Challenger

"She's terrifying." says Charles Van Doren. "She knows everything!" Quiz Champ Van Doren was referring to his latest and ablest challenger in the gaming booths of Twenty One: Vivienne Nearing. 30. a blonde and pretty lawyer with a hard-candy smile who next week (NBC. Monday night at 9) threatens to chop a chunk out of Van Doren's $143,000 prize money.

In an early round on Twenty One, Vivienne Nearing's husband Victor, also a lawyer, fell before Van Doren's erudition --one of his 13 victims in 13 weeks. So Vivienne Nearing. who has a weakness for parlor quiz games, decided to recoup the family honor. On the three-to four-hour, 363-question test given to would-be Twenty One contestants, Vivienne scored third highest in the show's history--just ahead of John Kieran Jr. and just behind Van Doren (her husband was seventh). A sometime painter, pianist and Double-Crostics fan, she has a bachelor's degree (cum laude) from Queens College. New York, an M.A. and LL.B. from Columbia, has served as a legal assistant to Chief Justice Arthur Vanderbilt of the New Jersey Supreme Court. With Husband Victor, Vivienne lives in a 3 1/2-room Greenwich Village apartment only four blocks from Van Doren.

After her first match against Van Doren two weeks ago, Mrs. Nearing spent the weekend poring over the Encyclopaedia Britannica. But none of her hunches paid off. Still she managed to tie Van Doren and push the stakes to $1,000 a point.

"No more boning up." she decided after that. "Knowledge is for a different end, for a man to know himself and the universe better. This is just a game."

For a game that brings diverse eggheads together. Vivienne and Charles play it remarkably alike. Last week, in their second playoff at $1,500 a point, both headed straightaway for the harder, highpoint questions, got all the answers and carried the deadlock to $2,000 a point. On a question about the six Vice Presidents of the U.S. who went on to be elected to the presidency, both minds clicked along the same track of thought, got three chronologically (Adams. Jefferson, Van Buren), jumped to the latest--Harry Truman--then to Coolidge and then agonized for a while before naming Teddy Roosevelt. Van Doren, who risks losing $42,000, perhaps even more, of his big pot, was beginning to chafe at the tension: "It's like a full house in a poker game when there's a lot of money going." Vivienne Nearing. whose policy is to go for the big questions because she knows that that is Van Doren's game, will probably stick to her plunger's game in the return match. "If you're going to be killed," she said, "be killed for a lion instead of a lamb."

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