The Cutprice Guignol

On December 5th, 1956, Herbert Stempel stood in the small isolation booth in front of a studio audience on the set of the CBS quiz show Twenty-One, just five points short of the twenty-one he needed to win.

After a winning streak that had last five weeks and earned him close to $50,000 in winnings, Stempel was the show’s returning champion, opposed by a new competitor, Charles Van Doren. The question posed to him by host Jack Barry, worth five points, was one Stempel knew the answer to: what movie won the 1955 Academy Award for Best Picture? The answer, of course, was Marty – a romance starring Ernest Borgnine as a butcher from the Bronx. Having grown up in the Bronx himself, Stempel loved the film, and had already seen it three times – the question couldn’t have been easier for him. He hesitated for a moment before giving his answer: 1954’s On The Waterfront.

It was this answer that would begin the end of Stempel’s winning streak on Twenty-One – and, after a scandal that led to twelve arrests and congressional hearings, change the way that American quiz shows worked forever.

In the mid-1950s, the quiz show had begun to take root as a staple of American primetime television. Making the jump from radio, the quiz show made for an easy, quick, and cheap production, and, by the mid-1950s, twenty-four primetime slots were taken up across major networks by quiz shows of various descriptions. The $64,000 Question, first broadcasting on CBS in 1955, served as one of the first to offer a significant cash prize ($64,000 equal to around $700,000 today) to winners, and the high-stakes drama proved an instant hit. The show became the first to knock I Love Lucy off the ratings top spot, and launched minor celebrities in big winners, with nationally-syndicated TV psychologist Dr Joyce Brothers earning her start in pop culture after taking the show’s top prize. One thing was clear: there was big money in quiz shows, and not just for the people taking the top prizes.

Amongst the shows that tried to capitalize on the success of The $64,000 Question was Twenty-One – developed by frequent collaborators Jack Barry and Dan Enright for NBC, it followed Juvenile Jury and Life Begins at 80, with, respectively, featured panels of young and old people answering questions submitted by the audience. In Twenty-One, two contestants – usually one returning champion and one challenger – would each enter isolation booths, where they couldn’t see or hear the other contestant or the audience reactions. The host, Jack Barry, would then go back and forth between the contestants, asking them various questions – the contestants could choose the category they wished to answer from, with harder categories earning them more points. The goal was to reach a total of twenty-one points before your opponent – the larger the gap between your opponent’s points and your own, the more money you would earn.

The first episode broadcast on September 12th, 1956, in a 10.30pm slot that left it floundering in the ratings. According to Enright, the show was just “plain dull” – a dismal failure compared to the duo’s earlier successes. Enright knew that the show needed a boost if it was going to stay on the air and compete with major competitors, and, so, he began to search for a compelling protagonist.

Herbert Stempel, at this time, was a twenty-nine-year-old college student living with his wife and one-year-old son in New York. He’d enlisted in the army in 1944 and left in 1952, and, like millions of other Americans, he and his family watched quiz shows on TV regularly. His wife encouraged him to apply to one of the quiz shows, on account of his excellent memory and impressive ability to recall information, and, after achieving the highest score ever on the intake test, he was invited to feature in an episode of Twenty-One as a contestant.

But what Stempel didn’t know was that Enright was planning to make some major changes to how Twenty-One operated behind the scenes – and he, Stempel, would be at the centre of it. Enright promised Stempel at least $24,000 in winnings in Stempel played along with Enright’s plans, to which Stempel agreed – Enright, visiting Stempel at his home, began to craft the image of the man he wanted viewers to root for.

Rifling through Stempel’s closet, he found an old suit that had belonged to his father-in-law, two sizes too big for Stempel, and a frayed blue shirt, which he insisted Stempel wear. He asked Stempel to cut his hair into something resembling a GI haircut, a short back and sides, and even picked out a loud, old watch to replace Stempel’s newer, quieter model – the watch, Enright explained, would be close to the microphone during recording, and the ticking would create a greater sense of suspense for the viewers at home. The image Enright was trying to create was a down-on-his-luck ex-soldier, trying to pay his way through college and support his family, a relatable archetype to many Americans at the time – but his coaching of Stempel didn’t end there.

Before Stempel’s first appearance on the show, Enright guided him through exactly what was going to happen – from the way he would address Jack Barry (sheepishly, and always as “Mr Barry”) to the way he would nervously mop his brow (patting rather than swiping, to avoid removing the make-up). But, beyond that, Stempel was also fed a script – the exact answers to the questions he would give, correct and incorrect, in order to stir the most excitement from the audience and create the most compelling narrative for future episodes of Twenty-One.

The first episode, the flop, had been un-rigged, but, from 17th October 1956, they would be carefully-cultivated to make certain that they kept viewers gripped and coming back for more. Stempel, who later said he needed and wanted the money Enright was offering, accepted his new role – not as a contestant, but as an actor in a scripted performance.

Stempel starred across five weeks of Twenty-One, where he took home around $50,000 – in his dressing room, before each show, he and Enright would run through the script, from where Stempel was to pause to the order in which he was to answer multi-part questions. And, while the show saw an increase in ratings during this time, they began to plateau in November, when Enright began to fear that Stempel came across as too smug. Enright told Stempel that ratings had begun to dip – and that he needed to be replaced by a new champion.

And that new champion came in the form of Charles Van Doren. Van Doren, a then thirty-year-old English professor at Columbia University, came from an impressive pedigree – his father, a Pulitzer prize-winning poet, his mother a respected novelist. Handsome and photogenic, he seemed like the perfect person to take over from Stempel, and he first stepped into the isolation booth on the set of Twenty-One on 28th November, 1956.

Stempel and Van Doren would play three games against each other in total – the first, a 17-17 tie, and then, a tie at 21-21, all planned and scripted by Enright and the production. On their third and final meeting, a much-touted clash between the two men where Stempel stood to take home more money than had ever been one on a gameshow before, Stempel was reluctant to play along with Enright’s plans. But, promised a well-paid job working at the studio if he threw the game, he eventually agreed to take a dive. His scripted incorrect answer to the question about the 1955 Academy Awards gave Van Doren an opportunity to pull ahead, and, sure enough, Van Doren, in front of an estimated fifteen million viewers, became the show’s new champion.

And one of Twenty-One’s most successful alumni. By January 1957, Van Doren was in the midst of a winning streak on the show that would net him more than a hundred thousand dollars in prize money, until he was knocked off his spot by Vivienne Nearing in March. After his run on the show, he was offered a three-year contract worth more than $150,000 by NBC, and began work as a cultural correspondent for the Today show, even featuring on the cover of Time magazine in February of the same year. His students at Columbia put up signs declaring him the “smartest man in the world”, and he received thousands of letters – including more than a hundred marriage proposals. He was a bonafide celebrity, one of the most successful ever to come from the quiz show circuit at the time – and, as long as the truth of his rigged rise to fame remained hidden, it would stay that way.

Stempel, for his part, was frustrated by the loss, and the incredible career heights his successor had risen to in the aftermath; though he had talked casually with the rigging of the show with some friends, he threatened Enright with exposure for his behind-the-scenes string-pulling on Twenty-One. Enright attempted to placate Stempel with promises of a job, but eventually, Stempel reached out to a journalist friend with the accusations – however, with no evidence and nobody else involved with the show willing to corroborate his claims, they were never published.

Just over eighteen months after Stempel and Van Doren’s final clash on Twenty-One, in August 1958, however, another show came under scrutiny. Dotto, a show that combined general knowledge quiz questions with a connect-the-dots game, faced exposure after a contestant discovered a notebook backstage detailing the questions and answers for another contestant. The revelation lent more weight to Stempel’s earlier accusations against Twenty-One, and, in October the same year, an investigation into the veracity and ethics of TV quiz shows, was launched by the District Attorney. Herbert Stempel, upon discovering news of the investigation, contacted the District Attorney, and shared his side of the story of his time on Twenty-One.

The Journal-American, who Stempel had approached with the story previously, published his claims as the investigation continued – and soon, a furore broke out over the veracity of the show that had catapulted the now-beloved Van Doren to fame. Dan Enright, for his part, dug his heels in and refused to admit his show had been in any way rigged – going so far as to organise a press conference where he played a surreptitiously-recorded conversation between him and Stempel to paint Stempel as mentally unstable, and producing a letter Stempel had signed attesting to the ethical nature of the show’s production (Stempel claimed he had been strongarmed into signing the letter).

The grand jury gathered to hear evidence from both producers and former contestants on the show; more than one hundred people who had participated in Twenty-One provided evidence in the case, including Stempel. Stempel was the only former contestant attesting to the show’s deceptive practices, and, despite a few other behind-the-scenes staff backing up his claims, with little in the way of concrete evidence, nothing could be definitively proven. Though rigging a quiz show was not a crime in and of itself, there were reputations to protect and the sanctity of the genre in the public eye to preserve – not to mention the potential embarrassment for former contestants admitting they had gone along with the fraud. Van Doren continued to insist that he and the show were free from wrongdoing – his meteoric rise, after all, markedly less impressive and organic if it came on the back of fraud.

And, despite the fact that there was no definitive answer as to the nature of the quiz shows that had beamed into American homes over the past half-decade or so, the investigation caused a serious wobble in ratings. Shows lost primetime spots and others, including the hugely successful The $64,000 Question, were cancelled outright.

Unable to reach any satisfactory conclusions, the case was advanced to the congressional level, and was brought before Congress in October 1959, with Stempel once again testifying – but, this time, he wasn’t the only former contestant who was speaking out against the deception in Twenty-One. And this contestant, unlike Stempel, had evidence for the show’s deceptive practices.

James Snodgrass was a short-lived and unmemorable contestant on Twenty-One in 1957 who, like Stempel, had been fed a script of answers to deliver to the questions he faced on the show. Snodgrass, though, had chosen to record the questions and answers he was given by Enright and post them as letters to himself, to keep a record of his involvement with the show. Snodgrass testified to Congress in 1959, with the letters serving as the smoking gun for the show’s true rigged nature: the letters contained a detailed record of the questions he’d be asked, the answers he was intended to give and how he was to deliver them, and how many points each of them would be worth, all of which matched the shows broadcast days after the letters were sent. It was undeniable proof – Enright and the production team behind Twenty-One had carefully scripted every episode to produce a certain end result, one that was deemed the most exciting and appealing to audiences.

Stempel testified once again, but there was one person everyone was still waiting to hear from: James Van Doren. Van Doren had fled paparazzi and press harassment to New England to avoid a congressional subpoena; after his passionate defence of the veracity of his rise to fame, it seemed he had no choice but to admit the truth.

Finally, in early November, Van Doren came before the congressional hearing to share his side of the story.

And, nearly three years after his first appearance on the show, Van Doren admitted in emotive testimony that it had been rigged in his favour. Though he had initially tried to decline the help of the producers to beat Stempel, he was told that Stempel was “too knowledgeable” and that this was the only way to ensure his victory – according to Van Doren, he was convinced by the promise of “increasing public respect for the work of the mind” with his showing on Twenty-One, and accepted his part of his fraudulent seventeen-week run.

From there, he contended with more money and more fame than he could ever have imagined – he wanted to leave the show long before he actually did, but, upon the end of his run as champion, he hoped he could put quiz shows behind him and focus on more intellectual televisual pursuits. When Stempel’s claims came out, he struggled with his role as a public-facing representative of education and intellectualism:

“Thousands [of letters] were from teachers all over the country. Thousands more were from schoolchildren and students. All expressed their faith in me, their hope for the future, their dedication to knowledge and education. These letters and all they stood for were like a vast weight. I could not bear to betray that faith and hope…And so I made a statement on the Garroway program the next morning to the effect that I knew of no improper activities on “Twenty-one” and that I had received no assistance. I knew that most people would believe me. Most people did.”

He claimed to have had a sudden change of heart when he received a letter from a viewer, who encouraged him to unburden himself “clearly, openly, truly) of the truth of what he had been involved with.

With perhaps the most well-known face of quiz show celebrity finally coming clean about the rigged nature of the program that had served as the groundwork for his rise to fame, the quiz show, as it had once stood, was changed for good. An amendment was made to the 1934 Communications Act to ensure that competition shows relying on skill or knowledge were not rigged to ensure a certain outcome – signed into law in 1960, it prohibited the broadcast of any competition intending to deceive the audience. While the revelation evidently landed several people who had testified in the initial investigation in hot water for perjury, the worst punishment any received was a suspended sentence.

Van Doren suffered perhaps the biggest professional hit of anyone involved in the scandal; he lost his job with NBC and was forced to resign from his position at Columbia University. He went on to low-profile work as an editor on Encyclopaedia Britannia, and declined any requests for interviews about the incident until he wrote about it for the New York Times in 2008. Stempel went on to graduate from college and worked for the New York City Transport Department; he also made a brief, uncredited cameo in the 1994 movie adaptation of the incident, Quiz Show, directed by Robert Redford, where Stempel’s character was played by John Tuturro.

Dan Enright and Jack Barry were functionally removed from the industry in the years following the revelation, with Barry admitting to knowledge of Enright’s rigging and his complicity in covering for him. After a decade-long exile in local radio, the two began to work their way back into the quiz show realm again, with Enright and Barry collaborating on the hugely successful revival of Tic-Tac-Dough in the late 70s. They also attempted to revive Twenty-One in 1982, but it would lay dormant until a more successful return in the early 2000s.

The impact these changes in quiz show rules had on the industry have remained in place ever since, with modern shows required to play as fairly as possible (though that has not entirely discouraged some attempts to rig the system). And, though Herb Stempel and Charles Van Doren had their respective runs in quiz show fame cut short, their impact on the industry remains, more than sixty years later.

Sources and Further Reading

Television Fraud: The History and Implications of the Quiz Show Scandals by J. Kent Anderson

Intellect on Television: The Quiz Show Scandals of the 1950s by Richard Tedlow

Prime time and misdemeanours : investigating the 1950s TV quiz scandal: A D.A.’s account by Joseph Stone

PBS: American Experience: The Quiz Show Scandal

James Snodgrass Testimony

Herbert Stempel Testimony

Charles Van Doren Testimony

Museum.TV: Quiz Show Scandals

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(header image via IMD Forums)