Rick Kogan: The story behind 'The Queen's Gambit' and other tales from author Walter Tevis

I just finished “The Queen’s Gambit.”

Big deal, you’re thinking.

Big deal, because that would make me just one of an estimated 62 million people and counting who have seen/are watching/will see the captivating and lavishly praised seven-episode Netflix series that has become a cultural phenomenon.

The story follows the 1950s and 1960s life of Beth Harmon (a soon to be major star Anya Taylor-Joy) from the time she is orphaned and institutionalized until she becomes — yes, it’s quite a ride, featuring troubles, triumphs and a compelling cast of characters — the chess champion of the planet.

Not only is it the highest rated show in the network’s history, it has jet fueled the chess biz, doubling “how to play chess” searches on Google. Sales of chess sets are up, as much as 200% from some sellers, and the number of new players on the game site chess.com has increased fourfold and keeps growing.

Again, I just finished “The Queen’s Gambit,” the series … and the book.

As you are certainly aware, many movies are based — good, bad and sad — on books. In this case it’s a 1983 novel written by Walter Tevis, dead now for almost four decades.

I first encountered Tevis with his first book, 1959’s “The Hustler.” I read it shortly after seeing the film version made from it in 1961. That cinematic “The Hustler” starred Paul Newman as pool prodigy “Fast Eddie” Felson, Jackie Gleason as the old cue maestro “Minnesota Fats,” Piper Laurie as the damaged alcoholic who hooks up with Eddie and George C. Scott as a vicious and amoral gambler who backs Eddie for a time.

The movie was a box office and critical hit. All four of its principal characters were nominated for Academy Awards, of which the film received eight and won two, for art direction and cinematography. It has aged well, becoming as the late critic Roger Ebert wrote, “one of those films where scenes have such psychic weight that they grow in our memories,” and calling Felson/Newman one of “only a handful of movie characters so real that the audience refers to them as touchstones.”

He certainly was for those partaking of the movie-inspired 1960s pool boom, playing at such fancy Chicago joints as the Golden Eight Ball on Walton Street, and much grittier places as Bensinger’s Pool Hall, in a basement on Broadway north of Diversey Avenue.

The novel holds up too. Tevis is great writer but I had no idea at the time that many of the details in “The Hustler” were drawn from his own life. That’s also true for “The Queen’s Gambit.”

Tevis was born in 1928 in San Francisco. He wrote six novels and dozens of magazine stories, many of them science fiction. He taught high school and college English. He started playing chess as a 7-year-old and hung around pool halls long enough to become a decent player and fair hustler. He played pool and chess his entire life, which ended in New York City in 1984.

His was a life peppered with drugs and booze, lousy parents, all manner of insecurities, and a wife, two children and five grandkids. You can piece together your own biographer of the man from various sources or read David Hill’s biographical story on The Ringer website. In it, Hill writes, “Two major successes under (Tevis’s), he took a job teaching English at Ohio University in Athens, Ohio, where he taught classes during the day and drank during the night.”

But back to the movie business.

His 1963 novel, “The Man Who Fell to Earth,” was made into a 1976 movie starring David Bowie. His 1984 “The Color of Money,” a sequel to “The Hustler,” was made into a 1986 Martin Scorsese film with Newman reprising his Fast Eddie opposite a hyperactive, pool playing Tom Cruise. It won for Newman his only acting Oscar.

Tevis’ obituary in The New York Times was only five paragraph long. It does not mention “The Queen’s Gambit,” which is, you might say, ironic because that book — his title — has spent many recent months on the paper’s bestseller list.

Naturally, changes were made to the book on its trip to the screen. I got insight into how some of this worked from William Horberg. He is one of the series’ three executive producers and a Chicago born and raised filmmaker.

When Netflix OK’d (“greenlit” in Hollywood-ese) the series, Horberg called his old friend Bruce Pandolfini, a renowned chess author and teacher with whom Horberg had first worked in the 1993 film “Searching for Bobby Fischer.”

They lunched in New York with Scott Frank and Allan Scott. Those two created “Queen” and Frank wrote and directed all the episodes.

“Bruce revealed a surprising fact,” Horberg said. “He had been hired by the book’s publisher to be Tevis’ consultant, to help him get the chess right in the final revisions of his manuscript. It was a shotgun marriage, and Tevis, who was a good amateur player himself, wasn’t too thrilled to have anyone looking over his shoulder. But over the course of a few months of meetings, he warmed to Bruce, and allowed him to make corrections to the manuscript.

“Then Bruce told us the biggest surprise of all: the manuscript had a different name at that time, and Pandolfini was the one to suggest to Tevis that he title the book ‘The Queen’s Gambit.’” When the book was finally published, Bruce found that Tevis had included exactly none of his suggested revisions to the chess games, but he had adopted his suggested title. It felt like good karma to us that, through Bruce working with us on the show, we had made this direct connection to Tevis.”

It has been a wildly fruitful “connection.” As Horberg and most anybody in the movie business will tell you, not all good books make good movies.

“Tevis was a master storyteller, says Horberg. “He’s one of those writers whose craft is so artful it doesn’t look like art. He just pulls you in sentence by sentence until you are so inside his story you forget about everything else. Michael Ondaatje (the renowned author of, among many works, “The English Patient”), no slouch himself, introduced me to ‘The Queen’s Gambit.’

“I was already a big fan of ‘The Hustler,’ but Ondaatje said that ‘Gambit’ was a book he rereads every couple of years to remember how to write. I ran to get a copy and he was right.”

Horberg asked me to read the first sentences of the book’s first two paragraphs.

I did and here they are:

“Beth learned of her mother’s death from a woman with a clipboard.”

“In the Methuen Home in Mount Sterling, Kentucky, Beth was given a tranquilizer twice a day.”

Horberg then said, “For the next 243 pages, the most important thing in your life is hoping she is going to be OK. So, you go back and look. How the hell did he do that? I’m still looking.”

See the series. Read the book. You can’t go wrong with either. Or with both.

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(Rick Kogan is a columnist for the Chicago Tribune.)

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