TV & Radio: The Wizard of Quiz

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The Magic Billfold. "In our senior year," says one of Van Doren's college roommates, "Charlie used to have a recurring dream about a billfold in which there was a $20 bill, and when you took the bill away, there would be another one there." Charlie sought the magic billfold last November when a friend told him about the easy money on Tic-Tac-Dough, another Barry-Enright production. He looked so promising that the producers put him on Twenty One. But Charlie's dream has come true with some nightmarish side effects. "Here I am with all this money and celebrity," he lamented last week, "but I don't have the time or appetite to eat." He has lost 10 lbs. since the ordeal began. To carry him through the foodless day, he keeps cooking himself bigger breakfasts in his sunny, $10-a-month, three-room walkup apartment in Greenwich Village.

The nightmare began when he hit $99,000. Since then, he has given close to 100 interviews, made guest appearances on other TV shows, parried dinner invitations from as far away as Boston and Philadelphia, put up with the same questions from strangers in streets, subways and restaurants ("Whaddaya gonna do with all that money?" "How does that game work anyway?"), and succeeded in getting his telephone number changed just as the phone was about to drive him out of his apartment. From The Bronx to Basutoland, fans have deluged him with 2,000 letters, including 20 outright proposals of marriage, numerous veiled ones, solicitations from investment houses and wildcatters, requests for handouts that add up to more money than he has won. The town of Cornwall (pop. 1,100), where 26 Van Dorens gather each summer, asked him to finance a new fire engine, and some of Charles's schools would like endowments. One scholar suggested that Charlie endow a chair for himself at Columbia. One in four letters comes from a teacher, parent or student thanking Van Doren for taking the curse off studying. "I'm damned happy about those letters," he says.

There are other compensations, some of them strange. Now that he is a celebrity expecting a large sum of money, a cab driver, a tailor and a restaurant have refused to take anything at all in payment for their services. From his savings, Van Doren has splurged mildly on clothes and an extra round of Christmas gifts for his family. The only whim he plans to indulge is to replace his 1948 Studebaker with a 190 SL Mercedes-Benz. He will probably invest the rest of the money.

He has become Columbia's most cherished hero since Sid Luckman was tossing passes at Baker Field. While his colleagues beam in admiring good will, President Grayson Kirk sings his praises as "an able and exciting teacher," the Graduate English Department information desk bears the legend "Only Charles Van Doren Knows All the Answers." and his students decorate the blackboard with such questions as "For $52,500, what did Plato mean by Justice?" At St. John's, where only two faculty members deign to own TV sets, President Richard Weigle went to a neighborhood bar to catch last week's show.