Quiz-Show Scandal.

Today's hit TV quiz shows have ancestors--with a dirty little secret

When parents told their kids to be like Charles Van Doren, they didn't mean be a phony.

In the winter of 1956-57, Van Doren, a handsome, learned Columbia University instructor, was the popular champion of a TV quiz show called Twenty-One. Name the Balearic Islands--and he did. List the members of George Washington's cabinet--and he did. For week after week, he nailed brain-busting questions like these, becoming a national hero, an all-star intellectual.

Except the whole show was a scam. And when the curtain was ripped off, the nation was so scandalized that quiz shows disappeared. Today, as prime-time quiz shows like Who Wants to Be a Millionaire flood the airwaves for the first time in decades, the nation has changed. In this era of professional wrestling, few Americans would be shocked to find out that a TV show was rigged. But the 1950s were different.

Television was still new. Just 10 percent of Americans owned sets at the start of the decade; by 1960, it was 90 percent. The TV industry made up the rules as it went along, creating brilliant live dramas--and quiz shows on which, supposedly, anything could happen.

The first of these shows, The $64,000 Question, made its debut on CBS in June 1955. It was exciting television, and advertisers pressured producers to keep it that way. Producers grilled contestants beforehand to determine their strong suits. If ratings were sagging with one winner, they could slip in a tough question outside those areas and be pretty sure of getting a new one. One producer recalls being told that the sponsor "thinks the Lincoln expert is boring. He wants you to stiff him."

Question's success spawned imitators, including Twenty-One, which first aired on NBC in September 1956. In this show, contestants had to answer questions from 108 categories. But no one was an expert in 108 fields. To keep viewers from being bored by constant I-don't-knows, producers started giving players the answers in advance.

When the young, clean-cut, intellectual Charles Van Doren appeared in producers' offices, they thought he would be a refreshing change from Twenty-One's reigning champ, a working-class ex-soldier named Herbert Stempel. It didn't hurt that Van Doren was from a famous literary family; his father, Mark Van Doren, was a noted poet. As Charles later recalled, a producer took him to his apartment and told him that

Stempel was unpopular, and was defeating opponents right and left to the detriment of the program.... I asked him to let me go on the program honestly, without receiving help. He told me that I would not have a chance to defeat Stempel because he was too knowledgeable. He also told me that the show was merely entertainment and that giving help to quiz contestants was a common practice and merely a part of show business. This of course was not true, but perhaps I wanted to believe him.

Actually Stempel too, was being coached. When the producers told Stempel to miss an answer he knew--the fact that the movie Marry had won the Academy Award for Best Picture in 1955--he was bitter, because he loved the movie and thought the question was insultingly easy. But vague promises of a future in TV induced Stempel to play along.

He and Van Doren weren't just given answers; they were directed like actors in a play. Van Doren said a producer

instructed me how to answer the questions: to pause before certain of the answers, to skip certain parts and return to them, to hesitate and build up suspense ... he gave me a script to memorize....

The script called for Van Doren to beat Stempel, and that's just what happened. Then Van Doren kept on winning, and millions of viewers tuned in week after week to watch him. He became the first player ever to win $100,000, and

... from an unknown college professor, I became a celebrity. I received thousands of letters and dozens of requests to make speeches, appear in movies... To a certain extent this went to my head.

Van Doren knew his fame was built on fakery. But he told himself he was doing good by making the public appreciate education. When he finally lost to another contestant, he was given a $50,000-a-year contract with NBC, and soon began appearing as a commentator on the Today show.

But trouble loomed. Denied his hoped-for TV career, Stempel had begun talking to newspapers, telling them he had been given answers and then been required to "take a dive." Twenty-One producers tried to discredit Stempel as mentally unstable. But another ex-contestant, James Snodgrass, had mailed himself scripts with questions and answers by registered letter--showing postmarks prior to the actual show dates.

Van Doren didn't come clean. On Today, he denied that he had been given any aid in answering quiz-show questions. Called before a district attorney, he said, "I was shocked when I heard about [Stempel's] accusations, which are absurd." Appearing before a grand jury investigating the charges, he lied once again.

In a sense, I was like a child who refuses to admit a fact in the hope that it will go away. Of course, it did not go away ...

But when a special House of Representatives subcommittee subpoenaed him to appear on November 2, 1959, Van Doren could pretend no more. He finally confessed to knowing participation in a rigged quiz show--and lying about it:

I would give almost anything I have to reverse the course of my life in the last three years. I was involved, deeply involved, in a deception.

It turned out that several quiz shows had been rigged, and the networks promptly canceled those that were still on the air. Van Doren lost his jobs with both Columbia and NBC, and went into seclusion.

President Dwight D. Eisenhower called the quiz-show fixing "a terrible thing to do to the American public." The scandal spurred new laws banning shows that claimed to be contests of skill or knowledge but were really prearranged.

And it came to symbolize a national loss of innocence. Afterward, Americans would be quicker to suspect chicanery behind what they saw and heard--and not just on TV.