It was just over four miles from the site of the championship to 560 Lincoln Place, apartment Q, where, on a rainy day in 1949, Bobby Fischer’s sister first brought up a plastic chess set, with red and black squares and hollow pieces, that she bought for a buck from the local candy store to keep her lonely brother company just after his sixth birthday. It was the first time Fischer had seen a chessboard in his life. Instantly the fuse was lit. For Fischer, the encounter with the chessboard catalyzed his place in the world. Soon he would be capable of some of the most biblically majestic and strange acts—on and off the board—that history had ever witnessed. The ensuing years would see him go from America’s Cold War hero, celebrated on the covers of Time and Life and Newsweek, to a fugitive from justice, owing to his insistence on violating American economic sanctions and playing in Yugoslavia, ultimately becoming a Unabomber-like character who removed his dental work to forestall presumed CIA surveillance, raged publicly as a virulent anti-Semite and Holocaust denier, and following the 9/11 attacks called into a Philippines radio station to say, “This is all wonderful news. It’s time for the fucking US to get their heads kicked in. It’s time to finish off the US once and for all. . . . I want to see the US wiped out.”
A twenty-nine-year-old Fischer told Mike Wallace, during an interview for 60 Minutes that aired on April 9, 1972, “I remember the first thing they [the Russian media] ever wrote about me was that I was a talented player . . . but all this publicity I was getting and all the attention cannot fail to have a harmful effect on my personality development. And sure enough, a few months later, I was a rotten person already in their press. I was doing this, I was doing that, I was conceited, you know. This was before they ever even knew anything about me personally.”
Of course, by design, it was hard to know anything about Fischer personally. “He lives alone,” Wallace reported, “always in hotel rooms that seem barely larger than chessboards. The television set is his window on the world. . . . It is almost the only company he keeps. A lot of the time he won’t even answer his telephone. He’s shy. Suspicious of strangers. It took us nearly six months to persuade him to sit for this television portrait. . . . He has no advisers, no coaches, no manager. He doesn’t really trust anyone’s advice. In a sense, his most reliable friends are the pieces on the board. His strategies in life as in chess are mysterious and his own.”
Forty years later, in another 60 Minutes profile, Bob Simon asked Magnus about Fischer’s descent into madness.
“Do you ever think about that?”
“Yes, I do,” Magnus said. “You know, when I was watching the recent film about Bobby Fischer, I was thinking, ‘Is this going to be me in a few years?’ I don’t think that’s going to happen, but it made me think a little bit that I have to be aware of this at least.”
In order to answer my editor’s questions about Magnus, I felt like I had to better understand Fischer. I read as many books and saw as many documentaries about him as I could—watched everything I could find on YouTube. The most revealing were the three interviews Fischer did on The Dick Cavett Show.
In the lead-up to 1972 world championship, Cavett asked Fischer, “What’s the moment of pleasure for you? Is it when you see the guy in trouble? Where’s the greatest pleasure that corresponds to hitting the home run in baseball?”
“Uh, the greatest pleasure?” Fischer stroked his chin, pondering. “Huh. Well, when you break his ego. That’s where it’s at. You know?”
Fischer then smiled sadistically before offering Cavett a face worthy of the Coney Island clown horrifyingly come to life. Fischer giggled uncontrollably as the studio audience gasped.
“Really?” Cavett asked.
“Yeah.” Fischer giggled some more, this time with the audience joining him.
“And when does that occur? When he sees that he’s finished?”
“Yeah, you know. He sees it’s coming and, uh, breaks up all inside.”
Later that same year, after winning the title from Boris Spassky in Reykjavík on September 1 in front of one of the largest global television audiences in history, Fischer came back on Cavett’s show for the final time.
The high school dropout from Brooklyn, who had mastered one of the world’s most complicated intellectual endeavors on his own from inside his small Crown Heights apartment, had symbolically taken on and brought down the mighty Soviet Union. The win was as big a victory in the Cold War as the Apollo moon landing had been three years earlier. Fischer’s victories at the chessboard in Iceland were daily front-page news in the New York Times, and Walter Cronkite informed America about Vietnam and the Watergate scandal only after he offered updates from Reykjavík. After Fischer took the crown, chess became so popular in the United States that inmates at New York’s Rikers Island jail were photographed reaching through the bars to play on boards placed on tables outside their cells.
Fischer, wearing a burgundy suit, received a roaring ovation when he arrived onstage. Cavett’s other guest was actor Tony Randall, from the TV hit The Odd Couple.
“The New York Times reviewer,” Randall said, referencing Pulitzer Prize winner Harold Schonberg, who covered both music and chess for the paper, “wrote that you are a merciless sadist without feelings for others, whose only wish is to destroy your opponent. Is that true?”
Fischer smiled coyly.
“No,” he said.
“Crushing a man’s ego,” Cavett jumped in. “Was there that moment? A specific moment?”
“I’ll tell you,” Fischer said with a grin, his eyes beginning to gleam with the casual menace of Rasputin. “That was the one thing I didn’t really enjoy about this match. Because I never felt he gave up. He never just . . . collapsed. He tried to make a fight of it to the end.”
“So you never really had that moment?” Cavett asked.
“Just at the very end,” Fischer said. “The last game. The last couple of games. I started to feel him getting a little despondent. I kinda started to feel it a little bit. But not the real full measure, you know, that I like.”
“But you’re not a merciless sadist who likes to destroy your opponents,” Randall said.
“Of course not,” Cavett said.
The three men and the crowd laughed.
I wrote to Cavett asking if he would speak to me. He had gotten a fair bit of shit over his fondness for Fischer, especially when in 2008 he wrote a column in the New York Times referring to Fischer’s death as “among this year’s worst news.” He mailed me recordings of all three of their conversations but said he no longer wished to discuss their relationship.
• • •
I reached out to a few other people who had encountered Fischer personally. One was the author Gay Talese.
In 1957, a twenty-five-year-old Talese had been hired to work at the New York Times sports desk after getting out of the army. He was sniffing around New York for the stories and characters that would soon make him one of the most legendary journalists of the twentieth century. Only a few months before, a thirteen-year-old Fischer had made headlines around the world for a game he played at the Marshall Chess Club in New York’s West Village. Fischer sacrificed his queen on the seventeenth move of his game against twenty-six-year-old Donald Byrne, one of the top players in the country. Time was running out for Fischer, and when Byrne took the piece, many in the room thought the cocky kid had cracked under the pressure and hung the most important piece on the board. Twenty-four moves later, after five hours, all the room of spectators finally saw that Bobby’s masterpiece was a paint-by-numbers he’d seen a mile off. Even Byrne smiled after being mated, well aware he had been on the losing end of a historic game that would soon be crowned “the Game of the Century.”
Hearing word of this, Talese wrote one of the first profiles of Fischer. He first found the boy sipping a Coke inside an air-conditioned bar near the Manhattan Chess Club. Fischer confessed that he used to cry whenever he lost, but before long he hardly ever lost. “Players with Fischer’s talent come along only once in a century,” the Manhattan Chess Club president Maurice J. Kasper told Talese. But there was already gossip that the genius was troubled. Fischer’s mother told Talese she spent four years trying to get her son away from the game. She thought it would be too much strain on him. Fischer admitted that he had been “addicted” to chess since the age of six. “Always serious,” Talese wrote in his piece, “he peers grimly down at the chessboard as if the fate of mankind hinged on his next move. . . . Genius being as unpredictable as it is astounding, the future of the remarkable Bobby is anyone’s guess. . . . The young genius had no explanation for his genius. He simply ordered another Coke.”
I met Talese at a café near his Upper East Side home to discuss his encounter with Fischer.
“You ever see Fischer after that first meeting?” I asked.
“Nope,” he said. He seemed more interested in impaling his cherry pastry with a fork than in answering my questions.
“Never wanted to follow up?” I asked.
“Never did,” he said. “Listen, I told you I was happy to meet and talk, but I don’t want any homework on this. I’m too old and I’m already late on a book I owe my publisher. This was sixty fuckin’ years ago. There was something just as spooky as there was special about Bobby, even back then.”
Eventually I found someone who’d encountered Fischer and had some insight to offer: Errol Morris, arguably the greatest documentary filmmaker who ever lived. Like Fischer, Morris spent some time in Brooklyn growing up. Before his third birthday, his father, a doctor, died suddenly of a heart attack. Growing up, Morris was surrounded by evidence of a father who wasn’t there. Not entirely surprising, then, that this brilliant mind would spend a lifetime obsessed with conducting investigations—first as a private investigator and then as a filmmaker.
“It just so happens that the psychiatrist that I saw when I was very young also saw Fischer,” Morris told me over the phone from his Cambridge, Massachusetts, home. “I remember bumping into him and his mother. I was seeing a psychiatrist as early as the late fifties. I’m five years younger than Bobby. I haven’t thought of him in a long time. I got into a terrible fight about him once, when that movie Searching for Bobby Fischer had just come out in the early nineties. My son was six or seven, like the hero in the film. I disliked the movie immensely, while everyone else seemed to really like it. I basically hated the argument the film made. The argument was as if the kid had a choice. The choice is, would you rather be the greatest chess player in the world or perhaps the greatest chess player who ever lived, versus an all-around kind of citizen of the community. I thought the question itself was ridiculous. Also, I knew how I would answer the question, even though it’s not really a question. It’s not like, you know, would you rather be Franz Kafka, or would you rather be John Q. Citizen. And if you ask me—”
“Errol,” I said, “I’d like to ask you—”
“I’d rather be Franz fucking Kafka! I’d rather be Bobby Fischer. And that goes with knowing that these people lived tortured lives. Having said that, there is no choice here. It’s not as if you have some kind of smorgasbord where you can select one from column A and one from column B. You’re in so many ways indentured to yourself and who you are and what your obsessions are, and what your talents are. I thought Searching for Bobby Fischer, the movie, got it all wrong. Bobby Fischer had no choice but to be Bobby Fischer. It’s not as though he could sit down one day and say, ‘I think I’ll be a normal human being because it’s much easier to live that way.’ That was not an option, a box that you could check, an alternative. He had to be Bobby Fischer. And he was cursed with this endowment of extraordinary ability. It’s not about discipline. That’s not what is at issue. I’ve realized from many gifted prodigies I’ve encountered—and I’ve known a number of them in my day—particularly in music, that there was no discipline involved at all. They were all compulsive. They were obsessive. They couldn’t not do what they were doing.”
“This is a fascinating point,” I said. “We always say people who get to the top sacrificed so much, yet I can never figure out what they sacrificed. Weren’t they the only ones who didn’t have to sacrifice anything and got to do the thing they loved more than anything else all the fucking time? Everyone around them sure had to sacrifice to support them and their dream. But what did they sacrifice?”
“Nobody had to tell these people who get to the top, ‘You sit and play at the piano or the chessboard for twenty hours a day, you fucker!’ ” Morris said. “It’s none of that. I went to the music school in France and there are all kinds of prodigies there. Real prodigies. I remember this eleven-year-old kid who later won the Van Cliburn competition. And his goal was to learn to play Mendelssohn’s Variations. His parents had to restrict the amount he could play the piano every day. That’s how this stuff really works. And to have Searching for Bobby Fischer lecture me on the nature of prodigies and the choices available to prodigies, it was dishonest to say the least. Bobby Fischer had no choice! If it was put to me, I would take the choice to be bat-shit crazy and to do something extraordinarily well.”
• • •
Errol Morris wasn’t a chess player.
“I played when I was kid,” he told me. “I was never ever good at chess.”
But there was another filmmaker who’d grown up in New York and loved to play. In the 1950s, a twentysomething photographer for Look magazine named Stanley Kubrick who was just starting to dabble in motion pictures could often be found playing chess down in Greenwich Village’s Washington Square Park. “I would go there about twelve o’clock and stay there until midnight,” he said in 1966 in a rare interview he gave to Jeremy Bernstein of The New Yorker. “In the summer it was marvelous. In the daytime you’d get a table by the shade and at nighttime you’d get a table by the light.”
Kubrick was famous for playing chess on the set of his films. In 1964, when he clashed with George C. Scott while working on Dr. Strangelove, Kubrick found out Scott fancied himself a strong chess player and immediately challenged him to a game. After Kubrick soundly thrashed Scott on the board, the actor became much more malleable to Kubrick’s direction and ideas.
The same year 2001: A Space Odyssey was released, Kubrick spoke with Playboy, explaining how chess had greatly informed his approach to filmmaking:
“Among a great many other things that chess teaches you is to control the initial excitement you feel when you see something that looks good. It trains you to think before grabbing, and to think just as objectively when you’re in trouble. When you’re making a film you have to make most of your decisions on the run, and there is a tendency to always shoot from the hip. It takes more discipline than you might imagine to think, even for thirty seconds, in the noisy, confusing, high-pressure atmosphere of a film set. But a few seconds’ thought can often prevent a serious mistake being made about something that looks good at first glance. With respect to films, chess is more useful preventing you from making mistakes than giving you ideas. Ideas come spontaneously and the discipline required to evaluate and put them to use tends to be the real work.”
In a 2010 essay on Kubrick and chess for the New York Review of Books, Jeremy Bernstein wrote of how he and the director, who’d become friendly, watched together at Kubrick’s London home the 60 Minutes profile of Fischer. Which led me to wonder if Kubrick had ever crossed paths with Fischer back when he was playing in the Village. So I got in touch with his eighty-five-year-old widow, Christiane, who lives in London. She couldn’t remember anything about Fischer, but we did talk for a bit over the phone about her late husband’s relationship to the game.
“He learned as a child and was hooked very early,” she said with a laugh. “It ruined him in school. He never paid any attention in school and just played chess. He cheated the rest of the time. Later he played chess with computers. He was in danger of being swallowed up by it. He felt it was compulsive and an addiction as powerful as smoking. Losing days or weeks, he knew he was in danger. But he was careful to not give in and focused on his work with films.”
• • •
Around the same time Kubrick was shooting for Look, Scottish photographer Harry Benson was living in London and working for the Daily Express newspaper. In 1964, Benson was supposed to go to Uganda for a story on the country’s recent independence from British rule, but his editor at the paper had a last-minute change of plans and instead sent him to Paris to photograph a young rock-and-roll band called the Beatles. It was on that assignment that Benson captured their famous hotel room pillow fight—helping launch his own career as well as that of the band. Benson has gotten up close and photographed every American president since Eisenhower. Odds were, if you were anybody or anything making a dent in the culture in the second half of the twentieth century, Benson had flown around the world in order to take your picture. “A great photograph can never happen again,” Benson once said of his aim with taking pictures. On April 4, 1968, in Memphis, he heard Martin Luther King Jr. had been shot and rushed to the Lorraine Motel only to find the police had just left. The motel room’s door was slightly open. One of the civil rights leaders, Hosea Williams, was sobbing inside while wringing towels of something strange into a jar. Benson asked him what it was. “This is Martin’s blood,” Williams told him. Two months later, Benson was six feet away from Robert F. Kennedy, who had just finished a speech at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles when another assassin’s bullet was fatally fired. Five other people were shot immediately around Benson.
In late 1971, Benson was assigned by Life magazine to cover Bobby Fischer after another photographer dropped out at the last minute. After Fischer’s victory against Tigran Vartanovich Petrosian in the 1971 Candidates Tournament, he had earned the right to challenge Boris Spassky for the world title. Benson flew to meet Fischer at his hotel in Buenos Aires at around one in the morning. Fischer invited Benson to join him on a walk. Fischer brought along a pocket chess set. Benson didn’t even know how to play.
Benson photographed Fischer playing chess with children in the park, at amusement parks on his own, riding horses, smelling roses, being licked by a collie. The intimacy and vulnerability Fischer offered in these photos was unique. And as America grappled with the Watergate scandal and fifty-seven thousand American deaths and counting in Vietnam, Fischer’s looming Cold War battle against the Soviet Union began to overshadow everything on the news. Benson’s portrait of Fischer made the cover of Life on November 12, 1971.
Harry Benson invited me to speak with him at the apartment he shares with his wife and business manager, Gigi, on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. Even at eighty-seven, Benson still wears his collar popped, has a full head of messy white hair and amused black eyes under bushy eyebrows. His life’s work hangs on most of the walls of his apartment: President Ronald Reagan pulling a horse out of a barn, Hillary and Bill Clinton lying together in a hammock, Muhammad Ali’s fist mock-striking the Beatles’ heads as if tipping over a row of dominos, a white cop smoking a cigarette while the African American that he’s just killed lies sprawled out before him, Frank Sinatra and Mia Farrow in masks at Truman Capote’s Black and White Ball at the Plaza.
“I don’t know anything about chess,” Benson said in his melodic, singsong voice, after taking a sip from a can of Coke and petting his seventeen-year-old dog Tilly. “But I’ve been a photographer my entire adult life. I’ve photographed a lot of people. Bobby Fischer is the most extraordinary man I’ve ever met and the most interesting person I’ve ever photographed.”
“How can that be?” I said. “Especially when you don’t even care about chess.”
“I’m really not sure.” Benson shrugged innocently. “But it’s true.”
“But how can anyone understand someone who has photographed every president since Eisenhower, seeing power so up close, that a chess player—”
“Bobby was very powerful too.”
“In what way?”
“Just the way he had about him. He didn’t care what anybody thought. He really didn’t.”
“Yes, I did. I was one of the few people that liked him. It’s very hard to be critical of someone that allows you to do your job and gives you total and complete access. Bobby did that with me.”
“Why did he do that?”
“He liked the idea of being a big shot. He never identified with chess people. He didn’t like them. He identified with jocks. We never talked about chess. I knew nothing. When he trained for Iceland at Grossinger’s, he trained like an athlete and I photographed him during that time.”
Fischer agreed to allow Benson access while he trained in the Catskill Mountains resort in upstate New York for the chess world championship. Fischer flatly refused to even talk to any other outsider. He liked training where Rocky Marciano and other boxing legends had prepared for boxing title matches. He ran in the mornings, played table tennis, punched a heavy bag, swam laps, skipped rope, and held his breath underwater to improve his stamina and nerves under pressure. At night he went back to his hotel room, put on a visor, and studied chess for endless hours on his own. He allowed Benson to document all of it.
“He was playing against the best in Iceland and he was alone,” Benson said. “It made him feel like a prizefighter alone in the ring. He didn’t want anybody’s advice. He didn’t think of himself as an intellectual. More of an athlete. He didn’t like the way chess people looked.”
Benson spent the entire summer of 1972 in Iceland to cover Fischer’s match against Spassky. At first it seemed as if Fischer was content not to show up at all. The opening ceremony took place without him. It was only after the prize fund was doubled and Henry Kissinger called from the White House to plead with him that Fischer relented and got on a plane. Late on the night Fischer arrived, he knocked on Benson’s door and invited him on a walk.
“Iceland was the land of the midnight sun, as they say. It was never dark. We drove a few miles outside Reykjavík to the lava fields and walked for hours. Sometimes he talked. Sometimes he was quiet. I took some of my favorite shots of him on a boat at three in the morning. Dead of night but not dark in the least. He threw a blanket over himself and was sitting on the edge of the boat. All his isolation is just right there. Naked. He had been alone so much of his life. There was always only chess. We’re talking about someone with totally nonexistent social skills. He was always pleasant with me. Fun sense of humor. But very, very isolated.”
“What was he like on that boat?” I asked.
Benson sighed.
“Free. Free. Free. Nobody bothering him. Bobby felt that chess for him was the same as for a fighter. He was going in there alone. It wasn’t a team sport he was in. And, you know, he didn’t want to just beat his opponents either. He wanted to tear people apart and humiliate them. Really bring them down. His idea was to tear them apart.”
“It sounds like you’re talking about Muhammad Ali,” I said.
“I covered most of Ali’s career. Bobby and Ali had similarities. Their eyes, for example. Both Ali’s and Fischer’s eyes were like snakes’. Ali never took his eye off his opponent. Never took his eye off.”
“Did you see immense cruelty in Fischer’s eyes?” I asked.
“Yeah. I did. He didn’t want to let his opponents go. His attitude was, ‘You’re going to pay for this. How dare you be in front of me.’ Ali had the same look. They both watched everything in their opponents. Fischer watched everything, saw every detail anywhere in the room going on. He was just such a wonderful, wonderful character. There’s no characters like him anymore, or Ali. Where is a Truman Capote anymore? We’re short of these characters. I don’t really see many people right now that are on the same class, the same status, you know?”
“What do you remember most from Fischer beating Spassky in Iceland?” I asked.
“Just before the twenty-first game, I was supposed to photograph Spassky before he went to the hall to play. I went to his hotel and found him walking in the lobby. When I got up close he turned to me and said, ‘There is a new world champion. His name is Robert James Fischer.’ He turned around and said he was going for a walk. I rushed back to the Loftleidir hotel and banged on Bobby’s door to give him the news.”
Benson laughed.
“He was suspicious! He went over to a chessboard in the bedroom and looked over the position of the game. Then Bobby went over to the hall to hear the announcement. The New York Times reported the next day on the front page of the paper that Bobby first heard the news he was champion from my having telephoned him. They got that wrong.”
“And then Bobby disappeared,” I said. “Did you see that coming?”
“He could have made millions of dollars if he kept going, but he didn’t. He didn’t trust people. Didn’t trust this. Didn’t trust that. He could have been a very rich man. There was only one of him. He said that chess was nothing without him. He was right.”
Gigi brought in a pot of tea and a tray of cookies. Benson bit off a corner of a cookie and gave Tilly some attention for a minute.
“When was the last time you saw him?” I asked.
“Saw him in Los Angeles ten years before he died. A long time ago. I’d seen him a few times in LA before that. He was involved with a church that took all his money.”
“Did you see him as a friend or as work?” I asked.
“I’ve never gotten close to anybody. In my business? There’s a lot of reasons for that.”
“When I look at the way Fischer is looking into your camera at you, it’s pretty clear there’s a profound level of trust and a strange connection.”
“There could be a connection.”
Benson leaned down and stroked Tilly’s chin.
“Bobby was in a dark place all his life,” Benson said. “He really was sad.”
Gigi brought over a few collections of her husband’s photographs. Benson opened the book up to the middle, and there Michael Jackson stood at the entrance to his bedroom, guarded by the statue of a Boy Scout and a Girl Scout reaching over with their hands high above their heads to create an arch.
“That was the first time he ever let a photographer into his bedroom. Huge throne inside there where he let me take a photo of him sitting in it.”
Benson turned the page and Marlon Brando appeared. “Piece of shit. Not a pleasant man. Fat and—shit.”
He turned another page. John Lennon. “Halfway through that first week when they were hitting America, it was sensational to be around them. Fischer mania, in a way, was like that. In a way it was.”
Benson turned the page and Andy Warhol’s face was shielded behind a camera as Benson took his picture.
“Warhol would have enjoyed Bobby,” Benson said. “They would have enjoyed each other. Warhol is another class of character we haven’t got anymore. They’re all gone, really. Bobby, Andy, Truman—so many great characters. Who has replaced them?”
“You don’t see any?” I asked.
“Well . . .” Benson shrugged and reached for another cookie. He turned the page with his free hand, and there was Donald Trump feigning the pose of a boxer atop the Trump Tower with the New York skyline behind him.
“When was the first time you photographed him?” I said.
“Forty years ago,” Benson said. “He was around thirty. I’ve known him for years.”
“You’re friends?” I asked.
“I think he’s terrible. I think he’s awful. I feel sorry for America.”
“How many years after meeting him did you suspect he would run for president?”
“Years? Five minutes after meeting him I knew he would run for president. From the very beginning it was obvious he would want that. And now he’s won and it’s not good. You could tell the second you met him, all Trump wanted to do was take over. It was like meeting Hitler in that way. Just wanted total power. I hate to say it, but Bobby probably would have voted for Trump. Even with that being the case, Bobby was somebody I would have liked to have said goodbye to. You know, people are in your life and the next thing you know, they’re dead. I would like to have one more chance to pass a little bit of the day with Bobby one more time. I’m very sad that I’ll never see him again. I knew him at the best time in his life. Now you can’t write a word about chess without remembering him.”