Watkins said that when touring the museum, Ali had cried when he read Williams’s Hall of Fame induction speech calling on Cooperstown to admit Negro League stars. Perhaps knowing of Williams’s reputation, Ali felt comfortable enough with Williams to venture a provocative joke when the two were seated alone. “Ted,” he said, “did you just call me a nigger?” Williams was shaken and didn’t know how to respond. Then Ali laughed and said, ‘I’m only kidding you, Ted.’ ” Williams delighted in telling this story to friends later.3
Although Claudia wasn’t there for the museum festivities, Bobby-Jo was, invited by Ted after he reconnected with her for the first time in years at Louise’s funeral. Bobby-Jo came with her second husband, Mark Ferrell, a copyright enforcer for ASCAP, the American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers. They had met at an Orlando bowling alley in 1975 and later moved from Florida to Nashville, where Bobby-Jo dabbled in country music and once recorded a song she proudly presented Ted called “I Love You, Dad.” Now Ferrell was about to retire, and the couple planned another move—to remote Franklin, North Carolina, in the Smoky Mountains.
Bobby-Jo was thrilled to be remembered and fawned over at the museum opening by a host of Ted’s old pals, including the longtime Fenway Park ushers and concessionaires whom Williams had invited down. “It freaked me out,” she remembered. “They said, ‘I watched you grow up,’ and they even lined up for my autograph.”
Bobby-Jo said John-Henry looked on warily as Ted’s friends greeted her. “And I just knew that right then, John-Henry considered me the enemy. Right then is when I know he said, ‘She’s gonna be a problem to my plans.’ Everybody knew me at that thing. He’d never seen that before.”4
DiMaggio, dapper in his tailored dark suit, introduced Ted by saying: “Some people like to set goals, and Ted did this. He said he wanted to be the greatest hitter that ever played the game. Well, I can’t vouch for that completely…” He cited some greats, such as Ruth, who had preceded Ted. But from the time Williams came up in 1936 until the present, Joe said, “I can truthfully say I’ve never seen a better hitter than Ted Williams.”
If that represented a slight retreat from previous unequivocal DiMaggio testimonials that Ted was the greatest, Williams, taking the podium dressed in a light blue short-sleeved shirt, seemed fine with the assessment.
“I go to some of these places in life and I’m sitting someplace and somebody at the microphone starts hollering and yelling to everybody that I’m the greatest hitter that ever lived, and I’ll tell you something, I get a little lower in my seat and I want to hide if I can, but I can’t,” Ted said. “Because I can’t believe that myself either.… I never saw those guys, so I feel the same way, Joe, that to single one guy out is tough. But if they’ll put me in the select company of Ruth, Gehrig, Simmons, Foxx, Hornsby, DiMaggio and some of the others—Aaron, Mays—that suits me to a T.”5
After the ceremony, Williams, DiMaggio, and Musial—escorted by a gaggle of sheriff’s deputies more interested in genuflection than protection—went back to Ted’s house and talked baseball late into the night: the Kid, the Clipper, and Stan the Man.
Ten days after the museum opening, Ted and Lynette were sitting around watching TV at night when Williams said he wanted to take a shower before bed. After he had been gone for what seemed to Lynette like a long time, she started to go check on him and heard Ted calling for her. Entering the bedroom, she saw Williams lying on the floor, unable to get up. He had emerged from the shower, put on a pair of shorts, and was walking around his bed when he’d suffered a stroke and collapsed. A blood clot from his heart had gone to his brain.
“My legs gave way,” Ted said later. “There was no pain, but I had no strength. I couldn’t get enough push from my legs to get up.”6
A distraught Lynette said she would call 911, but Williams told her to call Lewis Watkins instead. She did, but she summoned an ambulance as well, and soon Ted was taken away to the local hospital, Citrus Memorial, before being transported to Shands Hospital, a teaching facility at the University of Florida in Gainesville, sixty miles to the north.
Williams stayed at Shands for nine days and underwent a spate of tests, after which doctors determined that he had just suffered his third stroke, not his second. In early 1992, not long after he had his first stroke—the one he suffered in December of 1991, which had robbed him of some of his peripheral vision—Williams had had another mild stroke without realizing it. Now this third stroke had taken away all his peripheral vision and about 75 percent of his remaining eyesight. Now the hitter and fighter pilot with the renowned vision could only see straight ahead: he had tunnel vision.
The doctors concluded that Ted’s strokes and vision problems were linked to an irregular heartbeat, so he was given an electric shock treatment to stimulate his heart and his sight. As a result, Williams thought what he could see became 30 percent brighter.7 But the left side of his body was numb, which affected his balance and required that he begin using a walker and, later, a cane, after intensive rehabilitation therapy. The balance and vision problems required adjustments around the house to help him navigate. Frequently traveled hallways were marked with his old uniform number—9: 9 to the bathroom, 9 to his bedroom, 9 to the living room.8
Williams did his physical therapy at a clinic in Ocala, about twenty-five miles from Citrus Hills. His mood was dark, and he was feeling sorry for himself, but then he met seventeen-year-old Tricia Miranti. When she was five, Tricia had had a brain hemorrhage that left her confined to a wheelchair and impaired her speech. She and Ted were assigned the same therapist, who had them play a game of checkers as a rehabilitation exercise.
Williams assumed that because Tricia had difficulty speaking she was mentally impaired as well, so he thought he’d let her beat him at checkers. But she was not mentally impaired in the least. He noticed that she was making a series of skilled moves, and before long she really had beaten him.
Ted learned that Tricia lived in Inverness, just five minutes from Citrus Hills. He visited her house and invited her to his. Tricia needed water therapy, so Ted insisted that she use his pool.
Vicki Miranti, Tricia’s mother, a teacher’s assistant, said Williams was “always nice and helpful. It was, ‘Whatever I have you’re welcome to it.’ He loved to make her giggle and laugh.”
Williams learned that Tricia attended a local junior college, and he said he wanted to pay her tuition. Vicki thanked him but explained that because Tricia was disabled, the state paid. Ted asked what else he could do. Vicki told him that Tricia could use a live-in caregiver, and Williams promptly started a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization for the teenager’s benefit, which he called the Ted Williams Citrus County Scholarship for the Physically Impaired.
Soon Tricia became Ted’s local cause célèbre, a mini–Jimmy Fund project. He told all his friends about her and urged them to meet her and chip in to help. When Sports Illustrated came to town to do a big piece on the Kid in his dotage, Ted said he’d do it on one condition: that Tricia be in the story and get paid, to boot. “They paid her two thousand dollars,” Vicki recalled. “All the money was used for the caregiver, rent, living expenses. Ted would say, ‘If the damn little girl wants to get a dress, I wanna make sure she can goddamn get a dress.’ ”
As for why Williams got so involved in Tricia’s case, Vicki Miranti said Ted told her: “ ‘I was sitting there feeling sorry for myself, and she’s struggling to take a step, sweating, fixating, concentrating, and she still had a little smile, and it inspired me to not feel sorry for myself.’ ”9
Tricia, for her part, teared up when she talked about Ted. “He was, and always will be, my angel.”10
Ted’s three children convened in Florida to be with their father after his stroke. Claudia flew in from Germany, where she was living after becoming romantically involved with a young German man. Bobby-Jo was furious that John-Henry had not called her with the news, which she had seen on TV. When she confronted him about it, he said he hadn�
�t been able to get to a phone but would try to keep her in the loop in the future.
“When he told me that, he was walking around with three cell phones: one around his neck, one on his face, and one in his hand,” Bobby-Jo said. “So whatever.” She soon returned to Nashville.
John-Henry had come from Boston with Anita Lovely, the former beauty queen. They had been dating since January, and John-Henry had named her vice president of Grand Slam Marketing. She was twenty-nine, nearly four year his elder, tall and attractive with brown hair and a distinctive port-wine stain on her left arm.*
Meanwhile, Lynette Siman was still in the house and trying to adjust to poststroke life. She said Williams told her he was no longer interested in getting married: “He said he wouldn’t marry me under his health condition. He said he was an invalid and didn’t want to saddle me with that, but I didn’t care. I loved him.” But John-Henry and Claudia, as they surveyed Ted’s life and sought to bring a new order to it, quickly decided to send Lynette packing. “Lynette was a duplicate of Louise,” said Claudia. “I was like, ‘Jesus, we gotta deal with another one?’ I don’t think Dad was sleeping. He was getting very irritable. Lynette couldn’t cook. Dad hated her food. And it was like she was taking over. She was bad for Dad at that time. He was lonely, no question, but we finally just told Lynette she had to leave. John-Henry and I high-fived after she left.”
Protecting Ted became a top priority. “John-Henry made some other changes,” Claudia added. “All of a sudden there were codes on the doors. The numbers were changed. Joe Public just couldn’t come walking up to the door and knock and proclaim themselves as the greatest fan of Ted Williams, and ‘Won’t you please sign this?’ I mean, it had to be like that.”11
With Ted increasingly infirm, John-Henry would move to consolidate his growing power—and keeping a close eye on his father was crucial to that end. John-Henry told Claudia that he planned to move to Citrus Hills. He would run the various Williams enterprises and oversee the caretakers who would watch over their father from down there. At first he and Anita lived in the condo that Ted kept at Citrus Hills, then they moved into a house that John-Henry bought at nearby Black Diamond Ranch, a gated community with golf courses. Anita described the house as a “small villa.”
She helped hire the caretakers for Ted, monitored an office for Grand Slam Marketing at a strip mall in Hernando, and oversaw the Ted Williams Store outside Boston, all while taking on more responsibility within Grand Slam. And when John-Henry decided that Ted was no longer able to run his own bank account or write his own checks, he had Anita take the checkbook and issue checks on Williams’s behalf.
Following Williams’s first stroke, in December of 1991, John-Henry had obtained his father’s health proxy and with it the legal authority to make life-and-death decisions for Ted if he were incapacitated. Now, in May of 1994, he obtained a power of attorney authorizing him to make any move he wished with respect to Ted’s various memorabilia companies, and that power would be strengthened two years later to include all his father’s finances.
Both documents were drawn up by Eric Abel. Abel, then thirty-one, was house counsel for the Citrus Hills development where Ted lived, but he was also playing an increasingly important role as a Williams family attorney and a trusted confidant to John-Henry.
“When Ted first agreed to give John-Henry his power of attorney, I had to have a discussion with him about how powerful this is and what can happen,” Abel said. “I presented it to him right down to the exaggerated ‘John-Henry, if he wants to, can empty your bank account.’ Ted would look stunned and say, ‘Would he do that?’ He’d pause and say, ‘Fuck it, let’s do it. If I got it, he can have it.’ ”12
Anita and John-Henry still had one foot in Boston as they worked to move their various businesses to Florida but, increasingly, remote Citrus Hills became home, and she found it quite an adjustment. There wasn’t a decent restaurant for miles—not even an Outback Steakhouse or an Applebee’s. They played golf and tennis and drove to the coast to try scuba diving. They were fixtures at the nearest movie theater, in Inverness. She would take Ted out in a golf cart and drive him around Citrus Hills. They might go watch John-Henry play golf or tennis, and Ted would comment on his son’s shots. Anita would let Ted drive the golf cart, even when he could no longer drive a car. He could still see straight ahead.
For his part, Ted was thrilled to have John-Henry’s operation nearby, Claudia recalled. “He loved to just surprise John-Henry. Drive on down to the office. Just barge in. Half the employees would go gawking because Ted Williams just walked through the office. Dad loved it.”
Anita thought John-Henry yearned for his father’s approval and wanted to prove to him that he could run the various memorabilia businesses. “He wanted to be in his dad’s favor, definitely, and he was very protective of his father. I think that he looked at a lot of people as trying to take advantage of Ted, and he wanted to protect him from that. He thought he could help to grow a business for his father, but there was a money element for John-Henry, too. He definitely was attracted to money. He wanted to earn a lot, and he wanted to spend a lot.”
She thought this desire for money stemmed from his austere life growing up in Vermont, where he’d been deprived of most luxuries. Now he was seeing what money could buy and what comfort it could create. But John-Henry was essentially using the various businesses as his own bank account, sometimes running up tens of thousands of dollars in monthly bills for personal expenses.13 “All of a sudden he went from having nothing to being able to buy whatever he wanted,” Anita recalled. “You could not quench his desire to have the latest gadgets. It was unbelievable.” She thought Ted, had he been aware of the expenses John-Henry was running up, would likely have found it inexcusable. “Cost control was always a problem,” Anita said. John-Henry “just didn’t think too much about it.”14
However, Bob McWalter, Ted’s lawyer, was concerned about cost control in the Williams businesses, and he was beginning to raise more questions about John-Henry as a manager.
In November of 1993, McWalter had created a new entity, Ted Williams Family Enterprises, to guard against non–family members, especially Grand Slam Marketing’s Brian Interland and Jerry Brenner, reaping any benefits that should accrue to Ted alone.
“We wanted to make it clear that Ted owned everything,” McWalter said. “I was very concerned that intellectual property rights would get in the hands of Jerry and Brian. I was afraid that the right to give permission to use Ted’s likeness was slipping away from Ted himself. I thought, ‘Let’s get this under one hat.’ So we formed TWFE, with one hundred percent of common stock owned by Ted. We transferred all of these rights to that corporation. I was also concerned that John-Henry was throwing things in front of his father to sign, and Ted would be signing away this and signing away that. Now we would have a center of gravity.” McWalter made himself president of TWFE as further protection from those who might take advantage.
That December, Ted persuaded McWalter to quit his job at Sherburne, Powers and come work for him full-time. John-Henry was opposed, but his father insisted. He was comfortable with McWalter, and they had been working together for years.
In his new full-time capacity, and as president of Ted Williams Family Enterprises, based in an office on Boylston Street in downtown Boston, McWalter began to comb through the books and determined that a large amount of cash was unaccounted for. He concentrated on the three facets of the operation he was most familiar with: Grand Slam, the Ted Williams Store at the Atrium Mall in Chestnut Hill, outside Boston, and several days of so-called private signings that Williams had done with McWalter in Boston in February of 1994, just before his stroke. At the signings, Williams would autograph pictures that fans sent him and affix a personal message, as requested.
“No money ever came in from the private signings of photographs that people sent in,” McWalter said. “On the retail store in the Atrium Mall, I was out there a lot watching. I saw stuff going
out but no money coming in to Ted. Anita was dropping hints. It might have been just a sigh. Then I got some information on the sales at Grand Slam. For a long period not only did no money come in to Ted but nothing came in to Grand Slam. I had a meeting with Interland and Brenner, and they said they hadn’t seen John-Henry for three or four months. They admitted they could have cut expenses more, particularly Interland. He charged two new Lexuses to the corporation. They were always flying first-class, the three of them: John-Henry, Interland, and Brenner. Even Ted never flew first-class.”
When McWalter added it all up, he discovered that $1.8 million was missing. First he reported his findings to John-Henry, who attempted to quickly shift blame to Interland and Brenner, but McWalter thought the two men weren’t culpable. “They were very dedicated to Ted and caught in the middle,” McWalter concluded.*
After meeting with John-Henry, McWalter flew to Florida to talk with his client, Ted. Williams was in his bedroom.
“Ted, this is very painful,” McWalter began. “But as best I can figure, you have autographed stuff and not been paid what you are owed. I’m not sure who owes it—Grand Slam, John-Henry, or a combination—but you are owed about 1.8 million dollars.”
“Where the hell is it?” Williams said.
“Jerry and Brian have said that except for excess spending, they don’t have it, and that only leaves John-Henry. I think you ought to raise that issue with him.”
McWalter decided to get all the bad news out at once. “There’s something more,” he told Williams. “Do you realize John-Henry has borrowed a great deal of money from Bob Breitbard and invested it in the Ted Williams Card Company?”
The Kid: The Immortal Life of Ted Williams Page 86
