Word: doren
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Lion Follows Christian. Twenty One has built its week-to-week suspense on whether Van Doren will keep plunging or quit while he is so far ahead. By now, he risks little to keep going. It would take eleven tie games followed by a 21-0 defeat to wipe out his winnings. His income-tax bracket is so high that if he were defeated in a game that cost him, say, $20,000, he would actually be out of pocket only $2,200 (see chart). Of the $122,000 he has won, income taxes will let the unmarried...
Already a pioneer in the stratosphere of quiz shows, Van Doren has only a fictitious precedent if he decides to press on. In a 1950 movie comedy, Champagne for Caesar, Ronald Colman played an omniscient scholar who almost wins a quiz-show sponsor's $40 million soap company. Says Sponsor Rosenhaus: "Everybody keeps asking if Van Doren is going to win the Geritol company. But we're safe." Geritol's contract with Barry & Enright limits its annual outlay for prizes to $520,000; anything over that comes out of the producers' pocket. So far, Van Doren...
Because Van Doren can use up only a few contestants a week, the producers manage to keep the other booth stocked with competitors brainy enough to pass a tough written qualifying exam ("The hardest one I ever took," according to Van Doren). Last week they had "ten or 15" ready, but felt that only three or four of those could be flung against Van Doren. Reason: the rest lack an imposing background and the audience might think that they were merely lambs being led to slaughter. One of the waiting eligibles is John Kieran Jr., 35, son of the original...
...Aghast." Even if they grow blasé or hostile toward Van Doren as an unbeatable contestant, it is difficult to imagine viewers tiring of the fascinating, suspense-taut spectacle of his highly trained mind at work. Breathing heavily, Charlie coaxes elusive answers out of odd corners of his brains by talking to himself, muttering little associated fragments of knowledge. Like a boxer staying down for a count of nine, he takes all the time he can possibly get ("Let's skip that part, please, and come back to it"). When trying to identify the character in La Traviata...
...Doren is the first to admit that he is no genius and can claim neither a photographic memory nor total recall. Indeed, most of his education was in schools that had little interest in memory work or tests, regarded facts as mere accessories in the handling of ideas and the development of taste and reasoning. Some of his classmates at St. John's College in Annapolis, famed for its "great books" course and its cloistered devotion to scholarship, say that Van Doren's quiz wizardry flies ironically in the face of what the college and Charlie himself stand...