The Kid: The Immortal Life of Ted Williams (89 page)

“She’d tell me, ‘Well, that’s your half sister. She’s about twenty-five years older than you are, but she’s done some things where she’s hurt your father and made him very upset.’ ”

Claudia never dared ask Ted what those things were. “I didn’t want to talk about something that made him upset. My time with Dad was limited. I wanted it to be happy.”

Claudia and John-Henry watched their father walk all over Louise. “We didn’t like her, but we respected her because she was with Dad so long,” Claudia said. “We saw that woman get absolutely chewed up. He’d call her ‘a dried-up old cunt,’ ‘an old bag.’ We thought, ‘Oh, my God! She’ll go now.’ But she hung in there.”
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Claudia and John-Henry thought that one way Louise kept Ted’s
excesses in check as he aged was to let him drink too much, and this became another point of conflict with the children. Ted basically didn’t start drinking until he was in his late fifties, and while it could have the relaxing effect Claudia said Louise wanted, it could also facilitate his mean streaks.

Ted did show Louise kindness, like buying her rings and new cars, but the kids noticed few displays of physical affection. He might throw his arm around her after a day of fishing, but there would be no hugging or kissing. Part of her father’s physical reserve, Claudia thought, was because he was a germophobe. “If he thought he had a stink on him, boom, in the shower,” Claudia said. “And he always had fresh breath. Watching him brush his teeth was a twenty-minute ritual. He’d literally grab his tongue and brush it, then almost throw his back out gargling. Then he’d slap on some Drakkar Noir cologne. Finally, when he was finished primping, he’d wink and smile at the mirror. If I was in there and he saw me, he’d say, ‘What do you think of Ted Williams, huh? What do you think of your old dad?’ ” Then, getting dressed, Ted would put his shoes on first to avoid wrinkling his pants when he sat down to lace his shoes. Claudia assumed this was a carryover from the service.

Williams liked a regimented life; he liked order. When an emotional issue developed, that posed a problem. Once, when she was away at a boarding school in ninth grade, Claudia wasn’t getting along particularly well with her mother and called Ted instead, saying she was homesick. He didn’t have a clue what to do.

“Well, Jesus Christ!” he told her. “What’s the matter? What the hell’s wrong? Call your mother!” Then he hung up the phone.

“He couldn’t deal with emotions. He couldn’t deal with someone being upset. He couldn’t deal with me crying. I think part of the reason was because he couldn’t do anything about it. Every time I remember Dad getting mad about something, it was something he had no control over,” Claudia said.

If the phone rang during dinner, Ted might go off the deep end, but afterward he wanted to know who called and what the person said. “It was control,” Claudia said. “He couldn’t control the call coming in during dinner, so he wanted nothing to do with it.

“If you talk to a psychiatrist, most people’s problems derive from not being in control of a situation. Leads to anxiety, leads to depression, leads to anger. That was Dad.”

Claudia thought she understood how her father’s mind worked. She, too, learned to let him vent, even if she was bearing the brunt of one of his outbursts. “I don’t think I have a moment in my mind that I can think of right now where I resented my father. Maybe at the moment for a brief second I’d be like, ‘Why is he doing this? Why?’ I can remember when he would get mad or scream at me and say something. I’d be like, ‘Dad, why are you doing this? Settle down. Don’t be so mad! It’s no big deal.’ ”

She said she didn’t resent his absence when she was growing up. And on significant occasions, he
was
there for her. For a big cross-country invitational Claudia was running in, Ted was there. She was in an opera. Ted was there. She was misdiagnosed with lupus one year when she was twelve. Ted was there. She got a hernia. Ted was there. And he reliably called her and John-Henry on Sunday mornings between eight and nine o’clock. Then the kids would take turns getting on the phone. He’d ask Claudia if she had any boyfriends yet, and she would always say no. Pity the poor boy who might have to pass muster with Ted, she knew. Then he’d want to know how much she weighed. How was her appetite? He wanted her to eat well and grow, but she knew she couldn’t be overweight.

Claudia would grow to be five foot eleven and was always thin, but Ted kept her on guard. Once, she bought a white miniskirt and wanted to try it on for John-Henry and Ted. First she asked her brother if he thought it made her look fat. He said no, it looked fine. When Ted saw her he said, “Get the fuck outta here, you fat bitch.” She rolled with the blow.

Sometimes she would ask her father about his childhood, but he refused to talk about it. “Nah, read my book,” he’d say, waving her off. “The time with Dad was so short, or so it seemed, that we totally focused on each other. Ourselves. He’d never ask me about my aunt or my cousins, and I’d never ask him about his parents or his mother or brother or anybody else. It was just, ‘How you doing in school?’ Here and now.”

While John-Henry and Claudia let it be known that they disliked Louise, most of her five children weren’t exactly taken with the Kid, either. The exception was Louise’s daughter Barbara Kovacs and her children, who adored Ted. But Louise’s oldest son, Rob Kaufman, thought Williams was a boorish, loud bully who was insecure and wholly lacking in the social graces.

“He reminded me of a typical very successful athlete, and I’m not sure what else he brought to the table,” Kaufman said. “I know he was loud. My mother thought Ted walked on water, and she was very protective of him. He was a very important person in her life and stayed that way for her last forty years. She had what she wanted out of life when she had Ted. She characterized him as John Wayne—sound-and look-alike.”

Rob thought his mother and Williams probably had a 60 percent loving relationship and a 40 percent angry one, filled with turmoil. She mothered him. Neither one of them was easy to get along with. They both had mood swings. Maybe that’s why they were a good match. Louise only feared him moving on again. She didn’t fear him in other ways. “One time I was visiting, and he was ranting and raving like a two-or three-year-old, and she left the room. I looked at him and said, ‘You know, she divorced Bob Kaufman for acting like an asshole, like you are now. What makes you think you’re any different?’ From that time on, when I called he always said, ‘Hi, Rob, your mother’s fine; here, would you like to talk to her?’ I challenged him, and I was right. It was at his table, in his house, and it went away.”

Rob thought Ted’s anger was initially a cover-up for being unsophisticated, something he used as a young athlete to hide his feelings of social and educational inadequacy. “People ran for cover, and that became a method and later a lifestyle. He started arguing with people and bullying people. They either succumbed to it or left the situation. He was totally lacking in social skills. He spent too much time in the locker room. He was intelligent, but he didn’t learn any of the skills that his peers learned.”

As for Ted’s kids, Rob thought John-Henry and Claudia were spoiled, especially John-Henry. “I think John-Henry very early on was impressed that he had a famous father. And that was worth something to him—maybe not to win friendships. The father might not have been there, but the name was. My mother’s relationship with him was that John-Henry decided he didn’t have to listen to her. If you were picking on John-Henry, you were picking at the heart of Ted. He would have defended him to anybody else.”
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Williams must have known that John-Henry and Claudia disliked Louise, but occasionally he let them know how important she was to him. Once, when the three of them were having dinner at a restaurant in Boston along with Ted’s lawyer, Bob McWalter, John-Henry and Claudia were watching pretty women walk by and rating them on a scale of one to ten. Ted was annoyed. “Claudia, John-Henry, when we get home, I
want you to look at Louise Kaufman,” he said. “There’s no number high enough for Louise Kaufman.”
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For John-Henry and Claudia, there were relatively few forays to see their father. Home base was rural Vermont, where they led a simple, rustic—even austere—life under the rigid supervision of their mother. Their old farmhouse, high on a hill, had a sweeping view of the woods and, on the horizon, the Connecticut River. The house had creaky, wide-pine floors and was heated by a woodstove. John-Henry and Claudia slept upstairs in a loft lit by oil-burning lamps. There were chores to be done. Every fall, they would head out to the woods and cut down enough trees to yield four or five cords of firewood for the winter. Dolores and John-Henry took turns on the chain saw, and Claudia would help stack the wood, first onto a truck and then in their cellar. They had to tend to chickens, geese, sheep, and a horse. Television was still not allowed. In fact, there was no TV in the house, and when Ted sent them one for Christmas, Dolores promptly threw it out.

“She was very tough,” Claudia said. “Very tough. We never did drugs, never smoked. We were straight kids.”

Dolores encouraged John-Henry and Claudia to read and immerse themselves in nature instead. They collected sap and made maple syrup. They studied Polish one year, Swedish another. They took singing lessons, piano lessons, learned the violin.

Ted liked Dolores’s style—as a mother. “Dad would often say, ‘You can’t make your mother happy’ or ‘Your mother’s a pain in the ass.’ But till the day he died, he also said, ‘Your mother—I’ve got to give her this: she was a great mother. She did a great job of raising you kids.’ ”

Over the years, as Claudia and John-Henry felt increasingly alienated by Louise, they would subtly push their parents to reconcile. But Ted wouldn’t hear of it, and while Dolores in her heart yearned for a second chance, she realized it could never work out. “Yes,” she said, “the kids wanted a reconciliation, but Ted and I never discussed it. Besides, there were still enough women vying for his attention. I would have had to have been involved in a briar patch again, and I didn’t want to have to do that. I didn’t need to be scrambling like a bear on the street for pennies.”

Dolores and Ted had different notions about what was best for John-Henry. She wanted to make him more worldly and have him follow an artistic bent. Ted wanted to toughen him up and encourage him to play sports, including baseball. But after her experience with Ted and the
Senators, Dolores thought baseball people were crude and uncouth. She yanked John-Henry off his Little League team after learning that one of his coaches had sworn at him.

That incident became fodder for a lively family discussion. Ted, the dean of foul language, seized on the story as much ado about nothing and used it to suggest that Dolores was coddling John-Henry. And he needled his son about it by way of suggesting that he needed to toughen up and develop a thicker skin.

John-Henry had shown little appetite for baseball to this point. Once, he’d attended Ted’s camp in Lakeville and had been hit twice on the thigh by pitches while batting. Missing his mother, he asked to go back to Vermont early.
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When John-Henry was in the sixth grade, Dolores promoted her vision for her son by sending him off to France on an exchange program. The following year, 1982, the Eaglebrook School—John-Henry’s boarding school in Deerfield, Massachusetts—sponsored a spring-vacation trip to a more exotic locale: Brazil, where students would explore the Amazon River. Dolores had her doubts, but Ted boosted the idea, seeing it as a rite of passage that might help make a man out of his son. To Dolores’s consternation, however, John-Henry returned home early from the Amazon, riddled with mosquito bites.

Landing in Florida, he spent the rest of his vacation with his father at the Red Sox spring training camp in Winter Haven, where he was given a uniform and designated a “junior batboy.” He loved the atmosphere: while Ted made the rounds, instructing hitters and holding court, John-Henry found himself the object of considerable attention. Fans and press alike were able to get a gander at “the Kid’s kid,” as the press quickly dubbed him—tall, slender, and handsome.

“I’d like to be a hitter,” John-Henry told a TV interviewer. “The same as my dad.”

“He’ll be a pitcher,” said Ted, playing along. “He’s got the perfect build for a pitcher.”
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Williams’s friends—like Al Cassidy and his father, who had started the baseball camp in Massachusetts with Ted—observed the dynamic between him and his son with interest. “The kid when he first came down did not have the best of experiences,” said the younger Cassidy.
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“Ted did not know how to be a father to John-Henry. He was the public Ted with him. Me and Dad would sit with Ted and basically tell him, ‘You have to stop being Ted Williams with John-Henry. You’re not Ted Williams—you’re his dad.’ ”

Over the winter, the Red Sox had called and told Ted they wanted to stage their first Old-Timers’ Game in May, but they would only do it if Williams appeared as the lead attraction. The game was the idea of George Sullivan, the former Red Sox batboy who later became a sportswriter—much to Ted’s dismay—and then publicity director for the team. Sullivan knew that unless he could convince Ted to play, the team ownership felt the game would be pointless.

“I called him,” Sullivan remembered, “and of course he said, ‘Jesus Christ! I always said I’d never play in one of those goddamn games,’ and blah, blah, blah. I let him rave on for a few minutes. Then he said, ‘When do you want me to be there?’ He said, ‘The Yawkeys are the only people I’d ever do it for.’ Next spring, we go to spring training, and after practice one day I heard the crack of the bat, crack of the bat. I said, ‘Geez, I wonder who’s taking extra hitting.’ I went out, and there was Ted in the cage by himself. Getting ready. He was hitting some shots.”
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John-Henry, fresh off the positive spring training experience, asked his mother if he could watch his father in action at the Old-Timers’ Game. Dolores refused to let him go, and Ted, still in the doghouse over the Amazon trip, backed her decision. John-Henry then appealed to Ted’s old teammate and close friend Johnny Pesky, whom the boy considered his godfather, to intervene. Pesky did, strongly urging Williams to permit the visit and use it as another stepping-stone with which to forge a relationship with his son. Dolores relented, on the condition that she accompany John-Henry.