The Wayward Queen Attack
About a year ago, just as everyone was settling down for an autumn in lockdown following a spring and summer of the same, Netflix premiered “The Queen’s Gambit,” which would become its most successful limited series of all time. The seven-part series, set during the 1950s and 1960s, recounted the story of Beth Harmon, a woman who ends up in an orphanage as a young child. Thanks to a gruff but kindly janitor, she discovers that she has a gift for chess comparable to that of real-life American prodigies Bobby Fischer or Paul Morphy — but she also ends up with a serious drug addiction because her orphanage medicates the children to pacify them.
The series starred Anya Taylor-Joy, a young actress with stunning eyes, as Beth. While Taylor-Joy’s performance won several awards, and was nominated for others including an Emmy, not everyone was pleased. In The New Yorker, for example, writer Sarah Miller noted her disappointment with the casting, specifically that “Anya Taylor-Joy is way too good-looking to play Beth Harmon.” Miller quotes an early passage from the source novel in which its author, Walter Tevis, has another character tells Beth that she is “the ugliest white girl ever. Your nose is ugly and your face is ugly and your skin is like sandpaper.” Beth cannot argue because she “know that it was true.”
Well . . . that’s what happened when television and movie producers take something originally created for a one medium and turn it into a cinematic work. There are always a few changes along the way.
But there was another change to “The Queen’s Gambit” that led to a somewhat different result: a lawsuit in Los Angeles federal district court. Nona Gaprindashvili, a real-life chess grandmaster (grandmistress?) filed the suit on Sept. 16, complaining about one line spoken by during the series’ grand finale, a chess match in which Beth is matched against the best Russian players in the world. The commentator notes how unusual it is for a woman to be competing in a chess grandmaster tournament, and states that among women chess players, “There’s Nona Gaprindashvili, but she’s the female world champion and has never faced men.”
It turns out that Ms. Gaprindashvili, who as her name suggests is from the former Soviet republic (now independent nation) of Georgia, was indeed a gifted chess player and one of the few women to reach the heights of the chess world. In many ways (a point the lawsuit itself makes), Beth Harmon is essentially an Americanized (albeit fictional) version of Gaprindashvili.
The lawsuit raises two problems with the statement attributed to this chess match version of a color commentator. First the complaint states (helpfully illustrated with a number of photographs) that during her prime Gaprindashvili actually did play against, and occasionally defeated, real chess grandmasters, including Dragolyub Velimirovich, Svetozar Gligoric, Bojan Kurajica, and Viswanathan Anand.
Bet you can’t say those names three times fast.
Actually, the lawsuit does name three other grandmasters whom Gaprindashvili played, including Boris Spassky and Mikhail Tal, both of whom were also world chess champions. But the other names, along with Ms. Gaprindashvili’s, are far more fun in the death struggle among multi-syllabic names.
Or maybe it was different in the original Cyrillic.
Anyway, the other problem the lawsuit raises — analogous the casting the compelling Ms. Taylor-Joy to play “the ugliest white girl ever” — is that, although Gaprindashvili is also mentioned in the novel version of “The Queen’s Gambit,” the passage describing her is . . . somewhat different. The lawsuit even puts the two side-byside: in the original, the line compares Beth to “Nona Gaprindashvili, not up to the level of this tournament, but a player who had met all these Russian Grandmasters many times before.”
Oops. Can’t blame Walter Tevis for that one.
Less compelling is Gaprindashvili’s complaint that the television series describes her as a “Russian,” whereas she is actually Georgian. Well, yeah — but wasn’t Georgia part of Russia in the 1960s? After all, Joe Stalin was from Georgia too, but everyone described him as a “Russian.”
If the law of defamation applies to Ms. Gaprindashvili’s lawsuit, she’ll have somewhat of an uphill battle. On the other hand, if the lawsuit is correct, the statements appear to be demonstrably false, and while that doesn’t necessarily make them libelous, they’re certainly not nice. It’s probable that the insurance companies who have to defend the case will eventually decide to cut their losses and offer enough money to make lawsuit go away — and make Gaprindashvili’s retirement a little sweeter.
And if so, she’ll have Beth Harmon to thank.