The Big Bam: The Life and Times of Babe Ruth (45 page)

Ruth gave Didrikson a ride home from the match and crashed his car. Neither Babe, it was reported, was hurt. Vowing to win the U.S. and British Opens, Montague later shot 81 at Open qualifying, missed the cut badly, and never was an attraction again.

“Shucks, this was nothing,” Didrikson, who came from Texas, said at the end of the strange day. “You ought to see the cattle stampede down home.”

On the Fourth of July 1939, the Babe—the male Babe—had a poignant public moment. The 1927 Yankees team was brought back to Yankee Stadium to honor Lou Gehrig, who was dying. The 36-year-old first baseman’s debilitating, incurable disease, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS, was known to everyone now, including the definite sad end ahead.

The Babe and Gehrig hadn’t talked in five years, and the big man was late arriving. Would he show? When he finally appeared, he was almost as majestic as he ever had been, stuffed in a white suit, wearing two-toned shoes, sporting a dark tan, looking like the somebody he always was. Posed in the middle of a picture of the 1927 returnees, minus Gehrig, he looked like the grand leader of a dour, dark-suited band.

He stood with all of them, Hoyt and Dugan, Lazzeri and Pennock and little Benny Bengough, for the progression of sad moments in the ceremony staged between games of the holiday doubleheader with the Senators. The saddest moment, of course, was when Gehrig spoke. Convinced to talk by Joe McCarthy, he gave a speech that became famous, naming the people he’d known with the Yankees, finishing with the words that made all hearts break in the crowd of 61,808.

“What young man wouldn’t give anything to mingle with such men for a single day as I have for all these years?” Gehrig said. “You’ve been reading about my bad break for weeks now. But today I think I’m the luckiest man alive. I now feel, more than ever, that I have much to live for.”

At the end, he began to cry. Ruth was nudged to the microphone. He walked to his longtime associate, if not friend, his brother in long-ball history, grabbed him around the neck, and broke their five years of silence with a whispered joke that made them both smile. He then told the crowd that he thought the 1927 version of the Yankees was better right now than the present version and intimated that he wouldn’t mind playing against them right now.

“Anyway,” he said, “that’s my opinion, and while Lazzeri here pointed out to me that there are only 13 or 14 of us here, my answer is shucks, we only need nine to beat ’em.”

And so it went. The Babe lived his retired, energy-burning life, came out for these public moments, then went back again to the golf and the bowling and the tracking of wild animals. He was something like a famous retired statesman, a professor emeritus, a president who had been voted out of office. Except he was much younger.

Both of his daughters married. Dorothy, of course, left home when she was 18 after an argument with Claire and ran away to get married. Julia, of course, went the social route, the Babe as the father of the bride in top hat and tails. Col. Ruppert had died at the beginning of 1939, an emotional scene in the last days when he asked to see “Root” and actually called him “Babe” for the first and only time. Ruth cried. A month after the Gehrig Appreciation Day in 1939, he went to Cooperstown, New York, and was inducted along with Ty Cobb, Honus Wagner, and Christy Mathewson as the first class in the Baseball Hall of Fame. Cobb was the leading vote-getter, Ruth second.

He played a publicized series of three golf matches with Cobb in 1941 in Boston, New York, and Detroit for charities. (Cobb won two of the three.) He played himself in
Pride of the Yankees
, a 1942 movie on the life of Gehrig, who finally had died on June 2, 1941. To look athletic for the part, Ruth lost 47 pounds in 60 days and almost killed himself, ending up in intensive care, but he did look good in the movie. He became so excited in the scene showing the wild train ride back from St. Louis after beating the Cardinals in the 1926 World Series that he punched his fist through a window and cut himself.

The Second World War came along, and he was a fund-raiser on assorted fronts. He played his last actual baseball at the Stadium in a benefit for the Army-Navy Relief Fund. Between the benefit game and the Yankees game, Walter Johnson pitched, and the Babe hit and on the 21st pitch lofted a long shot to right that curved foul at the last moment but clanked into the stands. Close enough. He went into a home run trot. He bowled against New York Giants football star Ken Strong in a series of matches to raise money, umpired softball games, refereed wrestling matches. He went to veterans’ hospitals.

The story came out that Japanese soldiers were shouting, “The hell with Babe Ruth,” or some derivative when they attacked, and he became so mad he destroyed most of the treasures he had brought back from Japan after the big trip. (“I hope every Jap that mentions my name gets shot,” he said. “And to hell with all Japs anyway.”) A friend told him that because of his popularity in Japan, one plan had been submitted that he be flown to Guam and put on a destroyer to broadcast to the Japanese people about the wisdom of surrender before the United States unleashed its nuclear bomb. Nothing ever came of it.

He took his final shots at getting back into baseball in 1946, after the war ended. He tried to land the Newark job, the same minor league post he had spurned long ago. Ruppert’s estate had sold the team to a new set of owners. The Babe called new Yankees boss Larry MacPhail, the owner who ran the club, and made his pitch, but was turned down. He then took a nice trip to Mexico with Claire and Julia and her husband to investigate the new, renegade Mexican League, expenses paid, but found millionaire owner Jorge Pasquel mostly just wanted him to ride the elephant. How could Babe Ruth live in Mexico anyway? He came back to New York and called MacPhail again, looking for
any
kind of job in the Yankees organization. He heard nothing, then received a letter on Yankees stationery in early October.

“Bad news,” he told Claire. “Good news, they call. Bad news, they send a letter.”

MacPhail had proposed that Ruth work with sandlot baseball in New York, with kids. Claire said Ruth cried. Kids? They wanted him to work with kids? The door was shut and now it was locked. He never would get back into baseball.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

T
HE BAD TIMES
began on November 26, 1946, two months after the letter from Larry MacPhail. The Babe checked into French Hospital on 29th Street for “observation.” He had been suffering from headaches and pains above his left eye for the past few months. His voice had become increasingly hoarse. The left side of his face now was swollen, and his left eye was closed. He couldn’t swallow.

Dorothy, his daughter, said the pain had become so bad that he had threatened to kill himself a few days earlier.

“About 11 o’clock in the evening I received a frantic phone call from a friend telling me to rush over to Babe and Claire’s apartment on Riverside Drive,” she wrote in her book.

When I arrived, his bedroom door was locked and I could hear my emotionally distraught father threatening to jump from the 15th floor window. I got on my knees and looked through the keyhole, only to discover Babe trying to break the window guard by jumping up and down on the chain. I felt completely helpless, trying to console him from out in the hallway; I just wanted to throw my arms around him and tell him how much he meant to me. I don’t know what I said, but thank God he finally came to his senses and opened the door.

He had cancer.

The optimistic approach in the first few days was that he was suffering from a sinus problem and maybe was troubled by three bad teeth. The diagnosis was soon changed. A tumor had developed in the nasopharynx, a part of the air passages behind the nose. It sat in a place near the undersurface of the skull that was inaccessible to surgeons. As the tumor had grown, it had pressed against nerves from the brain that supplied the motor function of the throat and larynx. This was what made him hoarse and made swallowing difficult.

He was doomed. That pretty much was the case. The tumor now had grown into his neck. He was off on that long forced march of the cancer patient through surgery and radiation and experimental drugs. He was a pathfinder, really, one of the first cancer patients to receive both radiation and drugs at the same time, his name and fame bringing him to the front of the list. He still was doomed.

For the last 21 months of his life, he never would feel well again. He would feel better on some days, would play golf a few times and travel, would work with American Legion baseball for the Ford Motor Company, a job that sent him around the country, but he never would feel well. Health, survival, became his primary consideration.

The “observation” stretched into 82 days in room 1114 at French Hospital. He first was treated with radiation, then had surgery on his neck that was characterized by his doctors as “serious” on January 6, 1947, an attempt to alleviate the pressure on the nerves to his vocal cords. He was still in the hospital on his birthday on February 7, 1947. He received over 30,000 pieces of mail, including a bottle of water from Lourdes. He rubbed the water on his body. He pinned a miraculous medal to his pajamas.

“How old are you?” his nurse asked, confused by the old birthday problem. “Are you 52 or 53?”

“What difference does it make if you feel good?” he said.

This was one of the better days.

He left the hospital nine days later. This was not one of the better days. He was helped from the hospital door to the car, unable to walk on his own. He looked terrible, a thousand years old, his weight down to 180 pounds on his 6-foot-2 frame. He cried as 100 bystanders wished him well. His daughter Julia read a statement that her father wanted to go home to Riverside Drive to “look at the river from my apartment window.” An unidentified nurse told the
Times
the Babe was “still a very sick man.”

The newspaper writers, all of them, did a nice thing: they never mentioned the word “cancer.” They described how he looked and quoted what the doctors said, but they never said the bad word. The doctors never said the bad word. No one said the bad word.

The idea was to keep the news from the Babe that he was doomed. Maybe this worked. Maybe it didn’t. There was no doubt, though, that he knew he was “a very sick man.”

A Babe Ruth Day was held two months later on April 27, 1947, not only at Yankee Stadium but everywhere in baseball by order of new commissioner Happy Chandler. The Babe was at the Stadium, bundled into his camel’s hair coat, wearing the cap. He frightened people. They hadn’t seen him since he became sick. Even with a good tan, the result of weeks of recuperation in Florida, where he had fished and even tried golf, he was a sadly shrunken version of the man who once walked from the same dugout and made pitchers nervous.

The similarities to the farewell to Gehrig, eight years earlier, were obvious. Ruth thought about them the entire day. The differences also were obvious. The robust figure that put his arm around the dying first baseman and made him laugh now looked far worse than the dying first baseman had.

Like Gehrig, Ruth had no prepared, written-out speech when he approached the microphone. The crowd of 58,339 cheered at his introduction by Yankees announcer Mel Allen, and he started to cry and then started coughing, and for a moment it looked as if he wouldn’t be able to speak. He composed himself.

“Thank you very much, ladies and gentlemen,” he said in a terrible rasp. “You know how bad my voice sounds. Well, it feels just as bad….

“You know, this baseball game of ours comes up from the youth. That means the boys. And after you’ve been a boy and grow up to know how to play ball, then you come to the boys you see representing themselves today in our national pastime.

“The only real game in the world, I think, is baseball. As a rule, some people think if you give them a football or a baseball or something like that, naturally they’re athletes right away. But you can’t do that in baseball. You gotta start from way down at the bottom, when you’re six or seven years old. You can’t wait until you’re 15 or 16. You’ve gotta let it grow up with you. And if you’re successful and you try hard enough, you’re bound to come out on top, just like these boys have come to the top now.

“There’s been so many lovely things said about me, I’m glad I had the opportunity to thank everybody. Thank you.”

The words weren’t nearly as compelling as the “luckiest man” speech by Gehrig, but the words didn’t matter. The delivery, the sound, the gravel and pain in each syllable was sent across the country and broadcast through loudspeakers at every ballpark before every game of the day, providing a window to the famous man’s struggle. He went back to the dugout, where he had another prolonged fit of coughing.

He then watched the first eight innings of the Senators’ 1–0 win over the Yankees. He was back in the hospital two months later.

The radiation had worked, allowing him to speak and to swallow a bit, to go to Florida, appear in public, make assorted stops for Ford, but the effects had worn off. The same symptoms had returned. His jaw hurt if he even tried to eat eggs. He now tried the new science, chemotherapy.

The drug, called teropterin, was basically a stronger, synthetic version of folic acid. Tests had been run on mice with mixed results, some of them encouraging. The Babe was one of the first human subjects, maybe the first. In these early days of chemical testing, there were very few rules. He consented to take a drug he knew nothing about for a disease no one had told him he had. There were no forms to be filled out. He simply nodded his head.

“There was a chance it would prove nothing, and there was a chance it might prove harmful to me in my condition,” the Babe said. “I was in pretty bad shape. The matter was left up to me. It wasn’t an easy decision.”

He took daily injections for six weeks. He didn’t stay in the hospital for all of that time, but came in every day for his shots. The teropterin seemed to work. His symptoms quieted a bit. He could eat some soft foods. He started to regain some weight. His hair, lost during the radiation treatments, came back. The lymph nodes in his neck shrunk down to nothing. The doctors in the study were so excited that they rushed out a paper that was delivered at the International Cancer Congress in St.Louis. They thought they had cured this form of cancer. They mentioned a “52-year-old man” but didn’t mention Ruth’s name. His case was seen as a scientific miracle.

He’d signed a contract for a ghostwritten book,
The Babe Ruth Story,
so he spent stretches of time with the writer, Bob Considine. A top general columnist with the Hearst syndicate, Considine had become famous with
Thirty Seconds over Tokyo,
written with Ted Lawson, a flier who had lost a leg in the bombing raids on the Japanese city during World War II. The book was a great success and was made into a movie starring Spencer Tracy and Van Johnson.

Considine didn’t have much more luck with the failing Ruth than previous famous writers, working as his newspaper ghosts, had had with the healthy Ruth. A half-hour into an interview session, Ruth would suggest that they take a ride, hit some golf balls, maybe play nine holes, do something. Off they would go to the golf course in the Babe’s Lincoln Continental.

They would stop at a butcher shop on Ninth Avenue to pick up some hamburger that he would have cooked for lunch at the golf course. Some days he could eat it. Some days he could eat nothing more than a two-minute egg. The golf was sad. The same drives that went for 300 yards now went for 100, 150. The wooden shaft did not bend anymore.

This was no way to write a book. Ruth was far too sick to concentrate and tell his story. Considine realized he was in trouble, so he brought in Fred Lieb. The sportswriter from the
New York Telegram
became the ghostwriter for the ghostwriter.

“I wrote the book,” Lieb said. “I dictated that book for about a week to ten days before the 1947 World Series. Considine didn’t know enough about Ruth. See, I was with Ruth from 1920 to 1934. Considine didn’t come to New York until around 1933.”

The Babe went to the 1947 World Series with Claire, the Yankees matched against the Dodgers. He became a focus of attention. People noticed when he arrived or exited. The new medium—television—focused its cameras on him often. His discomfort was obvious.

In January he returned to the Neurological Institute for 17 days and was cleared at the end to go to Florida with Claire and his male nurse, Frank Delaney, to resume as much of his life as he could stand. He still felt awful when his birthday came on February 7, 1948, but at least he wasn’t in the hospital.

“I’m full of aches and pains,” he told a reporter on the doorstep to his surfside bungalow at the Golden Strand Hotel in Miami Beach. “My arms hurt, and I can’t stretch them out. My neck hurts, and I’m hopeful the sun will do the job.”

The sun did turn out to be good medicine, although no papers would be written about it for any scientific journals. By the end of six weeks, the patient said he felt “100 percent better” and a “new man” as he returned to New York. The book was about to be published, and he felt well enough to go to a book-signing party at the offices of the publisher, E. P. Dutton.

“A lot of publishers were there because it was obvious the Babe’s days were numbered,” Considine said. “Bennett Cerf stood in line to get the Babe’s autograph. Ernest Hemingway was there. The books were just about running out, the end of the line near, and I said, ‘Jeez, I’d like to have one too.’ Babe opened a book and wrote, in his marvelous Spencerian handwriting, ‘To my pal, Bob….’ And he looked up and said, ‘What the hell is your last name?’ I’d spent two months with him.”

The book was being made into a movie, also titled
The Babe Ruth Story
, the screenplay written by Considine. The Babe had been hired as a “technical adviser,” supposedly to teach William Bendix, the star, how to hit 60 home runs a year. Or to look like he could hit 60 home runs a year. The real job, though, was publicity. The Babe and Claire and Julia and her husband went to Hollywood at the end of April, arriving on May 1.

Joe L. Brown, son of comedian Joe E. Brown, had been hired by Allied Artists Studio as “special sports publicist” for the picture, a job that basically entailed helping the Babe. Brown appeared at nine in the morning and stayed with him until he went to bed. Every day started with a visit from a doctor who would swab some medication in the back of Ruth’s throat. The Babe would have to say, “Ahhhhh.”

“Take a look at this,” Babe said one day to Brown after the procedure.

“Don’t show him,” the doctor said.

“It’s okay,” Ruth said.

He opened his mouth and said, “Ahhhhh.” Brown looked inside and saw a large hole. The cancer had eaten away the back of the Babe’s throat.

The movie people only needed one day of publicity shots—Ruth posed with Bendix and co-star Claire Trevor—so the rest of the time Brown took him wherever he wanted to go. They wound up one day at Twentieth-Century Fox, watching Betty Grable make a movie. They sat in two director’s chairs at the side of the set. Grable did some scene.

“Look at that babe, will ya?” the Babe said. “If I’d only known her when I was younger. We’d have had some fun.”

On June 13, 1948, he was in a baseball uniform for the last time. Yankee Stadium was now 25 years old, and the Babe’s number 3 was retired as part of the silver-anniversary celebration. A two-inning old-timers’ game was played between the gray and bald 1923 Yankees, the first team to play in the Stadium, and a team of more recent alumni before the start of the regular game between the Yankees and the Cleveland Indians. The Babe was the manager of the 1923 squad. Ed Barrow, his old nemesis, now 80 years old, was the manager of the later alumni.

The day was rainy and cold. The ceremonies were maudlin, and wreaths were placed in front of center-field monuments that had been erected for Ruppert, Miller Huggins, and Gehrig. “Taps” was played for all deceased members of the Yankees family. Six of the Murderers’ Row Yankees of 1927 already were gone. Gehrig, of course, and Huggins and Urban Shocker. Tony Lazzeri had been found at the foot of the stairs in his home in 1946, dead either from a heart attack or from an epileptic fit. John Grabowski, a backup catcher, had died in a fire, and finally, Herb Pennock, the Squire of Kennett Square, had died five months earlier in January of a cerebral hemorrhage.