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".
Early life
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.
Education
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.
Military service
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.
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.
Broadcast career
Radio
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. 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. 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)".
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 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."
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.
George Fenneman remained friends with Marx until the latter's death in 1977. On one episode, Fenneman spoofed himself. During a parody of You Bet Your Life, on the broadcast of October 14, 1952, "Groucho Martin" (Dean Martin) asks Fenneman to remind listeners about how "the other couple" is doing. Fenneman said "The sponsor and the sponsor's wife are way ahead with eighteen million dollars".
Game shows
Fenneman also hosted many game shows: in 1953, Your Claim To Fame, a panel quiz show sponsored by the Regal Amber Brewing Company of San Francisco, Anybody Can Play in 1958 with Dolores Reed, The Perfect Husband, Who In The World and Your Surprise Package in 1961. In 1966 he hosted two pilot episodes for Crossword, a game show that would be renamed The Cross-Wits in 1975 and aired with Jack Clark as host.
Commercial production company
Fenneman formed the "George Fenneman Productions (Ltd.)" commercial production company in 1962. His first client was the Douglas Fir Plywood Association. He also created commercials for the Paper Mate pen company.
He was the commercial spokesman for Lipton Tea during much of the 1960s, and in that role appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show when The Beatles made their second U.S. TV appearance on February 16, 1964. The entire episode (including commercials) had been taped at Miami Beach, Florida's Hotel Deauville prior to broadcast.
Fenneman also recorded commercials for Philip Morris. From 1978 to the end of his life in 1995, Fenneman was both the public relations spokesperson and commercial announcer for the Los Angeles-based Home Savings & Loan.
Television show host
In 1963, he hosted an ABC television program called Your Funny, Funny Films, a precursor to America's Funniest Home Videos.
In 1974, Fenneman co-hosted Talk About Pictures, an Emmy Award-winning program created by Life magazine photographer Leigh Wiener. The show featured a wide-ranging cross-section of photographers and photography collectors including Ansel Adams, Alfred Eisenstaedt and Graham Nash. 130 episodes were broadcast on NBC's Los Angeles affiliate KNBC. The show won a local Emmy award in 1974.
Announcing career
Fenneman was the announcer for a number of radio shows, including Pete Kelly's Blues, The Orson Welles Show, The Eddie Albert Show and The Hedda Hopper Show. He was also an announcer on television shows as well, including The Life of Riley, The Jim Nabors Hour and The Donny & Marie Show. He was also one of the rotating announcers on the radio program Go Navy! The Navy Swings, a public-service series that aired from 1957 to 1970. Fenneman described the show as "a labor of love". The episode's closing sequence is a reference to Dragnet. Fenneman recorded the episode's ending in a Dragnet-style summation of the three principal characters' fates.
Spurious credits
Oft-repeated statements that Fenneman is the voice of the US Naval Observatory Master Clock or the National Institute of Standards and Technology's radio station WWV are untrue. Those announcements were actually performed by Fred Covington (1928–1993).
Acting career
Radio actor
Fenneman played Buzz, the co-pilot on the radio show I Fly Anything, a radio adventure drama, broadcast on ABC from November 29, 1950, until July 19, 1951.
Film and television actor
He appeared on screen in the 1951 film The Thing from Another World as "Dr. Redding", Fenneman was a neighbor of The Thing from Another Worlds director, Christian Nyby. A spontaneous on-set script revision convinced Fenneman his future was not in movie acting. Producer Howard Hawks took a long scientific speech away from Robert O. Cornthwaite's character Dr. Carrington, preferring to give exposition to a minor character (Fenneman). The scene was "the most difficult to shoot" in the science fiction film. Fellow cast member Kenneth Tobey said "George didn't even know what he was talking about, and it took him thirty takes to get through the speech". As a radio performer accustomed to reading from a script and not used to quick memorization, Fenneman stumbled over the technical gobbledegook ("We have the time of arrival on the seismograph..."), resulting in multiple takes of the scene. In the final film, viewers can see the other actors trying not to smile as Fenneman spouts the lines.
In the 1950s, he made appearances in serialized science and nature themed segments on The Mickey Mouse Club, including a February 1957 appearance as Dr. Bill Richards, who undertakes a difficult expedition into the wilderness in The Secret Of Mystery Lake.
Fenneman portrayed Randy Rambo in The Tom Ewell Show episode "The Prying Eye," broadcast on March 28, 1961. On October 20, 1966, he appeared as a newsman in "The Yegg Foes of Gotham", episode 48 of the Batman TV show.
In 1967 Fenneman appeared in the film adaptation of the Broadway show How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying as himself. In the film, he portrayed the host of a new television show who is introduced as "George Fenneman". He is credited at the end as "TV Announcer".
Personal life
thumb|George and Peggy Fenneman, 1958
Fenneman married his college sweetheart, Margaret "Peggy" Jane Clifford in 1943. They had three children. He died from respiratory failure at his home in Los Angeles, California, on May 29, 1997, at the age of 77.
- 1974 — National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences, Los Angeles Chapter, Regional "Emmy" Award, Information Series - Talk About Pictures.