The Kid: The Immortal Life of Ted Williams (116 page)

“Everybody wants to say something bad about John-Henry and I. What we did! What did we really do? Think about it. What did we really do? We loved our dad. There was no greater love, in my opinion, that existed than between John-Henry and his father. No greater love. And then you have someone like Bobby-Jo, who resented it and was going to fight it the only way she knew how: by telling vicious, mean lies. She did whatever she could to just tear us down. She got an awful lot of people out there thinking John-Henry was an awful boy. I’m ‘Fraudia’ and John-Henry’s ‘Freezer Boy.’ I mean, that’s pretty crude. It was just awful.”

After the pact was signed, Claudia said John-Henry put it in a folder he carried with him in his car and apparently forgot about it. “He lived in his car.”

Seventeen months went by. In the days following Ted’s death, as pressure mounted to prove what Williams’s wishes truly were, John-Henry and Claudia met at Ted’s house with Goldman and with Eric Abel, who was helping to map out a legal strategy. Goldman said the way he read Florida law, they were going to need something in writing from Ted saying he wished to be cryonically preserved.

“When Goldman left the house, John-Henry said to me, ‘You know, Claudia and I and Dad signed something, but I don’t know if it’s what Goldman’s looking for,’ ” Abel recalled. “I said anything Ted signed, even on a napkin, would help their case. He started telling me about this
note. I asked him where it was. He didn’t know. Next day, John-Henry said, ‘I looked here, looked there, couldn’t find it.’ I said, ‘Keep looking.’ Finally he found it and showed it to me. I was like, ‘Holy shit!’ It was just amazing he had it in writing. It was like finding a gold mine. The crudity of the document meant nothing to me. He said it was in the trunk of the car.”
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On why Ted signed the pact as Ted Williams rather than Theodore S. Williams, which had been his habit when signing any kind of official document, Claudia said: “Dad for the last probably five years of his life didn’t have to sign any more official documents because John-Henry did that for him. All Daddy had to do was practice ‘Ted Williams’ so that he could sign memorabilia for John-Henry. It was easy. Dad at that time could barely see. But he could basically close his eyes and sign ‘Ted Williams.’ ”

On why John-Henry called Shands Hospital on July 10 and asked for the date of Ted’s catheterization procedure, Claudia said she had not known that he did. “Let’s just assume for a second that John-Henry did make that phone call, and he asked for the date because he wanted to make sure he had the right date on the note, and the whole damn thing is forged, you know? With that aside, what is so wrong with what he did? Dad died, okay? Dad died. He left two children behind that were heartbroken that they had lost their father. Two children behind that for the last good three years of his life were around him all the time, okay? What is so wrong? Why, why do people want to just say, ‘Aha! Look at that! They’re bad. They did something wrong.’ The fuck we did!”

And Claudia bristled when considering Carter’s and Brothers’s accounts that she could not have been at the hospital on November 2. “I can’t believe that they have the nerve to say I wasn’t there then, because I had an accident that day on the way up to be there. So I mean, it is crazy. I was rushing to get up there and I had a car accident. Right off the exit, near the hospital. I had to go see a doctor while I was there just to make sure I was okay.” Yet when Claudia learned that the accident report placed her in Gainesville on November 5, not November 2, she was devastated and burst into tears. “I know it happened,” she said, referring to the written pact. “But now you won’t believe me! I know what I felt, saw, and lived.”
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Bobby-Jo’s lawyers thought the fact that Ted, when he was alive, had never applied to Alcor himself cast further doubt on what his true wishes were. And the fact that John-Henry had not bothered to fill out an
application on his father’s behalf until after Ted died raised an interesting legal question: while the son’s power of attorney clearly empowered him to deal with Alcor on Ted’s behalf while he was alive, after Williams died, didn’t John-Henry’s power of attorney expire as well? This was an issue that young Williams’s attorneys were not anxious to litigate. One of them, Peter Sutton, acknowledged that the power of attorney did die with Ted, while Eric Abel thought John-Henry still might have some wiggle room. “Many lawyers would say no, the power of attorney does die on his death,” Abel said. “But that doesn’t mean some attorneys wouldn’t argue that there are residual powers. If it helps my client, I would argue it.”

As John-Henry and Alcor waited for the question of Ted’s wishes to be resolved in court, they were facing other difficulties, since it appeared that their compliance with multiple sections of Florida law regulating anatomical gifts could be challenged unless the pact was accepted. The law at the time said that if a decedent did not execute an agreement to make an anatomical gift while he was alive, as Ted had not, certain “classes of persons” could make the donation for him upon his death. The first class was the spouse, but Ted was not married when he died. The second class was “an adult son or daughter of the decedent.” But the law went on to say that a person in this class could only make the donation “in the absence of actual notice of contrary indications by the decedent or actual notice of opposition by a member of the same… class,” such as Bobby-Jo.
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Moreover, the Florida law placed restrictions on the “donee,” in this case Alcor, if the children were making the gift. The statute said: “If the donee has actual notice of contrary indications by the decedent or… actual notice that a gift by a member of a class is opposed by a member of the same or prior class, the donee shall not accept the gift.”

Alcor seemed particularly vulnerable on the question of whether it had been given notice of Bobby-Jo’s opposition to the cryonics procedure, since early on the afternoon of Ted’s death, hours before his body left Florida, she had e-mailed Alcor to notify it that she was opposed to her father being frozen. But the company went ahead anyway. In accepting Ted’s body, Alcor also seemed to have violated its own policy. The company had a clause in its “Third Party Application for Membership,” filled out by John-Henry for Ted, that explicitly stated that if an applicant
had a will specifying that he wished to be cremated, the agreement to freeze the person would be invalid. Included in the Alcor application were two questions, each followed by Yes and No boxes to check: “Does Donor have a will?” and “If ‘Yes,’ does it include any provisions contrary to cryonics?” John-Henry did not answer either question.
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Abel said that the night Ted died, Alcor called John-Henry and asked him to sign some of the documents again. “They were making up the agreement and wanted it resigned, making it more specific to the case,” Abel recalled. “Then they wanted Claudia as next of kin also.” That was probably because Alcor knew that, unlike Florida law, the Arizona statute on anatomical gifts had language specifying that in the event of a conflict between the decedent’s children over whether to donate the body, the majority ruled. Claudia signed her set of papers and faxed them to Alcor between 9:10 and 9:33 p.m. eastern time on July 5, 2002. More than twelve hours after Ted’s death, she officially became the majority vote.

And there were still other problems: though Ted’s body was flown from Florida to Arizona, only Florida law likely governed the transaction under the legal test of “significant contacts.” When the laws of two states might conflict, the law of the state where the principals involved have the most “significant contacts” takes precedence. Ted lived in Florida, his estate was probated there, and all three of his children lived in Florida.

When the cryonics news became public, John-Henry entered into a negotiation with Alcor, asking for concessions on its $170,000 bill ($120,000 of the bill was for Ted’s “whole-body” procedure, which covered his trunk, and $50,000 of it was for the “neuro”). John-Henry thought a deep discount was appropriate, if not a waiving of the fees altogether, given the publicity boon the company was getting—indeed, he was even willing to consider waiving the confidentiality provision to let Alcor speak about Ted publicly if the price was right.

But Alcor balked, pointing to its costs in chartering the private jet that flew Williams’s body from Florida to Arizona and arguing that it was incurring extra costs because of new security demands and having to add people to handle all the phone calls they were getting. The company knew it had the upper hand, since John-Henry had failed to negotiate any price concessions when he had far more leverage—when Ted was alive. Now Williams was dead, and Alcor had his body.

The Alcorians were worried about Bobby-Jo going to court, and when John-Henry and Claudia produced the written pact, there was considerable relief—and a touch of skepticism—in Scottsdale. “When the note was revealed it buttressed our position internally that even though we never met Ted Williams and no one ever spoke to Ted Williams, this at least indicated that John-Henry had talked to Ted and Claudia in this bemusing note hidden in the trunk,” said Bill Haworth. “But the note seemed so bizarre. You had to question it. It didn’t pass the smell test, but that’s what we ended up with. Alcor and Jerry Lemler were just so thrilled with the prospects of someone like Ted Williams becoming a patient, as they called him, they didn’t want to even suggest that John-Henry didn’t discuss it with his father. They wanted to believe it was the truth because that validated what Alcor wanted to gain. We were also worried about John-Henry’s power of attorney and whether it could survive Ted’s death. Was he carrying out his father’s wishes or his own?”

John-Henry thought there was a real possibility that Bobby-Jo would win her legal challenge and that Ted’s body would be ordered out of Alcor. But, he confided to his girlfriend at the time, Jenna Bernreuter, he had a contingency plan in place: if Bobby-Jo succeeded, he would move Ted’s body to a cryonics facility in Germany, where, his research indicated, the legal climate was more favorable.
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“If Ted’s body had been ordered out of Alcor, it would have sent John-Henry off the deep end,” Peter Sutton said. “That was the key to the whole situation. That’s why we fought Bobby-Jo so hard—because Ted would not have wanted to have his son blow his brains out over this problem. I sent Al Cassidy over there to watch him right away. It was scary. Very scary. He was losing it. I think it was the weight of the whole thing, the stress. Bobby-Jo was attacking him. The press was attacking him. It was just too much for him.”

But John-Henry, backed by Ted’s estate, had key financial advantages that Bobby-Jo did not, allowing him to string out the legal proceedings to drive up his sister’s legal fees. By September, Bobby-Jo signaled the end was near. John Heer told reporters she had spent $50,000 so far, mostly from her retirement savings, and he anticipated it would take another $60,000 for the case to go to trial. She had been able to attract only $2,500 through the fund-raising vehicle she had set up, Ted Williams’s Last Wish Fund, mostly in $10 to $25 contributions from the public.
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John-Henry could have prevailed through attrition, but he had
another key chit at his disposal, which he used to settle the issue. Under the terms of an irrevocable 1986 insurance trust, Ted had left $600,000 to his three children, to be distributed equally. John-Henry asked the three trustees of the trust—Eric Abel, Al Cassidy, and David McCarthy, director of the Ted Williams museum—to give Bobby-Jo her $200,000 share immediately if she agreed to drop any legal challenge and let Ted’s body remain at Alcor. Abel said that Ted, in revising his will in 1996, asked him verbally not to distribute Bobby-Jo’s full share in a lump sum because he was afraid she would spend it all, recklessly. But Abel said he persuaded the other trustees to go along with paying her the full $200,000 immediately if she would drop her objections to Ted’s final resting place.

In December, five months after her father’s death, Bobby-Jo agreed. Her share, with interest, came to $211,000. (Peter Sutton said Bobby-Jo also received thirty-seven Ted-signed bats from the same trust, worth $2,000 each, “as part of the deal to get rid of her.”) A bitter Bobby-Jo and Mark Ferrell used much of the money to buy a new trailer, and they took off on an extended trip around the country.

Forged or not, the written pact and the sad cryonics coda showed that Ted reaped what he sowed as a father and underscored the fact that Williams never fully escaped the family dysfunction that had ensnared him as a boy.

Eager to atone for neglecting John-Henry in his youth, Ted welcomed his son back into his life as an adult and gave him the keys to his kingdom. John-Henry took his father’s trust—and his power of attorney—and ran with them.

Their relationship was symbiotic and mutually fulfilling. Ted grew to love his son and in the end relied on him totally as his caretaker, though Williams’s appeals to several close friends for help just before he died showed that he came to have second thoughts about having delegated so much power to John-Henry. But it was too late.

Young Williams, for his part, plainly exploited his father but was also devoted to him. Consumed by his father’s considerable shadow, the son never made any attempt to escape it. Taking over Ted’s memorabilia business was virtually a license to print money, and John-Henry used it fully, keeping Williams hustling long past the time it was comfortable for him to sign autographs. He also deceived his father, as when he borrowed $500,000 from Bob Breitbard without telling Ted and went into the porn business to try and grow Hitter.net.

Yet John-Henry certainly loved Ted. Where he easily could have let the nurses and caretakers look after his father, in the end he took part in the nitty-gritty himself: showering with Ted so he wouldn’t fall, grooming him, administering his oxygen and medications, and even, according to Claudia, learning how to insert his catheter. The son’s bizarre but poignant decision to mount a pro baseball career at the age of thirty-three was all about paying homage to his father. And John-Henry’s cryonics decision for Ted seemed less about exploitation than it was about not wanting to let go.