NONFICTION - April 19, 1992

PRIME TIME AND MISDEMEANORS: Investigating the 1950s T.V. Quiz Scandal by Joseph Stone and Tim Yohn (Rutgers University Press: $22.95: 310 pp.). By the time the book was closed on the great television quiz-show scandal of the 1950s, 20 former contestants had been convicted of perjury. That may seem like something to boast about, but to former New York district attorney Joseph Stone, who supervised the earliest investigation into the scandal, the convictions are something of an embarrassment: All the big fish--television producers, media executives, and corporate lawyers among them--got away, some quite untainted. Stone has written “Prime Time and Misdemeanors” to remedy the fact that the scandal is now regarded as a historical curiosity, and he succeeds, for it’s quite shocking to learn how quickly the fixing of game shows became routine, and how few people seemed to care. Stone, with free-lance writer Tim Yohn, goes into far more detail than necessary, but occasionally his particulars capture nicely the elaborate nature of the fraud. On “Twenty-One,” for example, a show based loosely on blackjack, all the contestants appeared to sweat in anxiety in their isolation booths even when the producers had given one of them the correct answers beforehand. Why did the tipped-off winner glisten? Because the booth’s air conditioning had been switched off.