Stempel remained in the Army for the next seven years, attending counterintelligence school in Baltimore, Maryland and serving as "an agent" until 1952,[2] when he began work in the United States Post Office as a clerk.
And next morning, the sponsor called my partner, Jack Barry, and me and told us in no uncertain terms that he never wanted to see a repeat of what happened the previous night.
[citation needed] Several weeks later, Enright paid Stempel a visit while his wife was out at the theater and he was looking after their young son, and posed the fateful question: "How would you like to make $25,000?"
Stempel was married to a woman whose family had money and the couple was not suffering financially, but Enright decided that the image of an underdog, a penniless GI working his way through school, would appeal to the American public.
[5] Enright personally selected his wardrobe: an oversized, baggy double-breasted suit that had belonged to Stempel's late father-in-law, a blue shirt with a frayed collar, "terrible looking" tie and an old "Timex watch that ticked like an alarm clock", the sound of which would be picked up by the studio microphone and thus help build suspense.
The reason I had been asked to put on this old, ill-fitting suit and get this Marine-type haircut was to make me appear as what you would call today, a nerd, a square. ...
Van Doren went on to become the single most popular contestant in the quiz show's early history, while Stempel became the forgotten man.
When Enright subsequently told him the promise could not be kept because he had sold his shows to NBC itself, Stempel called Jack O'Brian, a columnist who covered television for the New York City Journal-American.
Although O'Brian found the story hung together, the paper's syndicate, fearing a libel suit, refused to print the allegation without further corroboration.
There were no corroborating witnesses or hard evidence to back up Stempel's accusations, and Enright dismissed them as being rooted in jealousy over Van Doren's success.
It took Ed Hilgemeier, a contestant-in-waiting who found a notebook full of answers belonging to Marie Winn, another contestant on the new quiz show Dotto, airing on CBS,[8] to convince authorities and the Journal-American that Stempel should be taken seriously.
Jackman only realized the game was fixed the night he appeared, when the questions he was asked were identical to the ones Enright had reviewed with him in a "practice session" that afternoon.
[10] Enright quickly countered, denying any wrongdoing or fraud had taken place, suing the Journal-American, and mounting a campaign to discredit Stempel.
At a sensational press conference, he attempted to demonstrate that Stempel was mentally unstable by playing a recording of a conversation with him that Enright had secretly taped.
Suddenly, to everyone's astonishment, the grand jury testimony was sealed from the public by Judge Mitchell Schweitzer, for reasons that to this day are still not clear.
Particularly jarring was Stempel's revelation that he was strong-armed into incorrectly identifying what was, in fact, one of his favorite films: This was supposed to be the twist of the Twenty-One program.
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.'
[14]The kinescope that has survived of that episode shows that the round in which Stempel was ordered to provide the wrong answer actually ended in a tie.
This time, Stempel failed to recall the name of William Allen White's popular editorials, What's the Matter with Kansas?
[citation needed] As the investigation progressed, Charles Van Doren, now a host on The Today Show, was under pressure from NBC to testify.
It was another former Twenty-One contestant, an artist named James Snodgrass, who finally provided indisputable supporting proof that the show had been rigged.
[7] It was not until he was approached, some thirty years later, by the producers of the documentary The Quiz Show Scandals for PBS's American Experience, that he finally agreed to be interviewed on the subject.
Stempel actually made an uncredited film debut in that movie, portraying a different contestant being interviewed by the congressional investigator Dick Goodwin, played by Rob Morrow.
When Quiz Show was released, in spite of being "a little miffed by the portrayal", which he thought was "an over-the-top sort of portrayal of me",[7] 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.
Every time Quiz Show is shown on television, invariably the phone rings and some character at the other end says, "What picture won the Academy Award in 1955?
"[16]In 2008, Charles Van Doren broke his long silence, and in an article in The New Yorker described the overtures Robert Redford's production company made to him to cooperate with the filming of Quiz Show.
He claimed that Barry & Enright Productions staffer Albert Freedman was actually responsible for scripting the entire Stempel–Van Doren competition, and rejected the image of Stempel as a penurious CCNY student: In fact, he was a Marines [Stempel was actually in the U.S. Army] veteran married to a woman of some means who once appeared on the set wearing a Persian-lamb coat and was quickly spirited away so that she wouldn't blow his cover.
Dan Enright has stated that due to the sponsor's displeasure he began to rig the show immediately after the premiere episode debuted on September 12, 1956.
Jackman finally accepted a check for $15,000, and for continuity's sake promised to appear again so he could publicly choose to take his "winnings" and depart at the beginning of the show.
Enright is described as deliberately targeting Stempel's emotions, as he did with other contestants, leaving no angle overlooked when trying to gain their full participation.