The Kid: The Immortal Life of Ted Williams

by Ben Bradlee Jr.

  The two talked baseball with anyone who asked. “It was unbelievable,” remembered Sununu.35 “Here were two icons of baseball talking and reminiscing. They were friendly. By that time they had accommodated themselves to each other.”

  Canadian prime minister Brian Mulroney was on board, and Williams seized the occasion to lobby the startled Mulroney, demanding to know what he intended to do about Indians overfishing the Miramichi for Atlantic salmon.

  When the day was finished, DiMaggio told Vincent bluntly that while he’d enjoyed himself, he would never do it again.36 Later, taking inventory of his various awards, Joe couldn’t find the Medal of Freedom that he had received in 1977, so he called Sununu to see if he could get another.

  “I said, ‘That’s almost impossible to do, but I’ll do it,’ ” Sununu said. “I had also gotten Williams and Joe to sign a picture of them and Bush for the president, and I wanted one for myself. So I sent Joe the new Medal of Freedom and the picture, asking that he sign it. He returned the picture unsigned, saying he couldn’t sign it.” He said when he told Bush about this, the president gave him his own signed photo.

  “DiMaggio was revered during his playing years and became more of a difficult personality as years went on, and [it] hurt his reputation,” Sununu said. “Ted was aloof during his playing years, but his heart got bigger than ever as he aged. They were just the opposite.”

  Bush remembered another mercenary moment concerning Joe and the pictures they had taken at the White House. “That one famous picture of DiMaggio, me, and Ted, we had a hundred signed copies and agreed that each would get a third. One of us got thirty-four. Joe didn’t want his share.” Williams was happy to take the extras, and DiMaggio was happy to provide them—for $500 each. Ted paid.

  That November, the president wanted Ted to return to the White House to accept a Medal of Freedom along with nine others, including Betty Ford and William F. Buckley Jr. But Williams was tardy in responding to the official invitation, again wary of attending another spectacle that would require his wearing a tie.

  Commissioner Vincent intervened and, after consulting with Sununu, brokered a deal whereby Williams would attend without having to wear a tie.

  John Dowd, Ted’s lawyer in the Antonucci affair, greeted Williams at the airport, and they repaired to the Hay-Adams Hotel. Dowd, who, like Williams, was a retired Marine captain, had a stricter sense of decorum than Ted when it came to proper attire when visiting the president of the United States, their commander in chief.

  “The morning comes, Ted’s wearing gray slacks and a powder-blue shirt, and he’s saying, ‘I’m not wearing a tie,’ ” recalled Dowd. “I got everybody out of the room. I said, ‘This is your commander in chief. I’m not going over there with you if you’re gonna look like Joe Shit the Rag Man.’ Then he weakened a little and said, ‘I don’t even know how to tie the fuckin’ thing.’ So I tied it. He’s mumbling out of the side of his mouth, ‘This is the last time.’ ” Dowd even persuaded the Kid to add a handkerchief to his ensemble.

  “At the White House, we go in the north gate. A Secret Service guy yells out, ‘Yo, Mr. Williams, you look terrific.’ ‘I don’t want to hear that,’ says Ted. Then we’re in the receiving line waiting to meet the president. No one can be more gracious than the Bush family. Ted puts me in front of him in the line. I meet the president. Bush says, ‘I don’t recognize this fellow with the tie on.’ Ted had steam coming out his ears.’

  “He had a ball. Then, when it was time to leave, as soon as we got out, he ripped that tie and handkerchief off and threw them at me. You can imagine the calls I got asking for the tie. I gave it to John Sununu. I kept the handkerchief.”

  About two weeks later, Ted suffered a mild stroke.

  He had driven the seventy miles from Citrus Hills down to Tampa to meet with Stacia Gerow, his longtime secretary. She lived in the vicinity, and they were scheduled to spend a few days catching up on his mail and other paperwork. When he arrived, he developed a severe headache, which was unusual. Ted liked to brag that he never got headaches.

  He checked into a motel and took two aspirin. When the pain persisted, he took two more, and after a while, another two. Then he noticed that he couldn’t see normally, especially with his peripheral vision. Though it was only afternoon, he went to bed, and he didn’t get up until the next morning, when he decided to drive home and see an ophthalmologist. The ophthalmologist told him he had lost his peripheral vision permanently and recommended that he go to the hospital to determine if he had had a stroke. At the hospital, he was told that he had, and after tests, Williams’s carotid artery was found to be 95 percent blocked. He would have to have surgery to clean the vital artery out.37

  The surgery was booked for mid-January, after the holidays. In the meantime, Williams began pondering his own mortality and decided to take care of one piece of business that was important to him. Though he had talked with his personal attorney in Boston, Robert McWalter, about the sort of arrangements he wanted to have when he died, Ted thought now would be a good time to formalize his wishes in writing.

  So he wrote McWalter a letter on December 19, 1991:

  Dear Bob,

  This letter is to confirm our discussions over the years relating to my desires for funeral and burial arrangements. I feel strongly about what I want and do not want, and I hope you will make my wishes known to Louise and my family at the time of my death.

  It is my wish that no funeral or memorial service of any kind be held and that my remains be cremated as soon as possible after my death. I want you to see that my ashes are sprinkled at sea off the coast of Florida where the water is very deep. Naturally, I understand that others may want to have some sort of memorial service, but I do not want it sponsored by my family or you, my friend and professional advisor.

  From time to time as we talk, I will give you further details, but for the moment I want to document my present thinking.

  Sincerely,

  Theodore S. Williams38

  Ted used “Ted Williams” when he signed autographs. “Theodore S. Williams” was for legal documents or other papers of serious intent. And concerning the arrangements after he died, the Kid appeared to be quite serious.

  27

  Enter John-Henry

  Two days after laying out his wishes in writing for his lawyer, Williams was feeling well enough to travel to Orono, Maine, for John-Henry’s graduation from the University of Maine.

  It was the first time any one of his three children had graduated from college, and Ted was filled with pride. Dolores, John-Henry’s mother, did not attend, perhaps because of tension between her and Ted, but Claudia was there, along with Ted’s fishing buddy Bud Leavitt, family friend Brian Interland, Williams’s lawyer, Robert McWalter, and Rodney Nichols, a young Maine state trooper who had become acquainted with John-Henry the year before.

  When he watched his son walk across the stage to get his diploma, Ted cried. “I had never seen him cry, and I didn’t think he knew how,” recalled Interland. “But the tears were spurting out, and unabashedly. It was unbelievable to see. He was always a very proud man, and it just hit him—that his son did something that he never did, that nobody ever did in the family.”1

  But when John-Henry showed his leather binder to his father, there was no diploma inside. John-Henry said there must have been a mix-up.

  It turned out he was just shy of the necessary credits to graduate, but the university, knowing Ted would be there, let John-Henry walk the line anyway to avoid embarrassment. For Ted, this latest misstep reminded him of John-Henry’s previous faux pas—his pretense that he had made the University of Maine baseball team and his entitled escapades in California while living with his Herrera cousins—and it would also be a harbinger of egregious errors in judgment to come. Despite his genuine love for his father, John-Henry would consistently display a pattern of using Ted’s famous name to enrich himself or to skate through difficulties caused by overconfidence in his business acumen.
This behavior would be abetted by Williams’s own love for his son and by the long slack Ted extended John-Henry in an effort to make up for years of neglect.

  After young Williams made up the credits the following summer, he presented the diploma to his father with fanfare. “John-Henry put his cap and diploma in a gold-laminated frame, with the graduation program included,” Claudia remembered. “Well, you would have thought Dad got the best present of his life. He loved it! Hung it right in the middle of the best place in his office. ‘That’s my son! He went to college.’ ”2

  A year before graduating, John-Henry had gotten his first significant press coverage, a coming-out of sorts, when he was the subject of a feature story in glossy Boston magazine entitled “The Kid’s Kid.” (The phrase would always remain the default position for any headline writer charged with dressing up a piece on John-Henry.) Interviewed while watching a Red Sox game at Fenway Park, Ted’s son—described as six foot five and “movie star handsome”—was depicted as privileged but searching for his identity. He was said to be a fixture at Fenway who was allowed to park his car in the players’ parking lot and was well known to the front office—as well as to secretaries, ushers, and concessionaires—walking around “as if he owns the place.”

  The Boston writer thought the son was struggling to find a way to make his own mark. “Let’s not kid ourselves—Ted Williams’s son, that’s why you’re here,” John-Henry told the reporter. “It’s going to be fun when—and it will happen some day—when Dad’s going to say, ‘I’m his dad.’ ” At times, John-Henry’s haughtiness was striking: he said he argued with his father about hitting technique, but Ted always had the ultimate comeback: “Oh is that so? I don’t see you in the Hall of Fame.” He knew that escape would be nearly impossible. “I don’t know,” he told the reporter. “Maybe it’s better the way it happened. It’s kind of sad sometimes. Not sad, but what the hell. Everything will fall into place. I’m sure of it. Dad’s looking out for me. There are a lot of opportunities out there.”3

  Seven months before his college graduation, John-Henry had seized his first opportunity to make money off his father’s reputation. In the run-up to Ted Williams Day at Fenway Park in May, he decided to try dabbling in the memorabilia business by exploiting the hoopla surrounding the fiftieth anniversary of .406. Ted reluctantly gave his consent but advised his still-green son to accept the counsel of Brian Interland. Interland had first met Ted in 1951, when he and two other members of his Little League team were plucked out of the stands at Fenway Park to pose for a picture with the Kid and Lou Boudreau. Years later, when he was in college and interning for a Boston television station, Interland tagged along with a reporter who was doing a feature on Williams. The reporter told Ted that Interland had compiled an array of statistics on him over the years. Williams arranged a time for Interland to meet him at his hotel and show him what he had. A friendship developed, and Interland eventually purchased a condominium in Islamorada so he could be close to his hero. Later, he served as a mentor for John-Henry as he grew up.

  Interland was as excited as John-Henry about going into the Ted business—if not more so. He fawned over Williams and told him he needed to be marketed as the legend he was. “We were going to do something that nobody had ever done before,” he said, “which was really represent a former athlete in a way that no one had. I mean, we’d walk through airports and it was amazing. People thought he was a god.” Interland took a leave from his job in the recording industry and he and John-Henry formed Grand Slam Marketing, financed with $60,000 in start-up funds from Interland’s business partner, Jerry Brenner.

  At the time, the Antonucci debacle was still playing out in the courts, and Williams’s legal bills were piling up. He was receptive to the argument that he needed people he could trust to run his affairs. “I just took over where Antonucci kind of was,” John-Henry told the Boston Globe in 1995. “What I wanted to do was take the fear out of Dad’s mind of someone else trying to scam him. If he can’t trust me, he can’t trust anybody. I’d do anything for him.”4

  Grand Slam started with the limited goal of producing Ted Williams Day T-shirts, and then it expanded into marketing and licensing all things Ted. On May 16, 1991, just five days after the Red Sox honored Williams, Interland seized the commercial moment and arranged for the Kid to appear on the Home Shopping Network to hawk his wares, including baseball cards, autographed balls, a replica of a 1941 Red Sox jersey ($498.75), a commemorative plaque of Ted and Mickey Mantle ($159.75), and a replica of a 1946 World Series press pin ($99.75).

  It was jarring to see Williams on the Home Shopping Network, long relegated to the remote precincts of the cable television dial. As a perfectly manicured and bejeweled female hand incongruously caressed each ball and card up for sale, a fast-talking announcer extolled the virtues of the pieces and the value of memorabilia as investment vehicles. An earpiece in Ted’s left ear allowed him to communicate with callers. He gave them some inside tidbits, like how he used to weigh his bats constantly and how he used to be able to smell the burning wood on his bat when he hit a ball on the screws.

  Other ballplayers—like Pete Rose, Reggie Jackson, and Mantle—had gone on the Home Shopping Network before, but some observers thought Ted should not have stooped. “It was if John Hancock were selling commemorative copies of the Declaration of Independence, as if Ernest Hemingway were hawking signed copies of A Farewell to Arms, as if Clark Gable or Humphrey Bogart or Spencer Tracy were peddling plastic replicas of Oscar,” wrote Sports Illustrated’s Leigh Montville at the time. “The eye had trouble convincing the mind about what it was seeing.”5

  Later in 1991, as John-Henry finished up college, Interland negotiated a deal for Ted with Upper Deck, the baseball card company. The agreement, which was signed in November and ran through the end of 1993, called for Williams to sign up to 2,800 cards over the two-plus years and make himself available for occasional promotional duties. Upper Deck was starting a new line of cards called Heroes of Baseball, for which Ted’s card was to be the centerpiece, or “chase card,” as it is known in the trade. When a buyer of a Heroes set drew Williams’s signed card in the mix, it was said to be worth $500 or more. Ted also agreed to appear at two Heroes of Baseball games sponsored by Upper Deck, the first of which was the 1992 All-Star Game in San Diego.

  These were no-heavy-lifting deals, grossing Williams $250,000 for the first thirteen months and $250,000 for the subsequent year. During the negotiations, both sides also discussed a second, even more lucrative agreement. Upper Deck wanted to use Ted as the springboard to start a second company known as Upper Deck Authenticated, which would move beyond baseball cards and enter the larger autograph market of so-called flats—such as photographs, postcards, and lithographs—as well as signed balls and bats.

  The Upper Deck arrangements were in sync with John-Henry’s plans to broaden his father’s commercial horizons. He and various other partners would launch four more companies tied to Ted besides Grand Slam Marketing: Major League Memorabilia, which handled the sale of Ted stuff on the Home Shopping Network; the Ted Williams Card Company, which made specialized themed baseball cards; Global Electronic Publishing, which produced CD-ROMs about the Kid; and the Ted Williams Store, which sold Ted paraphernalia in a shopping mall outside Boston. Such entrepreneurial flurry represented an attempt to capitalize on the sports collectibles craze of the early-to-mid ’90s, a market that was driven in no small part by Williams. “Ted Williams was the first one who made autograph prices soar,” said Phil Castinetti, owner of Sportsworld, the largest memorabilia store in the Boston area. “After Ted Williams’s autograph got to be hundreds of dollars, everything else went up.”6

  But John-Henry’s quick build-out was an overreach, an effort to do too much too soon without a coherent, interconnected business strategy. Among the things he had ignored in his rush to riches was that memorabilia prices were (like prices in general) dependent on scarcity, and the more Ted memorabilia he put out there, the les
s collectors were willing to pay for it and the fewer items they were willing to purchase. As the saturated market peaked, John-Henry suddenly declared in the press that fully 80 percent of Ted Williams signatures were fakes. With little evidence that this was so, John-Henry proceeded to launch a mostly self-serving jihad to clean up the industry.

  “He just burned bridges every place he went,” Castinetti said. “Everybody he talked to, everything had to be his way. He’d go to card shows and say, ‘That’s a forgery; where’d that come from?’ And the dealer would say, ‘I bought it from you two months ago.’ ” John-Henry would visit a store, approach a salesman, and demand to know the provenance of a Williams-autographed ball or simply label it a phony in a preemptive strike. He’d do the same at card shows, further alienating a large slice of the collectibles industry.*

  Some of John-Henry’s tough-guy tack seemed designed to impress his father and convince him that he could succeed in the business world.

  “He was a kid who really was wanting his dad’s approval, wanting to impress his dad that ‘Dad, I’m a good businessman, I’m gonna be here to look after you like nobody else will,’ ” said Interland, who had watched John-Henry grow up. “He would go down to Florida to be by his dad’s side. He’d come back, and they ended up developing the relationship that I think John-Henry always wanted.”

  Ted and his son bonded further in July of 1992 on a trip to San Diego. John-Henry was agog as he watched his father throw out the first ball at that year’s All-Star Game and attend a ceremony at which a local highway was renamed the Ted Williams Parkway. Williams made his arrival at the highway ceremony in a black 1940 Ford convertible, and a big crowd surged around him. At another event, Ted donated several of his most important trophies to his childhood friend Bob Breitbard’s museum, the San Diego Hall of Champions.7