The Kid: The Immortal Life of Ted Williams (115 page)

Dom DiMaggio served as her surrogate, however, and he elicited a standing ovation from the crowd when he said: “I am saddened by the turmoil of the current controversy. I hope and pray this controversy will end as abruptly as it began, and the family will do the right thing by honoring Ted’s last wishes as to his final resting place. And may he then finally rest in peace.”

After the speakers finished, nine white doves were released from a box at home plate and then flew out over the outfield and beyond. For the finale, the lights were turned off, and a number 9 formed by a pattern of lights inside the Prudential Tower, behind right field, appeared. Then a group of Red Sox old-timers, led by DiMaggio and Pesky, and a handful of current players, led by Garciaparra, went out to the left-field garden, and each laid a red rose amid the white carnations that shaped Ted’s 9. Finally, Curt Gowdy, the former voice of the Red Sox, came to home plate and reenacted his call of Williams’s final home run, on September 28, 1960. Gowdy was helped by Jack Fisher, the former Orioles pitcher who had served up the pitch that Ted hit out that day. Fisher walked out to the mound and obligingly wound up and pretended to throw a pitch, happy to play the willing victim.

On July 25, John-Henry and Claudia released a statement about their decision to have their father frozen, announcing that Ted had been skeptical about cryonics but had gradually come around, and that “when we were together prior to his surgery, he embraced the idea as his own.”
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They also disclosed the written pact in a court filing after all, thus supplying the first written evidence that Ted had changed his mind about cremation and committed to cryonics. But the document’s authenticity was met with widespread skepticism by the commentariat.

Responding to questions from reporters about the chain of custody of the pact after it was purportedly signed on November 2, 2000, representatives of the younger Williams children told the media that John-Henry had folded it up, put it in the trunk of his car with other papers, and forgotten about it. The note remained in the car for the next seventeen months, collecting oil stains, and only recently was recovered and stored more carefully after its significance in the cryonics dispute became apparent. Bobby-Jo’s lawyers pointed out that the pact had not been notarized or otherwise witnessed, and they also questioned whether Ted was mentally competent at the time, given his age and hospitalization for congestive heart failure.

“It’s authentic because my clients were there,” Robert Goldman, a Naples, Florida, attorney representing John-Henry and Claudia, said. “I can tell you unequivocally that it’s an absolutely authentic document.” As for whether Ted was of sound mind at the time of the pact, Goldman said Shands doctors could testify that he was, though he somewhat oddly added that Florida’s standard was so low that “literally, there are many zoo animals that could” be found competent.

On August 8, Al Cassidy formally dropped his request on behalf of Williams’s estate that the court settle what Ted’s wishes were, saying he had concluded that the written pact was genuine. Cassidy noted that a handwriting expert, whose selection was approved by both sides, had concluded that Ted’s signature was authentic, and he also said he had been influenced by a new sworn affidavit from Claudia in which she said she was present in the hospital room on November 2, 2000, when Williams “verbally indicated he wanted to be cryonically preserved in bio-stasis.”
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Lawyers for Bobby-Jo said she would continue to press her court challenge, though her financial ability to do so was in question. She had already appealed to the public for donations to help finance her legal expenses, indicating that her own funds were limited.

When Nancy Carmichael saw the date of the pact—November 2, 2000—she immediately thought she knew why John-Henry had called the hospital after Ted died, wanting to know the date of the catheterization procedure: to date a forged note plausibly, he needed to place himself in the hospital before the surgery. Any kind of surgery for Ted at his age and in his condition was risky, so it would have been natural to have a discussion about committing to cryonics before that time. And he could not have chosen a day or two before Williams’s pacemaker was installed, on November 6, because John-Henry had been barred from the hospital during that period as a result of his chicken pox. “I just thought, ‘Oh, my God. That’s why he wanted to know the date,’ ” Carmichael said. “I guess he figured I’m too stupid. I’d never figure it out. I immediately thought it was a phony. First because of the conversations about cremation—I was present when Ted and Frank Brothers were talking about Islamorada, and Ted said he wanted to be cremated. That was just after the time John-Henry was saying Ted signed this paper that he wanted to be frozen. Secondly, the state of the document. I don’t keep my very important documents in the trunk of my car with grease on them. Plus it wasn’t notarized.”

Carmichael told John Heer her story and offered some supporting evidence. When John-Henry had called the hospital asking for the date of the catheterization procedure, he had reached Michael Johnson, a clinical social worker with whom he was friendly. It had been Johnson who asked Nancy to get the information, and she still had on her pager the text she had received from him on July 10 at 10:58 a.m.: “Nancy, please call JHW about his dad. He wants to know when the heart catheterization [
sic
].”
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Carmichael read the text to Heer on the phone. She also said that while she recalled seeing John-Henry on November 3 for the catheterization procedure, Claudia was not there. Carmichael declined to talk to reporters about all this, concerned about violating patient confidentiality regulations, but she told Heer she would testify in court if she were subpoenaed.

Heer and Spike Fitzpatrick, Bobby-Jo’s other lawyer, turned their attention to Claudia. If she had not been there for Ted’s catheterization procedure when it occurred at 7:50 a.m. on November 3, a Friday,
would she have been there the night before to sign the pact? She had, after all, been working in Clearwater, some 150 miles south of Shands, in Gainesville.

Caretakers George Carter and Frank Brothers, who had been alternating twelve-hour shifts and staying with Williams throughout the day, told the legal team that Claudia had not been there on November 2. Carter remembered easily, because he said Claudia called him on Sunday the fifth, furious he had not told her that Ted was in the hospital. Brothers was also present when Claudia called, and he talked with her as well that day: “I was right there when Claudia called George on the fifth, screaming and yelling, ‘I thought you were my friend,’ ” he recalled. “She’d just found out her father was in the hospital on the fifth. And George is trying to explain to her, ‘Look, John-Henry said he would call you.’ And I got on the phone and told Claudia that as well, and she said, ‘You guys should’ve known better. You should have just called me.’ Now, how could she have been in that room to sign that on the second when she didn’t even know her father was in the hospital on the second?”
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Furthermore, Brothers and Carter stressed that between them, they were with Ted twenty-four hours a day, and at no time during his Shands hospitalization were John-Henry and Claudia with him alone.

Rick Kerensky, Ted’s cardiologist, had introduced Claudia to his assistant, Carmichael, on the morning of November 6 before the pacemaker surgery. “When Kerensky introduced me to Claudia, she made excuses why she had not been there for the catheter because of her work,” Carmichael said. “Her work wouldn’t let her off or whatever. I remember that very well. She also told me about a car accident she got into the night before, on the fifth—she rear-ended someone at the bottom of the exit ramp near the hospital after driving up.”

Nevertheless, as the controversy over the authenticity of the pact raged in the press, John-Henry approached Kerensky and asked him to sign a statement attesting that Claudia was at Shands on the night of November 2. The doctor agreed. Several years later, Kerensky concluded in an interview that he no longer could be sure his letter was correct. “I felt signing the letter was the right thing to do at the time,” he said. “But I’ve got to admit, I was very naive. I wasn’t thinking, ‘This was why he was doing that.’ Can I absolutely recall that date? No. I did the best I could.”
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During the course of several taped interviews with me that began in 2004, Claudia spoke for the first time in detail about how the pact came to
be signed, saying in the end that Ted did agree to the procedure and that it was easy to get him to do so simply by framing the issue as something that was vitally important to John-Henry and to her. She stressed that the crude note had never been intended for public consumption, and she vigorously defended her and her brother’s right to do whatever they wanted with their father’s remains—as is the general legal standard for next of kin. She also insisted that she was at Shands Hospital on November 2, 2000, and disputed the accounts of Carter, Brothers, and Carmichael, who each said she was not. But one key piece of evidence that she said would prove she was there on the second—her car accident—had the opposite effect when the accident report showed that the mishap occurred on November 5.

Claudia said she, Ted, and John-Henry had not discussed cryonics as a threesome before, nor had she and her brother planned to sign a pact with their father. It just happened spontaneously the night of November 2, though they were mindful of his failing health and his surgical procedure the next day. When she arrived, she said she did not see either Brothers or Carter and that they were not in Ted’s private room within the intensive care unit at the time.

According to Claudia, Ted was sitting up in his bed with a tube of oxygen attached to his nose when the following conversation ensued:

“Dad, remember all the conversations we’ve had about cryonics, and I would want you to do that?” John-Henry began.

“Yeah,” said Ted.

“You know, I’ve talked to Claudia about it. We’ve talked a lot about it, and we really want to do it, too.”

Williams turned to Claudia and said: “You’re in on this, too?” She smiled and nodded.

“We really want to do it,” John-Henry continued.

“I know, I know.”

“And you know we’re really worried about you, and you know we really love you.”

“I know you do, and I love you, too.”

“Will you please promise us that we can do this, that we will do this as a family?”

Ted paused before answering, closed his eyes, and seemed to get annoyed that he was being pressed on the subject. But Claudia was sure this was just a pose that he affected to assert his control, a drumroll before he replied.

“You can do whatever you want with me,” he finally said. “I’ve had a great life. Whatever you want to do with me is fine.”

John-Henry brightened. “Okay,” he said. “Let’s all sign it. Let’s all make a pact. Let’s all agree, among us, that we’ll do this. We’ll promise each other right now that we’ll do it.”

“And that’s exactly how it went down,” Claudia said. John-Henry “reached over, and he grabbed a piece of paper and ripped off the bottom because it had something written on it that was from the hospital. Then he wrote out the words right there, using that portable tray that hospitals use to serve food, you know?

“He grabbed it and wrote it, just like that. He read it out loud to Dad and me, and we signed it. This was for us. It was a moment. It was a very private moment that was for us. It was our Bible, okay? It was ours to have, to know it was okay, that we were all going to do it.”

John-Henry signed first, then gave the pen he used to his father. Then Ted signed. Claudia said she grabbed a different pen that was closer to her, and she signed. “I’m glad we got that out of the way,” Ted said with what Claudia interpreted as loving sarcasm.

She conceded that her father had said many times that he wanted to be cremated, but she said that he changed his mind as he grew closer to his younger children. “It’s true he said he wanted to be cremated often. But what a lot of people don’t realize is that the last year and a half of his life, Dad changed a lot, and it was because he was with us, and because we were living with him, helping him, working with him, loving him, caring for him, you know? And he knew that. And he knew that John-Henry and I both were struggling with the fact that right when we were starting to get to know him and love him and understand him, we were losing him, you know? And it was awful. We didn’t want that to happen. So I know he did it for us. There’s no doubt in my mind. And he’s like, ‘What the hell, who knows, it might happen,’ you know.”

Ultimately, Claudia thought, getting Ted to agree was “easy. It was easy! If your kids came to you and said, ‘Dad, please. Dad, please. We’re going to miss you so much. Give us something to hold on to. Just sign this.’ Are you going to say no to your kids?”

After the pact was signed, John-Henry looked at his sister and held it up with a smile, almost in triumph. Then he tucked the note in his pocket.

The very crudeness of the pact attests to the fact that it was never meant for public consumption, Claudia said—merely as a private expression of a
decision taken. “John-Henry and I never wanted to bring that note out. We were praying that we would never have to bring that note out. Because we knew it’s crude. It’s stained. But we never thought we would have to use it. Never! Never! It was among us. It was us. And there were three people in that room: John-Henry, me, and Dad. Then after Dad died it was for two of us to hold on to when we lost the third leg of our stool. The only reason we brought out the note was because we were afraid Bobby-Jo was going to take it all away. It wasn’t meant to be shown. It’s a pact. It was our little secret.”

She bitterly resented that they were forced to reveal that their father’s remains were frozen in the first place, that their privacy was invaded, their beliefs questioned. “Why do I have to prove anything to anybody? I’m certainly not going to tell you that you have to cremate your mother. I wouldn’t say to someone, ‘Give it up. God doesn’t exist.’ Don’t stomp on my faith. I’ll stomp on yours. It’s private, personal family business, and people forget that but for a jealous, estranged daughter, it never would have been made public.