Whistleblower of rigged 1950s quiz show

In the isolation booth, Herb Stempel bit his lip to show tension. He dabbed sweat from his brow and sighed into the microphone. And as 50 million viewers hung in suspense, he seemed to agonize over the question in his last appearance on the rigged NBC quiz show “Twenty-One.”

What movie won the Academy Award for best picture in 1955?

It was Dec. 5, 1956, and Stempel, a City College student from Queens, was in his eighth week on the show, posing as a nerdy know-it-all. He had won $49,500. But his new rival was Charles Van Doren, a golden-boy Columbia University instructor, and the uninspiring Stempel was scripted to take a dive.

“On the Waterfront,” he said, knowing the answer was “Marty,” one of his favorites. While Van Doren went on to become the most celebrated (and, later, vilified) contestant of the quiz-show era, on the cover of Time magazine and inundated with fan mail and contract offers, Stempel might have become a forgotten man. Instead, he helped blow the cover off one of the major scandals of the age, telling the news media, prosecutors and congressional investigators that it was all a hoax.

Stempel, who became a high school social studies teacher in New York and later worked for the city’s

Stempel

Department of Transportation, died April 7. He was

93. His death, which was not publicly announced, was confirmed by a former stepdaughter, Bobra Fyne.

The disgraced Van Doren retreated from public life for decades. Stempel, in contrast, assisted in the production of Robert Redford’s Oscar-nominated 1994 movie, “Quiz Show,” which starred Ralph Fiennes as Van Doren and John Turturro as Stempel, and in a 1992 documentary for the PBS series “American Experience.”

Herbert Milton Stempel was born in the Bronx on Dec. 19, 1926, a son of Solomon and Mary Stempel. A gifted student with a prodigious memory, he attended the prestigious Bronx High School of Science and scored at genius level on an IQ test. He worked for the

Post Office, was in the

Army from 1946 to 1952 and enrolled at City College under the GI Bill.

Stempel married Tobie Mantell in 1954. She died in 1980. They had a son, Harvey. Stempel married Ethel Feinblum after his first wife’s death.

In exchange for losing to Van Doren, who participated in the deception, and for signing a false statement that he had not been coached, Stempel was promised more television work by Enright. But no jobs materialized. Like several other disgruntled former contestants, Stempel went public with accusations that quiz shows were fixed.

There were denials by networks and producers, but the ratings plummeted. “Twenty-One” was killed in 1958, and the shows’ heyday faded.