Cobb’s eldest boy had little interest in baseball, but that wasn’t the problem. In 1919, when Cobb still had only two sons, Tyrus and Herschel, he told a sportswriter he didn’t want them following in his path. “A ballplayer’s fame is too fleeting,” he said. “You are a star today and a has-been tomorrow. I wish that I had established myself along more permanent lines.” Herschel did take to baseball anyway, and showed a talent for it. But Ty Jr. always preferred tennis. He had plenty of opportunity to play at the schools his father sent him to—Richmond Academy in Augusta, the tony Hun School in New Jersey, and Princeton University. At eighteen he was an alternate on the United States Davis Cup team, coached by Bill Tilden, a winner of 10 Grand Slams and the dominant player of the early 1920s. But just as his father was a trailblazer for future celebrities, Ty Jr. found himself in the first wave of overprivileged celebrity children, and behaved accordingly, drinking too much, driving too fast, and flunking out of college in his freshman year. Cobb yelled and maybe—probably—struck him; that in any case is what his younger sister Shirley said. Ty Jr. wasn’t his only problem child. As a teenager Herschel was tried for what amounted to attempted rape (he was acquitted) and was later involved in an automobile mishap that resulted in a friend’s death. But Ty Jr.’s screwups seemed to anger and embarrass Cobb more acutely, and he traced most of them to Charlie, since it was she who had the most influence on the boy while Cobb was away playing baseball. Years later the surviving Cobb children agreed that Charlie was not entirely blameless, since she spoiled Ty Jr., cleaned up all of his more youthful messes, and then concealed the facts from his father. Cobb also railed that she was never straight with him, even about simple domestic matters, like whether the laundry had been done. Eventually the marriage broke down under the strain and in 1931 Charlie filed for divorce, claiming “cruel treatment.”
Cobb was “surprised and shocked,” he told the newspapermen after they’d gotten wind of the action from Charlie’s lawyer. Even though they slept in separate bedrooms by then he was probably telling the truth because they had been through so much together and come so far in the world that it was hard to imagine the family dissolving. Each spring the Cobbs had moved from Augusta to a rented house in Detroit for the long, emotionally exhausting baseball season, then back to Augusta each fall so the kids could go to school there. Along the way, Charlie had commenced thirteen pregnancies, eight of them ending in miscarriage, and she had needed surgeries a few times in between. When births or those other complications happened during the season, he always left the team to be with her. Meanwhile, it was she who had nursed Ty Sr. when he came home in the evening with his legs bleeding from sliding and from other men’s spikes, using various homeopathic salves and ointments, then wrapped the wounds and sores in towels. The Cobbs went through a lot of towels. “I have always loved my wife, my children and my home,” was about all he could muster for newsmen who came looking for a response to her divorce filing.
The Cobbs’ home in 1931 had recently shifted from Augusta to Atherton, California, a town about thirty miles south of San Francisco. His previous house had been more than comfortable, definitely upper-middle-class, but the new place was magnificent, a seven-bedroom Mission-style mansion, with pool and guesthouse, located on about four acres just off tree-lined Spencer Lane. They had named it El Roble, or the Oak, a nod, it would seem, to Charlie’s family estate in Augusta, “The Oaks,” where in 1908 they had been married. Cobb had become interested in the San Francisco area in the early 1920s, when he first came to California to play winter ball in the Pacific Coast League. Apart from a climate more benign than Georgia’s, it offered what he hoped would be a fresh start. The old house in the last year or so had become unlivable for Charlie, who had moved out and into a rented place nearby with her children. In California, Ty and Charlie even moved back into the same bedroom.
The novelty of the new place wore off quickly, though, and the old tensions resurfaced. Ty Jr. by then had transferred to Yale, where he became captain of the tennis team, and his grades at first seemed marginally better. But then he suddenly quit tennis, saying that his coach, Tilden, who was known to be gay, had made flirty advances that disgusted him, and he could no longer be around the sport. Without tennis he seemed directionless, and he would soon leave college again.
Cobb took out his frustration with his son, and dissatisfaction with life in general, on his family, carrying on in a way that often made his children cower. Or maybe not; it depends on which sibling you talked to. Their descriptions of him varied significantly, from that of his elder daughter, Shirley, who told Don Rhodes, the author of Ty Cobb: Safe at Home, “I never spent five seconds with that man that I wasn’t scared pea green,” to that of his youngest boy, Jimmy, who said he could be intimidating, but that he was also the kind of father who routinely tucked in the children and told them bedtime stories. (Of the five Cobb children, Shirley, who ran a bookstore for many years in Palo Alto, was the most similar to her father, which may explain her particularly harsh assessments of him.) Jimmy was definitely the most pro-dad. “We were a very affectionate family,” Jimmy told an NPR interviewer in 1995, about a year before he died. “Every time I saw my father it was always a hug. He wouldn’t just shake your hand; it was an embrace.” When Jimmy came home from the Navy at the end of World War II, Cobb was waiting on the dock in San Francisco with an ice-cold quart of milk and a bag of doughnuts, Jimmy’s favorite childhood treat.
So which sibling is right, or most right, about what kind of father Cobb was? Perhaps it was Beverly, the younger daughter, who was born in 1919 and died in 1998, and who came down somewhere between Jimmy and Shirley, telling Rhodes that “Overall, it was happy living” in the Cobb house, but the kids had to learn to stand up for themselves. Once while she was home from college she offered a political opinion during a dinner at which her parents had several guests. This was not appreciated. Not only had she spoken up unbidden, but she’d said something her father didn’t agree with. “Who gave you the right to think?” snapped Cobb. Beverly replied, “God gave me a brain, and you spent a lot of money developing it, and I hope you both haven’t been failures!” Years later she remembered, “He never said anything like that to me again.”
While they were never exactly estranged, Cobb ultimately had a troubled relationship with Herschel, who as a teenager was forced to abandon his baseball ambitions after he lost an eye in what Cobb once described as “a rock fight with hooligans down by the creek.” Based on his grades and the cut of his jib, Herschel never did appear to be Ivy League material, the way Ty Jr. had. When he reached manhood, Cobb gave him a Coca-Cola distributorship in Idaho to run as his own business, so he could support himself and his family. Even with that jump-start, though, Herschel failed to find success. He abused alcohol, flew into rages, and struggled to keep his weight below 300 pounds. In his wrenching memoir, Heart of a Tiger, his son, also named Herschel, described a wretched childhood of abuse (both his parents drank themselves into a stupor more or less daily) relieved only by occasional visits from Ty, whom he saw as a typical loving grandfather. Herschel Jr. doesn’t say this in so many words in his book, but when his father died suddenly of a heart attack in 1951 at the age of thirty-three, it seemed in some ways a relief as well as a shock and a sorrow.
The story of Ty Jr. seems even sadder. After things didn’t work out at Yale, the tall, handsome ex-athlete pulled himself together and decided that he wanted to be what his grandfather W.H. had most earnestly wanted his father to become: a doctor. Ty Sr., however, would offer no financial help with medical school—in fact, according to family legend, Cobb was so angry at Ty Jr. for wasting his chances at two good schools, he sold all the G.M. stock he had in trust for him, and kept the money. In any case, they seldom spoke during the younger Cobb’s years at Medical College of South Carolina in Charleston. It was only after Ty Jr. graduated in 1942 with a specialty in gynecology and obstetrics, married well, and set up a practice in Dublin, Georgia, that the two got back
in touch. Wary of each other, they both proceeded with caution—more than was advisable, Cobb realized, when Ty Jr. was diagnosed with a brain tumor just a few months after Herschel’s death. “His days are numbered,” Cobb wrote in a letter to a friend. After that, apologies and explanations seemed beside the point; all they could do was sit with each other in the shade of a Dublin, Georgia, porch, son in a wheelchair, father in a rocker, and try to think of things to say. Ty Jr. died in September of 1952, at the age of forty-two. “My boys, my boys!” Cobb could sometimes be heard wailing in the time afterward.
By then Ty and Charlie’s marriage was finally over. A few weeks after she had filed for divorce in 1931, she announced that she was rescinding the action. She would repeat this pattern three more times over the next sixteen years until, in 1947, she finally filed for good. Her lawyer in that instance was Melvin Belli, the flamboyant “King of Torts” whose clients would include Muhammad Ali, Zsa Zsa Gabor, and Jack Ruby. In her suit, Charlie estimated her husband’s net worth at $7 million, which Ty naturally said was on the high side, but which sounds about right. They reached an agreement out of court, the terms of which were never disclosed.
Cobb was married to another women in the early 1950s, when he lost his two sons. Frances Fairburn Cass was the pretty daughter of an ear-nose-and-throat doctor whom Cobb knew, twice previously married but twenty-three years younger than he. After a brief courtship they wed in her hometown of Buffalo, and lived in Lake Tahoe, Nevada, mostly unhappily. Their divorce six years later was not exactly fodder for the scandal sheets. At their court hearing she accused him of occasionally “embarrassing me in front of my friends” due to his excessive drinking. He countered by saying she constantly criticized his choice of clothing. It was a low-stakes love affair. Frances did move back for a period a few years later when he became very sick—over his objections; he thought it was improper since they were no longer man and wife—but by the end she had faded from his life. When Cobb died in July of 1961, it was Charlie, along with his three surviving children, who stood around his bedside and wept.
— CHAPTER THIRTY —
WHEN I STARTED RESEARCHING THIS book I believed, like a lot of people, that Ty Cobb was a wonderful ballplayer but a maniac, meaning a racist and a mean, spikes-sharpening son of a bitch. This was not a professional opinion based on knowledge; it was an assumption based on stories I’d been hearing all my life. People said it in bars; Ken Burns said it in his baseball documentary, so it must be true—that sort of thing. That I’d come to this conclusion without investigating the matter myself made the myth more, not less, powerful for me.
I remember going to Royston very early in my research, when I was still deeply in this frame of mind, and peering into Cobb’s crypt. What a pathetic scene, fit for a villain, I thought. The Rose Hill Cemetery is especially sad for being so nondescript, not ugly but unlovely. Propped on the steps of the Cobb mausoleum were a weathered pine wreath and a plastic pink lily, and in the space between a wrought iron grating and the window one or more people had stuffed four now sun-baked baseballs. A small handmade sign said “Thanks for the game, Ty.” Everything looked as though it had been there a while, suggesting that the grave didn’t get a lot of traffic. What did that sign even mean?
It was a beautiful April day in Georgia, though, very close to Masters Tournament time. I pressed my forehead to the warm glass and peered inside. Very tidy!—just as you might expect, I thought, though I would have thought the same thing if it had been very messy in there. Both order and disorder would have suggested evil to me in my prejudiced frame of mind.
There was room for six coffins in the crypt, which I knew was ordered and paid for by Cobb himself in the late 1950s when he felt that his days were numbered. Little plaques identified the residents. On the right side, from the top down, were his mother, Amanda, his father, William Herschel, and his sister, Florence Leslie Cobb. Directly across from W.H., in a space between two empty slots, was the evil genius himself. You know how they say that your hair and fingernails continue to grow after you die? As I stood squinting in through the window I imagined Cobb lying there in a kind of Howard Hughes–ian dishabille, hair and fingernails filling the casket like excelsior, the shrinking flesh forcing his lips into a zombie grin.
Since I had already devoured everything Al Stump had written about Cobb, I knew that writer and subject had visited this very spot together seven months before the Peach’s passing. It was Christmas Eve, in fact, and a light snow was supposedly falling as darkness descended. In the distance, Stump wrote, “faintly, Yule chimes could be heard.” It sounded like something out of an old movie. At first Cobb for some reason couldn’t find what is probably the largest structure on the grounds, Stump said, but when he finally located the crypt “on a windswept hill” (which seemed to have flattened considerably in the years since) he asked Stump if he would like to pray with him, and dropped to his knees. After a silent moment he said, “My father had his head blown off with a shotgun when I was 18 years old—by a member of my own family [the italics are Stump’s]. I didn’t get over that. I’ve never gotten over that.”
Indeed, the scene sounded so much like something from an old movie that it should have aroused my suspicions. But it didn’t; not right then, anyway. Because Stump was confirming and enhancing my preconceived notions about Cobb and simultaneously appealing to my predilection for colorful bad guys who are not just interesting themselves, but who provide someone to feel superior to. I thought, instead, that it was cool to be standing in the spot where Cobb, more than fifty years before, had reenacted the Agony in the Garden.
After a while, though, it all got to be just a little too much. The more I reread and reconsidered the writings of Al Stump, the more the unrealness of his scenes and dialogue nagged at me. Then I saw, or saw again, something that I thought was really a step too far. It was something that occurred in Stump’s infamous True Magazine article of late 1961, specifically in an anectdote about how Cobb had commissioned a portrait of himself just before his death. Stump’s intention in this case was to illustrate Cobb’s callousness toward the artist he’d promised to hire for the project, but it had a very different effect on me. I remember wondering why someone who, according to Stump, a) wouldn’t part with a penny unless he absolutely had to, and b) couldn’t sit up for more than a few minutes at a time because of numerous illnesses, would commission a portrait in oils, done from life. Wouldn’t posing for a “noted Arizona artist” (Stump provides no name) both necessitate sitting and result in an unnecessary expense? What ultimately tipped the scales, though, was a quote that Stump used to finish the story. Stump’s Cobb, after checking the preliminary sketches, and seeing a living corpse with “sagging cheeks and a thin neck,” supposedly canceled the portrait, telling the artist, “I wouldn’t let you recalcimine my toilet!”
I simply didn’t believe that any human being ever said, “I wouldn’t let you recalcimine my toilet!”
If one thing is a lie, how much else is? I decided to do a little random fact-checking, starting with the weather in Royston on December 24, 1960, the day Stump said he went to Rose Hill Cemetery with Cobb. It turned out that it didn’t snow that day in Royston or for hundreds of miles around. Not even lightly. It was one tiny thread but when I tugged it, Stump’s oeuvre unraveled. The more I checked, the more “mistakes” I found. It didn’t take me long to realize that I could stop checking. Despite the audience Stump had attracted for his yarns about Cobb, and as influential as he had been in shaping the man’s present-day image, most of what he wrote wasn’t the truth. The degree to which his writing had been accepted (and embroidered upon by those who came after) had nothing to do with its dependability. He got both the finer details and the broader strokes wrong, and largely on purpose, for the sake of a more dramatic and thus more marketable story. The experience taught me a lesson about how assumptions can shape our thinking, and hence our lives. Just because you’ve heard something a thousand times doesn’t mean it’s true. Did
you know that it’s not even true that your hair and fingernails keep growing after you’re dead?
• • •
Looking back at the way Cobb lived out his retirement years, it’s hard to guess what he thought he was up to. In hindsight he looks very much like a man without a plan. Shortly after his last major league game he took off with his family for a six-week tour of Japan, playing (mostly first base, though he also pitched a bit) and coaching for several college teams in a series of games that routinely drew about 20,000 spectators. The following March, instead of going to spring training, he, Charlie, and the children set off on a months-long tour of Europe. He returned to a mostly blank appointment calendar. He played golf a lot, kept an eye on the stock market, and drove around with Grantland Rice visiting other old buddies. Some of these get-togethers went better than others. One night in the mid-1930s, when the columnist and Cobb were having dinner at the Detroit Athletic Club with ex-catcher Nig Clarke, Rice recalled in his memoir The Tumult and the Shouting that he mentioned “Clarke’s rapid tag and immediate throwing of his glove aside, signifying the third out.” When Clarke snickered and said, “I missed many a runner who was called out—I missed you at least ten times at the plate, Ty—times when you were called out,” Cobb flew into a rage.
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