Few lives had been filled with as much pure drama as Ted Williams’s, and so there had long been talk of a Ted movie.
Since the early ’50s, Warner Brothers had had a standing $250,000 offer on the table for Williams to play himself in a Hollywood spectacular. But he had nixed the idea because the filmmakers naturally wanted to include certain dramatic elements—his personal life, his war service, his tussles with the press, and his efforts on behalf of the Jimmy Fund—that the Kid preferred to avoid. Instead, he wanted only his baseball and fishing prowess featured. Over the years, however, he was persuaded that he would have to agree to more drama if he ever wanted to see his story—at least the version he could control—hit the silver screen. And so in March of 1986, a press conference was called at the Red Sox spring training headquarters in Winter Haven to announce that Ted had signed off on a movie about his life and that the $6 million production would get under way later that year.
James Vinick, an investment banker from Springfield, Massachusetts, with no experience in making movies, had acquired the rights to Ted’s life story by giving him a check for $125,000 with the promise of more to come when the film started production and at the back end, depending on how much money it made.6 Vinick and Williams had become friends through their involvement with the Jimmy Fund (Vinick’s son Jeffrey had died of cancer in 1982), and some of the proceeds from the film would benefit the charity.
Vinick recruited an executive producer, Skip Chernov, and, to write the script, John Underwood, who seemed to remain ubiquitous when it came to Williams-related literary and artistic endeavors. Underwood’s script would be adapted from My Turn at Bat, the book he had ghostwritten for Ted.
Williams took a break from his duties at spring training and showed up for the press conference, along with Vinick, Chernov, and Underwood. “I think it should be honest and fair,” Ted said of the movie, which had the working title of Hitter. It was apparent he had changed his mind about what could be included in the film: “I’ve had my ups and downs, good and bad, and I think it all should be in there. However, I know who the bad guys will be,” he added, looking at the Boston writers and drawing a laugh.7
Of course the reporters wanted to know who would play Williams. “Sam Shepard is the perfect Ted Williams,” replied Chernov. “He’s moody, antisocial, controversial, introspective and he’s had his problems with women. A guy who plays Ted Williams has got to look like Ted Williams. I didn’t want Don Johnson to play Ted Williams, no matter how popular he is. We don’t want Magnum, P.I. to play Ted Williams. You go down the list of stars, and there’s not that many that could handle the role.” Ted ventured that he had met James Garner in 1963. “He told me that if they ever made my life’s story, he’d play me, but he’s gotten older now.… I just hope whoever they choose is good looking and a helluva athlete.” He said he’d be able to give the actor a hitting consultation. “I’ll make a comment if he doesn’t get his ass into the ball,” Williams said, “but nobody else will know the difference.”
Underwood said he would try and keep four-letter words out of the script, as Vinick had promised to avoid an R rating.
Summing up, Ted said the movie would be “the story of a desperate, dedicated kid who wanted to play baseball more than anything else in his life.”8
Williams knew how he wanted the movie to begin. “It’s in a fighter plane, see, flying, from the pilot’s eye, over KOREA. Seoul,” he told the writer Richard Ben Cramer earlier in 1986 for the memorable Esquire profile in June of that year that captured the Kid’s voice precisely. Cramer used capital letters to underscore the volume Ted used when saying certain words.
“And it’s flying, slow and sunny and then bang WHAM BOOOOMMM the biggest goddamn explosion ever on the screen. I mean BOOOOOMMM. And the screen goes dark. DARK. For maybe ten seconds there’s NOTHING. NOTHING. And then when it comes back there’s the ballpark and the crowd ROARING… and that’s the beginning.”9
But the movie was never made. Vinick and Underwood had a parting of the ways. Other scripts by other writers and tentative deals with various studios all fell apart when executives who had been pushing the film jumped to rival studios.10
In 1987, Ted left the Keys and moved to central Florida, fulfilling the terms of the deal he had made five years earlier with the New Hampshire developers Sam Tamposi and Gerry Nash to be the live-in spokesman for their Citrus Hills development. Islamorada had grown too congested for him, anyway. Besides, now that his Sears contract had not been renewed, he needed the money, and Citrus Hills represented an easy source of income.
Ted was an enthusiastic pitchman. “Hi, I’m Ted Williams,” he said, looking into the camera for a short promotional film that Tamposi and Nash ordered up. “If you always dreamed of a place in the sun, come to the outdoor wonderland of Citrus County. Citrus Hills. On Florida’s Gold Coast. It’s truly a sportsman’s paradise. Fishing, golf, tennis, and more. Citrus Hills has something for everyone. Including a spacious country club with the best dining around. I love it. I know you would, too.”
Of course there had been many failed and colorful outtakes before that one—aborted attempts in which Ted had botched his lines, kicked over a light stand or two, and railed at “cocksucking, fuckin’ syphilitic Jesus.” But never mind. It was the finished product that counted, and the lots sold briskly—despite the fact that Citrus Hills really was in the middle of nowhere, a cultural wasteland peppered with strip malls and ominous billboards calling on sinners to repent while they still could: the apocalypse was approaching.
“When he moved to Citrus Hills, we said, ‘Dad, there’s nothing here,’ ” Ted’s daughter Claudia said. “But he loved it. He moved here for Sam.”
Louise Kaufman was happy to have the change of scenery, too, even though some of her tonier friends, like Evalyn Sterry, considered Citrus Hills a crude backwater. As long as Ted was happy, Louise was. They moved into a modest condominium at first, then a model home built along a golf course, and in 1991 to what was considered the prize in the development: a four-thousand-square-foot ranch-style house with three bedrooms, a pool, and a lanai on four and a half acres of land that was surrounded by a grove of tall oak trees dripping with Spanish moss. The house sat atop a hill that was one of the highest points in all of Florida—at 230 feet.
The developers carved out a special street that led to the house and named it Ted Williams Court. In case visitors had any doubts about where they were going, there was a huge gate with a big red number 9 on it blocking access to the driveway. Friends knew the keypad code to make the gate swing open: 1941, the year the occupant hit .406, of course.
One of the first new friends Williams and Louise made was Ted Johnston, the young contractor who built their house on the golf course, and later, the bigger one on the hill. After moving into the first house, Ted had called Johnston, who was in his early thirties, and asked him to come over for a drink. They talked for a while, and as Johnston was getting ready to leave, Ted handed him an envelope. “I want you to have this money,” Williams said. “I know you didn’t make a lot on this project.” When Johnston was about a block down the street, he pulled his car over to look inside the envelope. “It was twenty-five hundred dollars, and it was the smartest twenty-five hundred dollars Ted ever spent,” Johnston said. “Every time he called with a problem I went right over there, so he got his money back and more. The longer I was around the better friends we became. They treated me like a son.”
Ted took Johnston under his wing and took him fishing in Islamorada, Mexico, the Bahamas, and Belize. Williams advised him to start a travel business focusing on fishing destinations, and Johnston did. “He had a hot temper for some people, but he never raised his voice to me,” remembered Johnston. “He was eager to teach, and I was eager to learn. The guy was good with things the general public was not aware of, such as hunting and guns. He could go into the detail of the graining of a bullet, the machining of a barrel, ballistics, velocity, and so on.”11
Some
of Ted’s new friends took due note of his temper. “He used to get these terrible tantrums,” recalled Frank Inamorati, the local tennis pro, who also became a friend. “He had a loud voice, very penetrating. Once, he got upset in a restaurant and I just put my head down. I told him, ‘I’m not gonna subject myself to that anymore.’ It was not often, but it did happen.”12
Ted would call Joe Rigney, a Citrus Hills property manager, if he needed something done around the house, and the needs were frequent, since Williams wasn’t exactly handy. “Ted Williams couldn’t hammer a nail straight,” said Rigney, who as an ex-Marine, a retired Boston cop, and a big Red Sox fan bonded quickly with Ted. “I don’t think he’d ever had to, so I got to do a lot of work for him and we hit it off pretty good.” One of the reasons they did is because Rigney didn’t grovel around the Kid. “I never asked him to autograph balls or pictures, because I knew that bothered him,” said Rigney. “A lot of people took advantage of that, and they’d sell them.”13 Williams got friendly with Rigney’s son, too. When the boy was killed in a car accident in 1993 at the age of seventeen, Ted went to both the wake and the funeral, one of the few funeral services he had ever attended.
Besides the new friends, there were some familiar faces. Monte Irvin, the former Negro League great who had joined the New York Giants in 1949 and later the Cubs before making it to the Hall of Fame, lived nearby. Ted convinced his old friend Joe Lindia, the Rhode Island restaurateur, and his wife, Dorothy, to move down. And Andy Giacobbe, who had faithfully tended to Ted’s televisions at the Somerset Hotel in Boston, moved to Citrus Hills, smitten by his hero’s sales pitch.
Other friends found Citrus Hills too isolated to consider buying a home there, and the remote location made for fewer visitors than Ted and Louise had received in the Keys. But Williams still went out on the road a fair amount, continuing to take his bows.
That same year, 1987, Ted returned to San Diego to attend his fiftieth high school reunion. He made the rounds of Hoover High, reconnecting with classmates, signing autographs, and speaking to students.
Several months later, in February of 1988, the year Williams would turn seventy, Sam Tamposi recruited his friend for another endorsement mission—to pitch not another housing development but a presidential candidate.
Vice President George H. W. Bush had just lost the Iowa caucuses decisively to Senator Bob Dole of Kansas. Even the Reverend Pat Robertson had finished well ahead of the vice president and claimed second place. To revive his flagging candidacy, Bush had to win New Hampshire.
Tamposi was close to John Sununu, then the governor of New Hampshire, who was chairman of the state’s Bush campaign. When Tamposi suggested to Sununu that they bring in Williams, the governor quickly embraced the idea.
“We tried to take advantage of Ted wherever we could, to be blunt,” Sununu remembered. “Just put Ted anywhere there was a line or a lure.” The crowds would reach the thousands. “I remember going to a gun show or something in Manchester,” Bush recalled with a laugh, “and hell, it was like I did not exist. ‘Hey, Ted’s coming!’ I thought to myself: Wait a minute, the vice president of the United States is here, too.” At one event, Ted signed autographs using Bush’s back for support.14 “Ted was what I call a uniform Republican,” said Sununu. “His heart and soul was military. He viewed the country as an old soldier would, and as such had a very strong, positive feeling about George Herbert Walker Bush—the Marine and Navy flier.”15
Bush was thrilled to have the Kid stumping for him. As a teenager at Phillips Andover Academy, outside Boston, Bush had gone in to Fenway Park occasionally, and Williams had been his favorite player. Then their paths crossed in the run-up to World War II, in preflight school at Cherry Point, North Carolina. “I was there in the First Battalion, and everybody was excited that the big hero Ted Williams was coming,” Bush recalled. “Then in 1988, we came into New Hampshire really having to win it. Ted came up there and he was great. We’d go out to dinner, and he could be pretty cantankerous, and bawl out the waitress if she did not respond fast enough. He could get a little feisty. Barbara commented on it. But he was a fun guy. With me he was down-to-earth. We talked about sports; politics some, but not a lot. He was fairly conservative and not all that steeped in the particulars.”16
In the end, Bush won the primary going away, with 37.6 percent of the vote to Senator Dole’s 28.4 percent, gaining the momentum he needed to eventually capture the Republican nomination and the presidency. “That’s the greatest story of Ted’s life—greater than anything he did in baseball,” the younger Al Cassidy said. “Ted won that election for Bush.”17 Sununu, a more astute and dispassionate analyst of New Hampshire politics, would not go that far, but judged the “Ted effect” to be considerable.
Bush would always be grateful for Williams’s help. He would honor him twice at the White House in 1991, and in 1989, four months into his presidency, he invited Ted to join him in Baltimore for the Orioles’ opening day.*
Continuing his goodwill tour following the New Hampshire political interlude, Ted came to Boston to attend a ceremony in which a twenty-mile stretch of Route 9 running west of the city was renamed the Ted Williams Highway. “Over the past many years, I’ve had a lot of difficulty finding Route 9,” he told the assembled crowd, “but if I don’t know how to get there now, I won’t know what my own name is.”
That August, the Kid turned seventy, and in Massachusetts, Governor Michael Dukakis proclaimed it Ted Williams Day. Three months later, Ted made one of the most meaningful stops on his Being Ted Williams tour: he came to Boston to be honored for the forty years of work he had put in for the Jimmy Fund. He had been visiting the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute regularly in retirement, sometimes bringing John-Henry and Claudia with him. “When Dad met the kids, it was heartbreaking,” Claudia remembered. “He was so careful and gentle with them. Dad was not normally delicate or careful. He would ask them if they liked baseball—even the girls. And if they said no, he’d ask, ‘Why not?’ in a goofy, sarcastic, smiling way. When we walked the hospital halls, Dad was pretty quiet. I only remember him asking, ‘Is he going to be all right? Is he going to make it? How is he feeling? Are they in a lot of pain? Do the parents have insurance to cover all this?’ ”
When he departed, Williams would glance at the heavens and rage at the injustice of it all. “When we left the hospital Dad was so mad,” Claudia added. “It was scary to be around him when he got like that. He ground his teeth down and clenched his teeth, and God forbid if anyone around him did anything wrong at that moment. Because then the anger would flow all over us, even for something stupid like dropping our fork at the dinner table.”18
The Jimmy Fund event on November 10, 1988, was called An Evening with Ted Williams, Number 9, and Friends, and 4,200 people turned out at an ornate old theater in Boston, the Wang Center, to see Williams feted by a slew of admirers ranging from his old pal John Glenn to the Red Sox–loving writer Stephen King.
“It took an awful, awful, awful, awful lot to get me here,” Ted told the press before the program began. “I just thought there were millions and millions of people who’ve done a lot more for this than I have.” But friends had leaned on him to accept the honor, not least because $250,000 would be raised for the Jimmy Fund, so there he was, even wearing a tie—though it was a bolo tie, sporting a silver oval clasp with a gold salmon embossed on it.
Besides Glenn and King, the friends of Ted who offered testimonials about him included his old teammates Dominic DiMaggio, Bobby Doerr, and Johnny Pesky; rivals Joe DiMaggio and Bob Feller; fishing pal Bud Leavitt; former House Speaker Tip O’Neill of Boston; President Ronald Reagan and president-elect George H. W. Bush (both via video); and baseball ambassador-at-large Tommy Lasorda, the former Dodgers manager.
Perhaps the most memorable of the testimonials was Joe DiMaggio’s.
The Yankee Clipper, in contrast to some of the disparaging remarks he’d made about Ted privately, gave Williams his due in public that night: “Absol
utely, he was the best I ever saw,” Joe said. “I’ve never seen a better hitter. Not just hit, but power. He was feared.”19*
John Glenn, who had become a US senator and Ted’s favorite Democrat, told the crowd about his fellow fighter pilot’s excellence in Korea and of surviving that crash landing. “Let me say just one thing,” Glenn said. “Ted only batted .406 for the Red Sox. He batted a thousand for the Marine Corps and for the United States.”
When the testimonials were finished, Ted’s son, John-Henry, then twenty, appeared onstage with a five-year-old boy named Joey Raymundo. Dressed in a tuxedo and acting on behalf of the Jimmy Fund, Joey, who had leukemia and was being treated at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, presented Williams with the fund’s gift of an oil painting depicting the Kid in baseball action.
At that, it was Ted’s turn to speak. He took out some notes and, to everyone’s surprise, a pair of reading glasses, his famed vision having dimmed a bit. “Not a lot of people have seen these,” he said of his specs.
Ted spoke of how lucky he had been, and when the emcee asked a question that Williams thought cut too deep, he replied: “You’re not gonna make this old guy cry.” Then he looked around at his friends who had come to praise him, then out at the audience, and said: “This has been an honor, and I’m thrilled and a little embarrassed.” Then he paused and added: “And I want to thank you.” There was a catch in his throat, and his eyes welled up a bit.20
Being Ted Williams had always meant signing autographs, but starting in the 1980s Ted began charging a fee for his signature as the memorabilia industry emerged to offer aging sports heroes an unexpected source of money.
In his retirement, Williams had constantly been asked if he begrudged modern ballplayers the multimillion-dollar contracts that even .250 hitters were getting. He always said he did not, and more power to them. Still, the windfalls that the red-hot, baby boomer–driven memorabilia market suddenly produced in the late ’80s and into the ’90s for icons like Ted and DiMaggio had the effect of leveling the playing field somewhat and letting the storied old-timers catch up financially with the modern mediocrities.
The Kid: The Immortal Life of Ted Williams Page 81