by Ann Hulbert
BOBBY WITH HIS MOTHER Credit 9
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On the July 4 weekend in 1956, Bobby won the U.S. Junior Championship and became the youngest chess master in history. He looked ten but was thirteen, and he knew how he intended to spend the rest of the summer: traveling on his own to meet the strongest opposition yet at the U.S. Open in Oklahoma City and after that at the First Canadian Open in Montreal. Regina resisted, and then gave up. He held a simultaneous exhibition to help raise money, and she found people for him to stay with. Bobby, chewing holes in his shirts as he played, tied for fourth in Oklahoma and second in Montreal (keeping the $59 Canadian prize for himself, not telling his mother).
By the fall he was a freshman at Erasmus Hall High School, but the only learning he cared about was happening a few blocks away. Jack Collins, a renowned player whom top U.S. talents sought out as a teacher, hosted a chess salon in the apartment he and his sister shared (complete with chess-piece-patterned upholstery and drapes). Bobby had first shown up at the door in June. Now he dropped by at lunch, in his free periods, after school—and accompanied Collins, who was wheelchair-bound, on outings, too, playing blindfold chess en route. Collins’s learning-by-osmosis method was made for Bobby. When Regina dragged him home, he took books from Collins’s extensive chess library with him. Hater of homework, he dove deep into research in his chosen realm—long before computers could instantly summon up centuries’ worth of games. Bobby’s herculean explorations of his predecessors complemented his upstart instinct to look beyond prevailing styles at the board. He was primed, starting very young, to see what others didn’t.
On an unusually hot evening in October, ignoring the dress code of the elegant Marshall Chess Club off Fifth Avenue in Greenwich Village, Bobby appeared for the prestigious Rosenwald Memorial Tournament—his first all-masters outing—in a striped T-shirt. He played what was immediately heralded as the “Game of the Century,” facing an opponent named Donald Byrne, a leading young player at twenty-six. Early on, Bobby offered up a knight—a move no one predicted but whose ingenuity the kibitzers quickly appreciated. And then, as his time was running low, Bobby realized that the extraordinary sacrifice of his queen could alter the entire game.
There were stunned whispers among the sweaty crowd of onlookers. Years later, Kasparov distilled Bobby’s brilliance as an “ability to look at everything afresh.” Already, while he was still more boy than teenager, his signature clarity jolted a chess elite that would go on to learn from Bobby that, again in Kasparov’s words, “simplification—the reduction of forces through exchanges—was often the strongest path as long as activity was maintained.” Seeing twenty moves or more ahead, Bobby proceeded to respond to Byrne with speedy calm, his long fingers propelling his pieces in unexpected directions and snatching his opponent’s off the board.
The game eclipsed Samuel Reshevsky’s victory at the tournament. Bobby’s feat evoked comparison with America’s most famous native chess prodigy ever, the Louisianan Paul Morphy. Many felt he had surpassed Morphy’s legendary win at almost thirteen in 1850. Bobby continued to stun the chess world the next year. He won the U.S. Junior Open again in July 1957 and the U.S. Open a month later, the youngest person ever to manage that—and the only player to hold both titles at once. In January of 1958, taller and gawky now, Bobby emerged the upstart winner of the U.S. Championship. His cool ruthlessness was intimidating, though his well-gnawed fingernails and knuckle cracking (he had stopped chewing on his shirts) betrayed the tension. He played thirteen games against a very strong field without a loss. When his spectacular victory became clear, the “Mozart of Chess,” as the Times called him, began to dance and jump around. But Bobby also sounded a querulous note. Upon being named an international master, he complained in a voice that was breaking, “They shoulda made me a Grand Master.”
The growing acclaim for Bobby during his chess surge of the previous two years had been mixed with unease behind the scenes. Regina had continued to worry about his obsessiveness, though her ever-balkier teenager’s success stirred a new ambivalence. She “lives in terror of him,” an FBI informant noted, “but at the same time seems to ‘gloat’ over his publicity.” Even for chess aficionados, well acquainted with single-minded eccentrics, Bobby’s increasingly obstreperous style was unsettling. When he sat down at the board, he was a paragon of rule-abiding respect. Away from it, everybody could see that Bobby, for whom all the attention coincided with puberty, needed guidance. (Much the same, under very different circumstances, had been true of Barbara Follett—a celebrated author suddenly emotionally at sea—during her rocky mother-daughter voyage.) Yet nobody was better than Bobby at rebuffing unbidden attempts to provide direction. The anxious efforts to tame his intransigence—by his mother and by a motley chess entourage—were singularly inept, sporadic, and halfhearted. Whether subtler, or stricter, or steadier handling would have met with greater success is anyone’s guess. And at what price, given a rare talent fueled by a defiantly individualistic temperament? That was the rub, especially since this was the United States, after all, not the USSR.
Lurking in the minds of apprehensive admirers was Paul Morphy, for reasons other than his youthful brilliance at the board. Bobby’s 1956 anointment as his successor paid tribute to half of his legacy, as “perhaps the most accurate chess player who ever lived,” in Bobby’s words. But Morphy wasn’t just the marvel who put the United States on the world chess map by triumphing over a European chess elite in 1858. He then quit chess in his twenties and became deeply paranoid before dying a recluse at forty-seven. Morphy also put madness on the American chess map.
For Regina, around 1957, proud though she was of Bobby’s streak, the recent publication of a monograph by the former-chess-star-turned-psychoanalyst Reuben Fine was a spur to give psychiatry another try. His Psychoanalytic Observations on Chess and Chess Masters opened with a nod to Ernest Jones’s classic paper “The Problem of Paul Morphy,” published twenty-five years earlier, and went on to pursue an Oedipal theme not irrelevant to the Fischer family. Chess, Dr. Fine declared, was a sublimated form of struggle with the father (the all-important yet weak king who must be checkmated). More useful was his division of chess greats into two groups: the “heroes,” near-monomaniacal players surrounded by worshippers, and the “non-heroes,” for whom chess was only a part of their life. The former, he noted, “showed considerable emotional disturbance.” Regina—more anxious than ever to get her son on a well-rounded academic track, especially now that college was in view—phoned Dr. Fine. He would be dealing, she warned him, with a very unwilling patient.
To allay Bobby’s astute suspicions, Fine agreed to invite him over to play chess in his family quarters—not the home office—in his huge Upper West Side apartment. The purpose wasn’t psychological probing, he assured Bobby, and he began by sending him copies of his chess books to establish a bond and, at the same time, his authority. The disingenuous paternalism annoyed Bobby, who set the terms over their next six or so meetings. Dr. Fine couldn’t win his respect without beating him, and being beaten prompted Bobby’s fury. “Lucky,” he seethed after every defeat. Flattering himself that there was at last some rapport and “hopeful that I might help him to develop in other directions,” Fine one day asked a question about school. “You have tricked me,” Bobby declared, and stormed off.
Bobby had seized his chance to confront a father figure—and a maternal accomplice—who played by deceptive rules. (No Oedipal gloss is needed to imagine how gratifying this must have felt.) Redoubling his commitment to dominating at the board, he continued his streak. Regina responded in her typically inconsistent yet fervent way. At first, she bore down in earnest on the school front. Languages were her specialty, and after Bobby failed a Spanish quiz, she exhorted focus while also urging the benefits of multilingualism for his chess travels, a savvy pitch. Regina started speaking Spanish to Bobby and tutoring him at home, and his grades soared. But soon she got swept up in his chess triumphs. After all, they m
ade him happy. The “professional protester,” as Joan once called her mother, now turned Bobby’s career into a cause. Impatient over the lack of publicity and fund-raising, she wrote press releases and tried to get on television shows. She didn’t seem to notice how much Bobby, mortified, resented the intrusions.
Bobby’s peers, predictably, also hadn’t managed to curb his growing insistence that, whatever the circumstance, he got to set the terms. When Bobby joined the Manhattan Chess Club, he had been the still boyish near-teen in a mostly older youth contingent, but soon they were acolytes, deferring to him and his hard-driving pace. On the trajectory from one victory to the next, Bobby became more imperious. A fellow participant in the 1957 U.S. Junior Championship tournament held in San Francisco described a fourteen-year-old master of shock-and-awe drama—except the intimidating act suggested a boy out of control. Bobby had missed the ice cream social beforehand, where there had been lots of talk about the reigning champion. Striding in late, his hair shaved short and his Levi’s ragged, he ignored young fans as he headed straight for the director’s table to find out what the winner would get this year. “I do not want another typewriter!” he raged on learning the first prize was a repeat. When another player mocked his assurance as premature, Bobby turned on him: “You don’t know me.”
Working up to his encounter with Gilbert Ramirez, the highest-ranked junior, Bobby repeatedly rebuffed Gil’s invitation to play some speed chess in between his rounds. “Too weak,” he muttered. But Bobby relented before the two of them, each with four victories so far, were to meet at the board. In front of a large crowd, he sat down for a brisk preview of things to come. They played twenty-five or thirty blitz games, and Bobby didn’t lose or draw one. He spent less than a minute on each. “It’s like angels are moving his hand!” said Miguel Najdorf, a leading grandmaster of the time who was among the spectators. Bobby won the real games, too, retaining the junior title.
Before heading to Cleveland to play (and emerge victorious) in the U.S. Open several weeks later, he killed time out west with Gil and some other boys who had played in the tournament. It was a rare occasion for bonding, which clearly did not go so well for Bobby. During a memorable fight on the drive across the desert, he bit Gil hard enough to leave scars. But Bobby was also doing his best to sound more calmly mature. Maybe someone had dared to offer him advice, though effective counsel had notably not been the pattern so far. “Yes, sometimes I did cry when I lost, but I don’t cry any more,” he had told the New York Times reporter Gay Talese before his summer conquests. “I’m thrilled about winning but I try to be nice to people. I don’t know if older persons are embarrassed about losing to me, but I do not feel awkward about playing them—or beating them. I beat them, or they’ll beat me.”
In his monograph, Fine noted the Soviets’ “determined effort to prove that in their society artists”—a category that included chess stars—“need not be the tormented prima donnas so often encountered in other countries, but can lead socially normal lives.” If anything, Bobby was reinforced in assuming the opposite: that bucking normalcy was a privilege of path-breaking genius. Such heady hero stuff was not exactly helpful, especially for a highly temperamental and vulnerable teenager with years of nonstandard socializing already behind him. Carmine Nigro had moved to Florida in 1956, and he and Bobby never saw each other again. Even with Jack Collins, who gave him a home away from home, Bobby began making occasional digs behind his back. Bobby was always “ahead of any plans his elders had for him,” noted Frank Brady, the founding editor of Chess Life who met him around this time and later became his biographer.
In any case, his elders’ plans were not exactly clear or firm. The upper reaches of the chess establishment were concerned enough to convene a meeting. The governors’ board of the wood-paneled Marshall Chess Club of course agreed on Bobby’s phenomenal talent. The problem was his attitude. The club manager, Caroline Marshall—the widow of the former long-standing U.S. champion Frank Marshall, for whom rich patrons had originally bought the brownstone—had threatened to keep Bobby out if he didn’t abide by its sartorial rules. Bobby paid no attention and provoked other sponsors with antics that were evidently far more disruptive. “Some of what he did was so outrageous it was decided maybe he had emotional problems,” Allen Kaufman, a chess master who had known Bobby and who attended the meeting, later told a reporter (without offering details). Someone suggested consulting—whom else?—Reuben Fine. But a board member broached a quandary that hadn’t occurred to Regina when she first asked for Fine’s guidance: in Bobby, they might have a case of neurosis bound up with chess genius. Did they want to run the risk that successful therapy might derail the United States in its suddenly promising quest for a world champion? They did not.
Though he doubtless wouldn’t have tolerated Soviet-style chess training, much less therapy, the mixed signals Bobby got during his chess and adolescent growth spurts arguably suited him too well. A conflicted mother and a muddled chess world—both filled mostly with permissive fervor on Bobby’s behalf—gushed, and knew how to get out of his way. That helped inspire his focus and abet his young genius. But by the time they faced an ever more combative teenager whose rare gifts they revered—and had their own reasons for promoting—they were singularly ill equipped to deal. They squirmed, went behind his back, flinched, hoping for the best. And when the new U.S. champion, who turned fifteen two months after winning the title, was heralded by “not one word from the Government…silence from the authorities,” as an outraged chess elder put it, a similar message got through to Bobby: you don’t owe anybody anything.
Another message also registered, which no fifteen-year-old would handle well: keep winning, and you’ll be owed big. As Bobby turned to face the world in 1958, America’s great chess hope felt he had license to conceive himself a lone ranger, now on a global stage. The United States had finally gotten a satellite into orbit in late January, and the National Defense Education Act was in the works. But funding was not forthcoming for a prodigy in the Soviet national sport: Bobby was eager for a summer trip to the USSR before heading to Yugoslavia for one of the qualifying tournaments for the world championship. Government money hadn’t been available for a spring visit to Moscow by a Texan piano prodigy, Van Cliburn, either. At twenty-three, he had just stunned the world by winning the Soviet Union’s first International Tchaikovsky Piano Competition after adoring fans swooned, thrilled by his romantic Russian feel for their music. Starry-eyed Cliburn (“a boy, not a young man,” his hosts judged) had swooned, too, enthralled by the country and its people. No wonder, perhaps, the Soviets were favorably disposed to Regina’s suggestion that Bobby be invited to visit—and the U.S. government, nonplussed by the pro-Soviet effusions of one Cold War cultural emissary already, kept its distance.
Regina secured the airfare with the I’ve Got a Secret gambit, and the Soviets quickly found themselves with an anti-Cliburn on their hands. Bobby, too, was steeped in Russian prowess, but he aimed to do as he pleased. He and Joan arrived early, to give him extra time to “play against the best they’ve got,” as he told a reporter. “Their style gets me. That’s why I came here.” He rebuffed the sightseeing his hosts had arranged, well aware that his mother had conceived of the trip as culturally enriching for him. His goal was immersion in the Soviet way of chess, and the chance to battle with the best. “We have to throw him out every afternoon,” an official of the Moscow Central Chess Club said, initially charmed by Bobby’s passion. “We don’t know what to do with him. But he’s a wonderful boy.”
Soon Bobby asked when the games with their chess pantheon would begin, and was surprised to learn that the Soviets had no intention of trotting out their masters and methods. Exactly a century earlier, when Paul Morphy had taken his triumphant foreign tour, his trip had been marred only by the refusal of the top player (a Briton) to play a match. Bobby seized on the precedent, but he didn’t have Morphy’s “genial disposition, his unaffected modesty and gentlemanly courtesy,”
as Chess Monthly had described him. Bobby was furious. An interpreter perhaps misunderstood him when he said he had been served enough pork at meals, or else she transcribed Bobby’s sentiments perfectly: “I’m fed up with these Russian pigs.” Feeling insulted and betrayed by his chess heroes, he vowed eternal enmity. Bobby conveyed a toned-down version in a postcard to Jack Collins: “I don’t like Russian hospitality and the people themselves. It seems they don’t like me either.”
Bobby returned home in the fall of 1958 from Yugoslavia, where he had become the youngest grandmaster ever and was lionized as a quintessentially American upstart, “laconic as the hero of an old cowboy movie,” a reporter wrote. He draped a scarf he had bought for Regina around her neck and gallantly told her, “That’s very Continental.” But before long their apartment was too small for them both. She had begun petitioning and picketing the American Chess Foundation, which she felt was offering inadequate support to U.S. chess efforts. So was the government, which wasn’t funding the Olympic team’s trip to Leipzig in 1960. To Bobby’s fury, she picketed in front of the White House and the State Department, and began a hunger strike for chess. Up-close-and-personal support didn’t suit her so well, or him either, so Regina moved out to live with a friend in the Bronx. “It sounds terrible to leave a 16-year-old to his own devices, but he is probably happier that way,” Regina wrote to another friend. “Maybe he is better off without my nagging him to get out for sports, etc, eat, get through his homework, go to bed before 1 am, etc. I am tired of being a scapegoat and doormat.”
Regina ended up miles away, though they corresponded. She went to California to embark on a peace walk from San Francisco to Moscow and en route found a new husband, an Englishman. She at last finished her medical degree in East Germany and continued to keep the FBI busy tracking her political activism, now on the Continent, where she tirelessly protested against the Vietnam War. Bobby retreated to a filthy apartment that was all his, with chessboards next to each of three beds and the radio often on. It was his idea of bliss—and it was a barricaded existence. He had already devastated Regina by dropping out of Erasmus High. Bobby spent the rest of his teens brooding even more over his beloved game, playing and studying ten to fourteen hours a day. “Chess and me,” as he later said, “it’s hard to take them apart. It’s like my alter ego.”