The Kid: The Immortal Life of Ted Williams (90 page)

Winter Haven was one thing, but seeing his father at Fenway Park was quite another for John-Henry, who again served as a batboy. It was the first time he began to fathom how big a figure Ted had been. The crowd cheered the sixty-three-year-old Williams’s every move wildly, starting with his emergence from the dugout on his way to the batting cage, where he ripped the first pitch thrown to him into the right-field stands, on one bounce. In the game, Ted went 0–2 at the plate but raced into shallow left field to make a nice shoestring catch off Mike Andrews, the second baseman on the pennant-winning 1967 Red Sox, who would become chairman of the Jimmy Fund in 1984.
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After the game, as Ted was holding court in the clubhouse with his buddies, Sullivan came by to see him. “When Ted saw me, he said, ‘There’s the SOB I want to talk to,’ ” Sullivan remembered. “His big
booming voice. I worried something was wrong. He said, ‘Come on, let’s go into the office.’ He shut the door. He said, ‘You remember when you called me last winter I said I told you I’d never play? This morning I woke up in the hotel, and I looked at myself in the mirror. I’m fat and out of shape, and I was cursing you. But right now, I want to tell you,’ he said, ‘this is one of the greatest days in my life. I really, really enjoyed myself.’ ”

The Williamses, father and son, each met someone at the 1982 game who would become a significant figure in their lives. For Ted it was Sam Tamposi, a minority owner of the Red Sox who was a major real estate developer in New Hampshire and Florida. For John-Henry it was Michelle Orlando, the granddaughter of Red Sox equipment manger Vince Orlando.

Tamposi told Ted that he and his partner, Gerry Nash, were getting ready to build a retirement community on twenty thousand acres of land they had been sitting on since the 1960s in Citrus County, Florida, some seventy miles north of Tampa and sixty-five miles west of Orlando. The demographic they were trying to attract was seniors in New Hampshire, extending down into Massachusetts and the Boston area—just the kind of people who had grown up under the Williams spell. They needed a pitchman for the development, someone who could serve as its public face and vouch for the premise that Citrus Hills, as it would be called, was a slice of heaven on earth. Ted was intrigued and said he would be glad to receive Tamposi and Nash down in Islamorada to discuss the idea further.

Ted hadn’t been to the development site, but he knew and liked the fishing in and around the Gulf Coast towns of Crystal River and Homosassa Springs, ten or fifteen miles to the west. Tamposi and Nash came down and spent more time with Ted, and they met Louise. Williams especially liked Tamposi, a self-made hustler who had been raised on a farm and sold salve and vacuum cleaners door-to-door before making it big in real estate. Tamposi was also a kindred Republican spirit, Ted learned, having long been active in New Hampshire politics, and he’d been a major fund-raiser for Barry Goldwater, Richard Nixon, and Ronald Reagan.

Tamposi and Nash were catching Ted at an auspicious time. First, Sears had not picked up his contract again, so he needed a new source of income, and second, he was tiring of the Keys. Islamorada, the remote island he had been coming to since the late ’40s, was by then overrun
with tourists, and its character had fundamentally changed. All manner of boats now prowled Ted’s favorite fishing spots, and Route 1 was getting so congested that he sometimes had to wait several minutes just to turn onto the highway. Ted asked Louise what she thought of moving up to north-central Florida. She was game.

“When I first went up there, I thought, ‘I can’t imagine moving to this godforsaken place,’ ” remembered Louise’s friend Evalyn Sterry. “There wasn’t anything there. It looked like the middle of nowhere. But wherever Ted wanted was fine with Lou.”

By December of ’82, Ted, Tamposi, and Nash had thrashed out a deal: in return for providing promotional services for Citrus Hills, Williams would receive one-half of one percent of all real estate sales in the development, which would yield him an annual income of about $300,000. In addition, he received options to buy forty lots at predevelopment prices, options that he would exercise. He would be required to move to Citrus Hills, meet with prospective buyers, live in the most expensive home, and allow visitors to gawk at his house from a distance.
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John-Henry and Michelle Orlando fell for each other with puppy-love excitement. She was his first girlfriend, and he was her first boyfriend. Michelle was a lively, pretty brunette who had grown up hearing Ted Williams tales of yore from her grandfather Vince Orlando, Johnny’s younger brother.

Vince was the less prominent Orlando and deferred to Johnny, the clubhouse manager, but he had established his own relationship with Ted. He loved to tell his family about how he and Williams used to go on double dates together when the Kid was starting out, and how Ted would speed around Boston in his big Buick, terrifying Vince. When they went to the movies, Ted would want to sit as close as he could to the screen; Williams said he liked to imagine the dirt flying out and hitting him in the face when the horses flew by. Or how Ted, at his first Red Sox spring training in 1938, bought a bat for $1 at a drugstore on his way to Sarasota and hit with it the entire first week.
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After meeting at the 1982 Old-Timers’ Game, John-Henry and Michelle began hanging out together at spring training. By 1984, they had become close. She thought he was a bubbly country bumpkin, a clueless innocent when it came to city life.

He asked her questions about his father as a player, and she would answer, drawing on what Vince Orlando had told her. “One of the things I had to help John-Henry with was that when it came to bonding
with his father, he saw him as being mean. If he heard Ted call his name—‘John-Henry!’—he’d shiver. I said, ‘Why don’t you look at old videos and see him as you are today?’ I think through us he got to see the warmer side of his father. And as time went on, I think by understanding his father, the more he loved him.”

One day in the spring of 1984 at Winter Haven, Michelle and her family were going to Epcot Center for the day, and she invited John-Henry to come along. He said he didn’t think his father would let him. When Michelle asked why, John-Henry said Ted was afraid he would be kidnapped. Michelle’s grandmother Mary Orlando overheard the conversation and thought she could help. She went over to Ted, explained the situation, and assured him John-Henry would be safe with her family. Ted agreed.

“Nana, why is Ted afraid John-Henry will be kidnapped?” Michelle asked Mary after Williams had left.

“For a ransom,” her grandmother replied. “You’re too young to remember the Lindbergh baby. The boy was stolen and murdered just because his father was famous. Don’t worry; that was a long time ago. You’ll all be safe today.”
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John-Henry told Michelle he liked working with clay and enjoyed taking art in school. Back in Vermont, he showered her with letters and called her constantly. He told her he loved her. Once, he took a bus down to see Michelle at her home outside Boston without telling Dolores where he was going. He showed up at the house and told Michelle’s mother, Candace Orlando Siegel, that he was on a school vacation and had permission to be there. “So the next day I got a phone call from Ted,” Candace remembered. “He said, ‘Is my son there?’ ‘Yeah.’ ‘Well, he’s not supposed to be. He’s supposed to be home.’ He was furious. I had to bring him back to the bus.”

John-Henry liked Candace and confided in her about wanting to become an artist. “He said, ‘I don’t want to be in sports or business. I want to be an artist, but my father won’t let me.’ His father stifled it. Ted didn’t think that was a real career.”
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Candace wondered if John-Henry had any sort of spiritual life. He didn’t. “We used to talk to him about God, and he’d say, ‘You really believe that stuff?’ ‘Yes! Come to church with us.’ ” John-Henry would brush the suggestion away. He also would say he thought he was going to die young because his uncle, Ted’s brother, Danny, had.

If being an artist was impractical, his other dream, John-Henry told Michelle, was to play the young Ted Williams in a movie about his
father. Then came an accident on his farm that seemed to make an acting career out of the question.

It happened in November of 1984. John-Henry had noticed a small cat on the side of a road near his house. He brought it home, but it died the next day, and the local vet advised burning it in case it had an illness that could be contagious to the other animals. John-Henry went next door to his grandparents’ house, where they burned trash in a barrel. Pouring gas on the cat, he didn’t realize he’d spilled some of the fluid on his hand. When he ignited the animal, flames leaped up to his hand and onto a polyester shirt he was wearing, which melted on his chest and hands. Claudia screamed at him to roll on the ground, and as soon as the flames were extinguished, they went running home. Dolores thought the burn didn’t look too bad and put some aloe on it, but then they decided to go to the Brattleboro hospital, where they were told the burn was severe—too severe for them to handle—and that John-Henry needed to be transported to the Shriners Hospital in Boston. The sixteen-year-old was hospitalized for weeks and had skin grafts. He now had a big scar on his chest and hands, which he was acutely self-conscious about. Ted came to visit. John-Henry and Michelle talked on the phone a lot. “He sounded very sad and said he was lonely,” she remembered. “He’d have a crack in his voice.”

John-Henry had recently started tenth grade at a new school near his house, Vermont Academy, and he and Michelle drifted apart. A few years later, when John-Henry ran into Michelle’s grandmother at a golf tournament and asked after Michelle, he was told she was married. John-Henry nearly fainted.

Their timing was off, but they stayed friends. “He said we were young, we’d lead long lives, and get back together again. He said, ‘You’re my Louise Kaufman,’ ” Michelle recalled.
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The cat-burning incident was one of two factors that greatly complicated John-Henry’s first year at Vermont Academy, a small private school just down the road from his house in Westminster, which had about 250 students, 180 of them boarders. John-Henry was one of the seventy day students. The second difficulty was that John-Henry had broken into the coin box of a video game on campus and stolen about $150 in quarters. The theft was the talk of the school. Parents were notified. An investigation was conducted without turning up the culprit. Then Dolores found the quarters in her son’s possession at home. Furious, she marched him into the office of the headmaster, Bob Long, dropped a
huge bag of quarters on his desk, and said, “John-Henry wants to turn this in.”

“This was completely out of the blue,” Long remembered. “There was no suspicion at all.” Though expulsion was virtually automatic for theft, Long and school officials found a way not to dismiss him “because of the honesty factor,” Long said. He had, after all, admitted the theft and returned the loot. Or Dolores had done it for him.

Long did not know why John-Henry had stolen the money, but it was clear to him that things were not going well at home. “There were difficulties—I’m assuming with his mom. But a lot of it was a young kid who’s coming into early and later adolescence, inquiring and concerned more about how his dad should, and could, be more of a player in his life.”

Sometimes John-Henry felt the Ted void acutely. One day when he was about fifteen or sixteen, John-Henry called a family friend, Brian Interland, in tears and asked him, “Why doesn’t my dad love me?”

Interland hemmed and hawed, wanting to make the most plausible excuse he could for Williams.

“John-Henry, your dad talks about you so much—maybe not when you’re around—and he loves you as much as I love my kids,” Interland said. “You can just see it in him, in the way he expresses himself.”
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“Well, how come I don’t know that?” John-Henry replied.

“Well, you’re young, and you’re not with him. If you were with him, you would have known that a long time ago. But Ted’s different than a lot of people. He’s very independent, he loves to fish, and why you guys don’t see each other more than that, I don’t know. I just know one thing, and any of Ted’s friends would tell you the same thing: he loves you more than you know.”

Ted rarely made it to Vermont Academy. Once, he turned up to watch John-Henry play in a JV baseball game. Though Williams just sat and watched, the mere presence of Teddy Ballgame cowed the inexperienced coach. Dolores, on the other hand, was a frequent presence at the school, and Long found her a handful. “Dolores came into the office frequently—three, four, five times in a semester—to ask about, or complain about, something with John-Henry, and she would unfortunately spend a good piece of time ranting about Ted and how poor of a father he was.”

It was decided that John-Henry would live on campus for his final two years, and after that he had no other serious discipline problems. Young Williams was an average student and an average athlete. “Overall,
John-Henry was a gregarious, friendly kid,” Long said. “He didn’t stand out particularly. He was not a doper, not a drinker, a pretty straight kid who seemed more comfortable with adults than kids. Not that he was ostracized by kids, but he was more of an adult person than a kid person.”
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Once, he snuck off in a car with a bunch of other boys and went into town looking for girls, only to run into Dolores, who ordered him out of the car and hauled him back to school.

One of the adults John-Henry gravitated to in this period was Ferd Ensinger, an executive for the Bigelow Company, a Portsmouth, New Hampshire, mergers and acquisitions firm. One of Ferd’s clients was a New Hampshire bank that Betty Tamposi—daughter of Ted’s new confidant Sam Tamposi—was a director of. One thing led to another, and before long Ted met Ensinger—a former teacher—and asked if he would take John-Henry under his wing. Maybe Ferd could sharpen the boy’s writing skills, help steer him to the right college, and just generally be a mentor.