The Kid: The Immortal Life of Ted Williams (85 page)

And of course, people were more curious about her now. The press wanted to talk with the wife of the new Senators manager. Her first encounter with a major newspaper, her first interview as Mrs. Ted Williams, did not go well. She spoke with Myra MacPherson of the
Washington Post
at Ted’s house in Islamorada. It was a soft setting—at home with Mrs. Williams—but Dolores misread the situation. She turned up dressed to kill, offered champagne to the reporter at lunch, swore occasionally, and then stirred the pot by suggesting that Ted was
not easy to live with and that he had a hard time getting along with people.

MacPherson wrote that Dolores, clad in low-slung, hip-hugger jeans and a shirt tied at the midriff, “looked about as much like a housewife as Zsa Zsa Gabor looks like a nursemaid.” When she opened a bottle of French champagne for lunch, she remarked, “It’s not too early for wine. Some people have it for breakfast.” And about Ted’s new managing job, Dolores said: “It’s about time he learned to get along with people. He’s up and down like the weather. I go from being extremely happy to extremely unhappy. Just when I’m ready to give up, he’ll say, ‘I love you and I didn’t mean it.’ ”
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Ted was mortified by the
Post
story and barred her from giving any more interviews. But in late September, at the end of his first season as manager, Dolores, without telling her husband, decided to open up to someone else. Don Newbery was the antithesis of a
Washington Post
reporter. He was not even a reporter per se but a high school teacher and coach in Silver Spring, Maryland, who did some freelance radio work on the side. He’d go to Senators games and Washington Redskins games and practices, then hustle interviews with players and coaches and try to sell his pieces to area radio stations. Newbery had interviewed Ted and met Dolores at the ballpark. He asked her for an interview. At first she ignored him, but at the end of the season, she told him to call her and arrange a time to come by and talk. They met where she and Ted lived in Washington, at the Shoreham Hotel. When he arrived, she suggested they do the interview on the roof.

As they spoke, it was obvious that Dolores was dying to unburden herself of various pent-up frustrations about life with Ted: how he wouldn’t deign to discuss his Senators job with her, how insecure he was, how jealous she was of the other women who flocked around him, how much of the romance had left their relationship since they got married.

“It’s the toughest relationship going when you live with someone as famous as he is and with someone as volatile as he is and someone who is as expressive and can work under these pressures. He’s very insecure. He wants badly to be able to do something right the first time. Nothing can get in his way. If I even ask a question it turn[s] into an argument. They say you always hurt the ones you love, but when he would come home and just take everything out on me, it was tough, and of course, I don’t know baseball, and for someone like me to show some interest it was more irritating
than anything. Like you don’t have time for the greenhorn. This now became
the
most important thing in his life, and that was difficult.

“I think in the beginning I was kept out of everything. I was told I couldn’t go to the training, I wasn’t allowed at practice, I wasn’t allowed at the games, I couldn’t travel, and I had all of these imaginations of why, why, why? What’s happened? Why doesn’t he want me? I was trying to think of where I failed. Then he’d come home with all of this tension. I began—oh, dear, all of these women! The female plague—jealousy. Of course, they were mobbing him. He is charming; he could charm the leaves off a tree. And of course this was eating at me. His hostility that he’s capable of.… When you’re not married to someone you don’t know how unpleasant it is to be married sometimes. I had the best relationships when marriage wasn’t involved, but as soon as it happened, the romance went right out the window. I’m not an equal anymore.” Plaintively, she added, “I’d love to be able to make mistakes and have Ted say, ‘I love you anyway, sweetie. I love you for your faults, too.’ ”
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This was poignant but explosive material. Newbery knew that if he had aired his interview at the time, it would have made front-page news around the country. But he was not a reporter and lacked the scoop mentality. He was more teacher than journalist, and as a human being, he was worried about Dolores. Worried that Ted would go ballistic when this came out, and worried about Dolores’s welfare as a result. So Newbery decided to pack away his cassettes and not release them until after Ted died.
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Williams tried not to play favorites among his players, of course, but if he had a pet, it was probably Mike Epstein, the young power-hitting first baseman whom his teammates called Super Jew.

Scanning his roster after he took the job, Williams had concluded that Epstein was too heavy at 230 pounds. So he wrote him a letter and asked him to get down to 210 by spring training. Epstein dieted like mad and reported to Pompano twenty pounds lighter.

“I’m Ted Williams, who are you?” Ted said to Epstein, introducing himself.

“Mike Epstein.”

“Jesus Christ, you look awful. Jesus, are you sick? You better put on some weight.”

“But you told me to lose some!”

“Well, I didn’t know you had that big a frame.”

Williams gave Epstein extra time in the cage that first spring, and after practice, he would take him to the Howard Johnson on Route A1A in Pompano Beach and bulk him up with milk shakes. Ted would usually have a shake or two himself.

Williams liked the kid’s company, and during the season, he took him hunting. “On days off, we’d go to Sharpsburg, up in Maryland, and we’d hunt groundhogs,” Epstein said. “We’d come off a road trip at three or four in the morning, and he’d say to me, ‘Aw, shit, there’s no reason to go to bed. We’ve got an off day tomorrow—let’s go shooting.’ So we’d go up and wait for the rock chucks, and we’d fall asleep by two p.m. with our rifles in our hands, out in the grass.”

Epstein was always picking Williams’s brain and firing questions at him about hitting. Ted had asked lots of questions, too, of course, as a young player and throughout his career, so in that sense Mike reminded him of himself. Many of the great hitters didn’t have a clue about how to teach others, Epstein said: “I’ll talk hitting with Hall of Famers, and you don’t get any answers. Joe DiMaggio is a classic example. He said to me, ‘One day you’ll wake up and realize you’re born with it or you aren’t.’ That was the extent of Joe getting into hitting technique.” Epstein thought Williams was better at teaching the mental part of hitting than the mechanical side. Ted could dissect a swing and demonstrate proper technique, but Mike found years later when he was starting a hitters’ school that Williams sometimes couldn’t explain the why of it all. “He’d say, ‘Hips lead the way,’ but in his book he never tells how that would happen. So I asked him one day, and he says, ‘Well, it just happens. When you’ve got good mechanics, it just happens.’ And I said, ‘But if some kid comes up, and you’re a hitting instructor, and he says, “You say the hips lead the way,” and I say, “They just do,” I’m not Ted Williams. They’re not gonna take a lesson from me.’ ”

Ted couldn’t really resolve that. Sometimes teaching seemed to only go so far. Mentally, he would encourage his hitters to guess in certain situations and advised them to adapt to how they were being pitched to so they could turn what the pitcher perceived as their weakness to a strength. “He would tell you things like, ‘If they’re pitching you inside, look for that pitch, look for the pitch that’s giving you the most trouble,’ and then he’d walk away,” Epstein said.

On July 21, Major League Baseball celebrated its hundredth anniversary with a lavish dinner in Washington attended by 2,200 people, including six members of President Nixon’s cabinet and thirty-five members of the
Hall of Fame. The Baseball Writers’ Association of America selected Babe Ruth as the greatest player ever, while Joe DiMaggio was voted to the all-time team and named the outstanding living player. Williams was left off the all-time team and voted to the all-time living team. Piqued that he had been bested by DiMaggio, Ted refused to attend the dinner. DiMaggio did come. Williams sent Dolores to accept his award for him, and she tried to explain away her husband’s absence by citing his aversion to dressing up for such fetes.

“You all know Ted’s sentiments on formal occasions,” Dolores said. “Well, he hasn’t changed any, and that’s what makes him great.”

Not so great, actually, in the eyes of the writers, Bowie Kuhn, and the other lords of baseball, who saw Williams’s absence for what it was: a petty snub.

The following day, President Nixon, the überfan, hosted a reception at the White House in honor of the centennial, and this time Ted, wearing his bolo tie, showed up, waiting in a long receiving line with some four hundred other baseball dignitaries to greet Nixon.

Williams’s and the president’s mutual admiration society was one of the more intriguing subplots of Ted’s term as manager of the Senators. Ted hardly disguised his feelings for Nixon, going so far as to hang a large photo of the president in his office at RFK Stadium for all the writers to see, a bald political statement that might have been a first for a major-league manager.
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Nixon came to a handful of Senators home games each season, and Williams would have Ed Doherty, the former Red Sox public relations man whom he had brought down from Boston to serve in the same capacity, sit next to the president and tend to his every need. Doherty had been hired by Tom Yawkey in 1939 and was so hostile to reporters that the writers in Boston viewed him as the anti–press agent, but that reputation helped him with Williams. Ted and Doherty made sure the president got a good in-house press. A smiling Nixon even ended up on the cover of the team program for the 1970 season alongside the words “Our No. 1 Fan.”
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During Nixon’s reelection campaign, in 1972, Williams, who thought Watergate was much ado about nothing, made sure that writers covering the team knew how he felt about Democrats such as George McGovern, Ed Muskie, and Hubert Humphrey. “As politicians, they make me puke,” he said. In the presence of Bob Short, however, Williams had to tone down his extreme anti-Democratic views. After a game in 1969, Short, the Democratic Party luminary, asked Ted and Dolores to join him for dinner at the Occidental Restaurant with Eugene McCarthy of Minnesota, who had lost the Democratic presidential nomination to Hubert Humphrey the previous year. Williams was diplomatic and contained his enthusiasm for Nixon.
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Ted was also a devotee of Spiro Agnew, the vice president, and loved the way Agnew gave the press hell. In addition, he publicly supported the National Rifle Association and proudly displayed one of the colorful law-and-order bumper stickers on his car that helped fan the culture wars in the divisive late ’60s:
IF YOU DON’T LIKE POLICEMEN, THE NEXT TIME YOU NEED HELP CALL A HIPPIE
.
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After Nixon resigned the presidency in disgrace, he and Ted would remain in touch. In 1977, Nixon invited Williams to visit him in San Clemente for a few days, but Ted had a prior commitment and had to beg off. In the summer of 1984, the president saw Williams interviewed on TV and dashed off a fan note: “Dear Ted: Last night I had a choice between listening to the Democratic National Convention and your superb interview on Channel Nine. You won in a landslide! You were intelligent, articulate and informative.”
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And in 1994, on the opening of Ted’s museum in Florida, Nixon submitted a videotaped testimonial in which he said he “cherished” Williams’s friendship. “In politics,” he said, “I’ve learned that you win and you lose. When you win, you hear from everyone, and when you lose, you hear from your friends. I always heard from Ted Williams. He’s a role model. I’m one of his fans, as millions of Americans are, not just because he was a great baseball player but because he was a fine human being.”

During the season, Ted would occasionally call his managerial mentor, Joe McCarthy, for strategic advice. Then in early September, when the Senators had two off days in a row, Williams and Ed Doherty went to visit McCarthy at his home outside Buffalo. Ted had his team at 71–66, the best record the Senators had had in decades. Still, he wanted to pay his respects to McCarthy.

As a writer for the
Buffalo Evening News
who had been invited to sit in
looked on, the two men reminisced about their years in Boston and about McCarthy’s kind words to Ted after the devastating loss in the 1948 playoff game against the Indians. McCarthy had said they surprised everyone by getting along so well.

The Kid said he’d appreciated McCarthy’s defense of him to the press on another issue that year. “When criticism grew over my taking a base on balls instead of swinging at a pitch just off the strike zone, I went to you for advice,” Williams said. “And I told you that you knew the strike zone better than anyone else in baseball and that you should never change,” McCarthy replied.

As Williams prepared to leave, McCarthy wished him luck and said, “You’re the only manager I light candles for.” In the car as they drove away, Williams asked Doherty what the candles reference meant. Doherty explained that McCarthy was a Catholic, and it was common to light a votive candle in church for someone you are praying for. Ted, who was, at best, ambivalent about religion, pondered that in silence for a while, then said: “How can I miss with a man like McCarthy praying for me?”
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Williams went on to lead the Senators to their best season in seventeen years. The team finished in fourth place out of six teams in the new American League East division, with a record of 86–76. Not since 1952 had the club finished above .500, and this team had had essentially the same players as the 1968 club, which had won twenty-one fewer games. It was not hard to conclude who had made the difference.

Williams “bubbles with enthusiasm and it’s contagious,” said shortstop Ed Brinkman,
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whose average spiked up 79 points from the previous season to .266 in 1969. Frank Howard ended the year with a career-high 48 home runs, a .296 average, and 102 walks, nearly double his previous year’s total. He also cut down on his strikeouts with 96—45 fewer than in 1968. Mike Epstein raised his average 44 points to .278 and hit 17 more home runs than he did in 1968 to finish with 30.