Fifties (107 page)

They kept in touch, and the seduction continued. “How much do you make as an instructor?” Freedman asked at one point. “About four thousand dollars a year,” Van Doren answered. Freedman wondered aloud whether a young man could support a family on that salary. For the first time Van Doren asked how much money he might make as a contestant. Freedman explained that he might make as much as $50,000, or even $100,000. Van Doren asked Freedman how much the most recent contestant had won. Sixty thousand dollars, Freedman answered. Van Doren walked down some steps to leave, got to the bottom, and thought to himself,
Sixty thousand dollars! Sixty thousand dollars!
It took his breath away.

The next time they talked, Van Doren asked, “Who would have to know about it?” Freedman sensed that he had him. Just Enright and me, he answered. Freedman pledged to Van Doren that he would never turn him in. There were more talks; the seduction went on for several weeks. Finally, he agreed to go on; at first he asked to play it straight, but then it was explained to him that no one on
Twenty-One
played it straight.

It was a masterful stroke of casting: Van Doren turned out to be a superb performer. In contrast to the unattractive Stempel, he was, in Enright’s phrase, the kind of young man “you’d love to have your daughter marry.” He never seemed to lose his boyish innocence, which in fact he had lost from the start. At the height of his success, Van Doren seemed oddly immune to all the fuss. “Charlie,” Freedman would say. “Do you know that somewhere between 25 and 30 million people watched you last night? Isn’t that amazing?” Van Doren would simply shake his head: “It’s hard for me to picture.” Even more amazed than Charles was his father. Mark Van Doren wrote to his friend and former student Thomas Merton, the poet and Trappist monk, “About fifteen million people have fallen in love with him—and I don’t use the word lightly.”

Perhaps it was the contrast between Charles Van Doren’s innate modesty and the hyped-up atmosphere of the quiz show, but there was no doubt about it—Charles Van Doren, not yet a Columbia Ph.D., merely a $4,000-a-year instructor, was one of television’s first stars, and arguably its first intellectual star. Ironically, even his inner doubts worked for the show: The longer he stayed on the show, the more he hated what he was doing and the more he wanted to get off;
and some of that conflict must have shown through and made him an even more winning contestant.

The Van Dorens were an old American family, dating back to the eighteenth century. Because their name was Dutch and had the prefix Van, many assumed they were aristocrats; instead the family was one of hardworking salt-of-the-earth Midwesterners. Mark Van Doren’s grandfather, William Henry Van Doren, had been a farmer, blacksmith, and preacher (and, noted Mark in his autobiography, “not much of a businessman”). But he stressed education and his son became a doctor and two of his grandsons, Carl and Mark, got Ph.D.s. As a young graduate student Carl wrote his mother of the hardships of student life: “Some days I grow a despicable coward and am nearly tempted to turn my back upon all the bright ideal to which I have been true now for nearly a third of my life, and drop my energies to a slighter task where there is a chance of wealth and ease after a time. I know I could be rich—but I don’t care to be ...”

Mark Van Doren was not only a professor—he had won a Pulitzer Prize in poetry and had written a distinguished biography of Hawthorne. His wife, Dorothy (and Charles’s mother), was a former editor of
The Nation
and a novelist; his brother, Carl, won a Pulitzer Prize for biography in 1939, and Carl’s wife, Irita, was book editor of
The Herald Tribune,
a position of considerable influence in those days. It was her affair with Wendell Willkie, during which she encouraged him to run for the Presidency, that inspired Howard Lindsay and Russell Crouse to write their hit musical
State of the Union.

The Van Dorens were, in sum, a family that seemed to reflect the best of the liberal, humanist values of the era; Mark and Dorothy Van Doren had a town house in the Village and country house in northwestern Connecticut. If anything, Mark was the most blessed of them all, a successful and gifted poet and a truly beloved teacher, absolutely in command of his work, gentle, generous to, and tolerant of his students, even if their work was different from his (as in the case of Allen Ginsburg even before he emerged as an early Beat poet). One student later wrote that he had the gift of making “the difficult attainable through lightness.” Another of his students, Alfred Kazin, later one of America’s most distinguished critics, remembered the pleasure of Van Doren’s lectures in a course on “the long poem.” The sun would go down just as Van Doren was finishing the lecture, Kazin remembered, and then he would leave the campus and take the Seventh Avenue subway to his house in the Village, often accompanied by students, who used the subway ride to expand the classroom hour and who were often invited in for a drink or for tea.

Family friends included James Thurber (the Van Doren family cat was named Walter, after Thurber’s character Walter Mitty), John Berryman (“Charlie, by the way,” Mark Van Doren had written Berryman when his son was young, “values your letters if only for their stamps”), Joseph Wood Krutch, Franklin P. Adams, Jacques Barzun, Thomas Merton, Lionel Trilling, and Rex Stout.

The Van Dorens were not wealthy; money was always secondary to teaching and writing. As Mark Van Doren wrote Charles in the fall of 1952, in a letter filled with a father’s pride that his son would soon be asked to teach English at Columbia at a salary of $3,600 a year: “Really Cha, I’m not advising you to say Yes. You would have to love it to do it at all, and the rewards, I don’t need to tell you, are scandalously slight; they have always been for teachers, and they always will be. I have enjoyed it, even though I am quitting soon; but the enjoyment was the greater part of my pay ...” (Indeed, one of the first things that Charles Van Doren did when he became successful on
Twenty-One
was to buy his parents a television set.)

Charles Van Doren reflected both the strengths and the weaknesses of so privileged and protected a background. He developed into an erudite classicist and gifted musician. But it was always there, the fact that he was a
Van Doren.
When he first went on the show, Jack Barry coyly asked him, “Just out of curiosity, Mr. Van Doren, are you in any way related to Mark Van Doren, up at Columbia University, the famous writer?” Van Doren: “Yes. I am. He is my father.” Barry: “He is your father!” Van Doren: “Yes.” Barry: “The name Van Doren is a very well known name. Are you related to any of the other well-known Van Dorens?” Van Doren: “Well, Dorothy Van Doren, the novelist and author of the recent ‘The Country Wife’ is my mother, and Carl Van Doren, the biographer of Benjamin Franklin, was my uncle.” Barry: “Well, you have every reason in the world to be mighty proud of your name and your family, Van Doren ...”

Coached by Freedman on how to answer, Charles Van Doren became very good at the theatrics of the show. He learned to stutter, to seem to grope toward answers he had already been given. He was good at the game, but not too good; the questions were answerable, his struggling implied, but they were not easy. (When Jack Barry, talking about the cast of
On The Waterfront,
asked him, among other things, for the name of the Best Supporting Actress, Van Doren had answered, “Uh well, the only woman I can remember in that picture was the one who played opposite Brando, but I would have thought that she would have got the Best Actress award. But if she’s the only one I remember—let’s see—she was that lovely frail
girl—Eva Saint—uh, Eva Marie Saint.” Later, he noted, on the occasions when he had been given an answer, a curious pride made him go and look it up.

What Stempel, who hated him, and millions of others who were rooting for him could not understand about Van Doren was that coming from a family that accomplished was not without its burdens. What in life really belonged to Charles Van Doren independent of his family? Van Doren’s life was not as enviable as it seemed. He was dealing with an age-old dilemma, made no easier by its familiarity—being the son of a famous and successful father and/or mother in the same profession. Charles had reluctantly decided to seek a career as an English professor. As a young man he had gone to Paris and tried to write a novel about patricide, although as he told Dick Goodwin, a House investigator, he had also asked for his father’s help in editing it. There was a quality about his life that was oddly airless. As Van Doren himself said a few weeks after he finally came forward to admit that he had been part of the scam, “I’ve been acting a part, a role, not just the last few years—I’ve been acting a role for ten or fifteen years, maybe all my life. It’s a role of thinking that I’ve done far more than I’ve done, accomplished more than I’ve accomplished, produced more than I’ve produced. It has in a way something to do with my family, I suppose. I don’t mean just my father, there are other people in my family. But I’ve been running.” Burdened and conflicted, uncertain about what was his and what was his family’s, desperately needing successes and an identity of his own, Van Doren had been a perfect catch for someone like Enright. By going on the quiz shows, perhaps Charles Van Doren was seeking fame of his own; and for a brief time he became far more famous than his illustrious relatives; they were known only to a small elite; he was known to millions—his face was even on the cover of
Time.

To Stempel, Van Doren was the enemy and the epitome of all the injustices he had suffered in terms of privilege and looks. “I felt here was a guy, Van Doren, that had a fancy name, Ivy League education, parents all his life, and I had just the opposite, the hard way up,” he once told Enright. That Stempel, because of the deal he had made with the devil, would now have to give up his television celebrity, pretend that he was dumber than he was, and lose to someone he was sure he could beat was the unkindest cut of all.

When Enright first told Stempel it was his turn to lose, he angrily balked. The fame had proved to be addictive; he was in no hurry to give up his appearances on television. No, he said, he wouldn’t do it. But Enright knew he was a street kid, and street kids
kept their word. “Herbie, when this started, you gave me your word,” Enright said. So Stempel agreed to take the fall, but he was bitter about it. He begged Enright to revoke the deal, to let him play Van Doren fair and square.

All of this was done under the sponsorship (but without the direct knowledge of) Pharmaceuticals Inc., a maker of patent medicines. So there was the bizarre spectacle of Jack Barry challenging these two intelligent young men with extremely serious questions and then switching back to his pitches for Geritol: “I guess I’ve asked thousands of questions at one time or another here on television. I haven’t got enough used to it yet, but there is one simple question that I think almost everybody asks everybody else—I think you know the question—what’s the weather gonna be like ... So, remember, if tired blood is your problem, especially in this rough weather after those colds or flu or sore throats or a virus, take either the good-tasting liquid Geritol or the handy Geritol tablets ...” Pharmaceuticals Inc., like Revlon, reaped huge benefits from sponsoring the quiz shows; in the first year, its sales went from $10.4 million to $13.9.

The denouement for Herb Stempel came on the night of December 5, 1956. According to Enright’s script, he was to lose by answering incorrectly a question the answer to which he knew perfectly well: which movie had won the Academy Award for Best Picture in 1955. The answer was
Marty,
and Stempel had seen the movie three times. He loved it because he could identify with its principal character, an unattractive but sensitive man who has as many feelings as someone who is handsome. That it was a movie he cared about made it all the harder. On the day just before he was to lose, he became so frustrated that he told a few of his friends that he was going to take a dive on the show. On the day of the program, NBC hyped the confrontation all day long: “Is Herb Stempel going to win over $111,000 on
Twenty-One
tonight?” an announcer would say over and over again as the day wore on. Stempel would talk back to the television set in his room: “No, he’s not going to win over $111,000, he’s going to take a dive.”

Once the program began, he came perilously close to answering the
Marty
question correctly, breaking Enright’s rules and just going for it. Years later he pondered how history might have been different: He would have won, he would not have proceeded to help blow the whistle on Enright, and Charles Van Doren would have lost and been able to go back gracefully to Columbia and to his real love, teaching. But he played by the rules, and Van Doren ended up riding
a tiger. Van Doren, in time, became a national hero, with a record fifteen appearances on the show. He had greatly underestimated the power of television. Something that had begun as a lark turned into the young academic’s nightmare. Hundreds of letters came in each day telling him how he represented America’s hope for a more serious, cerebral future, particularly after the dark years of McCarthy had poisoned the minds of the American public about the value of education. Other universities offered him tenured professorships. There were offers to star in movies. NBC signed him to a three-year contract that included regular stints on the
Today
show, where he was to be the resident intellectual. His salary from the network was a staggering $50,000 a year. “I felt like a bullfighter in a bull ring with thousands and thousands of people cheering me on and all I wanted to do was get out of there,” he later told Dick Goodwin. In the end his total winnings came to $129,000; but given the draconian taxes of the period, he actually took home only about $28,000. Stempel asked to challenge Van Doren one more time but was told that Van Doren would not take him on. Perhaps Vivienne Nearing, Van Doren’s then opponent, might; when Stempel heard this, he understood immediately that in the forthcoming contest between Ms. Nearing and Van Doren, Van Doren was scripted to lose, so Stempel, nothing if not shrewd, took $5,000 of his savings and bet it two-to-one on Nearing.