Stars like Charles Boyer, Billy Wilder or Humphrey Bogart found the perfect place to play
May 30, 1937. Two friends travel by road after participating in the annual tournament pitting 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. Hosted by Herman Steiner, founder of the Hollywood Chess Club, publisher and journalist. Steiner plays board number one. It’s radiant. He defeated Adolf Fink, the strongest chess player in San Francisco, multiple state champion. They take the highway south of Ventura. It is the shortest route to Los Angeles.
Suddenly, the vehicle collides head-on with another car. Steiner is seriously injured. Your friend will get the worst. He dies on the spot. This is Dr. Robert Griffith, 60, a leading surgeon among celebrities and movie stars. Griffith was for a time the personal physician of actress Mary Pickford and Charlie Chaplin. On the day of the accident, Steiner was 32 years old. He receives a sharp and violent blow, but he is lucky after all. He is born again. His life, from the flash before impact, from the strange terminal brightness, 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 lay an entire ocean in search of peace and a better future in New York. Herman was then 16 years old. To earn his living, the boy took up boxing. The newspaper ‘California Chess Reporter’ describes that “he became an expert in the manly art of self-defense”. He also played chess. His playing style followed the lines of Morphy, Pillsbury and Marshall, the magic triad of great American romantic players. Actually, Steiner understood the board as a ring. He showed a direct, aggressive chess game, as if observing through a telescopic sight and a reticle, constantly chasing the enemy king. Off the board, however, he was an affable, handsome chap, very adept at short distances. Always well groomed, with Clark Gable bangs and a vintage mustache.
On March 7, 1924, the world champion José Raúl offered Capablanca a simultaneous exhibition at the Brooklyn Chess Club against thirty-three boards. Steiner was one of four rivals the Cuban managed to beat. The newspapers confused the name and noted the performance of “S. Steimer”, but it was Herman who showed more than promising talent. In the summer of 1928, Steiner represented the United States at the Chess Olympiad in The Hague. it on board two, behind only Isaac Kashdan, a very strong chess player known as Der Kleine Capablanca, “little Capablanca”. The American team competed masterfully and took the silver medal. Hungary, the home country of the Steiner family, won gold The tangle of fate.
Herman Steiner took advantage of the trip to Europe to play tournaments on the old continent. On his return he lost in Bradley Beach, New Jersey to Alexander Alekhine, the new world champion. Soon after, he played his second Olympiad, this time in Hamburg (1930), as fourth board. It did not go very well. And there was no medal. In 1932 Steiner regained his best at the Pasadena International Tournament. He assumed his stellar performance (finishing 5th, tied for 3rd) would de facto crown him the new California state champion, but his bureaucratic situation (Steiner officially lived in New York) robbed him of a title he no doubt needed. earned. . 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 movie industry. Some time later, he moved the club’s headquarters 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, such as the one he played against José Raúl Capablanca, under the watchful eye of his members. And that of a very special referee: Cecil B. DeMille, film director and producer who already triumphed with ‘The Ten Commandments’ (1923) and was about to reach posterity with ‘Cleopatra’ (1934).
Gradually, 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. Of the actors, Bogart was by far the one with the greatest acting power. His passion for chess was just as great as his passion for the cinema. It’s no coincidence that the first time we see Rick Blaine in ‘Casablanca’ (1942), we see him playing against himself in front of a board. “This was my father’s idea,” his son Stephen wrote. But I believe – and I strongly believe – that the idea came from Herman Steiner, a good friend of Humphrey’s.
Stephen Bogart also shared that his father and Herman Steiner dined (always at the same table) at the restaurant that Mike Romanoff, a colorful character of Russian descent, ran in Beverly Hills. “My father was a great chess player, but Romanoff was better,” Stephen wrote. One night Romanoff told Humphrey that she would donate a hundred dollars to charity if he could beat him on the board.
They played game after game until Romanoff apologized at one point. 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 said 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 any given time. 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 that frequented the Hollywood Chess Club, I forgot to mention a shining star named Billy Wilder. The Austrian-born filmmaker was taught by Steiner. Wilder was also a regular reader of ‘Chess Review’ magazine. In the fall of 1944, this publication launched a cover with a photo of three women playing chess. The three wore the short skirt, with the allure of Betty Boop. The image is aesthetically pleasing, although it must not have seemed so to Billy Wilder, as 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 rather ironic in Wilder, the man who filmed Marilyn Monroe on the subway grille in “Temptation Lives Above” (1955) or in the carriages of a wild and lewd train in “With Skirts Already Crazy” (1955). 1959). ).
Another cult cover ‘Chess Review’ was published in June-July 1945 as a promotional poster for the first International Pan-American Tournament held at the Hollywood Athletic Club. On this occasion, we see Herman Steiner watching Lauren Bacall as Charles Boyer and Humphrey Bogart play a game of chess. The scene took place in Boyer’s locker room at the Warner Bros. studios. The International Pan-American Tournament was hosted by Steiner. The actress Carmen Miranda was the master of ceremonies, and Marlene Dietrich dropped by the playroom 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, brought about the end of the war in the Pacific. In an ominous move, American of Jewish descent Samuel Reshevsky (Polish by birth) was victorious. Steiner had a quiet performance. It is clear that he has made the effort to be organizer and player at the same time.
Jacqueline Rothschild was the daughter of the French baron Eduardo de Rothschild, one of the richest bankers in the world. An intellectual and sophisticated woman, Jacqueline 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, so much so that she sent the solutions to all the problems published in the Los Angeles Times. The editor of the paper’s chess column was none other than Herman Steiner.
One day, the Piatigorsky couple bid for a garnet brooch at an auction. Herman Steiner and his wife were in the same room, also arguing over the brooch. Steiner recognized Jacqueline as the woman who had sent the chess solutions to the newspaper, so he invited them to the club next to his house. Once she arrived, Jacqueline played a game against a tall, stuttering young man at Steiner’s request. Lost. “You just played your first tournament game,” Herman told him. Jacqueline smiled and continued playing the next rounds. It remained in the middle of the scoreboard, but won the prize for the most beautiful game. I don’t know at all, excuse me, what happened to the garnet brooch in the end.
From that moment on, a lifelong friendship developed between Herman and Jacqueline. She began studying with Steiner and in a very short time 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 music world I am known as a cellist. In the world of chess, 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 brightness, the flash, the sharp and violent blow that, well, clipped off his wings, the wings of an unrepeatable angel, with his Clark Gable-style bangs and his vintage moustache.
After Steiner’s sudden death, Jacqueline Piatigorsky took over the Hollywood chess club. The first thing he did was change the name and put a sign on the door: ‘Steiner Chess Club’.
Source: La Verdad
I am David Jackson, a highly experienced professional in the news industry. I have been working as an author at Today Times Live for over 10 years, and specialize in covering the entertainment section. My expertise lies in writing engaging stories that capture readers’ attention and deliver timely information about the latest developments.
