The Big Bam: The Life and Times of Babe Ruth

by Montville, Leigh

  The headline in the New York Daily News was “Mrs. Babe Ruth Dies in Love Nest Fire.”

  The Babe invited 20 reporters to his suite at the Brunswick Hotel on Monday. It was a cramped, embarrassing moment in room 574. Just a look at the troubled Ruth made the reporters pause. None of them wanted to intrude on his sorrow, so everybody sat and respectfully waited for the big man to compose himself. This really didn’t happen.

  “I’m in a hell of a fix, boys…” he said.

  He clenched and unclenched his hands. He clenched harder until his knuckles turned white.

  “All I want to say is that it was a great shock to me…”

  He started to sob. He tried to speak again, but couldn’t. He pulled out a handkerchief. His face contorted. He sobbed again.

  “Please let my wife alone,” he said. “Let her stay dead.”

  He cried a little more.

  “That’s all I’ve got to say.”

  The reporters filed out of the room. How could they push him? In the midst of all the charges and accusations and false reports, the Home Run King was a character of sad dignity in this situation. He had no bad words for anybody. Maybe it was years in front of a crowd that made him act the way he did, maybe it was good advice, maybe it was simple good-heartedness at his core, but he walked through the days of mourning, putting one foot in front of the other, with nothing but unadulterated grief. Maybe it was guilt.

  The check marks in researching the tale quickly arrived. The second medical examiner announced that there was no evidence of foul play. There was no poison, no alcohol, no drug in Helen’s body. She had died from smoke inhalation and the burns she received. The fire inspector again ruled that the fire had sprung from an overloaded connection and faulty wiring. The investigation was done. Death by natural causes.

  The many voices in the situation suddenly went silent. The members of the Woodford family made no more claims, telling reporters they accepted the decisions. They said they would not fight for custody of Dorothy. Kinder and his father backed away from the scene with no more comment. The lawyers, hired by everyone in the matter, had nothing more to say. If there had been a financial settlement by Ruth with all parties, which seemed to be the case, it was never discussed. The silence simply came, and Helen could finally be buried.

  Ruth paid for all the arrangements. Helen was buried out of the Woodford family home at 420 West Fourth Street in South Boston on Thursday morning, January 17, 1929. At midnight the night before the burial, Ruth arrived at the house to pay his respects. A crowd, estimated as high as 5,000 people, held back by 25 Boston patrolmen, was waiting as his car turned off F Street and came down West Fourth. Flashbulbs lit up the night as he walked up the stairs to the house.

  The parlor was filled with flowers, mostly from the Babe. He had received dozens of telegrams of condolence, including messages from Miller Huggins and Lou Gehrig. He moved across the room and knelt next to the body of his wife, which lay in the $1,000 bronze casket he had purchased. It was an open casket; her death was mainly due to smoke inhalation. He stared at her for a full five minutes, looked directly into her eyes. And then he began to wail.

  “Oh…oh…oh…oh…”

  He was sweating, crying, holding on to his rosary beads. The room became quiet. Everyone simply watched.

  “Oh…oh…oh…Helen…”

  When he tried to stand, he collapsed. Arthur Crowley and his father and assorted men grabbed him. They virtually carried him from the parlor, down the stairs, and into the car. His attorney, John Feeney, told him that it was all right to leave. Everything had been arranged for the funeral in the morning.

  “What funeral?” the Babe asked.

  He was not in much better shape in the morning when he returned to the house for a short, 15-minute service, followed by the cortege to Calvary Cemetery and the 10-minute burial service. The day was cold, and snow was falling as Helen was laid to rest. The Babe stood with his sad face in a group of sad faces. He looked as if he would collapse again at any moment. Photographers took his picture. He was 34 years old, and he had been married to Helen Woodford for 15 tumultuous years.

  Now it was done.

  “The boys in Boston all said Helen was with the doctor for the drugs,” Marshall Hunt said years later. “She was hooked on the stuff. He could give her the prescriptions.”

  The return to New York was quiet. The newspapers said the Babe returned with Dorothy, his daughter, but that was not the case. She was still in her room at Academy of the Assumption in Wellesley, nine years old and miserable. No one had told her that Helen had died.

  Dorothy recalled many years later in her book My Dad, the Babe that she had been placed in the school when Helen moved into the new house with Kinder. Helen had explained that the school was wonderful and there was no need for Dorothy to worry, she would see Helen and the doctor every weekend. This was a lie. She said she hadn’t seen either of them for six months. She also hadn’t seen her father. The other girls would go home for weekends, and she would be left alone in the dorm wondering what had happened to her parents.

  The mystery soon deepened.

  “One cold night in the middle of January, a week after Helen’s death, two nuns woke me up and told me to get dressed and pack all my belongings,” Dorothy said in her book. “I had no idea what was going on, but I did what I was told. The next thing I knew I was boarding a train bound for New York with two nuns who kept saying. ‘Trust in God. Everything will be all right.’ When I heard that, I knew I was in trouble.”

  She wound up at the New York Foundling Hospital on East 68th Street. The next morning the mother superior told her that she was going to live with a nice woman named Miss Dooley until her father came for her. Miss Dooley lived in a brownstone in Brooklyn. Her first message to Dorothy was that Dorothy’s name had been changed. It was now “Marie Harrington.”

  What was the deal? For five months, she lived under this new name. Miss Dooley even wrote it on all of her clothes, all of her possessions. The nine-year-old girl despaired. She hated the new name, hated her situation. Would she ever see her father again?

  Back in Boston, unknown to her, she had become one of the richest nine-year-olds in the country when Helen’s will was read. The will gave five dollars to the Babe, five dollars to her mother, and five dollars to each of her brothers and sisters. Everything else, a figure later determined as $34,224, went to her “ward.”

  On a spring day in 1929, Miss Dooley took Dorothy back to the New York Foundling Hospital, and there was her father. He looked the same as she had remembered, a teddy bear of a man with a big smile. He was alive! He had come for her! She ran to him and hugged him. That was when she noticed that he was accompanied by a woman with brown hair.

  He introduced the woman. He told Dorothy to meet her new mother.

  That was when she met Claire Hodgson.

  The Babe and Claire were married on April 17, 1929, three months and six days after Helen died. They had spent most of those three months and six days apart. He was in spring training in St. Petersburg, had left for Florida early, two weeks after returning from Boston, just to get away from the attention. She was in New York. The phone bill between the two places, she said, was $1600.

  The decision to marry was mutual. They both had worried about the timing, so close to Helen’s death, but they consulted with Father William Hughes, a friend from St. Gregory’s Church on West 91st Street. He said he saw nothing wrong with getting married immediately. He offered to perform the wedding.

  An attempt was made at secrecy, but after their late visit to the marriage license office at the 8:00 P.M. closing on Monday, all the ears of the press were perked. An announcement by Christy Walsh on Tuesday said that the marriage would take place on Wednesday at 6:30 in the morning at St. Gregory’s. Walsh, ever the publicist, said that the couple had wanted the wedding to be secret, but “as an appreciation of the consideration that has always been shown him by newspaper writers and photographers,” Ruth had
authorized him to release the news.

  The Babe and Claire then showed up an hour early the next day and were married before most of the press arrived. (Walsh was left to handle the disgruntled journalists.) Two friends, Mr. and Mrs. George Lovell, were the best man and maid of honor. Claire’s mother and brothers and Walsh were in attendance, but the rest of the crowd was composed of people going to an early Mass. No ballplayers were at the wedding.

  Westbrook Pegler said there was a reason for this.

  “The Babe has been drawing away from ballplayers socially these past few years and finding his companionship outside the business,” Pegler wrote. “He always had trouble associating with ballplayers. He likes to gad about at night and has the physique to stand up under a brisk social program, but less durable ballplayers who tried to go along with him found themselves asleep on double plays or snoring under fly balls. So they yawned their way out of the league and the Babe was blamed for leading them into evil ways.”

  The bridal breakfast was held at an 11-room apartment on West 88th Street that was the couple’s new home. They would live there with Claire’s mother, two brothers, daughter Julia, and, eventually, Dorothy. The Babe proudly showed off the apartment to visitors. He called one room “the billiard room,” although no table had been installed. His gift for Claire on their wedding day was a $7,000 diamond bracelet.

  “Nice workmanship,” someone said.

  “The workmanship cost more than the stones,” Babe said.

  He gave his bride a second gift a day later. Opening day, scheduled for Tuesday, was rained out, then shifted to Wednesday, rained out again, and finally played on Thursday. The opponent was the Red Sox, and the pitcher was Red Ruffing. In the first inning, on a three-and-two count, the Babe swung hard but late and lifted a long fly ball to left that ducked into the stands for a home run. The showbiz audacity of the hit was wonderful. He turned third base on his home run trot and looked at Claire in her box behind the dugout, tipped his cap, and blew her a little kiss.

  Claire stood and cheered. She said she was going to attend every game and the Yankees were going to win another pennant.

  This marriage brought a change in the Babe’s well-documented modus operandi. The cartoons of the time about marriage often showed the little woman of the house holding a rolling pin while she waited for the late arrival of her man from some transgression. The rolling pin was used to bop the man over the head. Claire now held the rolling pin.

  She had done this with some success during her six-year relationship with the Babe, operating as a force behind his subtle moderation since the bad season in 1925. Now, with the title, not to mention the checkbook, she was able to implement a range of reforms. The Babe would spend less, sleep more, eat better, settle for beer instead of harder spirits, dress with suitable panache, and signal before all left-hand turns. For the first time, really, since he had left the Xaverian brothers, someone else would have firm control of his daily life.

  “I don’t think I am disclosing any secrets when I state that a bride can do an awful lot with her husband of a few months that a wife of ten years can’t do,” Claire wrote in her memoir. “I was persistent, but persuasive.”

  The Babe was now on an allowance. If he wanted money, Claire wrote him a $50 check. If he wanted more money, she wrote him another $50 check. Sometimes $50 checks flew through the day like autumn leaves, but there was no more walking around with uncashed checks for $35,000, no more mistaken grabs into the pocket to hand a teammate a random $500 bill. There would be so many endorsed $50 checks that Claire would routinely send them to people requesting the Babe’s autograph.

  She called herself “an All American wet blanket.” She established a ten o’clock curfew both in her own home (“I’m sorry, you have to leave now”) and at all events (“I’m sorry, we have to leave now”). She substituted a club sandwich for the big steak the Babe liked to eat before bed. She served only beer in the house during the season. She banned the daily racing form. She cut certain high-living friends from the roster.

  When Col. Ruppert invited her to travel with the team on the first road trip of 1929 to Boston, she blanched a bit at the destination but accepted, and soon she was making most road trips, traveling in the drawing-room car with the Babe, the only woman in this roving band of men. She answered the phone in the hotel rooms, was amazed at the number of women who called, and told them that the Playboy of the Western World was out of commission.

  “The Babe brought out the beast in a lot of ladies the world over, and I enjoyed very much setting them straight on their problem,” Claire wrote. “The Babe was always amused by my reports and rarely failed to point out that this was further evidence that I was the luckiest of women to have snared so obviously desirable a man.”

  The Babe, for his part, seemed to enjoy the routine. There were still days spent with the boys, some trips that Claire didn’t take, some time to operate, but he had the home base that he’d never had before. There was a genuine family with Claire’s mother and two brothers and two kids on the scene, all of it legitimate and real. Claire opened all the windows for him so he wouldn’t throw out his back. She cut his toenails so he wouldn’t stick himself with the scissors. She worried that he would catch a cold.

  No one ever had worried that he would catch a cold.

  The new season started magnificently, the Yankees of 1929 looking very much like the Yankees of 1928 and 1927 as they bolted off to 13 wins in the first 17 games. But that was an illusion. The surging A’s of a year ago were still surging. Led by their own back-to-back sluggers, Jimmie Foxx and Al Simmons, with Lefty Grove and George Earnshaw on the mound, they took over first place on May 13, soon went on an 11-game winning streak, and pretty much had won the pennant before summer even arrived.

  The Babe was not part of the problem. With Claire in the stands and newfound virtue in his heart, the well-rested wage earner went back to his job of placing baseballs in strange locations. Early in June, though, he developed a severe chest cold (Claire was right to worry) and wound up at St. Vincent’s Hospital for a night. An erroneous report out of Boston said that he had suffered a heart attack, and that report magnified quickly to yet another rumor that he was dead, but he simply had a cold. He needed liquids and rest.

  His life since the death of Helen in January had been a merry-go-round of activity, and it was decided that a lot of rest, rather than a little, was the proper answer. He announced that he and Claire were going to an undisclosed location near a lake for a week or ten days.

  “No, boys, I can’t smoke,” he told reporters when they came to his new apartment and he welcomed them in a rose-colored bathrobe. “Doctors’ orders. But you can light up. I can’t chew or take snuff either. Pretty bad.”

  He said Dr. Edward King, the Yankees’ physician, had outlined a plan for when he returned. He would, if possible, stay out of the ever-present exhibition games the team played on off-days. He also would play only one game of any doubleheader. That would give him more rest during the season.

  “It’s tough, you know, with all those people around you on the field, charging you after the game,” he said about the exhibitions. “Then, after autographing heaven knows how many balls, they mob you, meaning well enough, of course. I am always afraid of spiking some of them, and I generally wind up spiking myself when I have fifty people on top of me.

  “What can a man do? Just lie there until they get up. The small-town cops don’t help you. They stand by and grin.”

  The Babe and Claire went for a week to a cottage on Chesapeake Bay. This might have been his quietest stretch in a decade. Three weeks after he left the lineup, he came back in time to hit a pair of homers in a five-game series at the Stadium against the A’s. The teams split back-to-back doubleheaders, each twin bill attracting over 70,000 fans, and the A’s took the final, single game to leave town with an eight-and-a-half-game lead and total control.

  The Babe went back to his long-ball production. Despite missing 17 days and f
alling nine home runs behind Gehrig, he again would lead the league with 46 and hit .345. He reached a milestone on August 11 in Cleveland when he smacked Indians starter Willis Hudlin’s first pitch in the second inning far and wide over the right-field fence at League Park for his 500th home run. It was a startling figure, more than twice as many home runs as anyone in the majors ever had hit. The clout also was the Babe’s sixth home run in the past six games.

  The ball ricocheted off a Lexington Avenue doorstep and rolled to the feet of Jake Geiser, 46, who was walking to catch a bus home to New Philadelphia. Geiser was found, brought to the Yankees dugout, and presented with two baseballs and an autographed $20 bill by the Bambino, in exchange for the ball in his possession.

  On September 6, Ruth hit one of the longest home runs of his life. The Yankees played an exhibition against inmates at Sing Sing Prison in Ossining, New York, and the Babe, good resolutions about no more exhibitions forgotten, was part of the traveling squad. In the second inning, he hit the first of three home runs on the day, a rocket that soared over the 40-foot stone wall and seemed to carry forever, the inmates in the crowd probably wishing that he could hit them out too. Local legend said that the ball came to rest 620 feet from home plate, but later research indicated the spot was 100 feet closer.

  The Babe tried out the electric chair for size, autographed baseballs, and chatted with inmates. He talked for a while with an older man, now blind, and later asked one of the guards what the man had done to land in Sing Sing. The guard said the man had killed his wife and had been on Death Row until his sentence was reduced to life in prison.

  “Gosh,” the Babe said.

  On September 20, a sad conclusion to a long year began. Miller Huggins entered the hospital. The little manager had felt lousy for most of the season and had promised to whip himself into shape when the campaign ended. An aggravating carbuncle on his face near his eye and unremitting headaches finally sent him to St. Vincent’s Hospital.