America's Obsessives: The Compulsive Energy That Built a Nation (36 page)

Both sons are chips off the old block. Ronald and Leonard also have obsessive traits, though Ronald has never been as excited about business as his elder brother. Ronald’s heart has always been in collecting. “I first became interested in art at thirteen,” he told me. “I guided my parents, who never had time to learn about it. I grew up around great style, and I knew what they liked.” The man who founded Manhattan’s Neue Galerie Museum for German and Austrian Art in 2001 bought his first canvas of the Austrian great Egon Schiele with his bar mitzvah money. As the
New Yorker
noted in its 2007 profile, “An Acquiring Eye,” this megacollector—Glenn Lowry, the director of the Museum of Modern Art, has called his private holdings “the finest collection of modern art assembled by an individual in the world today”—has “given himself the grand, cultured Viennese heritage to which Estée Lauder pretended.” While most of Leonard’s obsessionality has been plowed into the company, he, too, has dabbled as an art collector. He has made several donations of prominent American artworks to Manhattan’s Whitney Museum. Ever since the age of six—back when he was coping with the interregnum in his parents’ marriage—Leonard has also been accumulating postcards; he started by spending his five-cent allowance on five cards of the Empire State Building. At present, his collection, which he plans to donate to Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, features 125,000 items encompassing numerous subgenres, such as artists’ postcards, sports postcards, advertising postcards, and fashion postcards. His late wife Evelyn, Leonard told the
New Yorker
in 2012, “often said my postcard collection was my mistress.”

Estée Lauder wanted both her boys to work in the family biz, and in the mid-1960s, not long after finishing business school at Wharton, Ronald also came on board. In 1968, when she rolled out Clinique, a new line of medically sanctioned skin-care products, she named Ronald its executive vice president. Under his leadership, a decade later, Clinique’s sales came to $80 million, nearly 30 percent of the company’s total. After dabbling in politics in the 1980s—in 1983, he worked in the Reagan Defense Department as deputy assistant secretary, and in 1986 he was appointed U.S. ambassador to Austria—he spent a decade as chairman of Estée Lauder International. In 1995, Ronald also became chairman of Clinique—now the bestselling prestige makeup line in the United States and most of the 130 other countries in which it is sold—a position that he still holds. As peripatetic as his mother ever was, Ronald now also runs several businesses of his own, including a leading TV station in Central Europe.

On October 16, 1979, the seventy-one-year-old Lauder, having already enjoyed a couple of decades of spectacular wealth and fame, was forced to endure fifteen minutes of terror. At five thirty that afternoon, three gun-toting intruders stormed past her maid and into her Manhattan mansion. Lauder immediately locked herself in her third-floor bedroom, but two of the robbers rushed up the stairs and kicked in the door, threatening to kill her if she did not cooperate. After one man smacked her across the face, she opened the two wall safes containing her jewelry. Though tied to a chair, a relatively unscathed Lauder made a rather gutsy move that could have been life-threatening. Wiggling around on the floor, she activated the silent alarm button that was hooked up to police headquarters. After noticing what she had done, the thieves collected their heist and immediately dashed out of the house. Two minutes later, the police arrived. As with other obsessives, Lauder’s nervous system worked backward. While too little to do could raise her anxiety level, too much to do—or even danger—could reduce it. The police sergeant who spoke to her that afternoon told the
New York Post
that she was “quite calm, unusually calm” about the robbery, in which she lost about a million dollars in jewelry as well as $6,000 in cash. “I’m not a bit disturbed,” she told the paper. This perfectionist would always pride herself on her emotional control. “They took a few things that were lying around,” she added, “but nothing important.” In her autobiography, however, she would finally acknowledge the truth, stating, “I gave them everything.” For the rest of her life, she would be protected by bodyguards.

Three years later, Lauder was felled by another blow, one from which she would never fully recover. On January 15, 1983, the fifty-third anniversary of her first wedding, Joe collapsed and died during a dinner at Ronald’s Manhattan home. Lauder’s remarkable control over her public image (and the news media) came through loud and clear in the vague
New York Times
obituary. The paper of record was reduced to guesstimating her husband’s age, reporting that he was “in his 70s.” He was actually eighty.

While many women of her generation were reluctant to reveal their age, Lauder’s desire to keep her birthdate hidden was extreme. As her grandson William told me, when he was carrying her passport on a trip to Austria in the mid-1980s, she insisted that he not take a peek. So determined was she to keep her secret that she also kept a tight lid on the age of other family members—namely, her husband and elder son. Leonard was under strict orders not to be open about his age, unless otherwise directed. As Lauder acknowledged in her autobiography, when asked, Leonard would reply, “I’ll have to ask my mother.…I’ll check on what I am this week and let you know.” In 1988, in an effort to keep
her
secret, she would ask her fifty-five-year-old son to paint
his
graying hair. The 1983
Times
obituary also failed to mention where her husband’s burial took place. The venue, the Beth El Cemetery in Paramus, New Jersey, where her father, Max, had once roamed with his horses, may well have struck the family as too Jewish.

The loss of her husband was overwhelming. Joe had been not just her spouse, but also her surrogate mother, who had given her the attention that she had never received from the anxious and overburdened Rose back in Corona. For the next several weeks, Lauder retreated to the upstairs bedroom of Ronald’s nearby Manhattan town house. Her nose, she figured, could help bring her out of her despair, and over the next couple of years, she put her energy into developing a new fragrance, Beautiful. As she was racing around the country during the launch in 1986, she told the
New Yorker
, “Hard work never killed anyone.…Smile and the world smiles with you, cry and you cry alone.…I found that out after Joe died.” But for the first time in her life, burying her emotions in her work was no longer working. “After 1986, she was meaningfully less active. At the time, we did not appreciate how much of an effect my grandfather’s death was still having on her,” William Lauder told me.

From then on, her public appearances would be limited. In December 1988, Raisa Gorbachev, who was in Manhattan to attend an event at the United Nations, headed up to the thirty-seventh floor of the General Motors Building, where she sampled Beautiful and a few other perfumes. After their forty-five-minute meeting, Lauder, apparently frustrated because she did not get to dab her visitor, told the
New York Times
: “I want her to come back and talk about skin.” Two years later, when Leonard Lauder introduced Origins, a frail Lauder would head down to its retail outlet in Soho with William, then the vice president of this line of natural skin-care products. “She loved standing behind the counter,” her grandson stated, “and waiting on customers.” By 1993, when she went to Florida for the last time, Alzheimer’s was starting to set in. “Both her mother and her sister, Renée, suffered from the disease. Her sister’s came quite early when I was still in my teens,” added William. Lauder would die, attended by nurses, in her Manhattan town house in 2004. She was ninety-five.

By the end of this Queen of Beauty’s long reign, her family knew exactly how to defuse the rough edges of her obsessionality. In 1989, as the company was reshuffling its offices in the GM Building as part of an expansion—Lauder’s office was moved up from the thirty-seventh floor to the fortieth—Leonard was nervous about showing his mother the renovation. Relaying the story to me, a smiling William Lauder explained: “My father told one of his assistants, ‘Break something. Something that isn’t important.’ The next day, as my eighty-year-old grandmother was entering her new quarters, she stopped and snapped, ‘The door handle isn’t working. They didn’t do it right. That needs to be fixed right away.’ She then let out a big sigh of relief and was quiet for the rest of the day. Order was restored.”

T
ED WILLIAMS SMACKS SMACKER
.

Thus ran the caption on the front page of the
Boston Globe
on September 29, 1941, below the AP photo of “the Kid” kissing his bat after the season-ending doubleheader against the Philadelphia Athletics. Entering the day’s action hitting .39955, which rounds off to .400, the twenty-three-year-old Red Sox left fielder could have sat out and still etched his name into the record books. While players often quit while they are ahead rather than risk losing a milestone, for Williams, that was not an option. Choosing to “play it all the way,” the six-foot-four, 175-pound John Wayne look-alike collected six hits in eight times at bat, raising his average to .406, the highest in the major leagues since 1924 (and 47 points higher than the second-place finisher). Baseball is a game of numbers, and during his annus mirabilis he racked up some of the best ever. In addition to his ninth-inning walk-off homer in the All-Star Game, Williams hit 37 home runs and drove in 120 runs; he also finished with 145 walks, while striking out a paltry 27 times. His on-base percentage—bases on balls plus hits divided by at bats—came to a staggering .551, a mark that went unmatched for more than sixty years (when it was broken by Barry Bonds who, as critics charge, may well have had some biochemical assistance). No batter has hit .400 since. Analyzing and contextualizing these stats, the late Harvard biologist and baseball aficionado Stephen Jay Gould has called Williams’s accomplishment on the diamond that year “a beacon in the history of excellence, a lesson to all who value the best in human possibility.”

On that early autumn day, a jubilant Williams was clearly mugging for the cameraman stationed in the visitors’ locker room in Philadelphia, but his lust for lumber was no passing fancy. That year, his Play Ball baseball card described him as “an enthusiastic ball player who would rather wield a bat than eat.” The bat was to him what the machine was to Lindbergh—his emotional anchor, his most profound connection. “It was,” he wrote in his bestselling 1969 memoir,
My Turn at Bat
, “the center of my heart, hitting a baseball.” Like the security blanket tethered to the fingers of Charles Schulz’s Linus, his bat was a transitional object, to which he repeatedly turned for comfort. Speculating about the thoughts that shaped the perennial All-Star’s inner world, sportswriter Roger Kahn wrote in 1959, a year before Williams’s retirement from the Red Sox, “I never needed anybody. I always had my bat.”

His love affair with the bat began in boyhood, when home plate substituted for a real home. “[Hitting] was my whole life,” he told
Harper’s
in 1969. “It was the only thing I wanted to do.” Like Lindbergh, Williams grew up in a tense and severely dysfunctional family. His parents, too, could not stand each other and were mired in a perpetual cold war. During Ted’s grammar school days in San Diego, rarely was any adult present in the family’s small frame house at 4121 Utah Street until 10 p.m. His father, a sometime photographer, was typically out carousing; and his mother, a Salvation Army zealot, was busy trying to save the town’s drunks and prostitutes. After school, Ted would go straight to the nearby diamond at North Park to practice his hitting until 9 p.m., when the lights went out. He would continue swinging his bat in his backyard until one of his parents finally showed up. He would imagine himself at the plate in various situations, something he would continue to do as a Red Sox star. (“We’re in Detroit. [Hal] Newhouser is on the mound. The count is two and one. Here he comes,” Williams would bark out to a Sox teammate during batting practice a couple of decades later.) The next day at dawn, he would be in his backyard, going at it again. “When I wasn’t sleeping or eating,” Williams later noted, “I was practicing swinging.” He got to school just as the janitor opened the building so that he could squeeze in some hitting before class. And if the janitor happened to be late, he climbed through a window to grab the bat himself. “By the time the other kids showed,” he recalled for
Time
in 1950, “I’d have the bat in my hand, to be the first up.” When he couldn’t get hold of a bona fide bat, he would make one out of paper and swing at anything in his midst, including berries and stones. At Hoover High, he would bring his beloved bat to class. “I always took subjects [like shop] that wouldn’t have much homework,” he later stated, “because I wanted more time for hitting.” The only course, besides phys ed, in which he excelled was typing, for which the perfectionist won an award by cranking out thirty-two words a minute without error.

And the bat for Williams, like the machine for Lindbergh, was also the primary means by which he drew other people into his life. His baseball coaches would become his surrogate parents. As an adult, his standard conversation starter was “Show me your swing.” It’s a request that Williams would ask not just of fellow ballplayers, but also of kids, sportswriters, old men in wheelchairs, and even nubile women, for whom it sometimes did double duty as a pickup line. He could not imagine that anyone might not share
his
pressing preoccupation. And once he got a response, Williams relished the chance to help his interlocutor tweak his or her stroke to get in a little more hip action—a necessity for hitting the ball with power. At the Fenway Park memorial celebration held after his death in July 2002, former senator John Glenn, who served in the Marines with Williams during the Korean War, recalled how a half century earlier in Kyoto, the Sox outfielder had befriended a Japanese boy whom he spotted taking phantom swings with an imaginary bat. “The boy hitter swung again,” stated Glenn, “but this time Ted scowled at him. He went over to where the boy was standing, put him in a batting position and proceeded to correct his form!” Stepping away, Williams then threw an imaginary baseball toward the boy who demonstrated his newly tailored swing. Williams immediately ducked, as if a searing line drive were coming straight for his head—a gesture that led the batter and his young companions standing next to him to jump for joy. After his retirement from baseball, the bat would still cement connections, though it would not be quite as central to his social life as its successor, the fishing rod. Casting both spinning and fly rods with the same precision as he swung a bat, in 1999, Williams would be inducted into the International Game Fish Association Hall of Fame.

For Williams, bats were not just the tools of his trade, but holy relics. During his Red Sox career, he would make a pilgrimage every winter to Kentucky to speak with those responsible for creating his favorite companions. “He was one of our best clients; he loved us and was loyal to us,” said Nathan Stalvey in a phone interview. Stalvey is the curator of the Louisville Slugger Museum and Factory, the bat company that still supplies about 70 percent of major leaguers with their lumber. When Bud Hillerich, the CEO of batmaker Hillerich and Bradsby, died in 1946, Williams was the only player in all of baseball to wire condolences to the exec’s loved ones. “As far as our family is concerned,” an appreciative John Hillerich, who was Bud’s son and successor, told the
Boston Globe
the following year, “Ted can have the best in bats.” Williams would not settle for anything less. He would often slip the Louisville Slugger lathe operator, Fritz Bickel, a twenty spot, in order to ensure that his bats had more grain lines per inch—the closer the grain lines, the higher quality the wood—than those sent to other players. Whenever he got a shipment of bats, he would dash over to the post office to weigh them; he wanted to make sure that they were exactly as advertised. Toward the end of summer, he would do a retest, as his bats often gained a half ounce due to the humidity. In the mid-1950s, Williams sent back to Louisville a box of twenty bats, complaining that they did not feel right. Upon examination, the company realized that he was correct; the bat handles were five-thousandths of an inch off. And he was constantly providing lots of tender loving care. “I always worked with my bats,” he later wrote, “boning them down, putting a shine on them, forcing the fibers together.…I treated them like babies.” In the Red Sox clubhouse, his bats were assigned their own locker, adjacent to his.

Williams was not just an expert practitioner; he was also a hitting savant. He was one of the first players to switch to a lighter bat to increase bat speed. In contrast to Babe Ruth, who used a forty-ounce bat to slug sixty homers in 1927, Williams used a thirty-two-ounce bat in 1941. Today most players still heed his wisdom. “Lord knows I wasn’t much of a student,” the intellectually curious autodidact, who once described
why
as “a wonderful word,” later recalled. “But baseballically, I was a cum laude.” More than a generation before stats geeks such as Bill James launched the field of sabermetrics, Williams was already compiling data. Soon after arriving in Florida for his first spring training with the Red Sox—for moral support, he toted his own bat to camp—he began gathering info on opposing pitchers, which he kept in a little black book. Like a dogged investigative journalist, he would dig and dig and dig. To get the full scoop on a given pitcher’s habits, he would quiz not only any veteran who would listen to his flood of questions but also umpires. Blessed with a phenomenal memory, he could remember the sequences of pitches in a given at bat for decades after the fact. “Ted didn’t need a computer to track pitchers. He was his own computer,” Frank Malzone, the Sox All-Star third baseman in the late 1950s, told me. Williams also did a systematic study of every big-league park, learning about the slope of the batter’s box—in Fenway, it was a tad higher in the back, enabling him to plant his back foot more firmly—and the prevailing wind currents. His fieldwork also included a visit to the physics lab at Cambridge’s Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he learned about the trajectory of baseballs upon impact. “Some people called it monomania,” Richard Ben Cramer observed in his landmark 1986
Esquire
article, “What Do You Think of Ted Williams Now?” of the thoroughness with which Williams studied hitting, “but with Ted it was serial (multimania?) in eager furtherance of everything he loved.”

A master of his craft, Williams continued to excel even as injuries and advancing age slowed him down. In 1957, at thirty-nine, the left-handed slugger stunned the baseball world by making another go at .400, finishing at a robust .388. The following year, he won his seventh batting title; he remains the oldest man ever to win a batting crown. In his last at bat, in September of 1960, he slammed his 521st home run. (If he had not lost nearly five full seasons in his prime due to military service, most experts agree that he might have challenged Babe Ruth’s longstanding record of 714.) For his career, Williams hit .344, higher than any other power hitter, including Ruth, and his lifetime slugging percentage (total bases divided by at bats) is second only to Ruth’s. Moreover, his lifetime on-base percentage (OBP) of .483 is tops. While an OBP anywhere north of .400 is indicative of a stand-out season, only three times in nineteen seasons did Williams’s OBP dip below .450. At the plate, this perfectionist came closer to perfection than any other hitter in history, reaching base nearly one out of every two times he ever came to bat. The adolescent who vowed to become “the greatest hitter who ever lived” remained true to his word.

At the center of Williams’s methodology was a simple concept: “Get a good pitch to hit.” This was the advice that he received from Hall of Famer Rogers Hornsby (the only man besides Williams ever to win the Triple Crown—to lead the league in batting, home runs, and RBIs—twice), his batting instructor during his stint with the Minneapolis Millers of the American Association in 1938. In
The Science of Hitting
, the influential manual Williams wrote after his playing days were over, he divided home plate into seventy-seven baseballs. As he explained, he strove to hit at pitches in “his happy zone”—the fifteen baseballs in the middle—where he could expect to hit .400. In contrast, he could hope to hit only .230 when he swung at pitches in the low-outside corner. Approximately 95 percent of the time, he took the first pitch so that he could study how the pitcher was throwing. He would do his best to avoid anything outside the strike zone. And in the late innings, with the game on the line, he might try to hit the bottom half of the ball in order to increase his chances of hitting a home run. He ended up with a higher percentage of game-winning home runs than any other player, including Ruth.

While Williams was convinced that he knew best, he made some allowances for individual differences. As he told numerous players, including his successor in left field at Fenway Park, Carl Yastrzemski, “Don’t let anyone change your swing.” Though he was horrified by the approach of the Yankee Hall of Famer Yogi Berra (“The son of a bitch got his bat on the ball” was how Williams described his rival’s style), he conceded that the Berra Method might work, but only for a select few. In direct contrast to the Splinter, Berra was a “bad-ball hitter,” meaning that he wouldn’t hesitate to swing at high or inside pitches off the plate. “As I always said,” Berra explained to me, “if I could see it, I could hit it. Ted wouldn’t swing at too many pitches I would. But we had one thing in common. Neither of us struck out much.” But Berra’s OBP was never above .400 in any season—it was just .348 over the course of his career—and his lifetime average was a not-quite-majestic .285.

In the batter’s box during a game, Williams, unlike Berra, was a paragon of rationality, precision, and patience. “No other player,” John Updike mused in the famous
New Yorker
profile published after Williams’s final game, “so constantly brought to the plate that intensity of competence that crowds the throat with joy.” The same was true in those two other places to which he later transferred his exceptional hitting prowess—the airplane where he became a decorated fighter pilot and the boat where he evolved into one of the world’s best fly-fisherman. However, just about everywhere else, even on other parts of the baseball field, he was more a disorganized jumble of raw nerve endings than an apotheosis of anything.