The Big Fella

by Jane Leavy

  Many of the homes, hospitals, and orphanages that Ruth visited, including Boys Town, made sure to mention that Ruth was an orphan in their fund-raising campaigns, thereby perpetuating an untruth that he had long since given up trying to disprove but also forging a sympathetic bond between him and the institutions he visited. “Johnnie ‘the Gloom-Killer,’” the newest and youngest host on Father Flanagan’s radio station, WOW, invoked the Babe’s example in his follow-up broadcast. “The Babe told us, ‘When you leave this Home and make some money, help support it. Our Home burned down in Baltimore and I worked hard to raise about three million dollars to build the new Home.’”

  As the public grew wise to the ways of marketing manipulation, however, the ubiquity of the photographs of Ruth posing with lost, orphaned, and abandoned children gave rise to a new kind of cynicism and the suspicion that the visits were “arranged solely for the publicity they afforded him,” Frank Graham wrote in his history of the Yankees. “After a while, hurt by the charge that they were but publicity dodges”—an assertion uniformly denied by Graham and other writers who covered Ruth regularly—“he exacted promises from his friends among the newspapermen not to mention them and these promises always were kept.”

  III

  Lady Amco did not know it, but she, too, was in debt to Edward Bernays. The Beech-Nut Packing Company, purveyors of everything from chewing gum to pork products, had hired him in 1925 to increase the American appetite for bacon. Until then, America had gotten by on a cup of coffee, a piece of toast, and maybe a glass of juice for breakfast. Bernays asked physician Dr. A. L. Goldwater whether a heavier breakfast might be beneficial to the workingmen of America. Knowing which way his toast was buttered, the doctor confirmed Bernays’s suspicion and agreed to consult five thousand of his closest doctor friends, most of whom concurred, thus allowing Bernays to claim they had made a scientific study of the matter. The demand for bacon—and eggs—soared.

  Just that week, the White House forwarded a menu to industrialist R. M. Melon in advance of a morning meeting at his home in Pittsburgh, notifying the chef that the president required “the breakfast standby of America”—bacon and eggs. (Lou Gehrig would refuse to leave his hotel room in Sioux City until he’d had his fill of the same.)

  Thus, upon receiving Lady Amco’s 171st egg, the Babe eyed the assembled newsreel cameras and newspaper reporters and declared, “Looks like breakfast to me!”

  To his grave disappointment, there was no bacon. The Cudahy Packing Company of Sioux City stepped into the breach two days later, presenting him with a personalized ham—his name spelled out in cloves. “So Now Babe Ruth Can Have Ham and Eggs,” read the ensuing headline.

  (Less than a decade later, the Babe’s ad men would employ the same strategy in cartoon strips created by Quaker Oats to accompany his endorsement of Puffed Wheat and Puffed Rice, quoting a prominent nutritionist who testified to the wonders of dry cereal. “AMAZING BUT TRUE. MORE THAN DOUBLE THE FOOD-ENERGY OF EGGS, EVEN MORE BODY-BUILDING PROTEIN THAN BACON.”)

  By the time Ruth and Gehrig arrived at Omaha’s Western League Park, Babe’s egg had been sent downtown to a local artist, who inscribed it: “From the Queen of Hens to the King of Swats.” Or “From the Queen of Eggs to the King of Hitters.” It depended on which newspaper you read. The egg was then packed in a jewelry box and tied with a ribbon and delivered to home plate for the formal presentation.

  The best amateur baseball talent in Omaha, teams representing the Omaha Printing Company, winners of the Saturday League, and the Brown Park Merchants, winners of the Sunday League, had been scheduled to play for the city championship that afternoon. Instead they found themselves sharing the day and the bench with Babe Ruth, whom seventeen-year-old Francis O’Donnell, the Prints’ batboy and occasional utility player, pronounced “as common as anyone in the dugout.”

  A compliment.

  When Ruth stepped to the plate for his first at-bat, the game was interrupted for the presentation of the ceremonial egg. With Landers at his side, H. L. McLaughlin, Nebraska’s secretary of agriculture, launched into a speech extolling the virtues of clean chickens. “The Norfolk hen, I suppose, has breeding, but there is no mystery about her diet or her care,” he said, seizing the opportunity to urge Nebraska farmers to clean up their chicken coops. “She was given no dope, just plain food but kept very clean in clean surroundings. What her owner has done others may do. Dirt and filth is what is holding back Nebraska poultry in the markets of the east. They breed disease.”

  Amco officials, who were heavily invested in promoting what its mash could do for the lagging state egg industry—including a two-page ad in the souvenir scorecard—couldn’t have been happy with his remarks.

  When the game resumed, Ruth and Gehrig took turns playing first base and pitching to each other. Ruth hit two home runs, one of which, O’Donnell told his sons later, he called. “He pointed to center field. Just like in the movies.”

  Ruth went to the pitching mound in the seventh inning and struck out four of the batters he faced, among them Johnny Rosenblatt, the youngest player on the field, who led off in the ninth, and Gehrig, who didn’t fare any better. So after Ruth struck him out to end the game, Ruth just kept pitching until Gehrig finally got ahold of one, thereby delaying the first pitch of the city championship game to the point that it had to be called on account of darkness.

  Meanwhile, back at the henhouse, Amco handlers were beginning the delicate process of “breaking” Lady Babe from her high-protein feed, upping the percentage of carbohydrates from 10 to 20 percent and lowering her protein by inverse proportion. “She could have continued until she laid 300 or more eggs if we continued to feed her proteins but in doing so she might have killed herself,” Danforth told reporters. “We did it for her own sake.”

  (This was an allusion to the unfortunate death of the 1926 champion Lady Lindy, who laid 149 eggs in as many days and succumbed two hours after her final effort.)

  Landers told reporters that Lady Babe, who had lost three-quarters of a pound during her championship season, would quit laying before “she layed herself to death.” She quit two days later after delivering an under-par 173rd egg. She was too valuable for breeding purposes to be sacrificed for the few extra eggs she might lay. He expected her to produce thirty pullets worth $100 to $155 each and twenty cockerels worth $50 to $100 each, he told the New York Times—an $8,250 profit off a $2 hen. Little wonder he had turned down a $3,000 offer. He planned to breed her in the spring with a cock he promised to name Buster Gehrig.

  The photo of the “Two Record Busters” traveled to sixteen states, appearing in thirty newspapers in a single day. Other papers printed a drawing of the Babe clutching his namesake alongside Joe Williams’s syndicated “Nut Cracker” column: “That picture of Babe Ruth holding the Omaha chicken named after him indicates that his barnstorming tour is having splendid results.”

  No doubt it helped sell tickets to upcoming games in San Francisco and Santa Barbara, two of the cities where the photo appeared. But more important, it promoted the image of a wholesome Babe, clucking with pleasure at the feathery bundle in his arms. The wire service caption reminded readers: “He is a bit of a farmer in the off-season.”

  Walsh wasn’t about to object to the outdated tidbit of information, which helpfully reinforced the image he had been cultivating of Babe Ruth as a gentleman farmer and family man—a life he had briefly led at Walsh’s behest in a highly publicized reclamation effort in the fall of 1922.

  This was as good as money in the bank. More valuable than the twenty-five-hundred-dollar guarantee (plus 50 percent of the gate) Walsh had been promised by promoters J. J. Isaacson, recreation director for the city of Omaha, and Johnny “Dynamo” Dennison, the czar of the municipal baseball league (and nephew of a local political fixer and crime boss).

  Only seven hundred fans turned out for that one. Newspapers estimated there were five thousand people at League Park five years later; Dennison reckoned the count was m
ore like seven or eight thousand, which at a dollar a head was good money for a couple of hours of work.

  Among those in attendance were two local lovelies who caught Ruth’s eye, Dennison related to the Omaha World-Herald years later. “He told me, ‘Every day the girls are looking better.’”

  He spotted a couple of good-looking girls in the grandstand and told me to give them the key to his room at the Fontanelle. He said I should tell them to leave in the seventh inning, and that he would meet them later.

  Well, the priest at Immaculate Conception Church asked me if I thought I could get Babe to stop at the school. I think they were laying a cornerstone. The Babe said he’d be glad to.

  He went to the school after the game and said a few words. The kids just climbed all over him and started asking for autographs. He said he couldn’t stay; he had to catch a train.

  Hell, he just wanted to get back to the hotel.

  Whatever or whoever was waiting for him at the hotel never became public—thanks, no doubt, to the ever-vigilant Christy Walsh. Unfortunately, he hadn’t been on retainer during the 1920 tour of Cuba when Ruth was fleeced out of somewhere between $60,000 and $130,000 by gamblers and con men—the amount depended on which magazine exclusive you believed—and had to be bailed out by the missus.

  And he wasn’t yet fully in charge when Ruth, who had doubled his income by barnstorming in 1919 and 1920, signed a contract to do so again in defiance of Commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis in 1921. The contract called for him to play exhibition games in New York State, Pennsylvania, and Oklahoma from October 16 to November 1 for a guarantee of a thousand dollars each, followed by a sixteen-week vaudeville tour on the B. F. Keith vaudeville circuit.

  A loosely enforced ban prohibiting players from World Series teams from such tours had been on the books since 1911. Landis reiterated his intention to enforce the arcane prohibition when he took office in January 1921 and again in the clubhouse after the Yankees clinched the pennant. “Well, I’m notifying you that I am going to violate the rule and I don’t care what you do about it,” Ruth declared.

  With that, he walked—or barnstormed—into a legal ambush. It was a test case of the authority of the new commissioner, who began his imperial reign only after being granted unilateral powers over the game. He could summon witnesses, order the production of documents, and impose penalties, just as he did from the federal bench. He had insisted on keeping his seat on the court when he assumed his new role. As a result, he continued to issue judicial opinions while meting out punishment to the eight White Sox players who allegedly conspired to throw the 1919 World Series.

  Eager as Landis was to consolidate his power—particularly over his rival, American League president Ban Johnson—he had another reason to make an example of Ruth. Landis had been formally censured by the American Bar Association at the beginning of September for refusing to give up his $42,000-a-year federal judgeship. On October 20, in the midst of the Ruth imbroglio, a congressman from Brooklyn announced he was introducing legislation barring judges from holding any other paying position, the third congressional attempt to dislodge Landis from the bench.

  The more Landis railed against Ruth—calling his conduct “mutinous defiance,” and thundering, “Who the hell does that big ape think he is?”—the more he was able to divert attention from his own compromised position. (He resigned from the bench on February 18, 1922, waiting just long enough to give the illusion that he wasn’t quitting under fire.)

  Ruth responded to Landis’s fulminations with logic and a blithe disregard for his authority. He ignored a summons from the commissioner the night the series ended and set off for Buffalo at midnight with Yankee teammates Bob Meusel and Bill Piercy despite the threat of suspension. Landis generally enjoyed the support of the press, publicly and privately, for staring down a national idol. Jay Jerome Williams, superintendent of the Consolidated Press Association, wrote from San Francisco: “So glad you’ve stood your ground on the Babe Ruth-Meusel suspension. That’s great stuff. It shows that whether on the bench or off of it when you say a thing you mean it. (Of course, we knew this to be the case but I reckon there were some natural born detracts and ‘s-o-b’s’ that figured otherwise.)”

  Landis also received covert intelligence from Yankee co-owner Colonel Tillinghast L’Hommedieu Huston, who sent an especially unctuous letter informing him of Ban Johnson’s complicity in the effort to impeach him. “I would feel a delicacy in working on this matter while the Ruth case is up before you for adjudication did I not know that it would not influence you in the slightest degree,” Cap Huston wrote. “I want you to know that you are placed under no obligation whatever. I am working from purely selfish incentives.”

  Indeed. His motives had everything to do with Ruth’s stunning 1921 season—59 home runs, 168 RBI, and a .378 batting average—and the $224,234,200 (in 2016 dollars) that he generated for the Yankees from home, away, and exhibition games. Currying favor with Landis by sabotaging Johnson was the Yankees’ way of pleading for their pocketbook.

  Walsh, who was already exploring endorsement deals for a line of boys’ clothing for 1922, needed a compliant Babe, a wholesome Babe, to sell to manufacturers. Walsh wired Huston to suggest enlisting New York City’s sports editors to communicate their disapproval of the tour. Huston arranged for W. S. Farnsworth of the New York American and W. J. Macbeth of the New York Tribune to meet Ruth in Jamestown, New York, where he agreed to quit the tour if the commissioner indemnified him against punishment, which was a nonstarter. He also asked Huston to meet him in Scranton.

  When Huston arrived, Ruth told him he was in bed and blithely kept his boss waiting for an hour in the lobby of the Hotel Casey before capitulating to reason—also the weather, crowds, and notices had been lousy. Huston wrote to Landis immediately: “He agreed to abandon his trip because, he said, he had been made to realize by Messrs. Farnsworth and Macbeth (and he gave this as his sole reason for quitting) that the New York club was the principal (and possibly the only) sufferer in the matter.”

  After sharing the good news, Huston wrote a couple of mollifying checks to local promoters of the canceled games.

  Landis took the case under advisement; Ruth took to the boards with an old-time vaudeville song-and-dance man, Wellington Cross, who crooned “Along Came Ruth” by way of an introduction. A few lame Landis jokes were added during a tryout in Mount Vernon, New York, before the opening in Boston on November 7. Politically tone-deaf tour manager Harry Weber solicited a congratulatory telegram from the commissioner, which failed to materialize.

  Ruth had come down with a bad case of laryngitis in Mount Vernon, which may or may not have made any difference in his delivery. He gamely croaked his way through his solo, “Little by Little, Bit by Bit,” reminding the critic from the Boston Post that as a member of a Red Sox quartet no one was quite sure if Ruth was a tenor or a bass. A reviewer for the International News Service observed, “You just knew he’d like to get his hands on the guy who wrote the song.”

  Helen Ruth fretted over her hubby from a box in the B. F. Keith’s Theatre. Helen was most often seen in those days waving from the grandstand at the Polo Grounds. She made occasional predictions—one hundred home runs in 1921!—and occasional wifely pronouncements: “Clouting Home Runs Good for Appetite.” She offered even more occasional insights into their relationship. “Babe says there’s two sides to his head. One of them is for baseball and the other is for me. And I love baseball enough to divide anyway.”

  Margery Lee, a society reporter for the Boston Telegram, sat behind her at the opening performance, noting the jeweled hands that played nervously with her beaded purse, the brown eyes that never left the Babe’s throat, and her refusal to laugh at a single joke. Lee was kind enough not to mention the hat she wore, which resembled the back end of a turkey. Perhaps it was one of the twenty-five chapeaux, the Boston Globe reported, that she had had purchased for $840 the year before. Lee was rewarded with a marital scoop: “Babe Ruth in Dange
r of Being Kidnapped—Mrs. Babe Threatens to Take Him Away from Public to Farm”:

  “Honey-dear, does it hurt terribly?” she cooed. “Does his sweet little voice hurt him?”

  “Rats, it’s all right,” says Babe, in a raspy squeak. “What’s a little sore throat to a big husky man? And suppose I do lose my voice? I’ll never be a singer anyway, and I could always go in the movies.”

  “Oh, I’ll be so glad when I can have my hubby all to myself,” Mrs. Babe Ruth said. “He’s such a busy man. I feel as if he only belonged to me when no one else happened to want him. Some day people are going to find that I’ve kidnapped my own husband and have run away some place with him where we can lead a simple life away from grandstands, and managers and photographers and all the annoying things that clutter up our life.

  “You know what I’d like to do?” she said with a sudden sparkle in her mischievous eyes. “I’d like to slip away to a little farmhouse in the hills, where we could have a little garden and Honey could rest and play with me. We could fish and go on tramps together and have a glorious time.”

  Meanwhile, the Babe was confessing to a peculiar strain of stage fright.

  “There’s something about women that scare me to death. I’m not afraid of any man on earth but almost any little scrap of woman can knock the nerve out of me. Gee, they have a way of looking at you that makes my knees turn to butter and my tongue forget the English language.

  “Women are so little, and there’s such a lot of complicated fussiness about them, I mean their fluffy little clothes and bewildering hats, that are entirely beyond me. A vaudeville audience of women is about 60 times harder to face than all the baseball fans in the world. Gosh, I never knew what stage fright was ’til I looked over the footlights and saw two little flappers staring at me from the front row.”