The Kid: The Immortal Life of Ted Williams (60 page)

Angell was wondering where this conversation was headed when Williams proceeded to make an explicit link between hitting performance and abstinence: “Roger,” the Kid said, “I didn’t get laid for the first time until the All-Star Game break of my second year in the majors. I was thinking about hitting.”
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That would place his rite of passage in Saint Louis in 1940, not in Detroit in 1939, as Ted had told Underwood.

Not long before he died, Williams offered still another version—time and place not specified—to one of his lawyers, Eric Abel, though this story, too, was linked to performance on the field. “He was about twenty,” recalled Abel, who later would marry Ted’s younger daughter, Claudia. “He told me he was in a hotel room, traveling with the team. There were girls waiting outside. Groupies. But he was very shy. He said he couldn’t imagine taking a girl, just like that, going up and having sex. But his buddies took the women up. He’d be up there, and one said, ‘Send someone up.’ Finally one of the guys said, ‘You gotta do this, Ted. Just do it.’ So I think one of his buddies called the bellhop. Ted’s telling the story, and he says, ‘I’m nervous, but Jesus, it’s pretty good. This is pretty good. Whoa!’ Next day he goes three for four. ‘I’m telling you what, this is the ticket. I’ve got to do that again tonight.’ Next day two for four. ‘This is it. I love this. Feels pretty good.’ Next day, oh for four. Another night, then oh for four. After that he rules it out as helping his hitting. He was more concerned about its effect on his hitting than he was enjoyment.”
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It wasn’t long, however, before Ted lost all his sexual inhibitions. Johnny Lazor, a backup outfielder with the Red Sox in the ’40s, recalled an awkward moment in Detroit in 1946: “In Detroit, the hotel was within walking distance from the ballpark, and we were walking back after a game. There were four of us walking down the street. I don’t
know if I should be saying this, but there were four women on the sidewalk. And Ted, he picked out one girl and walked up to her and tapped her on the shoulder and said to her, ‘Do you fuck?’ ” The girl and her companions scurried away.
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At games, Williams would happily join his teammates and play what was known as “shoot the beaver,” a game in which the players would scan the stands for the best-looking talent in attendance. Plenty of women would be checking Williams out, too. Once, in Washington, an overzealous girl decided to crawl out on the top of the Red Sox dugout during pregame warm-ups and gaze into the dugout at Ted.

“Her head’s upside down, six feet in front of us,” remembered George Sullivan, the former Sox batboy turned baseball writer, who was sitting next to Williams at the time. “She propositioned him. Told him what she’d do for him. She had long, dark hair, hanging way down. A brunette.”
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Such incidents, as well as the ready assistance of ushers and clubhouse attendants, would often lead to dates. If Ted and one of his Red Sox friends double-dated, Williams wouldn’t hesitate to hit on the teammate’s girl if he decided she was more attractive than his own date.

Eddie Pellagrini, the backup shortstop in 1946, recalls a time that year on the road when Williams suggested they go out. “Hey, dago,” Williams said, using his preferred name for Pellagrini. “I’ve got a date with my girlfriend, and she’s got one for you. She’s supposed to be a gorgeous chick.”

Ted and Eddie picked up Ted’s girl at the hotel. “Ted says to his girl, ‘Where we going?’ She says to the theater. I was thinking, ‘Oh, Christ, who is my girl going to be, a popcorn girl, a ticket taker?’ ” Pellagrini recalled, laughing. “So we get there and this girl walks up and Ted says, ‘Is that her?’ His girl says, ‘Yeah, that’s my friend Heidi.’ Ted is carrying on in the front. I just said, ‘She ain’t bad.’ She was actually gorgeous. Heidi says, ‘Well, I have my own car. Eddie, why don’t you come with me and we’ll go in my car?’ I said, ‘Why not?’ She was prettier than Ted’s girl.
Gorgeous!
Oh, yeah, shit. So we go to some restaurant, and Ted’s putting the moves on my girl the whole time. He was really workin’ her. Oh, yeah, he was a good-looking kid, but Heidi’s paying attention to me, not him. Anyway, she took me home and nothing happened. I might have put my arm around her. I don’t remember if I kissed her or what. To make a long story short, I got back to the hotel, Ted was in the lobby. He says, ‘Hey, dago, how did you make out?’ I said, ‘Wooooo, oh, baby!’ ”
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Williams was less on the prowl in Boston than he was when the Red Sox were on the road. At home, his hotel room was his base and refuge. He
shunned the limelight, preferring to be alone. He’d decompress after a game, watching television and tying intricate flies to add to his collection for fishing.

When he returned from Korea, Ted moved back into the Shelton Hotel on Bay State Road off Kenmore Square, near Fenway Park. The two-hundred-room hotel was on the banks of the Charles River and had an eclectic, mostly residential clientele that included Eugene O’Neill, the playwright. When the Sonnabend family, who owned the Shelton, sold the hotel to Boston University in 1953 so it could be converted to a dormitory, Paul Sonnabend, the manager, told Williams he was leaving to become general manager at the Somerset, a much larger hotel nearby, overlooking Commonwealth Avenue. “Can I come with you?” said Ted.
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Sonnabend made sure his staff at the Somerset zealously catered to Ted and ensured his privacy. He settled into a second-floor suite, room 231, which had a sweeping view of Commonwealth Avenue, one of Boston’s grandest boulevards. There were elegant brownstones on either side of the street, which was divided by a median lined with trees. Williams also took another room on the sixth floor for guests, or to use as a getaway for added privacy. The Somerset was the only hotel in the city at the time that had a swimming pool, and it had two good restaurants, the Rib Room and the Polynesian Village, which would each carve out some breathing room for Ted if he wanted to come down and eat in peace.

Williams soon grew close to the Somerset assistant manager, the doorman, bellhops, bell captains, parking lot attendants, the valet, television repairman, and telephone operators, all of whom went the extra mile for him. He took exceptionally good care of them financially, too, and came to regard some as close friends.

Williams had asked for a room on the second floor so that he could reach his suite easily by using a back stairway, without anyone seeing him. He wanted to avoid walking through a crowded lobby to take the elevator, which he would need to reach a room on the upper floors. The hard-core Ted groupies were of course aware that he lived at the Somerset and would sometimes congregate in the lobby hoping for a sighting, but the staff was vigilant for this and would shoo them away whenever they reached critical mass. (Mae Carney, the lead telephone operator, was under strict instructions never to put any phone calls through to Ted, only to take messages, which the bellhops would slide under the door of room 231.) If Ted expected female company he would usually alert the parking lot attendant or one of the bellhops, who would facilitate her arrival via the back stairs.

Arthur D’Angelo came for his laundry, and Andy Giacobbe was the TV repairman. D’Angelo had a key to Ted’s room and would come and go several days a week, picking up and dropping off laundry. He was an Italian immigrant who had come to Boston in 1939 with his twin brother, Henry, and launched a dry cleaning business that serviced several of the hotels, including the Somerset.

Starting in 1946, Arthur and Henry had opened a side business selling souvenirs around Fenway Park, which would mushroom years later into the highly lucrative Twins Enterprises Inc. across from the ballpark, which now sells all manner of Red Sox paraphernalia. So Ted already knew Arthur. Back then, he’d see the brothers on the street and say, jovially, “You two guys are making a fortune on me and you’re not giving me a penny, but I don’t give a shit.”

Later, at the hotel, Ted and Arthur would continue the banter. “When I saw Ted at the Somerset, we’d talk about the usual stuff,” Arthur said. “What did he do when he was out of town, did he pick up any broads, nothing big. He was an ice cream freak. He had just a room with a refrigerator, and his place was always filled with candies and ice cream. He liked Baby Ruth candy bars. He was interested in where I came from. He’d say, ‘You little greaseball, you came from nothing in Italy and you made a fortune.’ He’d talk like that. I think he liked me. I think he trusted me.”
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Andy Giacobbe was startled one day when he walked into Williams’s room to check on his TV. “Would you like to be my best friend?” Ted asked him. “This TV is my life. I eat all my meals in front of the TV, I tie fishing flies in front of the TV, I don’t go to theaters, I don’t go to dinner. I want you to check it for me every day, whether we’re here or on the road.” Following instructions, for the next several years, Giacobbe would go to his room seven days a week. “He was a lonesome guy who hungered to have friends,” Andy recalled. “He used to insist I have breakfast with him, he gave me tickets to day games, and over the years I got to know him pretty well.” When he was in town, Ted would look forward to Andy’s daily visits. “If you’re not busy, stay a while,” Williams would tell him. “You’ll never overstay your welcome.” Once, when Andy stopped by a pet store and the owner told him he was about to throw out a sick canary, Andy took it, plucked its feathers, and presented them to Ted to use for his fly making. “I thought he was gonna kiss me, he was so elated, and he told me what kinds of flies he made with them, and he still remembered that fifty years later,” Andy said.

Usually the chambermaids kept his suite immaculate, but one day, in 1957, Andy came in to find the room a shambles. Ted had thrown the
cushions on the floor and there was crumpled newspaper everywhere. “Eleven years!” Williams screamed. “Eleven years and Egan won’t get off my back about the 1946 World Series!”
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Another regular visitor to room 231, though he was not an employee of the Somerset, was Jim Carroll, who had emerged during the ’50s as one of Ted’s closest friends and his man Friday. The two had met accidentally in 1950 on Cape Cod when both turned up for a fishing trip at the wrong dock. Carroll noticed the famous man sitting in his beige Cadillac Coupe de Ville with Minnesota plates, reading the paper. It was a Monday, an off day for the Red Sox. Ted asked if Jim wanted to get some breakfast.

Carroll was the top liquor salesman in Boston in his day. He had seventy-six bars and fourteen package stores on his route, mostly in his home territory of South Boston. In case his visitors wanted a drink, Ted would order a case of Cutty Sark regularly from Jim, and before long Carroll had a key to Ted’s room to make his deliveries.

They would hang out in the suite and talk, watching Ed Sullivan as Ted sipped on a ginger ale. Jim routinely met Ted at the airport when the team came home from a road trip, pulling up to Logan in Williams’s Cadillac, which Ted let him use when the Red Sox were away. Carroll got a big kick out of showing the car off to his friends, and it wasn’t bad for business, either, as he made his rounds of the bars and package stores. (Ted declared Jim’s own 1958 Ford convertible a shitbox.)

Sometimes when Williams got restless at night he’d ask Jim to go for a walk. They would leave the hotel, cross Commonwealth Avenue, make their way to Marlborough Street, go down to Arlington Street on Boston Common, then head back on Beacon Street to Kenmore Square. Often they’d stop outside the Howard Johnson there and Ted would send Jim in for a chocolate and vanilla double cone.

They would talk about politics, especially later, when the Kennedy-Nixon presidential campaign heated up. Ted was a big Nixon man, of course. They also discussed more metaphysical subjects. Once, when the two were out walking, Carroll dropped his rosary beads. Ted noticed and said, “You’re one of them?” Ted questioned him about Catholicism and what he believed. Williams said he wanted to be cremated. Did the Catholics have a policy on that?

Ted had been in Boston for years, but he didn’t know the city well, so sometimes Carroll would drive Ted around town and take him to neighborhoods he’d never been to, like South Boston.

The two men wouldn’t eat out much, but when they did, Ted liked the Union Oyster House, near Faneuil Hall, or the Linwood Grill, on Kilmarnock Street, near Fenway. “They gave him a good steak there, and no one bothered him,” Carroll said. Not being bothered was as important to Williams, if not more important, than the food. Once, Ted suggested they go see a western, but when about fifty people surrounded him and started to create too much of a scene, Williams said, “Let’s get the Christ out of here.” Carroll complained he had just paid for the tickets. Ted said, “You want the money back?”

Sometimes Ted would go to Fenway for extra batting practice and invite Carroll along, sending him out to right field to shag flies. Jim remembers line drives whistling over his head. If he was lucky enough to catch a ball, his hand would burn with pain.

One day in June of 1955, Ted asked Carroll to drive him to visit Harry Agganis at the Sancta Maria Hospital in Cambridge. Agganis, then twenty-six, had emerged as a power-hitting first baseman for the Red Sox in 1954, unseating Dick Gernert and hitting eleven home runs that year, eight of them at Fenway, as a left-handed batter. In 1955, he was hitting .313 in the cleanup spot behind Ted when he was suddenly hospitalized with fever and chest pains. The son of Greek immigrants, Agganis had been raised in working-class Lynn, north of Boston, and had gone to Boston University, where he starred as an All-American quarterback and came to be known as “the Golden Greek.” Drafted by the Cleveland Browns, he chose to play baseball instead and signed with the Red Sox. Williams had grown close to Agganis and was shaken by the hospital visit, as it was apparent his teammate did not have long to live. Ted and Carroll got to talking about what his funeral would be like. Carroll noted that Agganis was Greek Orthodox, and the church customarily had an open casket. “I’m not gonna lay in a goddamn box and have people gawk at me,” Ted said, reiterating that he wanted to be cremated. Agganis died of a massive pulmonary embolism two days after the visit.