TV & Radio: The Wizard of Quiz

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Then, "with tremendous relief," Charlie began studying for a Ph.D. in his father's field, "but I still refused to admit that I might follow in my father's footsteps as a teacher." In 1951 he won a $3,000 traveling fellowship—the same one that Mark had won at Columbia in 1919—and went to Cambridge University to research his dissertation on 18th century English Poet William Cowper. But Cambridge proved frustrating, and before the academic year was out, he left abruptly for Paris "under something of a pall, without fulfilling certain obligations." According to his Cambridge landlady, who has a transatlantic eye on his TV winnings, the obligations included £22 ($61.60) of unpaid rent.

In Paris, he "rebelled against the order of my life," drank Pernod at the Deux Magots, attended the Sorbonne "desultorily," and began a novel about a young man who sets out to murder his father. Much rewritten since then with his father's encouragement, the novel is still unpublished. But since he returned to the U.S. and finally embraced his father's career as writer and teacher. Charles has broken into print as assistant editor of Fadiman's anthology The American Treasury, and this April Harper's will publish his Lincoln's Commando, a biography on the Union Navy's William B. Gushing, written in collaboration with Ralph H. Roske.

He Can Even Cook. Throughout his career, Van Doren has been so well-rounded that none of his friends ever regarded him as a bookworm. He plays good squash and tennis, won a $60-a-month athletic scholarship at St. John's to coach intramural basketball and baseball, played extracurricular bridge and pool. As a World War II pre-aviation cadet whose initials doomed him to the nickname "V.D.," he became adept at poker. Pooling resources with a buddy named Laural Whipkey, now an advertising man in West Virginia, Corporal Van Doren played poker twelve hours a day, won $3,000 in a year. Says Whipkey: "He figures the percentage to the last decimal. On the TV show, he follows the old Black Jack rule, 'Always hit 16, always stick on 18.' Once on TV when Charlie reached 17, I told my wife that Charlie would call it like Black Jack—and he did." Charlie has spent a night in jail (in Florida, when MPs arrested him for overcelebrating V-E day and adding a bright red tie to his uniform), hitchhiked 4,000 miles around Europe, swum near Barcelona and skied in Switzerland. Says a friend: "He has never wanted for girls. They're usually attractive and not intellectual fireballs." Charlie can even cook. His specialty: chicken pilaff.