May 30, 1937. Two friends are traveling by road after participating in the annual tournament that pits the best chess players from Northern and Southern California against each other. The two friends are active members of the Hollywood Chess Club. They talk about the games. The host is Herman Steiner, founder of the Hollywood Chess Club, publisher and journalist. Steiner plays board number one. He is beaming. He has beaten Adolf Fink, San Francisco’s strongest chess player, multiple times state champion. They take the freeway south of Ventura. It is the shortest route to Los Angeles.
Suddenly, the vehicle collides head-on with another car. Steiner is seriously injured. His friend gets the worst of it. He dies on the spot. This is Dr. Robert Griffith, 60, an eminent surgeon among celebrities and movie stars. For a time, Griffith was the personal physician to actress Mary Pickford and Charlie Chaplin. On the day of the accident, Steiner was 32 years old. He suffers a sudden and violent blow, but, after all, he is lucky. He is born again. His life, from the flash before the impact, from the strange terminal lucidity, will be the life of an angel. Or that of a hero.
Let’s talk in the past. Steiner was born in the spring of 1905 in Dunajská Streda, a Hungarian (now Slovak) town on the Danube. Steiner’s parents were Jewish. In 1921 they decided to put an entire ocean in search of peace and a better future in New York. Herman was then 16 years old. To earn his bread, the boy started boxing. The newspaper ‘California Chess Reporter’ describes that he “became expert in the manly art of self-defense”. He also played chess. His playing style followed the lines set by Morphy, Pillsbury and Marshall, the magical triad of great American romantic players. Actually, Steiner understood the board as a ring. He displayed a direct, aggressive chess, as if he were looking through a telescopic sight and a reticle, constantly hunting the enemy king. Off the board, however, he was a suave, handsome fellow, highly adept at close range. He always well groomed, with Clark Gable bangs and a vintage mustache.
more than promising talent
On March 7, 1924, the world champion José Raúl Capablanca offered a simultaneous exhibition at the Brooklyn Chess Club against thirty-three boards. Steiner was one of the four rivals who managed to beat the Cuban. The newspapers confused the name and noted the feat to “S. Steimer », but it was Herman who showed that he had a more than promising talent. In the summer of 1928 Steiner represented the United States at the Chess Olympiad in The Hague. He did it on board two, only behind Isaac Kashdan, a very strong chess player known as Der Kleine Capablanca, “little Capablanca”. The American team competed masterfully and achieved the silver medal. Hungary, the country of origin of the Steiner family, won gold. The tangles of fate.
Steiner, with Clark Gable bangs and a vintage mustache, understood the board as a ring. He displayed a direct, aggressive chess
Herman Steiner took advantage of the trip to Europe to play tournaments on the old continent. Around him, he lost to Alexander Alekhine, the new world champion, in Bradley Beach, New Jersey. Shortly after, he played his second Olympiad, this time in Hamburg (1930), as fourth board. Things didn’t go so well. And there was no medal. In 1932 Steiner recovered his best level at the Pasadena International Tournament. He took it for granted that his great performance (he finished 5th, tied with 3rd) would de facto crown him as the brand new California state champion, but his bureaucratic situation (Steiner officially resided in New York) deprived him of a title which he certainly deserved. Herman then moved to Los Angeles and this decision marked the beginning of an adventure that became extraordinary, a story that reads like the script for a Hollywood movie.
Upon arrival in Los Angeles, Herman Steiner founded the International Chess Club on Sunset Boulevard, in the epicenter of the film industry. Some time later he moved the clubhouse to 108 North Formosa Avenue, next to his residence. The venue became known as the Hollywood Chess Club. Steiner taught classes, organized tournaments, and sometimes held meetings with great masters, like the one he played against José Raúl Capablanca, under the watchful eye of his partners. And that of a very particular referee: Cecil B. DeMille, film director and producer who had already triumphed with ‘The Ten Commandments’ (1923) and who was about to achieve posterity with ‘Cleopatra’ (1934).
Gradually the Steiner chess club became a meeting place for many of the movie stars of those glorious years. There he passed (and played) Charles Boyer, Douglas Fairbanks, Rosemary Clooney, Katharine Hepburn and the most glamorous couple, Lauren Bacall and Humphrey Bogart. Among the actors, Bogart was by far the one with the greatest playing force. His passion for chess was as great as his for the movies. It is no coincidence that the first time we see Rick Blaine in ‘Casablanca’ (1942) we find him before a board playing against himself. “This was my father’s idea,” wrote his son Stephen. But I believe – and I strongly believe it – that the idea came from Herman Steiner, a good friend of Humphrey’s.
It is no coincidence that the first time Bogart appears in ‘Casablanca’ we see him before a board playing against himself
Bogart, a great player
Stephen Bogart also recounted that his father and Herman Steiner dined (always at the same table) at the restaurant that Mike Romanoff, a colorful character of Russian origin, ran in Beverly Hills. “My father was a great chess player, but Romanoff was better,” Stephen wrote. One night, Romanoff told Humphrey that he would donate a hundred dollars to charity if he could beat him at the board.
They played game after game until, at one point, Romanoff apologized. He had to go to the hospital for minor surgery. Agree. Both decided that they would follow the game by phone. But Bogart played with two devices. In one he listened to what Romanoff was saying to him and in the other he called “some of the great chess champions of the United States” to tell him what move he should make at each moment. It goes without saying that Romanoff lost in a landslide. And he kept his promise. Film director Richard Brooks knew this anecdote and named Bogart’s secret confidant: Herman Steiner.
In the constellation of stars that frequented the Hollywood Chess Club, I have forgotten to mention a shining star called Billy Wilder. The Austrian-born filmmaker received classes from Steiner. Wilder was also a regular reader of the ‘Chess Review’ magazine. In the fall of 1944, this publication launched a cover with a photograph of three women playing chess. The three wore the short skirt, with the air of Betty Boop. The image, aesthetically speaking, is beautiful, although it must not have seemed so to Billy Wilder because he wrote a letter to the magazine. I read aloud: “I love your magazine, but what are those three ladies doing on the August-September cover? Please please. BILLY WILDER». I find this attack of puritanism quite ironic in Wilder, the man who filmed Marilyn Monroe on the subway ventilation grill in ‘Temptation lives above’ (1955) or in the wagons of a wild and lewd train in ‘With skirts already crazy’ (1959).
Another cult ‘Chess Review’ cover was published in June-July 1945 as a promotional poster for the first International Pan-American Tournament to be held at the Hollywood Athletic Club. On this occasion we see Herman Steiner looking at Lauren Bacall while Charles Boyer and Humphrey Bogart play a game of chess. The scene happened in Boyer’s dressing room at the Warner Bros. studios. The International Pan-American Tournament was organized by Steiner. The actress Carmen Miranda was the master of ceremonies and Marlene Dietrich stopped by the game room several times. Between rounds, the participants received the news from the front with a mixture of fear and relief. The two atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were dropped during the course of the games and, perhaps unintentionally, precipitated the end of the Pacific War. In a foreboding move, the American of Jewish origin Samuel Reshevsky (Polish by birth) was victorious. Steiner had a low-key performance. It is obvious that he paid for the efforts of being an organizer and a player at the same time.
A love story
Jacqueline Rothschild was the daughter of the French baron Eduardo de Rothschild, one of the richest bankers in the world. Jacqueline, an intellectual and refined woman, married the virtuoso cellist Gregor Piatigorsky. When the Nazis occupied France, they fled to the United States. Chess was one of Jacqueline’s great passions, to the point that she sent the solutions to all the problems that were published in the Los Angeles Times. The editor of the newspaper’s chess section was none other than Herman Steiner.
One day, the Piatigorsky couple were bidding at an auction for a garnet brooch. Herman Steiner and his wife were in the same room and were also fighting over the brooch. Steiner recognized Jacqueline as the woman who sent chess solutions to the newspaper, so he invited them to the club he had right next to his house. Once they arrived, Jacqueline played a game, at Steiner’s request, against a tall young man with a stutter. She lost. “You just played your first tournament game,” Herman told him. Jacqueline smiled and continued to play the next few rounds. She was left in the middle of the leaderboard, but won the prize for the most beautiful game. I am completely unaware, excuse me, what finally happened to the garnet brooch.
From that moment on, a lifelong friendship developed between Herman and Jacqueline. She began studying with Steiner and, in a very short time, she became one of the top ten players in the United States. She played in the Women’s Chess Olympiad (1957) and won the bronze medal on board number two. Her husband said: «In the world of music, she is known to me as a cellist. In the chess world, I am Mrs. Piatigorsky’s husband.”
On November 25, 1955, while playing a California Championship game in Los Angeles, Herman Steiner suffered a heart attack. Again Steiner felt the terminal lucidity, the flash, the sharp and violent blow that, now, yes, mowed down his wings, the wings of an unrepeatable angel, with his Clark Gable-style bangs and his period mustache.
Following Steiner’s sudden death, Jacqueline Piatigorsky took over the Hollywood chess club. The first thing she did was change her name and hang a sign on the door: ‘Steiner Chess Club’.