The Kid: The Immortal Life of Ted Williams

by Ben Bradlee Jr.

  Ted flew to Chicago for the announcement, two days after Christmas. The deal was for five years at $125,000 a year, but that was just a base figure; Williams also got a percentage of anything sold with his name on it, according to Ted Rogowski, a lawyer who represented him on the Sears deal. And while Ted would be required to drop his association with Wilson, a competitor, he could keep his fishing-tackle business.

  A few weeks after the deal was announced, Williams called Karl Smith to thank him for giving him the Sears idea.

  “It’s the biggest robbery since Brink’s,” crowed Smith. “It means you’re gonna go hunting and fishing anywhere you want to and Sears will pick up the tab for it.”

  Ted laughed and said, “You’ve always been a wise son of a bitch.”6

  The deal was a coup for Williams. It paid well and linked him to a major company and the recreational sports that he so enjoyed. Moreover, he wouldn’t have to work that hard: all told, the time required of him would not be more than two months a year.

  Ted enjoyed the interaction with members of his “sports advisory staff,” all of whom were leading lights in their fields. Sears was then at the forefront of an effort by the merchandise sector to recruit celebrities as endorsers of its products, and Williams was the company’s celebrity in chief. Under him were about a dozen active or former “sportsmen,” including Sir Edmund Hillary, the New Zealander who in 1953 had become the first to scale Mount Everest; Bob Mathias, the Olympic decathlon winner in 1948 and 1952; basketball’s Jack Twyman, then captain of the Cincinnati Royals; and, later, pro tennis star Butch Buchholz.

  Sears quickly became the biggest buyer of Ted Williams, Inc., gear and launched an aggressive advertising campaign that was the first of its kind. It featured two-page layouts in Life, Look, and other magazines that showed the Kid, dressed in a white jacket, dark tie, and dark slacks, standing in front of Sir Edmund and the others. The ad copy said that Sears had signed Ted as a “playing manager” who would “add a cold, professional viewpoint on the quality of every piece of Sears sports equipment before it gets into the Sears catalog or any one of the… Sears department stores.”*

  Williams and his advisory group gathered at least twice a year; they met with manufacturers to discuss equipment (Ted might recommend putting stronger wheels on a camp trailer, lighter soles on hunting boots, or softer leather on baseball gloves to improve their feel) and visited new Sears stores when they opened. On those occasions, Ted would put on fly-casting demonstrations, setting up garbage cans in a parking lot and dropping a line into them from two hundred feet away.

  “We were not just endorsees; we had to test and be satisfied and proud of the products, and Ted was very much the leader of that philosophy,” said Buchholz, who joined the group in the early ’70s. “Ted was a very strong individual. He led by example, and if he didn’t like something, boy, he made sure the manufacturer would fix it. I saw him break fishing poles over his knee if they weren’t good enough.”7

  The advisory group was filled with type A personalities who liked to hold forth on the intricacies of their sports, and they each commanded attention. Jack Twyman and Williams hit it off particularly well. Williams nicknamed the six-foot-six-inch basketball star the Glandular Case, and Twyman called Ted the Swollen Splinter. Besides Williams, Twyman was struck by Hillary. “Sir Edmund Hillary: he was a tiger.… Just imagine climbing Everest like he did! He was the toughest man I have ever seen; I wouldn’t tangle with him.” Twyman recalled that Williams would grab a fork during dinner, simulate a bat, and talk for hours about the art of hitting. “There was no one that studied it like him or could articulate it like him,” and he would brook no challenges. “ ‘You don’t know anything about it,’ he’d say.”8

  Ted was just as expert at fishing. He would analyze the butt of the rod for strength, the middle for flex, and the tip for feel. His boss at Sears, Carl Lind, recalled that at a sporting goods show in Houston, a buyer introduced Ted to a group from Daiwa Seiko, the Japanese fishing-tackle manufacturer. “Ted became the center of attention when he began to dissect their reels down to the last screw, showing them how to reconfigure the parts to improve their function,” Lind said. “It was a sight to see three Japanese engineers furiously taking notes. They got a free fishing lesson that day from the master.” When Lind introduced his boss to Ted, the man excitedly volunteered that he had just bought a new fishing pole. “We only deal with rods in this business,” Williams informed the executive curtly. “Poles are for catfishing.”

  Ted was also involved with a Sears division that made fishing boats, motors, and marine safety equipment. One key corporate goal, Lind said, was to produce an unsinkable boat. Their designers used plastic to shape the hull and deck and poured expandable foam in between. Williams was chosen to be the centerpiece of a TV ad campaign for the boat and was shown drilling a hole through the bottom, but the boat sailed on. Then, in the climax, he sawed the boat in half, and still half of it kept planing along. “This was a merchandising utopia,” Lind wrote in a short reflection on his time with Ted.

  To promote the boat and its other products, Sears invited a group of writers from various outdoor magazines, like Field & Stream, Outdoor Life, and Sports Afield, to come to its test base at Fort Myers Beach, Florida. One of the writers asked Williams: “Did you really saw that boat in half in the TV commercial and still ride in it without sinking?”

  “Hell, yes!” said Ted. Then he pointed to the manager of the test base. “Get me the half boat we used in the commercial. I’ll show them.” The manager retrieved it from storage, attached a motor, and took it to the dock. Ted hopped in, fired up the engine, sat well back in the stern to ensure the craft would plane, and off he went—just as he did in the commercial. But as he made his way out into the Gulf, Ted inched forward, curious to find the tipping point where the boat would no longer plane. He went an inch too far, and suddenly the boat capsized, and Williams was hurled into the ocean. Fearing his star attraction might drown in full view of the outdoor press, Lind dispatched a motorboat to the rescue, and Ted was fished out. When he docked, he emerged laughing, as if he’d thoroughly enjoyed the entire spectacle.

  Williams also made his presence felt in hunting. Once, on a trip to Arkansas to visit the factory that manufactured Daisy BB guns, carried by Sears, Ted watched a demonstration of point shooting, in which a rifle is fired from the hip as opposed to the shoulder. He then tried firing at a series of objects such as coins, keys, and buttons that were dangling from a line tied between two trees. “From about 20 feet away, it was remarkable, after a few trials, how many of those objects Ted was able to hit,” Lind wrote.9 On another outing in Illinois, a skeet-shooting competition was arranged between Williams and decathloner Mathias. Each shot a perfect twenty-five for twenty-five.

  As Ted established himself with Chicago-based Sears, he was also spending more time there courting Lee Howard. During one of Ted’s visits, when Lee had to cut the evening short to relieve her parents, who had been babysitting her children, he suddenly proposed. Actually, it was more of a directive, she recalled: “I told him I had to leave. He said, ‘This is ridiculous. We’re getting married!’ He didn’t ask me. He told me. I thought it was great. I kind of liked it that he didn’t ask.”

  Ted made it clear he didn’t want to have any more kids. “No, he did not want children. It didn’t matter to me. I had mine, so I didn’t care if we had any more children. I didn’t try to push that at all.”

  Ted told her a little about his childhood, but not much. “He would just grit his teeth and clench his jaw over the fact that he used to have to stand around on corners with his mother and collect money. That really, really bothered him. I suppose it was embarrassment.”

  May Williams died on August 27, 1961, in a Santa Barbara nursing home at the age of seventy. Ted flew out and took charge of the arrangements. Bobby-Jo, who by then was thirteen, called her father to say she was sorry that May had died. Her mother had instructed her to call him and express
her condolences, but he seemed uninterested. She’d never met her grandmother. There was a simple graveside service conducted by the Salvation Army.

  Ted and Lee got married less than a month later, on September 19, in Cambridge, outside Boston. Ted was forty-three, Lee thirty-eight. Ted wanted absolute secrecy, so his old pal John Buckley, who ran a movie theater in Cambridge by then and was well connected at city hall, had a friend—an assistant court clerk who was also a justice of the peace—marry the couple in his office at the courthouse.

  The ceremony lasted ten minutes. “It was the second wedding for both of us,” said Lee. “We wanted something low-key, and of course Ted wanted no publicity, if he could help it.” Williams was dressed in a cream-colored sport shirt, a blue checked sport jacket, blue slacks, and white buckskin shoes. Lee wore an understated but elegant cream-colored dress. In the wedding paperwork, Ted listed his occupation as “public relations.”

  The couple was forced to scrap plans to honeymoon in Bermuda because of Hurricane Esther, which was then raging up the Atlantic, so after a celebratory dinner with the Buckleys at the Carriage House in nearby Lexington, Ted and Lee got in a car and drove north to Maine, on their way to Canada, where Williams had bought some land along the Miramichi River in New Brunswick and planned to build a cabin. The river was known for having some of the best Atlantic salmon fishing in the world.

  Lee, the Chicago fashion flower, was no outdoorswoman, but Ted set out to make her one. Though she’d barely fished a day in her life, it wasn’t long before Williams had her decked out in rubber hip boots in the pools of the Miramichi, on the prowl for salmon. When she didn’t perform to Ted’s liking in that first test, he assigned her a task for which he deemed her more suitable: picking out furniture for the new cabin. “It was very nice furniture, very tasteful for a cabin,” she remembered, but it was too luxe for Ted. “He said, ‘Jesus Christ, you’d think you’re trying to furnish a penthouse on Fifth Avenue!’ ”

  Soon there were more fishing trials. When they went to Islamorada for the winter, Ted was up at 5:30 each morning and would wake Lee with a mock reveille, sung through his fist over his mouth. “Rise and shine!” He’d insist she go out on the boat with him and adhere to a strict protocol. “He would take you out on that boat for nine hours at a crack, and he didn’t want you to sit, you had to stand up—something about the fish making a fool of you, don’t ask me, I have no idea. One day I was complaining about having to stand, and he is saying, ‘Stand up! Get up!’ whenever I’d sit. So I’m facing out the back of the boat and I’m holding a rod and I heard a splash and I say to myself, ‘Oh, gosh, he’s got a big one,’ and I turned around and he’d fallen overboard. I just roared with laughter. He wasn’t too happy with me.”

  Williams had a workshop in the back of the house where he would spend hours tying extremely intricate flies. “He’d have me out there and try to teach me,” Lee said. “He was very good at it. It’s difficult, very difficult. I didn’t find it too exciting, though.”

  She liked golf better, and sometimes they would go over to the Cheeca Lodge, an Islamorada resort, where there was a course. “That’s where he used to throw the clubs whenever he hit a bad shot,” she said with a chuckle. “He would get so violent with the temper when he played golf. At one point I had him taking calcium pills. It was supposed to calm him down, but it didn’t work. Now, if they had had Prozac at that time, that’s what the man should have been on.”

  Lee also had to adjust, in Islamorada, to the presence of Ted’s old flame Louise Kaufman, who lived just a few doors down from the new house Williams had moved into after the hurricane destroyed his old one. Louise had been devastated when Ted informed her that he was marrying Lee—after all, Louise had left her husband, with whom she’d had four children, on the hope that she would eventually marry Ted. Louise warned Ted that Lee would just get pregnant and take all his money.

  Lee, in turn, teased her husband about his attraction to the older Louise. “I used to kid him and say, ‘Do you have a mother fixation or something?’ ” she said, laughing. She was less amused after she caught Louise prowling in the bushes outside at night, trying to peek in their bathroom window. She told Ted, who just shrugged it off, bemused.

  Ted was fully aware how different Lee and Louise were. Just before they married, he had invited Lee to join him at the summer baseball camp for kids he had started in 1958 in Lakeville, Massachusetts, a rural community about forty miles south of Boston promoted with typical chamber of commerce gusto as the “gateway to Cape Cod.” One evening Ted was holding forth to his pupils under a tall oak tree. Lee remembered: “I walked out there and Ted said, ‘Listen to what I am going to ask you now, fellas.’ I was standing right there. ‘If you had two gals, one that loves you just for yourself and the other one that loves you but wanted parties and mink coats, which one would you choose?’ And I spoke up and said, ‘The smart one!’ He was talking about Lou Kaufman as the other one. He was saying that that’s what I wanted, parties and the mink coat, but the other one just loved him for himself.” Lee convinced herself that Ted had been kidding—after all, it had been he who’d bought her a $5,000 mink coat in Chicago after the wedding. He insisted, so she took him to a furrier she knew from her modeling days. “He wanted everyone to know he’d bought me a mink coat. I wasn’t asking for one.” And it was Ted who wanted her to have all the jewelry she needed, ordering a Boston jeweler he knew to send a selection of pieces for her to inspect down in Islamorada. “He had them send a bunch of bracelets, gold bracelets, and a chain with a diamond, a pendant. I could pick out what I wanted.” Less glamorously, Ted also bought Lee a sewing machine and asked her if she’d make him some Bermuda shorts.

  Sometimes they would go for long walks in the evening and have good talks. Once, they discussed what would happen when they died. “It was one of those foolish things where he said, ‘I want to go first, and I don’t want to be here without you.’ And I said the same thing, blah, blah, blah. And that led to him saying that he wanted to be cremated.”

  When they were courting, Ted had been on his best behavior, and his temper hadn’t been an issue. She knew he swore like a trooper, and after they were married, in jest she had tried to get him to curb the habit by instituting a fining system. She put a jar on the table, and every time he uttered a four-letter word, he would have to put a dollar in the jar. But Ted was familiar with that exercise, and there would be ten dollars in the jar within the hour, so it was pointless.

  Still, the swearing seemed to mask a deeper anger that she hadn’t been aware of and that soon became troubling. “I always used to wonder how someone who had such talent and had been given so much could be so angry,” Howard said. “And I asked him that many times, and he wouldn’t answer.”

  After fishing, golfing, and walking, Lee ran out of things to do in the Keys, and she yearned for a taste of mainland civilization, so she would drive up to Coral Gables and go shopping. Williams wouldn’t want her to go and angrily accused her of sneaking around and flirting with other men. The nearly instant lurch into ferocity alarmed Lee. “It would just be nothing to set him off,” she recalled. “You never knew when it was going to happen. It was incredible.” One Thanksgiving, Lee had worked all day preparing the meal and announced that the turkey was ready. But when Ted opened the oven, he was enraged—the bird wasn’t nearly brown enough, he said. “I would say it was his childhood, but that couldn’t have made you that angry to all of a sudden just go berserk. He’d rip phones out of the wall at the house. He hated phones. He would throw phones and break them. I told him, ‘I am not calling the phone company anymore.’ I was embarrassed.”

  Williams’s temper could also flare when Bobby-Jo visited. In the summer of 1962, Ted, Lee, and Bobby-Jo were at Williams’s baseball camp. One evening there was a dinner for the camp counselors and other adult staff and their families. Bobby-Jo noticed that Ted was getting increasingly agitated because he felt people were not finishing the food on their plates. Willia
ms had such an aversion to wasting food that he had carved the words “It’s a sin to waste food” on a small tree planted inside the camp dining hall. Bobby-Jo wasn’t sure why Ted felt so strongly about this. Her husband, Mark Ferrell, thought it dated to his childhood, during the Depression, when sometimes he’d be home alone and there wasn’t enough food. Bobby-Jo remembered the time Ted had taken his friend John Buckley out for Chinese food. Buckley kept ordering one dish after another. “You’d better eat every bite of that,” Ted warned him. Then he said it again, more angrily. When Buckley added still another dish, Williams said, “You’d better eat every bite of that, you dirty son of a bitch!” Bobby-Jo and others had to help Buckley finish all the food to forestall another tirade from Ted. “We were, like, bloated,” she remembered.

  Now, at the camp, she could see her father doing another slow boil. Then he threw his napkin on the floor in disgust, something Bobby-Jo knew he sometimes did at the dinner table if something displeased him. Afterward, he expected that someone would pick up the napkin and somehow rectify the affront, so Bobby-Jo did what she knew he expected of her. When she gave the napkin back to her father, Williams suddenly spit a mouthful of food in her face.

  “I was absolutely and totally so mortified that I remember sitting there, and I did nothing for a few seconds,” Bobby-Jo said. “Then I hit the outside, running, and I ran and it was cool and I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t want anybody to see me. I got back to the car, and I’ll never forget this: one by one, and two by two, they started coming out to me. All the women. They were all at the car. And they said, ‘Your father didn’t mean that, but he wasn’t right.’ And you know, he never apologized.”