The Kid: The Immortal Life of Ted Williams (81 page)

Her parents disclosed the wedding to the press in June of 1968. Fibbing, they said the union had taken place the previous fall rather than the previous month.

That Christmas, Ted tried to rectify his wedding-ring slight. The first several presents she opened from him were innocuous. Finally, Ted produced a small box with a rose on it, which contained the wedding band. Ted himself declined to wear a wedding ring. Of course he hadn’t bothered to get her an engagement ring before the wedding, either. Years later, he would try and make amends on that score by giving her his MVP trophies instead.

Their son was born on August 26, 1968, in Brattleboro, Vermont. Ted wanted to call him John, with the middle name Henry. Dolores suggested they combine John and Henry into a hyphenated first name. They both liked the legend of John Henry, the black former slave who, in the nineteenth-century push to lay railroad tracks to the West, became the greatest steel-driver of them all and who died victorious in a contest to beat an automated hammer touted as a replacement for the men on the line. Someone teased Williams about naming his son John-Henry because it was considered “a colored name,” Dolores said, to which Ted responded, “Oh, yeah? Well, so is Williams.” Dolores added a middle name: Dussault, after a friend of hers and Ted’s, Ding Dussault, the track coach at Tufts University, outside Boston, and a neighbor of Ted’s at his fishing camp in New Brunswick. Dolores called the boy Dusey.

Just as he did with Bobby-Jo, Ted missed the birth of his son, again
because he was away fishing. When he showed up at the hospital, Dolores said, Ted took a long look at his son and said: “Yeah? Well, he’ll never be the ballplayer I was.”

Though Dolores now had a full-time job tending to John-Henry, Williams hoped she could help him deal with Bobby-Jo as well. His daughter was having serious problems coping with marriage and with being a mother, and Ted didn’t have a clue what to do about it. He still cared about Bobby-Jo—his house in Islamorada was filled with pictures of her taken when she was a baby girl and when she was a young mother and at every stage in between—but he was frustrated by her various meltdowns, for which he had no patience or understanding.
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Bobby-Jo certainly needed help: she was now abusing drugs, having moved on from Darvon to Seconal. The Seconal didn’t mix well with alcohol, which she had also begun using with increasing frequency. Sometimes she’d just announce to her husband that she was taking a handful of pills, hoping to end it all. And then there were the affairs. “Her promiscuity—that’s what led us to a divorce,” concluded Steve. At one particularly low point, she announced that she was in love with one of their neighbors and that she was pregnant. Not sure if the baby was the neighbor’s or Steve’s, Bobby-Jo tried to abort herself and botched the job badly. She had to be rushed to the hospital and have a hysterectomy. They went to Florida and spent a month with Doris. Things calmed down, and Bobby-Jo promised not to see the neighbor again, yet she later ran off with him, taking the girls.

“We moved to Miami and lived in an apartment,” Dawn recalled. “My mom was basically a hippie. We were always on Miami Beach, and we’d never go home. I always felt more secure with her friends. They played guitar, and the only song Mom knew was ‘Row, Row, Row Your Boat.’ When it was just us and my mom, she was unpredictable, and she’d get mean. She smoked marijuana. Her drinking got worse. I became more of the caretaker than Mom. I’d take care of Sherri because Mom couldn’t.

“She’d go on drinking binges. She’d wake us up in the middle of the night, and we’d call my dad in Philadelphia. He had an unpublished number. She’d call the police and fire departments and say there was a family emergency and they had to get in touch with him. She’d say there’s something wrong with the kids. She wanted more money, and she’d make us get on the phone and ask our dad for more money.”

Then one day Bobby-Jo called Steve, crying, and said her lover had
beaten her up, hit the kids, and thrown them all out on the street. She told her husband she still loved him and begged him to take her back. Ignoring the advice of his friends and family, Steve agreed. He rented a trailer, drove to Florida, picked up his family, and drove home. “The kids were thrilled,” Steve recalled. “They were elated. It was almost as if not a lot had changed. In a short time it felt like old times. Barbara acted as if nothing had happened. It was like we’d taken a trip and we were coming home. So I felt great.”

But Bobby-Jo lapsed again. Steve says she had a fling with a 7-Eleven attendant, then took a handful of pills and had to have her stomach pumped. After she took another fistful of pills, Steve had her committed. When he called Ted and asked him for advice, Williams ducked the issue and sent Dolores to Philadelphia instead. She gave Steve a sympathetic ear, but delivered a tough message as well. “Dolores said Ted could no longer be financially responsible for the trouble Barbara got into,” Steve said. “It was unfortunate, but she pretty much said, ‘You’re on your own.’ I wasn’t looking for money, really, just support and advice.”

Dolores says Ted hoped that with her nursing background, she could perhaps instill in Bobby-Jo a greater sense of maturity and “straighten her out.” But the new Mrs. Williams wasn’t seen by Bobby-Jo as neutral. “If anything, she resented my being in her life because she needed her father for her,” Dolores recalled. “She needed all she could get and then some.” And Ted, Dolores added, “couldn’t stand” Bobby-Jo anymore. “She just didn’t behave the way he wanted a kid of his to behave, that’s all. She was a spoiled brat. She was looking for attention. She didn’t care how she got it.” Bobby-Jo, for her part, dismissed Dolores as an interloping gold digger. “I just thought she was different from
anybody
my dad had been around,” she said. “Different from anybody.”

After several months, against doctors’ advice, Steve took Bobby-Jo out of the hospital. In her absence, he had put their daughters in a foster home because he worked and said there was no one else to take care of them. When Bobby-Jo came home, they regained custody of the girls.

Seeking some sort of reconnection, Bobby-Jo and Steve went to visit Ted and see her new half brother. At one point they were standing in the living room of Ted and Dolores’s apartment, and John-Henry crawled out onto a balcony, ten floors up. Bobby-Jo darted out to scoop him up, worried he might fall. “Dolores came over to me, and she grabbed him, and she said, ‘Don’t you
ever
touch my child again.’ ”

Not long after they returned home, Bobby-Jo took another lover, and that was the last straw for Steve. He moved in with his parents. When
she moved to Florida with still another man, again taking the girls, Steve had her served with papers, and they were divorced in 1971.

Bobby-Jo’s daughter Dawn Hebding said her mother never told her why she and her father split up. “My mother broke up the marriage, according to my father. But after growing up with my mother, no sane person could have gone through that. I think my father felt he was going to have to let us go in order to have a life without us burdening him.” Nor did Bobby-Jo ever discuss why her own parents, Ted and Doris, got divorced, or the strains that placed on her. “She has so many secrets, she holds so much in,” Dawn said. “I’m sure that’s contributed to her problem. I love my mother, but she’s very ill, emotionally.”
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If Bobby-Jo had been less than thrilled by the arrival of Dolores on the scene, there was another woman who had a far stronger reaction: Louise Kaufman.

Nursing her wounds from the Kid’s earlier rejections, Louise had spent time in Paris and Ireland, but when Ted and Lee divorced, she and Williams reconnected in Islamorada and, before you knew it, Louise had moved her clothing into Ted’s house. But when Dolores got pregnant and Ted announced he would marry her, Louise had been jilted yet again.

After Ted gave her the bad news, Louise called a friend of theirs, John Underwood, and begged him to talk some sense into Ted. “She felt she’d waited long enough, and asked me to intervene,” Underwood said. But he declined. “I said that was Ted’s decision.”

Underwood was a writer for
Sports Illustrated,
then in his early thirties. A year before, in the summer of 1967, he had spent two days fishing in the Keys with Ted, then written a sparkling feature for the magazine called “Going Fishing with the Kid.” He was a facile writer, and the piece was a revealing look at Williams’s fishing expertise as well as his demanding, perfectionist persona.

Williams liked the story and sent Underwood a note. “Way to go,” he wrote. “You captured the real me.” Underwood and his editors at
Sports Illustrated
saw an opportunity. Williams had never told his life story to anyone. He plainly liked Underwood. Why didn’t they approach the Kid about doing a series for the magazine?

Williams was coy. “A lot of guys want to do that, but maybe you’re the one,” he told Underwood without committing. Ted put him off for a while longer, but eventually agreed. The two men met for weeks at a time at various places, such as Ocala, Florida, where the Red Sox had their minor-league training camp, or they’d go hunting and fishing.

Recalled Underwood, “He’d call me and say, ‘I’m going somewhere, you want to go?’ We went fishing in Costa Rica once. I was, in effect, becoming his brother. I taped as much I could, probably half tape and half notes. Ted was totally candid. There was nothing he wouldn’t delve into. He had a way of talking that was peculiar to Ted. He’d not only expose something, he’d go back over it. He had a very analytical mind. He’d analyze his own actions, even when they weren’t so nice.”
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The result was a four-part series about Williams’s life and a stand-alone article about hitting a baseball. The series began on June 10, 1968, after Ted and Dolores had been married a month. Simon and Schuster then asked Underwood to turn the
SI
series into Ted’s autobiography, which he did.
My Turn at Bat
was published the following year and became a bestseller. The hitting article was also later turned into a book, called
The Science of Hitting
(a title Ted chose), and remains today perhaps the foremost batting tutorial. Adding to his Williams oeuvre, Underwood would also crank out a third book with Ted, this one on fishing, called
Ted Williams: Fishing the Big Three,
a guide to going after tarpon, bonefish, and Atlantic salmon.

In a July 18, 1968, letter to Williams, Underwood said that Simon and Schuster had committed to a $75,000 advance for
My Turn at Bat.
No figure was mentioned for the hitting book, but they were aiming for $25,000 for the fishing story. No fishing book had ever earned a $25,000 advance, unless it was
The Old Man and the Sea,
Underwood assured Ted in the letter, which began, “Dear G.C.” This was a reference to G. C. Luther, an alias Williams had told the writer he often used to register at hotels when he traveled.

There were some sloppy mistakes in the autobiography, such as misspelling Ted’s mother’s maiden name (it was Venzor, not Venzer), getting the score of the Red Sox’s playoff-game loss to the Indians in 1948 wrong (it was 8–3, not 4–1), and incorrectly naming the
Boston Globe
’s Mel Webb as the one writer who had failed to nominate Ted in the controversial 1947 MVP balloting, when Webb didn’t even have a vote. Underwood also glossed over Williams’s first two marriages and chose not to explore his Mexican heritage, even though Ted had not put anything off-limits. But the book, written in the first person when Williams was forty-nine, amounted to a revealing first cut of his life to that point, and was especially effective at capturing Ted’s voice. “Obviously he didn’t say all those things the way I wrote it,” explained Underwood. “You get all his things in bits and pieces. If you can capture the lexicon
and argot, then you could go off on tangents. I felt like I was inside his mind, and I could write the way he would speak, so I weaved it together.”

During the year he spent with Ted on both the fishing story and the magazine series, Underwood got to know Dolores well. “Ted met his match with Dolores, in terms of her ability to cuss and stand up to him,” he said. “In many respects, she was probably the right woman for him, but she was also too similar, and they were constantly at odds.”
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Unsurprisingly, Dolores quickly found herself at odds with Louise Kaufman. When Dolores arrived in Islamorada, Louise didn’t concede defeat immediately. Instead she tried to use her status as Williams’s next-door neighbor to her advantage by inventing excuses to remain in touch with Ted. According to Dolores, some of these bordered on the ridiculous, such as Louise tossing her dog over the fence onto Ted’s property, then asking him to bring the dog back to her house, saying it had escaped. It was the first Dolores had heard of Louise, and so she worried: “He had said I meant more to him than any dame he ever met, but then I wondered, did I really? Because I couldn’t quite understand the patience he had with these other women.”
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Finally, Louise appeared to give up. She sold her house in Islamorada and moved up to Delray Beach, Florida, to be near her friend Evalyn Sterry.

Ted and Dolores, meanwhile, had no fixed home; they moved with the seasons. They’d spend the summers at Ted’s baseball camp in Massachusetts, the fall at his fishing cabin on the Miramichi River in New Brunswick, the early winter, until Christmas, at Dolores’s house in Vermont, then return to Islamorada for the rest of the winter, until spring training.

Williams taught Dolores to fish on the Miramichi, and not only did she quickly get the hang of it, she also became quite confident, if not cocky, about her ability. Dolores thought she was especially accomplished at fly casting, and Ted got annoyed when other fishermen admired her stroke—sometimes too annoyed. He was extremely possessive of Dolores on and off the water. If she was out when he called, he always wanted to know where she’d been and what she was doing. If ever she was with a man Ted did not know, he would say, “What are you doing with that clown?”