The Kid: The Immortal Life of Ted Williams

by Ben Bradlee Jr.

  She went to the regional high school in Bellows Falls, and then on to the University of Vermont, over the objections of her old-fashioned father, who saw no purpose in girls pursuing higher education. Dolores majored in nursing with a minor in animal husbandry, since she wanted to be able to help her father run the farm. A professor suggested she compete for the Miss Vermont title, part of the Miss USA pageant. Dolores didn’t need much convincing. In high school she’d thought of herself as a tall, gangly ugly duckling, but she’d blossomed in college. Being Miss Vermont would be a validation of her adult beauty.

  She won that first title, becoming Miss Vermont in 1956, then it was off to Long Beach, California, and the Miss USA round, where she sized up the girls from what were then the other forty-seven states with trepidation. Pageant officials, meanwhile, pored over her vital statistics like commodities brokers: she was a blue-eyed brunette, 37-24-36, five foot nine, and 130 pounds. (Her enormous feet—size 11AAA—were not officially noted.) For local color, she donned a Vermont Green Mountain Boys costume and a white swimsuit with rhinestones around the bust, but the Miss USA crown went to someone else.

  Returning to the University of Vermont in the fall of 1956, Dolores got involved in politics, helping host a visit to Burlington by Tennessee senator Estes Kefauver, who was the Democratic nominee for vice president on the ticket with Adlai Stevenson. After graduating in 1957, Dolores took a job as a nurse at St. Clare’s Hospital in New York, where a few chance encounters soon broadened her horizons, first in acting and then in modeling. One day, as Dolores was riding a crosstown bus, the producer of an off-Broadway play, taken by her beauty, approached and asked if she would like to audition for the play—in his apartment. “My girlfriends told me it was just a line and I shouldn’t go, but I thought he looked sincere,” Dolores told the New York Journal American in 1959 for a saucy feature the paper did on her unlikely evolution from nurse to actress.5 She was given the role of a sorceress in Shakuntala, an Indian stage classic about a king who falls in love with a maiden commoner. Variety archly noted Dolores was “lithe and lovely, and most expressive when she is mute.”6

  Despite the theater experience, she had to work as a waitress to supplement her nurse’s salary. Two fashion photographers spotted her in the restaurant and told her she’d make a great model. They asked her to come to their studio for a shoot, after which Vogue quickly snapped her up.

  It was 1961, and the country was infatuated with Jacqueline Kennedy. Fashionistas coveted the “Jackie look,” and Dolores was deemed nearly a dead ringer for the new First Lady. Both Time and Newsweek had articles on the surging Jackie trend and said that models who looked like her were prospering. Dolores was pictured striking an elegant pose in the Newsweek spread, while in Time she was touted as “lush and Lorenesque… the newest, most dewy-eyed model this year.” The only negative was that she was deemed to have “too much figure.” Translation: she was too buxom. “I’m made to wear a flattening bra,” Dolores was quoted as saying. “Otherwise, I take away from the dress.”7

  While a regular in Vogue, Dolores was also featured in Look, Esquire, Pageant, and other magazines. Soon, she was being sent all around the world. “It was good money, but you couldn’t take it seriously,” Dolores mused. “You were selling garments. The girls were very competitive. I didn’t really like it that much.”

  In 1964, the year Dolores met Ted, Carlo Ponti, the famed Italian producer, was captivated by her modeling photos and offered her a costarring role in one of his movies, Controsesso (“A Woman of Affairs”), a wry sexploitation comedy filmed in Rome. Dolores jumped at the offer and was amused by the interaction between Ponti and his legendary wife, Sophia Loren, who towered over him and was twenty-two years his junior. That same year, Dolores nearly became one of the James Bond girls when she was considered for the part of Pussy Galore opposite Sean Connery’s Bond in Goldfinger. The Bond people had sent for her after seeing her pose in Vogue, putting on a pair of hose alluringly. She says she was initially offered the part, but the producers changed their mind and gave the role to Honor Blackman. In Ian Fleming’s novel, Pussy is a lesbian. In the film, Bond seduces her, but only after a sexually ambiguous scene in which Pussy fends him off by saying she is “immune” to his advances. “They just said, ‘I’m sorry, Dolores, but you won’t pass for a dyke,’ ” she recalled, laughing.

  There had been other movie-business encounters for Dolores—a meeting with the director Howard Hawks, a correspondence with Marlon Brando, a dinner date with Anthony Quinn—but those memories, those possibilities, receded abruptly as her relationship with Ted Williams developed. They had to. She knew how possessive Ted was, how he wouldn’t brook any sort of perceived competition or sharing of center stage. “He told me, ‘Don’t try to steal the limelight,’ ” Dolores said.

  At the time of the wedding, Dolores was thirty-three, sixteen years younger than Ted, but she liked to be coy about her age. Being in the beauty business, she found it prudent to keep people guessing about how old she actually was, so she carried three different birth certificates. On her marriage certificate, she listed herself as twenty-seven. Ted correctly said he was forty-nine, and gave his marital status as divorced. Dolores, with a touch of whimsy, reported that she was a “spinster.”

  Her parents disclosed the wedding to the press in June of 1968. Fibbing, they said the union had taken place the previous fall rather than the previous month.

  That Christmas, Ted tried to rectify his wedding-ring slight. The first several presents she opened from him were innocuous. Finally, Ted produced a small box with a rose on it, which contained the wedding band. Ted himself declined to wear a wedding ring. Of course he hadn’t bothered to get her an engagement ring before the wedding, either. Years later, he would try and make amends on that score by giving her his MVP trophies instead.

  Their son was born on August 26, 1968, in Brattleboro, Vermont. Ted wanted to call him John, with the middle name Henry. Dolores suggested they combine John and Henry into a hyphenated first name. They both liked the legend of John Henry, the black former slave who, in the nineteenth-century push to lay railroad tracks to the West, became the greatest steel-driver of them all and who died victorious in a contest to beat an automated hammer touted as a replacement for the men on the line. Someone teased Williams about naming his son John-Henry because it was considered “a colored name,” Dolores said, to which Ted responded, “Oh, yeah? Well, so is Williams.” Dolores added a middle name: Dussault, after a friend of hers and Ted’s, Ding Dussault, the track coach at Tufts University, outside Boston, and a neighbor of Ted’s at his fishing camp in New Brunswick. Dolores called the boy Dusey.

  Just as he did with Bobby-Jo, Ted missed the birth of his son, again because he was away fishing. When he showed up at the hospital, Dolores said, Ted took a long look at his son and said: “Yeah? Well, he’ll never be the ballplayer I was.”

  Though Dolores now had a full-time job tending to John-Henry, Williams hoped she could help him deal with Bobby-Jo as well. His daughter was having serious problems coping with marriage and with being a mother, and Ted didn’t have a clue what to do about it. He still cared about Bobby-Jo—his house in Islamorada was filled with pictures of her taken when she was a baby girl and when she was a young mother and at every stage in between—but he was frustrated by her various meltdowns, for which he had no patience or understanding.8

  Bobby-Jo certainly needed help: she was now abusing drugs, having moved on from Darvon to Seconal. The Seconal didn’t mix well with alcohol, which she had also begun using with increasing frequency. Sometimes she’d just announce to her husband that she was taking a handful of pills, hoping to end it all. And then there were the affairs. “Her promiscuity—that’s what led us to a divorce,” concluded Steve. At one particularly low point, she announced that she was in love with one of their neighbors and that she was pregnant. Not sure if the baby was the neighbor’s or Steve’s, Bobby-Jo tried to abort herself and botched the job badly. She h
ad to be rushed to the hospital and have a hysterectomy. They went to Florida and spent a month with Doris. Things calmed down, and Bobby-Jo promised not to see the neighbor again, yet she later ran off with him, taking the girls.

  “We moved to Miami and lived in an apartment,” Dawn recalled. “My mom was basically a hippie. We were always on Miami Beach, and we’d never go home. I always felt more secure with her friends. They played guitar, and the only song Mom knew was ‘Row, Row, Row Your Boat.’ When it was just us and my mom, she was unpredictable, and she’d get mean. She smoked marijuana. Her drinking got worse. I became more of the caretaker than Mom. I’d take care of Sherri because Mom couldn’t.

  “She’d go on drinking binges. She’d wake us up in the middle of the night, and we’d call my dad in Philadelphia. He had an unpublished number. She’d call the police and fire departments and say there was a family emergency and they had to get in touch with him. She’d say there’s something wrong with the kids. She wanted more money, and she’d make us get on the phone and ask our dad for more money.”

  Then one day Bobby-Jo called Steve, crying, and said her lover had beaten her up, hit the kids, and thrown them all out on the street. She told her husband she still loved him and begged him to take her back. Ignoring the advice of his friends and family, Steve agreed. He rented a trailer, drove to Florida, picked up his family, and drove home. “The kids were thrilled,” Steve recalled. “They were elated. It was almost as if not a lot had changed. In a short time it felt like old times. Barbara acted as if nothing had happened. It was like we’d taken a trip and we were coming home. So I felt great.”

  But Bobby-Jo lapsed again. Steve says she had a fling with a 7-Eleven attendant, then took a handful of pills and had to have her stomach pumped. After she took another fistful of pills, Steve had her committed. When he called Ted and asked him for advice, Williams ducked the issue and sent Dolores to Philadelphia instead. She gave Steve a sympathetic ear, but delivered a tough message as well. “Dolores said Ted could no longer be financially responsible for the trouble Barbara got into,” Steve said. “It was unfortunate, but she pretty much said, ‘You’re on your own.’ I wasn’t looking for money, really, just support and advice.”

  Dolores says Ted hoped that with her nursing background, she could perhaps instill in Bobby-Jo a greater sense of maturity and “straighten her out.” But the new Mrs. Williams wasn’t seen by Bobby-Jo as neutral. “If anything, she resented my being in her life because she needed her father for her,” Dolores recalled. “She needed all she could get and then some.” And Ted, Dolores added, “couldn’t stand” Bobby-Jo anymore. “She just didn’t behave the way he wanted a kid of his to behave, that’s all. She was a spoiled brat. She was looking for attention. She didn’t care how she got it.” Bobby-Jo, for her part, dismissed Dolores as an interloping gold digger. “I just thought she was different from anybody my dad had been around,” she said. “Different from anybody.”

  After several months, against doctors’ advice, Steve took Bobby-Jo out of the hospital. In her absence, he had put their daughters in a foster home because he worked and said there was no one else to take care of them. When Bobby-Jo came home, they regained custody of the girls.

  Seeking some sort of reconnection, Bobby-Jo and Steve went to visit Ted and see her new half brother. At one point they were standing in the living room of Ted and Dolores’s apartment, and John-Henry crawled out onto a balcony, ten floors up. Bobby-Jo darted out to scoop him up, worried he might fall. “Dolores came over to me, and she grabbed him, and she said, ‘Don’t you ever touch my child again.’ ”

  Not long after they returned home, Bobby-Jo took another lover, and that was the last straw for Steve. He moved in with his parents. When she moved to Florida with still another man, again taking the girls, Steve had her served with papers, and they were divorced in 1971.

  Bobby-Jo’s daughter Dawn Hebding said her mother never told her why she and her father split up. “My mother broke up the marriage, according to my father. But after growing up with my mother, no sane person could have gone through that. I think my father felt he was going to have to let us go in order to have a life without us burdening him.” Nor did Bobby-Jo ever discuss why her own parents, Ted and Doris, got divorced, or the strains that placed on her. “She has so many secrets, she holds so much in,” Dawn said. “I’m sure that’s contributed to her problem. I love my mother, but she’s very ill, emotionally.”9

  If Bobby-Jo had been less than thrilled by the arrival of Dolores on the scene, there was another woman who had a far stronger reaction: Louise Kaufman.

  Nursing her wounds from the Kid’s earlier rejections, Louise had spent time in Paris and Ireland, but when Ted and Lee divorced, she and Williams reconnected in Islamorada and, before you knew it, Louise had moved her clothing into Ted’s house. But when Dolores got pregnant and Ted announced he would marry her, Louise had been jilted yet again.

  After Ted gave her the bad news, Louise called a friend of theirs, John Underwood, and begged him to talk some sense into Ted. “She felt she’d waited long enough, and asked me to intervene,” Underwood said. But he declined. “I said that was Ted’s decision.”

  Underwood was a writer for Sports Illustrated, then in his early thirties. A year before, in the summer of 1967, he had spent two days fishing in the Keys with Ted, then written a sparkling feature for the magazine called “Going Fishing with the Kid.” He was a facile writer, and the piece was a revealing look at Williams’s fishing expertise as well as his demanding, perfectionist persona.

  Williams liked the story and sent Underwood a note. “Way to go,” he wrote. “You captured the real me.” Underwood and his editors at Sports Illustrated saw an opportunity. Williams had never told his life story to anyone. He plainly liked Underwood. Why didn’t they approach the Kid about doing a series for the magazine?

  Williams was coy. “A lot of guys want to do that, but maybe you’re the one,” he told Underwood without committing. Ted put him off for a while longer, but eventually agreed. The two men met for weeks at a time at various places, such as Ocala, Florida, where the Red Sox had their minor-league training camp, or they’d go hunting and fishing.

  Recalled Underwood, “He’d call me and say, ‘I’m going somewhere, you want to go?’ We went fishing in Costa Rica once. I was, in effect, becoming his brother. I taped as much I could, probably half tape and half notes. Ted was totally candid. There was nothing he wouldn’t delve into. He had a way of talking that was peculiar to Ted. He’d not only expose something, he’d go back over it. He had a very analytical mind. He’d analyze his own actions, even when they weren’t so nice.”10

  The result was a four-part series about Williams’s life and a stand-alone article about hitting a baseball. The series began on June 10, 1968, after Ted and Dolores had been married a month. Simon and Schuster then asked Underwood to turn the SI series into Ted’s autobiography, which he did. My Turn at Bat was published the following year and became a bestseller. The hitting article was also later turned into a book, called The Science of Hitting (a title Ted chose), and remains today perhaps the foremost batting tutorial. Adding to his Williams oeuvre, Underwood would also crank out a third book with Ted, this one on fishing, called Ted Williams: Fishing the Big Three, a guide to going after tarpon, bonefish, and Atlantic salmon.

  In a July 18, 1968, letter to Williams, Underwood said that Simon and Schuster had committed to a $75,000 advance for My Turn at Bat. No figure was mentioned for the hitting book, but they were aiming for $25,000 for the fishing story. No fishing book had ever earned a $25,000 advance, unless it was The Old Man and the Sea, Underwood assured Ted in the letter, which began, “Dear G.C.” This was a reference to G. C. Luther, an alias Williams had told the writer he often used to register at hotels when he traveled.

  There were some sloppy mistakes in the autobiography, such as misspelling Ted’s mother’s maiden name (it was Venzor, not Venzer), getting the score of the Red Sox’s playoff
-game loss to the Indians in 1948 wrong (it was 8–3, not 4–1), and incorrectly naming the Boston Globe’s Mel Webb as the one writer who had failed to nominate Ted in the controversial 1947 MVP balloting, when Webb didn’t even have a vote. Underwood also glossed over Williams’s first two marriages and chose not to explore his Mexican heritage, even though Ted had not put anything off-limits. But the book, written in the first person when Williams was forty-nine, amounted to a revealing first cut of his life to that point, and was especially effective at capturing Ted’s voice. “Obviously he didn’t say all those things the way I wrote it,” explained Underwood. “You get all his things in bits and pieces. If you can capture the lexicon and argot, then you could go off on tangents. I felt like I was inside his mind, and I could write the way he would speak, so I weaved it together.”

  During the year he spent with Ted on both the fishing story and the magazine series, Underwood got to know Dolores well. “Ted met his match with Dolores, in terms of her ability to cuss and stand up to him,” he said. “In many respects, she was probably the right woman for him, but she was also too similar, and they were constantly at odds.”11

  Unsurprisingly, Dolores quickly found herself at odds with Louise Kaufman. When Dolores arrived in Islamorada, Louise didn’t concede defeat immediately. Instead she tried to use her status as Williams’s next-door neighbor to her advantage by inventing excuses to remain in touch with Ted. According to Dolores, some of these bordered on the ridiculous, such as Louise tossing her dog over the fence onto Ted’s property, then asking him to bring the dog back to her house, saying it had escaped. It was the first Dolores had heard of Louise, and so she worried: “He had said I meant more to him than any dame he ever met, but then I wondered, did I really? Because I couldn’t quite understand the patience he had with these other women.”* Finally, Louise appeared to give up. She sold her house in Islamorada and moved up to Delray Beach, Florida, to be near her friend Evalyn Sterry.