The Big Fella

by Jane Leavy

  He was scheduled to address a dinner in New York in May with a thousand former Army officers in attendance. Back in his Manhattan office, Walsh wrote to the general with his latest brainstorm, putting Ruth forward as an after-dinner speaker. Granted, he wasn’t an orator, Walsh wrote, but had spoken at “similar occasions with credit.” He felt sure that Ruth would respond positively to a personal appeal from the general.

  Pershing politely demurred, saying he preferred to save Ruth for a more auspicious occasion.

  The next day, May 13, Ruth’s byline column in the New York American offered a sales pitch for the Citizens’ Training Camps, encouraging boys ages seventeen to twenty-four to join up for what he described as spring training for soldiers. He provided an address for potential candidates, suggesting they mark their envelopes “application through Babe Ruth.”

  A week later he enlisted in the 104th Field Artillery of the National Guard at high noon in Times Square, taking the oath of allegiance in a three-piece suit beside a gun carriage. Police reserves had to be called in to handle the mob.

  When the Yankees arrived in Washington a week after that, Private Ruth, in a hastily tailored uniform, reported for duty at the War Office, smartly saluting his commanding officer, General John J. Pershing. He went 3 for 8 in a doubleheader later that afternoon at Griffith Stadium.

  In gratitude, Walsh sent the general a desk blotter in the shape of a baseball, autographed by Babe Ruth, John McGraw, Miller Huggins, and Nick Altrock, with a note expressing his hope that it would facilitate the writing of the general’s war memoir.

  “A unique souvenir,” Pershing called it.

  From then on, Walsh never missed an opportunity to put Ruth in uniform. He addressed cadets at a Citizens’ Training Camp, caught baseballs dropped from the roof of the George M. Cohan Theatre in Times Square to benefit a fund for the widows and orphans of New York City policemen killed in the line of duty, practiced his marksmanship under the tutelage of Medal of Honor winner Samuel Woodfill, signed up with the New York City Police Auxiliary, and conducted military drills in June 1927 on Governors Island with little boys armed with wooden bats.

  As hoped, the displays of discipline distracted attention from his misbehavior, which didn’t seem to detract from his performance at all in 1924. He was splendid, leading the major leagues in batting average, slugging percentage, and on-base percentage in the American League. The Yankees, who finished second two games behind the Washington Senators, never got around to disciplining him.

  Huggins assured Mark Roth, the team’s traveling secretary, that he would find the right time and place to address Ruth’s chronic tardiness and impertinence. But then Ruth would hit another two home runs and the manager would lose the initiative. “Now?” Roth said, nudging Huggins in a Chicago elevator as Ruth headed out for a night on the town.

  “Shut up,” Huggins replied.

  Another time, also in Chicago, Huggins hovered by the clubhouse door, vowing to confront Ruth when he breezed in late yet again. But then, seeing the room enlivened by his arrival, Huggins hesitated. “You going to speak to him?” Roth said.

  “Sure,” Huggins replied.

  And he did.

  He said, “Hiya, Babe.”

  V

  It takes a lot of agility for a big man to get off a small horse without looking silly, which may explain why Dudley Scott’s camera was turned off when Ruth alighted from the pony Molly that afternoon in Sioux City. A still photo of the moment, sold by International Newsreel, caught the anguished look on his face when he realized his predicament. The photo, accompanied by a pithy caption—“Ride ’Em, Big Boy, Ride ’Em!”—showed up in the New York American and the New York Evening Journal, and in two of the cities they had yet to visit. Editors elaborated at will. In the Evening Journal, “Babe wanted to ride the pony, but the pony wouldn’t stand for it.” In the San Francisco Examiner, the reluctant Babe was coaxed into the saddle by the Donohue boys. “Babe feared his weight would be too much for the little horse, but he was assured the pony was ‘tough.’ We don’t know whether the photographer tricked this picture, but Ruth really looks bigger than the pony.”

  This was the predicament of the size of his fame: every gesture, grimace, and offhand remark could catch up with him. For someone described by New York Times reporter John Drebinger as “the most uninhibited man” he’d ever met, learning discretion was not just difficult, it was antithetical to his entire being. But he was trying.

  Claire was cooperatively mum. Even if she got wind of the gossip that reached the smallest-circulation dailies like the Town Talk of Alexandria, Louisiana, in early 1927, there was nothing she could do or say about it. “Babe Ruth, batting his eyelashes before Hollywood movie cameras, says he prefers blonds. We thought it was bonds. The Babe is batting a thousand for popularity honors. He plays right field at a dinner party almost every night.”

  As for Helen, she was like disappearing ink. After his visit to her in the hospital in March on the day he returned from California, there was no mention of her in any of the papers, no follow-up on her condition or her whereabouts. She was subsumed by the cacophony of loud headlines generated by news of the three-year contract he had signed for 1927–29. At season’s end she made the obligatory wifely appearance at the World Series with Dorothy and then disappeared again.

  And so, apparently, Walsh felt confident enough to allow John B. Kennedy to tag along on the barnstorming tour. That fall, he was also working on a football story for Collier’s, “The Halfback of Notre Dame,” which gave him an entrée to Rockne and Walsh. The Rock liked the article enough to make Kennedy his de facto ghostwriter. His eight-part series for the magazine, published in 1930, would be hastily assembled as a posthumous autobiography when the Notre Dame coach died in an airplane crash in 1931.

  Walsh could count on Kennedy to craft a credulous story, which was timed to run with the opening of the new baseball season. He called it “Innocents Abroad,” and cast Ruth as a wise elder, tutoring innocent Lou on the pitfalls of dames and fame. “The Babe led Gehrig in avoiding all but the necessary lionizing,” Kennedy wrote, “and ladies in waiting were completely out of luck.”

  When one such lady, professing a “personal friendship,” reached Ruth on the phone in their hotel suite in Omaha, Kennedy dutifully recounted Ruth’s refusal to take her call, not once but twice, putting her off by putting her on the line with Gehrig, whom he called his social secretary. “‘See Lou,’ Ruth moralized. ‘You’ve got to be careful who you talk with and what you say.’”

  Chapter 11

  October 19 / Denver

  "MY FRIEND, YOU NEVER LEAVE WHITE SPACE. YOU ALWAYS FILL IT."

  —DAMON RUNYON TO WALLY PIPP ON THE DAY HE TOOK HIMSELF OUT OF THE YANKEE LINEUP BECAUSE OF A HEADACHE

  "VENI, VIDI, VICI"

  —OTTO FLOTO, DENVER POST

  I

  Otto Floto, sports editor of the Denver Post, made himself at home in the suite he had reserved for Ruth and Gehrig at the Brown Palace Hotel. Floto, who was hired on at the Post because one of the paper’s owners liked the sound of his name, was on familiar terms with Ruth, who had wired ahead to ask a favor. “Please have dining car steward lay in supply of buffalo meat. I want to give Lou a thrill and a good feed.”

  Floto’s sports section provided a reliable home for Ruth’s column, and the Post, as sponsor of the game at Merchants Park, was an enthusiastic cheerleader for Walsh’s Symphony of Swat. In one pregame puff piece, Floto reprinted verbatim correspondence from Joe Bihler in Walsh’s New York office demanding “GOOD BASEBALLS”—“the finest grade, most expensive baseballs—in other words, the Spalding National league or the Reach American league ball.” (Both endorsed by Ruth.)

  The failure of either of the Bustin’ Twins to hit a home run in Des Moines had resulted in poor reviews, with the Des Moines Register calling the game “a baseball atrocity,” which Walsh attributed to inferior baseballs and overindulging at a pheasant dinner hosted by Gehrig’s fra
ternity brothers.

  Floto dutifully reported Walsh’s promise of a rivalry between Ruth and Gehrig “just as intense as was the rivalry of the Yanks and the Pittsburghs in the recent World’s Series.”

  Having appointed himself flack and consort for the day, Floto greeted the party at Union Station, where three thousand people, including tribal elders bearing ceremonial headdresses, awaited, then escorted them to their hotel, where he recorded a scene of tender friendship and harmony “such as grows up only between few men.”

  Floto was a barely literate drunk who loved three-syllable words but eschewed punctuation, according to one of his successors, Woody Paige. He wrote about fights he secretly promoted, claimed to have discovered Jack Dempsey, giving him leave to announce himself on the section masthead as “dean of boxing writers,” brawled with the legendary Wild West gunman turned sportswriter Bat Masterson, married a bareback rider performing in the eponymously named “Floto Dog and Pony Show” (funded by the Post), and hired a young local writer by the name of Alfred (Damon) Runyon to ghostwrite his columns.

  In short, he fit Paul Gallico’s retrospective assessment of his former colleagues in the fun and games department: “One grade above the office cat.”

  Floto knew Walsh and Ruth well enough to have been granted an audience with the pajama-clad King of Swat on the roof deck of St. Vincent’s Hospital when he was recuperating from surgery in May 1925. His former assistant, Gene Fowler, was one of Walsh’s most trusted spooks. No doubt Floto took Ruth’s inscription on the obligatory photo—“To my friend, Otto Floto”—to heart and would not have seen anything wrong with documenting the friendship in print.

  When the Yankees headed south in the spring of 1927 without the Babe, who was then still holding out for a hundred thousand dollars a year, Floto, who had a fondness for Big Top similes, opined that this was like “the circus coming to town without its clowns.” He put forth the novel suggestion that the owners of the other seven American League teams contribute twenty-five thousand to Ruth’s salary.

  Far be it from Otto Floto to commit journalism on the day Ruth and Gehrig came to town. He solemnly recounted the jig Lou danced upon reaching their hotel and reading the telegram bearing the news that his mother had finally been released from the hospital. And the moisture in Babe’s eyes as he whispered, “You know, every town we go into, immediately on arrival he writes to his mother and what a wonderful thing it is to have a mother at his age. You know, I was unfortunate enough to lose my mother when I was a mere tot in Baltimore.”

  Otto Floto reliably reported the misstatement of fact, true only in Ruth’s heart. After all, Floto wrote, it was a privilege to be with him.

  II

  Sportswriting in the age of jazz journalism was “a low form of art,” said Stanley Woodward, the venerated sports editor of the New York Herald Tribune. You couldn’t get much lower than Otto Floto, who was a one-man circus of ballyhoo.

  This in no way made Otto exceptional. Today’s conflicts of interest were yesterday’s norms: the “sugaring” of writers—paying money under the table to guarantee coverage of events or personalities—was a given; press releases were routinely printed as copy; beat writers traveled and ate on the team’s dime; reporters for afternoon papers moonlighted for morning papers, padding their bank accounts while bringing a certain sameness to the coverage of the day’s events.

  Not everyone in the business bowed to the status quo. Protests by the Baseball Writers’ Association of America about the proliferation of ghostwriting since its debut at the 1911 World Series had been lodged with the baseball commissioner. It was one of the practices responsible for the establishment of the American Society of News Editors (ASNE) and its code of journalistic ethics in 1922.

  Sportswriters in the golden era committed as many sins against language as they did against journalistic propriety. Contrary to the received wisdom, purple prose wasn’t invented in the press box at Yankee Stadium. “Weighty openings and grand declarations often / Have one or two purple patches tacked on, that gleam / Far and wide,” the Roman poet Horace wrote in Ars Poetica in give or take 19 BC.

  Stanley Walker, editor of the New York City Herald-Tribune, was responsible for the linguistic division of sportswriters into two camps: “gee whiz” and “aw nuts.” The golden era was heavy on gee whiz, and Grantland Rice, an erudite practitioner of press box poesy, was its poet laureate. He was also the most widely syndicated and imitated sportswriter in the country, best remembered for his 1908 homage to the alumni of Vanderbilt football: “For when the one Great Scorer comes to write against your name, / He marks—not that you won or lost—but how you played the Game.”

  Rice was unequivocal about his mandate: “When a sportswriter stops making heroes out of athletes, it’s time to get out of the business.”

  For Rice, Ruth was the Crown Prince of Verdun. For Paul Gallico, he was the American Porthos. For Otto Floto, he was the Julius Caesar of home-run hitters, who provided “the big music, the blare of trumpets and the crash of cymbals stuff.”

  They wrote from above, literally, filing dramatic set pieces from the remove of the press box without descending to the level of conversation or inquiry. Gallico said he covered sports as parable, contests between good and evil, not, say, the Yankees versus the Pirates. As the boxing writer Larry Merchant once told New York Times columnist Robert Lipsyte, “If sportswriters back then had asked questions, we would know whether Babe Ruth really pointed to the stands before his home run in the 1932 World Series.”

  Occupying the other end of the press box were the “aw nuts” reformers also known as knockers, led by the curmudgeonly Westbrook Pegler, W. O. McGeehan (the only writer, Walsh said, to rebuff his offer to join his staff of ghosts), and McGeehan’s former editor Heywood Broun, who once informed his staff that if a “reporter finds out that a baseball player struck out with the bases loaded because he was out on a beer party the night before the game, that’s the story I want.”

  Reporters who filed for morning papers had no time to ask questions; those who wrote for afternoon dailies had the leisure to look for “color” but never quoted anyone the way they actually talked.

  That left an open field for Walsh’s ghosts. Ford Frick, who channeled the Babe for the better part of ten years, never expressed any conflict about the conflict of interest at the center of his dual career: not in private correspondence (now on file at the Hall of Fame), nor in any of his newspaper work, nor in any of the many articles written about him after he became baseball commissioner. In a single aside in his 1973 autobiography, he mentioned “doing a little ghosting for Jedgie.” He cast his lot with the mediums and never looked back. “It’s easy to be a debunker,” he said. “But why do it? That’s the thing I can’t understand.”

  III

  It began with a gurgle, then a cramp, then a pain so acute that it felled him as he did his roadwork in Hot Springs, Arkansas, in the spring of 1925.

  In retrospect, the “bellyache heard round the world” in April 1925 would prove a turning point for both Ruth and the writers who covered him. The story became a season-long feeding frenzy, a steady diet of column inches about Ruthian excess.

  The gastric crisis was inevitable. Inevitable because everything about him had become overstated: the meals, beer, pounds, spending, and even the linguistic entitlements. He had begun speaking of himself in the third person, a disease that has become endemic to the modern locker room. “The Babe can’t disappoint his fans,” he declaimed the day before he passed out in Asheville, North Carolina, as the Yankees headed north from spring training.

  And it was “heard round the world,” in McGeehan’s felicitous phrase, because of the proliferation of New York City tabloids and because of the echo chamber created by the evolving mass media. The coverage was as feverish as the Babe when it all caught up with him.

  Ruth had shown up in Hot Springs for what would prove to be the last Babe Boil more zaftig than ever, weighing in at 256 pounds. The Yankees had al
ways sanctioned these pre-spring-training trips. In fact, Marshall Hunt later confessed to having been a party to Ruth’s contract negotiation in a Hot Springs hot tub, offering advice to both sides, and witnessing the Babe signing while stark naked and sopping wet.

  Soaking and sweating and then soaking some more, he lost thirty pounds in less than a month. Weakened by “too rapid a reduction in fat,” as the Evening Graphic put it, he collapsed one day in acute pain while running the hills outside town. He nonetheless found the energy to entertain “two damsels who may or may not have been professionals of one kind or another,” the Daily Mirror observed.

  The Yankees had moved their spring training camp from New Orleans to St. Petersburg that year. Nothing went right from the moment he got to Florida. There were alligators in the outfield. He broke a finger on his left hand making a catch. And then Helen and Dorothy showed up.

  The marriage was foundering and had been for some time. Reporters had overheard Babe and Helen quarreling in New Orleans in 1923 when she stood by him throughout the Dolores Dixon debacle. “I wish you would blow back home,” Ruth told her. “You certainly cramp my style.”

  He was on his best behavior two years later in St. Pete while Helen and Dorothy were around but broke loose as soon as they left. He went on a bender with Steve O’Neill, one of the four baseball-playing O’Neill brothers he knew from Scranton, who became a regular playmate when he joined the Yankees in 1925. And, Ruth played day and night despite increasing chills, a chest cold, stomach cramps, and a fever. Arriving in Asheville on April 7 after a long and winding train trip through the Great Smoky Mountains, he collapsed in the station waiting room and announced he wanted to go home.

  “He was right in front of me,” Marshall Hunt told Kal Wagenheim. “He collapsed in Steve O’Neill’s arms. He fell against a steam radiator there and then down on the floor. Ford Frick was with him. I said to Ford, ‘I don’t think he’s faking this time.’”