The Kid: The Immortal Life of Ted Williams (62 page)

Nelva More was a stunning brunette whom Williams met not long after his return from Korea. A mutual friend had introduced Ted to Nelva, a model and fledgling actress, on August 30, 1953, in Cleveland, following a Red Sox–Indians game.

Nelva, who was then twenty-two, had been born and raised in Greensboro, North Carolina. She left home suddenly after she was raped and everybody seemed to know about it. She went to South Carolina and started working as a carhop. A dress designer spotted her and asked if she wanted to model in Miami. After a stint there, she graduated to New York, modeling clothes and suits in the garment district, then she did runway work. She got a role in
The Fifth Season
, a Broadway play about the fashion business. Then came small movie roles, including one with Henry Fonda in
Stage Struck
. On television, she appeared with Jackie Gleason and the June Taylor Dancers.

Nelva had been in Cleveland on a modeling job when a friend who knew Williams invited her to come with him to the game and meet Ted. She said she knew nothing about baseball but went along anyway. She
met Williams after the game, and they talked for a while. “I thought he was a rugged diamond in the rough,” Nelva recalled. “Not the kind of person I was looking for. I like men who like to dress elegantly. Not Teddy.” But there was a spark. “Ted and I just liked the way we looked at each other, I guess, or I probably gave him a kind of look that [made him decide] to call me back.”

They decided to meet again a week later in Philadelphia, where the Red Sox were scheduled to play the Athletics and where Nelva had a modeling date. They ordered room service at the Warwick Hotel for dinner, made plans to meet again in New York, and the romance was on. Nelva was married but separated from her Brazilian husband when she began her relationship with Williams. Before long she called and told her husband she wouldn’t be returning to Brazil.

Instead she came to Boston to spend a week with Williams. The suite at the Somerset was modest, she thought. “It was about what you’d expect Teddy to have,” she said. “It wasn’t the Plaza or the Waldorf.” Williams wanted her at Fenway Park every day she was there. Sometimes she’d arrive late, and that irritated Ted. “You always arrive late and come sashaying in and want everyone to notice you,” he told her. “I wait until after you a hit a home run,” Nelva replied. “You don’t seem to hit one when I’m there.”

Still, she was thrilled to watch him: “Everyone around probably knew I was with Teddy, but no one stared at me. It was just like I was at any ball game, but as he was going into the dugout he’d give me a smile. I felt kind of proud because I was with him. All the people would lust to get an autograph or photograph. Women were always coming up to him in the hotel lobby or at the ball games. They’d be hollering silly things like women do sometimes. Throwing notes down to the dugout. I think he liked for people to see that he had one on his arm. Or he liked for people to know he could have them.”

At the end of the season, Ted invited Nelva down to Islamorada and, inevitably, they ran into Louise. They were at a restaurant, and Kaufman came right over and sat on Ted’s lap—and just stayed there, Nelva be damned: “I got upset because he didn’t tell her to leave,” Nelva said. “He seemed to be enjoying it.”

Travel to road games meant Williams and More couldn’t spend much extended time together, but they stayed in close touch by phone. “We’d talk on the phone just about every day,” Nelva said. “I might call him or he might call me. Mostly he’d call me.” Nelva found conversation easy. Neither wanted to discuss their families or childhoods, because those
were unhappy times for them both. Instead they talked about their likes and dislikes and what they wanted to accomplish in the future, not what happened in the past. (Doris was a no-go area. Ted didn’t even tell Nelva about the divorce until it was official.) Williams also took her fishing. Once, off Montauk, at the tip of Long Island, Nelva caught a fish and was straining to bring it in. Ted said, “Aw, Nelva, that’s just a little snapper. Hell, you’re working it like it weighs a ton. It’s just a little fish.” So she gave him the rod, and he jerked it once, and it turned out there was a mud shark on the line with the other fish. “Teddy was such a perfectionist in what he chose to do. I had all kinds of his fishing gear. He showed me how to do everything. But once he showed you he expected you to have it and pay attention. If you did not, he said, ‘Forget it; you’re not going to make it if you can’t even pay attention.’ ”

Ted usually insisted they stay in rather than go out to a restaurant, where his presence would cause a scene, but Nelva thought he secretly liked the attention he got at restaurants. “You’re not the greatest if you’re not getting the attention,” she said. “He wanted to be private, but he couldn’t be. It came with the territory. He wanted to have his cake and eat it, too.”

Nelva would stand up to Ted when she thought he was wrong, and his reactions lacked the volcanic quality other women (and men) had encountered after confronting him. She was at Fenway Park once when he spat at the fans after they got on him. She asked why he did that and told him it was stupid.

“I got tired of them booing me,” Williams said. “I thought, ‘Who needs them?’ ”

“You do,” Nelva replied.

They had an understanding that they could date other people, but as Nelva understood the deal, it meant that they couldn’t be intimate with anyone else. She said Ted couldn’t hold to that. When she called him at the Somerset, sometimes she could hear a female voice in the background. “I’d confront him, but he’d just laugh and say, ‘Well, do you not go out with anyone while you’re in New York?’ I said, ‘Yes, but not in my apartment.’ I couldn’t be that stubborn about it. I didn’t want to take a chance on losing him.”
^*

When the Red Sox were on the road, Nelva once told Ted that she supposed he was like a sailor, with a girl in every port. Ted said she could go on the road with him anytime. “He did not say he didn’t have a girl in every port,” she noted.

Still, such dalliances notwithstanding, Williams was enamored enough with Nelva to keep coming back to her. In January of 1957, he called her in New York before he left Islamorada for Boston and, in his own way, proposed.

“Why don’t you meet me in Boston and we’ll talk about something more serious?” Ted said.

“Like what?” Nelva wondered.

“How would you like to get married?”

That was the proposal.

At the time, More was sharing an apartment in New York with her stepmother, who had heard Nelva’s end of the conversation, concluded that a marriage was imminent, and promptly alerted the New York gossip columns.

The next night, Ted called Nelva and couldn’t reach her. He kept calling and calling, assuming the worst, that she was out with another man. Actually, she was at the Brazilian consulate for a party and after that had gone out for breakfast. “He thought I was with someone else. He was very jealous. When he finally reached me, he said, ‘Who the hell were you sleeping with last night?’ ”

She promptly hung up on him. He called back, cursed some more, and again she hung up. If he knew that news of their plans to marry had made the papers, he didn’t mention it.

When Ted arrived in Boston, the reporters were waiting at the airport to ask about news of the nuptials. Williams replied that while Nelva was a nice girl, he wasn’t going to marry her because he’d “had it” with marriage. He then spelled it out: H-A-D I-T. Wounded by Ted’s quote, Nelva struck back when called by a reporter for a response. “I said he wasn’t really my type, wore baggy pants, and I didn’t like his mannerisms,” she said.

They tried to hash things out. Ted finally accepted her explanation about simply going to the party and then breakfast. He said he hadn’t meant the “had it” quote to be as harsh as it appeared—he just didn’t have her explanation at that point. But when Ted told More she’d have
to give up her job if they were going to get married, Nelva replied that she wasn’t ready to do that.

For Williams, that was enough. “I never saw him again,” said Nelva. “I had every desire to go up there and be with him, but I knew it wouldn’t work out.”

Four years later, on the night before Ted was to be married to another woman, he called Nelva to tell her the news. “I wished him all the luck in the world. He said we had some great times. I felt a little pang. I really cared for him. Some people you just don’t get over.”
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Nancy Barnard met Williams in Sarasota during spring training of 1956. She had just turned twenty-five. She was a Tufts University graduate with a geology degree who had a job in Boston advising investment bankers on where oil might be found. “Famous people were brought into my office,” she said. “I had maps all over the wall with pins on them, and people thought I was a curiosity.”

Nancy was attractive—five foot five, with blue eyes and dark hair cut in a pageboy. She loved baseball and had had a box seat at Fenway behind the Red Sox dugout since 1953. (In those days, the box seats behind the dugout were metal folding chairs arranged seven seats across to form a row.) One day in Sarasota, Nancy and a guy she knew from Boston who had a seat near hers at Fenway were chatting in their front-row box at Payne Park when Ted wandered over. All business, he didn’t say hello. He looked at Nancy.

“You have a roster card?” he asked her.

“Yes,” Nancy replied.

“Can I see it?”

“Yes.”

Williams took it and wrote the name of his motel, his bungalow number, and “7:30.”

As it happened, Nancy was staying at the same motel, in a modest room above the office. But she was taken aback by his bold overture. “I did not follow up,” she said. “I don’t automatically wander over to men’s bungalows.” Nevertheless, she saw him around the motel and at the pool. Ted at one end, Nancy at the other. They never spoke. Nothing happened.

The last day Nancy was there she went into a drugstore in town that had a soda fountain. Ted was there having breakfast. He came up and asked her out to dinner. Nancy said she was sorry, but she was flying back to Boston that afternoon. Ted said he’d call her when he returned.

About three weeks later, at a regular-season game in Fenway, an usher behind the dugout came up to Nancy and said, “The Man wants your phone number.”

“Oh, yeah?” she replied, in a tone that suggested he was fresh to have asked, but that she would be happy to comply. She gave the usher both her home and work numbers. A few days later Ted called her office. When the switchboard operator put him through, Ted didn’t say who he was, but she of course recognized his voice.

He asked what she did, and she told him. They spoke for about a half hour, mostly about what exactly a petroleum geologist did. Ted didn’t ask her out exactly, but hinted at it. “See ya at the park,” he said. “Over the top of the dugout.”

There were more telephone calls, notes back and forth from the clubhouse—where would Nancy be at such and such a time? Innocuous stuff, and unproductive. Several attempts at getting together failed for one reason or another.

Then Nancy had a date in New York with Red Sox pitcher Mel Parnell.

Ted heard about it, because Parnell knew that Ted was attracted to Nancy and wanted to rub it in by telling Ted that he’d had a delightful time with her. She hadn’t been back home five minutes when her phone rang. It was Ted, demanding to know why she had gone out with Parnell. “I told him it was none of his business what I did. I had no arrangement with him. I was an independent person and a very independent woman, considering the job I had and the traveling I did. I didn’t feel like I had to answer to anybody.” Williams made no effort to disguise his anger, telling Barnard that her behavior was unconscionable. “I figured I could go to dinner with a twenty-game winner,” said Nancy. “What’s wrong with that? It was just one dinner in New York at Mamma Leone’s, for cripe’s sake. At least he wasn’t a Yankee!”

The next obstacle was put in place by Ted when he began seeing one of the singers on Arthur Godfrey’s show. She would come up from New York and sit near Nancy at the games, and the two became friends. The woman would say she was going to meet Ted at the Polynesian Village in the Somerset Hotel and ask Nancy to wait with her for him. When Williams showed up, Nancy would leave. “She was obviously crazy about him. I didn’t want to hurt her feelings. So I just backed away,” said Nancy.

In the meantime Nancy didn’t remain idle. She went out with another Red Sox player, catcher Sammy White. Ted of course quickly learned of
that and called her to announce, “I don’t know what you see in him. He can’t hit!”
^*

That was priceless, Nancy thought. A classic Teddy Ballgame retort. She told him, “You wouldn’t understand.” For the next several years, this pattern would repeat itself: whenever Ted heard that Nancy was going out with someone, he’d call to berate her.

“I assume I was the burr under his saddle,” Nancy concluded. “A couple of years we played this game, that’s all. I don’t know if Ted ever wanted me. I think he just thought I didn’t show him the proper respect. Most girls were falling down dead in front of him. I guess I seemed mysterious to him.”

For the rest of his career, Ted would glare at Nancy as he came in from left field on his way to the dugout between innings. She was in the stands for Ted’s last home run, then she got married, moved to Michigan, and went on to have three children. She had no contact with him after that until she began writing to him in the mid-to-late ’90s, after he became seriously ill. She’d become an avid fisherwoman, and she wrote him about her experiences fishing in Kenya and Alaska, enclosing pictures. An assistant would write back on Ted’s behalf, saying he was tickled to hear from her.

“All I knew,” she commented wistfully, was that Williams “was someone I was very fond of. If I could give him something to think about besides being sick, I would write. I think I was a disappointment to him. I wasn’t that nice to him, and I think he was hurt, and I’m still sorry about it.”
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Of Williams’s three significant romances in the post-Korea period, the one with Isabel Gilmore would turn out to be the most important. Forty-five years after they met, when Ted lay on his deathbed, Isabel would be at his side, a source of love and solace.