King's Gambit

by Paul Hoffman

  Soon Bloodgood went into the marines—first to Parris Island, South Carolina, and then to Okinawa, where he was trained as a sharpshooter. He beguiled his sister with wild stories of geishas. When he returned home to Virginia, he told his family that he had tricked the Mafia by selling them a nonexistent call-girl ring. “Now my father was really worried,” she recalled. “He’d walk around the house with a gun and keep the shades drawn in case the Mafia came for their money.”

  I asked her if Bloodgood might have met Bogart in a California VA hospital in the 1950s.

  “Hell, no.”

  “So he was never in a VA hospital?”

  “He was in 1955, I think, but not in California.”

  “Did he have friends in Hollywood?”

  “Of course not.”

  “Could he have been married to the actress Kathryn Grayson?”

  “That’s a joke.”

  “Not according to his FBI files. They don’t rule it out.”

  “Well, there you go. One of the things about my brother was that there was always a very tiny thread of truth in these goddamn wild stories. Just enough to pique you and make you wonder about everything else.”

  She said that their father loved Claude despite his criminal behavior. His brother would take the family credit cards and go on vacation in Mexico. “My father always welcomed him back,” she said, “and tried to find him a job and get him back into society.” In 1968, Claude cashed their parents’ IRS check. “They reported this,” she said. “My father told my mother and me that he worried Claude was going to kill one of us. But I was worried that he was going to kill my dad—they were the ones who fought. My father soon had second thoughts and said that he couldn’t put his own son in jail. Two weeks later, Dad died. My mother went ahead and testified against Claude, and he turned to her in the courtroom and said, ‘You’ll never live to spend Dad’s money.’ He went to jail for one year, came out, and killed her.

  “He could be really vicious and cruel. When I asked if Mom had suffered when he killed her, he said, ‘Yeah, she suffered.’ But he could also be very generous and protective. He stood up for me when other kids harassed me. I remember how one Easter I knocked over my parents’ radio and broke it while looking for my Easter basket. I was terrified by what my father would do to me. Claude saw I was scared and he told my father that he did it. Claude was so bright and he exposed me to a lot of things that were way beyond my parents. He had me reading Dostoyevsky when I was eleven or twelve. He taught himself Russian from audiotapes and then he taught me.

  “I’m glad he did the chess thing in prison. It gave him something to do with his mind. I have to laugh because this sounds gross, but that’s really what he wanted to do with his life. Just sit there and play chess. He didn’t want to get a job. I’m sure it was horrible to be in jail for thirty years, but he made the experience what he wanted it to be.

  “Recently I read some of the chess books he wrote. They’re interesting. I haven’t played since he was a kid. He was much better than me. Maybe I’ll get back into chess now.”

  ONE EVENING, AFTER I HAD SPOKEN WITH BLOODGOOD’S SISTER ABOUT HIS childhood, I had a postmortem with my own mother about my father’s difficult upbringing. His mother, Charlotte Dinter, had been a bon vivant, a strong, independent woman who owned two chic dress boutiques in New Jersey. My father was haunted throughout his life by the identity of his own father, who had left before he was born. There was a name on his birth certificate, James Smith, which he suspected might have been made up. He never met his father, and his mother refused to tell him anything about Smith. When he occasionally asked, she’d cry and not respond. She was married four times, and her boyfriends were too numerous for my dad to keep track of their names. She would gallivant around the world with these men, spending months at a time at resorts in Germany. I do not know who took care of my dad back in New Jersey when she was in Europe; his sister would be shipped off to a Catholic boarding school within walking distance of their home.

  Some of the husbands were losers. Husband number three showed up at her front door and threw a bottle of acid in her face after she broke off their relationship. My father summoned the paramedics, and his mother was basically OK because she had ducked in time. Husband number three went to prison, and Charlotte changed her name and switched residences out of fear that he might return after his release.

  In my father’s senior year in college, he took the name of husband number four, the new man in his mother’s life, whom he liked better than the others and hoped against hope was his real father. The timing made that unlikely: Charlotte and number four would have had to have first met nineteen years earlier, before the three intervening husbands. Number four was a Russian-born Jew who became an officer in the U.S. Army and won a medal for his heroism in Cuba during the Spanish-American War. After the war, he ran hotels in Miami. His army awards plaque indicates that he was a short, thin man—a fact that also argued against his being the father of someone as tall and big-framed as my dad.

  I didn’t like Charlotte. We’d visit her once a year for Thanksgiving at her home in Plainfield, New Jersey. My dad would always coax me beforehand to hug her enthusiastically. I didn’t like her because on Thanksgiving she’d have me sit on her lap and talk through me to my parents as if I were a ventriloquist’s dummy. “Mommy, you’ve aged a lot,” she’d say in a squeaky voice. “You have new wrinkles on your face.” And to my dad, “You should have me wear a nice suit to Grandmother’s, not dress me like a slob.” At least she wanted me to wear men’s clothes. My father claimed that every Halloween when he was a boy, Charlotte had forced him to dress up as her.

  Charlotte was born in 1898 in Görlitz, Germany. Her mother died when she was in her early teens, and in 1913, at the age of fourteen, her father shipped her off by herself, speaking no English, to be raised by relatives in Pennsylvania. She apparently learned English quickly, because two years later her high school report card showed her getting good marks: Plane Geometry 88.6, Chemistry 93.1, Cicero 90, Latin Prose 92, English 86.5, Spelling 99, European History 92.2.

  I told my mother that some time after my father died, Charlotte had confided in my cousin, who was the unofficial family historian, that she had been raped by one of her Pennsylvania relatives. My mother was surprised. “Now I understand,” she said. “Once I made an off-color joke about rape and Charlotte got very angry.” My cousin speculated that the man could have been my dad’s father. That would explain why Charlotte became distraught and withdrawn when my dad raised the issue of his paternity.

  “Did I ever tell you that your father told me about how the lying began?” my mother asked.

  “He admitted he lied?”

  “Yes.”

  “What did he say?”

  “I can show you,” she said.

  “You can show me?”

  “Yes. The lying started with a high school English composition. He made it all up. The teacher praised him, and he realized how easy it was to fool people and be rewarded for it.” Because of the lying, my mother said, he later became a patient of Fritz Perls, the legendary founder of Gestalt therapy.

  My mother left the room and returned with the composition, which was written in the form of a letter to his teacher. A weathered Post-it note was attached to it on which my mother had written: “Jim Hoffman’s composition re: his family. Age 15 with scarcely one true fact.”

  The letter began:

  940 Kensington Avenue

  Plainfield, New Jersey

  September 24, 1934

  My dear Miss Gilbert,

  It is with a feeling of joy that I write this letter to you. It always gives me great happiness to tell anyone, whether by word of mouth or in writing, about my family. My father came to this country at the age of eight.

  I felt queasy as I read the letter to myself. Of course, the first yarn he told would be about the father—and a heroic father, too—that he never had. It made sense. The letter continued:

  He
and his people were poor hard working Germans who came to this country looking for honest work and a home of their own. When dad was twelve, his father died leaving him the soul [sic] support of the family. From but a school boy of twelve to a sweat shop is one long jump. Slowly, however, he lifted himself and his family out of their environment by hard work. From the factory he advanced to a newspaper office. Gradually he worked his way upward to the ranks of reporters. Then he met, fell in love and married my mother. When I was four years old, I distinctly remember his appointment as a columnist on the “Times.” In this new position he had a column of his own in which he could write about anything of current interest he wished. A small struggle between two minute republics in South America, “The Twenty Four Hour War,” broke out. Anticipating the war, the “Times” sent dad down to the war zone. Although the war lasted but twenty-four hours and he was a non-participant, he was one of the twelve people killed in the war. Since that time, mother has worked hard to support my younger sister and myself. She owns a dress shoppe and is getting along fine. For a woman who never worked before his death ten years ago, she’s doing a great job.

  Sincerely yours,

  James Williams

  Below the letter, the teacher had written in red pencil: “A perfectly fine letter. I was greatly moved by it. Be as fine a fellow as you appear to do justice to such parents!”

  I didn’t know what to think. On the one hand, I was glad that my dad felt safe enough with my mother to confess his deception. My impression of their marriage was that it had been absent of such intimacy, and I was comforted to learn otherwise. It would have meant so much to me, though, if he had admitted to me before he died that he had manipulated me, too.

  I also didn’t understand why my mother had kept the letter and why she’d never told me about it before. She knew how troubled I was by my father’s behavior—she and I had spoken about this many times over the past twenty-five years. Why had she been holding out on me? And what compelled him to keep the letter in the first place? The substance of the letter was also disturbing: it was calculated to control the emotional response of his audience. My father had gone for the quick hit of an engaging, targeted lie by which he could engender a sympathetic reaction from his teacher rather than risk the uncertainty of how she might respond to the untidy truth.

  IT IS EASY TO DISMISS BLOODGOOD AS AN ABERRANT FIGURE IN THE CHESS world. After all, it’s not as if chess masters make a habit of bludgeoning their mothers. But it is a truism in research psychology that behavior carried to a grotesque extreme may reveal, by its very excess, essential aspects of normal behavior. What should we make of Bloodgood’s pathological lying? Is it characteristic of chess players?

  Tom Plenty said that chess was the one activity in which Bloodgood was scrupulously ethical and that he never violated the touch-move rule. But Bloodgood was dishonest in chess in a fundamental way. He invented games—not just the result but all the individual moves—played against people whom he presumably never met: John Wayne, Gary Cooper, Peter Lorre, and Henry Fonda. He went so far as to publish fictitious games and dress them up with elaborate stories about the context, such as the particular Hollywood restaurant in which they were played.

  In my youth, when I frequented Washington Square Park, I often faced patzers who fabricated stories about how they’d once trounced Bobby Fischer at blitz. They’d even point to the particular table on which the purported victory took place, and some would show me the moves of these alleged miniatures. If Fischer had lost that many games back then, he would have given up chess.

  The undeniable truth is that deception is everywhere in the world of chess. When chess amateurs describe their ability, they are prone to add a couple of hundred points to their peak rating. And when they tell you the score of a lengthy blitz match against a stronger player, the score tends to shift in their favor with each telling. Players of all strengths often let their time elapse, like Karpov did when he played Pascal, because they find it more palatable to lose on time than on the board.

  In addition, there are whole tournaments recorded that simply never occurred. For example, according to the Web site for the “Heroes of Chernobyl” tournament in April 2005, three grandmasters, five international masters, and six other players conducted a round-robin near Kiev. The Web site showed photographs of the players and even provided all the moves of their games. But the tournament itself turned out to be faked in order to elevate the ratings of the designated winners.4

  Allegations of rating fraud even extend into the equivalent of the chess “White House.” Zurab Azmaiparashvili, a tough-looking grandmaster from Georgia and vice president of the World Chess Federation, has long been dogged by rumors of paying opponents to throw games.5 In a tournament in Macedonia in 1995, which GM Nigel Short called “highly irregular” because there were questions about whether any of the games were ever played, the Georgian reportedly won fourteen games, drew four, and lost none—a spectacular performance that netted him forty rating points and made him ranked number seventeen in the world. Azmai, as he is known, wondered why Short and other grandmasters were skeptical of his success when, in 1993, he had already been ranked number eleven. The Macedonian tournament took place in a restaurant, he said, and most of his opponents were too relaxed to care about their games.6

  In many tournaments there is scuttlebutt about fixed games in the final round, players agreeing to throw games to each other in order to maximize their collective earnings, the loser receiving a kickback from the monetary prize granted the winner.7 In individual games with peculiar results, such rumors are hard to prove or dispel. A player who lets his clock run out in an easy, winning position might not have thrown the game but been the victim of fatigue and simply misread or misjudged the clock. There are strong players such as Bobby Fischer who suspect that most top games are fixed. When he played in the Candidates Tournament in Curaçao in 1962, some of the Russians drew quickly with each other—under instruction from Moscow—so that they could save their energy for their encounters with him. But Fischer takes the accusation of arranged games to a ludicrous extreme, maintaining that Kasparov purposely lost the World Championship to Kramnik so that the title would still be held by a Jew. (Not only is there no evidence for a rigged match but there is a fundamental problem with Fischer’s theory: Kramnik is not Jewish.)

  Viktor Korchnoi, the outspoken Soviet defector who challenged Karpov for the world title in 1978 and 1981, wrote in Chess Is My Life about the extent of cheating in Soviet chess.8 In the Chigorin Memorial Tournament in Leningrad in 1951, Korchnoi admitted to earning a national master norm in an underhanded way. He needed a win in the last round against an experienced master but found himself in “a dead drawn position” at adjournment.

  Being a young player, I had a number of supporters, including some of the organizers of the tournament. They put strong pressure on my opponent, threatening not to hand over the cash prize due to him, if he did not agree to their demands. In the end my opponent succumbed to this blackmail, and he found a way to lose the drawn position. I must admit that throughout this unsavoury episode I behaved quite improperly. I made out that I knew nothing of what was happening, and laughed at my opponent.

  Five years later Korchnoi tied for first at Hastings in 1956. He said that his compatriot, grandmaster Mark Taimanov, persuaded him privately to agree to a draw before they faced each other at the board. Later Korchnoi was stunned that Taimanov wrote a book in which “he went into raptures about how brilliantly we had played—but in fact the whole game had been worked out beforehand!”9

  Although cheating in chess is an old phenomenon, the advent of chess-playing software that can easily fit on a concealed computer or a PDA now makes it simpler for dishonest amateurs to make strong chess moves. In 1993, an unrated first-timer to tournaments entered the World Open in Philadelphia under the name John von Neumann (the same name as the celebrated pioneer of artificial intelligence). After he drew with a GM and defeated a strong master, “von Neum
ann,” whose pocket bulged suspiciously with something that was making a buzzing sound, was interrogated by a tournament director who concluded that he knew very little chess strategy.

  Chess engines have only gotten smaller since 1993, and the time will soon come when Fritz will run on a cell phone or an iPod. Von Neumann had to leave the board to consult his pocket computer, drawing attention to himself by constantly getting up and down and making it impractical for him to get assistance on every move. The development of tiny wireless transmitters embedded in the ear canal and miniature cameras concealed in a sleeve or disguised as a shirt button means that a weak player, aided by an accomplice who is located remotely and equipped with a computer, can have grandmaster-strength software making all of his moves for him. Computer-assisted cheating is now such a threat to the integrity of amateur chess that a town meeting on the subject was held on December 4, 2006, at the Marshall. The conclusion of the meeting was that such chicanery is nearly impossible to prevent. Tournament organizers fear that casual players may stay away from the game if they are subjected to the same stringent anti-cheating measures—metal detectors, bathroom attendants, a prohibition on iPods and music headsets—to which highly paid chess pros like Kramnik and Topalov are now forced to submit. Moreover, it is questionable whether such measures would eradicate all cases of silicon-aided cheating. Wireless devices need not be metallic and could be so small that they’d elude all methods of detection except for invasive strip searches, and in the United States—unlike in Kalmykia—it is against the law to jam wireless communications.