The queen’s endgame
Women’s chess champion Lisa Lane captured the national imagination with aggressive play and sharp one-liners, said Stefan Fatsis in Slate. But she couldn’t beat the sexism of the 1960s.
IN MAY 1961, Lisa Lane was a contestant on the longrunning CBS game show What’s My Line? Wearing a dark A-line dress and no jewelry, Lane walked onstage and wrote her name on a chalkboard in neat script. The show’s host, John Charles Daly, told the panel of celebrities in tuxedos and evening dresses— on this episode, actor Arlene Francis, Broadway writer Abe Burrows, humorist and publisher Bennett Cerf, and journalist Dorothy Kilgallen—that Lane “is self-employed, deals in a service.”
The panel had to figure out
Lane’s occupation by asking yes-or-no questions. Cerf went first. “Miss Lane, do your very good looks and youthful charm have any bearing on the service that you perform?” Lane said no. Cerf replied, “Ridiculous! Ridiculous!” The panelists determined that Lane’s job was related to sports. But then they asked whether she wore a costume or worked with animals. Finally, after 10 noes, Daly introduced Lane as the reigning U.S. women’s chess champion.
“Well, John, we were very snobbish,” Burrows said. “Because she’s so pretty, we ruled out anything intellectual.”
During her brief and polarizing career in a male-dominated sport in a chauvinistic society, a focus on looks over brains was typically how it went for Lane, who died of cancer on Feb. 28 at age 90 at her home in Kent, N.Y. When Bobby Fischer was still a brash wunderkind, Lane was a bona fide grown-up media star. In 1961 alone, she was interviewed on the Today show, was profiled in The New York Times Magazine, and appeared on the cover of Sports Illustrated (Fischer would, too, 11 years later). She was touted as a great American hope against the scary Russians.
Lane marketed herself and, in the process, elevated chess’ profile in America. Disgusted by the game’s latent sexism and classism, she criticized its leadership and advocated for equal pay. Then, as quickly as she’d arrived, she all but disappeared from the game.
“Lisa Lane was an icon and a woman far ahead of her time,” said two-time U.S. women’s champion Jennifer Shahade, who wrote about Lane in her 2023 book Chess Queens. “Decades before The Queen’s Gambit”—the 1983 novel by Walter Tevis and hit 2020 Netflix series—“Lisa Lane showed the world that chess can be glamorous and that women can be as competitive as men. She got that it wasn’t just how you played chess, but also about the people you inspired with your moves.”
SHORTLY AFTER THE publication of his novel, Tevis told Chess Life magazine that “he made no effort to portray any real chess personalities” and didn’t speak to any women players while researching the book. But there were similarities between the fictional Beth Harmon (played in the adaptation by Anya Taylor-Joy) and the real-life Lane. Both were tempestuous, driven, talented, and unafraid to take on men, the chess establishment, or the Soviets. And both endured turbulent childhoods. Harmon was an orphan. Lane’s father left when she was a toddler. Her mother worked as a secretary at a meatpacking company and for a radio station in Philadelphia. Lane and her sister shuttled among homes and boarding schools. She quit high school and cycled through jobs.
In a game known for child prodigies and eccentric grinds, Lane’s rise was unusual and remarkable. She said she didn’t encounter chess until she was a student at Temple University in the spring of 1957, in a coffeehouse, the Artist’s Hut, off Rittenhouse Square. “I was hooked,” Lane told Robert Lipsyte in the Times Magazine story. “It was like being on dope watching the combinations and the moves.” (Lane always said she was 19 when she first played; according to personal records and the 1940 U.S. census, she actually would have been 23 or 24. “She was fudging a bit along the line,” her husband, the retired journalist Neil Hickey, told me.)
Lane fell into a routine familiar to serious games players: play a lot, then play some more. One night, she said in the Sports Illustrated story, a high school chess player beat her in a few moves and took her to the Franklin Mercantile Chess Club, in Philadelphia. A master-level player named Attilio Di Camillo agreed to teach her the game. “Lisa improved so fast,” Robert Cantwell wrote in SI, “that chess wits said he had hypnotized her, that they were Svengali and Trilby.”
Lane didn’t return to Temple that fall. She took a job at a Philadelphia hospital and studied and played chess. Lane won the city’s first women’s championship in 1958, was the top woman in the U.S. amateur championship in the spring of 1959, and just two and a half years after first touching a pawn, won the U.S. women’s title that December, dethroning a four-time champ, Gisela Gresser.
The Boston Globe’s chess columnist wrote that at one of Lane’s early tournaments— an “open” event, including both men and women—“her games constantly drew the largest gallery. With stunning male chauvinism, one kibitzer was heard to say in an astonished tone: ‘She plays chess like a man!’ Better than most, I fear, brother.” One male player said, “It’s hard enough to concentrate on the game with her sitting across the chessboard in a floppy sweater. But on top of that, she’s a killer. She plays chess like Pancho Gonzales plays tennis: always stalking, always aggressive.”
Lane didn’t deny her obsessive drive and volatile temper. “I never hit that guy with an ashtray!” she said in SI about an incident in a Philadelphia club. “It hit the table and broke, and a piece must have bounced
up and hit him!” Nor did she hide her disdain for opponents. “There’s no relation between intelligence and chess,” she told one reporter. “Some of the dumbest people I know are good chess players.”
And she never complained about the male writers who described her with a thesau-rusful of objectifying adjectives—“darkly beautiful,” “petite,” “slender,” “attractive,” “lissome,” “comely,” “shapely.” One chess columnist dubbed her “America’s ‘Luscious Lisa’ Lane.” For the SI story, Lane posed on a couch in front of a board, bare-legged in a diaphanous robe. “I love to be in the newspapers,” she said. In 2018, she told Emma Baccellieri of SI, “It didn’t bother me. It wasn’t like they said I was beautiful and not a good chess player.”
To Lane, the attention was good for chess, and for her own earning potential in a game that offered meager remuneration, especially for women. “For this reason alone, I’m the most important American chess player,” Lane told Lipsyte. “People will be attracted to the game by a young, pretty girl. That’s why chess should support me. I’m bringing it publicity and, ultimately, money.”
Lipsyte interviewed Lane after she moved to New York in 1961 to prepare for a tournament in Yugoslavia that would determine a challenger to women’s world champion Elisaveta Bykova of the Soviet Union. Lane asked to meet Lipsyte, now 86, over breakfast—at 10 p.m. She did a terrific impression for him of the teenage Fischer, who once refused to participate in a tournament with Lane, saying, “Men and women shouldn’t play together.” Lane zinged back: “Adults and children shouldn’t play together.”
Lane told Lipsyte she wasn’t offended at being told she played like a man. “Their egos are involved,” she said. “I can understand it. I guess my ego is involved, too. I can’t stand losing to anybody.” She shrugged off the game’s inherent boorishness. “I get a lot of love letters from other chess players,” she said. “I read them, I laugh, and then I file them. Letters from grandmasters go on top.”
After moving to New York, Lane received a $1,000 grant from a sports foundation, worked as a part-time editor for a chess magazine, played exhibitions at schools and clubs, made frequent media and TV appearances—including on another game show, To Tell the Truth—and studied Russian so she could read Soviet chess magazines. But at the challengers tournament, held in Vrnjacka Banja, a Yugoslav mountain resort, Lane finished 12th of 17 players. The next month, she dropped out of a tourney in England because, she said, she was homesick and in love.
Lane’s withdrawal was big news on both sides of the Atlantic. Among the predictably punny headlines: “Cupid Checks Chess Champ,” “Thinking of Her Knight?” and “Chess Queen Quits—She Was Only a Pawn of Love.” The boyfriend back home was Neil Hickey, who had written one of the first lathery stories about Lane—under the headline “Chess Queen’s Gambit”—and was later the New York bureau chief for
TV Guide and an editor at the Columbia Journalism Review. They would marry in 1969, and were still together at the end of her life.
Lane finished second in the 1962 U.S. women’s championship, to Gresser, but was left off a two-player U.S. team for an international competition. Lane complained that she had been blacklisted because other players “were sore because I had been getting so much publicity.” But U.S. chess officials gave her another reason: money. Gresser, a wealthy Upper East Side “patron of the art,” in SI’s words, and Mary Bain, the 1951 U.S. champ now ranked only fifth, could afford to pay their own expenses. “Since when did you have to be a millionairess to represent your country in sport?” Lane said.
THE SNUB SOURED her. Lane opened a chess parlor in Greenwich Village called the Queen’s Pawn and lived in a studio apartment upstairs. The club was intended, she said, for casual players. “I don’t want anything to do with organized chess,” Lane told the New York Daily News. She struggled in the 1964 women’s world championship challengers tournament, finishing 12th of 18 players.
When the 1966 U.S. women’s championship in New York offered a prize pool of $600—compared with $6,000 for the men’s version—Lane organized Queen’s Pawn regulars to picket the event. The demonstrators, all men, carried signs reading “What Good’s a King Without a Queen?” and “One Man Is Worth Ten Women?” None of the other women players supported Lane’s campaign, which they viewed as unseemly. Lane and Gesser tied for the title, each winning seven games and drawing three.
And that was the end of Lane’s competitive career. She was just 33. She had grown tired of a cycle that repeated itself too often: being identified as a women’s champion, having a man ask why tournaments were gendered, explaining the disparities in chess culture, and feeling obligated to defend herself and all women by playing the men who inevitably challenged her to a game. “I felt like I was working all the time,” Lane said in the 2018 SI story. “I just couldn’t put the title of women’s chess champion on the line every time I sat down to play.”
But Lane was unsparing toward women players too, who she said behaved like patrons of the game, not professionals. “The greatest enemies of women in chess are not men but other women,” she told the Times in 1972. “These were women who were raised in a period when women considered themselves to be subservient to men. What money they won they gave to the United States Chess Federation to sponsor other tournaments—mostly for men.”
Lane read Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, became interested in environmentalism, and spent most of her time in rural Kent, an hour and a half north of the couple’s apartment on Fifth Avenue. She opened a natural-food store called Amber Waves of Grain, which she ran for more than three decades, and a gift shop, Earth Lore Gems and Minerals. Hickey told me that while chess “was enormously large in the arc of her life,” Lane moved on happily from it; she loved her work, her dogs, her crewel embroidery, and socializing with local friends, including the illustrator Edward Sorel and the former tennis player Renée Richards. Last year, Lane was inducted into the U.S. Chess Hall of Fame, which called her “a pioneer in the development of women’s chess.”
After retiring from tournaments, Lane played a few games in 1971 against an early chess program on an IBM System/360 Model 91 computer. She won every one. “I felt a genuine sense of confrontation—and a tinge of disappointment when the computer failed to offer a word of congratulation... upon resigning,” Lane wrote in IBM’s in-house magazine, Think. “It did not, at least, appear to resent losing to a woman— as do many human male players.”
This story was originally published in Slate. Used with permission.