The Big Bam: The Life and Times of Babe Ruth (22 page)

The Babe sold papers. The papers sold him. It was a fine symbiotic relationship. For a man who liked company, the dance with the writers was hardly a chore. He remembered few of their names, didn’t know which writer wrote for which paper, never read the papers in fact, but he remembered faces. A knock on his door, either at his home or in the hotel or on the train, often resulted in an invitation to share a libation and a story. Christy Walsh no doubt impressed upon him the need for publicity, but the Babe never really needed coaching. He inhaled and people watched. He exhaled and headlines were created. He breathed publicity naturally.

In an amendment to his 1924 income tax, he would file a request for a $9,000 deduction for money “expended for the purpose of establishing and maintaining good will to the extent of entertaining sports writers, press agents and other similarly situated in order to constantly keep himself before the public.” This figure was larger than the salaries paid to most major league baseball players during a season and much larger than the salaries of average American workingmen. It also was approximately one-seventh of the Babe’s own stated income for the year, $66,215.34.

He was not afraid of publicity.

A new contender in the newspaper war was the
Illustrated Daily News
, which began operation on June 26, 1919. The publisher, Capt. Joseph Medill Patterson, whose family also owned the
Chicago Tribune
, was on furlough in England during the war and was impressed by the
Daily Mirror,
a photo-filled London tabloid that had a rapidly growing circulation of 800,000. He decided he wanted to bring the same kind of publication to New York.

In the oft-told romantic version of the paper’s creation, he and his cousin, Col. Robert McCormick, plotted out the operation next to a fumier, a large pile of collected manure, in the French countryside a few days before the second battle of the Marne. The war ended, and less than a year later the paper—the name soon shortened to the
Daily News
—was on the streets.

The early circulation figures bounced wildly, 35,000 one day, 75,000 the next. The
News
stayed near the bottom of the pile as Patterson refined his formula. Then it began to take off.

There never had been a paper like this in the United States. Pictures in prewar U.S. newspapers traditionally had been restricted to one-column headshots, austere faces set in a field of gray type. This had begun to change with the addition of rotogravure sections, but now the
News
rushed to the forefront. Pictures of people, animals, events—action pictures—were used throughout the paper to illustrate stories about love triangles and murders, politics, human interest, and celebrity. Two full pages of pictures were placed in the middle of each edition. Puzzles, comics, contests, and serial fiction were other parts of the tabloid mix, everything kept short and convenient to be read by the daily rider of the city’s subways.

The first sports editor was Marshall Hunt, a 24-year-old native of Tacoma, Washington. The son of a newspaper editor, he had been a journalism student at the University of Washington when war was declared. Virtually the entire membership of his fraternity house, Phi Gamma Delta, immediately enlisted. He joined the U.S. Army Signal Corps and, when the opportunity presented itself, trained to become a pilot.

By the time his training was completed, the war was in its final months. He spent a pleasant year flying from airfield to airfield in France and developed an appreciation for wine in Bordeaux. Back in the States, he decided to forgo school and become not only a newspaperman but a newspaperman in New York. After finding a job at the
Newark Ledger
in New Jersey, the only spot open, he heard about Capt. Patterson’s new enterprise. He became not only the first sports editor but the entire department.

“We had no wire service,” Hunt said. “We practiced the greatest larceny in the world. I would wait until the late editions of the afternoon papers were delivered at my desk, and I would write three baseball stories almost simultaneously from the play-by-play accounts of the final editions. I did that for a long time. I really believed that Capt. Patterson thought we had a wire service doing all that. But it was a nip-and-tuck affair, three stories a day, stolen.”

Luckily for Hunt, the importance of sports was established early at the paper. Patterson liked sports, and three months into production, managing editor Arthur Clarke decided to give the back page of the 20-page daily to the sports department. Unlike the random events covered in the rest of the paper, sports ran on a schedule. The moments of drama could be predicted, cameras focused and poised for the action. Sports were perfect for the
Daily News,
large shots from games involving any of the three New York major league teams run across the back with little labels attached to identify each of the participants in a given play. The reader’s imagination was left to insert the proper colors and crowd noise.

Capt. Patterson soon allowed Hunt to expand the department, first with an office boy and then with writers to cover boxing and racing. Hunt liked the help but was frustrated with the boundaries of his work. He found that he had become an administrator, a copy editor, more than a writer. This wasn’t why he had come to New York. He wanted to be out in the city, seeing people, doing things, being part of what he thought was a glamorous Manhattan hum. His salvation came when Paul Gallico, a young movie critic and part-time short story writer from New York, was shifted to sports because Patterson disliked the negative tone of his reviews.

Hunt surrendered the job of sports editor and his column to Gallico and became a baseball writer. He convinced Patterson that he not only should cover the Yankees at home, which the
News
already did, but also should cover the team on the road. Only afternoon papers sent writers on the road at the time, the writers also hired as stringers for extra money to reconfigure their work for the morning papers. Hunt sensed there was an opening for the
News
here. He had a different strategy for covering baseball.

“I wasn’t there to cover the Yankees or the games, you see,” he said. “I was there to cover the Babe.”

What was more important as the decade unrolled, as the Babe piled feat upon feat—how the runs were scored or where the great man went for dinner? The double that won the game or the raccoon coat the Babe wore when he left the clubhouse? He was the object of public fascination. He was the star, everyone else on both teams only bit players in his daily tragedy or comedy. He was the one who sold papers.

The back page of the
Daily News
was perfect for the Babe, and the Babe was perfect for the back page of the
Daily News
. Marshall Hunt was determined to keep him there.

“When the Babe came down from Boston, we knew a lot about him,” Hunt said years later. “He’d been an amazing pitcher up there, a great hitter, really a good fielder…we knew the Babe. When we were in Boston, we always went down to the clubhouse. It’s not like now. You were welcome. The players came over and shaked your hand, even though you had kidded them badly the day before.

“Patterson was always looking around for some outstanding people in tennis, football, baseball that we could latch on to and sort of cultivate and have exclusive stuff on the guy, just because we could go to his apartment at night, take him fishing, hunting, anything. So Babe arrived in New York, and we recognized him as someone we could do business with.”

Hunt was one of those small, mischievous men with a twinkle in an eye that saw everything around him. He was always on the lookout for life. He appreciated a cocktail, a good meal, a late night. He was a respectable golfer, an avid fisherman. He was a perfect companion for the Babe.

There was no secret to the way he became close with his subject: he simply showed up. He went to the places where the other writers didn’t, the nonbaseball places where the Babe was happy to see a familiar face. Dinners and vaudeville shows. Prizefights and hospitals. He was around and the Babe noticed, and after a while they would go to these places together.

The trap was sprung. The common bond was fun. Hunt became a figure in the background in pictures, a member of the foursome watching as the subject teed off. Christy Walsh was in the foreground in formal shots. Hunt was in the background in the informal ones. The Babe had become a
Daily News
man.

Hunt was his serial biographer.

“We got along fine,” Hunt said. “I never had a cross word with the Big Baboon. He was no intellectual, you know, but he was an agreeable guy. He really liked baseball, and he liked people. And he tried to be agreeable.”

“Marsh is okay, but someday I hope that little runt misses a train,” the Babe said. “A guy has to have some privacy.”

The job for Hunt was a joy. Not only was he out in the desired hum, he was at its epicenter. He was bright and well read, curious and funny, and when he walked the same red carpet as the Babe, he was able to notice all the things that the big man missed. The code was in place, Hunt so careful of the boundaries that he asked editor Phil Payne to send other reporters to the scene when scandal arose and tough questions had to be asked, but he still tried to present the outrageousness of his subject’s life, the ceaseless, wonderful feast that was laid out, the unremitting excess. He was mesmerized by it.

The practice at the time was for the baseball clubs to pick up the expenses of the writers traveling with the club. The Yankees were no different. Hunt told Patterson that the
News
should pay his expenses. The Babe already was staying at a different hotel from the team on the road. With a carte blanche expense account, Hunt could join him. He could trail his man in all endeavors, not worrying about cost. Patterson agreed.

“No one ever questioned my expenses,” Hunt said. “It was publish or perish. If you got the stories, no one bothered you.”

The other writers mostly ended their coverage of the Babe at the end of the season, moving along to other sports, other subjects. Hunt would keep going. The Babe was a 12-month job. Hunt would move along to the barnstorming tours, to the vaudeville tours, to the off-season habitats of the great man. The stories were even better in the off-season. They mostly didn’t have to be shared. They belonged only to the
Daily News.

Example: Hunt showed up at the farm in Sudbury unannounced. He simply said, “I wonder what the Babe’s doing?” and took a train from New York. He got off at a small station in Massachusetts in a blizzard, learned there was no such thing as a taxi, and found a man who would give him a ride to the farm in a hearse. He showed up at the Babe’s door in a hearse! The Babe let him in.

“There was all of this snow piled up in the back of the house,” Hunt said. “I thought it had been bulldozed into a pile. No. The Babe said he’d been trying to get his car, a big Packard, out of the backyard. He’d been driving the car back and forth, stuck, and built up the pile. He had burned out the clutch and was complaining about the cheap clutch. It wasn’t the cheap clutch. He’d just killed it.”

Hunt noticed a piano in the living room. The Babe said it had come with the farm. Hunt noticed some scratches on the top of the piano. The Babe said there was a reason. He had a cat that did a very good trick. Here…the Babe showed the trick.

He put the cat in a rocking chair. He waited for the cat to fall asleep, then brought out a shotgun and opened a window. He fired the shotgun out the window. The cat did one world-class leap from the rocking chair to the top of the piano, digging his claws into the finish as he landed. Wasn’t that a good trick?

“I have no idea how many times he did it,” Hunt said. “I don’t know if the cat jumped every time. He did it this time, though. Jesus, what a trajectory.”

Example: Hunt went bowling with the Babe. Off on a barnstorming tour, somewhere in the middle of America, killing time, he and the Babe found a dilapidated alley located on the second floor of a building on a steep hill.

“There were two lanes, both of which looked as though they had been used as a proving ground for Caterpillar tractors,” Hunt recalled years later in the
Seattle Post-Intelligencer.
“The proprietor said we could bowl, but not until he found a pin boy. He departed on his errand, but not until he had propped open double doors at the head of the stairs.

“The Babe noticed that pins were standing up in one alley. He announced that he would take a practice roll, whereupon he picked up one of the three balls on the rails that appeared to be fairly round, but its surface suggested that perhaps an alligator had teethed on it.”

The Babe rolled. He slipped in his follow-through. The misshapen ball veered across the misshapen alley, went into the gutter, then jumped out again and began rolling across the floor. It reached the open double doors, went down the stairs,
thumpeta-thumpeta,
hit the street, and kept going down the hill. Gravity made it move faster and faster.

Hunt and the Babe followed. They walked all the way to where the ball finally stopped. They estimated the distance at 1,050 feet. The Babe thought he might have established a world record for the longest rolling of a bowling ball. Hunt thought he had a pretty good story for the readers of the
Daily News.

Example: Ice fishing in upstate New York. The Babe was cold; the fish weren’t biting. It was time to go…

“We were preparing to leave when the Babe removed the backseat of his 12-cylinder Packard and lifted out a golf bag the diameter of a hot water tank,” Hunt said. “He pulled out a driver and extracted a ball and a wooden peg. He hammered the peg into frozen ground, perched a ball on the tee, only to see it blown off. He replaced it, stood erect, wound up in his inimitable fashion.

“As he swung at the ball, as only the Babe could swing at it, I thought I heard, above the sound of the gale, a distinct whistle—which could have been caused only by the shaft of a golf club slicing the air with incredible speed. There was a loud smack, and the ball, lofted into a howling tail wind, left our vicinity as though fired from a mortar.