|
Click here to go back to the list of Sharon Schuman's articles
Confessions of a quiz show criminal
The Sunday Oregonian FORUM , November 20, 1994
By Sharon Schuman
Why are the quiz show scandals more striking than scandals in banking or Congress?
 Buried
in one of my oldest scrapbooks is a 8-by-1O glossy photo of
Bert Parks bending down to ask me a question on "Break
the Bank," a quiz show of the 1950s. Nine-year-olds focus
on the strangest things, so what I remember best about that
moment is his tan, his energy and, behind startlingly crooked
teeth, a whiff of bad breath. That's why I'm leaning backward
in the photo, smiling though, as my proud father beams and
my temporarily disarmed brother stands there looking innocent.
We have taken the only "big" vacation I remember from my childhood, courtesy of my sister, the airline stewardess, who has got us four tickets from San Francisco to New York. Besides the mandatory visits to the Empire State Building and the Statue of Liberty, this trip's real purpose is for me to be "discovered" as the next Shirley Temple. My mother, in fact, has been working
on this plan for years, enrolling me in dance classes, writing songs for me to sing, and, most importantly, curling my hair in ringlets.
The last step before stardom is to be on the quiz show, where, if all goes well, I will get to sing and dance on national TV and some Hollywood agent will cast me in a touching role opposite Bob Hope.
First, though, we have to get on the quiz show. It turns out that they choose contestants from the studio audience of the previous night, so we get there early and situate ourselves down front where whoever is doing the warm-up will spot me in my black cowgirl outfit.
Sure enough, it's not long before I'm charming them with a well-rehearsed recitation of life "20 minutes north of San Francisco across the Golden Gate Bridge." We get on the show, although there's only room for three, so my mother self-effacingly bows out. She doesn't get to become a criminal.
The next night, we are told, I will sing and dance on national TV. Then we will have a chance to win $500 (an enormous sum in those days - enough to pay for the trip). I can't remember a thing about the singing and dancing, although I think I would have remembered it if a Hollywood agent had called afterward. What I do remember is going with my father and brother into a nice little room, somewhat hot, where a couple of people from the show explained what would happen when we got out on stage. They would play three songs for us and we would try to identify them.
A little help
To make sure, after all this trouble, that we didn't go home empty-handed, they would tell us the answers to the first two questions, but for the third question, where we could double our money from $250 to $500, we were on our own. That sounded pretty fair.
Everything went smoothly for the first two questions, but even before we heard the music for the third, my mind was blank. Sure enough, when they played "When YOU Wish Upon a Star," one of the most memorable songs from a movie that my oldest sister had taken me to see just the week before, a song whose title was the first six words of it, a song probably calculated to be a piece of cake, my mind seized up, and my father and brother must have felt a similar panic. When we came up with nothing, Bert Parks looked genuinely disappointed and hoped that we would still enjoy the $250, which we did.
In the nearly 40 years that have elapsed since this incident, I have revised it many times in my mind, first as child, then as a young adult, and now as one who has just seen the Robert Redford movie "Quiz Show." Right afterward I was mainly mortified that we bombed on an easy question that I really knew the answer to. How could I have let my family down? A small piece of me wondered if it might be wrong to pretend to know something when you really don't, but the people at the show had made it sound like this was how it was always done, and my parents didn't seem to mind, so I figured it must be OK, a kind of secret.
By the time I was in college, though, I enjoyed from time to time shocking friends with this revelation. They were invariably (as they are now) intrigued. It was something like being a second cousin to the queen's nephew, or a distant relative of Al Capone.
Then I went to see "Quiz Show," the story of Charles Van Doren's apotheosis and fall on "Twenty-One." As I watched him slide into actions that wound up shattering his career, I replayed the mental tape of my own experience and thought further about it. I wondered, for example, if the adults in that scenario - Bert Parks, his aides, my parents - gave any thought to the educational effect of their complicity on the developing minds of two children.
I wondered whether my parents or brother ever felt guilty about what we did. I was in a position to wonder this, because I was just realizing that we hadn't spoken about it at all, ever, after we returned from New York. In fact, last Saturday, in a routine long-distance call from my Chicago sister, the former stewardess, she said: "You mean that show was rigged? I wondered how Daddy knew the 'Threepenny Opera.'"
Van Doren's punishment
The thing I wondered most about, though, was ,why Charles Van Doren punished himself for so many years by giving up his vocation and laboring in obscurity at Encyclopedia Britannica. At least that's how I have imagined him. I, meanwhile, who committed the same crime, although much less spectacularly, wound up being a college professor. I therefore know exactly what he has missed, because I know what it is like to read great books and share them with students. I know what it is like to have colleagues. All this has been denied him (or he has denied it to himself) because he admitted cheating on a quiz show. I, too, have admitted this, but, in my case, it doesn't seem to have mattered. Why has it mattered so much for him? Does it still matter now?
I don't know what great lesson we are to learn from the quiz show scandals, or should I say, from the congressional scandals, the savings and loan scandals, the Hollywood scandals, or the day-to-day scandals that permeate our local newspapers. Maybe the quiz shows stand out because they embodied a heroic fantasy of intellectual greatness made accessible and comprehensible to average people in their living rooms. Every time any of us answered a question before the contestant did, we got to share in the glory. The contestant who answered them all showed just how glorious we could be.
Charles Van Doren, the most glorious, made us mad when he denied us this fantasy, and maybe we have punished him for it. If so, let's stop. Mr. Van Doren, I say, go back to the classroom. It needs you. Perhaps you still need it.
|
