There were other people willing to look after him. One was Claudia Mokarow, also a member of the Worldwide Church of God. International master David Levy visited Fischer in 1976. At the time, his host was staying in a large house with no furniture. Levy and Fischer slept on mattresses on the floor. Fischer used Mokarow as a taxi service, Levy remembers, calling her up to take them to and from the restaurants of his choice.
In 1977 Fischer broke with the church, accusing it of being “satanic,” and vigorously attacking its methods and leadership. From this point on, the subject of so much chess acclaim became a near total recluse. Those acquaintances with whom he kept in contact were sworn to secrecy. Relations with anyone who spoke about him to the outside world were broken off—for good. So as not to be recognized, he grew a beard and mustache. However, a letter from Fischer to an old chess acquaintance, Bernard Zuckerman, dated 13 May 1978, shows that he was still using Claudia Mokarow as his answering service. He gave her telephone number and told Zuckerman that was where he could leave messages.
Fischer’s life now became a fertile ground for rumor, although few rumors could exaggerate the reality. In early 1981, he spent several months in San Francisco playing a series of seventeen speed games against Peter Biyiasas, a Greek-born Canadian grandmaster. (Fischer won them all.) Biyiasas said that Fischer carried around a locked valise full of Chinese and Mexican pills. “If the Commies come to poison me, I don’t want to make it easy for them.” There were reports that Fischer had replaced all his fillings after coming to believe that the Soviets were capable of using the metal in his teeth to beam in malignant waves.
On the afternoon of 26 May 1981, Fischer was picked up by the police, apparently mistaken for a bank robber, and was thrown behind bars for two days. He later published a pamphlet, graphically depicting the indignities he suffered: “I Was Tortured in the Pasadena Jailhouse! by Bobby Fischer, the World Chess Champion.”
It appears that Fischer’s refusal to cooperate with the authorities and his inability to recall the address at which he was staying were at least part of the problem. Fischer wrote that he was “brutally handcuffed” and that the metal tore into his flesh. When he stopped answering their questions, one officer, Fischer wrote, “grabbed my throat with one hand and started choking me by the neck.” Although he never discovered this policeman’s name, he wanted him identified. Fischer described him as “hyper-aggressive, like a little dog who barks and snaps a lot and bares his teeth. He is also quite vicious.” Fischer declared that he was stripped and left naked in a bare, dank, drafty cell. Through the tiny window, he sought help from passersby, screaming that he was being tortured to death. Nobody came to his rescue.
Fischer’s apparent inability to distinguish between the genuinely shocking and the relatively trivial is striking. The hysterical tone remains constant throughout: “Legality is a sham at the jail-house. There are No Smoking signs everywhere, and no smoking is rigidly enforced—for the prisoners. But I noticed a light-skinned colored cop/jailer smoking whenever he pleased.”
The text is signed:
Robert D. James (professionally known as Robert J. Fischer or Bobby Fischer, the World Chess Champion)
After this, “Robert J. Fischer, the World Chess Champion,” became a wanderer. For a time in the mid-1980s, he lived in Germany. Michael Bezold, then just a schoolboy but later a grandmaster, analyzed with him each day for three months. Fischer was still a nocturnal animal, rising in the afternoon and often eating a huge breakfast of cereal and eggs and bread at five P.M. He was obsessed with “a game in the 1960s, and the question was whether or not to move the pawn to h6. This was the only question. And he said he’d been analyzing this game for more than thirty years, and he couldn’t figure out whether it’s better to play h6 or not. It was fantastic.”
Then suddenly the recluse resurfaced for all the world to see. In 1992, in the midst of the Yugoslav war, exactly two decades after their encounter in Reykjavik, Spassky and Fischer met in a rematch. It was organized by Jezdimir Vasiljevic, a Serbian financier of dubious repute, who proffered $5 million of his bank’s money (two-thirds to go to the winner, one-third to the loser) to entice the ex-champions back to the board. Once again, the world’s press assembled en masse, tantalized not only by the prospect of a battle between the two old foes, but by a sighting of Fischer. What would he look like after all these years?
The answer was, totally transformed from the lithe, boyish figure he had presented in Reykjavik. Now forty-nine, balding, pudgy, and with a beard mottled the same shade of gray as his suit, he had the air of a university lecturer. Fischer considered this a “World Championship” contest—absurdly, given that he had forfeited the title seventeen years earlier and Spassky was now rated only about one hundredth in the world.
The match, split between Belgrade and the picturesque island resort of Sveti Stefan in Montenegro on the Adriatic Sea, was in many ways a triumph for Fischer’s obduracy (as well as his principles), for the rules were those upon which Fischer had insisted in 1974 in the negotiations with FIDE. But his taking part in the match in the middle of the Yugoslav civil war breached UN sanctions: the U.S. Treasury Department bluntly informed him beforehand that he would be in violation of an executive order (number 12810) if the match went ahead—a serious crime carrying a heavy fine and/or a jail sentence.
He ignored the warning. In a press conference, Fischer opened his brown leather suitcase and removed a letter from the Treasury Department. He then spat at it, with precision. Asked about the then top two players in the world, Karpov and Kasparov, he described them as “the lowest dogs around.” A U.S. arrest warrant was later issued—it is still valid.
For admirers of the two champions, the rematch was an unedifying spectacle, rather like the sight of two former heavyweight boxers, well past their prime, climbing back into the ring for a last big payday. After game one, the experts were in a state of high excitement—Fischer had won it brilliantly: he looked like the Fischer of old. But it was a form he was to regain in only a couple of games. Although he won convincingly, ten games to Spassky’s five, with fifteen draws, the quality of the chess was regarded as somewhat pedestrian. An immensely profitable few weeks for the two adversaries, the episode tarnished the Reykjavik legend as a bad sequel to a movie can sully the original.
Then the nomad was off again. Zita Rajcsanyi, a nineteen-year-old Hungarian chess star, had been instrumental in drawing him into the Spassky rematch and had kept him company in Yugoslavia. But although Fischer spent several years in Budapest in the 1990s, Rajcsanyi married and disappeared from the scene. At some stage, Fischer moved to Tokyo. There are reports of his having a child. Sightings of him became as rare and often no more accurate than those of the Loch Ness monster.
Fischer has descended into an abyss of unreality, the world of Holocaust denial, persecution complexes, and conspiracy theories. In the 1980s he became fixated on the study of anti-Semitic tracts, such as the Tsarist forgery The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and Hitler’s manifesto, Mein Kampf. In the late 1990s, he broadcast occasional interviews, though he performed only on condition that they went out live. This was a risky proposition for station chiefs: Fischer railed about the Jews, usually referring to them as kikes, Jew-bastards, or Yids. He told those with whom he retained any kind of contact that he had a mission to tell the truth. “It’s a dirty job, but somebody has to do it. Huh!” As for the attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center on 11 September 2001, “Well, America got what it deserved.” That very day, on Philippine radio, he shouted, “Death to the U.S.A.!” (The USCF subsequently passed a motion condemning their only world champion.) An anticommunism had somehow transmuted into an anti-Americanism. In an interview with Icelandic radio, he recommended the country break with the United States and shut down the Keflavik air base. His e-mail address in Japan was us_is_shit.