The Big Fella

by Jane Leavy

  The pit stop produced a national advertising campaign with print ads in Liberty magazine, among other outlets, featuring Ruth and a young boy named Sonny Bowles standing by a Model T, car crank in hand, with his dress shirt peeking out from the collar of his Union-All and a well-shod foot perched on the running board. “Well, who wouldn’t?” wrote columnist Joe Williams when news broke of the Babe’s latest gambit.

  Such were the spoils of fame in 1927: bigger than ever and smaller than they ought to have been. The parameters of celebrity were changing as fast as the Babe got in and out of his Whizit. While he was testifying to the efficacy of the zipper—“as much speed as there is on a Walter Johnson fastball”—attorneys for the George H. Ruth Candy Company were trying and failing to prove in patent court the patent injustice of their case against the Candy King of Chicago.

  Ruth was famous in a way that no one had ever been famous before. Famous in a way the law had never envisioned. The patent court had no way to make him whole. In short, Ruth was penalized for his originality. It would take thirty years for jurisprudence to catch up with him.

  II

  Thanks to Ruth, Damon Runyon, who knew a thing or two about dice games, cardsharps, and horse players, was no longer the only sports scribe filling white space with talk about money. Just that week a syndicated sports filler ran in hundreds of newspapers across the country: “Babe Ruth receives $92 an hour. This is based on five hours a day.”

  His visit to Boys Town prompted this calculation in the Lincoln Star: “Babe Ruth now earns more in one year than it takes to care annually for 200 homeless boys in Father Flanagan’s boys’ home.”

  While his Yankee salary continued to generate envy and debate on the sports pages, the Wall Street Journal took an unprecedented look at what Walsh liked to call his “by-product money.” “He scores homers by allowing his name to be printed on boys’ underwear, caps and shoes,” the Journal reported. “He gathers in royalties from manufacturers of all kinds of soft drinks and holiday souvenirs.

  “No figures are kept, or at least made public, of the Babe’s total income.”

  In fact, Walsh kept meticulous accounts of the income he generated for Ruth, down to the penny, less his commission. The ledger he prepared at the end of their contractual relationship in May 1938 documented every dollar Ruth earned through his management, Walsh wrote in an accompanying letter to the Babe.

  The year-by-year accounting does not include contracts Ruth signed prior to their relationship, or those for vaudeville and barnstorming tours managed by others in 1920–21 and in 1923. Nor does it include an untold number of endorsement deals Ruth negotiated for himself, such as the Whizit. It’s impossible to know just how much the document underreports the income generated through his fame.

  One figure stands out in neon sizzle from the rest. In 1927, Ruth earned $73,247 in by-product money, $3,247 more than his Yankee salary, making him undoubtedly the first professional athlete to earn as much or more off the field as on it. According to Michael Haupert, professor of economics at the University of Wisconsin–La Crosse and the executive director of the Economic History Association, Ruth’s take-home pay that year was the equivalent of $26 million in today’s purchasing dollars.

  Chump change compared with the incomes of today’s top earners. According to Opendorse, the athlete-marketing platform established in 2012, Roger Federer was 2017’s top athlete endorser, with $60 million in off-the-court income. Twenty-two major leaguers made the list of the top 100 in 2017, but the best of them, Buster Posey of the San Francisco Giants, was ranked forty-eighth, with only $4 million in endorsement income.

  Ruth earned $13,000 from endorsements in 1927, which doesn’t sound like much except that it was then twice the average major-league salary. (In modern dollars, it would buy, for example, 177,323 Baby Ruth bars.) By addressing the subject of Ruth’s financial portfolio, the editors of the Journal were acknowledging a new phenomenon in the American marketplace. He was the prototype for the modern athletic pitchman: Joe DiMaggio for Mr. Coffee, OJ for Avis, and Peyton Manning for everything. Everyone, except the Curtiss Candy Company, wanted to be associated with him.

  III

  It was the decade of the “new consumptionism,” Samuel Strauss declared in a cautionary essay titled “Things Are in the Saddle,” published by the Atlantic Monthly in 1924. World War I had primed American industry for the mass production of consumer goods. The Highway Act of 1921 spurred the growth of interstate trucking and facilitated the delivery of those goods. The electrification of factories and households—in concert with aggressive advertising campaigns and increased disposable income—stimulated a national spending spree. By the end of the twenties, nearly half the American population had purchased automobiles, radios, refrigerators, and vacuum cleaners. Consumer credit made it easy to buy on time. Chain stores and mail-order houses proliferated.

  Ruth was a model citizen in the Country of More—the perfect spokesman not just for things but for an entire era. “Talk about a consumer!” said George Lois, guru of the sixties creative revolution on Madison Avenue.

  He had the name—the Babe!—and name recognition forty years before a Long Island company began measuring it in 1964. He remains “the name-ly-est guy in the world,” in the words of Henry Schafer, executive vice president of Marketing Evaluations.

  He was—and is—instantly recognizable. “He had a face that looked like the clay moved,” in the words of Lois, who was famous for, among other things, putting Mickey Mantle to work on behalf of the children’s cereal Maypo in the 1960s.

  Ty Cobb, who did all right for himself, investing in and shilling for Coca-Cola, sneered at Ruth’s bona fides as a spokesman—“Ruth endorses whorehouses by word of mouth,” he told biographer Al Stump. But businessmen did not share his skepticism.

  Babe Ruth wasn’t baseball’s first huckster. Hall of Famer George Wright of the Boston Red Sox posed for Red Stockings Cigars in 1874. Cap Anson and Buck Ewing promoted E. & J. Burke Pale Ale and Extra Stout brews in 1888. Honus Wagner touted the “vim and vigor” of cocaine-infused Coca-Cola in 1908.

  Giants manager John McGraw endorsed Colgate’s Ribbon Dental Cream and brought a dentist to spring training. Ty Cobb and Walter Johnson showed up in a 1914 Royal Tailors catalog, promoting a line of Hart, Schnaffer and Marx clothing for boys. Ruth would appear in the 1921–22 edition advertising clothes for Big Fellas with his measurements included: “Babe Ruth Pays No Tax On His Size.”

  Ruth quickly became baseball’s most profligate and indiscriminate pitchman. On one November day in Boston in 1921, he shilled for Dr. Reed’s Cushion Shoes; the Talbot Company; Wolf’s clothier; S. J. Beckwith & Co. hardware; the Horace Partridge Co., purveyor of sporting goods; the Donovan Car Co., a Studebaker dealership which had provided his transportation in Boston; the Grafonola Co., a manufacturer of phonographs; and Richardson’s cigar shop. The Boston Post ran a helpful schedule of his appearances in the morning paper under the headline: “Babe Ruth Appears in Boston in a New Role.”

  Over the course of his career he deployed his mug on behalf of a stunning array of consumer goods: Mrs. Sherlock’s Home Made Bread, Puffed Wheat, Puffed Rice, and Muffets Whole Wheat Biscuits; Bambino Cola and RedRock Cola; Babe Ruth Big League Chewing Gum, Sport Kings Gum, Babe Ruth Fro-joy Ice Cream for Sealtest (“with Youth Units”), Babe Ruth Home Runs, Chocolate Covered Ice Cream Baseballs, and Girl Scout cookies; Bambino High Grade Burley Rolled Cut Smoking Tobacco (11/2-ounce tin 10 cents, 3 for 25 cents); Babe Ruth Pinch-Hit Tobacco; Kaywoodie pipe tobacco; Old Gold Cigarettes (“Presenting BABE RUTH in the Blindfold cigarette test”) and Raleigh Cigarettes (“NOW! MEDICAL SCIENCE OFFERS PROOF POSITIVE! No Other Leading Cigarette Is Safer to Smoke! No Other Gives You LESS NICOTINE, LESS THROAT IRRITANTS”). With the lucrative exception of the contract with Quaker Oats, none of these deals were negotiated by Walsh or tallied in his ledger.

  He endorsed Murphy-Rich Soap and, although he rarely shaved himself, Barbasol shaving c
ream—“an errorless shave and hits 1,000 in smoothness, comfort, speed.”

  Also: a celluloid “Babe” Ruth Baseball Scorer, available with coupons in the New York American and the Washington Times, among other newspapers; Babe Ruth’s Baseball Game marketed by Milton Bradley; Remington Hi-Skor .22 rifles and ammunition; and a 29-inch Babe Ruth doll (available in Red Sox and Yankee colors) from the Sterling Doll Company that resembled a demented Howdy Doody with blue eyes, plucked eyebrows, dimples, and a serious overbite.

  He endorsed cars as quickly as he wrecked them, promoting Cadillacs in New York, Packards in Boston, and Reos in St. Louis. Elsewhere he preferred Auburns, Studebakers, Chevrolets, and Chryslers. It depended on which dealership was providing a car for his use. (He endorsed Nash cars after he retired.)

  Under Walsh’s management, he became a more discriminating endorser, adopting what has become the modern model of affiliating himself with only one company in each product category. Walsh put him in conservative and predictable deals for Louisville Slugger bats and “Big League Gloves” for A. J. Reach. Between 1927 and 1938, he earned $26,381.59 from A. G. Spalding & Bros., the sporting goods manufacturer, for a full line of baseball equipment that came with instructional manuals and “Babe Ruth’s Questions and Answers Booklet,” produced by none other than Edward Bernays, making a brief foray into sports promotion.

  There were book deals and movie deals—a 1928 primer, Babe Ruth’s Own Book of Baseball, for which he received a thousand-dollar advance, and Play Ball with Babe Ruth, a series of five instructional movie shorts released by “Christy Walsh All America Sport Reels” in 1932: Fancy Curves, Just Pals, Over the Fence, Perfect Control, and Slide, Babe, Slide, which brought in another $5,625.

  “Walsh was a visionary, ahead of his time,” declared Leigh Steinberg, the Christy Walsh of the eighties. “He understood branding and product categories. This sort of thing hadn’t been done since P. T. Barnum.”

  Ruth’s longest association was with the McLoughlin Manufacturing Company, makers of Babe Ruth All America Athletic Underwear and Underwear for Boys—“The Right Underwear for Boys Who Want to Hit Home-Runs.” Five decades before Baltimore Orioles pitcher Jim Palmer scandalized Western civilization by posing in a bikini brief for Jockey, Walsh recruited Ruth’s teammates Joe Dugan, Myles Thomas, Lou Gehrig, and Earle Combs to show a little leg in the Yankee locker room in their one-piece Babe Ruth union suits. It wasn’t exactly a sexy look—especially with Combs sporting black socks and garters—but it was unheard of.

  The deal yielded more attention than cash: $13,443.09 between 1926 and 1938. But Walsh understood that in marketing, one thing leads to another, in this case a deal for Babe Ruth Longjohns made by Jockey in the 1940s. Ruth, who had been known to eschew underwear, winter and summer (Collier’s reported), became adept at slipping mentions of his skivvies into routine news coverage. Thus, the breathless dispatch out of San Francisco: “Babe Ruth has a crush on (leave the room, Willie!) cream silk undies.”

  He had persuaded McLoughlin to manufacture a silk version of the cotton underwear sold under his name just for him.

  He wasn’t shy about making appearances on behalf of his undergarments either. One day in Chicago, teammate Waite Hoyt recalled, the advertising director for a big department store phoned Ruth at his hotel, requesting his presence at the underwear counter. “Ruth said: ‘I can’t say anything without consulting my business manager. You’ll have to call him in New York. No. No. I’ll tell you now, it’s gonna cost you a thousand dollars an hour.’

  “There was a sudden stupefied click and the conversation was over. But in twenty minutes the phone rang again. Same man. Ruth was paid the shocking sum of one thousand dollars an hour to stand next to a pile of underwear.”

  IV

  The product with which he is most identified is also the one from which he never earned a nickel—America’s first nickel candy bar, that gooey confection of nougat, chocolate, peanuts, and gall.

  The history of Baby Ruth and the Babe is murky and not at all sweet. The Curtiss Candy Company was not the only commercial enterprise to profit from a presumed association with Ruth. Walsh, who had never made use of the legal education he acquired to please his father, spent so much time putting out legal brush fires for the Babe, he could hardly be expected to keep up with all the various and nefarious attempts to cash in on Ruth’s name, too. When Ruth’s vaudeville tour visited Vancouver in December 1926, Duplex Sales Limited, the local distributor of Auburn and Pierce-Arrow automobiles, offered him use of an Auburn 8-88 Roadster. Ruth wired his regrets, saying the theater manager had made other arrangements. “Always happy to have Auburn for use,” he added politely. “I favor it over other cars.”

  The dealership promptly took out an ad for the Auburn Roadster in the Vancouver Sun: “What Babe Ruth Drives When He Has His Choice.”

  When he arrived in San Diego a month later, he was photographed—between vaudeville shows—standing arm in arm with real estate developers James Love and W. J. Touhey, who were then selling building lots in a new development at Windsor Hills on Mount Nebo with magisterial views of the city below. The photo was published in the San Diego Sun along with a headlined story: “Babe Ruth Buys Lot in Windsor Hills. Panorama from Point Aery Charms Athlete, Will Hold for Investment Value.” According to the caption, “Ruth grabbed five minutes between acts to purchase” the lot.

  By then, Ruth had promised Walsh, in writing, not to purchase any real estate without prior approval. Perhaps they offered him a lot—Walsh said later that Ruth turned down offers of beaches, battlefields, farms, and manors. Probably the developers showed him the view and paid him to say it was swell. (An advertisement in the San Diego Union on January 9 quotes him as saying, “I clipped this from Love & Touhey’s Windsor Hills ad because It’s the Way I Saw It.”) There is no deed in his name in the San Diego recorder’s office; nor was any such property mentioned in his will. But locals still swear he owned a piece of the view.

  As much as Ruth made by exploiting his name and image, what was truly noteworthy was how much others made off him. Enterprising businessmen, with deep pockets and good lawyers, appropriated his name, betting he’d never find out about it or knowing there was nothing legally he could do about it.

  Bambino Pinto Beans from Mingo, Kansas? Big Hit Babe Ruth candy from Oconto, Wisconsin? Who’d ever heard of those?

  But nothing was as infuriating as the case of the Baby Ruth candy bar.

  For the better part of the two years, since Ruth and Walsh had decided to get in on the nut roll action—agreeing to license his name in December 1925 to produce Ruth’s Home Run bar to compete with the fifty to sixty similar confections already on the market—Walsh had been exhorting, cajoling, hectoring, and pestering executives and attorneys for the George H. Ruth Candy Company with marketing ideas, legal strategies, advertising campaigns, and, finally, pleas to be released from the contract. Although Walsh and Ruth were stockholders—Walsh had been named a director and the Babe a vice president with 5 percent royalties on sales—their relationship with the company was tenuous to say the least.

  They had negotiated the deal with Louis Glick, a candy manufacturer from Cleveland, who had approached them with the idea, in hopes of capitalizing on Baby Ruth’s notoriety, according to Curtiss’s attorneys. (Among them was Sylvester J. Liddy, the father of G. Gordon Liddy, who organized the burglary at the Democratic Party headquarters at the Watergate for Richard Nixon.)

  The Home Run bars were manufactured in Glick’s factories. William F. Eckhardt, his former employee, was named secretary and treasurer of the company. Though Eckhardt stated under oath that Glick had no role or interest in the company, it was to Glick that Walsh directed many of his appeals. The candyman dismissed Walsh’s suggestions as a matter of course and eventually ignored him altogether.

  The trouble began when the company sought trademark protection for “Ruth’s Home Run” bar and “Babe Ruth’s Own Candy” in June 1926. Curtiss immediately filed
an objection, claiming the Home Run bar unfairly infringed on its trademark, causing irreparable harm given its financial investment in the production and promotion of the Baby Ruth bar.

  Walsh embarked on a public relations campaign to gin up sympathy for the Babe, placing stories with friendly reporters in New York dailies. “Some months ago, a manufacturer brought out a confection bearing the magic name of Ruth,” George Daley wrote in the New York World. “It sold well. As the Babe is big and generous so was this lump of sweetness big and generous. But there was nothing in it for the Babe, although many fans bought it with the idea that he had something to do with its making. This manufacturer scoffed at Ruth’s contention that his name was being bootlegged and pirated. There was nothing George Herman could do about it. George Herman figured he might as well get some of it. He’s trying. What next? Most anything can happen in these highly commercialized days.”

  Walsh quickly realized that he had met his match in Otto Schnering, who was working as a piano salesman when he formed the Curtiss Candy Company in 1916 with four employees, a secondhand stove, and a five-gallon kettle in a rented space above a plumbing shop. He named the company after his mother in an effort to deflect anti-German bias.

  Chicago was not just the Windy City. It was also the candy capital of the country, the birthplace of Wrigley’s Gum (and the family that owned the Chicago Cubs), Cracker Jack, and the Oh Henry! bar. Schnering made Polar Bars, Jolly Jacks, Marsh-O-Nut Dipps, Honey Comb Chips, and the Kandy Kake bar—more pastry than candy bar. But he needed a name product in order to make a name for Otto Schnering.

  In 1919, just as Babe Ruth was giving Boston an intimation of the fullness of his powers, Otto reformulated the former Kandy Kake into the Baby Ruth and began telling poignant tales of Baby Ruth Cleveland’s visit to the factory that manufactured the bar in her honor—a convenient transposition of time and place for marketing purposes that would have required the reincarnation of the president’s daughter.