How It Was Done

The checkered troupe of supporting witnesses that followed Charles Van Doren showed that no one seemed to be immune. Entertainers, admen, producers--everyone played along.

"Most of us have a great deal of larceny in us," drawled the Rev. Charles ("Stony") Jackson of Tullahoma, Tenn. "The fact that I am an ordained minister [Disciples of Christ] does not make me a saint." In 1957 Jackson wrote to The $64,000 Question, said he planned a book about quizzes (working title: Hucksters and Suckers), asked for help. The producers took the hint. Back came an invitation for Stony to audition as a contestant. The category chosen for the pastor: great love stories. After producers fed him the romantic answers in "screening" sessions, he rolled up $20,000 on CBS's $64,000 Question and $64,000 Challenge. What happened to the money? The minister spent some on himself, gave $12,000 to a home for orphans. Said he: "I wanted to be a Protestant Father Flanagan."

Mixed Methods. Even children were taught to cheat. The probing Congressmen summoned Child Actress Patty (The Miracle Worker) Duke, a Challenge champ. Her manager, John Ross, testified that answers were fed to her by Associate Producer Shirley Bernstein, 36, sister of Conductor Leonard Bernstein. In the popular-music category, elfin Patty tied with Child Actor Eddie (The Music Man) Hodges, 12, split $64,000 with him.* Manager Ross admitted that he gave $1,000 of his share to the show's "People-Getter" Irving Harris, pocketed $3,800 of Patty's prize himself as his manager's fee.

Aging stars played the same disreputable charade. Bandleader Xavier Cugat, 59, testified that he topped Warbler Lillian Roth in a Challenge match on Tin Pan Alley only because Producer Mert Koplin supplied the answers to him. "Cugie" won $16,000--and slipped 10% to his publicity man, who arranged his spot on the show for the pressagentry value of the thing. Cugie was no exception. On the Question and Challenge shows, 60% to 70% of the winners got help, testified Producer Koplin, and so did practically every winner who scaled the $32,000 plateau.

Many were the kinds of fixes, testified Koplin. Among them: the Area Fix, i.e., questions were pitched within the contestants' strong and specific areas of knowledge. (This was usually the case, declared Koplin, with Challenge's Teddy Nadler, who won $252,000.) There was also the Playback (questions had been asked in pre-game tests) and the Emergency (questions and answers were given the contestants, usually just before the show). "Emergencies" produced some Keystone Cops fiascos; often the fixer had to spring down to the celebrated bank vault, where the questions were held, quickly slip in the rigged question before air time.

Mixed Values? As a witness, Producer Koplin went on to violate one of the cardinal rules of TV: he bit the hand that sponsored him. Really to blame for the $64,000 rigging, he said, was Revlon, Inc. and its hard-reigning bosses, the Revson brothers, who rank as Madison Avenue's most feared and jeered clients (see BUSINESS). At weekly meetings, sometimes attended by President Charles Revson, Executive Vice President Martin Revson made pointed suggestions as to which contestants were to rise or fall. Yet contestants were so unpredictable that about 20% of them did not win or lose on schedule. After such snafus, Koplin was roasted by the sponsor "in the form of lectures, or just veiled looks." Worse, the Revsons were constantly threatening to withdraw their sponsorship.

Angrily last week the terrible-tempered Revson brothers denied any complicity. But their testimony was sharply disputed by Revlon's former advertising chief, George Abrams, who also attended the weekly meetings. Abrams thought that the producers "were living between the mixed values of show business and advertising, and moral values were lost sight of." In the scramble of values, headline hunters bought their way onto the air waves. A furniture buyer for a Pennsylvania department store told how he placed another buyer on $64,000 Question for publicity simply by shelling out $10,000 to a Question official. The store, testified its owner, was in the habit of paying thousands every year for plugs on TV shows and in newspaper columns.

Some angry losers were still trying to cash in on these mixed values. Lawyer Ethel Davidson, who left Twenty One with a $100 consolation prize, last week filed suit against NBC and five other Twenty One-scarred defendants (with the aid of Fellow Lawyer Roy Cohn) for $1,200,000. Her argument: if the show had not been rigged, against her, she would have won at least $100,000; she also asked compensation for her humiliation and ridicule. Meanwhile, ex-Buffalo Cab Driver Tom Kane, who drove off with $100,000 on the $64,000 shows as an English-language expert, offered $1,000 to anyone who could prove that he had been rigged. "It is high time," said he, "that the producers who were in on the fixes came out with a list of genuine winners."

*Eddie Hodges also copped top prize on Name That Tune, split $25,000 with his partner, then Major John H. Glenn Jr., U.S.M.C., now one of the U.S.'s seven astronauts and a lieutenant colonel.

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