Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, January 6, 1992 TAG: 9201050006
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: E-6 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: PATRICIA BRENNAN
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
'50S QUIZ-SHOW CHEATERS TELL WHAT REALLY HAPPENED
In the 1950s, when Americans were becoming obsessed by television, new celebrities appeared on the national scene: contestants on big-money quiz shows.In the days before state lotteries, these people were becoming instantly rich before the eyes of some 50 million viewers, presumably through the contestants' own intellectual expertise.
The best-known of these shows were "The $64,000 Question," "The $64,000 Challenge," "Twenty-One" and "Dotto." In the first three, contestants were placed in an "isolation booth" (or booths, in the case of "Challenge," for both contestant and challenger) to prevent cheating.
But the truth was that the shows themselves were fixed.
Producer Julian Krainin's "The Quiz Show Scandal" (tonight at 9 on WBRA Channel 15) reveals that many of the shows were choreographed so that every mop of a brow, and every question and answer, were planned.
To make certain that the public's favorites continued, contestants such as Charles Van Doren, Herbert Stempel and Jim Snodgrass were favored with easy questions and sometimes were given the answers.
"Twenty-One" contestant Stempel, who said he was instructed to look like "a nerd, a square," eventually was instructed to lose to Van Doren, a college instructor with a flair for acting who became the most acclaimed of all quiz-show contestants.
In his final appearance, Stempel was given a question he could answer, about the Oscar-winning movie "Marty" (ironically, Stempel had identified personally with the title character) and was told to miss it.
Afterward, Stempel tried to expose the corruption but had no corroborating witnesses, and the deceit didn't begin to unravel until an unemployed actor who was a contestant on "Dotto" noticed that the woman who preceded him on the show was studying a notebook of questions and answers backstage. He contacted a lawyer.
The networks claimed they knew nothing of the deception, blaming the fraud entirely on the producers, but the public was outraged and Congress decided to look into the matter.
This week some but not all of the players who were involved tell what really happened.
"Here I was contacting people who had been hiding for 30 years," Krainin said. "They got the phone call they had been dreading all their lives."
But Charles Van Doren did not want to discuss it. For more than three decades, Krainin said, "Van Doren has pretty much been keeping to himself."
Van Doren has written a half dozen books in various areas, Krainin said, and just completed another. "But he can't go on the circuit to promote the books because of what happened to him. He found it a very tearing experience."
Herb Stempel also had hoped to teach at the college level, Krainin said. Instead, Stempel spent a career working for the New York City Department of Transportation as an expert witness in lawsuits against the city.
Another contestant was Joyce Brothers, a psychologist, who was "in fact very bright and had a great memory," said Krainin, "but they did try to get rid of her."
The problem was that the pretty, blonde Brothers did not wear makeup, a fact that annoyed the show's sponsor, Revlon. "When Charlie Revson saw her on the air, he said to get rid of her," said Krainin. "Her category was boxing, so they threw her a curve, started asking questions about referees. But she knew them. For weeks she had studied the whole subject of boxing and had virtually memorized three books about it."
There is no indication, he said, that Brothers was given answers.
Krainin said he was told by quiz-show producer Dan Enright that today, more than 30 years later, he "feels horrible about the people whose lives he hurt and says he realized he did a horrible thing. Many of his producers were blacklisted, and Enright could never get back in television."