The Wizard of Quiz

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TV's brightest new face wears an agony that in only ten weeks has grown as familiar to millions as Ed Murrow's cigarette or Arthur Godfrey's tea bag. Clamped in a vise of earphones, the eyes roll heavenward and squeeze shut, the brow sweats and furrows, the teeth gnaw at the lower lip. But the weekly torment of concentration always ends in triumph for Charles Lincoln Van Doren, 30, who has already won $122,000--more than any other quiz contestant in history--and is still going strong on NBC's Twenty One (Mon. 9 p.m., E.S.T.). Van Doren. a Columbia University English instructor who inherits the brilliance of the literary Van Doren clan, also enjoys a stranger triumph. Just by being himself, 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.

Though he has never bothered to own a TV set, Charlie Van Doren now has such influence on the viewing habits of others that he may swing a major victory in the war between the two big networks. Besides cutting down Jackie Gleason--a deed performed by Perry Como--NBC has long yearned to break two other major CBS strangleholds on the TV audience: Sunday night's Ed Sullivan Show and Monday night's I Love Lucy. Last week, when Charlie Van Doren appeared as a guest on the Steve Allen Show, it topped the Sullivan show in the ratings. Nobody wanted to credit Van Doren entirely, but oddly enough, Allen had beaten Sullivan only once before--when one of his guests was Elvis Presley. Since Van Doren piled up $99,000 on Twenty One. the show has steadily shaved Lucy's lead, and the industry is standing by in anticipation of at least a temporary upset in the balance of power when the two shows again collide head-on next Monday night at 9 o'clock. "I don't say we'll catch Lucy" crowed Matthew Rosenhaus, president of Pharmaceuticals, Inc., who sponsors the show for his Geritol tonic (for "tired blood"), "but I think we're going to give her a run for her money."

Across the Board. Van Doren, whom many a grateful parent regards as TV's own health-restoring antidote to Presley, is no narrow specialist like the culinary Marine captain or the opera-buff shoemaker of The $64,000 Question, but an agile Jack-of-all-subjects. He is an engaging, curly-haired, lanky (6 ft. 2 1/2 in., 160 lbs.) image of the all-American boy--"so likable," gushed the Chicago American's TV Critic Janet Kern, "that he has come to be a 'friend' whose weekly visits the whole family eagerly anticipates." Along with this charm, he combines the universal erudition of a Renaissance man with the nerve and cunning of a riverboat gambler and the showmanship of the born actor.

Uniquely among TV quiz shows, Twenty One is shrewdly designed to test the same odd combination of many-sided learning and the gambler's art. Packaged and owned by M.C. Jack Barry and Dan Enright, the show may pop questions in any of 108 categories of information that range across the board of knowledge. Moreover, though the contestant stakes none of his own money at the outset, he risks his winnings every time he chooses to play.

The game isolates its two contestants in glass-walled booths. Each tries to amass 21 points by answering questions in categories over which he has no choice. The questions are worth from one to eleven points according to difficulty, and by picking the number, he can choose how hard a question he wants (Van Doren's frequent strategy is to pick the tough 10-and 11-point questions and go for a quick 21). At the end of the second round, either contestant can stop the game if he thinks he is ahead. The winner gets $500 a point for the difference between his score and the loser's--paid out of the loser's stake, if any. In case the opponents tie at 21, each game necessary for the play-off is played for an additional $500 a point.

Thus after four tie games. Van Doren once found himself playing for $2,500 a point against a Manhattan textbook writer named Ruth Miller. He won 21-0, sweeping up $52,500. In all, he has mowed down ten opponents, including lawyers, teachers and an ex-college president, by tackling 50 questions on such subjects as Shakespeare, baseball, chemistry, art, medicine, explorers and the American Revolution. Over the weeks, while groaning, muttering and mugging, he has managed a staggering variety of hard ones, e.g., identifying the main Balearic Islands (Majorca, Minorca, Iviza and Formentera); the only three baseball players who have amassed more than 3,500 hits (Ty Cobb, Cap Anson, Tris Speaker); the process of photosynthesis. On the six occasions when he has muffed questions, e.g., the identity of the Republican vice-presidential candidate who died before Election Day in 1912 (James S. Sherman), Van Doren's luck and gambling skill have averted defeat.

Lion Follows Christian. Twenty One has built its week-to-week suspense on whether Van Doren will keep plunging or quit while he is so far ahead. By now, he risks little to keep going. It would take eleven tie games followed by a 21-0 defeat to wipe out his winnings. His income-tax bracket is so high that if he were defeated in a game that cost him, say, $20,000, he would actually be out of pocket only $2,200 (see chart). Of the $122,000 he has won, income taxes will let the unmarried, $4,400-a-year instructor keep perhaps as little as $32,600.*

Already a pioneer in the stratosphere of quiz shows, Van Doren has only a fictitious precedent if he decides to press on. In a 1950 movie comedy, Champagne for Caesar, Ronald Colman played an omniscient scholar who almost wins a quiz-show sponsor's $40 million soap company. Says Sponsor Rosenhaus: "Everybody keeps asking if Van Doren is going to win the Geritol company. But we're safe." Geritol's contract with Barry & Enright limits its annual outlay for prizes to $520,000; anything over that comes out of the producers' pocket. So far, Van Doren's winnings have been running Barry & Enright into the hole at the rate of $2,200 a week. Nevertheless, they are eager for him to keep playing. If the show's rating keeps climbing, especially if it tops Lucy, it could become a property worth $1,000,000 or more to them.

Because Van Doren can use up only a few contestants a week, the producers manage to keep the other booth stocked with competitors brainy enough to pass a tough written qualifying exam ("The hardest one I ever took," according to Van Doren). Last week they had "ten or 15" ready, but felt that only three or four of those could be flung against Van Doren. Reason: the rest lack an imposing background and the audience might think that they were merely lambs being led to slaughter. One of the waiting eligibles is John Kieran Jr., 35, son of the original Information Please panel member, who declined an invitation himself. Much as they now want Van Doren to go on, the producers also foresee a chance that audiences may tire of his winning streak. As the Van Doren family's friend, Clifton Fadiman, puts it: "Sooner or later he's going to stop being a Christian and start being a lion."

"I'm Aghast." Even if they grow blase or hostile toward Van Doren as an unbeatable contestant, it is difficult to imagine viewers tiring of the fascinating, suspense-taut spectacle of his highly trained mind at work. Breathing heavily, Charlie coaxes elusive answers out of odd corners of his brains by talking to himself, muttering little associated fragments of knowledge. Like a boxer staying down for a count of nine, he takes all the time he can possibly get ("Let's skip that part, please, and come back to it"). When trying to identify the character in La Traviata who sings the aria Sempre libera, he half-whispered: "She sings it right at the end of a party given by ... What's her name! Soprano. Her name is like . . . Violetta. Violetta!" Some viewers get the feeling that he knows most of the answers immediately and simply makes the audience squirm for the money he gets. But Charlie and those who know him best insist that it is actually his technique of ferreting out the answers ("You can see him making the thinking connections").

Van Doren is the first to admit that he is no genius and can claim neither a photographic memory nor total recall. Indeed, most of his education was in schools that had little interest in memory work or tests, regarded facts as mere accessories in the handling of ideas and the development of taste and reasoning. Some of his classmates at St. John's College in Annapolis, famed for its "great books" course and its cloistered devotion to scholarship, say that Van Doren's quiz wizardry flies ironically in the face of what the college and Charlie himself stand for. So does Philosopher Mortimer J. (How To Read a Book) Adler, a longtime friend, who admits "my own low fascination with the show" but adds: "I'm aghast that anyone would have this kind of information in his head. I wouldn't be caught dead with it. I just can't believe it isn't a mental burden."* Others, including faculty members at St. John's itself, point out that Van Doren's mind comes through on TV not as a card-index file but as a reasoning instrument that explores a memory clearly embedded in taste.

"A Bunch of Uncles." For his freakish TV success and, more important, for being the remarkable young man he is, Charles Van Doren owes most to the remarkable Van Doren family (see box). Says a friend: "I have always thought the Van Dorens the most successful family I've ever experienced in terms of closeness, intellectual vitality, mutual respect, in terms of exchange of ideas and the flow of electricity that keeps everybody learning all the time. Charlie spent his whole life saturated in this sort of thing." His father is Mark Van Doren, 62, Pulitzer Prizewinning poet and professor of English at Columbia; his mother, Dorothy, is a onetime editor (on The Nation) who has published five novels; his late Uncle Carl, whom he idolized, was a Pulitzer Prize biographer, a topflight literary critic and, like Mark, a prolific man of letters who wrote in virtually every form that exists between covers.

Mark's family shuttled between a sprawling 18th century farmhouse on 150 acres in Cornwall, Conn, and a house on Greenwich Village's Bleecker Street, where an evening's conversation struck sparks from a roomful of such guests as Carl, Mortimer Adler, Clifton Fadiman, Critic Joseph Wood Krutch, Columnist Franklin P. Adams, Lawyer Morris L. Ernst, Novelist Sinclair Lewis. "We'd be talking along," recalls Fadiman, "and then we'd look up and there would be two little kids in pajamas, hanging over the banister, eavesdropping." Charles's mother would pack him and his younger brother John, now 28 and an instructor in American civilization at Brandeis University, off to bed. But Charlie never stood in awe of the guests. "They were like a bunch of uncles to him," says Fadiman. As a tot, Charlie played with Philosopher Adler at a highbrow game of "neologizing" (inventing words in sentences to sound like a foreign language). As a youth, he played word games with Cornwall Neighbor James Thurber, who was so taken with Van Doren's acting skill ten years ago as the lead in an amateur production of The Male Animal that he recently began trying--before Charlie became famous--to persuade him to take a role in a play he is preparing for Broadway next season.

The Dictionary as Literature. Charlie and his family say he was "slow getting started," did not walk until he was 18 months or talk until he was two. His records at the City and Country School, a progressive school in Greenwich Village, seem strangely prophetic: at four, "one of the best block builders in the group; his dramatic play is very vivid"; at six, "outstanding for clear thinking and intelligent planning"; at eight, "a ready fund of first-hand knowledge." His mother taught him to read at five during a Connecticut winter away from school. He remembers his first book: The Little Fir Tree. By the time he was eight, his parents would find him with his light on at 11 p.m., reading anything that was handy. "Children should be allowed to read things they don't understand completely," says Mark. "We had thousands of books around the house. God knows what he read!" By nine he was devouring books on baseball; the elder Van Dorens read up on the subject to please their children and soon the whole family was expert. Adler recalls grumpily: "I can remember dinner parties where I was frankly bored by all this talk about who batted what when."

From his father, Charlie learned a passion for getting facts straight by checking them in reference books. Friends have often seen Mark go to a dictionary or encyclopedia a dozen times during a conversation. But Charlie also developed a passion for reading a dictionary as living literature. "When I look up a word," he says, "I start to browse, and next thing I know, I've read four or five pages." (Now he bones up on the Rand McNally Atlas and the World Almanac before his sessions on the air.) One weekend in his teens, he picked up the Bible and read it through. He feels, however, that he never read in earnest until he decided to try for a Ph.D. in English literature. He systematically read his way through the Columbia library stacks on the subject, averaging 20 books a week for two years.

From Pall to Pernod. When Charlie was eleven, the year he learned to drive a car on the farm, a worried teacher told his father: "Charlie is capable in any direction. But I wonder if he'll ever be able to concentrate on any one thing." To the greater glory of Twenty One, the fear proved well grounded. In Manhattan's High School of Music and Art, Charlie Van Doren studied the clarinet to become a concert artist. But though he ran up a 95 average and became the school's first student to qualify for college at the end of his junior year, he abandoned music as a profession. He has since picked up piano and guitar by ear. After graduating from St. John's cum laude in 1947, he decided to become an astrophysicist, partly, he now thinks, because he wanted to get out of the shadow of his father and uncle. In graduate school at Columbia he soured on astronomy, took his master's degree in higher mathematics with a thesis on An Introduction to Inversive Geometry. He still regards mathematics as "the most beautiful of all human activities," but dropped it as a career on deciding that his talent for the subject equipped him for nothing more creative than teaching it.

Then, "with tremendous relief," Charlie began studying for a Ph.D. in his father's field, "but I still refused to admit that I might follow in my father's footsteps as a teacher." In 1951 he won a $3,000 traveling fellowship--the same one that Mark had won at Columbia in 1919--and went to Cambridge University to research his dissertation on 18th century English Poet William Cowper. But Cambridge proved frustrating, and before the academic year was out, he left abruptly for Paris "under something of a pall, without fulfilling certain obligations." According to his Cambridge landlady, who has a transatlantic eye on his TV winnings, the obligations included -L-22 ($61.60) of unpaid rent.

In Paris, he "rebelled against the order of my life," drank Pernod at the Deux Magots, attended the Sorbonne "desultorily," and began a novel about a young man who sets out to murder his father. Much rewritten since then with his father's encouragement, the novel is still unpublished. But since he returned to the U.S. and finally embraced his father's career as writer and teacher. Charles has broken into print as assistant editor of Fadiman's anthology The American Treasury, and this April Harper's will publish his Lincoln's Commando, a biography on the Union Navy's William B. Gushing, written in collaboration with Ralph H. Roske.

He Can Even Cook. Throughout his career, Van Doren has been so well-rounded that none of his friends ever regarded him as a bookworm. He plays good squash and tennis, won a $60-a-month athletic scholarship at St. John's to coach intramural basketball and baseball, played extracurricular bridge and pool. As a World War II pre-aviation cadet whose initials doomed him to the nickname "V.D.," he became adept at poker. Pooling resources with a buddy named Laural Whipkey, now an advertising man in West Virginia, Corporal Van Doren played poker twelve hours a day, won $3,000 in a year. Says Whipkey: "He figures the percentage to the last decimal. On the TV show, he follows the old Black Jack rule, 'Always hit 16, always stick on 18.' Once on TV when Charlie reached 17, I told my wife that Charlie would call it like Black Jack--and he did." Charlie has spent a night in jail (in Florida, when MPs arrested him for overcelebrating V-E day and adding a bright red tie to his uniform), hitchhiked 4,000 miles around Europe, swum near Barcelona and skied in Switzerland. Says a friend: "He has never wanted for girls. They're usually attractive and not intellectual fireballs." Charlie can even cook. His specialty: chicken pilaff.

The Magic Billfold. "In our senior year," says one of Van Doren's college roommates, "Charlie used to have a recurring dream about a billfold in which there was a $20 bill, and when you took the bill away, there would be another one there." Charlie sought the magic billfold last November when a friend told him about the easy money on Tic-Tac-Dough, another Barry-Enright production. He looked so promising that the producers put him on Twenty One. But Charlie's dream has come true with some nightmarish side effects. "Here I am with all this money and celebrity," he lamented last week, "but I don't have the time or appetite to eat." He has lost 10 lbs. since the ordeal began. To carry him through the foodless day, he keeps cooking himself bigger breakfasts in his sunny, $10-a-month, three-room walkup apartment in Greenwich Village.

The nightmare began when he hit $99,000. Since then, he has given close to 100 interviews, made guest appearances on other TV shows, parried dinner invitations from as far away as Boston and Philadelphia, put up with the same questions from strangers in streets, subways and restaurants ("Whaddaya gonna do with all that money?" "How does that game work anyway?"), and succeeded in getting his telephone number changed just as the phone was about to drive him out of his apartment. From The Bronx to Basutoland, fans have deluged him with 2,000 letters, including 20 outright proposals of marriage, numerous veiled ones, solicitations from investment houses and wildcatters, requests for handouts that add up to more money than he has won. The town of Cornwall (pop. 1,100), where 26 Van Dorens gather each summer, asked him to finance a new fire engine, and some of Charles's schools would like endowments. One scholar suggested that Charlie endow a chair for himself at Columbia. One in four letters comes from a teacher, parent or student thanking Van Doren for taking the curse off studying. "I'm damned happy about those letters," he says.

There are other compensations, some of them strange. Now that he is a celebrity expecting a large sum of money, a cab driver, a tailor and a restaurant have refused to take anything at all in payment for their services. From his savings, Van Doren has splurged mildly on clothes and an extra round of Christmas gifts for his family. The only whim he plans to indulge is to replace his 1948 Studebaker with a 190 SL Mercedes-Benz. He will probably invest the rest of the money.

He has become Columbia's most cherished hero since Sid Luckman was tossing passes at Baker Field. While his colleagues beam in admiring good will, President Grayson Kirk sings his praises as "an able and exciting teacher," the Graduate English Department information desk bears the legend "Only Charles Van Doren Knows All the Answers." and his students decorate the blackboard with such questions as "For $52,500, what did Plato mean by Justice?" At St. John's, where only two faculty members deign to own TV sets, President Richard Weigle went to a neighborhood bar to catch last week's show.

The Eleven-Point Question. Will Van Doren keep gambling on Twenty One? His friends and family are sharply divided on whether he should, and, in his own mind, so is he. Says St. John's Classmate Steven Benedict, now a U.S. Information Agency officer: "He's almost a Greek tragic hero, a vast commercial property being used by Geritol. He has strong opinions about the debasement of values by commercialism, but he can't condemn commercialism now. He's under a kind of Faustian pact with the devil." Says Laural Whipkey: "Charlie will play until he's beaten. That's the kind of guy he is." Van Doren's parents tell him that the show is taking up too much of his time, that he can't possibly be thinking of anything else. "I tell them it isn't so," he says. "But of course, it is." If he decides to stop, he will probably be swayed less by the risk of loss or the dwindling prospect of gain than by the time he needs to write his Ph.D. dissertation and attend to his calling.

The eleven-point question is not whether Van Doren will go on gambling on TV but whether his whole career may-not be about to veer again. His celebrity has drawn a swarm of offers: to appear on TV as guest star, panelist, moderator of his own series, to edit almanacs and write magazine articles. Barry & Enright want him to join them later as a consultant, and NBC is preparing to make him an offer as a performer. Says Charlie: "Everybody in the world knows what I should do except me. Before last November, I knew I wanted to teach and to write. But that acting experience [when he played in The Male Animal] is something I've never forgotten. The histrionic aspect of teaching is one of the things that interest me about the profession. I haven't decided against the TV business on principle. I have rejected a number of specific things simply because they didn't fit a particular image of myself which is very secure in me. I believe in TV as a medium of communication. I think it is potentially the greatest of all."

*Much less than California Construction Engineer Erik Gude, 29, and his wife, Helena, 26, will keep of their winnings on Do You Trust Your Wife? This week their take from the Edgar Bergen quiz show went up to $84,400--but it will be paid out $100 a week over a period of 16 years and taxed accordingly at the rate of $5,200 a year.

* Alexander Pope put it: "The bookful blockhead, ignorantly read, with loads of learned lumber in his head."

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