This all sounded very good, including the part about anti-Semitism at work because Frazee was perceived in Boston to be Jewish, even though he wasn’t, except…
Except the final judgment wasn’t true. No, No, Nanette was indeed part of the deal. Frazee did use the money to keep his theatrical interests afloat. The picture that had been handed down to generations of New England schoolchildren was essentially correct: Harry Frazee was the bad guy.
“In the spring of 1920, I was playing with the Boston Red Sox,” Hall of Fame pitcher Waite Hoyt said in an interview for the Baseball Hall of Fame. “Before the season opened, we played an exhibition series with the New York Giants at the Polo Grounds. There was a notice posted on our bulletin board that we were invited to a theatrical performance, a light comedy, called My Lady Friends, that Harry Frazee was producing. There would be tickets at the box office.
“We went to the show, and it was quite amusing, very good. We enjoyed it a great deal. That show was put to music in 1924 and became No, No, Nanette…. If you trace it back, it was the sale of Babe Ruth that provided Harry Frazee with the $125,000 to produce that show.”
The deal might not have been as straightforward as that—the Babe for the show—but the show and other theatrical ventures were involved. Frazee had a lot of things happening at the same time.
On October 23, 1919, he was quoted in the Times, under the headline “Red Sox Club Not on Market,” saying he didn’t want to sell because he considered “his star slugger Babe Ruth as the greatest attraction in the national game.” Didn’t that make him sound like he wanted to keep the Babe forever? On November 1, he defaulted on the $125,000 payment on the note to Lannin. On December 3, My Lady Friends opened in New York. On December 26, two days before he was quoted in the Times saying that he “would include any player in a deal with the exception of Harry Hooper,” the deal for Ruth already had been made.
How had “the greatest attraction in the national game” become a liability in less than two months? Could Ruth’s dance to renegotiate his contract have been that offensive? Frazee was from the world of the theater. He had worked in boxing. The contract dance with a temperamental star was a staple in both environments. He’d worked in baseball, had been through these dances with other players, had been through them with Ruth. Management always held the trump card at the end. Where could the player go?
In a 1951 memoir, My Fifty Years in Baseball, Ed Barrow, the Red Sox manager, recounted the dialogue when Frazee told him that Ruth was gone. He said he met the owner, who was sitting with actor Frank McIntyre, at six o’clock in the evening in the café at the Hotel Knickerbocker.
“Simon,” Frazee said, “I am going to sell Ruth to the Yankees.”
“I thought as much,” Barrow said. “I could feel it in my bones. But you ought to know that you’re making a mistake.”
“Maybe I am,” Frazee said, “but I can’t help it. Lannin is after me to make good on my notes. And my shows aren’t going so good. Ruppert and Huston will give me $100,000 for Ruth, and they’ve agreed to loan me $350,000. I can’t turn that down. But don’t worry. I’ll get you some ballplayers too.”
Three months later, on March 26, Frazee announced the purchase of the Harris Theater on West 42nd Street in New York. No details of the purchase were given, but the theater had been built 20 years earlier at the cost of $500,000 and certainly was worth more now. Frazee announced that he was renaming the Harris the Frazee. A hurry-up letter he sent to Ruppert in early April requested the transferral of funds for the loan. He said he needed the money “very badly to complete the balance of my negotiations.”
An interesting footnote was that two days before he bought the Harris and renamed it the Frazee, the Yankees had announced they were moving their offices from 30 East 42nd Street to 226 West 42nd Street, where they had taken out a ten-year lease in the Cohen and Harris Theater Building on the same block of the same street as the Frazee. The Yankees now owned a mortgage on Fenway Park and Frazee was the Yankees’ neighbor on 42nd Street, and everywhere, it seemed, he and the Colonels, the Red Sox and the Yankees, baseball and the theater, were entwined. The circumstantial evidence pointed directly to where Frazee’s interests resided. In May 1923, news would come of Frazee’s investment in the musical version of My Lady Friends. Nine weeks later, he would sell the Red Sox.
A second footnote was that he paid No, No, Nanette star Louise Groody $1,750 per week, which translates to $87,500 per year. He could have had four years of Babe Ruth—even at the Babe’s extravagant asking price of $20,000—for one year of Louise Groody.
“The best part about Boston,” Harry Frazee once said, “was the train ride back to New York.”
The final Boston word on the deal came on the editorial page of the Globe on January 7, 1920. Under the title “The Athens of America,” the paper decided that it was all right for even the most respected Brahmins and the smartest of the intelligentsia to shed a tear over the departure of a baseball player.
“The Red Sox without Babe Ruth will certainly be—different,” the paper said.
There is much to be said on both sides, and the fans gathered at the daily meetings of the Hot Stove League have already begun to do full justice to the sale of Boston’s colossal fence buster.
The Hub of the Universe, also known as the Athens of America, is undeniably “het up” on the prospects of next season. It is possible that unscholarly persons will rise and remark that the prevailing excitement concerning a man who merely made 29 home runs is unbecoming Boston’s reputation as a center of learning. If any assertion of that sort is made, it will only indicate a lack of classical culture.
Ancient Greece was both the intellectual and athletic center of the world. Much has been written about the simple chaplet of olive leaves as the only prize for winners of the Olympic games. That was all they were given at the stadium, but when they reached home they received substantial rewards—a jeweled casket filled with gold, a house and lot, no doubt a wife—possibly more than one—and the esteem of the highest circles of society.
The Stadium of Athens was laid out by Lycurgus, the orator. Praxiteles and Phidas, the sculptors, were not above making statues of great athletes. Pindar wrote odes to them.
Any Bostonian who feels sad on the subject of Mr. George H. Ruth may remember Athens and then give full vent to his grief in public.
The Babe was gone.
CHAPTER EIGHT
T HE MARRIAGE between the Babe and New York City had every chance to be perfect. He was built for the New York of 1920, and the New York of 1920 was built for him. He was a muscle man coming to a muscle city in a muscle time. The war was long done, everyone home, and the United States of America was second to no one, thank you very much. New York, New York, was the center of all that was fresh and new and without limit. Enormous buildings were beginning to grow out of the ground, fabulous concrete beanstalks that shut out the sun. Money was beginning to move, faster and faster, doubling and tripling, quadrupling itself, multiplying in the air. Engines were running everywhere. The streets were filled every day with more automobiles and more people of all description.
The Billy Sunday evangelists and their followers might have stuffed through the Eighteenth Amendment, but let those timid outlying souls live with it. The liquor never stopped flowing in New York City, where almost twice as many speakeasies soon replaced the bars that were closed. The night never stopped. Hemlines were being pulled up and stockings were being rolled down and women with short hair and high-fashion bobs were coming out to smoke cigarettes and dance. A faster, louder, outrageous syncopation was at work.
This was the beginning of what New York sportswriter Westbrook Pegler would call “the Era of Wonderful Nonsense” and Paul Gallico, another New York sportswriter, would say was a time when “we were like children who’d been let out of school.” What was more nonsensical than standing and cheering the flight of a round, white, horsehide-covered ball with red stitching on the sides? Who, of all the 86,
079,000 inhabitants of the country counted in the 1920 census, ever had charged any harder at the sound of the recess bell than the boy from the Baltimore orphanage?
“I began to like New York, the racy, adventurous feel of it at night and the satisfaction that the constant flicker of men and women and machines gives to the restless eye,” narrator Nick Carraway says in The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald. “I liked to walk up Fifth Avenue and pick out romantic women from the crowd and imagine that in a few minutes I was going to enter into their lives, and no one would ever know or disapprove.”
“Do we not stand, in this northern port, at the farthest post of history and look out on the newest horizons?” author Edmund Wilson asked. “Do we not get the latest news and explore the extreme possibilities? Do we not, between the office and the night-club, in the excitement of winning and spending, and slightly poisoned by the absorption of bad alcohol, succeed in experiencing sensations which humanity has never known?”
“New York is a home run town,” Miller Huggins said.
If the Babe had stayed in Boston, no matter how many glorious feats he performed, no matter how many records and furniture store windows he broke with long drives over faraway fences, he would have been given a blue ribbon and a gold watch and celebrated as the owner of the prize turnips at the state fair. He would have been a good, great, interesting baseball player. To do the same things in New York not only would make him part of this giddy social upheaval; he would stand in front of the parade with marching boots and a big, 52-ounce baton and whistle. In a time of venial sin in a city of venial sin, the man of magnified venial sin would become the Sultan of Swat, the Caliph of Clout, the Wizard of Whack, the Rajah of Rap, the Wazir of Wham, the Mammoth of Maul, the Maharajah of Mash, the Bambino. The Bam. The Big Bam.
He had landed in the absolute right place.
He didn’t arrive in the city until February 28, the day of the Yankees’ departure for spring training to Jacksonville. A round of activities had kept him in Boston, including a dinner at the Hotel Brunswick and a basketball game for the Shawmut Athletic Club, in which he scored eight points in a 41–25 win.
He boomed into the club offices on 42nd Street, still tanned from California, animated, wearing a large leather coat and handing out cigars. The Colonels, meeting with Miller Huggins, had their first good look at their investment. He very much seemed to be the oversized character he was supposed to be. In the course of conversation, Huston tried to preach the virtues of moderation, much as Huggins had in California. It also didn’t work.
“Look at ya,” the Babe said. “Too fat and too old to have any fun.”
“That goes for him too,” he added, pointing to Ruppert.
“As for that shrimp,” the big man finalized, indicating Huggins, “he’s half-dead right now.”
The grand experiment had begun. Ten minutes before the departure of the Florida Flyer to Jacksonville, the big man appeared at the designated track at Pennsylvania Station in his big leather coat. He was followed by a porter pushing a cart loaded with suitcases and a new set of golf clubs picked up in California. A gathering crowd of gawkers came next, merging into a crowd of the curious who already were waiting.
It was a comic yet majestic scene, due to be repeated every time he took a train out of the city. He would turn to speak to the porter, or change direction on a whim, and the crowd would turn with him, people stepping on each other just to be closer, just to hear whatever he might say, see whatever he might do.
After this fast, first snapshot, he was off, playing cards with his new teammates for meal money and more before the train hit New Jersey. The implications of all of this interest—new town, new team, new position, new expectations—did not seem to faze him at all. He told reporters that he expected to hit 50 home runs. He said, “Deal,” and headed south with the same expectations everyone else had.
On the first day in Jacksonville, practice was optional, since Huggins hadn’t arrived, so the big man played golf. Sixteen players showed up at Southside Park to return to baseball, to get the muscles working again, but the Babe toured 18 holes at the Florida Country Club. Newspapers reported that he wore a silk shirt and white golf flannels and at one point threw his golf club high in the air to intercept a golf ball in midflight. Look! How many people could do that!
The Yankees team he joined had possibilities. The third-place finish of a year earlier had been put together by some veterans like shortstop Roger Peckinpaugh, third baseman Frank “Home Run” Baker, first baseman Wally Pipp, and outfielders Ping Bodie and Duffy Lewis. A new kid, outfielder Bob Meusel, taller even than Ruth, was supposed to be another big addition this year from Vernon in the Pacific Coast League. Another kid, infielder Aaron Ward, soon would prove vital when Baker, whose wife had died in the off-season, decided to stay home for a year to raise his two children.
The pace of the camp was casual. The Brooklyn Dodgers also trained in Jacksonville, on the other side of the city at Barrs Field, and practiced twice a day. Huggins, a manager who was not a disciplinarian and never had a curfew, worked his team only once every day. This left ample time for golf and hijinks, two areas pursued with great interest.
The Babe quickly established a man-of-mystery routine for hijinks that would continue for all of his time with the Yankees. Evening would come and he would disappear. Helen was back in Massachusetts, and he would cut through the lobby of the Hotel Burbridge, dapper and clean, flamboyantly fashionable, and step into a waiting car or a cab and be gone, off to whatever delights awaited. The other players were left to more modest frivolities around the hotel.
From the start, he lived a different life from all of them. The Yankees, who handed out $5 per day meal money, at one point had to change the policy to $5 credit at the hotel restaurant. The players were eating cheap hot dogs every day, saving the rest of the money for other things, then appearing at the ballpark weak and uninspired. The Babe lived on another economic and social level.
“He was a peculiar character,” pitcher Waite Hoyt would say in future years. “If I may be so bold to say, so frank to say, Ruth reminded me of…we used to compare him to an Airedale dog or a sheep hound or something. He went around visiting girlfriends, and then he would come home. He would come and the family would, like a dog, pat him. He’d been out all night carousing, and then he would come home to a respectable family, and the family would pat the dog on the head, and the family would say what a nice dog Rover is.”
Ping Bodie, nominally his roommate in Jacksonville, delivered the famous answer when asked what kind of guy the Babe was. Bodie said (the quote repeated various times in various ways), “I don’t know. I don’t room with Babe Ruth. I room with his suitcase.”
A second ritual of the spring also was established: the Babe was a slow starter at the plate. Every year it would take a while before the internal mechanisms that measured speed and distance were matched to the external reactions of body mass and power. Every spring there would be a great speculation if maybe, just maybe, the big man’s great trick had been lost or squandered through a winter of neglect. (His bats arrived late this time from Boston in Jacksonville. Was he having problems because he didn’t have his favorite bats? It was a story.) Every spring, no matter what, the trick eventually would return.
The first big blast didn’t come until March 19, 17 days after he arrived. The assembled sportswriters had been waiting for so long that when Ruth clocked a simple batting practice pitch from Mario DeVitalis over the center-field fence toward the St. John River, everyone in the press box became a little giddy. A couple of writers hustled out with a tape measure and figured the ball had traveled 478 feet. The fence was 428 feet, and the ball had traveled 50 feet more. Even though the Babe said it was the farthest he ever had hit a baseball except for the shot a year earlier in Tampa, even though it was the longest home run ever recorded in Jacksonville, those statements were not big enough. Exaggeration came into easy play.
“Ruth hit the ball over the cente
rfield fence at the Yankees’ training yard in South Jacksonville,” Damon Runyon wrote in the New York American, making fun of the shouting. “Yes, sir, clean, over, right over. My what a swat it was. My! My! My! My! My! My! My! My! My! My! My! My! My! My! My! My! My! My! Plumb over.”
The Yankees advertised all exhibition games as an appearance of “Babe Ruth, the Home Run King,” but he hit only one shot during a game in all of the time in Florida. That came on April 1 off Dodgers pitcher Al Mamaux in the first inning of a 6–2 win, and the Times gurgled that “no other man in baseball could have lifted a ball that far. The pellet cleared the center field fence.”
More time was spent in discussion about the possibility of more home runs than was spent actually watching home runs. A change in the rules, outlawing trick pitches like the emery ball, the shine ball, and the spitball, had been made for the new season, giving the batter a projected advantage. No longer would he have to see the doctored balls, with their lopsided dynamics, spinning and dancing and dropping in ways that challenged conventional laws of physics. Huggins was one of the few baseball voices against the change (“When they prohibit a pitcher from using his noodle to develop freak deliveries they are killing the pitcher’s initiative”), but it generally was thought his team would be the greatest beneficiary.
The Big Bam: The Life and Times of Babe Ruth Page 13