The Kid: The Immortal Life of Ted Williams (102 page)

In April of ’94, McWalter flew out to San Diego to meet with Richard McWilliam, president of the Upper Deck company. Ted, since his stroke in February, had been unable to keep pace with his obligation to sign twenty-five thousand autographs a year under Upper Deck Authenticated’s 1993 deal with Grand Slam Marketing. Now McWilliam wanted to review the status of the contract and to express his continued frustration that the Ted Williams Card Company was effectively acting as an Upper Deck competitor. John-Henry had been expected to go on the trip but decided not to at the last minute.

“It was the day of President Nixon’s funeral, April twenty-seventh,” McWalter remembered. “The Upper Deck president kept me sitting for four hours. Then he blasted me for John-Henry, as if John-Henry was sitting there. He said he loved Ted and enjoyed doing business with him. I was finally dismissed. I was not used to being treated this way.”

Later, back at his hotel, McWalter got a call that a fax had arrived for him. The fax was from John-Henry. Acting under his new power of attorney, John-Henry told McWalter he was fired. Everyone the various Ted companies were doing business with was also being notified that he had been fired and was no longer authorized to represent Ted.

McWalter began fielding calls from startled clients. The first call was from John Harrington, head of the JRY Trust, which owned the Boston Red Sox. Ted had been doing some informal consulting with the Red Sox, and McWalter had been discussing the possibility of a formal arrangement for Williams with Harrington in hopes of leveraging a limited-partnership stake in the team. The stunned McWalter had to say he had no idea what John-Henry was doing.

Then Ted himself called McWalter, as if nothing were amiss, wondering
about the status of the Harrington negotiations. McWalter told him that given the stroke, he didn’t think Ted could put in enough hours on consulting to make a deal viable. Ted also asked about the status of the missing $1.8 million McWalter had told him about earlier. McWalter said he thought they should do a formal audit to develop more specific information. Williams clearly had no knowledge of McWalter’s termination, and McWalter held his tongue.

The lawyer flew back to Boston and prepared to meet with John-Henry, who had consulted with his accountant, Clifton Helman, and told him he intended to fire McWalter. “I said, ‘You can’t do that. He just left his law firm,’ ” Helman recalled. “John-Henry said, ‘I don’t care. I don’t need him. I don’t like him.’ ”

Helman reminded John-Henry that just five months earlier, Ted had made a commitment to McWalter that if he left Sherburne, Powers and went to work solely for him, he would pay him $100,000 a year. John-Henry acknowledged that Ted had made this offer, but he said he could no longer accept the authority and power that McWalter held. He had not told his father that he was going to fire him.

As the meeting with McWalter began, John-Henry was nervous and had a hard time getting to the point. He was discussing business as usual when McWalter interrupted him.

“Are you trying to tell me, John-Henry, that my job here is terminated? I tell you, I’ve had a magnificent run with your dad. He’s one of the finest men I’ve ever known. I’ll never forget that.” Then he cited the poster Williams had given him with the inscription: “To my friend and lawyer and confidant.”

“Oh, hell,” John-Henry said, “he writes that to everybody.”

McWalter was steaming, waiting for the inevitable. “Why are you wasting time?” he asked. “Did you come to fire me?”

“I guess that’s why I came,” John-Henry replied. Then he stood up, as if aware that his reply lacked the dramatic impact the moment seemed to call for. He looked directly at McWalter and said: “You’re fired!” McWalter stormed out of the room. “I don’t believe Ted would do that to me,” he said as he left.
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In a few days, after John-Henry had finally given his father the news, McWalter called Ted, who seemed anguished. “Bob, I don’t know what I’m going to do,” Williams said. “He’s put me in the middle. He told me
I have to make a choice between you or him.” McWalter didn’t try to reverse the decision. “Ted, if that were me, I’d pick my son,” he said.

A few weeks later, John-Henry called McWalter to a meeting at his apartment in Brookline. There, McWalter was asked to help the Williams companies make the transition to new management without him. His replacement was to be Steve Southard, a Florida business consultant close to Al Cassidy, the longtime Williams family friend whom Ted would name executor of his estate. Ted flew up for the meeting, which was run by Southard.

“They put me in a straight-back chair, and they surrounded me, sitting in comfortable chairs,” McWalter remembered. “Ted was polite, but I felt he thought he was a fox. He would say things he obviously didn’t mean. He said, ‘Bob, I want you down at my house like you have been. I want our friendship to continue.’ I did not believe a word of it.” McWalter resigned from the trusts that Ted had asked him to help oversee and was given a modest severance package.

In early July, Williams sat down with the
Boston Globe
’s Dan Shaughnessy to assess his changed life. Shaughnessy had revealed in an April column that his eight-year-old daughter, Kate, had recently been diagnosed with leukemia and that Williams had called her in the hospital to wish her well. Kate didn’t have a clue who Ted was when he called. She passed the phone to her father, saying, “Daddy, there’s a loud man on the phone, telling me I’m going to be okay.”

When Shaughnessy got on the line, Williams told him: “Dr. Sidney Farber used to tell me, ‘Ted, we’re going to find a way to cure these kids.’ Sure enough, he did it. You tell your daughter she’s going to be fine. Tell her I’ll come visit her.”
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Williams told the columnist that he should have seen his third stroke coming. “If there was ever a candidate for this, it was me because I was involved in 40 different things,” Ted said, speaking from the new Grand Slam office that John-Henry had set up in Hernando so that his father could more conveniently autograph memorabilia. “That museum was a big project and… I was just trying to do too much. They want me to go so many damn places. I had too much going on and too many stresses and worries and stuff. It was harder as I got older, because no matter what, there [were] more demands on me.” And why were there so many demands on him at the age of seventy-five? Shaughnessy asked. “They think you’re going to die, I guess,” he said with a laugh. “Let’s get him before he dies.”
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Then Ted shared a dream he’d had recently. “I was laying there and I
was having a lousy night. I was kind of resting and then I started to dream. Randy Johnson was pitching. I said, ‘Geez, I can’t hit him. I just had a stroke and I’m not even seeing very good.’ But they kept teasing me and I thought, ‘Aw, Christ.’ So I started to get up there and he’s throwing a couple and I’m saying, ‘Geez, he’s got pretty good stuff.’ So I said to myself, ‘I’m not going to try to pull him.’ That’s the first thing I said in my dream. ‘I’m not going to try to pull him, I’m going to try and hit it hard through the middle.’ He threw one ball and it was a ball. I seen his speed. He threw another one and another one and it was right there and I just punched it through the middle.”

Three weeks after Shaughnessy’s piece ran, Ted made his first public appearance since his stroke. He flew up to Boston to attend an event at the Ted Williams Store, John-Henry’s memorabilia shop in suburban Chestnut Hill. He signed autographs with his friends and former teammates: Dom DiMaggio, Bobby Doerr, Johnny Pesky, and Eddie Pellagrini. All six hundred tickets for the event were sold in a few hours. “The Splendid Splinter looked fatigued and walked with a cane, but his voice was loud and clear,” the
Globe
reported. “His vision is probably permanently impaired, but his signature was bold and authoritative.”
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The event was essentially the swan song for the Ted Williams Store: by December, it had closed down so that John-Henry could complete his move to Florida.

As for the various other Ted-related businesses that had been launched a few years earlier, Major League Memorabilia, which supplied material for the Home Shopping Network, was closed; the Ted Williams Card Company went bankrupt in 1995; and Grand Slam Marketing moved to Florida and continued to operate as Grand Slam Sports, Inc. Brian Interland and Jerry Brenner, who each owned a third of Grand Slam, considered asking John-Henry to buy them out, but decided to walk away and cede their interests to the Williams family rather than risk alienating Ted.

As some companies closed, others opened. John-Henry started Green Diamond Sports to license and market Ted memorabilia, further refining what was being done by Grand Slam and Ted Williams Family Enterprises. Then, swerving in a totally different direction, he started a gun company, called Full Auto, Inc. John-Henry loved guns and was a collector, and he decided that starting a business would be a logical extension of that hobby. He also liked cops and enjoyed flashing a sheriff’s badge from Middlesex County in Massachusetts, which he had received as a member of the Reserve Deputy Sheriffs Association, a volunteer
group. He had some law-enforcement friends and contacts who, he thought, could help him in business. “Like anything, when he had an interest, he went head over heels to understand it, to see what he could do,” said Eric Abel. “It started as having some guns, then he wanted faster, more powerful guns.” First he collected .357 handguns and 12-gauge shotguns, then a black, light handgun with a laser sight that he described as the kind Navy SEALs would use, then a .45-caliber, fully automatic machine gun, and finally a grenade launcher.

John-Henry and Abel liked to take an automatic, go out on a remote tract in the Citrus Hills development that had a sandpit, and blast away. “We’d set up a target,” Abel said. “It was incredible, how fast it fired. You could pull that trigger and it unloaded some shells. The clip maybe held fifty rounds. Tension got harder and harder as you loaded them in there. John-Henry was very safety-conscious. He wasn’t some wild man. He made sure I knew what I was doing, and I was gun-experienced. You hold it down at your hip. He thought it was a wonderful piece of machinery. The technology amazed him. We each fired it twice and went through about fifty dollars’ worth of shells in two minutes.”

After the old businesses were put to rest and the new ones launched, John-Henry no longer felt any need for Steve Southard. He thought Southard’s $125,000 salary was too high, and, more important, he was becoming an obstacle. Southard, for his part, was frustrated dealing with Ted’s son, privately commiserating with Bob McWalter about John-Henry’s irresponsibility. Al Cassidy came up to try and act as a mediator between his friend Southard and John-Henry, to no avail.

“Steve came home and just said, ‘I’m not working there anymore. John-Henry came in and said he’d used me as much as he wanted to,’ ” recalled Carol Southard about her husband, who died suddenly in 2003 at age fifty-seven. “He said he wasn’t paying him anymore, and therefore he was just done. I think John-Henry was very much a user of other people. When he called at first to offer Steve a job, I answered the phone and said, ‘Why do you want Steve to work for you?’ John-Henry said, ‘Because he’s the smartest man I ever met.’ But after Steve straightened out all his messes, and it was just the running of the business, he said, ‘I don’t need this guy.’ That was John-Henry. When he was done with you, he was done.”
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With the hiring of a number of caretakers for Ted, a new phase of life began for Williams. Their arrival meant that his independence was gone: not only were these strangers walking in and out of his house, some
actually lived there, effectively working twenty-four-hour shifts five to seven days a week. Most of the caretakers clashed with John-Henry, whom they considered imperious and entitled. Some described instances in which he privately mocked Ted behind his back, and almost all said the younger Williams pressured his father into signing autographs to generate income even as Ted grew more frail. But Claudia Williams and family friends insisted no one could force Ted to do anything he did not want to do, and that he was anxious to generate money that he could leave to his children. Most of the caretakers, they added, had an ax to grind because they were either fired by John-Henry or left under duress.

Over time, Williams bonded strongly with some of his new roommates. Ted’s favorite caretakers were George Carter, a former Marine and Pawtucket, Rhode Island, cop; Frank Brothers, a jack-of-all-trades whose main qualification was that he was the son of Jack Brothers, the late Islamorada fishing guide and Ted pal; and Judy Ebers, a transplanted New Yorker who sassed Williams in a way that charmed and delighted him. Carter, fifty-four, and Brothers, thirty-eight, were the live-in mainstays who would play a key role at the end of Ted’s life. Amid the gloom of Ted’s unrelenting decline, these three provided considerable comic relief. Ebers liked to come to work wearing a Yankees hat to needle Ted. Carter once reported for duty wearing only his underpants, apparently in homage to Williams, who often took his meals wearing only his briefs and a T-shirt. When Ted hired a French chef, Ebers, Carter, and Brothers set about teaching him the American vernacular, especially one important word in the Williams household:
bullshit
. “Bool-sheet, bool-sheet,” the chef kept saying.

Carter and Ted related to each other as former Marines. They loved to tease and cuss each other out. Carter had heard of Williams but was not a real baseball fan and certainly no hero-worshiper. “I’ve seen people who if they would touch Ted Williams, they’d have an orgasm,” he said dismissively. But George had to admit he was taken aback when, on one of his first days on the job, he answered the phone and it was Joe DiMaggio calling to check in on Ted after his stroke.

Carter had problems dealing with Ted’s ex-wife Dolores, who, now that John-Henry was in charge of Ted, was coming down from Vermont more frequently. Ted tolerated her, but barely. He usually imposed a three-day limit to her visits, but gradually, as he began to develop symptoms of dementia, she would extend her stays beyond that limit. Then when Ted saw her, he would have forgotten she was there in the first
place. “When did you get in town?” he would say. “Well, how are ya? How are the animals? How is it in Sticksville?”
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