Orson Bean’s wild life: Why did the LA Times obit skip God’s role in his final chapters?

No doubt about it, actor Orson Bean lived a wild life — even by Hollywood standards.

As you would expect, the lengthy Los Angeles Times obituary for Bean — who died at age 91 when hit by two cars — was packed with colorful details. I mean, this is a man whose early life included a run-in with the Hollywood blacklist, yet he ended up as a conservative who helped inspire the career of his son-in-law Andrew Breitbart.

But here is the GetReligion question for this day: Why would the newspaper of record in La La Land avoid one of the key elements of the final chapter of this man’s life, as in his conversion to Christianity?

Surely there was room for a phrase or two about that development in lines such as these?

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, with “Two and a Half Men,” “The Closer,” “Modern Family” and “How I Met Your Mother” among them.

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.

The story gets wilder and wilder, which only points to the irony of journalists (the Los Angeles Times was not alone in missing the faith angle here, as demonstrated at The New York Times) avoiding any discussion of Bean’s faith — which he made no attempt to hide, as one can see in the videos accompanying this post.

You can see a hint of what is missing in this colorful passage:

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.”

So success didn’t make him happy, so he “learned to surrender.”

That’s an interesting statement: Surrender to what?

Later on, there is a discussion of “Safe at Home: An Evening With Orson Bean” that was staged, at the Pacific Resident Theatre in 2016. The focus of the show, the Times said, was his “humorous and heart-wrenching life, his 50 years in show business and his determination to be happy.”

OK, so how did the drama end, in terms of this long wrestling match inside his mind and soul? Maybe readers would want to know about that?