George Watt Fenneman (November 10, 1919 – May 29, 1997) was an American radio and television announcer. Fenneman is best remembered as the show announcer and straight man on Groucho Marx's You Bet Your Life. Marx said of Fenneman in 1976, "There never was a comedian who was any good unless he had a good straight man, and George was straight on all four sides".
Fenneman was born in Peking (now Beijing), China, the only child of Edgar Warfield and Jessico "Jessie" (née Watt) Fenneman. He was an infant when his parents moved to San Francisco, California, where he grew up. Fenneman's father was a certified public accountant and worked in the import-export business. His mother was an author and a minister of the Divine Art of Living. When Fenneman was eight, he wrote and starred in his own drama before his neighborhood friends in the basement of his home. Fenneman grew up in San Francisco's West Portal district.
Fenneman graduated from San Francisco Polytechnic High School. In 1942 he graduated from San Francisco State College with a B.A. in Speech and Drama.
Poor eyesight and asthma prevented Fenneman from military action in World War II. Fenneman became a broadcast correspondent for the U.S. Office of War Information, where he met Jack Webb, a fellow staff announcer who would later hire him for Webb's Dragnet radio and TV series. Fenneman's work in the Army included announcing the wartime service show Sound Off!.
In the early part of World War II, he and college classmate Bob Sweeney formed a stand-up comedy team and entertained troops at military bases.
In 1941, Fenneman was hired by KSFO (AM) radio for $35 per week. He immediately found himself hosting the show Lunch at the Top of the Mark. The 22-year-old Fenneman's first interview that day was the actor Boris Karloff. In 1942, Fenneman took a job as a radio announcer and actor at KGO (AM), increasing his salary to $55 per week. His first acting role on the station was the early California bandit Joaquin Murrieta in the production Golden Days.
Returning to broadcasting in 1946 following World War II, he moved to Los Angeles. "I figured if you're going to be in this business, you've got to be in southern California". In 1948, the George Fenneman Show was heard weekdays at 4:00 p.m. on KECA (AM) radio in Los Angeles. Fenneman was reported to be "one of the better radio voices". In 1948, Fenneman was an announcer for the Abbott and Costello radio show. He became the announcer on the Coca-Cola Victory Parade of Spotlight Bands, heard on over 168 radio stations on the NBC Blue Network.
Fenneman is best remembered as the announcer and good-natured sidekick for Groucho Marx's comedy/quiz show You Bet Your Life. He won the audition as the radio show's announcer in 1947. Fenneman stayed with the show when it moved to television in 1950, on NBC where it remained for 11 years. Fenneman was known as "Groucho Marx's man Friday, who helps him on Wednesdays (on radio) and Thursdays (on TV)".
Fenneman's voice, looks, and manner provided the ideal foil for Marx's antics and ad libs.
Robert "Bob" Dwan, director of You Bet Your Life, said "He had a naturally good voice." One day, Fenneman met Dwan at Hollywood and Vine in Los Angeles during his lunch hour. Dwan told Fenneman to immediately go to a studio where auditions were being held for a new Groucho Marx program. Dwan said Fenneman's demeanor made him the perfect straight man for the show. Initially hired for $55 per week, Fenneman's salary reportedly grew to "more than $50,000 per year".
Dwan said "He was the perfect foil for Groucho. We didn't pick him for that reason, however. We picked him because he was very bright, someone who could keep track of the quiz score and do the math on the spot. George's main principle was that he didn't tell the jokes, no matter how good a reply he might have. He knew what his role was, and he was, above all, a gentleman." Fenneman got the job, and was paid $55 a week to start. Groucho frequently encouraged contestants to bet odd amounts, making the arithmetic difficult to keep straight on the fly during a live show. Dwan said "Groucho had a tendency to get them (the show's contestants) to bet odd amounts, like $17.36. So George had a bit of a task." Fenneman said he was "a spring-board of interplay" between Marx and himself. "I was the foil for a lot of his wit. It was sheer trauma for me. I showed up every night and prayed."
Fenneman was a resilient target of Marx's frequent mispronunciations of his name ("Feminine") and other light-hearted teasing. "Groucho called Fenneman the male Margaret Dumont", according to Frank Ferrante, who portrayed Marx onstage in Groucho: A Life in Revue. "George took it as the highest praise. Groucho called him the perfect straight man."
Fenneman said "I was the gentleman, the nice fellow. Older ladies who would watch the show would see me as their son. Oh, the letters they used to write, castigating mean old Groucho for being cruel to that nice young man."
When a young female contestant referred to Fenneman as "Mr. Fidderman", Marx ordered Fenneman onstage and accused him of leading a "double life". On one episode Fenneman was suspended in a harness as a substitute for the show's stuffed duck that was dropped from overhead with a $100 payoff in its beak when a contestant said the secret word during every episode. Fenneman's wife said "Everyone had told Groucho 47 times before the show, 'Don't touch him', so George came down, and Groucho immediately came over and pushed him; and he turned upside down. He was absolutely terrified."
Fenneman said of working with Marx, "I can't impress on you too much what it meant to be working with a legend. I was 30 years old and working with this man who was 60 at the time, who'd been the biggest star of all the media."
George Fenneman remained a familiar personality into the 1960s and 1970s, due in large part to two widespread revivals of You Bet Your Life. It was customary practice, established in radio, for a successful network series to take the summer months off and return in the fall. A summer-replacement series, usually a musical or comedy half-hour, would fill the established time slot for 13 weeks until the parent program returned. You Bet Your Life was the first network TV series to continue into the summer months, with reruns of some of the previous season's better episodes. To inform the public that these summer broadcasts were repeats and not new programs, the summer show was titled The Best of Groucho, and 13 reruns were selected each year, beginning in 1952.
After You Bet Your Life ended its network run in 1961, NBC's syndication department prepared new versions of the 1950s shows, with all mentions of the original sponsor removed or cropped out of the picture. Of the 529 filmed half-hours, NBC packaged 250 for syndication, dating mostly from the last half of the series's run. Because the reruns had already been established as The Best of Groucho, the syndicated version took that title, and was an immediate hit: in September 1961 NBC Films announced that 40 major markets had already bought the show, and predicted that more than 150 stations would follow. Most stations opted to air The Best of Groucho on weekdays, five times a week. Stations across America broadcast the show mornings, afternoons, evenings, and late-nights. WPIX in New York programmed it at 11:00 p.m., and sponsors bought up all the commercial time before the show was even broadcast.
Gradually the show fell out of fashion, as faster-paced game shows videotaped in color forced the old, leisurely black-and-white show off the air. The show remained a memory until 1973, when Groucho Marx accepted a huge shipment of old film prints from an NBC warehouse. Producer John Guedel, anxious to see if there was still a market for the show, sold it on a trial basis to a local station for less than $50 for each night. It was programmed at 11:00 p.m., coincidentally following the successful WPIX model when the show was first syndicated. The Best of Groucho became an instant success, prompting Guedel to send the reruns into syndication almost immediately.