The Big Fella

by Jane Leavy

  “He was a trailblazer,” Bill James has said. “A man who had the courage to escape the fictions and falsehoods that constrained other men’s talents and show them what could be done.”

  He was synonymous with undiluted American power and unbridled appetite. Playing the role of the Babe in the 2014 New York production of Bronx Bombers, the actor C. J. Wilson literally gagged at the prospect of eating two cold hot dogs—with buns—at every performance, especially on matinee days.

  He was a symbol of the new American obsession with mobility. John Kieran, a sports columnist for the New York Times, recalled one spring training when Ruth decided to motor north from camp and bought a car for the trip. “An hour later the garage at which he had bought the car received a telephone call,” Kieran wrote. “‘This is Babe Ruth. You know that car you sold me? Well, it’s off the road upside down in a culvert out there. It’s busted up plenty.’

  “‘We’ll be right out to fix it, Mr. Ruth.’

  “‘Fix nothing,’ Babe replied. ‘Send me another car.’”

  He was a symbol of the power of self-invention. The dirty-faced street urchin of myth morphed into a man of style, even elegance, and underappreciated dignity. Call it the triumph of couth. He got regular manicures (buff, no polish) and never shaved his own face if he could help it, a gentleman’s prerogative.

  But what made him “the complete American,” as the New York Herald Tribune would describe him in his obituary, was not that rags-to-riches mythology, but his restlessness and energy. Winking, swinging, mincing, sliding, he seemed always to be going somewhere, doing something, usually over the speed limit.

  What is most striking about Ruth at this remove is how thoroughly modern he was, not just in the way he attacked a baseball, but also in the creation, manipulation, and exploitation of his public image at the precise moment in history when mass media was redefining what it meant to be public. He challenged the prevailing ethos that great athletes must pay for their success with asceticism. He challenged the salary structure of the sport, and the authority of the baseball commissioner to dictate where and how players made money in the off-season. He challenged the notion that stardom was the sole province of saints and movie stars. He challenged the autonomy of team owners by hiring Christy Walsh, the first sports agent, to promote and protect his interests.

  Under Walsh’s management, Ruth became the first sports star to avail himself fully of the machinery of fame that roared to life as the Babe ascended the national stage.

  He sought refuge in the blaze of notoriety, in the persona he created, in the diversions of a lavish and profligate public life; in the attentions of the famous, the infamous, the ballyhooed, the know-it-alls, and oh-so-many boys hungry for attention, who must have reminded him of himself.

  Bad boy Ruth—that was me. Don’t get the idea that I’m proud of my harum-scarum youth. I’m not. I simply had a rotten start in life, and it took me a long time to get my bearings. Looking back to my youth, I honestly don’t think I knew the difference between right and wrong. I spent much of my early boyhood living over my father’s saloon, in Baltimore—and when I wasn’t living over it, I was in it, soaking up the atmosphere.

  Like so many of the words attributed to him, the statement at the entrance to the exhibition, written as a farewell message to Catholic youth as he lay dying in Memorial Hospital in August 1948, was not his own. Below it hung the photo of Little George that my son, Nick, and I had seen in Baltimore all those years earlier. He still looked sad, his cumbrous eyebrows punctuating the glum set of his brow. But his being was so animated, his face so mobile, it was easy to miss its downcast mien. The Italian artist Paulo Garretto captured the look in a 1929 caricature for the New York World. With five strokes of his lithographer’s crayon—eyes, nose, mouth, cap—he evoked the sadness in Ruth’s bloated cartoon features.

  The caricature, featured in a 2016 “One Life: Babe Ruth” exhibit at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C., was unique in that Garretto gave him no lower body, no underpinning. What some view as a portrait of buoyancy, I have come to see as a depiction of rootlessness and disconnection.

  By the time Garretto’s drawing appeared on September 22, 1929, the received wisdom had congealed into hard fact, like the Babe’s thickening middle. “A big likeable kid,” the Sporting News said in 1922. “Well named, Babe.”

  “The Babe is a boy—moody, clever, tangible, and human,” Waldo Frank noted in the New Yorker.

  “A child of nature,” Red Smith eulogized.

  Everyone agreed he never grew up. Never provided “a noble example for the youth of the nation,” Bill Veeck observed, “which is undoubtedly why the youth of the nation loved him.”

  “Appealing and appalling,” the actress Teresa Wright concluded after meeting him on the set of The Pride of the Yankees in 1942.

  Appealing.

  The doting dad who collected his daughter Dot at her best friend’s apartment after school, settling his large self on a delicate, Duncan Phyfe–style side chair while helping himself to another handful of homemade chocolate chip cookies—and remembering to praise the lady of the house, who looked on in dismay as her most valuable possession teetered under his grateful bulk.

  Appalling.

  Steve Wulf, the longtime baseball writer and editor for Sports Illustrated and then ESPN the Magazine, was sitting at a picnic table in the Yankee locker room back in the eighties when the ancient clubhouse man, Pete Sheehy, hired in 1927, came and sat down across from him. “You knew the Babe, what was he really like?” Wulf asked. “He looked around to make sure nobody was really listening. He said, ‘He never flushed.’

  “It was like a secret he’d been holding in for sixty years.”

  So, when Wulf’s brother-in-law, a building contractor in Sudbury, Massachusetts, was hired to renovate Ruth’s former farmhouse, Home Plate Farm, and called offering the Babe’s bathtub or toilet as a souvenir, Wulf opted for the tub. “Of course, the bathtub was probably no better,” he said.

  But no one asked, or succeeded in eliciting much from him, about the childhood they said he never outgrew. And he volunteered very little, even to his daughter Julia Ruth Stevens. Of his years at St. Mary’s, he told her only: “I never felt full.”

  Little George is a spectral presence, when he is present at all, in the Ruth oeuvre and at the Birthplace and Museum, where shards from an untold family story are preserved behind glass. A copy of the misdated birth certificate that misspells his mother’s maiden name and omits the name of the newborn. A picture of baby George looking glum in a frilly collar. A photo taken at a family reunion with Little George in Katie’s lap, the only picture of mother and son. A hymnal found under floorboards at St. Mary’s.

  If Mickey Mantle was the last boy to function under a set of rules that Babe Ruth created for athletic celebrities, then the Babe is a boy lost in his own life story. Without that boy, it is impossible to grasp the full dimensions of the man he became and the complex relationship between public and private, between the persona and the person, between “the Big Fella” and Little George. If I wanted to write about the Babe, I had to find a way to allow Little George to tell his story.

  I had to hear his voice, not one scripted by Christy Walsh’s ghostwriters, or one running on an endless loop of newsreel clips in the Hall of Fame exhibit, but that of an authentic, unguarded, unimproved human being.

  I found it downstairs in the Hall of Fame’s research library, in a dog-eared Xerox copy of a 1963 Sport magazine article by Jhan Robbins, stuffed among decades of unscanned Babe Ruth newspaper clippings. It figures that Ruth would allow himself to be heard by a fourteen-year-old boy reporter trying to play the part of a grown-up.

  Ruth was in his last year with the Yankees when Robbins showed up for his interview on Saturday afternoon, June 25, 1934. Yankee owner Jacob Ruppert had personally approved the request from Jhan’s English teacher, who called him “a serious student of journalism.”

  Ruth was standin
g in a pair of striped undershorts by his shiny red locker inhaling mouthfuls of peanuts and soda pop when Jhan arrived in the clubhouse. After taking a moment to regain his equilibrium, Jhan formulated his first question. “To what do you owe your success?”

  Ruth laughed. “Good, clean living.”

  Robbins recorded his answers faithfully on yellow copy paper that schoolkids used back then, and which would provide the basis for his story published on the fifteenth anniversary of Ruth’s last visit to the Stadium in June 1948.

  They talked about Ruth’s prize bull terrier—Ruth said manager Joe McCarthy looked like one and made a point of telling the boy, “You can print that.” Everyone knew he hated McCarthy.

  He said his greatest thrill in baseball was the 292/3 scoreless innings he’d pitched for the Red Sox in the World Series and a 587-foot home run he’d hit in spring training in Tampa, Florida, in 1919. He’d said those things plenty of times before.

  He talked about his childhood, trotting out familiar lines he’d repeated so often he could no longer distinguish fact from fiction—but then again neither could anyone else. How his father ran a bar and he began chewing tobacco when he was seven and drinking whiskey when he was ten. He said that his mother, who didn’t remember his birth date, died when he was fifteen, when actually he was seventeen.

  He talked about St. Mary’s Industrial School, where he learned what it meant to be on his own and how to make the best of it. The brothers taught him how to make a shirt collar and how to stave off loneliness in the crucible of competition. Daily confrontations with a man sixty feet, six inches away left little room for rumination or regret, as Jhan learned when he asked what the Babe thought about in the batter’s box. It was a question no adult writer I’ve read ever thought to ask.

  “Well, you’re all alone out there,” the Babe said. “You’re expected to belt it. You don’t want to let anybody down. But I don’t worry about how I’m going to hit. I don’t bother trying to outguess the field. I think about the pork chops I had the night before and if there should have been more salt in the barbecue sauce.”

  He didn’t have long to think about being a disappointment or to remember the self-consciousness that predated the glamorous reinvention of Little George, who suspected that he was too ugly to merit visitors at St. Mary’s. There was always another pitch to focus his mind on the present. A hard, round ball that obliterated everything but the moment.

  “The second the pitcher rears back everything goes out of my mind but the ball,” he told Jhan. “What I see is the heart of it and that’s what I lean into.”

  That insight, elicited by a boy from Brooklyn, was what I leaned on as I followed the ball from Ruth’s hand on the mound at Fenway Park to the batter’s box at Yankee Stadium, tracing the trajectory of a life that transformed Little George into the Big Fella.

  Prologue

  June 13, 1902 / Baltimore

  I

  Friday the thirteenth was a fortunate day for most of the residents of Baltimore City. Thundershowers and cooler temperatures had temporarily paroled H. L. Mencken’s “wicked seaport” from unseasonable 94-degree heat and humidity that had reached 82 percent at 8:00 A.M. the previous day and was no lower when Oliver Fassig at the United States Weather Bureau recorded it twelve hours later.

  “Sunshine of the most powerful sort” had put the city on notice, the Baltimore Sun declared. The front page was full of advertisements for summer rentals and excursions leaving from the Light Street Wharf.

  Perched on the fall line between the Piedmont Plateau and the Atlantic Coastal Plain, Baltimore City was divided by geology into an upper and a lower city, where George Herman Ruth Jr. awoke in the apartment above his father’s saloon at 426 West Camden Street, a half mile from the waterfront.

  For all its growth and municipal improvements in the Progressive Era, Baltimore was also the largest unsewered city in the country: every lower-city privy—the post office, in local parlance—and every upper-city cesspool drained into the back basin and percolated into sea-level streets. Cobblestones were laid at an angle to the curb to facilitate drainage. But the indolent tide, fed by Gwynns Falls, a twenty-five-mile stream descending from the hills of western Baltimore County into the Patapsco River, kept the human detritus close. A “mephitic” municipal stench blossomed every spring, a smell Mencken likened to “a billion polecats” in summer.

  For Baltimore residents, nothing in the morning headlines seemed as pressing as making plans to get out of town. President Theodore Roosevelt had reluctantly postponed a weekend at his Long Island estate in Oyster Bay to deal with pressing business on Capitol Hill, where additional funding for the continued dredging of Baltimore harbor had just been approved.

  A delegation of colored Baltimoreans had visited the Washington office of Republican senator Louis E. McComas to discuss the efforts of Democrats to deprive them of their franchise, while in Virginia Robert E. Lee’s daughter Mary Custis Lee had been arrested for sitting in the colored section of an Alexandria streetcar. She claimed ignorance of the law.

  The Baltimore Orioles game in Detroit had been called after seven innings on account of a cyclone, with the Orioles ahead 9–3. A “Remarkable Baseball Fatality” had occurred in Charlottesville, Virginia, when the shortstop for the city team was struck in the throat by an opposing batter’s ground ball; he died three minutes after throwing the man out.

  Also, the creation of a new American League baseball club, the first to call New York home, was announced in Manhattan.

  The sun rose at 4:39 A.M., a half hour after the city’s new electric streetlights went dark, and would set at 7:33 P.M.—one of the longest days of the year and surely the longest day of any year in the life of the boy his family called Little George.

  He was seven years old but he thought he was eight.

  In the spring of 1902, what George Washington had dubbed “the risingest town in America” in 1789 was the country’s sixth-largest city, home to 509,000 residents, 34,000 of whom, including George and Katie Ruth and their two children, George and Mamie, were of German descent.

  It was the era of “good government” Republicanism, the Democratic machine having been swept out of power in 1895. The city had tripled in size with the 1888 annexation of portions of Baltimore County, and facilitated growth into this new southwest territory with the consolidation and extension of a maze of streetcar lines into the United Railways and Electric Company. George Sr. had tried his hand as a gripman among other occupations before settling on the saloon business. For a nickel you could go anywhere.

  Health consciousness had prompted the purchase of 391 acres of public parkland in Gwynns Falls, the creation of a Free Public Bath Commission, and a citywide campaign initiated by the state against tuberculosis. The second of two public bathhouses funded by philanthropist Henry Walters, Walters Bath House Number 2, in its second month of operation, charged three cents for soap and towels for adults and a penny for children. Users were restricted to a twenty-minute shower. For a few cents more, you could wash your laundry in one of its eighteen tubs.

  Innovation and optimism also prevailed in the state capital in Annapolis, where that year the progressive Maryland legislature passed the first workers’ compensation law in the country, enacted mine safety regulations, voted to permit female attorneys to practice in state courts, and guaranteed pensions for public-school teachers. New legislation allocated funding for public libraries, outlawed child labor under the age of twelve, created kindergarten classes, and made school attendance compulsory for all children age eight to twelve. An attempt, Mencken observed with asperity, to rid the state of “dirt pedagogy.”

  That new law, passed in April, was scheduled to go into effect when the school year commenced in September—an unwelcome development for Little George. The closest white public school, at the corner of Barre and Warner Streets, was a third of a mile walk from the Ruths’ home. Primary School No. 12, a gloomy pre–Civil War brick building, had been rated “very
defective”—one step from unacceptable—in the school administration’s 1900 survey of its facilities. Two years later, none of the recommended repairs had been made.

  The Ruths were new to the neighborhood, having relocated in April 1901, when George Sr. was granted a liquor license to operate a saloon at the corner of South Paca and West Camden Streets, in the industrial heart of the city. It was a world of grit and bustle and thirst and crowds: the locus of a city in transit and transition. It was also home to Camden Station, the principal terminal of the B&O Railroad, to tradesmen and traveling salesmen, and to back alleys where horses grazed on the grass growing between the cobblestones. A vast Italianate structure that stretched five city blocks, the station dictated the rhythm, character, sound, and history of the neighborhood. Abraham Lincoln had to be smuggled into the station en route to his 1861 inauguration; the first Union casualties of the Civil War occurred two months later when Massachusetts troops were attacked by Confederate sympathizers as they made their way through the city to board a train for Washington.

  In the spring of 1902, the B&O was expanding its operations, building a thousand-foot-long warehouse adjacent to the station with a capacity of a thousand carloads of freight. It was the longest brick structure in the United States.

  Train whistles announcing arrivals and departures vied for attention with jackhammers and the hollers of oystermen and “arabbers” (pronounced ay-rabbers), street hucksters who patrolled the streets in pony-drawn carts laden with fresh produce, each announcing their wares with jangling bells and singsong cries. The air was filled with the screech and gong of streetcar motormen braking for slower traffic under the windows of the Ruths’ second-story apartment.

  Their neighbors included a chemical company and a shipping outfit that handled all the freight that came through the station. Directly across the street: William J. Tickner and Sons, Undertakers. Down the block: Charles G. Summers & Co., dealers in canned goods, and Swift & Co., meatpackers. The 1900 census described neighborhood residents as “poor white.” They lived in tenements squeezed between factories; African Americans survived in cramped alleys that bisected the main streets.