Sullivan eventually relented and re-booked him, opining that he was the master of his own show, not "Campbell's Soup." Theatre 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. He only stopped working in television for a year. "Basically I was blacklisted because I had a cute communist girlfriend," he said in a 2001 interview. He "maintained a steady career since the 1950s and cut his teeth on and off Broadway before becoming a live-television staple." Temporary eclipse īean was placed on the Hollywood blacklist for attending Communist Party meetings while dating a member, but continued to work through the 1950s and 1960s. He once hosted a television show, "Blue Angel", on CBS. 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. Bean's august, bemused delivery belied the fact that this eminent professor was only 24 years old.įor 10 years, he was the house comic at New York's Blue Angel comedy club.
ANNE FRANCIS AND ORSON BEAN SERIES
NBC had broadcast the series off and on since 1940, and it was revived for a 13-week run with "Dr. 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. 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. 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.
(Bean again told the story nearly verbatim on the Carson show September 23, 1976, but Carson appeared to not remember having heard it before.) īean claimed that his name was a blend of the pompous and the amusing. Given his success on that occasion, Bean decided to keep using the odd-sounding but memorable name. 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. 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. 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. 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. In an interview on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson in 1974, Bean recounted the source of his stage name. Following his military service, Bean began working in small venues as a stage magician before transitioning in the early 1950s to stand-up comedy. He then joined the United States Army and was stationed in Japan for a year. īean graduated from Rindge Technical School in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1946. He left home at 16 after his mother died by suicide. Bean said his house was "full of causes".
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. Bean was the son of Marian Ainsworth ( née Pollard) and George Frederick Burrows. Orson Bean was born in Burlington, Vermont, in 1928, while his first cousin twice removed, Calvin Coolidge, was President of the United States.
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