The Kid: The Immortal Life of Ted Williams (80 page)

Williams’s statement in Cooperstown had added resonance and significance because he’d played for the Red Sox, the last major-league team to integrate and the club with the worst record on race.

Owner Tom Yawkey had been among the thousands cheering for Ted that day when he was inducted, but he must have been taken aback by his star’s detour into the subject of race, for not only had Yawkey’s team been the last to integrate, Yawkey had been one of the leaders of baseball’s segregationist old guard, one of the authors of that secret 1946 report advising then-commissioner Happy Chandler to keep the game white.

Even putting aside the sham tryout the team gave to Jackie Robinson and two of his Negro League compatriots in 1945, and its passing over Willie Mays in 1948, the Red Sox record on race continued to be dismal. In 1966, four months before Williams’s remarks in Cooperstown, Earl Wilson, a black pitcher on the Red Sox, was subjected to an ugly incident in Florida for which he was given no support by the club. Wilson, who had thrown a no-hitter in 1962, had gone to a bar in Winter Haven, the Red Sox spring training site, with two white teammates and was told: “We don’t serve niggers.” Wilson reported the incident to team officials, who told him to forget about it and to say nothing to the press. But Wilson did go to reporters, and in the ensuing uproar was traded away to the Detroit Tigers.

As far as the public knew, Ted’s remarks at Cooperstown were his first about race. He was a baseball player, after all, and what ballplayer spoke out on political issues of the day, much less on the tinderbox of race relations? Few, if any, knew of his acts of kindness toward Robinson, Doby, Pumpsie Green, Blue Moon Odom, or Theodore Roosevelt Radcliffe. His 1954 quote touting black ballplayers in the
Saturday Evening Post
had been buried in a larger piece about Williams himself, and the 1963 column in which he wrote that “sports do not ask what a man’s color is” was otherwise forgettable.

Since Williams, not Tom Yawkey, was the public face of the Red Sox in the ’40s and ’50s, and since he seemed to be so powerful, many in the black community actually suspected that Ted had played a role in keeping the franchise white far beyond its time. Such critics “believe Williams to have been the secret engine behind the Red Sox’ reluctance to
integrate during the 1950’s,” said Howard Bryant, author of the 2002 book
Shut Out: A Story of Race and Baseball in Boston.
“I think it is illustrative of many blacks’ need to ‘find some plausible explanation’ for why the Red Sox were so recalcitrant during those times.” Yet there was no evidence to indict Williams for this, Bryant noted. In fact, the record proved the opposite, and Bryant rejected the hypothesis as “absurd” when discussing his book in a forum.
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According to Al Cassidy, the executor of Ted’s estate, Ted, later in life, regretted that he had not done more to use his influence with Yawkey to speed up the integration of the Red Sox. “Ted didn’t feel he had the standing to force this change,” Cassidy said. “He said, ‘Who am I?’ He knew he had status as a player, but Ted had a strict rule with Yawkey. Yawkey was the owner of the club. Ted drew a line, and he would not have crossed that line. Still, it was one of those things that truly bothered him. Not just the Pumpsie Green case but the other Negro League players. Inequalities hurt him.”

Once, Cassidy’s father, with whom Ted had started the baseball summer camp in Lakeville, asked Williams directly why he had not done more to help the black cause. Recalled the younger Cassidy, “I was there when Dad asked him point-blank: ‘You were so powerful back then; you could have made it an issue.’ Ted said, ‘Looking back, you’re right, but back then I didn’t think I had any authority with Mr. Yawkey.’ He said that was one of his regrets—that he didn’t do more.”
²⁹

Certainly for Williams to have lobbied his club owner on a major policy issue like integration in that era would have been unusual. “Ted challenging Yawkey on race, or anything else, would have been like a guy on the Ford factory line going up to Henry Ford and saying, ‘You know, I think you need this in your V-8,’ ” said Martin Nolan, former editor of the
Boston Globe
editorial page and a lifelong Red Sox fan.
³⁰
Buck O’Neil agreed. “Ted had nothing to do with the Red Sox decision,” he said. “Ted was a ballplayer, not the owner.”
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Yet Williams was not just any assembly-line worker and certainly was not just any ballplayer. He was a superstar to whom Yawkey had shown great deference: moving Fenway Park’s right-field fence in for him, making sure he was the highest-paid player in baseball, tolerating his temper tantrums and outbursts, backing his demand that writers be temporarily kept out of the clubhouse after games, condoning his ploy to miss two months of the 1955 season and conceal income so he could get a better divorce deal, and offering to make him a player-manager. So it is not implausible to argue that since he knew Yawkey gave him a wide berth
and admired him greatly, Williams might have leveraged his status to prod the owner on race—especially in the ’50s, after the color line had been broken and it would have been easy to mount an economic argument, not just a moral one. Red Sox teams were consistently dismal that decade, attendance was in decline, and the addition of black players could have made the team far more competitive. As his early acts of compassion to Robinson, Doby, Pumpsie Green, and others attested, Ted knew better, but he went along. “He framed it as being a different world back then,” Cassidy said. “It embarrassed him it took so long. But he said prior to Robinson, it was just accepted that blacks had their league and whites had theirs. It was normal. He looked at Robinson coming in as a good thing, but not necessarily as a call to arms. It was the times.”
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Williams’s comments to the Cassidys suggest that his failure to at least broach the question with Yawkey festered within him, perhaps contributing to his decision to take a stand on racial equality in his Hall of Fame speech.

There was a footnote to Ted’s big day at Cooperstown: After being presented with his plaque, the Kid decided that he didn’t care for his bronzed likeness. The features were off, and it just didn’t look like him, he felt. So he asked that the artist have another go at it.

There are no records kept at the Hall of Fame in the category of inducted players demanding that their plaques be redone, but suffice to say it was a rare, if not unprecedented, request. But this was Ted Williams, so officials agreed.
^*
Williams found the likeness on the second plaque an improvement, though he told friends he was not thrilled with that one, either. Still, he could hardly make another stink about it.

Years later, in 1985, a life-size wooden statue of Williams by the sculptor Armand LaMontagne would be dedicated at the Hall of Fame and situated in a place of honor in the lobby, next to the statue of another remarkable hitter also sculpted by LaMontagne: Babe Ruth. When Ted pulled the covering from the statue, the crowd cheered, and scores of flashbulbs went off. Williams gazed at his likeness and absorbed the moment, then wept, overwhelmed by his proximity to Ruth.
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“The comparison with the greatest physical force in the history of the game was too much for me,” Ted remarked later, explaining his tears.
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T
hree months after Ted’s enshrinement, he was officially divorced from Lee Howard. Before issuing his decree, Miami circuit court judge Harvie DuVal asked Lee if she thought there was any chance of a reconciliation. “Are you kidding?” she replied.

DuVal awarded her $50,000, plus $10,000 in attorneys’ fees.
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Ted, after initially trying to win Lee back, had become resigned to the divorce and was ready to move on. And there were other family doings. In December, he became a grandfather when Bobby-Jo gave birth to a girl, Francine Dawn Tomasco, who became known by her middle name, Dawn. As she grew up, Dawn would look forward to visiting Ted, partially just to escape life with her mother, which she described as tumultuous and unsettled. “I used to love going to Islamorada and being with Grandpa,” she said, “because I knew everything would be okay—that’s where I felt safe.”

Dawn and her younger sister, Sherri, who was born in September of 1968, would play on a hammock and a tire out back. Then they’d watch Ted tie flies by the hour in his workshop.

“He wanted to know about my grades in school, how long my fingernails were, how much I weighed,” Dawn recalled. “He’d say my hair was a bit long. He was very loud. He used to cook breakfast. He was a terrible cook. He’d make eggs, and they’d still have the whites in them. They’d be raw! ‘Aren’t those the best damned eggs you ever had? You want some more?’ He’d be gritting his teeth. He was always intense. Then he’d make us baked beans from a can. He’d call them Ted Williams’s famous baked beans!”

Ted had the girls give him a list of all their friends in school, then he
would send the friends autographed balls. He’d take Dawn and Sherri out for Key lime slushies. And when he visited in Philadelphia, they’d go shopping—to Radio Shack for the latest electronic gadgetry, or to buy Bass shoes, his favorite. The shoes had to be Bass, Ted said. “He’d spoil us terribly. He loved obedient children. Visiting us with Mom, he’d want us to help her with her chores, then he’d stick hundred-dollar bills in our pockets. ‘Don’t tell your mom,’ he’d say.”

On August 26, 1968, less than a month before Bobby-Jo was to give birth to her second child, she got a call from her father informing her that she now had a little brother. “There’s a gal by the name of Dolores,” Ted said.
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Dolores Wettach, the
Vogue
model Williams had met on the plane home from New Zealand in March of 1964, had been helping him tend to his love life after his breakup with Lee Howard. After their San Francisco dinner, he’d invited her to join him at spring training. She declined, but an intermittent courtship began. Ted was traveling, busy with Sears, his Red Sox duties, and fishing. Dolores was traveling, too, from her base in New York, pursuing a fledgling acting career in addition to the modeling work that was her mainstay.

They were a combustible mix of sexual tension and emotional volatility. Dolores was smart, sensuous, and sassy. She had a back-to-the-land sensibility leavened by urban sophistication. She told him about her experiences as a nurse, model, and actress. She told him that she’d had a daughter by a hometown boyfriend she was never serious about and that she’d decided to give the girl up for adoption. The two had little contact now.

At first, Ted liked it when she refused to play the sycophantic bobby-soxer to his Great Man. Dolores seemed to delight in asserting her independence and standing up to him when he was outrageous or too casually asserting his will. They’d be lucky if they went three days without a fight, after which there would be an eruption followed by a tender reunion. Dolores got used to the cycles. “I was smitten with him,” she said. “He was easy to love.”

In the spring of 1968, Dolores told Ted she was pregnant with his child. Williams was incredulous. He asked her if she was sure he was the father. Dolores said she was quite sure. But Ted wasn’t. Uncertain what to do, he called his second wife, Lee Howard.

“I got a call from him one day, and he was crying on the phone,” Lee remembered. “He was saying, ‘It’s not mine, sweetie, it’s not mine!’ Dolores was threatening to expose the pregnancy, and he was with Sears, and that would have been bad. Ted told me she was threatening to go to the papers. He kept saying, ‘It’s not mine. It’s not mine.’ ”

Lee was unmoved. “Don’t tell me, Ted!” she said. “Tell her!”
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Dolores denied she pressured Williams or threatened to go public with her pregnancy. “That’s silly. No one threatened Ted. You didn’t force him to do anything.” She said she’d been hoping he’d propose for three years, but she hardly entrapped him. “I’m not going to throw myself at someone,” she said. “I’m not going to try and finagle them. You like me or you don’t like me. That’s it.”
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Reluctantly, Ted decided he would have to marry Dolores, and he told her they would elope to Jamaica, though first he insisted that she sign a prenuptial agreement. When they met at the airport for their flight to the island, he carefully looked her over. She was six months along but still barely showing. “Maybe you’re not pregnant,” Ted said hopefully.

It was not the most romantic way to start the trip, and the chill continued when they arrived in Jamaica. Williams nixed Dolores’s proposed wedding dress. (She’d brought a formal gown that she considered jazzy and elegant, but Ted thought it was over the top given the circumstances.) She settled for a simple white wraparound knit number, and Ted wore just an Izod sport shirt over a pair of baggy slacks. “He’d say, ‘I like a little ass room in my pants,’ ” Dolores recalled.

The wedding, on May 7, was held in a remote section of Kingston Parish. He didn’t want a lot of fanfare, he’d told her, and there was certainly none of that: they were out in the middle of nowhere. “He whisked me off down into the hinterlands of the island,” Dolores said. “We went in there to get married. The chickens were crowing. I thought it wasn’t a professional place.” The justice of the peace waved in a few locals to be witnesses. When the justice asked for the ring to put on Dolores’s finger, “Ted said, ‘She doesn’t get a ring.’ So the man, he looked at my stomach as if to say, ‘She must be pregnant or something.…’ And then, after being married, Ted took me to spend the night, and the mattress sunk way down, and I couldn’t sleep in the bed because I kept rolling onto Ted. So I got up and slept in the bathtub.”

Dolores Ethel Wettach was the oldest of four children. Her mother was Swedish, and her father, Karl Joseph Wettach, was Swiss-German. Karl had come to the United States at the age of twenty and headed for Montana, aspiring to make it as a cowboy. He rode Brahman bulls and broncos for a while, but decided it wasn’t as glamorous, or lucrative, as he had hoped. Back east, he married Ethel Erickson, and they settled on an eighty-acre farm in Westminster, Vermont, a town of about three thousand
people on the banks of the Connecticut River, some twenty-five miles north of the Massachusetts line, near Brattleboro. Karl made a go of it as a mink farmer.

As a girl, Dolores would walk a half mile to a one-room schoolhouse. She had to drop out for a while during World War II, when her mother was working and Dolores was needed at home to help take care of her two sisters and brother. She’d get up early and do chores on the farm, including taking care of the minks. They had to be fed ground-up horsemeat and watered five times a day, and Dolores would drag pails of water up a hill from the well to the barn.

She went to the regional high school in Bellows Falls, and then on to the University of Vermont, over the objections of her old-fashioned father, who saw no purpose in girls pursuing higher education. Dolores majored in nursing with a minor in animal husbandry, since she wanted to be able to help her father run the farm. A professor suggested she compete for the Miss Vermont title, part of the Miss USA pageant. Dolores didn’t need much convincing. In high school she’d thought of herself as a tall, gangly ugly duckling, but she’d blossomed in college. Being Miss Vermont would be a validation of her adult beauty.

She won that first title, becoming Miss Vermont in 1956, then it was off to Long Beach, California, and the Miss USA round, where she sized up the girls from what were then the other forty-seven states with trepidation. Pageant officials, meanwhile, pored over her vital statistics like commodities brokers: she was a blue-eyed brunette, 37-24-36, five foot nine, and 130 pounds. (Her enormous feet—size 11AAA—were not officially noted.) For local color, she donned a Vermont Green Mountain Boys costume and a white swimsuit with rhinestones around the bust, but the Miss USA crown went to someone else.

Returning to the University of Vermont in the fall of 1956, Dolores got involved in politics, helping host a visit to Burlington by Tennessee senator Estes Kefauver, who was the Democratic nominee for vice president on the ticket with Adlai Stevenson. After graduating in 1957, Dolores took a job as a nurse at St. Clare’s Hospital in New York, where a few chance encounters soon broadened her horizons, first in acting and then in modeling. One day, as Dolores was riding a crosstown bus, the producer of an off-Broadway play, taken by her beauty, approached and asked if she would like to audition for the play—in his apartment. “My girlfriends told me it was just a line and I shouldn’t go, but I thought he looked sincere,” Dolores told the
New York Journal American
in 1959 for a
saucy feature the paper did on her unlikely evolution from nurse to actress.
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She was given the role of a sorceress in
Shakuntala,
an Indian stage classic about a king who falls in love with a maiden commoner.
Variety
archly noted Dolores was “lithe and lovely, and most expressive when she is mute.”
⁶

Despite the theater experience, she had to work as a waitress to supplement her nurse’s salary. Two fashion photographers spotted her in the restaurant and told her she’d make a great model. They asked her to come to their studio for a shoot, after which
Vogue
quickly snapped her up.

It was 1961, and the country was infatuated with Jacqueline Kennedy. Fashionistas coveted the “Jackie look,” and Dolores was deemed nearly a dead ringer for the new First Lady. Both
Time
and
Newsweek
had articles on the surging Jackie trend and said that models who looked like her were prospering. Dolores was pictured striking an elegant pose in the
Newsweek
spread, while in
Time
she was touted as “lush and Lorenesque… the newest, most dewy-eyed model this year.” The only negative was that she was deemed to have “too much figure.” Translation: she was too buxom. “I’m made to wear a flattening bra,” Dolores was quoted as saying. “Otherwise, I take away from the dress.”
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While a regular in
Vogue,
Dolores was also featured in
Look, Esquire, Pageant,
and other magazines. Soon, she was being sent all around the world. “It was good money, but you couldn’t take it seriously,” Dolores mused. “You were selling garments. The girls were very competitive. I didn’t really like it that much.”

In 1964, the year Dolores met Ted, Carlo Ponti, the famed Italian producer, was captivated by her modeling photos and offered her a costarring role in one of his movies,
Controsesso
(“A Woman of Affairs”), a wry sexploitation comedy filmed in Rome. Dolores jumped at the offer and was amused by the interaction between Ponti and his legendary wife, Sophia Loren, who towered over him and was twenty-two years his junior. That same year, Dolores nearly became one of the James Bond girls when she was considered for the part of Pussy Galore opposite Sean Connery’s Bond in
Goldfinger.
The Bond people had sent for her after seeing her pose in
Vogue,
putting on a pair of hose alluringly. She says she was initially offered the part, but the producers changed their mind and gave the role to Honor Blackman. In Ian Fleming’s novel, Pussy is a lesbian. In the film, Bond seduces her, but only after a sexually ambiguous scene in which Pussy fends him off by saying she is “immune”
to his advances. “They just said, ‘I’m sorry, Dolores, but you won’t pass for a dyke,’ ” she recalled, laughing.

There had been other movie-business encounters for Dolores—a meeting with the director Howard Hawks, a correspondence with Marlon Brando, a dinner date with Anthony Quinn—but those memories, those possibilities, receded abruptly as her relationship with Ted Williams developed. They had to. She knew how possessive Ted was, how he wouldn’t brook any sort of perceived competition or sharing of center stage. “He told me, ‘Don’t try to steal the limelight,’ ” Dolores said.

At the time of the wedding, Dolores was thirty-three, sixteen years younger than Ted, but she liked to be coy about her age. Being in the beauty business, she found it prudent to keep people guessing about how old she actually was, so she carried three different birth certificates. On her marriage certificate, she listed herself as twenty-seven. Ted correctly said he was forty-nine, and gave his marital status as divorced. Dolores, with a touch of whimsy, reported that she was a “spinster.”