The Big Bam: The Life and Times of Babe Ruth (39 page)

Ruppert and Barrow told him that they didn’t want a player-manager and that he was more valuable as a player. It was a convenient excuse, but only pushed the confrontation off to the side. When the Yankees bosses decided toward the end of the 1930 season that Shawkey had been a mistake, they had Ruth back in front of the door. They tried the same arguments, but this time Ruth argued back. Player-managers had been part of baseball history. Player-managers had won pennants.

“How can you manage a team,” Ruppert finally asked, the heart of the matter, “when you can’t manage yourself?”

Ruth replied that he had changed.

He took the selection in October of Joe McCarthy as the new manager as almost an insult. McCarthy, 44, had just been fired by the Chicago Cubs. As a player, he never had reached the big leagues. He was known as a disciplinarian, an enforcer of rules, the opposite of Miller Huggins. The new manager of the Yankees had about a thousand things wrong with him in the mind of Babe Ruth. The worst was that he wasn’t Babe Ruth.

Ruth played for McCarthy, played well, but didn’t like it. McCarthy made some quick changes to set a tone—no more card playing in the clubhouse, compulsory breakfast at 8:30 in the hotel dining room on the road, little tweaks to establish a businesslike atmosphere. No more shaving in the clubhouse! A man should come to this job the way he came to any job: clean-shaven and ready to work. The changes didn’t affect Ruth much—he always was clean-shaven when he came to work, was exempt from the breakfast rule owing to the commotion he would make, and rarely played cards in the clubhouse—but they were symbolic nuisances. Hadn’t Yankee teams won some pennants and World Series championships with a card table in the clubhouse? With a razor in the shower room? Without a good breakfast on the road?

McCarthy was smart enough to leave Ruth alone, to simply let him play. He did respect Ruth’s stature and obviously wanted his offensive production. Ruth was smart enough to leave McCarthy alone. The grand collisions that would have happened ten years earlier, the Babe flouting all authority if a stronger disciplinarian than Huggins had been in charge, did not happen. Ruth played, hit his 600th homer in the middle of the 1931 season, did his job for the man he didn’t like, and went about his own business. It was an efficient situation, a truce, but lacked a certain joy.

When the season was done, the Babe went to Hollywood to make some short instructional films about baseball. While he was there, he gave an interview that described a life that had grown tired in many respects. The comments quickly were called “Babe Ruth’s Ten Can’ts.”

“I can’t go to movies. It might hurt my eyes,” he said.

“I can’t dance. They tell me it’s bad for my legs.

I can’t attend a night club. They’d say I was drinking and carousing.

I can’t read a book on a train. It’s too hard on my eyes and I spend most of my life on trains.

I can’t gamble. I love to bet on horses—on anything, but if I was seen with gamblers or in gambling houses it would start gossip.

I can’t travel on airplanes. It’s against the rules of my contract and my insurance policies.

I can’t shake hands promiscuously. It’s dangerous.

I can’t go swimming. I’m told I would expose myself to colds.

I can’t speed my sixteen-cylinder automobile. If I was hurt while speeding, my wages would be stopped.

I can’t enjoy golf. I’m followed by autograph seekers.

Hang it all, I can’t do anything. Not just yet. But wait. In two years I’ll be through with baseball, then I’ll break loose—wide open. Not for long, but for a while.”

There was exaggeration here for sure. He still could do—and did—many of these things, but the sparks of discovery and defiance were long gone. The long-ago wonder of the boy from St. Mary’s Industrial School was long gone.

His personal life was as settled as it had ever been. On October 30, 1930, after he had “covered” the World Series for the Christy Walsh syndicate, the Babe and Claire signed the papers at Surrogate’s Court in New York to adopt jointly both Claire’s 12-year-old daughter Julia and Dorothy, now nine. This officially made him father as well as husband. He not only was a family man but had papers to prove it.

He slipped into the role without much difficulty, but it wasn’t a difficult role. He wasn’t home that much, so Claire and her mother and her two brothers had more to do with the two girls than he did. When he was home, he sat in his big chair, the only overstuffed chair in the house, smoked his cigar, looked out the window at the Hudson River, and listened to
Gangbusters, The Shadow
, and
The Lone Ranger
on the radio. He was the father as caricature. He was gone by 7:30 in the morning, never home before 7:30 at night.

“He loved to come home and throw his huge raccoon coat at me and see if I could catch it—which was almost impossible, since the coat weighed more than I did,” Dorothy wrote in
My Dad, the Babe.
“I would always wind up on the floor underneath the coat while my father laughed and laughed.”

Julia, Claire’s daughter, loved when the Babe would wake her at five in the morning on the days he was going hunting. He would make breakfast for the two of them, his special breakfast of browned bread with a fried egg in the middle of it, topped by a slice of fried bologna. They would eat alone, then he would go hunting and she would go back to bed.

The complexities of domestic life were left to Claire. Dorothy always felt that she was the forgotten figure in the house. She painted a picture of an alliance between Claire and Julia that worked against her. Julia had the better room. Julia had the better clothes. Julia went to private school, Dorothy went to public. The Babe was the titular head, but Claire pretty much ran the show.

A look at the Babe at home for photographers and sportswriters came in the first month of the 1931 season. He had been injured in the first week of the season in Boston when he tried to score from third on a Lazzeri fly ball to right. Beaten by the throw, he went into a football collision with Sox catcher Charlie Berry, who indeed once had been a football player at Lafayette. Ruth dislodged Berry from the ball and touched the plate with his hand, but he also dislodged some blood vessels in his left thigh. This caused him to collapse in the field in the bottom of the inning, his left leg paralyzed, when he tried to chase a fly ball. He was carried to the dugout, spent five days in a Boston hospital, and now was finishing his recuperation at home.

He lay on a pale green divan in his green bathrobe and pajamas, a color-coordinated patient. He ordered up cigars for everyone, Artie McGovern passing around a humidor, and smoked and posed for pictures with Claire and said he thought he might be back in 48 hours if things kept going well. Claire, on the side, said he didn’t have a chance. He hadn’t even walked yet with a cane.

“Two weeks,” she said. “That’s what the doctor said. He’s going to take two weeks.”

Claire, who was right in her prognosis, ran his life and he did not argue. The role of the henpecked husband fit an older man. He had an explanation for why he sometimes didn’t do the things he used to do—his wife wouldn’t like it. He worked under Claire’s rules much happier than he did under Joe McCarthy’s rules. He had a partner. An irony was that Jumpin’ Joe Dugan and Waite Hoyt both were in the midst of divorces brought about by the Murderers’ Row fun times and here he was, the family man.

Claire also had become part of all business discussions about the Babe. All deals went through Claire. She asked the questions that he never had asked. He was much more financially solvent.

“It took three varied skills to make the Babe wealthy,” Claire said in her book. “First and foremost there had to be a demand for Babe’s services. Babe more than provided that. Somebody had to handle the offers and see that Babe got a fair price. Christy Walsh handled that. I handled the Babe.”

Christy Walsh was still involved but now spent more time with his other clients. The biggest probably was Knute Rockne, the Notre Dame football coach. Walsh worked the same program with Rockne that he had worked with the Babe: the ghostwritten articles, the publicity appearances, the constant spread of the name, leading to business opportunities. Rockne wound up at the Mayo Clinic once, exhausted from the schedule.

On the night of March 30, 1931, Walsh had dinner in Chicago with Rockne and Alfred Fuller, a local hotel man. The agent had arranged a movie deal for Rockne in Hollywood, and at the end of dinner Walsh and Fuller put Rockne in a cab to the train station to catch an overnight to Kansas City, where he would take a morning mail flight to Los Angeles.

“Hope you have a soft landing,” Fuller said in good-bye.

“You mean a happy landing,” Rockne replied.

At 11 o’clock the next morning, the plane carrying Rockne and seven other passengers crashed shortly after takeoff in a field in Bazaar, Kansas. All eight people were killed. It instantly became the most famous crash in American aviation history.

Christy Walsh’s wife, Madaline, fainted when she heard the news in Los Angeles. She had expected her husband to be one of the passengers.

In 1932 Ruth took a $5,000 pay cut. Salaries were being reduced everywhere. People were being asked to work one week a month for free in many industries. Banks were failing. Even a leader in home runs, second in the American League in batting average, was affected by the new national austerity. Baseball owners across the board had promised to cut over $1 million in salary for the new season. The best place to start was at the top.

Ruth at first asked for two more seasons at the same $80,000 he had made the past two seasons. The Colonel offered $70,000 for one season. He said no player should make $80,000 in these troubled times. Ruth did not agree.

“What about the depression?” a sportswriter asked Ruth.

“I didn’t see much of a depression with the Yankees,” Ruth replied.

This was a gentlemanly dispute as befit the times. The compromise for one year at $75,000 plus 25 percent of net proceeds from exhibition games (part of his previous contract) came again in St. Petersburg at the Rolyat Hotel, where the Babe and Claire were staying. He and Ruppert signed the contract in front of a wishing well, then Claire and both of them tossed coins into the water. The Babe asked for a Yankee pennant. Claire asked for two more years of Yankees contracts. The Colonel asked for the money in the wishing well. Ruth tossed in an extra silver half-dollar to that end.

“There goes some of this year’s contract,” he announced.

The season that followed again was solid, with 41 home runs and a .341 batting average, but for the first time in his American League career the Babe was not the acknowledged King/Sultan/Maharajah of Swat. Jimmy Foxx of the A’s took the honors this time. He was the one who was matched against the 1927 homer pace in the newspapers and gave it a good run, finishing with 58. (He came to the final weekend needing four home runs in three games to reach 60.) Foxx even took away the slugging average title.

Although the drop-off in the Babe’s numbers wasn’t great, the symbolic shift of coming in second in both categories was huge. The inventor now saw someone use his invention better than he did. He never would lead the league again. Even on the Yankees, Gehrig had become the subtle constant, the true star. He hit four home runs on June 2, 1932, in a game against the A’s at Shibe Park, something the Babe never had done.

The game was a fight now. Claire talked about putting an electric pad on her man’s knees every night to keep him going. He left games early, replaced by Sammy Byrd or Myril Hoag for pinch-running or for defensive purposes in late innings. He missed a few games in June when he pulled a muscle in the back of his leg while chasing a fly ball. In September he had a mystery ailment. He and Claire left the team in Detroit on September 7 with the permission of Joe McCarthy and hurried back to Dr. King in New York because the Babe had shooting pains in his side and thought he had appendicitis.

The doctor never announced what Ruth’s problem was. There was no operation, but he missed ten days and was packed in ice for much of the time. When he returned to the Stadium for his first workout on September 17, he was so weak that he didn’t hit one ball into the stands during batting practice. He said, after the ice, he had to get thawed out.

He was in a hurry, of course, because the silver half-dollar in the wishing well in St. Petersburg had worked. The Yankees had had an extraordinary season. Ten days later, they would open up the World Series against the Chicago Cubs. If McCarthy’s methods hadn’t found favor with the Babe, they had with other parts of the roster. With Lefty Gomez and Red Ruffing as a one-two combination on the mound, backed by solid defense and the familiar bats of Ruth and Gehrig, Combs and Lazzeri, plus heavy-swinging catcher Bill Dickey, the Yankees had pulled away from the A’s this time, winning the pennant by thirteen and a half games.

The Babe would have his tenth World Series. Healthy again by the time the games arrived, he also would have his most remembered moment, a combination of timing, excellence, folklore, and fun. That would be “the Called Shot,” a story that should be told from the beginning.

On July 6, 1932, a 21-year-old woman named Violet Valle went to the room at the Hotel Carlos at 3834 Sheffield Avenue in Chicago where 24-year-old Cubs shortstop Billy Jurges lived. Ms. Valle, a jilted lover, was upset with Jurges and had a 25-caliber revolver to prove it. Her plan was to kill Jurges and then kill herself.

“To me, life without Billy isn’t worth living,” she wrote in a good-bye note she left for her brother. “But why should I leave this earth alone? I’m going to take Billy with me.”

Her execution of the plan, once she was admitted by the shortstop into his room, was a bit slow. Jurges was able to wrestle her for the gun. He was shot twice, once in the ribs and once in the hand, and she was shot once, but neither of the combatants was seriously injured. They both were taken to the hospital.

Jurges, the gentleman, refused to press charges. Violet, passions subsided, signed a 22-week vaudeville contract for shows that billed her as “Violet (What I Did for Love) Valle—The Most Talked-About Woman in Chicago.” The story had a reasonably happy ending for everyone concerned except for the Cubs, who needed a shortstop to replace Jurges while his injuries healed.