The Kid: The Immortal Life of Ted Williams (110 page)

Kent and Faloon, both multimillionaires, were Alcor leaders assigned to recruit John-Henry hard, with the goal of landing his commitment to deliver Ted Williams when the time came. In 1980, Kent and Faloon founded the Florida-based Life Extension Foundation, which sells vitamins and dietary supplements and promotes antiaging research.
^*

Kent became infamous in 1987 for presiding over the beheading of his eighty-three-year-old mother, Dora, and having her head frozen at Alcor. The procedure took place two days after Kent took his mother out of a Riverside, California, nursing home and brought her to Alcor—ailing but quite alive. The case garnered international attention after Riverside County coroner’s investigators questioned whether Mrs. Kent
was still alive when the “neuro” procedure began. A death certificate, signed by a procryonics doctor who was not present when Mrs. Kent was said to have died, listed the cause of death as heart disease and pneumonia. The local district attorney’s office ultimately decided not to file any charges, and Saul Kent denied any wrongdoing, saying his mother had been a cryonics supporter and had died shortly before the procedure began. This episode would later be memorialized in a short, not unsympathetic documentary by the filmmaker Errol Morris entitled
I Dismember Mama
. Adding to Kent’s allure for cryonicists was the fact that he had a dog named Franklin whom he had experimentally frozen then successfully revived after a few hours.

Kent and Faloon’s Life Extension Foundation took most of its name from the Alcor Life Extension Foundation. Kent was on the Alcor board, and the groups had other interlocking ties though no official corporate relationship. Life Extension also funded various companies doing cryonics-related research, including Suspended Animation, Inc., in Florida, and 21st Century Medicine, in California. The eccentric Kent was also deeply involved in finding a site for a construction project he called Timeship, which would be a mecca for cryonics research and the long-term storage of people who choose to be frozen after they die.

It was the Life Extension Foundation through which John-Henry obtained the various vitamin and herbal concoctions that he insisted his father take, and his dealings with the foundation provided a catalyst for his interest in cryonics generally and Alcor specifically, according to Claudia Williams.

Dr. Jerry Lemler, Alcor’s CEO, was another aggressive suitor of John-Henry’s. An ardent baseball fan whose motto is “You only live twice,” Lemler, in conducting a tour of the facility for a
Denver Post
reporter, pointed to the huge cylinders known as Dewars that contain four bodies and up to five heads and said: “These people aren’t dead. They are only at a point where contemporary medicine has given up on them. We’re not about raising the dead.… We’re about extending life further into the future than ever before.”

The fiftyish, bearded Lemler, who liked to quote Robert Frost and Woody Allen and smoke a cigar, saw himself as an adventurer. “I’ve pushed limits and mostly been better for doing so,” he said. “So the future offers virtually limitless possibilities.”
⁷

John-Henry also met two Alcor lifers so devoted to the organization that they lived in the building: Hugh Hixon and Michael Perry. Hixon, a former Air Force captain, started working for Alcor in 1982 and had
attended virtually every cryopreservation procedure since then, including that of his own father. Perry is a computer science PhD who has worked at Alcor since 1987 as a computer programmer and writer. He also is an ordained minister in the Society for Venturism, an obscure quasi church based in Arizona that touts cryonics while practicing its “immortalist” philosophy.

John-Henry learned more about the demographics of the cryonics movement: the average cryonicist is a middle-aged white male, generally from an engineering or technical background, college educated, fairly affluent, and the kind of person who recognizes and admires the impact that technology has had in his life.
⁸
Of the people frozen at Alcor, the ratio of men to women is four to one; a third were gay, and a third were Jewish. About 90 percent of Alcor’s clients—those who have signed up to be frozen when they die—are concentrated in Florida, California, and New York.
⁹

Returning to California, John-Henry continued his research and met with several other cryonics activists and researchers. Then, several weeks later, when Alcor’s next client was about to die, Alcor called John-Henry and asked if he’d be interested in watching a cryonics procedure. This was virtually unheard of and indicative of the lengths to which Alcor was going to woo the young Williams.

John-Henry not only made the trip but filmed the procedure. He returned to San Diego and asked Claudia, who was visiting Ted, if she wanted to see his film. She didn’t.

John-Henry, now wildly enthused with cryonics and with Alcor specifically, was ready to tell some of Ted’s old friends, including Bob Breitbard and Eddie Barry, the former Boston Bruin and Ted pal who wintered in Citrus Hills, about his plan. Both men told him they thought he was mad.

Undaunted, John-Henry was comforted by the fact that he had Claudia in his corner on the cryonics plan for Ted. He thought it would be even better if he could win the support of Bobby-Jo so that all three of the Williams children might be on board.

In early June, John-Henry called Bobby-Jo from San Diego. She was in the garage of her new house in Citrus Hills having a cigarette when the call came through. There was some brief chitchat before John-Henry asked her if she’d ever heard of cryonics. In fact, Bobby-Jo, having recently seen a documentary on the subject, knew quite a bit about it. Furthermore, her mother’s side of the family had been in the funeral business. She knew about death and its attendant rituals. John-Henry
told her that he was impressed—and then dropped his bombshell: “How would you like this for Dad?”

Bobby-Jo exclaimed that her father had wanted to be cremated, but John-Henry confidently told her everything could be worked out. He also let her know that he had witnessed a cryonics procedure and could arrange for her to do the same.

Bobby-Jo was shocked. “Where?” she asked.

“In Scottsdale. And I want you to come out here, and they’ll show you one.”

This was too much for Bobby-Jo to absorb. She told John-Henry she had to go to the bathroom. “I went in and got Mark and I said, ‘You’ve got to come out here now!’ I said, ‘John-Henry’s talking about cryonically freezing Daddy!’ ” They went back to the phone, and Bobby-Jo angled the receiver so that Mark could hear what her brother was saying. John-Henry excitedly explained that they wouldn’t even need to freeze Ted’s entire body but could simply cut off his head.

“ ‘Think about this,’ ” Bobby-Jo said he added. “ ‘The way the science is going, we can make a whole lot of money. If we can get them to take Dad’s DNA, think about it. How many people would buy Ted Williams’s DNA to have little Ted Williamses running around?’ ”

Six months earlier, John-Henry had also raised the possibility of selling his father’s DNA in discussing cryonics with Becky Vaughn, the critical-care nurse who had tended to Ted. Claudia Williams, who said she was with her brother when he called Bobby-Jo, acknowledged that John-Henry did mention DNA during the phone call, but only in answering a question Bobby-Jo asked about cell damage during the freezing process. “He was like, ‘No. They can now regenerate cells, and all we need is one DNA or one cell particle, and it sends the message and it completes the DNA chain and it makes it again.’ That’s how that came up.” Besides, Claudia pointed out, John-Henry hardly needed to go through cryonics and freeze Ted to get his DNA. He could have taken some of Ted’s hair or a vial of his blood anytime he wished.

For Bobby-Jo, the phone call and her brother’s plan were horrific. But Claudia got a different impression of her sister’s view. “I was right there with John-Henry,” Claudia said. “When he got off the phone he was sky-high. He was like, ‘This is great. She actually knows a lot about this. She’s coming out.’ He was all excited.”

The next day, Eleanor Diamond, John-Henry’s secretary, called Bobby-Jo to say that her brother had bought her a plane ticket to fly to Arizona. Recalled Bobby-Jo, “I said, ‘No. John-Henry and I have
already discussed this, and I don’t want that ticket.’ ” John-Henry called Bobby-Jo back to try to get her to change her mind, but a disgusted Mark answered and he wouldn’t put his wife on the phone.
¹⁰

Bobby-Jo and Mark Ferrell moved quickly to put John-Henry’s inner circle on notice that they knew of his plan to freeze Ted and objected to it. Bobby-Jo called Peter Sutton, nearly hysterical. “I remember her calling me and saying, ‘They want to cut my daddy’s head off!’ and I called John-Henry and said, ‘What are you doing?’ ” Sutton said. “He said Bobby-Jo had freaked out when he talked to her about cryonics for Ted. He couldn’t believe it. He said calling her had backfired and he thought he’d made a mistake.” And Ferrell called Al Cassidy, whom Ted had chosen to be the executor of his estate. Ferrell vilified John-Henry’s cryonics plan and told Cassidy there was no way Bobby-Jo would approve of it.

John-Henry had already let Cassidy know of his intentions. “I strongly recommended that he talk to Ted about it. It was a touchy subject, obviously,” Cassidy said. “Every conversation I had with him, I said, ‘Have you talked with your father?’ ‘Not yet.’

“He told me they had several conversations about it leading up to the [2001] heart surgery. And he finally affirmed to me before the surgery that Ted had agreed to it.” Cassidy took this claim as truth; after all, he said, “John-Henry never lied to me.”
¹¹

For John-Henry, Bobby-Jo’s rejection of his request to consider cryonics for Ted, and her and Mark’s subsequent harsh complaints to Sutton and Cassidy, were watershed moments. He decided to sever whatever ties he had to Bobby-Jo, then he went further: he would deny her permission to ever visit Ted again, and if she came to their father’s house, he would have her arrested.

John-Henry had Eric Abel deliver that message. When Abel called, Mark answered the phone, as he was doing increasingly, wanting to act as his wife’s spokesman. Ferrell, who despised Abel, questioned whether John-Henry could legally do that. Abel said the power of attorney that Ted had given his son was broad and empowered him to make such a decision. Soon Ferrell was venting about John-Henry’s cryonics plans for Ted, and issued his own threat.

“You all do this shit, and we’ll go to the press,” he said.

Abel paused for a moment or two, then replied, “You’d do that?”

“You’re goddamned right we would.”
¹²

J
ohn-Henry hardly let the negative reaction from Bobby-Jo and some family friends deter him from cryonics or from digging in with Alcor as his preferred provider when the time arrived.

And though his own brief career in business thus far had been checkered at best, he did not hesitate to give the Alcorians advice on how to run a tighter ship. John-Henry pressed the company on its finances and on the ways in which the arrival of Ted Williams could turn things around. He even raised the possibility of making an announcement while Ted was still alive, prompting Dr. Jerry Lemler, the Alcor CEO, to gush, in a June 2001 letter to John-Henry, about the advantages of a “pre-mortem disclosure.” Lemler treated the young Williams as a princeling.

“We at Alcor are most assuredly grateful to you for your abiding interest and sincere concern regarding not only the optimal rescue and long-term care of your father, but the security and stability of our organization in toto,” Lemler wrote John-Henry in his June 12 letter.

As for what it might mean to announce that Ted would be coming to Alcor, Lemler thought “it would be huge. In nearly three decades of providing biostasis services, we’ve had a few so-called ‘heavy hitters’ look us over, but we’ve never had a .400 hitter as a member. It’s a genuine first for us! Stated bluntly, the Williams name can be expected to provide Alcor with a fund-raising and membership enhancing leverage wedge it has never possessed.”
¹

Ted’s rehabilitation in San Diego lasted four months and was difficult. He was still prone to infections. In New York, he’d developed a staph
infection for which vancomycin, a powerful antibiotic, was prescribed. The vancomycin had killed the infection but damaged Williams’s kidneys, and he had to go on dialysis. The same pattern recurred in San Diego, where he’d registered at the hospital under the alias Luke Jackson. He was still on a ventilator, often uncooperative in his rehab, and listless, despite visits from John Glenn, Dom DiMaggio, and the third Mrs. Williams.
^*

A visit from Tommy Lasorda perked Ted up, however. “Ted always kept his eyes closed at that point in time, but he opened one eye briefly and closed it again,” his doctor Allan Goodman recalled. “When Tommy saw Ted respond he pulled me aside and he stepped up. He spent about an hour and a half in the most motivational session I’ll ever see. He leaned over Ted and said, ‘Ted, open those eyes,’ and Ted shook his head no. So he said, ‘Ted, I want to see those beautiful eyes I love so much,’ and Ted said no again, but within five minutes he was opening his eyes, and Tommy wouldn’t give up. I told him, ‘Tommy, we need to get him walking,’ because at that time he wasn’t walking. So Tommy said to him, ‘Let’s see you move those legs.’ And he hadn’t moved his legs in months, but he finally wiggled his toes, and Tommy said, ‘That’s not enough, I wanna see those legs move!’ And before you know it Ted was kicking his legs, just going to town.”

Then Lasorda told some doctor jokes at Goodman’s expense, and Ted began rolling in his bed, laughing. The visit was a breakthrough, and Williams became a more willing partner in his rehabilitation. “When we walked out of the room, I said, ‘Tommy, I now see how every time the Dodgers came to San Diego, you beat the Padres,’ ” Goodman said.
²

Despite this progress, John-Henry and Claudia had philosophical differences with Goodman over Ted’s care. Goodman was a friend of Bob Breitbard’s and had grown up in the Boston area a big fan of Williams. They thought Goodman was too passive in his approach and that he belonged to the Bobby-Jo school of letting nature run its course.

“We thought we were going to lose him in San Diego,” Claudia remembered. “As soon as we moved out there, Breitbard and the doctors started saying, ‘Let’s let him go.’ Finally we said, ‘We’re out of here.’ ”

So in mid-June, preparations were made to fly Williams back across the country to Florida, where he would be readmitted to Gainesville’s Shands Hospital. Before leaving San Diego, John-Henry decided to fire
Frank Brothers and George Carter, Ted’s longest-serving caretakers. While he knew his father loved Frank and George, the young Williams continued to have a tense relationship with both men, and he thought they were undermining him.

Ted returned to Shands, signing in as Chris Rivers, and was gradually weaned off the ventilator. “We’re convinced Shands saved Dad’s life,” Claudia said. “He looked so bad John-Henry wouldn’t allow visitors because he didn’t want Dad to be embarrassed.”

But Bobby-Jo visited, tipped off by a sympathetic nurse that Ted was back. John-Henry, who had been deliberately keeping his older sister in the dark, was furious when he learned she had been at the hospital, and he issued orders that she was not to be allowed back.

Ted was released from Shands in time for his eighty-third birthday on August 30, the first time he had been home for nearly nine months.

Bobby-Jo, forgetting or ignoring the fact that John-Henry had banned her from coming to Ted’s house, called her brother and left a message on his cell phone saying she would be over to celebrate Ted’s birthday. He called her back that evening to bluntly tell her that she was not a “team player” and that he didn’t think she was going to see her father again.

Bobby-Jo and Mark complained to the local sheriff but were told it was a civil issue, not a criminal issue, and that John-Henry was within his rights under the power of attorney Ted had given him.

In late October, Ted had a delightful and often emotional two-day interlude—a visit from two of his oldest Red Sox pals, Dominic DiMaggio and Johnny Pesky.
^*

Teddy and Dommie (as they’d come to call themselves) had grown closer as they’d aged. Ted admired the richness and fullness of Dom’s life: After retiring from baseball abruptly in 1953, he had founded two successful manufacturing businesses—one that made carpeting for automobiles and another that made foam padding for car seats. He and his wife, Emily, had been married for more than fifty years and had three children. He was a good citizen who gave back to his community.

Ted had told his friend once that by comparison, he had made a hash of his personal life with his failed marriages and absentee fatherhood. Dominic had scolded Williams for coming to such a gloomy conclusion:
Ted was an undisputed icon who had achieved so much in his life—the greatest hitter in baseball, a war hero, and a champion to sick kids. But Ted could not shake the comparison.

And now it was Dominic, more than any other friend, who took the initiative in staying in touch with Ted. He would call to deliver his Red Sox reports, and they would shoot the breeze as Williams’s health permitted. In turn, Dominic would relay Ted’s news to Pesky and to the fourth member of their gang, Bobby Doerr, who these days was preoccupied with tending to his ailing wife, Monica, at their home in Oregon.

In early October, Dominic and Emily had been having dinner at a restaurant with their friend Dick Flavin, a former television reporter who had become a well-known humorist and toastmaster in Boston.
^*
The DiMaggios, who lived in Marion, Massachusetts, on Buzzards Bay, were discussing their annual winter move to Florida. Emily said she would fly down soon to get their place ready, but Dom said he was thinking of driving. Emily said she forbade him to drive alone—he was eighty-four, after all—so Flavin volunteered to keep him company. Wonderful, said Dom, who then called Johnny Pesky to see if he wanted to go, too. Pesky said he was game, so the three men set out on October 20 in Dom’s gray Jaguar sedan. Flavin and Dom shared the driving. Pesky was in the backseat and agreed not to smoke his cigar.

Flavin, who was about twenty years younger than Dom and Johnny, was beside himself with excitement. There he was, a lifelong Red Sox fan who never had been able to hit the ball out of the infield as a kid, embarking on a road trip with two of his heroes, on their way to see the great Williams.

Flavin felt like he was in fantasy camp as he listened to Dom and Johnny spin baseball yarns—like the one about the play they used to work together. Dom would be on first and Johnny would be up. If Pesky felt the situation was right—usually with no one out—he would signal to Dom by rubbing his nose, and then he would drop a bunt down the third-base line. Dom would be off with the pitch and race all the way to third, which would be vacant after the third baseman had come in to field the bunt. They worked this so often that the papers wrote about it.
Then one day, against the Yankees, the play backfired. Pesky dropped his bunt down and duly drew the third baseman in, but by the time Dom got to third, catcher Bill Dickey was waiting to tag him out. “I read the papers too, you know,” Dickey said to the startled DiMaggio.

The three travelers arrived at Ted’s house on Tuesday morning, October 23, around ten o’clock. When no one answered the door, Dom and the others just walked in. As they entered the living room they spotted Ted in silhouette from a distance. He was on the other side of the room near a sliding glass door, slumped in his wheelchair.

“He was alone, and it was just so jarring,” Flavin said. “Christ, this was Ted Williams, and here is this poor invalid. I can remember Johnny actually gasping.”

DiMaggio took the lead and almost ran to his friend. “Teddy, it’s Dommie! Teddy, it’s Dommie!” he cried. “And Johnny Pesky is here! And Dick Flavin!”

Williams stirred. “Hello, Dommie,” he said.

Pesky couldn’t speak for the first twenty minutes and seemed on the verge of tears. Dom started chatting away and telling Ted about the ride down. Williams’s vision had so declined that at one point he looked at Johnny and said, “Who are you?”

“Ted, I’m Johnny Pesky!”

“Needle!” Ted said with conviction, using his favorite nickname for Pesky, a reference to his long nose. Then Williams greeted Flavin, whom he knew a bit. They had conspired on the phone together about how best to boost Dominic for the Hall of Fame. This had been a pet cause of Ted’s from his perch on the Veterans Committee, to no avail. Dominic, after all, had fallen just short of the .300 mark as a hitter (.298 lifetime), and while he’d been a scintillating fielder, they didn’t pay off on fielding, as Ted himself had famously said.

Dom noticed several ceramic knickknacks in the kitchen that paid tribute to Ted’s beloved Dalmatian, Slugger.

“That was a helluva dog, right, Ted?” Dom said.

“Helluva dog,” Ted agreed.

“What kind of dog was it?”

Williams paused for a moment or two to think about that. “A German shepherd,” he said.

Then Ted, livening up a bit, said he had a trivia challenge for his guests. He was thinking of a Yankee who was a great clutch hitter. His initials were PT. Dom, Johnny, and Dick racked their brains but couldn’t come up with anyone who had the initials PT.

“Paul O’Neill,” Ted finally told them.

The guests graciously failed to point out Ted’s mistakes and moved on.

During lunch, Williams had to be helped with his food, and this infuriated him, underscoring as it did his lack of independence. When he went off on a swearing jag, one of the nurses handled him kindly and skillfully. “Now, Ted,” she said, speaking to him as if he were her naughty son.

John-Henry appeared and said hello. Flavin looked askance at the cameras the young Williams had stationed around the house but said nothing. “He apparently wanted to make sure none of the caretakers got an autograph from Ted or something.”

That night, over a glass of wine, Dominic announced that he was going to sing an aria for Ted. Williams sat and listened, rapt and smiling. After Dom finished, he explained what the song was about. A guy was in love with a girl, but he was too afraid to tell her, so he had his friend do it. The friend did and stole the girl. An exuberant Ted asked Dom for another rendition. After the second aria, Flavin, not to be outdone, said he, too, had a song for Ted, and he launched into one of his favorite Irish ballads, “I’ll Take You Home Again, Kathleen.” “Ted thought my song was pretty good, but he said, ‘Dom’s better than you,’ ” recalled Flavin, laughing.

From time to time during the course of the two-day visit, Flavin noticed that Ted would quietly weep—especially on the first visit in the morning, when he appeared overwhelmed that his two old Red Sox teammates had come to see him. Once, Ted, who always liked to measure himself against the great DiMaggio, asked Dom if Joe had ever cried. “He did toward the end,” Dom said. “But there was a difference. Joe was never going to get out of his bed again. You’re getting stronger and better.”
³

John-Henry was still bruised by the Hitter.net failure. Its success could have helped him at least partially emerge from Ted’s considerable shadow and forge his own identity outside the memorabilia business, which was dependent upon his father’s famous name. Paradoxically, John-Henry was also acutely aware that Ted had only limited time left, and he felt a strong need to do his father proud in some way while he still could.

The 9/11 attacks had helped trigger this soul-searching, the taking stock of where he was in life. Someone had called Ted’s house that day to let him know that a plane had crashed into a skyscraper in New York. John-Henry and his father turned on the TV. “He and I just sat there,
stunned, watching it, watching the aftermath, and seeing how precious life all of a sudden is again,” John-Henry recalled later. “I just sat there and got a sense that life is… passing me by and that motivated me. I think it motivated a lot of other Americans too, to get off their tush and start doing something positive. And that’s what I did.”
⁴