Endgame

13

Crossing Borders

YOU DON’T NEED BODYGUARDS in Budapest,” Benko told Bobby. “Only the Russian Mafia have bodyguards here.” Benko was concerned that Bobby’s two barrel-chested Serbian bodyguards, both with necks like wrestlers and carrying automatic pistols, would bring even more attention to Bobby than if he made his way through the city by himself. Bobby wasn’t quite ready to give them up, however. Not only did they protect him, but he used them to run errands, serve as chauffeurs and occasional dinner companions, and be available to do whatever else he wanted at any hour. Primarily, of course, their job was to keep him safe. He thought he needed protection from the U.S. government, which just might have him assassinated instead of extraditing him and bringing him home for a costly and unpopular trial. He was worried about Israel as well. Because of his statements finding fault with Jews, he believed that either the Mossad or an inflamed pro-Israeli patriot might also try to kill him. And he’d always thought that the Soviets wanted him dead, because of the international embarrassment over the 1972 match, and his accusations of Russian cheating. To protect himself, he bought a heavy coat made of horse leather that weighed more than thirty pounds; he hoped it would be thick enough to deflect a knife attack. It’s also likely that he wore a bulletproof vest.

All of these fears, tinged with paranoia, seemed to Bobby to justify constant concern for his life. Though some thought his fears were imaginary, he responded to physical threats just as he did threats on the board. He wanted to be prepared for any eventuality—an attack from any direction—so that it could be thwarted. His continual fear of being arrested, killed, accosted, or insulted fatigued him, and that may be one of the reasons he slept ten or twelve hours every night. He was ever fearful of what lay in the shadows, and that ever-present dread, combined with his constant tilting at windmills, exhausted him.

As soon as he was settled at the Hotel Gellért, Bobby was invited to spend part of the summer with the Polgars at their country compound at Nagymaros, about thirty-five miles north of Budapest, in the verdant Danube Bend section of the Slavic Hills of Hungary. As he and his two bodyguards drove along the banks of the Danube, Bobby noticed that the river wasn’t the color he’d thought it would be. Unlike “The Blue Danube” of Strauss’s waltz, this deep water was mud brown.

Bobby and his guards were given a small cottage at Nagymaros, but he ate all of his meals and spent most of his time at the large family house. All of the sisters played chess with him, but acceding to his preference, they played Fischer Random. Invented by Bobby, this was a variation on the standard game. The pawns are placed in their normal positions at the beginning of the game. The pieces remain in the back row and are placed randomly, on squares that are different from where they normally reside. Thus players who’ve spent years studying chess openings don’t have much advantage: Memory and book learning (except as they concern endings) aren’t as important. Imagination and ingenuity become more essential. As it happened, eighteen-year-old Sofia, the middle of the Polgar daughters, beat Bobby three straight. Zsuzsa played him “countless games” and never revealed the results other than to say she did “all right.” She observed that Bobby’s ability as an analyst was awesome.

Laszlo Polgar was a man who didn’t mince words. When Bobby denied the very existence of Auschwitz, refusing to acknowledge that more than one million people had been murdered there, Laszlo told him about relatives who’d been exterminated in concentration camps. “Bobby,” he said, frowning, “do you really think my family disappeared by some magic trick?” Bobby had nothing to back up his claim and could only refer to various Holocaust denial books.

It seems in keeping with Bobby’s beliefs and personality that even though he was a guest, he had the audacity to voice his anti-Semitic views in the Jewish household of the Polgars’. Zsuzsa recalled: “I tried to convince him in the beginning about the realities, telling him the facts, but soon I realized that it was impossible to convince him, and I tried to change the topic.” Judit was more outspoken: “He was an extremely great player, but crazy: a sick-psycho.” And her father agreed: “He was schizophrenic.”

Despite Bobby’s insensitivity and bullheadedness, the Polgars were gracious hosts and continued to entertain and care for him. Eventually, Bobby shifted his monologues from hatred of the Jews to chess. He became angry, however, when Laszlo showed him a book published in 1910 by the Croatian writer Izidor Gross. The book described a variation of chess that seemed to be the forerunner of Fischer Random, with the exact same rules. Muttering something about Gross being Jewish, Bobby went on to change the rules of his variation to make it different from Gross’s.

One day that summer the family went on an outing to the Visegrád water park. They invited Bobby to join them, along with his bodyguards. After taking the ferry across the river to reach the park, Bobby was soon in his element: swimming, and lounging in the hot tubs. He even went on the giant water slide, and wound up trying it over and over again. “He was like a big kid,” Zsuzsa fondly remembered.

Laszlo kept a watchful eye on Bobby’s behavior toward the three sisters. Bobby favored Zsuzsa, but she stated afterward that she wasn’t aware of his growing affection. Laszlo was, and he didn’t like it.

After three and a half weeks, Magyar Television somehow learned that Bobby was staying at Nagymaros and sent a camera crew to film him. Crew members hid in the woods at a distance of about fifty yards and filmed him using a telescopic lens. When someone became aware of their presence, there was panic. Bobby was a fugitive, and he obviously didn’t want the world to know where he was hiding. He sent his bodyguards after the cameramen, and they wrenched the cassettes out of the cameras: No one was going to argue with the two bruisers. Bobby then asked Polgar for a hammer, sat on the stone floor of the living room, and ceremoniously and with increasing anger smashed the cassettes to pieces.

The Polgars had offered Bobby friendship and a respite, but it was now clear that the press was aware of his specific whereabouts. He departed from Nagymaros immediately, returned to Budapest, packed his bags, and left the Gellért in short order. Accompanied by his bodyguards, who were now doubling as porters, he checked into the Hotel Rege, at the foot of the Buda Hills, across the street from Benko’s apartment and about fifteen minutes by bus from the city’s center. Then, taking his friend’s advice, he permanently dismissed his bodyguards as being too obvious and therefore potentially dangerous.

The Budapest that Bobby roamed through in 1993 was a rapidly changing city. No longer under the thumb of the Soviets, the city (and all of Hungary) had rid itself of the Iron Curtain in 1989 and had opened its border to Austria. Many businesses had been privatized, and only a small percentage were still connected to Russia. Among the people, there was a sense of vibrancy and freedom. It could be felt just walking down the Váci Utca, the city’s principal mall street, with shops of all kinds selling wares. People were smiling, and staying out late enjoying themselves.

When Bobby determined, or at least believed, that he was no longer being followed or pursued, he began to freely wander the city, taking trams and buses to various destinations. Though many people undoubtedly recognized him, they almost never approached. Indeed, he always felt he was an alien and never a true resident of Budapest. Even after living there for years, he referred to himself as a “tourist.”

He continued to visit the Polgars in Budapest, and on days that he wasn’t playing chess or Ping-Pong with them, he’d be at the home of eighty-two-year-old Andrei Lilienthal and his wife, Olga, who was thirty years younger. The Lilienthals were genial hosts and they adored Bobby, and he greatly respected Lilienthal, a man who had once defeated former World Champion Mikhail Botvinnik. The old grandmaster had many tales to tell, and listening to him was like reading a book of chess history.

Although Olga was almost the same age as Bobby, she treated him in a motherly way—for example, by preparing the foods she knew he preferred. He spoke to Olga in Russian, and she’d later tell people that his command of the language was “pretty good.” All throughout the years that he lived in Budapest, Bobby studied Russian almost every day, and he used Olga to correct his grammar and pronunciation. In his library, he collected various Russian-English dictionaries and, also, books on Russian grammar and conversation. Lilienthal and Bobby talked in German.

When Bobby aired his views regarding the Jews, Lilienthal stopped him: “Bobby,” he said, “did you know that I, in fact, am a Jew?” Bobby smiled and replied, “You are a good man, a good person, so you are not a Jew.” It was becoming apparent that, although Bobby’s rhetoric was clearly anti-Semitic, he tended to use the word “Jew” as a general pejorative. Anyone—whether Jewish or not—who was “bad,” in Bobby’s opinion, was a Jew. Anyone who was “good”—such as Lilienthal—whether Jewish or not, was not a Jew. “I reserve the right to generalize,” Bobby wrote about his penchant for stereotyping.

After dinner almost every night, when he was at the Lilienthals’ home, Bobby would watch a wide range of Russian television broadcasting—concerts, news, films—which he preferred to the Hungarian and American programming that was available. Such viewing also helped increase his understanding of the language. And then Bobby and Lilienthal would repair to the study and analyze games far into the night. They never played.

Since the Lilienthals were supportive of Bobby, he reciprocated with gifts: a television satellite dish, a vacuum cleaner, leather goods that he’d buy on trips to Vienna, and special gifts for birthdays and other holidays. His relationship with the Lilienthals wasn’t unlike the one he’d had with Jack and Ethel Collins: Together, the three created a family atmosphere that was consistently supportive, involved chess, and hopefully would last for years.

After four years of interacting affectionately with the Lilienthals, however, two incidents severed the bond. Andrei had surreptitiously taken a photograph of Bobby at a New Year’s Eve dinner party and sent it to Shakhmatny Bulletin, the Russian chess magazine. They published the picture and as an honorarium sent Lilienthal $200. Bobby was furious when he saw the issue and became more incensed when he learned that Lilienthal had been paid for the photo.

Bobby continually talked about the royalties he was owed for the Russian-language edition of My 60 Memorable Games, and Lilienthal sent a letter to Kirsan Ilyumzhinov, the current president of FIDE, and signed Bobby’s name to it (without his knowledge), asking for a meeting. At one of his press conferences in Yugoslavia, Bobby had said, just to open discussions about how much was owed him, that the Russian publishers would have to pay $100,000, but that it was possible he really was owed “millions.” Ilyumzhinov was also the president of the Russian Republic of Kalmykia, on the northwest shores of the Caspian Sea. An extraordinarily wealthy man with a passion for chess, he wanted to pay Bobby some of the royalties that were due him. He relayed a message to Lilienthal that he’d deliver the $100,000 in American cash to Bobby personally.

A meeting was arranged—a dinner at the Lilienthals’. It had been eighteen years since Bobby had broken off relations with FIDE, when he forfeited his match with Karpov, and therefore Bobby was not prone to be friendly, although Ilyumzhinov had had nothing to do with the organization at the time of the Karpov debacle. Speaking excellent English, Ilyumzhinov greeted Bobby and handed him a suitcase of money. Bobby sat there and resolutely counted every dollar. The dinner that followed was lively and cordial: Bobby showed Ilyumzhinov how Fischer Random was played, and he plied the president with questions about Russian politics. Ilyumzhinov recalled: “I was struck by how Fischer was up on everything that was happening in our country. He named our politicians and members of the government, and asked who I thought would win the elections.”

Offers of possible reconciliation between Bobby and FIDE were made that evening, and Ilyumzhinov suggested that Bobby move to Kalmykia, where he’d be given free land and a new house could be built to his specifications. The federation president gave Bobby a deed for more than an acre of land in Elista, his capital city. Bobby thanked the president and asked about Kalmykia’s medical care program but did not accept Ilyumzhinov’s offer to live in Elista. Ilyumzhinov also offered to put up millions for another Fischer-Spassky match, but all Bobby would say was “I am only interested in Fischer Random.” Somehow, in the course of the conversation, Bobby learned that the letter that had been sent to Ilyumzhinov had his forged name on it. The evening was getting late, and Ilyumzhinov began to make motions to go, but before doing so, he asked Bobby to pose with him for a photograph. “No,” said Bobby ungraciously, silently fuming over what he regarded as two betrayals by Lilienthal (the photo and the forgery), “the $100,000 that you gave me doesn’t include a photograph.” Ilyumzhinov, the spurned suitor, left in a huff, and Bobby, the resentful friend, exited just behind him—with the money. Bobby always held that it was easier to forgive an enemy than a friend. He never saw the Lilienthals again.

When Bobby finally started writing a book on how he’d been cheated by various publishers, he dedicated it to: “The old Jewish scoundrel Andrei Lilienthal whose forgery of my name on his letter to FIDE was the straw that broke the camel’s back [to write an anti-Semitic tract].”

Eventually, Bobby lost as friends not only the Lilienthals, but also the Polgars. Sofia Polgar was invited to give a simultaneous exhibition at the American embassy of Budapest, and Bobby was furious that she’d even consider it, claiming that his enemies—that is, the U.S. government and, therefore, the American embassy—must be considered the Polgars’ enemies as well. Bobby quarreled not only with Sofia but with the entire Polgar family about the exhibition. Incredulous, Bobby asked Sofia: “How can you even talk to those people?” She went ahead anyway and performed well. The Polgars stopped all contact with Bobby after that, and he with them.

All while he was attempting to establish a life in Budapest, and yet alienating everyone around him, Bobby was also trying to win over Zita. It was a campaign fated to end badly. In the nearly eight years that he lived in Hungary, he only managed to convince her to see him a few times—once when she attended his fiftieth birthday party in Bulgaria. That time, he again proposed marriage, even though she was happily ensconced with her boyfriend and had a child. “It’s out of the question,” she told him. “Then what about your sister Lilla?” he asked. When Zita told her mother what he’d said, that Bobby was looking for a breeder, Mrs. Rajcsanyi was horrified.

Zita’s theory about Bobby was that he was dominated by an idée fixe of reproducing himself, much as Henry VIII quested after a son. She felt that the obsession driving Bobby was I must get married, I must have a child, I cannot die without an offspring, or else my genius will vanish forever. Fischer began collecting photos of other Hungarian girls he’d like to meet, and he recruited his new friend and assistant Janos Rigo—an international master and chess organizer—to serve as a matchmaker. The girls had to have certain characteristics or else he didn’t even want to meet them. They must be: (1) blond and blue-eyed, (2) young, (3) beautiful, and (4) a serious chessplayer. When Rigo would bring photos to him, Bobby almost always rejected the women as not having all or enough of those qualities. Finally, Bobby placed the following advertisement in several Hungarian newspapers (his description of himself is revealing, as is the fact that he didn’t risk narrowing the pool of candidates by sticking with all four of his requirements):

Single, tall, rich, handsome, middle-aged American man with good personality desires to meet beautiful young Hungarian girl for serious relationship. One or more photos please.

He gave Rigo’s address for replies, and there were some responses, but none met his perfectionist standards, and ultimately, he nixed them all.

Bobby continued reading anti-Semitic literature as well as neo-Nazi tracts and getting into heated arguments about the evilness of the Jews with virtually everyone he met. Once, when coming home late at night from an event, with Rigo serving as his driver, he refused to allow a Jewish chess player to enter the car until the man was willing to proclaim that the Holocaust didn’t happen.

Some of the many hate books Bobby read while in Budapest were The Myth of the Six Million by David Hoggan; On the Jews and Their Lies by Martin Luther, written in 1543; and Jewish Ritual Murder by Arnold S. Leese. He also read an account of Nazi general Ernst Kaltenbrunner, a leader of the SS who ended up being found guilty at the Nuremberg trials and executed. While in prison and awaiting judgment, Kaltenbrunner wrote a letter to his family and Bobby was affected by it. Here are excerpts of what Kaltenbrunner wrote:

My own destiny lies in the hands of God. I am glad that I never separated from Him. I cannot believe that I shall be held responsible for the mistakes of our leaders, for in the short time of my activity I have striven hard for a reasonable attitude, both internal and external.… They ought to have paid more attention to my words.… We have no property worth mentioning. Perhaps the only resource for you will be my small stamp collection.… Was it not my duty to open the door to socialism and freedom as we imagined and desired them? … I have not given up hope that the truth will be found out and for a just legal decision.

When Bobby discovered that Kaltenbrunner’s son was still alive, living in Vienna, he visited him to discuss whether the concentration camps did or didn’t exist. If they did exist, he wanted to know whether the entire Holocaust story was blown out of proportion, and the account of millions being exterminated a myth. Bobby was disappointed when he met the executed SS leader’s son. The younger Kaltenbrunner was an avowed liberal and had no interest in discussing his father, the camps, or anything else concerning Nazism or anti-Semitism. But he was a chess player! To Kaltenbrunner the fact that the great Bobby Fischer was gracing his home—for whatever reason—was equivalent to having the president of a country stop in to pay a visit. When Bobby left, Kaltenbrunner affixed an engraved plaque to the chair in which Bobby sat: IN THIS CHAIR SAT THE WORLD’S CHESS CHAMPION, ROBERT J. FISCHER.

In the summer of 1993, an American feature film called Searching for Bobby Fischer was released to stellar reviews. Originally titled Innocent Moves, the film was retitled before final release, with producers deciding to mimic the title of the book on which the film was based. Using Bobby’s name, they thought, would have more promotional power. Searching for Bobby Fischer was the true story of a young boy, Josh Waitzkin, who showed incredible talent for the game, and how he became successful at the board, at first despite his parents’ doubts and then with the encouragement of his parents and his extraordinary chess teacher, Bruce Pandolfini, played in the film by Ben Kingsley. It was one of the most respectful and sensitive films ever made about chess. The character of Bobby is not in the film, but he is seen in documentary footage. What he accomplished in Iceland inspired the film, which discusses the so-called Fischer Boom of increased chess activity, post-1972. The film grossed more than $7 million and was nominated for an Academy Award. Bobby was indignant and then irate when he heard about it, proclaiming the film a misappropriation of his name and, therefore, an invasion of his privacy. When the final box office receipts were tallied, the producers were disappointed, citing the ambiguous title of the film as the cause for relatively low attendance, and on hindsight they wished that they hadn’t used Bobby’s name.

He was never asked by the filmmakers to give his approval of the project, nor did he receive any compensation from it. He claimed that the film made more than “a hundred million dollars,” which was highly exaggerated. It’s “a monumental swindle,” he wrote. After checking with his attorney, he discovered that because he was a public figure, the producers—Paramount Pictures—had the right to use his name. Even though Bobby felt Paramount’s behavior was unethical and unfair, he took no legal action. Even so, after that he continually complained and wrote negatively about the film, even though he’d never seen it and had been told that it was an excellent depiction of how a child enters the chess world.

Bobby felt safe enough to travel and eventually went to many countries: often to Germany as a companion to Benko, who was playing chess for a team there … to Austria to go shopping with Rigo … to Switzerland to meet his bankers … to Argentina to promote his Fischer Random variation … and to the Philippines, China, and Japan for social and business reasons. Mysteriously, he also journeyed to Italy to meet a member of the Mafia; he wanted to meet a mafioso because he admired the Mafia’s family structure and code of conduct and wanted to know more about it. Whether this was the real reason he flew to Italy is not known.

At the beginning of 1997 Fischer’s passport was expiring. Though it could have been renewed at the U.S. embassy in Budapest, Bobby was worried: What if his passport was confiscated and he was trapped in Hungary, unable to travel anywhere and possibly unable to access his bank account? Or, even worse, what if they arrested him? He considered all possibilities as if he were analyzing a chess problem, and decided that he didn’t want to be confined in Hungary. Bobby asked Rigo to drive him to Bern, Switzerland. When they arrived, he entered the U.S. embassy, trying to look calm, though he was feeling intense trepidation. His reason for attempting a passport renewal in Switzerland rather than Hungary was that even if he were stymied and had to stay put in Switzerland, he would still be able to access the money he had on deposit in the Union Bank of Switzerland. Rigo waited for him in the car outside of the embassy, equipped with a list of emergency telephone numbers to call should Bobby be detained or arrested; he also had a set of keys to Bobby’s safe deposit boxes and other locked cases. Within forty minutes, Bobby exited the building with a big smile on his face: He had a new U.S. passport, valid until 2007. It was now safe for him to return to Budapest.

Of course, there was one country Bobby still couldn’t travel to, since if he did it would mean almost certain arrest: the United States. This presented an emotional dilemma in July of 1997. Regina had died and Bobby wanted to attend her funeral. Some chess players in the state of Washington conjectured that he surreptitiously entered the United States wearing a disguise, first flying to Vancouver, Canada, and then crossing the border to Seattle and traveling south to California by car, where he attended the service incognito. According to the story, he didn’t talk to his sister, nephews, or anyone else. He just stood on the sidelines, unrecognized.

Not a year later, Bobby’s sister, Joan, then age sixty, died suddenly of a stroke, and Bobby once again felt the pangs of not being able to show his respects at a family member’s graveside. This enforced separation from his family aggravated the hatred for America that he’d felt since 1976, when he lost his case in federal court and refused thereafter to pay taxes. It’s not clear why, during Bobby’s years eluding American authorities, his sister and her family didn’t visit him in Europe; his mother, however, had visited him once in Budapest.

After the schism with the Polgars and the Lilienthals, Bobby’s life in Budapest became less social, but since he’d lived an isolated life for so long, he didn’t appear outwardly affected by the two families’ lack of warmth. Still, the absence of these supportive relationships must have hurt, despite his role in the schism.

His daily routine consisted of rising in the afternoon and having breakfast at his hotel—usually in his room, but occasionally in the dining room—swimming in the indoor pool or taking a trip to one of the city’s many thermal baths, then making a visit to a library or bookstore. Sometimes he’d vary his routine and go on long walks, wandering with his memories near the caves in the Buda Hills—or he’d have an espresso on the terrace of the Hilton on Castle Hill. Rigo usually picked him up at his hotel at about seven p.m. for dinner. Bobby deliberately varied the kinds of food he ate: Japanese, Chinese, Indian, Hungarian, even Kosher, alternating restaurants every night. Occasionally he was joined by Pal Benko or Lajos Portisch or Peter Leko—a young Hungarian grandmaster—or one or two others. Bobby would only sit with his back against the wall, preferably in a corner and away from the windows—all tactics to escape notice by other diners or passersby. He always picked up the check for everyone at his table.

He carried his own bottle of water and only occasionally would have alcohol. Once he drank a little too much palinka, a plum brandy made in Hungary and Transylvania that is supposed to aid digestion after a meal, and he got drunk. He was so unused to such a quantity of alcohol that his hangover lasted for three days.

Many have wondered how much of the Hungarian language Bobby mastered during his almost eight years in Budapest. Zsuzsa Polgar believed that he spoke almost no Hungarian; Zita claimed he only knew about seven words, gymulcsriz, his favorite desert, being one of them; and Rigo thought he knew about two hundred words, enough to order from a menu, ask for directions, and make himself understood to shop owners and others. The fact that most older Hungarians knew Russian, and that many also had a command of German, while most of the younger generation could speak English, helped Bobby in communicating.

Once or twice a week in the late afternoon Bobby went to the movies and saw mostly popular American films. He said that he identified with the character played by Jim Carrey in The Truman Show, that he sometimes felt as though he lived in a Kafkaesque world where he—Bobby—like Truman, was the only honest person in the world and everyone else was an actor.

Back in his hotel room at around eleven p.m., Bobby would read and listen to music and the news on BBC radio. He had decided to write an anti-America book in which he’d present his arguments against the country, tying that in somehow with his distrust of and animosity toward Jews (and his personal enemies, whom he called “Jews” regardless of their religion). He connected all this with the rage he still felt for the loss of personal effects he’d kept for years in a storeroom in California, which had been sold at auction when the storage rent wasn’t paid. As preparation for the book, Bobby spent part of his nighttime hours recording on cassette tapes his anti-Semitic and anti-American screeds.

As the hours faded into dawn, he’d play over games from the latest tournaments, impeccably dissecting each move using his mental microscope, looking for errors, misinterpretations, and fallacious conclusions—especially ones that might prove conspiracies among those he believed were the chess world’s thieves and embezzlers. Each game became a mystery novel. The goal was never to find a murderer—rather, it was to discover how the “cheating” had occurred.

He began to limp noticeably, and several of his colleagues urged him to see a doctor, a dreaded experience that Bobby would only agree to if he were in enormous pain. Finally, after the suffering became intolerable, he relented, was examined, and was told that he was suffering from orchitis, an inflammation of the testicle. As he walked, he was “guarding” the gland and therefore limping. Usually, a ten-day antibiotic treatment alleviates the symptoms, or a fast in-office medical procedure can release the pressure. Bobby availed himself of neither. Instead, he told everyone that his limp was caused by an old leg injury (he’d broken his leg many years before), and he just suffered through the pain of orchitis until the swelling subsided on its own. He continued to walk with a slight limp for the rest of his life.

“As Adolf Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf, the Jews are not the victims, they are the victimizers!” blared Bobby Fischer during a live broadcast on Calypso Radio in Budapest on January 13, 1999. How many of the 1.5 million citizens of Budapest, or the ten million people who lived in all of Hungary, were listening to Bobby when he offered his hate-filled comments is not known, but the interviewer, Thomas Monath, was dumbfounded as to what to do. Turn off his microphone? Shout him down? Bobby’s rant could be heard for years all over the world because the show went online.

It was Bobby, through Pal Benko, who’d approached the station to say that he wanted to give an interview, his first since he’d won the match against Spassky in 1992. At first, the interview was fairly benign, and questions such as why Bobby preferred to live in Budapest were answered politely (“I like the mineral baths, the people; you have a fabulous city here”), but soon he became impatient, saying he wanted to discuss much more substantive things. If the world, at least the Hungarians, had missed his anti-Semitic remarks during his press conferences in 1992, they certainly couldn’t have missed his near hysterical posturing on Calypso Radio seven years later.

The rationale that Bobby offered for his blather was that all of his personal belongings and memorabilia—admittedly valuable to him, and some of interest to collectors—that he’d stored at the Bekins warehouse in Pasadena, California, had been auctioned off because of the failure of his agent Robert Ellsworth to pay the storage bill of $480. “It was worth tens of millions, or even hundreds of millions of dollars, and it was stolen!” Bobby complained. Then in some incredible leap of illogic, he equated the loss of his property to a conspiracy hatched by the Jewish people, and his argument was delivered with such venom and vulgarity that the broadcasting station considered ending his time on the show. Monath appealed to him, “Will you please allow me to ask you some friendly questions about chess?” Raising his voice and bullying his way forward, Bobby replied: “No, I won’t let you!” He continued his rant, talking about how he was being “persecuted by the Jews,” and claiming that “the Holocaust never happened,” and using four-letter words to describe “the Jew Ellsworth.” It was almost as though he felt that this opportunity of being on the air live might be his one and only chance to set the record straight—to inform both the station’s listeners and the world of the injustices done to him. His hatred continued to spill out into the broadcasting ether until Monath could stand it no longer: “Mr. Fischer, you are destroyed in your mind,” he said, and Fischer’s microphone was rendered mute.

The facts of Fischer’s loss of belongings are fairly straightforward: He’d been paying for storage costs for about ten years, and his bin contained a large safe with such things as his letter from President Nixon congratulating him for his win in Iceland, his World Championship medal presented to him by FIDE, letters, score sheets, paintings, trophies, statues, scrapbooks, photos, books, and hundreds of other items. One great loss for the chess world was the original scores of games that Bobby played in a series of simultaneous exhibitions throughout South America and about which he planned to write a book, since he had played a number of interesting games during that time. If sold individually—there were thousands of games, according to Bobby—or as one large cache to a collector, the value of these score sheets alone would have totaled somewhere around $100,000.

Bobby had been giving Ellsworth, his agent, about $5,000 a year to pay the storage cost and some minimal taxes on property—five lots—that he owned in Clearwater and Tarpon Springs, Florida, which were originally owned by his grandfather (Bobby bought them from his mother in 1992). Those various expenses came to about $4,000 a year; the $1,000 left over was for Ellsworth’s management. The storage room was registered under the names of “Claudia Mokarow and Robert D. James,” and since Ellsworth was paying the charges year after year, it is possible that the storage company had no idea that the material in the bin belonged to Bobby Fischer. Somehow Ellsworth had blundered—either through carelessness or a clerical error—and didn’t pay $480 that was owed, and as contractually agreed upon, the company had the right to dispose of the storage room’s contents. As soon as Ellsworth discovered his mistake, he felt guilty about it, and one can understand how heartbreaking it was to Bobby: “My whole life!” he said, outraged.

Ellsworth actually realized his error in time to attend the auction and buy back $8,000 worth of the material, not bidding on comic books and other memorabilia that he believed—wrongfully, as it developed—would no longer be of any interest to Fischer. Harry Sneider, Fischer’s former physical trainer, accompanied Ellsworth to the auction and Sneider’s son subsequently traveled to Budapest with twelve boxes of material. When he handed them over, Bobby said, “Where’s the rest?” He claimed to have had at least one hundred boxes in his storage unit and maintained that what had been brought to him was only one percent of his belongings.

He just wouldn’t let it rest. Before he was done, he gave thirty-five radio broadcast interviews—they all found their way online—most of them through a small public radio station in the Philippines and some lasting almost two hours, expounding on his theory that he was a victim of a conspiracy that involved a Jewish cabal, the U.S. government, the Russians, Robert Ellsworth, and the Bekins Storage company.

It seemed that Bobby had lapsed over the years into a state of increasingly frequent paranoia, believing as he did that people and organizations, bonded in a conspiracy, were out to persecute him. It was as if he had a form of Tourette’s syndrome where, plagued by a temporary storm in his mind, he couldn’t stop himself from denigrating Jews in the vilest terms: His hate rhetoric just spewed out and he couldn’t—nor did he want to—control it. He was not delusional nor did he have hallucinations—that anyone knows of—so he could not be labeled psychotic. (One psychiatrist, Dr. Magnus Skulasson, who knew Bobby well toward the end of his life, insisted that the term “psychotic” definitely didn’t apply to him.) Indeed, removed from stressful situations (such as the loss of his possessions at Bekins), he was completely in touch with reality and could be charming, friendly, and even rational (if limited to certain topics) at times. Dr. Anthony Saidy, one of Bobby’s oldest and closet friends, wrote a letter to Chess Life about Bobby’s broadcasts in which he stated: “His paranoia has worsened through the years, and he is more isolated than ever in an alien culture.” Saidy added that the media were exploitative in publishing the most hideous of Bobby’s statements, that the press should leave him alone.

When Bobby read Saidy’s comments he was furious. He lambasted Saidy for living in the United States, a truly alien culture by his definition, and called Saidy a Jew (he is not).

The smell of camphor trees in Kamata, a suburban section of Tokyo, intrigued Bobby. Many of the Japanese would scoop up or pluck the aromatic leaves and boil them and inhale the steam, claiming that it was good for colds; others felt that camphor steam could be harmful. Regardless of who was correct, the trees drew people’s attention, including Bobby’s. If you picked up just a few of the fallen leaves and crushed them in your hands, you could smell their pungent scent. Bobby increasingly relied on homeopathic remedies as an alternative to prescription drugs for his aches or pains, and he was always looking for natural cures; this quest for medicinal herbs may have plunged him into trouble.

He’d arrived in Tokyo on January 28, 2000, after first announcing to his friends that he’d be gone from Budapest “for a few months” and storing everything in Benko’s apartment. He never returned. In Japan, he had a standing invitation to stay with Miyoko Watai, the president of the Japanese Chess Association, a woman he’d known since 1973, when he first visited the country, seeking a venue for his upcoming yet never-played match with Karpov. Over the years they’d corresponded, and she’d visited him both in Los Angeles and in Budapest. Miyoko, one of the strongest women players in Japan, admitted that as a chess player Bobby was her idol and that before meeting him she’d read everything about him she could find and had played over every one of his games. She was in love with him.

To his friends, though, Bobby denied that there was a romantic relationship with Miyoko, who was two years younger than him.

Bobby was still looking for a woman who could bear him a child, and hoped he would meet a number of young Filipina women, among whom he might find a candidate. So Bobby began a routine of flying back and forth between Tokyo and the Philippines, staying in Japan just shy of three months (for immigration purposes) and then doing the same in the Philippines, and living—to some extent—a life similar to the one in the film The Captain’s Paradise, where the protagonist has a wife in two separate ports and rotates visits to each. In Bobby’s case, he wasn’t married, but he was intimate with Miyoko in Tokyo and with other women in the Philippines, and this back-and-forth philandering went on for several years.

Bobby and Miyoko, both in their late fifties, lived a quiet life in the quiet suburb of Tokyo called Ikegami, traveling to various onsen—hot springs—going to movies, taking long walks, sitting in the park, where no one seemed to recognize Bobby, and just living what could be called an unremarkable but romantic middle-class life. A rare false note was struck when Bobby and Miyoko attended a screening of the American film Pearl Harbor. When the Japanese Zeroes began bombing the ships in Battleship Row and destroyed the USS Arizona, Bobby began clapping loudly. He was the only one in the theater to do so—much to the embarrassment of the Japanese. He said that he was shocked that no one else joined in.

But then the three months were up, and just before the flag fell on the immigration clock, Bobby would scoot off to the Philippines.

Life in Baguio City, about 130 miles from Manila, was somewhat more exotic than Tokyo. Half of the city’s population consisted of university students (some 150,000 of them), so the opportunity to meet the type of girls Bobby preferred (young and beautiful) was greater than in Japan. Curiously, though, during those periods when Bobby was in Japan he didn’t stray from Miyoko.

In the Philippines Fischer was hosted by an admirer at the Baguio Country Club for his first three months, played tennis every day, and met and dined with Torre and occasionally with the dignified Florencio Campomanes, the former president of the International Chess Federation (FIDE). Eventually, Bobby leased a home in the same compound where Torre lived and, as a constant dinner guest, often enjoying the cooking of Torre’s wife.

At a party hosted by Torre at the country club in early 2000, Bobby met an attractive young woman named Justine Ong, who changed her name to Marilyn Young, a Filipina of Chinese extraction, and they began dating. Several months later, she announced that she was pregnant. The idea of abortion was abhorrent to Bobby and he refused to even discuss it. At the birth of the child, named Jinky, Marilyn had Bobby’s name recorded on the birth certificate as the father. He promised to support mother and child, as he did, buying them a home in the Philippines, sending occasional gifts to the child, and money to Marilyn. His friends have said that he wasn’t certain that the child was his, but just as he was supported by Paul Nemenyi, not knowing whether Nemenyi was his father, he would do the same for Jinky, and even stand in as the child’s titular father. This arrangement went on for seven years, with Bobby sending greeting cards to the young girl signed “Daddy,” and having mother and child visit him later on. One of his friends who observed them together said that Bobby treated little Jinky with affection, but he didn’t seem as close to her as one would expect if he thought she was truly his daughter.

In one of Bobby’s broadcasts (August 9, 2000) from Tokyo to Radio Baguio, he made mention of having been arrested in Japan around that time on a “trumped-up drug charge” but gave very little other information about it except to say that he was in jail for eighteen days before being released and how absurd it was because he took no drugs, not even aspirin. The arrest took place in the spring or summer of 2000, and it received no publicity that this writer could find; it’s possible that the Japanese authorities, not knowing who Fischer was, simply saw a foreigner coming frequently in and out of the country with a backpack of herbs—the profile of a drug dealer—and interrogated him. Knowing Bobby’s penchant for noncooperation with authority figures, he might well have been incarcerated more for his attitude than anything else.

Perhaps the most horrendous of Bobby’s broadcasts came on September 11, 2001. He was called by Radio Baguio in the Philippines (he was living in Tokyo at the time) to comment on the attacks in the United States on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. The interview was his shortest, only twelve minutes, but it created an international fury since it was picked up in its entirety online. Bobby’s polemic was a full-frontal attack on a suffering nation.

In speaking his mind, Bobby had no idea—or if he did, maybe he didn’t care—that he was sealing his fate with the U.S. government, Jews around the world, and the vast majority of the American people who felt wounded and outraged over the carnage of the 9/11 attacks and Bobby’s blasphemy concerning them. To say that Bobby’s broadcast was one of the most hateful by an American in the history of radio would not be an exaggeration. Following is a transcribed version of some of his comments:

Fischer: Yes, well, this is all wonderful news. It’s time for the fucking U.S. to get their heads kicked in. It’s time to finish off the U.S. once and for all.

Interviewer: You are happy at what happened?

Fischer: Yes, I applaud the act.… Fuck the U.S. I want to see the U.S. wiped out.

Fischer: The United States is based on lies. It’s based on theft. Look at all I have done for the U.S. Nobody has single-handedly done more for the U.S. than me. I really believe this. You know, when I won the World Championship in 1972, the United States had an image of a football country, a baseball country, but nobody thought of it as an intellectual country. I turned that all around single-handedly, right?

Fischer: But I’m hoping for a Seven Days in May scenario, where sane people will take over the U.S.…

Interviewer: “Sane people”?

Fischer: Sane people, military people. Yes. They will imprison the Jews; they will execute several hundred thousand of them at least.…

Fischer: I say death to President Bush! I say death to the United States. Fuck the United States! Fuck the Jews! The Jews are a criminal people. They mutilate [circumcise] their children. They’re murderous, criminal, thieving, lying bastards. They made up the Holocaust. There’s not a word of truth to it.… This is a wonderful day. Fuck the United States. Cry, you crybabies! Whine, you bastards! Now your time is coming.