America's Obsessives: The Compulsive Energy That Built a Nation (37 page)

Rarely could he sit still, as his attention easily wandered. Early in his career, he would infuriate managers by turning his back to the action in right field—he did not move to left field until his second season with the Sox—in order to practice his swing with an imaginary bat. He remained a lackadaisical fielder who looked, as
Time
reported in 1950, “like a tired and slightly bored businessman” while standing in front of Fenway Park’s Green Monster. Impulsive by nature, he often let his emotions hijack his brain. A notorious F-bomb hurler, “he was,” wrote Leigh Montville, author of the definitive
Ted Williams: The Biography of an American Hero
(2004), “the best curser in the history of the human race.” Before the fans got to the park, to get himself psyched for that day’s game, he was prone to yell at the batting practice pitcher, “I’m Ted fucking Williams, the greatest hitter in baseball.” His actions could be as crude as his adjectives. Too thin-skinned to tolerate any booing, he would vent his rage with the Fenway Park faithful by performing obscene gestures and spitting in their direction. For one of his legendary “great expectorations,” in 1956, an exasperated Sox general manager Joe Cronin fined him $5,000, which was 5 percent of his annual salary (the equivalent of about a million bucks today, since stars of his magnitude now make upward of $20 million).

Like other obsessives, Williams did not do intimacy. He rarely hung out with teammates, preferring the company of sycophants such as clubhouse attendants who were in awe of him and would agree to do as he pleased such as consume the evening meal in the late afternoon. “Bing, bang boom, get it the hell over with” was how the slugger approached the dinner plate. He could not handle the give-and-take of real relationships. “With women, he had a reputation for being a pig,” veteran
Boston Globe
sports columnist Dan Shaughnessy told me.

Scouting out for company for the night (or the afternoon), the playboy, who would quickly alienate all three wives with his constant barrage of vicious epithets, would blurt out to unsuspecting strangers, “Do you fuck?” (Given that he was Ted Williams, his boorishness didn’t doom him to a microscopic batting average.) Wife number two, Lee Howard, a statuesque blonde whom he married in 1961, threw him out after just a couple of years. “If we went fishing,” the former model recalled, “he would scream at me, call me dumb, and kick the tackle box.” When asked by the judge at her divorce hearing whether there was any chance of reconciling with her husband, a startled Howard responded, “Are you kidding?”

And like his parents before him, Williams neglected his three children—his daughter Bobby-Jo, from his first marriage to Doris Soule; and his son, John Henry, and daughter Claudia from his third marriage to Dolores Wettach. He was not present for any of their births, and for long stretches of time he pretended as if they did not exist. Late in life, as he found love in the arms of an older woman, Louise Kaufman, he recognized and tried to make amends for his wayward ways. “I was,” he would confess to anyone who would listen, “horseshit as a father.”

But though “Terrible Ted,” a nickname that emerged shortly after his major-league debut, often mistreated his nearest and dearest, he could be a charmer and a lively conversationalist. With his booming voice—his hearing soured after his service in Korea—he entranced interlocutors on many subjects besides hittingology. “He was a student of everything,” stated John Underwood in a phone interview. Underwood, his coauthor on
My Turn at Bat
, added that Williams would spend hours burying his head in his
World Book Encyclopedia
. After devouring William Manchester’s critical volume on his hero, Gen. Douglas MacArthur, the lifelong conservative with the photographic memory got into a friendly argument with Doris Kearns Goodwin. “I didn’t agree,” the armchair historian told the bestselling author, whom he liked to needle by calling her Pinko, “with [the biographer] in certain things.” Williams was also capable of nearly otherworldly empathy and generosity.

For decades, he was the face of the Jimmy Fund Clinic, the pediatric cancer center in Boston, for which he worked tirelessly to help raise tens of millions of dollars. “Ted was a teddy bear,” recalled Suzanne Fountain, the charity’s director of community relations. While Williams never raked in anything near what today’s All-Stars make, as a retiree in Florida, he would not hesitate to write $10,000 checks for fellow ballplayers down on their luck. And he had an abiding sense of justice. At his Hall of Fame induction ceremony in 1966, he urged baseball to honor “the great Negro players.” “His speech had an impact,” former New York Giants outfielder Monte Irvin has noted. “The powers-that-be at the Hall of Fame had to kind of perk up and take notice.” Five years later, Satchel Paige became the first black player to be enshrined in Cooperstown.

Williams’s sensitivity to racial discrimination—in 1959, he also took under his wing the first black player on the Sox, Pumpsie Green—had roots in his deepest fears. While most baseball fans, even die-hard members of Red Sox Nation, assume that Manny Ramirez was the first great Hispanic player to patrol the Green Monster, that distinction actually belongs to Williams. (Ramirez’s quirky temperament was also foreshadowed by Williams; two generations before the Fenway Faithful resigned themselves to “Manny being Manny,” Ted set the gold standard for eccentricity.) Ted’s maternal grandparents, Pablo and Natalia Venzor, both hailed from Mexico, and his mother spoke Spanish at home during her childhood in Santa Barbara. His younger brother, Danny, who had dark skin and a round face, looked Mexican. Ted, in contrast, resembled his father, Samuel, who was of English-Welsh extraction. “If I had had my mother’s name,” Theodore Samuel Williams later wrote, “there is no doubt I would have run into problems in those days, the prejudices people had in Southern California.” Like Lauder, the young phenom wound up creating the personal identity that best suited him (and his obsession). To the press, the Sox star stated that his mother was French (the family had ties to the Basque region). And he officially changed his date of birth from August 30 to October 30 during his rookie year because, as he later told the
Boston Globe
, “I didn’t want to celebrate my birthday during the playing season.”

Samuel Williams was a nonentity in Ted’s life. “My dad and I,” the retired ballplayer would note in his memoir, downplaying the truth, “were never close.” Ted hardly got to know his nomadic father. Born in Mount Vernon, New York, at sixteen, Samuel Williams ran away from home to join the United States Cavalry. After serving for a few years in the Philippines, Corporal Williams was stationed in the Hawaiian Islands, where he met his future wife, Micaela (“May”) Venzor. The couple was married in Santa Barbara in 1913 before settling in San Diego, where Ted was born in 1918. The stern and moody Samuel Williams, who has been described as a “semiderelict,” cared more about getting his next drink than about spending time with his growing family, which by 1920 included Ted’s brother, Danny. In the mid-1930s, with his photography business floundering, Samuel Williams moved up to Sacramento to take up a position as a state jail inspector. He also took up with his secretary, whom he later made his second wife. Ted felt that his father had shortchanged him, as the now ninety-something Bobby Doerr, the Red Sox Hall of Fame second baseman who also played minor-league ball with Williams in California, noted in a phone interview. In late 1936, Doerr invited his teammate to dinner at his family’s Los Angeles home. In contrast to Williams, Doerr had a warm relationship with his father, who gave him whatever he needed to begin his baseball career. “As we left,” Doerr recalled, “Ted told me, ‘You’re lucky to have a dad like that.’” As Ted metamorphosed into a celebrity, Samuel Williams kept trying to wangle money from his son. When his father died in a Bay Area nursing home in 1952, Ted chose not to attend the funeral.

Like her husband, May Williams, known up and down the Southern California coast as “Salvation May,” frequented taverns; the teetotaler went not to imbibe, but to collect money for the Salvation Army. After her son became famous, the avid proselytizer’s pitch to patrons ran, “I’m Ted Williams’s mother. Empty your pockets.” May first took up the cause as a teenager in 1907, and she kept at it for the next half century. Not so Ted, who hated marching in parades with his mother and dropped out of Sunday school as soon as he could. “I’d stand behind the bass drum,” Williams later wrote, “trying to hide so none of my friends would see me.” While his mother’s religious fervor made Ted squirm, her single-minded determination proved to be a model. A fearless and tireless advocate for the needy, she thought of little else. “Mrs. Williams,” the
San Diego Sun
noted in 1936, “
is
the Salvation Army.” Tambourine in hand, she would ride hour after hour on the city’s two streetcar lines, shouting in her booming voice, “Praise the Lord!” A slick networker who befriended many of the state’s leading politicos, including Governor Frank Merriam, she once held the world’s record for selling the most copies of the Salvation Army paper,
War Cry
, in a calendar year. But she ignored the needs of her family. “Always gone,” Williams wrote in 1969. “The house dirty all the time. Even now I can’t stand a dirty house.” Thus was made the germaphobe, whose bachelor pads would be remarkable for their cleanliness and order, and who, before sitting down to a meal, would insist that everyone at the table scrub their hands.

In contrast to Ted, who filled the nurture deficit with baseball, the unathletic five-foot-four-inch Danny turned to petty crime. Dubbed “the city’s most incorrigible youth,” by the San Diego Police Department, the teenage Danny did not hesitate to filch from the family; he once pawned his mother’s coronet. But by the 1950s, the former juvenile delinquent turned to the straight and narrow, became a contractor, got married, and started a family. He died of leukemia in 1960 at the age of thirty-nine.

In the late 1950s, the cancer-stricken Danny moved back into his boyhood home with his wife, Jean, and sons Sam and Ted, then in grade school. Today Ted Williams, the nephew of the baseball slugger, runs his own graphic design firm in the Bay Area. “Living with my grandmother wasn’t easy,” the Hall of Famer’s nephew told me. May Williams once swatted him with a broom, complaining that he was getting in her way. “My mother had to tell her not to hit kids,” he added. Noting that his father, Danny, also beat him, Ted Williams suspects that May also hit both her sons when they were boys. “My uncle Ted, like my father, had a temper, and they must have learned that behavior at home,” he added. While the future Sox star presumably did not take to his bat solely to defend himself against his mother’s broom, he could connect with it much more easily than with her. Bill Swank, now a retired San Diego probation officer, ran into May Williams in 1957 when he was working as a shipping clerk. “Mrs. Williams,” Swank stated in a recent phone interview, “was kinda nuts. She was in her own little world. She would jabber nonstop about God. It was impossible to figure out what she was saying.”

By then, May Williams was in her midsixties, and a bad back, stemming from a bus accident, prevented her from marching around town on behalf of the Salvation Army. No longer able to pursue her all-consuming obsession, her mental state began to deteriorate. “She was depressed, but if she started talking about the Lord, her face would light up,” recalled her grandson Ted Williams. While she once collected objects that held meaning for her, such as tambourines and all the published materials about her son, she turned to junk. She became both a compulsive hoarder, filling every room from floor to ceiling with old newspapers, as well as a serial shoplifter. In addition, May developed hypergraphia; she could not stop jotting down gibberish on the newspapers and on the backs of old photos. “My uncle Ted used to scold her,” the graphic designer said. “He would give her a photo of his daughter Bobby-Jo, and tell her, ‘Don’t write on this.’” In late 1958, Ted Williams sent Danny a letter in which he urged him to place their mother in a nursing home so that she could get “the proper care which she obviously needs so badly.” Suffering from the early stages of dementia, May Williams eventually moved in with a sister in Santa Barbara, where she died in 1961.

Growing up with a domineering mother whom he feared, Ted Williams was too shy to go out on any dates in high school. “[If] a girl looked at me twice,” he later wrote, “I’d run the other way.” And the little that the girls saw, they did not like. High school classmate Ruth Browning has recalled thinking he was “very arrogant, conceited.” The adolescent with the thinnest of ties to his own mama had not yet figured out that girls were separate human beings (a fact that he never quite could get his arms around). According to the late
Boston Globe
sportswriter Will McDonough, in his minor-league career Williams was “like a Neanderthal.” In 1938, a few minutes into one of his first dates, as a clubhouse attendant was driving him around town, Williams jumped a woman in the backseat of a car. “He didn’t know,” said McDonough, “that maybe you were supposed to talk to each other, maybe eat dinner, whatever.” Journalist John Underwood, who was a friend of Williams from the 1960s until his death in 2002, noted, “He never paid attention to the normal rules of male-female relationships.”

Left to his own devices by his neglectful parents, the San Diego boy managed to find a series of surrogate fathers who helped him develop his athletic prowess. At the age of five, Ted dragged his bat across the street to the house of his neighbor John Lutz, a twenty-four-year-old chicken salesman, whom he got to pitch to him. Lutz also taught him how to hunt and fish, sometimes taking him on day trips to Mexico. At nine, the budding ballplayer told his mother that he’d “ruther [
sic
] be a Babe Ruth than a captain in the Salvation Army,” and turned to Rod Luscomb, the director at the North Park playground and a former minor-league ballplayer, for guidance. Six days a week for the next seven years, he and Luscomb would pitch to one another for hours at a time. “He was a baseball nut, too,” Williams noted.