Game show whiz overcame scandal
Howard Felsher, the television game show doctor who was fired because he went too far in fixing “TicTac-Dough” in the 1950s by feeding contestants clues, but scored a comeback two decades later by helping to sustain “Family Feud” as a No. 1 hit, died on July 23 at his home in Tarzana, Calif. He was 90.
His death was confirmed by his wife, Nancy Duggan.
Mr. Felsher never hosted his own series and only rarely appeared on camera, mostly as a foil for Richard Dawson, the British-born M.C. who notoriously lipkissed female contestants for goodluck on “Family Feud.”
But as its Emmy Awardwinning producer, he nurtured “Family Feud” when it was the highest-rated game show in the late 1970s and often the top-rated network program on daytime television.
Mr. Felsher and Mr. Dawson, as well, broke new ground by widening their pool of contestants to include older people, those from racial and ethnic minorities and others who were disabled.
Mr. Felsher’s success was all the more striking because he had emerged from the most damaging scandal of television’s early days. In 1959, he vaulted briefly from his daily five seconds of fame — his name flashing by as producer in the onscreen credits for “Tic-Tac-Dough” — to center stage as a star witness in a sensational congressional investigation into quiz show rigging.
He admitted not only to meeting contestants in his Madison Avenue office, car or Upper West Side home before they appeared on “TicTac-Dough” and feeding them questions, answers and other cues, but also to lying to a Manhattan grand jury when he denied doing so. What was more, he acknowledged that he had coached as many as 30 contestants to make the same denials.
Mr. Felsher testified that “Tic-Tac-Dough,” a daytime show appearing weekdays, was relatively honest. But he also said that about 75 percent of the quizzes on a newly launched evening version, broadcast once a week, were rigged to generate “excitement, tension, pace, drama, suspense.”
“I was trying to put together an entertaining and exciting show,” Mr. Felsher, then 32, testified to a spellbound subcommittee in Washington. “That is why I did this for the most part. At the time, I did not feel that it wasterribly, terribly wrong.”
NBC fired Mr. Felsher in October 1959 and took over production of the show from Jack Barry and Dan Enright after several contestants rocked the television and advertising industries with allegations that another Barry & Enright production, “TwentyOne,”had also been rigged.
Mr. Felsher was fired after refusing to swear to the network that he had never coached contestants. A week later, he testified that he had indeed conferred with Mr. Enright about which contestants should be tutored.
“I would not have done it without his consent,” Mr. Felsher said.
The “Twenty-One” scandal, reprised in the 1994 film “Quiz Show,” had been brewing since Herb Stempel, a postal clerk from Queens, revealed that he had been ordered in 1956 to lose to Charles Van Doren, who taught English at Columbia University and was the son of a Pulitzer Prize-winning professor there. The producers, it was revealed, had thought that audiences would find the handsome, personable Mr. VanDoren more fetching.
To boost ratings for “Twenty-One,” they choreographed three face-offs ending in ties, then a scripted loss when Mr. Stempel was asked to name the 1955 winner of the Academy Award for best motion picture. He deliberately answered “On the Waterfront,” which had won the year before, instead of “Marty.” Mr. Van Doren eventually won $129,000 (about $1.1 million in today’s dollars).
The allegations gained credibility when irregularities involving another game show, “Dotto,” were revealed in August 1958, prompting grand jury and congressional subcommittee probes. Shows were canceled, producers were fired, a handful of network executives were toppled, limits on winnings were temporarily imposed, and rigging results was made illegal.
Incontrast to Mr. Felsher’s first appearance before the grand jury, when he perjured himself — “I was panicked, I was terrorized,” he recalled — his testimony to a second grand jury and before the subcommittee seemed refreshingly frank. (He was not criminallycharged.)
He explained that the coaching of contestants had largely ended after NBC took control of production and before the congressional investigation began, if for no other reason than because the nighttime “Tic-TacDough” was attracting a steady audience by then.
“In other words,” he was asked, “you were not prompted by any qualms of conscience to make that change, were you, Mr. Felsher?”
“No,” he replied. “I can’t say that I was.”