Twin Stars

 I want to take you back, back to the early 70’s, to two figures that have always fascinated me and -  Janis Joplin and Bobby Fischer.  My love of music has roots in Janis and Bobby influenced my intellectual and sports life.  They have always captivated me because of their enormous talent, their stark individuality and rebelliousness, and complex personalities.  They led parallel lives and their apogee was oh, so brief. Both should still be with us. Janis would be 77 today, only a year older than Mick Jagger and he’s still touring. Fischer would be 76.   I still have distinct memories of watching each of their guest appearances on The Dick Cavett (who had a special thing for Janis) show, which are still available on YouTube.

I highly recommend Holly George-Warren’s meticulously documented biography, “Janis—Her Life and Music”  If you are a fan of her and her music. Janis has been gone now for a half century, dying at the tender age of 27, yet her work left an indelible mark on me.  Pearl was one of the first albums I acquired and to this day, I have never tired of it.  Why?  I think because no other musician has been able to express themselves through their music in such a passionate and authentic way.

Her character was so complex and fraught with contradictions.  Very smart and very artistic, she pushed boundaries early on in her conservative town of Port Arthur, Texas.  As a result, she found herself walled off from the in crowd in high school.  She ultimately found another, more intellectual crowd, but the mocking and exclusion cut her deeply.  Former Dallas Cowboys coach Jimmy Johnson was part of the crowd that tormented her and his cruelty  certainly altered my view of him.

Like most artists, Janis had to endure long stretches of uncertainty and penury.  Part of her was bold, brash and tough.  She once bashed a beer bottle over someone’s head in a bar fight.  She was a woman in a man’s world, a white woman singing the blues and bisexual at a time when it was not accepted.  She was full of contradictions, brazen, yet vulnerable. Part of her liked the adoration and stardom, but part of her yearned for stability, domesticity and a house with a white picket fence.  Throughout her short life, she yearned for constant love and connection which she never really found.

Her internal discord manifests itself in her music.  You don’t just listen to Janis’s music, you feel it.  You can feel her deep emotional pain, loneliness and longing as her raspy voice belts out the first three songs on Pearl -- Move Over, Cry Baby, and A Woman Left Lonely.  She sang not with her voice but with the deepest parts of her soul, which always had an empty, unfulfilled place.  Janis tried to fill that hole with promiscuity and drugs and her demons eventually overtook her.  Perhaps the most incisive line in George-Warren’s book was from a friend and lover David Niehaus,  Janis “died because she was so sensitive to the world.  That’s what killed her.”

Just after Janis’s death, another superstar burst on to the popular culture scene.  A brash, gawky young chess nerd took the world by storm.  Bobby Fischer, a most unlikely superstar, became an overnight sensation, and vaulted chess from an obscure game of nerds to a national pastime and subject of conversation.  Today, few people could name the world chess champion (Magnus Carlsen), but in the early 1970’s, everyone knew Bobby Fischer.  At the time, Fischer spawned chess clubs and an enthusiastic interest in chess across the U.S.

Living with his single mom in the Brooklyn, Fischer became obsessed with chess at a very early age.  So consumed by the game was young Fischer that his mother sought professional help for him.  He played at the chess clubs with the strongest players in the country,  and became the youngest Junior Champion at 13 and US Chess Champion at 14.  Legend has it that he was so consumed by chess that when one of his mentors took him to a brothel for his first sexual experience at 19, he came out, shrugged his shoulders and said, “Chess is better.”   His rise in the chess world was meteoric but his eccentricities also manifested themselves early, as he accused the Russians of collusion during his trip there in 1962.  The Russians dominated world chess but Fischer began to beat Russian giants like Tigran Petrosian and  Mark Taimanov.

One cannot examine the Fischer phenomenon out of the context of the Cold War (captured in what I think is the best biography of him, Bobby Fischer Goes to War).  The proliferation of nuclear weapons made a hot war between the superpowers unthinkable.  The contest between the U.S. and the Soviets was fought in skirmishes on the turf of several third world countries, and in 1972, it was fought on a small 64 square slab.  Fischer embodied American individualism—the brash, solitary pioneer; Spassky, the product of the Soviet collective system.  So symbolically important was this match that when the temperamental Fischer threatened to pull out, Henry Kissinger called him to persuade him to show up.   We all know the results.  The petulant and eccentric Fischer blundered in the first game and forfeited the second over outlandish demands about the playing conditions.  Fischer clawed his way back and defeated Spassky to become World Champion and returned from Reykjavik to the sort of adulation usually reserved for returning warriors and astronauts.

But it was all short-lived.   Fischer’s eccentricities got the best of him and he lost his title when he refused to defend it, resigning the title in 1974.  He vanished into  seclusion for over two decades but surfaced again to play a rematch in Sarajevo which was under U.S. sanction at the time and he was eventually arrested for defying sanctions.  He became more anti-American as he aged and cheered on the 9/11 attackers.  He often went on strange, virulent antisemitic tirades (his mother was Jewish). Fischer died in 2008, known as much for his borderline psychotic behavior as an individualist that took on and defeated the Soviet empire by himself.  Like Janis, much of Fischer’s life was sad, tormented and lonely.  While Bobby had no formal diagnosis, several people have put forward theories his deeply troubled personality.  But for one brief shining moment, Fischer’s obsession made him a national hero.

The lives of Janis Joplin and Bobby Fischer ran in parallel paths.  Their time in the spotlight was so maddeningly brief, their genius and enormous talents derailed by their fatal flaws. Despite the brevity of their celebrity, and their early unraveling, nearly a half century later we still marvel at the gifts they brought us.  Half a century later, when we think of the blues, we think of Janis and when we think of chess, we think of Bobby. Each was truly sui generis.

Perhaps the great essayist H.L. Mencken was onto something 100 years ago when he wrote, “No moral man—that is, moral in the Y.M.C.A. sense—has ever painted a picture worth looking at, or written a symphony worth hearing, or a  book worth reading, and it is highly improbable that the thing has ever  been done by a virtuous woman.”