by Frank Brady
It is known that the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation wanted to interview Bobby for a documentary: He demanded $5,000 just to discuss it over the phone, with no promises of anything else. The network refused. A reporter from Newsday, which had one of the largest circulations of any daily tabloid in the United States, sought an interview with Bobby and was told by Claudia Mokarow to “go back to your publisher and ask for a million dollars, and then we’ll talk about whether Bobby will grant you an interview.” Carol J. Williams, a reporter for the Los Angeles Times, approached Bobby for an interview and was told his required fee was $200,000. His request was refused “on principle.” Freelance photographers were willing to pay $5,000 to anyone who could arrange just to locate Bobby so they could take a single photograph, and perhaps pay $10,000 to Bobby if he’d allow the picture to be taken. It never happened. Edward Fox, a freelance journalist for the British Independent newspaper, wrote of Bobby: “The years passed, and the last extant photographs were growing more and more out of date. No one knew what Bobby Fischer looked like any more. Into the vacuum of his non-presence rushed a fog of rumors and fragmentary information. He existed as a vortex of recycled facts and second-hand quotes. Every now and then there would be a ‘sighting’ of a forlorn, bearded figure.”
A sensationalistic television show, Now It Can Be Told, spent weeks in the early 1990s trying to capture the reclusive Bobby for their broadcast, and managed to film him for a few seconds in a parking lot, getting out of an automobile, en route to a restaurant with Claudia Mokarow and her husband.
Bobby Fischer! It was the first time he’d been seen by the public in almost two decades. His pants and jacket were wrinkled, but he didn’t look as derelict as some of the press accounts had indicated. Aside from the fact that his hair was thinning and he’d put on weight and grown a beard, he was the unmistakable, broad-shouldered, swaggering Bobby Fischer.
12
Fischer-Spassky Redux
BOBBY’S CHESS DRAGON was not only stirring in the cave, it was lashing its tail. Perhaps because he could no longer tolerate his downtrodden life, living off his mother’s checks and receiving just an occasional trickle of cash from here or there, Bobby wanted to get back to the game … desperately. But his urge to rejoin the fray wasn’t all about remuneration—it was the call to battle, the game itself, that he missed: the prestige; the silence (hopefully) of the tournament room; the sibilant buzz of the kibitzers (damn them); the life of chess. Jonathan Swift defined war as “that mad game the world loves to play.” Fischer felt exactly the same way about chess. But could he find his way, existentially, back to the board? Hermann Hesse, in his masterful novel Magister Ludi (The Glass Bead Game), told of someone whose knowledge of “the game” was Fischer-like: “One who had experienced the ultimate meaning of the game within himself would no longer be a player; he would no longer dwell in the world of multiplicity and would no longer delight in invention, construction, and combination, since he would know altogether different joys and raptures.” The difference is that the joys and raptures away from the board weren’t really there for Bobby.
Spassky provided a way back to the board. He contacted Bobby in 1990 and informed him that Bessel Kok, the man who was running for the presidency of FIDE that year (1990), was interested in organizing a Fischer-Spassky rematch, and there might be millions—although not the $5 million he’d passed up in 1975 for a match with Karpov—available for the prize fund.
Kok, a Dutch businessman of extreme wealth, was president of a Belgium-based banking company, SWIFT, and was responsible for organizing several international tournaments. Kok had a noble agenda: He wanted Bobby to continue his career, and he wanted to be a privileged witness to his games, as did almost all chess players.
A meeting was planned to discuss the match, with Kok agreeing to pay all the expenses for Bobby to fly, first class, to Belgium and be lodged at the five-star Sheraton Brussels Hotel. To avoid journalists, Bobby checked in under the name of Brown. He mentioned to Kok that he’d need some cash for pocket money upon arrival. Twenty-five hundred dollars in cash was waiting for him at the hotel.
In addition to Bobby, Kok also invited Spassky and his wife Marina to Brussels. For four days, the trio spent mostly all of their time at Kok’s suburban mansion, but it wasn’t all a discussion of the possible match. At one point, Fischer and Kok joined the Spasskys in a doubles tennis match; there were elegant, candlelit dinners and postprandial conversations, and a few outings into Brussels itself. Kok’s wife, Pierette Broodhaers, an attorney, said that she had a “normal and friendly” conversation with Bobby, not at all about chess. Nor, according to her, did he show any signs of the eccentricities the press kept referring to, with the exception of his speaking too loudly. “Maybe he is used to living alone so nobody listens to him,” she said, sensing his loneliness. He forbade her to take a photograph of him.
One evening, the men, who were joined by Jan Timman from Holland, the number three–ranked chess player in the world, went off to what Broodhaers described as a “raunchy” nightclub in downtown Brussels. Timman recalled meeting Fischer for the first time: “The most interesting thing was that I had once dreamed of meeting Fischer in a nightclub. Funny I had never entertained the hope of [actually] meeting him. When I broke through internationally, he had just stopped [playing].” Talking about who might be considered the greatest player of all time, he said, “As far as I am concerned, Fischer is the best ever.”
The amount being mentioned as the purse for the rematch was $2,500,000. Although Bobby was in want financially, this prize fund was not acceptable to him. Spassky wanted to go through with it, but no deal could be arranged. Little did either of them know, but Kok had already decided not to pursue the possible match. He found Fischer’s neo-Nazi remarks about Jews to be “beyond the abhorrent” and concluded that any large-scale match involving him would spell trouble. Spassky flew back to Paris, and Bobby boarded a train for Germany.
Since he was in Europe—his first time there in almost twenty years—Bobby felt he should stay awhile. Gerhardt Fischer, the man listed on Bobby’s birth certificate as his father, was living in Berlin, and at eighty-two he was not in good health. The press had learned that Gerhardt was somewhere in Germany—and that Bobby was in the country—and they were trying to track down the father so they could interview his famous son. Reporters believed that it was possible Bobby visited him, but there’s no proof he did.
In the late 1980s, during the Chess Bundesliga competition in Germany, Boris Spassky had met a young woman named Petra Stadler. He felt paternal toward her and thought Bobby might be interested in meeting her, so he gave her Fischer’s address in Los Angeles and suggested she write to him and send him her photograph. In 1988 she did just that, and to her surprise Fischer phoned her from California. Near the beginning of their conversation, he asked her if she was an Aryan. Recollecting the incident years later, she claims she replied: “I think so.”
Fischer invited her to visit him in Los Angeles, where she stayed in a hotel, and the two spent the next few weeks getting to know each other. Then Petra returned to her home in Seeheim, Germany. At that time, Fischer was impoverished, so it was impossible for him to fly to Germany with her. Now that he was in Europe in 1990, courtesy of Bessel Kok, Bobby visited Petra, and with the “pocket money” Kok had given him, his mother’s Social Security income, and some small royalty checks for his books, he lived for almost a year in Seeheim and in nearby towns, moving from hotel to hotel to avoid reporters, and spending time with Petra for as long as their relationship lasted.
Petra married Russian grandmaster Rustem Dautov in 1992, and in 1995 she wrote a book titled Bobby Fischer—Wie er wirklich ist—Ein Jahr mit dem Schachgenie (Fischer as He Really Is: A Year with a Chess Genius). Boris Spassky saw a copy and wrote Bobby a letter of apology for having introduced him to Petra. It was dated March 23, 1995.
He told Bobby that when he introduced Petra to him he meant well, but shortly after they met “s
he started to talk too much about you to other people.” Sensing that Petra would reveal secrets, Spassky warned Bobby to “be careful.”
After Petra’s revealing book was published, Spassky was very upset, primarily because he didn’t want the woman or her book to come between him and Bobby and ruin their good relationship. As a result of Spassky’s letter, Bobby never spoke to Petra again, but he accepted his friend’s apology and maintained cordial relations with Spassky.
While he was in Germany, Bobby went to Bamberg to visit Lothar Schmid, who’d served as arbiter in the 1972 match with Spassky. Schmid’s castle housed the largest known privately owned chess library in the world. Bobby wanted to scrutinize the library and view Schmid’s chess art masterpieces. While there, they also analyzed a number of games together, an experience that indicated to Schmid that Bobby’s command of the game hadn’t waned in his years away from public competition; Schmid claimed that Bobby’s analysis was still remarkably brilliant.
After having been Schmid’s houseguest, Bobby moved to an inn in Pulvermühle, close to Bamberg, located in a valley between Nuremberg and Bayreuth. The inn was known to be friendly to those who played the game and was family-run by Kaspar Bezold, an amateur chess player. Petrosian was a guest there when he played in the international tournament in Bamberg in 1968, and players from throughout Europe often stayed there on holiday.
Schmid made the arrangements for Bobby to stay in Pulvermühle and, to keep journalists at bay, had him register under an assumed name. Staying at a friendly Bavarian inn in the countryside is usually a pleasant affair and can be a chance for renewal, offering long walks in the pastoral countryside, succulent German cooking, decadent desserts, and steins of Rauchbier, the smoked malt and hops from Bamberg that is famous throughout the Free State of Bavaria. But what Bobby liked most was that nobody at the inn, other than Bezold and his son Michael, an up-and-coming chess player, knew who he was. Bobby gave Michael lessons, and the young man went on to become an international grandmaster some eight years later, perhaps inspired by his meeting with the world’s greatest player.
Bobby studied and practiced his German and was becoming semi-fluent after three months. He might have stayed in Pulvermühle much longer, or at least as long as his money held out, but he was spotted by a journalist from the German magazine Stern, who’d tracked him down. Bobby checked out immediately and was never seen in Pulvermühle again.
When Bobby returned from Europe and collected his months of accumulated mail from Claudia Mokarow, there was an unusual letter waiting for him. It would change his life.
I WOULD LIKE TO SELL YOU THE WORLD’S BEST VACUUM CLEANER!
That was how the letter started off. Beneath that headline was a hand-drawn picture of a vacuum cleaner, rendered in color. Why had this been mailed to Fischer and how had the sender found his address? The odd document continued:
NOW THAT I HAVE YOUR INTEREST, TURN THE PAGE.
It was, in fact, a letter from a seventeen-year-old girl, Zita Rajcsanyi, one of Hungary’s most promising women chess players. She had sent the letter to the U.S. Chess Federation, and asked them to forward it to Bobby. “Now that I have your interest,” the letter stated, “I want to tell you the real reason why I wrote to you.” Why did you stop playing? Why did you disappear? she went on to ask. She wrote that she’d been intrigued by Bobby ever since she’d read about him in a book on the history of World Chess Champions. Bobby noticed that the postmark on the letter’s envelope was many months past, and there was actually another letter from Zita in his pile of unopened mail. She was persistent and wanted an answer.
Thus it was that one morning, at about six a.m. Hungarian time, Zita’s phone rang. Zita’s father, an official of FIDE, answered and immediately woke her. “Hi, this is Bobby.” He told her that the reason he was responding was that her letters were so “weird” and quite different from the average fan letters he received, but he thanked her for them. He told her that the reason he wasn’t playing was because the Russians cheat, and over the course of future letters and phone calls he elaborated on his theory regarding how the games played by Kasparov and Karpov had all been prearranged and that he believed that Kasparov and Karpov were actually agents of the Russian regime. He asked if she was Jewish. “Everyone who is a Soviet, and everyone who is Jewish, cannot be trusted,” he affirmed. When she objected to his ranting, he broke off the conversation and didn’t call back for months. More phone calls eventually followed, however, often in the middle of the night, and they also started a pen pal correspondence.
Eventually, he asked Zita whether she’d like to visit him. He told her he’d send her an airline ticket and that she could stay with a friend of his, since his room was too small and it wouldn’t be appropriate for her to stay with him in any event. He was right: After Regina had visited him once, she wrote to him about his cramped quarters: “You can hardly turn around.”
Zita applied for a visa immediately in the summer of 1992 and after many weeks of bureaucratic processing, she arrived in Los Angeles. Bobby met her at the airport. She did not recognize him because of his beard. Although he’d paid for the round-trip ticket, when Zita met him she discovered that he was practically penniless. She lent him a few hundred dollars, virtually all of her spending money. Some of it was paid back immediately because he agreed to be interviewed by a foreign journalist for a fee of $300. Bobby’s having consented to be interviewed for such a relatively small amount of money showed his financial desperation. It’s not known where, or if, the intended story ever appeared.
Zita remained in Los Angeles for six weeks and stayed at the home of Robert Ellsworth, an attorney who helped Bobby with various legal matters. She was with Bobby every day. They enjoyed each other’s company and, despite the May-December age gap (she was 17, he was 47), found common ground in their respective backgrounds. Both had started playing chess seriously at the age of eight and had dropped out of high school to be able to play chess full-time. Both loved the game and were highly intelligent and argumentative by nature. Bobby loved languages and, in addition to being fluent in Spanish, was becoming adept at Russian and German. Zita spoke German and English with hardly a trace of an accent. Bobby was World Champion—or so he still claimed—and she aspired to be. In an interview later on, Zita claimed that the real reason Bobby was interested in her was “because I didn’t want anything from him.”
When Bobby embarrassedly showed her his room, she couldn’t believe the way he lived. Barely thirty-five square feet, the living space included a small bathroom and a single bed. “He was ashamed of his poverty,” she later recalled. Books, boxes, and tapes were piled high. The content of the tapes? According to to Zita, they contained Bobby’s conspiracy theories. He told her he was planning to write a book that would prove how the Soviet players cheated in chess, and the tapes contained his thoughts on the matter.
Bobby and Zita played one game of chess: his new variation, called Fischer Random. She claims that she won and then became frightened. Perhaps he’d become violent toward her, she thought, because she was a woman and, also, not yet even a master. They never played again, but they did analyze together.
One evening when he picked her up to go out to dinner, he spotted some repairmen on the roof of a low-rise building across the street. They were probably Mossad (Israeli intelligence agents) spying on him, he said, part of his continued litany of “constant obsessions” as Zita observed.
Bobby explained that the reason he hadn’t competed in almost twenty years was that he was still waiting for the right offer, though he didn’t define what “right” meant. The right prize fund? Venue? Opponent? Number of games? It was probably all of those things and many more. He was also furious that although President Nixon had said he’d be invited to the White House in 1972, the invitation never arrived; Bobby had been fuming about it for two decades. In the interview Zita later gave to Tivadar Farkasházy, she claimed that Bobby was still waiting for the American government to apologize for the White H
ouse snub.
Zita couldn’t figure out who was paying his rent, minimal though it was. Somehow she knew that it wasn’t Claudia Mokarow. Zita thought it could be Bessel Kok; she was unaware that Kok no longer had any interest in backing Fischer for anything. In fact, Bobby’s rent and other basic needs were being paid for by his mother’s Social Security checks.
Regina had moved back to California from Nicaragua after having dizzy spells, a result of heart problems. She was seventy-seven and thinking of having an operation, and she wanted it performed in the United States. When Bobby heard about his mother’s impending surgery, he and Zita, both out of money, used the cheapest transportation they could find—an uncomfortable Greyhound bus—to travel north along the Pacific coast for three hundred miles, to Palo Alto. Besides offering Regina support, Bobby wanted to introduce her to Zita.
Regina was about to have a pacemaker implanted. Bobby, distrustful of doctors, tried to talk her out of the procedure, and they argued about it for hours. As a medical doctor, Regina knew more about the risks than he did, but Bobby was afraid of a foreign object being implanted in his mother’s body and what it might do to her. Regina remained adamant and had the operation anyway. She lived until the age of eighty-four.