The Kid: The Immortal Life of Ted Williams (77 page)

Dubbed the Sportsman’s Marathon, the plan called for Ted to try and catch a big-game fish at sea, then go inland to catch a trout, and finally shoot a deer—all within a twenty-four-hour period. Williams, it turned out, accomplished the feat in ten hours and twenty-five minutes.

On the flight home in early March, somewhere over the Pacific en route to San Francisco, Williams looked around the first-class cabin after he’d had a few cocktails and allowed his eyes to rest on a beautiful brunette sitting across the aisle a row behind him. Her name was Dolores Wettach, a five-foot-nine-inch
Vogue
model returning from a shoot in Australia.

Williams got out a piece of paper, wrote “Who are you?” on it, then crumpled it up and threw it at Dolores, like a child might throw a spitball. Dolores, tired of her
Vogue
group and game for flirting with a handsome
stranger, wrote that she was a model, and who was he? She threw the note back at him.

“Sam Williams, a fisherman,” was the reply Ted tossed back to her. “What’s your name?” Dolores wrote her name down and threw the paper again. The final written exchange came from Ted, who suggested they have dinner after they arrived in San Francisco.

Dolores didn’t answer that one and eventually got up to go to the bathroom. Ted followed her down the aisle and was waiting when she emerged from the toilet.

“You are meant to be bit and sucked,” Williams told her as she passed him.

“I was gonna haul off and slap him one, but I held back,” Dolores recalled. She remembered considering him “an intoxicated gentleman.”

When the plane landed, Dolores was having second thoughts about dining with Ted and walked off briskly until they got separated in the terminal crowd. Besides, she was supposed to meet a doctor friend for dinner. After a while, however, the doctor sent a telegram saying he couldn’t make it, and Dolores promptly booked a flight on to New York. Then, to her amazement, a phone call came in for her at the airline counter she was standing in front of. It was Ted. She had no idea how he knew where she was at that moment or how he could arrange a call to that very desk. He wanted to know if she was still there, he said. She was, but she was returning to New York, she told him. Then came word from the airline that the flight would be canceled because of bad weather in New York. Soon Ted called again. Worn down, Dolores said yes to dinner. She still had no idea who he was.

Williams took her to a Polynesian-style restaurant, where the coat-check girl immediately recognized him. “I know who you are,” she said. “You’re Ted Williams.”

“Nah, I just look like him,” said Ted.

Dolores had only heard of three baseball players. “I’d heard the names Ted Williams, Babe Ruth, and Joe DiMaggio,” she said. “I realized afterwards that this really
was
Ted Williams.”
²⁶

A
fter Ted and Doris were divorced in 1955, Bobby-Jo’s visits to her father began to wear on her, not just because they were stressful and she couldn’t make one false move without risking an outburst from Ted but also because her friends were where her mother was. “You know, going to Fenway Park, sitting at the games—it’s cool for a while, but it’s not what you want to do,” Bobby-Jo said.
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Not that life with Doris was easy. Her alcoholism had only gotten worse after the divorce. She’d bought a beauty shop in Coral Gables to try to become more economically independent, but that didn’t work out. Then she worked part-time at various funeral homes, doing dead people’s hair, mostly the ladies.

Despite the difficulties with her father, Bobby-Jo liked the attention that being Ted Williams’s daughter brought her, so she didn’t hesitate to let her friends know of the connection. Once, in third grade, after her classmates asked her for some autographed balls, she got Ted to give her a dozen, then excitedly reported back to him that she had sold them for twenty-five cents each.

Ted’s chief role as a father seemed to be the mostly absent provider and disciplinarian. Enforcing proper hygiene was always a priority. “He wanted to watch me brush my teeth for four years to make sure I was doing it properly,” said Bobby-Jo. “And then every once in a while, right on up till I was driving, he’d say, ‘How do you brush your teeth?’ He was a tooth fanatic. It was the cleanliness part of him. He wanted to see everybody’s nails, too.” Once, at a fancy Boston restaurant, he exploded at a waiter whose nails were not up to his exacting standards.

Williams could be generous and slip his daughter extra cash when she
visited, but he was a stickler with Doris on child support, insisting that she manage with what he gave her. “He gave my mom a hundred dollars a month for child support. But that was for everything. He didn’t want to know about any additionals. He wanted to know why you couldn’t make do with what you had. But a hundred dollars a month wasn’t cutting it.” And paradoxically, while Ted preached the importance of education, he refused to give Bobby-Jo a set of encyclopedias she told him she needed when, around fifth grade, she’d been assigned written reports for the first time.

Still, Williams was there for at least some of the big events in his daughter’s life—including her confirmation, when she was thirteen, at an Episcopal church in South Miami. Ted showed up underdressed, as usual, and a priest slipped him a tie to put over his Ban-Lon shirt.

That year, 1961, Doris got married to an insurance salesman named Joe Tridico. Bobby-Jo thought he was nice enough, but Tridico hardly dared intrude on Ted’s discipline domain, even though Doris, burdened by her alcoholic haze, left Bobby-Jo unchecked.

“Poor Bobby-Jo—it was awful,” said Daria Stehle, a friend of Ted’s and Doris’s in the ’50s. “Doris let her do whatever she wanted. She wasn’t receptive to help. She just never stayed sober. There was no control. Then Bobby-Jo would go down to see her father, and he was very strict, and it was such a change for her. She couldn’t handle it.”
²

Not long after Bobby-Jo got her driver’s license, Ted agreed to buy her a car, a surprising decision given his stated desire not to spoil her and his penchant to pinch pennies when it came to less extravagant items on his daughter’s wish list. Then, exploiting the vacuum left by Doris, Bobby-Jo took to tooling around in her new car, relishing a new sense of freedom and life as a sexually precocious teenager. She dropped out of high school, and in the summer of 1965 got pregnant at the age of seventeen. The father was a local boy she’d been hanging out with but didn’t feel a particularly close attachment to.

When Ted got the news from Doris, he—predictably—went ballistic. Bobby-Jo, who lived for her father’s approval, could not bear his scorn. She went into the bathroom at home and slashed both her wrists. Doris found her before it was too late.

Williams quickly decreed that the pregnancy would have to be aborted—no discussion was to be had, though neither Doris nor Bobby-Jo mounted any serious objections. A safe abortion was still hard to obtain in those days, but it was legal and relatively easy to arrange if
the procedure could be done under the auspices of a psychiatrist, Ted learned.

“Ted called me up and said, ‘Can you help me?’ ” remembered his World War II and Korea Marine buddy Bill Churchman, from Philadelphia.
³
“He explained to me that Bobby-Jo had attempted suicide. There was this institute here run by the University of Pennsylvania. This was not a penal offense. I hooked Ted up with a good friend of mine who was a psychiatrist, and they got her admitted. Ted had the impression that if he went to a Florida hospital, attempted suicide might be considered a criminal offense.”

Churchman met Bobby-Jo at the train station and took her to the Institute of the Pennsylvania Hospital, a noted psychiatric facility in Philadelphia that had treated Marilyn Monroe and Judy Garland, for what would end up being a convalescence and psychiatric evaluation of several months’ duration. She wore a sweater in the summer heat to try to cover up the scars, which extended from her wrists to her elbows, but Churchman couldn’t help noticing the wounds. She checked into a private room on the fifth floor and was placed on a suicide watch, under the care of Dr. Silas L. Warner, a specialist in personality disorders.

After a while, Bobby-Jo was allowed to come and go as she pleased, as long as she returned to the hospital at night. One evening, she and a young man who was also a patient at the institute went to a party on the Main Line. There she met eighteen-year-old Stephen Tomasco, the son of a truck driver for the
Philadelphia Inquirer
and the
Philadelphia Daily News.
Tomasco had graduated from high school earlier that year and was working at a local racetrack selling tip sheets.

Bobby-Jo homed in on Tomasco immediately. “She was a good-looking girl,” Steve remembered. “The way she carried herself, she was very friendly, easy to talk to. She showed within minutes of talking to her that she liked you. The night we met, she said real fast, ‘Why don’t we leave here?’ I said, ‘What about the fella you came with?’ She said, ‘He’s a screwball.’

“I was a virgin when I met her. One night when she was in the hospital, we took a ride to a park, and she said, ‘Come on, let’s do this.’ You know how a young guy is. I figured, what have I got to lose?”
⁴

Bobby-Jo had quickly told Steve who her father was, and he’d been intrigued. He was a baseball fan, though not a rabid one. Over time, Steve noticed that she would reveal the Ted connection early on when they met new people, trying to build on his success.

Bobby-Jo also readily told Steve all about her abortion and slitting her wrists. “When I saw her wrists, that scared the hell out of me,” he said. “What a sight. She said she couldn’t deal with Ted’s reaction to her being pregnant.” But Steve liked that she was honest with him, and he started visiting her at the hospital regularly. “She got real serious, real fast. She’d been around the block before, and I hadn’t. We kind of fell in love real quick. We spent every day together. I was working, and I’d go and visit. We’d stay out all night, mostly in my car, and I’d take her back to the hospital at four or five in the morning, then go to work.”

When Ted came to Philadelphia to see Bobby-Jo, he would stay at the Warwick Hotel. Since he didn’t like to go to the hospital, Bobby-Jo would have Steve drive her to the hotel to see her father. Williams was primed to meet Steve because his daughter had announced that she wished to marry him, an idea that Ted was strongly against, given Bobby-Jo’s fragile condition. There was also the fact that she was not yet eighteen.

“Ted interviewed me, asked what I did, asked about my family,” Steve recalled. “But he didn’t flip out on us. He wasn’t loud, like I’ve seen him. He wasn’t mean. He was forthright. He said he thought it was a mistake, and he didn’t think we should do it. We spent the whole time in the hotel and ordered room service.”

Steve had problems convincing his parents, too. His mother, especially, was not wild about Bobby-Jo—or Barbara, as Steve usually called her. The mother thought Bobby-Jo had a sharp tongue and could be disrespectful. Finally, Steve’s parents gave their consent because he convinced them this was what he wanted to do. “I was just young and didn’t have any better sense,” he said now of his decision.

Bobby-Jo was released from the hospital in the late fall of 1965 and returned home to Florida, but with marriage now firmly in her mind, she found living with Doris increasingly untenable. Doris didn’t seem to care if her daughter got married or not. It was Ted whom Bobby-Jo had to convince, and eventually she did. As Steve put it: “She talked him into marriage, saying it wouldn’t be too horrible.”

That was a pretty low bar, but Williams became resigned to the idea and, in a phone call to his friend Bill Churchman to share the news, managed a pinch of gallows humor: “Here I entrust my daughter to you, and what do you do? You let her run off with a dago kid!” Ted said.
⁵

Bobby-Jo returned to Philadelphia and moved in with Steve’s parents. In January of 1966, they went to Elkton, Maryland, on the north side of Chesapeake Bay. In the 1920s and ’30s, Elkton had been a marriage
mecca for the Northeast, cranking out more than ten thousand newlyweds a year because it had no residency requirement or waiting period. Later, concerned that the town was developing too trashy an image, local officials mandated a forty-eight-hour waiting period.
⁶

Steve and Bobby-Jo were married by a justice of the peace on January 17—eleven days before her eighteenth birthday. Since Bobby-Jo was still a minor, one of her parents (Doris did the chore) had to submit an affidavit giving consent. Steve was by then nineteen. Only his mother attended the ceremony.

To help make ends meet, Steve took a second job, slicing cold cuts behind the deli counter of a supermarket. Later, Doris invited twenty or thirty of her friends to a reception for the new couple down in Coral Gables. Ted wasn’t there.

After Doris’s reception, Steve and Bobby-Jo went to Islamorada for a few days to visit Ted. He still wasn’t happy about the marriage—as was apparent from his decision to attend neither the wedding nor Doris’s gathering—but he offered to get Steve a job at Sears. Eventually, Steve did go for an interview, and was offered a salesman position, but he decided not to take it, worried that he’d always be known as Ted Williams’s son-in-law.

Steve thought computers were the future and noticed an ad in the Sunday paper for a training course in computer programming. Before long, Ted was on the phone with the head of the training school trying to get the lowdown on the curriculum. He agreed to pay the tuition for Steve to attend school full-time and to support him and Bobby-Jo in the interim. Steve graduated high in his class and got a job as a computer operator at Temple University. “My career has been very successful, but I feel indebted to Ted for getting me started,” Steve said.

From the moment he first met Steve, Ted insisted that a certain protocol be observed. “Ted said, ‘Steve, you can call me Mr. Williams. I think respect is in order.’ I didn’t argue with him. Even after we were married, I always called him Mr. Williams, and Barbara always called him Daddy. He had that piercing glance when he looked at you. Kind of tilted his head and stared right at you. It demanded your attention. It was, ‘I’m going to give you advice now, and here’s what you ought to do.’ ‘Just keep your eye on the ball,’ he’d say. ‘That’s what old Teddy Ballgame would do. Teddy Baseball.’ He talked about himself in the third person.”

Steve had a beard at the time, and Bobby-Jo smoked too much—a pack and a half of Kents a day. Williams wasn’t happy about either. He told Steve to lose the beard and advised his daughter to stop smoking.

“Ted was very threatening—a big guy,” said Steve. “His facial expressions and his loud voice were enough to get your attention. When he got angry, the only thing you could do was watch. One night in Islamorada, a space heater wasn’t pumping out enough heat, so he tore it apart. He went on a rampage, cursing it. It was mounted on a wall. He kicked it, tried to tear it out of the wall. He had a hair-trigger temper. When he went off, he’d get loud and animated very quickly. The arms, cursing, and facial expressions. That’s what scared a lot of people. He was always an angry guy.”

Steve had a front-row seat from which to observe the relationship between Ted and Bobby-Jo, and he reached several conclusions: that she was largely successful in manipulating her father financially, despite his nearly constant complaints that he was giving her too much money; that Bobby-Jo could never get enough of Ted’s time; that he wanted a son and wasn’t happy with her as a daughter; and that he felt she was a nuisance to him and not independent enough.

“I think early on, Barbara got into a habit that whenever she needed something, she got it from her father,” Steve said. “Barbara had a split personality. She was perfect in front of Ted, but different in front of everyone else.” She would spend hours on the phone and rack up hundreds of dollars in long-distance bills that Steve couldn’t begin to pay for. Bobby-Jo said Ted would. He’d pay for them. She’d run up a big credit card bill at Sears; Ted paid. She also maintained a virtual hotline to Ted’s Boston accountant, Paul Brophy, who oversaw a trust fund that Williams had created for his daughter. Brophy couldn’t make any disbursements at her request, of course, but Bobby-Jo often found him sympathetic to her cause, and he would occasionally persuade Ted to cut another check.