The Big Bam: The Life and Times of Babe Ruth (16 page)

The game back at the Polo Grounds had continued after Chapman left. The Babe was the first man up in the ninth, the Indians ahead, 4–0. He was 0-for-3 on the day against Coveleski, but singled sharply. The Yankees scored three times in the inning, but still lost, 4–3.

The game the next day was postponed.

The Babe became a movie star in the following weeks. Or at least he made a movie. He had signed in July to appear in
Headin’ Home,
the story of a village simpleton’s rise to baseball glory and the capture of the hand of the local fair maiden. (No typecasting here.) The deal was not unusual—sports stars were increasingly being brought into the growing movie business—but the timing was peculiar. The Babe made the movie almost immediately, in the middle of the season.

The studio was in Haverstraw, New York, 30 miles outside the city and on the other side of the Hudson River. For a succession of August days—often nights—Ruth took the ferry to New Jersey, drove to Haverstraw, played his role, and returned back on the ferry to the pennant race. He was supposed to receive $50,000 for his efforts. The producers, Kessel & Baumann, paid him $15,000 up front and gave him a second check for $35,000 to hold for a few weeks until they could put enough money in the bank. He folded the check and put it in his wallet and carried it everywhere. He was not averse to showing it in the locker room.

“Hey, I need some money,” he would say, big joke, pulling out the check, which soon became worn-looking. “Could you cash this for me?”

During the production, there were days when he arrived at the ballpark and didn’t even have time to wash off the makeup. He would make monster faces in the clubhouse, then go out to be the first man in baseball history to play right field with eyeliner and mascara. On the morning of August 22, he filmed all the live baseball scenes before a crowd of 2,000 at a local field in Haverstraw also known as the Polo Grounds. With a bat he supposedly had whittled from a tree trunk, he sent shots over the fence off constable Peter Reilly’s house and into Frank Smith’s front yard and onto a shed and into someone’s kitchen. He then left the filming and played against the Detroit Tigers in the afternoon in the real Polo Grounds.

If he had any reservations, any worries that this moviemaking might hurt his home run making, he certainly didn’t show them. He had developed an attitude to match his celebrity, his uninhibited behavior from Boston now wrapped in a true sense of privilege. The rules for everyone else didn’t matter. He paid no attention to signs given on the baseball diamond, did whatever he wanted on each at-bat, and very soon no signs were given. He paid no attention to signs anywhere.

On the road he no longer had a roommate. He often didn’t even stay in the same hotel with the rest of the team, choosing to rent his own suite somewhere else for $100 per day. On short trips he didn’t travel with the team, riding in his own car with his own choice of company. Helen could come, friends could come, he could pick out coaches or players to take on the ride. On longer trips he had his own compartment on the train, freed from the upper-lower snores and grunts in the rest of the car, but most importantly from curious fans. He was living the same life as his teammates, but on an entirely different plane. If there was any resentment about any of this, he never heard it.

He continued to hold Miller Huggins, whom he routinely called “Little Boy” or “the Flea,” in obvious disdain. He liked his teammates well enough but, except for a few regulars, remembered none of their names. He used his universal “hey, kid” with almost everyone. A pay phone that he never answered had been installed next to his locker for his personal calls. (Teammates answered, told female callers they were the Babe, and made dates for meetings at the Hotel Astor that were never kept.) The mail also never was answered. He had teammates and trainer Doc Moore sort through it for letters from women and checks. Doc Moore once totaled up $6,000 in checks from envelopes that simply had been discarded.

The life he chose to live seemed to be the life of Henry VIII or Louis XIV. He could be crude or rude or quite kind. His disposition at the moment told him what to do. There were no other constraints on a king.

“When we get to the Cooper Carlton, there’ll be a stack of mail for me as big as my prick,” he boasted one day to sportswriter Fred Lieb of the
New York Telegram
as they shared a cab to the hotel from the Chicago train station.

That was his basic unit of measurement. His favorite saying—he said it everywhere—was “I can knock the prick off any ball that was ever pitched.” His language had little moderation. His libido was never far from his mind.

“A believer in reincarnation, I always felt that Ruth was a reincarnated African king or Arabic emir with a stable of wives and concubines,” Lieb wrote years later in a book called
Baseball As I Have Known It.
“Or, perhaps, in an earlier life, he lived in ancient Babylon, where they worshipped Phallus. Babe was inherently a phallic worshipper. It cropped up regularly in his conversation. His phallus and home run bat were his most prized possessions, in that order.”

The phrase that always had been used to describe him, “he’s like a big kid,” had been altered. He was now pretty much a big spoiled kid. Or a kid who was out of control.

In the last few days of making the movie, he was stung on the wrist by a wasp. Or maybe he was bitten by a tick. After the spot became infected, it was lanced and then stitched. He missed six games in the middle of the pennant race. The other players grumbled, but then he came back on Labor Day weekend at Fenway Park in Boston. This was the Yankees’ last visit during the season. To honor the exploits of their transplanted star, the local Knights of Columbus presented him with a set of cuff links at the September 4 doubleheader, which was dubbed “Babe Ruth Day.” The Babe returned the honor by belting home run number 45 into the right-field bleachers in the first game, then repeating with home run number 46 to the same spot in the second. Another record had been dredged up—Perry Werden of Minneapolis in the Western League had hit 44 home runs in another bandbox park in 1894 for the minor league record—so now Ruth had the record for all of organized baseball. The
New York Times
referred to him after this exhibition as “the Behemoth of Bangs.”

Where would it all end?

The United News syndicate had struck a ghostwriting deal with him for a modest $1,000 in advance and $5 for a column every time he hit a home run. The ghost was Westbrook Pegler, who didn’t like a lot of people and found the big man “on close acquaintance to be unbelievably mean, foulmouthed and violent,” according to biographer Oliver Pilat (
Pegler: Angry Man of the Press
). Ruth contributed little to Pegler’s reports beyond a telegram reading something like “Poled two out of the park today. High fastballs. Send check immediately.”

Part of the deal also was a first-person autobiographical series. Again, the Babe was little help. Pegler, desperate, finally took a bunch of clippings to his apartment and with the help of another United News reporter inventively typed 80,000 words in two days in the Babe’s “voice.” The result was published in 16 installments that ran through the middle of the summer across the country. The life story read like juvenile fiction, and Pegler’s sense of irony hung brightly through the words, put together in thoughts and sentence constructions that were far from the truth.

He can almost be seen smiling as he typed out the final two paragraphs of the series to young boys of the day under the name of one of America’s most noted reprobates:

If you haven’t started to smoke, don’t begin now. If you have, keep it down, especially during the playing season. I smoke a lot of cigars and I wish I didn’t, but I own a cigar factory, which I have to keep busy.

And here’s another thing: get married. Pick a nice girl who understands you—she’ll understand you a long time before you understand and appreciate her—and make a home run. Mrs. Ruth was only 16 when I married her and I was a youngster of 20. I wasn’t any kind of a champion then except I was a champ picker and I certainly was good at that.

(The End.)

A rumor clattered across the country on September 10 that the Babe had suffered two broken legs and was near death. It started with messages received at W. E. Hutton and other Wall Street brokerage houses that Ruth had been involved in a terrible automobile accident and that not only had he been injured, but teammates Bob Meusel, Del Pratt, and Duffy Lewis also were in the car and injured. Later messages claimed that both Meusel and Pratt were dead.

Ruth had been involved in a previous celebrated accident in June when he flipped his big touring car in a ditch in Wawa, Pennsylvania, while traveling from Washington to New York after a series with the Senators. Helen, catcher Fred Hofmann, outfielder Frank Gleich, and third base coach Charlie O’Leary were with him. O’Leary was knocked unconscious, a cause for concern, but quickly awoke with the words, “Where the hell is my straw hat?” Everyone else was fine. The Babe and party spent the night in a farmhouse, and he told the mechanics who arrived from Media, Pennsylvania, the next morning to take the car and “sell it for whatever you can get. I’m through with it.”

The accident obviously set nefarious minds to work. A quick rumor in Philadelphia, dispelled when the Babe played the next day at the Polo Grounds against the Detroit Tigers, had said that he was severely injured in Wawa and perhaps was dead. A group of gamblers now built a bigger, better rumor and distributed it across the country with great efficiency on the eve of an important three-game series with the Indians at League Park in Cleveland. The goal was to affect the odds, making Cleveland the favorite, which would open the possibility to place large New York bets and collect a very good return.

The
Los Angeles Times
reported that this was the biggest national rumor since the famous “Fake Armistice” story of November 7, 1918, which at first sent people into the streets in celebration of the end of the world war, then resulted in a number of riots when the news turned out to be false. The Babe rumor, while it did flash through poolrooms and boardrooms everywhere in the country, had a much quieter finish as baseball officials immediately denied it.

“It’s a sure thing gamblers started this story,” Col. Huston said. “I have no facts on which to base any charges, but one can understand the possibilities of gamblers getting unfair odds through just such tricks. This is something baseball authorities have no way of stopping. I want to say, however, that there has not been a suspicion of anything wrong, no matter what one may think about betting on baseball or anything else.”

The incident was a public tug that brought the subterranean world of baseball betting into the newspapers. Betting had been a staple of the game since its conception and like almost everything else, especially everything else that was illicit, it was flourishing in the postwar boom.

The war, in fact, had helped baseball gambling. The racetracks had been cut back for the duration, and the bookies and gamblers had moved quickly into the ballparks. Bets could be made on games, innings, individual pitches, and at-bats without the patron having to leave his seat if he knew where to sit. Baseball pools, where the bettor picked the results of a number of games, were a staple of most machine shops and factories.

As the Yankees won two out of three in their series in Cleveland, to draw even with the White Sox in second place a half-game behind the Indians in the closest American League race in more than a decade, a much bigger gambling story than the rumor about the Babe was beginning to unfold. The Yankees won three straight in the next stop in Detroit, then lost three in Chicago to the White Sox to fall two games out of first. Then the details started to spill out from Chicago.

On September 21, New York Giants pitcher Rube Benton told a Cook County grand jury how the 1919 World Series between the White Sox and the Cincinnati Reds had been fixed. Ban Johnson and White Sox owner Charles Comiskey followed Benton to the stand and told about their suspicions from the first pitch of that Series, and then the parade began. By September 27, White Sox knuckleballer Eddie Cicotte and star outfielder Shoeless Joe Jackson had confessed and implicated six other teammates, including Buck Weaver, the Babe’s barnstorming partner. Everything was true.

“I had bought a farm with a $4,000 mortgage on it,” Cicotte said. “There isn’t any mortgage on it now. I paid it off with the crooked money.”

The news about the “Black Sox” scandal had every right to be devastating. If the games—the biggest games of all, in fact—were fixed, why should anyone pay attention? The core of baseball’s believability was being challenged. The Babe himself said, upon hearing the news, “it was like hearing that my Church had sold out.” The testimony detailed intentional errors, grooved fastballs, Cicotte’s vow to throw the ball over the center-field fence if he had to for the money. (One of the early planning meetings for the fix, in fact, had been held at the Ansonia Hotel, the Babe’s address, where the team stayed when it went to New York.) Nothing messier ever could be imagined. Wouldn’t the public surely revolt?

The answer was no. Nothing happened. The eight players were suspended from baseball, the depleted White Sox went 0-for-3 in their last series, the Indians won the pennant, and the Yankees finished third. The people didn’t care. They were hooked already on the melodrama in front of their eyes, not only caught up in the pennant race but also mesmerized by the home run show that went with it. Mesmerized by the Babe.

Fixed? How did you fix a 450-foot circuit clout by the Prince of Pounders, the Behemoth of Bash? The Babe just kept whacking through the headlines. On September 24, the scandal breaking everywhere, he blasted numbers 50 and 51 in a doubleheader split with the Senators. (Fifty home runs! Who ever thought it would be possible? The fact was noted that he “has hit as many home runs as Heinz has pickles…in fact, he is the greatest pickler the world has ever known.”) A crowd of 25,000 was at the Polo Grounds for those meaningless two games, followed by a crowd of 30,000 the next day.