by Jane Leavy
Perhaps what really scared him was his wife’s vision of happiness. Because, Lee wrote, “he added, sort of confidential-like, ‘It’s funny ’cause I certainly do like the little darlings.’”
The tour proceeded from Boston to the Palace Theatre in New York, where Ruth was greeted with a standing-room-only crowd and a one-minute ovation when he took the stage. Then Chicago, Washington, Philly, Pittsburgh, Detroit, Cincy—major-league cities—and lots of bush-league towns, too. In Helen’s absence, Ruth toured the country living large. He granted interviews from a pink silk chaise longue in Washington and hosted one of his humdingers in his suite at Chicago’s Congress Hotel. As he rushed to the theater one evening, he instructed the hotel’s wine agent, a fellow named Joe, to fill the closet in his suite with booze. “Joe filled it up,” Marshall Hunt told Ruth’s biographer Kal Wagenheim. “Babe did a double-take at the bill when he got back. It’s $4,000. The closet was as big as an ordinary sleeping room! An adjustment was reached there.”
While in Chicago, Ruth’s pal Rogers Hornsby, the great infielder for the St. Louis Cardinals, paid a call. “Somehow Rogers got ahold of a big thing that looked like a cow’s drinking trough,” Hunt said. “It was round and about two feet deep, made out of galvanized sheet metal. They filled that with hot water. Then all these dames came. Rogers sent them into another room to dress in these costumes that he had made for them. So they came out looking beautiful, and they all had to get in the tub. They were made out of paper and loosely glued together; so, the second they got in the tub, all this came off.
“Rogers didn’t smoke or drink, but he was a very good picker of dames.”
Though he filed stories about Ruth almost every day, Hunt never did find an occasion to write that one for the Daily News. Nor did he ever mention their spring training excursions into the countryside in search of farms offering “the chicken and daughter” combination dinner.
Landis took his sweet time deciding Ruth’s punishment. His office was inundated with petitions and letters on Ruth’s behalf from fans who liked that Ruth was bigger than the game. Preacher Billy Sunday, the former ballplayer, said Ruth was only as foolish as the rule he had violated and advocated fining him the amount he had earned on the barnstorming tour. Cap Huston and the Yankees begged for leniency, invoking Ruth’s lack of advantages at the “Reformatory Institution” in Baltimore, the adulation that had “enlarged his cranium,” and his “sincere, if hazy, idea that he was a crusader and was helping the ball players by his daring.”
Huston also proposed that the rule be changed in the interests of baseball.
When Landis issued his ruling on December 5, banning Ruth and Meusel until May 20, 1922 (one quarter of the season), and relieving each of his $3,362.26 share of the World Series loot, the Yankees were secretly relieved—especially because Ruth was allowed to participate fully in spring training and the lucrative exhibition games the Yankees staged as they made their way north.
Participate fully he did. Spring training was defined by a single headline: “Yankees Training on Scotch.”
On March 10, he signed a three-year contract with the Yankees for $52,000 a year—a figure that appealed to him because he always wanted to be able to say he earned “a grand a week.” Notably omitted from the deal was the bonus clause that had paid him $50 for each of his fifty-nine home runs in 1921.
Helen posed for the newspapers clutching the signed document like an ancient scroll and wearing another remarkable fascinator—this one resembled an opulent porcupine. Babe bristled at the criticism that followed the signing, which unlike that of most baseball contracts was highly publicized. He hardly sounded like a simpleton in stating the case for a ballplayer’s right to earn an unfettered living. In this, he had both a firm grasp of his own worth and ownership’s unfair and unilateral control of the game. “It isn’t right to call me or any ballplayer an ingrate because we ask for more money. Sure I want more, all I’m entitled to. The time of a ballplayer is short. He must get his money in a few years or lose out. Listen, a man who works for another man is not going to be paid any more than he’s worth. You can bet on that. A man ought to get all he can earn. A man who knows he’s making money for other people ought to get some of the profit he brings in. Don’t make any difference if it’s baseball or a bank or a vaudeville show. It’s a business, I tell you. There ain’t no sentiment to it. Forget that stuff.”
The Yankees tried to protect their interests by inserting a hilariously unenforceable morals clause in the new contract, widely believed to be the first in professional sports and widely believed to have been inspired by language in a 1921 contract between Universal Studios and Fatty Arbuckle, then on trial for rape and manslaughter.
It is understood and agreed by and between the parties hereto that the regulation above set forth, numbered “2” shall be construed to mean among other things, that the player shall at all times during the training and playing season of the term of this contract and any renewals thereof refrain entirely from the use of intoxicating liquors and that he shall not during the training and playing season in each year stay up later than 1 o’clock A.M. on any day without the permission and consent of the Club’s manager.
Legislating the libido of the man roommates called “the noisiest fucker in North America” was nonnegotiable. “I’ll promise to go easier on drinking and to get to bed earlier, but not for you, fifty thousand dollars, or two hundred and fifty thousand dollars will I give up women,” sportswriter Fred Lieb quoted him as saying. “They’re too much fun.”
On opening day of the season at Griffith Stadium in the nation’s capital, Ruth, looking especially dapper in civilian clothes, was conspicuously photographed hobnobbing with the commander in chief by the presidential box. He watched the game from the grandstand with Ban Johnson and Cap Huston and opined in his next ghostwritten column that the Yankees would have won had he been playing the sun field.
The vengeful patriarch of major-league baseball was not among the luminaries mentioned in the New York Times account of President Warren Harding’s day at the ballpark.
Yankee fans stormed the ticket offices at the Polo Grounds in anticipation of Ruth’s return on May 20, 1922. He was received like Ulysses, lauded and feted with plunder—floral tributes, a silver bat, and a silver loving cup filled with dirt, dug by Brother Matthias’s own two hands from the area around home plate at St. Mary’s.
He was also greeted by three sign-carrying representatives of the Babe Ruth Shoe Company, which had pledged twenty-four pairs of shoes to the orphans of St. Mary’s upon Ruth’s return, and ten additional pairs on the occasion of his first home run.
He had signed two new five-year endorsement deals to merchandise goods in his name, one with Rosenwasser Bros. Inc. for shoes and leggings, for which he was to receive 1 percent of net sales each year, and the other with the Manhattan Knitting Mills to produce sweaters for men and “he-boys,” advertised in the New York Times that morning as “a whale of a hit for boys, $4.00.” Ruth earned a dollar per dozen sold.
Walsh wasn’t worried about whether boys wanted to look and dress like Ruth. As his step-grandson Frank Merritt would observe, “Every boy by definition is misunderstood; so, of course they would identify with Babe Ruth as this bad boy.” Walsh needed him to act like someone their parents would pay for their sons to look like—at least until they outgrew their first pair of Babe Ruth shoes.
Within five days, Ruth threw dirt on umpire George Hildebrand when he called him out trying to stretch a single into a double and charged into the stands to confront hecklers—actions that cost him his team captaincy, a $200 fine, and a one-day suspension. On June 19 in Cleveland, he charged in from left field, cursing and kicking umpire Bill Dinneen, and, worse, calling him “yellow.” This violation of baseball’s eccentric and unwritten code of honor was a slur so damnable that Ban Johnson wrote Ruth a letter questioning his breeding and fitness to play in the American League.
The next day in the Indians’ dugout
players had to intercede between the combatants. Ruth’s punishment, as reported at the time, was a five-day suspension (three for kicking, two for cursing, none for questioning the umpire’s mettle) and a $1,502.85 American League fine. Not reported at the time was an additional $9,017 fine imposed by the Yankees.
Yankee management responded by hiring a private detective named Jimmy Kelly to follow Ruth and his fellow merrymakers on the Yankees’ upcoming road trip through the Midwest. Kelly wasn’t above a little entrapment. He plied the players with so much booze in St. Louis that they begged him to join them in Chicago, where he arranged a trip to a Joliet brewery and suggested a group photo be taken, copies of which he got each of the duped revelers to sign. The incriminating photos made their way up the chain of command to Landis, who arrived in Boston to deliver some fire and brimstone along with additional fines.
The Yankees kept the private dicks on retainer through the rest of the season, paying the Burns Detective Agency $2,650.03 in total, according to team ledgers at the Hall of Fame. The last payment in October bore the explanation of $259.50 for a “Ruth matter.” By season’s end, Ruth had been suspended four times for a total of forty-four days and had been fined $10,719.95 of his $52,000 salary.
September arrived with a welcome, if puzzling, addition and distraction. The Yankees were in Cleveland when sixteen-month-old Dorothy Helen Ruth made her public debut in New York: “The Secret Is Out—Babe’s a Father.” The announcement was awkward inasmuch as her parents couldn’t agree on the facts of her birth or provide a convincing explanation of where she had been since the blessed event. Babe told reporters that she was born on February 21, 1921, at Presbyterian Hospital in New York. Helen said she was born on June 7, 1921, at St. Vincent’s Hospital. Her hubby had confused the baby’s birthday with his own, she said. You know how he is.
(Found among Helen’s personal effects at the time of her death was a certificate of baptism for a child born February 11, 1921, the Associated Press reported.)
The divergent accounts led to immediate, published speculation about Dorothy’s parentage. Both parents heatedly denied she was adopted. “I should know, shouldn’t I?” Helen said. She had been seen wheeling a baby carriage outside the Ansonia in New York and during spring training but had said nothing publicly, she claimed, because Dorothy was born prematurely, a small, sickly child, and Babe feared being teased about her size.
(Dorothy’s youngest daughter, Linda Ruth Tosetti, said her mother weighed five pounds at birth and was born with rickets. Helen said she weighed three and a half pounds and was in an incubator. In her memoir, Dorothy claimed that her nursemaid told her she weighed two pounds and was “so ugly she used to put a net over the carriage, so no one would see me.”)
Speculation did not abate. Things just didn’t add up. There was no mention of a child in Margery Lee’s Boston Telegram story from November 1921. Nor was there any mention of a child in May 1922, when Helen had surgery at St. Vincent’s Hospital in New York, described as “slightly more serious” than the tonsillectomy her husband underwent at the same time. Hugh Fullerton reported in the Chicago Tribune that Helen had suffered two previous miscarriages, which matches Julia Ruth’s understanding of events.
On September 26, a photo of a chubby baby in a white silk organza dress clutching a toy wooden bat was released to the newspapers. She had unruly hair and melancholy eyes. The story proved a welcome albeit brief respite from a season of turmoil. But unknowns and uncertainties would become the defining factors in Dorothy Ruth’s sad life.
IV
Walsh’s efforts at damage control began in earnest late in the fall of 1922. Ruth needed and wanted the money he had been fined. On November 13, he agreed to an amended version of his three-year contract. In exchange for a return of his money, Ruth accepted a stricter (though equally unenforceable) morals clause and a payout system that allowed the Yankees to withhold half his monthly salary until the end of each season as a guarantor of good behavior.
The amended contract prohibited him from indulging in intoxicating liquors and staying up after 1:00 A.M. “whether in the playing season or not.” What’s more, “any action or misbehavior” that rendered him unable to perform gave the Yankees the right to terminate the contract and keep the withheld salary—what lawyers call “potential liquidated damages.”
The fine fiscal hand of Christy Walsh was evident in the new arrangement, an allowance giving Ruth a single monthly payment of $4,333.33. Left to his own devices he spent it all. He was always running short. That danger was made patent the day after he signed the addendum, when his attorney was notified of a threatened lawsuit by an aggrieved Manhattan shopgirl named Dolores Dixon, who claimed she was expecting a Little Babe and wanted fifty thousand dollars for her trouble and her silence.
Walsh met with Babe and Helen at their apartment to broach his idea for a program of rehabilitation, starting with a public mea culpa to be staged at the November 20 dinner of the New York chapter of the Baseball Writers’ Association of America. With Helen’s encouragement and Babe’s grudging consent, Walsh set about planning an event at the Elks Club, guaranteed to garner the maximum public exposure for the humbling of the Babe. Walsh called it the “Back to the Farm” dinner. He considered it the turning point of Ruth’s career.
All the top sportswriters and sports editors in New York attended, not to mention Cap Huston. Standing in the center of the head table amid a heap of alfalfa and root vegetables was a stuffed heifer, a reminder of Ruth’s wild ride ten days earlier aboard a famously ill-tempered 2,400-pound New Jersey bull named King Jess—and his wild season. Ruth received a paper shovel as a gift, a not-too-subtle reminder of the depth and nature of the hole he had dug for himself.
The ground rules allowed the gentlemen of the press free rein to question Ruth on any subject. They gave him a good going-over. Then the featured speaker, Gentleman Jimmy Walker, the future mayor of New York, beseeched the Babe never again to disappoint the “dirty-faced kids” of New York. “Will you not, for the kids of America, solemnly promise to mend your ways?”
Ruth tearfully and solemnly pledged reform. Raising a glass to the assembled writers, he vowed: “Fellows, you’ve told me the truth. Now, I’m going to tell you something true. I’m going to take this one drink with you to show there’s no hard feelings—and this will be the last drink for me until the end of next season—October 1923.”
He vowed to go back to the farm he told the Times he had purchased in the spring in Sudbury, Massachusetts. (Documents from the Middlesex County Registry of Deeds record a single purchase from John McCrillis in June 1923.) There would be chickens to feed, wood to chop, pit bulls to raise, and plenty of photo opportunities.
“Quite an act,” Hunt recalled.
Two years after she had daydreamed aloud to a reporter about slipping away to a little farmhouse in the hills, Helen Ruth believed she was about to get her wish.
Chapter 9
October 17 / Aboard the Rock Island Line to Des Moines
"RUTH POSES IN OVERALLS, THEN COLLECTS $3000"
—ASSOCIATED PRESS
"WELL, I AIN'T EATIN' YOUR DAMNED CANDY BAR ANYMORE!"
—BABE RUTH, ON THE BABY RUTH CANDY BAR
I
As Babe Ruth headed for Des Moines with three thousand dollars in his pocket from a quickie photo shoot in Kansas City and a two-day-old unrefrigerated egg, twenty-four freight cars loaded with Baby Ruth candy bars hit the rails in Chicago, traveling deluxe in Baby Ruth refrigerator cars making their maiden voyage on behalf of America’s sweet tooth.
“No longer will our candy bars associate with machinery, soap, canned goods, and other ordinary freight,” declared Otto Y. Schnering, president of the Curtiss Candy Company, in announcing the purchase of an additional two hundred dedicated freight cars necessitated by the annual production of one billion Baby Ruth bars. Which, he happily reported, totaled 15 percent of all the candy bars—and 12 percent of all chocolate-covered confections—consumed by
the American public. “Our plan is to have one thousand of these cars in operation in the near future.”
Most everyone in the country—from radio disc jockeys to stock boys to baseball fans mailing Baby Ruth wrappers to the Babe for his signature to Ruth’s own caddy—accepted as fact that the Ruth in question was him. “Yah, sar, you’re de man daf makes dem candy bars,” his caddy replied one day when asked by a sports columnist if he recognized the man whose clubs he was carrying. “I eats one of ’dem every morning.”
Everyone but Schnering, who maintained in contravention of logic and public belief that his candy bar was named for Baby Ruth Cleveland, the long-dead daughter of President Grover Cleveland who succumbed to diphtheria at the age of twelve in 1904—fifteen years before the first Baby Ruth bar appeared on American store shelves. The name had “a smile in it,” Schnering said.
While Schnering was ostentatiously counting his blessings and the $1 million Baby Ruth generated each month, Christy Walsh was preparing for his deposition in the ongoing litigation between the Curtiss Candy Company and the George H. Ruth Candy Company, formed in 1925 in a belated attempt to take a bite out of Schnering’s sales—litigation that would eat up a substantial portion of the next six years. Meanwhile, Ruth was cashing in any way he could.
While in Kansas City, he had dashed off to an impromptu photo shoot for the H. D. Lee Mercantile Company, maker of Lee jeans (née cowboy pants) and its new line of buttonless men’s (and boys’) workwear featuring the newest technology: the zipper. Lee had just announced the winner of a fifty-state naming contest for a new line of Union-Alls featuring the new technology, a marketing strategy that offered cash prizes of $1,000—$250 to the winner—as an inducement to come on down to your local store and try on a pair! The winning entry, courtesy of George M. Mock of Seattle: Whizit!
Who better to promote the unheard-of speed afforded by the Whizit than the Babe, who spent a lot of time getting in and out of baseball uniforms and other suits of clothes?