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John-Henry - The Kid's only son In many ways, a man very much like his father By Joseph P. Kahn, Globe Staff, 7/21/2002
Williams was playing in the team's inaugural Old-Timers Game. His only son, then 13, was an honorary batboy. When 63-year old Teddy Ballgame made a shoestring catch in left field - who said he couldn't play defense? - the crowd roared. John-Henry basked in the applause. For one of the first times in his young life, he wasn't just face-to-face with The Kid. He was brushing elbows with the Legend, too. ''It was the day on which Ted Williams began to get his son back,'' wrote biographer Ed Linn, 10 years later. That process of reclaiming his son would have profound consequences for both. As Linn observed, John-Henry, the product of a marriage that fell apart when he was just 4, had already begun to ''force the issue'' of reconnecting with his largely absent father. Over his mother's objections, he begged to attend the game. At the same time, Dolores Williams was also recognizing the need for father and son to get closer during a pivotal time in John-Henry's life. And in his father's life, too. ''The relationship with his son has transformed Ted,'' Linn wrote. ''On that, everyone is in complete agreement.'' In light of what has transpired since the slugger's death on July 5 - the controversy over the disposal of his remains, the family feud over his will, the vilification of John-Henry, now 33, as an opportunist, a parasite, or worse - there has been nothing close to agreement on another issue: What did father and son actually find in one another that made their subsequent bond so strong? How did that relationship color choices each would make in the latter stages of Ted Williams's life? And what transformed a boy who barely knew his father growing up into an adult whose recent behavior - pursuing a quixotic shot at pro baseball, sleeping in his father's bed after he died - seems more than mere idolatry? John-Henry isn't talking publicly, having gone into seclusion at the family home in Hernando, Fla. He declined to be interviewed for this article. However, as interviews with others connected to his past suggest, the roots of his current troubles are far more tangled than some would portray them. A closer look at John-Henry's life and the complicated family dynamics that shaped him suggests that many of the unsavory traits associated with the son - insecurity, belligerence, haughtiness, a need for control - may be fairly traced to aspects of his upbringing and specifically to his father, a larger-than-life figure, to be sure, but also a belligerent, haughty, controlling and, in many ways, insecure man whose dependency on John-Henry seemed to deepen rather than diminish over time. ''Ted needed John-Henry as much as he needed Ted,'' observes Dr. Jeffrey Borer, a New York cardiologist who began treating Ted Williams four years ago. Without John-Henry, Borer flatly asserts, Ted would not have made it through the last 18 months of his life. Perhaps not even the last eight years, following a stroke he suffered in 1994. ''If I ever get that sick,'' says Borer, ''I hope my own kids are that attentive.'' Their mutual dependency was ''a two-way street,'' says David McCarthy, a retired New Hampshire state trooper whom Ted asked to watch over his son and who grew close to both men. ''John-Henry had a definite hero-worship toward his father. To get Ted's recognition was everything for him. And Ted loved that boy.'' Many details of the father-son relationship are already well-known. Some, however, are not. Ted Williams never had much time for fathering - or much patience for married life. He was married three times, the last time in 1968 to Dolores Wettach, a former Vogue model and nurse who grew up on a Vermont farm. The couple met on an airplane; she did not even know he was a former ballplayer. Yet she shared his passion for fishing and hunting and for blunt, off-color language that often turned the warmest of Ted's relationships into expletive-laced shouting matches. John-Henry was born on Aug. 27, 1968, three years before sister Claudia. His father gave him the name because it was a ''strong one,'' Ted said, like the steel-driving man of popular song. (In much of the reportage, the hyphen had inaccurately disappeared). His father returned to baseball the next year as manager of the Washington Senators. Within four years, the length of his Senators contract, the marriage was over. Dolores Williams moved to a 60-acre farm near Putney, Vt., where her children grew up far from their father's world. Ted decamped to a fishing shack in Florida. He mostly kept in touch by telephone. Ed Linn writes that Dolores had ''come to hate baseball people'' and kept her son away from them. During his last year with the Senators, Ted could see that ''John-Henry was getting away with certain things he didn't like,'' writes Linn. ''`I can see he's going to be a discipline problem,''' Ted is quoted as saying. ''`I warned him a couple of times, and finally I gave him a good slap in the fanny, and the kid looks at me like this' - trembling lower lip - `and says, ''You go back to the ballpark.'' That was the identification he had of me. I was the voice from the ballpark.''' Dolores Williams filed for divorce in 1972, charging Ted with having ''made life unbearable'' for her with his ''constant obscene criticism.'' Visits between Ted and his two young children were severely limited thereafter. One family friend compares the Vermont farm life of Dolores, John-Henry, and Claudia Williams to the Waltons, ''doing all the chores that farm kids do.'' Located a few miles from the Putney village center, down an unpaved road, the property is still in Dolores Williams's name. Last week, a padlocked gate stretched across the driveway. There was no sign of activity behind it. A note left by a reporter in her mailbox and a voice-mail message garnered no response. Two people who were in touch with Williams in recent months confirm, however, that Dolores Williams visited her former husband in San Diego after his heart surgery last year and again in Florida just weeks before his death. By all accounts, the relationship between the exes remained chilly as their children grew up. ''She did not speak favorably of her ex-husband,'' says Bob Long, headmaster at Vermont Academy when John-Henry attended high school there in the mid-1980s. ''And they were never on campus together. Knowing his old man was a legend - yet growing up apart from him, and with a mother who probably said his dad was evil - no doubt added to the complexity of the situation for John- Henry.'' Johnny Pesky, one of Ted's closest Red Sox friends, remembers John-Henry as a ''very friendly kid.'' Not a great athlete, says Pesky, whose Swampscott home John-Henry often visited as a teenager, but not a troubled adolescent, either. Pesky's niece, Joanne DeVeau, 44, also spent time with John-Henry during spring training visits to Florida. ''All of a sudden, he showed up when he was about 13,'' says DeVeau, who lives in Lynn. ''He was a mischievous kid, with a little wild streak, maybe. But to me anyway, he was just acting his age.'' After John-Henry got burned severely in an accident on the farm, DeVeau visited him in the hospital. ''He was pretty funny about it,'' she remembers. ''He gave give me a tour of the other wards and told horror stories about the kids who were worse off than he was. I never saw Ted there, though.'' The incident, which has never fully been detailed, is reliably said to have involved a cat that the youngster found on his farm. Not a live cat but a dead one. John-Henry tried to cremate the animal in a 55-gallon drum, using lighter fluid. However, the fumes ignited prematurely, burning his hands and chest. In all likelihood this happened on Nov. 11, 1984, a date referred to in Williams's senior high school yearbook entry as ''A black cat on Sunday.'' Dolores may have had other reasons for nudging her son back toward his father at that time. John-Henry was initially enrolled at Vermont Academy as a day student. Yet he moved onto campus for his junior and senior years. ''The situation at home, as I understand it, was tough and traumatic,'' says Long, the academy headmaster. ''There were relationship issues with his mom. She was rather eccentric and unpredictable, you might say.'' And although Ted wasn't around much, either, according to Long, when he did show up it was often unannounced. ''We all knew about his celebrity,'' says Long. ''But most of John-Henry's peers didn't even know who Ted Williams was.'' John-Henry was an ''outgoing and good-looking'' young man, says Chip Wolcott, a former admissions director and wrestling coach on whose team John-Henry competed. ''A little geeky but not a nerd. And certainly not mean-spirited. A little bit of a mama's boy, a bit of a whiner at times. But never totally unpopular.'' Earning mostly Bs and Cs in school, according to Wolcott, John-Henry did respectably well on his SATs (scoring about 1,100) and had no disciplinary problems or issues with drugs or alcohol. He won a headmaster's award at graduation, which Ted attended with his then girlfriend, Louise Kaufman. Kaufman, a divorcee, had raised three sons of her own. She lived with Ted from the mid-'70s until her death in 1997, and according to at least one Williams relative, grew to dislike and distrust John-Henry. Ted, who had barely scraped through high school, personally took his son around to visit colleges. In Richard Ben Cramer's 1986 Esquire profile, the retired slugger said they visited Babson College but that he was put off by the coed dorms and sexually explicit graffiti on the walls. ''I like to see a place with a little more standards than that,'' Ted told Cramer. They later visited Bates College. Not only did John-Henry fall in love with it, according to Cramer's retelling, but Ted boasted about how impressed he was when he was belatedly recognized as, well, Ted Williams. ''I was shocked when John-Henry got into Bates,'' Wolcott admits. ''But I heard Ted went with him and signed a bunch of baseballs in the admissions office, so who knows?'' As far as sports went, adds Wolcott, Ted realized early on that his son wasn't much of a ballplayer. ''He knew education was John-Henry's only way,'' Wolcott avers. Another Ted Williams - the slugger's 50-year-old nephew, who's a graphic designer in Oakland - doesn't know John-Henry personally. But having lost his own father, Dan (Ted's brother), to leukemia in 1960, he says, and knowing that the Williams brothers were themselves products of a broken marriage and a distant father, his Uncle Ted was no doubt ''trying to make up for his failings as a father,'' says Williams. Much of Ted's rudeness and arrogance was his ''defense mechanism for his shyness, the poverty of his youth, and lack of education,'' says his nephew, whose own college education was paid for by Ted. ''Both he and my father grew up without much adult supervision or role models to follow. Fortunately, Ted had baseball. My father struggled all his life finding a place in the world and was not a very good father because of it. I doubt Ted knew how to do it, either.'' The Babson story makes an interesting coda to what allegedly happened with John-Henry at Bates, where he spent three semesters (in '86 and '87) before transferring to the University of Maine at Orono. According to James Vinick, who befriended Ted and owns the rights to his autobiography ''My Turn At Bat,'' Ted spoke about yanking John-Henry out of Bates after spotting some sexually frank writing on a bulletin board. ''He didn't like the permissive attitudes, I guess,'' remembers Vinick. ''The funny thing is, when Ted lived at the Somerset Hotel during his playing days, the women were lined up down the hallway from his room. Knowing the way they flocked to him, Ted's language and his attitude [toward women], it was shocking to hear him say that.'' How shocking really was it, though? As John Underwood wrote in The New York Times recently, the retired slugger was ''sensitive about his education'' long after his playing days. Like his stance on sexual liberation, the message to his son may have been: Do as I say, and not as I did. Transferring to the University of Maine at Orono, he earned a marketing degree in December 1991. Officials there won't speak on the record, but they say he failed to make the baseball team after trying out for it and that he lived off-campus in Bangor. ''He kept a very low profile,'' says one official. ''Didn't really socialize here, didn't let people know he was the son of Ted Williams.'' A ''pretty good student,'' according to this official, John-Henry was liked by his professors but for one annoying trait: He carried a cellphone to class, one of the few students to do so, and it was a distraction as it often rang. John-Henry took off for a semester in 1989 (against Ted's wishes) to play semipro baseball in California. Not much came of it, and a later tryout with the Toronto Blue Jays was similarly unproductive. But a hint of troubles to come was witnessed by Ted's second cousin, Manuel Herrera, who housed John-Henry for three months at his home in Carpinteria, Calif., near Santa Barbara. According to Herrera, John- Henry was searching for something to do - baseball, acting, race-car driving - while boasting of the $2,000 a month Ted was providing him. He even met with a producer about playing the lead role in the film version of his father's life story. (Nothing came of that, either). More disturbingly, says Herrera, he said his dad would ''give me anything I wanted'' and that he, John-Henry, was waiting for Ted to die so he could ''get all his money.'' ''He knew his dad's weaknesses, as most kids do,'' says Herrera, who is now retired and lives in Utah. ''And he said he was going to get whatever he wanted.'' Angry over unpaid phone bills, Herrera eventually asked John- Henry to leave - and never saw him again. In a conversation with Louise Kaufman, Ted's girlfriend, Herrrera says she told him, ''`Ted doesn't know how to raise kids. He doesn't have a clue. The public owns him, and that's sad. But it's just the way it is.''' Back at college, John-Henry came up with his first commercial venture, selling 50th anniversary T-shirts commemorating his dad's .406 batting average in 1951. He moved into a Beacon Street apartment and struck up a relationship with Anita Lovely. The couple dated for several years. They were supposed to marry on 9/9/99, says Johnny Pesky, but John-Henry called it off. ''Ted wanted it to happen,'' says Pesky. ''But Anita got tired of waiting.'' Other sources indicate that the two still maintain a close relationship. ''He was like a little lost soul,'' reflects Joanne DeVeau. Brian O'Connor, another friend of Ted's who helped John-Henry get started in business, won't even speculate what motivated Ted as a father - guilt, misplaced trust, his own unrealized dreams, or something else. ''I can't answer that,'' says O'Connor. He adds, ''Ted was always talking more about Claudia's accomplishments, I'll say that. She was the finished product, while John-Henry was more the work in progress.'' And so it rests for the moment with a lawsuit in Florida, a body in Arizona, and a memorial gathering in Fenway Park tomorrow that none of Ted Williams's children will be attending - 20 years after an improbable shoestring catch and the crowd's roar ringing in the ears of a 13-year-old boy. Joseph P. Kahn can be reached at jkahn@globe.com.
This story ran on page A1 of the Boston Globe on 7/21/2002.
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ohn-Henry Williams's first visit to Fenway Park, on May 1, 1982, was memorable in more ways than one. Not only was he entering the arena where his famous father had fashioned a brilliant Hall of Fame career and countless other fathers had brought their sons to bond over a baseball game. The day also marked the first time in 22 years that Ted Williams had put on a Red Sox uniform and performed before the hometown fans.