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Charles Van Doren, Contestant in Quiz-Show Scandal, Dies at 93

Charles Van Doren, Contestant in Quiz-Show Scandal, Dies at 93

(Bloomberg) -- Charles Van Doren, who deceived millions of U.S. television viewers in the 1950s as the winning contestant on a rigged game show that was the subject of a movie directed by Robert Redford almost four decades later, has died. He was 93.

Van Doren died of natural causes Tuesday at a care center for the elderly in Canaan, Connecticut, his son, John Van Doren told the Associated Press. The funeral services will be private.

The Columbia University English instructor won about $128,000 on NBC’s “Twenty-One” in 1956 and 1957 before a congressional investigation revealed that the show’s producers were feeding the correct answers to contestants in a bid to boost ratings. Seventeen participants were arrested and indicted, though none received prison sentences. The producers and host, Jack Barry, were exiled by the industry for years.

Charles Van Doren, Contestant in Quiz-Show Scandal, Dies at 93

Van Doren, the son and nephew of Columbia professors, sat in one of the show’s two isolated booths, where contestants were asked to risk points on increasingly difficult questions, aiming to reach a score of 21. Van Doren, who appeared on the cover of Time magazine in 1957, became a celebrity when he defeated Herb Stempel, who had a six-week run on the show.

Scripted Loss

The new champion was scripted off the program in the same year when he “lost” to lawyer Vivienne Nearing after failing to name the king of Belgium.

“I was almost able to convince myself that it did not matter what I was doing because it was having such a good effect on the national attitude to teachers, education and the intellectual life,” Van Doren said before a panel of the House Committee on Interstate and Foreign Commerce in 1959. “At the same time, I was winning more money than I had ever had or even dreamed of having.”

A Hollywood film, with the title “Quiz Show” and starring Ralph Fiennes as Van Doren, recreated the scandal in 1994. It was nominated for four Oscars, including best picture and best director. Van Doren turned down a $100,000 offer to assist with the movie, he wrote in an article for the New Yorker in 2008, the first time he had commented on the event in a half century.

Early Years

Charles Lincoln Van Doren was born on Feb. 12, 1926, in New York. His father, Mark Van Doren, was a poet and critic who won a Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1940 and was a mentor to writers as a professor of English at Columbia. His mother, the former Dorothy Graffe, was a novelist.

Van Doren earned a bachelor’s degree at St. John’s College in Annapolis, Maryland; a master’s in astrophysics at Columbia and a doctorate in English at Columbia. He also studied at Cambridge University in England and at the Sorbonne in Paris. Van Doren became an instructor of English at Columbia in 1955, earning $4,400 a year.

His first contact at NBC was producer Al Freedman, whom Van Doren met through a friend. Freedman groomed Van Doren as Stempel’s successor on the show and talked him into taking part in a scripted program that would win him a lot of money.

“I swear to you, no one will ever know,” Freedman said, according to Van Doren’s account in the New Yorker. “It will be just between you and me.”

Worried Look

Van Doren’s run lasted from November 1956 until March 1957 and he was coached throughout on how to deliver his answers: with pauses, hesitant comments and always with a worried look.

Following his loss to Nearing, Van Doren worked for NBC as a consultant for public-service and educational broadcasting at a salary of $50,000 a year, and later as a reporter at the White House. He also did segments on Dave Garroway’s “Wide Wide World” and “Today” shows.

After lying to a grand jury and pleading guilty to perjury, Van Doren began a new career at Encyclopedia Britannica in Chicago, where he was vice president of editorial while writing and editing books. He retired in 1982 at age 56.

Van Doren lived in later years in Cornwall, Connecticut. He and his wife of more than 50 years, Gerry, taught English at the Torrington campus of the University of Connecticut. They had a daughter, Elizabeth, and a son.

To contact the reporter on this story: David Henry in Frankfurt at sgittelson@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Crayton Harrison at tharrison5@bloomberg.net, Chuck Stevens, Rob Golum

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