The Kid: The Immortal Life of Ted Williams

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For Jan, Joe, Anna, and Greta.

And in memory of Matt Herrick.

W
hen I was a boy growing up in the mid-1950s outside Boston, Ted Williams was my hero. My bedroom was plastered with pictures of the Kid clipped from
Sports Illustrated
or
Sport
magazines, and I especially liked a large, framed, pen-and-ink drawing done by the artist Robert Riger in 1955 showing Williams in baseball repose, leaning on two bats, presumably waiting his turn to hit.

Like thousands of kids my age, I was captivated by Ted’s peerless batting skill and by the way he always seized and held the spotlight. He was the only reason to follow the abysmal Red Sox teams of that era. When I went to games, I was struck by the way the atmosphere at Fenway Park changed each time he came to bat. There would be an anticipatory murmur from the crowd when Ted stepped into the box. He’d knock some real or imagined dirt from his spikes, dig in, wiggle his hips, grind his hands on the handle of the bat, and hold it tight against his body, ready to face the pitcher. People never even considered leaving their seats when Williams was hitting. His at bats were events, and he himself was the main event in Boston sports from 1939 to 1960 and well into his retirement.

With his dramatic, tempestuous persona, Ted made as much news off the field as on: always feuding with newspapermen, outraged over perceived slights, spitting or gesturing at hostile fans, going off not just to one war but to two as a Marine Corps fighter pilot, getting married and divorced three times. He even made news fishing, once catching a 1,235-pound black marlin off the coast of Peru and putting on annual fly-casting exhibitions in the off-season.

I got Ted’s autograph once, waiting outside the players’ parking lot at Fenway Park with scores of other kids. Williams stopped to sign that day, which he didn’t always do. He insisted on imposing some order on the unruly scene before him, and he made us take turns. I still have the
ball he signed for me, on the sweet spot, of course, the ink on the signature now fading badly with the passage of more than fifty years.

And I happened to be at the ballpark on Sunday, September 21, 1958, when Ted, enraged by a rare strikeout, flung his bat in disgust, only to have it sail into the box seats near the Red Sox dugout and strike an elderly woman in the head. Mortified, Williams rushed to the first-aid room to apologize to the bloodied lady, explaining that he had lost control of the bat because the handle had sticky resin on it. The woman, a Ted fan, saw how anguished he was and consoled
him,
saying she knew it had been an accident.

Melodrama of that sort always seemed to attend Williams. He knew how to make an entrance—and an exit, as when he took his leave from baseball by hitting a majestic home run on his last time at bat on September 28, 1960.

I kept following Ted in his retirement, with interest. He took a visible job with Sears, Roebuck, advising the chain on a line of sports and outdoor equipment. He had a syndicated column. He was inducted into the Hall of Fame the first time he was eligible, in 1966. He published his autobiography in 1969, which I remember devouring. He made a surprise return to baseball as manager of the lowly Washington Senators that same year. He wasn’t particularly good at managing, but the game was better for having him back. He stayed engaged in baseball as a fan, and signed on with the Red Sox as a hitting coach. In that capacity, Williams would make godlike annual appearances at spring training, where he would hold court before worshipful young players—and the writers, whom he had outlasted and bent to his will.

Being Ted Williams seemed like a full-time job. He plied the memorabilia circuit, but not aggressively. He returned to Fenway Park for Old-Timers’ Games and to be honored on various occasions. He had highways and tunnels named after him. And in 1991, on the fiftieth anniversary of his signature achievement—batting .406—President George H. W. Bush feted him at the White House along with Joe DiMaggio, whose fifty-six-game hitting streak in 1941 was also recalled with awe. Then Ted returned solo later in the year to receive the Medal of Freedom from Bush. Those celebrations, however poignant, paled in comparison to the nationally televised spectacle of Williams, eighty and frail, returning to Fenway Park for the 1999 All-Star Game and what everyone understood would be his farewell to Boston. Living members of baseball’s All-Century Team joined that year’s All-Stars in one of the game’s most memorable tableaux, swarming around Williams in adulation and refusing
to leave the field despite appeals to do so by the public-address announcer.

So it seemed Ted never really left the sporting scene. When he died in 2002, I read the obituaries, the special sections, and the tributes and was struck by how much interest there still was in his life, by how many different people he had touched in different ways, and by what a rich, extraordinary life he had led. I was familiar with the Williams genre—the dozen or so previous books on the Kid, the vast majority of which had been written by adoring sportswriters who had concentrated almost exclusively on his baseball exploits. I’d read most of them as a boy when they came out—short books like
Ted Williams: The Eternal Kid,
by Ed Linn (1961),
Ted Williams,
by Ray Robinson (1962), and
The Ted Williams Story
by Gene Schoor (also 1962). Williams himself improved on the spare, early books with his autobiography,
My Turn at Bat,
ghostwritten by John Underwood.
My Turn
captured Ted’s voice, but was limited in scope, as autobiographies often are, and Williams barely delved into his personal life at all. He also had thirty-three more years to live after the book was published.

In subsequent years, several coffee-table books about Ted appeared, most of them glowing hagiography. In 1991, Columbia University English professor Michael Seidel produced the solid and serious
Ted Williams: A Baseball Life,
though it received little national attention. In 1993, Ed Linn greatly expanded his small 1961 book into the worthy
Hitter: The Life and Turmoils of Ted Williams.
The best piece of writing on Ted in this period, however, was not a book but a long piece in
Esquire
magazine by the estimable Richard Ben Cramer, published in 1986. Cramer, who died of cancer in 2013, precisely captured Ted’s vernacular—and a hint of his deep-seated anger: the Kid spoke in loud and profane staccato bursts, veering from one subject to another. It was an ultimately sympathetic portrait of a troubled man who tried to be the best at what he did, a man who wanted fame but not celebrity and who was the absolute master of his own his-way-or-the-highway universe.

This was basically the state of “Ted lit”—plentiful but thin—when I began work on this biography more than a decade ago now, in the fall of 2002. Before long, Leigh Montville’s
Ted Williams: An American Hero
appeared. Montville, a former sports columnist at the
Boston Globe
and a colleague of mine when he was there, is a gifted writer—and much faster than I am. His book, published in 2004, just twenty-one months after Williams’s death, raised the bar in Ted lit substantially.

I decided not to skimp on the central baseball part of Ted’s life but
nevertheless to concentrate my efforts on areas that had been far less chronicled, such as his troubled childhood, his anger and its source, his kindness to sick children and others down on their luck, his war service, his dealings with the sportswriters who covered him (a dynamic essential to understanding Williams), his love and mastery of fishing as an example of his striving for excellence in everything he undertook, his relationships with his wives, other women, and his children, his vibrant second act in retirement, and finally a detailed examination of the dark cryonics affair, which, sadly, dominated the Williams postmortems.

What I discovered in my many years of research surprised me. Ted, it turned out, had gone to considerable lengths to conceal the fact that he was Mexican-American out of fear that his baseball career might be jeopardized by the prejudice of the day. In addition, the Williams war years seemed even more remarkable when compared to the virtually unfathomable prospect of a modern superstar athlete putting his career aside to serve in two wars. Yet it was curious that historians glossed over the fact that Williams initially sought a deferment in World War II and actively tried to avoid being recalled for Korea.

Ted’s boiling anger—rage, really—particularly piqued my curiosity: where it came from, how he managed it, and how he failed to manage it. On the field he was able to use it as a tonic to fuel hitting tears—often using the press as his foil. At other times he used it to manufacture a controversy or portray himself as the maligned victim of ink-stained wretches, most of whom actually gave him rave notices. But in his personal life, the anger often made him dysfunctional and unable to sustain relationships with loved ones. He’d had three wives and a handful of serious relationships with other women, two of whom, I learned, he’d proposed to. He’d lived with another woman for nearly twenty years at the end of his life, and hardly anything was known about that relationship. And he’d had three children: a daughter by his first marriage, Bobby-Jo, whom he’d grown estranged from, and a son and daughter from his third marriage, John-Henry and Claudia.

The first Mrs. Williams, Doris Soule, had died in 1987. Tracking down Lee Howard, Ted’s second wife, in October of 2002 and persuading the former Chicago model to publicly discuss her life with Williams for the first time gave me an early insight into the joy and misery of loving the Kid. But the most important breakthrough came in the spring of 2004, when, after nearly two years of saying no, Ted’s two daughters agreed, quite separately, to give me their first substantive interviews about growing up with their famous father.

Bobby-Jo, speaking for two days in Florida with her husband, Mark Ferrell, at her side, was still traumatized by the fact that Ted’s body had been frozen, or cryonically preserved, a decision driven by John-Henry that might have remained a deep family secret had she not alerted the press. Bobby-Jo had threatened to go to court to try to get her father’s remains taken out of the Arizona cryonics facility that held them on the grounds that his will specified he had wished to be cremated, but she’d been forced to drop her challenge when she ran out of money. She spoke of how hard it had been to please her father when she was growing up, of his bouts of anger, which were so intense she thought he was mentally ill, and of her gradual isolation and estrangement from Ted as an adult—aided and abetted, she thought, by John-Henry as he came to play a more dominant role in his father’s life. Bobby-Jo was a wounded, fragile figure, and before long she went underground, moving to Tennessee and cutting herself off completely from many of her friends.

Claudia, after initially appearing more distrustful than Bobby-Jo, ended up speaking with me extensively. We had sixteen formal interviews over sixteen days spanning 2004 through 2006. Many of these sessions were in Ted’s Florida house, and she came to allow me to remain in the house by myself, free to rummage around as I pleased through his papers, records, scrapbooks, letters, journals, wartime pilot’s logs, and fishing logs. This sort of stuff is a biographer’s dream and yielded nuggets such as Ted’s private address book, containing names of many people I’d never heard of but who ended up providing useful insights about Williams when interviewed; letters from people such as Richard Nixon, Bob Feller, and John Updike; copies of little-known speeches Ted delivered while working for Sears, Roebuck; and various audio-and videotapes of Williams interviews, one dating back to 1946. Claudia also shared Ted’s private family photos, tape recordings, and videos with me, and helped persuade her mother—Ted’s third wife, Dolores Williams—to give me her first interview. Like Bobby-Jo, Claudia provided important insights into growing up with Ted—his view of women, his anger, his insecurity, and his record as a father. But perhaps the most significant thing she supplied was her family’s first full explanation, including many new details, of the cryonics affair.

I think Claudia’s main motivation in cooperating with me to the extent that she did was that she thought I would give John-Henry a fair hearing, and I made every effort to do that—to go beyond the way he’d been caricatured in the press as Ted’s scheming bad seed. Like his sisters, John-Henry himself had initially declined to talk to me, then he agreed,
but contracted leukemia and became too ill to be interviewed. He died in March of 2004, less than two years after his father. Then he had his body frozen at the same cryonics facility in Arizona that held Ted’s remains.

After having little to do with any of his children as they grew up, Williams reached out to John-Henry, in particular, at the end. Ted wanted to make up for all the years he’d been absent, and in the process he overcompensated by ceding total control of his affairs during the final decade of his life to his untested son, who was then just coming of age, in his early twenties. John-Henry eagerly seized the reins with a mixture of exploitation, love, and devotion. The last part of the book is the story of a father and a son discovering each other during a difficult but poignant period of symbiotic dependency.

Researching and writing this book took me more than a decade. After six-hundred-odd interviews, uncounted hours of research in archives and among the private papers given to me by the Williams family, after looking closely at that signed baseball more than a few times and thinking hard about the man I’d briefly met as a boy and the man I was meeting now, I felt ready to let go of this Ted Williams tale, the story of an exceptional, tumultuous, and epic American life—an immortal life.

Ben Bradlee, Jr.

August 2013