The Big Fella

by Jane Leavy

  Dear Sir and General:

  Having used your name to symbolize the clean-fisted fighting American youth now adding glorious chapters to our history of uninterrupted victories I am taking the liberty of handing you herewith a newspaper clipping containing the article referred to.

  Assuring of the pride and everlasting cooperation of those at home and with application for immediate induction now in the mail I am looking forward to the honor of being one of your valiant over-sea legion before many months.

  He got as far as Florida.

  He proved adept at ingratiating himself with power, making and keeping important contacts. He parlayed the perfunctory functionary’s letter of thanks into an excuse for continued correspondence, which would lead to Ruth’s involvement with the Citizens’ Training Camps and, much later, an opportunity to seek Pershing’s help with a movie about Eddie Rickenbacker’s career.

  When released from his arduous tour of duty in 1919, Lieutenant Walsh returned to his job editing The Punch, successfully placing several columns in auto trade magazines touting the excellence of his own work. He had a knack for getting his name in print. Sometimes all he had to do was show up. Or quit. When he left the editing job in June 1920 to join the Van Pattens’ New York office as national account manager for Maxwell-Chalmers, his friends at the Oakland Tribune hailed his new career move with a headline: “Christy Walsh Given Gold Fountain Pen.” The gold fountain pen also found its way into the pages of Advertising & Selling and the Fourth Estate.

  III

  Arriving in New York at the dawn of the age of advertising and consumerism, Walsh saw himself as part of the vast migration of aspiration that F. Scott Fitzgerald evoked in his short stories and that Walsh would describe more floridly in his brief 1937 memoir, Adios to Ghosts. His was “the story of thousands of young dreamers anxious to escape the fetters of the smaller hometown and hie for the city on the Hendrik Hudson, where the rainbow of opportunity is alleged to terminate and be within the grasp of all who reach high enough.”

  The rainbow of his ambition led to “a blend of sport-cartooning, peddling publicity and working for an advertising agency,” at the end of which he hoped to find the proverbial pot of gold.

  He decamped for New York at a propitious moment. Advertising revenues in the United States would climb from $682 million in 1914 to $3 billion in 1929. By the mid-1920s the number of advertising agencies had grown from twelve hundred before World War I to five thousand.

  Van Patten was a boutique agency—without either an art or copy department—specializing in automobile accounts. “Out of some 1,500 firms in the same line of business, it ranks in number of accounts somewhere near the bottom of the list,” reported the October 16, 1920, edition of Automobile Topics. “Yet in size of volume, per account, Van Patten, Inc., ranks among the first ten to fifteen.”

  Walsh believed deeply in two things: Irish independence and the power of advertising. In the late winter of 1921, he took it upon himself to write, print, publish, and distribute a special issue of The Punch dedicated to the cause that was inimical to the beliefs of his immediate superior, a Scot violently opposed to Sinn Fein. Walsh bribed the printers to keep his opus a secret and had it delivered to Boston in time for the annual convention of Maxwell-Chalmers agents. It was liberally decorated with green shamrocks and gold harps. The lead article was written by Eamon de Valera, political leader in the Irish War of Independence and founder of the upstart Republican Party, Fianna Fáil. Walsh paid the waiters to hand copies around with the meal. “Before the first course was over,” the New Yorker later reported, “Walsh’s usefulness to the Maxwell-Chalmers organization was ended.”

  Walsh put a happier spin on it. “Alas my rainbow dissolved abruptly, the alluring colors faded into a murky smear, the salary stopped, the jig was up and the red light went on, just where Opportunity Boulevard runs into Success.”

  But he stumbled upon that most elusive form of American currency: a great idea. His initial plan was to syndicate ghostwritten copy for entertainers, giving a public voice to the still silent stars of Hollywood movies, and the strong, silent hero types like Rickenbacker. He quickly sized up the competition in the syndication racket and concluded it might be wiser to specialize in something they didn’t offer: columns from clients who made daily headlines instead of one movie a year.

  He told so many versions of how he met Babe Ruth that it was hard to keep track of them all. There was the version he told his brother Matt: how he found out the floor and room number of the hotel where Ruth was staying, climbed the fire escape, clambered through the window (magically open a crack), found Ruth in bed with a blonde, slapped the Babe on the butt, and said, “I want to represent you.”

  If it wasn’t true, it should have been.

  There was the one he told for attribution in Adios to Ghosts, in which he staked out Ruth’s apartment at the Ansonia Hotel on the West Side of Manhattan. Time was running out.

  Four days before Ruth was scheduled to leave for Hot Springs, Arkansas, to steep his suety self in 108-degree sitz baths, Walsh was at the local deli where the Babe bought his beer, when the counterman got a telephone call. “Baby Root vants a case of beer. Right avay, right avay, and mine boy is gone. Yoi. Yoi. Yoi.”

  Ten minutes later, Walsh was unloading beer in the Babe’s kitchen and inquiring how much Ruth was paid for the ghostwritten accounts of each of his fifty-four home runs in 1920 published by the United News Service.

  Five bucks, said the Babe.

  That came to $270 for the season—which was about all they were worth. His literary input, according to Westbrook Pegler, amounted to baseball haiku. “Socked one today. Fast ball. High outside.”

  Walsh said, “I can get you five hundred dollars.”

  Now he had the Babe’s attention.

  Years later, Walsh would tell Joe Williams off the record that he bribed the deliveryman with a fiver to let him make the delivery.

  In all the tellings—written and oral—handed down to successive generations of Walshes, one part of the story never changed. Having traded his suit jacket for a delivery boy’s pocketless white coat, Walsh didn’t have the contract with him when he talked his way into Ruth’s apartment and got him to agree to a one-year syndication deal.

  His grandson Bob, an L.A. guy—who calls his grandfather Walsh—tells it like a scene from a Hollywood screenplay. Ruth tells Walsh to meet him on the platform at Penn Station. Young Christy, his life disappearing in front of his eyes, stays up all night and gets to the station early, which was unlike him. (He would grow accustomed to trains being held for him.) “He waits on the platform,” Bob Walsh said. “Then out of nowhere, through the steam, like an Inspector Poirot–type thing, there comes Ruth, beaming in a belted camel hair coat with an oversized cigar all aglow.”

  While Helen Ruth diverted her husband’s many admirers, Walsh secured his signature on the wrinkled contract he had typed out in letter form, a copy of which would sell for $21,510 in 2010.

  Walsh announced the creation of the Christy Walsh Syndicate in the March 19, 1921, edition of Editor & Publisher. Two weeks later, he placed a full-page ad in the same publication, touting the “greatest array of talent and genius ever offered American newspapers, names whose combined annual services would cost half a million dollars, whose work and deeds are known to newspaper readers through $5,000,000 worth of personal advertising.”

  That great array of talent he claimed to represent included filmmaker D. W. Griffith, whose secretary never actually let Walsh through the front door; Gene Buck, who was too busy running the Ziegfeld Follies to write the proposed Broadway column, “A Buck a Day”; opera diva Mary Garden, who boarded a ship for Europe without crafting a single word; historian Hendrik Willem van Loon, who wrote his own stuff; and Jack Dempsey’s fight manager, Jack “Doc” Kearns, who had the virtue of being available, which the Manassa Mauler was not. And of course, Babe Ruth, who had agreed to write two articles a week.

  The editorial
response to Walsh’s initial pitch was less than underwhelming; his only employee quit two weeks later.

  He persuaded a charitable printer to print five hundred circulars on credit, hauled them to the post office, and waited. The next morning, Bradford Merrill, general manager of the Hearst Syndicate, ordered the Babe Ruth feature for the entire Hearst string. Merrill re-upped for the Babe’s World Series coverage and for the entire 1922 season.

  Walsh didn’t invent ghostwriting. It was known as “the player-author evil” when Ban Johnson, president of the American League, threatened to ban Eddie Collins and Frank “Home Run” Baker from the 1913 World Series because of contracts they had signed with John Wheeler’s Bell Syndicate.

  But, as Joe Williams put it, Walsh “harnessed this Niagara of writing genius and turned it into artistically useful channels. Other hardy pioneers had dabbled in this unique literary field on earlier occasions, but it remained for Walsh, a tall, dark-haired Irishman in his middle thirties, to put the proposition on a sound, systematic basis, by which the reading public was assured the best thoughts of the best athletic minds in the best manner.”

  Once he had Ruth under contract, other big names quickly followed: John McGraw, Walter Johnson, Ty Cobb, Miller Huggins, Rogers Hornsby, and Gehrig, whose life story he had been aggressively peddling since August. Then came the gridiron greats. Soon he was bragging that the Christy Walsh Syndicate was the only one in the country “dealing exclusively in sport page material.”

  Walsh was selling a kind of fool’s gold, whose value peaked in the golden age of sports: bright, shiny words with little mettle that generated lots of cold, hard cash for author, subject, and the syndicate man, casting a gauzy glow over the putative authors while offering readers the illusion of being in the know. Paul Gallico, upon exiting the sporting stage, expressed astonishment at “how much of the hogwash was taken as gospel.”

  But in an era before radio delivered pregame, postgame, and in-game interviews, Walsh’s fables were as close as baseball fans could get to hearing voices of faraway stars. No one knew what they sounded like anyway. So what if reading them required a willing suspension of disbelief?

  On opening day at the Polo Grounds in 1921, ninety days before he was contractually obliged to do so, Walsh handed Ruth a check for a thousand dollars—borrowed at 6 percent interest. “I shall never forget the expression on Babe Ruth’s face when I handed him the check,” he wrote. “Here’s a fellow who had been skinned so many times by strangers that I felt the way to win his confidence was to pay in advance.”

  What Walsh didn’t know, according to Matt Cwieka, Christy Walsh Jr.’s son-in-law, was that Mada’s father, the bank president, had arranged for the loans. “Mada was on the phone with him telling him, ‘You can do this,’” said Cwieka.

  At the end of that first year, he had $8.90 in his bank account.

  Broke as he may have been, Walsh was a visionary. He saw that a new kind of stardom was emerging, one grounded in personality and amplified by marketing and technology, by the repetition and dissemination of images in the new tabloid press, by the transmission of the human voice through what the Babe called “the ether.”

  He also saw the opportunities and the dangers that awaited when Ruth reported to Manhattan traffic court at 9:00 A.M. on June 8, 1921, having been arrested for speeding for the second time in three months—by a cop who held motorcycle racing records! Ruth expected the crowd of press and well-wishers that greeted him at the courthouse at 300 Mulberry Street. He also expected leniency. His lawyer had told him to check the part in the magistrate’s hair for a clue to the judge’s mood.

  He left his car, the 12-cylinder maroon torpedo roadster in which he’d been arrested—known fondly to his teammates as the ghost of Riverside Drive—in the care of a couple of boys. He didn’t figure to be gone long. He confidently and remorsefully pleaded guilty, submitted to fingerprinting, paid his hundred-dollar fine, and was sentenced to a day in the slammer despite the encouraging part in his honor’s hair.

  Having observed the C-note with which he had ostentatiously paid his fine, Ruth’s cellmates—chauffeurs found guilty of the same crime—demanded he join them in a jailhouse game of craps. Ruth sought refuge by the window.

  “I see a shadow!” bellowed a news photographer who’d mounted a fire escape on a building across the street.

  “Snap the shadow!” came the fevered reply from the reporter on the pavement below.

  Even the slightest intimation of the Babe was news.

  Ruth used his one telephone call to ask for his uniform, which he donned under his street clothes, a dove gray suit. “I’m going to run like hell to get to the game,” he told his cellmates. “Keeping you late like this makes a speeder of you.”

  At 3:57 P.M., three minutes before the end of his sentence, Ruth was ushered out a side door. He covered the nine miles between the jail and the Polo Grounds in eighteen minutes flat, thereby exceeding the speed for which he had been arrested by four miles an hour. Trailing scribes lost him and the motorcycle police escorting him at 110th Street, where he exited Central Park. He arrived in time to bat in the bottom of the sixth inning, slowing down, finally, enough to walk. Then, according to the Associated Press, “he stole second and was not arrested.”

  The story made the front page of the Times and the Daily News, which ran a full-page photograph of the Babe signing his confession. The Times earnestly included figures cited by the sentencing magistrate comparing the ninety-one thousand fatalities that occurred on American highways during a nineteen-month period with the forty-eight thousand U.S. soldiers who lost their lives on the killing fields of France.

  One American soldier, according to legend, Captain Joe Patterson, returned home from a decisive encounter with his cousin Robert McCormick in a manure pile in Mareuil-en-Dôle, France, during the Second Battle of the Marne, with a mission. Patterson had been to London on furlough and witnessed the stunning success of Lord Northcliffe’s new “picture paper,” the Daily Mirror. During Patterson’s serendipitous farmyard meeting with his cousin, publisher of the Chicago Tribune, he secured familial support for the Daily News.

  The first edition of the Illustrated Daily News went to press less than a year later, on June 26, 1919. In the eight years since, Patterson’s cheeky tab had completely reinvented the way news was covered in the city, giving, among other things, more space and prominence to sports, especially baseball.

  It was the first flower of jazz journalism in America, a sassy bouquet of sex and money, heavy on gossip and local crime with lots of contests for readers to enter. Patterson wanted riffs rather than ruminations, punctuated with as many illustrations and photographs as his editors could cram on the page.

  “We can’t make it too clear and easy for our readers,” Patterson wrote in a memo to his editorial staff seven weeks before the first edition went to press. He reinforced that message in the June 19 paper, promising readers that no story would be continued on a jump page.

  The birth of tabloid journalism marked the beginning of an inexorable shift from word to image and from information to entertainment. If the mandate was to entertain, it followed that sports, the entertainment of the masses, would become central to tabloid journalism. Ruth would descend on New York six months later, bludgeon in hand, in a “burst of dazzle and jingle,” New York Post columnist Jimmy Cannon wrote some years later.

  He was the perfect story for a publisher whose mandate to his sports editor, Marshall Hunt, was to produce “very biff, bang, boom stuff.”

  Sportswriting—and baseball coverage in particular—had been on the rise since the first known box score was published in 1845, which evolved under Henry Chadwick’s stewardship in the New York Clipper in the late 1850s. By 1860, Chadwick was compiling season totals for teams and players in Beadle’s Dime Base-Ball Player.

  The rise of yellow journalism in New York City twenty years later and the circulation war between Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst also proved a boon f
or sportswriting. Pulitzer created the first newspaper sports department at the New York World in 1883. Hearst countered with the first separate sports section in the New York Journal two years later. The Sporting Life and the Sporting News were born in the same period.

  In 1887, the New York Tribune published a handbook of sports with rules for various games because the editors said they had detected a widespread interest—and market—in athletics and had themselves printed eighty columns of sports news during the previous year.

  Rough Rider Teddy Roosevelt’s embrace of manly pursuits, and the movement for muscular Christianity, prompted the nation’s dailies to bulk up their skeletal sports coverage from less than half a percent of the news hole in the 1880s to 4 percent by the turn of the century. By 1914 the Readers’ Guide to Periodical Literature listed 249 publications devoted to baseball.

  This rise coincided with the golden age of newspapering. As general readership increased from 32 million in 1920 to 40 million in 1929, the percentage of space allotted to sports went up right along with it. Not everyone rejoiced. Concerned about the upward tick in crime and sports reporting, the American Society of News Editors commissioned a study in 1926 that confirmed the worst: the average newspaper dedicated ten columns daily to sports and twice that on Sunday. By 1927, even the sober broadsheets were devoting twenty-five or more columns a day to sports.

  Sports coverage proliferated. In the years before World War II, when newsprint shortages curtailed available space, “twelve-to-fourteen-page sports sections were not uncommon,” Stanley Woodward wrote in his primer for the business, Sports Page, and many papers “printed eighty pages of sports on a single Sunday.”

  Joe Patterson put sports out front, on page 1, within two weeks of the first edition. The occasion was the July 4, 1919, heavyweight title fight in Toledo, Ohio, between Jack Dempsey and Jess Willard. Christy Walsh covered the fight for the San Francisco Chronicle, complaining to his editor that all ringside seats had been reserved for New York scribes, while he was assigned a seat fifty feet from the action. Enterprising as always, he rushed along with the crowd for unoccupied seats by the ropes, snapping a few unauthorized photographs with a camera he had hidden in his jacket pocket.