Herbert Stempel, whistleblower in quiz show scandals, dies, 93
Herbert Stempel, the Bronxborn 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,” died April 7 at a nursing home in New York City. He was 93.
His former wife Ethel Stempel did not give a precise cause but confirmed the death, which was not publicly announced and was first reported on Sunday by the New York Times.
Stempel, once dubbed a “high-strung Human Univac” after the 1950s supercomputer, displayed an uncanny intelligence and viselike 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 the City College of New York on the G.I. Bill and struggling to support his wife and toddler son. He thought he found a solution to his financial strains when, on Sept. 12, 1956, he watched the premiere episode of the NBC game show “Twenty-One.”
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.
“I had been a poor boy all my life and I was sort of overjoyed,” he would later tell a congressional panel investigating game shows in 1959, “and I took it for granted this was the way things were run on these programs.”
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 that battled radio programs, newspapers and magazines for commercial and cultural influence at the dawn of the TV age.
“I was assigned to play the role of a nerd, a human computer,” Stempel told The Washington Post in 1994.
Enright instructed Stempel to cut his hair short, and the producer handpicked an ill-fitting suit for him. Stempel was told never to call Barry by his first name, as other contestants did, but rather to address him as “Mr. Barry.” The intent was to create a wooden, unlikable character who would provide a foil for the more attractive contestants. Years later, Enright told PBS that viewers would watch Stempel and “pray for his opponent to win.”
“He was the antithesis of the image he presented on the air,” said Steve Beverly, a professor of broadcast journalism at Union University in Jackson, Tennessee, and an authority on game show history. Beverly said Stempel’s on-air personality was “almost a cartoon character.”
The coaching, Stempel discovered, included orders on which questions to answer correctly and which ones to miss. “Everything was explicit,” he told the congressional panel.
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.”