Off the Charts

by Ann Hulbert

  George’s income had ebbed as he swerved rightward politically, but by 1949 he was worrying over Philippa’s manic practicing and her single-minded pursuit of soaring goals. “Ten hours a day is entirely too much for anybody to work at music or anything else….This is especially so where a person does nothing else,” he wrote to Josephine, who was increasingly estranged and often depressed.

  Philippa is ruining her girlhood with too serious application and other fool notions. She needs to have more optimism, hopefulness and buoyancy, and stop so much damn worrying about the future. It is especially silly at 18. Success is not a career or money, it is inner peace and smiling contentment and a minimum of grandiose illusions.

  If George was hoping to exert any influence or enlighten his wife, he was way too late.

  It was not the last time that Philippa came close to “breaking under the strain,” as she put it. Her confidence shaken by more encounters with American prejudice, and her self-reliance eroded by her mother’s insistent demands, Philippa “adjusted,” she wrote. “I left.” In 1952, the year she turned twenty-one, she embarked on a Caribbean tour without Josephine, who was soon urging her to return to play U.S. concerts. “STAYING. AM COMMITTED. PRACTICING EIGHT NINE HOURS DAILY. EXCEEDING WORK SCHEDULE. LEARNING PIECES,” Philippa telegrammed in response. The American tour sponsor “CAN’T RULE MY LIFE….CARAMBA. THATS BEEN TROUBLE. EVERYBODY WANTED MAKE ME PUPPET.” It was the start of a peripatetic performing career abroad, which took Philippa to South and Central America, Europe, Latin America, and Africa over the next decade and a half. She plunged into mixed-race cultures, often barely skirting real danger amid political violence—and always practicing tirelessly. She found welcoming audiences, and also critics for whom her roiling style revealed more need than art. Returning home to face prejudice and maternal pressure firsthand, she would set off again.

  An intrepid spirit, perhaps as much as particular talents, had marked out both Shirley and Philippa in childhood. Remarkably, neither of them lost it. Philippa lived for high drama, vainly seeking love and subsisting on little money and sleep as she struggled to assert her independence and forge an identity. Josephine never stopped hounding her, sending long letters when she was away, intruding on her daughter’s ill-fated romances, too. “Do you realize what you are expecting of me?” Philippa, now almost thirty, wrote her in 1960.

  Are you aware of the pressures you put me under? Are you aware of the impossibilities you ask of me?

  To be a great pianist.

  To be a great composer.

  To be a great arranger.

  To be a great author.

  To be a great journalist.

  To always get marvellous reviews.

  To always pull off marvellous coups no one else could do.

  To get good photographs everywhere….

  To always make money, and always keep within my budget….

  To always be a great beauty.

  This is beyond human capability.

  Yet even as she and her mother continued to torment each other, Philippa refused to be constrained by perfectionist caution. That same year, in a quasi-memoir about her travels that had begun as a novel, she struck a very different note. She made a point of embracing “the turmoils, threats, hazards, uncertainties, of this age”—and of her own life so far. “I am not sorry that I was a child prodigy. There is so much to learn, and so little time in which to learn it,” she wrote. A similar declaration of mettle had been Shirley’s on-screen message, one that she had taken to heart in life. Philippa meant it, too, in the face of far more daunting lessons. She portrayed a young woman avidly taking risks, encountering strangers, crossing social boundaries.

  “Youth is brave and wants to do battle,” she insisted, a sentiment the prodigies in the previous pages all endorsed, in their own way. That included combat with elders, who tended to be crusader types themselves. Philippa was very much her parents’ daughter even in her often embittered quest to chart a path beyond their vision of her as the biracial artist who would be a bridge between races. Not unlike the young Josephine in flight from Texas, Philippa was a radical shapeshifter, going so far as to shed her black lineage to try out a European onstage persona by the name of Felipa Monterro in the early 1960s. Following in her father’s footsteps, Philippa flouted caution and convention as she fit reportorial writing into her travels. Her work included two books about Africa, which shared George’s by now very conservative views and anti-Communist zeal. She wrote pro-war dispatches from Vietnam.

  But she saw her country’s blindness, too. Stunned by prejudice against black GIs and Asians in Vietnam, Philippa became more disillusioned than ever about American racial attitudes. She cofounded an organization to aid “half-castes” fathered by Americans. And she was determined to help evacuate children from a Catholic orphanage in central Vietnam to safety farther south. She had postponed her return to the United States several times, despite her mother’s pleas, when the helicopter transporting her and a group of orphans went down in the South China Sea on May 9, 1967. Philippa drowned at thirty-five. Two years later, on May 2, Josephine committed suicide.

  That future in which Philippa would “enjoy life really” had kept receding from her. When Shirley Temple discovered that she had been deprived of a fortune, forgiveness was her assertion of freedom. But Philippa Schuyler never escaped the sense that she was owed big, because she was. She could be exceptional, or else invisible: that was the brutal deal offered by a mother who failed to recognize a child’s need to feel that she is lovable. A bigoted country confirmed a third option: however phenomenal she was, Philippa would be a perpetual outsider. When Josephine sent her grown daughter a benediction of sorts in the early 1960s, she had no idea how heartless it sounded—or how heartbreaking it would seem in retrospect. “We have tried to make you important. We have been as diligent and sincere on this end as you have on your end,” she wrote Philippa.

  However, I can see why you are tired, it was a great ordeal, a tremendous task, which you carried out with great triumph and ingenuity….YOU WERE PART OF HISTORY.

  Now, we can make this the end of all such attempts to capture public interest….You have become a world figure….Now, you can do as you wish with the future.

  PART III

  REBELS with CAUSES

  CHAPTER 5

  Bobby Fischer’s Battles

  · 1 ·

  Bobby Fischer, born on March 9, 1943, gave his single mother, Regina, a hard time starting very early. He wasn’t easy on his sister either. Joan, five years older and unusually smart and responsible, was often left in charge. One rainy day when Bobby was six, she got tired of his fits at Parcheesi. The family had just settled into a cheap apartment on East Thirteenth Street in Manhattan after moving around the country during the previous half decade. At the candy store nearby, Joan bought a plastic chess set. She wasn’t familiar with the game, but it seemed promising: Bobby liked puzzles a lot, and didn’t like outcomes determined by a roll of the dice at all. Several years later, after they had moved again, to Flatbush—and Bobby had bounced unhappily among schools—his mother began walking him over to the Brooklyn Chess Club, where he would tug on the trousers of the club regulars. Never looking the men in the eye, Bobby would ask, “Wanna have a game?” And then he would set out to win. When he did, one grandmaster remembered, his eyes “flooded with maniacal glee.”

  In January 1958 Bobby, by then fourteen and a (lousy) student at Erasmus Hall High School, won very big. Three months after the Soviets’ launch of Sputnik sparked educational panic in America, he became the youngest U.S. champion in a brainy game long dominated by the Russians. In “a football country, a baseball country,” as Bobby later put it, his stunning rise was not immediately national news. On the television quiz show I’ve Got a Secret shortly after his triumph, he held up a mock newspaper emblazoned with the headline “Teenager’s Strategy Defeats All Comers.” Who was this gangly Mr. X, with dark circles under his eyes, notable for some sort
of combative prowess and clearly uncomfortable in front of the cameras? The panelists took turns probing. Did his pursuit make other people happy? one of them asked. Bobby’s answer—“It made me happy”—got a laugh out of the audience (in on the secret). The panel was mystified.

  For viewers who might have lately tuned in to the Quiz Kids on TV (a brief stab at reviving the popular wartime radio show in a new medium), Bobby was a reticent contrast to the adorably encyclopedic prodigies earning prize money to pay for college. What few words he said definitely didn’t fit the adult-pleasing wunderkind image cultivated over the course of the preceding half century either. Bobby, the antithesis of Shirley Temple in every way, may call to mind William Sidis—with the big difference that the wary loner in Brooklyn proceeded to become, of course, a huge success. More than that, Bobby insisted on calling the shots almost from the start and got away with it. His parent was the one who felt intimidated. That kids-are-boss power shift is likely to make Bobby seem not unfamiliar, particularly if your family life is scheduled around a young sports fanatic—though nobody could match Bobby’s single-minded, unwavering focus. He was an unprecedented handful.

  Regina was trying her best, however, to broaden her obsessive son’s horizons. That was how Bobby got roped into appearing on I’ve Got a Secret, one of whose sponsors was Sabena Airlines. When nobody guessed his feat, he walked away with a prize in the form of two round-trip plane tickets to Russia. He was dying to see Soviet chess up close—to play their stars and visit the Young Pioneer Palaces where the nation’s, and world’s, best young talent was incubated. Eager to expose her very bright children to foreign culture and language, Regina was all for it. (Maybe Bobby would pick up new interests and buckle down at school, too.) But she couldn’t possibly afford it, so she had wangled him a spot on the show. Now, with Joan enlisted as chaperone, the summer trip was on.

  The Fischer family was right in step with Cold War zeal to play educational catch-up. At the same time, characteristically, mother and son were marching to their own drummers. That fall Congress passed the National Defense Education Act, a response to Sputnik-inspired fears that a streamlined Soviet system of top-down talent development threatened the strategic superiority of the United States. The time had come to boost federal support for college study of science, math, and foreign languages in particular. The following year Harvard’s former president James Bryant Conant published The American High School Today, a best seller. An early champion of the SAT for a fast-expanding pool of college applicants, he urged greater academic rigor for gifted, test-acing achievers, along with general education for all.

  The prewar message, sounded in different ways by prodigy promoters like Boris Sidis and Lewis Terman (and by Hollywood studios, too), had gotten through: young marvels, far from misfits, were ripe for newly systematic sorting and tending. Except Bobby bucked the trend in a well-timed way. Just when the meritocratic mission was catching on, here was a stubborn genius scripting his own rise off on the cultural margins. (No one would have imagined the weekend-consuming enterprise that scholastic chess has since become.) The democratic allure of a boy blazing a path into a field the enemy considered its own—not space, but chess—was hard to resist. What if this fiercely competitive young maverick could outplay the apparatchiks—without a Soviet-style machine assiduously training a cadre of high-ranked stars? The optics were exciting, even if the facts were potentially disconcerting.

  In the corduroy pants, T-shirts, and cheap sneakers he always wore, Bobby with his blondish buzz cut and hazel eyes looked like an all-American boy. When a smile appeared, he seemed to beam. But that was mostly because a grin was rare, breaking through the scowl of a very prickly youth. Aloof arrogance, not dimpled confidence, was his signature. Unlike his prodigy predecessors, he stirred no concern that he might be subject to undue “forcing” by blinkered parents or mentors. Quite the contrary. Bobby, a forerunner of young computer-era upstarts, bucked authority. Inseparable from his pocket chess set, he said he needed no friends, and he bridled at adults—above all his mother—who presumed to hover or hound or just help. His IQ was sky-high, but he dismissed school as a place for “weakies” and a distraction from chess. He dropped out as soon as he could, at sixteen.

  By then, Bobby had already made disruptive public scenes in the United States and abroad. His story, for all its rebel-with-a-cause allure, did not neatly vindicate a democratic approach to talent development, as the Soviets took pleasure in noting. Long before his paranoid retreat as an adult, Bobby’s obstinate spirit and obsessive temperament spelled trouble—as well as spectacular accomplishments. His elders’ attempts, such as they were, to encourage wider interests were a mixed blessing, too. And were their hearts really in those efforts anyway? This driven teenager, after all, looked like he just might be the one to rout the Russians. In any case, nudges toward well-rounded balance served only to fuel Bobby’s monomaniacal focus—for good and for ill.

  · 2 ·

  Regina Wender Fischer exerted greater influence on Bobby than she recognized. She didn’t, of course, choose the genes she passed on. She would have said her guidance, both as a role model and as a concerned mother, got ignored. More to the point, it routinely backfired: Bobby did take cues from her, and then typically proceeded to do the opposite. In his remarkably energetic defiance of help or direction, except on his own terms, the apple didn’t fall far from the tree.

  Shortly after he was born, Regina took up residence at the Sarah Hackett Memorial House for indigent single mothers in Chicago and promptly broke the rules: she tried to sneak in five-year-old Joan (who had been staying with her grandfather Jacob Wender in St. Louis during Regina’s pregnancy). Regina then refused to leave and was arrested for disturbing the peace. A year earlier, when dire straits had led her to try placing Joan with a foster mother, she had run into trouble, too. The woman returned Joan and quietly reported Regina as a possible spy, her suspicions aroused by various items she found in a box of clothes—a high-quality camera and a letter from a leftist friend, among other things. The FBI opened a file on Regina. Agents keeping tabs on her got a copy of the psychiatric report that was ordered when she waived a trial after her Chicago arrest. The prognosis sounds discouraging: “Stilted (paranoid) personality, querulent [sic] but not psychotic….It is difficult to see how she can unravel the complexities of her personal life. It is obvious that she will continue to refuse any agency or counsel.”

  The examiner underestimated her (and two decades of FBI surveillance, the extent of which she never knew, perhaps casts her paranoia in a different light). Regina, who stares out of photographs with dark-eyed intensity and gamine appeal, wasn’t trying to unravel complexities. She was a remarkably restless woman who sought them out. Born in 1913 in Switzerland to Polish parents who were Jewish, she had grown up in the United States and speedily, if circuitously, graduated from college in her teens: she studied at three different universities. She headed to Berlin at nineteen to study some more, and met a German biophysicist, Gerhardt Fischer. She followed him to the Soviet Union, where he—evidently a Communist—was perhaps a Comintern agent. They married, and Regina began studying medicine in Moscow. Not long after Joan’s birth in 1937 and before she finished her degree, Regina left and was en route to the United States in early 1939. Her husband, denied entry, ended up in Chile.

  Regina bounced among cities and jobs, from schoolteacher to shipyard welder, taking whatever work she could get and often studying as well. (She ended up knowing six languages, several fluently, and she dabbled in Yiddish.) She paused long enough in Denver to have a brief liaison with a Hungarian mechanical engineer and mathematician teaching nearby, Paul Nemenyi. Bobby’s birth certificate listed Fischer as his father (and Regina told a social worker her son was conceived during a rendezvous in Mexico with her husband in 1942), but the evidence points strongly to Nemenyi. Regina apparently considered putting Bobby up for adoption but couldn’t bring herself to do it—or to settle down.

  She ke
pt the FBI busy. There were no subversive plots to unearth, but just tracking her whereabouts was time-consuming: Chicago, Oregon, St. Louis, California, Illinois, Arizona, Idaho (where she officially divorced Gerhardt Fischer from afar in 1945). Always scrounging for work and money, she turned to Jewish family agencies in various places for financial aid but not, it seems, for counsel or other help with the children. Nemenyi weighed in from a distance. In 1946 and 1947, according to the FBI records, he told one agency that he “considered the subject to be mentally upset and also described Robert as an ‘upset child.’ ” To another agency, he portrayed Regina as a “driving and aggressive person.” The social worker wasn’t sure how to weigh his concerns, judging him “somewhat of a ‘paranoid type.’ ” (Clarissa and Henry Cowell’s peregrinations forty years earlier, though the pair were similarly hard up, were an idyll by comparison.) All Bobby ever said he remembered about these years was living in a trailer “out west.”

  Not long after they arrived in Manhattan in 1949, Joan resorted to the chess set. She and her brother figured out the rules together, but for Bobby chess wasn’t an instant passion. Nor did he get the sort of warm home support for playful exploration that can help launch a youthful talent. Joan’s interest flagged, and Regina, whom Bobby then taught to play, was terrible at it. “My mother has an anti-talent for chess,” Bobby later said. “She’s hopeless.” Working on her skills was not a priority, as Regina scrambled to earn a living and keep up her leftist political activities—and send her son to summer camp. During either his first season out on Long Island, when he was six, or the next one, Bobby stumbled on a book of annotated chess games. For a boy with an evident antitalent for friendship, it offered some comfort—but not enough. “MOMMY I WANT TO COME HOME,” Bobby wrote in big letters on a prestamped and addressed postcard.