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. Van Doren, who admitted his television quiz show performances in the 1950s had been rigged, died on Tuesday, April 9, 2019, in Canaan, Conn. 2, 1959 file photo, Charles Van Doren sits as a witness before Congress in Washington during a hearing on rigged television game shows.
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