The Kid: The Immortal Life of Ted Williams (54 page)

But the fact remained that he had served in World War II, and his peers felt he was getting a raw deal. “He was pissed off to no end that he had to go back the second time,” said Ted Lepcio, a Red Sox infielder from 1952 to 1959. “He was very resentful. Breaking records kind of gnawed at him. He was always indicating to me, ‘Do you know what I could have done with those numbers?’ Then it would have been everyone chasing him.”
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Bob Feller sent Ted a sympathetic letter: “Personally, I cannot get too much enthused about the way they handled your particular case,” Feller wrote. “In fact, I do not like it.”
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Williams seethed at what he considered the injustice of it all, but he kept his rage bottled up. It wasn’t until four years later, when he lashed out at the induction of Brooklyn Dodgers pitcher Johnny Podres, and the year after that, when he popped off about his own case, that the depth of Ted’s resentment at being recalled for Korea became publicly known.

Podres had been the star of the 1955 World Series, winning twice to lead the Dodgers over the Yankees in seven games. Though before his Series heroics he had twice been rejected for the service because of a bad back, Podres was inducted into the Army in early 1956. When Williams was asked innocently that March if the Dodgers would miss Podres, he was off to the races: “Gutless draft boards, gutless politicians and gutless baseball writers—that’s what we’ve got,” said Ted. “Here’s this kid who
was deferred three years ago for a bad back and then what happens? He wins a couple of games, gets famous and some two-bit draft board puts the arm on him. It’s a damn shame and something should be done.… They’ve taken 20 percent of his baseball life, his earning life, away from him, and for no other reason than he gets famous by beating the Yankees in the World Series.”
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Then during spring training of 1957, Williams went nuclear about his own case, revealing for the first time that he had sought outside intervention to keep from being called up to Korea. Following an exhibition game in New Orleans on March 31, as the Red Sox were at the airport preparing to return to Florida, Crozet Duplantier, executive sports editor of the
New Orleans States
newspaper, approached the
Globe
’s Hy Hurwitz and asked to be introduced to Williams. Like Hurwitz, Duplantier had been a Marine. He was still in the Reserves and told Hurwitz he hoped he could get Ted to say something that might give the Reserves a boost.
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After Hurwitz made the introduction in the airport restaurant, Duplantier asked Williams if he harbored any resentment against the Marine Corps for having twice interrupted his baseball career. Ted ignited. “You’re damned right I do,” he said. “Resentment against the Marine Corps and the whole damned government.” At that point he got up, left the restaurant, and stalked out into the terminal. Duplantier followed. “You think Senator Taft was a great man?” Williams continued. “Well, here’s what I think of him.” Then he turned to spit on the floor. “He was afraid to even try to do anything for me. He said he wouldn’t mind going to bat for some other guy. But not me. I was too important.

“And the same goes for Harry Truman!” Ted added, whereupon he spat on the floor again. “And the whole damn government is phony.” Asked if he was still in the Reserves, Williams replied: “Boy, you know, I’m not. When I got out this last time and they gave me a chance to pick up that [discharge] paper, I grabbed it.”

Ted’s blast ricocheted across the front pages of the country. The next day, Ted confirmed to the Associated Press that his remarks to Duplantier about the Marines and Taft were accurate, but he denied bashing Truman and the government. Then he took another swipe at the Corps. “I’ll tell you about the Marines,” he said. “They got the government to appropriate a lot of money. They said they had the pilots but they needed planes for them. Actually, they had no pilots, so they called 1,100 guys like me back. Most of us hadn’t flown a plane for 11 years, but the Marines wanted to make a good show. That’s why they grabbed a big name like me.”
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A spokesman for the Marine Corps said it would have
no comment because “we take the position that Williams is a private citizen and can say what he wants to.”

As the publicity intensified and Ted came in for increasing criticism as a selfish lout who had tried to pull strings and expected to be treated differently from the average guy, Williams retreated and grudgingly apologized—after a fashion. In a statement issued under Red Sox letterhead, he was contrite toward the Marines but implied that Duplantier was a drunk and therefore not trustworthy. Then, inexplicably and ineptly, he opened up a new line of attack against what he saw as government overreach and excess for its handling of a tax case against boxer Joe Louis: “Look at this terrible treatment Joe Louis is getting,” Williams said. “Here’s a guy who’s been a credit to his race and to his country. If some big shot phony politician was in the same predicament, they’d allow him to settle it by paying two cents on the dollar.”
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In issuing Ted’s rambling rant on team stationery, the Red Sox did themselves and their star no favors, again calling into question the club’s lack of public relations acumen and its inability to play the clearheaded adult in dealing with another of Williams’s petulant pop-offs.

Ted showed up in Sarasota for spring training on March 1, 1952, characteristically late for the first workout but cheerful enough for someone ticketed for Korea the following month. He joked with Lou Boudreau, met with Joe Cronin to sign his contract, then posed for pictures with both men. The writers asked how he felt about his pending Marine physical exam, scheduled for the following month, and Ted said he needed to get in shape for the season in case he flunked the physical. In response to such speculation, the Marine Corps had recently noted that Williams had passed a physical the previous fall upon his promotion to captain. Ted suggested, hopefully, that the April checkup would be more thorough.
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Some around Williams were urging him to put up a fight on the medical front, to marshal his own doctors, who might attest that his elbow still caused him significant pain and would interfere with his ability to function as a Marine. One of those pushing him on in this regard was Evelyn Turner, a National Airlines stewardess with whom Ted had become romantically involved. Ted and his wife, Doris, were estranged by that time. They had been drifting further and further apart, and among the bevy of women who frequently crossed his path, Ted had taken a particular shine to Turner, an attractive blonde three years his senior, starting in early 1950.

Doris never really confronted Williams about his philandering, and Ted received any questioning about other women with dismissive, slightly bemused, nondenial denials. After all, he was Ted Williams—of course there were other women, and lots of them. They were a star’s entitlement, and he indulged himself. On the road, Ted would often use visiting-team clubhouse attendants to facilitate his assignations. In his engaging memoir of life as a Detroit Tigers batboy, Danny Dillman tells a colorful story about a delicate errand he ran for Williams in 1949.

“Hey, kid!” Ted yelled at Dillman, who was then fifteen.

“Yes, sir, Mr. Williams.”

“Here’s thirty-five dollars. Take a cab downtown and get me the best five-pound box of chocolates you can find and a big box of rubbers. Can you do that for me, kid? This is very important. I’ve got a heavy date this weekend. Don’t let me down.”

“No, sir, you’ll have them before game time,” replied Dillman confidently, though he immediately began wondering how he would persuade a pharmacist to sell a pack of condoms to a fifteen-year-old.

Getting the candy at a Fanny Farmer store was the easy part. Then Dillman entered a nearby drugstore and approached the pharmacist with great trepidation. Did he need a prescription filled? the proprietor asked the boy. No, he didn’t, Danny stammered. Unable to speak his request, he asked for a piece of paper and wrote it down. He worked for the Tigers and was on a mission for a famous ballplayer. He needed a big box of condoms. The pharmacist chuckled and said, “You’re kidding, aren’t you?” Danny said he wasn’t, and then had the presence of mind to suggest that the man call his boss in the visitors’ clubhouse at Briggs Stadium, “Fat Frank,” who could verify the assignment. The pharmacist made the call, Fat Frank vouched for his batboy, and Danny got his rubbers.

Returning to the clubhouse, Dillman, who would go on to get his PhD in geography and become a university professor, a job he held for forty-four years, proudly placed the chocolates and condoms at the top of Williams’s locker, along with an envelope. Ted eventually ambled over, held up the envelope, and shouted, “Hey, kid, what the hell is this?”

“I put the change there from the thirty-five dollars you gave me,” said Danny.

“Well, I’ll be goddamned. This is the only fuckin’ time I ever got money back from an errand. People usually keep what’s left as a tip.”

“Mr. Williams, we want this to be the best visitors’ clubhouse in the American League.”

“Well, it sure as shit is, kid. You keep the money for yourself.” It was $6.50, more than two days’ pay for Danny.

His romantic plans on track, Williams could return to his pregame routine: rubbing his bats on a soup bone to remove any dirt or resin accumulated from the previous game and weighing them on special scales to confirm they were his preferred weight. Then, wearing only his jockstrap, a sweatshirt, and shower clogs, Ted would stand in front of a full-length mirror and begin swinging a bat.

“My name is Ted Fuckin’ Williams and I’m the greatest hitter in baseball,” he’d say, then swing.
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“My name is Ted Fuckin’ Williams and I’m the greatest hitter in baseball,” he’d repeat, teeth clenched, and swing again. He would continue this swing-and-proclaim routine for several minutes, interrupting it only occasionally to offer a lecture on the finer points of hitting to anyone who cared to listen.

“That was his mantra,” says Dillman. “He did that before every game.… He was psyching himself up. He wasn’t quite as confident as he appeared.”
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But Ted did not lack confidence with women. If Baseball Annies, starlets, models, and assorted others fell into his orbit because of his celebrity, plenty of other women came on to him merely because they thought he was good-looking, without having a clue that he was the Red Sox star, Williams confided to friends.

Ted had met Evelyn Turner on a National Airlines flight when she’d asked him to sign a baseball for her. “To Ev, a sweet chick, Ted Williams,” he wrote. From 1950 to 1954, Turner obsessively documented her affair with Ted, saving such commemorative shards as airline tickets to cities where they rendezvoused, hotel receipts, and ticket stubs from various American League ballparks.
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She inventoried some of the gifts she’d received from Ted, such as a gold wristwatch. There were snapshots she took of Ted, photos of them together, and a series of pictures of her striking sexually provocative poses. There was even a July 1951 shot of Williams in front of his house near Miami as well as one of his daughter Bobby-Jo, three years old at the time, holding two parrots. Doris was nowhere in evidence. Turner assembled all these mementos in an album, which she would decide to send to Bobby-Jo after Ted died. Evelyn even kept some of Ted’s clothes—such as shorts, boxers, shirts, and trousers—folded and boxed for fifty years. Ted wrote Turner thirty-nine letters during their time together, and she kept them for the rest of her life in a box marked
PERSONAL, PRICELESS LETTERS FROM TSW
, according to Joe Bastarache, a friend and neighbor of Turner’s in Blowing Rock, North
Carolina, where she would retire in the 1980s.
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Bastarache, who became Turner’s guardian after she moved into a nursing home and then the executor of her estate when she died in 2004, said Evelyn told him she and Ted lived together in Miami for a while—apparently after Williams and Doris were formally separated in 1954. “They would go for rides in Miami in Ted’s Studebaker convertible,” said Bastarache. “Often they’d go to a drive-in, until Ted got recognized, and then they’d peel away. Ted seemed to enjoy this game.”
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Turner had a son, Albert Christiano, from a first marriage and would ultimately be married three more times. Recalled Christiano: “My mother was very much in love with Ted. She told me several times that he asked her to marry him, but she said no because of Ted’s priorities. She told him she’d marry him if he assured her she would be his number one priority. He said, ‘It’s baseball first, fishing second, and you third.’ She regretted till the day she died that she didn’t accept that offer and try to work her way up the priority list.”

Christiano said Evelyn told him she was responsible for Ted’s breakup with Doris Soule. “She wasn’t proud of it. But she also said it didn’t matter because he was going to leave his wife anyway.”
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In a meandering, sixty-six-page account of her time with Ted, much of it quoting from the letters he wrote her, Turner told of her role as an interlocutor between Ted and the doctor he was consulting with just before he was scheduled to take his final physical, which would decide if he’d be sent to Korea or not. “I was given the message to relay it to Ted,” Turner wrote in her manuscript.
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She told him his doctor, Russell Sullivan, chief orthopedic surgeon at Boston City Hospital, had contacted a sympathetic admiral in Baltimore who planned to put in a good word with a Marine commander. But the doctor insisted Ted submit to a medical examination to justify his claim, and in the end, Williams decided not to play this card. While he’d lost about a third of the bone that rotates in the socket of his left elbow following surgery, he’d built much of his strength back, he’d played all of the previous season with the elbow and been productive, and he was swatting the ball with authority in spring training. Basically, using the elbow as an excuse wouldn’t fly.