Herb Stempel - The Defeated

The Defeated

Stempel was the undefeated champion for six weeks, ostensibly winning $69,500, until he was informed of Enright's kickback scheme, which was presented to him as an unnotarized "settlement" agreement.

As weeks went by, people began to recognize me more and more. I got more and more fan mail. My classmates at college were very proud of me. My professors were proud of me. I just couldn't hold this inside of me, though, because I was overjoyed about being a celebrity, winning and so forth. I was overwhelmed. ...Then, Dan Enright said to me, "You know, Herb, you're not going to get all the money that you've won so far or are going to win." I said, "What? What do you mean?" He says, "No," he says, "We have to look out for ourselves, so I have a paper here which you're going to have to sign." I realized that if I didn't sign, I might not find myself on the program too much longer, so I decided to sign. — Herb Stempel

Even though Stempel agreed to take less money, that actually made no difference: his ratings were dropping and the producers decided he had to go. A new contestant was selected to challenge him and knock him off. He was a pedigreed, clean-cut, WASP intellectual from a literary family, an English instructor at Columbia University, who would become the most acclaimed – and notorious – of all quiz-show contestants: Charles Van Doren. Van Doren was persuaded to go along with the fraud by an appeal that his appearance would help glamorize information and intellectualism. His impact was immediate and his name quickly became synonymous with quiz shows. For week after week, the two men battled it out, tying with scores of 21-21, as tens of millions of Americans tuned in to see if their new hero would beat Stempel.

I told Herb Stempel that he was going to be losing that night to Charles Van Doren. He asked me whether he could not forego the losing and whether he could not play against Van Doren clean and I said "no" and I reminded him he had given me his word that when I would ask him to lose, he would lose. — Dan Enright

Enright promised Stempel a subsequent television job if he would finish the performance they had started, but the final act, as choreographed by Enright, was particularly humiliating to Stempel. The question was, "What motion picture won the Academy Award for 1955?"

I knew that the answer was "Marty", but Dan Enright specifically wanted me to miss that question. This hurt me very deeply because this was one of my favorite pictures of all times and I could never forget this. A few seconds before that as I was trying to come up with the answer, I could have changed my mind. I could have said, "The answer is Marty, instead of 'On the Waterfront'. I would have won. There would have been no Charles Van Doren, no famous celebrity. Charles Van Doren would have gone back to teaching college and my whole life would have been changed...On the day I was due to lose to Van Doren, I sat home, watching television in the morning. Every few minutes, an announcement would break in on WNBC, saying, "Is Herb Stempel going to win over $100,000 tonight?" And I said, "No, he's not going to win $100,000. He's going to take a dive." — Herb Stempel

Years later Dan Enright stated in the WGBH documentary American Experience: The Quiz Show Scandal interview:

This man was taken from obscurity - he came from rather impoverished circumstances - taken from obscurity and then exposed to the light of celebrity, became for some six weeks a celebrity and then just as quickly was cast back into obscurity. And we, at the time deluded ourselves into believing that what we were doing was not that wrong and I bear a tremendous guilt to Herb Stempel and I was sorry. I should have been far more mindful and far more sensitive. — Dan Enright, 1991

No. I believe he feels bad that I exposed his show. That's my real belief.— Herb Stempel, 2004

Van Doren defeated Stempel before 15 million viewers, and went on to become the single most popular contestant in the quiz show's early history, while Stempel became the forgotten man. After his loss, he overheard one backstage technician say to another: "At least, we finally have a clean-cut intellectual on this program, not a freak with a sponge memory." Enright's promise to find Stempel a panel show slot after his college graduation went unfulfilled. When Stempel, who by then had gone through his winnings, later demanded Enright follow through on his original promise, Enright demanded he first sign a statement affirming he had never been coached on Twenty One. Again, no show materialized.