Endgame (41 page)

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.

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.