“Do you know what this means?” he asked.
“What?” Gillespie replied.
“It means if this story is incorrect, you’re fired.”
The St. Louis Globe-Democrat had the scoop.
The second Babe Ruth public melodrama of the season had begun. The fine and suspension opened the door to the Babe’s entire life. The protection from sportswriters who felt that a player’s life existed only on the field was gone. Claire Hodgson’s name and picture were in the paper immediately, and reporters and photographers were camped outside her apartment house on West 79th Street. Helen was under siege at the apartment she and the Babe had rented at the Concourse Plaza on the Grand Concourse. Tabloid fun had begun for everyone.
“I know absolutely nothing about that matter,” Helen told reporters when asked about the “New York widow.” “And I don’t care to talk on that subject for publication. However, I intend to discuss these matters with my husband when he returns.”
“Early yesterday afternoon a limousine drove up to the curb before the apartment house,” the Daily News reported from West 79th Street. “In the limousine were Eugene and Hubert Merritt, Mrs. Hodgson’s brothers. A slim young woman, heavily veiled, but easily recognized as Mrs. Hodgson, slipped into the waiting car, the curtains were jerked down and the car whizzed away.”
Unnamed sources appeared from everywhere to tell their name-filled stories. The stories were about how the Babe had changed with the advent of money, about how much he drank, about how he had been involved with a well-known shimmy dancer, about how Helen once had slapped the Babe in the face after he’d bet $1,000 on a race, drunk, at the dog track in St. Petersburg. There was more than one story that Helen had been preparing to file for a separation agreement.
The Babe missed the first wave of all of this. He didn’t use the Yankees’ ticket back to New York. He spent the night in St. Louis instead with friends, perhaps friends who were doing the Lord’s work at the House of Good Shepard, and the next day went to Chicago to plead his case to Judge Landis. The Judge, alas, was on vacation at Burt Lake, Michigan, so the Babe pleaded his case with the press. The headline in the Chicago Tribune—“Babe Ruth, Mad, Denies Orgies; Here to Fight”—was a quick summation.
“Huggins is making me the goat for the rotten showing of the team,” he told reporters. “He said that the fine and suspension resulted from misconduct off the ball field and drinking. He has been laying for a chance to get me and I gave it to him by staying out until 2:30 in the morning in St. Louis. As far as the drinking charge, he’s a liar.”
Ruth tore into Huggins’s strategy, his management of the team. He said Huggins basically had blown the pennant a year earlier to the Senators. He admitted that he had disobeyed two of Huggins’s orders during games in Chicago, but said he did so because the orders were bad baseball. Huggins, it seemed, could do nothing right. Ruth said he would never play for the Yankees again as long as Huggins was the manager.
“Can you imagine a fellow who hit .240 when he was playing ball trying to tell players who have .350 averages how to hit the ball?” Ruth asked.
Landis sent word he would see him—“There’s a 5:30 train to Burt Lake”—but Ruth decided the next day to go back to New York to talk to Ruppert. He boarded the Twentieth Century Limited that afternoon, with “his pet portable Victrola and his huge suitcase that contained, among other things, nine pairs of white flannel pants, for which he has a failing,” news reports said. The long overnight trip did wonders. The Babe Ruth anger died. This was his familiar pattern: anger in a flash, followed by acceptance and contrition.
“Ruth has the mind of a 15-year-old,” American League president Ban Johnson said in the midst of this flap. It probably was the best appraisal of the man in all of the words spoken or written. The Xaverians had done their job. The 15-year-old boy at St. Mary’s Industrial School argued against the whacks on the backside, then took them and was sorry and apologized. Sins gone. Slate clean. That was how he worked.
(After a year, maybe two, he offered Waite Hoyt a beer on a train trip back from St. Louis. The business was finished. They were friends again.)
Indeed, Father Edward Quinn, a New York priest who had been at St. Mary’s when Ruth was there, met him at Grand Central Station when he arrived from Chicago. The scene was chaotic—a crowd estimated at 3,000 people had gathered to see him pass. At the front were the battalions of reporters and photographers. Getting into a cab with Father Quinn, Ruth said that maybe he would see them later at the Concourse Plaza. They naturally piled into cabs and followed his cab to the hotel, where another crowd awaited.
Helen now was under a nurse’s care in her bedroom at the apartment. The stress had knocked her out again. She also had an infection on the ring finger of her left hand. Reports soon said she had sustained the injury while trying to rip off her wedding and engagement bands. When her finger swelled, the rings had to be sawed off.
Ruth went into the bedroom to see Helen, then talked with the reporters in the living room. The anger clearly was gone, replaced by an urgency to set things right. The photographers asked if he would pose for pictures with Helen, and he agreed.
“Sure,” he said, “but first I want to say something. What really gets me sore is those stories about me and women, and the pictures. I can take the baseball stories, but can’t you lay off the women stuff?”
He posed for the pictures, looking solemn next to his sick wife. She put her arms around him and began to cry. He began to cry. It was all too intimate to be public, but public it was. The photographers snapped. The brightness of their flashbulbs filled the room. Ruth walked to the window and stared below.
He then went to Col. Ruppert’s office at 93rd Street and Avenue A to see about his future. Again, reporters followed. Ruppert was not alone in the office. Miller Huggins also was there, but left immediately. Ruth and Ruppert went behind closed doors. The owner told Ruth that the matter totally was in Huggins’s hands. The decision about what to do next was up to Ruth.
He went almost immediately to the Stadium to see Huggins. Again, the reporters followed. They were there when the two antagonists met in the Yankees clubhouse.
“Hello, Miller,” the Babe said.
“Hello,” Huggins replied.
The presence of the reporters made everything awkward. The two men tried to move to a corner, but the pack followed. The search for privacy was impossible. Ruth finally broke the silence.
“Well,” he said, “what do I do?”
“Babe,” the manager said, “I can’t see you today. I will call you on the phone when I want to see you.”
“Can I put on a uniform to practice?”
“Well,” the manager said, “I will let you know when I am ready to see you.”
The battle was done. Huggins was the winner on all scorecards. The little man strung out the process for six more days, amiable but firm, the parent letting the child know that all was forgiven, but still there was a price to be paid for the transgression. Ruth, antsy, remained contrite. On Labor Day in Boston, Huggins finally relented and let him back into the lineup. It was a quiet return, 1-for-4 in a 5–1 loss to the Red Sox, but Ruth was the first man on the field by several minutes on the rainy afternoon and spent a long time in the batting cage, obviously happy to be back.
There were 29 games left in the season. He went on a 9-game hitting streak to start. He hit 10 home runs in the 29 games to finish the season with 25. He hit .345 in the 29 games to raise his final average to .290. He did nothing to incur Miller Huggins’s displeasure.
The very public affair, finished now, had brought out thousands of words about the construction of heroes in America. Who was a hero? Who wasn’t? What should a hero do? The easy approach was condemnation and sadness—“With the fall from glory of Babe Ruth, a million young Americans are bereft,” the New York Herald Tribune said in an editorial. “Being a boy isn’t as certain fun as it used to be”—but that was too easy. A million young Americans weren’
t bereft. They were intrigued, excited. They wanted to know more. And more.
The American hero was constructed differently from the classic heroes of the Greeks and Romans. Virtue never had been a necessity. The New York World had the right idea:
Babe Ruth has been fined $5,000 and indefinitely suspended. And are we, the great American public, virtuously shocked? Not at all. We long to look him up, pat him on the back and shake the brunoid paw. If it were anybody else who had provoked Mr. Huggins to such summary action, we would point a finger, shout “Fie, Fie!” and read a moral about a player’s duty to his club and teammates. But not with Ruth. There is something about him, even when he is under the dark cloud of disgrace, which makes us find excuses and love him still. That is probably because we realize he has never grown up. He started life as a bad boy, and he is still a bad boy. And if now and then he pays the penalty that bad boys pay, he also reaps the reward that they reap. The whole world loves a bad boy. It ought to love Rollo, but actually it loves Huck Finn.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
T HE BABE SAT DOWN with Joe Winkworth of Collier’s magazine a few weeks after the 1925 season ended. The bluster was gone. A contrite, apologetic character looked out the windows of the Grand Concourse apartment—the great stadium part of his view—and called himself “the sappiest of saps.” This was a different kind of Sultan of Swat interview.
“I have been a Babe and a Boob,” the Babe said. “And I am through—through with the pests and the good-time guys. Between them and a few crooks I have thrown away over a quarter million dollars.”
The message of moderation finally had landed. He had heard it forever, packaged in different ways by Huggins and Barrow and Walsh, by Brother Matthias and Jimmy Walker, by Ban Johnson and Kenesaw Mountain Landis, by assorted sportswriters and worried friends, but never really paid attention. He always had nodded at the words, made his small promises to make amends, but then followed the first bright light that passed in the night.
George Herman Ruth, Sultan of Swat, was bulletproof and wonderful. That was the image he always had projected and pretty much fulfilled. Conventional advice might apply to conventional people, but conventional people couldn’t do what he could. The 24-hour buffet line of life experiences had no effect on him, not even the dessert section or the cocktail bar at the end. Look at the performance. Look at the home runs, the money, the fame. Who could argue with that? He never had reason to listen.
He did now. His body talked to him in assorted ways. He was too heavy, too slow, too sore. He had become increasingly frail. His digestive system was an obvious mess. He even had to leave his annual ghost-reporting job at the World Series early because he felt ill, the effects of his operation still at work. The drop-off in his performance during the season of turbulence, combined with the Yankees’ sad finish, was the ultimate indication that he was in trouble.
He soon would be 31 years old (and thought he would be 32), and he could hear the comments everywhere that he was on the downside, possibly finished. The money that had come and gone, without much thought used in the middle, suddenly mattered. Would the grand revenue stream somehow disappear? The time for accounting finally, reluctantly, had arrived.
He estimated he had roared through over $500,000 in gambling, bad business deals, and high living. He had owned nine different high-priced American cars. He once had worn 22 new silk shirts during three hot days in St. Louis, and then left them for the maid. The life of a Home Run King was not only expensive but complicated. He was sick of dealing with lawyers and private detectives, sick of the schemes that always seemed to surround him. He was sick of trouble.
“A fellow is defenseless unless he cuts out all good-timing,” Ruth said. “And that’s what I have done. I don’t even say hello to anyone anymore unless I know him well. And parties are out because I have mapped out a comeback schedule for myself and I am going to live up to it absolutely.”
There would be no barnstorming trip this year. There would be no trip to Hot Springs for the baths and the chicken dinners. Helen was gone, off in the fog, unseen, unheard, back in Boston with Dorothy. The farm in Sudbury was still up for sale. The Babe was alone for the first time in a long while. Okay, he had Christy, and he was involved with Claire, and his phone always rang, and he was in a crowd as soon as he walked out his front door, but this was as alone as he had been in his professional life.
The start of the comeback was a hunting trip to New Brunswick, Canada, with ballplayers Bob Shawkey, Muddy Ruel, Joe Bush, Eddie Collins, and Benny Bengough. Going into the woods, the Babe was so out of shape that he rode a packhorse while the other ballplayers all hiked 40 miles to their camp. The trip lasted three weeks, and when the Babe came back, he proudly reported that he had spurned the horse and hiked the 40 miles out of the woods. He then returned to New York and, after considering an early departure for St. Petersburg to work himself back into shape in the sun, made the decision that probably saved his career.
He showed up at Artie McGovern’s door.
Artie McGovern ran an 11,640-square-foot gymnasium for rich people on the fourth floor of the Liggitt Building at 41 East 42nd Street at the corner of Madison Avenue. An enterprising former flyweight boxer who grew up in Hell’s Kitchen at the turn of the century, he had developed theories of exercise and nutrition that now intrigued New York high society and made him a national authority on physical fitness. The McGovern Method of Physical Reconstruction, which cost $500 per year, featured only individualized instruction.
His list of clients included department store magnate Marshall Field, composer John Philip Sousa, financier John J. Raskob, architect Whitney Warren, golfers Gene Sarazen and Johnny Farrell, tennis player Vinnie Richards, lawyer and writer Arthur Train, bandleader Paul Whiteman, and dozens of other prominent New York names. His establishment was equipped with sunlamps, electric ray cabinets, massage rooms, handball courts, squash courts, rowing machines, sitz baths, and golf driving nets—all of the modern tools of exercise.
The biggest feature of Artie McGovern’s gym, though, was Artie McGovern. A 35-year-old dynamo, he was a little man in a white sweater who worked 12-hour days filled with constant movement, pushing, prodding, extolling. To sign with his program was to hand your life to him and his staff. There were no excuses, no matter how busy you might be. Artie McGovern would send someone to your house to make sure you did the work. His wake-up calls were a symbol of status as much as good health. He delighted in making rich people sweat.
“Now I have about 20 boys out every morning,” he said in an interview in American magazine. “In winter you will see them going into houses and apartments along Park and Fifth Avenues almost before it’s light. They have keys—they just walk right into the bedrooms and yank the covers off the millionaires. The masseurs come along twenty minutes later.
“It’s not as easy as you would think. It takes as much diplomacy as an ambassador to get some of them out of bed. You mustn’t make them too mad, but you’ve got to get them up. You’ve got to give them orders. Some of those big fellows from Wall Street have got a new excuse every morning in the year. You just have to shove them out of bed and order them around if you want to get any results at all.”
The McGovern philosophy of exercise centered on a concept he called “Vital Energy.” Every human being was born with a finite amount of Vital Energy, enough to last a lifetime if used correctly. If used incorrectly, squandered, a person’s Vital Energy could be gone in youth, his body left open to fatigue, disease, and ultimately death.
Artie believed that over-exercise was more harmful than no exercise. He thought that most college athletes over-exercised, using up their Vital Energy in great gulps. He railed against the weekend exerciser trying to cram fitness into two days. (“You’d be better off spending the weekend in bed!” he said.) The McGovern plan demanded daily work, half the exercises done on the back, half standing. Regularity was the key, not ferocity. Exercise should feel good.
“Your feelings will tell yo
u when to quit,” he said. “When there is no exhilaration, no fun in your game whatever it is; when you are holding on by your clenched teeth and your grit, it’s time to stop. In fact, you’ve passed the time to stop by a dangerous margin.”
The McGovern approach had been developed during an interesting rise to prominence. Artie estimated he’d had over 200 prizefights, professional and amateur, as a young man. His father, Happy Jack McGovern, was a full-time blacksmith and a part-time fighter, and Artie had grown up around the boxing game. John L. Sullivan’s bar was across the street from the McGovern house. Billy Elmer’s fight club was next door. Artie, 97 pounds, was in the ring by the time he was 15.
After a list of injuries that included a nose broken 18 times, front teeth knocked out, assorted broken ribs, and a partial loss of hearing, a fractured knuckle was both the end of his boxing career and the start of his new career. He had the knuckle rebroken and set at the Cornell Clinic. While that was taking place, the head of the clinic, Dr. William Hills Sheldon, suggested in conversation that Artie set up a small gymnasium to take care of the needs of the doctors at the hospital and some of their recuperating patients.
Artie, without other options, followed the advice. He had little formal education but knew how to train and exercise himself, and now he spent time at the hospital talking with doctors, further learning the mechanics of the body. The Great War gave him a laboratory full of customers to study as he worked as a volunteer with soldiers and sailors deemed unfit for service and with returning wounded and shell-shocked veterans. He developed his philosophy, and then his client list and his business expanded as he moved from smaller to larger locations.
The Big Bam: The Life and Times of Babe Ruth Page 26