Chess champion who dared to take on misogyny and inequality in the game
b April 25, 1933 d February28, 2024
In 1961, Lisa Lane, who has died at the age of 90, was a contestant on the American TV game show What’s My Line? Wearing an A-line dress and no jewellery, she wrote her name on a blackboard and a panel of celebrities in dinner jackets and evening dresses who were required to guess her occupation were told that she was self-employed and “deals in a service”.
The panellists were permitted 10 yes or no questions, the first of which was “Miss Lane, do your very good looks and youthful charm have any bearing on the service that you perform?” She answered no, but when asked if her job was related to sport, she replied in the affirmative.
Further questions asked if she wore a costume (a football cheerleader, perhaps?) and if she worked with animals, the questioner no doubt imagining something horsey.
In fact, Lane was the reigning US women’s chess champion and after the panel had come nowhere near guessing, one of them explained that “because she’s so pretty, we ruled out anything intellectual”.
It was typical of the chauvinism – and sometimes downright misogyny – that followed Lane throughout her years as a champion and eventually persuaded her to quit the world of competitive chess at the height of her powers, aged 33.
Born Marianne Elizabeth Lane in 1933 in Philadelphia, she never knew her father, a leather glazer, and saw little of her mother who worked two jobs to support two daughters on a single income.
Her maternal grandmother helped to bring her up and she often stayed with various friends and neighbours while her mother worked nights at a local radio station after spending all day as a secretary at a meat-packing factory.
She worked her way through numerous schools, mystifying her teachers for being exceptional at maths and having a phenomenal memory, but making no effort in her studies. At one point a student guidance counsellor visited her mother and reported that she had deliberately given the wrong answers in an exam when she knew the right ones. She had got it into her head that she would be more popular if her classmates thought she were dumb.
On leaving school she took a job in a research laboratory, had an affair with a much older man and at 20, with her life going nowhere, decided she should get a college education. That involved completing her final two years of schooling before she enrolled at Philadelphia’s Temple University, funding her studies by taking a part-time job in one of the university’s labs.
While a student she struck and killed an elderly woman while driving her mother’s car. The accident was deemed not to have been her fault and she was not charged, but it sent her into a deep depression.
Looking for a way out of her slough of despond she began playing chess in a local coffee house. She was 24 and had never played previously in her life. To her surprise she began beating even the most experienced players.
“It was like being on dope watching the combinations and the moves,” she said. “I was hooked.”
Within 12 months she had won the women’s championship of Philadelphia and within two years she was the US Women’s Chess Champion dethroning the four-time winner Gisela Gresser.
Her meteoric rise attracted huge media attention and in 1961 she became the first chess player to feature on the cover of the magazine Sports Illustrated, more than a decade before her friend Bobby Fischer became the second.
She knew she was on the cover as much for her looks as her chess skills, but went along with it, posing on a sofa in front of a board, bare-legged in a diaphanous robe.
She was either “beautifully serious, or seriously beautiful”, the magazine gushed. Another profile in a Sunday newspaper supplement wrote that “she’ll beat you fair and square or rattle your composure with a flutter of eyelids”. The writer, Neil Hickey, subsequently married her.
Moving to New York she opened her own chess shop called The Queen’s Pawn and after losing her supremacy in 1962 won the title back again four years later after tying with Gresser, the only player who could rival her.
That 1966 US women’s championship offered a prize of US$600 while US$6000 was at stake for the men’s tournament, so she organised a picket.
Demonstrators carried placards reading “What Good’s a King Without a Queen?” and to the tune of Down by the Riverside sang “I’m going to lay down my queen and pawn until it’s 50-50”.
To her disappointment, none of her fellow female players on whose behalf she was campaigning supported Lane and several told her the protest was “unseemly”. She concluded that she’d had enough of the sexism and walked away from the game.
She became a committed environmentalist and opened a health food store and a New Age gift shop named Earth Lore Gems & Minerals, which she ran with Hickey, to whom she was married for 55 years. He survived her, but only briefly, dying within a week of her. An earlier marriage to Walter Rich, an advertising executive, ended in divorce in 1961.
After retiring from tournaments, she re-emerged briefly 1971 to play a series against an early IBM chess computer, winning every game.
“I felt a tinge of disappointment when the computer failed to offer a word of congratulation,” she said. “But it did not, at least, appear to resent losing to a woman, as do many human male players.” – The Times