That year, 1961, Doris got married to an insurance salesman named Joe Tridico. Bobby-Jo thought he was nice enough, but Tridico hardly dared intrude on Ted’s discipline domain, even though Doris, burdened by her alcoholic haze, left Bobby-Jo unchecked.
“Poor Bobby-Jo—it was awful,” said Daria Stehle, a friend of Ted’s and Doris’s in the ’50s. “Doris let her do whatever she wanted. She wasn’t receptive to help. She just never stayed sober. There was no control. Then Bobby-Jo would go down to see her father, and he was very strict, and it was such a change for her. She couldn’t handle it.”2
Not long after Bobby-Jo got her driver’s license, Ted agreed to buy her a car, a surprising decision given his stated desire not to spoil her and his penchant to pinch pennies when it came to less extravagant items on his daughter’s wish list. Then, exploiting the vacuum left by Doris, Bobby-Jo took to tooling around in her new car, relishing a new sense of freedom and life as a sexually precocious teenager. She dropped out of high school, and in the summer of 1965 got pregnant at the age of seventeen. The father was a local boy she’d been hanging out with but didn’t feel a particularly close attachment to.
When Ted got the news from Doris, he—predictably—went ballistic. Bobby-Jo, who lived for her father’s approval, could not bear his scorn. She went into the bathroom at home and slashed both her wrists. Doris found her before it was too late.
Williams quickly decreed that the pregnancy would have to be aborted—no discussion was to be had, though neither Doris nor Bobby-Jo mounted any serious objections. A safe abortion was still hard to obtain in those days, but it was legal and relatively easy to arrange if the procedure could be done under the auspices of a psychiatrist, Ted learned.
“Ted called me up and said, ‘Can you help me?’ ” remembered his World War II and Korea Marine buddy Bill Churchman, from Philadelphia.3 “He explained to me that Bobby-Jo had attempted suicide. There was this institute here run by the University of Pennsylvania. This was not a penal offense. I hooked Ted up with a good friend of mine who was a psychiatrist, and they got her admitted. Ted had the impression that if he went to a Florida hospital, attempted suicide might be considered a criminal offense.”
Churchman met Bobby-Jo at the train station and took her to the Institute of the Pennsylvania Hospital, a noted psychiatric facility in Philadelphia that had treated Marilyn Monroe and Judy Garland, for what would end up being a convalescence and psychiatric evaluation of several months’ duration. She wore a sweater in the summer heat to try to cover up the scars, which extended from her wrists to her elbows, but Churchman couldn’t help noticing the wounds. She checked into a private room on the fifth floor and was placed on a suicide watch, under the care of Dr. Silas L. Warner, a specialist in personality disorders.
After a while, Bobby-Jo was allowed to come and go as she pleased, as long as she returned to the hospital at night. One evening, she and a young man who was also a patient at the institute went to a party on the Main Line. There she met eighteen-year-old Stephen Tomasco, the son of a truck driver for the Philadelphia Inquirer and the Philadelphia Daily News. Tomasco had graduated from high school earlier that year and was working at a local racetrack selling tip sheets.
Bobby-Jo homed in on Tomasco immediately. “She was a good-looking girl,” Steve remembered. “The way she carried herself, she was very friendly, easy to talk to. She showed within minutes of talking to her that she liked you. The night we met, she said real fast, ‘Why don’t we leave here?’ I said, ‘What about the fella you came with?’ She said, ‘He’s a screwball.’
“I was a virgin when I met her. One night when she was in the hospital, we took a ride to a park, and she said, ‘Come on, let’s do this.’ You know how a young guy is. I figured, what have I got to lose?”4
Bobby-Jo had quickly told Steve who her father was, and he’d been intrigued. He was a baseball fan, though not a rabid one. Over time, Steve noticed that she would reveal the Ted connection early on when they met new people, trying to build on his success.
Bobby-Jo also readily told Steve all about her abortion and slitting her wrists. “When I saw her wrists, that scared the hell out of me,” he said. “What a sight. She said she couldn’t deal with Ted’s reaction to her being pregnant.” But Steve liked that she was honest with him, and he started visiting her at the hospital regularly. “She got real serious, real fast. She’d been around the block before, and I hadn’t. We kind of fell in love real quick. We spent every day together. I was working, and I’d go and visit. We’d stay out all night, mostly in my car, and I’d take her back to the hospital at four or five in the morning, then go to work.”
When Ted came to Philadelphia to see Bobby-Jo, he would stay at the Warwick Hotel. Since he didn’t like to go to the hospital, Bobby-Jo would have Steve drive her to the hotel to see her father. Williams was primed to meet Steve because his daughter had announced that she wished to marry him, an idea that Ted was strongly against, given Bobby-Jo’s fragile condition. There was also the fact that she was not yet eighteen.
“Ted interviewed me, asked what I did, asked about my family,” Steve recalled. “But he didn’t flip out on us. He wasn’t loud, like I’ve seen him. He wasn’t mean. He was forthright. He said he thought it was a mistake, and he didn’t think we should do it. We spent the whole time in the hotel and ordered room service.”
Steve had problems convincing his parents, too. His mother, especially, was not wild about Bobby-Jo—or Barbara, as Steve usually called her. The mother thought Bobby-Jo had a sharp tongue and could be disrespectful. Finally, Steve’s parents gave their consent because he convinced them this was what he wanted to do. “I was just young and didn’t have any better sense,” he said now of his decision.
Bobby-Jo was released from the hospital in the late fall of 1965 and returned home to Florida, but with marriage now firmly in her mind, she found living with Doris increasingly untenable. Doris didn’t seem to care if her daughter got married or not. It was Ted whom Bobby-Jo had to convince, and eventually she did. As Steve put it: “She talked him into marriage, saying it wouldn’t be too horrible.”
That was a pretty low bar, but Williams became resigned to the idea and, in a phone call to his friend Bill Churchman to share the news, managed a pinch of gallows humor: “Here I entrust my daughter to you, and what do you do? You let her run off with a dago kid!” Ted said.5
Bobby-Jo returned to Philadelphia and moved in with Steve’s parents. In January of 1966, they went to Elkton, Maryland, on the north side of Chesapeake Bay. In the 1920s and ’30s, Elkton had been a marriage mecca for the Northeast, cranking out more than ten thousand newlyweds a year because it had no residency requirement or waiting period. Later, concerned that the town was developing too trashy an image, local officials mandated a forty-eight-hour waiting period.6
Steve and Bobby-Jo were married by a justice of the peace on January 17—eleven days before her eighteenth birthday. Since Bobby-Jo was still a minor, one of her parents (Doris did the chore) had to submit an affidavit giving consent. Steve was by then nineteen. Only his mother attended the ceremony.
To help make ends meet, Steve took a second job, slicing cold cuts behind the deli counter of a supermarket. Later, Doris invited twenty or thirty of her friends to a reception for the new couple down in Coral Gables. Ted wasn’t there.
After Doris’s reception, Steve and Bobby-Jo went to Islamorada for a few days to visit Ted. He still wasn’t happy about the marriage—as was apparent from his decision to attend neither the wedding nor Doris’s gathering—but he offered to get Steve a job at Sears. Eventually, Steve did go for an interview, and was offered a salesman position, but he decided not to take it, worried that he’d always be known as Ted Williams’s son-in-law.
Steve thought computers were the future and noticed an ad in the Sunday paper for a training course in computer programming. Before long, Ted was on the phone with the head of the training school trying to get the lowdown on the curriculum. He
agreed to pay the tuition for Steve to attend school full-time and to support him and Bobby-Jo in the interim. Steve graduated high in his class and got a job as a computer operator at Temple University. “My career has been very successful, but I feel indebted to Ted for getting me started,” Steve said.
From the moment he first met Steve, Ted insisted that a certain protocol be observed. “Ted said, ‘Steve, you can call me Mr. Williams. I think respect is in order.’ I didn’t argue with him. Even after we were married, I always called him Mr. Williams, and Barbara always called him Daddy. He had that piercing glance when he looked at you. Kind of tilted his head and stared right at you. It demanded your attention. It was, ‘I’m going to give you advice now, and here’s what you ought to do.’ ‘Just keep your eye on the ball,’ he’d say. ‘That’s what old Teddy Ballgame would do. Teddy Baseball.’ He talked about himself in the third person.”
Steve had a beard at the time, and Bobby-Jo smoked too much—a pack and a half of Kents a day. Williams wasn’t happy about either. He told Steve to lose the beard and advised his daughter to stop smoking.
“Ted was very threatening—a big guy,” said Steve. “His facial expressions and his loud voice were enough to get your attention. When he got angry, the only thing you could do was watch. One night in Islamorada, a space heater wasn’t pumping out enough heat, so he tore it apart. He went on a rampage, cursing it. It was mounted on a wall. He kicked it, tried to tear it out of the wall. He had a hair-trigger temper. When he went off, he’d get loud and animated very quickly. The arms, cursing, and facial expressions. That’s what scared a lot of people. He was always an angry guy.”
Steve had a front-row seat from which to observe the relationship between Ted and Bobby-Jo, and he reached several conclusions: that she was largely successful in manipulating her father financially, despite his nearly constant complaints that he was giving her too much money; that Bobby-Jo could never get enough of Ted’s time; that he wanted a son and wasn’t happy with her as a daughter; and that he felt she was a nuisance to him and not independent enough.
“I think early on, Barbara got into a habit that whenever she needed something, she got it from her father,” Steve said. “Barbara had a split personality. She was perfect in front of Ted, but different in front of everyone else.” She would spend hours on the phone and rack up hundreds of dollars in long-distance bills that Steve couldn’t begin to pay for. Bobby-Jo said Ted would. He’d pay for them. She’d run up a big credit card bill at Sears; Ted paid. She also maintained a virtual hotline to Ted’s Boston accountant, Paul Brophy, who oversaw a trust fund that Williams had created for his daughter. Brophy couldn’t make any disbursements at her request, of course, but Bobby-Jo often found him sympathetic to her cause, and he would occasionally persuade Ted to cut another check.
Ted had been very strict with Bobby-Jo when she was growing up, but he had hardly any time for her. He was always on the road. When he called her he’d ask about her weight and how she was doing in school. He wanted to be sure she was thin.
“Barbara never got enough of his time, and she resented that. She went along with the program of, ‘Yes, Daddy, no, Daddy.’ She probably wanted to hug him. She was always trying to gain his approval but never quite made the grade. When he called, she’d get really nervous and run for her cigarettes and her Diet Pepsis.”
Steve found his early life with Bobby-Jo difficult. First, she quickly became pregnant, which should have been a happy occasion, but she always seemed stressed-out. She hated to go to bed and hated to get up. She began abusing the Darvon she’d been prescribed by Dr. Warner at Pennsylvania Hospital. “I had to watch the bottle, because she’d think nothing of taking three or four pills at a time,” Steve said. “She overdosed at least two times and had to be hospitalized. She’d call me at work and want me to come home for lunch. If I couldn’t, she’d threaten to take a handful of pills unless I did. Once, I came home and found her unconscious, and I had to call the rescue squad.”
Bobby-Jo had inherited a temper, though in her case it led to depression as opposed to ferocity. She would do drugs; not care; not eat.
“I always found myself like an investigator with Barbara,” Steve explained, “probing, trying to find the truth. I used to spend countless hours questioning [her].” Much of the questioning concerned what he quickly came to discover was her promiscuity. “I counted seven or eight relationships she had when we were married,” Steve said. “It was obvious how she acted. Sometimes with my friends.”
He didn’t tell Ted about that, of course, and he found that Williams was of little assistance when it came to Bobby-Jo besides being a ready source of money. “Whenever we talked about Barbara’s problems with Ted, he’d always tell her, ‘Jesus Christ, it cost me seventy thousand dollars for all that time you were in the hospital. You should be better by now.’ That’s what he expected. I think he saw her as a thorn in his side who couldn’t stand on her own two feet. It was always, ‘She’s asking me for something.’ ”
21
“Inn of the Immortals”
Three days after Bobby-Jo and Steve got married, Ted would find out whether he’d been elected to the Hall of Fame.
It was widely assumed that he would easily receive the required 75 percent of the vote from the Baseball Writers’ Association of America. The only question would be his margin, and whether some writers would nix him from their ballots out of spite to avenge his shabby treatment of them over the years. A minority felt it was possible Ted would fall short, simply because even the greats don’t always get in the first year they are eligible. Joe DiMaggio, it was noted, failed twice before he made it.
The Traveler’s Tim Horgan, responding to a story in his own paper headlined WILL SCRIBES PAY TED BACK?, said he would be voting for Ted. “I’d rather help reserve T.W. for posterity than get embalmed myself,” Horgan wrote. “The inference is clear. This isn’t an election. It’s a grudge match. And if the scribes don’t vote Teddy into the Hall, tar and feathers will be among the many public terms applied to them.… We’ll become the Knives of the Keyboard.”1
Arthur Daley of the New York Times called for a unanimous selection of Williams and warned his brethren against any vengeful behavior. “If the Baseball Writers let pettiness or spite imperil them to default on a solemn obligation, they would stand revealed to the world of sports as men too small-minded to be worthy of the trust imposed in them,” Daley wrote.2 Williams guru Harold Kaese of the Boston Globe opined that a first-ballot induction was a given, and that the only real question was whether the vote would be unanimous—unlikely, since no previous player had gotten a unanimous vote.3 (Ty Cobb had been the highest rated, at 98 percent, followed by Ruth and Honus Wagner at 95 percent and Bob Feller at 94.4)
John Gillooly of the Record-American, heir to Colonel Egan, told his readers he had voted for Williams but gave voice to the wounds still nursed by many of the writers who had felt Ted’s lash: “This of course, is not a popularity contest, but it is a little difficult to go into the booth, pull the curtains and put an X after the name of a person who has often gone out of his way to demean your profession.”
Gillooly thought it possible that the writers might make Williams cool his heels for a few years. “DiMaggio had to wait, wait and wait some more before the room clerk found him a space at the Inn of the Immortals,” Gillooly wrote. “So don’t be startled if the Kid is asked to sit in the lobby for a while.” And, noting that the Hall voting instructions required writers to judge a candidate’s “playing ability” and his “contribution to the team,” he reprised the essence of Egan’s critique: “I’m trying to tell you that Williams, a great buster, was shy of several essential talents (running, fielding, throwing) and that the Red Sox record of Williams’s era (one flag) indicates that he wasn’t a tremendous leader, a team-man as was Joe DiMaggio. Yes, The Kid could be put on a stand-by basis.”5
Just after 10:00 a.m. on January 20, Williams walked into the Fenway Park press room before a
throng of writers, cameramen, commentators, and assorted courtiers. (“The lamb in the lion’s den,” Ted cracked, smiling, as he surveyed the majority before him.) The Globe’s Hy Hurwitz, who had sparred with Williams many a time over the years, called the proceedings to order in his capacity as secretary of the Writers’ Association. He took out a manila envelope, ripped it open, and announced that Ted had been elected to the Hall of Fame with 282 votes, or 93.3 percent.
No other player had been elected on that cycle. Of the 302 ballots cast, twenty writers had not included Ted’s name in what was seen as a token protest. Hurwitz said the 282 votes were the most that any player had received since Hall of Fame balloting began in 1936.
Williams took to the microphones, clearly touched. “This completes everything a ballplayer ever dreams about or hopes happens to him,” he proclaimed. “I can’t begin to tell you how pleased I am to have been elected to the Hall of Fame. My only regret is that some great ballplayers couldn’t make it at the same time.” He cited in particular Red Ruffing, the old Yankee whom Williams had faced in his first major-league at bat at Yankee Stadium. Ruffing had received 68.8 percent of the vote. Then Ted thanked the writers he had once scorned for electing him, especially in the first year he was eligible. Inevitably, he was asked to comment on his tumultuous relationship with the newspapermen. “My ‘feud’ with the baseball writers?” he said with a grin. “A great, great majority of the press was always with me, on my side. It was the small minority which was against me. If anything, their criticism helped. It irritated me and spurred me on.”
Assessing his career, Ted rated the 1941 All-Star Game home run as his biggest thrill and the loss of the 1949 pennant to the Yankees as his lowest point. “The longest train ride of my life was that one, returning to Boston.” And he declared that hitting .388 in 1957 gave him more satisfaction than hitting .406 in 1941. “I was an old man and near the end of it all when I hit .388,” Ted said. “It was a real struggle for me all the way—yet I think I really hit the ball better that year than when I hit .406.”6
The Kid: The Immortal Life of Ted Williams Page 65
