Now her bank accounts were checked, fellow nurses at her hospital were surreptitiously taken to one side and questioned, the make of her car was jotted down (a 1957 Chrysler Sedan), her father’s will was examined (Regina inherited a tidy sum—around $40,000), and all previously collated documents were excavated and old sources reinterviewed.
By this stage, Bobby had become a celebrity, and the relationship between him and his mother was placed under the official microscope. The FBI director was reassured that the inquiry was being handled with “the utmost discretion,” so as not to arouse Regina’s attention. One source told the FBI that Regina could not control her son. She “lives in terror of him [Bobby] but at the same time seems to ‘gloat’ over his publicity.”
Bobby’s movements were tracked to and from Moscow via Brussels and Prague. Agents were asked to discover why he was so disgusted with his Soviet hosts. Did they make some kind of communist “approach” to him? After Moscow, and before the Interzonal at Portoroz, an informer described Bobby as “a very sick boy emotionally and in such a mental state at the present time that losing the tournament may cause him to become violent and may cause him to be confined to a mental institution.”
In 1959, Bobby and Regina went to Argentina and then Chile. Bobby was playing chess. What was Regina doing? Was she trying to contact her ex-husband? (She may not have known that two years earlier, “Don Gerardo Fischer Liebscher” had remarried, to a Mrs. Renata Sternaux Meyer in Algarrobo in Chile.) The question was considered of such import that on 22 May, Hoover wrote to his counterpart, the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, Allen Dulles, to request assistance and collaboration: “Inasmuch as Mrs. Regina Fischer accompanied her son to South America, it is believed probable that she was with him in Santiago, Chile, during the chess tournament in that city. Accordingly, the possibility exists that Mrs. Fischer may have been in contact with her estranged husband, Gerardo Fischer.”
By the end of September 1959, the FBI at last acknowledged its failure to unearth any real subversion: “It appears the only logical investigation remaining would be an interview of the subject, but due to her mental instability, this line of action is not recommended. Therefore, it is recommended that no further investigation be conducted and this case be closed.”
In spite of that recommendation, a residual watchfulness continued. In 1960, Regina picketed the White House because the State Department refused the U.S. chess team permission to play in that year’s Olympiad in East Germany. Her demonstration provoked many column inches in papers across the nation. A secret service agent reported her movements: She arrived at 10:30 A.M. and departed at 2:33 P.M. She returned to the White House at 4:52 P.M., staying until 5:30 P.M. In the autumn, when Regina moved out of her long-standing Brooklyn home, the FBI dispatched an agent, disguised as a deliveryman, to confirm that she really had settled into her new abode in the Bronx.
During a 1961 “Walk for Peace” from San Francisco to Moscow, sponsored by the Committee for Non-Violent Action, Regina met her second husband, an English left-wing teacher, Cyril Pustan. She relocated to Europe, where the Bureau still took note of her activities: her continued protests in France, West Germany, and Great Britain against the Vietnam War, her attendance in Stockholm on 24 July 1967 at a conference on Vietnam. Finally the FBI gave up, parting company with Regina after nearly a quarter of a century. Regina eventually returned to the United States, where she died of cancer in 1997. (Don Gerardo Fischer Liebscher died on 25 February 1993 in the city of his birth, Berlin.)
Intriguingly, the detailed information in the dossier puts a question mark over Bobby’s official parentage: If Gerhardt was his biological father, when did he and Regina conceive their son? Bobby was born in 1943. While Gerhardt and Regina divorced only in 1945, they were physically apart from 1939, though Regina is reported as saying—presumably in an attempt to explain Bobby—that she and Gerhardt had a 1942 rendezvous in Mexico.
Some continuing relationship between them is indicated by Regina’s making a move to visit her husband in 1944—though there is no hint as to her motive or intention. She applied for a visa to Chile, but the wartime Department of State returned the forms to her because some details were missing. In May 1945, she presented a statement from the University of Chile offering her a place as a student. She never took this up: the divorce came through four months later. The FBI files contain no evidence that Gerhardt tried to join her in the United States before or after Bobby’s birth. What is more, on several occasions she confessed to not having seen her husband since 1939.
If not Gerhardt, who? For reasons never elucidated—always blanked out—there are copious notes on Dr. Paul Felix Nemenyi in the files on Regina. He is described as having a large nose, large knobby fingers, and an awkward, slovenly walk and dress.
Born into a Jewish family in Fiume in Hungary on 5 June 1895, Nemenyi was educated at the Institute of Technology in Budapest and in Berlin. He then held research fellowships in Copenhagen and Imperial College, London. In 1939, he emigrated to the United States. There he worked as a mathematics teacher and later as a mechanical engineer in a highly sensitive post in the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, D.C. His expertise was in fluid mechanics. He died at a dance in Washington, D.C, on 1 March 1952. The FBI suspected that he too was a communist.
The notes offer an account of the relationship between Regina and Paul that points in one direction only: Nemenyi was Bobby’s biological father. A year before Bobby was born, Nemenyi befriended Regina when he was an assistant mathematics professor in Colorado. After Bobby was born, he took a special interest in the child. When Regina moved to Washington with her new baby, it looks as if it was Dr. Nemenyi who found her an apartment to stay in and paid the rent. After she relocated to New York, he paid for Bobby’s attendance at Brooklyn Community College and sent Regina $20 a week. He seemed to visit his son often enough for Bobby to become attached to him. At one stage, in 1948, the Bureau discovered Nemenyi telling a social worker that he was very upset about the way Bobby was being brought up, particularly because of the “instability of the mother.”
Letters written to and by Nemenyi’s son, Peter, who became a civil rights activist, are now available and appear to put the identity of Bobby’s biological father beyond doubt. In the month his father died, Peter wrote to Bobby’s psychiatrist, Dr. Kline, asking for advice on who should inform Bobby of Nemenyi’s death; he assumed the doctor knew that Nemenyi was Bobby Fischer’s father. The following month, Begina wrote to Peter complaining that she had no money for food or to repair Bobby’s shoes. Bobby had been feverish, but she could not afford a doctor. In an imploring tone, she asked whether Nemenyi had left Bobby any money. She told Peter that Bobby was still expecting Nemenyi’s visits; she had not told him of the death.
It seems unlikely that anybody ever told him. If the FBI had not delved so carefully into Regina’s life, and if Bobby Fischer, the world chess champion, had not remained an object of fascination for press and public to this day, his family secret would have remained just that.
GLOSSARY
a1… b1… g1… h1… a2… h2, and so on—Each of the sixty-four squares on the chessboard has a unique coordinate, from a1 to h8. a1 to a8 runs down a “file,” from white to black; al to h1 runs down a “rank,” from one side of the board to the other. This is the algebraic notation for identifying squares on the board. Thus, “Re3,” means the rook moves to the “e3” square. In 1972, most people operated with another language. A white move of the pawn to e4—the pawn to the fourth square of the king file—was written down as “P-K4.” When black moved, his/her moves were seen from his/her side: thus, if black moved his/her king’s pawn two squares (to e5), this was also jotted down as “P-K4.”