As the publicity intensified and Ted came in for increasing criticism as a selfish lout who had tried to pull strings and expected to be treated differently from the average guy, Williams retreated and grudgingly apologized—after a fashion. In a statement issued under Red Sox letterhead, he was contrite toward the Marines but implied that Duplantier was a drunk and therefore not trustworthy. Then, inexplicably and ineptly, he opened up a new line of attack against what he saw as government overreach and excess for its handling of a tax case against boxer Joe Louis: “Look at this terrible treatment Joe Louis is getting,” Williams said. “Here’s a guy who’s been a credit to his race and to his country. If some big shot phony politician was in the same predicament, they’d allow him to settle it by paying two cents on the dollar.”17
In issuing Ted’s rambling rant on team stationery, the Red Sox did themselves and their star no favors, again calling into question the club’s lack of public relations acumen and its inability to play the clearheaded adult in dealing with another of Williams’s petulant pop-offs.
Ted showed up in Sarasota for spring training on March 1, 1952, characteristically late for the first workout but cheerful enough for someone ticketed for Korea the following month. He joked with Lou Boudreau, met with Joe Cronin to sign his contract, then posed for pictures with both men. The writers asked how he felt about his pending Marine physical exam, scheduled for the following month, and Ted said he needed to get in shape for the season in case he flunked the physical. In response to such speculation, the Marine Corps had recently noted that Williams had passed a physical the previous fall upon his promotion to captain. Ted suggested, hopefully, that the April checkup would be more thorough.18
Some around Williams were urging him to put up a fight on the medical front, to marshal his own doctors, who might attest that his elbow still caused him significant pain and would interfere with his ability to function as a Marine. One of those pushing him on in this regard was Evelyn Turner, a National Airlines stewardess with whom Ted had become romantically involved. Ted and his wife, Doris, were estranged by that time. They had been drifting further and further apart, and among the bevy of women who frequently crossed his path, Ted had taken a particular shine to Turner, an attractive blonde three years his senior, starting in early 1950.
Doris never really confronted Williams about his philandering, and Ted received any questioning about other women with dismissive, slightly bemused, nondenial denials. After all, he was Ted Williams—of course there were other women, and lots of them. They were a star’s entitlement, and he indulged himself. On the road, Ted would often use visiting-team clubhouse attendants to facilitate his assignations. In his engaging memoir of life as a Detroit Tigers batboy, Danny Dillman tells a colorful story about a delicate errand he ran for Williams in 1949.
“Hey, kid!” Ted yelled at Dillman, who was then fifteen.
“Yes, sir, Mr. Williams.”
“Here’s thirty-five dollars. Take a cab downtown and get me the best five-pound box of chocolates you can find and a big box of rubbers. Can you do that for me, kid? This is very important. I’ve got a heavy date this weekend. Don’t let me down.”
“No, sir, you’ll have them before game time,” replied Dillman confidently, though he immediately began wondering how he would persuade a pharmacist to sell a pack of condoms to a fifteen-year-old.
Getting the candy at a Fanny Farmer store was the easy part. Then Dillman entered a nearby drugstore and approached the pharmacist with great trepidation. Did he need a prescription filled? the proprietor asked the boy. No, he didn’t, Danny stammered. Unable to speak his request, he asked for a piece of paper and wrote it down. He worked for the Tigers and was on a mission for a famous ballplayer. He needed a big box of condoms. The pharmacist chuckled and said, “You’re kidding, aren’t you?” Danny said he wasn’t, and then had the presence of mind to suggest that the man call his boss in the visitors’ clubhouse at Briggs Stadium, “Fat Frank,” who could verify the assignment. The pharmacist made the call, Fat Frank vouched for his batboy, and Danny got his rubbers.
Returning to the clubhouse, Dillman, who would go on to get his PhD in geography and become a university professor, a job he held for forty-four years, proudly placed the chocolates and condoms at the top of Williams’s locker, along with an envelope. Ted eventually ambled over, held up the envelope, and shouted, “Hey, kid, what the hell is this?”
“I put the change there from the thirty-five dollars you gave me,” said Danny.
“Well, I’ll be goddamned. This is the only fuckin’ time I ever got money back from an errand. People usually keep what’s left as a tip.”
“Mr. Williams, we want this to be the best visitors’ clubhouse in the American League.”
“Well, it sure as shit is, kid. You keep the money for yourself.” It was $6.50, more than two days’ pay for Danny.
His romantic plans on track, Williams could return to his pregame routine: rubbing his bats on a soup bone to remove any dirt or resin accumulated from the previous game and weighing them on special scales to confirm they were his preferred weight. Then, wearing only his jockstrap, a sweatshirt, and shower clogs, Ted would stand in front of a full-length mirror and begin swinging a bat.
“My name is Ted Fuckin’ Williams and I’m the greatest hitter in baseball,” he’d say, then swing.19 “My name is Ted Fuckin’ Williams and I’m the greatest hitter in baseball,” he’d repeat, teeth clenched, and swing again. He would continue this swing-and-proclaim routine for several minutes, interrupting it only occasionally to offer a lecture on the finer points of hitting to anyone who cared to listen.
“That was his mantra,” says Dillman. “He did that before every game.… He was psyching himself up. He wasn’t quite as confident as he appeared.”20
But Ted did not lack confidence with women. If Baseball Annies, starlets, models, and assorted others fell into his orbit because of his celebrity, plenty of other women came on to him merely because they thought he was good-looking, without having a clue that he was the Red Sox star, Williams confided to friends.
Ted had met Evelyn Turner on a National Airlines flight when she’d asked him to sign a baseball for her. “To Ev, a sweet chick, Ted Williams,” he wrote. From 1950 to 1954, Turner obsessively documented her affair with Ted, saving such commemorative shards as airline tickets to cities where they rendezvoused, hotel receipts, and ticket stubs from various American League ballparks.21 She inventoried some of the gifts she’d received from Ted, such as a gold wristwatch. There were snapshots she took of Ted, photos of them together, and a series of pictures of her striking sexually provocative poses. There was even a July 1951 shot of Williams in front of his house near Miami as well as one of his daughter Bobby-Jo, three years old at the time, holding two parrots. Doris was nowhere in evidence. Turner assembled all these mementos in an album, which she would decide to send to Bobby-Jo after Ted died. Evelyn even kept some of Ted’s clothes—such as shorts, boxers, shirts, and trousers—folded and boxed for fifty years. Ted wrote Turner thirty-nine letters during their time together, and she kept them for the rest of her life in a box marked PERSONAL, PRICELESS LETTERS FROM TSW, according to Joe Bastarache, a friend and neighbor of Turner’s in Blowing Rock, North Carolina, where she would retire in the 1980s.22 Bastarache, who became Turner’s guardian after she moved into a nursing home and then the executor of her estate when she died in 2004, said Evelyn told him she and Ted lived together in Miami for a while—apparently after Williams and Doris were formally separated in 1954. “They would go for rides in Miami in Ted’s Studebaker convertible,” said Bastarache. “Often they’d go to a drive-in, until Ted got recognized, and then they’d peel away. Ted seemed to enjoy this game.”23
Turner had a son, Albert Christiano, from a first marriage and would ultimately be married three more times. Recalled Christiano: “My mother was very much in love with Ted. She told me several times that he asked her to marry him, but she said no because of Ted�
��s priorities. She told him she’d marry him if he assured her she would be his number one priority. He said, ‘It’s baseball first, fishing second, and you third.’ She regretted till the day she died that she didn’t accept that offer and try to work her way up the priority list.”
Christiano said Evelyn told him she was responsible for Ted’s breakup with Doris Soule. “She wasn’t proud of it. But she also said it didn’t matter because he was going to leave his wife anyway.”24
In a meandering, sixty-six-page account of her time with Ted, much of it quoting from the letters he wrote her, Turner told of her role as an interlocutor between Ted and the doctor he was consulting with just before he was scheduled to take his final physical, which would decide if he’d be sent to Korea or not. “I was given the message to relay it to Ted,” Turner wrote in her manuscript.25 She told him his doctor, Russell Sullivan, chief orthopedic surgeon at Boston City Hospital, had contacted a sympathetic admiral in Baltimore who planned to put in a good word with a Marine commander. But the doctor insisted Ted submit to a medical examination to justify his claim, and in the end, Williams decided not to play this card. While he’d lost about a third of the bone that rotates in the socket of his left elbow following surgery, he’d built much of his strength back, he’d played all of the previous season with the elbow and been productive, and he was swatting the ball with authority in spring training. Basically, using the elbow as an excuse wouldn’t fly.
“When I passed the important information to him, he listened thoughtfully, but then and there, I knew his fierce pride would not allow him to take the necessary steps for dismissal from his duty,” Turner wrote. “As the future later proved for itself, Ted was 100 percent correct in his judgment. Had he followed through with the plan to excuse himself from duty, never would Ted have held his head so high or be able to face his loyal public with the same air of confidence as he now can.”
Accompanied by Yankees infielder Jerry Coleman, Ted appeared for his physical at the vast Naval Air Station Jacksonville on April 2 at 10:00 a.m. Coleman and Williams were the only two men examined at that time. A medical board consisting of a handful of officers headed by a Captain J. C. Early conducted the exam, which lasted two hours. Commander L. S. Sims, who assisted Early, was first out of the examination room. “Both boys are in,” Sims said to six reporters waiting outside. Sims watched with amusement as two of the reporters collided and nearly knocked each other down as they raced for a phone in the lobby nearby to spread the news. He suggested they wait just to be sure, because the X-rays of Williams’s elbow hadn’t been developed yet.
That seemed a mere formality. Soon Captain Early appeared with the ballplayers in tow. “Meet Captain Coleman and Captain Williams, boys,” Early said, adding that X-rays and an examination of Ted’s elbow had shown “no significant limitations.” Both players seemed resigned to the decision. “Well, I’m back in the Marines,” said Ted. “I’ll try to be a good one. After that, who knows?”26
Williams’s orders were to report on May 2 to the Marine Air Reserve Training Command at Willow Grove, Pennsylvania, for a four-week refresher course and then go to Marine Corps Air Station Cherry Point, in Havelock, North Carolina. Before then, on April 30, the Red Sox staged “Ted Williams Day” to commemorate what was to be their star’s last game of the season and—who knew?—perhaps of his career. Just under twenty-five thousand fans turned out on a sunny and warm Wednesday afternoon to say their good-byes to Ted, who before the game was feted with an assortment of gifts ranging from a new Cadillac donated by a handful of friends to hundreds of “memory books” containing the signatures of some 430,000 admirers, which had been collected by the Herald and Traveler newspapers. Though it was not announced, the Red Sox also moved to mitigate the sting of his recall by paying Ted’s full $85,000 salary for 1952.
There were tributes from Massachusetts governor Paul Dever, Boston mayor John Hynes, and other dignitaries as Williams listened, head down, hands clasped behind his back, nervously pawing the ground with his left foot. When emcee Curt Gowdy gave him the microphone, Ted said: “I’ve always believed that one of the finest things that could happen to any ballplayer was to have a day for him, and my being so honored today with such little advance fanfare makes me feel humbly honored. Little did I realize in 1938 that I was joining such a wonderful organization and that I was to be with so grand an owner. I wish I could remain all summer for I feel sure the Sox will surprise a lot of people. I do hope you fans stick with them. This is a day I’ll remember as long as I live, and I want to thank you from the bottom of my heart.”27
As the crowd roared and Williams bathed in the cheers, a friend standing just behind him, Herald sports editor Ed Costello, whispered to him: “Tip your hat.” Ted yanked his hat from his back pocket and held it aloft, first to the right-field grandstand. The fans cheered louder still. Then he turned to home plate and finally to left field. The Kid thought he was done, but Costello leaned in again and whispered: “Center field. Don’t forget center field.”
“Not those [expletives] too!” said Williams, laughing.28*
With that, the Red Sox and their opponents that day, the Detroit Tigers, joined hands. Williams was in the middle: on his left was Dominic DiMaggio; on his right was Private Fred Wolfe, an injured Korean War veteran confined to a wheelchair. Then the players and fans sang “Auld Lang Syne.”
Amid all the huzzahs for Ted, which included a resolution from the Massachusetts Senate praising him for being an “inspiration… to the youth of the country,” the only discordant note was struck by Dave Egan, who, after blasting the Marine Corps for recalling Williams, had reverted to form by castigating the Red Sox that very morning for hosting a day in honor of someone he considered ill-mannered and a terrible role model for kids.
If Ted was aware of the blast—and he almost certainly was, since he always paid close attention to Egan—it didn’t appear to bother him. Rather, he seemed to revel in the adulation that poured down on him. He was applauded for anything he did: running to his position in left field, catching a fly ball, running back to the dugout, coming out to the on-deck circle, singling his first time at bat off Virgil Trucks—even striking out in the third inning.
But in the bottom of the seventh, in what figured to be his final at bat that season—and possibly, many thought, his final at bat ever—Williams jolted the crowd past polite applause and into frenzy. With the game tied 3–3 and a man on base, Ted dug in against Dizzy Trout. He fouled off the first pitch. Then Trout snapped off a knee-high curve, and Williams drove the ball into the wind and six rows deep in the right-field grandstand.
“No crowd ever was paid off with a bigger thrill as Ted raced around the sacks,” wrote Arthur Sampson in the Herald. “When he ducked into the dugout to get away from the applause as quickly as possible, as is his custom, his teammates pounded him heartily in their elation.”29
There was no tip of the hat, as was also his custom. “I said I wouldn’t tip my cap right along,” Ted told the writers afterward, “and I had no intention of doing it. That’s the way I feel about it.” And how did this homer compare with the other thrills he’d had in his career? “Oh, it was a thrill,” Williams replied. “But it didn’t compare with the one I hit off Claude Passeau in the All Star game in Detroit in ’41. That will always stand as my top thrill in this game.” Still, his teammates were incredulous at the calling card he had left them. “He never said it out loud, but I’m sure he wanted to hit a home run before he went to Korea,” recalled Ken Wood, a utility outfielder on the Red Sox for part of 1952, who was at Fenway that day. “He did it. It was almost to say, ‘I’ll leave you with something to remember me by.’ ”30
That night, Ted threw a good-bye party for himself at Jimmy O’Keefe’s, the Boylston Street saloon he frequented, run by his pal Bill Greeley. Not a single teammate or anyone else from the Red Sox was invited—no big shots at all, in fact, which was how Williams liked it. The core group was the so-called Thirteen-Year-Olds, a ref
erence to eight Bostonians who had been close to Ted for the thirteen years he had been with the Red Sox, since his rookie year of 1939. Besides Greeley, this regular-guy crowd included theater manager John Buckley; state cop John Blake; former Red Sox batboy Freddy Stack, who by then was a fireman; Ted’s dentist, Dr. Sidney Isherwood; former Sheraton hotel bellhops Dave and Chick Hunter; and Johnny Benedetti, who had lived in the suite next to Williams’s in the old Canterbury Hotel. Also attending were Ted’s manager, Fred Corcoran, and Dr. Russell Sullivan, his medical confidant on the Korean call-up. “There isn’t a soul here who hasn’t helped me appreciate the friendliness of Bostonians,” Ted remarked to George Carens, a trusted Traveler writer whom Williams had allowed in to chronicle the evening.31
The next morning, Ted set out for the Naval Air Station in Willow Grove, Pennsylvania, outside Philadelphia, where he would begin his training on the SNJ fighter plane. Ted hitched a ride with Raymond Sisk, the Boston friend he had served with in World War II at Chapel Hill, Bunker Hill, and Pensacola. Sisk had also been recalled for Korea duty.
They arrived at Willow Grove that evening, and all looked quiet. Remembered Sisk, “Ted said, ‘Just drive by at first. These Philadelphia reporters are the worst in the world.’ On the first pass there was no one in sight. Then they came out of the woodwork. By the time we got back, there were ten or twelve all of a sudden, coming up and taking pictures. The colonel came out and said Ted had to check in, then they could sit down and talk to him.”32
“I hope very much that I can play when I get out,” Ted later told the writers. “I’m going to do the best I can. This is a really wonderful looking base. The best I’ve ever seen.” The next day, the Marines could not resist staging a photo op. They had Williams stand next to the old recruiting poster he’d put out for the Corps that featured his photo and the message “Ask the man who was one!” A smiling Ted was shown changing “was” to “is.”
The Kid: The Immortal Life of Ted Williams Page 45
