America's Obsessives: The Compulsive Energy That Built a Nation (41 page)

  Even more remarkable, Williams revived the Senators’ pitching staff with the same one-dimensional approach. Adopting the mind-set of hitters, his pitchers discovered that they were better equipped to do their job. “I just listened to everything he said to the hitters,” reliever Casey Cox later recalled, “and turned it around. If this was the situation they wanted to create, the 2-0, 3-1 count, then it was the situation I wanted to avoid. The most important thing was to throw strikes.” The inverse of Williams’s hitting mantra—“Don’t get into a situation where you have to throw a good pitch to hit”—also proved useful. Cox had his best year in the majors, going 12-7 with a 2.78 ERA. Starter Dick Bosman went from 2-9 to 16-12 with a league-leading 2.19 ERA. “He [Williams] taught me to pitch from the neck up,” stated Bosman. The team’s ERA was fifth in the league in 1969, up from tenth in 1968.

The superior hitting, combined with the dependable pitching, translated into wins. “Williams has refused to act like a rookie manager,” wrote the
Washington Post
’s Shirley Povich on July 4, 1969, alluding to the “sorcery he has used to bring forth feats from athletes who are surpassing themselves.” The 1969 Senators were the first Washington ball club since 1952 to be five games over .500 by the All-Star break. By July 14, home attendance was already 11,000 more than for all of 1968. For the year, the team went 86-76, its best record in twenty-four years. Proud of how hard his players worked, on the last day of the season, Williams rewarded each one with an object dear to his heart—not a bat, but the next best thing, a fishing rod, which he placed in their lockers. Though the Senators finished in fourth place in the American League East, more than twenty games behind the first-place Orioles, the turnaround was so remarkable that the Associated Press named Williams the AL Manager of the Year. The whole city exulted in his triumph. Richard Nixon, who also moved to the nation’s capital in early 1969, personally wired his congratulations. (Years later, Williams would call Nixon “the greatest fucking President since Abraham Lincoln.”)

Williams had once again shown that he could control his behavior to meet a given objective. As a player, he had infuriated the writers and charmed the umpires (so that he could keep pumping them for info on hitters), but as a manager, he did just the opposite. “He gave us fantastic copy,” stated Russ White, who covered the Senators for the
Washington Daily News
, in a recent interview. “He was colorful, and he didn’t lie.” After a game early in the 1969 season in which Morganna, the blonde bombshell known as the “Kissing Bandit,” ran onto the field, reached up and pecked Frank Howard, the manager told White, “Hell of a butt on her.” In Washington, in sharp contrast to Boston, Williams was beloved for his wit, intelligence, and strength of character. When the Senators manager met Vince Lombardi for the first time in the summer of 1969, he said, “I understand that you can walk on water,” to which the Redskins coach responded, “I understand that you can, too.”

But Williams couldn’t keep up the magic. In 1970, the Senators reverted to form, winning only seventy games. And the team’s fortunes went downhill from there. Much of the blame can be heaped on team owner Bob Short, who made a series of ill-conceived decisions, such as trading several key players for a controversial has-been, pitcher Denny McLain. Williams got embroiled in a bitter feud with the former All-Star, who suffered a league-leading twenty-two losses in his only year with the team. Early in the 1971 season, to balance his books, Short sold a couple of his best players, including Mike Epstein; that fall, the mercurial executive abandoned Washington in favor of Arlington, Texas. A frustrated and bitter Williams stayed on and became the first manager of the new Texas Rangers. One of the few highlights of his disastrous 1972 season—the Rangers lost more games than any other team in baseball—was a pregame hitting exhibition at Fenway Park on August 25, when the paunchy fifty-three-year-old-thrilled the Boston fans by picking up a bat and promptly knocking one into the seats.

As the 1972 season ended, Williams resigned as the Rangers manager. He had had enough. “Managing is essentially a loser’s job,” he later wrote, “and managers are about the most expendable pieces of furniture on earth.” For the control freak, overseeing twenty-five men, whom he could not even pick, as opposed to confronting a single dumb pitcher in the batter’s box, left too much to chance.

Under his cushy contract with Short, Williams could keep collecting his checks for another year while remaining a team consultant devoid of any responsibilities.

He turned his attention back to being Ted Williams, a demanding full-time job in its own right. Everyone from Hollywood A-listers to politicos of all stripes was eager to rub shoulders with him, but he came out of his cocoon only occasionally. While he relished the social clout that his hitting had wrought, he exercised his newfound freedom to the fullest extent possible. Like Holden Caulfield, the adolescent anti-hero created by the late J. D. Salinger, the perpetual “Kid” had no interest in sucking up to anyone he considered a phony. “Ted don’t do mucha anything he don’t want to,” said his longtime Florida neighbor and fishing guide, Jimmy Albright. For this man of modest means and simple tastes, life would once again revolve around the pursuit of the Big Three. At home in the Florida Keys, he would go after tarpon and bonefish; and every summer, he would retreat to his cabin on the Miramichi River in New Brunswick to fish for Atlantic salmon. “I am as nuts about it [salmon fishing] in a cold, pouring rain as I am in bright sunshine,” he later wrote. “I love it that much.”

But not long after calling it quits with both the Texas Rangers and his third wife, Williams stumbled upon something unexpected: love. It came in the form of Louise Kaufman, a white-haired woman six years his senior, whom he invited to move into his home in Islamorada, Florida, in the mid-1970s. Nearly two decades earlier, as her own first marriage was crumbling, Louise first became entranced by Williams, and she was devastated when he kept passing her up for his assorted lot of short-term lovers and part-time spouses. Though Louise was no looker—Williams’s Red Sox teammate Johnny Pesky nicknamed her “Grandma”—her résumé was ideally suited for the nearly impossible position of being Ted Williams’s live-in girlfriend. A card-carrying member of the International Women’s Gamefishing Association, she once caught a 152-pound fish (and she weighed only about 120). An avid nonfiction reader who liked to collect facts, she, too, could hurl F-bombs. But most important, Louise knew how to stand up to the rageaholic without losing control herself. For the first time, Williams would manage to organize his existence through a bond with another human being rather than with an implement. The anti–May Williams, Louise would keep his houses spick-and-span; she not only cleaned his clothes, but she even ironed his underpants. While order was still his summum bonum, he was now accompanied on his quixotic quest by a flesh-and-blood companion with whom he shared both his wounds and his aspirations. As he neared his sixties, Ted Williams was finally starting to understand what human connection was all about.

In 1978, Williams also reconnected with baseball when he was hired by the Red Sox to come to Winter Haven every spring to work with young hitters. For a new generation of Red Sox minor leaguers, “the Corpulent Clouter,” as a
Globe
columnist dubbed the 260-pound retiree, was not a Greek hero, or even a Greek god, but God Himself. One awestruck teenager was future Hall of Famer Wade Boggs, who first met Williams when they both happened to be standing in line for a movie. Within seconds, as Boggs recalled in a recent phone interview, Williams emitted his standard salutation, and Boggs, who had pored over
The Science of Hitting
in high school, was suddenly shaking with excitement. As the other patrons started filing into the theater, the pair kept demonstrating batting stances and discussing hip action. “Ted was bigger than life,” stated the former third baseman with the .328 lifetime average. For Boggs, who also “never could get enough hitting practice,” Williams’s monomania would serve as inspiration.

The former catcher Rich Gedman, who also played with Boggs both in the minors and on the 1986 Sox team that lost a classic World Series to the New York Mets, recalled the hush that shrouded the field at the team’s minor-league complex whenever Williams started issuing his profanity-laced running commentary from behind the batting cage. “It was like the old E. F. Hutton commercial,” Gedman told me. “We sensed that we were in the presence of greatness, and we listened intently to every word.” Besides hitting coach, Williams also served as cleanliness consultant. Soon after his return to the Sox, according to Leigh Montville, then a
Globe
reporter, Williams asked the club’s equipment guy: “What detergent do you use to clean these uniforms?” When he heard Tide, his inquisitive mind was far from satisfied: “Now why do you use Tide? Is it better than all the other detergents? Is it cheaper? Is there some secret ingredient? Why do you use Tide?”

After Louise Kaufman died unexpectedly in August 1993 during the couple’s annual sojourn in New Brunswick, Williams’s health quickly deteriorated. As with Estée Lauder after the loss of her husband, he was devastated; he immediately shut down emotionally. Six months later, he suffered a major stroke, which robbed him of 75 percent of his vision. The seventy-five-year-old would now require round-the-clock nursing care. At the end of 1994, his youngest child, John Henry, then twenty-six, moved into his Florida home and promptly took control. “The Kid’s Kid,” as he was called in the Boston papers, had the same volatile temperament. “Dealing with John Henry is like sitting on a powder keg,” an auctioneer once told the
New York Times
. But the six-foot-five JFK Jr. look-alike had little talent or ingenuity to go with the touch of madness. He could not even hit minor-league pitching and never made it anywhere near the bigs in several cracks at a baseball career. And just about every one of his many business ventures, which he kept concocting in the attempt to cash in on his father’s fame, flopped miserably. As Williams careened from one health crisis to another, all that the self-absorbed and combative John Henry seemed to care about, according to a slew of observers, was whether his autograph machine could still function. In the fall of 2001, as an exceedingly frail Williams recovered from major heart surgery, his former cook, Jacques Prudhomme, noticed that he was doing special exercises to strengthen his right wrist. “Just for the autographs,” Prudhomme told Leigh Montville. “I went into my car and cried.…I would never come back to…[his home] again.”

As soon as Williams died on July 5, 2002, John Henry had the body flown to Alcor, a cryonics firm in Arizona, which promptly put him in a freezer. The reason? Unlike Lindbergh, Williams himself rarely, if ever, expressed an interest in immortality; however, John Henry, who held power of attorney, insisted otherwise. He also produced an oil-stained scrap of paper containing his father’s signature to back up his claim that his father wanted to be frozen until medical science could figure out how to bring bodies back to life. His older sister, Bobby-Jo, was shocked and horrified. In an interview with a Boston TV station, she stated that John Henry had told her: “We can sell Dad’s DNA and people will buy it because they’d love to have little Ted Williamses.” Supported by a host of family friends, Bobby-Jo sought legal action to stop her brother. Six months later, lacking sufficient financial resources, she reached an out-of-court settlement; in exchange for a couple of hundred grand, Bobby-Jo gave up her attempt to have her father cremated, in accordance with the request that he had made in his will. Today “a splintered Splendid Splinter” is still frozen. But as an ex-Alcor employee, Larry Johnson, claimed in a controversial
Sports Illustrated
feature story and subsequent book,
Frozen: My Journey into the World of Cryonics, Deception, and Death
(2009), the job may have been botched. According to Johnson, the firm ended up severing Williams’s head from his body and storing each part separately; moreover, during the surgery, his head was accidentally cracked in nine places.  (Alcor ended up suing Johnson for defamation, and in early 2012 the two sides reached an out-of-court settlement. Avoiding a protracted legal battle, Johnson issued a public statement, which included the following carefully worded retraction: “My account of the Ted Williams cryopreservation, which was not based upon my first-hand observation as noted in my book, is contradicted by information furnished by Alcor.”) In a rare interview with ABC News in 2012, Claudia Williams defended her brother, whose body was also shipped to Arizona after his death from leukemia in 2004. By way of explanation, she alluded to her father’s lifelong obsession with science—a word that, as she noted, made it into the title of his treatise on hitting. She added: “We [the family] did this together because it made us feel like it had something of hope. That’s all. A hope.” But as a good obsessive, Williams was much more about complete control than idle hope. And especially in something as monumental as possible resurrection, it is likely that this god would have done everything in his power to ensure at least a reasonable chance of success—say, .400.

P
articularly in these tense economic times, America could certainly benefit from a new generation of obsessive innovators. What baseball general manager wouldn’t want to sign the next Ted Williams, even if he too displayed screwball antics on the diamond? (A few might even be willing to acquire some DNA of the last one, no matter how slim the odds are that cryonics will turn out to be anything but a bust.) What venture capitalist wouldn’t be eager to support a new business led by the next Henry Heinz or Estée Lauder?

It’s hard not to fantasize about a little army of obsessives suddenly coming along and single-handedly jump-starting the entire economy. Heck, you might even be tempted to rush out and become one yourself. Soon after publishing his book
The Hypomanic Edge
, Johns Hopkins psychologist John D. Gartner received many calls from people asking, “How can I get hypomania?”

Unfortunately, or fortunately—depending on your angle—one can’t suddenly come down with a deeply entrenched form of mental illness such as OCPD or hypomania. By the time you reach adulthood, either you’ve got it or you don’t. America will just have to settle for those obsessives who happen to come down the pike. “There is no formula for making them,” psychiatrist Kerry Sulkowicz, head of the Boswell Group consulting firm, told me. “If there were, it would be some form of child abuse. And we wouldn’t want to try that kind of social engineering. We would probably get it wrong, and the kids would end up in a mental institution.”

However, as successful as some obsessive innovators have been, should we even look up to them? After all, they also come weighed down with the kind of self-absorption that can humiliate underlings, wreck marriages, and traumatize children. Do they all belong in the Hall of Shame rather than the Hall of Fame? As this book demonstrates, upon close examination, some of those very same super-achievers who have long defined the American character—such as Jefferson, Lindbergh, and Ted Williams in particular—were themselves defined by major character flaws. If truth be told, these were not the kind of men whom any of us would want our daughters to marry. But though we may not approve of how these obsessive innovators lived their lives, we can unequivocally admire both how they solved particular problems and the attributes that they brought to their respective crafts—the thoroughness, the dedication, and the passion.

Can obsessives perhaps maintain their drive and focus while shedding the emotional volatility that also has the potential to destroy their own careers? That is the bailiwick of business consultants and therapists to whom they are sometimes forced to turn after a major meltdown or business failure. (Both the depressed twenty-eight-year-old Melvil Dui and the burned-out sixty-year-old Alfred Kinsey could well have used such a professional tune-up.) While medications, most clinicians agree, have little effect, other treatments can sometimes steer them back toward productivity. In his work with executives with personality disorders, Michael Maccoby, head of the Washington, D.C.–based consultancy the Maccoby Group, teaches what he calls “strategic intelligence.” “They often pick the wrong people to work with, such as those who flatter them. They can benefit by learning how to partner with and motivate others,” stated Maccoby.

Psychologist Stephen C. Josephson, an OCPD expert who teaches at the medical schools of both Cornell and Columbia University, relies on cognitive-behavioral psychotherapy. “Homework assignments can be useful,” he noted. “To help obsessives become less rigid, I sometimes start by asking them to try eating different foods or even walking home a different way. The ultimate goal is to get them to learn how to tolerate the anxiety associated with imperfection both in themselves and others.”

How about a cure? For obsessives, full-scale transformations are possible, but rare. The emotional pain is just too deep. John Oldham, an international authority on personality disorders who runs the Menninger Clinic in Houston, cites his thrice-weekly psychoanalytic treatment of a patient with OCPD, whom he calls “Dr. B.,” as one of the highlights of his forty-five-year career as a psychiatrist. Oldham, who recently stepped down as president of the American Psychiatric Association, mentioned the case in his presidential address at the annual APA convention in 2012. A high-powered young academic, Dr. B. sought therapy after he failed to get tenure and his wife left him. “After some time in treatment,” Oldham complained to his fellow shrinks, “I thought I understood how his wife must have felt.” The problem? Dr. B. was disconnected from his feelings, and in the clinical setting he was so emotionally controlled that the sessions were “amazingly sanitized, colorless, and cerebral.” However, after a few years, the patient started to open up about his early history. “His father was distant and detached,” Oldham explained to me in a recent phone interview. “And his mother died when he was four. He was raised by a highly critical stepmother who was a mess.” Dr. B. also confided in Oldham that he would spend hours fingering memorabilia of his dead mother to soothe himself. Eventually, he was able to mourn her loss and begin anew. Dr. B. got remarried and ended treatment by giving Oldham a bear hug. He later sent Oldham photos of his kids. It’s unclear, however, whether Dr. B.’s newfound happiness reduced his potential for staggering success.

While one wouldn’t wish the distress of the young Dr. B. on anyone, those types of childhood wounds can have an upside; they are the stuff out of which America has long been—and will likely continue to be—built.