Unlike, say, heavyweight champion Jack Dempsey, he was in public view for half of the days of the calendar year, 154 regular-season games plus spring training and whatever drama might emerge in the fall. He was out there, loud and noisy and big, big in everything he did on the field or off the field. He hit home runs, won championships, set records, ate lunch. There was no such thing as no news with the Babe. His strikeouts were as noteworthy as his home runs, his failures and pitfalls as memorable as his successes.
The Speed Graphic, the newspaper photographer’s camera of choice, loved his broad face with its flat nose and tiny eyes, loved his absolutely unique look, features put together in a hurry, an out-of-focus bulldog, no veneer or sanding involved. This was a face that soon was instantly recognizable, seen again and again, more familiar in most households than the faces of a second cousin once removed or a Dutch uncle who always appeared for Sunday dinner. The Babe was an incorrigible, wondrous part of everyone’s family. He posed in any kind of uniform, any kind of situation. He kissed dogs and cows and chimpanzees. He wore cowboy suits and patrolman blue, badge included. He posed with celebrities and bands of waifs whose eyes all glowed as if they were in the presence of a deity. He was the life of everybody’s party.
The words that accompanied the pictures came from an open vault of superlatives. Laughing but earnest men in fedoras and off-the-rack suits, sportswriters, watched the sun rise and fall on his big head and were moved to grand statements. They typed the legend into place, adding layer upon layer of adjectives until often the man in the middle couldn’t even be seen. He became a modern Vesuvius, a wonder of the world to be described daily. Everybody had a crack at him.
“No man has ever lived who hit a baseball as hard as Ruth,” columnist Damon Runyon wrote in the American in a typical daily offering in September 1920. “In the olden days, soldiers were equipped with slings and slew their enemies with missiles thrown from these slings, but it is doubtful if they got as much force behind them as Ruth puts back of a batted ball. The weapon which was the nearest approach to Babe’s deadly drive was the catapult.”
The end of the war had brought a rush of writing talent into the city. Working for a newspaper was a glamorous occupation, and New York was the most glamorous, most vibrant city in the postwar world. The first two commercial radio stations, one in Pittsburgh and one in Detroit, had only started operation in 1920, so for the last few years the newspaper reporter and the columnist were the only voices that brought news, opinion, even entertainment, every day. Not only were these people stars, but some of them were shooting off toward greater accomplishments.
Runyon, who invented the nicknames “Bambino” and “Bam” and “the Big Bam” for Ruth at the American, already was shifting more and more toward his dialogue-filled tales of gangsters and Broadway lowlifes, but he still found his way to the ballpark. Grantland Rice at the Herald already was the preeminent sports columnist in the nation, a lyricist much more than an investigator, a few lines of doggerel starting each piece, Greek gods and portentous skies always in the background. Westbrook Pegler, increasingly acerbic and cynical in covering sports in New York for the United Press and then the Chicago Tribune syndicate, would evolve into an acerbic and cynical right-wing commentator about politics and life. John Kieran, the first sports columnist in New York Times history, had such a range of interests and knowledge that he eventually would become famous on a national radio show, Information Please, as a man who could answer all questions about anything.
The baseball beat writers, on the trail every day, sometimes switching to cover the Giants or Dodgers, sometimes not, were a strikingly literate and well-traveled group. Many of them had been in the war. Bozeman Bulger of the Evening World, a large and witty character from Birmingham, Alabama, with a fat southern drawl, had been a hero in the Argonne offensive. One-armed Bob Boyd of the World, an Australian, looked as if he had been a hero but, alas, had been a member of the Canadian air force and walked into a moving propeller before he ever left for combat. Richards Vidmer of the Times, such a sophisticated presence that author Katherine Brush wrote a best-selling novel about him called The Young Man of Manhattan, had survived a midair collision with a civilian plane near Hicksville, Long Island, during pilot training in the Signal Corps.
“How are the other fellows?” he asked after being pulled, badly injured, from the crashed fuselage.
“Oh, they’re better off than you,” he was told. “They’re all dead.”
Fred Lieb was at the Telegram, a statistics man, a baseball insider, who had grown up in Philadelphia. Ford Frick was at the American, a future commissioner of baseball from Fort Wayne, Indiana, who had learned to touch-type at 15 because he knew he wanted to be a sportswriter. Dan Daniel, proud that he had been the first local sportswriter to use one of those new portable typewriters that everyone now used, was at the Press. Will Wedge, who took a note on absolutely everything that happened during a game and secretly wanted to be a poet, was at the Sun.
The list went on and on and would expand and contract through the years as affiliations changed, as papers were merged or killed, as assignments changed—Heywood Broun, Joe Williams, Tom Meany, Arthur Robinson, John Drebinger, Jimmy Cannon, W. O. McGeehan, Bill Corum, Bill Slocum, Frank Graham, people coming and going—but always there would be a good-sized corps that followed the Yankees, followed the Babe, typed out the words.
Everything was done in close quarters. The writers were thrown together with each other, then thrown together with the players. The clubhouse was not the meeting ground that it would become, stark-naked athletes questioned daily about their views on hanging curveballs and life, but incidental contact was perpetual. The writers rode with the players on the trains and in cabs, lived in the same hotels. The games were played in the afternoon, so nights were open and often shared, ballplayers and writers in the same restaurants and speakeasies, seated at the same card table.
A friendly atmosphere prevailed. The writers of the time grew to know their subjects much better than future generations in the craft would. They also reported much less than future generations would. Especially about the Babe.
“Hell, I could have written a story every day on the Babe,” Richards Vidmer said. “But I never wrote about his personal life, not if it would hurt him. Babe couldn’t say no to certain things. Hot dogs was the least of ’em. He couldn’t say no to a hot dog, but there were other things that were worse. Hell, sometimes, I thought it was one long line, a procession…”
The Babe was an ultimate test in writing and reporting. What to leave in? What to leave out? His pleasure-dominated life constantly put him in questionable situations. Was it news that he was drunk again late at night? Was it news that he had been with one, two, three women who were not his wife?
An unwritten, sometimes-spoken code existed not only with him but with virtually everybody in public life. A boundary existed between the public and the private. Unless a door was opened by a policeman or a court proceeding, affairs of the heart and matters of the bedroom, drunken vulgarities, and four-star orgies were not reported. This code prevailed not only in sports but in politics, the arts, even show business. If the president of the United States urinated into a fireplace at the White House—as Richards Vidmer saw Warren Harding do—it didn’t make the newspaper.
Hints could be made, winks and nods, flaws in character sticking out the sides of a feature story like lettuce in a fat BLT, but names seldom were named, dates and places seldom included. A curtain of good taste pretty much came down in many areas once the game had ended. This was not a bad thing for the Babe.
An example: Vidmer would often play bridge in the Babe’s hotel room on the long barnstorming trips back from spring training. The Yankees would play a 1:00 P.M. game in some southern town, the game finished by three, and everybody would go back to the hotel to await an 11:00 P.M. departure for the next town. The bridge games would take place, other ballplayers and Vidmer and the Babe, during that time.
&n
bsp; The phone always would ring. Vidmer always would answer.
“Is Babe Ruth there?” a woman’s voice would ask.
“No, he’s not here right now,” Vidmer would reply. “This is his secretary. Can I tell him who called?”
“This is Mildred. Tell him Mildred called.”
“Mildred…”
Vidmer would look at the Babe. The Babe would shake his head, no, not here, not for Mildred.
“I’m sorry,” Vidmer would say. “He’s not here right now, but I’ll tell him you called…”
Invariably, the Babe would have instant second thoughts. Invariably, he would sprint across the room and grab the phone.
“Hello, babe. Come on up.”
“And she’d come up and interrupt the bridge game for ten minutes or so,” Vidmer said. “They’d go in the other room. Pretty soon, they’d come out and the girl would leave. Babe would say, ‘So long, kid,’ or something like that. Then he’d sit down and we’d continue our bridge game. That’s all. That was it. While he was absent, we’d sit and talk, wait for him.”
This was not material for the paper. Should it have been? The curtain of good taste covered the situation. The curtain covered a lot of situations. The writers pounded away with their similes and allusions, constructed their grand rococo word sculptures, truly florid and inventive stuff. They worked within their limits.
Fred Lieb always told the story about the woman chasing Ruth with a knife through a Pullman car in Shreveport during spring training in 1921 as the train was almost ready to leave for New Orleans. Ruth was running as fast as he could, and the dark-haired, dark-eyed woman, said to be the wife of a Louisiana legislator, was five feet behind him. Ruth pounded through the car, jumped off the train, then jumped back on as it was leaving, the woman back on the platform.
Eleven writers, playing cards, watched the whole thing. None of them wrote a word.
“Well,” Bill Slocum of the Morning American said as the card game continued, “if she had carved up the Babe, we really would have had a hell of a story.”
The work of the writers would be derided in future journalism school classes, seen as the creation of a day-to-day hagiography, but there were subtleties that the public understood. The spaces between the lines of the nonstop words counted as much as the words themselves. The image came through. Was there any well-minded reader who did not suspect the crudities, the womanizing, the drinking? They were part of what made the Babe so intriguing. They were part of the big and blustery, oversized image that was created.
“So unique is Babe’s record, so amazing his exploits, that the riches of the English language seem barren of words adequately to describe him,” F. C. Lane wrote in Baseball magazine in October 1922, describing the daily exercise of writing about the new sensation.
Flaming adjectives lose their color when applied to the Babe. Overworked verbs falter in the narration of his record feats. While as for nouns that may serve as comparisons—the word painter who scans the verbal horizon for such things finds only a bleak and barren landscape. How are you going to find anyone when nobody like him has ever worn a baseball uniform? Babe is unique.
And yet Ruth is a theme which never grows threadbare. He is to the baseball scribbler as perennial a subject as spring to the budding poet, a sunset to the descriptive prose writer. Familiar from every angle there is yet something about him which is always new. No baseball player has ever been so thoroughly discussed. His most intimate acts and tastes and characteristics are subjected to the searching scrutiny of publicity.
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 Big Bam: The Life and Times of Babe Ruth Page 20