It drew its questions from 108 separate categories of information, which is to say, it needed talking encyclopedias and human almanacs. The resulting play and TV drama take a nuanced, if not necessarily exculpatory, view of events. “Just out of curiosity, Mr. Van Doren, are you in any way related to Mark Van Doren, up at Columbia University, the famous writer?”, “He is your father!” Feigned ecstasy overwhelmed Barry. As it turned out, the extraordinary outburst of soul-searching brought on by the “Van Doren case” signified something far different from that. “I simply ran away.

The main fact is this: When “The $64,000 Question” made its debut on June 7, 1955, over the CBS network, it became, almost at once, the mass-media equivalent of the Klondike gold strike. He boasted of a ‘Very retentive, if not photographic, memory,” and answered 251 of the 363 questions given as a test to would-be “Twenty-One” contestants. Surely the well-bred scion was being built up so that he, the common man triumphant, could knock him down all the more dramatically when they met the second time. Then there was the quiz world’s nemesis, chubby Herbert Stempel of New York, aged twenty-nine, who was winning prize money hand over fist in the autumn of 1956 on a quiz show called ‘Twenty-One.” Stempel’s winning technique was simplicity itself: He got all the questions and answers in advance from the show’s producer, Daniel Enright, “one of the nicest people I ever met before he got greedy enough to enter into such an unholy alliance,” as Enright’s publicity agent was to testify before a congressional committee in October 1959. In the complacency of the Eisenhower era, the country was extremely loath to think ill of the quiz shows, as the Reverend Mr. Jackson discovered to his wonderfully comical dismay. Did “Herb” dare risk his $69,500 against this formidable new challenger?, Jack Barry asked at the start of the show. That Monday evening, October 12, Van Doren telephoned his lawyer (who privately feared for his client’s sanity) and learned that the Harris subcommittee had issued a subpoena ordering him to testify on November 2. It was not until May 20, 1958, that the quiz empire suffered its first wounding blow, the weapon forged in the dressing room of a new daytime quiz show called “Dotto”—“the game that turns dots into pictures and pictures into dollars.” The show’s current winner was stealthily peering into a notebook and being stealthily watched as she did so by the show’s current “standby,” the veteran contestant Eddie Hilgemeier. “Tomorrow I take a dive,” he told a friend. Van Doren returned to New York, held an evasive news conference before an angry, shouting press corps, eluded pursuing reporters in midtown traffic, and eventually retired to his father’s country place in Connecticut. He “would stop people in the streets and tell them the sad story,” recalled Enright’s publicity agent. OK, ‘Quiz’ revisits British game-show cheating scandal, Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window), Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window), Click to share on Reddit (Opens in new window), Batts: Biden off the campaign trail, hiding from voters, Hugh Grant gets mysterious in HBO’s ‘The Undoing’, Boo! Stempel was “too knowledgeable,” and the rigging of quiz shows was “common practice.” In any case, they were “merely entertainment.” Do it, Charles, as a favor to me, urged Freedman, as Van Doren would testify to Congress in the climactic hour of the entire quiz scandal.