The Big Fella

by Jane Leavy

  The first of his three shows that day, his last in Long Beach, was an afternoon matinee. Ruth figured he had plenty of time to dip a line in the water. Dressed in boots and breeches and a warm jacket, Ruth showed up at the Riverside Studebaker dealership owned by Thomas’s brother Clare at 4:00 A.M. to pose for a publicity photo—“Studebaker Car Is Choice of Babe Ruth”—and to give an interview to the Riverside Enterprise, in which he announced the movie deal and declined to comment on the gambling scandal swirling around Ty Cobb and Rogers Hornsby. For once Commissioner Landis’s wrath was aimed at someone else, and Ruth—or Walsh—was smart enough not to divert attention away from it.

  Then he and Thomas took off for the Rainbow Angling Club, a fishing resort in the foothills of the San Bernardino Mountains some three hours away.

  By the time brother Clare and his companion, Will H. Marsh, the automotive editor for the Enterprise, arrived at noon, Ruth had caught and eaten seventeen trout. “With all due deference to the prowess of the Babe on the diamond,” Marsh wrote, “he has never showed more speed or capacity on the diamond than he did right there tucking away that early morning catch.”

  Sated, Ruth realized it was too late to make it back to the State Theatre in Long Beach for his matinee—even in a Glenn E. Thomas Studebaker. The club secretary placed a call to the Riverside airfield, a hard-pack airstrip that was home to the Cowboy Aviator, Roman Warren, to charter a flight.

  Warren had made national headlines on June 13, 1926, when he flew a Thomas-Morse Scout under the sixteen-foot-high Rubidoux Bridge. The arch of the bridge was lower and smaller than that of the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, where another daredevil pilot had lost his life making the attempt.

  Photographers for Pathé newsreels and local newspapers insisted on taking Warren’s picture before the flight because they didn’t think they’d be able to do so afterward. After flying under the bridge at 120 miles per hour with the fuselage no more than a yard above the shallow waters of the Santa Ana River, Warren told reporters his motivation was simple: “Hunger.” The stunt didn’t scare up any business, however—it just scared people away. They all thought he was going to fly them under the bridge.

  So he was happy to fly the Babe to Long Beach and happier still to charge him $20.00—he usually got $2.50 for a flight.

  Ruth arrived at the airfield in a convoy that included local police and his fishing party. He got out a flask and four silver and gold cups, put them on the running board of the Studebaker, and offered a drink all around. Warren and his line boy John Hammond declined.

  “I put him in the back seat,” Hammond told the Riverside Enterprise some years later. “He weighed about 240 pounds. He was slightly high. He skootched around a little bit in the seat, raised his elbows and poked both elbows out through the sides of the fuselage fabric. I didn’t like that much. I did scold him a bit.”

  Hammond found some Pillsbury bags used for dishcloths, cut them into small squares, and had the plane patched up and ready to go in fifteen minutes. Ruth’s curtain call was in less than an hour. Warren said he jabbered nonstop on the thirty-five-minute flight to Long Beach.

  His mood crashed upon landing. Stage manager Roy Reid greeted him in his dressing room, where Ruth was happily juggling autographed baseballs, the Riverside Press-Telegram Press reported, with news that he was about to be served with a warrant on charges of violating child labor laws during the late performance at the Pantages Theater in San Diego on January 14. The very vigilant and very publicity-conscious deputy state labor commissioner Stanley M. Gue had indicted him for allowing one Baby Annette Lumb, also known as Baby Annette De Kirby, age eight, to recite a poem during his act without first having obtained a permit from the commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics and for having done so after the hour of 10:00 P.M.

  Ruth turned himself in at the Long Beach Police Station in stage makeup and smelling of fish. He was photographed posting five hundred dollars bail in the baseball uniform he wore for his act, street shoes, and the argyle sweater he had worn to the Rainbow Angling Club. “I’ve only tried to give them a little bit of sunshine,” he said of the children whom he invited to the stage at every performance. “I have never been so mad in my life.”

  Wasn’t this exactly what he warned Gehrig about in Asbury Park?

  Some observers thought they caught a whiff of Christy Walsh’s handiwork in the proceeding, particularly after it became known that Baby Annette was a child actress who would make her big screen debut that year as Clarabelle in the Our Gang comedy, Dog Heaven, and her last film appearance the following year in Mother Knows Best. Also, the jailhouse photographer whose picture appeared in newspapers all over the country was none other than the one employed by Glenn E. Thomas.

  But those skeptics didn’t see Walsh’s heated correspondence with Ruth’s attorneys, complaining bitterly about “Mr. Goof” and his “bid for cheap notoriety.” Nor did they see his written objection to the $212.18 legal fee the lawyers charged after getting the whole thing dismissed by the time Ruth left California.

  Walsh did what he did best—he changed the subject. The trial date had been set for February 7, the day Ruth believed was his thirty-third birthday. This gave Walsh an idea and an opportunity. Money was pouring in even faster than Babe Ruth could spend it. Even discounting the inflated sums reported in the industry trades for his movie contract with First National Pictures and the Pantages Theater, his off-season income exceeded his 1926 $52,000 Yankee salary by $209.69. That didn’t include an additional $8,000 in endorsement money itemized on Walsh’s ledger sheet.

  “‘Ruth coined money so fast in the mid-twenties that I bought a $50,000 annuity for him and paid it off in three years,’” the columnist Joe Williams quoted Walsh in a 1949 interview. “When Babe learned that he had to make payments at regular intervals he became so angry he didn’t speak to Walsh for days. Somehow the Babe had it figured out that his business manager was invading his privacy in an unseemly manner. ‘I think he also resented the regularity that was involved. As you know, nothing irked him more than a routine which he was forced to respect.’”

  Walsh had waged a highly unsuccessful three-year, arm-twisting campaign to get Ruth out of hock and convince him to save for the future. By February 1927, he realized it was time to resort to trickery. He convinced Ruth that it would be great PR to stage a news conference in Los Angeles on his birthday to announce that he was penalizing himself a thousand dollars for each year of misbehavior and putting it in a new trust fund with the Bank of Manhattan in New York. Then he got the presiding judge in the child labor violation case in San Diego, the People of the State of California vs. George Herman Ruth to postpone the trial.

  On February 7, Ruth looked into the cameras and said, “Christy, I guess you have me convinced about the importance of saving a few bucks. You can penalize me a thousand dollars for each year. That’ll make thirty-three thousand dollars to start with.”

  John B. Kennedy elaborated in Collier’s. “To make it look real, the Babe was photographed signing the thirty-three thousand dollars over into an untouchable trust fund. The Babe later demanded his money back but found that the principal was beyond his reach forever and that he could have nothing but the interest.”

  Newspapers across the country trumpeted the news of a new era of fiscal responsibility. Walsh wired Frank Hilton, vice president of the Bank of Manhattan, euphorically and followed up with a triumphant letter the next day.

  It makes me very happy indeed to enclose herewith check for Thirty-Three Thousand ($33,000) dollars as the first step toward a trust fund for Mr. Ge. H. (“Babe”) Ruth.

  This is in accordance with our several past conversations and my wire from here February 6. And it concludes a campaign of nearly three years in which I have pleaded with my good friend Babe to do this important thing for his own future happiness. The difficulty has been to get him in an agreeable mood—and with the necessary cash on hand—both at the same time. I was able to engineer this by getting
him to leave all receipts from his earnings this winter in my name. Exhibition baseball games, vaudeville and a motion picture have given him his most profitable winter season and the best part of the entire experience to me is that he has not spent a cent of it. I know many, many people who would not believe this!

  In a separate wire, Walsh authorized Hilton to release the telegram as received in hopes of getting “full publicity value for Babe and your bank.”

  The deal was: all ancillary income would go into the trust while Ruth kept his Yankee salary to live on and play with—a salary that was not yet established. Ruth and the Yankees were then engaged in the Kabuki dance between players and management that passed for negotiations in the years before agents were allowed in the room. Owners lowballed players. Players threatened to quit. Empty threats were their only leverage.

  As an opening gambit, the Yankees had sent a contract for $52,000, the same salary he had earned the previous three seasons, which they knew Ruth would return unsigned.

  By then, Walsh had gone on the record with the sotto voce demands he had whispered in the World Series press box, telling reporters in December: “After what the Babe has done this year, he ought to be worth $150,000 on any man’s ball cub.”

  On February 8, the day after the $33,000 press conference, Damon Runyon published a column pointing out that Ruth was wildly underpaid compared to entertainers like the Irish tenor John McCormack, who according to Variety was then the highest-paid performer in the United States, commanding $5,000 a night.

  Joe Williams chimed in: “Ruth is cheap at $100,000.”

  It also helped Ruth’s cause that Ty Cobb, very much on his last legs, was rumored to have received a $75,000 offer from the Senators and that former New York mayor Jimmy Walker was said to have been offered $100,000 to serve as American League president.

  On February 10, Ruth told the Associated Press he wanted “$100,000 for Next Year or I’ll Quit”—a story he promptly denied.

  “I’m not in the market for real estate, or stock or any easy money rackets,” he told the Los Angeles Times the next day, sounding very much like he had bought into the logic of financial prudence. “From now on what I earn I sock away where I can’t even get at it myself.”

  Meanwhile cameras were rolling at Los Angeles’s new Wrigley Field and on the lot at First National Pictures, where a replica of part of the stadium had been constructed in case of inclement weather. A public invitation to see the Babe hit at Wrigley Field saved producers $45,000 they didn’t have to pay extras when eleven thousand fans accepted the invite. Pretzel molders, ex-pugilists, barbers, and tightrope walkers in ill-fitting uniforms played the part of baseball players.

  Between takes, Ruth held court in his sumptuous dressing room, reprising his threat to stay in Hollywood if the Yankees failed to meet his price—or open a baseball school for boys or a chain of gymnasiums with trainer Artie McGovern, who had been summoned to whip Ruth into shape for the season he was threatening not to play.

  He ran every morning at 6:30 and worked out ostentatiously during lunch, jumping rope and playing catch with a medicine ball. McGovern kept the papers updated on Ruth’s shrinking midline: 40 inches, compared with the 481/2 inches it had been two years earlier. Marshall Hunt of the Daily News was conveniently available on the set, having been anointed a technical adviser by the Babe, to provide breathless daily updates, punctuated by the huffing and puffing of the Big Fella during his training sessions.

  The cameras weren’t rolling and the Babe wasn’t acting when he trudged off the set, disconsolate at having split in two the bat he used to hit three runs in Game 4 of the World Series. “Smelling salts were applied,” Hunt wrote.

  Ruth spent the evening of February 17 mingling with three thousand Hollywood types gathered by studio press agents to salute thirteen starlets at the annual Wampas Frolic, a glitzy affair at the new Ambassador Hotel boasting no fewer than seven orchestras and a show featuring the Mack Sennett players, the Duncan Sisters, Douglas Fairbanks, Fanny Brice, Eddie Cantor, Tom Mix, and Babe Ruth.

  The next morning, Ruth sent a letter to the Yankees, written “by his ventriloquist Christy Walsh,” Ed Sullivan reported in the Evening Graphic, asking for the $100,000 contract he had denied asking for, plus $7,700 in salary that had been held back in fines.

  When Jacob Ruppert failed to reply—that was not the Yankee way—Ruth threatened to make his own letter public. “Babe Ruth to Tell All,” promised the Los Angeles Times.

  Which he did, giving the story to Hunt, who had the whole thing in the Daily News on February 26. Headline writers in New York adopted a more measured tone: “Stage All Set for Battle of 2,000 Centuries.”

  The News also carried an exclusive item about Helen Ruth, who was in St. Vincent’s Hospital recovering from surgery. She had been there for more than a week. The nature of her illness was not disclosed.

  Bookies back east were laying 2-to-1 odds that he wouldn’t get the one hundred thou.

  Ruth headed back to New York on the evening of February 26, having finished shooting his last scenes at two o’clock in the morning. It was a real Hollywood send-off: he left town with a lei of flowers and “a bevy of ravishing femininity” draped about his neck—extras hired by the studio for the occasion, Hunt wrote. He also had a $30,000 option for another feature film with First National (which was never made) and a favorable verdict in People of the State of California v. George Herman Ruth.

  The case, having been successfully delayed by his attorneys and inclement weather, had been heard just the day before. By the time Ruth entrained, Justice Claude I. Chambers had released his six-page opinion, declaring, “If this case constitutes a violation of the law, then all my thirty years of the study of law have gotten away from me.”

  This did not deter Deputy Commissioner Stanley M. Gue from immediately filing another complaint, dismissed with similar alacrity. It was once again safe to take American children to see Babe Ruth. Despite the verdict in Ruth’s favor, and the fact that he never had to step foot in court, Walsh protested the legal fees and still had not paid them by April 5.

  Walsh was barred by tradition and by the thoroughly unbalanced balance of power in the game from representing Ruth’s interests at the bargaining table. “He would have liked to be present at the negotiation, as he knew something about Mr. Generous Edward Barrow’s capacity for earnestness under such conditions, but no player has ever done business with the magnates through a manager, and anyway he thought he could trust this party to hold out for $100,000,” Pegler wrote in a column published in the Washington Post on April 25.

  In fact, Walsh tried to do business with the magnates, as Pegler acknowledged in a 1941 column carried by the Post about the absence of collective bargaining in baseball. “The management of the Yankees had made known unmistakably its determination not to set a precedent by negotiating the Babe’s terms of employment through any third person and the matter was not pressed.”

  This would not change until Marvin Miller organized the Major League Baseball Players Association in 1965. Roger Maris wasn’t even permitted to bring his brother along with him to negotiate his 1962 contract with the Yankees after breaking Ruth’s home-run record the year before.

  The best Walsh could do was offer the Babe a cram course in the art of negotiation. He accompanied Ruth as far as Salt Lake City. They sat in his drawing room, playacting the roles of the respective parties, a conversation re-created by Pegler.

  Walsh apprised Ruth of how much money Col. Ruppert had and how valuable he was to the Yankees and the American League and the importance of getting while the getting was good. He reminded Ruth that he had just turned 33. Then they rehearsed their lines with Walsh playing the part of the Colonel:

  “Now I will be Jake Ruppert and you will be Babe Ruth,” Mr. Walsh said. In the final rehearsal of the scene, “You come into the office and I say to you, ‘Hello, Babe; you are not looking very well. Do you think you will last through next summer?’

&nbs
p; “Now, what are you supposed to say?”

  “I am supposed to say, ‘I want a three-year-contract at $100,000 or I will retire from the great national game,’” Mr. Ruth replied brightly.

  “Fine,” Mr. Walsh exclaimed. “Now I say, ‘You must be crazy. I think I will trade you to the Red Sox.’ And what do you say?”

  “I say, ‘All right, then, there is no sense of our talking any more, so good-bye, Jack.’”

  If they came at the Babe with anything about his debt to baseball, the Babe was to remind them of the seasons when he filled the ballparks all around the league for $25,000 and $52,000. If they brought out any statistics to show that a $100,000 salary would leave them no profits, he was to suggest an accounting of the exhibition games in the spring and on the open dates during the summer, for several years, and remind them of the exhibition games which they scheduled for this year.

  The Babe is the only member of the ball club who is obliged by contract to appear in the exhibition games and this, of course, means that the promoters want Babe Ruth, not the New York Yankees.

  While they talked, Artie McGovern dictated a letter to the Brooklyn Eagle, reporting that Ruth had achieved his ideal weight—222 pounds. They had been working out in the baggage car. Nonetheless, by the time Ruth reached New York on March 2 he had gained four pounds.

  Marshall Hunt wired his story to New York, predicting that Ruth would not get the hoped-for two-year, hundred-thousand-dollar-a-year deal, and adjourned to the dining car, where he ran into Captain Joe Patterson, who had been in Hollywood on business. Patterson asked whether the Babe might be induced to come to his compartment for a chat. Nothing long, mind you; the captain was tired, but he wanted to meet the man who helped build his paper’s circulation and put it in the black. Patterson said he would brush the front of his shirt when he wanted to end the interview. He never gave the signal.