"Great," I said. "Where, when?"

I was whispering, too, acting as if someone were listening, as if the CIA had bugged the phones.

"Come to the sixth floor," he said, "take the steps, stand by the door. I will be waiting for you."

I scuttled down the stairs like a crab. (Am I being followed?) When I crossed the landing and stepped through the door, I was standing next to Bobby Fischer. The whole world was trying to talk to this genius recluse, this Howard Hughes. I mean, legions of reporters were camped in the lobby with this one goal in mind, and here I was, having pulled it off without trying, in less than a day. (What can I say? The Lord takes care of me.) Fischer motioned me to follow him. He took me down the hall to his room. It was disgusting. There were half-eaten cheeseburgers, old pizzas, boxes of shit, Coke cans, crap lying everywhere. And the smell! My God, the smell. Here and there, on the floor, on the bed, Playboy magazines were opened, and I am sure he'd been masturbating all over the centerfolds. Fischer was standing in the middle of all this, with an air of "Look what time hath wrought."

"I have no money," he whispered.

"What do you mean, you have no money?"

"The Chess Federation won't give me any money," he said. "I have nothing."

"No problem," I said. "We'll get you some money."

He looked at me. His eyes were intelligent and calculating, but their setting (his narrow, ascetic face, the face of a mystic or monk) was not reassuring.

"You can get me money?" he asked.

"Of course I can get you money," I told him.

"Good," he said. "I want to go bowling."

"Then go bowling," I said.

"I can't afford it," he said. "I have no money."

"I'll figure it out," I said. "By tomorrow, there will be a deal for you."

"Then can we go bowling?"

"Yes," I said. "Then we can go bowling."

He asked me to go with him to the match. So the next night, when Fischer climbed out of his car, with the journalists clamoring for a quote, I was the corner man at his side. I sat behind him as he played. A few days before, I had been watching this scene on television. Now here I was, in the background of the establishing shot. I had gone inside the screen. I played off Fischer, reacted to his every move.

I looked annoyed when he looked annoyed. I looked amused when he looked amused. We drove back to the hotel, huddled together in confab.

Then I took him bowling.

"How are we going to make money?" he asked.

"I've been thinking about that," I told him. "And I have a great idea. I'm going to call my friends in LA. You're going to make a record."

He looked at me like I was nuts. Being looked at like you're crazy by a crazy man is a singular experience. "What do you mean a record?" he asked. "I can't even carry a tune."

"No, you're not going to sing," I told him. "You're going to teach."

"Teach what?"

"The record is going to be Bobby Fischer teaching a six-year-old kid, who knows nothing about chess, how to play. And the cover will be a chess board. And with it, we will include chess pieces in a plastic bag. We'll sell it at Christmas. It will be huge."

I called Warner Music the next day. I sold the deal over the phone, just like that. First of all, the record executives loved the idea of getting a phone call from Reykjavik. They loved the idea of being in business with Fischer, too. He was the mystery man of the moment, a mercurial genius, all over television but nowhere at all. What's more, it was a great idea. The label gave us a lot of money for it. I don't remember the figure, but it was a primary number followed by many zeros. The contract came, Fischer signed it. Then I had another idea, which appeared to me in a vision: Boris Spassky and Bobby Fischer playing a winner-take-all match in a glass box on a casino floor in Las Vegas. Could you imagine the scene, the bookmakers and high rollers and celebrities? We would sell it as a heavyweight title fight, the World Championship of Chess. For a minute, I even thought it would happen. I did not yet understand Fischer, and how nutty he was.

He flipped out in Reykjavik a few nights later. This was in the arena in the middle of a match. He was sitting there, head in his palm, drumming his fingers on his cranium. Every few seconds, he looked at the ceiling and shuddered. He leaped to his feet as if he'd been burned and ran across the floor. He went through the crowd as if he were being chased. Then he was gone, the match forfeited. There was a moment of silence, then you heard his voice, a guttural shout with a hint of Brooklyn, calling, "Jerry Weintraub! Come on, Jerry Weintraub, we're getting out of here."

I followed him into the backseat of the car. We started to drive. "What the hell just happened?" I asked.

"Did you hear it?" he said. "Tell me the truth, did you hear it?"

"Hear what?"

"The whirring, the whirring."

Then he put his fingers to his temples, as if he was holding the dark matter of his brain from spilling across the backseat, and yelled, "I CAN'T THINK!"

When we got back to the hotel, I made some calls, asked around. At first, I did not believe him. He was really crazy, but, you know, he was right-there was whirring in the ceiling. It was the ABC camera, filming for Wide World of Sports. Fischer said he could not play until it was taken out, removed.

"No more whirring. No more whirring. No more whirring."

I spoke to Roone Arledge, tried to work something out. Then I came back to Bobby, and said, "Look, Bobby, if you got paid, if there was money on the table, do you think the whirring might go away?"

He stopped pacing and looked at me. At such times, the nuttiness and confusion went out of his eyes, and, for a moment, he was sober and shrewd.

"Sure," he said, "it might go away."

"Okay," I said, "let me see what I can do."

I spoke to producers at ABC, gave them the rundown, then came back to Fischer with twenty-five thousand dollars. After that, he did not hear the whirring. He won the tournament, but the incident was a prelude, a glimpse into his soul, which was a morass, brilliance knotted with neurosis, paranoia, and fear. The guy was really something.

He moved to LA. He was brilliant at chess, but lost in the world. He bailed out of the record deal and everything else. He did not trust the businessmen, he did not trust me, he did not trust anyone. There were voices in his head. He wandered, tortured by the whirring of imaginary machines. He let himself go, typical crazy man stuff. He was a target for charismatics, a question mark in search of an easy answer. He got hooked up with a cult in the Valley, the Assembly Church of God. He fell under the sway of a high-ranking member, Dr. Stanley Rader, a total con man. Rader was an accountant from New York who had seen the light. He had been Jewish before he was baptized into the sect-in a bathtub in the Mandarin Hotel in Hong Kong -by the church's founder, Herbert Armstrong. This is the craziness Fischer fell into after Iceland. In this way, everything we planned, everything he could have been and done, went away. He ended up living in the basement of the church and became utterly, totally, and completely insane.

The Death of the King

Elvis is dead."

I was in Malibu, the morning of August 16, 1977, when the call came. It was Roone Arledge, who had just become the head of ABC News. His people had picked up the 911 call on a police scanner. "What are you talking about?" I asked.

"We just got the news," he said. "Elvis Presley is dead."

I was supposed to meet Elvis in Portland, Maine, the next day. We were going on tour. He had been at home, in Graceland, getting in shape for the road. He had played racquetball on his private court, sat at his piano, sung "Unchained Melody," gone upstairs, and died-they found him several hours later on the floor of his bathroom.