It taught self-reliance by making lessons and most rules optional, hoping to instill responsibility. Bean, who never got beyond high school, bought a building in Chelsea in 1964, hired four teachers and opened the 15th Street School with 40 pupils in the nursery, kindergarten and lower elementary grades. Neill’s Summerhill School in England, Mr. He became a disciple of the Austrian psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich and wrote a book about his psychosexual theories, “Me and the Orgone.” (Orgone is a concept, originally proposed by Reich, of a universal life force.) Bean abandoned his thriving career and moved his family to Australia in 1970. I became convinced that the country was going fascist.”īelieving that America’s generals were planning an imminent coup d’état, Mr. We loved it, but I was starting to freak out. “We had a four-story townhouse and a live-in maid. “We were having babies and the money was rolling in so fast we had to push it out,” he recalled in an interview with The New York Times years later. But he felt overwhelmed by the trappings of success and by turmoil in a nation caught up in conflicts over the Vietnam War, the civil rights movement, the assassinations of leaders and a political drift to the right. He was often seen on five television panel shows a week, squeezed in nightclub acts and a Broadway show, married (for the second time) and added more children to his growing family.
He also starred on and off Broadway, made Hollywood films, founded a society of Laurel and Hardy aficionados, amassed a fortune and was blacklisted briefly as a suspected Communist. He popped up on all the networks as an ad-libbing game-show panelist (a mainstay on “To Tell the Truth”), a frequent guest of Jack Paar and Johnny Carson on “The Tonight Show,” a regular on drama anthology shows and, in 1954, the host of his own CBS variety show, “The Blue Angel.” Bean, a subtle comic who looked like a naïve farm boy, was ubiquitous on TV. Bean was struck by a car while crossing the street.Įarly in his career, in the 1950s and ’60s, Mr. Brian Wendling of the Los Angeles Police Department said Mr. His death was confirmed on Saturday by the Los Angeles County coroner’s office. Orson Bean, the free-spirited television, stage and film comedian who stepped out of his storybook life to found a progressive school, move to Australia, give away his possessions and wander around a turbulent America in the 1970s as a late-blooming hippie, was killed in a traffic accident on Friday in Venice, Calif.
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