Bronx brainiac blew the whistle on rigging of US quiz shows in the 1950s
Herbert Stempel, who has died aged 93, was the Bronx-born brainiac who became a central figure and whistleblower in the game show rigging scandals of the 1950s, a cultural turning point later chronicled in the 1994 movie Quiz Show.
Stempel, once dubbed a ‘‘high-strung Human Univac’’ after the 1950s supercomputer, displayed an uncanny intelligence and memory from his earliest years. Raised by a widowed mother during the Great Depression, he spent long hours at New York City libraries and showed particular aptitude for geography and history. As a boy, he participated in radio quiz shows.
‘‘When I was a kid,’’ he later joked,
‘‘someone said, ‘If you ask Herb who built the great pyramids, he’ll say,
Do you mean day shift or night shift?’ ’’
By age 29, he was an army veteran attending college and struggling to support his wife and toddler son. He thought he found a solution to his financial strains when watching the first episode of the NBC game show Twenty-One in September 1956.
He quickly sent off a note introducing himself to the show’s producers. ‘‘I have thousands of odd and obscure facts,’’ he wrote, ‘‘and many facets of general information at my fingertips.’’ Producer Dan Enright and host Jack Barry agreed to test Stempel’s knowledge and found that he scored better than any previous applicant. Enright soon made Stempel a proposition: ‘‘How would you like to win $25,000?’’
The offer, however, hinged on Stempel’s willingness to obey instructions about how the game could be conducted.
Inspired by the card game Blackjack, Twenty-One featured two contestants who sat in isolation booths and were required to answer questions of increasing difficulty in an effort to win 21 points. The debut episode was a ratings dud, and sponsors demanded rapid improvement.
The producers decided to ramp up drama by treating the contestants as characters and turning their interactions into a tightly choreographed soap opera. The result was a television tour de force.
‘‘I was assigned to play the role of a nerd, a human computer,’’ Stempel told the
Washington Post in 1994. Enright instructed him to cut his hair short, and handpicked an ill-fitting suit for him. The intent was to create a wooden, unlikeable character who would provide a foil for the more attractive contestants. Years later, Enright said viewers would watch Stempel and ‘‘pray for his opponent to win’’.
The coaching, Stempel discovered, included orders on which questions to answer correctly and which ones to miss. ‘‘Everything was explicit,’’ he would later tell a congressional panel investigating game shows in 1959.
Enright, he said, ‘‘showed me how to bite my lip to show extreme tension. How to mop my brow. He told me specifically not to smear my brow, but rather to pat for optimum effect, as that created a more tense atmosphere. He told me how to breathe heavily into the microphone and sigh.’’
Stempel’s dominant – and preordained – run on the show lasted from October to December 1956. He was dethroned by Charles Van Doren, the telegenic and suave son of an intellectually prominent family. ‘‘Once I saw him,’’ Stempel told the Los Angeles Times decades later, ‘‘I knew my days on the show were numbered. He was tall, thin and Waspy, and I was this Bronx Jewish kid. It was as simple as that.’’
Stempel collected nearly $50,000 before he said he deliberately flubbed a question about the winner of the best picture Oscar in 1955. He said On the Waterfront – the winner for
‘‘I was assigned to play the role of a nerd, a human computer.’’
Herb Stempel on his scripted role in the quiz show Twenty-One
1954 – when the correct answer was Marty. Stempel had seen Marty three times.
He said he agreed to the defeat because Enright had offered him future television work. When those opportunities failed to materialise, Stempel decided to expose the rigging. In February 1957, he gave his story to the New York Post, but claimed it did not run it for fear of libel action.
Public revelation of quiz show deception did not begin until 1958. Investigations – including New York grand jury proceedings and the congressional inquiry – ensued, and several quiz programmes were cancelled.
Van Doren pleaded guilty to perjury in
1962, admitting he lied to a grand jury about
Twenty-One. His sentence was suspended, sparing him jail time.
The affair was revived for a later generation in director Robert Redford’s movie
Quiz Show, starring Ralph Fiennes as Van Doren and John Turturro as Stempel.
‘‘I wouldn’t call him a saint or a sinner,’’ TV historian Wesley Hyatt said of Stempel. ‘‘More than anything else, he was just a human being who was caught in a situation that was unprecedented. He did some wise things, and he did some not-so-wise things.’’
Herbert Milton Stempel was born in the Bronx. He was 7 when his father, a postal carrier, died.
His first wife, the former Tobie Mantell, died in 1980, and his marriage to Ethel Feinblum ended in divorce. He had a son from his first marriage, who survives him.
After the scandal, Stempel lost his game show winnings to a Florida con artist running an off-track betting scheme. He bounced around jobs and eventually became a researcher in the New York City transportation department.
Unlike Van Doren, who found work at
Encyclopaedia Britannica and avoided the public spotlight before his death in 2019, Stempel was a garrulous presence in documentaries about the quiz show era. He also was a consultant on the Redford movie.
He long insisted that he was not bitter about his curtailed TV career – or personally angry at Van Doren. On the day of their final appearance together on Twenty-One, Stempel was frustrated by promotions for that night’s episode. ‘‘Every few minutes,’’ he said, ‘‘an announcement would break in saying, ‘Is Herb Stempel going to win over $100,000 tonight?’ and I said, ‘No, he is not going to win $100,000. He’s going to take a dive.’ ’’ –