Endgame (49 page)

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: