The Kid: The Immortal Life of Ted Williams

by Ben Bradlee Jr.

  Arthur D’Angelo, who had the Somerset Hotel laundry account, visited Ted’s room so often he wouldn’t always knock. Once or twice he interrupted while the Kid was busy with a woman. “They’d get covered up, and Ted would say, ‘You son of a bitch, you could have knocked at the door,” D’Angelo recalled, laughing. “He wasn’t too upset about it. I think I knew his personal life better than most. Some of the women he was with were homely. Later I’d kid him and say, ‘Hey, Ted, look at DiMaggio. He has Marilyn and gets the cream of the crop. How come you got dogs?’ He’d laugh and say, ‘A hole is a hole.’ ” Others were struck by the harshness of his language. “He would talk about women in awful ways,” said Jonathan Gallen, who worked closely with Ted in the memorabilia business in the early 1990s. “Everyone was a ‘fuckin’ cunt,’ or a ‘fuckin’ bitch.’… He’d talk about women in ways I’d never heard before.”30

  Friends and family members linked Williams’s misogyny to his mother, a classic case of transference: the deep resentment that Ted harbored toward his mother for tending to the poor of San Diego at the expense of him and his brother was deflected onto women he met, and it colored his relationships with them.

  Claudia called her father’s resentment of his mother “the seed that grew to be the disrespect Dad had for women.” There was also frustration, she said, that Williams couldn’t always control the dynamic with women. “He couldn’t control his mother. She was never around. He couldn’t control a woman. ‘They’re good for nothin’.’ ”

  Added cousin Manuel Herrera, Sal’s brother: “Ted had vicious hate for women because of his mother.31 He had no patience for anything. When I visited him in eighty-nine or ninety, he said, ‘My father should have got the medal of honor for putting up with that son of a bitch.’ ”

  Bobby-Jo thought her father grew angrier with women as successive relationships failed and as marriages kept ending in divorce. “After his last divorce, he was angry for a good couple of years,” she said. “Real down on women. Boy, he could be laughing, watching TV, or watching a game, and it hit him in his head, and he’d go off.”

  At the same time, he couldn’t do without the opposite sex. He was keenly aware of the effect of his celebrity on women, which, combined with his looks, seemed to give him carte blanche to have whomever he wished whenever he wanted, and he reveled in asserting this power. He would be in a restaurant and notice a nice-looking waitress. He’d get up, and as she approached he’d put his hand on the wall so she couldn’t pass by. Then he’d stand there talking to her for ten minutes while the trapped woman was pinned against the wall. “He was addicted to women,” said Bobby-Jo. “I think it’s absolutely amazing—you would never wish superstardom on anyone that you really cared about, because something happens to you. My dad was as handsome as they come, he really was, and he had an air about him that—it was just an air. And maybe it was because he was such a big guy and he carried himself like somebody. He’d walk in and everybody’d just go—it was like they’d drop their box off the cart.”

  Even when he was married, Ted preferred to leave his wife at home whenever he went out, the better to preserve his options. “He wanted other women to think he was available,” said Claudia. “It was more exciting that way. Are you kidding? You got the little wifey next to you, it’s, like, ‘I gotta behave.’ ”

  Williams would milk his iconic status as leverage for flirtations or propositions well into retirement. Maureen Cronin, Joe Cronin’s daughter, who always had a crush on Ted, tells of the time in the ’70s when the Kid attended a Red Sox luncheon. An elegant matron of a certain age from upscale Wellesley, west of Boston, approached him and asked him to sign a baseball. “Ted Williams, room 305,” the Kid wrote.32

  At Old-Timers’ Days at Fenway Park, the bobby-soxers who had screamed for Ted back in the day would return and come down close to the field, still starry-eyed, yoo-hooing number 9. There would be women waiting on the charity circuit, too. Once, in the ’80s, he attended a golf tournament to benefit the Jimmy Fund out in Springfield, in western Massachusetts. The tournament was being played on several courses, and at one point Ted asked to go to the course where the ladies were playing. His host was Jim Vinick, a pal from Springfield who had acquired Ted’s film rights in hopes of doing a movie on his life. They roamed the course in a golf cart. “We stop at all the different foursomes, and he’s hugging the women and kissing them, and ‘Thank you for coming to the Jimmy Fund, we’re gonna raise a lot of money this year,’ and on and on,” said Vinick. “He was in his glory. He was very cordial and just loved the adoration.” Then all of a sudden, Williams said, “Uh-oh.” “What’s the matter?” said Vinick. Said Ted: “See that fat little old lady with the white hair over there? Let’s get the hell outta here. Every time I come north she finds me.” Vinick asked where she was from. Ted anxiously replied that she’d probably come from “the Somerset Hotel, for Chrissakes! Let’s get outta here. She’s there with her son. That could be my son!” Williams added, “You’re with them once and they think they own you forever.”33

  At times it could seem like all Ted was interested in was getting his share. Recalled Red Sox outfielder Jimmy Piersall, “One time we were playing in a mostly empty stadium, but there was this one pretty lady sitting in the upper deck that we were both looking at, and Ted dropped a fly ball. I gave him shit, and he said to me, ‘C’mon, Jim, I lost it in the moon.’ Bullshit: he lost it in the broad in the upper deck.”34

  For all his amorous adventures, Williams was keenly aware of his shortcomings when it came to sustaining a successful relationship. He would always refer to himself as “a three-time loser” in marriage. While he was disappointed by his daughter Bobby-Jo in many ways, he admired the longevity of her marriage to her second husband, Mark Ferrell. On a visit once in the late ’90s, Ted asked Mark how long they had been married. Mark said twenty-six years.

  “Jesus!” said Ted. “That’s a long time. What’s the secret of staying together that many years?”

  “You give and take, you love each other,” Mark said.

  The next morning at breakfast, Williams told Mark and Bobby-Jo wistfully: “I thought about you guys all night. What the hell is the secret?” So they went through it again. “ ‘Give and take, compromise. You stay truthful to one woman,’ I should have said, but I didn’t,” Mark noted.35

  The eight years between 1953, when Williams returned from Korea, and his second marriage, in 1961, were filled with romantic belt-notching, intrigue, and fulfillment—so much so that he felt vindicated in his decision to brush off Louise Kaufman. First, there was still a lot of catting around to do, but second, he had significant relationships with three women during this period—two of whom, Nelva More and Isabel Gilmore, he would propose to. The third, Nancy Barnard, Ted ardently pursued but could never land. She would be a mysterious woman in his life, one who got away—one who rejected him at a time when others flocked to him constantly. Yet all three women carried tender memories of Ted with them and would stay in touch with him and care for him for the rest of his life.

  Nelva More was a stunning brunette whom Williams met not long after his return from Korea. A mutual friend had introduced Ted to Nelva, a model and fledgling actress, on August 30, 1953, in Cleveland, following a Red Sox–Indians game.

  Nelva, who was then twenty-two, had been born and raised in Greensboro, North Carolina. She left home suddenly after she was raped and everybody seemed to know about it. She went to South Carolina and started working as a carhop. A dress designer spotted her and asked if she wanted to model in Miami. After a stint there, she graduated to New York, modeling clothes and suits in the garment district, then she did runway work. She got a role in The Fifth Season, a Broadway play about the fashion business. Then came small movie roles, including one with Henry Fonda in Stage Struck. On television, she appeared with Jackie Gleason and the June Taylor Dancers.

  Nelva had been in Cleveland on a modeling job when a friend who knew Williams invited her to come with him
to the game and meet Ted. She said she knew nothing about baseball but went along anyway. She met Williams after the game, and they talked for a while. “I thought he was a rugged diamond in the rough,” Nelva recalled. “Not the kind of person I was looking for. I like men who like to dress elegantly. Not Teddy.” But there was a spark. “Ted and I just liked the way we looked at each other, I guess, or I probably gave him a kind of look that [made him decide] to call me back.”

  They decided to meet again a week later in Philadelphia, where the Red Sox were scheduled to play the Athletics and where Nelva had a modeling date. They ordered room service at the Warwick Hotel for dinner, made plans to meet again in New York, and the romance was on. Nelva was married but separated from her Brazilian husband when she began her relationship with Williams. Before long she called and told her husband she wouldn’t be returning to Brazil.

  Instead she came to Boston to spend a week with Williams. The suite at the Somerset was modest, she thought. “It was about what you’d expect Teddy to have,” she said. “It wasn’t the Plaza or the Waldorf.” Williams wanted her at Fenway Park every day she was there. Sometimes she’d arrive late, and that irritated Ted. “You always arrive late and come sashaying in and want everyone to notice you,” he told her. “I wait until after you a hit a home run,” Nelva replied. “You don’t seem to hit one when I’m there.”

  Still, she was thrilled to watch him: “Everyone around probably knew I was with Teddy, but no one stared at me. It was just like I was at any ball game, but as he was going into the dugout he’d give me a smile. I felt kind of proud because I was with him. All the people would lust to get an autograph or photograph. Women were always coming up to him in the hotel lobby or at the ball games. They’d be hollering silly things like women do sometimes. Throwing notes down to the dugout. I think he liked for people to see that he had one on his arm. Or he liked for people to know he could have them.”

  At the end of the season, Ted invited Nelva down to Islamorada and, inevitably, they ran into Louise. They were at a restaurant, and Kaufman came right over and sat on Ted’s lap—and just stayed there, Nelva be damned: “I got upset because he didn’t tell her to leave,” Nelva said. “He seemed to be enjoying it.”

  Travel to road games meant Williams and More couldn’t spend much extended time together, but they stayed in close touch by phone. “We’d talk on the phone just about every day,” Nelva said. “I might call him or he might call me. Mostly he’d call me.” Nelva found conversation easy. Neither wanted to discuss their families or childhoods, because those were unhappy times for them both. Instead they talked about their likes and dislikes and what they wanted to accomplish in the future, not what happened in the past. (Doris was a no-go area. Ted didn’t even tell Nelva about the divorce until it was official.) Williams also took her fishing. Once, off Montauk, at the tip of Long Island, Nelva caught a fish and was straining to bring it in. Ted said, “Aw, Nelva, that’s just a little snapper. Hell, you’re working it like it weighs a ton. It’s just a little fish.” So she gave him the rod, and he jerked it once, and it turned out there was a mud shark on the line with the other fish. “Teddy was such a perfectionist in what he chose to do. I had all kinds of his fishing gear. He showed me how to do everything. But once he showed you he expected you to have it and pay attention. If you did not, he said, ‘Forget it; you’re not going to make it if you can’t even pay attention.’ ”

  Ted usually insisted they stay in rather than go out to a restaurant, where his presence would cause a scene, but Nelva thought he secretly liked the attention he got at restaurants. “You’re not the greatest if you’re not getting the attention,” she said. “He wanted to be private, but he couldn’t be. It came with the territory. He wanted to have his cake and eat it, too.”

  Nelva would stand up to Ted when she thought he was wrong, and his reactions lacked the volcanic quality other women (and men) had encountered after confronting him. She was at Fenway Park once when he spat at the fans after they got on him. She asked why he did that and told him it was stupid.

  “I got tired of them booing me,” Williams said. “I thought, ‘Who needs them?’ ”

  “You do,” Nelva replied.

  They had an understanding that they could date other people, but as Nelva understood the deal, it meant that they couldn’t be intimate with anyone else. She said Ted couldn’t hold to that. When she called him at the Somerset, sometimes she could hear a female voice in the background. “I’d confront him, but he’d just laugh and say, ‘Well, do you not go out with anyone while you’re in New York?’ I said, ‘Yes, but not in my apartment.’ I couldn’t be that stubborn about it. I didn’t want to take a chance on losing him.”*

  When the Red Sox were on the road, Nelva once told Ted that she supposed he was like a sailor, with a girl in every port. Ted said she could go on the road with him anytime. “He did not say he didn’t have a girl in every port,” she noted.

  Still, such dalliances notwithstanding, Williams was enamored enough with Nelva to keep coming back to her. In January of 1957, he called her in New York before he left Islamorada for Boston and, in his own way, proposed.

  “Why don’t you meet me in Boston and we’ll talk about something more serious?” Ted said.

  “Like what?” Nelva wondered.

  “How would you like to get married?”

  That was the proposal.

  At the time, More was sharing an apartment in New York with her stepmother, who had heard Nelva’s end of the conversation, concluded that a marriage was imminent, and promptly alerted the New York gossip columns.

  The next night, Ted called Nelva and couldn’t reach her. He kept calling and calling, assuming the worst, that she was out with another man. Actually, she was at the Brazilian consulate for a party and after that had gone out for breakfast. “He thought I was with someone else. He was very jealous. When he finally reached me, he said, ‘Who the hell were you sleeping with last night?’ ”

  She promptly hung up on him. He called back, cursed some more, and again she hung up. If he knew that news of their plans to marry had made the papers, he didn’t mention it.

  When Ted arrived in Boston, the reporters were waiting at the airport to ask about news of the nuptials. Williams replied that while Nelva was a nice girl, he wasn’t going to marry her because he’d “had it” with marriage. He then spelled it out: H-A-D I-T. Wounded by Ted’s quote, Nelva struck back when called by a reporter for a response. “I said he wasn’t really my type, wore baggy pants, and I didn’t like his mannerisms,” she said.

  They tried to hash things out. Ted finally accepted her explanation about simply going to the party and then breakfast. He said he hadn’t meant the “had it” quote to be as harsh as it appeared—he just didn’t have her explanation at that point. But when Ted told More she’d have to give up her job if they were going to get married, Nelva replied that she wasn’t ready to do that.

  For Williams, that was enough. “I never saw him again,” said Nelva. “I had every desire to go up there and be with him, but I knew it wouldn’t work out.”

  Four years later, on the night before Ted was to be married to another woman, he called Nelva to tell her the news. “I wished him all the luck in the world. He said we had some great times. I felt a little pang. I really cared for him. Some people you just don’t get over.”36

  Nancy Barnard met Williams in Sarasota during spring training of 1956. She had just turned twenty-five. She was a Tufts University graduate with a geology degree who had a job in Boston advising investment bankers on where oil might be found. “Famous people were brought into my office,” she said. “I had maps all over the wall with pins on them, and people thought I was a curiosity.”

  Nancy was attractive—five foot five, with blue eyes and dark hair cut in a pageboy. She loved baseball and had had a box seat at Fenway behind the Red Sox dugout since 1953. (In those days, the box seats behind the dugout were metal folding chairs arranged seven seats across
to form a row.) One day in Sarasota, Nancy and a guy she knew from Boston who had a seat near hers at Fenway were chatting in their front-row box at Payne Park when Ted wandered over. All business, he didn’t say hello. He looked at Nancy.

  “You have a roster card?” he asked her.

  “Yes,” Nancy replied.

  “Can I see it?”

  “Yes.”

  Williams took it and wrote the name of his motel, his bungalow number, and “7:30.”

  As it happened, Nancy was staying at the same motel, in a modest room above the office. But she was taken aback by his bold overture. “I did not follow up,” she said. “I don’t automatically wander over to men’s bungalows.” Nevertheless, she saw him around the motel and at the pool. Ted at one end, Nancy at the other. They never spoke. Nothing happened.

  The last day Nancy was there she went into a drugstore in town that had a soda fountain. Ted was there having breakfast. He came up and asked her out to dinner. Nancy said she was sorry, but she was flying back to Boston that afternoon. Ted said he’d call her when he returned.

  About three weeks later, at a regular-season game in Fenway, an usher behind the dugout came up to Nancy and said, “The Man wants your phone number.”

  “Oh, yeah?” she replied, in a tone that suggested he was fresh to have asked, but that she would be happy to comply. She gave the usher both her home and work numbers. A few days later Ted called her office. When the switchboard operator put him through, Ted didn’t say who he was, but she of course recognized his voice.

  He asked what she did, and she told him. They spoke for about a half hour, mostly about what exactly a petroleum geologist did. Ted didn’t ask her out exactly, but hinted at it. “See ya at the park,” he said. “Over the top of the dugout.”

  There were more telephone calls, notes back and forth from the clubhouse—where would Nancy be at such and such a time? Innocuous stuff, and unproductive. Several attempts at getting together failed for one reason or another.