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On both Take It or Leave It and The $64 Question, contestants were asked questions devised by the series' writer-researcher Edith Oliver. She attempted to make each question slightly more difficult than the preceding one. After answering a question correctly, the contestant had the choice to "take" the prize for that question or "leave it" in favor of a chance at the next question. The first question was worth one dollar, and the value doubled for each successive question, up to the seventh and final question worth $64.

During the 1940s, "That's the $64 question" became a common catchphrase for a particularly difficult question or problem. In addition to the common phrase "Take it or leave it", the show also popularized another phrase, widely spoken in the 1940s as a taunt but now mostly forgotten (except in Warner Bros. cartoons). Chanted in unison by the entire audience when someone chose to risk their winnings by going for the $64 prize, it was vocalized with a rising inflection: "You'll be sorrr-REEEE!"

The $64,000 Question was created by Louis G. Cowan, formerly known for radio's Quiz Kids and the television series Stop the Music. Cowan had difficulty locating sponsorship for The $64,000 Question. Cosmetics giant Helena Rubenstein, which eventually did become a familiar television advertiser, rejected the idea, reportedly because its wealthy founding namesake did not own a television set at the time and had no idea of the medium's advertising potential. The Chrysler Corporation turned down the chance to launch the show because the automaker reportedly feared sponsoring a big-money quiz show would outrage company workers whose wages they were trying not to inflate. A vacuum cleaner company also said no to Cowan, reportedly because the concept would be too glamorous for its product.

Finally, Cowan convinced Revlon. The key: Revlon founder and chieftain Charles Revson knew top competitor Hazel Bishop had fattened its sales through sponsoring the popular This Is Your Life, and he wanted a piece of that action if he could have it. According to Fire and Ice[5] (1976), Andrew Tobias' biography of Revson, Revlon first signed a deal to sponsor Cowan's brainchild for 13 weeks with the right to withdraw when they expired.

The $64,000 Question premiered June 7, 1955 on CBS-TV, sponsored by cosmetics maker Revlon and originating from the start live from CBS-TV Studio 52 in (later the disco-theater Studio 54). The first contestant on the show was Thelma Farrell Bennett, a housewife from Trenton, New Jersey who failed to make it to the first plateau but won a 1955 Cadillac convertible. To increase the show's drama and suspense, it was decided to use an actor rather than a broadcaster as the host. Television and film actor Hal March, familiar to TV viewers as a supporting regular on The and Gracie Allen Show and My Friend Irma, found instant fame as the quiz show's host, and Lynn Dollar stood nearby as his assistant. Author and TV panelist Dr. Bergen Evans was the show's expert authority, and actress Wendy Barrie did the "Living Lipstick" commercials. (Coincidentally, in 1978, Evans and Barrie died within 72 hours of each other.) To capitalize on the initial television success, the show was also simulcast for two months on CBS Radio where it was heard from October 4, 1955 to November 29, 1955.

Almost immediately, The $64,000 Question beat every other program on Tuesday nights in ratings. Broadcast historian Robert Metz, in CBS: Reflections in a Bloodshot Eye, claimed U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower himself did not want to be disturbed while the show was on and that the nation's crime rate, movie theater, and restaurant patronage dropped dramatically when the show aired. It earned the #1 rating spot for the 1955–56 season, holding the distinction of being the only television show to knock out of the #1 spot. Among its imitators or inspirations were The Big Surprise, Tic-Tac-Dough, and Twenty-One.

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, .

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 players took turns answering questions from the same category starting at the $1,000 level. If they each answered a question correctly, the next level would be twice that of the previous level. Starting at the $4,000 level, both players answered the same question while each standing in their own isolation booth. If, at any given level, a player answered correctly with the other player missing a question, the winning player may keep that money and face a new opponent or continue playing against the same challenger at the next money level.

Question contestants sometimes became celebrities themselves for a short while, including 11-year-old Robert Strom (who won $192,000) and Teddy Nadler ($252,000 across both shows), 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 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 McCutcheon, 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.

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 McCutcheon 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. Traveler 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. She also appeared as a guest on NBC's The Martha Raye Show where she was warmly greeted by Martha Raye and fellow guest Tallulah Bankhead. Baseball expert Myrtle Power was made a sports commentator on CBS. Eleven-year-old stock market expert Lenny Ross was asked to open up the New York Stock Exchange. And with only an eighth-grade education, supply clerk Teddy Nadler, an expert on everything, won more money than any other contestant. It was a new kind of hero in America, a common person with the uncommon gift of knowledge."[7] 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 Bob and Ray's The 64-Cent Question. The Program featured Hal March as a contestant in an October 20, 1957 spoof[8] with Benny asking the questions. As a gag, Benny actually appeared as a contestant on The $64,000 Question, 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 (), 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.

Three years after it exploded into a nation's consciousness, Question and Challenge were dead. Having faded in popularity as it was, in the wake of the hugely popular Twenty-One championship of , Question and Challenge were yanked off the air within three months of the quiz show scandal's eruption. Challenge went first on September 14, 1958 with Question – once the emperor of Tuesday-night television – taking its Sunday-night timeslot after a three-month hiatus until it was killed on November 9.

The relatively new but phenomenally popular Dotto, and then Twenty-One, were found to have been rigged and were promptly canceled. Then one Challenge contestant, the Rev. Charles Jackson, told the federal grand jury probing the quiz shows that he received answers during his screening for his appearance. That prompted Challenge's sponsor, the Lorillard Tobacco Company (Kent, Old Gold cigarettes), to drop the show.

The $64,000 Question had the opposite problem: sponsor Revlon – possibly under pressure from its chieftain, Charles Revson, who has been credited with expressing the desire for famous faces that prompted Challenge's expansion to include celebrities - often tried to interfere with the production of Question, including and especially trying to bump contestants it simply disliked, no matter whether the audience liked them. Revson's brother, Martin, was assigned to oversee Question–including heavy discussions of feedback the show received. The would-be bumpees included Joyce Brothers herself, who managed to outwit the question writers and Revlon long enough to win the maximum prize.

It was revealed during Congressional investigations into the quiz show scandal that Revlon was as determined to keep the show appealing - even if it meant manipulating the results – as the producer of Twenty-One (albeit also under sponsor pressure) had been. Unlike Twenty-One and Dotto, where contestants got the answers in advance, Revlon was reportedly far more subtle: they may have depended less on asking questions on the air that a contestant had already heard in pre-air screenings than on switching the questions kept secure in a bank vault at the last minute, to make sure a contestant the sponsor liked would be suited according to his or her chosen expertise.

The most prominent victim may have been the man who launched the franchise in the first place. 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 and not CBS' quiz shows bearing 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.

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.

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, . 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 film 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 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. http://kgarch.org/efg.pdf http://kgarch.org/2ln.pdf http://kgarch.org/818.pdf http://kgarch.org/acg.pdf http://kgarch.org/dig.pdf http://kgarch.org/f8g.pdf http://kgarch.org/9lf.pdf http://kgarch.org/eh4.pdf http://kgarch.org/84e.pdf http://kgarch.org/e9h.pdf http://kgarch.org/6cf.pdf http://kgarch.org/26h.pdf http://kgarch.org/7m4.pdf http://kgarch.org/2l1.pdf