The Kid: The Immortal Life of Ted Williams (88 page)

Late in the season, McLain ratcheted up his treachery by forming what he called the Underminers’ Club, the purpose of which was simply to sabotage Ted’s tenure as manager. The other members were Bernie Allen, Tim Cullen, Dick Billings, and first baseman and outfielder Tommy McCraw. “We were the people dedicated (in our minds anyway) to the overthrow of Ted Williams,” McLain said. One night, McLain and his wife had a team party at their house in which they inducted six new members of the Underminers’ Club in a spoof of a Ku Klux Klan ceremony. McLain and his crew dressed up in sheets and carried crosses as they inducted the new members.
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McLain went 10–22 on the year with a 4.28 ERA, including a twenty-one-day stint on the disabled list, which he said “may have been
the most pleasant days of the season.”
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With the team floundering and losing money, Bob Short announced in mid-September that he was moving the club to Arlington, Texas, outside Dallas. The Senators would become the Texas Rangers.

President Nixon said he was “distressed” that Washington would again be without baseball. But Ted said Short had little choice but to move the club. “There was a hard core of fans here all right, but there were only six or seven thousand of them,” he observed. “Basically, Washington is a city of transient people. Most people didn’t give a damn.”
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The Senators finished fifth in their division with a record of 63–96, thirty-eight and a half games out of first place. About the only positive in the year for Ted (besides Sears extending his contract for another nine years, to 1979) was the publication of his second book, again with John Underwood,
The Science of Hitting.
The book did little to help Williams as a manager, since it only reinforced the perception that his approach to baseball was one-dimensional.

Surprisingly—given the performance of his team and its near insurrection—Ted signed on for the move to Texas. He still retained Short’s support, and the press wasn’t on him much. The writers, in fact, seemed more interested in Williams’s upcoming second safari to central Africa than they were in the performance of the Senators. Ted said this time he hoped to bag a lion, a buffalo, a leopard, and maybe an elephant.
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In the off-season, McLain and two other ringleaders of the Underminers’ Club, Bernie Allen and Tommy McCraw, were traded away, while a fourth, Tim Cullen, was released. Williams hoped that getting rid of most of the clubhouse lawyers would ease his passage to Texas. To help herald the move, Ted donned the obligatory ten-gallon hat in a photo op demanded by the photographers, but from the beginning, he hated the Dallas area and had largely checked out as manager.

“In Texas, Ted didn’t act like a guy that liked to manage,” said Tom Grieve, an outfielder on the 1972 team. “You could talk hitting or pitching with him, and then the enthusiasm bubbled over. But the managing, the traveling, being part of the team—he couldn’t wait to get out. I don’t think he was frustrated with himself, he was frustrated with all of us. We all felt a little embarrassed and guilty to know we had the greatest hitting instructor ever and couldn’t do better.”
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Williams lived in a hotel and began spending more time with his third-base coach, Wayne Terwilliger. There was a pizza place outside
Arlington that showed Charlie Chaplin and other old movies that Ted enjoyed, so he would ask Twig to join him there. Another time, they went to a jazz club in Dallas to listen to Erroll Garner, long a Williams favorite. They sat near the piano, and Ted would talk to Garner between tunes. “Ted would say that the sound of the bat hitting the ball was as beautiful as listening to Erroll Garner,” Terwilliger wrote in his book.
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Once, in Cleveland for a game, the two men came across a peep show. They went in, got behind separate curtains, fed quarters into the slots, and watched dirty movies together. Sometimes Ted would sing out, “Hey, this one’s not too bad,” so Twig would go over and have a look.
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The highlight of the year, unquestionably, came August 25, when the Rangers came to Boston to open a three-game series. It was a Friday night, and there was a full house at Fenway for a game in which all proceeds were to go to the Jimmy Fund. As an added draw, several Red Sox old-timers, including Johnny Pesky, Eddie Pellagrini, Ted Lepcio, Haywood Sullivan, Dom DiMaggio, Sam Mele, Frank Malzone, and Walt Dropo, were to engage in a hitting contest.

There had been an announcement in the press box earlier that Williams would not be among the Sox veterans to hit. But before the game, Rangers trainer Bill Zeigler spotted Tom Yawkey going into Ted’s office in the Rangers clubhouse, presumably to lobby his former star. After Yawkey left, Ted emerged and said he was going to hit in the contest after all. He would turn fifty-four in five days.

In the dugout, Williams rummaged through the bat rack and couldn’t seem to find anything he liked. His players looked on carefully, taking in the moment.

“No wonder you fuckin’ guys can’t hit,” Ted said. “These bats are terrible.”

Then Zeigler, who revered Williams so much that he had named his son Ted Williams Zeigler, handed him some of Tom Grieve’s bats. Grieve used the Louisville Slugger W183. The W stood for Williams, and 183 was the model number Ted had used for the last several years of his career. Williams picked the bats up and flexed each one before he found one to his liking. “Give me some pine tar,” he barked to Zeigler, and then he began working the bat until he got the grip just the way he wanted it. Williams glanced out at his former teammates hitting soft-serves from Red Sox coach Lee Stange, who was known as Stinger. “He’s gonna have to throw harder than that to me,” Ted muttered to Zeigler. “I can’t hit that slow shit.” When the last Red Sox veteran finished batting, there was a lull for a few minutes. Then the crowd
began to chant: “We want Ted! We want Ted! We want Ted!” Williams let them chant a bit longer, psyching himself up and letting the drama build. “I’ll show these cocksuckers,” he said quietly. Williams walked out of the dugout and began striding to home plate in his distinctive gait, head down, as the crowd stood and roared. He still had on the silky warm-up jacket he’d been using to conceal his girth since becoming a manager, but he ripped it off and let it fall to the ground before reaching the batter’s box.

Stange threw his first pitch, but Ted let it go by. He always took the first pitch.

Then he pulled the next ball hard, but way foul.

“Goddamn it, Stinger,” Ted barked. “Put some juice on the damned ball.”

Then Ted began hitting line drives all over right field and center field. They were all ropes. One ball cleared the right-field fence by Pesky’s Pole. Another hit the bull-pen wall on a short hop. After ten or twelve swings, Ted flipped his bat in the air dramatically and walked back to his dugout in triumph, as the entire park cheered deliriously. Players from both benches also stood to applaud.

“It was the most electrifying experience in my life,” said Dick Billings, the onetime Underminer. “I’ve never in my life heard an ovation like that. We sat on the bench with our mouths open. He never hit in spring training or during our batting practice. The Boston fans absolutely loved him. For him to be able to do that, he’s the best or one of the best ever. What I saw that day, he still could have hit .300 if he didn’t have to run.”

Williams skipped down the dugout steps with a big smile on his face. “I guess I showed those cocksuckers I can still hit,” Ted told Zeigler.
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The Rangers lost a hundred games that season, winning but fifty-four, and finished last in the American League West. Williams had had enough. “I had another year on my contract, but that was it,” he said later. “I had managed my last game.”
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T
ed saw little of Dolores and their two children, John-Henry and Claudia, that spring and summer of 1972, when he was off in Texas. His relationship with his wife had deteriorated into a series of acrimonious exchanges punctuated by characteristic outbursts of anger from Williams. When Ted quit the Rangers and was home full-time, nothing changed, so Dolores decided to file for divorce in Miami, asserting in her suit that Ted had “made life unbearable” for her with his “constant obscene criticism.”

Williams had hardly spent any time with his two youngest children thus far, and the divorce would not change that pattern. Just as his own parents had largely been absent, Ted proved an indifferent father at best. His career and the demands of celebrity were mitigating circumstances, perhaps, but even out of baseball he remained preoccupied with himself, not his kids.

Years later, driven by a basic love and mutual need, Ted, John-Henry, and Claudia would rediscover each other—Claudia having done all she could to forge her own identity, John-Henry having subsumed himself in his father’s shadow.

If there was a triggering event that made her decide to file for divorce, Dolores thought, it came one day when she and Ted were arguing, and John-Henry, then about five, intervened on her behalf and confronted his father. “You don’t talk to Mommy that way!” he said with chest puffed out. Then, turning to Dolores, the boy added: “There, Mommy, I served him. Now, let’s go, and if you’re not ready, I’m going without you.”

“I think when John-Henry said that, I knew I had to get a divorce,”
Dolores concluded. “It just wasn’t working. I didn’t have the courage to tell him directly, so I had a lawyer do it for me. Ted reacted with frustration. He told me, ‘I couldn’t please you if I was Jesus Christ himself.’ ”

As the case awaited trial, there were moments when Dolores felt Ted was reaching out to her. On March 15, 1974, for example, he wrote her a short, whimsical note on his Sears stationery offering to pay her $10,000 if she could take two out of three sets from him in tennis. “Please bring knife when this happens,” he added, before signing the letter “Ted Williams, of sound mind.”
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But as she went ahead with the divorce, his letters were no longer lighthearted. He told her he regretted ever meeting her, accused her of entrapping him by deliberately getting pregnant with John-Henry, and of sleeping around once they were married. She retorted that he was a lousy lover and gathered ammunition for her lawyers—such as soiled clothing that she said proved Ted had his own collection of infidelities and a series of telephone messages left for him by presumed girlfriends.

The divorce was finalized on November 25, 1974. Under the terms, Ted waived the prenuptial agreement Dolores had signed before they were married, six years and seven months earlier. He agreed to pay her $20,000 to renounce any further claims on his property and $16,000 per year in alimony for the rest of his life. If Dolores remarried, the alimony would drop to $6,000 a year and end altogether in 1987. Dolores was to get full custody of John-Henry and Claudia, and child support would be $2,000 annually per child. Ted also agreed to pay college and medical expenses for the children and to leave each one not less than one-quarter of his net estate after he died. In addition, Williams gave Dolores two cars and paid her legal fees.

Now thrice divorced, Ted was fifty-six years old. The idea of spending the rest of his years alone had no appeal, so he quickly began looking for other options. His first choice was to try to reconcile with Lee Howard, wife number two.

Lee had spent the last few years in California managing a 365-unit apartment complex in Marina del Rey. Ted had reached out to her a few times while he was still married to Dolores—to touch base, or perhaps to hedge his bets. “Things weren’t going too well with Dolores, apparently, so he would call and say, ‘How are you? Have you found anybody?’ ” Lee remembered. “He told me to write to him, and he gave me a post-office box. I wrote a letter or two, but what was I going to say?”

After the divorce from Dolores, Ted and Lee arranged to have dinner in Florida, and he asked her to come back to him. She said no. Williams,
no longer wanting to start from scratch with someone new, then turned to his old reliable: the long-suffering Louise Kaufman, who had been holding out for Ted for more than twenty years, since first meeting him on Islamorada in 1953. Now, after Lee spurned his request to give it another go, Ted summoned Louise back to Islamorada from Delray Beach, where she was still living near her friend Evalyn Sterry. Thrilled, Louise promptly appeared at Ted’s door with all her clothes and furniture. She was sixty-two when she finally won her man.

Since he had been married three times and had made a hash of things on each try, Williams told Louise up front that there could be no fourth marriage for him. Though she ached for the status and legitimacy of a Mrs. Williams title, she accepted Ted’s terms. Louise also realized that they would probably fare better as a couple if Ted felt less bridled, so she settled into her own bedroom.
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Louise knew to give Ted plenty of rope and, most important, to let him explode when he had to. She hated these outbursts of rage, but knew she couldn’t stop them and that it could be even more dangerous if he weren’t able to blow off steam. She would try to temper his behavior by not being a doormat and by calling him out on his excesses. He respected her for that, but he also respected her for letting him blow and not holding it against him, as his three wives had. He needed his loved ones not to nurse grudges toward him, even when he knew, down deep, that his tantrums were unwarranted.

Ted didn’t tell Louise about his final overture to Lee, of course, and tried to make it appear that he wasn’t just settling for her. He tempered his no-marriage edict by promising Louise that he wouldn’t jilt her a fourth time. And he tried to adapt to her wishes, such as saying grace before a meal. “When we’d go down to stay with Ted, Louise would always say a blessing,” said Bobby Doerr, a devout Christian. “You always doubted Ted was religious. But he’d grab your hand and say, ‘Come on,’ while she said the blessing. So you wondered down deep if he had any religious feeling. It was at least a show of respect for her.”
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Dolores, meanwhile, had rented a house on the other side of Islamorada from Ted and enrolled John-Henry and Claudia at the Island Christian School, a new private school. But before long, the island felt too small for both her and Ted, and bumping into Louise around town was more than Dolores could abide, so she took the kids and moved back to Vermont, on the farm next door to her parents. They established a routine in which Ted would call Claudia and John-Henry on Sunday mornings, and the children would spend Christmas vacation in Islamorada
and a few weeks during the summer at Ted’s cabin on the Miramichi River in New Brunswick.

That wasn’t a lot of time, but the kids weren’t used to seeing much of Ted anyway. As manager of the Rangers and a spokesman for Sears, he’d been away almost constantly. Louise at first urged Ted to spend more time with John-Henry and Claudia, but they resented her immediately as an unwanted intruder who only got in the way of access to their father. And Louise, despite her initial good intentions of wanting Ted to engage more with the children he barely knew, would come to deeply resent John-Henry and Claudia as well.

“I still remember going to the Keys and seeing Louise there for the first time and wondering, ‘Who is this woman?’ ” Claudia said.

When Claudia was about four or five years old, she and her brother were in Islamorada on one of their periodic visits. Claudia had just learned to braid her own hair, and Dolores had told her to make sure it was braided when she went out on the boat to fish with Ted, otherwise it would get knotted up and tangled. “Dad, when he goes fishing, he goes, and there’s no waiting around. I could hear him just bellowing: ‘Come on!’ In walks Louise, just barges in the bathroom, yanks the hair out of my hand, braids it up real fast, and she pushes me out the door. She said, ‘Don’t you ever make your father wait!’ ”

In addition, Claudia had a fair complexion. When she got out on the boat she realized she’d forgotten her sunbonnet and sunscreen. She started to get out of the boat to run back to the house, but Louise pulled her back in. “I was very intimidated by my father at that young age,” Claudia recalled. “He was very loud. Not very patient. Now we were going fishing, and there was no other focus, no other goal. I didn’t dare say, ‘I need to put on sunscreen.’ Well, my mom was so mad when I got back because my whole back was just sun blisters and peeling and red. I just hid it the whole time because I didn’t want Dad to get mad. I remember the guest room where we stayed, John-Henry and I. We were in the two twin beds, and every night he was putting aloe or cream on my back. I’d be crying, and he’d say, ‘Don’t cry. Don’t cry. Don’t get Dad mad.’ ”

Conflict was to be avoided at all costs lest Ted get provoked. “If he called and I was sick, he’d say, ‘Well, Jesus Christ! Why’d you get sick?’ ”

“I didn’t mean to get sick,” Claudia would reply.

“Well, goddamn it, get in bed and stay in bed and drink vitamin C.”

Despite her resentment of Louise, Claudia said she wanted to love her, “but it just couldn’t happen. Every time I tried to do something nice,
she’d be extremely critical, or she would twist it. She was out to make me [out] to be a bad person. She was very threatened by the relationship that John-Henry and I had with our dad. Because when we did visit him, it was just us. We’d just climb all over him. John-Henry was on the right, I was on the left, just piled on top of him on the recliner chair.”

The next Christmas, John-Henry and Claudia arrived to find that Louise’s daughter Barbara Kovacs was there with her children. “Now not only do we have to share Dad with Louise, but we have two grandkids,” Claudia said. “I remember hating that. And they were constantly being compared to us. ‘Oh, so-and-so was on the honor roll this week. Claudia, how are
you
doing in school? John-Henry, how are
you
doing in school?’ It was never pure dad-and-kids time. It was always competition.”

Time with Ted meant they would watch TV, go fishing, get an ice cream. Another favorite activity was watching movies together. Ted would send John-Henry and Claudia out to the video store and have them bring back a handful of John Wayne classics. Ted loved Oreos, and one Christmas, Claudia gave him a fancy tin filled with the cookies, and it was his favorite present. “He loved it. ‘Get the milk!’ We dunked the cookies in the milk. He loved us kids for a kid reason: he could be a kid, too.”

Yet Williams’s tin ear regarding offense to those close to him was evident in one of his terms of endearment for Claudia: “little shit”—as in, “C’mere, you little shit, you,” when he wanted to give her a hug.

She preferred visiting him in Canada to going to the Keys. The Miramichi was remote. There was no phone, which seemed to relax Ted further. When Louise had one installed, Williams had the phone listed under “Spaulding Trappers Association” to throw off any unwelcome callers.
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Claudia conceded that it was difficult for Louise. “That’s hard. That’s hard for a woman when she’s first in the relationship with Dad, and here we come.” Mary Diver of Baltimore, who had a cabin on the Miramichi near Ted’s and was a friend to him and Louise, said Louise “couldn’t stand John-Henry, and I don’t think she liked Claudia that much, either.” She recalled a scene in which “Ted was on the couch, and Claudia was fussing over him and messing with his hair, and Lou comes in and says, ‘Look at that little hussy.’ I don’t know if it was jealousy or one-upmanship.”
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While Claudia said she tried to get along with Louise, to no avail, John-Henry didn’t even bother to try, and he could get away with it because he had a different relationship with Ted from the one his sister had.

“John-Henry just had such a tight bond with Dad. Nothing Louise could do or say could sway Dad. Whereas me, I would easily be labeled whiny or bitchy or whatever. But boys don’t do that. I’d go running to Dad: ‘Louise did this, Daddy.’ And he’d be like: ‘Shut up! I don’t want to hear it.’ John-Henry just wouldn’t do that. He didn’t care. He got to go where Dad went, and Louise couldn’t go, either. Girls aren’t allowed in the dugout.

“I think Dad probably always wanted a son. And when he finally got one, especially after Bobby-Jo, he loved him so much. He just adored him. And when I came along? He was probably going, ‘Please, God, don’t be like Bobby-Jo!’ ”

Louise was jealous of John-Henry’s relationship with Ted, according to Janet Franzoni of Vermont, who, along with her late husband, Bob, was a close friend of Ted and Louise. “John-Henry would spend time with Ted, and she didn’t like it,” Franzoni said. “She also didn’t trust him.”
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When Claudia and John-Henry visited Ted, their older sister, whom they had not even met, was little discussed. When Bobby-Jo was talked about, it usually was when Ted was mad. “I just knew that whoever this Bobby-Jo was, I didn’t want to do what she had done,” Claudia said, “because Dad would say awful, awful things about her. He probably saved the
c
word if the kids were around, but ‘bitch’ and ‘whore’ and ‘tramp’ and just ‘lunatic’ were common. Dad would never be so direct as to name something specific that she did, but I remember many times going to Mom and saying, ‘Who is this Bobby-Jo? Why does Dad hate this Bobby-Jo?’