Fifties (108 page)

Stempel won $10,000 but quickly squandered that and his prize money in a series of bad investments. His bitterness festered. He began to bug Enright, demanding a chance to play Van Doren (“that son of a bitch”) in a clean, unfixed game. Enright became increasingly aware that Stempel was a live hand grenade. There was some talk about a place on another show. Stempel pledged to lose weight, “’cause when I go on I want to look like a gentleman, not a little short, squat guy, like I looked on
Twenty-One.
” At one point, Enright even secretly taped Stempel to show that the latter was blackmailing him and then skillfully cajoled him into signing a piece of paper that said there had been no fixing on
Twenty-One.
But none of this could stem Stempel’s growing rage.

The one thing that neither Enright nor Freedman had counted on was the impact of all this on Stempel’s psyche. It had all been traumatic, and they were now about to pay the price for what they had done. The key for fixing the show had been the ability to co-opt all the players; common sense decreed that those who had been part of the scam would keep quiet rather than hurt themselves. But Stempel was beyond the point of caring. What he wanted was revenge.

Stempel began to look for reporters who might write about the scandal. At first the press was wary of picking up the story because there was no way of corroborating it. Later Enright realized he had done an unspeakable thing: He had exploited a man who was emotionally vulnerable. Of all the things he had done during the quiz-show rigging, that was the thing that, many years later, Enright was most ashamed of. He was not nearly as bothered by what he had done to Van Doren, who, he decided, was an intelligent adult with a fully workable moral compass and who knew exactly what he was doing.

In the district attorney’s office there was a strong belief that the program had been rigged. But it was a hard case to break, for Enright and his deputy, Albert Freedman, had been careful fixers. The fixing had been done one-on-one, with no witnesses. Deniability was critical. In case a contestant changed his mind and wanted to talk, it was to be his word against that of a program executive; thus, charges of fraud against the program could be neutralized. There was to be as little overlapping as possible: Enright had fixed Stempel; Freedman had fixed Van Doren. They liked to co-opt the contestants even before they set foot on the show. That way they were less likely to turn on the men who had fixed them.

When the story of Stempel’s charges finally broke in a New York newspaper, Enright received a call from an uncle. “Dan,” his uncle said. “I hope this teaches you one thing.” “What’s that?” Enright asked. “Never bet on any animal that can talk,” his uncle said. Enright soon discovered he had seriously underestimated the sheer power of the show. In his own mind he had done nothing that violated the moral code of the world of entertainment as he knew it. But the show had transcended mere entertainment: It had become the property of an entire nation. Enright had crossed over, without knowing it, into another sphere, with another set of ethics and standards. He was playing with this new instrument of television without knowing its true power.

Their phenomenal success, Freedman realized, had also stirred powerful resentment in other segments of the media. As evidence of the fixing began to surface, the ferocity with which the newspapers picked up the story stunned him. It was not covered as a minor scandal in the minor world of entertainment but as a threat to the republic—something on the order of the press coverage of Watergate, he later thought. He had greatly underestimated the dimensions of celebrity that the game shows conferred. The press, especially the city’s more vulnerable newspapers, particularly those already suffering
financially from television’s ever more powerful reach—the
World Telegram,
the
Journal American,
and even the
Post
—feasted on the story as a means of showing that their prime competitor was not to be trusted.

It was a phenomenon of the fifties, Freedman thought. They were playing with this new instrument without knowing its real power: They had toyed with it as if it were merely an extension of radio, and they did not know that, in those days at least, it overwhelmed the people sitting at home watching and consumed those who went on the programs. A decade later, Freedman believed, the show might have been a success, but a much smaller one as the nation would have become far more immunized to the immediacy of television.

In 1957, Barry and Enright had sold the rights to the show to an eager NBC for $2 million. As the deal was being completed, Enright wondered whether they should tell the network that it was buying a rigged show. He called his agent, Sonny Werblin, an astute New York wheeler-dealer, and asked his advice. “Dan, have I ever asked you whether the show was rigged?” Werblin responded. No, Enright said. “And has NBC ever asked you whether the show was rigged?” Again Enright said no. “Well, the reason that none of us has asked,” Werblin continued, summing up the morality of the networks on the issue in those days, “is because we don’t want to know.”

But Stempel refused to go away, and was becoming increasingly obsessive. In his own mind, he had carried the show, had made it what it was, and would get no long-term benefit. Enright had promised him a job when he’d agreed to take the fall, but—and it seemed typical to Stempel—he was now hedging on it. By contrast, Van Doren was being given a steady job at $50,000 a year from NBC. There was simply no justice, he felt. He kept calling reporters, trying to give his story to them, but libel laws were tougher then and there was no corroborating evidence.

Inevitably, the whole scam unraveled. A young woman who had been coached left her notebook in the outer office of one show. Another contestant saw the notebook, which contained many of the answers the woman was asked to give as a contestant, and complained. Others came forward. One contestant mailed a registered letter to himself in which he placed an exact description of the process and including the answers themselves—powerful evidence for the courts. Finally, the district attorney’s office launched a broad investigation of the quiz shows. The evidence of rigging was overwhelming,
but for reasons never quite clear, the judge in the case impounded all the evidence. With that, the quiz show scandal was passed to a congressional committee.

Gradually, the congressional investigation kept coming back to focus on Charles Van Doren, the young man who had charmed the entire nation. Van Doren steadfastly maintained his innocence and claimed that he had received no help. That meant he continued to lie to the prosecutors, to the New York grand jury investigating the quiz shows, to the media, to his employers, to his family, and to his own lawyer. In 1959 Richard N. Goodwin, a young investigator for the congressional committee looking into the quiz-show scandals, had to deal with Stempel, Van Doren, and the others. Goodwin’s roots were not that different from Stempel’s, but he empathized with Van Doren; if he, like Stempel, was Jewish and came from a rather simple background, then his innate talent as a member of the new generation of the meritocracy was already manifesting itself. He had gone to Tufts and then to Harvard Law School, where he had been first in his class and gained the ultimate accolade: He had been chosen as a Felix Frankfurter law clerk. Goodwin found Stempel’s hatred of Van Doren distasteful; by contrast, Goodwin was charmed by Van Doren. Soon they became not hunter and hunted but almost pals, Dick and Charlie. Clearly, Van Doren was intrigued by Goodwin’s exceptional intelligence, by the fact that in addition to being a brilliant young lawyer, he loved American literature; Goodwin in turn had never met anyone like Van Doren, so intelligent, so graceful, from an old family, utterly devoid of snobbishness. The evidence, Goodwin thought, overwhelmingly showed that Van Doren had to be part of a fix, but he
wanted
to believe Van Doren, and for a time Goodwin lacked the final piece of evidence to implicate him: Freedman, Van Doren’s handler, had conveniently left the country for Mexico. Finally, under threat of the loss of his citizenship, he reluctantly returned.

When Goodwin had Freedman’s testimony, he called Van Doren to let him know where the case stood, that the committee now had a lock on it. For the first time, Van Doren seemed to pause. The next time they met, there was a lawyer at Van Doren’s side. Still, Van Doren protested his innocence. “Dick, someday I hope I’ll be able to tell you why he [Freedman] is lying,” Van Doren said. “Charlie, isn’t it interesting that the only people not telling the truth are from the best families?” Goodwin answered, mentioning one other quiz contestant with an exceptional background. At this point Goodwin felt himself in a bind: He was absolutely sure Van Doren was lying, but
he also saw no purpose in having the committee destroy him in public. It was, after all, not long after the McCarthy hearings and Goodwin still had vivid images of people whose lives had been ruined by their appearances before investigating committees. As far as Goodwin was concerned, the principal villains were the networks, which had averted their eyes from what was happening despite a number of warnings, the sponsors, who were the real beneficiaries, and the producers. Goodwin’s lack of zeal in going after Van Doren did not please Stempel. There were endless phone calls from him: “Are you calling Van Doren [to go before the committee]? Are you calling Van Doren?” Stempel would ask. Finally, Goodwin asked, “Herb, why do you hate him so much?” “I don’t hate him,” Stempel protested. “Come on,” Goodwin said. “You’ve been on my case since the beginning for one thing and one thing alone—to get him.” At that point Stempel told of an incident in which he had gone over to shake Van Doren’s hand at a charity benefit but Van Doren, according to Stempel, had turned away from him. That, thought Goodwin, sounded unlikely, because there was not a trace of snobbishness to Van Doren. But in some way he understood that even if it hadn’t happened in reality, it had happened in Herb Stempel’s mind.

Goodwin went to the committee members in closed session, said that he had more than enough information to show that the programs were rigged, but that he saw no need to destroy Van Doren in public before the committee. The committee members agreed, and the decision was made not to call him. With that, Goodwin told Van Doren, “Charlie, I know you’re lying to me,” he said. “Dick, I’m sorry you feel that way,” Van Doren answered. The committee, Goodwin continued, had decided not to call him. But don’t, he warned Van Doren, say anything publicly or do anything the committee might view as a challenge and which might force it to change its mind. With that, it seemed that Van Doren was home free. But then NBC told Van Doren that he had to send a telegram to the committee declaring his innocence or lose his job on the
Today
show. The obvious decision, Goodwin thought, was for Van Doren to tell NBC to stuff it and quit. Instead, pushed by his own pride, Van Doren took a fateful step and sent the telegram. It was a wildly self-destructive thing to do, Goodwin thought. Inevitably, he was subpoenaed. Goodwin, bothered by the coming confrontation, went to see his mentor, Justice Felix Frankfurter. Frankfurter had no personal connection with Van Doren and took a more objective view of what was happening: “A quiz-show investigation without Van
Doren,” he said, “is like
Hamlet
without anyone playing Hamlet.” Besides, Frankfurter added, Van Doren was not exactly innocent. He had been a willing participant. The fact that others in the scandal had done things worse did not exactly exonerate him.

On November 1, 1959, the night before Van Doren’s appearance before the committee, Dick Goodwin invited him and his father to dinner. Goodwin remembered being touched by the mutual affection between the two and Mark Van Doren’s self-evident relief that his son was going to be able to free himself of his terrible weight. The irony of all this—that the father and son who were so graceful and charming and who could, even in this most terrible hour, come to dinner and make a simple evening so rich with literate yet unpretentious conversation—did not escape Goodwin, who found himself torn by the entire experience.

The next day, a crush of journalists and photographers recorded Van Doren on the witness stand, beginning, “I would give almost anything I have to reverse the course of my life in the last three years. I cannot take back one word or action. The past does not change for anyone. But at least I can learn from the past. I have learned a lot in the last three weeks. I’ve learned a lot about life. I’ve learned a lot about myself, and about the responsibilities any man has to his fellow men. I’ve learned a lot about good and evil. They are not always what they appear to be. I was involved, deeply involved, in a deception. The fact that I, too, was very much deceived cannot keep me from being the principal victim of that deception, because I was its principal symbol. There may be a kind of justice in that ...” Aware of Van Doren’s great popularity, the committee members handled him gently and repeatedly praised him for his candor. Only Congressman Steve Derounian announced that he saw no particular point in praising someone of Van Doren’s exceptional talents and intelligence for simply telling the truth. With that, the room suddenly exploded with applause, and Goodwin knew at that moment ordinary people would not so easily forgive Van Doren.

Stempel had taken a train to Washington, paying for the trip with his own money, to see Van Doren’s appearance. In the crowded congressional hearing room, he wanted some kind of vindication. And although in the beginning his seat was far in the back, he had steadily edged forward so he could look in Van Doren’s face: He wanted to see and hear the members of the Congress of the United States scolding this privileged young man for breaking faith with the
American people, but he was bitterly disappointed by what happened. “I felt terribly hurt by the way they praised him,” he said years later. Afterward, Stempel grabbed Joseph Stone, the New York assistant DA who had done much of the early work on the case, and started to complain about the professors at CCNY who had turned down his proposal for a Ph.D. thesis. Even at what might have been a moment of triumph, it still seemed that he regarded himself a victim.