by Jane Leavy
His waist, Ruth bragged, had shrunk from 45 inches to a perfect 39 inches.
Mert Haskell, a young man who grew up on the farm next to Ruth’s, and with whom he had a good relationship, later told the Sudbury Town Crier that he had wielded the ax on the Babe’s behalf. “I’d do all the work and he’d sit there and drink beer and talk to me.”
III
The rehabilitation of the Babe lasted not much more than a month. In March, he was sued by his bookie for welching on a $7,700 gambling debt, and Dolores Dixon, the Manhattan shopgirl, made good on her threat to go public with the story of her pregnancy. Her hopes for a private settlement dashed, she sold a six-part series to a newspaper syndicate detailing the summer fling that ended with an alleged assault aboard a fishing boat off Long Island.
The March 14 headlines were as damning as Ruth was adamant in his condemnation of them: “Nineteen-Year-Old Girl Alleges Babe Is Cause of Her Impending Motherhood—Ruth Wires Attorney to Fight the Case.”
Phil Payne, managing editor of the New York Daily News, got Marshall Hunt on the phone in New Orleans and ordered him to confront Ruth. This was a first for Hunt, who thought his boss was a busybody with poor editorial judgment. “We were doing so much with Ruth,” he said. “I didn’t want to damage anything.”
It was also the first and last public allegation of the sort made against the Bambino. Given his liberal reputation with women, this is surprising, even to relatives—his grandson, Tom Stevens, wonders if the Babe was sterile.
Dorothy had a similar thought: If the Babe was so promiscuous, “Why don’t I have all these brothers and sisters popping up?”
(Asked why she and Babe never had any children, Claire Ruth told one family member, “It just didn’t happen.”)
Hunt knocked on Ruth’s door, reluctantly and apologetically. “He wasn’t mad at me, but he was kind of surprised that I barged up to his room that night and wanted to know these things,” Hunt told Kal Wagenheim. “But I did explain that the office wanted it. In fact, I said Phil Payne, the managing editor, kind of put the heat on me for the first time ever.
“Well, he didn’t invite me into the room, and we stalled around there, and finally he said, ‘I don’t want to say anything.’
“‘Well,’ I said, ‘that’s okay with me, Babe.’
“I immediately went back to my room and called up the office. I guess I talked with Payne. He seemed to think I should have milked the Babe, but he didn’t understand my end of it then. But he did later.
“I asked the Babe if he knew Dolores Dixon. He didn’t bat an eye and said, ‘No, I don’t know any dame named Dolores Dixon.’
“I said, ‘Take it easy now, Babe. Better think twice. Do you know her or not?’
“He said, ‘God damn it, I don’t know her.’”
Helen was with him when the story broke and stuck by him. Ruth summoned the Yankee writers to his suite, where they found him rocking the baby to sleep. “Nothing but a holdup game,” he said.
Ruth’s salary, and the money he earned outside the game, made him not only the highest-paid baseball player ever, but also the first worth blackmailing. He declared his intention to fight Dixon in court and ordered his lawyer, Hyman Bushel, to hire a private detective.
He was less solvent than his extravagances made him appear. He was still in the hole from the losses in Cuba and $9,000 in fines in 1922. Although the Yankees had refunded $415.80 for his tonsillectomy in 1922, laid out $620.51 to the sheriff of New York City for a judgment against Ruth involving the Automobile Association in May, and refunded another $1,500 fine, Ruth had still had to take a $5,000 advance on his 1923 salary in June and borrow $5,000 against his syndicate earnings in the fall to pay legal fees. The private eye was hard on her tail when Dixon’s lawyers finally filed their lawsuit on April 17. Yankee Stadium opened the next day.
Other teams had Fields and Parks and Yards and Grounds. The Babe required something grander. The Yankee Stadium, as it was known until the late fifties, was a great concrete-and-copper coliseum, whose antecedents were in ancient Greece and Rome. It rose out of raw earth and vacant lots on the east bank of the Harlem River in just 284 days.
The purchase of ten acres of shanty- and rubble-strewn landfill belonging to the William Waldorf Astor estate was announced on February 6, 1921. It had been the site of a Revolutionary War–era farm, a silent movie studio where cowboy pictures were made, and a lumberyard. A rusty sign for Mancuso’s Manufacturers was leaning against a ramshackle fence on the property when the deal was announced. A trickle of a stream, Cromwell’s Creek, ran 125 feet below. The floodplain and mud flats had been filled with Manhattan schist dug up when railroad tunnels were built below the Grand Concourse in 1905.
“Goatville,” John McGraw called it dismissively.
The Yankees did not disclose how much they paid the Astor estate. But according to team minutes dated March 1, 1921, the team paid $550,000 for the lot and $15,000 plus interest for two smaller parcels at the unpaved corner of River Avenue and 161st Street. According to Yankee accounting books, the cost of 11.6 acres in Goatville was $792,000. The location, Ruppert noted, had the advantage of being sixteen minutes from Grand Central by subway, and taunting distance from the Polo Grounds.
The Stadium was designed to inspire awe and built to accommodate Ruth’s left-handed power. The lopsided playing field tapered to just 275 feet down the left and right field lines that first year but was lengthened just a bit the following season. The original blueprints called for battlements to be installed above the third deck, but that proved too expensive even for the Yankees, who spent $2.5 million on their swanky new joint. Ruppert praised Cap Huston, a former Army engineer who supervised the project, for keeping the costs down, and promptly bought him out of his half of the team a month after opening day, a deal that had been announced the previous December.
A 15-foot-deep scalloped copper frieze hovering 109 feet above the playing field would have to suffice as an architectural signifier of monumentality, which the American Architect dismissed as “rather idiotic.”
It was a thoroughly modern facility with eight restrooms for men and eight for women (tastefully furnished with wicker chairs and dressing tables), and a 15-foot-deep brick-lined vault buried beneath second base housing electrical wiring, and telephone and telegraph equipment, so that a boxing ring and press area could function in the infield. It was constructed with 800 tons of rebar, 2,300 tons of mechanical steel, 950,000 feet of lumber, and one million brass screws, which held their own until a misguided modernization in 1974–75 did away with the elegant rotunda and archetypal frieze.
Star-spangled bunting draped the Stadium’s boxes for opening day on April 18, 1923. New York governor Al Smith threw out the first pitch at least ten times in order to accommodate all the photographers. John Philip Sousa led the Yankees and the Red Sox to the flagpole in deep center field and conducted the 7th Regiment Band in a pregame concert from left field. The place was so vast, twice the size of any other ballpark, that the music sounded to a New York Post scribe sitting upstairs in the press box as if he were hearing a Fifth Avenue parade from a building a block away.
“I’d give a year of my life if I can hit a home run in the first game in this new park,” the Babe said.
And so he did—the 198th of his career. The Red Sox outfielder backed up the hill in right field thinking, hoping, pretending he had a chance to catch the ball. When Ruth stepped on home plate, delicately for such a large man, the roar could be heard across the Harlem River in the Polo Grounds. “It would have been a home run in the Sahara Desert,” wrote the New York World’s Heywood Broun.
The announced attendance was 74,217, an astonishing number given that the Yankee Stadium had only 62,000 seats.
Fred Lieb dubbed it “The House That Ruth Built.”
Just like that, Dolores Dixon’s baby was relegated to fine print. Five days later, she recanted. The lawsuit was dropped when Ruth’s attorney produced a witness ready to testify
that the whole thing was a scam.
The Yankees arrived in Washington for their first visit to Griffith Stadium just as Ruth’s friend Jim Barton began an out-of-town run of his new show before its Broadway opening. It was called In the Moonlight then but would be renamed Dew Drop Inn by the time they got to the Great White Way. On Broadway, Barton would be best remembered for his role in Tobacco Road. In Yankee lore, he is best remembered for asking Claire Hodgson, a bit player in the company, but a very pretty girl, if she liked baseball. Why, yes, she replied, Ty Cobb was a client of her lawyer father back home in Athens, Georgia. In one of the several iterations told over the years about meeting her future husband, Claire said Barton extended an invitation to accompany him to the ball game, where he made an introduction to the Great Bambino.
Born Clara Mae Merritt, she had fled a failed early marriage for the footlights of New York. Claire was gorgeous and sassy and talked back, the way other women, Helen specifically, wouldn’t or couldn’t.
At not quite age fifteen, she had eloped with Frank Hodgson, the richest, most eligible bachelor in Athens, a gentleman caller more than twice her age. “She went off to marry him and left her schoolbooks behind the door as if she was going to school,” her daughter Julia Ruth Stevens said. “She and my biological father went off to get married and then she went off to school. That afternoon, he came to pick her up and my grandmother said, ‘Frank Hodgson, I told you I never wanted to see you again around this house.’
“He said, ‘Ma’am, I came to pick up my wife.’
“That stopped my grandmother.”
Julia was born on July 17, 1916. “He was all right up until I was born,” she said. “I came along and he started spending his nights at the Elks club. She said, ‘I’ve had enough of this.’”
In fact, Claire filed for divorce on June 3, 1919, charging Hodgson with habitual drunkenness, which he admitted, and verbal and physical abuse. According to the divorce petition, “He struck and beat her with his fists so forcibly as to bruise and discolor her face,” precipitating their immediate separation in the fall of 1917. The divorce was granted by jury trial on July 9, 1920. She received sole custody of Julia and three hundred dollars in alimony. She was granted permission by the court to remarry; he was not.
She left for New York with a hundred-dollar loan from a sympathetic member of the Hodgson family and a letter of introduction to Howard Chandler Christy—the bon vivant illustrator with an eye for a choice bit of calico. In the city of reinvention, Clara Mae introduced herself as Claire, a glamorous young widow of the South. “Mother was a dish,” Julia Ruth said. “So she went to the door with me. . . . He said, ‘Good, God, don’t tell me it’s another one of mine.’
“She told him she just wanted a job. He said, ‘Well, come right in and let me take a look at you.’
“He used her as a model. She had a friend who was on the stage and she told her, ‘They’re having a casting call tomorrow, why don’t you go and see if they can use you?’
“She went to the casting call and they picked her for the chorus line. Some people have said she was with the Ziegfeld Follies. Mother was very petite. The Ziegfeld girls were big girls.”
On a visit to Athens in 1922, Claire told her hometown paper that Christy helped her land a job with the Follies in 1918 and had arranged for her to pose as Lady Liberty for a Third Liberty Loan Drive poster drawn by Harrison Fisher. She described herself as “a three-or-four-line actress,” appearing in two movies, Fools First and Rough and Ready, in parts so small her name didn’t appear in the credits. She got a mention as an extra in the 1919 show The Magic Melody on Broadway and had toured the country in the road company of the Broadway hit Tangerine.
She was modeling in early April 1923—perched on the shoulders of a male model—in silk hose and heels while applying a coat of paint to a boat called The Pollywog. By the beginning of May, she was auditioning for the role of a lifetime as the future Mrs. Babe Ruth.
Which was much better than languishing in the ensemble of Dew Drop Inn, a play remembered chiefly for Jim Barton’s debut in blackface. Either Barton invited her and a girlfriend along to a party that night at the Babe’s hotel suite (the story Claire Ruth told in 1974) or the Babe sent the hunchbacked team mascot Eddie Bennett to the theater the next afternoon with an invite to the soiree. Either way she went after extracting a promise that she could bring a girlfriend along.
Babe told her the place would be lousy with people, which it was—most of whom didn’t know him and all of whom seemed intent on making sure his glass stayed full. She told him he drank too much.
First dame ever to tell him that.
He said she reminded him of Miller Huggins.
“I think the party would have gone on all night but around midnight I asked the bartenders to stop serving drinks,” she told the Buffalo Evening News in 1974. “I asked the bartenders to quit serving. I explained to everyone that the Babe had to get his sleep for the game the next day and suggested that the partygoers leave.”
A ballsy move from a tagalong chorus girl.
He said, “May I call on you in New York?”
And, according to her daughter, Julia, “She thought about it and said, ‘You may.’”
From then on—when he wasn’t on the road with the Yankees and she wasn’t on the road with the show—Ruth’s big maroon Packard was often spotted near the apartment she shared with her mother, Julia, and her two uncles at 219 West Eightieth Street.
Claire’s mother, Carrie Lou Merritt, was the disciplinarian. “Mean,” Julia said. “She did all the spanking.”
But she didn’t say a word to her daughter about keeping company with a married man. “And if she did, Mother didn’t pay attention,” Julia said. “And Daddy didn’t care. He was separated.”
Helen and Dorothy remained sequestered in Sudbury.
IV
Nineteen twenty-four was supposed to be the year of maturation. He was twenty-nine years old. “He’s beginning to grow up now,” manager Miller Huggins declared a month into the regular season.
Huggins spoke too soon. Or, it might be argued, not soon enough.
Two weeks after Huggins issued his happy prognostication, Yankee general manager Ed Barrow wrote an urgent appeal to Commissioner Landis asking him to intervene on behalf of the club. Ruth was gambling on the ponies again. The Yankees had paid $209.50 in May to the detective agency that followed him.
“We have been told that Ruth and several other Yankee players are ‘playing the races’ again,” Barrow wrote. “The chief offender, of course, is Ruth. The others are merely ‘piking’ along in a small way on ‘tips’ that Ruth has been receiving.
“The betting has not been done openly, therefore, we have been unable to take any action in the matter. Manager Huggins has had Ruth ‘on the carpet’ a couple of times but the player denied that he had done anything more than make an occasional small bet. Mr. Huggins is convinced, however, that Ruth has made and lost some large bets this spring. He has won some bets too, but most of them have gone against him.”
What was needed, Barrow said, was “a good stiff letter” from the commissioner telling Ruth “if he doesn’t cut it out you’ll take ‘drastic action’”—something stern enough to “scare him into stopping before he gets in too deep. The poor big simpleton hasn’t saved a dollar out of all the money he has made, and will in all probability wind up his baseball career flat broke.”
Letters of reproach and denial were exchanged with appropriate and unenforceable promises of reform. Ruth was not the leading man in the June 13 melee on the field in Detroit, but the mere possibility of his suspension merited a headline in the New York Times.
At the first whiff off misbehavior, Christy Walsh sprang into action. His efforts at imposing discipline, fiscal and otherwise, were flagging. There was no sending Ruth back to the farm or its woodshed in the middle of the season. And no one, it seemed, could make him salute and take orders either. But Walsh could at least align him with fo
rces that did.
Ruth had not served, nor had he been drafted into the Army, during World War I. As a married man, he was exempt from military service. He had, however, been the subject of an FBI investigation, an early lesson in the privilege and sting of notoriety. In October 1917, George A. Anderson, the United States attorney in Boston, received an anonymous tip that Ruth was a draft dodger. The matter was referred to the director of Military Enrollment and then on to the FBI, with Anderson’s request “that the investigation be made in a quiet way owing to the prominence of Mr. Ruth.”
A case was opened: “In re: George H. Ruth, alias Babe Ruth—Alleged Slacker.”
FBI agents visited his father’s saloon in Baltimore and reported back: “Ruth not registered in Baltimore. Information received from cafe he is supposed to own that his home is in Boston.”
The investigation was then turned over to a volunteer operative in Boston, who located his draft number. It had been a bum tip; the investigation was closed. But a paper trail had been created and the dossier remained on file, available to Landis in 1921 when he ordered his assistant to investigate Ruth’s service record as part of the barnstorming fiasco.
Three years later, with Ruth’s sullied reputation again under review by the commissioner, Walsh devised a preemptive strategy that established Ruth as a friend of law and order and an adjunct to military discipline—an association that would protect him should the file ever become public or his service questioned.
Everyone knew Ruth never followed orders. So Walsh decided to clothe him in the vestments of obedience and patriotism. In April 1924, he arranged a meeting at the home of General John J. Pershing, with whom he had begun the largely one-sided correspondence during his tenure in the Army Motor Pool. He suggested using Ruth as a recruiter for Pershing’s summer Citizens’ Training Camps.
This, Pershing agreed, was a pretty good idea.