Broadcast live and in prime time, the big-money quiz show presented itself as a high-pressure test of knowledge under the heat of klieg lights and the scrutiny of 55 million participant-observers. Set design, lighting, and pure hokum enhanced the atmosphere of suspense. Contestants were put in glass isolation booths, with the air conditioning turned off to make them sweat. Tight close-ups framed faces against darkened backgrounds, and spotlights illuminated contestants in a ghostly aura. Armed police guarded “secret” envelopes and impressive-looking contraptions spat out precooked questions on IBM cards. The big winners—such as Columbia University student Elfrida Von Nardroff, who earned $226,500 on Twenty-One, or warehouse clerk Teddy Nadler, who earned $252,000 on The $64,000 Challenge—took home a fortune.

By the standards of the game shows of a later epoch, the intellectual content of the 1950s quiz shows was erudite. Almost all the questions involved some demonstration of cerebral aptitude: retrieving lines of poetry; identifying dates from history; or reeling off scientific classifications, the stuff of memorization and canonical culture. Since victors returned to the show until they lost, risking accumulated winnings on future stakes, individual contestants might develop a devoted following over a period of weeks. Matching an incongruous area of expertise to the right personality was a favorite hook, as in the cases of Richard McCutchen, the rugged marine captain who was an expert on French cooking, or Dr. Joyce Brothers (not then an icon of pop psychology), whose encyclopedic knowledge of boxing won her $132,000.

If the quiz shows made celebrities out of ordinary folk, they also sought to engage the services of celebrities. Orson Welles claimed to have been approached by a quiz show producer looking for a “genius type” and guaranteeing him $150,000 and a seven-week engagement. Welles refused, but bandleader Xavier Cugat won $16,000 as an expert on Tin Pan Alley songs in a rigged match against actress Lillian Roth on The $64,000 Challenge. “I considered I was giving a performance,” he later explained guilelessly. Twelve-year-old Patty Duke won $32,000 against child actor Eddie Hodges, then the juvenile lead in The Music Man on Broadway. Teamed with a personable marine flyer named John Glenn, Hodges had earlier won the $25,000 grand prize on Name That Tune.

Far and away the most notorious Quizling was Charles Van Doren, a contestant on NBC’s Twenty-One, a quiz show based on the game of blackjack. Scion of the prestigious literary family and a lecturer in English at Columbia University, Van Doren was an authentic pop phenomenon, whose video charisma earned him $129,000 in prize money, the cover of Time magazine, and a permanent spot on NBC’s Today, where he discussed non-Euclidean geometry and recited 17th-century poetry.

From the moment Van Doren walked onto the set of Twenty-One, on November 28, 1956, for his first face-off against a high-IQ eccentric named Herbert Stempel, he proved himself a telegenic natural. In the isolation booth, Van Doren managed to engage the spectators’ sympathy by sharing his mental concentration. Apparently muttering unself-consciously to himself, he let viewers see him think: eyes alert, hand on chin, then a sudden bolt (“Oh, I know!”), after which he delivered the answer. Asked to name the volumes of Winston Churchill’s wartime memoirs, he muttered, “I’ve seen the ad for those books a thousand times!” Asked to come up with a biblical reference, he said self-deprecatingly, “My father would know that.” Van Doren’s was a remarkable and seductive performance.

Twenty-One’s convoluted rules decreed that, in the event of a tie, the money wagered for points doubled, from $500 a point to $1,000 (and so on). Thus, contestants needed to be coached not only on answers and acting but on the amount of points they selected in the gamble. A tie meant double financial stakes for each successive game with a consequent ratcheting up of the tension. By pregame arrangement, the first Van Doren–Stempel face-off ended with three ties; hence, the next week’s game would be played for $2,000 a point, and publicized accordingly.

On Wednesday, December 5, 1956, at 10:30 P.M., an estimated 50 million Americans tuned in to Twenty-One for what host and coproducer Jack Barry called “the biggest game ever played in the program.” The first category was boxing, and Van Doren fared poorly. Ahead 16 points to Van Doren’s 0, Stempel was given the chance to stop the game. Supposedly, only the audience knew he was in the lead and, if he stopped the game, Van Doren would lose. At this point, on live television, Stempel could have reneged on the deal, vanquished his opponent, and won an extra $32,000. But he opted to play by the script and continue the match. The next category, movies, proved more Van Doren-friendly. Asked to name Brando’s female costar in On the Waterfront, Van Doren teased briefly (“she was that lovely frail girl”) before coming up with the correct answer (Eva Marie Saint). Stempel again had the chance to ad-lib his own lines, but he did not. Asked to name the 1955 Oscar Winner for Best Picture, he hesitated and answered On the Waterfront. The correct answer was Marty.

But another tie meant another round at $2,500 a point. The next round of questions was crucial. Van Doren was asked to give the names and the fates of the third, fourth, and fifth wives of Henry VIII. As Barry led him through the litany, Van Doren took the audience with him every step of the way. (“I don’t think he beheaded her . . . . Yes, what happened to her?”) Given the same question, Stempel successfully named the wives, and Barry asked him their fates. “Well, they all died,” he cracked to gales of laughter. Van Doren stopped the game and won the round.

In August and September 1958 disgruntled former contestants went public with accusations that the results were rigged and the contestants coached. First, a standby contestant on Dotto produced a page from a winner’s crib sheet. Then, the bitter Herbert Stempel told how he had taken a dive in his climatic encounter with Van Doren. An artist named James Snodgrass had taken the precaution of mailing registered letters to himself with the results of his appearances on Twenty-One predicted in advance. Most of the high-drama matchups, it turned out, were carefully choreographed. Contestants were drilled in Q-and-A before airtime and coached in the pantomime of nail-biting suspense (stroke chin, furrow brow, wipe sweat from forehead).

By October 1958, as a New York grand jury convened by prosecutor Joseph Stone investigated the charges and heard closed-door testimony, quiz show ratings had plummeted. For their part, the networks played damage control, denying knowledge of rigging, canceling the suspect shows, and tossing the producers overboard. Yet it was hard to credit the innocence of executives at NBC and CBS. A public relations flack for Twenty-One best described the implied contract: “It was sort of a situation where a husband suspects his wife but doesn’t want to know because he loves her.”

Despite the revelations and the grand jury investigation, the quiz show producers, Van Doren, and the other big-money winners steadfastly maintained their innocence. Solid citizens all, they feared the loss of professional standing and the loyalty of friends and family as much as the retribution of the district attorney’s office. Nearly 100 people committed perjury rather than own up to activities that, though embarrassing, were not illegal. Prosecutor Stone lamented that “nothing in my experience prepared me for the mass perjury that took place on the part of scores of well-educated people who had no trouble understanding what was at stake.”

When the judge presiding over the New York investigations ordered the grand jury report sealed, Washington smelled a cover-up and a political opportunity. Through October and November 1959 the House Sub-committee on Legislative Oversight, chaired by Oren Harris (Democrat, Arkansas), held standing-room-only hearings into the quiz show scandals. A renewed wave of publicity recorded the testimony of the now-repentant network bigwigs and star contestants whose minds, apparently, were concentrated powerfully by federal intervention. At one point, committee staffers came upon possible communist associations in the background of a few witnesses.

Meanwhile, as newspaper headlines screamed “Where’s Charlie?,” the star witness everyone wanted to hear from was motoring desperately through the back roads of New England, ducking a congressional subpoena. Finally, on November 2, 1959, with tension mounting in anticipation of Van Doren’s appearance to answer questions (the irony was lost on no one), the chastened former English professor confessed. “I was involved, deeply involved, in a deception,” he told the Harris Committee. “The fact that I too was very much deceived cannot keep me from being the principal victim of that deception, because I was its principal symbol.” In another irony, Washington’s made-for-TV spectacle never made it to the airwaves due to the opposition of House Speaker Sam Rayburn, who felt that the presence of television cameras would undermine the dignity of Congress.

The firestorm that resulted, claimed Variety, “injured broadcasting more than anything ever before in the public eye.” Even the sainted Edward R. Murrow was sullied when it was revealed that his celebrity interview show, CBS’s Person to Person, provided guests with questions in advance. Perhaps most significantly in terms of the future shape of commercial television, the quiz show scandals made the networks forever leery of “single sponsorship” programming. Henceforth, they parceled out advertising time in 15-, 30-, or 60-second increments, wrenching control away from single sponsors and advertising agencies.