoir, recounted his humorous and heartwrenching life, his 50 years in show business and his determination to be happy.
“Once I understood it was all in the attitude, I stopped worrying about making a living,” he told The Times. “I always get a job, as I always have. The only thing that’s left out is the worrying about it.”