The Big Bam: The Life and Times of Babe Ruth (17 page)

In the final series of the year in Philadelphia, he whacked numbers 52 and 53 against the A’s in a single game. On the final day, September 29, the entire scandal out, first game of a doubleheader, he hit his 54th and final homer off Slim Hayes. His total gave him more homers than 14 of the other 15 big league teams. (The Philadelphia Phillies, with 64 homers as a team, played their games in tiny Baker Bowl.) He led the league in RBI with 137, and his .367 batting average placed him fourth. His slugging percentage was an unbelievable .847.

The Yankees had blown past all attendance records, becoming the first team to draw over a million fans at home with a final figure of 1,289,422. Major league baseball had attracted over nine million customers, easily a record. The Indians and the Brooklyn Robins in the World Series, after all of the headlines from Chicago, drew over 155,000 people as the Indians won in seven games. Scandal? What scandal?

The show was too exciting, too compelling, for a scandal to stop it. The Babe—though he probably would get too much credit for “saving baseball” from a crisis that never really developed—certainly was a huge part of that show.

He had finished the season accompanied by his own brass band. The fire that destroyed much of St. Mary’s Industrial School for Boys in 1919 had left some huge bills to be paid. The Babe arranged for the 50-member school band to accompany the Yankees on the last western swing. He was an untiring host as he appeared at concerts in the different cities to solicit donations, posed for pictures in a sailor’s cap and holding a tuba, ordered unlimited ice cream for the kids on the train.

Only six years removed from the institution, the boy called Nigger Lips was able to show these other boys what possibilities existed on the other side of the walls. With Brother Matthias along as one of the chaperons, the Babe had an opportunity to talk about old times. The band played in nine cities before returning to Baltimore for a large Knights of Columbus dinner at the Fifth Regiment Armory, followed by an exhibition game the next day between the Yankees and Orioles. Ruth, at the dinner, wrote out a check for $2,500. Nigger Lips had done pretty well.

He went on a barnstorming trip with Hofmann, Schang, and Carl Mays as soon as the season ended. A sign of his popularity came in Rochester, New York. Franklin D. Roosevelt, the vice presidential candidate on an ill-fated Democratic ticket with James M. Cox against Warren G. Harding in the November elections, arrived at the Rochester train station and had to be escorted through a large crowd that spilled onto the streets. Roosevelt was heartened by the turnout until told that the people were there not to see him but to wait for the Babe’s train to arrive.

After the barnstorming tour was completed, he and Helen embarked on a one-month trip to Cuba on October 27. He was the star attraction on a team put together by John McGraw, mostly members of the Giants plus Ruth. Havana, with its no-limit nightlife, had become an even more desirable destination since the advent of Prohibition. McGraw loved it. Ruth also soon loved it. He loved it too much. He gambled in Havana with Helen. He gambled without Helen when the team went on tour and Helen stayed back in the capital. He gambled.

“He came back to the room, and he’d made $900 gambling,” one unnamed roommate reported from one of the stops on the tour. “He said he was going back down to clean out the casino. He went into his wallet and counted out six thousand-dollar bills. I told him to leave the $6,000 in the room and clean ’em out with the $900. He didn’t do that. He came back in the morning and the wallet was empty. He’d lost $6,900.”

It got worse. The team came home after its tour, finishing with a 9–8 record. Ruth, who’d hit only two homers in the games, mainly because they were played with a big wind blowing in, signed to play ten more exhibitions, and he and Helen stayed for a second month. This was not a good move. He soon was wiped out.

The amount he lost will never be known. In an article written for
American Weekly
, a woman who called herself “Mrs. Margaret Hill, Queen of the Underworld,” detailed a complicated sting operation run on him by hustlers at the Plaza Hotel in Havana. Through fixed horse races, she said, Ruth was bilked of $130,000. That would seem like a lot of money, since he probably hadn’t earned that much money in his career, but he apparently did lose whatever money he had made in Cuba. Helen luckily had saved enough of what he had given her for them to get home in time for Christmas.

“I am not a bit worried about the weight I have picked up,” he told reporters on his return after they noticed that he had added as many as 40 pounds in Cuba. “I’m going back to the farm in Massachusetts and will put in six weeks or so of rugged outdoor life, chopping wood and the like. By the time I leave for Hot Springs, I should be fit to meet a grizzly.”

He also had lost money on the movie he made. That $35,000 check he carried around the locker room? He finally went to cash it, and it bounced higher than a Wee Willie Keeler Baltimore chop through the infield. The company had gone bankrupt and was out of business. A second movie, an instructional film showing him batting, had been made without his consent and without remuneration to him. He had sued. The suit was denied, the court ruling that he was “a public figure.”

The price of fame was getting expensive.

CHAPTER NINE

T
HE MAN
the Behemoth of Bang needed to meet was looking to meet the Behemoth of Bang. His name was Christy Walsh, and he was a shrewd, 29-year-old entrepreneurial fireball from Los Angeles. He had been drawn to New York the same way oilmen were drawn to Texas: this was where the natural resources were located. This was where the Babe was.

The idea that buzzed loudest in a mind buzzing with ideas was that a ghostwriting syndicate for newspapers could be a growth industry. Walsh was convinced that if he matched the biggest names with the best writers and marketed the product across the country with energy and imagination, he would have a winner.

Walsh was a lawyer who placed his degree from St. Vincent’s College on top of the dresser drawer about two minutes after he received it and took a job as a cartoonist. He had worked enough around the newspaper business to figure out what was attractive and what wasn’t when slipped under the green eyeshades of the country’s most powerful editors. He also knew how to sell. Wearing a double-breasted suit every day, and a Kelly green tie in support of the ongoing Irish struggle for independence, he was an engaging presence, a dapper charmer.

Walsh’s one ghostwriting experience had been with Eddie Rickenbacker, the world war flying ace and automobile racer. Rickenbacker, who shot down 26 enemy planes over France, was the guest referee for the 1919 Indianapolis 500, the first race since the war ended. Walsh convinced him to lend his name to a ghostwritten account of the race, then sold the upcoming story to 37 newspapers. On the given day, Walsh typed like a madman with an account of Howard Wilcox’s 88-mph victory in 5 hours, 40 minutes, and 42 seconds. Rickenbacker took a fast read and made a few changes. All of the papers used the story, 16 on the front page. Walsh and Rickenbacker split a profit of $874.

When he was fired from an advertising job at Maxwell-Chalmers Automobiles in Detroit, in part for printing an issue of the house organ on St. Patrick’s Day that, instead of providing the usual news about horsepower and sales figures, issued a call for Irish independence with a lead article by republican leader Eamon de Valera, Walsh decided it was a sign telling him to go off on his own. He started with the idea of ghosting some show business names, like moviemaker D. W. Griffith, soprano Mary Garden, or Broadway songwriter Gene Buck, but soon switched to sports. This sent him to the Babe.

Why not work with the biggest emerging name of all? Walsh took out a $2,000 loan and journeyed to New York to meet his man. His man wanted nothing to do with him. Offers and strange people were coming at the Babe every day now, and he simply walked past all of them as if he were on the way to another train. The burns from Havana and the movies were still sore. The few times Walsh approached, there was a crowd around and the Babe waved him off and simply kept moving.

Walsh’s answer was to stake out the Ansonia Hotel, where the Babe and Helen were staying after two months in Sudbury. He hoped he could catch his man coming or going. The problem was that the hotel had three doors on three different streets, and Walsh always seemed to be at the wrong one. Time became a factor, because now he learned the Babe was departing for Hot Springs the next day.

Wondering what to do, frustrated, Walsh sat in a neighborhood delicatessen that doubled as an illegal liquor store. The phone rang. He could hear the owner taking an order for “Mr. Ruth” for a case of beer. Walsh quickly had a suggestion about who could deliver that beer.

“Do you know who I am?” he asked as he helped the Babe put away the bottles in the kitchenette.

“Sure I know you,” the Babe replied. “Ain’t you been bringin’ our beer for the past two weeks?”

Walsh laid out his offer. How much did the Babe get for each of those little stories when he hit a home run in 1920? Five bucks. How would $500 sound? Logic soon won the argument. On the next morning, Walsh hurried with a contract to Penn Station, where the Babe and Helen were supposed to leave.

The Babe was waiting. Walsh described the moment in a short memoir,
Adios to Ghosts.

“The train leaves in 15 minutes and there he beams, belted camel-hair coat with cap to match, over-size cigar all aglow, and surrounded by the customary gallery of admirers,” Walsh wrote.

Mrs. Ruth stands nearby and gives me my first close-up of a mink coat; a luxurious, bulging wrap which probably set her man back a cool five thousand. While she obligingly diverts the autograph addicts, I spirit Babe through an iron gate, produce a badly wrinkled contract in the form of a short, informal letter and without question, he inscribes “George Herman Ruth” in the correct spot and I go in search of a ghost to do the writing.

The deal was a start for Walsh. He would build a syndicate that included the greatest names of American sport, from Knute Rockne to John McGraw to Ty Cobb to Doc Kearns, the manager of Jack Dempsey. He would sell their stories to countless papers across the country, his ghosts churning out the words, everyone making money. The deal was even better for the Babe. Walsh would turn out to be much more than the man behind the ghosts; he would become the man behind the Babe.

In short order, he became Ruth’s friend, business manager, and booking agent. He was the voice of moderation that Helen never could be. He was the fiscal bodyguard against the hornswogglers and fast talkers, the friends of the “Queen of the Underworld” who wanted to take the Babe’s money. He was the painter of a picture that all of America wanted to admire. A new concept that would be called “public relations” was emerging with people like Edward Bernays figuring out different ways to sell products and ideas, ways to create “image.” Christy Walsh was a part of that.

He would become the first personal PR man in sport. No image would be created any better than the one around the Behemoth of Bang.

The foundation of that image—the sight of a white ball, with red stitching, flying through the air to previously uncharted destinations—soon was back in public view. The new year was no different from the old year.

A few columnists had written that the 54 home runs in 1920 were “a fluke,” never to be matched again. The well-padded Bambino, still carrying some of that Havana weight, soon crumpled that opinion and swatted it into the nearest wastebasket. The Yankees had switched training sites to Shreveport, Louisiana, and he hit town, straight from Hot Springs, with the easy air of royalty.

A local dealer gave him a new green Essex roadster to use during his stay; a proclamation of the mayor, which referred to him as “His Majesty, Babe Ruth, the Sultan of Swat,” allowed him to drive without a Louisiana driver’s license; and local high school students presented a five-foot floral bat. He hit nine balls out of Gasser Park on his first day, hit a home run in a practice scrimmage the next, struck out three times on the third day, then walloped three homers and collected six hits against a visiting minor league team on the fourth.

Nothing had changed.

The bamming and whamming resumed as if it never had stopped. The extracurricular life, with its assault on the seven deadly sins from lust to gluttony and straight through to pride, resumed now that Helen was back at home. Teammates told a story of a car chase and a gun on a Louisiana night, Ruth saved at the last minute from the wrath of a local man. There was a story of the green Essex simply left in the middle of the road while the Babe rode off in the car of a local widow woman, and another of a woman with a knife on a train. A high school girl asked sportswriter Jimmy Sinnott of the
Mail
if he could fix her up with Ruth.

“Why would a nice girl like you want to get mixed up with a guy like him?” Sinnott asked.

“Oh,” she said, “it would give me some standing in my class and sorority if I could tell them I had gone to bed with a national hero.”

Beer consumption and food consumption were added up in daily, startling statistics. The long balls kept flying. The national hero was the attraction of attractions.

“In the Yankee-Dodger sette at Ponce deLeon Park yesterday afternoon about 12,000 persons saw the mammoth slugger circle the bases,” Fuzzy Woodruff of the
Atlanta Constitution
wrote as the Yankees and Dodgers stopped in his town on the way north. “They threw every kind of fit known to medical science when he slid into the plate with all the grace of a bear coming out of hibernation.”

When he hit New York and the season started, he was 5-for-5 on opening day, had five home runs before the end of April, and went from there. Observations were made immediately that he was ahead of “his pace” for 54 in 1920. Attending a performance of Dunninger, the mentalist, at the Hippodrome, Ruth was asked to write down how many homers he thought he would hit during the year. Ruth wrote, and after mentalizing, Dunninger said the word “sixty.” Ruth held up his blackboard. How did the guy know?

The Yankees of 1921 had undergone some off-season reconstruction. Again, the Red Sox had been involved. The biggest move was that Ed Barrow, no fool, had sent himself to New York. The Yankees business manager, Harry Sparrow, had died, and Barrow took himself out of the Boston dugout and back into a front office. He was back with the Babe, resurrecting their tenuous relationship, but more importantly he was back in a situation where his owners had cash. He could make moves, the same way he could when Harry Frazee gave him freedom to spend with the Red Sox in 1918 and he wound up with a world championship. It is a baseball fact that the presence of money makes baseball executives smarter.

(One Harry Sparrow story. In May 1919, anarchists had sent bombs to the residences and offices of many famous people in New York. The bombs all were enclosed in bags from Gimbel’s Department Store. A friend shipped some lobsters from New Brunswick, Canada, to Sparrow. The wrapping had come apart in transit, so someone in the Yankees office put the package in a Gimbel’s bag on Sparrow’s desk. The lobsters, alive, made a little clicking sound as they moved inside the bag. Sparrow discovered a clicking Gimbel’s bag on his desk and just about fainted.)

Barrow’s first move was a deal with his old boss. Frazee sent Waite Hoyt, Wally Schang, Harry Harper, and Mike McNally to the Yankees for Muddy Ruel, Del Pratt, Sammy Vick, and Hank Thormalen. It didn’t seem like a bad deal for the Boston owner at the time, value for value, but again, it would be tilted wildly against him when the 21-year-old Hoyt, known as “the Brooklyn Schoolboy,” 10–12 in his two seasons in Boston, almost immediately became a top-line pitcher in New York.

With Ruth whaling and with Hoyt added to Carl Mays and Bob Shawkey as the stars of a solid rotation, the Yankees sprinted to the front in the pennant race with the Cleveland Indians, a two-team affair that would stretch across the season. Not only was Ruth hitting homers, but his average consistently hung around the .400 mark. His name was everywhere.

The effects of Christy Walsh’s whispers in his ear already were evident. The business manager had presented Ruth with a $1,000 check on the day he returned from spring training, and that had opened communication. Ruth suddenly was sending a telegram to child actor Jackie Coogan, ill in a New York hospital with bronchitis. He was posing with Georges Carpentier (George and Georges), the French boxer challenging Jack Dempsey. He was visiting St. Paul’s Orphanage in Pittsburgh and talking to the national convention of Presbyterians at a banquet in St. Louis. He even had his own mascot in the dugout, three-year-old Little Ray Kelly. Hurtling down Riverside Drive one morning, the Babe had stopped at the sight of Little Ray, attired in a Yankees uniform, playing catch with his father. Three years old, the kid was good. The Babe recruited him on the spot to be his personal mascot at all home games. The arrangement would last for the next decade.

“Do any of the other players mind that the Babe has his own mascot?” Little Ray would be asked.

“Who would mind?” Kelly always would reply. “He’s Babe Ruth!”

How famous was Babe Ruth? The newspapers reported that a kid who gave his name as George Kelly applied for an American passport in London. He had “an extensive repertoire of American slang,” but his English had a French accent. The American consul was suspicious. What to do?

“Who is Babe Ruth?” he asked.

George Kelly did not know. Request denied. He couldn’t possibly be American.

In the second week of June, Ruth’s performance became a bit ridiculous. He hit seven home runs in five days. The culmination of the streak was back-to-back performances against the Tigers. On June 13, nobody else available, he voluntarily was the starting pitcher, back on the mound for one of two times during the year. He pitched five innings for the 13–8 win, striking out Ty Cobb. He hit two homers, the second into the center-field bleachers at the Polo Grounds, the first time that part of the park ever had been reached. On June 14, he hit two more in a 9–6 win. The second shot also went to the center-field bleachers, deeper than the one a day earlier. He now had 23 homers, well ahead of his “pace.”

The
Los Angeles Times
was moved to write an editorial declaring him the nation’s foremost hero. It said that in England the hero was an agreeable prince, in France a general, in Russia a “blood-stained Bolshevik,” in Italy a leader of the Fascists, and in the United States a baseball player.