The Big Fella

by Jane Leavy

  Even as he drew the cartoon that accompanied his story, Walsh knew that the era of pen and ink was coming to an end. Patterson would sign its death warrant when he removed “Illustrated” from his newspaper’s name between the first and second editions of the November 19 paper. (The Daily News officially became “New York’s Picture Newspaper”—with a camera prominently featured in the paper’s logo—ten months later.)

  Patterson’s choice for managing editor was Arthur Clarke, who began his career as a sportswriter in Omaha, Nebraska, and was hired away from the Evening World, the New York repository of yellow journalism. Clarke’s tenure at the News was brief. He stayed only seven months, but during that time instituted one of the most significant developments in sports reporting: converting the back page into a front page for sports.

  He broke readers in gently on November 3 and 4 with stories about Boston terriers and foxhounds. But, on Wednesday November 5, the back page featured real sports, the college football game of the week between Syracuse and Rutgers.

  Sports editors would never surrender that turf. The back page—and its “Socko! No. 60! O, BABE!” headlines—would become a staple of sports journalism, as well as a measuring stick employed by agents following in Christy Walsh’s footsteps to argue on behalf of their clients. (In January 2017, representatives for Mets slugger Yoenis Céspedes calculated that fifty back-page mentions in 2016 were worth $3.2 million to the team.)

  Clarke didn’t create the back page for the Babe, but he might as well have. The sale of the Bambino was announced on January 5, 1920. Ruth made his back-page debut two days later.

  BABE RUTH, HOME RUN KING, NOW WITH YANKEES

  Three Ruthian photographs filled the top half of the page. The images were static in the manner of the era: the perfect finish to his swing; detraining with Helen in Seattle prior to the sale; and his Red Sox team photo. But the quality of the photos was less important than their placement and the amount of space allotted to them.

  Ruth fully grasped the power of the press to reinforce the legend he and Walsh were creating, but Marshall Hunt doubted he was ever aware of how concerted Patterson’s strategy was in using him to build circulation. Patterson consciously cultivated neon names, stars “we could latch onto and sort of cultivate and make our own and have exclusive stuff on,” Hunt told Jerome Holtzman for his 1974 oral history of American sportswriters, No Cheering in the Press Box. “We recognized the Babe as a guy we could really do business with.”

  And so, “the Babe became sort of a Daily News man.”

  Hunt became Patterson’s full-time Babe Ruth man. His mandate was to follow him everywhere, before, during, and after the season, on the road and at home, a precursor of today’s 24/7 coverage. He was the first reporter from a morning paper to travel with the Yankees and the only beat reporter whose paper insisted upon paying his way. Ruth called Hunt his shadow, which may explain why he detested him, the Babe’s daughter says—always following him around with a photographer “trying to ambush him and catch him at his worst.” An early intimation of gotcha journalism and a very modern complaint.

  Hunt was also the first reporter for a morning paper to travel with the team and the only Yankees reporter whose paper insisted upon paying its own way.

  In June 1924, Hearst belatedly launched the New York Daily Mirror, his entry into the tabloid market Patterson had created, followed three months later by Bernarr Macfadden’s snarky evening tab, the New York Evening Graphic. The tabloid wars were on.

  Arthur Brisbane, who managed the Hearst empire, chose the path of least resistance and produced a tabloid very much in Joe Patterson’s image. After seeing sixty thousand people turn out to see Red Grange play football at the Polo Grounds, he summoned Ford Frick from his duties at the Evening Journal—where he doubled as Babe Ruth’s ghost—and ordered him to follow the Galloping Ghost wherever he went. Frick called his wife and said he wouldn’t be home for dinner for a month.

  Macfadden’s scandal sheet featured howling headlines and plunging décolletage. Shamelessly and gleefully unscrupulous, the Graphic was known for splashing salacious “cosmographs”—fake photos—across its pink front page. The most notorious was an elaborate depiction of Rudolph Valentino’s corpse with an accompanying story about his ascension to heaven.

  The paper launched the career of the legendary Walter Winchell, whose three-dot gossip column, the first in the nation, sold seventy-five thousand to a hundred thousand newspapers a day and, with its advice column to lovelorn New Yorkers, inspired Nathanael West’s novel Miss Lonelyhearts.

  Macfadden, who was far ahead of his time in his zealousness for diet and nutrition, also discovered and promoted Charles Atlas. He filled his pages with columns extolling the virtues of bodybuilding—with lots of grainy photos of scantily clad versions of Mr. America. He attempted to polish his tawdry image at the annual sports banquet he hosted, honoring the person “who, during the past year, has contributed most to the cause of clean sport”—a source of amusement to some readers but a see-and-be-seen event for governors and mayors and champions of every ilk. The festivities were carried live on radio; Ed Sullivan, the Graphic’s pickle-faced sports columnist, honed his skills as the future host of Sunday-night television by serving as emcee. Ruth would win the award in 1929 and 1930.

  In 1927, New York’s shanty newsstands sagged under the weight of twelve daily papers—not including the Brooklyn Eagle, El Diario, and the Jewish Daily Forward, and the three dailies that published A.M. and P.M. papers—and all those thick new magazines arranged in racks and dangling from clothespins. The city consumed 3.5 million newspapers a day, and every broadsheet and tabloid, morning and afternoon, had a big-name sports columnist who made his bones in printer’s ink—much of it quite purple. No one was more vivid or more widely syndicated than Grantland Rice, who draped Ruth in “a purple toga of royalty” in a 1921 column, and had cast his resurrection after hitting bottom in 1922 as a return from Elba.

  The gilded names of New York sportswriting—Damon Runyon, Ring Lardner, Paul Gallico, Bill McGeehan, Dan Daniel, Fred Lieb, Heywood Broun, and John Kieran—were usually the highest-paid men in the newsroom. They dined out daily on Babe Ruth. “A Sunday buffet every day of the week,” one writer called him.

  By Hunt’s estimation, “two-thirds of the front page of every afternoon paper in New York City” was devoted to Ruth. Gallico said he had more talent for staying on the front page than your average earthquake.

  Ruth posed a daily challenge to skepticism; every home run was an act of hyperbole. “You can’t exaggerate an exaggeration,” wrote W. O. McGeehan of the New York Tribune. A man not given to exaggeration, he said of one of Ruth’s home runs that the ball sailed so high it came down coated with ice.

  Ruth’s relationship with New York’s sporting press was cozy, complex, and complicit. Rice was his golfing companion. Paul Gallico, Bill Slocum, and Richards Vidmer dined at his apartment. Hunt’s fishing and hunting excursions, ostensibly arranged in order to generate copy, were always off the record. Fred Lieb acted as an intermediary between Ruth and Yankee co-owner Colonel Tillinghast L’Hommedieu Huston the night the Babe set out on his ill-conceived 1921 barnstorming trip.

  And then there were Walsh’s unholy ghosts, beat reporters like Frick and Slocum, who were richly remunerated to write under the byline of the Big Fella while also filing copy under their own names. One way or another, Ruth was responsible for the livelihood of every sportswriter who covered him, who wrote for him, or who took a pay cut because his editor spent the extra money in the budget to buy his syndicated columns.

  In 1927, the News rode Ruth’s coattails to a circulation just shy of a million, nearly three times that of the then very gray New York Times. Gallico, who had succeeded Hunt as sports editor, having impressed Patterson with a composite photograph of “the Ideal Athlete”—an amalgam of Babe Ruth’s eyes, Jack Dempsey’s torso, Bill Tilden’s wrists, and Bobby Jones’s arms—created the Golden Gloves amateur boxing tourname
nt, putting the paper in the sports promotion racket. It was so successful that Patterson rewarded him with a month’s vacation in Europe.

  The paper’s ascendancy was also facilitated by technology created in the photo department. The bulky Speed Graphic had long been the tool of the sports photographers’ trade, until the fall of 1920 when Marlborough Sylvester (Lou) Walker began tinkering with his equipment in an effort to find something that would allow readers to get closer to the action. That something was Big Bertha, a camera named for a fat German howitzer that debuted on the eve of World War I. Walker attached an extra-long base and an extra-long bellows to his 5 x 7-inch Graflex and fitted it with a lens of 24-inch focal length—more than three times the length of a standard lens—and headed for Ebbets Field for Game 1 of the World Series between the Dodgers and the Cleveland Indians. While the paper’s gal reporter was enjoying free hot dogs and coffee, Walker was taking panoramic photographs that allowed him to capture the action at three bases simultaneously.

  The News trumpeted its get on the front page of its October 6 editions with a photo and headline: “Something New in Baseball.” Editors devoted two full inside pages to the photos. “Crouched in the stand of Ebbets Field, Walker made pictures of plays on all bases of the diamond which were large enough on the negative plate to permit astonishing enlargement,” John Chapman explained in Tell It to Sweeney: The Informal History of the New York Daily News. The News featured a double spread of these pictures daily and made a mystery of its coup, querying on page 1, “HOW DOES THE NEWS DO IT?”

  The competition quickly figured it out. There was no hiding Big Bertha.

  Patterson ordered expanded sports coverage and demanded more and better pictures, exhorting his editors to “publish them before anyone else.” Another pioneering News photographer, Henry Olen, was busy mixing chemicals and improvising ways to increase the light sensitivity of the glass plates used to take action shots in darkened arenas and at nighttime outdoor events. His experiment worked. The image he captured at the Polo Grounds on September 14, 1923, during round 1 of the Jack Dempsey–Luis “Angel” Firpo fight, remains one of the most significant sports photos ever taken. News readers could see in the dark as Dempsey fell backward through the ropes, landing on the typewriter of a ringside reporter. (Christy Walsh claimed Dempsey landed in his lap.)

  As image gained ascendency over word, one author lamented in Harper’s Magazine, “We can no longer see the ideas for the illustrations.” But newspapers were still limited to printing next-day photos of events within the delivery range of daredevil motorcycle drivers and carrier pigeons. Engineers had been experimenting with how to send pictures by wire since the mid-1880s, but it wasn’t until 1920 that Bell Laboratories invented the first fax machine, capable of transmitting an image; it was used to send fingerprints of a suspect wanted in a crime from New York to Cleveland in 1924—and as a result the coppers got their man. AT&T debuted the first commercial “telephotography system” in 1925, with sending and receiving stations in eight major cities. Transmission was unreliable due to breaks in telephone connections, however, and the venture proved commercially unviable.

  On January 2, 1925, the Chicago Tribune trumpeted the debut of its Telepix system with a front-page story: “Telepix Beats Time, Space with Pictures.” Photos from Notre Dame’s victory over Stanford appeared on the back page that had been transmitted through telegraph wires as a series of dots and filled in by artists at the other end of the line.

  Seven months later, a photograph of Babe Ruth’s mistress was sent via Telepix from New York to Chicago to Los Angeles and beyond. In May, 1927, the Daily News filled six inside pages with photos of Lindbergh’s landing in Paris sent across the ocean with the same technology.

  And yet it wasn’t until January 1, 1935, when the Associated Press unveiled its Wirephoto service, transmitting an aerial photograph of a plane crash in upstate New York to forty-seven papers in twenty-five states, that images became instantly and reliably available.

  The quality of those images had improved, too, thanks to more manageable equipment and more sensitive film. The age of miniaturization had dawned in 1925 with the arrival of a 35mm Leica camera small enough to fit in your pocket but capable of producing newspaper-quality enlargements. It was followed three years later by a miniature from Ermanox that allowed sports photographers to capture fast-moving action.

  Daily News photographer Tom Howard, a wartime comrade of Joe Patterson’s, strapped one of those miniature cameras to his ankle and used it to capture the death of the notorious murderess Ruth Brown Snyder in the electric chair at Sing Sing in 1928.

  The News printed an extra edition with a photo of the newly deceased and a one-word headline: “DEAD!”

  If the twenties roared, it was in large part because of new means of amplification: bylined sports columns, screaming tabloid headlines, and radio frequencies that broadcast voices with unforeseen clarity from sea to shining sea, and beyond. Fame got bigger, louder, more personal.

  That’s why the story about ladies of the evening accompanying the Babe to Penn Station on the morning of October 11, 1927, would have legs whether or not it was true. Paul Gallico said as much in his September 3 column in the Daily News. “Ruth without temptations might be a pretty ordinary fellow. Part of his charm lies in the manner with which he succumbs to every temptation that comes his way. . . . Ruth is either planning to come loose, is cutting loose, or is repenting the last time he cut loose. He is a news story on legs going about looking for a place to happen.”

  Because Ruth made it his business to make the unbelievable believable, everyone believed everything they read and heard about him. Teammates who weren’t at Penn Station that morning would recount the scene to sportswriters who weren’t there who would write it anyway because it sounded true and surely could have been true. Those writers would add details like an early-morning departure, which it was not, and the cloud of cigar smoke curling above the Babe’s head, which there might well have been, and the inevitable polo coat, which he wasn’t wearing, and the big squeeze he gave Mama Gehrig, who was, in fact, still recuperating from goiter surgery at St. Vincent’s Hospital, promising to make sure her son wrote home every day.

  As if her Louie needed to be told.

  Besides, they’d be on their way back to the city an hour after the game, which left plenty of time to visit the hospital before playing the Bushwicks on Wednesday afternoon at Dexter Park, on the border between Brooklyn and Queens.

  IV

  This was the third postseason tour Walsh had organized for the Babe and by far the most ambitious—twenty-one cities in less than three weeks. By now he had the formula down. At every stop, Ruth and Gehrig would visit hospitals and orphanages, attend luncheons and banquets—hosted most often by the Elks or the Knights of Columbus, organizations to which Ruth belonged—give speeches (written by Walsh), praise local dignitaries, sign autographs (including baseballs left behind as prizes for the winners of student essay-writing contests), conduct pregame hitting exhibitions, and captain teams composed of local semi-pros, bush leaguers, and a few big leaguers in games between the Bustin’ Babes and Larrupin’ Lous, for which Walsh demanded a guaranteed flat fee. Up front. And never in cash.

  In some towns, Walsh recruited newspapers that bought Ruth’s columns to sponsor the games, generating this front-page headline in the Tacoma Ledger in 1924: “5000 Killed in Battle for Shanghai, Ledger Brings Babe Ruth to Tacoma.”

  “Barnstorming” was an aviator’s term. But like the circus and vaudeville and the national pastime, too, Walsh’s barnstorming tours derived from the oldest model of communal entertainment—the traveling troubadour. That said, Walsh was doing everything he could to modernize the tour, arranging for still and newsreel cameramen to show up at as many stops as possible, preferably with marching bands and a throng of clamoring boys. He booked radio interviews wherever he could. He sent dispatches to favored writers back in New York who could be counted on to write a column or plac
e an item. He sold Collier’s magazine on an exclusive story of the tour, inviting its writer John B. Kennedy to join the traveling caravan. Collier’s would run the story in April, at the beginning of the 1928 season.

  He gave exclusives to “girl reporters,” whom he could count on for feminine fawning and teary-eyed puffery to round out the Babe’s rougher edges. In 1926, he got Lorena Hickok, one of the first women to cover a sports beat for a major newspaper and later the first to receive a byline in the New York Times, to coo over Ruth in the society column of the Minneapolis Tribune. “What you most notice, after you have become accustomed to his size, are his eyes. Instead of being cold and keen and sharp, they are warm and amber colored and heavy-lidded, as clear and as soft as the eyes of a child.”

  The train pulled into Trenton’s Clinton Street Pennsylvania Railroad Station at 1:00 P.M. Walsh, Gehrig, and Ruth were met by the enterprising promoters: George Giasco, described in the press as a prominent Trenton athlete, and Joe Plumeri, the businessman who had slipped those ten $100 bills into Ruth’s paw outside Yankee Stadium. They had recruited Nat Strong’s Brooklyn Royal Giants of the Eastern Colored League to oppose Ruth and Gehrig, who would play with a collection of locals. The featured matchup was: the Babe versus Cannonball Dick Redding, the player-manager of the Royal Giants, who at age thirty-six was far past his prime but still capable of throwing a no-hitter, as he had in August. Redding had Chino Smith, the league’s batting champion, on his roster, but not much else. The Royal Giants had finished last in their league with a record of 15-31. And they came cheap.