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In 1955 and 1956, if you walked down a street in a city in the United States when this program was on television, there was nobody there because everybody was watching it. Attendance in movie theaters, at restaurants, it all dropped during that. I mean, it was a huge percentage, 50, 60, 70% of the televisions that were in use at the time were tuned into this. There's nothing similar. Maybe the Super Bowl.

But there's nothing other than that similar in this country today. The $64,000 question was a television quiz show that premiered on CBS in June of 1955. It was inspired by a popular radio show where people would answer a series of trivia questions for money. The first question was worth a dollar. The second, $2. The prizes doubled with each question.

The most money you could win on the radio show was $64. And a producer came up with the idea of vastly increasing the money reward from $64 to $64,000. This is historian Richard Tedlow. Put it this way.

A policeman in New York City in 1955 made about $4,000, $4,500. If you won $64,000 in 1955 or 1956, that was not a life-enhancing amount of money. It was a life-changing amount of money. One of the show's first contestants was a policeman from Staten Island who really loved Shakespeare.

He did pretty well, winning $16,000 after correctly naming the two men who, in 1623, printed the first collection of Shakespeare's works. But he decided to stop there. Instead of playing for more money, he said he was, quote, "...putting the conservatism of a father above the egotism of the scholar."

The show immediately made the policeman famous. He got offers to give lectures on Shakespeare and even write a book about the playwright's puns. Richard Tedlow says that the $64,000 question was so successful that it made every television network want a quiz show. There were, at the height of the quiz show mania, I'd say at least two dozen questions.

Shows like Tic-Tac-Dough, Name That Tune, Dotto. And what happened was each time there was another episode, the producers would think of ways to heighten the drama

On the $64,000 question, some of the questions would come from a bank vault, which an actual banker would bring on stage. And the banker would be flanked by two armed guards on a stage, theoretically sort of guarding the sanctity of the question. People started following quiz shows on television like they were sports games. Newspapers would publish weekly lists of the prize money given out on each show.

You know, I wish I could have been on the $64,000 question. In my head, I would do really well. Yeah, me too. And the thought of just answering a question and getting a rather large check was extremely appealing. The New York Times quoted the producer who created the $64,000 question. He said, My absolutely firm feeling about reality on TV is that there's too little of it.

The greatest things are the real things you see, where the unexpected is ahead of you. But Richard Tedlow says that from the very beginning, not everything about these quiz shows was as it seemed. The people who appeared on them and the kinds of questions they had to answer were never random. It was always, to the best of my knowledge, managed. They had a pretty good idea of your...

your specialty, the range of knowledge that you had. So they would ask you questions in that pasture, if you will. You could graze in the pasture of the Crusades. You could graze in the pasture of opera. And in a $64,000 question, for example, they liked to choose people who seemed to have an odd interest in something that you wouldn't have expected.

Let me give you a concrete example, quite a well-known example of this. There was a woman named Joyce Brothers, Dr. Joyce Brothers, PhD in psychology. She originally applied to the producers to come on as an expert in psychology. And they said, "Look, I mean, you're a psychologist. Being an expert in psychology isn't going to be particularly surprising or appealing to the viewing audience."

Why don't you go out, learn something about boxing, come back as an expert in boxing? A producer thought it would be better if she answered questions about, quote, something she shouldn't know about. Dr. Joyce Brothers agreed to boxing because her husband was a fan of the sport. She spent the next few weeks studying and said it felt like she was writing another dissertation. Then she got on the show. Dr. Joyce Brothers did well and came back week after week.

The $64,000 question liked to draw things out over several episodes so people would have to keep tuning in. She was asked questions like who taught the English poet Lord Byron how to box and what were the special gloves that the gladiators of ancient Rome wore. Dr. Joyce Brothers became an audience favorite, but there's a problem. The show's sponsor, Revlon, didn't like her. According to a producer, quote,

She didn't fit in with their concept of what cosmetics are all about. The producers were told to get her off the show, and so they tried to stump her. At one point, they figured they would get her off by asking her not about boxing, not about a boxer, but about a referee in a boxing match. But she knew the answer. Dr. Joyce Brothers became the second person and first woman to win the full $64,000 prize.

In 1956, a new quiz show premiered called 21. It was inspired by blackjack. Each question was worth a certain number of points, and the idea was to get to 21 points before your opponent. The premiere was a disaster. The people didn't know anything. The contestants didn't score at all. Even the producer who created the show, Dan Enright, said it was, quote, just plain dull. ♪

21's sponsor, Pharmaceuticals Inc., thought so too and called Dan Enright to complain. Then they realized we better engineer this a little bit better and they started fixing the show. I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal. Who was Herbert Stemple? Herbert Stemple's an interesting character. I kind of find him intriguing and I always rather like the guy. He was an ex-Marine.

He was 29 years old when he went on 21, and he was a smart guy. Herbert Semple liked to watch a lot of the quiz shows and found that he often knew a lot of the answers. His wife encouraged him to apply to be a contestant, so he wrote to the producers of 21. He said, quote, "...doctors have told me, and many of my friends say, that I have a very retentive, if not photographic, memory."

and I have thousands of odd and obscure facts at my fingertips. The producers gave him a test, and then he met with the creator of 21, Dan Enright. Dan Enright later said he knew that Herbert would be a good contestant because he believed that there were two ways to get people to watch the show. They would either have to be, quote, hoping that a contestant will win, or hoping the contestant will lose, or

And Herb, I felt, was the type of personality who would instill the latter. Dan Enright told Herbert Stemple he wanted him for 21, but he would have to follow some directions. They told him always to wear ill-fitting suits, suits that were too tight. They told him, for example, when he spoke to the M.C., never call him Jack, always call him Mr. Barry.

Herbert was also told that he wouldn't actually answer any of the questions with his own memory or knowledge. Instead, he'd rehearse everything with Dan Enright. They would say, look, Herb, this is the answer to the question. Before you answer it, mop your brow three times. And when you mop your brow, don't wipe your brow, don't wipe your face, because you've got makeup on and it'll smear.

Herbert said he knew what was going on, that the producers wanted to, quote, make me appear as what you would call today a nerd, a square. But he still went along with it. The first night he played on 21, he won around $9,000. He said he went home and told his wife, quote, this is the easiest money I've ever made in my life. 21's audience seemed to like watching Herbert Stemple, so he kept coming back.

And before every episode, he would meet with Dan Enright to go over each question and exactly how he should respond. Herbert said it was easy to remember all the answers, but it wasn't easy to pretend to struggle while giving them. Quote, remembering mop your brow twice, count to ten, breathe heavily. This was the hardest part. He kept winning more money, but then the show's ratings began to drop, and the producers of 21 started thinking about what they could do.

Charles Van Doren, he was the son of Mark Van Doren, who was a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet and a famous professor up at Columbia. Charles Van Doren also taught at Columbia University. And one night in 1956, he met a television producer at a dinner party. He remembered later that the producer seemed curious about his family, his teaching career, and what someone at Columbia typically made in a year.

The producer told Charles Van Doren that he worked on quiz shows and that people were winning a lot of money on television. He convinced Charles Van Doren to take a test just to see if he'd be a good contestant for 21. A few days later, Charles got a call from the same producer. Quote, he told me that a man named Herb Stemple was winning week after week, but he wasn't popular. You know, we're looking for a man who's going to be charismatic enough

Charlie, and you're that guy, and so we want you to beat Herb Stemple. The producer told Charles Van Dorn he could win at least $8,000 if he agreed to come on the show. He could guarantee $1,000 for the first show, he said, because he would give Charles the answers. Charles told the producer he wasn't sure that was the right thing to do. He thought he could try to play Herbert Stemple honestly. But the producer told him it was a common practice.

And the point of the show was to entertain people. And so that was the way they rationalized it to themselves. And by the way, nobody knows except you and me. I'm not going to tell. Neither are you. You've got nothing to worry about. Charles Van Doren said yes. Dan Enright told Herbert Stemple that someone new was joining the show. He planned for the two of them to come to a tie.

They played for the first time in November of 1956. Charles Van Dorn seemed relaxed and tended to talk through his answers. When he was asked to name the volumes of Winston Churchill's memoirs, he said, "I've seen the ad for those books a thousand times." How did the audience react to him? They loved him. He got many, many letters. He got proposals of marriage. He became a celebrity. One writer said, quote,

He appeared lanky, pleasant, smooth in dress and manner, but never slick. He seemed to coax information out of some corner of his mind by talking to himself in a kind of stream of consciousness. Like a good American, he fought hard. Herbert Stemple and Charles Van Doren played each other again a week later. And this time, the plan was for Charles Van Doren to win. He was, according to NBC, a rating sensation.

Dan Enright told Herbert Stemple, quote, you're going to have to go. But Herbert Stemple didn't want to. We'll be right back. To listen without ads, join Criminal Plus at thisiscriminal.com slash plus. Support for this show comes from Pure Leaf Iced Tea.

You know that point in the afternoon when you just hit a wall? You don't have time for self-care rituals or getting some fresh air, so maybe you grab a beverage to bring you back. But somehow it doesn't do the trick, or it leaves you feeling even worse. What you need is a quality break, a tea break. And you can do that with pure leaf iced tea, real brewed tea made in a variety of bold and refreshing flavors with just the right amount of naturally occurring caffeine.

With a Pure Leaf iced tea in hand, you'll be left feeling refreshed and revitalized with a new motivation to take on what's next. The next time you need to hit the reset button, grab a Pure Leaf iced tea. Time for a tea break, time for a Pure Leaf. Support for Criminal comes from ritual. There are small things you can do every day to get healthier, like adding a multivitamin to your routine. I started taking Rituals Essential for Women every day a year ago,

I like that I know exactly which ingredients are in each one and where those ingredients come from. You take two at a time. They're designed to be smaller and more comfortable to swallow, and each has nine nutrients. If you're someone who cares about real results like I do, you'll be happy to know that Ritual conducted a clinical trial to figure out just how effective the essential for women multivitamin really is.

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Ritual's Essential for Women 18 Plus is a multivitamin you can actually trust. Get 25% off your first month only at ritual.com slash criminal. Start Ritual or add Essential for Women 18 Plus to your subscription today. That's ritual.com slash criminal for 25% off. When Herbert Stemple found out he was supposed to lose to Charles Van Doren and leave the show, he started trying to negotiate with producer Dan Enright. He asked...

to be able to continue on the show without answers. In other words, I don't want to be managed. I want to just take my chances. And they said, nope, you're out. But Dan Enright promised Herbert he'd get him another job on TV, so he agreed to go along with the plan. Charles Van Doren and Herbert Stemple played their final game in December of 1956. Fifty million people watched the episode.

The host of 21 said it was, quote, the biggest game ever played in the program. And at the very beginning of the episode, he explained why. Tonight here on 21, Herbert Stemple, our 29-year-old GI college student, can win $111,500, the highest amount of money ever to be won on television. But to do this, he's risking much of the money he has won thus far.

When Charles Van Doren and Herbert Stemple walk on stage, Charles looks relaxed. Herbert doesn't. How are you tonight, Mr. Van Doren? I'm all right. You're okay? Yeah. And Herb, you got your $69,500 riding here at stake. How do you feel, okay? That's fine, thank you. Good enough. The plan was for Herbert to start in the lead. First, he was asked to name the Southern senator who refused to leave the Senate when his state seceded from the Union in 1861.

He got that right. Andrew Johnson from Tennessee. Then he was asked about boxing. Who was the famous boxing promoter largely responsible for staging fights outdoors? The answer was Tex Rickard. He got that one too. He had 16 points while Charles Van Doren had none. But then Herbert got to the question he was told to miss.

The right answer to the question is a movie called Marty, which happened to be one of Herbert's favorites. He related to the main character, a romantic, who sometimes felt lonely in life. But Herbert wasn't supposed to know the answer, so he said something else.

I don't remember. I don't remember. I don't remember. Do we want to take a guess at it? On the waterfront? No, I'm sorry, the answer is Marty. He took a dive. It gave Charles an opening to win. He was asked to list almost all of Henry VIII's wives and what happened to them. Oh, my goodness. You want me to name the second, third, fourth, fifth wives and what happened to all of them? That's right. I'll have to think a minute there.

He talked to himself and the audience as he thought through his answers. He named the first four, Catherine of Aragon, Anne Boleyn, Jane Seymour, and Anne of Cleves. But he seemed to be stuck on the fifth. Oh, I think that Henry VIII married three Catherines. Now, who was the other Catherine? Catherine Howard. Right, and what happened to her? That's what happened to her. LAUGHTER

Did he behead Kevin Howard? He did. You've got 18 points. Just as planned, Charles Van Doren won. Before the end of the episode, Herbert Stemple got to say something about his loss and his time on the show. Well, Mr. Barry, um...

This all came so suddenly. I would like to thank you and the members of your staff for all the kindness and the courtesy which you've extended to me. Herb, I want to say one thing. We may have a lot of contestants in the future, but I doubt that anybody will ever display the knowledge, the fighting spirit, and the courage that you have in this program. Charles Van Doren kept appearing and winning on 21. He won over $100,000, which would be more than a million today.

He answered questions about everything from history to music and seemed able to outsmart anyone, even in one case, a college president. But he was still getting help from producers. And he would sometimes read about questions to which he was given the answer. Now and again, he said, you know, can I do this legitimately? But he never pushed too hard. But basically, basically the man sold out.

He got all kinds of offers, one of which he accepted, which was from NBC, to appear for five minutes on the Today Show, you know, reading poetry. And that was a $50,000 annual contract. It was a lot of money. At one point, Charles Van Doren even made it onto the cover of Time magazine. Richard Tedlow says Herbert Stemple stayed a little famous too, but mostly because he had lost.

That was very hard on his ego. People would bump into him in a restaurant and say, how could you miss something like that? After several months of this, Herbert Stemple still hadn't gotten the TV job Dan Enright had promised. And he was so resentful of the Van Doren image and the way it was portrayed that...

He decided to try to tell the truth, and he was perfectly willing to say, look, I was given answers, but so was this guy, Charles Van Doren. He's not the all-American boy you think he is. In June of 1957, Herbert Stemple went to the press. And it was very difficult to get anyone to publish the story because he had no corroborating proof.

Plus, Richard Tedlow says, the papers were afraid the television networks would sue if they printed anything. So nothing got out. But then, about a year later, someone else decided to talk. Except they weren't from 21. It was a contestant from another quiz show called Dotto. The man said that before one of Dotto's episodes was recorded, he was waiting in a dressing room with another player, someone who'd been on a winning streak.

And he saw the player reading a notebook very carefully. Later, when everyone was gone, he snuck back into the dressing room to look at the notebook and found all the episode's answers inside. He tore out a page and started showing it to people. Eventually, the show's sponsor, Colgate and CBS, heard about it and immediately canceled the show. But they didn't tell anyone why. Rumors started going around.

And a week later, the New York Times reported that people were starting to think Dotto had been rigged and that other shows might be doing it too. The article told the story about a man who bragged about cheating on another show to people waiting in line to see a taping. In another article, the New York Times interviewed some former contestants. Charles Van Doren was one of them. He said, quote, I never got any kind of hint or help.

In August of 1958, the New York Times reported that the New York District Attorney had opened an investigation into quiz shows, and he was going to be interviewing contestants. A grand jury was impaneled in Manhattan, and 150 people wound up testifying before the grand jury. Including Charles Van Doren. When he got to court, Charles told the grand jury the same thing he had told the New York Times, that he hadn't gotten any help.

He wasn't the only person who lied. Of those 150 people, 100 perjured themselves. Why? I think that they probably thought everybody else was going to. Now this is pure speculation. I think they were afraid. I think they didn't know what was going to happen to them. I think they thought everybody else was going to lie too. But 50 of them didn't.

And there was a number of people, having discovered that some people told the truth, went back and changed their testimony. Because actually what they were doing wasn't illegal. I mean, it didn't look good. It may not have been moral, but it wasn't illegal. Absolutely. You're absolutely right. The assistant district attorney said, quote, "...nothing in my experience prepared me for the mass perjury that took place."

The grand jury wrote a 12,000-word report about their investigation and delivered it to a city judge. The judge thought, since cheating isn't a crime, the whole investigation should never have happened. He ordered the report to be sealed. It seemed like the quiz show scandal might be over. But then Congress got involved. We'll be right back. Support for Criminal comes from Quince. It's hard to know what you'll actually get when you shop for clothes online.

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You know that point in the afternoon when you just hit a wall? You don't have time for self-care rituals or getting some fresh air, so maybe you grab a beverage to bring you back. But somehow it doesn't do the trick, or it leaves you feeling even worse. What you need is a quality break, a tea break. And you can do that with pure leaf iced tea, real brewed tea made in a variety of bold and refreshing flavors with just the right amount of naturally occurring caffeine.

With a Pure Leaf iced tea in hand, you'll be left feeling refreshed and revitalized with a new motivation to take on what's next. The next time you need to hit the reset button, grab a Pure Leaf iced tea. Time for a tea break, time for a Pure Leaf. A man named James Snodgrass was a contestant on 21 in 1957, and he was also told exactly how to answer the questions. But James Snodgrass didn't always play along.

During one episode, he was asked which poet wrote, quote, "'Hope is a thing with feathers.'" He was told to say Ralph Waldo Emerson. But Snodgrass actually answered, quote, "'One of my favorite poets, Emily Dickinson.'" He was right. James Snodgrass also did something else while he was a contestant. He wrote down all of the instructions he got from a producer ahead of two different episodes and then put them in an envelope and mailed them to himself.

He wanted them to be officially dated, postmarked before each episode was recorded, proving that the show was fixed. And those letters wound up in possession of the Congressional Oversight Committee, and that was the kind of proof that the Congress needed that this was fraudulent. Congress announced that it would conduct an investigation into quiz shows, starting with a hearing on October 6, 1959. Two contestants testified on the first day.

One was James Snodgrass. The other was Herbert Stemple. Herbert told Congress everything, but he didn't have any proof that his opponent, Charles Van Doren, knew all the answers. When he was asked if it felt, quote, reasonable to assume, he said yes. Three days later, the Congressional Committee issued a subpoena to Charles Van Doren.

The New York Times reported that by 7 a.m. on the day of the hearing, there were already crowds waiting to get into the House caucus room for a chance to see him speak. The headline was, Van Doren Still Draws a Crowd. The article said he looked, quote, wan and frail, his eyes red-rimmed and darkly circled, and that he asked to read from a prepared statement. And that was what finally had Charles Van Doren under oath in front of the cameras saying,

And it was an interesting moment because Herbstempel was in the audience, and that was where he had to confess that, you know, this was not a legitimate enterprise. The New York Times printed the entirety of Charles Van Doren's statement the next day. In it, he said, quote, I've learned a lot about life, about the responsibilities any man has to his fellow men. I've learned a lot about good and evil. They're not always what they appear to be.

He also said, I would give almost anything I have to reverse the course of my life. Newspapers all over the country reported on Charles Van Doren's testimony. The Chicago Tribune said, quote, In telling the truth for a change, he's not doing any more than what we expect every day of people without his opportunities or pretensions. The Atlanta Journal called Charles Van Doren a symbol of the, quote, disease that's eating away at the moral tissue of our nation.

the fanatic urge to make a fast buck. Well, Dwight D. Eisenhower especially, who was the president at the time, thought it was awful. He compared it to the Black Sox scandal, which was when the Chicago White Sox threw the, I think it was the 1919 World Series. And he felt it was a terrible thing to do to the American people. Charles Van Doren and a few others pleaded guilty to second-degree perjury for lying to the New York grand jury.

NBC fired him immediately, and when he got back to New York, he learned that Columbia had accepted his resignation, which he actually had not submitted. But he was out, basically. And so were the quiz shows. 21 and the $64,000 question had been canceled, and many of the producers were temporarily blacklisted from television.

Richard Tedlow says the television networks were worried about how the scandal would affect their reputations. The networks were panic-stricken that they were going to lose their franchises with the American people because of this fraud. Which is one of the reasons, Richard Tedlow says, that the head of NBC approached Congress during the 1960 presidential campaign. And said, look, here's an idea. Why don't we have a debate between the contestants themselves

for the presidency. We as NBC, and I'm sure the other networks will go along, would be happy to donate free time to both major political parties. That year, Richard Nixon and John F. Kennedy appeared in the first televised presidential debates. These scandals are what created televised presidential debates? I'm reluctant to say created, but they certainly mattered.

I mean, if you've ever watched those debates, which, by the way, you can still see, there is a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian named Daniel Boorstin who has written, you know, to me, this looks like a $64,000 question. After all the scandal, it seemed like no one would ever be able to make a popular quiz show again. People would never believe they were real. That's what a television producer named Merv Griffin thought.

In 1963, he was talking to his wife about how much he missed the old quiz shows on TV. She thought he could make one of his own. If the problem was that people would think that contestants had all the answers, she said, quote, why don't you give them the answers? So instead of guessing the answer, they would have to guess the question. And if they guessed wrong, they would lose money. She explained, quote, that'll put them in jeopardy.

And Jeopardy, Merv Griffin thought, was a pretty good name. Criminal is created by Lauren Spohr and me. Nadia Olson is our senior producer. Katie Bishop is our supervising producer. Our producers are Susanna Robertson, Jackie Zajico, Lily Clark, Lena Sillison, and Megan Kinane. Our show is mixed and engineered by Veronica Simonetti. Julie and Alexander makes original illustrations for each episode of Criminal. You can see them at thisiscriminal.com.

And you can sign up for our newsletter at thisiscriminal.com slash newsletter. We hope you'll consider supporting our work by joining our membership program, Criminal Plus. You can listen to Criminal, This is Love, and Phoebe Reads a Mystery without any ads. Plus, you'll get bonus episodes. These are special episodes with me and Criminal co-creator Lauren Spohr, talking about everything from how we make our episodes to the crime stories that caught our attention that week to things we've been enjoying lately.

To learn more, go to thisiscriminal.com slash plus. We're on Facebook at This Is Criminal and Instagram and TikTok at criminal underscore podcast. We're also on YouTube at youtube.com slash criminal podcast. Criminal is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Discover more great shows at podcast.voxmedia.com. I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal.

Support for this show comes from Pure Leaf Iced Tea. When you find yourself in the afternoon slump, you need the right thing to make you bounce back. You need Pure Leaf Iced Tea. It's real brewed tea made in a variety of bold flavors with just the right amount of naturally occurring caffeine. You're left feeling refreshed and revitalized so you can be ready to take on what's next. The next time you need to hit the reset button, grab a Pure Leaf Iced Tea. Time for a tea break? Time for a Pure Leaf.