August 27, 1958—Herbert Stempel, former champion on the TV quiz show “Twenty-One,” seething over the popularity of the man who unseated him, Charles Van Doren, told Manhattan prosecutor Joe Stone that the show was fixed. The charge started a series of revelations that were like acid raining pouring on the game show history—slow, inexorable, a stain on the reputation of the television industry.
Van Doren’s memoir of the scandal, printed last month in The New Yorker, held special interest for me, and not merely due to the fact that I’d seen the “American Experience” special and Robert Redford docudrama Quiz Show based on those events. The legend of his father, a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet who taught the likes of Thomas Merton and Jack Kerouac, left residual luster for the English Department when I entered Columbia University in 1978. The whole family, it seems, had some kind of connection to the school: Charles himself was an English instructor there at the time he rocketed to fame and notoriety; uncle Carl had been on the faculty before leaving to become a Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer; and Charles’ son and nephew would both graduate from the college in the 1980s.
The blogger of My Open Wallet has an interesting analysis of Van Doren’s piece. Van Doren’s downfall, she believes, was “tied to a desire for money”—something she can’t understand, given that he came from a privileged background. As fine as her piece is, though, I believe it misses the point. Whatever money Charles received from his father, it would not have been through his own efforts.
The issue of identity, I think, was crucial here. As an instructor, Charles was so overshadowed by his father that even his own students didn’t take much notice of his celebrity on Twenty-One.
Or consider what to me is the most artfully constructed scene in the piece—his springtime walk down a country road with his father. The scene and the accompanying dialogue set up something out of Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken”—an alternative path not pursued, ushering in a lifetime of regrets.
As Charles recalls the scene, his father was dressed “in overalls, denim shirt, and boots, like the farmers he was descended from.” Tellingly, this was “the father I loved best,” not the elegant, erudite academic he could never match on the turf of Morningside Heights.
Had Charles Van Doren’s account been written before Quiz Show, it would have provided screenwriters—and the marvelous Paul Scofield, playing his father—with wonderful elliptical dialogue, practically Jamesian in its undertones, as father and son find a lifetime of questions hanging between them but no way to resolve them, especially this one: “You know, I’ve never been certain you wanted to live my life over again—be a professor at Columbia or anywhere.”
New York Times blogger Stanley Fish takes issue with this same reserve, asking why Van Doren did not confront the issues that readers had on their minds: “Why did you do it? What was going on in your mind? What about the moral issues?” Fish seems to have missed a key point, something strongly implied in the country road scene between Charles and Mark: Father and son came from a time far removed from our own, before the Oprah-Larry King culture of going on national talk shows for absolution.
I did like another aspect of the piece: its reminder that, despite television’s attempt to drive the game-show hosts off the air, certain aspects of so-called “reality shows” hark bark to the worst aspects of the game shows: the distortion of real people into more conflict characters; the manipulative music; the willingness to bend people to her purposes.
Van Doren’s memoir of the scandal, printed last month in The New Yorker, held special interest for me, and not merely due to the fact that I’d seen the “American Experience” special and Robert Redford docudrama Quiz Show based on those events. The legend of his father, a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet who taught the likes of Thomas Merton and Jack Kerouac, left residual luster for the English Department when I entered Columbia University in 1978. The whole family, it seems, had some kind of connection to the school: Charles himself was an English instructor there at the time he rocketed to fame and notoriety; uncle Carl had been on the faculty before leaving to become a Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer; and Charles’ son and nephew would both graduate from the college in the 1980s.
The blogger of My Open Wallet has an interesting analysis of Van Doren’s piece. Van Doren’s downfall, she believes, was “tied to a desire for money”—something she can’t understand, given that he came from a privileged background. As fine as her piece is, though, I believe it misses the point. Whatever money Charles received from his father, it would not have been through his own efforts.
The issue of identity, I think, was crucial here. As an instructor, Charles was so overshadowed by his father that even his own students didn’t take much notice of his celebrity on Twenty-One.
Or consider what to me is the most artfully constructed scene in the piece—his springtime walk down a country road with his father. The scene and the accompanying dialogue set up something out of Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken”—an alternative path not pursued, ushering in a lifetime of regrets.
As Charles recalls the scene, his father was dressed “in overalls, denim shirt, and boots, like the farmers he was descended from.” Tellingly, this was “the father I loved best,” not the elegant, erudite academic he could never match on the turf of Morningside Heights.
Had Charles Van Doren’s account been written before Quiz Show, it would have provided screenwriters—and the marvelous Paul Scofield, playing his father—with wonderful elliptical dialogue, practically Jamesian in its undertones, as father and son find a lifetime of questions hanging between them but no way to resolve them, especially this one: “You know, I’ve never been certain you wanted to live my life over again—be a professor at Columbia or anywhere.”
New York Times blogger Stanley Fish takes issue with this same reserve, asking why Van Doren did not confront the issues that readers had on their minds: “Why did you do it? What was going on in your mind? What about the moral issues?” Fish seems to have missed a key point, something strongly implied in the country road scene between Charles and Mark: Father and son came from a time far removed from our own, before the Oprah-Larry King culture of going on national talk shows for absolution.
I did like another aspect of the piece: its reminder that, despite television’s attempt to drive the game-show hosts off the air, certain aspects of so-called “reality shows” hark bark to the worst aspects of the game shows: the distortion of real people into more conflict characters; the manipulative music; the willingness to bend people to her purposes.
Van Doren reminds us, for instance, not just about the grubby ways that the producers of the show used to manipulate appearance (e.g., long, drawn-out answers, a contestant's patting his brow in the hot glass booths) but the more subtle but outrageous distortions of reality (Herb Stempel wasn't a down-on-his-luck City College student but a married man whose wife, wearing a Persian lamb-coat, had to be shooed from the set to avoid blowing his cover).
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