One-time academic and later encyclopedia editor and author Charles Van Doren, 93, has died from natural causes. Despite his achievements and his blueblood background, he is best known as the leading figure of the game show scandals of the 1950s. He made piles of money on the NBC quiz show, Twenty-One. He became a national hero and a much-needed alternative to the despised Elvis Presley. How did he do this? He did it the old-fashioned way: by cheating or allowing himself to be talked into cheating.
Van Doren in 1957 was a college instructor at Columbia University making a modest income. He was an intelligent man, but he wasn't so smart he could memorize everything there was to know about everything. Still, he was smart enough to qualify on one of the leading big money game shows, Twenty-One. His brain wasn't the only thing he had going for him. He was young, he was articulate, and he was photogenic. He was also lucky that his opponent was one Herbert Stempel, who was at least as smart he was, but he didn't have the looks. According the producers of the game show and I would imagine the sponsors, Stempel just didn't have what it took, plus he tended to be a little full of himself. It was time to knock him off. Van Doren did want to go on there honestly, but one of the people in the making of the program, Al Freedman, said he had to do what he was asked, and he was fed answers plus had to do all of the stage directions like mopping his brow and so forth. Producer Dan Enright had talked Stempel into throwing the game by giving the incorrect answer to the 1955 Oscar for Best Picture, which was Marty. It all worked beautifully, and Stempel went back into obscurity--seemingly--going to college and working in the public sector. Van Doren, though, got a lucrative job on The Today Show, got married to his girlfriend, Geraldine Bernstein, who later on also taught college, and seemed to have his whole life mapped out for him.
Except, as we know, it didn't. Stempel immediately cried foul when Enright refused to honor his promises to Stempel in exchange for losing and tried to take his case to the public, but it was the Dotto scandal later on that brought down the whole house of cards that was the quiz show scandals. Congress got involved, many contestants, including Van Doren, had lied under oath, and Van Doren's life went into seeming free fall for a time. He left Columbia, got sacked from The Today Show, and forevermore lived in obscurity. An excellent documentary aired on PBS in the 1990s, and a popular movie, the Robert Redford-directed Quiz Show, kept him remembered by the public. Van Doren, did, however, bounce back working for the Encyclopedia Britannica, becoming a disciple of sorts for the irritating Mortimer Adler, and writing a number of books over the years. He and his wife taught on the side.
So just how did Dotto bring down the big money quiz shows? I can remember as an itty-bitty girl in 1958, just three years of age, actually watching that show, which consisted of contestants trying to connect the dots to an image of a celebrity. On one of the broadcasts, one of the few still existing of this show, a young woman by the name of Marie Winn was on the air answering questions. A standby contestant saw a notebook she had left behind. The standby opened the notebook, and lo and behold, there were the answers to the very questions Winn was answering on the air. Edward Hilgemeier, Jr., the standby contestant, immediately went to the authorities, and that, as they say, was that. Dotto, Twenty-One, and the rest of the shows were immediately pulled off the air. Congress made it a crime to rig a game show. The big money game shows disappeared for well over a decade, not surfacing again until many years later. People involved in the shows that were implicated in the rigging, like Twenty-One producers Dan Enright and Jack Barry (Barry was the host of the show and was not involved in the rigging but he was tarnished just the same), were blacklisted for many years from the television industry (though they eventually made a comeback in the 1970s).
New York Times:
Charles Lincoln Van Doren was born in Manhattan on Feb. 12, 1926. He and his younger brother, John, were raised in a milieu of literary figures: Franklin P. Adams, Joseph Wood Krutch, Sinclair Lewis and others.
Charles attended the City and Country School and graduated from the High School of Music and Art in Manhattan. After serving with the Army Air Forces in 1944 and 1945, Mr. Van Doren graduated with honors from St. John’s College at Annapolis, Md., in 1947, and earned a master’s degree in mathematics from Columbia in 1949.
After studies at Cambridge University in England and the Sorbonne in Paris, he returned to New York and in 1955 began teaching at Columbia. He earned a doctorate in literature there in 1959.
A month after his appearances on “Twenty-One” ended in 1957, he married Geraldine Ann Bernstein, whom he had met a year earlier. The couple had two children.
The Times notes his brother, John, died in January.
You can read Van Doren's New Yorker piece here:
Later, I asked my friend to tell me more about Freedman, and she said that he was a producer for Jack Barry and Dan Enright, who created shows like “Tic Tac Dough.” Freedman called me a few days later. When I learned what he wanted, I telephoned Gerry—Geraldine Bernstein, the young woman I had been dating and whom I married six months later.
I told her that Al had persuaded me to take a test and that, depending on how I did, they might want me for a new show called “Twenty-One,” which was structured like blackjack. “The winner gets quite a bit,” I said. “The guy who’s on the show now has already won something like twenty-five thousand dollars.”
“Promise me you won’t agree to do this without talking to me first,” I remember her saying.
“O.K., I promise. They probably won’t ask me.”
They did—at least, Al Freedman did. He called me and told me that his job was on the line. A man named Herb Stempel was winning week after week, but he wasn’t popular and the ratings were suffering.
For the record, here is the Twenty-One episode in question:
And the Dotto episode with Marie Winn. She later became a writer of note:
Herb Stempel gave his take on Charles Van Doren. I hope this video stays up:
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