The Kid: The Immortal Life of Ted Williams (74 page)

As Ted established himself with Chicago-based Sears, he was also spending more time there courting Lee Howard. During one of Ted’s visits, when Lee had to cut the evening short to relieve her parents, who had been babysitting her children, he suddenly proposed. Actually, it was more of a directive, she recalled: “I told him I had to leave. He said, ‘This is ridiculous. We’re getting married!’ He didn’t ask me. He told me. I thought it was great. I kind of liked it that he didn’t ask.”

Ted made it clear he didn’t want to have any more kids. “No, he did not want children. It didn’t matter to me. I had mine, so I didn’t care if we had any more children. I didn’t try to push that at all.”

Ted told her a little about his childhood, but not much. “He would just grit his teeth and clench his jaw over the fact that he used to have to stand around on corners with his mother and collect money. That really, really bothered him. I suppose it was embarrassment.”

May Williams died on August 27, 1961, in a Santa Barbara nursing home at the age of seventy. Ted flew out and took charge of the arrangements. Bobby-Jo, who by then was thirteen, called her father to say she was sorry that May had died. Her mother had instructed her to call him and express her condolences, but he seemed uninterested. She’d never met her grandmother. There was a simple graveside service conducted by the Salvation Army.

Ted and Lee got married less than a month later, on September 19, in Cambridge, outside Boston. Ted was forty-three, Lee thirty-eight. Ted wanted absolute secrecy, so his old pal John Buckley, who ran a movie theater in Cambridge by then and was well connected at city hall, had a friend—an assistant court clerk who was also a justice of the peace—marry the couple in his office at the courthouse.

The ceremony lasted ten minutes. “It was the second wedding for both of us,” said Lee. “We wanted something low-key, and of course Ted wanted no publicity, if he could help it.” Williams was dressed in a cream-colored sport shirt, a blue checked sport jacket, blue slacks, and white buckskin shoes. Lee wore an understated but elegant cream-colored dress. In the wedding paperwork, Ted listed his occupation as “public relations.”

The couple was forced to scrap plans to honeymoon in Bermuda because of Hurricane Esther, which was then raging up the Atlantic, so after a celebratory dinner with the Buckleys at the Carriage House in nearby Lexington, Ted and Lee got in a car and drove north to Maine, on their way to Canada, where Williams had bought some land along the Miramichi River in New Brunswick and planned to build a cabin. The river was known for having some of the best Atlantic salmon fishing in the world.

Lee, the Chicago fashion flower, was no outdoorswoman, but Ted set out to make her one. Though she’d barely fished a day in her life, it wasn’t long before Williams had her decked out in rubber hip boots in the pools of the Miramichi, on the prowl for salmon. When she didn’t perform to Ted’s liking in that first test, he assigned her a task for which he deemed her more suitable: picking out furniture for the new cabin. “It was very nice furniture, very tasteful for a cabin,” she remembered, but it was too luxe for Ted. “He said, ‘Jesus Christ, you’d think you’re trying to furnish a penthouse on Fifth Avenue!’ ”

Soon there were more fishing trials. When they went to Islamorada for the winter, Ted was up at 5:30 each morning and would wake Lee
with a mock reveille, sung through his fist over his mouth. “Rise and shine!” He’d insist she go out on the boat with him and adhere to a strict protocol. “He would take you out on that boat for nine hours at a crack, and he didn’t want you to sit, you had to stand up—something about the fish making a fool of you, don’t ask me, I have no idea. One day I was complaining about having to stand, and he is saying, ‘Stand up! Get up!’ whenever I’d sit. So I’m facing out the back of the boat and I’m holding a rod and I heard a splash and I say to myself, ‘Oh, gosh, he’s got a big one,’ and I turned around and he’d fallen overboard. I just roared with laughter. He wasn’t too happy with me.”

Williams had a workshop in the back of the house where he would spend hours tying extremely intricate flies. “He’d have me out there and try to teach me,” Lee said. “He was very good at it. It’s difficult, very difficult. I didn’t find it too exciting, though.”

She liked golf better, and sometimes they would go over to the Cheeca Lodge, an Islamorada resort, where there was a course. “That’s where he used to throw the clubs whenever he hit a bad shot,” she said with a chuckle. “He would get so violent with the temper when he played golf. At one point I had him taking calcium pills. It was supposed to calm him down, but it didn’t work. Now, if they had had Prozac at that time, that’s what the man should have been on.”

Lee also had to adjust, in Islamorada, to the presence of Ted’s old flame Louise Kaufman, who lived just a few doors down from the new house Williams had moved into after the hurricane destroyed his old one. Louise had been devastated when Ted informed her that he was marrying Lee—after all, Louise had left her husband, with whom she’d had four children, on the hope that she would eventually marry Ted. Louise warned Ted that Lee would just get pregnant and take all his money.

Lee, in turn, teased her husband about his attraction to the older Louise. “I used to kid him and say, ‘Do you have a mother fixation or something?’ ” she said, laughing. She was less amused after she caught Louise prowling in the bushes outside at night, trying to peek in their bathroom window. She told Ted, who just shrugged it off, bemused.

Ted was fully aware how different Lee and Louise were. Just before they married, he had invited Lee to join him at the summer baseball camp for kids he had started in 1958 in Lakeville, Massachusetts, a rural community about forty miles south of Boston promoted with typical chamber of commerce gusto as the “gateway to Cape Cod.” One evening
Ted was holding forth to his pupils under a tall oak tree. Lee remembered: “I walked out there and Ted said, ‘Listen to what I am going to ask you now, fellas.’ I was standing right there. ‘If you had two gals, one that loves you just for yourself and the other one that loves you but wanted parties and mink coats, which one would you choose?’ And I spoke up and said, ‘The smart one!’ He was talking about Lou Kaufman as the other one. He was saying that that’s what I wanted, parties and the mink coat, but the other one just loved him for himself.” Lee convinced herself that Ted had been kidding—after all, it had been he who’d bought her a $5,000 mink coat in Chicago after the wedding. He insisted, so she took him to a furrier she knew from her modeling days. “He wanted everyone to know he’d bought me a mink coat. I wasn’t asking for one.” And it was Ted who wanted her to have all the jewelry she needed, ordering a Boston jeweler he knew to send a selection of pieces for her to inspect down in Islamorada. “He had them send a bunch of bracelets, gold bracelets, and a chain with a diamond, a pendant. I could pick out what I wanted.” Less glamorously, Ted also bought Lee a sewing machine and asked her if she’d make him some Bermuda shorts.

Sometimes they would go for long walks in the evening and have good talks. Once, they discussed what would happen when they died. “It was one of those foolish things where he said, ‘I want to go first, and I don’t want to be here without you.’ And I said the same thing, blah, blah, blah. And that led to him saying that he wanted to be cremated.”

When they were courting, Ted had been on his best behavior, and his temper hadn’t been an issue. She knew he swore like a trooper, and after they were married, in jest she had tried to get him to curb the habit by instituting a fining system. She put a jar on the table, and every time he uttered a four-letter word, he would have to put a dollar in the jar. But Ted was familiar with that exercise, and there would be ten dollars in the jar within the hour, so it was pointless.

Still, the swearing seemed to mask a deeper anger that she hadn’t been aware of and that soon became troubling. “I always used to wonder how someone who had such talent and had been given so much could be so angry,” Howard said. “And I asked him that many times, and he wouldn’t answer.”

After fishing, golfing, and walking, Lee ran out of things to do in the Keys, and she yearned for a taste of mainland civilization, so she would drive up to Coral Gables and go shopping. Williams wouldn’t want her to go and angrily accused her of sneaking around and flirting with other
men. The nearly instant lurch into ferocity alarmed Lee. “It would just be nothing to set him off,” she recalled. “You never knew when it was going to happen. It was incredible.” One Thanksgiving, Lee had worked all day preparing the meal and announced that the turkey was ready. But when Ted opened the oven, he was enraged—the bird wasn’t nearly brown enough, he said. “I would say it was his childhood, but that couldn’t have made you that angry to all of a sudden just go berserk. He’d rip phones out of the wall at the house. He hated phones. He would throw phones and break them. I told him, ‘I am not calling the phone company anymore.’ I was embarrassed.”

Williams’s temper could also flare when Bobby-Jo visited. In the summer of 1962, Ted, Lee, and Bobby-Jo were at Williams’s baseball camp. One evening there was a dinner for the camp counselors and other adult staff and their families. Bobby-Jo noticed that Ted was getting increasingly agitated because he felt people were not finishing the food on their plates. Williams had such an aversion to wasting food that he had carved the words “It’s a sin to waste food” on a small tree planted inside the camp dining hall. Bobby-Jo wasn’t sure why Ted felt so strongly about this. Her husband, Mark Ferrell, thought it dated to his childhood, during the Depression, when sometimes he’d be home alone and there wasn’t enough food. Bobby-Jo remembered the time Ted had taken his friend John Buckley out for Chinese food. Buckley kept ordering one dish after another. “You’d better eat every bite of that,” Ted warned him. Then he said it again, more angrily. When Buckley added still another dish, Williams said, “You’d better eat every bite of that, you dirty son of a bitch!” Bobby-Jo and others had to help Buckley finish all the food to forestall another tirade from Ted. “We were, like, bloated,” she remembered.

Now, at the camp, she could see her father doing another slow boil. Then he threw his napkin on the floor in disgust, something Bobby-Jo knew he sometimes did at the dinner table if something displeased him. Afterward, he expected that someone would pick up the napkin and somehow rectify the affront, so Bobby-Jo did what she knew he expected of her. When she gave the napkin back to her father, Williams suddenly spit a mouthful of food in her face.

“I was absolutely and totally so mortified that I remember sitting there, and I did nothing for a few seconds,” Bobby-Jo said. “Then I hit the outside, running, and I ran and it was cool and I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t want anybody to see me. I got back to the car, and I’ll never forget this: one by one, and two by two, they started coming out to me.
All the women. They were all at the car. And they said, ‘Your father didn’t mean that, but he wasn’t right.’ And you know, he never apologized.”

“There could be no mistakes,” Bobby-Jo said of life with her father. Around the same time, one night when Ted and Lee had taken Bobby-Jo out for dinner and were bringing her home to her mother’s house in Miami, Bobby-Jo forgot her keys, and Doris wasn’t home. It was late at night. Ted got out of the car, screaming and calling his daughter a dumb little bitch. He tried to open a window or two in the house without success. Then he ordered Lee back into the car and pulled away, leaving Bobby-Jo cowering in the bushes, alone, waiting for her mother to return.

“It was so absolutely obvious that he had a mental problem,” Bobby-Jo said. “But my father loved me, you know what I’m saying? He was so far ahead of his time as far as wanting to be a good dad, and he was good at it. The thing he wasn’t good at was, he had no control over his temper. It got progressively worse and worse and worse.”
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Lee thought one explanation for Ted’s unpredictable, abusive behavior was that he simply wanted attention—good or bad. “He was a very private person and cherished his privacy, yet at times if he didn’t get attention, he wanted it. He was kind of like a Jekyll and Hyde, to tell you the truth. When he didn’t get attention and wanted it, he would be very loud and obnoxious so everybody had to give him the attention. There was no two ways about it. A lot of things he did was just to shock people. Because in front of others, if he was nasty to me, he was usually winking at me. In other words, he was letting me know that ‘I don’t even mean this,’ that he was putting on a show. But the other people would be saying, ‘Oh, my God!’

“His friends knew how he was, so they accepted it. He didn’t stay mad at them or me. A lot of times when he would try to embarrass me in front of people by doing things, he would come back to me and say, ‘I love you more than anything.’ ”

Lee was also struck by Ted’s insecurity. “He used to say to me, ‘If I was an elevator operator’—why he chose that profession I don’t know—‘If I was an elevator operator, you wouldn’t even look at me.’ ” That insecurity could morph easily into jealousy. At airports, Ted would insist that Lee walk in front of him so he could see which oncoming men were staring at her. Once, driving along the highway, they passed a car and Lee looked over, as passengers often reflexively do. There were two men in the car, and Williams suddenly erupted. Recalled Lee, “He flew off the handle. Why was I looking at them! And he hit me in the arm
with his fist. I was all black-and-blue. But that’s the only time he ever touched me.”

Yet sometimes he would be so good to her, so attentive. He’d bring her coffee in bed in the morning, for example. “So he could be soft and kind and turn around and be a son of a gun. It’s so hard to explain how he could be half one way and half the other way.” But the son-of-a-gun side flared too often. Once, she had to lock him out of the bedroom because he’d gone into some rage. The next day he said he was sorry. That was the only time she could remember him apologizing.

She was always on pins and needles, never knowing when he was going to blow—either at her or at his friends, Lee recalled.