The Big Fella

by Jane Leavy

  Christy Walsh thrust himself into the scrum. Among other things, it was his job to make sure the story remained an either/or—either it wouldn’t find its way into print until long after they were all dead or it would be forgotten in a blitz of favorable mentions of the visits Walsh had arranged to hospitals and orphanages, where Babe would be photographed being his best self.

  Most Americans still thought the Babe was a happily married man—the photos of Dorothy and Helen in the stands at Games 3 and 4 helped. Walsh could count on the discretion of the beat guys on the payroll of the Christy Walsh Syndicate who doubled as Ruth’s ghosts, but not on their editors. Not anymore. Not since Joe Patterson, publisher of the New York Daily News, America’s first tabloid, plastered photos of Babe’s mistress, Claire Hodgson, on page 1 in August 1925. And not with Bernarr Macfadden of True Story fame bankrolling New York’s newest scandal sheet, the New York Evening Graphic—known around town as the Porno-Graphic.

  Walsh’s immediate task was to extricate Ruth from the mob that attached to him like an appendage. They had a train to catch. There was a ball game, a mayor, and a governor waiting for them in Trenton.

  The station occupied seven acres of Manhattan real estate, stretching two city blocks along Seventh Avenue. With its two grand carriage entrances evoking Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate, a main waiting room fashioned of pink granite and modeled on the Baths of Caracalla—the biggest indoor space in the city—and a soaring concourse with a greenhouse ceiling confected of iron and glass, Penn Station was Ruthian in proportion. It was also a landmark in the professional relationship between Ruth and Walsh: it was here, on February 21, 1921, that he secured Ruth’s signature on their first contract.

  Walsh wasn’t exactly a kid on the come. He was twenty-nine years old and out of a job, having been fired again, this time by the Van Patten advertising agency. It was hard to fail at that when all of New York was in thrall to the new art of propaganda. Walsh couldn’t have imagined when he signed the Big Fella to that one-year deal—fifteen minutes before Babe and Helen boarded the 4:50 P.M. train for Hot Springs, Arkansas, where Babe went to boil out before spring training—that Ruth would get this big. That the money would get this big. That the job would get this big.

  Ruth was the first athlete to be as famous for what he did off the field (or what people thought he did) as he was for what he did on it. And in 1927, with Walsh’s help, he would become the first ballplayer to be paid as much for what he did off the field as what he did on it. What began six years earlier as an agreement to syndicate ghostwritten stories under the Babe’s byline had become not only big business but an entirely new kind of business: the management, marketing, and promotion of athletic heroism. Together they were inventing a new way for athletes to be famous—and to profit from that fame.

  The sports world had begun to take notice. Even the inveterate curmudgeon Westbrook Pegler, the former ghostwriter responsible for the treacle serialized under Ruth’s name in 1920, had been forced to admit they were onto something new. Now a syndicated columnist for the Chicago Tribune, Pegler had given Walsh his grudging due in a February 11, 1927, column, played as a scoop by the Washington Post: “Babe Ruth Now an Industry and Has Acquired a Manager.”

  Which was particularly sweet coming from Pegler, who had dismissed the syndicate’s offerings as “journalistic chitterlings” and “rhetorical offal.”

  Radical as it was to think of an athlete as an entity to be capitalized, the headline was new only to the newspaper’s editors—Walsh had been in complete control of Ruth’s affairs for more than a year. In fact, he had signed him to a new five-year contract in July. He gave the story to New York Telegram columnist Joe Williams, who reciprocated with a fawning profile titled “Christy Walsh, the Man Behind Mr. Babe Ruth.” He now controlled every aspect of Ruth’s financial life: investments, annuities, insurance policies, endorsements, personal appearances, and taxes. And he was involved in every aspect of Ruth’s personal life, too. He would say later, “I did everything but sleep with him.” And one night, when only a single unoccupied berth was available on their overbooked Pullman, he even tried that. Ruth kicked him out of bed.

  The Big Fella didn’t set out to be a revolutionary. But in his anti-authoritarian soul, he understood the injustice of ownership holding all the cards. He thumbed his nose at the pooh-bahs in every front office of every major-league franchise by authorizing Walsh to represent and protect his interests, making him the first sports agent in industry history. Why shouldn’t he get his?

  He thumbed his nose at the autocrats of the dugout, managers like John McGraw, who exerted complete control of the game, moving men around the bases like chess pieces until the Babe came along, took the game into his own hands, and remade it in his image. Who said bunt and slash was the only way to play baseball? Who said you can’t swing away?

  He thumbed his nose at baseball commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis every time he barnstormed against Negro Leaguers and other touring black ball clubs as he had since 1918, and as they would that afternoon at a high school field in Trenton against the Brooklyn Royal Giants, and again in Asbury Park. True, Ruth wasn’t the only white player to compete against Negro Leaguers. But he was the Babe.

  He thumbed his nose at Landis in 1921 when he defied the capricious ban on World Series participants barnstorming in the off-season. In his own unlettered way, Ruth understood something the big shots in the commissioner’s office wouldn’t get for decades about showcasing the national pastime and creating a market west of the Mississippi: “I think we are doing something that is in the interest of baseball. I do not see why we are singled out when other big players, members of second and third place clubs in the World Series money, are permitted to play post-season games. I am out to earn an honest dollar, and at the same time give baseball fans an opportunity to see the big players in action.”

  Ruth had other lawyers and secretaries and “winter managers” before Walsh came along. He’d had a press agent since 1919, he bragged to the Brooklyn Daily Eagle. Connie Savage organized the early barnstorming tours. Harry Weber, a theatrical agent, booked the vaudeville tour in the winter of 1921–22. Johnny Igoe, a Boston pharmacist pal, was in charge when Ruth signed on to tour Cuba with the John McGraw All-Stars in October 1920. Everyone knew how that turned out: with Ruth locked in a train toilet with Giants’ pitcher Rosy Ryan and a gallon of rum on their way back to Havana, where the Babe got stranded, having been swindled out of everything he’d bankrolled by gamblers and con men.

  Walsh was first to merge all aspects of representation into a single agency. After signing Ruth to initial one-year syndication deals, he had acquired power of attorney and complete control of Ruth’s money when the Big Fella got himself in a financial hole. Now, thanks to Ruth, Walsh was sole proprietor of two companies: the Christy Walsh Syndicate, which spit out hundreds of thousands of words over the telegraph wires during the 1927 World Series and brought in $43,252; and Christy Walsh Management, which he had created to handle Ruth’s and now Gehrig’s financial affairs. “He made the Ruthian bankroll what it is today,” Williams wrote.

  In short, Ruthian.

  Gehrig’s signing had been revealed in an August 18 story by Henry L. Farrell of the United Press, who took the opportunity to chide Jake Ruppert—he’d have to do better by Lou than his 1927 $7,500 salary, now that he had demonstrated Ruth’s power and hired his agent.

  “Until Christy Walsh came along, Babe didn’t know how to make use of his by-products,” Dan Parker opined in the New York Mirror. “But what Armour did to the pig and the cow, Christy did for Babe.”

  Cleaned up and packaged right, Ruth also made Walsh a wealthy man. Parker called it “the most equitable partnership ever established in athletics.”

  Since signing Ruth, Walsh had expanded his sphere of influence into college football, establishing the “All American Board of Football” in 1924, the year before Walter Camp’s death, no doubt in hopes of replacing Camp’s annual All-America team
. He packed the board with his clients—Knute Rockne at Notre Dame, Tad Jones at Yale, Howard Jones at the University of Southern California, and Glen “Pop” Warner at Stanford—and packaged their opinions of each other in ghostwritten columns.

  He created a board for the Babe to chair as well—“The All America Board of Baseball”—and loaded that up with sportswriter pals from every major-league city. Babe’s All-Stars received a personally autographed certificate and a red, white, and blue woolen sweater.

  II

  They were an unlikely pair.

  Ruth was all id; Walsh was all superego. Everybody knew Ruth; Walsh made it his business to know everybody it was important to know. What they shared was a kinetic restlessness. Walsh traveled twenty-five thousand miles a year selling Ruth. Ruth traveled at least that much during the baseball season being himself.

  Born in St. Louis on December 2, 1891, Walsh was only four years Ruth’s senior, but now found himself acting in loco parentis, legally and otherwise. Yes, it could be frustrating “handling these children dressed as adults,” he would confide to his son in future correspondence. “But as long as they need you, you’re safe. You make them believe they can’t go on without you.”

  He looked like he was born responsible. His birthday suit was probably three-piece. His slicked-back black hair might have been parted with a nun’s ruler. A devout Catholic and son of Ireland, he pined for the old sod though he had never set foot on it.

  Walsh was a teetotaler and, to be polite about it, extremely careful with his money—and Ruth’s. Ruth wasn’t careful about anything.

  Walsh favored pinstriped, double-breasted suits that made him look older and squarer than he was, filling out his otherwise slim five-eleven frame. He wore shamrocks and Kelly green ties in solidarity with the movement for Irish independence, having adopted the cause of his paternal grandparents, from Cork. Ruth favored silk shirts of every hue, tossed away after a single wearing, and $225 handmade suits from his downtown Italian tailor, Carloni.

  Walsh was Hollywood by way of middle America, extolling the conservative “horse and buggy” values of his maternal grandparents, who had arrived in Los Angeles in the mid-1880s by covered wagon. In temperament and frugality, he was closer to Gehrig than Ruth; he, too, was a mama’s boy.

  In his thinking and rah-rah sensibility, he was closest to Knute Rockne. But no one doubted that Ruth was his meal ticket. And one thing about the Big Fella: unlike Rockne, who dallied with other agents, he was loyal.

  Walsh had married well and touted the arrival of his son in a ghostwritten birth announcement under Christy Jr.’s byline, identifying himself as “a chip off the old Syndicate.” His wife, Madeline—Mada to the family—was the daughter of Oscar M. Souden, president of the U.S. National Bank. Daddy built them an impressive home in the hills above Griffith Park with a view from the Pacific Ocean to downtown Los Angeles. Walsh dubbed it Walshchateau. Mada called it Villa Cypress. Among its twenty rooms, there were five bedrooms, six baths, and an entertaining space capable of holding one hundred to one hundred fifty guests, according to his grandson Bob Walsh. The foyer, where guests left their cards, was paved with black-and-white squares of marble, brought over from Europe.

  A circular banister graced a grandiose staircase accented by arched stained-glass windows. A sideboard in the dining room held a white-and-gold Limoges service for forty or fifty, each plate inscribed with a prominent W.

  The Walshes entertained strategically: clients mingled with gossip columnists Hedda Hopper, Louella Parsons, and Walter Winchell. Walsh knew everyone from the Little Rascals and silent-movie star Harold Lloyd to New York Democratic boss Jim Farley and New York governor Al Smith, for whom he would corral a glittering roster of supporters, including Ruth and Gehrig, under the banner “Champions of the World, Champions of Al Smith” during the 1928 presidential campaign.

  “Mada told me Einstein was there,” Bob’s wife, Katie Walsh, said. “She wasn’t impressed with Einstein because all he talked about was fish,” Bob said. “He liked to catch them, eat them, and talk about them.”

  They also owned a summer place on a rocky outcropping called Hemlock Point, situated on Lake Oscawana, forty miles north of New York City, where Walsh brought his most favored clients, and sportswriters he wanted to coddle. He had Gehrig photographed perched on a photogenic rock and Ruth photographed rowing on the lake with Army football coach Biff Jones. Walsh saw to it that both photographs made the papers, the first underscoring Gehrig’s ruggedness and the second aligning Ruth with military conformity.

  A corny Walsh cartoon tying Ruth’s home-run hitting spree to passage of the Volstead Act, which made Prohibition the law of the land, appeared in the Detroit Free Press on June 6, 1920, nominating in the caption “The Hon. Babe Ruth, People’s Choice on the Home Run Ticket (He Does Not Favor a 23/4% Batting Average).” He surrounded Ruth with a slate of candidates for baseball immortality—McGraw, Johnson, Huggins. He placed Ruth’s cap at a jaunty angle with an errant lock of hair (to suggest boyishness) pasted to his wrinkled brow. But he also gave him a deeply shadowed cheek, downcast eyes, and a downturned mouth. Walsh got him. He drew the sadness behind the caricature.

  As an artist, the best you could say about Walsh was that he was self-taught. He honed his skills by making his own Christmas cards and valentines. He had paid for his board at St. Vincent’s College in Los Angeles by trading cartoons for food at a local restaurant. With help from his father, he landed a job as a daily cartoonist for the Los Angeles Express, a position that paid twelve dollars a week. He framed the eventual letter of termination from the managing editor telling him he was overpaid and hung it on the wall of his New York office.

  He hooked on with the Los Angeles Herald as a cartoonist and cub reporter chasing hotel arrivals and taking copy over the phone, when he learned that Christy Mathewson, baseball’s greatest pitcher, would be spending the winter in Southern California. He got the address of the rented bungalow on the outskirts of the city where the Mathewson family would be staying and cased the joint in advance of their arrival. The day of the interview, January 20, 1912, Walsh arrived early, and waited for the great man to awake. He was all set for first scoop. Only problem: he forgot to bring a pencil and paper.

  By the time he returned from the nearest store, Matty was surrounded by seven baseball writers and one female reporter seeking “heart interest.”

  Unable to think of anything to ask, he dutifully scribbled the answers to questions posed by others and hustled back to the newsroom, where the editor said what editors always say: “Whaddya got?”

  Walsh produced his rumpled notes (with unseemly bravado), which the editor appropriated, along with the story, handing it to the new gal reporter in town, Adela Rogers—later known as the World’s Greatest Girl Reporter for her celebrity interviews for Photoplay.

  Walsh retreated to his desk to draw a cartoon to accompany her story: Matty, golf club in hand, standing in front of the bungalow that was the site of his reportorial humiliation. “That, young man, is your first lesson in the art of ghostwriting,” quipped fellow cub reporter William Ivan St. Johns, who would soon become Rogers’s first husband.

  That was how Walsh would eventually make his mark: syndicating the confected bons mots of the famous through what he liked to call the “ancient and honorable craft of literary make-believe.”

  Fired in what he described as a general shake-up at the Herald, he solicited for telephone directories, and drifted into advertising, representing Los Angeles car dealerships while studying law at night at USC to please his father, a traveling salesman. He passed the California bar in 1915 and bragged he was never retained by a single client. After a brief stint covering the United States Military Training Camp in Monterey for the Herald, he resolved to cast his lot, and his powers of persuasion, with the emerging industry of public relations. “He was selling air, concept and heart,” his grandson said.

  In 1916, he was hired as the Pacific Coast representative of Cha
lmers Motor Car Company, according to an October profile in the Fourth Estate. That year Chalmers unveiled a revolutionary concept in auto design—a “one-man” convertible top allegedly manageable by a single red-blooded American male. Walsh decided he was that man. He organized a demonstration in front of Los Angeles City Hall for the boss, Hugh Chalmers, and an audience of former Southern California mayors in town for a convention. Alas, it required the combined strength of twelve former mayors to free Walsh when his sleeve got caught in the one-man top. The car went to a garage for repairs; several mayors sought treatment for lacerations; and Walsh went back to work, without a sleeve, hoping to recoup the boss’s good favor.

  Two weeks later, on opening day of the Pacific Coast League, Walsh arranged for a parade of baseball players in Chalmers cars. This earned him a job in the company’s advertising department in San Francisco, which he lost almost immediately when a new division chief decided he wanted his own man. Walsh went around the new chief and got rehired to the same position at the same salary but with a new title. In his spare time, he began syndicating a series of his cartoons called “Coast Stars in the Big Leagues” to California newspapers.

  From San Francisco, he went to Detroit, hired by the New York advertising agency Van Patten, Inc., to edit The Punch, the house organ of the newly merged Maxwell-Chalmers Automobile Company. There he met the World War I flying ace Eddie Rickenbacker, newly engaged in the manufacture of automobiles. Walsh would later write and sell Rickenbacker’s coverage of the 1919 Indianapolis 500 to sixty newspapers across the country. His first foray into newspaper syndication fetched $874, which they would split two ways.

  When the war came, he enlisted in the Army Motor Transport Corps and wrote heartfelt stories from Fort Custer, Michigan, and Fort Johnston in Carrabelle, Florida, about military vehicles on parade, making sure to highlight those manufactured by Maxwell-Chalmers. He mailed his copy along with personal letters written on Van Patten stationery to General John J. Pershing in France.