The Kid: The Immortal Life of Ted Williams (109 page)

When Williams arrived home after the pacemaker procedure, Vaughn set up a medical area at the house, designed a rehab program, and put him on an herb-and-vitamin regimen that she and John-Henry both thought was beneficial. She would come over three or four days a week, take his blood pressure, check his medication, and they would talk.

On Christmas, Ted had one of his aides call Vaughn. “He said, ‘Hi, sweetheart; I just called to say Merry Christmas. You have such a nice family. I wish I could have a family like that.’ I said, ‘Are you having anybody over?’ ‘I don’t know. John-Henry is in charge of that.’ ”

Vaughn got to know John-Henry well. She thought he looked like
John F. Kennedy Jr. and was charismatic, but she also thought he was extravagant, wasteful, entitled, and behaved oddly. “We sat down to order some medical supplies once,” she remembered. “One of the things was a physician’s desk reference that tells you about the side effects of meds and other things. You can buy it for thirty dollars. Instead he bought the computer program that hospitals use for [between] three thousand [and] five thousand dollars. If he went out to buy one thing he’d buy fifty of them instead. He was wasting a ton of money.” And if he wanted something, patience was not an option. “Money and people were nothing to him,” she continued. “If he had a question for a doctor he’d call him at three a.m. No respect. He called me once at two a.m. and asked me about Ted’s blood pressure. It was as if he had an impulse-control problem. He could not see consequences for actions.”

Vaughn also thought John-Henry had a childlike quality. Once, at night, when they went outside to get something from her car, John-Henry stopped in his tracks. “He said, ‘Look at those stars! Don’t you wish you could travel to those stars?’ He was like a kid.”

One day in late December, Vaughn was sitting with Ted in his bedroom when John-Henry came in and asked her if she had ever heard of cryonics. She had, and she mentioned a lab in Orlando where he could get more information about it.

“Then John-Henry, in his Peter Pan way, said, ‘Just think of it: a thousand years from now, people could say their child could have a piece of Ted Williams.’ He said, ‘They could clone my father’s eyes, and a child could have Ted Williams’s eyesight. And they could bring him back to life, and he could feel great.’ ”

“What makes you think Ted would want that?” Vaughn asked.

Ted stirred in his bed, having heard the conversation. “John-Henry!” he said. “Stop talking about that bullshit!”

But John-Henry now felt free to talk in front of his father about sensitive issues, knowing that he drifted in and out and would forget what they were talking about by the next day anyway.

“What does your father want?” Vaughn asked John-Henry again.

“In his will he doesn’t want a funeral. He wants to be cremated and sprinkled over where he used to fish in the Keys.”

“If that’s what his will said, then that’s what he wants.”

“There are ways to get around things like that,” John-Henry said.

Vaughn said he went on to say “how cool it would be to clone Ted’s eyes, kind of a scenario where he and his dad would wake up and his dad has no aches and pains and he could go off and play baseball. He said
he’d also sell pieces of Ted’s DNA. I remember him saying, ‘Wouldn’t it be great if parents could have a child that could see like Ted Williams and hit a ball like Ted Williams?’ ”

In the end, Vaughn thought, John-Henry’s cryonics notion was more fantastical than exploitive.
²⁵

“I felt he was this little boy who wanted to make his dad happy but never dealt in reality. A little boy in a man’s body. He was going to make people happy by cloning his dad’s eyes. Who thinks like that? I think he felt this was how they’d make their money in the future. I don’t know if he was thinking, ‘Hey, I can take advantage of this old guy.’ I thought it was more: ‘I’m gonna do this for my dad and we’ll live forever.’ It was Peter Pan.”
²⁶

I
t soon became apparent that Ted’s cardio issues were more serious than a pacemaker could address, for on January 11, 2001, he suffered renewed shortness of breath and an apparent heart seizure. Becky Vaughn was on duty at the house and accompanied the ambulance over to nearby Citrus Memorial Hospital.

Soon Williams was back at Shands, in Gainesville, where doctors debated, along with John-Henry and Claudia, whether they should put the eighty-two-year-old Ted through open-heart surgery. Further testing had shown that the mitral valve on Ted’s heart was not closing properly when his heart pumped, causing blood to leak from his left ventricle into his left atrium. So the valve needed to be replaced. Ted asked his cardiologist, Rick Kerensky, what the chances of surviving the operation were, and Kerensky said fifty-fifty.

“Let’s go for it,” Williams told Kerensky.

The surgery would be done at New York–Presbyterian Hospital by Dr. Wayne Isom, chief of cardiothoracic surgery, who had operated on comedian David Letterman and violinist Isaac Stern.
¹
Kerensky had actually recommended a heart surgeon in Birmingham, Alabama, but John-Henry liked Dr. Isom’s celebrity cachet: if he was good enough for Letterman, he was good enough for Ted.

Williams met with all three of his children at Shands before leaving for New York. Bobby-Jo and her husband, Mark Ferrell, had moved to Citrus Hills in 1999 from North Carolina and had built a house on one of the fifteen lots in the development Williams had taken options on before giving five to each of his children.

Bobby-Jo had been in only sporadic contact with Ted in recent years.
She had been dealing with various issues: she continued to struggle with alcoholism and also had lupus, a chronic autoimmune disease. She and her husband had moved to Citrus Hills at her father’s urging, she said. But according to Bobby-Jo’s oldest daughter, Dawn Hebding, the move was primarily intended to curry favor with Ted. “Mom and Mark would say, ‘John-Henry and Claudia are making their move!’ ” said Hebding, laughing. “They wanted me and my sister to call Grandpa more. They’d say not to say this, and not to say that.”
²

Hebding, who had a rocky relationship with her mother and stepfather, said she visited a downbeat Ted in January of 2001, shortly before his seizure. “He talked about death, about being cremated and having his ashes thrown in the ocean,” Hebding said. “That was the last time I saw him.”

Now, on January 14, Bobby-Jo and Mark entered Ted’s room at Shands. John-Henry and Claudia were already there. Bobby-Jo, who barely knew her half siblings, already felt like a third wheel in the family. She had not been consulted on whether Ted should have the surgery and was against it. She knew her father was near death and thought it folly to undergo such a major and risky operation at this stage.

Truth be told, she had not even wanted Ted to have his heart catheterized or the pacemaker implanted in November. Whereas John-Henry and Claudia were pursuing an aggressive course of treatment and care for their father, Bobby-Jo wanted no heroic measures and to let nature simply take over. “Bobby-Jo said to John-Henry, ‘Just let him die,’ ” Claudia recalled. “She wanted him to be in hospice and to just die peacefully. We were throwing her out of the picture.”
³

There was a certain formality and awkwardness as Ted spoke to Bobby-Jo, whom he had written out of his will. Yet he wanted to summon some kind words now, knowing that they might be the last ones he uttered to his oldest child. “He said out of nowhere, ‘I sure do love you, sweetie,’ ” Bobby-Jo said. “And he just said, ‘I wish I’d been around more to have appreciated what a loving, sweet, wonderful person you are.’ ”

Then they wheeled Ted down to an ambulance that drove him to the Gainesville airport. John-Henry, Claudia, Bobby-Jo, and Mark followed in a caravan, right out onto the airport tarmac. There was another round of good-byes there before Williams was deposited in a Learjet, accompanied by John-Henry, two paramedics, and Nancy Carmichael, Kerensky’s assistant. After a few hours, the plane landed at Teterboro Airport in New Jersey, and Ted was taken by ambulance to Manhattan.

The surgery the next day lasted nine and a half hours. Dr. Isom and a team of a dozen others replaced the mitral valve in Ted’s heart with a tissue, or “pig,” valve, and while they were at it they repaired his tricuspid valve, which they found to be faulty. While it was initially thought Williams would remain in the hospital for about fourteen days, his recuperation turned out to be much more arduous than planned and dragged on for more than a month. He was on a respirator for an extended time and had to be heavily sedated.

On January 20, Ted acknowledged John-Henry for the first time since the surgery and reportedly enjoyed watching George W. Bush being inaugurated as the forty-third president on TV. But after that, the medical updates were few and far between. The Boston press, on high alert for even the most incremental Ted development, was forced to find other story lines, such as questioning why John-Henry chose New York over prestigious Boston hospitals for the heart surgery and whether it was appropriate for an eighty-two-year-old to have such traumatic surgery in the first place.

At the one-month mark of convalescence, doctors issued a gloomy report that said Williams was still on a respirator, spent most of the day sleeping, and that when he finally was released from the hospital he would need to spend several additional months in rehabilitation. A few days later, John-Henry chose a facility in San Diego for the rehab phase over others in Boston and Gainesville. On the morning of February 19, Ted was taken by ambulance back to Teterboro Airport, where he was lifted onto another Learjet and flown across the country, accompanied by John-Henry, a surgeon, and two paramedics. He checked into San Diego’s Sharp Memorial Hospital, not far from 4121 Utah Street, where he’d grown up.

Bob Breitbard, Ted’s boyhood chum, was thrilled to have Williams back in town, infirm as he was. Breitbard arranged for apartments for John-Henry (who still owed him the $250,000) and Ted’s two Florida caretakers, Frank Brothers and George Carter, so that they would have places to stay while they were in San Diego.

Meanwhile, as Ted faded, John-Henry was pressing ahead with cryonics, broadening the circle of people he sought advice from and narrowing his search for the right facility. In mid-December of 2000, John-Henry had contacted the Alcor Life Extension Foundation in Scottsdale, Arizona, the leading practitioner of cryonics in the country, and asked the company to send him its brochure. He asked his secretary, Eleanor
Diamond, to be on the lookout for the package and, when it arrived, to send it to Peter Sutton in Boston after reading it herself and letting him know what she thought. Diamond, then fifty-seven, had moved to Florida from her native Brooklyn and still spoke with the accent of her old neighborhood. “I said, ‘John-Henry, I’d never do that to my parents, but maybe there’s something in it for you. Nobody thought you could transplant a heart years ago, so maybe it’s something down the road.’ ”
⁴

Anita Lovely soon confided to Diamond that she, too, thought cryonics was crazy and said she was upset by John-Henry’s interest in the practice. John-Henry’s wedding to Anita, originally set for the Kid-happy 9/9/99, had been postponed, and there was no new date. John-Henry continued to resist any commitment, much to the consternation of Ted, who adored Anita and had once offered his son a $500,000 inducement to marry her. John-Henry still cared for Anita, and they had been through a lot together, but he seemed now to see her more as a friend and business partner than as a lover or future wife.

Sutton, a senior partner in the litigation department of the Boston law firm Riemer & Braunstein, reacted to cryonics the same way Eric Abel did when John-Henry had initially broached the subject to him: “I said, ‘Are you fucking crazy?’ ” Sutton recalled. “John-Henry’s approach was, ‘If I’m wrong, I don’t lose anything; but if I’m right, boy, do I win.’ He said it’s like a lottery ticket. You won’t win unless you buy it, but what if you win the two hundred million? He’d say, ‘How do you know it won’t work? How do you know there’s a God?’ ”

Sutton, a pugnacious Greek-American who relished a legal scrap, was a big Ted Williams fan who met John-Henry in 1994 while visiting the Ted souvenir store in Chestnut Hill, outside Boston. Later, when John-Henry tripped on an icy step outside his Brookline apartment and broke his ankle, Sutton filed a lawsuit against the landlord and got young Williams some money. Then he became a troubleshooter for John-Henry on the memorabilia front, working on licensing, royalty, and forgery issues. Sutton never charged Ted and John-Henry much, if anything. He liked being in the Williams orbit.

As they discussed cryonics further, John-Henry told Sutton that he, too, planned to join his father and be frozen when he died. Would Sutton himself ever consider the practice? “He wanted me to be a part of it because when they got thawed out, he and Ted wanted their lawyer! I think my answer was I’d rather have my family keep the hundred and fifty thousand dollars… than give it to those snake charmers. I went home and told my wife and said, ‘Hey honey, you want to be frozen
with the kids?’ She’s Greek Orthodox, and we had a good laugh about it.”

Sutton said he wasn’t concerned about whether Ted himself wanted cryonics because Williams, after he gave John-Henry his power of attorney, had said that whatever his son wanted was fine by him. “If John-Henry had gone to Ted and said, ‘We’re going to jump out of a plane holding hands without a parachute,’ Ted would have said, ‘Okay.’ So there was never a thought in my mind that Ted wouldn’t go along with whatever John-Henry wanted.”
⁵

As for Claudia Williams, she, like everyone, was skeptical of cryonics at first, but it wasn’t long before John-Henry had his sister on board. “I think the thing that certainly sold me on it was first and foremost his enthusiasm for it and his belief,” Claudia said. “He had faith in it, and it made him so much more ready for when Dad died. I knew that John-Henry had cryonics to hold on to. And that’s what sold me on it. And you know, after he’d educated me on it, talked to me about it, yeah! There might be a chance!”

She conceded that early on Ted was dismissive of cryonics. But she says he gradually evolved on the issue and became interested in it. He was not religious; rather, he was curious, and he listened to John-Henry’s occasional updates. “At first Dad reacted just like everybody else. He said, ‘That sounds a little kooky to me.’ Then John-Henry would tell him a few things. He’d be like, ‘Do you know, Dad, that they can now freeze a kidney for up to two days or twenty-four hours, and there will be absolutely minimal damage?’ And Dad would be like, ‘Really? Who discovered that?’ And then when Dad started to realize that all these latest little discoveries, if you will, that John-Henry was presenting were all from cryonics, he would every so often ask, ‘What’s the latest on that cryonics thing?’ ”

As Ted continued his recovery in San Diego, John-Henry took advantage of the city’s proximity to Arizona to take a short flight over to Phoenix and visit Alcor, in suburban Scottsdale.

Founded as a nonprofit in 1972, Alcor had been located there since 1994, after moving from Riverside, California. Its headquarters is at 7895 East Acoma Drive, a gray stucco building in a nondescript industrial park just down the road from the Scottsdale airport. The front door is always locked to guard against unwelcome visitors. At the time of John-Henry’s visit, in the spring of 2001, Alcor had frozen—“suspended” is the official term—forty-six people and several pets. Most of
the humans, by a factor of three to one, are “neuros”: those who had chosen to preserve only their heads.

One of the first things a visitor notices in the lobby is a photo of Robert Ettinger hanging over a plaque that reads,
FATHER OF CRYONICS.
Ettinger, a physics teacher and science-fiction writer, was the author of the 1964 book
The Prospect of Immortality,
which caused a media sensation at the time and launched the cryonics movement. Ettinger’s credo was that “life is better than death, healthy is better than sick, smart is better than stupid, and immortality might be worth the trouble!” His surmise was that death is only a transit station and that quick-freezing a corpse and preserving it that way offered the hope of resuscitation sometime in the future, when rapidly advancing science and medicine could cure whatever disease the person died from, and when cell damage now deemed irreparable might be fixed.

Ettinger went on to found the Cryonics Institute in Michigan and the related Immortalist Society, an education and research group. Soon most cryonics followers paid homage to Ettinger by calling themselves “immortalists.” Alcor displayed Ettinger’s picture to acknowledge his status as a cryonics pioneer, even though his Cryonics Institute was the Arizona company’s main competitor. Ettinger conceded in an interview, however, that Alcor was better organized, better funded, and further along in research than his group, thanks to the contributions of two wealthy benefactors: Saul Kent and Bill Faloon, both of whom John-Henry was soon introduced to.
⁶