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.
12
Fischer-Spassky Redux
BOBBY’S CHESS DRAGON was not only stirring in the cave, it was lashing its tail. Perhaps because he could no longer tolerate his downtrodden life, living off his mother’s checks and receiving just an occasional trickle of cash from here or there, Bobby wanted to get back to the game … desperately. But his urge to rejoin the fray wasn’t all about remuneration—it was the call to battle, the game itself, that he missed: the prestige; the silence (hopefully) of the tournament room; the sibilant buzz of the kibitzers (damn them); the life of chess. Jonathan Swift defined war as “that mad game the world loves to play.” Fischer felt exactly the same way about chess. But could he find his way, existentially, back to the board? Hermann Hesse, in his masterful novel Magister Ludi (The Glass Bead Game), told of someone whose knowledge of “the game” was Fischer-like: “One who had experienced the ultimate meaning of the game within himself would no longer be a player; he would no longer dwell in the world of multiplicity and would no longer delight in invention, construction, and combination, since he would know altogether different joys and raptures.” The difference is that the joys and raptures away from the board weren’t really there for Bobby.
Spassky provided a way back to the board. He contacted Bobby in 1990 and informed him that Bessel Kok, the man who was running for the presidency of FIDE that year (1990), was interested in organizing a Fischer-Spassky rematch, and there might be millions—although not the $5 million he’d passed up in 1975 for a match with Karpov—available for the prize fund.
Kok, a Dutch businessman of extreme wealth, was president of a Belgium-based banking company, SWIFT, and was responsible for organizing several international tournaments. Kok had a noble agenda: He wanted Bobby to continue his career, and he wanted to be a privileged witness to his games, as did almost all chess players.
A meeting was planned to discuss the match, with Kok agreeing to pay all the expenses for Bobby to fly, first class, to Belgium and be lodged at the five-star Sheraton Brussels Hotel. To avoid journalists, Bobby checked in under the name of Brown. He mentioned to Kok that he’d need some cash for pocket money upon arrival. Twenty-five hundred dollars in cash was waiting for him at the hotel.
In addition to Bobby, Kok also invited Spassky and his wife Marina to Brussels. For four days, the trio spent mostly all of their time at Kok’s suburban mansion, but it wasn’t all a discussion of the possible match. At one point, Fischer and Kok joined the Spasskys in a doubles tennis match; there were elegant, candlelit dinners and postprandial conversations, and a few outings into Brussels itself. Kok’s wife, Pierette Broodhaers, an attorney, said that she had a “normal and friendly” conversation with Bobby, not at all about chess. Nor, according to her, did he show any signs of the eccentricities the press kept referring to, with the exception of his speaking too loudly. “Maybe he is used to living alone so nobody listens to him,” she said, sensing his loneliness. He forbade her to take a photograph of him.
One evening, the men, who were joined by Jan Timman from Holland, the number three–ranked chess player in the world, went off to what Broodhaers described as a “raunchy” nightclub in downtown Brussels. Timman recalled meeting Fischer for the first time: “The most interesting thing was that I had once dreamed of meeting Fischer in a nightclub. Funny I had never entertained the hope of [actually] meeting him. When I broke through internationally, he had just stopped [playing].” Talking about who might be considered the greatest player of all time, he said, “As far as I am concerned, Fischer is the best ever.”