For fourteen weeks in the winter and spring of 1956-57, I came into millions of American homes, stood in a supposedly soundproof booth, and answered difficult questions. I was considered well spoken, well educated, handsome—the very image of a young man that parents would like their son to be. I was also thought to be the ideal teacher, which is to say patient, thoughtful, trustworthy, caring. In addition, I was making a small fortune. And then—well, this is what happened:

I don’t remember the dinner clearly, except that at some point in the early fall of 1956 I was talking with a man named Albert Freedman, who knew a friend of mine. Freedman was about my age, suave and well dressed—certainly no bohemian, like most of my friends. He asked me what I thought of “Tic Tac Dough.”

I didn’t have a television set in those days, but I knew that Al Freedman was in the TV business. And I’d certainly heard about the game shows, where people could win a lot of money. Al told me that contestants on “The $64,000 Question” could win that amount and on some shows they could win even more.

“Your father’s a professor at Columbia?” he asked, and, when I nodded, he asked if I was, too.

I told him that I was an instructor of English—a long way from being a professor. I was not comfortable talking about myself, especially when he asked me how much an instructor of English made. When I told him, he just looked at me.

Later, I asked my friend to tell me more about Freedman, and she said that he was a producer for Jack Barry and Dan Enright, who created shows like “Tic Tac Dough.” Freedman called me a few days later. When I learned what he wanted, I telephoned Gerry—Geraldine Bernstein, the young woman I had been dating and whom I married six months later.

I told her that Al had persuaded me to take a test and that, depending on how I did, they might want me for a new show called “Twenty-One,” which was structured like blackjack. “The winner gets quite a bit,” I said. “The guy who’s on the show now has already won something like twenty-five thousand dollars.”

“Promise me you won’t agree to do this without talking to me first,” I remember her saying.

“O.K., I promise. They probably won’t ask me.”

They did—at least, Al Freedman did. He called me and told me that his job was on the line. A man named Herb Stempel was winning week after week, but he wasn’t popular and the ratings were suffering.

“They want me to find a contestant who can beat Herb Stempel,” Al said. “It might be you.”

It wasn’t hard to guess why Al was interested in me. My father was Mark Van Doren, a poet and critic and, as Al Freedman knew, a legendary teacher. My uncle Carl, his oldest brother, had been a professor of American literature at Columbia. In 1912, Carl had married Irita Bradford, who not long afterward was named the book-review editor of the New York Herald Tribune. Carl resigned his Columbia professorship in order to pursue a writing career, which included winning a Pulitzer Prize for biography (of Benjamin Franklin); he helped my father to become a teacher of literature at Columbia, too. By 1956, Carl was dead and my father was close to retirement, after nearly forty years.

The first time Al called, he asked me to come to his apartment. When I arrived, he seemed nervous. I wondered what I was getting into.

Right away, he said, “You remember I told you about this fellow Stempel? Well, the sponsors want him to be beaten. He’ll walk away with a bundle, but they want somebody more sympathetic.”

“Do they have a right to do that?”

“Hey, come off it, Charlie. Don’t be naïve.” And he launched into his argument—that, when all was said and done, these game shows were mere entertainment. “Even Shakespeare is entertainment,” he said, although he conceded that the shows, unlike the plays, were presented as the real thing.

Al played an episode of “Twenty-One” for me, in which Stempel seemed very sure of himself. His answers were obviously based on genuine knowledge. I say “obviously,” although I realized that I couldn’t be certain. How would anyone know?

Stempel’s posture and gestures were awkward, his clothes were too tight—he seemed almost to be choking in his shirt—and his speech was wooden. I remembered Al’s remark that I might have a good chance against him, and then he came right out and said it: “I’ve thought about it, Charlie, and I’ve decided you should be the person to beat Stempel. And I’ll help you do it.” He held up his hand. “I swear to you, no one will ever know. It will be just between you and me. Jack Barry”—the show’s host—“won’t know and Dan Enright won’t, either. Stempel won’t know—I’ve got a way to handle that. The sponsors won’t know—anyway, they’ll be so happy they won’t give a damn. And the audience will never know, because I won’t tell them, and you won’t, either.”

He suggested that I could make at least eight thousand dollars, maybe a good deal more. I was guaranteed a thousand dollars for the first show.

“How would you do it?”

“Jack would ask you a question you could answer and Stempel couldn’t.”

I leaned my elbows on the table, resting my head in my hands. He was telling me, in so many words, that the show was fixed. “I don’t know,” I said again. “When would this be?”

A few days later, I took Gerry to dinner at Steak au Pommes Frites, the midtown restaurant where we’d had our first date. We drank some wine and then I told her. She didn’t say much; she’s a woman of few, choice words. But she didn’t like any of it.

My first appearance on “Twenty-One” was on November 28, 1956. I must have put the whole thing out of my mind, but about a week after my conversation with Freedman I suddenly found myself in the studio, with the red light glowing above the camera, totally unaware that I was being watched by millions of people. Herb Stempel by then had been on the show for six straight weeks and had won some seventy thousand dollars. You can “quit right now,” Jack Barry was saying to Stempel, in a voice practiced in arousing suspense, “and a check will be waiting for you, or you can decide to continue playing.”

Barry then introduced me: “He teaches music at Columbia University, and was a student at Cambridge University, in England . . . and his hobby is playing the piano in chamber-music groups.”

Barry was reading from a “continuity card” written in haste. In fact, I played the piano only clumsily and I taught literature. There was no time for corrections, I knew; Al had stressed this. Anyway, Barry was racing ahead, asking me if I was “related in any way to Mark Van Doren, up at Columbia, the famous writer.” Papa, forgive me! Mama, forgive me! Uncle Carl, forgive me! I’ve remembered that moment for more than fifty years.

Al had given me my instructions. My understanding was that I was to reach seventeen points in the first round, twenty-one in the second—at which point I’d defeat Herb Stempel. To my astonishment, both Stempel and I reached twenty-one points in the second round. So bells rang, commercials were read, and both of us agreed to come back a week later.

It was then—on December 5, 1956—that I “beat” Herb Stempel and began my rise to celebrity. I learned later that the question Stempel missed was one that he could have answered easily. But they had him. If he failed to go along with his script, he could lose a lot of the money he had already “won.”

Each week, Stempel had been told what to do: how many points to choose, how to deliver his answers. He was to pat his brow (it was hot in those glass booths) but not rub it, to avoid smearing his makeup. In addition, he was instructed to get a Marines-type “whitewall” haircut, to wear an ill-fitting suit (it had belonged to his deceased father-in-law), and to describe himself as a penurious student at City College. In fact, he was a Marines veteran married to a woman of some means who once appeared on the set wearing a Persian-lamb coat and was quickly spirited away so that she wouldn’t blow his cover.

Stempel was also told to wear a six-dollar wristwatch that “ticked away like an alarm clock,” as he later testified, and was audible when he stood sweating in the booth, earphones supposedly damping all outside sound. Once, he wore a new suit and had let his hair grow out, for which he was severely chastised by Enright. As Enright apparently believed, a successful game show needed two distinct personalities, one unsympathetic and unattractive, the other the opposite.

I continued to appear on “Twenty-One” until March 11, 1957. During those four months, Freedman never stopped coaching me, and I came to see just how carefully controlled the show was. In our sessions, he would ask me questions, I would answer them—and then he would tell me how to answer them: pause here; add this or that remark or aside; always seem to be worried, anxious; never answer too quickly, let the suspense build up. One January night, I was asked to give the nicknames of several Second World War airplanes, and in February I was asked to name the seven Prime Ministers of Britain between the world wars. A critic later wrote that mine “was a remarkable and seductive performance.” Toward the end, my face appeared on the cover of Time (with earphones superimposed on my head), and I was seen in public with movie starlets (the dates were arranged by Barry and Enright); a couple of women found out where I lived and came to my door.

For several weeks, the programs had ended in ties between me and a lawyer named Vivienne Nearing. At one point, it looked as if I could have won more than a hundred and fifty thousand dollars—except I couldn’t, because Al had informed me that I would lose to her. On the evening of March 11th, Jack Barry asked both of us to name the kings of Norway, Denmark, Sweden, Jordan, Iraq, and Belgium. According to our covert script, Nearing knew the answers and I didn’t. For years after that, people enjoyed asking me if I knew the name of the one I missed—the king of Belgium.

A photograph of me writing the figure “$128,000” on a blackboard was widely published. I deposited the net amount (a little less than that) and began to try to understand the life I’d created. Part of it was going to work for the National Broadcasting Company, which was willing to sign me to a three-year contract as a consultant on public-service and educational broadcasting, at an annual rate of fifty thousand dollars.

One day in the spring of 1957, shortly after Gerry and I were married, my father and I had a conversation. We were walking slowly down the road from his house, a road lined with stone walls on each side. At that time, our neighbor pastured heifers and dry cows—pregnant cows waiting to deliver—in the nearby fields. When we walked at night, the cows, curious about us, would breathe and snuffle, sometimes scaring our city friends.

“I’ve never asked you about this whole experience, Charlie,” Dad said. He was dressed in overalls, denim shirt, and boots, like the farmers he was descended from. In New York, he was an elegant figure, but this was the father I loved best. “But I get the impression you’re not too comfortable with your new fame—I mean, the way the quiz show may have changed your life. You have many opportunities now that you might never have had before. But I’ve wondered if they’re good—for you, being the man you are, or the man I think you are.”