The Kid: The Immortal Life of Ted Williams (61 page)

There were more pleasant outings. In February of 1957, Carroll was hanging out in Ted’s Somerset suite. Reading the paper, Jim noticed that James Michael Curley was seriously ill. Curley was the legendary rogue who had served as a congressman, the mayor of Boston, and the governor of Massachusetts. In 1947, during his fourth term as mayor, Curley had been imprisoned for his role in an influence-peddling scandal, but he had been pardoned by President Truman after five months behind bars.

“I got a good idea,” Carroll said. “Why don’t we go visit Curley. I know where he lives. What a thrill that would be for the old man.” When they arrived, they were escorted to Curley’s bedroom. He was lying on a twin bed. Ted sat on the other bed, talking baseball and Babe Ruth. People and the press congregated outside after learning that Williams was inside. Ted stayed about forty minutes and invited the old gent to opening day in April.

“Curley lit up,” said Carroll. Afterward, Ted asked Carroll, “Did you ever see such piercing eyes for a man like that? And what a voice!” When opening day came, Curley told the writers he was at the game as Ted’s guest. Declaring that it made him feel young again to be at the ballpark, he warmly recounted Williams’s visit in February. “Ted is in a class by himself,” Curley said.
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In August of 1957, Ted asked Jim to drive him to Lynn to visit a sick child on behalf of the Jimmy Fund. They were supposed to leave early in the morning, but the previous night, Carroll’s mother had had a cerebral hemorrhage. Jim was with her in the hospital and got home so late he overslept and missed his date to pick up Williams. Ted called him, mad as a hornet. Where the hell was he? Jim explained that his mother had had a stroke.

Ted hung up, embarrassed. He’d met Jim’s mother, an operator for New England Telephone, once before and charmed her. Ted called the Somerset doorman, asked directions to Carney Hospital in the Dorchester section of Boston, and jumped in his car to visit Mrs. Carroll. He got lost on the way, then, exasperated, started driving too fast. A cop pulled him over. He asked for Ted’s license, then looked at the driver for verification. “Oh, my God almighty, it’s Ted Williams,” he said. When the Kid explained his predicament, the officer gave him an escort to the Carney.

Ted presented Carroll’s mother with a carnation and visited for a half hour or so. By then, word was all over the hospital that Williams was there, and the corridors were jammed with doctors, nurses, and nuns clamoring for autographs. He obliged as many as he could, left a check for $5,000 at the front desk to pay for Mrs. Carroll’s care, then had the cop who had pinched him escort him to Fenway Park for an afternoon game against the Chicago White Sox.

Carroll learned of the visit later that day when he came to the hospital and one of the nuns handed him Ted’s check. Jim returned it to Williams,
who was not amused. “I left the goddamn money there, and it was none of your business!” he said. Jim thanked him but explained his mother had health insurance through her job at the phone company.

The following year, when Williams was turning forty, Carroll decided he wanted to do something special for his friend’s birthday. When they were talking one day, Jim asked Ted if he had a hero. First he said he didn’t, then, after thinking about it awhile, said he did: General Douglas MacArthur, the supreme commander of Allied forces in Korea when Ted served there. “Good man,” Williams said. “Never should have got fired.”

MacArthur lived at the Waldorf Towers in New York. Using the Somerset bellhop network, Jim wangled the general’s home number. He called, and Mrs. MacArthur answered the phone. He explained that he was giving a party for Ted Williams’s fortieth birthday and wanted to get an autographed picture of the general.

“Land sakes, my husband would be so pleased to hear that,” Mrs. MacArthur said. “He thinks Ted’s a great American.” She gave him an office number in New Jersey. Jim called, and a man answered. He recognized the voice.

“I don’t go to any birthday parties,” MacArthur said.

“I wonder if I can get a picture of you, because Ted Williams idolizes you,” Carroll replied.

“I’m really flattered. I think he’s a true American and one of the greatest baseball players I’ve ever seen.” What, MacArthur suggested, if he sent an oil painting of himself? He had hundreds of them that admirers had sent him. He told Carroll he’d be happy to inscribe it to Williams and send it up to Boston. MacArthur chose a painting among the many and wrote in the lower right-hand corner: “To Ted Williams, not only America’s greatest ball player, but a great American, who has served his country in two wars. Your admiring friend, Douglas MacArthur, General of the Army.” Jim presented the painting at the party. “He took a look at that, and the guy melted,” Carroll remembered. “He was thrilled. He said he was going to put it in his living room in Islamorada.”
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In the 1960s, when the feminist movement emerged in earnest, Williams would not know what to make of it. He was a product of his times in that he saw women primarily as sex objects or glorified domestics. He was unenlightened, to say the least. (Perhaps the only thing he had in common with some feminist thinkers was a deep dislike of women wearing makeup—but of course this consensus was reached from nearly opposite directions.)

Ted’s retro view of women and what they were capable of frustrated his daughter Claudia. “You had to really fight to gain Dad’s respect as a woman,” Claudia said.
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“Even as a sexual object, most women were still out for something else. They were using that as their power, and he would instantly disrespect them for that, too. I think in Dad’s world and in his experience, there were very few women that had beauty and brains and independence. I mean, I can remember every time he would ask about what I’d want to do in life, I would tell him X, Y, and Z. ‘I want to do the Tour de France’ or ‘I want to be a professional triathlete.’ He’d be, like, ‘Why don’t you just become an English teacher? Go to school. Be a teacher. That’s a really good job. Gives you great benefits.’ ”

While Ted could be charming and courtly with women when it suited him, he could also be crude and cruel. From his twenties, after he discovered sex, through his thirties, post-Doris, when he greatly expanded his female repertoire, Williams, while successfully forging meaningful relationships with a handful of women, generally hopped from one sexual encounter to another. “After he was turned on to sex, he only viewed it as sex, not as a commitment or part of a relationship,” said Steve Brown, who became a close friend of Ted’s late in life. “He felt there was no permanence in the institution of marriage. He loved beautiful women, and usually he would get them whenever he wanted them.”
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But sometimes, if he was just feeling randy, Williams became less discriminating in his tastes, and less than beautiful would do just fine. This surprised some who assumed that a star of his magnitude would only deign to date perfect tens. “Once, in Santa Barbara, I was with him when he came on to some broad,” remembered Ted’s cousin Sal Herrera. “I said to him, ‘That bitch is uglier than a mud hen. What are you making out with her for?’ ‘Well, I haven’t had some in a while,’ Ted said.”
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Arthur D’Angelo, who had the Somerset Hotel laundry account, visited Ted’s room so often he wouldn’t always knock. Once or twice he interrupted while the Kid was busy with a woman. “They’d get covered up, and Ted would say, ‘You son of a bitch, you could have knocked at the door,” D’Angelo recalled, laughing. “He wasn’t too upset about it. I think I knew his personal life better than most. Some of the women he was with were homely. Later I’d kid him and say, ‘Hey, Ted, look at DiMaggio. He has Marilyn and gets the cream of the crop. How come you got dogs?’ He’d laugh and say, ‘A hole is a hole.’ ” Others were struck by the harshness of his language. “He would talk about women in awful ways,” said Jonathan Gallen, who worked closely with Ted in the
memorabilia business in the early 1990s. “Everyone was a ‘fuckin’ cunt,’ or a ‘fuckin’ bitch.’… He’d talk about women in ways I’d never heard before.”
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Friends and family members linked Williams’s misogyny to his mother, a classic case of transference: the deep resentment that Ted harbored toward his mother for tending to the poor of San Diego at the expense of him and his brother was deflected onto women he met, and it colored his relationships with them.

Claudia called her father’s resentment of his mother “the seed that grew to be the disrespect Dad had for women.” There was also frustration, she said, that Williams couldn’t always control the dynamic with women. “He couldn’t control his mother. She was never around. He couldn’t control a woman. ‘They’re good for nothin’.’ ”

Added cousin Manuel Herrera, Sal’s brother: “Ted had vicious hate for women because of his mother.
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He had no patience for anything. When I visited him in eighty-nine or ninety, he said, ‘My father should have got the medal of honor for putting up with that son of a bitch.’ ”

Bobby-Jo thought her father grew angrier with women as successive relationships failed and as marriages kept ending in divorce. “After his last divorce, he was angry for a good couple of years,” she said. “Real down on women. Boy, he could be laughing, watching TV, or watching a game, and it hit him in his head, and he’d go off.”

At the same time, he couldn’t do without the opposite sex. He was keenly aware of the effect of his celebrity on women, which, combined with his looks, seemed to give him carte blanche to have whomever he wished whenever he wanted, and he reveled in asserting this power. He would be in a restaurant and notice a nice-looking waitress. He’d get up, and as she approached he’d put his hand on the wall so she couldn’t pass by. Then he’d stand there talking to her for ten minutes while the trapped woman was pinned against the wall. “He was addicted to women,” said Bobby-Jo. “I think it’s absolutely amazing—you would never wish superstardom on anyone that you really cared about, because something happens to you. My dad was as handsome as they come, he really was, and he had an air about him that—it was just an air. And maybe it was because he was such a big guy and he carried himself like somebody. He’d walk in and everybody’d just go—it was like they’d drop their box off the cart.”

Even when he was married, Ted preferred to leave his wife at home whenever he went out, the better to preserve his options. “He wanted other women to think he was available,” said Claudia. “It was more
exciting that way. Are you kidding? You got the little wifey next to you, it’s, like, ‘I gotta behave.’ ”

Williams would milk his iconic status as leverage for flirtations or propositions well into retirement. Maureen Cronin, Joe Cronin’s daughter, who always had a crush on Ted, tells of the time in the ’70s when the Kid attended a Red Sox luncheon. An elegant matron of a certain age from upscale Wellesley, west of Boston, approached him and asked him to sign a baseball. “Ted Williams, room 305,” the Kid wrote.
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At Old-Timers’ Days at Fenway Park, the bobby-soxers who had screamed for Ted back in the day would return and come down close to the field, still starry-eyed, yoo-hooing number 9. There would be women waiting on the charity circuit, too. Once, in the ’80s, he attended a golf tournament to benefit the Jimmy Fund out in Springfield, in western Massachusetts. The tournament was being played on several courses, and at one point Ted asked to go to the course where the ladies were playing. His host was Jim Vinick, a pal from Springfield who had acquired Ted’s film rights in hopes of doing a movie on his life. They roamed the course in a golf cart. “We stop at all the different foursomes, and he’s hugging the women and kissing them, and ‘Thank you for coming to the Jimmy Fund, we’re gonna raise a lot of money this year,’ and on and on,” said Vinick. “He was in his glory. He was very cordial and just loved the adoration.” Then all of a sudden, Williams said, “Uh-oh.” “What’s the matter?” said Vinick. Said Ted: “See that fat little old lady with the white hair over there? Let’s get the hell outta here. Every time I come north she finds me.” Vinick asked where she was from. Ted anxiously replied that she’d probably come from “the Somerset Hotel, for Chrissakes! Let’s get outta here. She’s there with her son. That could be my son!” Williams added, “You’re with them once and they think they own you forever.”
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At times it could seem like all Ted was interested in was getting his share. Recalled Red Sox outfielder Jimmy Piersall, “One time we were playing in a mostly empty stadium, but there was this one pretty lady sitting in the upper deck that we were both looking at, and Ted dropped a fly ball. I gave him shit, and he said to me, ‘C’mon, Jim, I lost it in the moon.’ Bullshit: he lost it in the broad in the upper deck.”
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For all his amorous adventures, Williams was keenly aware of his shortcomings when it came to sustaining a successful relationship. He would always refer to himself as “a three-time loser” in marriage. While he was disappointed by his daughter Bobby-Jo in many ways, he admired the longevity of her marriage to her second husband, Mark Ferrell. On a
visit once in the late ’90s, Ted asked Mark how long they had been married. Mark said twenty-six years.

“Jesus!” said Ted. “That’s a long time. What’s the secret of staying together that many years?”

“You give and take, you love each other,” Mark said.

The next morning at breakfast, Williams told Mark and Bobby-Jo wistfully: “I thought about you guys all night. What the hell is the secret?” So they went through it again. “ ‘Give and take, compromise. You stay truthful to one woman,’ I should have said, but I didn’t,” Mark noted.
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The eight years between 1953, when Williams returned from Korea, and his second marriage, in 1961, were filled with romantic belt-notching, intrigue, and fulfillment—so much so that he felt vindicated in his decision to brush off Louise Kaufman. First, there was still a lot of catting around to do, but second, he had significant relationships with three women during this period—two of whom, Nelva More and Isabel Gilmore, he would propose to. The third, Nancy Barnard, Ted ardently pursued but could never land. She would be a mysterious woman in his life, one who got away—one who rejected him at a time when others flocked to him constantly. Yet all three women carried tender memories of Ted with them and would stay in touch with him and care for him for the rest of his life.