The Sponsor’s Question: Revlon and The $64,000 Question

In June 1955 a lipstick company bought a quiz show. Revlon became the sole sponsor of The $64,000 Question, and for the next three years the programme sold its lipsticks and nail enamels to an audience that, on one evening, reached 55 million people.^[1][2]

It was the most successful piece of cosmetics advertising of the decade. It also put a makeup company in the room when the questions were being decided.

Selling lipstick on television was not new. Hazel Bishop had shown what it could do, becoming the country’s largest television cosmetics advertiser by 1953.^[3] What Revlon bought in June 1955 was a programme of its own: The $64,000 Question, produced by Louis G. Cowan for CBS, with Revlon as its only sponsor.^[4][5]

It worked at once. By July 1956 the Question and its spin-off, The $64,000 Challenge, were the two top shows on American television.^[5]

The two companies used the medium in opposite ways. Hazel Bishop’s marketer moved its money from programme to programme every six months — “we’ve skimmed the audience,” he explained, which was why the company had dropped Stop the Music for NBC’s Cameo Theatre.^[3] Revlon stayed with one show, and let the show become the company’s address on the schedule.

Revlon’s sales rose from $33,604,000 to $51,646,000 in 1955, although the show was on air for only six months of that year.^[6] The two accounts used here agree on the size of the jump: a rise of 54 per cent in the first six months.^[7]

The company went public on 7 December 1955. Its shares opened at $12, passed $30 within weeks and were split two-for-one in 1956; by 1958, when the show ended, sales stood at $110,363,000.^[6] Some of the gain came straight from a rival. Revlon’s share of the lipstick market rose from 15 to 28 per cent while Hazel Bishop’s fell from 28 to 24.^[8]

Revlon did not merely pay. In the fall of 1955 direction of the show was given to Martin Revson, Charles Revson’s brother and second in command at the company, and “at weekly meetings chaired by Martin and sometimes attended by Charles, every aspect of the program was reviewed.”^[9]

Charles Revson’s instruction for the spin-off was characteristically short: “Get me some famous faces and make them smart.”^[9]

A contestant on The $64,000 Challenge, the Rev. Charles E. “Stony” Jackson, told a grand jury that he had been given answers during “screening.”^[11] The producer Shirley Bernstein said she repeated questions to contestants “either because the contestant was very nervous or the sponsor had requested a particular outcome of a match.”^[12]

Her colleague Mert Koplin estimated that between 60 and 70 per cent of the winners on his two shows received some “help,” often without knowing it. Asked why, he said: “We had to.”^[12] By October 1958 both Twenty-One and the Question were off the air.^[11]

The scandal ended the big-money quiz. It did not end the lesson the cosmetics industry had drawn from it: television, as one historian of the industry puts it, had dramatically affected the sale of cosmetics in the United States.^[13] The habit of buying an audience — Hazel Bishop’s marketer called it skimming — outlived the programmes that taught it.^[14]

It left a pattern the industry kept: a product, a face to sell it, and an audience bought at the moment it was paying attention.

The premiere is dated 5 June 1955 by one source and 7 June by another; it is given here as June 1955.^[15][16]

The sources cited here do not settle how much Charles or Martin Revson knew of the rigging. They record a sponsor that reviewed every aspect of the programme each week, and producers who described outcomes the sponsor had requested; they record no finding against either brother, and this account asserts none.^[17]