Endgame (38 page)

Rader pointed out that aside from any non-sanctioned matches, the official match for the World Championship would be in 1975, and it would consist of Bobby against whoever qualified through the Candidates system. “When he defends his title in 1975,” Rader added, “he’ll be much better able to capitalize financially.”

And then the conference was over. “That’s all gentlemen. Thank you,” said Rader, and he and Bobby scurried away. The reporters looked at one another, incredulous at the abrupt termination.
As a result of the non-event event, the resulting press coverage was practically nil.

Rader had reason to be helpful to Bobby. If Bobby could make millions, and if he continued tithing large amounts to the Church, he could emerge as one of the Church’s biggest benefactors. Also, the more publicity Bobby received, the more publicity the Church would receive. Before anything was completed, however, complications set in.

Attractive financial offers kept tumbling Bobby’s way—almost pouring over him—but nothing was to his satisfaction:

• Warner Bros. offered him a million dollars to make a series of phonograph records on how to play chess, but Bobby wanted to voice the series himself. Scripts written by Larry Evans were translated into several languages and rendered phonetically to make it easier for Bobby to read. Unfortunately, when he voiced one of the scripts for a pilot recording, he didn’t like the sound of his own voice, and he wouldn’t approve a professional announcer as a substitute. Ultimately, he rejected the whole project.
  
• An entrepreneur, hearing of the $1 million offer from the Hilton Corporation in Las Vegas for a Fischer-Spassky match, offered to raise the amount of the prize fund to $1.5 million if the two men played in his home state of Texas. Nothing came of it.
  
• A publishing company offered Bobby a “small fortune,” according to press reports, to write a book on his title match. He refused.
  
• A television producer wanted him to make a series of chess films that could be marketed throughout the world. No agreement could be reached.
  
• Bobby was offered $75,000 plus residual royalties plus a new car simply to say in a commercial that he drove only that car, which would have been true since it would have been the only car he owned. He declined.
  
• The most fabulous offer came to Fischer in 1974, right after the Muhammad Ali–George Foreman fight (known as “The Rumble in the Jungle”) in Zaire. The Zaire government offered Bobby $5 million to play Anatoly Karpov in their country in what would have been a month-long championship chess match. “Too short,” said Bobby. “How dare they offer me five million dollars for a month-long match? Ali received twice that much for one night!” (He didn’t.) It was after that match that Ali began calling himself “The Greatest,” and Bobby took issue with that, too. “Ali stole that from me,” said Bobby. “I used ‘The Greatest’ for myself on television before he ever used it.”
  

Bobby
did
accept one offer, but not for millions—rather, for $20,000. He was invited to be the guest of honor at the First Philippine International Chess Tournament in 1973, and in addition to the honorarium mentioned above, all of his expenses were paid. He stayed at the Tropical Palace resort
on the outskirts of Manila for a month. At the tournament he made the ceremonial first move and played a mock game with President Marcos—one that ended in a mock draw after eight moves.

Journalists asked Fischer why he’d accepted the offer to come to the Philippines on his first “official” visit when he’d turned down similar offers from other countries. “I was there in 1967,” he said. “
I was not yet World Champion but they treated me like a world champion.” According to Casto Abundo, a chess player who described himself as Bobby’s “Young Man Friday” during his 1973 stay, Bobby studied chess every night, already preparing himself to face whoever emerged as the winner of the Candidates match. After finishing his studying, he often took long walks at three in the morning and didn’t fall asleep till four. Film footage from the visit shows Bobby at the apex of his life. Wearing the traditional crisp white
barong
shirt and often sporting a lei of flowers, he looked fit and handsome and was always smiling. The Filipinos loved him; Marcos entertained him at the palace and on his yacht; Marcos’s wife, Imelda, dined with him at lunch; young ladies gathered around him constantly, as if he were a movie star. On a Bangkok stopover en route to Manila, he’d bought a number of Thai music cassettes, which he played over and over again at night while he was going over games. By the time he sailed back to the United States, his fondness for the Filipino people had intensified.

Paul Marshall, Bobby’s lawyer during the Fischer-Spassky match negotiations, has said that by the
time Bobby came back from Iceland he’d received offers that could have totaled up to $10 million—but he turned down all of them. Bobby’s interest in making money was undeniable, so theories abounded as to why he acted contrary to his own financial interests. One friend chalked it up to Bobby’s winner-take-all mentality, saying, “If someone offers him a million dollars, he thinks there is a lot more available, and he wants it all.” Grandmaster Larry Evans preferred a more neutral explanation: “I think he feels that lending his name to something is beneath his dignity.” International master George Koltanowski conjectured that Bobby just didn’t trust people and didn’t want to be cheated: “There’s a word for it in German:
Verfolgungswahnsinn,
” he said. “It means ‘persecution mania.’ ” But perhaps the best explanation of why Bobby cast aside all financial offers came from Bobby himself: “People are trying to exploit me. Nobody is going
to make a nickel off of me!” Nor, as it developed, would he make a dime off of them—in the short term, at least.

As all of these financial shenanigans were happening—offers, discussions, negotiations, acceptances, and then rejections—Bobby was going his own way but under the influence and guidance of the Church. Church officials set him up with young, amply endowed women—all Church members—but since no physical intimacy was permitted, Bobby soon grew disillusioned. After dates with eight different “candidates,” each of whom adhered to the same sexless script, he abandoned Church relationships as the avenue to an amorous life.

His connection to the Church was always somewhat ambiguous. He was not a registered member, since he hadn’t agreed to be baptized by full immersion in water by Armstrong or one of his ministers. And since he wasn’t considered a duly recognized convert, he was sometimes referred to as a “coworker” or, less politely, as a “fringer”—someone on the fringes or edges of the Church but not totally committed to its mission.
The Church imposed a number of rules that Bobby thought were ridiculous and refused to adhere to, such as a ban on listening to hard rock or soul music (even though he preferred rhythm and blues) and prohibitions against seeing movies not rated G or PG, dating or fraternizing with non–Church members, and having premarital sex.

Ironically, despite Bobby’s unwillingness to follow principles espoused by the Church, his life still revolved around it. He sat in on a demanding Bible course, even though it was open only to members (the Church made an exception for him); he discussed personal and financial matters with both Rader and Armstrong; and he prayed at least an hour a day, in addition to spending time on a careful study of Church teachings. On a visit back to New York, while driving around Manhattan with his friend Bernard Zuckerman, Bobby made a reference to Satan. Zuckerman, ever sarcastic, said, “Satan? Why don’t you introduce me?”
Bobby was appalled. “What? Don’t you believe in Satan?”

As he continued to tithe more and more money to the Church, he enjoyed perks only available to high-ranking members, such as occasional use of a private jet and a chauffeur-driven limousine; invitations to exclusive events such as parties, concerts, and dinners; and a continuous parade of bright and
pretty women whom he couldn’t touch. He was also given access to the Church’s personal trainer, Harry Sneider, a former weight-lifting champion who took a special interest in Bobby. Sneider trained Bobby in swimming, weight lifting, tennis, and soccer, and they became friends.

With the same diligence he’d brought to the task of soaking up chess knowledge, Bobby around this time started a relentless search for general knowledge. The library at the Worldwide Church’s Ambassador College, to which he had access, was highly limited. It contained books on religion and theology, but he wanted other points of view and to explore other topics, and he never set foot back in the library after he heard it was sprayed with insecticide for termites.

Botvinnik may have been right when he suggested that Bobby suffered from a lack of culture and a thinness of education. But he was determined to catch up. He started by going to bookstores in Pasadena, and when he’d depleted their shelves, he took the bus into downtown Los Angeles and scoured the shelves of every bookstore he could find. He became a voracious reader.

There have been many theories offered over the years as to why Fischer eventually turned against Jews, including speculation that Bobby’s rhetoric was triggered by distaste he felt as a child for his mother’s Jewish friends; that he was antagonistic toward officials of the American Chess Foundation, most of whom were Jewish; that he was ultimately disillusioned with Stanley Rader, who was Jewish but had converted to the Worldwide Church of God; that he was somehow influenced by Forry Laucks’s Nazism; and that he was propelled by ideas he’d read in some of the literature that fell into his hands during the time he lived in California. Perhaps all of those factors contributed.

David Mamet, the Pulitzer Prize–winning writer, described the prototypical self-hating Jew in his book
The Wicked Son
, and his description, although arguable, could conceivably be applied to Bobby: “The Jew-hater begins with a proposition that glorifies and comforts him, that there exists a force of evil that he has, to his credit, discovered and bravely proclaimed. In opposing it he is self-glorified. One triumphs over evil, thus becoming a god, at no cost other than recognition of his own divinity. Ignorant of the practices of his
own tribe, he (the apostate) gravitates toward those he considers
Other
 … thinking, as does the adolescent, that they possess some special merit.
But these new groups are attractive to the apostate merely because they are foreign.”

In at least one significant case, Bobby woke up to the fact that the
Other
was less appealing than he’d first thought. More and more he was becoming alienated from the Worldwide Church of God. Herbert W. Armstrong had made prophecies that there would be a worldwide catastrophe and that the Messiah would return in 1972. As 1973 wound down, Bobby didn’t need much convincing to have an epiphany about the evils of the Church. In an interview that he gave to the
Ambassador Report
(an irreverent and controversial publication that criticized the Church) he said: “The real proof for me were those [false] prophecies … that show to me that he [Armstrong] is an outright huckster.… I thought, ‘This doesn’t seem right. I gave all my money. Everybody has been telling me this [that 1972 would be the date that the Worldwide Church of God would flee to a place of safety] for years. And now he’s half-denying he ever said it, when I remember him saying it a hundred times.’ … If you talk about fulfillment of prophecy, he [Armstrong] is a fulfillment of Elmer Gantry. If Elmer Gantry was the Elijah, Armstrong’s the ‘Christ’ of religious hucksters. There is no way he could truly be God’s prophet.
Either God is a masochist and likes to be made a fool of, or else Herbert Armstrong is a false prophet.”

Before he knew it, Bobby’s winnings from Reykjavik were beginning to diminish, and yet he saw that Rader and Armstrong were flying all over the world, entertaining lavishly, and proffering gifts to world leaders. “The whole thing is so sick,” said Bobby.

Wandering into a used bookstore in downtown Los Angeles, Bobby stumbled on a dusty old book called
The Protocols of the Elders of Zion
. Though he was introduced to the book by happenstance, he was ready for it. A work of fiction, it purported to be the actual master plan by Jewish leaders to take over the world. First published in 1905, the book, at the time Bobby found it, was still believed by some to be an authentic work of nonfiction. Even today those who are predisposed to believe it swear by its accuracy, and over the years its publication has done its share to stoke worldwide anti-Semitism.
To fire up hatred toward Jews, the book uses reverse psychology in presenting a damning case against gentiles: “
It is the bottomless rascality of the
goyim
people, who crawl on their bellies to force, but are merciless toward weakness, unsparing to faults, and indulgent to crimes, unwilling to bear the contradictions of a free social system but patient unto martyrdom under the violence of a bold despotism.”

As Bobby read
The Protocols
, he thought he saw authenticity in the book’s pages, and their implicit message resonated with him. Soon he began sending copies of the book to friends. To one he wrote: “I
carefully studied the
Protocols
. I think anyone who casually dismisses them as a forgery, hoax, etc., is either kidding themselves, is ignorant of them or else may well be a hypocrite!” At the time, one of the most militant anti-Semites and anti-blacks in the United States, Ben Klassen, had just written his first book,
Nature’s Eternal Religion
, and Bobby, who wasn’t particularly anti-black, nevertheless connected with Klassen’s theories concerning Jews. “
The book shows,” Bobby wrote, “that Christianity itself is just a Jewish hoax and one more Jewish tool for their conquest of the world.” As Regina had proselytized all her life for various causes—always liberal and humanistic ones—so, too, Bobby had become a proselytizer. The pawn did not stray too far from the queen.