17
Citrus Hills, 1994–1999
Williams is 78 now. Since falling in his driveway and breaking his left shoulder two years ago, he has been unable to drive. This year, for the first time in five decades, he didn't go fishing. His buddies Jack Brothers, Joe Lindia, Sam Tamposi—and, worst of all, his long-time, live-in girlfriend, Louise Kaufman—have died in the past five years, and the lines in Williams' face have sunk deeper with each loss. His voice carries a jagged weariness, a residue of seeing bits of his rich life fall away one by one.
S. L. PRICE, SPORTS ILLUSTRATED, NOVEMBER 25, 1996
George Carter was a former Marine, a former sergeant major in the U.S. Army, a former Pawtucket, Rhode Island, policeman, a former truck driver for Cumberland Farms, and more than a little uncertain in the summer of 1994 about how his new profession was going to work. He didn't know if he was going to like being a male nurse.
“People all think male nurses are gay,” he said. “Well, I'm not gay.”
Fifty-eight years old, a large and expressive man, he had relocated in Florida with his wife and searched for a new occupation. He enrolled in a program called Green Thumb at Withlacoochee Vocational Tech in Inverness, a program to retrain people over 55 for late-in-life careers. Nursing was a growth field in old-age Florida. It made sense.
He graduated in 1994, the only male in his class, and signed up with Interim Health Care. The company made its male nurses wear red polo shirts and white pants. He felt like an awkward clown. Especially on his first interview.
“We have a live-in position . . . ,” his new bosses at Interim told him.
“I specified that I didn't want to do live-in,” Carter said.
“The client requested a male nurse,” the bosses said. “It's a celebrity client, and you're the only available male nurse on our list.”
“Who's the celebrity?”
“We can't tell you until we get to the interview.”
The meeting with Ted Williams was held at the big house on top of the biggest hill on the Florida peninsula. Carter wasn't a Ted Williams fan, wasn't a baseball fan, but certainly knew who the potential client was. He was impressed. He sat on the couch in the living room with the 12-foot ceilings. Williams sat on the chair. Slugger, his pet Dalmatian, was next to him.
“Look out for the dog,” Williams said in his big voice. “He'll bite your arm off.”
A joke? Carter wasn't sure at first. He looked at the big, infirm man with this big, healthy voice. Williams was fresh out of the hospital from his stroke, still spinning, dealing with his new, altered life. John-Henry was closing up shop in Boston. The famous man clearly needed around-the-clock help. Carter decided that maybe he wanted this job.
Now he had to survive the interview. He gave Williams a rundown of his previous life, perhaps emphasizing the manly parts because of the, you know, misconception people sometimes have of male nurses. Williams perked up at the mention of Rhode Island.
“Do you know Bill Powers, the judge?” Williams asked.
Carter almost fell off his chair.
“My father grew up with Bill Powers,” Carter said.
“No kidding,” Williams said.
Carter said that Powers had grown up in Valley Falls, Rhode Island, which is right near Cumberland, Rhode Island, and was the attorney general when he, Carter, was a policeman. Powers later became Supreme Court justice of Rhode Island and was “blind as a bat.” Carter even knew how Powers had become blind. The judge was fixing a radio as a boy and a wire hit him in one eye and he must have gotten an infection and the blindness spread to the other eye, and that was how he had to spend the rest of his life.
“Bill Powers was my friend,” Williams said.
“Thank God,” Carter said to himself.
He had the job. He was plunged into a situation that neither Withlacoochee Tech nor Interim Health Care ever had envisioned in their Green Thumb brochures. For stretches of the next eight years, he bathed, dressed, cajoled, fought, drove, walked, befriended, and ultimately loved the famous man. He woke him in the morning with reveille, tooting into an imaginary trumpet formed by his right hand. (“Will all military personnel please fall out on the flight deck,” Carter would shout. “Williams, get your ass out of bed.”) He sent Williams to the bedroom at night, same imaginary trumpet, with taps or, more often, “The Marine Corps Hymn.” He pulled the covers high over the famous man's sleeping body at two in the morning to make sure the famous man was not cold.
The days were never boring. There were intermittent trips to famous places, dinners, events, everyone standing and applauding Ted Williams's glorious past and his pluck at handling the adversities of the present. There were more frequent trips to Walgreen's, where Williams would start to boom out the alligator story, holding on to his walker, and Carter would stand next to him, dressed in a nurse's whites, the two of them looking for all the world like a patient and his keeper out on a pass from the loony bin. There were stops at Kentucky Fried Chicken, where Williams would order the eight-piece bucket and eat it all, everything except the cardboard.
Famous people would stop at the house. John Glenn would visit to retell war stories. Senator John McCain would ask for an endorsement. (And be refused.) George Bush would be on the phone. (Mostly the father.) If the question from the baseball-card curious always had been, “What is Ted Williams really like?” George Carter had more answers than anyone who ever had lived. He was with the famous man for 24 hours a day at long stretches, sharing not only the most intimate moments but all moments, every one of them. He was the famous man's surrogate eyes and ears and surrogate legs. He did everything.
How far did the limits extend? Slugger, the dog, came down with cancer of the penis. George Carter administered salve to the affected region. Every day.
“This dog loves me,” he would tell the famous man. “He don't love you.”
“I know why he loves you,” Williams would reply.
The relationship that developed between the caretaker and the cared-for became a nice mixture of the gruff and the sweet. Carter wouldn't take any shit and Williams wouldn't take any shit, and they growled affectionately at each other through the days, weeks, months, and years. Carter became very protective of his client. He felt that protection was not only his job but his wish. His heart. He grew to love Ted Williams, that cranky old goat.
He did not grow to love Ted Williams's son.
“I thought sometimes I lived in a madhouse,” Carter says. “I couldn't believe what was taking place.”
The arrival of John-Henry in December 1994 brought a different dynamic to the big house. Lynette Simon, the girlfriend who replaced Louise, soon was gone. Lynette didn't fit. Stacia Gerow, Ted's longtime secretary in Islamorada, who had moved up to Clearwater simply to keep working for him, was gone. Stacia didn't fit. The friends and family of Louise found that their calls to Ted were unanswered. Gone.
John-Henry had his own approach to how things would be.
“It became increasingly harder to get through to Ted,” old friend Frank Cushing says. “John-Henry would let famous people like Tommy Lasorda get through, people he thought could do something for him, but Ted's old friends had problems.”
Starting with George Carter, a string of nurses and aides and cooks would come through the premises, most of them hired and ultimately fired by John-Henry; sometimes, like Carter, hired and fired again, sometimes offering frustrated resignations instead. The view of the famous man's son sometimes seemed to be universally negative.
From the beginning, he ruled with an air of privilege that the famous man never had. He was not afraid to spend the money earned on Ted Williams's name. The son bought his own condominium at Black Diamond, the trendiest of the competing developments that had sprung up around Citrus Hills. He drove a BMW 740IL and a 1978 Porsche 930. He had his Miss Massachusetts girlfriend, the former secretary from Boston. He was 26 years old when he arrived and could be brusque and demanding, overbearing. The workers soon thought he was arrogant, greedy, and, worst of all, incompetent. He, on the other hand, pretty much thought that they were a bunch of thieves.
Paranoia churned through the house as if it were part of the air-conditioning. The only one who didn't feel it was the prime resident.
“The one regret I have from all the time I worked with Ted Williams is that I never told him how bad his son was,” George Carter says. “Everyone kept it from Ted because Ted loved the kid, no matter how many times the kid disappointed him. Somebody should have told him. I should have told him.”
When John-Henry moved to Florida, an arm of the Ted Williams memorabilia business already had been established in Hernando, located in a storefront office in the Hampton Place strip mall. The office informally was called Grand-Slam South. Rich Eschen was running things on a low-key basis.
“It was a lot of fun,” Eschen says about the first days of the operation. “This was before Ted got sick. He would come in, sign some things in the morning, talk with the visitors—and there were a lot of them—and then we'd go to lunch and then we'd play golf. I couldn't think of anything better.”
Eschen had been working in real estate when he met Williams at Citrus Hills six years earlier in 1988. He was paired with Williams to play doubles by the development's tennis pro. Tennis evolved into golf, which evolved into a business relationship and friendship. When the judgments in the Antonucci case were delivered, Williams asked Eschen to go around and collect whatever Talkin' Baseball inventory was still available. Eschen did this, visiting stores, bringing packages back to Williams's house, where it quickly filled the dining room, packages everywhere.
Eschen suggested that maybe Williams should rent an office for all the stuff, plus any memorabilia work that had to be done. Louise, alive and in control of the business situation at the time, quickly endorsed the idea. Get the stuff out of the house. John-Henry agreed from Boston. The 1,200-square-foot office thus was already there, ready for John-Henry's schemes and dreams when he arrived. The dreams also were his father's dreams.
“Ted really wanted John-Henry to be a success,” Eschen says. “He looked at his friends, like Al Cassidy, like Sam Tamposi. Their kids were established, running the family businesses now. That's what he wanted for his own son.”
The difference in this business was that the major ingredient was not office buildings or developments; it was Ted Williams's right hand. The Williams signature, placed upon a bat or baseball or eight-by-ten glossy or uniform shirt or anything else was necessary to inflate the value and sell the item. This father, unlike Cassidy or Tamposi, still had to work to make the business go. He was at the core of production.
John-Henry stepped up this production. When Louise was alive, she and Eschen filtered through the many deals and demands that came to Williams's mailbox, picking out only the best ones. Williams himself bagged a lot of the offers. When John-Henry arrived, the selection process became much more liberal. Solicitation now mixed with selection. Even though he was sick, Ted would sign more than he ever did. Ted would visit more shows, more events.
“Ted wound up going to all kinds of things when he was sick,” old friend Jimmy O'Loughlin says. “He wouldn't do any of that shit when he was healthy.”
“I worked with Joe DiMaggio and Ted Williams for years,” Jerry Romolt says. “Joe was preoccupied with money. I did a thing with Joe in 1993 . . . I made him three and a half million dollars for eight hours' work. He signed 1,941 bats, and we put 'em on a shopping network and they sold out. Joe, for the longest time, didn't sign bats. We built a demand for these bats. Joe made the three and a half million; I put a new room on my house.
“Ted didn't care to do all this. He didn't care about money the same way.”
The autograph market had gone upward. This was the high point, the peak of the memorabilia craze. Prices varied, but on average a picture signed by Williams could be sold at retail for $300. A bat went for $700, $800. A jersey went for $1,000. Signing became a part of Williams's daily schedule. John-Henry always would say signing was therapy for his father, an activity that gave him direction, purpose. The nurses would say this was an activity that gave John-Henry money, that everything was based on making money. The debate would intensify as the years passed, as Williams grew sicker.
“John-Henry always had him signing,” Jack Gard, one of the string of nurses, says. “For me, the worst was when we went to San Diego for vacation one year. We went for a week. John-Henry sent stuff out there for Ted to sign by UPS, all these boxes. That's when I had it out with John-Henry. I told him, when we got back, ‘That's just not right. The man deserves a vacation.' That's what got me fired.”
The worst sin in the big house was to let an autograph go out the door for free. John-Henry would become furious when his father signed autographs for an old ballplayer, a friend. Mickey McDermott remembers sneaking into Williams's room on a freight elevator in Las Vegas during an autograph show to have five balls signed. He felt as if he were in a spy movie. The kid can't know! The kid will be mad! Williams signed. He told Mickey to keep quiet about it. Mickey kept quiet.
The employees were told never to ask for an autograph. Video cameras were installed around the house, tape rolling 24 hours a day, to make sure no extra signatures were being signed. Extensions were installed so John-Henry could monitor calls. Call with the wrong name or the wrong message and the phone suddenly would go dead. The number was changed often. The keyboard combination to open the front gate—forever 1-9-4-1—was changed.
“John-Henry brought a guy down from Boston to install the cameras,” John L. Sullivan, one of the nurses, says. “There were two in the kitchen, one in the living room, one in Ted's bedroom. We found out when some roofers came. There were leaks forever in the dining room, and when the roofers came, they said, ‘What the hell are all these wires doing up here?' The wires were from the cameras.”
Williams apparently did not know about any of this. Apparently, no one ever told him. There were a bunch of things he was not told.
“John-Henry forever was promising his father that he and Anita, his girlfriend from Massachusetts, were coming for dinner,” George Carter says. “He'd actually show up maybe one in 20 times. The other times, the food would be sitting there, getting cold, and Ted would say, ‘Where the hell is John-Henry?' He'd get antsy. I'd know John-Henry wasn't coming, so I'd say, ‘He told me earlier that he was going to take Anita out to dinner.' Ted would say, ‘Well, good. He should take Anita out. She deserves it.'”
John-Henry and Anita were the ruling couple. They would make a date to marry once—September 9, 1999 (9/9/99)—but that never happened, never seemed serious in the first place. They seemed more like business partners or friends than lovers. Anita handled the busywork of the business operation. John-Henry seemed to handle the big dreams. They shared their free time. They played a lot of video games.
“They played the same game, I forget the name of it,” Frankie Brothers, hired as one of the nurses, says. “They'd stay up until four in the morning. Then they'd show up late at the office. Ted would say, ‘John-Henry, you're running a fucken business. You can't stay up until four in the morning playing some fucken game.'”
Nothing, though, stopped the business of autographs.
Brothers invented a stand to hold bats to make signing them easier. John-Henry had it built. Williams signed. There were different experiments on how to validate the Williams signature—holograms, certificates, eventually Polaroid pictures—and John-Henry tried them all. Williams signed under all conditions.
There were days when the signing went easy, everything light. There were days when the signing went bad. Williams would hit a point . . . John-Henry would ask for more . . . Williams would throw his pen against the wall. Jesus!
“I hope you can eat, John-Henry,” Williams shouted one day. That session was finished.
The famous man's days still began notoriously early. He had a paper route of names he liked to call on the phone at 7:00 A.M. (“Come on, let's wake up So-and-So.”) He still liked big, mega-cholesterol breakfasts, more bacon, please, forget the doctors. (“When this man dies, I'm going to be the guy who has killed him,” Bill Hogerheide, one of the cooks who came and went, would say to himself as he worked at the stove, grease spattering everywhere.) He still had curiosity. (“What new thing are we going to learn today?”)
There were trips to Ocala to the rehab clinic three or four times a week, rehab sessions at home with a physical therapist on other days. There still were visitors, the trips, the ever-present autographs, and lots and lots of opinions. The restricted, different life was still a full and busy life.
“We'd stop at the office around ten on the way back from rehab, talk with John-Henry, sign the autographs,” Frankie Brothers says. “We'd do an hour, two hours. John-Henry would piss him off and he'd say, ‘Come on, Frankie, let's get out of here.' At 11:30, 12, he'd go to bed, watch the History Channel or the Discovery Channel and take a nap. Around 2:30, he'd be back up. ‘Frankie, who called?' He'd go back on the phone. Loved to talk to his friends. Four o'clock, we'd have dinner.”
Brothers, son of Jack Brothers, Williams's fishing guide in Islamorada, was recovering from his own problems. He had been addicted to cocaine, in and out of rehab, and this was a good chance for him. He was straight and helping his father's friend. He found joy in his job. Mr. Ted, Colonel Ted still was a hoot.
“When Ted would eat . . . he had the tunnel vision, you know, but the left eye was the worse eye,” Brothers says. “He would only eat the food on the right side of his plate. I'd get up, spin the plate around. Ted would say, ‘What's this? I didn't ask for fucken seconds.' I'd tell him what I'd done. He'd say, ‘Shit,' and start eating some more.”
If the Red Sox were playing on television, Williams's night was made. He would call his old bench coach with the Senators, his friend from the Ted Williams Camp, Joe Camacho in Fairhaven, Massachusetts, and they would stay on the line for the entire game. The hell with the bill. Camacho's wife had died in 1988, and he was living with his grown son, Jimmy. A scratch golfer, Jimmy would get on the phone extension to talk about how golf was a much harder sport to play than baseball, part of a continuing argument, but mostly his father and Williams would talk about the game.
“I think that last pitch was a slider,” Ted would boom into the phone.
“Yeah, a slider,” Camacho would reply.
“Nomar's hands seem a little higher now. Do they seem a little higher to you?”
“I don't know. . . .”
The unseen, often unmentioned, value of baseball—the blue light in the nursing home, a shut-in pleasure, a reason for enduring the complicated day—was shared by the widower and the convalescent. Every night. Night after night. Funny, after knowing virtually every famous name in the game, the convalescent's best friend was the minor leaguer who blew out a knee and became a school administrator.
“In May of 1986, Ted came to my father's retirement party at Thad's Steak House in New Bedford,” Jimmy Camacho says. “There were all these school administrators and teachers and Ted. He was in town for the Old-Timers' Game. Brought John-Henry with him. John-Henry was about 16, 17, this quiet, naive kid. Ted was eloquent when he spoke. He'd skipped the dinner for the old-timers just to be with my dad.”
After Williams's stroke in 1994, the Camachos would come down to Citrus Hills once a year to visit, usually around St. Patrick's Day. Other visitors would appear. Jimmy O'Loughlin would show up, find that the punch code didn't work at the gate, and simply drive the car around the end of the fence and across the lawn to the front door. Dominic DiMaggio would appear. Billy Reedy would arrive from Detroit, bringing hams from a company he owned. He also would bring baseball old-timer Clete Boyer. They would sit in the living room and replay the games of the past.
Reedy had been best friends with former manager Billy Martin. He was in the car with Martin when they crashed on Christmas night of 1989 in Johnson City, New York, and Martin died. The first words Reedy heard, coming out from the sedatives after his operation, were “Do you know Ted Williams? He's on the phone for you.”
“Why are you so friendly with Billy Martin?” Williams once asked. “I never really liked him very much.”
“Well, you should like him,” Reedy said. “Billy's from California. You're from California. Billy loves baseball. You love baseball. Billy loves hunting and fishing. You love hunting and fishing. And not to get too personal here, but Billy's had some problems with women and marriage, same as you. Ted, you and Billy Martin are the same guy!”
Dolores, wife number three and John-Henry's mother, also would come down now from Vermont to visit. The doors to the house were open to her again after the big stroke and Louise's death, no other woman on the scene, John-Henry in charge. Claudia soon was back from Germany, the triathlete, the jock, living and working in St. Petersburg, sometimes riding her bike 60 miles to visit her father. There was a hole in the Frustration Wall that Dolores long ago had constructed in her head as well as on the farm in Vermont. Couldn't she visit her son and daughter? Williams would shudder at her arrival. The nurses would shudder as she unpacked. Chaos would be part of her traveling ensemble.
“One of the first times she came was for the museum ceremonies when George Bush appeared,” Carter says. “She had brought down a revealing, low-cut dress for the dinner. She said to me, ‘The only way I can wear this is if you tape my breasts back.' So there I was with a roll of tape, taping her breasts back.”
“She would sunbathe naked by the pool,” John Sullivan says. “The landscapers would be out there, mowing the grass. There'd be one part of the grass that would be mowed to nothing . . . right by the pool.”
“She came down once and said she was going to marry Ted again,” Carter says. “She brought down a homemade wedding dress. Ted wanted no part of the whole idea.”
She once, at the dinner table, informed Carter that “a fat man like you is a bad fuck.” Carter didn't know what to say. Williams was so upset at the remark that he threw his napkin on the table, stood up, stalked to his bedroom. He didn't even use the walker.
Carter wound up quitting once in his on-again, off-again stint at the house because of Dolores. He says Dolores was supposed to go back to Vermont, but John-Henry was late arriving to give her a ride to the airport. Ted was agitated. He wanted Dolores gone. He transferred his anger to George. George's strategy—each of the nurses had different strategies for handling Ted—was to return anger for anger.
“Goddamn it, I don't want to hear another word, Ted,” he said.
“Well, where's John-Henry . . . ,” Ted said.
“I don't know where the little prick is,” Carter said.
Dolores heard this exchange. She grabbed Carter's wrist, dragged him into a bedroom, and locked the door.
“Who the fuck are you to talk to Ted Williams like that?” she asked.
“I'm not doing this, lady,” Carter said, unfreeing his hand, unlocking the door.
“I go out the door and into the hallway,” Carter says. “She gives me a good, swift kick in the ass. Really hurt. I turn around and say, ‘Go fuck yourself,' and I'm out of there.”
Seldom were the days dull. The nurses had to be on constant guard for a mishap. In 1994, Thanksgiving Day, pushing himself to come back from the big stroke too fast, Williams took an exercise walk with Kay Munday, nurse at the time. The walk went longer than expected and when they got back, while Munday answered the phone, Williams fell in the driveway and broke the same shoulder he had broken at the All-Star Game. Now there was no operation, no headlines. The broken shoulder was another situation that he had to accept. He couldn't lift his left arm.
In 1997 he fell again. His physical therapist wasn't paying attention this time. The dog, Slugger, knocked Williams to the living room floor, breaking his hip. He underwent hip replacement surgery. Falling was a constant worry. His health was a worry.
The Florida thunderstorm of anger also still could arise in a hurry. There were still moments when Williams would lose control, steam and pout and react. His anger still could be undiluted, fierce. The nurses had to work with that.
“When Ted had his hip done at Citrus County Hospital, John-Henry called me at 2:00 A.M. and told me to get over there because they said Ted was whipping out,” Frankie Brothers says. “I get over there, and he'd yanked out the catheter that goes into the main artery beside your heart to monitor your blood pressure. That could have killed him right there. He was screaming and yelling. The nurses in the hospital couldn't do anything with him.”
“Colonel, it's Frank,” Brothers said, grabbing Williams's arm. “I'm right here.”
“Oh, Jesus, Frankie,” Williams said. “Goddamn it, they're trying to hurt me.”
“They won't hurt you.”
“I hope so. Goddamn it, Frankie, don't leave.”
“I won't leave.”
“Anger was his fuel,” Brothers says. “Ted got pissed, he became the most focused person in the world. Most of us get flustered when we get angry. Ted was the opposite. When he hit home runs, that's how he did it. He got angry. Most people screw up. He hit home runs.”
The words sometimes were still tough to hear. . . .
“Claudia, you're becoming a cunt, just like your mother!”
How do you say that to your daughter?
“John-Henry, you're the abortion I wanted!”
How do you say that to your son?
“When he'd get upset at both of his kids, he'd start yelling, ‘Wettach, Wettach, Wettach,' their mother's maiden name,” nurse John Sullivan says. “Like all the bad things in them came from the other side of the family.”
The moment would pass. Life would resume.
The times the nurses liked best—better even than the occasional trips to events, the occasional minglings with the famous—were the times when no one else was in the house. The battles with John-Henry would be done. The autographs, the schedule would be done. Maybe Williams couldn't sleep, just wanted to talk. The disorientations and agitations gone, he would be fascinating.
“I wish I could remember all the names of the people in his stories,” George Carter says. “He told about the time an attendant came down in Washington and invited him up to meet President Eisenhower. He never went and really regretted that. Eisenhower was one of his heroes. Richard Nixon . . . when Nixon died, Ted cried. He loved Nixon. It was like his father had died.”
“He knew everything about baseball,” Frankie Brothers says. “He'd studied it. He'd talk about the Bernoulli Principle, which is the law in physics for why a curveball curves. Other guys didn't know anything about it. We were at Cooperstown one year, though, and he said to Sandy Koufax, ‘Sandy, have you ever heard of the Bernoulli Principle?' Sandy said, ‘Ted, you know better than to ask me that.' Ted said, ‘Goddamn it, that's why I'm glad you were in the other league!'”
Brothers asked Williams one night what was the longest game he'd ever played. Williams replied, “Seventeen innings, but I wasn't there at the end. I came out in the tenth.” He said he left the ballpark and went back to the team hotel. On the way back to his room, he passed the room of a teammate. (Unnamed.) The door was open. The teammate's girlfriend was in town and was watching the game and her boyfriend on television. She invited Williams to join her. They drank champagne and watched baseball.
“And I gave her a little bump,” Williams said.
Brothers was confused by the word. In his drug past, a “bump” was a line of cocaine. Ted Williams gave his teammate's girlfriend a line of cocaine?
“No, you dumb shit,” Williams said. “I popped her. We had sex. That's a bump.”
He still was an obvious flirt when pretty women came around. Anita Lovely, John-Henry's girlfriend/fiancée, could charm him in a moment. John-Henry would send Anita to talk to him when he was being obstinate, when there were problems with the autographs. Anita would bring calm. Ted still liked women and women liked him. He called them all “queens.”
“How's the queen today?” he would ask.
“Whoa, take a look at these queens around here,” he would say.
He kept gifts in the house for pretty women. For a while, he had watches. Then he had Estee Lauder perfume. Brothers had read a story that Williams was a virgin until he was 20 or 21 years old, that baseball was his passion until then, that he had no time for girls. Brothers asked if this was true. Williams said it was and proceeded to deliver a play-by-play of his first sexual encounter. He had a twinkle in his eye as he described the finish.
“I said, ‘Hell, this is pretty good!'” Williams said. “‘This is almost as much fun as baseball!'”
Alas, the long sexual run for a very sexual man had ended now. Williams was at the rehab clinic one day with Carter, sitting in the waiting room, wearing his normal outfit of faded shorts and old shirt and Velcro-tie sneakers. A receptionist noticed that his fly was unzipped. She said, “Psssst, Mr. Williams, your fly is open.”
He gave her a nice octogenarian smile.
“If it can't get up, it can't get out,” the famous man said. He made no move for his zipper.
The marked increase in autograph production from his father, coupled with the memorabilia craze, began to pay off for John-Henry's companies after a while. The cash began to flow. A Boston businessman, Brian O'Connor, a Polaroid executive and former Marine, was asked by Ted to give John-Henry advice.
“I went on a seven-day fishing trip with Ted and John-Henry in Mexico in 1996, maybe 1997,” O'Connor, who had met Williams as a Jimmy Fund director, says. “I think it was the last time Ted ever went fishing. We had to work a way to strap him into the boat. It wasn't too long after he'd tripped over the dog.
“We were fishing for permit, a game fish down there. The way you do it, you spot the permit and then cast to the fin. I was Ted's eyes. I'd spot the permit and then Ted would cast to where I told him. I'd have to kind of hold him so he wouldn't fall over when he cast . . . it worked all right.”
The message Williams wanted O'Connor to bring to John-Henry was to stay on the straight and narrow in business, not to “go off like a gunshot.” O'Connor repeated the message every night on the trip, and on the phone, and in ensuing trips to Florida. He pointed out that a company selling $500,000 worth of memorabilia at a whack had to be run differently from a company selling $50,000 at a whack. There had to be more prudence.
“I think John-Henry was listening at the beginning,” O'Connor says, “but over a period of two years, as his revenues grew, his listening power diminished.”
O'Connor's view of John-Henry was: “hard worker, not the brightest soul in the world, zero social graces.” The number of companies worried the adviser—especially with the addition of Hitter.net, an Internet service provider, a company unrelated to baseball. The accounting practices in all these cross-hatched companies worried the adviser as well.
“Try to do one thing well,” O'Connor advised.
John-Henry heard. Or maybe didn't.
Everything was spinning.
“The kid was spending a lot of money,” Frankie Brothers says. “I'd never seen anyone spend money like him who wasn't a drug dealer. Spending it on shit. I was running the house on an American Express card. Anita was doing the finances. One month she sent me a photocopy of the wrong statement. His statement. The kid had charged $38,000 that month in shit. All shit. Fifteen thousand dollars for a fish-eye lens. It was ludicrous.”
Several business situations had hit the newspapers. The first was a lawsuit from Upper Deck Authenticated, the trading card company. Ted had signed an exclusive, three-year, $2 million contract with Upper Deck in 1992. Part of the deal was that if he were incapacitated, he still would be paid, even if he no longer could sign autographs.
Indeed, since the bad stroke, he had not signed for Upper Deck and had not been paid. John-Henry's lawyers mentioned this fact. Upper Deck's lawyers then mentioned the fact that Ted had signed—had done a public signing at the Ted Williams Store, in fact, with the lithographs six months after the stroke—and still was signing for John-Henry's operations. Where were the autographs due Upper Deck? The card company sued. An out-of-court settlement was reached.
“So Ted had to sign to pay off the lawsuit from Upper Deck,” nurse John Sullivan says. “The guy from Upper Deck came, Monday through Friday, three straight weeks, and Ted signed every autograph.”
In the middle of the process one day, Williams turned to Sullivan. He was not happy.
“I'm eighty-whatever,” he said. “And I'm still fucken working.”
A second set of headlines around John-Henry came from a bizarre situation back in Boston. Rodney Nichols, the former Maine state trooper and friend of John-Henry's, now worked at a Toyota dealership. He and a friend had become jammed up with debts to a bookie. Rodney had given the bookie Ted Williams's World Series rings from 1946 and 1986, hoping they would be enough to pay the debt.
The bookie, wondering if the rings were authentic, gave them to a New Hampshire man who brought them to Phil Castinetti, the Everett, Massachusetts, memorabilia dealer. Castinetti said they were authentic, but wondered if they were stolen. Nichols assured everyone that they were not.
“John-Henry had left all that stuff in my father's basement,” Nichols says. “It had been there for years. My father got sick of seeing it. There was some food in the boxes and mice had gotten in there. My father called John-Henry and told him to come and get it, that if he didn't, it all would be sold at a yard sale. John-Henry said he didn't want anything, except his skis and maybe he'd like to sell a king-sized bed he'd bought new so his father could visit him in Maine. My father bought the bed, paid $600 for it.
“Going through the stuff for the yard sale, my father found the rings and some other memorabilia. He put the rings in a drawer. He kept the other memorabilia. I called John-Henry about the rings. He just said, ‘So that's where they are.' He didn't say anything about coming up for them.
“When I needed the money, I remembered the rings.”
Castinetti was prepared to sell the rings at public auction. He invited a crew from the New England Sports Network to his store to film the rings, to start the publicity. The reporter tried the rings on her hand. He advertised the fact that he had the rings.
He also called John-Henry. John-Henry called the FBI.
“I wanted to offer the rings to John-Henry because I knew him,” Castinetti says. “His reaction was, ‘I gotta get those rings back. My father will be pissed.' I said I'd sell them to him.”
John-Henry told the FBI the rings were stolen. A sting operation was established to arrest Castinetti. A hidden camera in a Boston hotel room captured an undercover FBI agent and John-Henry handing over $90,000 in a metal suitcase to Castinetti and his assistant Danny Dunn. Dunn gave the FBI agent the rings. The door opened and agents flooded the room. Castinetti thought at first he was being robbed.
(“It's all here on my videotape,” Castinetti says now in his family room, slipping a cassette into his tape machine. “I call it my ‘$30,000 videotape' because that's how much I had to pay my lawyer.”
(“Oh, don't play that,” his wife says from across the room filled with toys. “The kids get scared when they see the men burst in with the guns.”)
At the trial in March 1998, John-Henry contended that the rings were stolen by Nichols. He said that he had picked up whatever memorabilia he had left with Nichols's father. The rings had to be stolen. Nichols's father came to the stand. He brought along a box from his basement that contained hundreds of Ted Williams photographs, plaques, and his address book. How did John-Henry explain this?
Castinetti, Dunn, and another man were found innocent. Rodney Nichols was not so lucky. In a separate trial in Maine, Nichols was convicted and sentenced to six months of house arrest. John-Henry received the rings.
“I never have stolen a thing in my life,” Nichols still says. “I wanted my lawyer to call Ted as a witness, but he never did. I'd heard Ted was telling John-Henry to just let it go, that he shouldn't be doing this to a friend. I don't know. I tried to call Ted and John-Henry cut it off and called the FBI. They told me I would be charged with tampering with a potential witness if I called again.”
Police had to stop Castinetti from attacking John-Henry outside the courthouse in Maine after Nichols's trial ended. Castinetti was mad at John-Henry, Brian Interland, the FBI, everyone associated with John-Henry. He instituted an annual 50 percent off, one-day sale on all Ted Williams memorabilia in his store. He was quoted early in all future stories about Ted Williams's son.
The son, however, seemed bulletproof.
Hitter.net was another ascendant star in the NASDAQ, dot-com revolution. The company was providing Internet service, mostly in Florida, to places not reached by the bigger service providers. The subscriber list was up to 18,000. The possibilities were varied. Should John-Henry go public? This was the time of the instant-success IPOs. Should he sell to a bigger company? A number of them were romancing him, one prepared to pay $7.5 million for Hitter.net. Should he simply become bigger and bigger himself, challenge the big boys?
The mishmash of John-Henry's companies opened the possibility of taking memorabilia money and pumping it into the dot-com company. The Ted Williams name, golden, made investors and loan officers listen. In 1996 John-Henry had been granted power of attorney for his father. He now pretty much was Ted Williams, although Ted's signature was needed on certain documents. This was not a problem.
“I was with Ted at the house one day, and a bank officer had some things for Ted to sign,” John Sullivan says. “Ted asked me to read them because he couldn't read very well. The bank officer said, ‘No, they're all right, John.' I said, ‘Let me read them.' The contracts were blank. I told that to Ted. He said, ‘I'm not signing any blank contracts.' John-Henry showed up and then the donnybrook began.
“He was having his father sign all kinds of things. He was having him sign blank contracts. Ted had no idea what he was doing.”
A Florida businessman, Steve Southard, recommended by Al Cassidy Jr., had done good work closing the Boston companies and basing everything in the memorabilia business in Florida. He was seen as a reasoned voice of caution in the background. He eventually quit. He found John-Henry didn't need a voice of reason and caution. John-Henry didn't listen to any voices except his own.
“This kid is the Son of Satan,” Southard said to George Carter. “He's built a whole house of cards, and it's all going to fall down.”
“The president of Sprint came down to see John-Henry,” George Carter says. “I'm sure he was here mostly because he wanted to meet Ted—that happened a lot—but he talked with John-Henry for a long time. I was around.
“The president of Sprint said, ‘John-Henry, you're not a very good businessman.' He turned to me and said, ‘Isn't that true, George? Why isn't he a good businessman?' I said, ‘Because he won't listen to anybody.' The president of Sprint said, ‘John-Henry, listen to him . . . because he's telling you the truth.'”
The kid would self-destruct. That was the prevailing business thought. The night of July 13, 1999, was used as another illustration. That was the night of the 1999 All-Star Game in Boston, one of the greatest moments in Ted Williams's life.
The All-Star Game hadn't even been scheduled for Fenway Park in 1999, the last season of the 20th century. The Milwaukee Brewers, opening their new stadium, Miller Park, were supposed to have the honor. The Red Sox were supposed to host the game in 2002.
A construction accident in Milwaukee, part of the stands falling down, killing three workers, had rearranged things. Miller Park would not be ready for the 1999 season, and baseball commissioner Bud Selig, also the owner of the Milwaukee Brewers, executed a switch with the Red Sox.
A convergence of factors had begun that would create an extraordinary moment.
The game would be held at the place where Ted Williams's career had been played out. The people in the stands would be the people who watched him or descendants of the people who watched him. They would know his story the way schoolkids know the story of George Washington. . . .
The situation for the game was unique. Major League Baseball, to celebrate the end of the century, was going to unveil an All-Century team at the World Series. The living nominees for that team—33 men from a list of 100 names—would be flown into Boston, brought onto the field, one by one, and introduced by actor Kevin Costner in a virtual real-life replay of the movie Field of Dreams.
Willie Mays, Hank Aaron, Sandy Koufax, Cal Ripken, Juan Marichal, Al Kaline, Bob Feller, Yogi Berra . . . they would be joined by the present All-Stars . . . Mark McGwire, Sammy Sosa, Mike Piazza, Derek Jeter, Nomar Garciaparra . . . and they would all stand under the lights and the stars and the fireworks and the flyover. Never had such a gathering of baseball talent been held.
And Ted Williams would throw out the first ball. . . .
Mickey Mantle had died in 1995. Joe DiMaggio had died only five months earlier in 1999. Babe Ruth was dead and Lou Gehrig was dead and Ty Cobb was dead and Ted Williams was still standing. Shaky, perhaps, three-quarters blind, 80 years old, almost 81, but he still was there. He had won whatever race had been set out. Survived. The oldest of the living All-Century candidates. Alone at the top of his class.
He could be caught one last time in this late curtain call for a generation. World War II veterans supposedly were dying at a rate of 1,056 per day now, a layer of history being peeled off the top, but there was still time for one more wave, a good-bye, a wet-eyed standing ovation. He was wrapped in the flag, wrapped in all the sweet childhood memories of baseball, in the promise of youth, the sadness of old age, wrapped in noise and emotion. He was elevated to some level of secular American sainthood.
Theodore Samuel Williams, from 4121 Utah Street in San Diego, Teddy Ballgame, the Splendid Splinter, the Kid . . .
“With the Citgo sign pulsating behind him, a giant No. 9 stenciled into the outfield grass, and the ancient theatre shaking on its landfill foundation, Williams stood in front of the mound, flanked by Mark McGwire and Tony Gwynn,” Dan Shaughnessy would type for the Boston Globe. “Behind homeplate, dressed for dinner, but wearing a catcher's mitt, was Carlton Fisk.
“Strike.
“Bedlam.”
And the game that followed would mean nothing. And the players around him would be only so many supporting actors from the drama of Ted Williams's days. And he would remove his cap—yes, he did—and wave it at everyone in triumph.
His Hitter.net cap.
The cap on Williams's head became an instant story. Every other player on the field except a hatless Carl Yastrzemski wore a cap from his present or former team. Only the guest of honor, the star of the show, was different. Williams wore not only the hat but also a blue Hitter.net golf shirt.
The fashion decision immediately was seen as the most heinous of John-Henry's public crimes. Detractors said he had turned his poor, sickly father into a billboard. He had taken a pure, historic moment and turned it into a commercial opportunity. There was an observed impropriety here, a sadness. The greatest living baseball player resembled one of those old-timers visited at the nursing home, a once-dignified businessman now with a large soup stain on the front of his T-shirt.
The hat, the cap, was the soup stain. Hitter.net.
“The kid got a lot of grief for that,” Peter Sutton, John-Henry's attorney, says in defense, “but what people don't realize is that without Hitter.net, Ted wouldn't even have been at the All-Star Game. Baseball wouldn't have had one of its greatest moments.”
Sutton says Williams originally didn't want to go to the game. He didn't want the hassle, the inconvenience. He would be in a wheelchair most of the time, jostled and touched, surrounded by strangers, gawkers, bugged.
Sutton says he tried to convince Williams of the importance of the moment. John-Henry tried. The Red Sox tried. Major League Baseball tried. Williams couldn't find a reason for going.
“The thing that changed his mind was when a couple of firms inquired whether or not he was going because they wanted to make deals,” Sutton says. “Ted turned them down, but then he said to John-Henry, ‘Tell me this: if I went for your company, would that help you?' John-Henry said it sure would. Then Ted said, ‘Then I'm going. For you.'”
“That's true that Ted didn't want to go,” Brian O'Connor agrees. “Ted had no great love for the Red Sox front office. All those years, he'd want to go to a game sometime in the summer, take some friends? The Red Sox would give him the tickets, then send him a bill. Ted Williams had to pay to go to the Red Sox games!”
From not going, no, can't do it, the trip became an expanded expedition. O'Connor, still a director of the Jimmy Fund, lobbied hard for Ted to make a visit to the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. The charity recently had located its original poster child, “Jimmy,” a 63-year-old Maine man named Einar Gustafson. For years, Jimmy had been presumed dead, a victim of his cancer. Now he had stepped forward.
“Ted has to meet him,” O'Connor said.
John-Henry balked. He could see no commercial possibilities here.
“John-Henry,” O'Connor said, “Ted has to do this.”
John-Henry finally agreed.
“How are you, Jimmy baby?” Williams shouted on Friday afternoon, July 9, at the hospital when he finally met Gustafson, cameras clicking everywhere. “This is the biggest thrill of my trip, right here! Jeez, you look great! You're an inspiration to everybody.”
One more time Williams went around the wards, talking with sick kids. They had no idea who he was, but they certainly knew he was someone as he bellowed and laughed and more pictures were taken. What a good-looking kid you are! I'll bet you're not going to be here very long! This was a sweet reprise.
Two days later, he was at something entirely new for him. He was the grand marshal of the Jiffy Lube New England 300 NASCAR race at the New Hampshire International Speedway. The visit was arranged by Dave McCarthy, the New Hampshire state trooper who headed a three-man voluntary security force for Williams on road trips. McCarthy, previously a bodyguard for New Hampshire governor John Sununu, had noticed people crawling around and over Williams at an autograph show and had offered his services. He had become bodyguard and friend.
“So I set this up, and Ted's in the car, ready to go on the track, and I go to check something,” McCarthy says. “I'm walking back and I hear all this cheering. What's that? The car is gone. They took him out already, went without me, and he's going around the track, waving at people. The people are just going nuts.”
Hitter.net was a presence on Williams's hat and shirt and at the track. Special Ted Williams Hitter.net baseball cards were distributed. Hitter.net even sponsored a 16-year-old kid, Kenny White, in a number 9 car in an earlier Busch Northern race. (“He's not going to die, is he?” Ted asked.) Williams had little experience with NASCAR but was a big hit with the drivers. They all wanted their pictures taken with him.
“You just tell me where he's going to be,” Dale Earnhardt told McCarthy. “I'll be there.”
The plan was for Williams to leave before the race, but on the way out McCarthy wheeled him to the fence for the start. He wanted Williams to feel the power come past. When that happened, the 42 cars revved up, snorting and blowing, thundering into the afternoon, here and gone in a noisy instant, Williams shouted, “Holy shit! You don't get that on television.”
He stayed at the Four Seasons in Boston for the weekend, the Somerset long ago converted to condominiums. He did interview after interview, the last real walk around the block for the Public Ted, dissecting the game of baseball for newcomers, boosting the cause of the modern-day player against the long-ago star, rare for any retired athlete. He dozed off, woke up, came back for more.
On Tuesday night, the All-Star Game, he was driven from centerfield to the pitcher's mound by Al Forrister, a grounds crew employee who once had shagged balls for him. Forrister had started at Fenway in 1957. He once had warmed up Ryne Duren. Yankees manager Ralph Houk had used every other player in the bullpen except Duren during a game and now wanted Duren. The only people sitting in the bullpen were Duren and Forrister. Forrister grabbed a glove to catch the pitcher. He had been around so long that Williams had used his name as an alias for years when checking into hotels.
“I drove him out from the same place in centerfield in 1991 for the Equitable Old-Timers' Game,” Forrister says. “He and Joe DiMaggio came out together that night. Another guy and I, we had to time it just right. He went one way, I went the other, and we landed at home plate at the same time. Joe and Ted.
“This time, I went to the mound. I knew the way.”
When they reached the mound, All-Stars new and old surrounded the golf cart. Forrister called out their names for Williams, who could not see. Mark McGwire. Sammy Sosa. Here's Cal Ripken Jr.! Williams had words for each of them, everybody mingling in the noise as the ovation continued even past a public address announcement to leave the field. Who cared? This was history. Or at least it felt like history.
When the time came to throw the first pitch, Gwynn steadied Williams, pointed him in the right direction. The pitch went through the air, no bounce, and landed in Fisk's glove. The crowd cheered even more. This was the moment of the weekend.
“Tears were coming out of Ted's eyes,” All-Star Larry Walker of the Colorado Rockies said. “I had to turn away because tears were coming out of my eyes too.”
When the ceremonies were done, Forrister took Williams up the many ramps to luxury box 22, the Polaroid box. Williams was reunited with John-Henry and McCarthy and Brian O'Connor, now serving as the Polaroid host. O'Connor looked at his friend, still surrounded, and didn't like what he saw.
“His health wasn't good,” O'Connor says. “I hadn't seen him for a couple of years and was surprised at how much he had slipped. His talk was only baseball. He got very tired.”
“It was just a great weekend for him, though,” Dan Shaughnessy says. “I was there when he met Matt Damon, the actor. Matt Damon's just in awe. He's from Brookline. His dad's a baseball coach. He tells Ted he grew up reading his book on hitting. Ted says, ‘You did, huh? What's the biggest lesson in the book?' Damon says, ‘Get a good pitch to hit.' Ted's face just lit up.
“He got tired, but when you talked to him about baseball . . . he was almost dozing when I asked him about something the coaches had told my son. They'd said he should be a little pigeon-toed at the plate. I asked Ted. Why pigeon-toed? Here he was, almost asleep, and bang, he was standing up, going into the stance, talking a mile a minute.”
The only lingering question was the cap.
What about the cap? Hitter.net. What really happened?
“We had the two hats, the Red Sox hat and the Hitter.net hat,” Dave McCarthy says. “We're in the tunnel. There was some debate about which hat to wear. John-Henry asked me what I thought. I'm thinking, he wears the Boston hat, but I say, it's John-Henry's decision.
“John-Henry talks to a couple more people about it. I don't know how he decided. Maybe being at NASCAR the day before, where everyone is wearing a hat advertising something, had something to do with it. I don't know what happened. Except Ted wears the Hitter.net hat.
“I honestly don't think John-Henry had an idea what the ramifications would be. I didn't have any idea either.”
A public decision. A public mistake.
“When John-Henry was on a trip, Ted always wore the Hitter.net garbage,” John Gard, who was the nurse on the All-Star trip, says. “When Ted came just with me, I got him to wear other stuff. He had a bunch of other hats and shirts, Red Sox logos. When we went to the World Series in Atlanta, John-Henry wasn't along. Probably figured there wasn't any money in it. Ted wore the Red Sox cap.”
The crowd in Atlanta cheered as loudly as the crowd at Fenway had. The ovation for hometown hero Hank Aaron was paltry compared to the ovation for number 9, the Splendid Splinter, Teddy Ballgame. One last stadium shook one last time, and then the shaking stopped and the players and the 1999 World Series began.
The long, wet good-bye was done.
The advance of Williams's physical problems was unrelenting. Back at Citrus Hills, he would become disoriented more often, have to be led from room to room. There always was the worry that he would fall. He was tired much of the time, out of breath. He needed longer and longer naps, his life becoming more and more constricted. He was taking assorted medications for his assorted problems.
One-half of a Zoloft pill, an antidepressant, had been prescribed every day to help him through the first years of his situation. He was up to two full Zolofts a day now, and still the anger would seep out.
“If these are the golden years,” he said to Curt Gowdy, the broadcaster, “my question is: how long do they have to last?”
He would wake up in the mornings some days and the perversity, the hopelessness, of his situation would almost overwhelm him. He would stand at the side of his bed and talk to God as if God were some negligent waitress, some bellhop who had arrived too late to solve the day's latest problem. The anger would unroll.
“You're a black-bearded Jewish son of a bitch and your mother is a whore,” Williams would say, eyes toward the ceiling of his bedroom. “And I don't believe in either one of you.”
There was a general belief—Johnny Pesky said, flat out, “Ted was an atheist”—that Williams didn't believe in God. Never a churchgoer, never a confidant of priests and preachers, almost vicious in his descriptions of his mother's work with the Salvation Army, able to string out blasphemies at any moment (see above), he did little to change that opinion. He seemed, if anything, a direct opponent of God.
Which was the point.
How do you spend so much time cursing and damning a Someone who doesn't exist? John Underwood, the writer of My Turn at Bat, remembers that most of Williams's curses seemed to have God or Jesus Christ or some religious figure involved. Williams seldom knocked off an idle “goddammit,” just a little verbal seasoning to his language. His goddamns were direct and personal, requests to bring fire and necessary brimstone against a car that wouldn't start, a window that wouldn't open, a situation that had become unhinged.
God was an everyday character in Williams's life. An inhibitor. A black-bearded Jewish son of a bitch who did bad things. Why couldn't God be good? Better at least? If God knew everything, then how could He allow all of that suffering in all of those hospital wards? Couldn't He see all of those little kids at Dana-Farber with their shaved, bald heads and their dull eyes? If a baseball player could see and feel, why couldn't God?
“I had one conversation with Ted about God later in life,” Russ White, the sportswriter from the Washington Daily News, says. “I told him I had become a religion writer. That I felt it was my calling.
“I remember this perfectly: he wished me good luck and said, ‘You know, I never have gone much to church and all that, but I've always tried to live by the Golden Rule. Do unto others . . . I've always tried to do that.' He was absolutely sincere.”
This was true. He had led his life by adhering to codes. Maybe they were his own codes, drawn from different influences, but they resembled codes that came from religious teachings. He had comforted the sick, helped the needy. Money never had been his false god. The hurts he delivered to people mostly were unintentional, not calculated. Humility had been part of his package, buried perhaps underneath braggadocio, but certainly there. He never had gone “big time.” He had shared his good fortune easily with others.
Russ White considers Williams “one of the most spiritual people I've ever met.” He says Williams thought about God daily, battled Him, yet still tried to conform to His stated rules. In Williams's own way, he was more involved with God than a whole congregation of churchgoers might be. God was with him for every at bat. God was with him at every fishing hole. God was with him everywhere. God just pissed him off an awful lot. God was often the enemy.
“It sounds silly, but I have dreams about Ted,” White says. “He is in heaven, talking the way he talked. We're sitting at his feet. It is all very spiritual.”
The case of Tricia Miranti was exhibit A in Williams's discomfort with God. When Williams first began rehabilitation for his stroke, he met a small 17-year-old girl in a wheelchair at the Ocala clinic. Her therapy sessions ran at the same time his did, so the famous man and the small girl saw a lot of each other. He thought she was a cute girl and maybe not that bright. She obviously had a list of problems. He challenged her to a game of checkers just to be nice. She beat him.
“I'm figuring I'll be nice and maybe I'll let the little girl win,” he told her mother, Vicki. “Then I notice she's doing some moves here, some moves I didn't expect. Then she beats me. She actually beats me!”
Tricia Miranti, who was very bright, became his latest and last cause, the sick kid at the end of all the sick kids, a one-girl, personal Jimmy Fund crusade. When she was five, she had suffered a cerebral hemorrhage that almost killed her. She had been a normal kid and now was in a wheelchair. Her mind was not affected, but her body was changed forever. She had to relearn everything from how to speak to how to sit to how simply to hold her head up. There were things she never would relearn. Talk about the whims of God.
“She was perfectly normal when she was five years old,” Vicki Miranti says, describing how Tricia's problems started in 1981. “A few days after Thanksgiving, there was a sale and I bought her this Pink Panther bicycle she really wanted for Christmas. Then on December 10 she was hit by all of this. I had hidden the bike at her grandparents', and I kept it there for over a year, hoping . . . and then I just gave it away to a little girl who lived next door.”
Williams gave his failing heart to the teenage Miranti. The sweetest sound became her giggle. He tried to bring out that giggle as hard as he could. The sick old ballplayer and the sick kid became fast friends. Vicki would drive Tricia to the big house, where she would leave her with Ted and Frankie Brothers and Slugger for long afternoons at the pool. Williams never had used the pool, never would, never learned to swim, but Tricia would splash and do her therapy, and Williams would smile and talk with her.
He and Lewis Watkins set up a foundation for her. The goal was to send her to college (she went and graduated from the University of Central Florida) and provide for the many expenses in her life not covered by insurance. They ran one fund-raiser, a big-money luncheon at George Steinbrenner's hotel in Tampa for Williams's 80th birthday. The fund-raiser and other donations did the job.
“I never saw Ted Williams as a great baseball player,” Vicki Miranti says. “I saw him as a great man. He was my angel.”
His question was: if he was the angel, where were the supposed real angels? How could God do this to Tricia? What had she done to Him? The injustice of her situation would cause Williams to unravel strings of his curses, all the bad words, delivered in anger. Anger overtook him when he talked about what had happened to Tricia Miranti.
“You shouldn't talk to God like that,” George Carter said. “He'll punish you.”
“How will he do that?” Williams asked.
“He'll make you stay here even longer.”
That would be the cruelest trick of all. Stay here? For what? The many pleasures in Williams's life had disappeared, one by one. Eddie Barry, a former Boston Bruins hockey player and a friend, used to take him for rides on a golf cart around the local courses when he first became sick. Even that was too dangerous now. He was pretty much homebound. His last pleasure was food. Eating.
“He lived for food,” Jacques Prudhomme says. “‘That's all I have left,' he would say. He lived for TV, companionship, and food.”
Prudhomme became his personal chef in 1999. A French-Canadian world traveler, married and divorced five times, he answered an ad on the Internet for the job. He had owned restaurants, been a personal chef for millionaires, lived a wandering life that started when he was 13 years old in the back reaches of Quebec and his mother sold him to a circus. He was a perfect, new, accented voice in the household.
“People say to me, ‘Jacques, it is so bad that your marriages did not work out, that you did not find love,'” Prudhomme says. “I say to them this is not so. I have found love five different times with five different, wonderful women. I have lived five different lives. I consider myself more lucky than people who only have found love once.”
Prudhomme's idea was to clean up Williams's diet. The previous chefs had been intimidated by the famous man's bluster and cooked whatever he wanted. Prudhomme tried a strategy that involved psychology and white lies. He conned Williams out of the cholesterol.
Williams would demand bacon. . . .
“Mr. Williams, I am trying to develop a low-fat sausage,” Prudhomme would say. “Would you help me? I want to get it right. We will put a lot of garlic in it. Help me try that.”
Williams would ask for a Reuben sandwich. . . .
“Oh, Mr. Williams, I am sorry. I already have made a rack of lamb. I am such an asshole. Would you help me out and eat this rack of lamb? If it's no good, I will make you a Reuben sandwich.”
Every meal was another exercise in finesse. Prudhomme would cut up Williams's food and wait for the results. He knew he was doing well when he heard Williams on the phone with former President Bush, saying, “You've got to get your butt down here! We've got some of the best goddamned sausage you ever ate!”
Prudhomme quickly became friends with George Carter, who was back on the job after Williams begged him to return. They worried about the famous man, about his health, about his welfare, about the daily machinations of John-Henry. How had the famous man landed in this situation?
The component both Prudhomme and Carter thought had been missing from Williams's life most was love. They would talk about this often. How can a man who has been loved by so many people be missing love? He didn't seem to know how to give love, and he did not know how to receive it. Love always had seemed to arrive with a price tag for Williams, the request for a favor.
“Ted was like a little boy,” Carter says. “Somewhere along the line he'd missed love in his life. If you got to know him at his vulnerable points, he was a little boy. He would put on that facade when he was around people, he'd get on the phone and you couldn't even hear yourself think, but, ahh, deep down inside he was a little boy who didn't have much love in his life.”
“People had loved him all the way up as an idol, but never as a person,” Prudhomme says. “You know when you are 82, 83 years old, you think about these things, and at the end I think his eyes opened up and he could see who was really giving him love.”
Before he left every day, Prudhomme would take Williams's hand and say, “I love you, Mr. Williams.” Williams would ask him what he wanted, what he needed. Prudhomme would say, “All I want is your love.” Williams would say, “Well, you have that.”
“Jacques,” Prudhomme says Williams asked one day, “how come my son never tells me that he loves me?”
“I don't know,” Prudhomme replied.
The next time John-Henry was around, Prudhomme says he made a point to say, “I love you, Mr. Williams,” and then said, “John-Henry, you love your dad too, don't you?” “Yeah, I love you, Dad,” John-Henry said. Prudhomme thought the words were cold, mechanical. He thought that John-Henry also didn't know how to give or receive love.
“It was with his friends that he had the greatest love,” Prudhomme says. “With Joe Camacho. With Billy Reedy. With Bob Breitbard. There he could feel the unconditional love. He was a complicated man, but when he opened up, there was a flow of love.”
Even the love of life itself was now a problem. Williams's first 74 years had been an exercise in that love. Had anyone ever grabbed life harder by the ears, shook it, pummeled it, enjoyed it more? The last years had been an erosion of that love, piece by piece by piece. What was left?
“We talked about suicide one night,” John L. Sullivan, one of the nurses, says. “I'd been reading the book Final Exit, and Ted was very interested. The basis of the book was that you could control the end of your life. It told you what symptoms to fake to have control over your fate. You faked the symptoms and certain drugs were prescribed. You didn't take the drugs, you squirreled them away. When you had enough, you could check out when you wanted. The problem—I'd read this too—was that it didn't work. People were taking the drugs thinking they were going to die and they still were alive. And the drugs had terrible side effects.”
“You know what I think?” Williams said. “I think when you're 65 years old the government should give you a little green box. Inside the green box there should be a black pill. Whenever you needed to take it, it would be right there.”
“Jesus, Ted, I'm getting close to 65,” Sullivan said. “Couldn't you make it a little later?”
“Sixty-five,” Williams said.
The big decline in Williams's health came quickly. Both Carter and Brothers say that worry over money was one of the major reasons for the turn. Money and John-Henry. Money because of John-Henry.
“Ted would fuck his brain when he went to bed,” Carter says. “He was one of those guys, if something was bothering him, he couldn't let it go. John-Henry got him all worked up.”
The situation had begun years earlier, even before Williams became sick. One of the people who had come back into his life was high school classmate Bob Breitbard.
A precise and energetic little man, Breitbard had become a millionaire in the dry cleaning business since those Hoover High days. He was active in San Diego, the creator of the San Diego Hall of Champions, a well-known local figure. He once had owned the San Diego Rockets in the National Basketball Association.
Williams stayed in Breitbard's house for a week when the Hoover class of '36 held its 50th reunion. The Hall of Champions, with Williams as a prime member and Breitbard as the director, was another tie between the two men. When Williams went to San Diego with John-Henry in 1992 after the first stroke for the 1992 All-Star Game and for festivities naming a nine-mile stretch of Route 59 Ted Williams Parkway, Breitbard was the host.
Breitbard now would visit Williams once a year for at least a week in Florida and talk with him almost daily on the phone. Williams would visit Breitbard in San Diego. The longtime bonds of friendship had increased.
“How are you fixed for money for retirement?” Breitbard supposedly asked Williams after the Antonucci business.
“I'm okay,” Williams said.
“Well, if you need it, I can give you a million dollars.”
Williams refused, but John-Henry in 1991 asked Breitbard for a loan of $500,000 to get started in business. Breitbard made the four-month loan, interest-free, without Williams's knowledge. John-Henry missed the four-month deadline and nine years later on August 1, 2000, still owed $265,000. Williams found out about it.
“He asked Bob, and Bob said John-Henry still owed him the money,” Frankie Brothers says. “Bob told him, ‘I don't want to be an asshole, Ted, but I'm 81 years old and you're 81 years old, and neither of us knows how long we're going to be around. That's money for my kids. You should know that after we're gone, my kids are going to have to go after your kid.' Ted was really upset. He thought the kid had taken care of it.
“The next day John-Henry declared bankruptcy. Ted went off the wall.”
The bankruptcy was a coincidence of poor timing. Hitter.net, John-Henry's grandest scheme, had joined the first wave of dot-com failures, filing for Chapter 11. The company that once had attracted an offer of $7.5 million now was worth nothing. Less than nothing. The St. Petersburg Times later would say the company had “racked up debts of $12.8 million.” “When the new business took off, he expanded,” Peter Sutton, the lawyer for John-Henry, says. “He wanted to go nationwide. Then the economy hit him. He had put on too many people, bought switches, equipment. He had, like, 50 people on staff. Then the dot-coms died. He didn't take a salary, didn't want to restructure, firing a bunch of people. Plus, he was worried all the time about his dad dying. He gave up the whole business.”
“John-Henry always had eyes the size of pie plates when he started a business, but he'd never see the thing through,” Rich Eschen says. “He never had enough sense not to go for the big hit, to just establish your business and go from there. You look at the contacts he had. Ted would introduce him to anyone he wanted to meet. CEOs. Famous people. Presidents. Anyone. He had the world at his feet, and he kind of blew it.”
The worst part of the bankruptcy for Ted Williams was not the death of the company but the debt to Breitbard that now couldn't be paid. Williams was apoplectic.
“The next three or four days were hell,” George Carter says. “Ted was on the phone everywhere. He wanted to sell the place in Canada for the money. He was trying all kinds of things. He was out of his mind. Then on the third or fourth day, when I was washing him, I saw all these red things that had broken out on his back. He had the shingles.”
“He had a red rash on his left shoulder,” Frankie Brothers says. “Very painful. That was the beginning. That was August. In October, he had the pacemaker put in in Gainesville. In January of the next year, he had the open-heart surgery in New York. It was all downhill. The kid started it . . . and he's too stupid to know what he did.”
The nurses claim that John-Henry had squandered most of Williams's money in attempts to go big-time with the Internet company. They said houses that had been paid off in Citrus Hills now had second and third mortgages. Investment properties had been sold or claimed by the banks. Ted Williams pretty much was broke.
On October 30, 2000, Williams was rushed to Shands Hospital in Gainesville when he had difficulty breathing. This began the long process of surgeries and increased medical troubles. Three nights earlier the following auction item had appeared on eBay, the merchandise computer website:
Description: This is a 10 foot by 15 foot USA Flag. It has been flying at Ted Williams' house for the past 6 months. Florida weather during the summer has worn the color a bit and it was replaced by a new Flag. We took this Old Flag and decided to give it a place in History forever. Ted Williams signed it in blue Sharpie on a white stripe in big bold letters. This is the only flag of its kind in existence. The other flags were not as lucky as this one.
John-Henry Williams.
The item sold for $3,050. There were 28 bids.
“Somehow,” columnist Will McDonough wrote in the Boston Globe, “I don't think Ted Williams, a former Marine pilot, would have signed his name on a flag if he had known that U.S. Code Title 36, Section 176, paragraph (g) reads: ‘The flag should never have placed upon it, nor on any part of it, any mark, insignia, word, figure, picture or drawing of any nature.' Paragraph (i) reads: ‘The flag should never be used for advertising purposes in any manner whatsoever.'”
The Internet business was gone. The autograph business clearly was in trouble. The famous man was sick. What next?
“You look back now and the All-Star Game was the high point for both Ted and John-Henry,” Brian O'Connor, the former business adviser, says. “After that, they both started dying. Dying in different ways, but dying.”