Lina Grumette |
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5. Euwe, M. and Lod. Prins. JOSE RAOUL CAPABLANCA Y GRAUPERA. 19 November From chess champion Bobby Fischer's library, this copy bears the inscription "To Bobby Fischer/ With my best wishes/ Lina." Light offsetting to half-title. Minor dampstain to upper fore-edge of rear board, with light transfer to concluding pages and jacket. Jacket worn, with several mostly minor chips and tears, particularly at spine head, and some moderate chipping to spine ends and corners. Still, a very good copy. 1st edition. Book# 003789 US$300.00 Please contact The Book Shop for more information about purchasing this book. After a series of escalating demands, Fischer managed to drive up the match's prize money to $250,000 and was guaranteed a considerable slice of film or TV revenues. But even then the match hit a snag. Fischer refused to play because his favorite television program, The Jack LaLanne Show, wasn't available on Icelandic TV. It was Lina Grumette, a Los Angeles chess promoter and Fischer's "chess mother" at the time, who finally managed to talk Fischer into playing. Lina
Grumette,
for years a Los Angeles chess organizer and promoter, had been
Fischer's West
Coast "chess mother," beginning in the early 1960s. When Fischer, who
was raised in Brooklyn, went to California, he lived at her home, at
times for
weeks on end. She recalls Fischer sitting down at the bridge table
after dinner
and analyzing chess games. His hand would snap pieces rapidly off the
board, and
he would shake his head. "This
move is no good," he would say to Grumette. "He should have done this.
What do you think?" "What
are you asking me for?" she would say. "Well,
everybody's opinion helps," he would answer. That
is how she remembers him best, sitting at the board and having fun
playing
games. "Whatever people say about him, he has a very kind heart,"
Grumette says. "He always impressed me as a normal, kind, decent human
being. He visited my husband in the hospital when he was dying of
cancer, and
walked my dog every night. Bobby was part of the family." Until,
that is, Grumette talked innocently about him to a reporter from the Los
Angeles Times following his defeat of Spassky in 1972. "He
dropped me,
too," she says. Lina
took me to the second-floor room which Fischer had used when he lived
there, and
showed me a box of possessions that he had left behind: a warranty for
a Zenith
television set given to him after a tournament in 1966, a few religious
books
and stacks of letters from children asking him about chess. She
last spoke to him around 1979, when she was trying to arrange an
exhibition
match for him at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas. Caesars offered him
$250,000 in
appearance money. After he had agreed to the terms and all the
arrangements had
been made, Fischer called her. "I've been thinking," he began. The
minute he said that, she knew the deal was off. "I'm risking my
title," Fischer said. "I should get $1 million." The
last time Grumette tried to reach him, she called Claudia Mokarow to
ask for her
assistance. It was just after the appearance of another Los
Angeles Times
article in which Grumette was quoted. "That'll cost you $1,000,"
Mokarow told her. Actually
that figure was cheap. Not long after inviting Fischer to Chamberlain's
house
for dinner, Schaap got in touch with Mokarow and told her he wanted to
interview
Fischer for Games Magazine. "Bobby
will be perfectly happy to interview with you," Mokarow said. "He's
charging $25,000 per interview. Since he didn't charge you for the last
interview, it will be $50,000." |