by Frank Brady
When he was finished with that day’s pursuit of books, he returned to South Pasadena in the early evening for a workout at the gym, forty-five minutes of swimming, and then a sauna; by nightfall he was back at Mockingbird Lane, settling into his world of reading, and studying chess: peace. Unless a friend was visiting, he rarely went out at night, enjoying the comfort and safety of his home.
The apartment was strewn with books, magazines, and piles of clothing and had the smell of fresh oranges: Bobby would buy them and other fruits and vegetables by the bagful. Every day, he’d drink one or two pint glasses of carrot juice, one right after the other. Dozens of bottles of vitamin pills, Indian herbal medicines, Mexican rattlesnake pills, lotions, and exotic teas were piled on tables and ledges everywhere, all to help keep him on what he believed was a strict, healthful diet—and to treat some ailments he had from time to time. Often he’d take his hand-cranked juicer to a restaurant with him, order breakfast, ask for an empty glass, and break out a half dozen oranges, cut them in half, and squeeze them at his table while customers and waiters looked on in either puzzlement or amusement. He began to put on bulk and muscle and he seemed to be in perfect physical shape.
He’d collected hundreds of chess magazines in five or six languages, and all genres of chess books, the majority of which were sent to him by his mother. Now living in Jena, East Germany, behind the Iron Curtain, where she was completing her medical degree, Regina could purchase the latest Soviet chess literature quite inexpensively, and she regularly made shipments to her son, either at random or by request. At one point Bobby had to tell her to stop sending chess books because he was running out of room.
Far into the night he’d play over the latest games by himself—from tournaments in places ranging from England to Latvia to Yugoslavia to Bulgaria—and he’d hiss and scream as he followed the moves. So loudly did he exclaim “Yes!”, “Absurd!”, “It’s the knight!”, or “Always the rook on that rank!” that his pronouncements could be heard on the quiet lane where he lived. Bobby’s outbursts would startle the infrequent passersby and sometimes produce complaints from neighbors.
By the late 1970s, Fischer hadn’t played a single game of chess in public since Iceland. He was continuing to study the game, but he spent more time exploring his theories on religion. At one point, he was spotted in a parking lot with an armful of anti-Semitic flyers that promulgated the superiority of the Aryan race. In between handing out the flyers to those who walked by, he placed his declarations on windshields. Gradually, his savings were evaporating, and other than biannual royalty checks from his books, Bobby Fischer Teaches Chess and My 60 Memorable Games—which netted him roughly $6,000 a year in total—he had no other source of income.
Either by choice or necessity, Bobby moved out of the Mokarow house and settled in Los Angeles, in a small, dingy, dark, and inexpensive furnished room on Orange Avenue, one block off Wilshire Boulevard. Within a short while, though, the rent for the room became too much of a financial burden to carry. So he wrote to his mother, who was living in Nicaragua doing pro bono medical work for the poor, to see if she could help out. She immediately instructed his sister, Joan, to send the entire amount of her monthly Social Security check to Bobby to assist him with his rent. Joan had been collecting Regina’s checks and then banking them for her so that she’d have a small nest egg when she returned to the United States. Bobby continued to accept the proceeds of his mother’s Social Security checks for years.
His settlement on Orange Avenue wasn’t permanent, however, and he eventually began renting in the skid row section of L.A. near MacArthur Park, taking rooms in what might be called flophouses, sometimes just for the night or by the week.
In time, judging from his uncombed and disheveled physical appearance, it was difficult to differentiate Bobby from the down-and-outers of the area. His ten $400 suits were in storage somewhere, but he just didn’t seem to care to dress well anymore. He stopped regularly working out, started developing a paunch, began dressing in whatever clothes he happened to have handy, rarely had his hair or beard cut professionally, and even had the fillings of his teeth removed.
This last piece of physical business has been so distorted by the press over the years that it has entered the “Bobby Fischer Urban Legend Storybook” as proof of his “insanity.” Somewhere he was quoted as saying that he’d had his fillings removed because he feared that the Soviets could affect his mind by sending harmful radio signals through the metal in his teeth—and virtually every profile and book written about Bobby since has mentioned it. Either the quote was spurious or misremembered, or Bobby was joshing the reporter who recorded it, because the truth is that he had the fillings removed for what he believed was a legitimate health reason. He was solicitous toward Ethel Collins about this, since she’d been suffering with a chronic gum problem for years.
Bobby believed that false teeth and metal fillings (especially silver) were detrimental to periodontal health because they irritated the gums. He was also convinced that mercury in most fillings has a toxic effect on the body.
Consequently, Bobby had all of his fillings removed by a dentist in a quick procedure (it only took a few minutes), and he recommended that Ethel do so too. He admitted that eating without fillings was “uncomfortable,” but it was better than the alternative of losing all of one’s teeth, which he predicted would happen if the fillings remained.
Years later in Iceland, he told his closest friend Gardar Sverrisson that the “radio signal” story about the fillings was bogus: The reason he’d had them removed was because he felt that fillings caused more problems than they cured.
The problem for Bobby became that, since his teeth no longer had fillings, they also no longer had any support and became more fragile. They were also open to decay, and therefore began to chip away. The result: over time he lost a number of teeth. Since he no longer believed in going to a dentist (nor could he afford it) for crowns, implants, or replacements, his broken and missing teeth added to his vagrant look.
Despite his cordial exchanges with the Collinses, and his attempt at proselytizing them into accepting his conspiracy theories, he hurt Jack Collins deeply when he refused to write the introduction to Jack’s book My Seven Chess Prodigies (1974). Jack had told him that if he would just write a short introduction, it would mean a sizable advance from the publisher. Collins needed the extra money; although not indigent, he was always short of income since he was living off Ethel’s salary as a part-time nurse. His request of Bobby was couched in cordial, nonpleading terms, but Bobby heartlessly never answered him, and Lombardy stepped in to do the job.
When Bobby became unbearably lonely for companionship, he would often head up north to Palo Alto and stay with his sister and her husband, Russell Targ, a Stanford University scientist who was an authority on extrasensory perception. Joan was Jewish, as were Russell and their three children, and after hearing Bobby’s rants time and again against Jews, the family asked their houseguest to leave.
Living not too far from his sister was Bobby’s friend, grandmaster Peter Biyiasas and his wife Ruth, so Bobby stayed there for weeks on end. Over a period of four months Fischer and Biyiasas played seventeen five-minute games and Bobby won them all, with Biyiasis claiming that he never got into an endgame once: Bobby would just wipe him off the board in short order every time.
On three occasions, Bobby went to Berkeley in the San Francisco Bay Area to visit Walter Browne, an Australian-American grandmaster. They went over some of the games from Browne’s recent tournaments, although they didn’t play chess, and once took a long walk at sunset to enjoy the spectacular views of the city across the Bay. During the walk, Bobby kept up a continuous spiel about the Jewish World Conspiracy and made various anti-Semitic remarks, but when they returned to the house and sat down for dinner with Browne’s family he ceased his outré comments. On his third visit with Browne, Bobby was to stay overnight. After dinner he asked to use the phone and talked long distance for the rest
of the evening—“perhaps for four hours,” Browne later recalled. Finally Browne said, “You know, Bobby, you’ll really have to get off the phone. I can’t afford this.” Bobby hung up and immediately said he had to leave and couldn’t spend the night with the Brownes. They never talked again.
Back in Los Angeles, Bobby wrote to his mother, asking her when she could visit him, hoping it would be “soon,” and advising her to sail from England instead of flying, telling her that his boat trips in the past had been “a real experience.” At the end of the letter he included instructions: “Write to me at the Post Office box and do not put my name on the address. It’s not necessary.”
He simply did not want contact from anyone he didn’t know, and he made it quite clear, peremptorily, to Jack Collins that no mail—even important, flattering, or personal messages—should be forwarded to him. Possibly, he was worried that that a letter might contain poison or that a package could contain an explosive.
Chess colleagues of Bobby’s—including grandmaster Robert Byrne—have said that the real reason he was so private, and didn’t want anyone to know where he was at any given time, was that he feared a KGB assassination plot. Bobby believed, they said, that the Soviets were so enraged by his winning the crown from Spassky and thereby diminishing their greatest cultural achievement that they wanted him murdered. Of course, Bobby’s fears were thought by some to be incipient paranoia, and although it was highly unlikely that the KGB was plotting against him, even paranoids can have real enemies. At restaurants Bobby always carried with him a virtual pharmacy of remedies and potions to immediately counteract any poisons that the Soviets might slip into his food or drink. Hans Ree, a Dutch grandmaster and an accomplished journalist, summed it up this way: “It is undeniable that Fischer had real enemies and that they were extremely powerful ones.” He then went on to indicate that Mikhail Suslov, one of the most influential Soviet leaders, became involved in issuing instructions on how to subvert (not murder) Bobby, by creating a situation “unfavorable to R. Fischer.” Ree concludes: “There is nothing in the [KGB] documents that there ever were any plans to kill him. But that doesn’t mean there weren’t any.” The important point is that Bobby was convinced it was so and acted accordingly.
Part of his desire for privacy may have been attributable to his readings. Nietzsche said that solitude makes us tougher toward ourselves and more tender toward others. He held that in both ways it improves one’s character. It’s possible that since Bobby was influenced by Nietzsche to some extent, he was following this course to the extreme. By refusing to read letters that might have been laudatory or complimentary, or those that would have been for his own good, such as a letter from an old friend or an invitation to be a guest of honor at West Point, he was deliberately maintaining his isolation.
It was clear, though, that Bobby had a very difficult time considering anything that wasn’t on his own agenda. He was so focused on his path of righteousness and giving free rein to his different-drummer sensibilities that he refused to be distracted by trivia—as he saw it—entering his mailbox from a possibly unknown or unwelcome source.
Because Jack Collins was known as Bobby’s teacher, and he was readily available for contact—his telephone number was listed in the Manhattan telephone directory—he received calls and messages on a daily basis from people who for various reasons wanted to reach Bobby. Unfortunately for them, and even sadder for Bobby, after Collins received the letter warning him against forwarding anything, that conduit was cut off and the requests for contact drifted down into wastebasket oblivion.
Generally, Bobby was depressed, but he still managed to get up and out every day. He was attentive to his surroundings and hardly limited in his physical activity. But in retrospect, he was upset at having passed on the chance to acquire a portion of that $5 million purse in 1975. Who knew, after all, when the next opportunity to earn significant money would come along? The truth was, having to make ends meet was wearing on him. Also preying on his mind were his failure to find romantic love, and his constant religious doubts. This cumulative sadness contributed to his not wanting to be with people … unless he felt highly secure and comfortable with them. So he walked and walked for miles every day, lost in his dreams, or dwelling in a meditative state.
A sportswriter once wrote that Fischer was the fastest walker he ever saw outside of an Olympian. He took great strides, creating a slight wind in his wake, his left arm swinging high with his left leg, his right with his right, in an unusual cadence. Another journalist, Brad Darrach—who Fischer was suing—said that when he walked with Fischer, he felt as if he were Dopey, one of the Seven Dwarfs, trying to keep up with the big folks. Fischer’s erstwhile friend Walter Browne talked about walking with Bobby—very fast—from the Manhattan Chess Club all the way down to Greenwich Village on the West Side of Manhattan—over three miles—having dinner at a Mediterranean restaurant, and then walking all the way back uptown on the East Side, another three miles. Walking gave Bobby time to think—or to lose himself—and it kept him trim. He listed it, along with sports and reading, among his favorite pastimes.
After visiting Harry Sneider at the gym one day—he’d continued his friendship with the trainer even after severing his relationship with the Worldwide Church of God—Bobby chose to take one of his mammoth treks around the city of Pasadena. He walked alongside the Foothill Freeway and then walked back and turned at Lake Avenue, passing the Kaiser Permanente medical facility. A police cruiser stopped him. Apparently there had been a bank robbery in the area, and Bobby fit the description of the robber. He was asked for his name, address, age, type of work, etc., and although Bobby claimed that he answered the questions dutifully, there was something suspicious about him, according to the police interrogator. His appearance didn’t help, untidy as he was and carrying a soiled shopping bag containing a juicer and a number of hate books. The more questions that were asked, the more Bobby became belligerent. Perhaps because he was nervous, or perhaps because he kept moving from one flophouse to another, he couldn’t remember his address. Eventually, he was brought to the station and booked for vagrancy (since the bank robber had already been caught), although he did have $9 and some change on him at the time. He was stripped of his clothing, put in a cell, and not allowed a phone call to enlist help. Moreover, he later claimed that the guards brutalized him and deprived him of food.
Just so the world would know what he’d gone through those two days, when Bobby was finally released he wrote a punch-by-punch description of his ordeal, an eighty-five-hundred-word essay titled “I Was Tortured in the Pasadena Jailhouse!” Although not reaching the virtuosic literary heights of incarceration essays penned by writers such as Thoreau or Martin Luther King Jr., the document was an oddly compelling account of the execrable details of his experience. Described by some as incoherent ranting and too melodramatic, Bobby’s story, if it could be trusted on the basics, was truly horrifying. He was innocent, he claimed, and yet he was made to parade through the halls naked and threatened with being put in a mental institution.
Bobby self-published the essay in a fourteen-page booklet, with red-and-white stripes on the front to resemble cell bars, and signed it “Robert D. James (professionally known as Robert J. Fischer or Bobby Fischer, The World Chess Champion).” He had ten thousand copies printed, which cost him $3,257. How in his near destitute state he was able to obtain the needed money is not known. He sold his essay for $1 a copy, and Claudia Mokarow handled the distribution and sales. Breaking his own privacy rules, Bobby even included a PO box number that he could be written to in care of so that the reader could order “additional copies.” Ironically, he ended up making money from the project—after the printing, shipping, and advertising costs were deducted. Twenty-five years later, an original copy of I Was Tortured … was selling as a collector’s item for upward of $500. A collector asked Pal Benko to see if Bobby would autograph a copy of his j’accuse. Benko requested and Bobby refused: “Yes, I wrote it, but I had
a terrible time in that jail. I want to forget about it. No, I don’t want to sign it.”
The pamphlet is important in offering a glimpse of Bobby’s state of mind at that time (May 1981): It shows his utter outrage in being manhandled and falsely accused; his refusal to bend to authority; his use of a pseudonym (even Regina had begun to address her letters to him as “Robert D. James,” the “D” standing for “Dallas”) for self-protection; and his designation of himself as “The World Chess Champion.” Regarding this self-description, Bobby explained to a friend that he had never been defeated. He resigned the FIDE World Championship, but he believed the true World Champion’s title was still rightfully his. Further, he claimed that he had not won the World Championship in Iceland in 1972; he already was the World Champion: His title was stolen, he said, by the Russians.
Bobby’s life, post-Reykjavik, has been referred to by the press as his “Wilderness Years,” as indeed they were: living in the seamy underside of Los Angeles for the most part, twenty years out of view, refusing offers of money, on the edge of vagrancy, attempting to evaporate into anonymity so as to be shielded from perceived threats.
Money, however, was still available if he chose to avail himself of it. But the complications in getting it to him, or having him accept it, were enormous. First, those who had offers had to find him, not an easy task because he kept changing his address, gave his telephone number to virtually no one, and didn’t have an answering machine. His use of an alias also increased the difficulty of tracking him down. The mailbox at one of his apartments read “R. D. James.” Second, if contact was made, he’d never accept the first offer, and he usually named an amount that was double or triple—or more—pricing himself out of the market. Third, he refused to sign any contracts, making it impossible for most corporations or individuals to proceed with any kind of legally binding arrangement. Stories were told, unconfirmed by this writer, that when he was flat broke, he’d accept short telephone calls from chess players at a charge of $2,500 each, and would also give lessons over the phone for $10,000. If the stories were true, how these calls were arranged, how long they lasted, and who made them aren’t known.