Famed quiz show whistleblower dies

New York — Herbert Stempel, a fall guy and whistleblower of early television whose confession to deliberately losing on a 1950s quiz show helped drive a national scandal and join his name in history to winning contestant Charles Van Doren, has died age 93.

Stempel’s former wife, Ethel Stempel, told The Associated Press on Sunday that he died at a New York nursing home on April 7. She cited no specific cause of death.

Stempel’s long life was changed and defined by a TV face-off late in 1956, when he and Van Doren smoothly executed a fraudulent display of knowledge, gaps in knowledge and sportsmanship on “Twenty-One,” part of a wave of programs that offered big prizes for trivia experts. Confessions by Stempel and others badly tainted the young medium, helped lead to Congress’ banning what had been technically legal — rigging game shows — and to the cancellation of “Twenty-One” among others.

Interest was revived by the 1994 movie “Quiz Show,” directed by Robert Redford and starring John Turturro as

Stempel and Ralph Fiennes as Van Doren, who died last year.

The undoing of “Twenty-One” was set off by declining ratings, and a producer’s refusal to uphold a dirty bargain.

Stempel, born in New York City and the son of Jewish immigrants, would boast of a “retentive memory” that had made him a quiz show star since childhood and a natural for “Twenty-One.”

Hosted by Jack Barry, the program placed two contestants in isolation booths on opposite sides of the stage and challenged them on everything from modern sports to Civil War history.

Stempel, identified by Barry as a 29-year-old G.I. Bill college student from Queens, had prevailed for six straight weeks and accumulated $69,500. But audiences were apparently bored and advertisers worried.

Producer Dan Enright’s solution was to have Stempel lose to a more charismatic opponent, Van Doren, scion of a prominent scholarly family and himself a rising star at Columbia University.

Stempel later said he agreed when Enright promised to make him a question consultant for “Twenty-One.”