The Kid: The Immortal Life of Ted Williams (114 page)

Heer appealed to the local sheriff’s office for help, as Mark Ferrell had that morning, but Heer was again told this was a family matter and that John-Henry, holding Ted’s power of attorney, had broad authority.

At that point, Heer, Bobby-Jo, and Mark felt they had no other option but to go to the press. “We agreed if anyone can get to the bottom of this it’s going to be the press,” Heer said. “We knew time was of the essence. Alcor had a certain window of time to do what they were going to do. We didn’t know they’d already done it by Friday night.”

Heer had grown up a Red Sox fan and knew the Boston newspapers:
the
Globe
and the
Herald.
He called the
Globe
first. “I just called in to the news desk. They were saying, ‘Yeah, right!’ They didn’t believe me for a second. They thought I was completely nuts. I said, ‘I know you’re going to think we’re nuts, but we’re not, and we need help.’ ”

Eventually, his call was routed to Joe Sullivan, then the assistant sports editor. An amazed Sullivan consulted with other editors, and it was decided that because the tip involved cryonics, a science reporter, Beth Daley, should pursue it. “We were really suspicious,” said Daley, a tall, thin blonde with high energy who speaks in staccato bursts. She was assigned the story between 7:30 and 8:00 p.m. “It sounded so insane. I didn’t believe the editors when they told me Ted Williams’s daughter was accusing her brother of freezing Williams’s head. That’s how it was presented to me. I thought the whole thing was ludicrous and a crank.”
⁹

As reporters do, Daley tried to make herself an expert on the subject immediately. Wanting to get some background before interviewing Bobby-Jo, she surfed the Internet and checked past news stories about cryonics and Alcor. She called Harvard and MIT to try to round up an expert who could speak about cryonics generally, but it was after hours on a Friday night, and she got nowhere. Another reporter, Raja Mishra, gave her a quote from a cloning expert who said that while it was possible to freeze tissues and organs, they could not be thawed out without causing severe damage.

Then Daley called Alcor. “The woman on the other line was excited and implied she couldn’t talk because she was waiting for an important phone call. She refused to say from whom. I asked her if it was about Williams, and she said, ‘I gotta go.’ ”

After interviewing Bobby-Jo, Daley thought she sounded scared, furious, and legitimately aggrieved, but the whole story still seemed so wild. “Bobby-Jo was upset with John-Henry, alternating between tears, disbelief, anger, and assuring me her father loved her. She sounded credible, but I had never heard of this woman before, and when someone starts saying their half brother was trying to cash in on their dead father by freezing his head and selling his DNA, well, who wouldn’t be skeptical?”

Given the lack of secondary confirmation, the
Globe
decided to be cautious, write a short story, and place it inside the paper, with a tease off page 1. For one thing, the front page would have to be dominated by the overarching news that Ted had died: the main obituary, reaction stories, and a piece on his legacy. And while Bobby-Jo was named and on the
record as making the charge that Ted had been frozen, John-Henry, whom she was accusing of doing the deed, could not be reached for comment. In addition, Alcor wouldn’t confirm it had Ted.

Still, Daley’s story made for gripping reading: “Ted Williams’s estranged daughter said the baseball great’s son is freezing the hitter’s body in hopes of reviving him in the future—a decision that goes against Williams’s wishes to be cremated,” the first paragraph said.

Back at Ted’s house, John-Henry ignored all calls from reporters requesting comment on his father’s death. Instead, Eric Abel issued a statement to the Associated Press saying that the Williams family was grateful for the “overwhelming display of love and support” from Ted’s fans and friends. It said Ted was a private person in life and wanted to remain so in death, so there would be no funeral, and in lieu of flowers, the family requested that donations be made to the Jimmy Fund or to the Ted Williams museum in Hernando.

At the time the statement was drafted, John-Henry and Abel didn’t know that Bobby-Jo had already given interviews to the
Globe
and the
Herald.
They assumed they were still in control of the cryonics story and that Ted’s presence at Alcor remained a closely guarded secret. “Our goal was not to have this in the public arena,” said Abel. “It was for no one else’s consideration. Probably the world would have concluded we had a private ceremony, be it cremation or burial. They could have reached whatever conclusion they wanted to, in a vacuum.”
¹⁰
But late that night they learned via the Internet and local television that Bobby-Jo had gone public. Abel recalled that “there was a collective ‘Oh, shit!’ ” from him and John-Henry as well as from the others present: Claudia; Al Cassidy, Ted’s executor; and Cassidy’s wife, Gloria.

When reporters started calling Ted’s house for comment on the cryonics angle, Claudia shouted, “It’s none of their fuckin’ business! If that’s what we wanted and that’s what Dad wanted, then why don’t they leave us alone?” But they decided not to respond right away. They would wait and offer a considered reply the next day. “We didn’t want to be hasty,” Abel said. “We wanted to make a statement that addressed it all.” So for the moment, they tried to find consolation in watching the wondrous archival footage of the Kid in his prime that was being broadcast on television.
¹¹

There was an undercurrent of tension between Claudia and John-Henry that flared occasionally. Three months earlier, John-Henry had
taken the extraordinary step of suing his sister in a Florida court and winning a temporary injunction that prevented her from selling the two thousand bats that Ted had autographed and left to her as a nest egg. John-Henry, who had two thousand signed bats of his own from Ted, claimed the deal violated an agreement he had with Claudia whereby she would give him the right to buy her bats before she sold them. Claudia countersued John-Henry, and the litigation was pending. Ted had not been told about this unseemly bit of sibling rivalry.

Now Claudia couldn’t resist remarking on the absurdity of the situation, Abel said. “Claudia would take a poke: ‘I don’t know why we’re fighting. We’ve got enough on our hands without fighting about the bats.’ Then John-Henry would jab back. That was a distraction, and Al Cassidy worked hard to resolve it.” Cassidy put John-Henry and Claudia in separate rooms and started a round of shuttle diplomacy to try to bring them to their senses. “It was one of those shocking moments in life in which I said, ‘Did I just hear that?’ ” Cassidy recalled. “Claudia was on the floor and John-Henry on the couch and I about fell off the couch. I called them in one at a time.” John-Henry seemed to enjoy the process. He told Cassidy he actually admired Claudia for standing up to him and fighting to support her bats deal. And with an almost cultish devotion to cryonics, he remarked to Gloria Cassidy that Al, knowing Ted was at Alcor, must be regretting the fact that he had not had his own dead father frozen.

Before Ted’s cryonics procedure began in the operating room at Alcor headquarters in Scottsdale, Dave Hayes, who had accompanied Ted’s body on the plane from Ocala, briefed about a dozen technicians, support staff, and two surgeons on what had happened to that point. According to the operating room notes, the “team leader” that day was Mike Darwin. A former Alcor president, Darwin was an influential cryonicist who was presiding over Williams’s procedure as the lead surgeon. But Darwin was a dialysis technician by training, not a surgeon. Jose Kanshepolsky, a retired local surgeon under contract to Alcor who normally officiated at the group’s suspensions, as they were called, was relegated to a secondary role, assisting Darwin.

After the procedure began and Darwin announced that they were ready to cut Ted’s head off, Hayes called a halt to the proceedings. He told the group that when he had flown to Ocala to pick up Ted’s body, John-Henry had told him he was still trying to decide which kind of procedure his father should have: the whole-body or the neuro. There
were pros and cons associated with both options. One of the last things he asked of Hayes was to promise him that he would not let Alcor sever his father’s head until he was called first to give his final approval. Hayes promised.

So Jerry Lemler, the Alcor CEO, picked up his cell phone and called John-Henry. Lemler put his cell phone on speaker. “Four or five of us were talking to John-Henry,” said Hayes. “Jerry said, ‘This is what we want to do. I want everyone to hear.’ Most science surrounding cryonics thought a neuro was better, and so we discussed with [John-Henry] the benefits of it, and he agreed the neuro would be the way to go.”

When Lemler’s call came in, it was after 11:00 p.m. in Citrus Hills, and John-Henry walked out on the patio to speak privately, motioning for Eric Abel to come with him. The young Williams didn’t want Claudia to hear the details of this gruesome discussion. He put his Nextel phone on speaker so Abel could be a witness and participate if he wished.

“John-Henry thought neuro was best, but there were social considerations, too,” Abel said. “I said, ‘Whole-body sounds better. If this gets out, it’s bad enough that it’s cryonics, but neuro only is even worse. Doesn’t it sound better to say whole-body? That at least brings up an image of the whole body being together.’ So we decided to preserve the body as well. Otherwise they would have cremated it. But he did authorize the neuro. And he wanted to make sure they did as good a job as possible. In John-Henry’s mind that was most important—to get the head right.”

But Alcor quickly picked up on the PR value of preserving Ted’s body as well. “It was initially planned to be a cephalic isolation, as they call it,” said Bill Haworth, Alcor’s strategist, referring to only the head being cut off. “But then John-Henry said to Lemler, ‘Jerry, do you really think the public would ever stand for my father, the Splendid Splinter, to have his arms not being preserved?’ So a decision was reached: not only would they separate the head, but they’d preserve the body as well.”

With these fundamental issues resolved, Darwin picked up a carving knife and began to slice off Williams’s head. Two of the Alcorians, Charles Platt and Bobby June, had been taking pictures of all this. In addition to June and Platt, there were a gaggle of other people around and about, taking pictures of the dead Ted Williams going under the knife in a chaotic scene that was a gross breach of traditional operating room protocol.

“Many people photographed the subsequent surgical procedure,” Platt would write of the scene in a July 30, 2003, memo to the Alcor
board that criticized Lemler’s performance as CEO. “None of them signed any non-disclosure form. None of them agreed that Alcor would own the pictures. We do not know what happened to all these people with their cameras and photographs.… Security in the operating room during this case was grossly negligent.”

Added Haworth: “From talking to people that were there and directly involved, like Lemler and others, at one point in that OR there were as many as thirty people in scrubs—cameras clicking, video cameras, and house cameras videotaping it as well. It was controlled pandemonium. I mean, everyone was there. They drove in. They flew in. Anyone with credentials, any heavy-duty cryonicist who wanted to be there was there. The plane was met at the airport by a small motorcade. I’ve seen pictures of that scene. You had sixty to seventy percent of the board, all the staff, all the big contributors. It was a who’s who list of Alcorians. I think it came as a surprise that there were so many people there taking pictures, and there was a lot of concern about the supermarket tabloids. Any tabloid would have paid six figures for one of those pictures. They had to have been skulking around, yet nothing ever appeared.”

Also present were Alcor members in the Scottsdale area who wouldn’t have missed Ted Williams’s procedure for the world. Many of these members naturally gravitated to Alcor whenever a new patient arrived anyway. After all, there were only two or three procedures a year, on average, so each took on the trappings of a social event as well as what some critics thought was an overly festive atmosphere.

“The problem I had was that when you had a suspension, it was like a circus,” said Tom Brown, an Arizona mortician who worked at Alcor for most of 2002 but did not attend the Williams procedure. “People were getting food and drink. You had about twenty or thirty people in there when you only needed about eight. It was always like a circus atmosphere. ‘We got somebody! We got somebody!’ I was disappointed to see this atmosphere of a carnival. The party was on.”
¹²

Back in Citrus Hills, it was time to call it a night. John-Henry walked back to Ted’s room and lay down on the king-size bed, which had a remote control that could lift the head and feet. He decided to spend the night there. It seemed a good way to stay close to his father. After he got settled under the covers, he called Jenna Bernreuter.

“He said, ‘I’m wrapped up in Dad’s sheets,’ ” Jenna recalled.

N
ews of Ted’s fate stirred national outrage. John-Henry was vilified as the bad seed who had flouted his father’s well-documented wishes to be cremated and have his ashes sprinkled in the waters off Florida. There was widespread sympathy for Bobby-Jo, who quickly vowed to go to court to “rescue my father’s body.”
¹
John-Henry and Claudia promised to resist her there.

Journalist after journalist went after John-Henry’s subzero plotting: “Make no mistake: The Kid’s kid is Very Bad News, and he has saved his best/worst move for last, managing to besmirch… his father’s truly remarkable life,” wrote Bob Ryan, the
Boston Globe
sports columnist.
²
“Because of something Ted Williams could have absolutely no control over—the dispute in his family about his remains—he has been turned into a joke,” Bob Greene lamented in the
Chicago Tribune.
³
In the
Sporting News,
Dave Kindred picked up on the same theme: “No honor attends Ted Williams frozen.… The loss of dignity comes because Williams specifically and repeatedly made known his wishes to be cremated.”
⁴

Reporters and camera crews staked out John-Henry, hungry for any explanation he cared to offer about why he had dispatched his father to Alcor, but he remained hunkered down in Ted’s house, saying nothing. Bobby-Jo and her husband, Mark, on the other hand, granted interviews to virtually all comers, happy to stoke the flames of the emerging narrative that portrayed John-Henry as the devil incarnate.

Most of Ted’s old friends were appalled, though in retrospect some would note that John-Henry was tremendously persuasive, especially with his father, and might indeed have convinced Ted to accept cryonics. Still, such sentiment was barely reflected in any of the press coverage.

Major League Baseball announced on July 8 that it was renaming its All-Star Game Most Valuable Player Award after Williams, and John-Henry and Claudia were invited to come to Milwaukee for the game. But the reaction against John-Henry was so virulent that he and Claudia were quietly disinvited the next day.

Then on July 10, as the conflict appeared headed to court, John-Henry made a phone call that seemed to have little to do with the business at hand. Ringing up Shands Hospital in Gainesville, he asked for the date on which Ted had his heart catheterization procedure performed—the one he underwent before the pacemaker was installed. Nancy Carmichael, the assistant to Rick Kerensky, Williams’s cardiologist, called John-Henry back with the date—November 3, 2000—and expressed her condolences on the occasion of Ted’s death. After the call, she wondered why, as he grieved for his father, John-Henry wanted to know the date of a surgery that had happened nearly two years earlier.

The media swarm in tiny Citrus County, Florida, was more than matched by the crush of reporters and cameramen who gathered outside Alcor headquarters in Scottsdale, Arizona, looking first for confirmation that Ted’s remains were inside and second for illumination into the strange world of cryonics. Alcor was prohibited by its own confidentiality rules and by its agreement with John-Henry from acknowledging that it had Ted. But it was determined to take maximum advantage of the attention it was receiving to tout the company and cryonics generally. And since it was so widely assumed that Williams was at Alcor anyway, the company looked for a way to make the unofficial official.

“To get ahead of the curve a bit, to answer the ‘Is he at Alcor or not’ question, and to make a positive case for cryonics, we thought, ‘Let’s see if we can let the
New York Times
do something,’ ” recalled Bill Haworth, the Alcor PR man. “It was probably one of the best placements I ever did—below the fold, front page, on July tenth. It was basically constructed as ‘The
Times
has learned from sources close to the family that Williams is at Alcor.’ This at least provided the authority of the printed word, the words that we could not utter officially. I was tickled with that one, and while we didn’t know what John-Henry’s reaction would be, the day it ran, he called and said, ‘Great story in the
Times.
’ Then we opened the door selectively, one-on-one, to media. We still couldn’t acknowledge officially, but ‘Let’s talk about cryonics,’ and ‘You want to do the tour?’ That’s how I spun the media out from that time on.”
⁵

Jerry Lemler, the Alcor CEO, and other officials gave certain reporters
a tour of the facility, including the “patient care bay,” where the massive stainless steel tanks known as Dewars, which contain the frozen bodies, hang from the ceiling. Officials would linger near Dewar number 6, sometimes nodding their heads, so reporters could feel confident in providing the rich detail that that was where Williams’s remains resided. Alcor officials took care to conceal the grisly fact that Ted’s head had been cut off and was sitting in a can inside a “neuro column.” All the press attention seemed to have its intended effect: Lemler crowed that whereas, pre-Ted, Alcor had only averaged about five thousand hits a day on its website, since the news broke it was getting six hundred thousand hits daily.

At the request of John-Henry and Claudia, Bobby-Jo agreed to try mediation in an effort to end their dispute. They gathered on July 15 at the office of Richard “Spike” Fitzpatrick, one of Bobby-Jo’s attorneys, located near the Citrus County courthouse, where reporters were assembled to await the filing of Ted’s will.

The mediator, David C. Brennan, a lawyer from Orlando, greeted the three Williams children and passed out copies of Ted’s 1996 will, wherein he said he wanted to be cremated and wherein he excluded Bobby-Jo from his estate. Then Brennan presented Bobby-Jo and Mark Ferrell with a piece of paper they had never seen before. It appeared to have been written on a sheet of 8½" x 11" paper, turned sideways, with one end ripped off. Creased, handwritten, and oil-stained, the document was presented by John-Henry and Claudia as a private pact that offered incontrovertible proof that their father did, in fact, want to be cryonically preserved: “JHW, Claudia and Dad all agree to be put in bio-stasis after we die,” it read. “This is what we want, to be able to be together in the future, even if it is only a chance.” Below this declaration were three signatures: John-Henry’s, Ted’s, and, on the final line, Claudia’s. The document was dated November 2, 2000—the day before Ted’s heart catheterization procedure at Shands Hospital.

Bobby-Jo, Mark, and their two lawyers tried to make sense of the document. Mark quickly concluded it was fraudulent, raising the possibility that it had been built around an existing Ted Williams signature. He knew from the caretakers that John-Henry had been in the habit of having his father warm up before signing sessions by writing his signature on blank pieces of paper to make sure it was of adequate quality. Mark also pointed out that the date, written as 11/2/00, had an anomaly. The 11 was darker than the other numbers, and there was a line between
the two 1s, so it looked like a capital
H
. It appeared that the number might originally have been a 4 that was changed to an 11, Mark thought. He also noted that whenever Ted signed a letter or any kind of a formal document, he used “Theodore S. Williams,” not the informal “Ted Williams,” which appeared on the pact.

During breaks in the long day of mediation, Bobby-Jo’s team thought of ways to undermine the written pact. They began looking for people whom Ted had told he still wanted to be cremated
after
November 2, 2000. Bob Breitbard said Williams had told him so in November of 2001 and again in February of 2002. Nancy Carmichael of Shands said she remembered Ted talking of being cremated just weeks after the pact was supposedly signed, when he was still in the hospital recovering from his pacemaker surgery. Frank Brothers, also there at the time, along with another nurse, Debbie Erb, corroborated. Caretaker George Carter said Williams told him he still wanted to be cremated when recuperating from heart surgery in San Diego in the spring of 2001. Becky Vaughn, the nurse who cared for Ted in December of 2001, following the catheter and pacemaker procedures, had been present when Ted told John-Henry to stop talking about the cryonics “bullshit.” Bobby-Jo’s daughter, Dawn Hebding, had seen her grandfather in January of 2001, just before his seizure, and he had told her he wanted to be cremated. And Isabel Gilmore said Ted reaffirmed his wish to be cremated in 2002, not long before he died. Those eight, at a minimum, stood to be witnesses on behalf of Bobby-Jo if her challenge made it before a judge.

John-Henry and Claudia, feeling Mark was too angry, volatile, and controlling, wanted to speak to Bobby-Jo alone at the mediation session. Though reluctant, she finally agreed.

Claudia decided to do the talking, and she thought things were going well.

“I was thinking: ‘John-Henry, she doesn’t like you. Let me talk. Girl to girl. We might relate.’ Bang, we hit it off. I’m like, ‘Bobby-Jo, let’s be together on this. Please! This is what Dad wanted. This is what we did. We were there, Bobby-Jo. We were there! You weren’t there. We’re sorry.’ I even said to her, ‘I’m sorry you didn’t have the relationship with Dad that you may have wanted. But please, don’t take this away from us. Let’s be together. Let’s be a family.’

“She looked right at me and John-Henry and said, ‘You know, that’s all I’ve ever really wanted. To be included.’ She was being really nice. We were blown away! John-Henry’s sitting there. He finally said, ‘All the time, Bobby-Jo. We will be as one. Come on, let’s make it happen.’
We were so ready to just welcome her in. ‘Let’s just be united on this. Let’s be united.’ ”
⁶

When Bobby-Jo came out of the room and reported back to her team, Cleveland lawyer John Heer, who was also there representing Bobby-Jo, thought she seemed “shell-shocked. She didn’t know what to think. She said they were being very nice.”

That night, the two sides were near an agreement, according to a memo Fitzpatrick dictated at the time. Bobby-Jo wanted assurances that John-Henry would never sell Ted’s DNA, as she said he had threatened to do in their first phone call, and he agreed, saying that was never his intention. One sticking point, however, was that John-Henry and Claudia did not want to attach a copy of the written pact to the will when it was filed. It was too crude, and they were embarrassed by it. But Heer and Fitzpatrick thought the document was a fake, and they felt it was in their interest to have it revealed.

The next day, any hope of a resolution was dashed when the mediator invited Mark to participate, and the effect was like tossing a grenade into the room.

“I said, ‘Are you sure they want me in there?’ ” Mark recalled. “ ‘Because if I go in there it’s gonna be over with, because I don’t like what they’ve done, and they’re not gonna convince me this is what Ted wanted.’ ” When he sat down at the table with John-Henry, Mark promptly announced, “I’ve lived through sixty years, and you’re the most despicable piece of human garbage I’ve ever met in my life, you son of a bitch.” He then turned to Claudia and told her, “You’re just his little puppy dog.”

John-Henry’s face grew flush as he let Mark vent, but he held his tongue. Finally, he said, “I’m sorry you feel that way.” Claudia recalled that she had to contain herself to keep from lunging across the table at Mark, but in the end she, too, said nothing.

After the talks broke down, Al Cassidy, the Winter Haven real estate developer whom Ted had appointed as his executor, asked a judge to settle the issue of what Ted’s wishes were. But Cassidy had already made up his mind. “Based on what I know and believe, after the time of his will, Ted chose to have his body preserved via cryonics,” he said in a statement. “While many people may not make the same choice for themselves, I hope people will respect this as a private family matter.”

On the night of July 22, the Red Sox staged a tribute to Williams at Fenway Park. This Tedfest came as a welcome respite from the lurid
cryonics story and gave people a chance to say good-bye to the Kid and revel in their warm memories of him.

There were 20,500 paying fans who turned up. A huge number 9 hung from the center-field wall. On the left-field wall were large blown-up photographs showing Ted hitting, flying his jet in wartime, and kneeling while talking to children. In left field itself was a 77' × 36' number 9 made of white carnations. Bouquets of roses and other flowers filled the carnation borders.

After the national anthem and a flyover by Marine jets, the evening began, and more than a score of people who had been friends of Ted and had known him at various stages of his life took turns coming to home plate and telling stories about their experiences with him. The guests included Williams’s old pals and teammates Dominic DiMaggio and Johnny Pesky; John Glenn; Carl Yastrzemski; and Nomar Garciaparra, then the Sox shortstop and public face of the team. Noticeably absent were Ted’s three children, all of whom had declined invitations to attend. Given the public mood, John-Henry and Claudia’s absence was not surprising, but Bobby-Jo would later say she regretted not attending and seizing the moment to make a public plea for getting Ted’s remains out of Alcor.