The Big Bam: The Life and Times of Babe Ruth (31 page)

“Ruth is walked again for the fourth time today,” Graham McNamee told the country. “One strike on Bob Meusel. Going down to second!!! The game is over! Babe tried to steal second and is put out, catcher to second!”

The Series was done.

There was surprisingly little debate about Ruth’s bold decision. Miller Huggins defended his man.

“We needed an unexpected move,” the manager said. “Had Ruth made the steal, it would have been declared the smartest piece of baseball in the history of World Series play.”

The enduring Big Bam story from the World Series thus was not the attempted steal of second. It wasn’t even the three-home-run game or the four home runs in the Series or the .300 batting average or even the ten records he set. It was the story of Johnny Sylvester, the 11-year-old boy from Essex Falls, New Jersey, pulled from death’s grasp at the last moment by the heroics of a big lug half a continent away. Fact and myth and good PR, the new science, merged with marketing and America’s great love for pathos to create perfection. Johnny Sylvester and the Babe. This was the best story of them all.

“(
SPECIAL TO THE NEW YORK TIMES
)
ESSEX FALLS
,
N
.
J
.,
OCT
7.—John Dale Sylvester, 11 years old, to whom physicians allotted thirty minutes of life when he was struck with blood poisoning last week, was pronounced well on the road to recovery this afternoon, after he had contentedly listened to radio returns of the Yankees’ defeat of the Cardinals.”

The story started small and grew out of control, like the tales of the rescue of the cocker spaniel that fell in the well, the Boy Scout who stops a robbery, the old-timer who regains his hearing after he falls off the ladder. Somewhere a push came along to convert the mundane into a national fascination. One step led to another.

The first step: Johnny, kicked by a horse, sustained some sort of injury and was confined to his bed. The injury was to the head or spine, according to the newspaper a man read. (Readers of the
Times
were told it was blood poisoning.) The severity of the injury also varied, from simple inconvenience to—as the
Times
said—30 minutes from the Grim Reaper.

Johnny loved baseball, loved Babe Ruth. His well-connected father, Horace C. Sylvester Jr., vice president of the National City Bank of New York, trying to cheer up the lad in any way possible, sent a wire to friends in St. Louis asking if they could obtain autographed baseballs from both the Yankees and Cardinals. The baseballs arrived by air mail, apparently accompanied by a note from the Babe that said he would hit a home run for Johnny. The great man then, of course, hit three in one game.

Eureka! Johnny’s condition improved. Doctors were “baffled” by how this had happened. Must have been the baseballs. Must have been a miracle. Must have been the Babe.

The second step: someone alerted the press. The hand of Christy Walsh, though never matched publicly for fingerprints, would lead any list of suspects.

The third step: madness. Tabloid chaos.

“Did Babe Ruth knock a homer?” asked Johnny in one typical account. “His father displayed the evening newspaper. ‘Babe Ruth Hits Three Homers’ was the big black type at the top of the first page. Johnny sighed and went to sleep, a baseball in each hand. When he woke up, the nurse took his temperature. It had gone down two degrees.”

Eureka.

Stories about the Babe and kids were sports page favorites. Walsh loved them. Writers loved them. People loved them. The basic thread always was that the Caliph of Clout, the Rajah of Rap, the Behemoth of Bangs loved kids and kids loved him because he was one of them. He was pictured often with kids. He appeared at events for kids. He sold a bunch of products to kids. There was a tale, once a year, maybe twice, maybe more, about some kind thing he did for some kid. The runaway from Kansas always went home to start life anew. The tyke in the wheelchair had a signed baseball and a new, bright outlook.

The messages always were sweet and uplifting, almost Sunday school homilies. St. Francis of Assisi didn’t love birds as much as the Babe loved kids. A layer of truth always existed—there was a kid and there was an interaction with the Babe—but the words always seemed like they were spread too thick and deep and too absolutely perfect.

“For every picture you see of the Babe in a hospital, he visits fifty without publicity,”
New York Sun
sportswriter Bill Slocum, one of Ruth’s ghosts, once wrote. “I know. I get him there. Every road trip it’ll happen three or four times…. I’ll be going to bed around 11 and I’ll meet the Babe…. He’ll say, ‘Bill, I promised some guy I’d go out to a hospital tomorrow morning. Saint Something-or-Other hospital. Find out which one it is. I’ll meet you at eight o’clock here in the lobby.”

Was that the way it really was?

Fred Lieb, in his memoir
Baseball As I Have Known It,
gave a different Slocum opinion. He said Slocum always thought the Babe’s love for kids was “a sham and a put-on.” Lieb wrote the tale of Slocum, angry with Ruth, telling him this face-to-face. Lieb quoted Slocum: “You’re smart enough to know that your visits to sick and maimed kids square you with the club and the public for some of the rotten things you’ve done and all the trouble you’ve caused Miller Huggins.” Lieb then said, though, that he did believe that Ruth cared for kids.

Truth no doubt lived at an address in the middle. Kids loved Ruth. That was fact. He was a perpetual department store Santa. They followed him, mobbed him, reinvented him in their minds at home every night while they stared at his picture. He, in turn, did his job quite well. He made the stops, delivered the appropriate “ho-ho-ho’s.”

Though negative anecdotes seeped out in later years—he spit on this kid, kicked this other one, etc.—he certainly did not hate children. He listened with some animation to their words. He signed the autographs. He went to a lot of hospitals, orphanages, and Boy Scout jamborees. Put in the proper situation, he was good with his juvenile public. He simply wasn’t as good as the newspapers made him out to be. No human being could be that good.

Christy Walsh or maybe a reporter—and it had to be someone, because the newspapers had been alerted and sent photographers—convinced him to visit young Johnny Sylvester two days after the Series ended. Ruth was playing an exhibition that day anyway at Bradley Beach, New Jersey, against the Brooklyn Royal Colored Giants and was supposed to be honored at a reception there before the game. The stop made sense, even if he would be late for the reception.

He walked into Johnny’s room and flashbulbs popped, and he asked how Johnny was doing and made small talk, and the reporters scribbled and the wheels of commerce moved. (“Nice looking brother you have there,” the Babe said. “That’s my sister,” Johnny replied.) The scene was a postcard to the public, due to be reproduced in many saccharine variations for years.

“Supposing that while you were sick a baseball came from Babe Ruth himself because his name was on it and he promised to hit a home run for you in the World Series, a private home run and all, and then he hit
three
of them,” Paul Gallico wrote in the
Daily News
the next day.

I say just supposing. That’s all dreams are anyway—supposing. And then supposing one day mother came in all excited and said, “Johnny there’s someone here to see you,” and in walked Babe Ruth right out of the newspapers except he didn’t have his baseball suit on and he came over to your bed and held out his hand to shake and said, “Hello, Johnny; how do you feel now?” What would you do? What would you say? What would the fellows say? Not just someone dressed up like Ruth, mind you, but Babe Ruth himself, and he’d left a baseball game and a lot of people with silk hats and medals and things waiting for him while he called on you because he heard you were sick and needed him…. Life has no greater beauty to offer than that our dreams shall, at some time or other, acquire even a faint tinge of reality.

Two sportswriters, John Drebinger and Frank Graham, years later told about a meeting on an elevator between Ruth and a stranger, a man who shook Ruth’s hand, introduced himself as Johnny Sylvester’s uncle, and thanked the slugger for being such a help. The man left and Ruth said, “Now who the hell is Johnny Sylvester?” It didn’t matter. He always was bad with names. The story was the story.

Votive candles now flickered again under the picture of the man who a year ago had been seen as an overweight, overpaid, out-of-shape adulterer. The new science of public relations seemed to work quite well.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

M
ARSHALL
H
UNT
put together his ultimate “Babe and Me” exclusive in the first two months of 1927. The Babe was in Hollywood making a movie called
The Babe Comes Home
, and he secured for Hunt a low-paying but heavily privileged role as “a technical adviser.” Hunt convinced the
Daily News
that he should do a series on the whole thing, an easy bit of salesmanship, and headed west. He arrived two days into production while the crew was filming at a small amusement park at Venice Beach.

“Stop the camera!” the Babe shouted in mock horror when Hunt appeared. “This guy is everywhere!”

Unlike the Babe’s first venture into the movies, when the check ultimately bounced, this was a big-time operation for First National Pictures, the leading studio of the day. The director was Tim Wilde, who had directed many of Harold Lloyd’s comedies. The co-star was Anna Q. Nilsson, a bona-fide leading lady.

A native of Ystad, Sweden, she was the first of many Scandinavian beauties to capture Hollywood with their startling good looks. She had arrived in the town in 1910, 22 years old, and found immediate work as a model. The modeling led to movies, and she cranked them out, 84 films between 1911 and 1917 alone, her Swedish accent no problem in the age of silent film.

An accident while riding a horse in 1925, however, threatened her career. Thrown by the horse, she landed against a stone wall and was paralyzed for a year. She returned to Sweden, where she worked her way back through physical therapy to a point where she could walk and move again.
The Babe Comes Home
was part of her comeback.

It was generally known that she was not happy with the casting. The Babe was a late selection for an unnamed script that had been written. The original plan was for an actor to play the role of the slugger. Then someone had the idea to recruit the Babe himself and tweak the story. Anna Q. didn’t want to be paired with a baseball player, even if he was the most famous baseball player of all. There was little relationship between the star and co-star. The movie was made in parts, and Anna Q. and the Babe had only a few scenes together.

The plot was boy meets girl, sports version. Babe played a character named Babe Dugan, star slugger of the Los Angeles Angels. Nilsson played Vernie, the washerwoman who had to clean all of Babe Dugan’s dirty, tobacco-stained uniforms. By chance they meet, fall in love on a roller coaster, and soon plan to be married. Vernie has only one request: Babe has to stop chewing tobacco. He complies but, alas, finds that his hitting suffers when his routine changes. He is headed to bat in the big moment of the big game, of course, struggling, when he looks into the stands and sees Vernie, who, of course, takes pity and throws him a plug of chewing tobacco. Ta-da. Representatives of the American tobacco industry presumably would stand and cheer along with Vernie as he resumes masticating and spitting and blasts the ball out of the park.

Marshall Hunt started typing.

“The scene is Wrigley Field, a baseball enclosure in these remote precincts, and the time is the present,” Hunt wrote. “George Herman Ruth, an athlete of considerable fame, a director, his five assistants, a general supervisor and his assistants, a guardian of the script and her assistant, a chief electrician and minor electricians, a corps of property men (the property consisting of two baseballs and a dozen uniforms), a score or more of ex pugilists, pretzel molders, barbers, tightrope walkers and second story men posing as ballplayers, all are discovered in the act of creating a moving picture in which Mr. Ruth and Anna Q. Nilsson will be featured. The picture is yet an infant without a name.”

For the next 20 days, the stories continued. Hunt took great delight in describing the former boxers cast as baseball players, the director’s sketchy knowledge of baseball, the Babe’s ham-handed walk through moviemaking. This was the perfect out-of-context way to have fun and present the ungainliness, the humanity, of the character of George Herman Ruth.

No moment was too small to overlook. The Babe is wearing makeup! He tries a number 6, the same foundation used by stars like Ramon Navarro and John Gilbert, but finds it is too white, too light. Number 5 is the ticket, a ruddier, sunburned look. The Babe is looking at rushes! That har-har-har is from the big man himself. He thinks he is hilarious. The rain arrives! The filming is done indoors. The Babe wins the game and has to kiss the girl! He kisses the girl! Hunt covered it all with great enthusiasm.

“Does Mr. Ruth express his love with fawning looks, with sickly grins, with puppy-like grimaces?” Hunt wrote about the Babe’s big love scene. “He does not! There is nothing Westphalian about the wooing of the Babe. His features register tender affection as he first embraces the flaxen button cruncher. And in the final fadeout, there is warmth, intensity of passion burning in the optics of a man who would do murder to an umpire during the summer. And when lips meet lips, the connubial seal, there is a sizzling sound—hot lips! Hot dog! Alacazam!”

The circulation of the
Daily News
had rocketed past one million in the first weeks of 1926 and would approach 1,250,000 by the end of 1927. It had doubled the circulation of its nearest competitor, the
New York Journal
, and captured the attention of the common man. An advertising campaign started in 1923 called “Tell It to Sweeney” focused on what the paper thought was its audience: the working-class families of the big city, the first and second generations of immigrants. Don’t tell the story to the Stuyvesants and the bluebloods, tell it to Sweeney. The bluebloods had the
New York Times
and the other papers. Sweeney had the
News.

Sweeney loved all the pictures. Sweeney loved the stories of crime and political shenanigans. Sweeney loved the comics. Sweeney loved the movies and sports. Sweeney loved the Babe. The
News
—through Hunt—was more than happy to present the Babe.

“The Babe Breaks Pet Bat in Hollywood” (headline): “You will recall that for years the Bambino treasured a pet bat,” Hunt wrote. “He guarded it zealously. No other player ever used it. The bat was one with which he knocked three home runs in one World Series game. That bat enabled him to break a dozen records in the last series between the Yankees and Cards.

“But yesterday, while rehearsing a home run blow, he connected with a ball with such power that the club was split from end to end. A piteous expression wrinkled the features of the Babe. His head dropped. He trudged disconsolately to a chair. Smelling salts were applied….

“Whee! The Bam’s a Director Now” (headline): “The outfielders go to their positions and orders are megaphoned to them by Mr. Wilde,” Hunt wrote. “But Babe shakes his head. He takes the megaphone. The Bambino: ‘You, you left field and you, center field guy, move to the right! There’s a left handed batter at the plate in this shot. What’re you doing so far to the left? Move, you boilermakers, move to the right! What league do you think we’re in? A right hander’s league?’

“Mr. Wilde nods his approval. The Bambino has become a director!”

The amount of space devoted in the slim subway tabloid to these softer-than-soft news offerings was amazing. They were a tribute to the Babe’s commercial popularity, a window open to the giddy possibilities that danced in workingmen’s heads. Wouldn’t it be great to live like that! Sometimes too the stories showed some not-so-giddy realities.

In his 13th installment, for example, Hunt described a particular scene in the movie. Again, he danced lightly, looking for the laugh. The story was headlined “Babe Gets in Shape with an Ethiopian.”

“The scenario requires that the Bambino throw baseballs at a target in an amusement park which releases a trap and causes an Ethiopian to be precipitated into a pool of water,” Hunt wrote. “Each time the gentleman of color drops from his perch in a wire cage into the water the Babe is presented with a doll by the barker.

“The generous hero of the photoplay, accompanied by the pure and wholesome laundry maiden he is wooing, causes the Ethiopian to cool his ears in the pool twelve times and he is presented with twelve dolls which, with a gesture of magnificent generosity, he distributes among a group of children who gaze in open-mouthed astonishment at his accuracy in flopping the Ethiopian into the water.”

Hunt not only presented the picture but offered an extension of it:

“What a great benefit would the caged Ethiopian prove to pitchers in training camps!” he wrote. “Throwing a curve or fastball to a catcher whom they will face all summer becomes monotonous. The catcher’s glove is not stationary. The catcher can hop or leap to receive the ball. There is no great thrill, nothing to improve accuracy to a marked degree.

“The installation of an Ethiopian at a training camp would serve to stimulate the pitchers. A certain kick is derived from hitting the smallish target and watching the gentleman of color plunge into the pool.”

And finally:

“The supply of Ethiopians in Florida is practically inexhaustible and the cost of the accuracy developing mechanism would be negligible considering the effectiveness it is almost certain to produce.”

Sweeney probably was not a black man.

Artie McGovern had arrived early in the proceedings, leaving his gym in New York to personally handle the off-season health of his most notable client. Hunt thought that Ed Barrow had sent the trainer west, but Ruth certainly had the right of consent or refusal and obviously had consented. The bouncy McGovern, as he stated in a letter to
New York Post
sportswriter Walter Trumbull, was more than happy with what he found.

“When I left the East to come out here, take the Babe in hand, and try to duplicate the job of last year, I thought the publicity concerning Ruth’s being in good physical condition due to golf, tennis and other sports was the bunk,” Artie wrote. “But when I caught up with the big fellow, I received a very pleasant surprise. He really is in good physical condition. Most of those in the East figured as I did that a 14-week vaudeville tour was likely to put the rollers under anybody. The truth was that most of Ruth’s tour was in this part of the country and he has availed himself of every opportunity to get out on the golf course, not for the sake of exercise, but because he loves the game.

“When I checked the Babe’s weight and measurements I found him to be 10 pounds lighter than he was at this time a year ago. In other words, he is down to 231 pounds and his best weight is around 220 or 222, so there is not a great deal of work for me to do beyond a general systemic toning up and a concentration on the abdominal muscles. This will be easy in conjunction with the vast amount of exercise he is getting on the picture. The studio has constructed for Ruth a handball court and exercise room, supplying all that is necessary for us to work with.”

Hunt was enthralled by the exercise regimen. He noted that Ruth was out on Hollywood Boulevard by 6:30 in the morning, running distances from three to five miles as passing motorists and housewives stared. What a sight! Maybe “Tom Mix could be seen on a horse once in a while in Hollywood and Doug [Fairbanks] and Mary [Pickford] might be seen in the comforts of a limousine and there’s no telling where Lon Chaney might be seen, but here was a hero on his own hoof!” The Babe would return to the Hollywood Plaza, where Artie would give him a rubdown.

Exercise would run through the movie workday. Many of the scenes required physical activity from the Babe. He was always running, throwing, swinging a bat, sliding into home, again and again. Every noon would be an exercise show in itself.

“The professor [McGovern] would appear with boxing gloves, a medicine ball, a hand ball, a rope, a training table, tennis racquets, a grim determination and a small motor truck,” Hunt wrote. “Lunch for the Babe between 12 to 1? No! For ten minutes the professor and the Babe would box for all that was in them. McGovern would instruct the Bambino to stand upright while the professor would slam 50 virile blows to the tummy of the Babe. Ruth did not flinch. A hard midriff there, brethren!

“Tennis. Five minutes of rope skipping. Passing of the medicine ball. Exercises on the training table placed in the middle of the tennis courts on the company lot. A great show this, too, with hundreds of movie extras and stars and officials to look on in rapt approval.

“And to top off the exhibition, Prof. McGovern would mount the back end of the truck and command the Bambino to follow the truck wherever it might go. It usually went two miles; the professor standing on the rear and shouting to the driver to increase speed and daring Babe to pass the truck.”

At night, Artie sometimes would have the Babe run sprints in the corridors of the Plaza. Sometimes Artie would spar with him in the corridors, lively sessions complete with whoops and hollers. Other residents of the hotel complained. Management was not amused.

The result of all this work was that the Babe was in even better shape now than he had been at the start of the 1926 turnaround season. He had been following the McGovern plan for over 14 months. What other player in all of baseball was doing the things he was doing, sustained workouts under an expert in physical fitness? The image of the overweight hedonist continued—the
News
ran a cartoon to illustrate Hunt’s story that showed a black janitor saying, “Great Day. Ah thought its was a elephunt!!!” as a stocky Ruth ran past—but the image was wrong. The Babe was as ready as anyone in his game for the 1927 season.