by Jane Leavy
He possessed an offhanded motion so fluid that it looks graceful even in the skittish footage that survives from his Boston days. “It didn’t have too much extra motion to it,” observed Arnold Hano, a future sportswriter who was just a boy when he saw Ruth pitch his last major-league game. “A simple slow windup. He was fast but not Lefty Grove fast. It was not much more than one would have expected if you were throwing batting practice.”
As he told the young women featured in one of his later instructional films: “Just follow your arm right through.” Which is what he did when he went to the mound at Dexter Park, his upper body leading the way for his lower half. Though the crowd may not have appreciated it, Ruth was giving them a demonstration of why he would be forever considered the best—and most complete—baseball player ever. “Beethoven and Cezanne,” as the baseball historian Daniel Okrent would say a century later.
When he climbed the mound for the bottom of the eighth inning, the multitudes advanced on the diamond, a Pickett’s Charge of Babe Ruth partisans, now just a few feet from the infield dirt. Nonetheless the Babe retired all three batters he faced, two on infield grounders and a third “with a curve that broke more than a foot,” the Brooklyn Standard-Union reported.
He went to the bench with the Babes leading the Bushwicks 3–1.
The stampede began in the middle of the ninth. In the mayhem, bats, balls, bases, certainty, and safety disappeared. His was an “endangering fame,” a writer for the San Francisco Call observed.
Press accounts of the riot diverged. In one story, Ruth’s attempt to return to the mound for the bottom of the ninth precipitated the melee. Another writer contended that Ruth was minding his own business, having taken a seat in a field box, when the crowd charged.
“Two fans were trampled and slightly injured and several others are sporting black eyes as the result of a boisterous riot which followed the last out of the exhibition game between Babe Ruth’s touring ball troupe and the local Bushwick nine today,” the United Press Transcontinental Wire reported. “Milling and mauling, the fans swirled around the field, fistfights starting, and men and boys caught in the crush, shouting hysterically.”
The Times reported that Ruth was carried to the clubhouse by the mob that engulfed him.
Tommy Holmes saw it differently. Becalmed in the throng, unable to push his way “through the jostling, shrieking, hysterical mob,” Ruth was rescued when “finally, three or four policemen constructed a flying wedge before him and charged.”
Everyone agreed he was smiling.
Chapter 5
October 13 / Asbury Park
BABE AND LOU TALK IT OVER AT ASBURY PARK
—ASSOCIATED PRESS
RUTH AND GEHRIG PLAY HERE TODAY
DIAMOND BEING PUT IN SHAPE AFTER DOWNPOUR—POLICE MAY HAVE HANDS FULL
—ASBURY PARK PRESS
I
While untold thousands of the good citizens of Asbury Park, New Jersey, and its entire police force waited impatiently in the raw wood bleachers at the new high school stadium, city fathers convened an urgent meeting by the grandstand. Their goal: to extricate the stars of that afternoon’s performance from their room at the swank Berkeley-Carteret Hotel, where at game time Lou Gehrig was flexing his muscles for reporters and Babe Ruth was lounging in his underwear.
The issue at hand was money: specifically, the twenty-five-hundred-dollar appearance fee they had been promised by promoter William H. Truby, who had changed the date and location of the game three days earlier, moving it from Bradley Beach to the larger high school field, adjacent to Deal Lake, where baseball had never been played and where, as of the previous morning, there was no baseball diamond.
Truby was a local wheeler-dealer, manager of the Bradley Beach semi-pro baseball team, secretary of the New Jersey State Athletic Commission, and former secretary (and only named official) of the short-lived American Party, a party of America-Firsters that served mostly to get Truby’s name in the papers. He was known to Christy Walsh from Ruth’s visit to Bradley Beach the previous fall. Unknown to Walsh, to the city fathers, and to the reported seven thousand foot-stomping, catcalling fans, Truby was also the defendant in a lawsuit brought by one Umberto Grieco, who arrived at the ballpark in hopes of collecting a three-year-old judgment for $466.73, which had been issued in connection with subletting the beach chair concession at the annual bathing beauty parade.
Realizing that Truby was about to come into some money, Grieco seized the opportunity to have the sheriff’s office seize the funds from gate sales.
“Out of an abundance of caution,” as the court would later put it, and an apparent awareness of Truby’s reputation for not paying up, the money was being held by a representative of the Asbury Park school board, which was to receive 10 percent of the take. Said representative would not relinquish the funds to any of the concerned parties, including the undersheriff, the school board president, two city commissioners, Monmouth County Surrogate Joseph L. Donahay, Grieco, or Truby.
Thus, Ruth and Gehrig remained in seclusion in their finely appointed beachside hotel suite dressing for a game no one was sure they would play. Keeping them company were Walsh, busy writing a press release announcing that Fresno had been added to the tour, and Edward J. Neil, a young reporter in the newly established Associated Press sports department, who had arrived to interview Gehrig about being named baseball’s Most Valuable Player.
He found Gehrig “stripped to a mere breech cloth, the bulging muscles of his broad physique knotting as he stepped about assembling the uniform of the Larrupin’ Lous.”
Ruth was similarly attired but not at all cut from the same cloth. “The Babe is huge through the shoulders, pudgy of waist, with the legs of a welterweight bearing his 225-pound bulk, while Lou has the build of a four-square Dutchman, wide of shoulder and hips, with the legs of a heavyweight wrestler.”
Neil, sometimes known as Mike and other times Eddie, had joined the AP in Baltimore in 1926 and made a name for himself as a boxing writer dictating running copy from the Dempsey-Tunney fight in Chicago in September—the AP had just begun putting author bylines on its stories. Neil had gotten to know Ruth and Gehrig while gathering clubhouse gossip during the 1927 World Series. He became Ruth’s card-playing buddy, would cover his second wedding in 1929, and write a five-part World Series retrospective on his career in 1932, the same year Neil became the first sportswriter to be acknowledged by the Pulitzer Prize jury, for a feature about a bobsled crash at Lake Placid.
Relaxing with Ruth and Gehrig at the hotel, Neil quickly realized he had more than he bargained for in an otherwise routine assignment. So he ran with it. The resulting story appeared in hundreds of newspapers across the country. “Here was a peek at the Babe at his ease,” he wrote, and at the uncomplicated, easy, fraternal relationship that existed between what sportswriters liked to call the two Bams.
Any baby fat was long gone from Henry Louis Gehrig’s now chiseled visage and physique. He had grown into his body and his potential since newsreel cameras caught him lounging on the Yankee bench on June 1, 1925, the day Ruth returned to the lineup after missing the first two months of the season due to the most famous stomachache in the history of professional sports. It also marked the beginning of Gehrig’s 2,130 consecutive-game streak when he pinch-hit in the eighth inning.
The next day first baseman Wally Pipp took himself out of the lineup with what would become known as the most famous headache in the history of professional sports, ceding his position to Gehrig, who would not relinquish it until terminal illness compelled him to do so in 1939.
Ruth and Gehrig would become inextricably linked in the public imagination: number 3 and number 4. Their numbers, assigned in 1929, were signifiers of their place in the lineup but were suggestive, too, of a Yankee birth order. The Babe always came first. Back then, Lou was happy to defer.
They played bridge together and fished together and spoke German together and brought out the best in each other. Their admirati
on and affection were reciprocal.
Unclad, Gehrig seemed particularly uninhibited, insisting that he’d had no idea that Ruth was ineligible to repeat as Most Valuable Player. “‘All through the year I thought that Babe would get it,’ he said. ‘I never knew that he wasn’t eligible because he won it in 1923.’
“About that time, the Bambino cut himself into the conversation. ‘Listen kid, you were a cinch,’ he said. ‘You’d have won it anyway even if I wasn’t out, now act your age and climb into that sweatshirt.’”
Everywhere they went, and in every interview Walsh granted, he was quick to promote Ruth in the unaccustomed role of wise elder, teaching Buster about the perils of celebrity, urging him to save his money for the future, and coaching him on how to avoid the nuisance lawsuits that were like so many bugs drawn to the flypaper of fame. “You’ve got to be careful who you talk to and what you say,” Ruth would tell him, reminding him about the guy who had dragged him into court in September, claiming Ruth had slapped him on his way out of the ballpark. “You’ve got to be careful about some of these birds.”
Yes, Gehrig said, it was a real education traveling around with the Big Bam. “Ruth taught me how to act while on parade,” he would confide to John B. Kennedy. “We’d have been to jail more than once if Ruth didn’t know how to talk to traffic cops.”
Neil was happy to collaborate in the construction of Walsh’s narrative, describing Gehrig’s good-natured acceptance of the Babe’s affectionate joshing, and Ruth’s role as the “teacher, guide and clubbing mentor of his young teammate,” but Ruth made it a hard sell.
Unperturbed, “Larrupin” Lou’ stalked over to the Babe and said almost accusingly: “You know, that big hitting freak there taught me more about batting this season than all the rest of the people that have worked on me put together. He showed me how to line a ball into right field for two and three bases this spring after Miller Huggins taught me to loft pokey flies out that way for cheap singles.
“He tries to teach me to swing free and clean like he does but I can’t even get a foul. All I can do is stand there and swing with my arms alone. Just my arms.”
As Lou stretched at full length a pair of forearms that would shame a safe-mover, Babe bestirred himself, pulled on a pair of stockings, and then entered into the fascinating task of inserting himself backwards into the pants of his uniform.
First Babe turned the pants inside out and laid them on the floor. He then pulled each trouser leg on up to the knee and left the waist of the garment dangling, still inside out, around his ankles. After rolling stocking tops and pants knees together securely, he reached down and successfully peeled the garment up about his ample waist, adjusted the belt and grunted. “There’s one pair of pants that won’t get loose from my stockings in a hurry.”
This act of astonishing athletic dexterity—worthy of a kindergartner learning to put on a winter coat—was interrupted by an urgent summons from an Asbury Park Press reporter, telling them to get ready quick. Joseph Donahay, who was up for reelection, having served five terms as county surrogate, and whose photo graced the souvenir scorecard, had stepped into the breach with a personal check for twenty-five hundred dollars. Donahay, Truby, and assorted city officials had been downtown to a bank to exchange the surrogate’s personal check for currency acceptable to Walsh and were now en route to the Berkeley-Carteret with police sirens wailing. Ruth pulled up his pants and Gehrig grabbed their lumber.
“Remember, Babe, we’ve got to catch a train west at 5:30 P.M. and it’s three o’clock now,” Gehrig said as they exited the hotel. “Hit a couple out of the park about the sixth inning and I’ll sic the kids on you and break up the ball game.”
II
Much had transpired in the tumultuous and profitable year since Ruth last accepted an invitation from William Truby to barnstorm on the Jersey Shore. Then he was in hock to his agent and his wife. Then he was the hero of the 1926 World Series—hitting three home runs in Game 4 against the St. Louis Cardinals—as well as its goat, having tried and failed to steal second base with two outs in the ninth inning of Game 7, with the Yankees trailing by a run. The only “dumb play” of Ruth’s career, Yankee general manager Ed Barrow called it.
Ruth was quickly forgiven in part because of his otherwise spectacular performance in the series and because of his thoroughly unanticipated return to form during the regular season after a year of personal and professional travail. And he was forgiven because of Johnny Sylvester and the PR wizardry of Christy Walsh.
Johnny Sylvester was an eleven-year-old New Jersey boy whose banker father had used his contacts to ask the Yankees for an autographed baseball to cheer up his ailing son. Johnny had been kicked by a horse while on a family vacation in Bay Head, New Jersey. He had developed an infection—variously diagnosed as blood poisoning, a sinus infection, a spinal fusion, an infection in the skull, and osteomyelitis—and was confined to bed. Though he was never hospitalized, Johnny’s condition was said to be dire; the New York Herald Tribune reported he had thirty minutes to live, rallying only after his father fulfilled his final request—an autographed baseball from the Babe.
Two balls arrived by airmail from St. Louis, one signed by the St. Louis Cardinals, the other by the Yankees, with Ruth’s scribbled pledge: “I’ll knock a homer for Wednesday’s game.”
Which, of course, he did: “Babe Ruth Keeps Airmail Promise of Homer for Boy Near Death.”
A follow-up letter arrived from St. Louis with yet another promise from the Babe. “I will try to knock you another homer, maybe two today,” he wrote.
That was the day he hit three home runs. “Yeah, I had a good day,” he said. “But don’t forget, the fans had a hell of a day, too.”
In the press box, Christy Walsh began a whispering campaign, telling reporters, off the record, that Ruth might just ask the Yankees for $150,000 in 1927.
Johnny made a miraculous recovery; there was no way for the Yankees to recover from Ruth’s base-running blunder. The next morning Ruth and Walsh, accompanied by a Daily News reporter, headed for Bradley Beach to fulfill their commitment to play an exhibition game for William Truby. En route, they made a surprise visit to the Sylvesters’ Essex County home, where a maid answering the door politely inquired as to their identity. “Babe Ruth to see Johnny.”
The maid dutifully asked the lady of the house if he should be let in. Ruth went to Johnny’s second-floor bedroom and caught the boy totally off guard. Bedridden and tongue-tied, but otherwise in apparent fine fettle, Johnny exclaimed, “Gosh, ain’t he big!”
Ruth’s house call was on the front page of the next day’s New York Times:
DR. BABE RUTH CALLS ON HIS BOY PATIENT
HOME-RUN KING KEEPS RECEPTION WAITING WHILE HE SEES LAD HOMERS SAVED
—NEW YORK TIMES
The News published a front-page photo along with its story, in which Johnny looked just fine. “Note lad’s overjoyed expression,” the caption said.
(The episode imbued Ruth with magical healing powers but did nothing for his famously terrible memory for names. When he ran into Johnny’s uncle six months later, Ruth asked, “Now who the hell is Johnny Sylvester?”)
Having raised the dead, Ruth embarked on a barnstorming and vaudeville tour of the Midwest and California during which, by Walsh’s count, he made twenty-two speeches; autographed a thousand baseballs; visited three college football camps (Notre Dame, Drake, and the University of Minnesota); played golf with Pop Warner, Howard Jones, and Walter Hagen; and received instruction in how to apply stage makeup from Gloria Swanson and Bill Tilden.
On opening night in Minneapolis, he received a congratulatory telegram from Knute Rockne, drafted by Christy Walsh, which was nice but not nearly as impressive as those that had arrived at the Palace in New York in 1922 from Eddie Rickenbacker, Bennie Leonard, Buster Keaton, and Helen Keller, then on her own vaudeville tour, who all wired to say Break a leg.
His act consisted of a seven-minute motion picture showing him d
oing his best Bambino stuff and training at Artie McGovern’s gym. At the end, he stepped through the screen into the footlights and delivered the words crafted for him by Arthur “Bugs” Baer, who saved his best stuff for his columns for the Hearst Syndicate (“Love is the last line in a ten-word telegram”) and for the ghostwritten columns he wrote under Nick Altrock’s byline for the Christy Walsh Syndicate.
Then, as scripted by Baer, Ruth would summon a handful of kids—five or so—to the stage to receive batting tips and an autographed baseball. Each was offered the opportunity to sing a song or dance or recite a bit of poetry.
The twelve-week, fourteen-city tour with the Pantages vaudeville theater chain went well. Hailed as “Bludgeoner, Writer, Actor,” he went about his business painting scenery in Milwaukee, eating Thanksgiving dinner with orphans in Seattle, dressing as Peter Pan in Los Angeles, and posing as a sports editor for the Tacoma Daily Ledger, where he authored a ghosted column on salary negotiations with the Yankees, in which he insisted he wasn’t a holdout, claimed to be in the dark about the source of the rumors that he was demanding a $100,000 or $200,000 contract, and said if baseball didn’t work out he might just take up sportswriting. Or become a movie star.
The day before his last performance in Long Beach on January 21, he signed a $30,000 deal with First National Pictures to costar with Anna Q. Nilsson in Babe Comes Home. His already reluctant leading lady was none too pleased when six weeks later the contract was amended to give Ruth sole star billing. Walsh got credit on the movie posters: “By arrangement with Christy Walsh.”
The next morning Ruth decided to celebrate by going fishing. There were plenty of people throughout the country happy to accommodate him in his constant search for a good time. Among them was Glenn E. Thomas, owner of the biggest Studebaker dealership in Long Beach. He was a Republican, a city councilman, a Mason, an early investor in the Hancock Oil Company, and a firm believer in the power of public relations.