In 1988, during the American League Championship Series, when the Red Sox were playing the Oakland Athletics, John-Henry, lacking a ticket, assumed he could work his connections at the Fenway gate to get in. He left his car directly in front of the main entrance on Yawkey Way with the red hazard lights flashing and called Betty, who was inside with her father, sitting in an owner’s box.
“It was a mob scene pregame, and everybody was just walking around the car with the hazards on. I knew he was trying to get into the park and he didn’t have tickets. So I said to him, ‘John-Henry, listen, you can’t just park on Yawkey Way, on the sidewalks, nobody does that,’ and he was laughing and said, ‘Come on, lighten up, it was fun.’ ” Then John-Henry decided to go over Betty’s head and call her father to appeal for help in getting into the game. “I was standing with my father, he picked up, and it was John-Henry, and he said, ‘Mr. Tamposi, no one will let me into the park. My usual people won’t let me in.’ ” He added that Dom DiMaggio and his wife were also outside and having difficulty getting into the park for some reason. Sam Tamposi went downstairs and waved the DiMaggios in, but not John-Henry.
“What was endearing about him is he really wanted to do good, the intention was there, but it was heartbreaking to watch when he started to unravel, to a trajectory where bad things were going to happen,” Betty concluded.
By now, John-Henry was questioning why he needed to be in college at all. Recalled Betty, “He’d say, ‘I don’t understand why I can’t just start developing. I want to make money.’ So we had discussions about money. It was just important to him, a way of accomplishing things. He saw the money as an end in and of itself. John-Henry could be extraordinarily thoughtful. He had a depth and richness to the way he thought about things, and he really did have charisma. He was beyond his years in some ways, but John-Henry’s dictum was ‘Anything goes as long as you don’t get caught.’ ”23
One positive for Williams about John-Henry going to the University of Maine was that its principal campus, in Orono, was just north of Bangor, so Ted’s old friend Bud Leavitt could keep an eye on the boy. Also, the baseball coach at Maine, John Winkin, was a pal who had been an instructor at Ted’s camp in Lakeville, Massachusetts. Winkin had spent twenty years as the baseball coach and athletic director at nearby Colby College and had come to Orono in 1975. Ted had called Winkin and asked him to facilitate John-Henry’s transfer to Maine.
Not that he had any reasonable chance of playing varsity baseball at Maine. After all, he had not made his team at Bates, a Division III program; Maine was in Division I and had gone to the College World Series in Omaha six times since Winkin arrived.
Winkin said he had talked to the Bates coach about John-Henry, so he knew what sort of player he was. Winkin had also talked to Sam Tamposi. “Sam and I exchanged views about John-Henry, and he told me that he had difficulty getting him to really work, that he was kind of a lazy kid,” Winkin recalled.
There were two baseball diamonds at Maine. At the first practice, Winkin’s policy was to have the returning lettermen go on the varsity field and the new players report to the freshman field. John-Henry showed up carrying several of his own bats and walked over to the varsity field. Recalled Winkin, “I said, ‘John-Henry, you go where the new guys go,’ and I guess he was upset about that, and he left the field. I got a call from Ted that night, and I explained it to Ted, and he said, ‘Oh, well, that’s the way it should be.’
“So John-Henry came back the next day, and he said, ‘Did Dad call you?’ And I said, ‘Yeah.’ I think he thought his dad had made it possible for him to go to the regulars’ field. I said, ‘No, you’ve got to go with the guys who are starting out fresh,’ and he was disappointed. He decided not to come out for baseball. I think he was looking for special treatment. To be honest with you, he was a difficult kid to deal with. He was hard to trust.”24
John-Henry never told Ted that he had walked out. One day, Ted called Jim Vinick, a longtime friend of his from Springfield, Massachusetts, who had purchased the movie rights to My Turn at Bat.
“I was going to North Miami,” Vinick remembered. “I have friends down there—and Ted says to me, ‘While you’re down there, why don’t you go to see Miami play? They’re playing against Maine. John-Henry’s on the team,’ ” Vinick said. “Well, I got to my buddy’s house in North Miami, and I said, ‘Let’s take a ride down to Coral Gables. John-Henry Williams is playing for Maine against Miami.’ These guys are big Miami fans. We get down there, and I knew one of the assistant coaches. I walked out onto the field, talking to the guy, and I said, ‘Where’s John-Henry Williams?’ And he looked at me and said, ‘What do you mean?’ And I said, ‘Isn’t he on the team?’ And he says, ‘No, he never made the team.’
“He’d lied to Ted. He told Ted he made the team. He never made the team. So I called Ted and I said, ‘Got down to see Maine play Miami, but John-Henry wasn’t there.’ He said, ‘What do you mean he wasn’t there?’ And I said, ‘Ted, he never made the team.’ He went freakin’ nuts on the phone.”25
By now, John-Henry was clearly chafing at Maine. His grades were decent, but he annoyed some of his professors by bringing his cell phone to classes, and it would often ring, causing a distraction.26 He was living alone, off campus. He was restless and again not making many friends. So in January of 1989, he called Ferd Ensinger and told him he’d decided to take the spring semester off and go to California. “He said, ‘I’ve made up my mind. I’ve got to hit baseballs. I have to find out if I really can hit baseballs,’ ” Ensinger remembered.
John-Henry headed to Santa Barbara to stay with Ted’s second cousin, Manuel Herrera. Manuel was a Vietnam veteran who then worked construction, running a bulldozer. He’d been orphaned as a boy when his mother, Ted’s first cousin Annie Cordero, was murdered by Manuel’s father, Salvador Herrera, who then killed himself.
Manuel’s grandmother, Mary Venzor, had been the sister of May Williams, Ted’s mother. And Manuel had been one of the points of contact for Ted when it came to his dealings with the Venzors. He got John-Henry a tryout with a local sandlot team. “He batted ninth for the team, but kept trying to tell everyone what to do,” Manuel said. “I saw him play. He was slow, had a pretty nice swing, but was an average ballplayer. He had no confidence.” Next, Manuel got John-Henry a job at the local Radio Shack, which he quit after two weeks without informing his supervisor. He stayed at home watching TV and making long-distance phone calls. “John-Henry, when he stayed with me, was calling everybody. His phone bill was three to four hundred dollars a month. I couldn’t afford that.”*
Added Manuel, “I got tired of him. He was always trying to manipulate people. Money was always his focus. He told me he was waiting for his dad to die so he could be a millionaire.” Manuel was particularly struck by how entitled John-Henry felt. “He said, ‘I can have anything. My dad will pay for it.’ He had dreams of being a NASCAR driver. He thought his dad could buy the car for him, and he could step right in. He wasn’t ready to work his way up.” After a few months, Manuel got fed up with John-Henry and threw him out. “I was probably the only one who ever did,” he said. “Because he was Ted Williams’s kid, no one had ever stood up to him that way.”27
That June, Manuel wrote Ted and Louise a letter, reflecting on John-Henry. “He tries to be Ted Williams when he should be J. H. Williams,” Manuel wrote. “Ted, sir, your son needs help. I am sorry.”28
Then Manuel’s older brother, Salvador Herrera Jr., took John-Henry in. Sal and his wife, Edna, a retired Los Angeles police officer, lived in Porterville, California, north of Bakersfield in the San Joaquin Valley. Sal, then fifty-four, was a rough-and-tumble ironworker with a hair-trigger temper who had played minor-league ball in the Milwaukee Braves organization. He had his own batting cage and moonlighted as a hitting instructor. He took one look at John-Henry in action inside the cage and thought he was pathetic. Sal’s style was confrontational and in-your-face. He told John-Henry that if he wanted to get seri
ous about baseball, he was starting far too late. “I said, ‘You’re twenty-three years old or something. You’re a mama’s boy and you’re a daddy’s boy. You don’t know how to do anything.’ ”
But after a while, John-Henry began to respond to Sal’s drill-sergeant persona, and his hitting started to improve. Sal kept Ted apprised of his son’s progress. The pair liked each other and talked on the phone every month or so. They needled one another, spoke candidly, swore up a storm, and one would often hang up abruptly in a snit if he felt the conversation was not going his way. The aggrieved party would then promptly call back and say, “Don’t you ever hang up on me again”—and then hang up.
“I told Ted, ‘You don’t know how to teach guys to hit. You’d rather tell them how you hit,’ ” Sal said. “We used to argue about that shit. I told him, ‘I taught your kid something. I make it simple: you throw it and you hit it.’ ”
John-Henry stayed with the Herreras for three months. He greatly admired the way Sal could still turn on a ninety-mile-an-hour fastball and back up the abuse he dished out. John-Henry was further enamored of Sal because he had arranged a token tryout for him with the Toronto Blue Jays in Los Angeles by calling in a favor with a Blue Jays scout he knew. (On the way home, Sal said to John-Henry, “You might be a doctor or a lawyer, but you’re not going to be a professional baseball player.”29) John-Henry respected Edna, too, and soon found himself confiding in them in a manner that surprised the couple. They couldn’t believe what they were learning about the young man.
The first thing they learned came from Dolores, who called to inform them that her son had stolen several paintings from her house before leaving for California. “His mom called me up, and told me he got in her house and stole all her paintings and sold them,” Sal said. “He was a thief. The people he sold the paintings to told her. He admitted it to his mother. He told me, too. I said, ‘Hey, man, your old lady told me’—he laughed. That kid was the most money-hungry piece of trash I’ve ever seen.”
Next, John-Henry mocked the Herreras’ religious beliefs. Sal and Edna displayed a cross in their house. “He saw that and said, ‘Hiss-hiss,’ ” Sal remembered. “He said, ‘I don’t believe in God. It’s all bullshit. There is no God.’ ” Added Edna, “The part that surprised me about him was his utter lack of standards. I try to run the center of my home on a somewhat spiritual basis. He had none. He had no direction at all. He had no moral standards at all.”
One day, Sal said, John-Henry bragged to him that he was selling Ted Williams–autographed balls and bats at a healthy profit. But Ted hadn’t signed the merchandise—John-Henry had forged his father’s name. “He told me he’d forged a bunch of bats and balls and he could prove it to me, and that’s when he started to write Ted’s name on a pad of paper. John-Henry was sitting at my table showing my wife and I how he could duplicate his dad’s signature so good. He was showing off. He said, ‘I can write my dad’s name to a tee. I’ve practiced this.’ He used to sign baseballs and bats and have the trunk of his car loaded and sell them. He spent hours and days doing it. He did it right in front of my wife and me. I said to him, ‘You’re crazy. You’re just like your uncle Danny’ ”—Ted’s brother. Concluded Edna, “He had no idea of things you do and things you don’t do. I don’t think he ever got any guidance. John-Henry’s focus was on money. I said, ‘That’s not all there is to life.’ ”30 When one of Edna’s coworkers at a local hospital asked for a Ted Williams–autographed ball, she said John-Henry simply signed it in his father’s name.
John-Henry also fretted to the Herreras that his inheritance would be severely diminished now that Louise Kaufman had reentered Ted’s life. “He was afraid Ted was going to leave all the money to Louise,” Sal said. “He said, ‘Louise has got my dad wrapped around her finger. He’s going to leave her everything.’ So he was actually trying to find out how to have her killed. He talked to my wife about that. He said, ‘How can I kill her and get away with it?’ She was retired LAPD, and he figured she’d know. He was serious about that shit.”
Edna was shocked. “John-Henry did tell me that he was convinced Louise was after Ted’s money, and if he could think of a way to get rid of her, he would. I said, ‘That’s evil thinking, pal.’ I said that to him. He was waiting for Ted to die. He was counting early on what he was going to be getting. He was so concerned he was not going to get his share. He said that. He was very open.”
If John-Henry followed a traditional path from a prep school near home to college, albeit with detours, Claudia decided to do something different. After spending the ninth grade at Northfield Mount Hermon, a private school in western Massachusetts just over the Vermont line from Brattleboro, she set out for Paris. She would finish high school at École Active Bilingue, a prestigious bilingual studies program that attracts students from around the world.
“I think I was struggling very hard to find out who I was,” Claudia said. “Where I was at home didn’t seem big enough for John-Henry and I. We so badly wanted our father’s approval and recognition that we strived hard to do something exceptional. For me, because John-Henry had right from the start such a tight, tight relationship with Dad, I had to go a different direction to get Daddy to notice me.” In addition, Claudia felt that Dolores was smothering her. “It got to a point where Mom and I just started bashing heads. And I couldn’t get far enough away.”
Her maternal grandfather was Swiss-German, and Claudia had taken a school trip to Switzerland and Germany when she was thirteen. She had grown enamored of Europe, and loved the idea of becoming fluent in at least one foreign language. Dolores came around to the idea and asked a friend in Switzerland to go to Paris once a month to keep an eye on Claudia. Ted was fine with her plan, which required little effort on his part.
Claudia moved in with a Parisian family near the school as a fille au pair, and that took care of her room and board. She would come home twice a year, usually once at Christmas and once over the summer. She traveled widely in Europe, including in England and Austria. She had gotten interested in bicycle racing at home and now trained with a group of French cyclists, even aspiring to be the next Jeannie Longo, the French women’s cycling champion.
While cycling was a bit too exotic for Ted to relate to, he was alarmed when he learned of another of Claudia’s offbeat interests: parachuting. Once, she showed up at his house fresh from a jump. Williams thought her outfit was strange.
“What the fuck kind of shorts are those?” he asked her.
“Parachute shorts.”
“Jesus Christ! I hope you never do that.”
She then pulled out a photo of herself skydiving. Ted soon forgot his admonition and turned proud, introducing his daughter to friends as someone who “jumps out of airplanes.”
Being in Paris was a formative experience for Claudia. At home she’d always wondered, “Are they liking me for me or for who my dad is? In Europe, nobody knew who Ted Williams was. So every kind of compliment or accomplishment or recognition that I got over there, I earned it one hundred percent. And that was so character-building for me, especially at that age, because I was so desperately trying to figure out, ‘Who am I? Am I ever going to be able to even get close to who my father was or what he accomplished?’ That’s a pretty big shadow to grow up in. And I liked the people in Europe, the realness of it. When you make a friend there, they stay a friend. I find America fake and caught up in celebrity.”*
If she had had her druthers, Claudia would have stayed in Europe for a while after graduating from her Parisian school rather than go to college right away. She wanted to pursue cycling to see if she might be able to make it as a professional, but Ted wouldn’t hear of it. “He was constantly on us about the need to go to college, to get our education,” Claudia said. “There were two reasons for this. One of them was because he didn’t do it. He always used to say, ‘I’m just a dumb ballplayer.’ He wanted to have that certificate for his kids that said, ‘No, my kids have had their higher education.’ And
I also think he wanted us to be different than Bobby-Jo. If his first child was a failure, then he didn’t want his next children to make the same mistakes.”
Claudia had hoped to go to Middlebury College in Vermont to pursue her love of languages, but was rejected, so she went to Springfield College in Massachusetts. After her first semester, she kept trying to apply to Middlebury, this time as a transfer student, but to no avail, despite her fluency in French and strong grades. One day she told Ted of her frustration. “So for the first time, Daddy said, ‘What’s with this Middlebury?’ ” Unbeknownst to Claudia, Williams called John Sununu, the former governor of neighboring New Hampshire, and asked if he might help his daughter at Middlebury.
“A week later I got a call from the admissions office saying they’d apparently overlooked my application. I said, ‘I’m so disappointed in Middlebury. You get a call from a governor and only then do you check out my application? I had great grades and speak fluent French, and only after a politician calls do you want me?’ ” She turned them down and stayed at Springfield, graduating in three years. Claudia called her father and chewed him out for calling Sununu. Ted said, “Well, Jesus Christ, all I wanted to do was help you, goddamn it!” and hung up the phone. But in the meantime, Ted told all his pals how proud he was of Claudia going her own way.
“He told fifty people, ‘My daughter, I’m so damn proud of her. She did this. She did that. I called up Sununu, got her into Middlebury. She turned the fuckers down! She’s gonna do it her way.’ He loved that.”
The Kid: The Immortal Life of Ted Williams Page 77