But he was—and seriously, as Abel realized after sitting with John-Henry in his car for two hours in the early morning of October 31, 2000, near Shands Hospital.
“I’d say John-Henry was probably ninety-five percent there, maybe ninety-eight percent, by the time we had that late-night meeting,” Abel said. “At that point it was real to him. It was a decision he wanted to make. I beat him up on the mockery that was going to be made of him. He brushed that off. It was like, ‘That I can live with. I can handle that. It’s worth it, I believe.’ ”
Abel then began to discuss various legal options to prepare for a cryonics scenario. The first was that if John-Henry could get Ted to accept it, they simply could write a new will and have him affirm that he no longer wished to be cremated—he wanted to be frozen. But this option was quickly rejected. “Changing the will would have raised competency issues,” Abel said. “No one wanted to jeopardize the will that had already been redone. With cryonics, the existing will could have been thrown out, and he would not get any of his intentions done. We already assumed Bobby-Jo would be a nightmare. We didn’t want to give her more ammo.”
The other options, Abel told John-Henry, would be to convince Ted and have him submit an application to Alcor or the Cryonics Institute; or he could sign a notarized statement saying he wished to be cryonically preserved. Or his three children could legally dispose of their father’s body as they wished. Ted would not have to apply to a cryonics facility himself, Abel added. Either all three children could submit an application on his behalf to a cryonics facility, or two out of the three—a majority—could do so.22
On November 3, Dr. Kerensky catheterized Ted’s heart in a routine diagnostic procedure. It was determined that his heart was beating too quickly and that the condition could be corrected by installing a pacemaker.
John-Henry was the only family member present during the catheterization procedure, according to Kerensky’s assistant, Nancy Carmichael, who was watching from the control room behind a glass wall. Soon after that, John-Henry developed a case of the chicken pox and was put under quarantine, barred from returning to the hospital for several days. One thing Carmichael found troubling was that young Williams had given instructions to Ted’s nurses not to put intravenous lines in his right arm. “He didn’t give a reason that I know of, but we assumed that it was because it was Ted’s signing hand.”23
The pacemaker surgery was scheduled for Monday, November 6. Claudia arrived the day before and got into a minor auto accident, rear-ending another car as she was getting off the highway near Shands. She hadn’t known that Ted was in the hospital again and had called George Carter earlier on the fifth, furious at him for not informing her. Carter replied that John-Henry had told him he would call her.
The pacemaker was installed by Dr. Anne Curtis. Later on November 6, after Ted recovered from the surgery, he filled out an absentee ballot to vote in the presidential election the following day. He voted for George W. Bush, the Republican, of course.
Williams stayed in the hospital for another two weeks, trying to get his strength back, and he made friends with various nurses. One, Debbie Erb, had a house in the Keys and liked to fish. One day in mid-November, she brought in some pictures of herself fishing there. That prompted Ted and Frank Brothers to discuss their adventures in Islamorada. Frank noted that his late father, the famous guide and Williams pal Jack Brothers, had been cremated, and they’d sprinkled his ashes in what the locals called the Pocket, off Islamorada. “Ted said he wanted to do what his friend did, and that is be cremated and have his ashes scattered in the Keys,” Erb said.24
John-Henry knew he was going to need some extra help for his father, since Carter and Brothers had each worked twelve-hour shifts daily for three straight weeks and would need time off. So on November 19, the day before Ted checked out of Shands, John-Henry arranged for Becky Vaughn to come to the hospital.
Vaughn, a critical-care nurse at Citrus Memorial Hospital, had taken care of Ted after he fell and broke his hip in 1997. John-Henry remembered that Ted had liked her, so he called Vaughn and asked if she could come visit Ted to get reacquainted. Then they could discuss whether she’d be able to provide some care for him when he got home. Vaughn said she’d be happy to as long as she volunteered. A former model and amateur boxer who was married to a successful lawyer, Vaughn didn’t need the extra money, plus she’d grown fond of Williams after tending to him when he broke his hip. “I always got the feeling that somebody wanted something from Ted,” said Vaughn. “I didn’t want that. At the hospital in ninety-seven, people would ask me if I could get Ted to sign a baseball for them. I said no! I was like a mother bear to him because he needed to be protected. I was determined not to see him as a famous person. I was determined to treat him like a human being. People would do extra EKGs on him and pocket them. It was ridiculous. I wanted to protect him from that.”
When Williams arrived home after the pacemaker procedure, Vaughn set up a medical area at the house, designed a rehab program, and put him on an herb-and-vitamin regimen that she and John-Henry both thought was beneficial. She would come over three or four days a week, take his blood pressure, check his medication, and they would talk.
On Christmas, Ted had one of his aides call Vaughn. “He said, ‘Hi, sweetheart; I just called to say Merry Christmas. You have such a nice family. I wish I could have a family like that.’ I said, ‘Are you having anybody over?’ ‘I don’t know. John-Henry is in charge of that.’ ”
Vaughn got to know John-Henry well. She thought he looked like John F. Kennedy Jr. and was charismatic, but she also thought he was extravagant, wasteful, entitled, and behaved oddly. “We sat down to order some medical supplies once,” she remembered. “One of the things was a physician’s desk reference that tells you about the side effects of meds and other things. You can buy it for thirty dollars. Instead he bought the computer program that hospitals use for [between] three thousand [and] five thousand dollars. If he went out to buy one thing he’d buy fifty of them instead. He was wasting a ton of money.” And if he wanted something, patience was not an option. “Money and people were nothing to him,” she continued. “If he had a question for a doctor he’d call him at three a.m. No respect. He called me once at two a.m. and asked me about Ted’s blood pressure. It was as if he had an impulse-control problem. He could not see consequences for actions.”
Vaughn also thought John-Henry had a childlike quality. Once, at night, when they went outside to get something from her car, John-Henry stopped in his tracks. “He said, ‘Look at those stars! Don’t you wish you could travel to those stars?’ He was like a kid.”
One day in late December, Vaughn was sitting with Ted in his bedroom when John-Henry came in and asked her if she had ever heard of cryonics. She had, and she mentioned a lab in Orlando where he could get more information about it.
“Then John-Henry, in his Peter Pan way, said, ‘Just think of it: a thousand years from now, people could say their child could have a piece of Ted Williams.’ He said, ‘They could clone my father’s eyes, and a child could have Ted Williams’s eyesight. And they could bring him back to life, and he could feel great.’ ”
“What makes you think Ted would want that?” Vaughn asked.
Ted stirred in his bed, having heard the conversation. “John-Henry!” he said. “Stop talking about that bullshit!”
But John-Henry now felt free to talk in front of his father about sensitive issues, knowing that he drifted in and out and would forget what they were talking about by the next day anyway.
“What does your father want?” Vaughn asked John-Henry again.
“In his will he doesn’t want a funeral. He wants to be cremated and sprinkled over where he used to fish in the Keys.”
“If that’s what his will said, then that’s what he wants.”
“There are ways to get around things like that,” John-Henry said.
Vaughn said he went on to say “how cool it would be to clone Ted’s eye
s, kind of a scenario where he and his dad would wake up and his dad has no aches and pains and he could go off and play baseball. He said he’d also sell pieces of Ted’s DNA. I remember him saying, ‘Wouldn’t it be great if parents could have a child that could see like Ted Williams and hit a ball like Ted Williams?’ ”
In the end, Vaughn thought, John-Henry’s cryonics notion was more fantastical than exploitive.25
“I felt he was this little boy who wanted to make his dad happy but never dealt in reality. A little boy in a man’s body. He was going to make people happy by cloning his dad’s eyes. Who thinks like that? I think he felt this was how they’d make their money in the future. I don’t know if he was thinking, ‘Hey, I can take advantage of this old guy.’ I thought it was more: ‘I’m gonna do this for my dad and we’ll live forever.’ It was Peter Pan.”26
31
Alcor
It soon became apparent that Ted’s cardio issues were more serious than a pacemaker could address, for on January 11, 2001, he suffered renewed shortness of breath and an apparent heart seizure. Becky Vaughn was on duty at the house and accompanied the ambulance over to nearby Citrus Memorial Hospital.
Soon Williams was back at Shands, in Gainesville, where doctors debated, along with John-Henry and Claudia, whether they should put the eighty-two-year-old Ted through open-heart surgery. Further testing had shown that the mitral valve on Ted’s heart was not closing properly when his heart pumped, causing blood to leak from his left ventricle into his left atrium. So the valve needed to be replaced. Ted asked his cardiologist, Rick Kerensky, what the chances of surviving the operation were, and Kerensky said fifty-fifty.
“Let’s go for it,” Williams told Kerensky.
The surgery would be done at New York–Presbyterian Hospital by Dr. Wayne Isom, chief of cardiothoracic surgery, who had operated on comedian David Letterman and violinist Isaac Stern.1 Kerensky had actually recommended a heart surgeon in Birmingham, Alabama, but John-Henry liked Dr. Isom’s celebrity cachet: if he was good enough for Letterman, he was good enough for Ted.
Williams met with all three of his children at Shands before leaving for New York. Bobby-Jo and her husband, Mark Ferrell, had moved to Citrus Hills in 1999 from North Carolina and had built a house on one of the fifteen lots in the development Williams had taken options on before giving five to each of his children.
Bobby-Jo had been in only sporadic contact with Ted in recent years. She had been dealing with various issues: she continued to struggle with alcoholism and also had lupus, a chronic autoimmune disease. She and her husband had moved to Citrus Hills at her father’s urging, she said. But according to Bobby-Jo’s oldest daughter, Dawn Hebding, the move was primarily intended to curry favor with Ted. “Mom and Mark would say, ‘John-Henry and Claudia are making their move!’ ” said Hebding, laughing. “They wanted me and my sister to call Grandpa more. They’d say not to say this, and not to say that.”2
Hebding, who had a rocky relationship with her mother and stepfather, said she visited a downbeat Ted in January of 2001, shortly before his seizure. “He talked about death, about being cremated and having his ashes thrown in the ocean,” Hebding said. “That was the last time I saw him.”
Now, on January 14, Bobby-Jo and Mark entered Ted’s room at Shands. John-Henry and Claudia were already there. Bobby-Jo, who barely knew her half siblings, already felt like a third wheel in the family. She had not been consulted on whether Ted should have the surgery and was against it. She knew her father was near death and thought it folly to undergo such a major and risky operation at this stage.
Truth be told, she had not even wanted Ted to have his heart catheterized or the pacemaker implanted in November. Whereas John-Henry and Claudia were pursuing an aggressive course of treatment and care for their father, Bobby-Jo wanted no heroic measures and to let nature simply take over. “Bobby-Jo said to John-Henry, ‘Just let him die,’ ” Claudia recalled. “She wanted him to be in hospice and to just die peacefully. We were throwing her out of the picture.”3
There was a certain formality and awkwardness as Ted spoke to Bobby-Jo, whom he had written out of his will. Yet he wanted to summon some kind words now, knowing that they might be the last ones he uttered to his oldest child. “He said out of nowhere, ‘I sure do love you, sweetie,’ ” Bobby-Jo said. “And he just said, ‘I wish I’d been around more to have appreciated what a loving, sweet, wonderful person you are.’ ”
Then they wheeled Ted down to an ambulance that drove him to the Gainesville airport. John-Henry, Claudia, Bobby-Jo, and Mark followed in a caravan, right out onto the airport tarmac. There was another round of good-byes there before Williams was deposited in a Learjet, accompanied by John-Henry, two paramedics, and Nancy Carmichael, Kerensky’s assistant. After a few hours, the plane landed at Teterboro Airport in New Jersey, and Ted was taken by ambulance to Manhattan.
The surgery the next day lasted nine and a half hours. Dr. Isom and a team of a dozen others replaced the mitral valve in Ted’s heart with a tissue, or “pig,” valve, and while they were at it they repaired his tricuspid valve, which they found to be faulty. While it was initially thought Williams would remain in the hospital for about fourteen days, his recuperation turned out to be much more arduous than planned and dragged on for more than a month. He was on a respirator for an extended time and had to be heavily sedated.
On January 20, Ted acknowledged John-Henry for the first time since the surgery and reportedly enjoyed watching George W. Bush being inaugurated as the forty-third president on TV. But after that, the medical updates were few and far between. The Boston press, on high alert for even the most incremental Ted development, was forced to find other story lines, such as questioning why John-Henry chose New York over prestigious Boston hospitals for the heart surgery and whether it was appropriate for an eighty-two-year-old to have such traumatic surgery in the first place.
At the one-month mark of convalescence, doctors issued a gloomy report that said Williams was still on a respirator, spent most of the day sleeping, and that when he finally was released from the hospital he would need to spend several additional months in rehabilitation. A few days later, John-Henry chose a facility in San Diego for the rehab phase over others in Boston and Gainesville. On the morning of February 19, Ted was taken by ambulance back to Teterboro Airport, where he was lifted onto another Learjet and flown across the country, accompanied by John-Henry, a surgeon, and two paramedics. He checked into San Diego’s Sharp Memorial Hospital, not far from 4121 Utah Street, where he’d grown up.
Bob Breitbard, Ted’s boyhood chum, was thrilled to have Williams back in town, infirm as he was. Breitbard arranged for apartments for John-Henry (who still owed him the $250,000) and Ted’s two Florida caretakers, Frank Brothers and George Carter, so that they would have places to stay while they were in San Diego.
Meanwhile, as Ted faded, John-Henry was pressing ahead with cryonics, broadening the circle of people he sought advice from and narrowing his search for the right facility. In mid-December of 2000, John-Henry had contacted the Alcor Life Extension Foundation in Scottsdale, Arizona, the leading practitioner of cryonics in the country, and asked the company to send him its brochure. He asked his secretary, Eleanor Diamond, to be on the lookout for the package and, when it arrived, to send it to Peter Sutton in Boston after reading it herself and letting him know what she thought. Diamond, then fifty-seven, had moved to Florida from her native Brooklyn and still spoke with the accent of her old neighborhood. “I said, ‘John-Henry, I’d never do that to my parents, but maybe there’s something in it for you. Nobody thought you could transplant a heart years ago, so maybe it’s something down the road.’ ”4
Anita Lovely soon confided to Diamond that she, too, thought cryonics was crazy and said she was upset by John-Henry’s interest in the practice. John-Henry’s wedding to Anita, originally set for the Kid-happy 9/9/99, had been postponed, and there was no new date. John-Henry continued to resist any commitment, much to
the consternation of Ted, who adored Anita and had once offered his son a $500,000 inducement to marry her. John-Henry still cared for Anita, and they had been through a lot together, but he seemed now to see her more as a friend and business partner than as a lover or future wife.
Sutton, a senior partner in the litigation department of the Boston law firm Riemer & Braunstein, reacted to cryonics the same way Eric Abel did when John-Henry had initially broached the subject to him: “I said, ‘Are you fucking crazy?’ ” Sutton recalled. “John-Henry’s approach was, ‘If I’m wrong, I don’t lose anything; but if I’m right, boy, do I win.’ He said it’s like a lottery ticket. You won’t win unless you buy it, but what if you win the two hundred million? He’d say, ‘How do you know it won’t work? How do you know there’s a God?’ ”
Sutton, a pugnacious Greek-American who relished a legal scrap, was a big Ted Williams fan who met John-Henry in 1994 while visiting the Ted souvenir store in Chestnut Hill, outside Boston. Later, when John-Henry tripped on an icy step outside his Brookline apartment and broke his ankle, Sutton filed a lawsuit against the landlord and got young Williams some money. Then he became a troubleshooter for John-Henry on the memorabilia front, working on licensing, royalty, and forgery issues. Sutton never charged Ted and John-Henry much, if anything. He liked being in the Williams orbit.
As they discussed cryonics further, John-Henry told Sutton that he, too, planned to join his father and be frozen when he died. Would Sutton himself ever consider the practice? “He wanted me to be a part of it because when they got thawed out, he and Ted wanted their lawyer! I think my answer was I’d rather have my family keep the hundred and fifty thousand dollars… than give it to those snake charmers. I went home and told my wife and said, ‘Hey honey, you want to be frozen with the kids?’ She’s Greek Orthodox, and we had a good laugh about it.”
Sutton said he wasn’t concerned about whether Ted himself wanted cryonics because Williams, after he gave John-Henry his power of attorney, had said that whatever his son wanted was fine by him. “If John-Henry had gone to Ted and said, ‘We’re going to jump out of a plane holding hands without a parachute,’ Ted would have said, ‘Okay.’ So there was never a thought in my mind that Ted wouldn’t go along with whatever John-Henry wanted.”5
The Kid: The Immortal Life of Ted Williams Page 93