Fifties (106 page)

Not surprisingly,
The $64,000 Question
produced a Pavlovian response to its success. Suddenly the networks were flooded with imitations, all of them for big prize money. The people in Cowan’s old organization came up with
The $64,000 Challenge.
Others produced
Tic Tac Dough, Twenty-One, The Big Moment, Beat the Jackpot,
and
The Big Board.
There was even talk of
Twenty Steps to a Million.

By 1956, the appeal of these shows appeared to be limitless; then subtly, and soon not so subtly, there was the inevitable pressure that television especially seemed to inspire: to improve the show by manipulation, to
cast
it—that is, to ensure each contestant would find some special resonance with the millions of people watching at home. The process began naturally enough at first, with the preference to choose a contestant possessed of considerable charm over a contestant without it. Soon the producers, by pretesting, were able to tell where a candidate’s strengths lay and what his weaknesses were, without the contestants themselves even knowing what was happening: Prato knew Italian opera but little about the German opera; McCutcheon knew French cuisine rather than Italian or British. “We wrote the questions into the matrices of their existence,” Mert Koplin, one of the men who worked on
The $64,000 Question,
later said. As the pressure built for ratings, the manipulations grew more
serious. Some guests would be put through dry runs only to find that when they appeared on the live shows, the questions were remarkably similar to the ones they had answered correctly in the rehearsal. (McCutcheon, it turned out, was deeply bothered by this and thought seriously of getting out; he was encouraged to remain a contestant by his family. Later he told Joe Stone, the prosecutor from the New York District Attorney’s office, that he thought the shows were fraudulent and immoral, and he disagreed violently with the claim of the various producers that the rigging had hurt no one.)

The Revlon executives from the start were extremely outspoken about the guests on the two shows they sponsored,
The $64,000 Question
and
The $64,000 Challenge.
Starting in the fall of 1955, there was a weekly meeting in Martin Revson’s (Charles Revson’s brother) office, where he and his top advertising people critiqued the previous week’s shows and contestants. Revson was not shy about telling what he wanted to happen and who he wanted to win. He posted a chart in the meeting room with the ratings on it; if the ratings were down, it was the fault of the contestants. Were the contestants too old? Too young? Were they attractive enough? The criticism was often brutal. (The Revsons apparently did not like a young psychologist named Joyce Brothers, who appeared as an expert on boxing. Thus the questions given her were exceptionally hard—they even asked her the names of referees—in the desire to get her off the show; their strategy had no effect: She became the second person to win $64,000.)

More and more, with so many different shows vying for public approval, the producers found it was the quality of the contestants themselves—and the degree to which the nation identified with them—that made the difference. When the Barry and Enright company, one of the big hitters in the world of game shows, introduced its new game in March 1956, called
Twenty-One,
loosely based on the card game of the same name, Dan Enright was confident it would be an immediate success. Two contestants would answer questions for points, without knowing how many points their opponent had. Enright thought it was a sure bet for unbearable dramatic excitement, especially since the audience would know more about the competition than the contestants themselves. He was dead wrong. The premiere was, he said later, a dismal failure, “just plain dull.” The day after, Marty Rosenhouse, the sponsor, made an irate call to say he did not intend to own a turkey. “Do whatever you have to do,” he told Enright, “and you know what I’m talking about.” Those were the marching orders for Enright and his staff.

Fixing the show did not particularly bother Enright; the quiz shows had never been about intelligence or integrity as far as he was concerned; they were about drama and entertainment. “You cannot ask random questions of people and have a show,” one game-show producer later said. “You simply have failure, failure, failure, and that does not make entertainment.” That made it a predatory world, and Enright excelled in it. He was not, Dan Enright reflected years later, a very nice man in those days. He was totally compelled by work, wildly ambitious, and utterly self-involved. “I was determined to be successful no matter what it cost,” he said, “and I was greedy, greedy, not for money, but for authority, power, prestige and respect.” The end, he believed at the time, always justified the means. People were to be used; if you did not use them, he believed, they in turn would use you. Soon—with considerable fixing—
Twenty-One
became a huge success; at a relatively young age, Enright had already exceeded his own expectations, and he was wealthy and powerful. People coveted his attention and gave him respect. Thus he was able to rationalize everything he was doing.

From then on,
Twenty-One
became the prototype of the completely crooked show. Enright cast it as he might a musical comedy. He wanted not just winners and losers but heroes and villains. He tried for his first hero with a young writer named Richard Jackman, who appeared on the show on October 3, 1956. Before Jackman’s appearance, Enright went over a vast number of questions with Jackman. At the end of the session, Enright told him, “You are in a position to destroy my career.” Jackman had no idea what he was talking about, although he figured it out the next day, when the questions put before him were the very same questions used in the dry run. Jackman easily won $24,500, but then told Enright he wanted no part of being on a fixed program and withdrew. A worried Enright pleaded with him to continue, offering up all kinds of rationales. Finally, he got Jackman to accept a $15,000 check for his first appearance and convinced him to appear on one additional program, in order to bow out gracefully rather than just disappear mysteriously.

That left Enright with all that money to give out and no cast of characters. His first break had come a little earlier, when a young man named Herb Stempel wrote asking for a chance to be a candidate. Stempel had seen the debut of
Twenty-One
and had thought the questions rather simple. He had, he had always been told, a photographic memory. “The walking encyclopedia,” one uncle called him. He had watched all the other shows and invariably got the right answers. “I have thousands of odd and obscure facts and many
facets of general information at my fingertips,” he wrote the producers. At the time, Stempel was an impoverished graduate student at City University, and his wife’s moderately wealthy parents felt that their daughter had married beneath herself. Stempel was immediately invited to the offices of Barry and Enright, where he was given an exam consisting of 363 questions, of which he got 251 correct—the highest score anyone had gotten so far on the entrance exam. He was perfect for the show, except for one thing—he was short, stocky, and not particularly appealing on television.

He was, Enright decided, unlikeable. Because of that, Enright decided to exploit that and emphasize his unattractive side. Stempel had grown up in a poor section of the Bronx. His father, who had been a postal clerk, died when he was seven, and his mother suffered from high blood pressure and was on welfare from the time of her husband’s death to when she died. There had seemed to Stempel an unfairness about his childhood from the start—other kids had fathers, he did not; other kids had some money, he did not. But his photographic memory was remarkable. For all the knowledge stored in his head, Enright thought, he was socially limited, and almost unable to sustain a conversation. To talk with him you had to ask a very specific question, and when you did, you got a specific answer and nothing more. “If you saw him,” Enright said years later, “you had no choice but to root for him to lose.”

A few days after the first meeting, Enright came by to see Stempel at the latter’s home in Queens. Enright opened an attaché case and pulled out a bunch of cards similar to the ones used on
Twenty-One.
With that he began going over the questions in a dry run with Herb Stempel. Stempel got most of the answers right, and for the ones he didn’t get, Enright supplied the answer. It was, Stempel began to realize, a rehearsal for
Twenty-One.
“How would you like to win $25,000?” Enright asked Stempel. “Who wouldn’t,” he answered. With that Enright had made him a co-conspirator, demolishing any leverage he might have if qualms arose in the future.

While he was at Stempel’s Queens apartment Enright checked out his new contestant’s wardrobe. Since he was to be portrayed as a penniless ex-GI working his way through school, he was to wear his worst clothes: an ill-fitting double-breasted blue suit that had belonged to Stempel’s father-in-law. He also selected a blue shirt with a frayed collar to go with it. Enright made Stempel get a marine-style haircut, which made him look somewhat like a Nazi soldier, Enright thought, and thereby increased the audience’s antipathy. Stempel was even told to wear a cheap watch, which, in Stempel’s
words, ticked like an alarm clock, the better to make a loud sound during the tense moments in the isolation booth. He was never to answer too quickly. He had to pause, to show some doubt and conflict, perhaps even stumble on an answer. Questions should look like cliffhangers. He was to carry a handkerchief and pat, not wipe, his brow. He was not to call Barry, the emcee, Jack on the air as everyone else did; rather he was to refer to him obsequiously as
Mr.
Barry.

Nor was he to deviate from his instructions. At one point, when he changed suits and wore a single-breasted one and got a better haircut, Enright warned him, “You’re not paying attention to your lessons—you are not cooperating.” Stempel realized the role he was to play was the nerd, the square, the human computer. It was a cruel thing to do, Enright reflected years later, to make a man who obviously had considerable emotional problems go before the American people in as unattractive an incarnation as possible.

If Stempel resented such treatment, it was still his one moment of glory. Suddenly, he was a hero on the CCNY campus. He could sense, as he walked across the campus, that other students were pointing him out and talking about him. Sitting one day in the cafeteria, he heard another student boast to a colleague, “Herb Stempel’s in one of my classes.” Another student, whom he had never met before, came up and told him that he and all his friends were all proud that Herb Stempel went to CCNY. There were covertly admiring glances from girls. It was heady stuff.

Good soldier that he was, Stempel was not a satisfactory winner for
Twenty-One.
His only real value was as a loser. The show needed a hero in a white hat—a handsome young gladiator to defeat him. In October the producers found him in the person of a young English instructor at Columbia University named Charles Van Doren. Al Freedman, Enright’s deputy, met him at a cocktail party and was impressed by his intelligence and manner. “I think I’ve got the right person to beat Stempel with,” Freedman told Enright, “someone very smart, who I think is going to come over very well on the show.” Will he do it? Enright asked. “Yes,” Freedman answered. “I think he’ll do it, because his appearance will make erudition and education more popular.”

Of all the people associated with the quiz-show scandals, the one who remains most indelibly burned on most people’s memory is Charles Van Doren. He was the bearer of one of the most illustrious names in American intellectual life and he captivated the audience as no one else ever did. His manner—shy, gentle, somewhat self-deprecating,
like a young, more intellectual Jimmy Stewart—was immensely attractive, for he was smart enough to win yet modest enough to seem just a little uneasy with his success. His father was the celebrated Columbia professor Mark Van Doren. His uncle Carl was just as famous a man of letters. He seemed to Freedman almost perfect for this particular show: He had a rare intellectual curiosity—apparently he was a speed reader and he read two or three books a day—and was informed on a broad range of subjects. Then, in addition to all else, there was the charm: Van Doren was someone whom the audience would see as an aristocrat, and yet there was nothing snobbish about him. He would appeal to ordinary people in every region of the country. Since it was a time when Stempel was, in the view of the producers, destroying the show, swallowing up more likable contestants, Van Doren’s appeal was all the more attractive, and Freedman set out to get him on board.

That was not an easy process, though. A series of lunches followed, to seduce Van Doren, who remained largely unresponsive. Van Doren pointed out that he liked teaching very much, thank you; there was nothing else he coveted, and he was not interested in a career in television, not even as a lark. “It’s not my world,” he answered. “My world is academe and I like it very much.” But the more he resisted, the more Freedman was impressed; his very reserve was tantalizing, and so Freedman continued to see him. One thing that both Enright and Freedman had mastered by this time was the art of discovering a potential contestant’s vulnerability. Every man, they thought, had, if not his price, his special vanity, which was the weakness they could exploit. So Freedman, sensing that Van Doren’s love of teaching was critical to turning him, began to emphasize how much he might help the world of education and the teachers of America by coming on board. Teachers all over the country would get a boost from his appearances; he would be able to show that teachers were role models, worthy of the respect of their fellow citizens. “You can be erudite and learned but show that you don’t have to be an intellectual snob,” Freedman said. At first Van Doren seemed rather amused by this transparent ploy.

Then it began to change. Van Doren asked Freedman what made him so sure that he, Van Doren, would actually win on the show. At that point Freedman gave him a brief but somewhat sanitized history of radio and television game shows, explaining that they were all controlled in some way, because the producers had to hold the interest of the audience as well as educate it. It was not a question of truth, or documentaries; rather, it was show business. Why, look
at Eisenhower, he said. A book came out under his name, but it was most likely produced by a ghostwriter. Or a movie might show Gregory Peck parachuting behind the lines in Nazi Germany, but the person in the parachute was not Peck, but a double.