Child actor Patty Duke, a winner on The $64,000 Challenge, initially followed her manager’s instructions to lie when questioned by the Special Subcommittee on Legislative Oversight (which, under the House Committee on Interstate and Foreign Commerce, dealt with communications regulations). But in the end, she tearfully confessed that she’d been coached.
Records of the U.S. House of Representatives, National Archives and Records Administration
Mr. Goodwin. In the fifteen-minute session, she [Shirley Bernstein] went over pretty much . . . the exact things that were going to be on the show?
Ms. Duke. Yes. . . . She told me that I should study who looks like what, you know.
Patty Duke, Hearings before Special Subcommittee on Legislative Oversight, Committee . . . , November 3, 1959
Testimony of Patty Duke, . . . Hearings Held before Special Subcommittee on Legislative Oversight, . . . Television Quiz Show Programs, November 3, 1959
Television Quiz Shows
Television quiz shows offering substantial cash prizes became enormously popular in the 1950s. Their future was jeopardized, however, when in December 1956 Columbia University Professor Charles Van Doren beat longtime winner Herbert Stempel on the quiz show Twenty-One. Stempel later complained to the New York district attorney that the show was rigged. Following a grand jury investigation, the House Special Subcommittee on Legislative Oversight further investigated television quiz shows. The committee heard testimony from network officials, producers, and contestants, including Van Doren. After initial denials, Van Doren attested that Twenty-One was fixed. On the committee’s recommendation, Congress passed legislation in 1960 making quiz-show rigging a federal crime.
It is symptomatic of some far more basic problems in this whole industry with you people in a mad rush to develop something which is salable, which will draw a greater dollar, without any regard to public obligation.
Representative John E. Moss of California, Hearings before a Subcommittee of the Committee on Interstate and Foreign Commerce, 1959–1960
Child actor Patty Duke, a winner on The $64,000 Challenge, initially followed her manager’s instructions to lie when questioned by the Special Subcommittee on Legislative Oversight (which, under the House Committee on Interstate and Foreign Commerce, dealt with communications regulations). But in the end, she tearfully confessed that she’d been coached.
Records of the U.S. House of Representatives, National Archives and Records Administration
Mr. Goodwin. In the fifteen-minute session, she [Shirley Bernstein] went over pretty much . . . the exact things that were going to be on the show?
Ms. Duke. Yes. . . . She told me that I should study who looks like what, you know.
Patty Duke, Hearings before Special Subcommittee on Legislative Oversight, Committee . . . , November 3, 1959
