![]() "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." In a February 1957 cover story on Van Doren, Time magazine marveled at the "fascinating, suspense-taut spectacle of his highly trained mind at work." He made 14 electrifying appearances on "Twenty-One" in late 1956 and early '57, vanquishing 13 competitors and winning a then-record $129,000. "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.īefore his downfall, he was a ratings sensation. He spent the following decades largely out of the public eye. The handsome scion of a prominent literary family, Van Doren was the central figure in the TV game show scandals of the late 1950s and eventually pleaded guilty to perjury for lying to a grand jury that investigated them. ![]() ![]() He died of natural causes Tuesday at a care center for the elderly in Canaan, Connecticut, said his son, John Van Doren. 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. Charles Van Doren has died at the age of 93.
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