TELEVISION: The Big Fix

The hearing of the House Special Subcommittee on Legislative Oversight had not lasted long before a picture emerged from memory and began to dominate the scene. It was a picture of a tall, handsome young man in the isolation booth, his face contorted with mental effort, his lips muttering a kind of private stream-of-consciousness through which he tried to find the answers to Twenty One’s difficult questions. Bearer of a distinguished name, Charles Van Doren (TIME cover, Feb. n, 1957) had seemed the finest product of American education, character, family background and native intelligence. Could it be that all or much of that picture had been sham? That was the most disturbing question raised by last week’s Washington hearings on the scandal of the television quiz shows.

By week’s end no flat answer had yet come. Van Doren was in hiding, having added nothing to a midweek wire to Subcommittee Chairman Oren Harris that on the program he was “never assisted in any form.” (Van Doren said that he had made the same statement to a New York county grand jury months ago.) His failure to respond to the subcommittee’s invitation to testify had already caused NBC, which employs him at $50,000 a year as consultant and as a Today commentator, to suspend him. And many of the characters who had surrounded Van Doren during his 14-week climb toward his $129,000 winnings on NBC’s Twenty One told the subcommittee that the show was blatantly rigged until NBC bounced it off the air a year ago. The crassness of the deceit, the number of people involved and the relative gullibility or negligence of network executives were startling.

“Explode with Answers.” Twenty One’s Producer Dan Enright, 42, testified that on many shows the fix “has been in force for many years.” Herbert Stempel, the man who was defeated by Van Doren, admitted that he took a dive. And the woman who finally dethroned Van Doren, blonde Lawyer Vivienne Nearing, 32, was shown to have received $10,000 although she won only $5,500 under the rules of the game. Furthermore, Van Doren himself drew a $5,000 advance “for Christmas presents” at a time when he could have lost all his winnings—$20,000 at the time. Before the Congressmen and S.R.O. audiences in a huge, white-columned House caucus room, the witnesses gave a rare and disturbing backstage peek at carnival showmanship and cupidity.

In precise detail, Herbert Stempel, a paper genius (IQ: 170) and onetime patient of a psychiatrist, related how Twenty One’s Enright had set him up for the fix (“How would you like to win $25,000?”), schooled him on how to perform (“Count off and mumble, suddenly open [your] eyes, give a dazzling smile and explode with the answers”), and ordered him to bow before the engaging erudition of Charlie Van Doren. Stempel walked off with a consoling $49,500 in winnings. But when he quickly blew the money, Stempel became disillusioned, started leaking stories of the fix to newspapermen.

What happened then? Enright’s onetime pressagent, Art Franklin, told the story. “It was just automatically assumed by everyone that Herb Stempel was a raving lunatic,” said Franklin. Even so NBC was “terrified,” and “kept their hands as clean as possible by kicking it under the carpet.” At that time (spring 1957) little more than a simple denial from Producer Enright was enough for NBC to announce that its own “investigation had proved Stempel’s charges to be utterly baseless and untrue.” But P.R. Man Franklin was not so sure of the truthfulness of his client. As he testified: “The client rarely tells you the truth.”

“Or Else.” If Herb Stempel was hardly convincing when he first blabbed, the public began to listen when his charges were seconded by baby-faced Artist James Snodgrass, 36. Last week Snodgrass dramatically opened a registered letter, postmarked May 10, 1957, which not only gave the questions for the May 13 show (Sample: “What are the names of the Seven Dwarfs?”) but also the instructions for painfully spitting out the answers (“Sleepy, Sneezy, Dopey, Happy, pause—the grouchy one—Grumpy—Doc —pause—the bashful one!”). Snodgrass enjoyed winning so much that when he was instructed to fall before the mighty mind of Hank Bloomgarden (who later went on to win $98,500), he crossed up Twenty One, blurted the correct answer. After that show, Associate Producer Albert Freedman hustled up to him and protested “in tears” that Snodgrass “had thrown the budget out of whack.”

Indeed, holding down Twenty One’s budget was as vital as pushing up its rating. Twenty One’s sponsor, Geritol-making Pharmaceuticals, Inc., limited its prize money to $520,000 a year. The producers, Dan Enright and M.C. Jack Barry, 41, were to cover anything over that limit.

A good way to hold down prizes was to restrict the points rolled up by any fixed winner. One indignant Twenty One veteran, greying Mrs. Rose Leibbrand, executive director of the National Federation of Business and Professional Women’s Clubs, explained how it was done. Just before showtime Producer Freedman fed her the answers, and a warning: “Just remember not to bid over seven or eight —or else.”

“I Botched It Up.” The fixed contestants solemnly played along with the cheap little travesty. Labor Organizer Richard Jackman, built up on Twenty One as a workingman’s Jimmy Stewart, won $24,500 and pangs of conscience, settled for $15,000 when told by Enright that more “would throw the budget out of whack”; then he had third thoughts, started to sue Enright for the other $9,500, got it. Apple-cheeked Kirsten Falke, then only 16, was picked up for Twenty One’s penny-ante sister show, Tic Tac Dough, when she answered a call to audition as a folk singer. This led her to the office of Tic Tac Dough Producer Howard Felsher, who gave her answers and hints that she would get her big chance to sing on the show. “I botched it up,” recounted poor Kirsten. She had asked for her categories in the wrong order and pocketed only $800.

When the grand jury subpoenaed Kirsten Falke to testify, Producer Felsher urged her to lie. Felsher, who was fired by NBC only last week, told the Congressmen that he urged about 30 former contestants to lie to the grand jury, as he himself had done, naturally under oath (later Felsher returned to the grand jury, told the truth). How many of the nighttime programs of Tic Tac Dough were rigged? Answered Felsher: about 75%—and he had a simple explanation: “I was trying to put together an exciting show, and I never did feel that there was anything terribly wrong about it.”

In such an atmosphere, fixing was epidemic. On CBS, testified a network spokesman, Dotto went crooked. So did For Love or Money (whose “dancing decimal machine” was rigged to chisel down the contestants’ possible winnings). After a contestant reported he had been fed an answer, CBS even began to investigate The $64,000 Challenge (which was owned by a packaging firm controlled by CBS-TV President Lou Cowan). The network chucked all three shows between August 1958 and last January. But it has continued to ride with Name That Tune, though it publicly admits that some contestants are asked to identify songs that they have been tested on before.

“Deception Is of Value.” As the confessions kept coming, the networks took the position that they had been deceived along with the public. “A breach of public faith!” thundered NBC. “This deception strikes at the integrity of the networks,” echoed CBS. (Dan Enright did not agree. Said he: “A degree of deception is of considerable value in producing shows.”) But the networks could not deny that they had been less than thorough in investigating the charges when they were first made; even as late as last October, when NBC took over Dan Enright’s and M.C. Jack Barry’s supervision of the shows, NBC said that it was doing it so that the partners, in their own words, could “devote more time to disproving the unfounded charges against our integrity.”*

With everyone still awaiting word from Van Doren, one subcommittee member, California Democrat John Moss, summed up the practice of the quiz show operators: “It is a perfect illustration of their lack of morality, a perfect illustration of their lack of ethics. They are perfectly willing to corrupt.” It was also clear that a great many contestants, drawn from everyday America and tempted by small fortunes and big publicity, had been perfectly willing to be corrupted.

* In May 1957, soon after Charlie Van Doren’s fabled splurge, NBC had bought out their packaging firm, Barry and Enright Productions, Inc., for $2,200,000, also gave them long-term contracts as producers at $100,000 each per year. Fortnight ago, burned by the investigation, Barry and Enright closed out the contracts for a lump settlement of $26,000.