By December of ’82, Ted, Tamposi, and Nash had thrashed out a deal: in return for providing promotional services for Citrus Hills, Williams would receive one-half of one percent of all real estate sales in the development, which would yield him an annual income of about $300,000. In addition, he received options to buy forty lots at predevelopment prices, options that he would exercise. He would be required to move to Citrus Hills, meet with prospective buyers, live in the most expensive home, and allow visitors to gawk at his house from a distance.13
John-Henry and Michelle Orlando fell for each other with puppy-love excitement. She was his first girlfriend, and he was her first boyfriend. Michelle was a lively, pretty brunette who had grown up hearing Ted Williams tales of yore from her grandfather Vince Orlando, Johnny’s younger brother.
Vince was the less prominent Orlando and deferred to Johnny, the clubhouse manager, but he had established his own relationship with Ted. He loved to tell his family about how he and Williams used to go on double dates together when the Kid was starting out, and how Ted would speed around Boston in his big Buick, terrifying Vince. When they went to the movies, Ted would want to sit as close as he could to the screen; Williams said he liked to imagine the dirt flying out and hitting him in the face when the horses flew by. Or how Ted, at his first Red Sox spring training in 1938, bought a bat for $1 at a drugstore on his way to Sarasota and hit with it the entire first week.14
After meeting at the 1982 Old-Timers’ Game, John-Henry and Michelle began hanging out together at spring training. By 1984, they had become close. She thought he was a bubbly country bumpkin, a clueless innocent when it came to city life.
He asked her questions about his father as a player, and she would answer, drawing on what Vince Orlando had told her. “One of the things I had to help John-Henry with was that when it came to bonding with his father, he saw him as being mean. If he heard Ted call his name—‘John-Henry!’—he’d shiver. I said, ‘Why don’t you look at old videos and see him as you are today?’ I think through us he got to see the warmer side of his father. And as time went on, I think by understanding his father, the more he loved him.”
One day in the spring of 1984 at Winter Haven, Michelle and her family were going to Epcot Center for the day, and she invited John-Henry to come along. He said he didn’t think his father would let him. When Michelle asked why, John-Henry said Ted was afraid he would be kidnapped. Michelle’s grandmother Mary Orlando overheard the conversation and thought she could help. She went over to Ted, explained the situation, and assured him John-Henry would be safe with her family. Ted agreed.
“Nana, why is Ted afraid John-Henry will be kidnapped?” Michelle asked Mary after Williams had left.
“For a ransom,” her grandmother replied. “You’re too young to remember the Lindbergh baby. The boy was stolen and murdered just because his father was famous. Don’t worry; that was a long time ago. You’ll all be safe today.”15
John-Henry told Michelle he liked working with clay and enjoyed taking art in school. Back in Vermont, he showered her with letters and called her constantly. He told her he loved her. Once, he took a bus down to see Michelle at her home outside Boston without telling Dolores where he was going. He showed up at the house and told Michelle’s mother, Candace Orlando Siegel, that he was on a school vacation and had permission to be there. “So the next day I got a phone call from Ted,” Candace remembered. “He said, ‘Is my son there?’ ‘Yeah.’ ‘Well, he’s not supposed to be. He’s supposed to be home.’ He was furious. I had to bring him back to the bus.”
John-Henry liked Candace and confided in her about wanting to become an artist. “He said, ‘I don’t want to be in sports or business. I want to be an artist, but my father won’t let me.’ His father stifled it. Ted didn’t think that was a real career.”16
Candace wondered if John-Henry had any sort of spiritual life. He didn’t. “We used to talk to him about God, and he’d say, ‘You really believe that stuff?’ ‘Yes! Come to church with us.’ ” John-Henry would brush the suggestion away. He also would say he thought he was going to die young because his uncle, Ted’s brother, Danny, had.
If being an artist was impractical, his other dream, John-Henry told Michelle, was to play the young Ted Williams in a movie about his father. Then came an accident on his farm that seemed to make an acting career out of the question.
It happened in November of 1984. John-Henry had noticed a small cat on the side of a road near his house. He brought it home, but it died the next day, and the local vet advised burning it in case it had an illness that could be contagious to the other animals. John-Henry went next door to his grandparents’ house, where they burned trash in a barrel. Pouring gas on the cat, he didn’t realize he’d spilled some of the fluid on his hand. When he ignited the animal, flames leaped up to his hand and onto a polyester shirt he was wearing, which melted on his chest and hands. Claudia screamed at him to roll on the ground, and as soon as the flames were extinguished, they went running home. Dolores thought the burn didn’t look too bad and put some aloe on it, but then they decided to go to the Brattleboro hospital, where they were told the burn was severe—too severe for them to handle—and that John-Henry needed to be transported to the Shriners Hospital in Boston. The sixteen-year-old was hospitalized for weeks and had skin grafts. He now had a big scar on his chest and hands, which he was acutely self-conscious about. Ted came to visit. John-Henry and Michelle talked on the phone a lot. “He sounded very sad and said he was lonely,” she remembered. “He’d have a crack in his voice.”
John-Henry had recently started tenth grade at a new school near his house, Vermont Academy, and he and Michelle drifted apart. A few years later, when John-Henry ran into Michelle’s grandmother at a golf tournament and asked after Michelle, he was told she was married. John-Henry nearly fainted.
Their timing was off, but they stayed friends. “He said we were young, we’d lead long lives, and get back together again. He said, ‘You’re my Louise Kaufman,’ ” Michelle recalled.17
The cat-burning incident was one of two factors that greatly complicated John-Henry’s first year at Vermont Academy, a small private school just down the road from his house in Westminster, which had about 250 students, 180 of them boarders. John-Henry was one of the seventy day students. The second difficulty was that John-Henry had broken into the coin box of a video game on campus and stolen about $150 in quarters. The theft was the talk of the school. Parents were notified. An investigation was conducted without turning up the culprit. Then Dolores found the quarters in her son’s possession at home. Furious, she marched him into the office of the headmaster, Bob Long, dropped a huge bag of quarters on his desk, and said, “John-Henry wants to turn this in.”
“This was completely out of the blue,” Long remembered. “There was no suspicion at all.” Though expulsion was virtually automatic for theft, Long and school officials found a way not to dismiss him “because of the honesty factor,” Long said. He had, after all, admitted the theft and returned the loot. Or Dolores had done it for him.
Long did not know why John-Henry had stolen the money, but it was clear to him that things were not going well at home. “There were difficulties—I’m assuming with his mom. But a lot of it was a young kid who’s coming into early and later adolescence, inquiring and concerned more about how his dad should, and could, be more of a player in his life.”
Sometimes John-Henry felt the Ted void acutely. One day when he was about fifteen or sixteen, John-Henry called a family friend, Brian Interland, in tears and asked him, “Why doesn’t my dad love me?”
Interland hemmed and hawed, wanting to make the most plausible excuse he could for Williams.
“John-Henry, your dad talks about you so much—maybe not when you’re around—and he loves you as much as I love my kids,” Interland said. “You can just see it in him, in the way he expresses himself.”18
“Well, how come I don’t know that?” John-Henry replied.
Ted rarely made it to Vermont Academy. Once, he turned up to watch John-Henry play in a JV baseball game. Though Williams just sat and watched, the mere presence of Teddy Ballgame cowed the inexperienced coach. Dolores, on the other hand, was a frequent presence at the school, and Long found her a handful. “Dolores came into the office frequently—three, four, five times in a semester—to ask about, or complain about, something with John-Henry, and she would unfortunately spend a good piece of time ranting about Ted and how poor of a father he was.”
It was decided that John-Henry would live on campus for his final two years, and after that he had no other serious discipline problems. Young Williams was an average student and an average athlete. “Overall, John-Henry was a gregarious, friendly kid,” Long said. “He didn’t stand out particularly. He was not a doper, not a drinker, a pretty straight kid who seemed more comfortable with adults than kids. Not that he was ostracized by kids, but he was more of an adult person than a kid person.”19 Once, he snuck off in a car with a bunch of other boys and went into town looking for girls, only to run into Dolores, who ordered him out of the car and hauled him back to school.
One of the adults John-Henry gravitated to in this period was Ferd Ensinger, an executive for the Bigelow Company, a Portsmouth, New Hampshire, mergers and acquisitions firm. One of Ferd’s clients was a New Hampshire bank that Betty Tamposi—daughter of Ted’s new confidant Sam Tamposi—was a director of. One thing led to another, and before long Ted met Ensinger—a former teacher—and asked if he would take John-Henry under his wing. Maybe Ferd could sharpen the boy’s writing skills, help steer him to the right college, and just generally be a mentor.
Soon, John-Henry was spending almost every weekend with Ferd and his wife, Mary, at their home near Portsmouth, more than a hundred miles away. Ferd thought John-Henry had a lot of energy and a short attention span. He was Hollywood handsome, slender with dark hair, and growing like a weed. In the ninth grade, he had been five foot ten; a year and a half later, he was six two; and by his senior year, he would be six five, more than an inch taller than his father.20 He was not a good writer, and so they would practice on a subject he was familiar with, perhaps something in his past or baseball trivia. Most of all, Ferd was struck by how lonely John-Henry seemed. It was hard to tell why, but he had no friends. So Ferd and Mary became his friends. He called Ferd “Dear Buddy” and Mary “Mrs. Old Buddy.”
Getting to know John-Henry, Ferd talked of his own early years as a baseball fan, how he was drawn to Ted, what Williams had been like in his prime, and what he had meant to him. On his wedding day, Ferd had said to Mary, “Honey, you know what? Ted Williams hit three home runs today.” Ted loved that story, and so did John-Henry.
The Ensingers came to regard John-Henry as an adopted son, giving him love and affection. “I like to think we represented a source of elder counsel, mature counsel,” Ferd said. “We had a background of communicating with young people from strength and maturity, and I think John-Henry found that rewarding, satisfying, and comforting.”21 And it worked: after much time working with Ferd, John-Henry applied for early admission at Bates College, in Maine, and was accepted. That Christmas in Islamorada, Claudia remembered, John-Henry wrapped his acceptance letter from Bates in a green velvet envelope with a red velvet rope and gave it to his father as a present. Ted was delighted, and Claudia snapped a photograph of him holding up the letter in triumph.
When he arrived at Bates in September, John-Henry went to see varsity baseball coach Chick Leahey. Leahey had contacted John-Henry’s coach at Vermont Academy and received what he termed “a modest evaluation” of the young man’s baseball skills. Leahey said there would be a two-week tryout period indoors in the early spring, followed by a cut.
Before the season rolled around, Ted came for a visit, and John-Henry asked Leahey if he could set up the batting cage in the field house so his father could watch him hit and give him some tips.
Leahey agreed, more than curious to see Teddy Ballgame himself expound on the art of hitting.
“So at three o’clock Sunday afternoon they came in, and Ted barged into my office and said, ‘What’s it all about here? What kinda things do you do?’ ” Leahey recalled, chuckling. “So I talked about the baseball program, reminded him that I had a cut day but everybody had an opportunity for two weeks of daily practice and then the hammer came down, and he understood that. He had such an image, you were taken aback by this guy.”
Leahey set up the pitching machine and watched John-Henry hit. Ted was standing outside the netted area and watched as his son put on an indifferent performance. Leahey wondered what Ted would say, but he offered only neutral, measured comments, like “Keep your head in there”; “Don’t lunge”; “Let the ball come to you.” After about a half hour, Ted told John-Henry to wrap it up, take a shower, and meet him in the coach’s office.
Williams, taking over, then quizzed Leahey about the hitting technique he taught. “Now, what’s this about the top-hand thing you’re trying to sell to these kids?” he asked.
“If you’re right-handed, your right hand is doing two to three times the amount of work as your left hand, picking up things, opening doors, et cetera, so your left hand is passive while your right hand does the work,” Leahey said.
“That wouldn’t have done much for me. I was a left-handed hitter and I was a right-handed person.” Ted threw that out, as if to say, answer that one.
Leahey paused for a moment and said: “I have no problem figuring that out, because there’s only one Ted Williams.” It was a nice answer. He wasn’t going to get into the weeds of a discussion on batting with the last of the .400 hitters. Ted laughed, John-Henry appeared, and they said good-bye.
When the tryouts were held, John-Henry didn’t make the cut.22
The Ensingers came to visit John-Henry at Bates. Ferd suggested they go to a basketball game, but John-Henry seemed uninterested. Indeed, he didn’t seem to know anyone and didn’t introduce them to any other students. “I was just shocked that John-Henry wasn’t more involved,” Ferd said. “He was still pretty much a loner. And at the end of that first year, his grades suffered badly. I think he was on probation.” Soon afterward John-Henry called Ferd to say that he was transferring to the University of Maine.
Ted had felt things slipping away for his son at Bates. In the fall of 1986, he’d asked Sam Tamposi and Al Cassidy to meet John-Henry in Boston for lunch during the World Series, when the Red Sox were playing the New York Mets. Williams wanted his two successful business friends to preach the importance of college to the boy and give him a pep talk. But neither man had been to college, and they didn’t deliver the pitch with enough verve, much to Ted’s dismay.
Before John-Henry moved on to the University of Maine, Ted thought he needed the discipline of a job to help him focus and get serious about his education. So he went back to Tamposi for help, along with his daughter Betty, who had a leading role in the Tamposi Company real estate development firm, based in Nashua, New Hampshire. Sam said the boy could live with him at his home and Betty, who was helping manage the development of a five-hundred-unit residential complex, would create a job for him. It was the spring of 1987 when Ted came to Nashua to discuss John-Henry with the Tamposis. He had his dog with him, a Dalmatian named Slugger—the same name as his previous dog. Louise’s grandchildren had given him the pet as a Christmas present. Ted groused at the time that the last thing he needed in his life now was a dog, but he had quickly come to love the animal.
Betty took Ted on a boat ride along the Nashua River. It was a sunny day, and she wanted him to see how beautifully it had b
een cleaned up after being contaminated by textile mills and a cannery. The river used to be covered with a fluorescent green coating. Now you could fish in it.
“We came back, and in the car driving back to my office, Ted had Slugger in the back,” Betty remembered. “He started to get upset about John-Henry, and I was asking him what was going right and what wasn’t going right. He said he wasn’t taking his education seriously, just being cavalier about everything, he wasn’t able to stick with anything, he was all over the map, and he needed to get focused. He was getting angry talking about it, and out of nowhere he turned around and he punched Slugger.
“I said, ‘Why did you hit the dog?’ and he didn’t answer me, he just sat there fuming, but that was an indication to me that he had real demons, real problems containing his anger, his hostility. I was just in my early thirties. It was difficult to figure out how to handle both Ted and John-Henry.”
Betty found the younger Williams charming. So she decided to have him meet and greet prospective customers at the development they were building. He could also give them an overview of the project and perhaps help determine if the buyers were qualified. But it was hard for John-Henry to keep a regular schedule. Some days he didn’t show up at all; other days he’d breeze in late. Then, after the first month, Betty got the phone bill for the sales and marketing department, and it was thousands of dollars higher than it should have been. John-Henry had been making personal calls all over the country, and she made him pay the money back by docking his salary.
When shortly thereafter the Tamposi partners were coming in to inspect the project, Betty chose John-Henry to greet and attend to them. But on the appointed day he was nowhere to be found, and Betty was forced to make do by herself. Finally, as they were finishing up their tour, they came upon John-Henry lying on a chaise lounge and sunbathing with some friends as hot dogs and hamburgers sizzled on the grill.
His entitled behavior continued. At Fenway Park, he would saunter into the owner’s box uninvited, often with an entourage. Once, Betty heard Tom Yawkey’s wife, Jean, say to him: “John-Henry Williams, all you’re doing is using your father’s name to get a passport into these places. You don’t have any reason to be here, you’re not allowed to be here because you’re not an owner, and I don’t want to see you in this box again.”
The Kid: The Immortal Life of Ted Williams Page 76
