Herb Stempel
Encyclopedia
Herbert Milton "Herb" Stempel (born December 19, 1926) is a television game show
contestant and subsequent whistle blower on the fraudulent nature of the industry, in what became known as the quiz show scandals
. His rigged six-week appearance as a winning contestant on the 1950s show Twenty One
ended in an equally rigged defeat by Columbia University
teacher and literary scion Charles Van Doren
.
It was in the midst of the Depression, and the struggling family was on public assistance for years.
Twenty-One was not Stempel's first quiz show. At a very young age Stempel realized he had what he refers to as a "retentive memory", in that he could read a page about a subject and then, months later, summarize that page. He represented his elementary school, P.S. 6 on a radio quiz show, "Americana History," where he remained undefeated for several weeks. He was part of the "Kid Wizards", a three-man team who represented the Bronx High School of Science in competitions against New York high schools, remaining undefeated throughout the year. He claims his IQ has been measured at 170:
Stempel was graduated from prestigious Bronx High School of Science
in January of 1944. He briefly attended classes at City College of New York
(CCNY) before enlisting in the U.S. Army. He served in the 311th Infantry, 78th division, and was on the front lines in Europe for a month before the war ended. Stempel remained in the Army for the next seven years, attending Counterintelligence School in Baltimore, MD and serving "as an agent" until 1952, when he began work in the United States Post Office as a clerk. He married his wife, Toby, in 1954 and returned to CCNY on the GI Bill.
, the show's producer, asking to be a contestant. The qualifying trivia test took a grueling three-and-a-half hours; Stempel got 251 out of 363 questions right, which he claims is the highest score ever achieved."
At a time when the top five highest rated programs on television were quiz shows, Twenty-One was a mainstay for Barry & Enright Productions
and the network.
Twenty One took the ultimate step in quiz-show rigging. Cast as though they were actors, every detail carefully orchestrated, the contestants were now partners in the deception.
Stempel was not only provided with coaching on the answers and directions on how to deliver them, but on his physical appearance as well. Stempel was married to a woman whose family had money and the couple was not suffering financially, but Enright decided that the image of an underdog, a penniless GI working his way through school, would appeal to the American public. Enright personally selected his wardrobe: an oversized, baggy double-breasted suit that had belonged to Stempel's late father-in-law, a blue shirt with a frayed collar, "terrible looking" tie and an old "Timex watch that ticked like an alarm clock", the sound of which would be picked up by the studio microphone and thus help build suspense.
Enright later explained the reasons behind this:
scheme, which was presented to him as an unnotarized "settlement" agreement.
Even though Stempel agreed to take less money, that actually made no difference: his ratings were dropping and the producers decided he had to go. A new contestant was selected to challenge him and knock him off. He was a pedigreed
, clean-cut, WASP
intellectual from a literary family, an English instructor at Columbia University
, who would become the most acclaimed - and notorious - of all quiz-show contestants: Charles Van Doren
. Van Doren was persuaded to go along with the fraud by an appeal that his appearance would help glamorize information and intellectualism. His impact was immediate and his name quickly became synonymous with quiz shows. For week after week the two men battled it out, tying with scores of 21-21, as tens of millions of Americans tuned in to see if their new hero would beat Stempel.
Enright promised Stempel a subsequent television job if he would finish the performance they had started, but the final act, as choreographed by Enright, was particularly humiliating to Stempel. The question was, "What motion picture won the Academy Award for 1955?"
Years later Dan Enright stated in the WGBH documentary American Experience: The Quiz Show Scandal interview:
Van Doren defeated Stempel before 15 million viewers, and went on to become the single most popular contestant in the quiz show's early history, while Stempel became the forgotten man. After his loss, he overheard one backstage technician say to another: "At least, we finally have a clean-cut intellectual on this program, not a freak with a sponge memory." Enright's promise to find Stempel a panel show slot after his college graduation of a went unfulfilled. When Stempel, who by then had gone through his winnings, later demanded Enright follow through on his original promise, Enright demanded he first sign a statement affirming he had never been coached on Twenty One. Again, no show materialized.
itself, Stempel called Jack O'Brian, a columnist who covered television for the Journal-American. Although O'Brian found the story hung together, the paper's syndicate, fearing a libel suit, refused to print the allegation without further corroboration. Stempel later testified to Congress that in February 1957 he had spoken with a reporter from the New York Post, but that paper had the same reservations as the Journal-American. There were no corroborating witnesses or hard evidence to back up Stempel's accusations, and Enright dismissed them as being rooted in jealousy over Van Doren's success.
It took Ed Hilgemeier, a contestant-in-waiting who found a notebook full of answers belonging to Marcie Winn, another contestant on the relatively new quiz show, Dotto
, airing on CBS
, to convince authorities and the New York
Journal-American that Stempel should be taken seriously.
Manhattan
Assistant District Attorney Joseph Stone, who directed two grand jury probes into the case, states that Enright described Stempel to him as "a disturbed person and a blackmailer" and denied ever giving Stempel advance questions and answers. Three days after Twenty-One contestant, Richard Jackman, a writer from Oneonta, NY, told Stone that he too had been coached in advance of his appearance on October 3rd, Twenty One was canceled, and the investigation of the quiz show scandal began in earnest. Jackman only realizing the game was fixed the night he appeared, when the questions he was asked were identical to the ones Enright had reviewed with him in a "practice session" that afternoon.
Enright quickly went on a counterattack, denying any wrongdoing or fraud had taken place, suing the Journal-American and mounting a campaign to discredit Stempel. At a sensational press conference, he attempted to demonstrate that Stempel was mentally unstable by playing a recording of a conversation with him which Enright had secretly taped. To further discredit him, Enright also produced the statement that Stempel had signed earlier, declaring that Twenty-One was an honest program, that Barry and Enright were beyond reproach and that no rigging had taken place.
Jack O'Brian felt there was an "undercurrent" of coercion going on. Not only did some of the producers lie to the grand jury, they also had urged contestants to perjure themselves. In lower Manhattan, the grand jury was convened for nine months and heard testimony from over 150 contestants. It is estimated that over 100 lied under oath. Stempel continued telling the truth to anyone who would listen, but it was his unsubstantiated word against everyone else's; there was still no hard corroborating evidence. His testimony to the DA and the grand jury implicated Van Doren in the fraud, but there was massive resistance in accepting this accusation.
Suddenly, to everyone's astonishment, the grand jury testimony was sealed from the public by Judge Mitchell Schweitzer, for reasons that to this day are still not clear. This was almost an unprecedented move in New York State; in the no fewer than 497 grand jury presentments that had been filed in New York county since 1869, not one had ever been sealed. Afraid that the public might never learn what the grand jury had uncovered, Frank Hogan
, the New York County DA, filed a protest in the court of general sessions, spelling out why it was in the public interest to make the findings known. Suspicious of a cover-up, Congress called an immediate investigation. Once just a trivial form of entertainment, quiz shows were now the subject of investigation at the highest level of government.
Stempel told the U.S. House Subcommittee on Legislative Oversight
what he told Stone. Particularly jarring was Stempel's revelation that he was strong-armed into incorrectly identifying what was, in fact, one of his favorite films:
The kinescope
that has survived of that episode shows that the round in which Stempel was ordered to provide the wrong answer actually ended in a tie. Stempel and Van Doren went on to yet another game during the same show. This time, Stempel failed to recall the name of William Allen White
's popular editorials, What's the Matter with Kansas? "It just wouldn't help to guess," Stempel said softly in the booth, "I just don't know." The miss kept Stempel at zero, and Van Doren answered the questions in the category "Kings" successfully. Stempel drew the evening's biggest laugh when he was asked the fate of four of Henry VIII
's wives and answered, "They all died." Stempel answered the question correctly, but when offered their standard opportunity to stop the game, Van Doren stopped it and became the new Twenty One champion.
As the investigation progressed, Charles Van Doren, now a host on The Today Show
, was under pressure from NBC to testify. To avoid the committee's subpoena, he went into hiding. It was another former Twenty-One contestant, an artist named James Snodgrass, who would finally provide indisputable supporting proof that the show had been rigged. Snodgrass had documented every answer he was coached on in a series of registered letters he mailed to himself prior to the show being taped.
One month after the hearings began, Van Doren emerged from hiding and confessed before the committee that he had been complicit in the fraud.
It was not until he was approached, some thirty years later, by the producers of the documentary "The Quiz Show Scandals" for PBS's American Experience, that he finally agreed to be interviewed on the subject. Julian Krainin, who co-produced the film, also co-produced the 1994 feature film
Quiz Show
, in which Stempel was portrayed by John Turturro
. Stempel actually made an uncredited film debut in that movie, portraying a different contestant being interviewed by the congressional investigator Dick Goodwin, played by Rob Morrow
. In spite of being "a little miffed by the portrayal, it was an over-the-top sort of portrayal of me," When Quiz Show was released, Stempel embraced the renewed public interest in him, giving interviews on radio and television (notably appearing on Late Night With Conan O'Brien
, taped in the same NBC studio Twenty One once occupied), as well as lecturing at some colleges about the quiz scandals.
In 2008, Charles Van Doren broke his long silence, and in an article in The New Yorker described the overtures Robert Redford's production company made to him to cooperate with the filming of Quiz Show. He claimed that Barry & Enright Productions staffer Al Freedman was actually responsible for scripting the entire Stempel-Van Doren competition, and refuted the image of Stempel as a penurious CCNY student:
Van Doren wrote that until he viewed WGBH's American Experience
documentary "The Quiz Show Scandals" he was ignorant of the fact that the show had once been honest - at least for one episode - and that: "Herb Stempel was the first to agree to the fix".
This last remark is actually debatable. Dan Enright has stated that due to the sponsor's displeasure he began to rig the show immediately after the premiere episode debuted on September 12, 1956. Whether the contestants in the five weeks prior to Stempel's choreographed October 17th appearance unwittingly received the answers in "practice sessions" the way Richard Jackman described, or were openly coached the same way Stempel was, is unclear. According to Jackman, Enright was extremely nervous prior to his appearance on the show and stated, to Jackman's bewilderment: "You are in a position to destroy my career." After Jackman, a struggling author, told Enright he couldn't continue on a rigged show Enright tried various types of persuasion and offers of money to persuade him to change his mind. Jackman finally accepted a check for $15,000, and for continuity's sake promised to appear again so he could publically choose to take his "winnings" and depart at the beginning of the show. Kent Anderson portrays Enright as someone who would make certain his next contestant would cooperate. Enright is described as deliberately targeting Stempel's emotions, as he did with other contestants; leaving no angle overlooked when trying to gain their full participation.
Game show
A game show is a type of radio or television program in which members of the public, television personalities or celebrities, sometimes as part of a team, play a game which involves answering questions or solving puzzles usually for money and/or prizes...
contestant and subsequent whistle blower on the fraudulent nature of the industry, in what became known as the quiz show scandals
Quiz show scandals
The American quiz show scandals of the 1950s were a series of revelations that contestants of several popular television quiz shows were secretly given assistance by the show's producers to arrange the outcome of a supposedly fair competition....
. His rigged six-week appearance as a winning contestant on the 1950s show Twenty One
Twenty One (game show)
Twenty One is an American game show which aired in the late 1950s. While it included the most popular contestant of the quiz show era, it became notorious for being a rigged quiz show which nearly caused the demise of the entire genre in the wake of United States Senate investigations...
ended in an equally rigged defeat by Columbia University
Columbia University
Columbia University in the City of New York is a private, Ivy League university in Manhattan, New York City. Columbia is the oldest institution of higher learning in the state of New York, the fifth oldest in the United States, and one of the country's nine Colonial Colleges founded before the...
teacher and literary scion Charles Van Doren
Charles Van Doren
Charles Lincoln Van Doren is an American intellectual, writer, and editor who was involved in a television quiz show scandal in the 1950s...
.
Early life
A self described "avid reader" as a child, who "was interested in everything", Stempel attended P.S. 89 in the Bronx. He was skipped ahead several classes in school, so much so that his mother worried he was being pushed too far. When he was seven, his father died and Stempel, his mother and his older sister Harriet, moved to what he describes as a "poorer part of the Bronx".It was in the midst of the Depression, and the struggling family was on public assistance for years.
Twenty-One was not Stempel's first quiz show. At a very young age Stempel realized he had what he refers to as a "retentive memory", in that he could read a page about a subject and then, months later, summarize that page. He represented his elementary school, P.S. 6 on a radio quiz show, "Americana History," where he remained undefeated for several weeks. He was part of the "Kid Wizards", a three-man team who represented the Bronx High School of Science in competitions against New York high schools, remaining undefeated throughout the year. He claims his IQ has been measured at 170:
"That, and two dollars, gets me in the subway." — Herb Stempel
Stempel was graduated from prestigious Bronx High School of Science
Bronx High School of Science
The Bronx High School of Science is a specialized New York City public high school often considered the premier science magnet school in the United States. Founded in 1938, it is now located in the Bedford Park section of the Bronx...
in January of 1944. He briefly attended classes at City College of New York
City College of New York
The City College of the City University of New York is a senior college of the City University of New York , in New York City. It is also the oldest of the City University's twenty-three institutions of higher learning...
(CCNY) before enlisting in the U.S. Army. He served in the 311th Infantry, 78th division, and was on the front lines in Europe for a month before the war ended. Stempel remained in the Army for the next seven years, attending Counterintelligence School in Baltimore, MD and serving "as an agent" until 1952, when he began work in the United States Post Office as a clerk. He married his wife, Toby, in 1954 and returned to CCNY on the GI Bill.
Twenty One
In 1956, after tuning in to a new program, Twenty One, he was intriqued by the questions and wrote to Dan EnrightDan Enright
Daniel "Dan" Enright was one of the most successful game show producers in American television. Enright worked with Jack Barry from the 1940s until Barry's death in 1984. They were partners in creating programs for radio and television...
, the show's producer, asking to be a contestant. The qualifying trivia test took a grueling three-and-a-half hours; Stempel got 251 out of 363 questions right, which he claims is the highest score ever achieved."
At a time when the top five highest rated programs on television were quiz shows, Twenty-One was a mainstay for Barry & Enright Productions
Barry & Enright Productions
Barry & Enright Productions , was a United States television production company that was formed in 1947 by Jack Barry and Dan Enright.-History:Jack Barry and Dan Enright first met at radio station WOR in New York, where...
and the network.
Twenty One took the ultimate step in quiz-show rigging. Cast as though they were actors, every detail carefully orchestrated, the contestants were now partners in the deception.
The Champion
Several weeks later, Enright paid Stempel a visit while his wife was out at the theater and he was babysitting their young son, and posed the fateful question: "How would you like to make $25,000?" Stempel immediately understood the implications; Enright was not going to pay him just for appearing on the show, when he could be easily defeated.Stempel was not only provided with coaching on the answers and directions on how to deliver them, but on his physical appearance as well. Stempel was married to a woman whose family had money and the couple was not suffering financially, but Enright decided that the image of an underdog, a penniless GI working his way through school, would appeal to the American public. Enright personally selected his wardrobe: an oversized, baggy double-breasted suit that had belonged to Stempel's late father-in-law, a blue shirt with a frayed collar, "terrible looking" tie and an old "Timex watch that ticked like an alarm clock", the sound of which would be picked up by the studio microphone and thus help build suspense.
The whole idea was to make me appear like an ex-G.I. working his way through college. The reason I had been asked to put on this old, ill-fitting suit and get this Marine-type haircut was to make me appear as what you would call today, a nerd, a square...I was never to call the Master of Ceremonies, Jack Barry, "Jack." I was always to call him "Mr. Barry" and be very, very humble and very sheepish. On the first program I was on, I was on for approximately four minutes and I won approximately $9,000. I had never had that much money in my life and I was absolutely flabbergasted. — Herb Stempel
Enright later explained the reasons behind this:
You want the viewer to react emotionally to a contestant. Whether he reacts favorably or negatively is really not that important. The important thing is that he react. He should watch a contestant, hoping that the contestant will win or he should watch the contestant, hoping the contestant will lose. And Herb, I felt, was the type of personality who instilled the latter. Viewers would watch him and pray for his opponent to win...When he applied to the show and he took the test, he scored a very, very high score. He was the type of contestant who could very well antagonize viewers.
The Defeated
Stempel was the undefeated champion for six weeks, ostensibly winning $69,500, until he was informed of Enright's kickbackBribery
Bribery, a form of corruption, is an act implying money or gift giving that alters the behavior of the recipient. Bribery constitutes a crime and is defined by Black's Law Dictionary as the offering, giving, receiving, or soliciting of any item of value to influence the actions of an official or...
scheme, which was presented to him as an unnotarized "settlement" agreement.
As weeks went by, people began to recognize me more and more. I got more and more fan mail. My classmates at college were very proud of me. My professors were proud of me. I just couldn't hold this inside of me, though, because I was overjoyed about being a celebrity, winning and so forth. I was overwhelmed.
...Then, Dan Enright said to me, "You know, Herb, you're not going to get all the money that you've won so far or are going to win." I said, "What? What do you mean?" He says, "No," he says, "We have to look out for ourselves, so I have a paper here which you're going to have to sign." I realized that if I didn't sign, I might not find myself on the program too much longer, so I decided to sign. — Herb Stempel
Even though Stempel agreed to take less money, that actually made no difference: his ratings were dropping and the producers decided he had to go. A new contestant was selected to challenge him and knock him off. He was a pedigreed
Pedigree chart
A pedigree chart is a diagram that shows the occurrence and appearance or phenotypes of a particular gene or organism and its ancestors from one generation to the next, most commonly humans, show dogs, and race horses....
, clean-cut, WASP
White Anglo-Saxon Protestant
White Anglo-Saxon Protestant or WASP is an informal term, often derogatory or disparaging, for a closed group of high-status Americans mostly of British Protestant ancestry. The group supposedly wields disproportionate financial and social power. When it appears in writing, it is usually used to...
intellectual from a literary family, an English instructor at Columbia University
Columbia University
Columbia University in the City of New York is a private, Ivy League university in Manhattan, New York City. Columbia is the oldest institution of higher learning in the state of New York, the fifth oldest in the United States, and one of the country's nine Colonial Colleges founded before the...
, who would become the most acclaimed - and notorious - of all quiz-show contestants: Charles Van Doren
Charles Van Doren
Charles Lincoln Van Doren is an American intellectual, writer, and editor who was involved in a television quiz show scandal in the 1950s...
. Van Doren was persuaded to go along with the fraud by an appeal that his appearance would help glamorize information and intellectualism. His impact was immediate and his name quickly became synonymous with quiz shows. For week after week the two men battled it out, tying with scores of 21-21, as tens of millions of Americans tuned in to see if their new hero would beat Stempel.
I told Herb Stempel that he was going to be losing that night to Charles Van Doren. He asked me whether he could not forego the losing and whether he could not play against Van Doren clean [suggesting it could be touted as a duel between Columbia University and CCNY] and I said "no" and I reminded him he had given me his word that when I would ask him to lose, he would lose. — Dan Enright
Enright promised Stempel a subsequent television job if he would finish the performance they had started, but the final act, as choreographed by Enright, was particularly humiliating to Stempel. The question was, "What motion picture won the Academy Award for 1955?"
I knew that the answer was "Marty", but Dan Enright specifically wanted me to miss that question. This hurt me very deeply because this was one of my favorite pictures of all times and I could never forget this. A few seconds before that as I was trying to come up with the answer, I could have changed my mind. I could have said, "The answer is Marty, instead of 'On the Waterfront'. I would have won. There would have been no Charles Van Doren, no famous celebrity. Charles Van Doren would have gone back to teaching college and my whole life would have been changed...On the day I was due to lose to Van Doren, I sat home, watching television in the morning. Every few minutes, an announcement would break in on WNBC, saying, "Is Herb Stempel going to win over $100,000 tonight?" And I said, "No, he's not going to win $100,000. He's going to take a dive." — Herb Stempel
Years later Dan Enright stated in the WGBH documentary American Experience: The Quiz Show Scandal interview:
This man was taken from obscurity - he came from rather impoverished circumstances - taken from obscurity and then exposed to the light of celebrity, became for some six weeks a celebrity and then just as quickly was cast back into obscurity. And we, at the time deluded ourselves into believing that what we were doing was not that wrong and I bear a tremendous guilt to Herb Stempel and I was sorry. I should have been far more mindful and far more sensitive. — Dan Enright, 1991
[Do I believe it?] No. I believe he feels bad that I exposed his show. That's my real belief.— Herb Stempel, 2004
Van Doren defeated Stempel before 15 million viewers, and went on to become the single most popular contestant in the quiz show's early history, while Stempel became the forgotten man. After his loss, he overheard one backstage technician say to another: "At least, we finally have a clean-cut intellectual on this program, not a freak with a sponge memory." Enright's promise to find Stempel a panel show slot after his college graduation of a went unfulfilled. When Stempel, who by then had gone through his winnings, later demanded Enright follow through on his original promise, Enright demanded he first sign a statement affirming he had never been coached on Twenty One. Again, no show materialized.
Exposure
When Enright subsequently told him the promise could not be kept because he had sold his shows to NBCNBC
The National Broadcasting Company is an American commercial broadcasting television network and former radio network headquartered in the GE Building in New York City's Rockefeller Center with additional major offices near Los Angeles and in Chicago...
itself, Stempel called Jack O'Brian, a columnist who covered television for the Journal-American. Although O'Brian found the story hung together, the paper's syndicate, fearing a libel suit, refused to print the allegation without further corroboration. Stempel later testified to Congress that in February 1957 he had spoken with a reporter from the New York Post, but that paper had the same reservations as the Journal-American. There were no corroborating witnesses or hard evidence to back up Stempel's accusations, and Enright dismissed them as being rooted in jealousy over Van Doren's success.
It took Ed Hilgemeier, a contestant-in-waiting who found a notebook full of answers belonging to Marcie Winn, another contestant on the relatively new quiz show, Dotto
Dotto
Dotto is an American television quiz show which aired on CBS from January 6 to August 15, 1958 and was hosted by Jack Narz. Although it quickly became the highest-rated daytime game show on television, its end came when it became the unexpected first casualty – and ignition – of the...
, airing on CBS
CBS
CBS Broadcasting Inc. is a major US commercial broadcasting television network, which started as a radio network. The name is derived from the initials of the network's former name, Columbia Broadcasting System. The network is sometimes referred to as the "Eye Network" in reference to the shape of...
, to convince authorities and the New York
New York
New York is a state in the Northeastern region of the United States. It is the nation's third most populous state. New York is bordered by New Jersey and Pennsylvania to the south, and by Connecticut, Massachusetts and Vermont to the east...
Journal-American that Stempel should be taken seriously.
Manhattan
Manhattan
Manhattan is the oldest and the most densely populated of the five boroughs of New York City. Located primarily on the island of Manhattan at the mouth of the Hudson River, the boundaries of the borough are identical to those of New York County, an original county of the state of New York...
Assistant District Attorney Joseph Stone, who directed two grand jury probes into the case, states that Enright described Stempel to him as "a disturbed person and a blackmailer" and denied ever giving Stempel advance questions and answers. Three days after Twenty-One contestant, Richard Jackman, a writer from Oneonta, NY, told Stone that he too had been coached in advance of his appearance on October 3rd, Twenty One was canceled, and the investigation of the quiz show scandal began in earnest. Jackman only realizing the game was fixed the night he appeared, when the questions he was asked were identical to the ones Enright had reviewed with him in a "practice session" that afternoon.
Enright quickly went on a counterattack, denying any wrongdoing or fraud had taken place, suing the Journal-American and mounting a campaign to discredit Stempel. At a sensational press conference, he attempted to demonstrate that Stempel was mentally unstable by playing a recording of a conversation with him which Enright had secretly taped. To further discredit him, Enright also produced the statement that Stempel had signed earlier, declaring that Twenty-One was an honest program, that Barry and Enright were beyond reproach and that no rigging had taken place.
I was a damn fool to have signed such a thing, to have agreed to such a thing, but they again held out the prospects of jobs and money and this and that to me and I succumbed to that. — Herb Stempel
Jack O'Brian felt there was an "undercurrent" of coercion going on. Not only did some of the producers lie to the grand jury, they also had urged contestants to perjure themselves. In lower Manhattan, the grand jury was convened for nine months and heard testimony from over 150 contestants. It is estimated that over 100 lied under oath. Stempel continued telling the truth to anyone who would listen, but it was his unsubstantiated word against everyone else's; there was still no hard corroborating evidence. His testimony to the DA and the grand jury implicated Van Doren in the fraud, but there was massive resistance in accepting this accusation.
Suddenly, to everyone's astonishment, the grand jury testimony was sealed from the public by Judge Mitchell Schweitzer, for reasons that to this day are still not clear. This was almost an unprecedented move in New York State; in the no fewer than 497 grand jury presentments that had been filed in New York county since 1869, not one had ever been sealed. Afraid that the public might never learn what the grand jury had uncovered, Frank Hogan
Frank Hogan
Frank Smithwick Hogan was an American lawyer and politician from New York. Dubbed "Mr. Integrity" due to his perceived honesty and incorruptibility, he was D.A. of New York County for more than 30 years.-Life and career:...
, the New York County DA, filed a protest in the court of general sessions, spelling out why it was in the public interest to make the findings known. Suspicious of a cover-up, Congress called an immediate investigation. Once just a trivial form of entertainment, quiz shows were now the subject of investigation at the highest level of government.
Stempel told the U.S. House Subcommittee on Legislative Oversight
House Subcommittee on Legislative Oversight
The House Subcommitte on Legislative Oversight was special subcommittee of the House Committee on Interstate and Foreign Commerce, responsible for the oversight of federal regulatory agencies such as the Federal Communications Commission...
what he told Stone. Particularly jarring was Stempel's revelation that he was strong-armed into incorrectly identifying what was, in fact, one of his favorite films:
This was supposed to be the twist of the Twenty One program. In other words, the omniscient genius was supposed to know all the hard answers, but miss on the easy ones, because the public would figure one of two things. Either in his very, very erudite studies he had either glossed over this and missed it, or it was intended as a sop to the public at large to make them say, 'See, I knew the answer to this and the great genius, so and so, didn’t.' That is about the effect of it. — Herb Stempel
The kinescope
Kinescope
Kinescope , shortened to kine , also known as telerecording in Britain, is a recording of a television program made by filming the picture from a video monitor...
that has survived of that episode shows that the round in which Stempel was ordered to provide the wrong answer actually ended in a tie. Stempel and Van Doren went on to yet another game during the same show. This time, Stempel failed to recall the name of William Allen White
William Allen White
William Allen White was a renowned American newspaper editor, politician, author, and leader of the Progressive movement...
's popular editorials, What's the Matter with Kansas? "It just wouldn't help to guess," Stempel said softly in the booth, "I just don't know." The miss kept Stempel at zero, and Van Doren answered the questions in the category "Kings" successfully. Stempel drew the evening's biggest laugh when he was asked the fate of four of Henry VIII
Henry VIII of England
Henry VIII was King of England from 21 April 1509 until his death. He was Lord, and later King, of Ireland, as well as continuing the nominal claim by the English monarchs to the Kingdom of France...
's wives and answered, "They all died." Stempel answered the question correctly, but when offered their standard opportunity to stop the game, Van Doren stopped it and became the new Twenty One champion.
As the investigation progressed, Charles Van Doren, now a host on The Today Show
The Today Show
Today is an iconic American morning news and talk show airing every morning on NBC. Debuting on January 14, 1952, it was the first of its genre on American television and in the world. The show is also the fourth-longest running American television series...
, was under pressure from NBC to testify. To avoid the committee's subpoena, he went into hiding. It was another former Twenty-One contestant, an artist named James Snodgrass, who would finally provide indisputable supporting proof that the show had been rigged. Snodgrass had documented every answer he was coached on in a series of registered letters he mailed to himself prior to the show being taped.
One month after the hearings began, Van Doren emerged from hiding and confessed before the committee that he had been complicit in the fraud.
Life after the scandal
Following the scandal, Stempel finished putting himself through college on the G.I. Bill. He went to work for the New York City Transit Dept for the next two decades, doing examinations before trial, which meant he represented the Department in depositions by opposing counsel, testifying to various records in the city's possession.It was not until he was approached, some thirty years later, by the producers of the documentary "The Quiz Show Scandals" for PBS's American Experience, that he finally agreed to be interviewed on the subject. Julian Krainin, who co-produced the film, also co-produced the 1994 feature film
Feature film
In the film industry, a feature film is a film production made for initial distribution in theaters and being the main attraction of the screening, rather than a short film screened before it; a full length movie...
Quiz Show
Quiz Show
Quiz Show is a 1994 American historical drama film produced and directed by Robert Redford. Adapted by Paul Attanasio from Richard Goodwin's memoir Remembering America, the film is based upon the Twenty One quiz show scandal of the 1950s...
, in which Stempel was portrayed by John Turturro
John Turturro
John Michael Turturro is an American actor, writer and director known for his roles in the films Do the Right Thing , Miller's Crossing , Barton Fink , Quiz Show , The Big Lebowski , O Brother, Where Art Thou? and the Transformers film series...
. Stempel actually made an uncredited film debut in that movie, portraying a different contestant being interviewed by the congressional investigator Dick Goodwin, played by Rob Morrow
Rob Morrow
Robert Alan "Rob" Morrow is an American actor. He is known for his portrayal of Don Eppes on Numb3rs and as Dr. Joel Fleischman on Northern Exposure, a role which garnered him three Golden Globes and two Emmy Award nominations for "Best Actor in a Dramatic Series."-Personal life:Morrow was born in...
. In spite of being "a little miffed by the portrayal, it was an over-the-top sort of portrayal of me," When Quiz Show was released, Stempel embraced the renewed public interest in him, giving interviews on radio and television (notably appearing on Late Night With Conan O'Brien
Late Night with Conan O'Brien
Late Night with Conan O'Brien is an American late-night talk show hosted by Conan O'Brien that aired 2,725 episodes on NBC between 1993 and 2009. The show featured varied comedic material, celebrity interviews, and musical and comedy performances. Late Night aired weeknights at 12:37 am...
, taped in the same NBC studio Twenty One once occupied), as well as lecturing at some colleges about the quiz scandals.
Every time 'Quiz Show' is shown on television, invariably the phone rings and some character at the other end says, 'What picture won the Academy Award in 1955?' — Herb Stempel, 2004
In 2008, Charles Van Doren broke his long silence, and in an article in The New Yorker described the overtures Robert Redford's production company made to him to cooperate with the filming of Quiz Show. He claimed that Barry & Enright Productions staffer Al Freedman was actually responsible for scripting the entire Stempel-Van Doren competition, and refuted the image of Stempel as a penurious CCNY student:
In fact, he was a Marines [Stempel was actually in the US Army] veteran married to a woman of some means who once appeared on the set wearing a Persian-lamb coat and was quickly spirited away so that she wouldn’t blow his cover.
Van Doren wrote that until he viewed WGBH's American Experience
American Experience
American Experience is a television program airing on the Public Broadcasting Service Public television stations in the United States. The program airs documentaries, many of which have won awards, about important or interesting events and people in American history...
documentary "The Quiz Show Scandals" he was ignorant of the fact that the show had once been honest - at least for one episode - and that: "Herb Stempel was the first to agree to the fix".
This last remark is actually debatable. Dan Enright has stated that due to the sponsor's displeasure he began to rig the show immediately after the premiere episode debuted on September 12, 1956. Whether the contestants in the five weeks prior to Stempel's choreographed October 17th appearance unwittingly received the answers in "practice sessions" the way Richard Jackman described, or were openly coached the same way Stempel was, is unclear. According to Jackman, Enright was extremely nervous prior to his appearance on the show and stated, to Jackman's bewilderment: "You are in a position to destroy my career." After Jackman, a struggling author, told Enright he couldn't continue on a rigged show Enright tried various types of persuasion and offers of money to persuade him to change his mind. Jackman finally accepted a check for $15,000, and for continuity's sake promised to appear again so he could publically choose to take his "winnings" and depart at the beginning of the show. Kent Anderson portrays Enright as someone who would make certain his next contestant would cooperate. Enright is described as deliberately targeting Stempel's emotions, as he did with other contestants; leaving no angle overlooked when trying to gain their full participation.
I had been a poor boy all my life, and I was sort of overjoyed, and I took it for granted that this was the way things were run on these programs...I was stunned, I didn't know what to say...I told him I would do it. — Herb Stempel
External links
- Herb Stempel's testimony to the U.S. House Subcommittee on Legislative Oversight, 1959
- Investigation of television quiz shows. Hearings before a subcommittee of the Committee on Interstate and Foreign Commerce, House of Representatives, Eighty-sixth Congress, first session, PN I992.8.U5IJ, October 6-12, 1959 ǀ http://www.archive.org/stream/investigationoft01unit/investigationoft01unit_djvu.txt