But Fischer was incapable of sustaining himself in the limelight, and by the beginning of 1973, he had withdrawn into the weird solitude he more or less maintained for the remainder of his life. Over the years, he turned down huge financial offers to play, among them a bid of $1.4 million from the Hilton Corporation to defend his title in Las Vegas and even larger sums from dictators like Ferdinand Marcos of the Philippines and the Shah of Iran to compete in their countries. He said the money wasn’t enough.

He was involved with the now defunct Worldwide Church of God in the early 1960’s. For a time, he lived in Pasadena, Calif., the church’s home base, or nearby Los Angeles, where he was said to spend his time replaying chess games and reading Nazi literature. There were reports that he was destitute, though the state of his finances was never very clear.

In chess circles, rumors surfaced intermittently that he was playing, that he was training, that he was about to make a comeback. He invented a new kind of chess clock, which automatically rewarded players for moving quickly toward the end of the game, restoring time each time a move is made, and also experimented with new moves. But he did not emerge publicly until 1992, when he accepted the offer to play against Spassky again on an island in the Adriatic.

A man of narrow interests but great intellectual gifts - he reportedly had an I.Q. of 181 - Fischer was a hugely demanding personality who felt his prowess as a chess player entitled him to exorbitant privilege. It was an outlook that became ever more skewed as his life went on.

... contd.