The Kid: The Immortal Life of Ted Williams (59 page)

“I doubt that he meant to push her down the stairs,” Bobby-Jo recalled. “I mean, I’m almost positive of that, but that’s the way it happened, and I don’t know.” But Bobby-Jo thought the language Doris’s attorney used in the petition was accurate, not hyperbole. While the details of the physical abuse allegations were murky, there was no question that her father had verbally abused her mother—Bobby-Jo had witnessed a lot of that and had often been on the receiving end of Ted’s wrath herself: “He could hurt you as much with his mouth as he could if he punched you in the mouth. He could.”

One indication of the troubled marriage, though certainly not the major cause of the breakup, was that by the time Williams returned from Korea, Doris was a full-blown alcoholic. Her problem would only get worse as she aged.

Doris’s brother, Donald Soule, recalls her drinking hard as a young woman, too, and the problem only intensified after her marriage to Ted. It didn’t help that he was on the road so much playing ball, and away fighting two wars. “She started drinking early in life, and I guess it got to where she couldn’t handle it,” Soule said. “She drank all the time. It’s awfully sad. She told me she used to hide her bottle in the vacuum cleaner. She had to be worried about Ted catching her.”

The drinking was hard for Ted to accept. Though late in life he came to enjoy a stiff cocktail, in the early-to mid-’50s he was still a relative teetotaler who would take only an occasional glass of wine, usually sparkling Burgundy.

“Two very difficult, volatile people got together and made a lousy job of it,” Soule said in assessing his sister and Ted’s marriage.
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Now that Ted’s wife had asked for a formal separation, a marriage that had been largely a sham for the previous several years began its official unraveling, and for the rest of the decade, Williams would revel in the single life—both the diligent pursuit of other women and the tending to his own whims. Not that being married had ever stopped him from either.

Doris’s decline continued after the breakup. One of Bobby-Jo’s daughters, Dawn Hebding, remembered visiting her grandmother in Miami after she’d divorced Ted and gone through another marriage. By then Doris had a heart condition and was aging less than gracefully. She’d become a lonely, pathetic figure, living alone in an apartment, mostly just smoking and drinking. Once, her apartment had caught on fire because of a carelessly discarded cigarette. She developed Alzheimer’s and died in 1987, at the age of sixty-eight.

It was in Islamorada, in the fall of 1953, several months before Doris’s court filing, that Ted met Louise Magruder Kaufman. Louise was the daughter of an Ohio industrialist and by this time was quickly becoming a leading lady in Islamorada. She and her husband, Bob, had inherited 75 percent of her father’s metal cookware manufacturing company in Carrollton, Ohio, near Canton. Bob had joined the family business, and the couple and their five children lived on a 650-acre horse and dairy farm near Carrollton.

The Kaufmans had first come to Islamorada in the winter of 1948 and lived aboard their forty-two-foot sportfishing yacht, which had a full-time captain. Then they upgraded to a fifty-foot Chris-Craft before they tired of living on a boat and built their own house in 1952. By then, Louise, an avid and accomplished fisherwoman, had grown increasingly enchanted with the Keys and bored with Ohio. So she began spending most of the year in Islamorada, and she and Bob, who stayed back in Carrollton, drifted apart.

Islamorada was then just a sleepy village of about one thousand people on Route 1, halfway between Miami and Key West. It had a tidy harbor, a grocery store, a gas station, a construction company, a two-room schoolhouse, and a few restaurants and motels, including the Whale
Harbor Inn and the Green Turtle Inn, which featured sea-turtle steaks, soups, and chowders.

Louise was forty-one years old, five foot three and 120 pounds, with shoulder-length light brown hair—attractive but not striking. She immersed herself in the fishing life and soon was catching all the important game fish in the Keys and beyond. She caught a 152-pound tarpon, a woman’s world record for bait casting. She would catch bluefin tuna in Bimini as well as white marlin, sailfish, and wahoo off Islamorada. She also enjoyed cruising around the island in her black 1952 Buick convertible, which had red upholstery.

One night Jimmie Albright, the ace fishing guide, called Louise and said there was a big boxing match on television. Could he and Frankie come over and watch the fight? (Kaufman had one of the few TVs on the island.) Jimmie said they’d be bringing a friend—Ted Williams. Louise had heard of Ted, but she wasn’t much of a baseball fan. Still, she was struck by how handsome Williams was. “The physical attraction was there immediately,” Louise would tell an interviewer years later. “The way it happens. He was the most gorgeous man I’d ever seen.”
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They discussed fishing as equals. Ted liked Louise’s vibrant, forceful persona and seemed impressed that she was putting down roots in Islamorada, mostly alone. But he wasn’t particularly attracted to her. For one thing, she was six years older than he was—he’d just turned thirty-five that August. True, Evelyn Turner had been three years older than Ted, but Louise was quite different from the archetypal younger bombshell type Williams was coming to prefer.

Yet Ted and Louise began hanging out together. Islamorada was so small they’d bump into each other at the marina, the grocery store, or the gas station. Everyone seemed to know everyone else. They’d go fishing. It was low-key, casual, comfortable.

Soon, Louise wanted her best friend from Ohio, Evalyn Sterry, to come down and meet Ted. When Evalyn arrived, Louise (most of her friends called her Lou) said they were going to a meeting of the Islamorada Fishing Club. Evalyn wasn’t interested in fishing, but she went along. Ted was giving a talk. “Lou said, ‘That’s Ted Williams.’ And I thought that was the handsomest man I ever saw. You can’t believe how handsome he was,” Evalyn recalled.
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The next night Louise said they were going to meet Ted for a drink. It turned out Ted had a special guest staying with him: Benny Goodman. The King of Swing himself. Goodman was dressed casually, in khakis, and Evalyn assumed he was a fishing guide.

By 1955 Ted and Doris were divorced. Later Ted decided to buy a small, rudimentary house in Islamorada, on the ocean side of the island, about six blocks from Louise’s place, which was on the bay side. Bobby-Jo would come and visit Ted, and Louise’s five kids would visit her. The families mingled freely.

Meanwhile, a complicating factor for Louise was the emergence of another married woman who was smitten with Williams: Lynette Siman. Lynette, a petite brunette who was then thirty, was from the Boston area. She and her husband had arrived in Islamorada in 1953 and built an eight-room motel called The Sands. She was thrilled to be in the Keys.

“Oh, it was delightful,” Lynette said.
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“In September, you could stand in the middle of US 1 and shoot a cannon and you wouldn’t touch a soul. It was just a group of people who loved that tropical island living.”

Lynette eagerly jumped into Ted and Louise’s orbit. They fished, dined, and socialized together. Lynette grew romantically restless, and within five years she had divorced her husband and married a retired Iowa feed manufacturing executive who was twenty years her senior. She drew him into her Islamorada circle, and of course he was quite enamored of Williams, too. “A lot of us loved Ted,” she said.

While Lynette certainly wasn’t above flirting rather boldly with Ted when her husband and Louise weren’t around, she tried to be careful. “I didn’t wear a badge saying ‘I love Ted’ or anything like that. I was married; Louise was separated. We were neighbors. We were all friends. There was something always there, but the timing was not right.” Summing it up, Siman said, “I think we both knew there was a tremendous attraction, but there was never any hanky-panky, if you want to call it that.”

Lynette said she never told her close friend Louise of her feelings for Ted, but admitted it’s doubtful that Louise could have been oblivious to what was going on. As for Williams, he seemed to enjoy all the attention, like a star quarterback sitting back to watch two cheerleaders vie for his favor. Lynette knew that Louise had the circumstantial advantage over her with Ted, so she deferred to her friend and watched anxiously as he and Louise went back and forth to each other’s houses, often with their children.

If Williams and Kaufman were casual and warm with each other, such coziness did not carry over to their children. Ted had a routine with Bobby-Jo that Louise loved. In a mock military drill, he would make his daughter stand for a cleanliness inspection before dinner. Ted would tell
Bobby-Jo, who was then about six, to address him thusly: “Yes, sir, daddy dear sweetheart, I love you in the major leagues.” The terms eventually changed so that this response was required not just before meals but whenever she was spoken to.
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Living close by, spending a lot of time with Ted, and getting to know his daughter perhaps gave Louise a false sense of security. She knew she wanted to spend the rest of her life with him, and while Williams didn’t encourage her, he did put her in touch with his divorce lawyer in Miami. Louise flew up to Boston a time or two around 1955 to watch Ted play. When she was there, she stayed at the Somerset Hotel, where the Kid by then resided. Once, when Bobby-Jo was visiting, the three of them posed together for a picture.

Then, in 1957, Louise decided to make the leap and divorce Bob Kaufman, but Ted was not there to catch her. The baseball seasons of 1953 through 1957 yielded exciting, new, gorgeous—and much younger—women, some of whom Ted developed strong feelings for. It was unclear how much Louise knew of this; Williams of course compartmentalized the in-season romances, which were mostly for Boston and the road. Louise was for Islamorada—warm and comfortable, like a pair of slippers, not sexy high heels.

Ted would jilt Louise at least twice more by marrying two other women, even though each time Louise thought she would be the anointed one. Still, even spurned, she would never go far, always remaining at his beck and call, adoring, almost worshipful. Kaufman would love Ted for forty years, staying involved with him through all three of his marriages and persevering through all the rejection and heartache until he finally returned to her. It would be on his terms, however—not as a fourth wife, but as a live-in companion.

Louise could live with that. Indeed, that was the secret to living with Ted, after all—doing it his way. You had to be willing to let him run roughshod over you, to endure outbursts and crude insults. Louise would put it more diplomatically: you just had to know Ted and let him blow off steam. These were just passing squalls, and he would forget about them as soon as they happened. He really didn’t mean to hurt. But sometimes the hurt didn’t go away.

After Louise persevered and finally landed Ted later in life, when she was in her early sixties, Lynette Siman was happy for her old friend because she knew how much Louise had suffered along the way. Lynette was seemingly blocked again, but she knew a thing or two about perseverance herself. “After my husband died and Lou passed away, things took their normal course, I guess,” Lynette said.

As a boy, Williams could not have been less interested in girls. He was single-minded in his pursuit of baseball, and little else mattered. He was shy, gangling, and awkward around girls and only had one date during his entire time in high school. That was when his pal Bob Breitbard insisted they double-date at their senior prom in 1937, and Ted escorted Alberta Camus.

As Williams put it in his autobiography: “A girl looked at me twice, I’d run the other way.… I never went out with girls, never had any dates, not until I was much more mature-looking.”

According to Ted’s ghostwriter for his autobiography, former
Sports Illustrated
writer John Underwood, it was not until his rookie year with the Red Sox, in 1939, that Ted decided he was ready to have sex for the first time. He was twenty or twenty-one, and the team was playing the Tigers in Detroit. A young woman about three years his senior came on to him at the ballpark and then at the team hotel. Ted suggested a movie, but was wary of anything more. “I was scared of those things then,” Ted told Underwood thirty years later, in 1969. He thought “sex could screw up my career if I got gonorrhea.”

But the woman was ardent in her pursuit, so Williams procured a condom and agreed to do the deed. What should have been a delightful experience turned into merely an embarrassment. Ted was so inexperienced he didn’t know what to do with the condom, so the groupie had to show him. When he finished, he told Underwood, he felt “degraded. I said, ‘Geez, I’m never going to do that again until I get married.’ ”

The same woman stalked him again the following season, when the Red Sox arrived in Detroit. Ted ignored her messages until she sent him a two-page telegram claiming that she’d gotten pregnant during their 1939 encounter and she was now going to have his baby. Terrified, Williams consulted his older roommate, Charlie Wagner, who advised that they bring the problem to manager Joe Cronin. Cronin called in the cops, and it turned out to be a scam this woman had tried on Tigers star Hank Greenberg as well.
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Later in life, Ted told different versions of the story of how he lost his
virginity. In 1985, chatting with
The New Yorker
’s Roger Angell at the Red Sox spring training facility in Winter Haven, Florida, Williams complained that the modern player was thinking far more about sex than about hitting. “They’re fucking their brains out,” Ted said. “They’re just kids but they’re all married, and the ones that aren’t have got somebody living in with them, so it’s like they’re married. They’re just thinking of that one thing.” Williams then asked Angell if he had not had pretty decent seasons in 1938, when he was with the Minneapolis Millers in the American Association, and in 1939, his rookie year with the Red Sox. “Of course you did,” Angell replied, knowing full well Ted had hit .366 with the Millers and won the Triple Crown, then hit .327 and led the American League in RBIs with 145 the following year in Boston.