The CrankyCritic Talks with Orson Bean


CrankyCritic: ~We've got to say what a pleasure it was to see your face on the big screen again

Orson Bean:~ People come up to me and say "are you still alive?!"

CrankyCritic:~ Yeah, we'll admit. We thought you were dead . . .

Orson Bean:~ [laughing] First of all, I hid successfully for six years on a
program called Dr. Quinn Medicine Woman. It was a big hit in Texas and
Minneapolis, but people on the coasts didn't even know it was on. They picked me for this film because they read every old guy in the business and couldn't cast this part. I happened to be on a late night talk show with Tom Snyder and one of the producers said "get him in". As I'm concerned, God cast me in this part. Fate cast me in this part. I know that if I had come in earlier and had been one of those two hundred guys who read, they would have said "he isn't any good either." But when the producers had given up, suddenly it was like 2:30 in the morning at the White Rose Bar and the dame at the next stool looks pretty good. [big grin on his face]

CrankyCritic: Care to get retrospective and tell us what people remember?

Orson Bean: Well, if they're old enough, they remember me from the game shows and the talk shows. I was a Broadway actor for twenty years, but most people in America didn't know that. They saw me on Match Game; I was on To Tell The Truth for seven years. It was fun. It was better than heavy lifting, to get paid for playing a game! In those days, the talk shows and the game shows were pretty witty and clever. Today it's a bunch of scripted, smutty jokes. I like dirty jokes the same as the next man, but these are not dirty. They're smutty and there's a difference.

CrankyCritic:~How so?

Orson Bean:~ In those days you had to "get around" things. I used to watch Hollywood Squares -- I could never be on Hollywood Squares because I worked for Goodson-Todman, the competition -- and center square Paul Lynde was asked the question was "What is a pullet?" He said "A little show of affection." Now that's funny. It's clever and it's weird. [and we'll point out Bean does a dead on Lynde imitation; that a pullet is a chicken and that Lynde, a regular on Bewitched, was notorious for answering every question with double entendre.

CrankyCritic:~We can joke about not being seen on the coasts, but you did get whacked by the infamous Hollywood Black List, too.
Orson Bean:~ I was never bitter. I was horny for a Communist girl and she
dragged me to some meetings and that's why I got blacklisted. Everybody in those days wanted to end the black list. I ran on a slate of AFTRA and was elected first VP of the New York Local. For my pains, they dug up this stuff about me and, I went from being the hot comic on the Ed Sullivan Show to not working for a year. However, I got a Broadway show. At the end of that year Ed Sullivan called me up, as he promised he would, and said "I think things have softened up enough that I can book you again" and he did. That kind of broke it.

CrankyCritic:~Is there any kind of satisfaction seeing, in the last couple of
years, McCarthy and Cohn being totally exposed for what they were?

Orson Bean: It's always scary in a Democracy to see that stuff. I think Pat
Buchanan is truly frightening. The man is a fascist and an anti-Semite. If he's
willing to say as much in public as he says, imagine what he says in a room
full of his friends whom he trusts. I really admire John McCain for saying that [Buchanan] shouldn't be in the Republican party while George W. is saying "well, we need all the votes we can get..." You've got to watch out for stuff like that. It's an easy target. I made a movie with old Joe Welch, who was the wonderful lawyer who said "at long last Senator McCarthy, have you no sense of decency?" Otto Preminger had the brilliant idea of casting him as the judge in Anatomy of a Murder. I had a part in that. At night we would sit in a bar up in Michigan. Welch told us that he was brought in to represent the Army by Tom Dewey, who was the head of the Republican party, who said "This son of a bitch McCarthy is crazy and he's going to drag the party down with him." So it's interesting to see that when things go far enough there are moderates, even moderate conservatives like McCain, who start seeing how dangerous Buchanan is. I trust America. I've lived long enough to see the pendulum swing back and forth, to see that Democracy really wins out in the end. I read an interesting thing the other day. There has never been a famine in a democracy, including India. Some people get hungry but not real Famine. Famines are only caused by
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