The Kid: The Immortal Life of Ted Williams

by Ben Bradlee Jr.

  His tirades against God were likely due in part to festering resentment against his mother for her service to the Lord through the Salvation Army, which Ted believed came at his expense. And he would regularly, if simplistically, blame God for the unjust suffering he saw in the world (if there was a God, why would He allow such suffering?) and even for his own failing health as he aged. But this was largely misdirected anger, which allowed him to ignore the role of man and nature—as well as his own dysfunctions—in his grievances.

  Ted’s little-known encounter with the evangelist, which took place on Islamorada in 1975, suggests that he was more open to religion than he ever let on publicly. It happened at the Island Christian School, then a new private elementary school that John-Henry and Claudia were attending following Ted and Dolores’s divorce the previous year.

  One day Ted was in the school talking with Bruce Porter, founding pastor of the Island Community Church on Islamorada, which the school was affiliated with. Porter liked to invite outside speakers to address his isolated congregation, and the day he was talking with Ted, the Reverend Jack Hyles was visiting. Hyles was the fire-breathing pastor of the fundamentalist First Baptist Church in Hammond, Indiana, one of the first megachurches in the United States. In the mid-1970s the church boasted that it had the highest Sunday school attendance of any church in the world, with some thirty thousand students. When Porter spotted Hyles walking through the school, he waved him into his office to meet Ted. As it happened, Hyles was an avid baseball fan, and Williams had been his hero. He knew the highlights and the lowlights of Ted’s career and proceeded to engage the Kid in animated conversation. After a while, Hyles, Ted, and Porter moved outside to talk, along with the school principal, Tony Hammon. There, leveraging the chink in Ted’s armor—his anger—Hyles steered the conversation to the matter of Williams’s salvation and, to the amazement of Porter and Hammon, got him to pray and say that he accepted Jesus Christ as his savior.

  When he got back to Indiana, Hyles couldn’t wait to tell his flock about his triumphant encounter with the great Williams in Islamorada and how he had saved him. “And to my complete surprise, there was my hero, my number one sports hero, Ted Williams,” Hyles said in remarks that were tape-recorded. “I could not believe that I saw Ted Williams! And I walked to him. I said, ‘Hey, Ted! You know who I am?’ He said, ‘No, who are you?’ I said, ‘I am your number one fan in the whole world.’ I said, ‘Ted, the way you hit .406 in 1941…,’ I said, ‘Ted, boy I appreciate that [.344] lifetime batting average you had and the five hundred and twenty-one home runs you had.’ And I said, ‘Ted! I remember that time when you got mad at the umpire and got mad at the manager, too, and… you just put your right hand down, took a swing with your left hand, and knocked the ball against the center-field fence for a double.’ And ‘Ted, you remember the time that you got mad and threw your bat and hit a lady in the head over there in the front row?’ He looked at me and he said, ‘If I ever run for president, you’ll be my campaign manager.’

  “Then I saw it. He liked me. He knew that I was human. And then I said, ‘Ted, not a single hit that you got will help you when you stand before God. Not a one of those five hundred and twenty-one home runs, not the .406 batting average, not the lifetime [batting average], not all the RBIs you’ve got.’ And there, standing on a street corner, about four hundred people gathered around, I got to win Ted Williams to Jesus Christ.”

  Porter and Hammon confirm the essence of Hyles’s story, save the part about four hundred people. Porter said there were actually about forty, and they were students in a class passing by outside who paused respectfully when they saw a group of men with their heads bowed in prayer.

  “Hyles prayed for a moment or two, and then he asked Ted Williams to reach out his hand and shake Hyles’s hand if he truly wanted to receive Christ,” said Porter. “I looked up a little and saw that Ted did that, and then he repeated a prayer out loud that Hyles repeated.”14

  Hammon, the school principal, was especially startled by what he saw: “I remember standing there with my mouth agape watching as this evangelist put his arm on Ted’s shoulder and Ted bowed his head and prayed. I expected Ted to blow him off. I remember holding my breath, thinking, ‘He’s gonna rip you apart.’ But there was a much more tender side to Williams than others knew. If I was Baptist evangelist I would tell you his life changed from then on, but Ted Williams went on being Ted Williams, and maybe that’s good.”15

  Ted did go on being Ted—certainly never behaving as if he had been “saved” or, heaven forbid, nudging others to accept the Word. He continued his diatribes against the divine and continued to pop off at his loved ones occasionally. In New Brunswick, when the Reverend Barry Craig offered solace to Ted as Louise Kaufman declined, he couldn’t help but remember the times he’d seen Williams be harsh with his live-in companion. “I had a lot of anxiety about Louise,” Craig said. “Ted could be so gruff. He’d yell at her to bring him a drink, or he’d yell for her to do something else, and she would respond. She’d bark back, or roll her eyes, and I always thought, ‘I don’t know.’… But when she was ill, Ted’s love for her was so evident. I remember standing in intensive care over her bed, and there were tears running down his cheeks as he looked at her, and it was pretty clear to me then that he loved her, however awkward he was about being demonstrative about it.”16

  Louise came out of her coma for a day and seemed to be fine. She spoke with her daughter and with other family members by phone, but then she went back into the coma and never came out. She died on August 10.

  John-Henry prepared to fly up to New Brunswick to be with his father and called Claudia in Switzerland to give her the news. She flew to Canada, too. “When I saw Daddy after Louise died,” she recalled, “he said to me, ‘You mean more to me than any other woman in this world now. You need to be around me.’ That was how he talked.”

  Back at his camp the following day, Ted asked McWalter to help him with a letter he was writing to President Bush. Bush had sent Williams a sympathy note upon Louise’s death. Ted wanted his lawyer to proofread the letter, correct any grammatical mistakes, and generally buff it up a bit. “Ted handed me his draft and asked me to rewrite it, saying he couldn’t do it well,” McWalter recalled. “He told Bush how sad he was. I said, ‘Ted, put that in the envelope just the way it is. It’s beautiful, just a masterpiece.’ ”

  Louise’s funeral service was on August 17 at a Lutheran church in Columbia, South Carolina, as Barbara Kovacs wished. Ted’s closest friends were there, as were his three children. As guests began arriving, Claudia heard Ted yelling. “I listened carefully to decipher whether that was a bad yell or a good yell. Was he just greeting somebody? But I remember doing that attentive perk-up listen—be careful before you approach it, because you don’t know whether it’s friend or foe. And out of the corner of my eye, I saw the same reaction out of this woman. And I just looked right at her. Not to mention she looks a lot like Dad. But I looked at her and I said, ‘That is Bobby-Jo. I know it.’ And I walked right up to her and I said, ‘You must be Bobby-Jo.’ She goes, ‘Claudia?’ ”

  It was the first time Bobby-Jo and Claudia had met.

  “We were friendly. Very friendly. We were practically sitting in each other’s laps on the way over to the cemetery. Holding hands. She was overly affectionate with me. I didn’t see anything wrong with it. I didn’t have a problem with it. I was like, ‘What’s so wrong with this lady? She’s nice!’ And I can even remember Dad when we all got back to the hotel, saying, ‘That was very nice that you were so sweet to Bobby-Jo.’ I didn’t think twice about it.”

  At the funeral, Ted was weeping inconsolably. Bobby-Jo, who hadn’t seen her father in six years, was struck by that.17

  “I never saw my dad cry like a baby,” she said.18 “And he put himself into a corner, because he didn’t know what to do. He literally started bawling so hard he felt naked, and he just turned and walked into a corner. This was after the service.”
<
br />   Rob Kaufman, Louise’s son, though no Williams fan, was touched by his display of emotion. “Ted was very despondent and in tears, feeling miserable,” Kaufman remembered.19 “He was professing his love. ‘I love this woman more than anything in the world. She was the most wonderful person I knew. I miss her so much that I don’t know what I’m going to do.’ It was nice because he sounded like a husband after being widowed after a long, happy marriage.”

  It was an open casket. Ted had tied one of his special fishing flies and pinned it on the lapel of Louise’s dress. At the church, he reached out and grabbed her hand. Claudia was standing next to him at the time and felt squeamish about touching a corpse. “I thought, ‘Eech, I couldn’t do that,’ ” she said.

  The sisters had talked about staying in touch afterward, and Bobby-Jo got into the practice of calling Claudia a few times late at night. “I said to myself, ‘Gee, this is awfully late to call me.’ I kept listening to her and thought she sounded really tired. But she was actually really drunk. She was talking to me about, ‘I always wanted to have the relationship that you’ve had with Daddy. And it’s not fair.’ She was going on and on, and I was like, ‘Bobby-Jo, you’ve just got to let that go. That’s how Dad is.’ I was trying to console this woman, and then all of a sudden I didn’t like it anymore. It was starting to feel uncomfortable to me.” Claudia changed her phone number.

  For the twenty-four-year-old John-Henry Louise’s death represented a significant turning point. Louise had long been a burr in his saddle—not only a rival for Ted’s affection but also a roadblock to the son’s ambitious plans to take charge of his father’s life.

  “When Louise died, Ted had another nine years,” said Ferd Ensinger, the family friend who had been a mentor to the young John-Henry and taken him to visit various colleges. “But those years would not be easy for him, and that nine-year period, of course, is when John-Henry would make his mark.”20

  28

  Ted Failing

  After Louise’s funeral, Ted repaired to the Miramichi and listlessly finished out the fishing season in despair.

  He donated a new steeple for Louise’s local church in her memory and canceled a trip to Paris with John-Henry and Claudia that had been planned before Louise died, in no mood for any “gay Paree” frivolity.

  Ted’s seventy-fifth birthday, at the end of August, was muted, to say the least. And his malaise was exacerbated when he slipped down an embankment near his cabin and broke a rib. Returning to Florida in the fall, Williams sank further into despondency. He closed the shades on his big house at Citrus Hills, brooded, and started to drink heavily.

  “When Louise died I went to visit Ted, and he was sitting in his house alone in the dark, all full of sadness, and we talked for three or four hours about death, how you’re remembered, the things that you do, the legacy you leave, and I made sure I left with the lights on, trying to get his spirits back up,” recalled Williams’s fishing buddy Sammy Lee.1

  Also working overtime to brighten Ted’s mood was Lewis Watkins, an accomplished painter, sculptor, and printmaker who lived in nearby Brooksville. After meeting Williams in the late ’80s, Watkins had been commissioned to make a print of a photograph of Ted’s 1936 San Diego Padres team and then a print of a vintage poster of Fenway Park. Ted liked Lewis, who was nearly thirty years his junior. They would go fishing with some other local guys, country boys, then play liar’s poker with dollar bills. Williams would invite Watkins to come over for breakfast, and at the end of the meal he’d want to make plans for dinner. The two men became good friends, and Watkins would emerge as a significant figure at the end of Ted’s life—a doer, a fixer, and a key intermediary for those who wanted to reach the Kid by end-running John-Henry.

  “John-Henry hated my guts, probably because I had a close relationship with his dad,” said Watkins.

  Williams opened up to Lewis, talking frankly about his childhood—how he’d gone hungry as a kid and how people couldn’t get a quarter off his mother but she could get a dollar off them. Once, he said, he’d given her $5,000, and she turned around and gave it to the Salvation Army.

  Man-to-man, Ted cracked the door open on his marriages a bit as well, even confiding to Watkins that the best sex had been with Lee Howard but that she was also the most jealous and possessive of his three wives.

  Soon after Williams’s return from Canada, Watkins came up with an idea to perk his friend up. Two years earlier, Lewis and Ted had been talking about presidential museums when Williams, in an unusual display of hubris, allowed as to how he wouldn’t mind having his own museum, too. So, earlier that summer of 1993, when Ted and Louise were at the Miramichi, Watkins had arranged for ground to be broken on a prime lot in Hernando, where Citrus Hills was located. The land had been donated by Sam Tamposi, the Citrus Hills developer, who had also funded about $500,000 worth of construction. For their part, the Red Sox chipped in $150,000.

  Now Watkins drove Ted over to the construction site to show him the building taking shape amid the jumble of bulldozers and busy hard hats. Williams started to tear up. He said he’d never imagined anything so nice. Watkins told Ted they were on track for a grand opening three months later, in February of 1994. It would be the first museum ever built for a living American athlete.

  The museum served as a nice diversion from the Louise blues for Williams. His spirits were buoyed further by the reappearance of Lynette Siman, Louise’s longtime friend from Islamorada, who had been longing for Ted since the early ’50s. Over the years, Lynette, a petite brunette originally from the Boston area, had worked to contain her ardor for Ted in deference to Louise—and because she was married, of course. But now Louise was dead, and so was Lynette’s husband.

  Lynette lived about forty miles east of Hernando, in Yalaha, Florida, but soon was spending more time at Ted’s house. Eventually she brought some clothes with her so that she could spend the night. Concerned about appearances, Ted asked Watkins if it was too soon after Louise’s death, and Watkins waved him off: Williams should do what he wanted.

  What he wanted was companionship, and so Lynette was in. They reminisced about life in the Keys circa 1953—how Lynette and her first husband built a small motel called The Sands; how, with Louise, they had all fished and socialized together; how Lynette had divorced her husband and married an Iowa man twenty years her senior, who of course was also enthralled by Ted. And they talked about how things might have been different if Lynette hadn’t been married and if Louise hadn’t been on the scene.

  “Then Ted said to me, he said, ‘We should have been married thirty years ago,’ ” Lynette said. “I told John-Henry this one day. His mind went so fast, and he said, ‘I wouldn’t have been born if you had.’ ”

  Within a few months, Lynette maintained, she and Williams decided that they would get married after all and make up for all the years that they could have been together. “Ted and I were going to be married. No one has to believe it, but I know it. He knew I wasn’t going to practically live there if there wasn’t something permanent about it.”

  Lynette was not a John-Henry fan. “Let’s just say we weren’t bosom buddies. He did everything in the world to keep us apart. He thought, ‘If I can get rid of you, I could have him all to myself.’ He didn’t want anyone close to his father.” But when Lynette complained mildly to Ted about John-Henry, he turned on her. “The only thing I said was that I don’t think John-Henry likes me. Do you know what Ted said? ‘You disappoint me.’ I almost started to cry, and I said, ‘I don’t know why I disappoint you. He’s the one who doesn’t like me.’ I don’t think Ted had any idea in the world that John-Henry was exactly like he was. He had blinders because it was his child. That’s the only answer.

  “That boy was probably the most malevolent person I’ve ever seen,” Lynette concluded. “He loved the money, and he loved the fame. When these two things enter into it, I don’t know where love does. But Ted did love him. He wouldn’t entertain a bad word about him.”2

&n
bsp; The opening of Ted’s museum—officially named the Ted Williams Retrospective Museum and Library—on February 9, 1994, was surely the biggest thing to have ever happened in Hernando, Florida. The festive, mini–Oscar night atmosphere included red carpets, bright lights, fleets of limousines coming and going, and hovering news helicopters.

  The museum was 5,200 square feet and laid out in the shape of a baseball diamond, with various phases of Williams’s life illustrated and displayed at each base. There were memorabilia and scores of photographs, as well as video testimonials on a loop from various players and from Presidents Nixon, Ford, Reagan, and Bush (the elder). A new wing was to be added the following year for the Hitters Hall of Fame, whose members would be personally selected by Ted.

  More than two thousand people turned out for the opening ceremony, which was held in a large tent near the museum. The headliners, besides Ted, were Joe DiMaggio and Muhammad Ali. Ali, by then struggling with Parkinson’s disease, showed up a few days early and helped drum up publicity for the opening. There were a total of thirty-seven Hall of Famers there, including DiMaggio, Stan Musial, Bob Feller, Bobby Doerr, Al Kaline, and Brooks Robinson. Country singer Lee Greenwood performed, along with the United States Marine Band.

  The night before, Ali and Ted had dinner at a local restaurant. Also attending were Howard Bingham, Ali’s longtime photographer; John-Henry; and Robert McWalter, Ted’s lawyer. Williams had boned up for days on each of Ali’s fights, and the dinner conversation consisted mostly of Ted asking the Champ specific questions about his various bouts. A bunch of Ted’s local pals hovered around at tables nearby watching the scene, wishing they’d been invited to the table.