As triumph became scandal, he initially denied he had been given advance answers, but finally admitted that the show was not as it seemed
HARTFORD, Conn. — Charles Van Doren, the dashing young academic whose meteoric rise and fall as a corrupt game show contestant in the 1950s inspired the movie “Quiz Show” and served as a cautionary tale about the staged competitions of early television, has died. He was 93.
“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. Later, as the triumph unraveled into scandal, he 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.
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.” 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.
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