Herb Stempel

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Herb Stempel (born December 19, 1926) is a television game show contestant who became famous for his participation in the 1950s show Twenty One, where he had a suspiciously long run of wins in 1956, and for his eventual exposure of what became known as the quiz show scandals.

Stempel had actually been tested at a high IQ (he was a graduate of the famous Bronx High School of Science) and was as knowledgeable as portrayed. But his Twenty-One run was underwritten by coaching in both the questions he would be asked and his appearance, under the direction of the show's producer, Dan Enright. "The reason I had been asked to put on this old, ill-fitting suit and get this Marine-type haircut," he remembered many years later, to television's The American Experience, "was to make me appear as what you would call today, a nerd, a square." It worked only too well: Enright's coaching delivered Stempel as a kind of smug know-it-all who would be all but guaranteed to have the show's audience hungry for a more palatable challenger to dethrone him. Enter a mild-mannered, pleasant-looking Columbia University associate professor Charles Van Doren, who happened to be a fan of the quiz shows and may have applied to become a contestant half as a lark.

Enright got exactly what he hoped for when Van Doren, after a series of 21-21 ties lasting several weeks, defeated Stempel and went on to become the single most popular contestant in the quiz show's early history. Concurrently, Stempel became all but the forgotten man. He also reportedly overheard a comment backstage after his loss: "Now we have a clean-cut intellectual as champion instead of a freak with a sponge memory."

But Enright made a crucial mistake before Stempel v. Van Doren: Stempel, according to The American Experience, wanted to play it straight against Van Doren, even suggesting it could be touted somewhat as a duel between Columbia University and Stempel's City College of New York. Enright refused, reminded Stempel that the show's success "necessitated" his departure, and promised Stempel a subsequent television job if he would finish the performance they had started. Needless to say, perhaps, Enright's promise went unfulfilled. So did a later promise made when Stempel, by then broke, demanded a job as earlier promised, to find Stempel a "panel show" slot following his college graduation on condition he sign a statement affirming he had never been coached on Twenty-One.

When Enright subsequently told him the promise couldn't be kept because he had sold his shows to NBC itself, Stempel went to the authorities to explain how the show was fixed and how he took part in it, according to The American Experience and other sources about the scandals. At the time, there were no corroborating witnesses or hard evidence to back his accusations, and Enright claimed the accusations were rooted in jealousy over Van Doren's success. It took a contestant in waiting who happened upon an answer sheet belonging to another contestant on the relatively new quiz show, Dotto, to convince authorities and the New York Journal-American that Stempel should be taken seriously. Nor did it hurt that investigators soon discovered another Twenty-One contestant who sent himself copies of questions via registered mail.

Manhattan Assistant District Attorney Joseph Stone subsequently wrote, in his book about the scandals (Prime Time and Misdemeanors), that Enright described Stempel to him as "a disturbed person and a blackmailer" and denied ever giving Stempel advance questions and answers. And three days after another Twenty-One contestant, Richard Jackman, told Stone he, too, had been coached in advance, catching on when he began hearing questions on the show that Enright had reviewed with him in sessions before broadcasts. The show was canceled and the scandal was on in earnest.

Stempel told the U.S. House Subcommittee on Legislative Oversight what he told Stone. Particularly jarring and revealing was Stempel, on the night he lost to Van Doren, was strong-armed into answering incorrectly a question about the Academy Award for Best Picture for 1955: Marty, one of his favorite films. The incorrect answer he gave was On The Waterfront.

Stempel was portrayed by respected actor John Turturro in the film Quiz Show, which has attracted criticism over the years for inaccuracies and excessive dramatic license, including an exaggerated portrait of Stempel. But it turned out that Stempel had something in common with Van Doren aside from quiz show infamy after all: a life after the scandal, and not an insignificant one. Stempel finished putting himself through college on the G.I. Bill and working for New York City's Transportation Department, and eventually became a social studies teacher in the New York school system.

When Quiz Show was released, Stempel embraced the new public interest in him, giving interviews on radio and television (notably appearing on Late Night With Conan O'Brien, taped in the same NBC studio Twenty-One once was), as well as lecturing at some colleges about the quiz scandals.