The Kid: The Immortal Life of Ted Williams (53 page)

Williams would read about Joe’s private comments, or friends would tell him about them, but Ted would turn the other cheek—or even be sympathetic to Joe. “Ted would put a positive light to it, like, ‘Well, we were competitors; what do you want the guy to say?’ ” recalled Al Cassidy, Ted’s friend and the executor of his estate. “Or he’d sit there and say, ‘You know, I didn’t throw the ball very well.’ He justified why Joe would say it. I never knew Ted to be condescending to anybody, even in conversations like that, whether we said it or someone would say it to him.”
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When both men attended events, Ted would be solicitous of Joe and sometimes defer to him. Dan Wheeler, a friend of Williams, recalled the interplay between the two men at a New York fund-raising event for Major League Baseball in the ’90s: “We were in the green room. Joe Garagiola was the emcee. Sandy Koufax and Whitey Ford were in the room, and then Joe D came in, and Ted and Joe talked. Garagiola came
over to Ted, and said, ‘Ted, we’re gonna introduce you last,’ and Ted said, ‘No, second to last.’ He pointed to Joe and said, ‘Introduce him last, this is his town.’ ”
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Jonathan Gallen, a memorabilia dealer turned investment banker who had business dealings with both Ted and Joe, confirmed the differences between what each man said about the other privately: “Joe D could never hand out a solid compliment. It would be like, ‘Yeah, he could hit, but he couldn’t field.’ The general tone of it all was negative. Ted loved people. He never ran them down. He saw the best in people. He loved baseball. He had a giant appetite for life. There was no one whose public perception was more different than the reality than Joe DiMaggio. The reverse was true of Ted. Joe was cheap as hell. Ted could not say no. Ted would give you everything, and Joe would give you nothing. Ted would want you to do well. But Joe—if you were making more than he thought you should off a deal, Joe wouldn’t do the deal. Joe was stingy and unhappy.”
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As he got older, DiMaggio became fixated on making money from the memorabilia market. Williams dabbled in it, mostly as a way of reconnecting with his son, John-Henry, to whom he would entrust most of his business dealings.

The man who coordinated most deals for both men over a span of about fifteen years was one of the nation’s leading memorabilia brokers, Jerry Romolt of Arizona.

“I had Joe and Ted both, but I never promoted shows for them together,” Romolt said. “They were friendly when they crossed paths, in social activity, but they were not particularly close. Ted loved Joe, and Joe respected Ted. Joe was not a giving, gregarious person like Ted was; he was not as open as Ted was to him. Joe had a very competitive streak, and I know he was envious of Ted. Williams was my favorite of all time. He was rough on the exterior. But on a personal level there wasn’t a better human being. He was eminently reachable. There was an exposure to his soul that Joe could never bear.”
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Sometimes, DiMaggio would agree to do a promotional deal for a certain price, then insist on getting paid more when the event was actually being held.

Once, the Bowery Savings Bank in New York had hired DiMaggio to help it persuade Italian customers not to take their money elsewhere. “They called in Joe to reassure people, and to endorse the bank,” recalled former John Hancock Financial Services CEO David D’Alessandro, who at the time worked as an executive for an advertising firm retained by the bank. “He agreed to ten thousand dollars a day for two days. Then, after being told they had a full house and were turning people away, he said: ‘You guys are getting too good a deal,’ and raised his fee to twenty thousand dollars a day.”
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In his dealings with Bowery Savings, DiMaggio was always looking for ways to get extra money or merchandise, D’Alessandro said. For one advertising campaign, the bank wanted the Clipper photographed in his old Yankees uniform with assorted vintage equipment, so D’Alessandro arranged to borrow the precious gear from the Hall of Fame in Cooperstown. “After the photo shoot, the son of a bitch started packing the stuff up and was going to walk away with it!” D’Alessandro said. “I said, ‘Mr. DiMaggio, we borrowed this from Cooperstown. We have to return it all.’

“Joe said, ‘What are you talking about? I played with these things.’ Only after I told him that I would lose my job if I didn’t return the stuff did he give it back. The problem with Joe—he was always nickel-and-diming. You had to send him two first-class air tickets to bring him in from San Francisco. He would use one and cash the other.”
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According to Dr. Rock Positano, a leading podiatrist who began treating DiMaggio for his aching heels in the early 1990s and then became a Clipper intimate, Joe always stayed competitive with Williams and remained keenly aware of what Ted was doing.

“There was always this immense rivalry, even fifty years after they played ball,” Positano said. “Joe wouldn’t make a move without Ted doing it first—like going to the White House. Joe did not want Ted to get any of the publicity.” In 1991, President George H. W. Bush wanted to honor Joe and Ted on the fiftieth anniversary of the streak and Williams’s .406 milestone, and then fly them to the All-Star Game in Toronto aboard Air Force One. “Joe had a trepidation about it. He said, ‘Doc, Williams is doing it, so I’ve got to do it.’ ”

When DiMaggio introduced Rock to Ted at the Marriott Marquis hotel in New York, Positano was enamored with Williams and thought he was “larger than life.” But Joe didn’t want him to get too friendly with Ted. “He said, ‘Listen, Doc, he’s a little different than I am. He’s not as friendly as I am.’

“Joe really did not like Ted, that’s the bottom line. He respected him as a hitter. Joe thought Ted was a one-dimensional player. Just a hitter. He always judged his contemporaries on how many championships they won. But he did think Williams was the best natural hitter in baseball. And he had great respect for someone who served in the military.

“Ted was a lot easier on Joe than Joe was on Ted. I told Joe once, ‘Look, you have to be easier on this guy. He didn’t have an easy life. He was a war hero.’ Joe would say, ‘Listen, Doc, you have to understand, I’m still a competitor. Just because we stopped playing ball doesn’t mean we don’t have a competitive drive. I respect him as a hitter, but when it comes down to it, he should respect me more.’ ”
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Whenever the Yankees played the Red Sox at Fenway Park, Joe wanted to be sure to perform especially well, because he was not only going up against Ted but against Dominic as well. The Clipper was irritated by a ditty that Boston fans would serenade him with whenever he came to town. Sung to the tune of “O Tannenbaum,” it went: “He’s better than his brother Joe, Dominic DiMaggio!” Joe knew that wasn’t true, of course, but he thought Dom never gave him enough respect, and he didn’t like that Ted and Dom were friends.

“Joe felt his brother was too close to Ted,” Positano said. “He felt Ted had his attention. Joe always said that bothered him a little. He never asked Dom to pull away, but he’d say, ‘He may be your teammate, but I’m your brother.’ ”

Once, two of Ted’s friends were spending the night at his house in the Florida Keys. In the drawer of a bedside table was a small notebook of Williams’s, and inside was written: “Ways I’m better than DiMaggio.”
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The note probably revealed more about Ted’s insecurity than it did about his rivalry with the Clipper, which never reached the level of nastiness DiMaggio seemed to give it. In the end, Williams maintained his grace.

A
fter the 1951 season, Ted added a new wrinkle to his winter routine by taking up golf, inspired by a tip from Ty Cobb, who’d confided that the game had been good for his conditioning and had helped him stay in the big leagues into his forties. After two weeks of lessons, Williams made his debut on the Florida links in December, losing fifteen balls on the first nine holes.
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Mostly, he remained in his preferred fishing-dominated seclusion, tuning out baseball, though when he heard that one of his favorite umpires, Cal Hubbard, had injured an eye in a hunting accident, Ted immediately sent flowers and a droll telegram that stood the traditionally deferential player-umpire relationship on its ear: “Get that peeper in shape for April,” Williams wrote.
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“You’re my boy—Ted.”

Williams was indifferent to rumblings out of Boston that he would be traded, rumors that had spiked in October after Lou Boudreau was hired to take over as Red Sox manager for Steve O’Neill. On being introduced, Boudreau had said: “There are no untouchables on my team. I’ll trade anyone on the club, including Ted Williams, if we can get what we want.”
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Ted had a cool relationship with Boudreau, who’d joined the Red Sox as a free agent for a final, lackluster season as a player in 1951. (“Well, if it isn’t a Boudreau shift!” Williams had said to his former nemesis when they met that spring.)

Shortly after the turn of the New Year in 1952, the idle rhythms and concerns of Williams’s off-season ended abruptly. On January 9, while fishing in the Keys, Ted received a phone call from his agent, Fred Corcoran, informing him that he had officially been recalled for service in Korea by the Marine Corps. News reports from Washington had it
that Ted was one of several hundred Marine fliers being summoned to replace pilots being discharged from Korea. Assuming he passed a physical on April 2, he would begin eight weeks of training on May 2 and then serve seventeen months in Korea.

Williams was incredulous. Despite the ominous notices of the previous year that he was eligible to be recalled, Ted never thought it would actually happen. After all, he had already served in World War II and missed three full seasons of his baseball prime as a result. He’d done his duty. Now, at thirty-three, he would have to miss two more seasons of a career that only had limited time left. That seemed punitive. Weren’t there others available who had not already served? Did they really need
him?
Williams was not alone in suspecting a Marine ploy to use his star power as a recruiting tool.

Details of precisely how Williams came to be recalled remain murky to this day. A captain directly involved in the selection process later told friends that when officials chose Ted, they didn’t realize it was
the
Ted Williams. Another Marine, Williams’s squadron commander in Korea, said that was initially true, but before orders were issued, officials did know they were dealing with the ballplayer. The commander also asserted that the Marines reneged on an informal agreement that then-Commandant Alexander Vandegrift had reached with Ted at the end of World War II, which provided for Williams to remain in the Reserves and help with recruiting with the understanding he would not be recalled to active duty.

Ted was furious, but Corcoran counseled calm. The agent, mindful of his client’s image, issued a conciliatory, gung-ho statement on Williams’s behalf that was totally inconsistent with what he was actually thinking and feeling at that moment. The statement said: “If Uncle Sam wants me, I’m ready. I’m no different than the next fellow.” But on a parallel track, Ted decided to privately explore all his options to contest the order.

Williams called Joe Cronin with the bad news. They determined he should go to spring training as usual and participate until he was actually called up for duty. It was a long shot, but there was a slim chance he could fail his physical because of his bum elbow.

Man-on-the-street reaction in the papers mostly mourned the loss of a great star. The writers thought the call-up likely spelled the end of Ted’s career, while his teammates said they thought he was getting a raw deal. “We all thought that was unfair,” remembered Dom DiMaggio. “We thought they were making an example of him. Using him for public relations. Baseball years are so short, and he had already served.”
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The raw deal view was taken up and flogged for all it was worth by columnist Dave Egan, usually Williams’s archenemy. But the libertarian Egan, who had also supported Ted’s right to a deferment in World War II as sole supporter of his mother, again thought Williams was being treated unfairly.

Egan wrote, “I cannot rid myself of the feeling that he has been called back to the Marines, not because he is a reserve officer, but because he is Ted Williams… and because he can guarantee the press agents—pardon me, the public relations experts of the Marine Corps—plenty of front page publicity, and because he will stimulate recruiting.”
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But the Marines strongly denied they had singled out Williams.
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A spokesman revealed that Ted had been notified on June 30, 1951, that he had been promoted from first lieutenant to captain and that while he could have declined the promotion he did not. Instead, he submitted to a physical exam, which the boost in rank required, then accepted the promotion in writing. The spokesman noted that Ted had long been involved in recruiting—posing for photographs, recording radio promotional spots, and giving interviews designed to spur enrollment. A Marine recruiting poster in the late ’40s featured a photo of Ted in his Red Sox uniform and the message: “Ask the man who was one!”

Colonel Egan retorted the following day that any suggestion that Williams, by accepting a promotion, somehow was signaling that he wanted to be restored to active duty was a “Stalinesque fabrication” on the part of the Marine Corps. In this provocative analogy, Egan invoked none other than President Harry Truman, who in 1950 had famously dismissed a congressman who demanded that the Marines be given their own general on the Joint Chiefs of Staff by observing that the Corps already had “a propaganda machine that is almost equal to Stalin’s.”
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After an uproar ensued, Truman apologized for the remark, but Egan clearly believed the president was right the first time.

When the Korean War broke out, the regular Marine forces, and the crews of aviators needed to support them, were manned at levels far below what was needed to wage a battle halfway around the world. The Reserves were quickly called up, and they played a key role in early campaigns, such as the Inchon Landing. In November of 1950, as the American-dominated United Nations forces met with increasing success, China entered the war to bolster North Korea. Soon some sixty thousand Chinese troops had thirty thousand UN forces encircled at the frozen Chosin Reservoir. Still, during fierce fighting from December 5
through December 10, the UN troops managed to escape the trap and inflict crippling losses on the Chinese in a battle that remains etched in Marine lore as one of the Corps’ finest hours.

After being released from active duty at the end of World War II, reserve officers such as Williams had automatically been assigned to the Voluntary Reserve unless they specifically requested otherwise, which Ted did not. The goal was to build up an experienced standby force. Congress tried to make service in the Reserves more attractive by increasing benefits and adding new ones. By 1950, the Marine Corps was offering its active, or organized, Reserves longevity pay tied to their rank and increased pay for the required two-hour weekly drill, as well as for the two-week active-duty summer program. Promotions were generally easy to come by, and retirement benefits were enhanced.
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The volunteer, or inactive, Reserves to which Ted belonged were required to do no weekly or annual drills and were essentially a group that could be recalled in the event of a war or national emergency. Williams had not participated in any such drills as a member of the Reserves, and had only flown once since the end of World War II. Enrollment in the inactive Reserves was high because servicemen had assurances that they could quit when they wanted to and that they could only be recalled under certain parameters. Specifically, prior to the outbreak of hostilities in Korea, the Marine Corps was guided by the Naval Reserve Act of 1938, which provided that a member of the Reserves “may be ordered to active duty by the Secretary of the Navy in time of war or when in the opinion of the president a national emergency exists… but in time of peace, a reservist may be ordered to or continued on active duty with his consent only.”
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But that policy changed after the Korean War broke out on June 25, 1950. President Truman’s decision to commit US forces the very next day prompted Congress to approve the Selective Service Extension Act. Now Truman was authorized to “order into the active military or Naval service of the United States for a period not to exceed 21 consecutive months, with or without their consent, any or all members and units of any or all Reserve components of the Armed Forces of the United States.”

Under draft rules then in effect, college students could avoid being called up as long as they were enrolled, a policy that eliminated an entire class of able-bodied men. Furthermore, it soon became apparent that, at least among fighter pilots, a high percentage of career enlisted fliers were being assigned not to combat duty but to positions as instructors, in which they could train others to operate a new generation of jet aircraft.
That meant that a disproportionate share of the combat duty was falling to older reservists who were veterans of World War II (many of whom were immediately resentful).

Williams secretly retained a lawyer and instructed him to pursue any legal recourse he might have against the recall order, though there seemed none, since Congress had eliminated voluntary reservists’ ability to resign in 1950, following the start of the Korean War. There was a personal hardship exemption, but that was defined as having four or more dependents. Ted only had two—his wife and daughter—or three, if you still counted his mother.

The other avenues of pursuit were medical and political. Ted’s elbow still hurt him, especially in cold, damp weather, which Korea had in abundance, but he recognized that if he could play baseball with it, using the elbow as an excuse to get sprung from the military would seem both far-fetched and crass. Still, Williams was certainly open to a discreet inquiry from someone of influence who might make the case to a correctly situated official in the military hierarchy that Ted had already served his country and that asking him to do so again was asking too much.

Joe Cronin tried first. Cronin would tell his daughter, Maureen, a lifelong admirer of Williams, that he had called a friend who was an admiral to arrange a meeting at which Ted could go and make his case. “Ted went to visit this guy, to argue he had already served his time,” Maureen Cronin said. “I assume the meeting did not go well.”
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Ted wrote in his book that at spring training that April in Sarasota, a fan he described as “a big cheese man from Ohio” who thought the recall to Korea was unfair approached him and offered to ask his senator, Republican Robert A. Taft, to help. But after looking into his case Taft declined to intervene, telling the intermediary: “I have some reservations as to the fairness of it, whether these fellows should be going back, but I don’t interfere with a thing like that.” Taft, son of William Howard Taft, the twenty-seventh president of the United States, was then mounting an unsuccessful bid for the 1952 Republican presidential nomination himself. Ted said the senator wrote him a letter about the issue, which he did not keep. Another prominent politician, John F. Kennedy, then a third-term Massachusetts congressman running for the Senate, “tried to do something” for Williams but was unable to, Ted later claimed.

Concluded Ted, “I didn’t say anything, but I was bitter because it wasn’t fair. I think if it’s an emergency everybody goes. But Korea wasn’t a declared war, it wasn’t an all-out war. They should have let the professionals handle it. A lot of the professionals on duty for Reserves didn’t go.…
The unfairness of the Selective Service is obvious when you know how the draft laws and the exemptions work. There’s only one way to do it, of course, if you’re going to have a draft, and that’s to draft everybody.”
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The Marine Corps still insists that Williams’s selection was fair and square, as was that of other major leaguers summoned to Korea, including Jerry Coleman of the Yankees, Lloyd Merriman of the Reds, and Bob Kennedy, then of the Indians. (Kennedy was later granted a hardship discharge for having at least four dependents.) In any case, even if Williams did have an informal deal with Vandegrift at the end of World War II, he had no one to blame but himself for not having gotten out of the Reserves before the 1950 act of Congress froze him in place. He knew, or should have known, that he could have resigned any time before that. In 1948, the Marines had even given him a reminder in writing. In an October 29 letter that year informing him that he had been given a “permanent commission” as a first lieutenant, Ted was told: “Should you decide, subsequent to the acceptance of this appointment, that you are unable to continue the obligations your commission entails, you should submit your resignation to the Secretary of the Navy… and the Commandant of the Marine Corps.”