Herb Stempel
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| Herb Stempel | |
 Herb Stempel on Twenty One
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| Born | December 19, 1926 Bronx, New York |
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| Occupation | Television game show contestant; high school teacher. |
| Spouse | Toby Stempel (deceased) Ethel Stempel |
| Children | Harvey Stempel |
Herb Stempel (born December 19, 1926) is an American teacher who was famous for his celebrity as a television game show contestant—and for helping to expose what became known as the quiz show scandals after his long run as champion on the 1950s show Twenty One was ended by Columbia University teacher and literary scion Charles Van Doren.
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[edit] The champion
Stempel had actually been tested as having 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," Stempel 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, so it was assumed. (Stempel in fact bore a benign manner and spoke in a soft voice not unlike a low-keyed newscaster.) Enter mild-mannered, pleasant-looking Charles Van Doren.
[edit] Defeat
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, reminding 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.
Enright's promise went unfulfilled. So did a later promise made when Stempel, by then broke, demanded a job, as promised earlier, 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.
[edit] Exposure
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. As he later testified to Congress, he also agreed to talk to a reporter from the New York Post, but the paper feared libel trouble if they went public with Stempel's original accusations at the time they spoke, in February 1957. Moreover, there were no corroborating witnesses or hard evidence to back the 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, James Snodgrass, 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. 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, Twenty One was canceled. And the quiz show scandal was on in earnest.
Stempel told the U.S. House Subcommittee on Legislative Oversight what he told Stone. Particularly jarring was Stempel's revelation that, on the day he was to lose to Van Doren, he 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 was forced to give was On the Waterfront—which won the same Oscar for the year before.
"This was supposed to be the twist of the Twenty One program," Stempel replied, when asked by the subcommittee why he was asked to miss such a simple question. "In other words, the omniscient genius was supposed to know all the hard answers, but miss on the easy ones, because the public would figure one of two things. Either in his very, very erudite studies he had either glossed over this and missed it, or it was intended as a sop to the public at large to make them say, 'See, I knew the answer to this and the great genius, so and so, didn’t.' That is about the effect of it."
What isn't generally remembered, thanks in part to the way the game was portrayed in the popular film Quiz Show, is what can be seen on the kinescope that has survived of the fateful program: that that round, too, actually ended in a tie. Stempel and Van Doren went on to yet another game during the same show. This time, Stempel failed to recall the name of William Allen White's popular editorials, "What's the Matter with Kansas?" "It just wouldn't help to guess," Stempel said softly in the booth, "I just don't know."
The miss kept Stempel at zero, and Van Doren answered the questions in the category "Kings" successfully. Stempel drew the evening's biggest laugh when he was asked the fate of four of Henry VIII's wives and answered, "They all died," possibly to break the tension under which both men laboured thanks to the fix. Then Stempel answered the question correctly, but when offered their standard opportunity to stop the game, Van Doren stopped it and became the new Twenty One champion.
[edit] Life after the scandal
Stempel turned out to have something in common with Van Doren aside from quiz show infamy after all: a life after the scandal. Van Doren was forced out of Columbia University, and made a life as an editor for the Encyclopedia Britannica and for Praeger Books, before becoming a late-life adjunct professor at the University of Connecticut. Stempel, for his part, finished putting himself through college on the G.I. Bill while working for the New York City Transit Authority. But eventually Stempel became a teacher himself, teaching social studies in the New York school system.
Stempel was portrayed by John Turturro in the feature film Quiz Show. When Quiz Show was released, Stempel embraced the renewed 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 occupied), as well as lecturing at some colleges about the quiz scandals.
