The Big Fella

by Jane Leavy

  Evidently, she was unaware that Ruth had sworn off the candy bars after losing the case in patent court. She attached a letter from Julia, which Dear Abby also printed, politely noting another reason for her father’s success—“his generosity and sincere appreciation of his fans.”

  Not to mention eye-hand coordination, muscle mass, and audacity.

  In 2002, Nestlé celebrated the seventy-fifth anniversary of Ruth’s sixtieth home run—as well as the beginning of a new baseball season—by announcing that “Baby Ruth, ‘America’s baby,’ embraces its heritage and association with baseball”—in other words, embracing the Babe’s merchandising clout without actually embracing him.

  Four years later, on June 6, 2006, Baby Ruth was designated the Official Candy Bar of Major League Baseball. The three-year agreement between Nestlé and Major League Baseball expired in 2008 and was not renewed. A decade later, Nestlé USA quit the candy business, selling off all its sweets, including Baby Ruth, to the European food conglomerate Ferrero for $2.8 billion in cash.

  Chapter 10

  October 18 / Sioux City

  5,000 S.C. FANS SEE BABE RUTH HIT A HOMER

  KINGS OF SWAT DISPLAY WARES

  GEHRIG FAILS IN GAME BUT GETS TRIO IN PRACTICE

  —SIOUX CITY JOURNAL

  "BABE" KNOWS WHERE TO READ SPORT NEWS

  —SIOUX CITY JOURNAL

  I

  The genteel gathering in the backyard of the Donohue residence at 3723 Jackson Street in the North Side neighborhood of Sioux City on the afternoon of October 18 looked like any other garden party except for the absence of libations and the presence of two men in baseball uniforms and a pony named Molly.

  Before the game scheduled for that afternoon, John “Jiggs” Donohue, cattleman and sports promoter, had brought Ruth and Gehrig home to meet the family: his wife, Jo, and her sister, Ursula, both in cloche hats popular with the flappers back east, and his posse of boys, the oldest, Jimmie and Phil, in full buckaroo regalia—plaid shirts, kerchiefs, billowing chaps, and cowboy hats—and Jack and Kenny in short pants and knee socks. The four-month-old twins, Tommy and Joanne, were inside fast asleep.

  Dudley Scott, owner of two movie theaters in Lemars, some twenty-six miles away, was recording the event with a 16mm camera that he sometimes used to shoot shorts he ran in advance of the main feature. He panned the crowd, capturing the guests milling under a canopy of trees: the two women wearing their Sunday best on a Monday afternoon; the men all in three-piece suits except Christy Walsh, in his trademark double-breasted gabardine, gnawing on a wad of gum. He doffed his hat for the camera but didn’t stop chewing.

  Young Phil, aboard Molly, a lovely piebald pinto with a crooked blaze on her nose, backed her hindquarters into Dudley Scott’s lens. His mother, heels sinking into the sod, pointed to the camera and gave Molly’s rump an encouraging shove. Phil turned her around and whipped her onto her hind legs, showing off for the Babe. It looked for a minute like Phil meant to lasso himself a hero. Ruth ducked out of range of Phil’s rope, raising his hands in self-defense.

  Next thing you knew: he grabbed Phil’s cowboy hat and mashed it down on his own large head. Phil was lucky he didn’t smash the crown the way he did the straw panamas of God knows how many unsuspecting gentlemen. Dontcha know not to wear a panama after Labor Day? (Ruth also liked water balloons, whoopee cushions, and hunting frogs with a light attached to the end of his rifle.)

  Babe grinned, the boy grinned back. A knowing look was exchanged. A deal brokered. Phil slid off his mount. And suddenly Ruth’s big right foot was in the stirrup and he was hoisting himself into the center of attention. Molly canted slightly under his weight, then righted herself brightly as he settled into the saddle, while Phil and his brother Jimmy stood by, stroking Molly’s nose and hoping for the best.

  Once, twice, three times he bounced up and down, trying to get comfortable. Molly staggered. Gehrig stood at her left flank, with two-year-old Kenny in his arms, a buttress against the Babe’s girth.

  Dudley Scott got it all: Gehrig grinning so broadly at the sheer contagious joy of Ruth’s impulsivity that it looked like his dimples might drill through his cheeks. This was the Babe at his best, serving the two masters whose authority he never defied: the need to please and the need to be seen.

  Sixty-five years later a snippet of film from that afternoon showed up in two HBO documentaries produced by George Roy, When It Was a Game 2 and Babe Ruth. A decade later, R. C. Raycraft, a filmmaker whose parents own the 3rd Sunday Market in Bloomington, Illinois, met an antiques dealer there who said he had home movies of Ruth and Gehrig to sell. Knowing that less than an hour of unrehearsed Ruth footage survived him, Raycraft bought the eight reels of 16mm film. On the seventh reel, spliced into aerial footage of Iowa farmland and Nebraska football games, Raycraft discovered 2:22 minutes of film shot in the Donohues’ backyard. A typed summary provided the date and the name of the cinematographer.

  Raycraft tracked down members of the Donohue family, who were puzzled by his find since they had assumed the only copy was the one stored in cousin Michael’s basement. He shared a bit of the footage with a reporter from the New York Times, who shared it with Ruth’s daughter Julia and her son, Tom. For two minutes, the man she still calls Daddy came alive, the catalytic force of his personality leaping from the screen.

  Raycraft hired a lip-reader to try to put words to the action. He was especially interested in those addressed to Scott when he turned the camera on the Babe for an especially tight close-up. The grin was usurped by pursed lips and a deeply furrowed brow. It seemed that all the light had gone out of his eyes.

  “Turn that fucking thing off,” was the lip-reader’s interpretation.

  II

  It was the era of silence. As far as most of the country was concerned, Ruth was as he appeared, a playful man-child; a family man, father of six-year-old Dorothy, who had been seen in widely disseminated photographs horsing around with her daddy at Fenway Park, feeding chickens at their farm in Sudbury, and most recently during Games 3 and 4 of the World Series at Yankee Stadium, where he hit home runs just for her.

  Until August 1925, Ruth had no fear of anyone saying otherwise. New York scribes, wise to Ruth’s ways with women and his relationship with a former showgirl named Claire Hodgson, rarely mentioned Helen in their copy anymore—unless she had been hospitalized again, having another breakdown or surgery for another undisclosed illness.

  But out-of-town writers queried him about her whereabouts. Arriving on the West Coast three days later, Ruth told Jack M’Donald of the San Francisco Call: “No, I didn’t bring the wife out on this tour. Any woman who would try and travel as far and often as we have would have been dead long ago.”

  M’Donald dutifully reported: “Ruth is a dutiful husband, called Mrs. Ruth, who is in New York, from his suite at the Whitcomb and chatted the dollars away.”

  He even vowed to give up his annual hunting and fishing forays for the pleasures of the familial hearth. “I’m content to sit around by the fireside in New York with the wife and kid.”

  By then, Babe and Helen had been legally separated for more than two years.

  Christy Walsh had worked very hard to keep the state of their union as quiet as an idyllic winter scene inside a child’s snow globe. He had confected for Babe and Helen and Dorothy a Currier & Ives tableau of family life in the off-season of 1922, packing them off to the homestead in Massachusetts. The old Perry Farm was known to locals as a party house, the town historian said.

  Sudbury was a miniaturist’s vision of a perfect New England town. Henry David Thoreau had walked its woods and knew its freshwater ponds as well as the Babe knew its watering holes from his days with the Red Sox. Twenty-nine miles from the Fens, Sudbury was close enough to be accessible and distant enough to afford cover for ballplayers who partied in lakeside cottages, and for members of the Jewish mafia, who used them as hideouts during Prohibition.

  Babe and Helen had spent the winter of 1917–1
8 in a small, sparsely furnished fishing camp on the banks of Willis Pond. Ruth called the place, loaned to him for life by its owner Bill Joyce, Ihatetoquitit. The one-room cottage was just twenty feet by fifty feet, and featured fold-down cots, a Franklin stove, Japanese lanterns, flags from all the nations of the world except Germany, and an upright piano that would become the holy grail of the Curse of the Bambino.

  Boston Globe baseball writer Melville E. Webb Jr. trekked through the snow that winter to report on the domestic bliss of Ruth’s country life, giving ample space to the Bunyonesque feats of the ax-wielding left-hander—a twenty-four-game winner in 1917 with thirty-five complete games in thirty-eight starts—who hauled half a birch tree to the cabin on his shoulder as easily as a hickory bat.

  As much as he may have hated to quit the place, it was not a suitable family home. So when they returned to Sudbury four years later, it was to a colonial farmhouse at 558 Dutton Road. Built in 1800, it was one of the oldest homes in the area, and set on 190 acres, with a millpond stocked with pickerel, a wood, a swamp, a pasture, an icehouse, a chicken house, and a cedar-shingle barn large enough to accommodate four horses and twelve cars.

  Ruth left his mark on the pine floorboards of the Gathering Room, where he dropped cigar ashes—a selling point for future real estate brokers, who made sure to include the “Historic ‘Babe Ruth’ cigar marks” in their sales brochures. The Babe made himself comfortable by selling off all the valuable antiques and hammering bats and balls into the walls. He called the place “Home Plate Farm.”

  Again reporters trekked through bucolic snowdrifts to witness the domestication of the Babe. They dutifully recounted the piles of wood he chopped, the pickerel he caught, the pranks he played, only some of which made it into print, and the schedule he kept, which involved spending as little time as possible in Sudbury.

  When Edward M. Thierry, reporting for the Scripps-owned Newspaper Enterprise Association, arrived three days before Christmas, Ruth explained that he went down to Manhattan every Monday through Thursday in his $9,600 limousine, making the two-hundred-mile trip in five and a half hours, which made the week go faster and the simple life less lonely. He had installed a special 55-gallon gas tank in the Packard so he could make the trip without having to stop on the way.

  A Globe photographer arrived one day hoping to catch Ruth in the process of withdrawing a really big fish from a hole in the ice. Short on time and patience in the cold, the enterprising photographer asked to borrow an already dead, very much frozen 22-inch pickerel caught earlier in the day by another fisherman, which they hooked to Ruth’s line and dropped through the ice. “When Babe pulled it out and held it up it looked as though it was thrashing about, all crooked,” the town historian reported. “It made a good picture.”

  Marshall Hunt of the Daily News arrived unannounced one day, having detrained in a blizzard in the middle of nowhere. He was lucky to hitch a ride to the Ruth place from the local undertaker, whose services he might otherwise have required. He found the Babe home alone in his pajamas making breakfast.

  Ruth performed his favorite parlor trick, involving another piano and the family cat. “He put a cat on a rocking chair,” Hunt recalled. “When the cat went to sleep, Babe opened the window nearby, discharged a shotgun out the window, and this cat made a magnificent leap, hit the floor once and up on top of the piano where he lit his landing gear out and, naturally, there were a few scratches.

  “I said, ‘What kind of cat is this if you can play the same miserable trick on him?’

  “He said, ‘I don’t know how long it’s gonna last; maybe this is the last.’”

  Helen was absent that day, as she so often was, and Ruth offered no explanation for her whereabouts. Even in this idyllic respite, she was an afterthought.

  Helen Woodford Ruth was a mysterious and ultimately tragic figure in Ruth’s life, an unfinished woman who married too young and died too early to become fully fledged. She was seen primarily through a camera lens—in brief flares of flash powder—and through a scrim of misinformation, some of it supplied by her young husband. He wrote El Paso, Texas, as her birthplace on a 1920 passport application when in fact Mary Ellen Woodford was a child of an Irish Catholic family, born in Boston on October 20, 1896. Westbrook Pegler recycled that falsehood in his August 1920 newspaper serial, adding that she was a student studying in Boston when they met.

  Even their wedding date became the subject of dispute. A widely reprinted wire-service story published the week of Helen’s death claimed they had been married in a double ceremony in Boston with friends in late 1914, not in Ellicott City, Maryland, where their marriage certificate remains on exhibit under glass at St. Paul Catholic Church. (No documentation for a Boston marriage could be found in Massachusetts or the Boston city archives.)

  For young George Ruth, the impulsive culmination of the whirlwind courtship was as much a pledge of conformity as it was to fidelity, neither of which he would be able to sustain. Their lives and ambitions would diverge as widely as their accounts of Dorothy’s birth.

  “The Doomed Marriage of George Herman Ruth & Helen Woodford”—as it is described in the church brochure—was a turbulent union pockmarked by car wrecks, infidelities, and loss.

  On the day Dorothy was introduced to the public, Helen told the New York Sunday News that they had lost three children, and pointed to their photographs, displayed on the mantelpiece of their Ansonia apartment. Neither their births nor their deaths had ever been publicly acknowledged. The News checked New York City records and found no births listed for the Ruths between 1920 and 1922.

  The only documented birth for George Ruth and Helen Woodford in Massachusetts records was a stillbirth on November 19, 1916, which was just a month before newspapers reported that she had been thrown from a car while joyriding with her husband in Boston. The accounts did not specify the month or date of the accident, which was first reported by the Baltimore Sun in December.

  Boston police had notified George Ruth Sr. by telegram, and he told the paper she had been pitched from the car, suffering serious internal injuries requiring hospitalization. The following day, the Chicago Daily Tribune reported that Helen was “in a delicate condition” at the time of the crash.

  Neighbors in Sudbury were not sure what to make of the missus. In the early days, when the Ruths lived in the Ihatetoquitit cabin, she was known to play a good game of whist and to be generous with milk and cookies for local children who came wanting to play with the Babe. She was a more remote figure when they resided at Home Plate Farm.

  “I am not sure that I can express my feelings toward Mrs. Ruth,” Forrest D. Bradshaw told Ruth’s biographer Marshall Smelser in a March 10, 1972, letter. “What dealings I had with her were very pleasant. She seemed to me that she was married to someone that she had to live with and had to be at his beck and call. She was much smaller than he was. She acted more like a servant or slave than a wife. I don’t know that Babe would have known how to treat a wife.”

  Bradshaw ran the local grocery store, where Ruth once bought all the out-of-date gourmet goods he had displayed in the front window that no right-thinking New Englander would have paid a nickel for—and spent $60 for the lot of it!

  He routinely bought two slices of top-of-the-round steak cut three inches thick for himself and hamburger for Helen and the chauffeur. “I think that his wife was afraid of him because there was never any argument, in the store, at least,” Bradshaw wrote. “She would sort of hold back and let him have his way. It was seldom that they came to the store together. When she came in it was mostly because the chauffeur had brought her down. I don’t recall that I ever saw her drive.

  “My wife thinks that her hair was auburn. She was small, as I recall, about 5 ft 6., medium build, say about 130 lbs. about 25, not beautiful, possibly attractive. Serious and brooding. I think Catholic, democrat, frugal, a girl that seemed to be lost.”

  Bradshaw thought Ruth was very much attached to Dorothy, who would remember the
years at Home Plate Farm as the happiest of her young life. She had her father to herself, and a nursemaid named Fanny, whom she called Mommy. (Later, long after Helen’s death, Fanny confided that Helen “couldn’t stand the pressure and loneliness of my dad being away so often,” Dorothy said in her memoir, and started to drink and take pills, but Dorothy was blissfully unaware at the time.)

  The winters, when he was there most often, were beautiful, with lots of snow. There were ninety chickens in the new henhouse, a horse, a cow, and two pigs. She had a terrier named Lollipop. Her daddy raised and bred white English pit bulls. But then Lollipop drowned in the ice pond and Daddy left, heading south three weeks early to take the baths in Hot Springs, Arkansas, and hit some golf balls in preparation for serious training.

  Boarding the train in New York on February 16, Farmer Ruth pronounced himself a changed man, telling the Hartford Times, “When I came down from frozen little Sudbury, Massachusetts, I left two things behind: the old limousine with the brass-buttoned, gold braided atmosphere it created last season and, get this, TWENTY-ONE pounds of flesh.”

  And now it seems that everybody is more interested in my stomach than my home runs. Even up there in that little Massachusetts town youngsters would ask about my weight and the day I left, the garage owner waited three hours for me to come by. When I did, he pulled out a tape measure and asked me to stand still while a wager was being decided.

  The measurement was two inches less than he had wagered, and so it cost him $20. I learned afterward that the fellow who won had visited my farm every day to see if I was actually chopping wood and working hard. I proved my reduced weight pretty well to the experts up there in Sudbury.