Charles Van Doren death: Man whose life inspired Quiz Show film dies, aged 93

Van Doren is known as the central figure in the TV game show scandals of the 1950s

Charles Van Doren is pictured on 14 October, 1959 at New York's Roosevelt Hotel. Van Doren, who admitted his television quiz show performances in the 1950s had been rigged, died on Tuesday, 9 April in Canaan, Connecticut. ((AP Photo))

Charles Van Doren, the former game show contestant whose life inspired the film Quiz Show, has died aged 93.

Van Doren on Tuesday of natural causes at a care centre for the elderly in Canaan, Connecticut, said his son, John Van Doren.

In the 1950s, Van Doren made headlines as a corrupt game show contestant, and his story served as a cautionary tale about the staged competitions of early television.

Born in a prominent literary family, Van Doren was the central figure in the TV game show scandals of the decade and eventually pleaded guilty to perjury for lying to a grand jury that investigated them. He spent the following decades largely out of the public eye.

“It’s been hard to get away, partly because the man who cheated on Twenty-One is still part of me,” he wrote in a 2008 New Yorker essay – his first public comment in years.

Before his downfall, Van Doren was a ratings sensation. He made 14 electrifying appearances on Twenty-One in late 1956 and early 1957, vanquishing 13 competitors and winning a then-record $129,000. NBC hired him as a commentator.

In a February 1957 cover story on Van Doren, Time magazine marvelled at the “fascinating, suspense-taut spectacle of his highly trained mind at work”.

“Just by being himself,” Time wrote, “he has enabled a giveaway show, the crassest of lowbrow entertainments, to whip up a doting mass audience for a new kind of TV idol — of all things, an egghead.”

Later, as the triumph unravelled into scandal, Van Doren initially denied he had been given advance answers, but he finally admitted that the show was rigged.

He retreated to his family’s home in rural West Cornwall, Connecticut, after telling a congressional committee in 1959 that he was coached before each segment of the show.

After spending much of the 1960s and 1970s in Chicago, Van Doren and his wife, Geraldine, returned to Connecticut, residing for years in a small brown bungalow on the family compound. They did some teaching but largely lived in semi-seclusion, refusing to grant interviews and even leaving the country for several weeks when Robert Redford’s film Quiz Show was released in the fall of 1994.

Van Doren refused to cooperate in the movie’s making and declined to meet with actor Ralph Fiennes, who portrayed him in the film. Fiennes later told People magazine that after Van Doren brushed him off, he knocked on his door pretending to be lost so he could observe Van Doren’s movements and speech patterns.

Van Doren broke his silence in 2008, writing an account of his downfall in The New Yorker and how he finally had publicly admitted a half-century earlier that he was “foolish, naive, prideful and avaricious”.

“People who knew the entertainment business didn’t have much doubt about what was going on, although they didn’t speak out,” he wrote.

In light of the large profits the rigged game shows were making, he added, “why would they?”

Van Doren also disclosed that he eventually did watch Quiz Show and laughed at an insulting reference that a character made about him. He said he had been tempted to take a consulting fee from the producers, but his wife talked him out of it.

Van Doren’s family had a proud literary standing at the time of the scandal. His father, Mark Van Doren, was a critic, biographer and poet who won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1940. His uncle, Carl Van Doren, received a Pulitzer in 1939 for a biography of Benjamin Franklin.

Charles Van Doren was himself a rising young academic at Columbia when he became famous on the quiz show. He went on to win $129,000 on the show after defeating Herbert Stempel, a New Yorker portrayed by John Turturro in the movie.

Stempel later went public and said contestants were fed the answers to the questions prior to the show. He said he was told to lose because the show’s producers thought Van Doren had star potential.

In 1962, Van Doren and nine other winners from three NBC shows — Twenty-One, Tic-Tac-Dough and Hi-Lo — pleaded guilty to lying to a grand jury that had investigated the scandal. They were spared jail terms by a judge who said the nation’s scorn was punishment enough.

After the scandal broke, Van Doren lost the $50,000-a-year job NBC gave him when he defeated Stempel. He also was dropped from the faculty at Columbia, where his father had been a professor for decades.

Friends said Van Doren’s family was shocked by his eventual revelation that he had been given the answers in advance.

Van Doren later joined the Institute for Philosophical Research, a nonprofit Chicago think tank, and worked at Chicago-based Encyclopaedia Britannica for many years. Among his books were The Idea of Progress, a philosophical work, and A History of Knowledge; Past, Present, and Future.

Van Doren and his wife had two children, Elizabeth and John.

Additional reporting by AP