The Kid: The Immortal Life of Ted Williams (139 page)

*
Anita had initially turned down the Grand Slam job but finally accepted it on the condition that she would work for Brian Interland, not John-Henry. Interland was older, and she felt she could learn more about business from him than the inexperienced young Williams.

*
Interland said the Lexuses were leased, not bought, and he acknowledged significant expenses, but denied knowing about any missing funds. “On the $1.8 million, that’s unbelievable,” he said. “I have no idea of that. That’s shocking. I don’t recall that at all. When we were involved, we were not billing anything like $1.8 million.”

*
John-Henry stopped payment on a few paychecks that were in the pipeline to McWalter, but a sympathetic Helman found a way to make the checks good, unbeknownst to young Williams.

*
After the nomination was settled, Ted unsuccessfully lobbied Bush’s father to have his son choose McCain as his running mate.

*
Williams was watching the Red Sox play the Angels at Fenway Park with his cook, Robert Hogerheide, a former Navy chef, when they heard the announcers wish him a happy birthday. So Ted called Fenway, and they patched him straight through to the TV booth. “They broadcast the conversation right on the air as we were watching,” said Hogerheide. “It was great!”

*
Meanwhile, to honor Ted, the Marine Commandant had recently promoted him from captain to colonel. Williams was thrilled by this and loved for his caretakers or friends to call him Colonel.

*
The sales rep also accompanied John-Henry on several fruitless nonporn sales pitches in which the son tried to leverage the father’s name to get business for Hitter, including proposals to the Detroit Tigers owner, Mike Ilitch, and to the Jimmy Fund in Boston. John-Henry was trying to persuade both organizations to hire Hitter to provide their Internet services and website design.

*
Gard was fired in 2000 for allegedly getting Ted to sign autographs and then selling them without permission, according to Eric Abel, the Williams family lawyer. Gard denied he was fired and said he quit for health reasons.

*
Actually, Dluhy believed she was fibbing in giving that answer. She and some of the caretakers knew that Ted’s big house on the hill, which he had built in 1989, had been refinanced, and they assumed he no longer owned it. But he did. Records show the original mortgage was for $260,000 in 1989. The note was paid off in 1998 and a new $240,000 mortgage taken out, still in Ted’s name. The purpose of the refinancing was to take advantage of lower interest rates, not to take out equity, according to Eric Abel.

*
One deep-pocketed member of the embryonic Ted–and–John-Henry group was Gerry Rittenberg, the Party City owner and Williams memorabilia collector. Rittenberg tried to round up some venture capital tycoons he knew, and he said they expressed interest, but only if they could meet with Ted himself. Williams, however, was in no condition physically to meet with any possible investors, so the John-Henry gambit never got off the ground.

*
In 1991, Kent and Faloon were indicted on multiple counts of importing drugs not approved for sale in the United States, conspiracy, and dispensing drugs without prescriptions. The two men had a long wrangle with the Food and Drug Administration and the Justice Department, but the US attorney’s office in Fort Lauderdale ultimately dropped the charges against both.

*
Dolores caused a stir at the hospital after she slipped Ted some sort of homeopathic remedy that caused various monitors and machines attached to Williams to light up in alarm. She was asked to leave.

*
The meeting would be chronicled in David Halberstam’s engaging, short book
The Teammates.

*
Flavin was also a fixture at Fenway Park, where he was known as the Poet Laureate of the Red Sox. In that capacity, Flavin was best known for his rendition of “Teddy at the Bat,” his knockoff of Ernest Lawrence Thayer’s timeless “Casey at the Bat,” wherein Flavin substituted the Kid for Casey—but, of course, Ted did not strike out. In 2013, Flavin was named the Red Sox’s lead public-address announcer.

*
Connolly—who’d worked the Bill Clinton–Gennifer Flowers beat, among others—had employed John-Henry as his legman in early 1989, when he was stalking Jane Fonda on behalf of
Star
magazine. John-Henry was in California trying to play baseball at the time, and Connolly knew that young Williams had dated Vanessa Vadim, Fonda’s daughter from her first marriage, to the French director Roger Vadim.
Star
was chasing a story that Fonda was soon to divorce her second husband, Tom Hayden, and Connolly asked John-Henry to meet with the actress, whom he knew via Vanessa, to see what he could find out. He came up with enough information to help the
Star
story, and Connolly paid him $3,000 in cash. Fonda and Hayden were divorced later that year.

*
Heer’s wife was a singer and had once helped Bobby-Jo record her country song in honor of Ted, “I Love You, Dad.”

*
The expert, Linda J. Hart of Miami, concluded that both the pact and Ted’s signature had been written before John-Henry folded the document and stored it in his car. She said Ted and John-Henry had signed using the same pen, while Claudia used a different pen. And though two samples of Ted’s signature included in the report—samples from the night of October 30, 2000, when he checked into the hospital—appeared to the naked eye to be much weaker and different in several respects from the signature on the pact, which was dated three days later, Hart concluded in her report that there were “no significant differences observed.”

*
Eric Abel said he doubted John-Henry was aware of restrictions governing the transfer of Ted’s body to Alcor under Florida law, but he acknowledged that he hadn’t advised John-Henry of those restrictions.

*
While Alcor provided me with a tour of its facility and made its chief operating officer at the time, Tanya Jones, available to discuss its general practices, it declined all comment on the Williams case, citing patient confidentiality restrictions.

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Copyright © 2013 by Ben Bradlee, Jr.

Cover design by Wendy Lai

Cover photograph courtesy of the Griffin Museum of Photography

Author photograph by Bill Brett

Cover copyright © 2013 by Hachette Book Group, Inc.

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First ebook edition: December 2013

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ISBN 978-0-316-08448-2

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