The Big Bam: The Life and Times of Babe Ruth (21 page)

“I didn’t have a thing till I was 18 years old, not a bite,” Ruth replied, as introspective as anything he ever said. “Now it’s bustin’ out all over.”

He then went downstairs and told Whitey Witt in the lobby that if he ever found Kelly, he’d kill him.

No fines were given. No suspensions were levied. Kenesaw Mountain Landis did journey to Boston to talk to both the Yankees and Red Sox, gathered in the same room, about the perils of gambling, drink, bad friends, and staying up late.

“Seeing a glorious sunrise is all right if you get up in the morning to watch it,” the wrath of God said, “but waiting up all night to see it is the rankest kind of folly, which has no place in the life of an athlete.”

Yawn.

“Those of you who are innocent of this practice of betting on horse races need not reproach yourselves, nor consider my remarks as personal,” the commissioner continued. “But there are some who are doing this thing, and to these I wish to say that they have not been unobserved and that the practice must cease or I will gather them in as surely as the sun rises in the morning.”

Double yawn.

Fights were another feature of the season. Ruth had a fight with Wally Pipp, or rather Wally Pipp whacked Ruth in the dugout after Ruth criticized his fielding. Braggo Roth and Aaron Ward had a fight one day later. Al DeVormer, an eccentric backup catcher, had fights with Carl Mays and Fred Hofmann. Waite Hoyt wanted to fight Huggins. Ruth, oh, yes, was suspended again for using a vile and vicious word, maybe the same word, maybe not, this time to umpire Tom Connolly. The suspension was for three days, accompanied by another apology, a vow never to be thrown out of a game again. The format was familiar.

The result of all of this—or, perhaps, despite all of this—was that the Yankees had another date with the Giants in a second Subway Series. The format had been shortened to best-of-seven, a Judge Landis demand, but the matchups of old and new, brains and brawn, etc., were the same. The Giants had clinched their pennant early and appeared to be more rested. The Yankees, well, they had the Babe. The betting was evenly divided.

One difference this time was that the games were on radio, broadcast through an eastern network of an estimated five million people from WJZ in Newark, WGY in Schenectady, and WBZ in West Springfield, Massachusetts. Grantland Rice, the sportswriter, did the play-by-play to what the
New
York Times
called “an invisible audience.” It was noted that the invisible audience could even hear the cheering in the background at the Polo Grounds.

Another difference this time was that the Giants killed the Yankees in four straight games. All of the sins of the season came back. The Yankees were pitiful. Miller Huggins forever thought Carl Mays and Joe Bush both threw games on purpose, a charge never verified. It was that kind of performance.

Bush did almost certainly groove a pitch to George Kelly in the final game. In the eighth inning, two outs, runners on second and third, Yanks ahead, 3–2, Huggins ordered the right-handed Bush to walk the left-handed Ross Youngs and pitch to right-handed George Kelly. Bush disagreed with the decision.

“What for, you stupid [vile and vicious name]?” he shouted at Huggins loud enough for the entire, packed stadium to hear.

He walked Youngs. He served a meatball to Kelly. Kelly rifled the meatball into center field. The Giants took the lead, added another run, and five minutes later were champions of the world.

Ruth was especially pitiful. McGraw instructed his pitchers to serve the Bambino a consistent diet of junk balls, low and inside. The Bambino was as helpless against this diet as he was against the screwballs of young Hub Pruett. He never saw one fastball in the strike zone. He finished with only a double and a single in 17 at-bats. The Giants didn’t even bother to walk him, issuing only two bases on balls.

The frustration of it all hit Ruth at the end of the third game. The Giants had been riding him from the bench, bringing back that word “nigger” from St. Mary’s Industrial School for Boys. They used the word as both noun and adjective, teaming it with (as Ban Johnson would say) every vile and vicious name imaginable, calling him a “so-and-so nigger” and also “a nigger so-and-so.” Ruth had heard enough.

Taking Bob Meusel with him after the 3–0 loss, he went to the Giants’ clubhouse. He first challenged reserve infielder Johnny Rawlings, the loudest voice on the bench. Then pitcher Jess Barnes became involved. Then Earl Smith, catcher.

“What’d he call you?” Smith asked.

“He called me a nigger,” the Babe said.

“That’s nothing,” Smith said.

Ruth became aware that several sportswriters had been drawn to the confrontation. McGraw also had joined the scene and ordered him out of the clubhouse. The edge came off Ruth’s anger. He joked with a couple of the Giants. He left with a request rather than a demand.

“Don’t get me wrong,” he said. “I don’t mind being called a [submit vile and vicious name] or a [submit another vile and vicious name] or things like that. I expect that. Just lay off the personal stuff.”

The strange season was done.

In the off-season, Christy Walsh wanted to repair the damage that was done. It didn’t take an expert in this new public relations stuff to recognize that the Babe’s image had taken a few good blows. He hadn’t awed and amazed people, missing as many games as he did. He had come off as a combustible character, selfish, sometimes out of control, a bear that didn’t react well when baited. The goal was to bring him back to the big, lovable galoot who had captured America’s imagination in the first place.

Walsh knew that perception was more important than truth. He always told his ghostwriters not to strive to write the way their athlete talked, but to try to write the way the public thought the athlete talked. There was a difference. The character in the public mind was more important than the real character.

During the 1922 season, Ruth had two moments when he was an obvious big, lovable galoot. The first was when he bought the farm in Sudbury. The idea of him, the ultimate city kid, going off to raise chickens and turnips brought an immediate smile. The second moment was when he divulged that he was a father. He had a baby girl! Not only that, the baby girl was 16 months old!

The news came out of the fog of his marriage in strange circumstances. While the Babe was on the road in Cleveland on September 20, Helen showed up at the Polo Grounds for a Giants game with the baby and a nurse. Reporters inquired. Helen answered. She said the baby, named Dorothy, had been born very small, two and a half pounds, and had lived in an incubator, then with a nurse before recently coming home to the Ansonia Hotel. The Babe hadn’t wanted news of the baby released until they knew she was completely healthy.

Contacted in Cleveland, the Babe admitted he was a father. He said the baby had been born on February 2 at Presbyterian Hospital in New York. Helen, alas, had said the baby was born on June 7 at St. Vincent’s Hospital in New York. What was the deal?

“I guess she knows,” Babe said.

“You know he’s never good with names or dates,” Helen said.

All this was confusing. Most guesses were that the baby had been adopted, but neither adoption records nor birth records ever were found anywhere. The truth—or another version of the truth—would not come out until more than 60 years later, when Dorothy would be told that she was in fact Ruth’s natural daughter, born to a lover and taken from the lover to live with Helen and the Babe.

Whatever the case, he was now a dad, available for all of those dad photo opportunities. He was a big, lovable galoot of a dad.

Christy Walsh decided to focus on these domestic changes—the farm, the daughter—in rebuilding the Babe’s image. He also devised what would become a staple of repaired public relations: the apology. When the Babe returned from a desultory barnstorming trip across the Midwest—the rules had been changed against Landis’s protest to make this allowable now—he immediately telephoned the Yankees offices and described how the winter was going to be devoted to the simple life of chopping wood, hunting, hiking, and losing 25 pounds. He also said he had hit 20 homers in 17 games across Nebraska, Iowa, Minnesota, Colorado, and Oklahoma.

“Wait a minute,” he said in this report from his new domesticity. “The baby’s fallen out of the chair.”

Walsh plotted out a far more public moment. He arranged a dinner on November 15 at the midtown Elks Club in New York. The theme was “Back to the Farm,” a good-bye to Ruth before he left for Sudbury. Walsh invited the city’s sportswriters, plus assorted politicians and Broadway notables. Attendance was good, a large papier-mâché cow stood atop the head table, and the show was memorable.

State Sen. James J. Walker, later to become the gadfly mayor of New York, then the embattled mayor of New York, was the star attraction. At the end of an evening of pleasant speeches extolling the Babe, he rose and cut the Babe to pieces. A man publicly known to stay up late and take a drink had advice for a man publicly known to stay up later and take more drinks.

“Babe Ruth is not only a great athlete, but also a great fool,” Walker began. “His employer, Col. Jacob Ruppert, makes millions of gallons of beer, and Ruth is of the opinion that he can drink it faster than the Colonel and his large corps of brew masters can make it. Well…you can’t! Nobody can.”

The room became very quiet. The rest of the speech, as reported by Gene Fowler in his biography of Walker,
Beau James,
followed:

You are making a bigger salary than anyone ever received as a ballplayer. But the bigger the salary, the bigger the fool you have become.

Here sit some 40 sportswriters and big officials of baseball, our national sport. These men, your friends, know what you have done, even if you don’t. They are sad and dejected. Why? I’ll tell you. You have let them down!

But worst of all, worst of all, you have let down the kids of America. Everywhere in America, on every vacant lot where kids play baseball, and in the hospitals too, where crippled children dream of movement forever denied their thin and warped little bodies, they think of you, their hero; they look up to you, worship you. And then what happens? You carouse and abuse your great body and it is exactly as though Santa Claus himself suddenly were to take off his beard to reveal the features of a villain. The kids have seen their idol shattered and their dreams broken.

Fowler’s report had the Babe sobbing by now. Other reports—sports-writer Fred Lieb’s, for one—did not remember any sobbing. Walker, in Fowler’s report, placed his hand on the Babe’s shoulder.

“If we did not love you, Babe, and if I myself did not love you sincerely, I would not tell you these things,” Walker said. “Will you not, for the kids of America, solemnly mend your ways? Will you not give back to those kids their great idol?”

Fowler had the Babe reply in tears.

“So help me, Jim, I will!” Ruth said. “I’ll go back to my farm in Sudbury and get in shape.”

He soon left with Walsh and this firm purpose to repent. The gathered sportswriters left with filled notebooks. They might have had some cynicism, some doubt about whether what they had seen was true, half-true, or completely staged, but words were words and these were good ones.

The writers too wanted the old Babe to return.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

N
EW YORK
had 18 daily newspapers when the Babe arrived in 1920. Though the competition for readers and distribution wasn’t as deadly as it was in Chicago, where murders and sabotage were commonplace in the circulation wars in the first decade of the new century, the fight for the daily two cents from 5.6 million New Yorkers was serious and ferocious. The Babe was an answered prayer for everyone concerned.

The
Evening Journal
, a William Randolph Hearst paper, was the circulation leader at around 600,000. The
Times
, the
World
, and the
American
each averaged slightly over 300,000, while the
Sun
and the
Herald
each was around 200,000, followed by the rest of the pack. Sports occupied 10 to 15 percent of the average news hole in all of these papers, even in the
Times,
and the Sultan of Swat, the Colossus of Clout, filled that space better than any athlete who ever had come along.

Unlike, say, heavyweight champion Jack Dempsey, he was in public view for half of the days of the calendar year, 154 regular-season games plus spring training and whatever drama might emerge in the fall. He was out there, loud and noisy and big, big in everything he did on the field or off the field. He hit home runs, won championships, set records, ate lunch. There was no such thing as no news with the Babe. His strikeouts were as noteworthy as his home runs, his failures and pitfalls as memorable as his successes.

The Speed Graphic, the newspaper photographer’s camera of choice, loved his broad face with its flat nose and tiny eyes, loved his absolutely unique look, features put together in a hurry, an out-of-focus bulldog, no veneer or sanding involved. This was a face that soon was instantly recognizable, seen again and again, more familiar in most households than the faces of a second cousin once removed or a Dutch uncle who always appeared for Sunday dinner. The Babe was an incorrigible, wondrous part of everyone’s family. He posed in any kind of uniform, any kind of situation. He kissed dogs and cows and chimpanzees. He wore cowboy suits and patrolman blue, badge included. He posed with celebrities and bands of waifs whose eyes all glowed as if they were in the presence of a deity. He was the life of everybody’s party.

The words that accompanied the pictures came from an open vault of superlatives. Laughing but earnest men in fedoras and off-the-rack suits, sportswriters, watched the sun rise and fall on his big head and were moved to grand statements. They typed the legend into place, adding layer upon layer of adjectives until often the man in the middle couldn’t even be seen. He became a modern Vesuvius, a wonder of the world to be described daily. Everybody had a crack at him.

“No man has ever lived who hit a baseball as hard as Ruth,” columnist Damon Runyon wrote in the
American
in a typical daily offering in September 1920. “In the olden days, soldiers were equipped with slings and slew their enemies with missiles thrown from these slings, but it is doubtful if they got as much force behind them as Ruth puts back of a batted ball. The weapon which was the nearest approach to Babe’s deadly drive was the catapult.”

The end of the war had brought a rush of writing talent into the city. Working for a newspaper was a glamorous occupation, and New York was the most glamorous, most vibrant city in the postwar world. The first two commercial radio stations, one in Pittsburgh and one in Detroit, had only started operation in 1920, so for the last few years the newspaper reporter and the columnist were the only voices that brought news, opinion, even entertainment, every day. Not only were these people stars, but some of them were shooting off toward greater accomplishments.

Runyon, who invented the nicknames “Bambino” and “Bam” and “the Big Bam” for Ruth at the
American
, already was shifting more and more toward his dialogue-filled tales of gangsters and Broadway lowlifes, but he still found his way to the ballpark. Grantland Rice at the
Herald
already was the preeminent sports columnist in the nation, a lyricist much more than an investigator, a few lines of doggerel starting each piece, Greek gods and portentous skies always in the background. Westbrook Pegler, increasingly acerbic and cynical in covering sports in New York for the United Press and then the
Chicago Tribune
syndicate, would evolve into an acerbic and cynical right-wing commentator about politics and life. John Kieran, the first sports columnist in
New York Times
history, had such a range of interests and knowledge that he eventually would become famous on a national radio show,
Information Please,
as a man who could answer all questions about anything.

The baseball beat writers, on the trail every day, sometimes switching to cover the Giants or Dodgers, sometimes not, were a strikingly literate and well-traveled group. Many of them had been in the war. Bozeman Bulger of the
Evening World
, a large and witty character from Birmingham, Alabama, with a fat southern drawl, had been a hero in the Argonne offensive. One-armed Bob Boyd of the
World
, an Australian, looked as if he had been a hero but, alas, had been a member of the Canadian air force and walked into a moving propeller before he ever left for combat. Richards Vidmer of the
Times
, such a sophisticated presence that author Katherine Brush wrote a best-selling novel about him called
The Young Man of Manhattan,
had survived a midair collision with a civilian plane near Hicksville, Long Island, during pilot training in the Signal Corps.

“How are the other fellows?” he asked after being pulled, badly injured, from the crashed fuselage.

“Oh, they’re better off than you,” he was told. “They’re all dead.”

Fred Lieb was at the
Telegram
, a statistics man, a baseball insider, who had grown up in Philadelphia. Ford Frick was at the
American
, a future commissioner of baseball from Fort Wayne, Indiana, who had learned to touch-type at 15 because he knew he wanted to be a sportswriter. Dan Daniel, proud that he had been the first local sportswriter to use one of those new portable typewriters that everyone now used, was at the
Press
. Will Wedge, who took a note on absolutely everything that happened during a game and secretly wanted to be a poet, was at the
Sun
.

The list went on and on and would expand and contract through the years as affiliations changed, as papers were merged or killed, as assignments changed—Heywood Broun, Joe Williams, Tom Meany, Arthur Robinson, John Drebinger, Jimmy Cannon, W. O. McGeehan, Bill Corum, Bill Slocum, Frank Graham, people coming and going—but always there would be a good-sized corps that followed the Yankees, followed the Babe, typed out the words.

Everything was done in close quarters. The writers were thrown together with each other, then thrown together with the players. The clubhouse was not the meeting ground that it would become, stark-naked athletes questioned daily about their views on hanging curveballs and life, but incidental contact was perpetual. The writers rode with the players on the trains and in cabs, lived in the same hotels. The games were played in the afternoon, so nights were open and often shared, ballplayers and writers in the same restaurants and speakeasies, seated at the same card table.

A friendly atmosphere prevailed. The writers of the time grew to know their subjects much better than future generations in the craft would. They also reported much less than future generations would. Especially about the Babe.

“Hell, I could have written a story every day on the Babe,” Richards Vidmer said. “But I never wrote about his personal life, not if it would hurt him. Babe couldn’t say no to certain things. Hot dogs was the least of ’em. He couldn’t say no to a hot dog, but there were other things that were worse. Hell, sometimes, I thought it was one long line, a procession…”

The Babe was an ultimate test in writing and reporting. What to leave in? What to leave out? His pleasure-dominated life constantly put him in questionable situations. Was it news that he was drunk again late at night? Was it news that he had been with one, two, three women who were not his wife?

An unwritten, sometimes-spoken code existed not only with him but with virtually everybody in public life. A boundary existed between the public and the private. Unless a door was opened by a policeman or a court proceeding, affairs of the heart and matters of the bedroom, drunken vulgarities, and four-star orgies were not reported. This code prevailed not only in sports but in politics, the arts, even show business. If the president of the United States urinated into a fireplace at the White House—as Richards Vidmer saw Warren Harding do—it didn’t make the newspaper.

Hints could be made, winks and nods, flaws in character sticking out the sides of a feature story like lettuce in a fat BLT, but names seldom were named, dates and places seldom included. A curtain of good taste pretty much came down in many areas once the game had ended. This was not a bad thing for the Babe.

An example: Vidmer would often play bridge in the Babe’s hotel room on the long barnstorming trips back from spring training. The Yankees would play a 1:00
P
.
M
. game in some southern town, the game finished by three, and everybody would go back to the hotel to await an 11:00
P
.
M
. departure for the next town. The bridge games would take place, other ballplayers and Vidmer and the Babe, during that time.

The phone always would ring. Vidmer always would answer.

“Is Babe Ruth there?” a woman’s voice would ask.

“No, he’s not here right now,” Vidmer would reply. “This is his secretary. Can I tell him who called?”

“This is Mildred. Tell him Mildred called.”

“Mildred…”

Vidmer would look at the Babe. The Babe would shake his head, no, not here, not for Mildred.

“I’m sorry,” Vidmer would say. “He’s not here right now, but I’ll tell him you called…”

Invariably, the Babe would have instant second thoughts. Invariably, he would sprint across the room and grab the phone.

“Hello, babe. Come on up.”

“And she’d come up and interrupt the bridge game for ten minutes or so,” Vidmer said. “They’d go in the other room. Pretty soon, they’d come out and the girl would leave. Babe would say, ‘So long, kid,’ or something like that. Then he’d sit down and we’d continue our bridge game. That’s all. That was it. While he was absent, we’d sit and talk, wait for him.”

This was not material for the paper. Should it have been? The curtain of good taste covered the situation. The curtain covered a lot of situations. The writers pounded away with their similes and allusions, constructed their grand rococo word sculptures, truly florid and inventive stuff. They worked within their limits.

Fred Lieb always told the story about the woman chasing Ruth with a knife through a Pullman car in Shreveport during spring training in 1921 as the train was almost ready to leave for New Orleans. Ruth was running as fast as he could, and the dark-haired, dark-eyed woman, said to be the wife of a Louisiana legislator, was five feet behind him. Ruth pounded through the car, jumped off the train, then jumped back on as it was leaving, the woman back on the platform.

Eleven writers, playing cards, watched the whole thing. None of them wrote a word.

“Well,” Bill Slocum of the
Morning American
said as the card game continued, “if she had carved up the Babe, we really would have had a hell of a story.”

The work of the writers would be derided in future journalism school classes, seen as the creation of a day-to-day hagiography, but there were subtleties that the public understood. The spaces between the lines of the nonstop words counted as much as the words themselves. The image came through. Was there any well-minded reader who did not suspect the crudities, the womanizing, the drinking? They were part of what made the Babe so intriguing. They were part of the big and blustery, oversized image that was created.

“So unique is Babe’s record, so amazing his exploits, that the riches of the English language seem barren of words adequately to describe him,” F. C. Lane wrote in
Baseball
magazine in October 1922, describing the daily exercise of writing about the new sensation.

Flaming adjectives lose their color when applied to the Babe. Overworked verbs falter in the narration of his record feats. While as for nouns that may serve as comparisons—the word painter who scans the verbal horizon for such things finds only a bleak and barren landscape. How are you going to find anyone when nobody like him has ever worn a baseball uniform? Babe is unique.

And yet Ruth is a theme which never grows threadbare. He is to the baseball scribbler as perennial a subject as spring to the budding poet, a sunset to the descriptive prose writer. Familiar from every angle there is yet something about him which is always new. No baseball player has ever been so thoroughly discussed. His most intimate acts and tastes and characteristics are subjected to the searching scrutiny of publicity.