Obituraries

The troubled grandmaster who made chess a spectator sport

Bobby Fischer

1943–2008

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Before 1972, big-league chess was a blip on the public radar. But that summer, an intense, temperamental 29-year-old made international headlines by becoming the first and only American to win the world championship. Robert James Fischer, who popularized chess for millions, was one of the game’s greatest players. He was also an unpredictable eccentric who, long before he succumbed to kidney disease last week, became a paranoid recluse.

“Born in Chicago and abandoned by his father,” Fischer was raised above a candy store in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, by his mother, said the New York Daily News. When he was 6, his sister bought him his first chess set. Soon, he was a prodigy.

“He won the U.S. Junior Chess Champion­ship at 13, the youngest to this day.”

At 15, Fischer reached the top rank of grandmaster, an unheard-of achievement. A year later, the “shy, socially awkward” teenager quit school to pile up victories throughout the 1960s, including eight

U.S. championships.

Fischer, who had an IQ of 181, was obsessed with chess, said the London Telegraph. He absorbed every treatise on the game he could. He scrupulously studied the Soviet players who then dominated the field. But his play was unique—“innovative in the opening, profound in the middlegame, and remorselessly accurate in the endgame.” Through it all he displayed an “uncompromising” ruthlessness. “Chess is war on a board,” he said. “The object is to crush the other man’s mind.” He once declared, “I like to see ’em squirm.”

Fischer’s apex was his showdown with the world champion, the Russian Boris Spassky, in Reykjavik, Iceland, in 1972, said the Los Angeles Times. “By then, his reputation—as demanding, unpredictable, and surly—was firmly established.” He insisted on endless perks: “a Mercedes-Benz with an automatic transmission, a swimming pool reserved for his exclusive use, a certain kind of chess table.” He threatened to withdraw because the $125,000 purse was inadequate; National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger personally appealed to him to play. When Fischer finally arrived two days late for the multigame match, he blew the first game and refused to play the second because “the noise from the cameras was distracting.”

Throughout that July and August, as the match proceeded, a fascinated public ate it up, said The Washington Post. Detractors said Fischer was becoming unhinged; supporters insisted he was merely trying to psyche out Spassky. The competition itself was the Cold War in miniature. “Fischer stood as an iconic figure, a go-it-alone American battling the Soviet Union’s Communist Party–controlled chess bureaucracy.” Ultimately, Fischer won by 12½ games to 8½. Sales of chess sets skyrocketed, and Fischer was a global superstar.

Soon, though, Fischer’s life began unraveling, said The New York Times. “The International Chess Federation stripped him of his title in 1975 when he refused to play the rightful challenger, Anatoly Karpov, under federation rules.” Fischer then dropped out of public sight. “He was apparently broke and homeless”; occasionally, he was reported to be living in cheap California hotels or crashing with his dwindling circle of friends. Then, in 1992, he re-emerged to play Spassky in an unsanctioned 20th-anniversary match for $5 million. In an official communiqué, the Treasury Department warned Fischer that he was violating U.S. sanctions against Yugoslavia, which was waging its genocidal war against Bosnia. “In front of more than 150 reporters, he spat on the letter.”

Fischer defeated Spassky again but became a fugitive from justice, living in increasing obscurity abroad and growing both virulently anti-American and, though half-Jewish himself, rabidly anti-Semitic. In an interview on Philippine radio on Sept. 11, 2001, he called the terrorist attacks “wonderful news” and said he hoped the U.S government would “execute hundreds of thousands of Jewish ringleaders.” Arrested in Japan in 2004 over a passport violation, he was jailed for nine months before renouncing his American citizenship and moving to Reykjavik. There he died at 64—the number of squares on a chessboard.

The Emmy-nominated actress who played Bob Newhart’s wife

Suzanne Pleshette

1937–2008

One night in 1972, Suzanne Pleshette was a guest on The Tonight Show, during which she sat next to deadpan comedian Bob Newhart. Watching at home was producer David Davis, who was creating a sitcom for Newhart and needed to cast his wife. Pleshette was perfect. “She was bubbleheaded but smart,” recalled Davis, “loving toward her husband but relentless about his imperfections.” For six years Pleshette played that role to the hilt as Emily Hartley on The Bob Newhart Show, a CBS hit from 1972–78.

The daughter of a ballerina and a theater manager, Pleshette was “strikingly beautiful” and had one of the “deepest, most distinctive voices in show business,” said The Washington Post. She replaced Anne Bancroft in The Miracle Worker on Broadway in 1961, and her “dark allure” made her memorable as a socialite nymphomaniac in the film A Rage to Live (1965) and as a schoolteacher who gets pecked to death in Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds (1963).

Her TV union with Newhart was groundbreaking, said USA Today. “Few sitcom marriages have been as much of an equal partnership,” he a psychologist, she a particularly smart teacher. “Famously childless,” Bob and Emily had a relationship that was equally barbed and loving. “No one did sarcasm better than Pleshette. She had a way of looking at Bob, or saying ‘Bob’ that let him know she was either pleased or displeased, and he wisely snapped to.” Pleshette’s portrayal won her two of the four Emmy nominations she received during her career.

“Although Newhart got a new TV wife, played by Mary Frann, for his 1982–90 situation comedy, Newhart, Pleshette had the last laugh,” said the Los Angeles Times. In the last scene of Newhart’s last episode, the entire series is revealed to be a dream as she and Newhart wake up as Emily and Bob in the old Bob Newhart Show bedroom. The astonished audience screamed with delight at what has become one of TV’s most memorable finales. It was “very touching and so dear,” Pleshette recalled, that they “remembered us with such affection.”

Married three times—including to Troy Donahue and most recently to Tom Poston, who co-starred on Newhart’s second series and died last year—Pleshette leaves no immediate survivors. She died of lung cancer.