* DiMaggio’s frigidity and greed extended to his own family. Joe’s image was on the cover of his brother Dom’s memoir of the 1941 season, Real Grass, Real Heroes, but Dom never asked his brother’s permission, Joe said, because he knew Joe would have said no. Engelberg wrote in his book that Joe and Dom didn’t speak to each other for five years before Joe’s death.
* Reporters, ever alert to any Williams gesture, would later ask him if he had not violated his own ban on hat tipping. Ted of course said he had not. It had been merely a wave of thanks and farewell, hat held aloft, not the traditional baseball hat tip—hand to brim with cap on head—given to acknowledge a home run or other applause. For Williams, this was not an insignificant parsing of differences.
* Marty Keough, a Red Sox utility outfielder from 1956 to 1960, recalled that one of his favorite memories of Ted concerns the time when a plane carrying the team was struck by lightning in the late ’50s. “They had a cracked window and the priest was up saving everyone,” Keough said in an interview. “We were supposed to land in Florida at eleven at night and didn’t get in until three or four in the morning. Ted was the calmest out of anyone. He didn’t say a word, just sat there. Everyone else was freaking out, especially the ones who didn’t like to fly in the first place. He was probably thinking, ‘Shit, this is nothing. Just imagine doing this every day in Korea.’ ”
* Dave Egan pounced on the crash news to reprise his argument that Williams had only been recalled for PR purposes, and now that those aims had been achieved in spades he should be released.
* When Williams returned to his home outside Miami, he found a mob of reporters waiting for him. So he made a U-turn and headed straight back to Islamorada, to Albright’s house. Could he lie low there for a while? Sure he could. Albright’s wife, Frankie, prepared a meal, and just as they were sitting down to Key lime pie for dessert, two reporters knocked on the door, looking for Williams. Ted jumped up and hid in a closet. Albright, rather than shoo the scribes away, invited them in for pie and coffee and made Ted sweat it out in the closet for a bit.
* Years later, when Bobby-Jo met Ted’s son, John-Henry, for the first time, they compared notes on this practice: “We went alone into a room to talk. The first thing he said—we closed the door, this was 1991—he said, ‘Did you ever have to say…’ and he started to say it, and we both picked up the phrase at the same time, and I said, ‘Holy shit!’ ”
* Curley died the following year, at the age of eighty-three.
* In 1954 they went to see a horror movie called Creature from the Black Lagoon, starring Richard Carlson and Julie Adams. Ted emerged from the theater a bit too enthused about Adams for Nelva’s liking. “What a body!” he said. “How pretty!” Ted promptly asked Fred Corcoran to arrange a meeting with Adams, the sort of request from Williams that Corcoran was accustomed to receiving. Ted and the actress went out, and the news hit the gossip columns. “Ted Williams is the kind of man that makes you glad you’re a woman!” Julie told the New York Daily News on July 12, 1954. “I’ve really only had one date with him, but it was one date I’ll never forget if I live to be a million.”
* White had hit .245 in 1956, with 5 homers and 44 RBIs.
* Toward the end of the season, Boudreau began hitting Ted second in the order to get him more at bats, but he still fell fourteen short with 386, and Cleveland’s Bobby Avila won the batting title with a .341 average. Casey Stengel, always a Ted booster, spoke out against the four-hundred-at-bats rule, saying it was “never meant for a guy like Williams. It’s for Humpty Dumpties trying to steal a batting championship on half a season’s work.”
* In 1958, United Press had been renamed United Press International (UPI) after taking over the International News Service (INS).
* The Boston writers were annoyed they had to follow the Lebovitz scoop, but they contained their grievances in light of the five hundred milestone.
* Reflecting on Williams’s emotional outbursts, Farber compared Ted to General George Patton, also known for a raging temper—a “man of greatness under strain” whom people didn’t take the time to fully understand.
* While Ted kept his distance from his mother’s side of the family, one of his endorsement deals, with Wheaties, meant that hundreds of boxes of cereal were regularly delivered to 1008 Chino Street in Santa Barbara. The extended family was effectively raised on the cereal. “I remember I ate Wheaties until I was blue in the face, and I can’t stand them now,” said Ted’s cousin Rosalie Larson, Paul Venzor’s daughter.
* Though it was hard to imagine Hillary not having the first say on how to make the best sleeping bag, one early ad presented Williams as the idea generator: “Most sleeping bags seem to be made for midgets. Let’s make them longer and a whole lot wider—so that people can really stretch out. Who wants a sleeping bag that fits like a straitjacket?”
* Besides the column, the radio spot, and the cartoon panels, George Struthers, the Sears executive who had first reached out to Williams, also thought the company should produce a television documentary on Ted’s life. To that end, Struthers paid $10,000 to hire four researchers who combed through newspaper archives and put together two huge three-ring notebooks filled with clippings and notes chronicling Williams’s career. A script was written, and Ramin even wrote a song for the film. Then Struthers died suddenly of a heart attack. His replacement was less of a Ted booster, so the documentary project was dropped.
* The Veterans Committee is a voting arm of the Hall of Fame empowered to induct managers, umpires, baseball executives, and players retired at least twenty-three years who have not been admitted by the writers.
* Ironically, the Herald ’s editorial page that day differed from McKenna’s assessment. In a short editorial entitled “The Honest Man,” the paper decided that the Williams remark was a refreshing example of his candor.
* Hall of Fame president Jeff Idelson later told the Boston Herald that the first casting was not destroyed, as it should have been. It was tossed in a Dumpster, then pilfered and sold on the memorabilia market to an unknown buyer.
* Dolores’s use of the plural was indicative of a broader trail she’d noticed, just as Ted’s previous wives had.
* Burgin mentioned that he’d served in the Army for three years, and Williams teased him by saying, “A scribe in the fuckin’ Army? Jesus Christ, so much for military secrets.”
* In 1970, Nixon arranged for his son-in-law, David Eisenhower, to be the statistician for the Senators. According to Shelby Whitfield, Eisenhower was a diligent worker who would report for duty in the press box wearing a dark pin-striped suit. In a tell-all memoir of his two years with the Senators, Whitfield wrote that during the seventh-inning stretch, Eisenhower would ask a press-box attendant to get him a bowl of ice cream, as the writers sent out for beer. On road trips, some Senators players took Eisenhower out on the prowl, determined to test the strength of his relationship with Julie Nixon, but without success.
* Claudia knew from experience how to hang in there, too, having been on the receiving end of coarse insults from Ted. “Yeah, it hurt the first time I heard my father say to me: ‘As long as I have a hair in my ass, you’ll be a pain in it,’ ” she said. “And I’d be like, ‘Oh, my God!’ Just devastated. I’d go off to my room, bawl, pout, do whatever I had to do, come back out to the kitchen: He loved me! He loved me! But I don’t think I ever heard my dad say, ‘I’m sorry.’ Never.”
* The headline in the New York Times the next day was TED WILLIAMS: GOOD FIELD, NO HIT.
* Manuel said Ted eventually sent him $1,500 as reimbursement.
* When Claudia came back from Paris, Ted would always ask her to speak French to him, and when friends came over, he would demand that she give them a command performance. “Until the day Daddy died, he’d ask me to talk French.”
* The Gold Cup Invitational Tarpon Fly Tournament, as it is officially known, continues to be held every year in June and is known as the Wimbledon of tarpon competitions.
&nbs
p; * In the early ’60s, while shooting a film for Sears, Ted had expertly maneuvered a tarpon directly into his boat for the benefit of a photographer stationed in an adjacent boat, only to find that the photographer hadn’t been ready and had missed the shot. Enraged, Ted paid the man on the spot and sped off, telling him to find his own way home.
* In appreciation of his conservation efforts, the Canadian government later gave Williams a fishing license, enabling him to avoid the requirement that foreigners hire local guides, but Ted continued to use Roy Curtis. After Roy died, Ted employed his son Clarence.
* The new president’s other guest that day made for an unlikely companion for Williams: Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak.
* When Dominic was asked his opinion, he gave his standard diplomatic reply, all the more so because his big brother was watching and listening carefully: “Well,” he said as the audience laughed sympathetically, “the best right-handed hitter was Joe. But the best left-handed hitter by far was Ted Williams.”
* Many concluded that John-Henry’s effort was merely a ploy to eliminate some Ted signatures from the market in order to enhance the value of the autographs he was generating, but the son denied that. “It’s the furthest thing from the truth,” he told Sports Illustrated for its November 25, 1996, issue. “It doesn’t matter what type of forgeries are out there. It’s not going to affect the amount of money I make. But when I see people devaluing his autograph, that’s not fair.”
* Once when Ted was in town and staying with his son, John-Henry borrowed a window air conditioner from the Helmans so his father would be more comfortable. Helman didn’t get the unit back until he asked for it two years later.
* John-Henry also challenged some of McWalter’s moves, such as his decision to settle a minor dispute that arose after Williams bought out Barry Finger, Vince Antonucci’s original partner. “John-Henry said, ‘That isn’t the way the Ted Williams family does business. When someone crosses us, we get him! We don’t settle with him, we get him. You’re not our kind of person.’ ”
* Anita had initially turned down the Grand Slam job but finally accepted it on the condition that she would work for Brian Interland, not John-Henry. Interland was older, and she felt she could learn more about business from him than the inexperienced young Williams.
* Interland said the Lexuses were leased, not bought, and he acknowledged significant expenses, but denied knowing about any missing funds. “On the $1.8 million, that’s unbelievable,” he said. “I have no idea of that. That’s shocking. I don’t recall that at all. When we were involved, we were not billing anything like $1.8 million.”
* John-Henry stopped payment on a few paychecks that were in the pipeline to McWalter, but a sympathetic Helman found a way to make the checks good, unbeknownst to young Williams.
* After the nomination was settled, Ted unsuccessfully lobbied Bush’s father to have his son choose McCain as his running mate.
* Williams was watching the Red Sox play the Angels at Fenway Park with his cook, Robert Hogerheide, a former Navy chef, when they heard the announcers wish him a happy birthday. So Ted called Fenway, and they patched him straight through to the TV booth. “They broadcast the conversation right on the air as we were watching,” said Hogerheide. “It was great!”
* Meanwhile, to honor Ted, the Marine Commandant had recently promoted him from captain to colonel. Williams was thrilled by this and loved for his caretakers or friends to call him Colonel.
* The sales rep also accompanied John-Henry on several fruitless nonporn sales pitches in which the son tried to leverage the father’s name to get business for Hitter, including proposals to the Detroit Tigers owner, Mike Ilitch, and to the Jimmy Fund in Boston. John-Henry was trying to persuade both organizations to hire Hitter to provide their Internet services and website design.
* Gard was fired in 2000 for allegedly getting Ted to sign autographs and then selling them without permission, according to Eric Abel, the Williams family lawyer. Gard denied he was fired and said he quit for health reasons.
* Actually, Dluhy believed she was fibbing in giving that answer. She and some of the caretakers knew that Ted’s big house on the hill, which he had built in 1989, had been refinanced, and they assumed he no longer owned it. But he did. Records show the original mortgage was for $260,000 in 1989. The note was paid off in 1998 and a new $240,000 mortgage taken out, still in Ted’s name. The purpose of the refinancing was to take advantage of lower interest rates, not to take out equity, according to Eric Abel.
* One deep-pocketed member of the embryonic Ted–and–John-Henry group was Gerry Rittenberg, the Party City owner and Williams memorabilia collector. Rittenberg tried to round up some venture capital tycoons he knew, and he said they expressed interest, but only if they could meet with Ted himself. Williams, however, was in no condition physically to meet with any possible investors, so the John-Henry gambit never got off the ground.
* In 1991, Kent and Faloon were indicted on multiple counts of importing drugs not approved for sale in the United States, conspiracy, and dispensing drugs without prescriptions. The two men had a long wrangle with the Food and Drug Administration and the Justice Department, but the US attorney’s office in Fort Lauderdale ultimately dropped the charges against both.
* Dolores caused a stir at the hospital after she slipped Ted some sort of homeopathic remedy that caused various monitors and machines attached to Williams to light up in alarm. She was asked to leave.
* The meeting would be chronicled in David Halberstam’s engaging, short book The Teammates.
* Flavin was also a fixture at Fenway Park, where he was known as the Poet Laureate of the Red Sox. In that capacity, Flavin was best known for his rendition of “Teddy at the Bat,” his knockoff of Ernest Lawrence Thayer’s timeless “Casey at the Bat,” wherein Flavin substituted the Kid for Casey—but, of course, Ted did not strike out. In 2013, Flavin was named the Red Sox’s lead public-address announcer.
* Connolly—who’d worked the Bill Clinton–Gennifer Flowers beat, among others—had employed John-Henry as his legman in early 1989, when he was stalking Jane Fonda on behalf of Star magazine. John-Henry was in California trying to play baseball at the time, and Connolly knew that young Williams had dated Vanessa Vadim, Fonda’s daughter from her first marriage, to the French director Roger Vadim. Star was chasing a story that Fonda was soon to divorce her second husband, Tom Hayden, and Connolly asked John-Henry to meet with the actress, whom he knew via Vanessa, to see what he could find out. He came up with enough information to help the Star story, and Connolly paid him $3,000 in cash. Fonda and Hayden were divorced later that year.
* Heer’s wife was a singer and had once helped Bobby-Jo record her country song in honor of Ted, “I Love You, Dad.”
* The expert, Linda J. Hart of Miami, concluded that both the pact and Ted’s signature had been written before John-Henry folded the document and stored it in his car. She said Ted and John-Henry had signed using the same pen, while Claudia used a different pen. And though two samples of Ted’s signature included in the report—samples from the night of October 30, 2000, when he checked into the hospital—appeared to the naked eye to be much weaker and different in several respects from the signature on the pact, which was dated three days later, Hart concluded in her report that there were “no significant differences observed.”
* Eric Abel said he doubted John-Henry was aware of restrictions governing the transfer of Ted’s body to Alcor under Florida law, but he acknowledged that he hadn’t advised John-Henry of those restrictions.
* While Alcor provided me with a tour of its facility and made its chief operating officer at the time, Tanya Jones, available to discuss its general practices, it declined all comment on the Williams case, citing patient confidentiality restrictions.
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Contents
Cover
Title Page
Welcome
Dedication
Author’s Note
Introduction
1. Shame
2. “Fairyland”
3. Sarasota and Minneapolis
4. Big Time
5. The Writers
6. .406
7. 3A
8. World War II
9. 1946
10. 1947–1948
11. 1949–1951
12. Ted and Joe
13. Korea
14. Transitions
15. 1954–1956
16. Late Innings
17. Last Ups
18. Kindness
19. Real Life
20. Bobby-Jo
21. “Inn of the Immortals”
22. Dolores
The Kid: The Immortal Life of Ted Williams Page 112
