Show Business: Scandal of the Quizzes

Right from the start there were skeptics who insisted that some of the quiz programs must be fixed. But the vast majority of knob twisters were stubbornly faithful, watched in breathless suspense and genuine admiration as contestants exercised their incredible memories. Questions might be tailored by the producers to fit a contestant’s known areas of knowledge or ignorance, but the possibility of more blatant hanky-panky than that seemed remote. Too much money was at stake, too many people were involved, and if one show went sour—so the argument ran—they would all be suspect.

The argument was only too correct. When Dotto (TIME, Aug. 11) was summarily dumped by both its networks (CBS in the morning and NBC at night) and its sponsor (Colgate Palmolive Co.) last week, its guilty secret was impossible to keep. Dotto had been crooked.

The Anteroom Note. Everyone involved in the scandal suddenly became so tight-mouthed and empty-headed that neither networks nor sponsor nor Dotto’s owner (Frank Cooper Associates) seemed to know enough between them to rate a spot on the show. But despite the determined silences, the story leaked out.

Waiting nervously in a studio anteroom one morning, a Dotto stand-by contestant had noticed a woman contestant, already a steady winner, stealthily studying a set of notes. When the woman left the room —and left her notes behind—the stand-by grabbed them. A quick reading told the tale: someone was feeding the woman advance information. Her answers were all prepared; she could not lose. The stand-by rushed to a Dotto bigwig with the incriminating evidence and peddled his promise of silence for $1,500.

For a person who had been hanging around the show for days, the only real surprise was the stand-by’s shock at his discovery. “Every single one of us was briefed beforehand,” one Dotto winner told TIME last week. “But it was all done so subtly, you could never say positively that you’d been given any specific answer. One day I finally went up to one of the producers and said: ‘How on earth can you get away with it?’ He looked me right in the eye and said, ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’ “

Says a Manhattan housewife who won nearly $1,500 in a four-day appearance: ”Each morning, before the show goes on, each contestant sees a producer. He says something like ‘Well, what will we talk about today? Who holds the record for home runs? You know—Babe Ruth.’ Then he’ll say: ‘How would you recognize David Niven?’ Sure enough, when the dots fill in, there’s David Niven.”

Without Warmup. After her first appearance, the housewife was naive enough to thank the producer for his tip. Says she: “He shook his head firmly and put his finger to his mouth.” But when the showmen decided that she had won enough, they said to her: “We’re going in straight today—no warmup.” The other contestant was tipped off and the housewife was beaten. She picked up her prizes and went home happy.

But Dotto’s note-grabbing stand-by was far from happy with his hush money. He brooded for days, finally took his information to the FCC. Within hours Colgate Palmolive had a copy of his affidavit, the networks were informed, and everyone was in a lather. Everyone was also in agreement—Dotto was blotto. CBS replaced the daytime show with another quiz, Top Dollar. NBC, reading the public reaction more accurately, tried a whole new category: filmed drama.

More than $24 million in time and talent that is scheduled for quizzes this fall was suddenly as suspect as a hound dog with feathers on its face. The air was full of rumors about other shows, involving the most spectacular brain athletes. The audience was just about ready to believe that a Dotto spokesman was talking for every quiz show on the air when he said: “Look, this may be a quiz business to the housewives of America, but to us, it’s the entertainment business. There’s no reason for the public to know what happens behind the scenes. If you buy a $5.80 seat to a play, why should that entitle you to go backstage?”