Charismatic star of 1950s TV publicly confessed to cheating on quiz show

Charles Van Doren, who has died aged 93, was one of the first intellectual stars of the television era as a contestant on the NBC show Twenty One, who quickly became America’s leading villain after admitting that his winning streak on the popular game show had been rigged.

As many as 50 million Americans tuned in to watch what they thought were ordinary people hitting it big on the show. But in fact Twenty One had been scripted down to the dramatic pauses and theatrical stutters as

Van Doren ‘‘struggled’’ to recall the answers that producers had fed him beforehand.

In a 90-minute confession before a congressional committee, the charismatic Van

Doren – whose popularity in the late 1950s had been compared to Elvis Presley’s

– admitted: ‘‘I have deceived my friends, and I had millions of them.’’

The fallout was nothing short of a morality play acted out on a national stage. President Dwight Eisenhower called the deception ‘‘a terrible thing to do to the American public’’. The writer John Steinbeck raged against ‘‘the cynical immorality of my country’’.

An extensive investigation of the game show industry found cheating was commonplace, and almost all prime-time quiz shows were pulled from the air. Congress held fullscale hearings, and federal regulations of quiz shows were instituted.

The day Van Doren came clean to Congress in 1959, he lost two jobs. NBC fired him from his $50,000-a-year position as a Today show correspondent, and Columbia University asked him to resign as an assistant professor.

He and nine other contestants who had appeared on one of three NBC shows – Twenty One, Tic Tac Dough and High Low – pleaded guilty to perjury and were given suspended sentences. Almost all the producers lost their jobs and were unofficially blacklisted. The judge, who could have jailed the contestants, said their exposure to national scorn was punishment enough. When asked outside court what he planned to do after the legal proceedings were over, Van Doren responded: ‘‘For me it will never be over.’’

He slipped into obscurity and moved to Chicago. He used a family connection to land a job as an editor at Encyclopaedia

Britannica, where he stayed for more than 20 years. He travelled for Britannica, led seminars on philosophy and returned to teaching. In 2008, he was teaching English at the University of Connecticut.

‘‘So much with Charlie began with the fact that he was the most charming man in the Western hemisphere,’’ colleague Robert Mchenry said. ‘‘He was gracious, kind and awfully easy to work for.’’

He wrote under a pseudonym for years, but eventually reclaimed his own name and wrote

and edited a number of well-regarded books, including The Joy of Reading (1985) and A History of Knowledge (1991).

In 1994, the feature film Quiz Show revived interest in the scandal. The movie, directed by Robert Redford, starred the rakish Ralph Fiennes as Van Doren and used as its advertising tag line: ‘‘Fifty million people watched, but no-one saw a thing.’’

Charles Lincoln Van Doren was born in New York City into a family of intellectual achievers. His father, Mark, won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry and his mother, Dorothy, was a novelist and an editor. An uncle won a Pulitzer for his biography of Benjamin Franklin. As a child, Van Doren played word games with the philosopher Mortimer Adler and humorist James Thurber.

Partly to escape the shadow of his father and uncle, Van Doren started studying maths at Columbia but switched to English and worked towards a doctorate. He won a

fellowship to Cambridge but dropped out, attended the Sorbonne and hitch-hiked around Europe.

Stories vary as to how he became a game show contestant, but it seems Twenty One producer Al Freedman convinced him that he could win prize money in six figures by beating the reigning champion Herb Stempel. When he asked Freedman why he was so certain that he would succeed, Freedman responded that TV was show business, and every show was controlled in some way.

‘‘He always felt he was in the shadow of his father and family. There was this one shortcut, one direct route to move out quickly and get his own light,’’ said Julian Krainin, a producer who met Van Doren while researching the 1992 documentary The Quiz Show Scandal. ‘‘That shortcut involved a Faustian deal with the devil. It was to cheat.’’

In March 1957, he won $129,000, a quiz show record at the time, the equivalent in 2019 of $1.15 million. Stempel, bitter at losing in a fixed game and resentful that producers wouldn’t let him have an honest chance to regain his crown, sought out reporters to write about the scandal, but could provide no corroborating evidence.

The New York district attorney’s office launched an investigation of quiz shows in 1958 that showed rigging was rampant but, for reasons that were never made clear, the judge impounded all the evidence. On a hunch, Richard Goodwin – then a rookie congressional lawyer – reopened the case and pieced together the truth. His findings led to congressional hearings and the passage of laws regulating quiz shows.

Testifying before Congress in 1959, Van Doren’s confession began: ‘‘I would give almost anything I have to reverse the course of my life in the last three years.’’

For the most part, he avoided publicly commenting about the controversy until 2008, when, at 82, he wrote an article for The New Yorker. A mostly dispassionate recounting of events, the essay revealed little about why he took part in the televised deception. He imagined someone asking, ‘‘Aren’t you Charles Van Doren?’’ and his response: ‘‘Well, that’s my name, I say to myself, but I’m not who you think I am – or, at least, I don’t want to be.’’ – Los Angeles Times