The Kid: The Immortal Life of Ted Williams (24 page)

Doc Cramer, who’d had a rocky relationship with Williams, nonetheless tried to give him a boost. “You know who’s the best, don’t you?” Cramer told Ted privately. “You know who’s the best in the league? You are.”
¹⁴
But then Williams made another intemperate remark, telling Associated Press writer Eddie Brietz that if there were free agency in baseball, and if each team made him the same offer, he’d sign with the Dodgers. “I know I’d be a hero in Brooklyn,” Ted proclaimed.
¹⁵

The Red Sox played out the string, gliding toward what would be a fourth-place finish. On a lark, Cronin decided to have Williams pitch the last two innings in a 12–1 loss to the Tigers at Fenway Park on August 24. He allowed three hits and one run, walked none, and struck out Rudy York on three pitches. The move seemed to be an attempt by Cronin to placate angry fans with some pure entertainment in one of the worst losses of the year.

On September 4, Ted probably reached his nadir during a doubleheader at Fenway against the Athletics. The Sox won both games, but Williams was pouting again. He’d misjudged a liner that went over his head for a double, got picked off first base, and failed to run out a fly he thought would go foul but dropped in safely. In the seventh inning of the afternoon game, Ted decided to take out his frustrations by picking up a foul ball he had retrieved and throwing it as hard as he could at a bunch of photographers, who in those days were allowed on the field to
take up positions in foul territory. The group was huddled near third base, and the ball Ted threw hit one of them in the back. None was expecting it because the ball had been out of play. “As it happened, no damage was done and Ted was merely shown up as about the most unattractive ballplayer we’ve had here in a long, long while,” wrote the
Globe
’s Vic Jones, who had written Williams the sympathetic open letter in June.
¹⁶

Reflecting back years later on his dealings with the press that season, Ted wrote in his book that he was “still a kid, high strung and prone to tantrums,” and he felt like he was being “persecuted.… If there were eight or ten reporters around my locker, I’d spot a guy who’d written a bad article about me and I’d say, ‘Why should you even come around me, that crap-house stuff you’ve been writing.’ So that would embarrass
him,
and he’d get mad, and then off we’d go.… Before this, I was willing to believe a writer was my friend until he proved otherwise. Now my guard’s up all the time, always watching for critical stuff. If I saw something, I’d read it twenty times, and I’d burn without knowing how to fight it.”
¹⁷

Ted finished 1940 with more than respectable numbers: a .344 average, with 23 home runs and 113 RBIs. His average was 17 points higher than it was in his rookie year, but his power production was off, with eight fewer homers and 32 fewer RBIs compared to 1939. Of his 23 homers in 1940, only nine were at Fenway and just four of those went into the new bull pens.
¹⁸
But the story of 1940 was not a set of numbers that, however good, came in below expectations. The story of the year was Ted’s psychic tailspin, an evolving public meltdown that had played out in, and been shaped by, Boston’s newspapers.

It marked the first season of what would become a career-long jihad waged by Ted against the baseball writers—his so-called Knights of the Keyboard. In fact, this was not a feud as such but a conflict largely manufactured by Williams to fuel his drive to excel. Though his press was overwhelmingly positive, he would seize on a negative story or column to portray all writers as a contemptible lot bent on invading his privacy and stirring up public opinion against him. The newspapers became a bogeyman that Williams constructed to feed the fire of antagonism that was central to his ability to perform well. He always said he hit best when he was angry, and that was generally true.

The interplay between Ted and the writers would become an important window into his character and one of the longest-running dramas in his career. Now, reporters who had fawned over Ted during his rookie
year and even for part of the 1940 season had to recalibrate their relationship with him. In the process, the rules of engagement between newspapers and baseball began to change.

Between 1939 and 1960, the years spanning Ted’s career with the Red Sox, Boston had eight major newspapers, or nine if one counted both the morning and evening editions of the
Boston Globe,
which had separate staffs and circulations. The morning papers were the
Post,
the
Herald,
the
Record,
the
Daily Globe,
and the
Christian Science Monitor.
The evening journals were the
American,
the
Transcript,
the
Traveler,
and the
Evening Globe.
Two of the papers folded while Williams was still playing: the
Transcript
in 1941, and the
Post
in 1956.

The
Record
and the
American
were tabloids owned by the Hearst chain, and they operated out of the same building. The papers competed against each other but on Sundays jointly published the
Boston Sunday Advertiser.
The
Herald
owned the
Traveler.

The
Post
and
Record
dominated the city in 1940, with circulations of 369,000 and 329,000 respectively. The
Traveler
ranked third with 211,000, while figures for the others ranged between 117,000 and 168,000—except for the
Transcript,
which had only 28,000 customers.

But those 28,000 were highly prized by advertisers, representing as they did the vanguard of Boston’s dwindling but still disproportionately influential and moneyed Brahmin elite. The role of the
Transcript
in the city’s life was celebrated by Cleveland Amory in his classic novel about the blue bloods in the most class-conscious city in America,
The Proper Bostonians.
“Daily except Sunday, just at tea-time—when the Proper Bostonian mind is traditionally at its most receptive stage—the
Transcript
was quietly laid, never tossed, on the doorsteps of the best people in Boston,” Amory wrote. “Not to read the
Transcript
was unthinkable. It was never a newspaper in the vulgar sense of the word.… The loyalty of its readers was proverbial. In the wind of its editorial opinion they swayed, said the poet T. S. Eliot, ‘like a field of ripe corn.’ ”

Legend had it that when three reporters showed up one day to see the owner of a grand Beacon Hill town house, they received this introduction from the attending servant: “Two reporters from the papers, sir, and a gentleman from the
Transcript.
”

The
Transcript
saw itself as a bulwark against the encroaching yellow journalism flaunted by the
Post
and the
Record.
“The
Transcript
marches in the van of progress without sacrifice of dignity and self-respect…,” the paper said when marking its centennial edition on July 24, 1930. “It
differentiates solids from froth, the permanent from the passing, substance from shadow.”

Just eleven years later, however, the
Transcript
closed its doors, its circulation down to 15,788 Proper Bostonians, only nine of whom chose to heed the paper’s final appeal to send $500 to the National Shawmut Bank if the journal were to be kept afloat. But Boston then was still one of the most competitive newspaper cities in the country. The battles for circulation were intense, the journalism shallow and parochial.

The
Post
—which in its heyday in the late 1920s had a circulation of 628,000, larger than any other broadsheet in the country at the time—set the sensationalist tone for Boston at the start of the ’40s with a steady diet of crime, sex, and sports, pushed hard in the same direction by Hearst’s
Record
and
American.
The
Post
had supplanted the
Globe
as the favored paper of the Boston Irish by aggressively courting Catholics, who had become a majority in the city by the 1920s.

The
Post, Record,
and
American
were militantly Democratic. The
Herald
and its
Traveler
in the evening catered to a more upscale, suburban Republican clientele. The
Globe
tried to position itself as an enlightened, middle-of-the-road paper serving both the upper and the working classes. It saw itself as the
Post
and Hearst antidote, and adopted an aloof, don’t-rock-the-boat line geared toward the family, which often cost it scoops. The
Globe
took the somewhat self-deluding line that
Post
and Hearst scoops were suspect to begin with, not to mention here today and gone tomorrow, at least as far as the more refined sensibilities of
Globe
readers were concerned. It stressed features, sports, and politics.

The
Christian Science Monitor
emphasized foreign news, and most of its circulation was outside New England. It was not a competitive factor locally, but the
Monitor
’s longtime Red Sox beat writer Ed Rumill was respected and influential, not least because he was one of the few writers Ted liked and favored.

From 1851 to 1956, the Boston papers were concentrated downtown on a two-hundred-yard stretch of Washington Street, along what was called Newspaper Row. The row was known as the “Fleet Street of America” but had more journalists per square foot than its London counterpart and teemed with traffic through the horse-and-buggy era, then trolleys and cars. Before radio and through the late ’30s, up to fifty thousand people would pack the area on Election Night to get results. Office boys and artists posted the latest news on blackboards or bulletin boards. If the night ran long, the papers provided music, entertainment, and
political analysis over loudspeakers. Candidates would hop from paper to paper giving interviews.

Entertainers would also work the row during the day, hoping to attract publicity. In the ’20s, Houdini performed for a lunchtime crowd, drawing gasps and cheers when he freed himself from a straitjacket and chains while hanging by his feet. There were many other attractions and distractions, ranging from watering holes aplenty to indulgences of the flesh. Reporters wanting sex were accommodated by a prostitute who nominally worked as a waitress in a greasy spoon headquartered in one of the
Post
’s buildings.

If there was one place that personified the dominant Boston journalism ethos of the day, it was probably the building at One Winthrop Square that housed Hearst’s
Record
and
American.
Walking inside, one saw a huge framed poster featuring a portrait of William Randolph Hearst himself, along with the patriarch’s guidelines to good newspapering. These included “Pay LIBERALLY for big, exclusive stuff and encourage tipsters.… Make a paper for the NICEST KIND OF PEOPLE, for the great middle class. Don’t print a lot of dull stuff that they are supposed to like and don’t.… Try to get scoops in pictures. They are frequently almost as important as news.… Pictures of pretty women and babies are interesting.”

It was understood, of course, that “the nicest kind of people” were white. When a reporter called the city desk after responding to the scene of a murder, he would be asked, “Is it dark out there?” Meaning, was the murder victim black? If the answer was yes, there would be no story. The reporters were virtually all men, and the few women who cracked the ranks were mostly steered to “sob-sister” duty, turning out popular tearjerker stories that usually featured the widows and orphans of murder victims or of soldiers killed at war. The star sob sister at the
American
during World War II was Kitty Donovan. Gorgeous and a stylish writer to boot, Donovan turned out daily propaganda pieces about how awful the Germans were, under the standing headline
DIARY OF A GERMAN HOUSEWIFE
. The stories were pure fiction.

One of the framed Hearst admonitions was to “please be accurate,” but that was taken with a large grain of salt. “Mr. Hearst did allow an awful lot of fakery,” Frank “Mugsy” McGrath, a former night city editor at the
American,
told reporter Dave O’Brian for his 1982
Boston Phoenix
article on the local history of Hearst. “There was stiff competition, so you did have to imagine a few things from time to time. Reporters
would sometimes spend a month on the scene of a big murder, and the papers would be demanding fresh angles and startling news leads every day. We’d all get together after work and swap stories and leads.”

One legendary trafficker in tall tales back in the day was ace Hearst crime reporter Bob Court, who used to delight in bragging about all the fabricated stories he’d written. His favorite was the time he had planted a woman’s bloodstained panties at a crime scene for police to discover. On another occasion, running late to a murder scene with deadline for the first edition looming, Court stopped to phone in a totally fictitious account of the crime. Asked by McGrath how he could do that, Court replied, “Oh, that’ll keep ’em happy for the first edition. We’ll correct the story for the next one.”

The
Record
and
American
newsrooms looked nothing like the antiseptic interiors of today’s newspapers, whose carpeted quiet is as conducive to issuing insurance policies as it is to gathering the news. With the
Record
and
American
presses located just below the newsroom, above all there was noise and stifling heat year-round. Reporters sitting at their typewriters literally sweated. There was also the constant clacking of wire service machines and copy paper strewn about the floor, along with cigarette butts, many still smoldering. Cigarette and cigar smoke filled the air, along with shouts of “Boy!” from editors calling for copyboys.

The city editor of the
Record
from the mid-’20s to the ’60s was Eddie Holland. Holland’s first job was selling vegetables off a truck. He never went to college and didn’t like the notion of college graduates working as reporters because he thought they were too polite to ask difficult questions. “He wanted street-smart reporters who would dig and who didn’t mind embarrassing people,” his son Bob Holland, a former reporter and photo editor at the
Record,
told O’Brian.