The Kid: The Immortal Life of Ted Williams (63 page)

They had met during spring training in 1957, one year after Ted had encountered Nancy Barnard. Isabel taught art at a private school in Sarasota. Her true name was Isabella, and friends called her Izzie, but Ted settled on Isabel, with one
l
. She’d been born in Crozet, Virginia, outside Charlottesville, where her father grew apples on a 350-acre orchard. She was five foot four, a brunette with a pleasant Virginia lilt in her voice. She was divorced with two sons, and she later would settle in Alabama, where her southern accent grew more pronounced.

Gilmore met Ted at a performance of the Sailor Circus, Sarasota’s youth circus, also known as the Greatest Little Show on Earth. Isabel was there watching her boys—one was a clown, and the other played in the band. Ted was there with friends and was introduced to Isabel.

“He was very nice and polite, but I didn’t think anything further, because I wasn’t a model,” she remembered. “I was a schoolteacher. And baseball players go for Marilyn Monroe–type looks. I was shocked when he called: the very first thing he did is he showed up at the front door unannounced with a quart of ice cream and said he’d like to talk to me and get to know the family better. It was quite a surprise.” She thought it would be impolite not to invite him in, so she did.

Isabel found Ted charming and solicitous of her, not at all the bad boy he was cracked up to be. They’d go for long walks, play checkers and chess, and dine out if Ted could avoid causing a hullabaloo. “I didn’t think of him as a celebrity. He was a nice, attentive person who enjoyed my company and the children’s.”

There were some things about Ted that Isabel and her boys—Grant, then ten, and Marshall, then seven—did find jarring, like his swearing. Isabel would cheerfully say, “Not in our presence, please!” Once, Marshall heard a few choice words upstairs as he was getting ready for bed and yelled down, “Mr. Williams, we don’t allow curse words in our house.” Ted blushed and said okay.

Isabel was an active Presbyterian, and one Sunday she suggested to Ted that he come to church with her. “He enjoyed it, but I don’t know that he agreed with it. He was not really an atheist. I think his vocabulary made people feel that. He’d always say, ‘Aw, Jesus Christ!’ I believe he used those expressions because a lot of the baseball players do. They’re not using it sacrilegiously, but out of habit. I think also because his mother was so overly religious, he was fighting back.” Once, Isabel took the boys to Key West, and Ted invited them to visit him in Islamorada on their way back. “He thought that was the most wonderful place in the world. We were talking about how beautiful it was, and he said when he died he wanted to be cremated and have his ashes sprinkled in the sea there.”

Isabel could really only see Williams play during spring training, not during the regular season, because she had to be home for the boys. But she loved watching him play and followed him closely when he was away. “I’m very practical and down-to-earth and sincere,” Gilmore said, “so I didn’t do a lot of oohing and aahing and carrying on. He appreciated that. Everything in our relationship was very refined and on the up-and-up. I wasn’t running after anyone.”

She liked the way his mind worked. Ted was curious, a reader who could stump her on any history question. (They didn’t agree on politics, so they avoided that topic.) She did, however, get him to talk about his childhood a bit and could tell it had been painful. Doris also came up. He’d tell Isabel “how he’d made mistakes and she made mistakes, and they were young. The life he was living was just too much for her. But he never said anything unkind about her. He never said anything unkind about anyone.”

Isabel thought Ted respected women “if they demanded it. I demanded it. I expected it. If I didn’t get it, the heck with him. I wouldn’t care if he was president of the United States. But there are times when one person has to give in to another, and Ted expected a woman to give in to him.” Yet he also loathed the fluttering surrender of the sycophant.

As things heated up, they saw each other as often as possible and spoke on the phone two or three times a week. He’d send her gifts, such as flowers and perfume, a plastic statue of himself swinging a bat, and even a painting of himself holding a salmon, which he inscribed: “To Isabel, with all my love, Ted Williams.” The boys got boxing gloves, plus bats and balls, even though they weren’t serious about baseball and didn’t know much about the game. Still, Ted tried to interest both boys in baseball and had them come up to the summer camp that he ran in Lakeville, Massachusetts, south of Boston. Ted made a splashy arrival and took Marshall and Grant off in a limousine, making the other campers jealous, and he gave them other perks, such as arranging for a major-league scout to evaluate them. It was for naught. The boys asked to leave the camp after just a few weeks.

But Williams didn’t seem to mind, and he tried to engage them in other ways. He gave the boys their first fishing rods and plenty of tutorials in how to use them. And in the summer of 1958, he took them to the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum in Washington. Grant was interested in aeronautics and was dazzled by Ted’s knowledge of planes. He later did a painting of the Panther jet Ted had flown in Korea and presented it to him.

“Ted always asked me a million questions about everything,” Grant explained. “For two reasons—one to find out more information, but the other was to test me, to see what I knew.”

Marshall also felt Ted’s warmth. “When Ted was connecting with you, you could tell he really liked kids. Yet he was a perfectionist, and he was playing ball. So there was a bit of him that was hard. He was a star and a celebrity, and that gives you an essence that makes it hard to be
around. But he could click that off.” And years later, when Marshall’s own son came down with Hodgkin’s lymphoma, Ted would be there for him as well. “My son came down with this cancer out of nowhere. Ted called and talked to him and gave him his words of encouragement. To my son this was a god from baseball calling.”
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“We were without a father,” said Grant. “My mother had divorced when I was two years old. I’ll always remember Ted as very honest and straightforward and generous. He represented, to me, striving for perfection and doing well in whatever you do in life.”
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But though Ted genuinely cared about Grant and Marshall, as he got more and more serious about their mother, he couldn’t picture them all living together under one roof. He was still a major leaguer, flying hither and yon. If he was going to be with Isabel, he wanted to be able take her on trips and go wherever they pleased. The boys would prevent that. So in 1959, when Williams asked Isabel to marry him, the proposal came with a big condition: that the boys would have to be sent off to boarding school.

“It sort of came out of the blue, because I thought that he would probably marry someone in the spotlight, too,” Isabel said. “I can’t remember where he did it. He didn’t get down on his knees or anything! Just in a conversation.”

Isabel thought it was a compliment that Ted proposed, but she explained that she intended to personally raise her boys and was not going to send them to boarding school. Isabel told him she wanted a conventional home with her boys—along with Bobby-Jo. Indeed, she would have said yes, she made clear, if he’d agreed to living with the kids. They were all about the same age, and Bobby-Jo needed a good home, too.

“You’re the first person that’s ever said no to me,” Ted said, not mentioning Nancy Barnard. But maybe he thought she was in a different category. He’d never proposed to Nancy, after all.

“No, I don’t believe that,” said Isabel.

“Yes, it’s true. You are. I can get anybody I want.”

Isabel thought Ted, though disappointed, respected her decision. After all, in her commitment to her sons, she had shown precisely the sort of loyalty and devotion that his mother had failed to show him and his brother when they were growing up.

Ted never forgot Isabel, and she never forgot him. “I thought Ted was a terrific person and very, very kind,” she said.

N
ot ten minutes into his first day of spring training on March 1, 1954, Williams broke the collarbone on his left shoulder.

He had been shagging flies in left field when Hoot Evers hit a line drive in his direction. Ted jogged in for it, but when the ball started to sink he tried to catch it off his shoe tops with both hands. Losing his balance, he did an awkward quarter-gainer, then tried to rescue himself with a somersault, all to no avail.

“I heard something pop when I fell,” he told the writers later.
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“I knew I had a broken shoulder.” Dr. Russell Sullivan, the Boston orthopedist who had driven up to Sarasota from Islamorada with Williams that morning after completing a fishing trip, rushed onto the field to tend to his friend. After X-rays revealed the collarbone break, Sullivan estimated that Williams would be out for two months.

Some of the writers noted that at 215 pounds, Ted was the heaviest he had ever been, and they chided him for not doing enough off-season running to keep his weight down and his legs fit. “At least he was hurt hustling,” wrote Harold Kaese of the
Globe,
stretching for a silver lining. Kaese did some further research and found that only in 1949 had Williams been able to play an entire season without missing a game.
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Various injuries had kept him out of 138 games thus far in his career, and in thirty-five others he had been relegated to pinch-hitting duty because of one ailment or another—more than a season’s worth of games in total.

Ted flew to Boston for surgery, and his collarbone was reinforced with a four-inch steel pin. Restless while recuperating, Williams decided to stir the pot by giving a long interview to two New York writers, one of whom—Joe Reichler of the Associated Press—was a favorite of his.
Reichler and his collaborator, Joe Trimble, turned the interview into a three-part series in the
Saturday Evening Post,
for which Ted was reportedly paid $25,000.

In the first installment, Williams made big news by announcing that 1954 would be his final season. “This is my last year in baseball,” he began.
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“Even before I broke my collarbone on my first day of spring training last month, I had made up my mind to quit at the end of this season.” He said if it weren’t for the Korean War, he probably would have already been out of the game, claiming that he’d told Tom Yawkey he initially intended to have 1953 be his last season. He noted he would be thirty-six years old that October (actually, his birthday was in August). That would make him “an old man” as ballplayers go, and he didn’t want to embarrass himself. “I have a lot of pride in my .348 lifetime batting average,” Williams said. “The minute I find I can’t go at top speed or that baseball is no longer fun, I’ll know it’s time to quit. That time will come next fall.” Then he’d go back to Miami and tend to his fishing-tackle business, he said.

Williams’s retirement announcement roiled Boston, but it was greeted with widespread skepticism by fans, teammates, and a press corps that quickly concluded that one of Ted’s true motives in the story was to stick it to them yet again by giving his scoop to two out-of-town reporters. Harold Kaese said Williams could easily change his mind if he had a good season and would come under considerable pressure to do so from Yawkey, Cronin, and Fred Corcoran, “who also has to eat.”
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Kaese’s
Globe
colleague, beat writer Hy Hurwitz, predicted that Ted would keep playing as long as he could be in the lineup regularly, hit well, and draw a top salary. Hurwitz noted that Williams himself had said as much earlier that year at the sportsmen’s show: “When the day comes that I have to sit on the bench, to hell with it, I’ll quit.” And, predictably, the columnists teed off on him.
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Bill Cunningham said Williams was still a “sour, mixed up kid,” while Dave Egan wrote that “the Red Sox would be well served by Williams if he should make his retirement retroactive.”

In fact, while Williams always delighted in antagonizing the Boston writers, that was just a collateral benefit of the story; his main goal in the piece was likely to force his wife’s hand in court. Doris and her attorney, Earl Curry, had been taking a hard line in the increasingly contentious divorce proceedings, moving to attach a share of Ted’s future baseball earnings. If he retired, there would be no future earnings available, and Doris might be more motivated to negotiate a settlement.

Ted began taking batting practice in late April, about six weeks after
his surgery. When he returned to the starting lineup on May 16 in Detroit for a doubleheader against the Tigers, he put on a show. After getting three singles in four times up in the first game, Ted surprised his teammates by opting to play the second game, too, and he proceeded to go 5–5, with two home runs and a double. That was 8–9 on the day—“the greatest batting show I have ever seen,” said Curt Gowdy.
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“Here’s a guy who had had no spring training. I don’t think he ever had a better day.” The Sox lost both games, 7–6 and 9–8, but few seemed to care.

The team would mail in the rest of the season and finish fourth, forty-two games out of first place. Indeed, in 1954—and throughout the rest of the decade, until the end of Williams’s career—the Red Sox would be a case study in mediocrity, never finishing higher than third and never less than twelve games behind the winning team. And the winning team would always be the mighty Yankees, except for 1954 and 1959, when the Indians and White Sox respectively captured the pennant. It was Ted who supplied virtually all the sizzle, the only reason for most fans to come out to the ballpark during those seven sullen seasons.

After his May 16 star turn, Williams supplied more dramatics the following month when the Red Sox traveled to New York for an exhibition game against the National League Giants at the Polo Grounds on June 28. As was customary in such matchups, there was a home-run contest beforehand. Ted and three of his supporting cast would go against Willie Mays, who was just emerging as a superstar, and three other Giants.

Each player would have a chance to hit five fair balls, and the one with the most home runs would be the winner. None of the first three Giants hit more than two, then Mays came up and hit three. The first two Red Sox each hit one home run, and the third hit two. Then Williams strode to the plate, the last to bat, and the air crackled with expectation as he dug in against his favorite batting-practice pitcher, bull pen coach Paul Schreiber, a right-hander. Ted let the first two pitches go by, as was his wont, to size up Schreiber’s stuff and to get acclimated. He smashed the next pitch into the lower deck in right field. Ted pulled Schreiber’s next offering down the line just inside the foul pole for home run number two. Then came a shot into the upper deck to tie Mays at three. The crowd rose to its feet, and players in both dugouts moved to the top step as the drama built. In came the pitch, and out flew the ball, deeper into the upper deck this time. That was four swings, four home runs. Could he make it five for five? Williams let one pitch go—too low. Then he turned on the next one and crushed a rising line drive high in the sky. The ball struck off the base of the light towers and bounced down into
the stands. The fans and players from both sides gave Ted a five-minute standing ovation. “Unbelievable!” said Red Sox rookie pitcher Russ Kemmerer. “I’ve never seen anything like it and most likely never will.”
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Kemmerer’s shock and awe were typical of the way Williams’s teammates viewed him. Most were much younger than he, the product of a youth movement begun by manager Lou Boudreau in 1952, when Ted went off to Korea, and now they were getting their first extended time with the Great Man. For his part, Williams, in his first full season back since the war, was still adapting to all the new faces. He missed his old pals Bobby Doerr, Johnny Pesky, and Dom DiMaggio. (Doerr had retired after the 1951 season, Pesky had been traded to the Tigers in June of 1952, shortly after Ted went back into the service, and DiMaggio had retired suddenly in 1953.) Instead, there were players like Milt Bolling, who took over the starting shortstop job in 1953 at age twenty-two and stayed with the Red Sox until he was traded in 1957; Billy Consolo, the California bonus baby who came directly to the team in 1953 from high school, at the age of eighteen, and would remain the team’s utility infielder until 1959, when he was traded to Washington; Ted Lepcio, the starting second baseman in 1954 who had debuted in 1952 at age twenty-two; and the talented and voluble Jimmy Piersall, who had become the starting right fielder in 1953 at twenty-three and would move over to center, adjacent to Ted, by 1955.

Of course Williams gave his young teammates hitting tips. He would always counsel against swinging at the first pitch. Better to let the pitcher show you as much as he was willing to. And look for the fastball, then adjust if you get the curve, Ted would say. The players noticed that Williams was so quick he could do the reverse: look for the curve but catch up to a fastball if it came. “I stayed in baseball for forty-three years,” said Bolling.
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“I saw a lot of players, and he made it seem like the rest of us were Little Leaguers and he was the only major leaguer.”

Consolo was closely attuned to the clubhouse dynamics surrounding Williams. The players all had a single wire-cage locker, but Ted had a double-width steel locker in addition to his chain-link unit. The players were each issued two white home uniforms and two gray uniforms for the road. One day while Consolo was idling in front of his locker, he noticed an Italian tailor come in and start tending to Ted. He was tailoring the Kid’s uniforms. None of the rest of the players had fitted uniforms. Then there was the matter of leaving Fenway. After the game Ted would go to his car and try to drive out of the parking lot. Inevitably, there would be a sea of people, and it would take him a minute to move
barely a foot, so Williams got in the habit of leaving the ballpark early if the game was decided, or if there was basically no chance he’d get up again. Consolo might often be called to pinch-run for him, then Gene Stephens would go in and play left field.

When he played, Consolo would usually bat leadoff. “When I played and I got out, Ted would be waiting for me. He was going to ask me what pitch I got out on. I was only nineteen and I didn’t know what it was. I was just happy when I hit the ball.” Consolo soon learned another Williams idiosyncrasy after he got on base and Ted hit a home run. “I’m standing at home plate all excited like it was a high school game. I put out my hand and he went right on by me. I didn’t know what to do so I ran back to the dugout. I went to one of the trainers and told him what happened. He said, ‘No, the Kid don’t shake.’ I learned my lesson.”
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Williams was the team’s de facto hitting coach years before there was any such official position. He would critique a teammate’s swing or a time at bat, try and help someone out of a slump, share information about enemy pitchers, and expect his fellow hitters to give him any morsel they could in return. “I learned to listen to Ted because I might pick up some things that could help me out,” remembered Frank Malzone, the longtime Red Sox third baseman who came up in 1955 and was a starter from 1957 to 1965. “Like being patient at the plate, not being too anxious, or swinging at the first ball you see. When I would swing at the first pitch from a relief pitcher, Ted would say, ‘You dumb dago, how do you know what he’s throwing?’ I was an aggressive hitter, and I couldn’t wait all of the time. He hated that.”
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Williams would be brutally frank in his assessment of a hitter’s performance. Lepcio, a Red Sox infielder from 1952 to 1959, would be ready for Ted’s comments when he returned to the dugout after making an out. “I used to tell him the truth,” Lepcio said. “If [I’d been] shitty, I’d tell him. And most of the time he’d agree: ‘You’re right, it was a real horseshit swing,’ he’d say.”
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If Ted was on deck, there wasn’t always time for a full debriefing if the hitter ahead of him had made an out. But he still expected that the hitter, on his way back to the dugout, would give him some sense of what the pitcher was throwing. If Williams then failed at the plate, he sometimes would blame his teammate for inadequate reporting. Once, in 1957, Indians reliever Don Mossi had just struck out Billy Klaus, then the Red Sox starting shortstop. “As I was heading back to the dugout, I told Ted, ‘I don’t have shit today, he’s throwing good and hard,’ ” Klaus recalled. “Ted had a serious look on his face as I went into the dugout.
Mossi struck out Ted, too, and he was furious when he came back into the dugout. He said to me, ‘Billy, you little shit, you didn’t tell me he was throwing that hard.’ ”
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When Ted’s pupils weren’t receiving his tips, they would watch him carefully when he came to the plate, both during batting practice and in games. During one game, Consolo and Lepcio were sitting on the bench next to Mickey Vernon, the longtime Washington Senators first baseman who had come to Boston in 1956 and 1957. They watched as Ted hit a line drive so hard it nearly beheaded the opposing first baseman. When Consolo and Lepcio wondered how it was possible for anyone to hit a ball that hard, Vernon piped up: “Listen, when this guy first came up he used to hit three shots a day like that. I remember when I played first base against him, I used to ask the manager not to let me hold the runners on first because that s.o.b. hit them down there so fast you didn’t have a chance.”
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