Recalling Louise Kaufman
By John B. Holway
In 1981, 41 years after my first, boyhood look at Williams in 1940 and 24 after my first interview with him in ’57, I drove into the palm-studded driveway of Ted’s retreat on the Florida Keys.
Ted’s companion, Louise Kaufman, a merry Barbara Bush look-alike, was puttering around, putting the house in order.
They had just returned from a summer of fishing in Canada and she apologized that he had just left to do some fishing in Jamaica, but she invited me in and listened to my proposal.
Framed pictures of fishermen hung on the walls. (“You wouldn’t know I was a baseball player,” he later remarked.) A picture window looked out on mangrove islands in the Gulf.
The refrigerator door held a cartoon of a handyman who had put his foot through the seat of a wicker chair. Apparently the game’s greatest precision hitter was a klutz around the house.
Kaufman listened with interest to my idea for a book on the 1941 season, until we were interrupted by the phone. In a few minutes she returned, shaking her head maternally. It was Ted calling from the airport to say he had forgotten his passport. She sighed like a mother whose child has lost a mitten in kindergarten.
How sorry she was that I hadn’t arrived the day before. The Yankees-Dodgers World Series was on TV, and since she cared almost nothing about baseball, she had retired early. Poor Ted had been forced to watch the game with no one to talk to. If only I’d been there, she said, how glad he would have been to have some company.
Ted’s three wives had been, respectively, Dorothy Lamour (Doris), Princess Grace of Monaco (Lee), and Jackie Kennedy (Dolores).
Louise was June Allison, the perky starlet who played the girl next door. She was the mystery woman in Ted’s life. Hardly anything has been written about her.
A fresh, outdoorsie gal, she could catch bigger marlins then he could — and won first prize in a tournament for doing so. She was also seven years older than him.
Florida fishing guide Jimmy Albright introduced them. He told authors Jim Prime and Bill Nowlin: “Louise had four children, two girls and two boys. I had known Lou for quite a while, and they had a little tournament going, which Ted and I fished, and I introduced them. “She was a real good fisherman, and the only woman he ever loved.”
And she fell head over heels for him. Every time Ted married someone else, she fled to Europe to mend her broken heart.
When I met her, she was sweet, gray-haired, and grandmotherly. When I returned to the house after departing to do some diving, Ted drove up, still dabbing sweat from a tennis workout. “You the fella that’s been doin’ all the writin’?” he asked.
Some fishing “captains” followed us inside and hogged the conversation until Ted nodded that it was time to start the interview and they left.
“Now,” he said amiably, turning to me “what can I do for you?”
Ted and Louise were obviously very fond of each other. He called her “Sweetie,” and during a break in the interview, she asked with a twinkle if I’d like to see their bedroom. Of course, as a good reporter, I followed her upstairs. The one memory I retain is a signed picture of Boston Cardinal Cushing on the wall.
Her children didn’t share her fondness for her famous friend. Teen-age son Rob remembered him as always boasting: He could fry omelets better than anyone — he could do anything better then anyone.
But I noticed that if Ted started to bloviate on some subject, she pursed her lips and scolded, “Oh, just because you can hit a baseball doesn’t mean you know everything!” and he quickly toned down.
“Louise was a salty old New Englander,” recalled Dick Bosman with a smile; he pitched for Williams on the Senators. “They traded barbs pretty good. He’d rip her, and she’d rip right back. She didn’t take any guff.”
One evening Ted, Louise, and I went out for a seafood dinner, and one by one the other guests came over to ask Ted’s opinion on this or that hitter. They would return north to tell their friends, “I was talking to Ted Williams down in Florida, and he told me…”
He answered each one amiably, and we eventually were left alone to finish our meal. Suddenly Ted’s mood changed sharply, and the notorious terrible-tempered Ted erupted. Diners’ heads swung around. Louise and I recoiled. I still don’t know what triggered it. It was scary — at 300 pounds, he could have crushed each of us with one hand.
“Sometimes,” she snapped tartly, “I wish I’d never met Ted Williams!”
It worked. The squall passed as quickly as it had come, and we finished our meal pleasantly. I don’t think he even remembered the episode.
Author David Pietrusza observed an almost identical outburst, a sudden storm that broke in the middle of a conversation in a restaurant. Williams’ amanuensis, John Underwood, also reported a vesuvian eruption at a hotel breakfast table.
Could Ted’s notorious mood swings have been caused by a food allergy? I asked my family doctor, who said, indeed, it is possible. This is a line of inquiry that should be explored.
Louise Kaufman died in 1993. It may have been an aneurysm, Bosman thinks. “She went into the hospital, and in a day or two she was gone. I know it hurt him deeply.” His daughter Bobbi Jo said Ted broke down and wept.
John B. Holway is the author of the Ted Williams trilogy. Volume I, Ted the Kid, will be published in August by Summer Game Books.
The Mystery Woman in Ted’s Life was originally published in Our Game on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.