The $64,000 Question

Not only did Charles Revson not exercise his withdrawal right, but he wanted another way to take advantage of Question's swollen audience. April 8, 1956 saw the debut of The $64,000 Challenge (initially co-sponsored by Revlon and Lorillard Tobacco Company's Kent cigarettes), hosted through August 26 by future children's television star Sonny Fox and then, for the remainder of the show's life, Ralph Story.

It pitted contestants against winners of at least $8,000 on The $64,000 Question in a new, continuing game where they could win another $64,000. The contestants took turns answering questions from the same category starting at the $1,000 level. If they each answered a question correctly, they advanced to the $2,000 level. Starting at the $4,000 level, both contestants answered the same question while each standing in their own isolation booth. If, at any given level, a contestant answered correctly with the other contestant missing a question, the winning contestant either kept the money and faced a new player, or continued playing against the same opponent at the next money level.

In time, the sister show came to include various celebrities, including bandleader Xavier Cugat and child star Patty Duke, as well as former Question champions.

The J. Fred & Leslie W. MacDonald Collection of the Library of Congress contains one kinescoped episode featuring Capt. Richard McCutchen as a contestant, broadcast July 1, 1956.

Question contestants sometimes became celebrities themselves for a short while, including 11-year-old Robert Strom (who won $192,000, worth $1.8 million today) and Teddy Nadler ($252,000 across both shows, worth $2.4 million today), the two biggest winners in the show's history. Other such newly made celebrities included Italian-born Bronx shoemaker Gino Prato, who won $32,000 ($304,700 today) for his encyclopedic knowledge of opera. The longest enduring of these newly made celebrities was psychologist Joyce Brothers. Answering questions about boxing, she became, after McCutchen, the second top winner, and went on to a career providing psychological advice in newspaper columns and TV shows for the next four decades. Another winner, Pennsylvania typist Catherine Kreitzer, read Shakespeare on The Ed Sullivan Show. TV Guide kept a running tally of the money won on the show, which hit $1 million by the end of November 1956 ($9.4 million today).

The American Experience (PBS) episode probing the scandal noted:

"All the big winners became instant celebrities and household names. For the first time, America's heroes were intellectuals or experts–jockey Billy Pearson on art, Marine Captain McCutchen on cooking–every subject from the Bible to baseball. Not only had the contestants become rich overnight, but they were also treated to a whirlwind of publicity tours, awards, endorsements and meetings with dignitaries. Cobbler Gino Prato, whose category was opera, was brought to Italy for a special performance at la Scala and honored by an audience with the Pope. After winning $64,000, spelling whiz Gloria Lockerman, an African American, became a guest speaker at the 1956 Democratic National Convention... Eleven-year-old stock market expert Lenny Ross was asked to open up the New York Stock Exchange".[6]

One category on the Revlon Category Board was "Jazz", and within months of the premiere Columbia Records issued a 1955 album of various jazz artists under the tie-in title $64,000 Jazz (CL 777, also EP B-777), with the following tracks: "The Shrike" (Pete Rugolo), "Perdido" (J.J. Johnson, Kai Winding), "Laura" (Erroll Garner), "Honeysuckle Rose" (Benny Goodman), "Tawny" (Woody Herman), "One O'Clock Jump" (Harry James), "How Hi the Fi" (Buck Clayton), "I'm Comin', Virginia" (Eddie Condon), "A Fine Romance" (Dave Brubeck, Paul Desmond), "I Let A Song Go Out of My Heart" (Duke Ellington) and "Ain't Misbehavin'" (Louis Armstrong).

Other musical tie-ins included the 1955 song "The $64,000 Question (Do You Love Me)", recorded by Bobby Tuggle (Checker 823), Jackie Brooks (Decca 29684) and the Burton Sisters (RCA Victor 47-6265). "Love Is the $64,000 Question" (1956), which used the show's theme music by Norman F. Leyden with added Fred Ebb lyrics, was recorded by Hal March (Columbia 40684), Karen Chandler (Decca 29881), Jim Lowe (Dot 15456) and Tony Travis (RCA Victor 47-6476).

When the show was revived in 1976 as The $128,000 Question, its theme music and cues were performed (albeit with a new disco-style arrangement for the theme) by Charles Randolph Grean, who released a three-and-a-half-minute single, "The $128,000 Question" (the show's music and cues as an instrumental), with the B-side ("Sentimentale") on the Ranwood label (45rpm release R-1064). For the show's second season, Grean's music package was re-recorded by Guido Basso.

There were numerous parodies of the program, including in the Foghorn Leghorn cartoon "Fox-Terror", Bob and Ray's The 64-Cent Question. The Jack Benny Program featured Hal March as a contestant in an October 20, 1957 spoof[7] with Benny asking the questions. As a gag, Benny actually appeared as a contestant on The $64,000 Question on October 8, 1957, but insisted on walking away with $64 after answering the first question. Hal March finally gave him $64 out of his own pocket.

At the height of its popularity, The $64,000 Question was referenced in the scripts of other CBS shows, usually but not exclusively through punch lines that included references to "the isolation booth" or "reaching the first plateau". Typical of these was spoken by The Honeymooners' Ed Norton (Art Carney), who identified three times in a man's life when he wants to be alone, with the third being "when he's in the isolation booth of The $64,000 Question". At least three other Honeymooners episodes referenced Question: In A Woman's Work Is Never Done Ralph proposes to Alice that he go on the show because he's an expert in the "Aggravation" category. In Hello, Mom Norton tells Ralph that his mother-in-law's category on the show would be "Nasty". In The Worry Wart, Ralph advises Alice to become a contestant because she's an expert in the "Everything" category.

Another episode of The Honeymooners, delivered one of the best known Question references – a parody of the show itself, in one of the so-called "Original 39" episodes of the timeless situation comedy. In that episode, blustery bus driver Ralph Kramden becomes a contestant on the fictitious $99,000 Answer. Regarded as one of the Golden Age of Television's best quiz show parodies, the Honeymooners episode depicted Kramden spending a week intensively studying popular songs, only to blow the first question on the subject when he returned to play on the show. The host of the fictitious $99,000 Answer was one Herb Norris, played by former Twenty Questions emcee and future Tic-Tac-Dough host Jay Jackson.

The show has been referenced on other game shows. On the U.S. version of Deal or No Deal, an episode aired January 15, 2007, in which the banker's offer was $64,000. Host Howie Mandel said, "This is the $64,000 question".

In many money trees of most variations of the television series Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?, the amount of $64,000 is often included as the prize money awarded for correctly answering the 11th question.

The $64,000 Question was closely monitored by its sponsor's CEO, Revlon's Charles Revson, who often interfered with production, especially attempting to bump contestants he himself disliked, regardless of audience reaction. Revson's brother, Martin, was assigned to oversee production, including heavy discussions of feedback the show received.

According to Question producer Joe Cates, an IBM sorting machine was used to present lower dollar value questions, to give the illusion that the questions were randomly selected – in fact, all of the cards were identical.[13]

Nadler's victory was called into question when he failed a civil service exam in 1960 applying a job for the United States Census Bureau.[14]

The most prominent victim may have been the man who initially launched the franchise. Louis Cowan, made CBS Television president as a result of Question's fast success, was forced out of the network as the quiz scandal ramped up, even though it was NBC's quiz shows bearing most of the brunt of the scandal – and even though CBS itself, with a little help from sponsor Colgate-Palmolive, had moved fast in cancelling the popular Dotto at almost the moment it was confirmed that that show had been rigged. Cowan had never been suspected of taking part in any attempt to rig either Question or Challenge; later CBS historians suggested his reputation as an administrative bottleneck may have had as much to do with his firing as his tie to the tainted shows. Cowan may have been a textbook sacrificial lamb, in a bid to preempt any further scandal while the network scrambled to recover, and while president Frank Stanton accepted complete responsibility for any wrongdoing committed under his watch.

By the end of 1959, all first generation big-money quizzes were gone, with single-sponsorship television following and a federal law against fixing television game shows (an amendment to the 1960 Communications Act) coming. Over the course of the early 1960s, the networks wound down their five-figure jackpot game shows; Jackpot Bowling (1959–1961) and Make That Spare (1960–1964), a period on Beat the Clock (1960) when its Bonus Stunt grew in $100 increments past the $10,000 mark until finally being won for $20,100 on September 23, You Bet Your Life (ended 1960) and the more lavish prize offerings on The Nighttime Price Is Right (1957–1964) were the few remaining shows offering large prizes. Only one traditional big-money quiz show, the short-lived ABC quiz 100 Grand (1963), was attempted in the subsequent years; the networks stayed away from awarding five-figure cash jackpots until the premiere of The $10,000 Pyramid and Match Game 73 in 1973. The disappearance of the quiz shows gave rise to television's next big phenomenon–Westerns.

The scandals also resulted in a shift of the balance of power between networks and sponsors. The networks used the scandals to justify taking control of their programs away from sponsors, thereby eliminating any potential future manipulation in prime-time broadcasting, and giving the networks full autonomy over program content.[15]

None of the people directly involved in rigging any of the quiz shows faced any penalty more severe than suspended sentences for perjury before the federal grand jury that probed the scandal, even if many hosts and producers found themselves frozen out of television for many years. One Question contestant, Doll Goostree, sued both CBS and the producers in a bid to recoup $4,000 she said she might have won if her match of Question hadn't been rigged. Neither Goostree nor any other quiz contestant who similarly sued won their cases.

• Louis Cowan – In addition to Quiz Kids (1949–1951) and Stop the Music (1949–52, 1954–56), Cowan also created Down You Go (1951–1956) and the short-lived Ask Me Another (1952). Cowan briefly served as CBS Television Network president before leaving in the wake of the quiz show scandals. He later joined the faculty of the Columbia University school of journalism. He and his wife Polly were killed in an apartment fire in New York City in 1976. Lou Cowan's son Geoffrey later produced brief revivals of Quiz Kids in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s and is currently dean of the University of Southern California Annenberg School for Communication.
• Hal March – The former comic actor who became an overnight star on Question continued to appear as an actor in television and movies throughout the 1950s and 1960s. Shortly after he signed on as host of It's Your Bet in 1969, he was diagnosed with lung cancer and died in 1970, four months short of his 50th birthday.
• Irwin "Sonny" Fox – The first Challenge host was also known at the time for co-hosting the CBS children's travelogue Let's Take a Trip (Fox described it as "Taking two children on sort of an electronic field trip every week–live, remote location, no audience, no sponsors"), but his fame rests predominantly on his eight-year (1959–1967) tour as the suave, congenial and dryly witty fourth host of New York's Sunday morning children's learn-and-laugh marathon, Wonderama. Fox hosted Way Out Games (1976–1977), a Saturday-morning series for CBS, then later spent a year (1977–1978) running children's programming for NBC and eventually became a chairman of the board for Population Communications International, a nonprofit dedicated to "technical assistance, research and training consultation to governments, NGOs and foundations on a wide range of social marketing and communications initiatives", for which he is still an honorary chairman. Fox has also been a board chairman for the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences.
• Patty Duke – A child star (thanks to her Broadway portrayal of Helen Keller) when she appeared on Challenge, she eventually testified to Congressional investigators – and broke to tears when she admitted she'd been coached to speak falsely, an incident Sonny Fox described when interviewed for the PBS program reviewing the quiz scandals. Duke survived to become a television star (The Patty Duke Show) in the early-to-mid-'60s, before moving on to more film and television work (including a memorable role in Valley of the Dolls), becoming an activist in the Screen Actors Guild, writing two memoirs (Call Me Anna and A Brilliant Madness) describing her troubled child acting career and her lifelong battle with manic depression, and becoming an advocate for better protection and benefits for child actors. She died on March 29, 2016, from Sepsis, resulting from a ruptured Intestine.
• Charles Revson – Inspired by cosmetics competitor Hazel Bishop (whose sponsoring of This Is Your Life provided big sales to Bishop) to think about television sponsorship in the first place, Revson was never investigated in his own right for his role in the quiz show scandals despite testifying (as did his brother, Martin) before Congress when the scandals broke in earnest. The cosmetics empire he founded, however, continued its success – and continued to sponsor television programming – for many years after the scandals faded away. Known as a hard-driving, hard-driven perfectionist whose overbearing manner usually alienated even his closest business partners, Revson's success left him a billionaire when he died in 1975. His charitable foundation has since given over $145 million in grants to schools, hospitals, and service organizations in various Jewish communities.
• Dr. Joyce Brothers – Only the second contestant to win the show's big prize (after expertly thwarting numerous attempts to bump her from the show because Martin Revson was said to have disliked her and doubted her credibility as a boxing expert), Brothers has enjoyed the most enduring fame and media success among anyone who rose to prominence by way of Question. Her championship as a boxing expert led to an invitation to become a commentator for CBS' telecast of a championship boxing match between Sugar Ray Robinson and Carmen Basilio. In August 1958, shortly after she earned her license to practice psychology in New York, Brothers was given her own television program, first locally in New York and then in national syndication. Making numerous television and radio appearances as a psychologist, not to mention numerous television comedy roles, Brothers has also written a long-running syndicated advice column in newspapers and magazines, which was used as a source for some questions on the 1998–2004 revival of Hollywood Squares. She is still considered, arguably, the first media psychologist. She died from respiratory failure on May 13, 2013 at age 85.
• Ralph Story – He became the much-loved host of Ralph Story's Los Angeles (1964–1970), still considered the highest-rated, best-loved local show in Los Angeles television history. Story has also hosted A.M. Los Angeles and was the narrator for the ABC series Alias Smith and Jones in 1972–1973. He died on September 26, 2006 at the age of 86.

A similar version of The $64,000 Question was successful in Australia from 1960 to 1971 on Seven Network. Initially called Coles £3000 Question, the show changed its name to Coles $6000 Question on February 14, 1966 (the date Australia converted to decimal currency) and was sponsored for most of its run by Coles Stores. In July 1971, Coles dropped its sponsorship and the show became The $7000 Question. It was hosted by Malcolm Searle (1960-1963) and Roland Strong (1963-1971).

There were three derived versions in the UK: earlier, The 64,000 Question, Double Your Money (see above) and later, The $64,000 Question (despite the United Kingdom not using the dollar monitory system as their currency).

The Italian version of this quiz was Lascia o raddoppia? (1956–1959). The prize money doubled from 2,560,000 lire to 5,120,000 lire.

The Mexican version, El Gran Premio de los 64,000 pesos lasted from 1956 to 1994 with some interruptions, changes of name to compensate peso devaluation, and changes of TV network. Most of the time it was hosted by Pedro Ferriz. A movie was made in which Ferriz asks questions to a character played by Sara García, known then as "Mexican Cinema's Granny".

The Polish version of this quiz was Wielka gra (The Great Game, 1962–2006). Initially studio and rules were identical as in original, but in 1975, the rules and studio became a bit changed by Wojciech Pijanowski, author and host of plenty of quiz shows in Poland in late 20th century, isolation booth was abandoned and there was set a big round in the center of studio with prizes for each round and envelopes with questions. After this year, categories became more accurate (e.g. Mozart - life and compositions, Muslim conquests in 7th - 8th century), limited to art, history (most categories), geography and zoology and were chosen by player during eliminations to the quiz.

After 1975 game had following rounds:

• First round was a duel of two players, who won eliminations, it consisted of 20 questions and lasted to two mistakes by a player. Players used special headphones with playing loud music to not hear each other.
• Second round was "an exam", player, who won a duel, answered for questions of three experts of each category, each expert asked three questions. Player could make up to two mistakes. After that he received a prize.
• In third, fourth round and a final round player drew envelopes with questions on the big round in the studio, prizes doubled by every next round. Main prize changed many times, primarily it were 25,000 złotys (it was equal to average annual wage), lately it were 40,000 złotys (ca. $12,000).

Hosts were Ryszard Serafinowicz (1962–1969), Joanna Rostocka (1969–1973, previously hostess of Serafinowicz), Janusz Budzyński (1973–1975) and Stanisława Ryster (1975–2006).

Despite show was cancelled due to low attendance, cancellation was considered as a scandal due to high value of this show by many people, especially attendants of the show, and leaving some non finished and not started planned games.

Show had to be restored in 2016 as Większa gra (The Greater Game) in changed formula, but eventually plans were cancelled.

The Swedish version of this quiz was Kvitt eller dubbelt (1957–1994).

• The Honeymooners: "The $99,000 Answer" (first aired January 28, 1956); Ralph becomes a contestant on a quiz show, but nervously answers his first question incorrectly.
• The Phil Silvers Show: "It's for the Birds". Bilko discovers one of his platoon is an expert on birds. He signs Pvt. Honnegan (played by Fred Gwynne) up for 'The $64,000 Question' TV show. First broadcast on September 25, 1956.
• Fox-Terror[16] (Looney Tunes short, 1957)
• The Jack Benny Program: Hal March Show (#8.3) (1957). Host Hal March appears in Jack Benny's version of the game show.