Reporters and camera crews staked out John-Henry, hungry for any explanation he cared to offer about why he had dispatched his father to Alcor, but he remained hunkered down in Ted’s house, saying nothing. Bobby-Jo and her husband, Mark, on the other hand, granted interviews to virtually all comers, happy to stoke the flames of the emerging narrative that portrayed John-Henry as the devil incarnate.
Most of Ted’s old friends were appalled, though in retrospect some would note that John-Henry was tremendously persuasive, especially with his father, and might indeed have convinced Ted to accept cryonics. Still, such sentiment was barely reflected in any of the press coverage.
Major League Baseball announced on July 8 that it was renaming its All-Star Game Most Valuable Player Award after Williams, and John-Henry and Claudia were invited to come to Milwaukee for the game. But the reaction against John-Henry was so virulent that he and Claudia were quietly disinvited the next day.
Then on July 10, as the conflict appeared headed to court, John-Henry made a phone call that seemed to have little to do with the business at hand. Ringing up Shands Hospital in Gainesville, he asked for the date on which Ted had his heart catheterization procedure performed—the one he underwent before the pacemaker was installed. Nancy Carmichael, the assistant to Rick Kerensky, Williams’s cardiologist, called John-Henry back with the date—November 3, 2000—and expressed her condolences on the occasion of Ted’s death. After the call, she wondered why, as he grieved for his father, John-Henry wanted to know the date of a surgery that had happened nearly two years earlier.
The media swarm in tiny Citrus County, Florida, was more than matched by the crush of reporters and cameramen who gathered outside Alcor headquarters in Scottsdale, Arizona, looking first for confirmation that Ted’s remains were inside and second for illumination into the strange world of cryonics. Alcor was prohibited by its own confidentiality rules and by its agreement with John-Henry from acknowledging that it had Ted. But it was determined to take maximum advantage of the attention it was receiving to tout the company and cryonics generally. And since it was so widely assumed that Williams was at Alcor anyway, the company looked for a way to make the unofficial official.
“To get ahead of the curve a bit, to answer the ‘Is he at Alcor or not’ question, and to make a positive case for cryonics, we thought, ‘Let’s see if we can let the New York Times do something,’ ” recalled Bill Haworth, the Alcor PR man. “It was probably one of the best placements I ever did—below the fold, front page, on July tenth. It was basically constructed as ‘The Times has learned from sources close to the family that Williams is at Alcor.’ This at least provided the authority of the printed word, the words that we could not utter officially. I was tickled with that one, and while we didn’t know what John-Henry’s reaction would be, the day it ran, he called and said, ‘Great story in the Times.’ Then we opened the door selectively, one-on-one, to media. We still couldn’t acknowledge officially, but ‘Let’s talk about cryonics,’ and ‘You want to do the tour?’ That’s how I spun the media out from that time on.”5
Jerry Lemler, the Alcor CEO, and other officials gave certain reporters a tour of the facility, including the “patient care bay,” where the massive stainless steel tanks known as Dewars, which contain the frozen bodies, hang from the ceiling. Officials would linger near Dewar number 6, sometimes nodding their heads, so reporters could feel confident in providing the rich detail that that was where Williams’s remains resided. Alcor officials took care to conceal the grisly fact that Ted’s head had been cut off and was sitting in a can inside a “neuro column.” All the press attention seemed to have its intended effect: Lemler crowed that whereas, pre-Ted, Alcor had only averaged about five thousand hits a day on its website, since the news broke it was getting six hundred thousand hits daily.
At the request of John-Henry and Claudia, Bobby-Jo agreed to try mediation in an effort to end their dispute. They gathered on July 15 at the office of Richard “Spike” Fitzpatrick, one of Bobby-Jo’s attorneys, located near the Citrus County courthouse, where reporters were assembled to await the filing of Ted’s will.
The mediator, David C. Brennan, a lawyer from Orlando, greeted the three Williams children and passed out copies of Ted’s 1996 will, wherein he said he wanted to be cremated and wherein he excluded Bobby-Jo from his estate. Then Brennan presented Bobby-Jo and Mark Ferrell with a piece of paper they had never seen before. It appeared to have been written on a sheet of 8½" x 11" paper, turned sideways, with one end ripped off. Creased, handwritten, and oil-stained, the document was presented by John-Henry and Claudia as a private pact that offered incontrovertible proof that their father did, in fact, want to be cryonically preserved: “JHW, Claudia and Dad all agree to be put in bio-stasis after we die,” it read. “This is what we want, to be able to be together in the future, even if it is only a chance.” Below this declaration were three signatures: John-Henry’s, Ted’s, and, on the final line, Claudia’s. The document was dated November 2, 2000—the day before Ted’s heart catheterization procedure at Shands Hospital.
Bobby-Jo, Mark, and their two lawyers tried to make sense of the document. Mark quickly concluded it was fraudulent, raising the possibility that it had been built around an existing Ted Williams signature. He knew from the caretakers that John-Henry had been in the habit of having his father warm up before signing sessions by writing his signature on blank pieces of paper to make sure it was of adequate quality. Mark also pointed out that the date, written as 11/2/00, had an anomaly. The 11 was darker than the other numbers, and there was a line between the two 1s, so it looked like a capital H. It appeared that the number might originally have been a 4 that was changed to an 11, Mark thought. He also noted that whenever Ted signed a letter or any kind of a formal document, he used “Theodore S. Williams,” not the informal “Ted Williams,” which appeared on the pact.
During breaks in the long day of mediation, Bobby-Jo’s team thought of ways to undermine the written pact. They began looking for people whom Ted had told he still wanted to be cremated after November 2, 2000. Bob Breitbard said Williams had told him so in November of 2001 and again in February of 2002. Nancy Carmichael of Shands said she remembered Ted talking of being cremated just weeks after the pact was supposedly signed, when he was still in the hospital recovering from his pacemaker surgery. Frank Brothers, also there at the time, along with another nurse, Debbie Erb, corroborated. Caretaker George Carter said Williams told him he still wanted to be cremated when recuperating from heart surgery in San Diego in the spring of 2001. Becky Vaughn, the nurse who cared for Ted in December of 2001, following the catheter and pacemaker procedures, had been present when Ted told John-Henry to stop talking about the cryonics “bullshit.” Bobby-Jo’s daughter, Dawn Hebding, had seen her grandfather in January of 2001, just before his seizure, and he had told her he wanted to be cremated. And Isabel Gilmore said Ted reaffirmed his wish to be cremated in 2002, not long before he died. Those eight, at a minimum, stood to be witnesses on behalf of Bobby-Jo if her challenge made it before a judge.
John-Henry and Claudia, feeling Mark was too angry, volatile, and controlling, wanted to speak to Bobby-Jo alone at the mediation session. Though reluctant, she finally agreed.
Claudia decided to do the talking, and she thought things were going well.
“I was thinking: ‘John-Henry, she doesn’t like you. Let me talk. Girl to girl. We might relate.’ Bang, we hit it off. I’m like, ‘Bobby-Jo, let’s be together on this. Please! This is what Dad wanted. This is what we did. We were there, Bobby-Jo. We were there! You weren’t there. We’re sorry.’ I even said to her, ‘I’m sorry you didn’t have the relationship with Dad that you may have wanted. But please, don’t take this away from us. Let’s be together. Let’s be a family.’
“She looked right at me and John-Henry and said, ‘You know, that’s all I’ve ever really wanted. To be included.’ She was being really nice. We were blown away! John-Henry’s sitting there. He finally s
aid, ‘All the time, Bobby-Jo. We will be as one. Come on, let’s make it happen.’ We were so ready to just welcome her in. ‘Let’s just be united on this. Let’s be united.’ ”6
When Bobby-Jo came out of the room and reported back to her team, Cleveland lawyer John Heer, who was also there representing Bobby-Jo, thought she seemed “shell-shocked. She didn’t know what to think. She said they were being very nice.”
That night, the two sides were near an agreement, according to a memo Fitzpatrick dictated at the time. Bobby-Jo wanted assurances that John-Henry would never sell Ted’s DNA, as she said he had threatened to do in their first phone call, and he agreed, saying that was never his intention. One sticking point, however, was that John-Henry and Claudia did not want to attach a copy of the written pact to the will when it was filed. It was too crude, and they were embarrassed by it. But Heer and Fitzpatrick thought the document was a fake, and they felt it was in their interest to have it revealed.
The next day, any hope of a resolution was dashed when the mediator invited Mark to participate, and the effect was like tossing a grenade into the room.
“I said, ‘Are you sure they want me in there?’ ” Mark recalled. “ ‘Because if I go in there it’s gonna be over with, because I don’t like what they’ve done, and they’re not gonna convince me this is what Ted wanted.’ ” When he sat down at the table with John-Henry, Mark promptly announced, “I’ve lived through sixty years, and you’re the most despicable piece of human garbage I’ve ever met in my life, you son of a bitch.” He then turned to Claudia and told her, “You’re just his little puppy dog.”
John-Henry’s face grew flush as he let Mark vent, but he held his tongue. Finally, he said, “I’m sorry you feel that way.” Claudia recalled that she had to contain herself to keep from lunging across the table at Mark, but in the end she, too, said nothing.
After the talks broke down, Al Cassidy, the Winter Haven real estate developer whom Ted had appointed as his executor, asked a judge to settle the issue of what Ted’s wishes were. But Cassidy had already made up his mind. “Based on what I know and believe, after the time of his will, Ted chose to have his body preserved via cryonics,” he said in a statement. “While many people may not make the same choice for themselves, I hope people will respect this as a private family matter.”
On the night of July 22, the Red Sox staged a tribute to Williams at Fenway Park. This Tedfest came as a welcome respite from the lurid cryonics story and gave people a chance to say good-bye to the Kid and revel in their warm memories of him.
There were 20,500 paying fans who turned up. A huge number 9 hung from the center-field wall. On the left-field wall were large blown-up photographs showing Ted hitting, flying his jet in wartime, and kneeling while talking to children. In left field itself was a 77' × 36' number 9 made of white carnations. Bouquets of roses and other flowers filled the carnation borders.
After the national anthem and a flyover by Marine jets, the evening began, and more than a score of people who had been friends of Ted and had known him at various stages of his life took turns coming to home plate and telling stories about their experiences with him. The guests included Williams’s old pals and teammates Dominic DiMaggio and Johnny Pesky; John Glenn; Carl Yastrzemski; and Nomar Garciaparra, then the Sox shortstop and public face of the team. Noticeably absent were Ted’s three children, all of whom had declined invitations to attend. Given the public mood, John-Henry and Claudia’s absence was not surprising, but Bobby-Jo would later say she regretted not attending and seizing the moment to make a public plea for getting Ted’s remains out of Alcor.
Dom DiMaggio served as her surrogate, however, and he elicited a standing ovation from the crowd when he said: “I am saddened by the turmoil of the current controversy. I hope and pray this controversy will end as abruptly as it began, and the family will do the right thing by honoring Ted’s last wishes as to his final resting place. And may he then finally rest in peace.”
After the speakers finished, nine white doves were released from a box at home plate and then flew out over the outfield and beyond. For the finale, the lights were turned off, and a number 9 formed by a pattern of lights inside the Prudential Tower, behind right field, appeared. Then a group of Red Sox old-timers, led by DiMaggio and Pesky, and a handful of current players, led by Garciaparra, went out to the left-field garden, and each laid a red rose amid the white carnations that shaped Ted’s 9. Finally, Curt Gowdy, the former voice of the Red Sox, came to home plate and reenacted his call of Williams’s final home run, on September 28, 1960. Gowdy was helped by Jack Fisher, the former Orioles pitcher who had served up the pitch that Ted hit out that day. Fisher walked out to the mound and obligingly wound up and pretended to throw a pitch, happy to play the willing victim.
On July 25, John-Henry and Claudia released a statement about their decision to have their father frozen, announcing that Ted had been skeptical about cryonics but had gradually come around, and that “when we were together prior to his surgery, he embraced the idea as his own.”7 They also disclosed the written pact in a court filing after all, thus supplying the first written evidence that Ted had changed his mind about cremation and committed to cryonics. But the document’s authenticity was met with widespread skepticism by the commentariat.
Responding to questions from reporters about the chain of custody of the pact after it was purportedly signed on November 2, 2000, representatives of the younger Williams children told the media that John-Henry had folded it up, put it in the trunk of his car with other papers, and forgotten about it. The note remained in the car for the next seventeen months, collecting oil stains, and only recently was recovered and stored more carefully after its significance in the cryonics dispute became apparent. Bobby-Jo’s lawyers pointed out that the pact had not been notarized or otherwise witnessed, and they also questioned whether Ted was mentally competent at the time, given his age and hospitalization for congestive heart failure.
“It’s authentic because my clients were there,” Robert Goldman, a Naples, Florida, attorney representing John-Henry and Claudia, said. “I can tell you unequivocally that it’s an absolutely authentic document.” As for whether Ted was of sound mind at the time of the pact, Goldman said Shands doctors could testify that he was, though he somewhat oddly added that Florida’s standard was so low that “literally, there are many zoo animals that could” be found competent.
On August 8, Al Cassidy formally dropped his request on behalf of Williams’s estate that the court settle what Ted’s wishes were, saying he had concluded that the written pact was genuine. Cassidy noted that a handwriting expert, whose selection was approved by both sides, had concluded that Ted’s signature was authentic, and he also said he had been influenced by a new sworn affidavit from Claudia in which she said she was present in the hospital room on November 2, 2000, when Williams “verbally indicated he wanted to be cryonically preserved in bio-stasis.”*
Lawyers for Bobby-Jo said she would continue to press her court challenge, though her financial ability to do so was in question. She had already appealed to the public for donations to help finance her legal expenses, indicating that her own funds were limited.
When Nancy Carmichael saw the date of the pact—November 2, 2000—she immediately thought she knew why John-Henry had called the hospital after Ted died, wanting to know the date of the catheterization procedure: to date a forged note plausibly, he needed to place himself in the hospital before the surgery. Any kind of surgery for Ted at his age and in his condition was risky, so it would have been natural to have a discussion about committing to cryonics before that time. And he could not have chosen a day or two before Williams’s pacemaker was installed, on November 6, because John-Henry had been barred from the hospital during that period as a result of his chicken pox. “I just thought, ‘Oh, my God. That’s why he wanted to know the date,’ ” Carmichael said. “I guess he figured I’m too stupid. I’d never figure it out. I immediately thought it was a
phony. First because of the conversations about cremation—I was present when Ted and Frank Brothers were talking about Islamorada, and Ted said he wanted to be cremated. That was just after the time John-Henry was saying Ted signed this paper that he wanted to be frozen. Secondly, the state of the document. I don’t keep my very important documents in the trunk of my car with grease on them. Plus it wasn’t notarized.”
Carmichael told John Heer her story and offered some supporting evidence. When John-Henry had called the hospital asking for the date of the catheterization procedure, he had reached Michael Johnson, a clinical social worker with whom he was friendly. It had been Johnson who asked Nancy to get the information, and she still had on her pager the text she had received from him on July 10 at 10:58 a.m.: “Nancy, please call JHW about his dad. He wants to know when the heart catheterization [sic].”8 Carmichael read the text to Heer on the phone. She also said that while she recalled seeing John-Henry on November 3 for the catheterization procedure, Claudia was not there. Carmichael declined to talk to reporters about all this, concerned about violating patient confidentiality regulations, but she told Heer she would testify in court if she were subpoenaed.
Heer and Spike Fitzpatrick, Bobby-Jo’s other lawyer, turned their attention to Claudia. If she had not been there for Ted’s catheterization procedure when it occurred at 7:50 a.m. on November 3, a Friday, would she have been there the night before to sign the pact? She had, after all, been working in Clearwater, some 150 miles south of Shands, in Gainesville.
The Kid: The Immortal Life of Ted Williams Page 99
