As for Claudia Williams, she, like everyone, was skeptical of cryonics at first, but it wasn’t long before John-Henry had his sister on board. “I think the thing that certainly sold me on it was first and foremost his enthusiasm for it and his belief,” Claudia said. “He had faith in it, and it made him so much more ready for when Dad died. I knew that John-Henry had cryonics to hold on to. And that’s what sold me on it. And you know, after he’d educated me on it, talked to me about it, yeah! There might be a chance!”
She conceded that early on Ted was dismissive of cryonics. But she says he gradually evolved on the issue and became interested in it. He was not religious; rather, he was curious, and he listened to John-Henry’s occasional updates. “At first Dad reacted just like everybody else. He said, ‘That sounds a little kooky to me.’ Then John-Henry would tell him a few things. He’d be like, ‘Do you know, Dad, that they can now freeze a kidney for up to two days or twenty-four hours, and there will be absolutely minimal damage?’ And Dad would be like, ‘Really? Who discovered that?’ And then when Dad started to realize that all these latest little discoveries, if you will, that John-Henry was presenting were all from cryonics, he would every so often ask, ‘What’s the latest on that cryonics thing?’ ”
As Ted continued his recovery in San Diego, John-Henry took advantage of the city’s proximity to Arizona to take a short flight over to Phoenix and visit Alcor, in suburban Scottsdale.
Founded as a nonprofit in 1972, Alcor had been located there since 1994, after moving from Riverside, California. Its headquarters is at 7895 East Acoma Drive, a gray stucco building in a nondescript industrial park just down the road from the Scottsdale airport. The front door is always locked to guard against unwelcome visitors. At the time of John-Henry’s visit, in the spring of 2001, Alcor had frozen—“suspended” is the official term—forty-six people and several pets. Most of the humans, by a factor of three to one, are “neuros”: those who had chosen to preserve only their heads.
One of the first things a visitor notices in the lobby is a photo of Robert Ettinger hanging over a plaque that reads, FATHER OF CRYONICS. Ettinger, a physics teacher and science-fiction writer, was the author of the 1964 book The Prospect of Immortality, which caused a media sensation at the time and launched the cryonics movement. Ettinger’s credo was that “life is better than death, healthy is better than sick, smart is better than stupid, and immortality might be worth the trouble!” His surmise was that death is only a transit station and that quick-freezing a corpse and preserving it that way offered the hope of resuscitation sometime in the future, when rapidly advancing science and medicine could cure whatever disease the person died from, and when cell damage now deemed irreparable might be fixed.
Ettinger went on to found the Cryonics Institute in Michigan and the related Immortalist Society, an education and research group. Soon most cryonics followers paid homage to Ettinger by calling themselves “immortalists.” Alcor displayed Ettinger’s picture to acknowledge his status as a cryonics pioneer, even though his Cryonics Institute was the Arizona company’s main competitor. Ettinger conceded in an interview, however, that Alcor was better organized, better funded, and further along in research than his group, thanks to the contributions of two wealthy benefactors: Saul Kent and Bill Faloon, both of whom John-Henry was soon introduced to.6
Kent and Faloon, both multimillionaires, were Alcor leaders assigned to recruit John-Henry hard, with the goal of landing his commitment to deliver Ted Williams when the time came. In 1980, Kent and Faloon founded the Florida-based Life Extension Foundation, which sells vitamins and dietary supplements and promotes antiaging research.*
Kent became infamous in 1987 for presiding over the beheading of his eighty-three-year-old mother, Dora, and having her head frozen at Alcor. The procedure took place two days after Kent took his mother out of a Riverside, California, nursing home and brought her to Alcor—ailing but quite alive. The case garnered international attention after Riverside County coroner’s investigators questioned whether Mrs. Kent was still alive when the “neuro” procedure began. A death certificate, signed by a procryonics doctor who was not present when Mrs. Kent was said to have died, listed the cause of death as heart disease and pneumonia. The local district attorney’s office ultimately decided not to file any charges, and Saul Kent denied any wrongdoing, saying his mother had been a cryonics supporter and had died shortly before the procedure began. This episode would later be memorialized in a short, not unsympathetic documentary by the filmmaker Errol Morris entitled I Dismember Mama. Adding to Kent’s allure for cryonicists was the fact that he had a dog named Franklin whom he had experimentally frozen then successfully revived after a few hours.
Kent and Faloon’s Life Extension Foundation took most of its name from the Alcor Life Extension Foundation. Kent was on the Alcor board, and the groups had other interlocking ties though no official corporate relationship. Life Extension also funded various companies doing cryonics-related research, including Suspended Animation, Inc., in Florida, and 21st Century Medicine, in California. The eccentric Kent was also deeply involved in finding a site for a construction project he called Timeship, which would be a mecca for cryonics research and the long-term storage of people who choose to be frozen after they die.
It was the Life Extension Foundation through which John-Henry obtained the various vitamin and herbal concoctions that he insisted his father take, and his dealings with the foundation provided a catalyst for his interest in cryonics generally and Alcor specifically, according to Claudia Williams.
Dr. Jerry Lemler, Alcor’s CEO, was another aggressive suitor of John-Henry’s. An ardent baseball fan whose motto is “You only live twice,” Lemler, in conducting a tour of the facility for a Denver Post reporter, pointed to the huge cylinders known as Dewars that contain four bodies and up to five heads and said: “These people aren’t dead. They are only at a point where contemporary medicine has given up on them. We’re not about raising the dead.… We’re about extending life further into the future than ever before.”
The fiftyish, bearded Lemler, who liked to quote Robert Frost and Woody Allen and smoke a cigar, saw himself as an adventurer. “I’ve pushed limits and mostly been better for doing so,” he said. “So the future offers virtually limitless possibilities.”7
John-Henry also met two Alcor lifers so devoted to the organization that they lived in the building: Hugh Hixon and Michael Perry. Hixon, a former Air Force captain, started working for Alcor in 1982 and had attended virtually every cryopreservation procedure since then, including that of his own father. Perry is a computer science PhD who has worked at Alcor since 1987 as a computer programmer and writer. He also is an ordained minister in the Society for Venturism, an obscure quasi church based in Arizona that touts cryonics while practicing its “immortalist” philosophy.
John-Henry learned more about the demographics of the cryonics movement: the average cryonicist is a middle-aged white male, generally from an engineering or technical background, college educated, fairly affluent, and the kind of person who recognizes and admires the impact that technology has had in his life.8 Of the people frozen at Alcor, the ratio of men to women is four to one; a third were gay, and a third were Jewish. About 90 percent of Alcor’s clients—those who have signed up to be frozen when they die—are concentrated in Florida, California, and New York.9
Returning to California, John-Henry continued his research and met with several other cryonics activists and researchers. Then, several weeks later, when Alcor’s next client was about to die, Alcor called John-Henry and asked if he’d be interested in watching a cryonics procedure. This was virtually unheard of and indicative of the lengths to which Alcor was going to woo the young Williams.
John-Henry not only made the trip but filmed the procedure. He returned to San Diego and asked Claudia, who was visiting Ted, if she wanted to see his film. She didn’t.
John-Henry, now wildly enthused with cryonics and with Alcor specifically
, was ready to tell some of Ted’s old friends, including Bob Breitbard and Eddie Barry, the former Boston Bruin and Ted pal who wintered in Citrus Hills, about his plan. Both men told him they thought he was mad.
Undaunted, John-Henry was comforted by the fact that he had Claudia in his corner on the cryonics plan for Ted. He thought it would be even better if he could win the support of Bobby-Jo so that all three of the Williams children might be on board.
In early June, John-Henry called Bobby-Jo from San Diego. She was in the garage of her new house in Citrus Hills having a cigarette when the call came through. There was some brief chitchat before John-Henry asked her if she’d ever heard of cryonics. In fact, Bobby-Jo, having recently seen a documentary on the subject, knew quite a bit about it. Furthermore, her mother’s side of the family had been in the funeral business. She knew about death and its attendant rituals. John-Henry told her that he was impressed—and then dropped his bombshell: “How would you like this for Dad?”
Bobby-Jo exclaimed that her father had wanted to be cremated, but John-Henry confidently told her everything could be worked out. He also let her know that he had witnessed a cryonics procedure and could arrange for her to do the same.
Bobby-Jo was shocked. “Where?” she asked.
“In Scottsdale. And I want you to come out here, and they’ll show you one.”
This was too much for Bobby-Jo to absorb. She told John-Henry she had to go to the bathroom. “I went in and got Mark and I said, ‘You’ve got to come out here now!’ I said, ‘John-Henry’s talking about cryonically freezing Daddy!’ ” They went back to the phone, and Bobby-Jo angled the receiver so that Mark could hear what her brother was saying. John-Henry excitedly explained that they wouldn’t even need to freeze Ted’s entire body but could simply cut off his head.
“ ‘Think about this,’ ” Bobby-Jo said he added. “ ‘The way the science is going, we can make a whole lot of money. If we can get them to take Dad’s DNA, think about it. How many people would buy Ted Williams’s DNA to have little Ted Williamses running around?’ ”
Six months earlier, John-Henry had also raised the possibility of selling his father’s DNA in discussing cryonics with Becky Vaughn, the critical-care nurse who had tended to Ted. Claudia Williams, who said she was with her brother when he called Bobby-Jo, acknowledged that John-Henry did mention DNA during the phone call, but only in answering a question Bobby-Jo asked about cell damage during the freezing process. “He was like, ‘No. They can now regenerate cells, and all we need is one DNA or one cell particle, and it sends the message and it completes the DNA chain and it makes it again.’ That’s how that came up.” Besides, Claudia pointed out, John-Henry hardly needed to go through cryonics and freeze Ted to get his DNA. He could have taken some of Ted’s hair or a vial of his blood anytime he wished.
For Bobby-Jo, the phone call and her brother’s plan were horrific. But Claudia got a different impression of her sister’s view. “I was right there with John-Henry,” Claudia said. “When he got off the phone he was sky-high. He was like, ‘This is great. She actually knows a lot about this. She’s coming out.’ He was all excited.”
The next day, Eleanor Diamond, John-Henry’s secretary, called Bobby-Jo to say that her brother had bought her a plane ticket to fly to Arizona. Recalled Bobby-Jo, “I said, ‘No. John-Henry and I have already discussed this, and I don’t want that ticket.’ ” John-Henry called Bobby-Jo back to try to get her to change her mind, but a disgusted Mark answered and he wouldn’t put his wife on the phone.10
Bobby-Jo and Mark Ferrell moved quickly to put John-Henry’s inner circle on notice that they knew of his plan to freeze Ted and objected to it. Bobby-Jo called Peter Sutton, nearly hysterical. “I remember her calling me and saying, ‘They want to cut my daddy’s head off!’ and I called John-Henry and said, ‘What are you doing?’ ” Sutton said. “He said Bobby-Jo had freaked out when he talked to her about cryonics for Ted. He couldn’t believe it. He said calling her had backfired and he thought he’d made a mistake.” And Ferrell called Al Cassidy, whom Ted had chosen to be the executor of his estate. Ferrell vilified John-Henry’s cryonics plan and told Cassidy there was no way Bobby-Jo would approve of it.
John-Henry had already let Cassidy know of his intentions. “I strongly recommended that he talk to Ted about it. It was a touchy subject, obviously,” Cassidy said. “Every conversation I had with him, I said, ‘Have you talked with your father?’ ‘Not yet.’
“He told me they had several conversations about it leading up to the [2001] heart surgery. And he finally affirmed to me before the surgery that Ted had agreed to it.” Cassidy took this claim as truth; after all, he said, “John-Henry never lied to me.”11
For John-Henry, Bobby-Jo’s rejection of his request to consider cryonics for Ted, and her and Mark’s subsequent harsh complaints to Sutton and Cassidy, were watershed moments. He decided to sever whatever ties he had to Bobby-Jo, then he went further: he would deny her permission to ever visit Ted again, and if she came to their father’s house, he would have her arrested.
John-Henry had Eric Abel deliver that message. When Abel called, Mark answered the phone, as he was doing increasingly, wanting to act as his wife’s spokesman. Ferrell, who despised Abel, questioned whether John-Henry could legally do that. Abel said the power of attorney that Ted had given his son was broad and empowered him to make such a decision. Soon Ferrell was venting about John-Henry’s cryonics plans for Ted, and issued his own threat.
“You all do this shit, and we’ll go to the press,” he said.
Abel paused for a moment or two, then replied, “You’d do that?”
“You’re goddamned right we would.”12
32
Foreboding
J ohn-Henry hardly let the negative reaction from Bobby-Jo and some family friends deter him from cryonics or from digging in with Alcor as his preferred provider when the time arrived.
And though his own brief career in business thus far had been checkered at best, he did not hesitate to give the Alcorians advice on how to run a tighter ship. John-Henry pressed the company on its finances and on the ways in which the arrival of Ted Williams could turn things around. He even raised the possibility of making an announcement while Ted was still alive, prompting Dr. Jerry Lemler, the Alcor CEO, to gush, in a June 2001 letter to John-Henry, about the advantages of a “pre-mortem disclosure.” Lemler treated the young Williams as a princeling.
“We at Alcor are most assuredly grateful to you for your abiding interest and sincere concern regarding not only the optimal rescue and long-term care of your father, but the security and stability of our organization in toto,” Lemler wrote John-Henry in his June 12 letter.
As for what it might mean to announce that Ted would be coming to Alcor, Lemler thought “it would be huge. In nearly three decades of providing biostasis services, we’ve had a few so-called ‘heavy hitters’ look us over, but we’ve never had a .400 hitter as a member. It’s a genuine first for us! Stated bluntly, the Williams name can be expected to provide Alcor with a fund-raising and membership enhancing leverage wedge it has never possessed.”1
Ted’s rehabilitation in San Diego lasted four months and was difficult. He was still prone to infections. In New York, he’d developed a staph infection for which vancomycin, a powerful antibiotic, was prescribed. The vancomycin had killed the infection but damaged Williams’s kidneys, and he had to go on dialysis. The same pattern recurred in San Diego, where he’d registered at the hospital under the alias Luke Jackson. He was still on a ventilator, often uncooperative in his rehab, and listless, despite visits from John Glenn, Dom DiMaggio, and the third Mrs. Williams.*
A visit from Tommy Lasorda perked Ted up, however. “Ted always kept his eyes closed at that point in time, but he opened one eye briefly and closed it again,” his doctor Allan Goodman recalled. “When Tommy saw Ted respond he pulled me aside and he stepped up. He spent about an hour and a half in the most motivational session I’ll ever se
e. He leaned over Ted and said, ‘Ted, open those eyes,’ and Ted shook his head no. So he said, ‘Ted, I want to see those beautiful eyes I love so much,’ and Ted said no again, but within five minutes he was opening his eyes, and Tommy wouldn’t give up. I told him, ‘Tommy, we need to get him walking,’ because at that time he wasn’t walking. So Tommy said to him, ‘Let’s see you move those legs.’ And he hadn’t moved his legs in months, but he finally wiggled his toes, and Tommy said, ‘That’s not enough, I wanna see those legs move!’ And before you know it Ted was kicking his legs, just going to town.”
Then Lasorda told some doctor jokes at Goodman’s expense, and Ted began rolling in his bed, laughing. The visit was a breakthrough, and Williams became a more willing partner in his rehabilitation. “When we walked out of the room, I said, ‘Tommy, I now see how every time the Dodgers came to San Diego, you beat the Padres,’ ” Goodman said.2
Despite this progress, John-Henry and Claudia had philosophical differences with Goodman over Ted’s care. Goodman was a friend of Bob Breitbard’s and had grown up in the Boston area a big fan of Williams. They thought Goodman was too passive in his approach and that he belonged to the Bobby-Jo school of letting nature run its course.
“We thought we were going to lose him in San Diego,” Claudia remembered. “As soon as we moved out there, Breitbard and the doctors started saying, ‘Let’s let him go.’ Finally we said, ‘We’re out of here.’ ”
So in mid-June, preparations were made to fly Williams back across the country to Florida, where he would be readmitted to Gainesville’s Shands Hospital. Before leaving San Diego, John-Henry decided to fire Frank Brothers and George Carter, Ted’s longest-serving caretakers. While he knew his father loved Frank and George, the young Williams continued to have a tense relationship with both men, and he thought they were undermining him.
The Kid: The Immortal Life of Ted Williams Page 94
