Robert Dwan, who directed Groucho Marx throughout the entire 14-year run of his popular "You Bet Your Life" quiz show on radio and television, has died. He was 89.
Dwan died Friday of complications related to pneumonia at Santa Monica-UCLA Medical Center, his family said.
"You Bet Your Life," which debuted on radio in 1947 and aired on television from 1950 to 1961, provided an ideal format for Marx's rapier wit as he interviewed contestants before they played a question-and-answer quiz.
As director, Dwan staged the performance and supervised the editing.
"I did not direct Groucho in any traditional sense," Dwan wrote in "As Long as They're Laughing," his 2000 memoir chronicling his years with Marx. "No time limit was placed on the performance of the show. Rather than impose restraints on Groucho, we allowed the performance to run as long as seemed productive. Usually, we filmed about an hour for each half-hour broadcast. It was then my job to edit that 60 minutes, selecting the best material for a 30-minute program."
Although it had a staff of five or six writers, Dwan said, the show's success came from "giving Groucho Marx an opportunity to exercise his unique skills" in ad-libbing.
During filming of the show, Dwan stood beside Marx, "just off-camera, as he used prepared material, reworking it to suit the unpredictable responses of the contestants, adding his own on-the-spot thoughts, inventions and improvisations."
Marx never had to worry about whether one of his remarks might be in bad taste, Dwan wrote: "I did that for him later as his surrogate at the editing stage, exercising the judgment on whether a joke was funny or offensive or worth fighting for with the censor."
Dwan said 525 "You Bet Your Life" programs were produced in 14 years for radio and television, in which Groucho faced 2,500 contestants.
For Dwan's efforts as director, the acerbic Marx would frequently tell him: "Bob, I have nothing but confidence in you -- and very little of that."
In his book, Dwan recalled that when he began working with Groucho, he first had to learn how to talk to him. It was, Dwan wrote, "a skill that took considerable nerve and a knowledge of how his mind worked."
Dwan: (On the telephone.) Groucho ...
Groucho: Oh, it's you again.
Dwan: Yes. Groucho, I ...
Groucho: You just said that.
Dwan: It's about the show tonight. We have a peculiar ...
Groucho: All our shows are peculiar.
