The Big Fella

by Jane Leavy

  Hunt borrowed a camera and “got a beautiful shot of him propped up in bed, took it down and gave it to a Pullman porter. The paper had it the next day all over pg. 1.”

  He was said to be suffering from boils, flu, and indigestion brought on by an onslaught of hot dogs. The New York Evening Journal published a photo with twelve numbered franks superimposed on his belly.

  The Yankees insisted he stay behind and installed scout Paul Krichell as his minder and personal shopper. The only nightclothes he could find were size 42—six sizes too small—and pink. Word reached the Big Apple that the “King’s Pajamas” had to be split down the back in order to fit, qualifying him for his debut in the new New Yorker magazine. He was “The Talk of the Town.”

  When he finally headed north, a missed connection in Salisbury, Maryland, meant that he failed to arrive in Washington at the appointed time. News flashed around the world to London, where one newspaper pronounced him dead. The obituary made note of his recent abdication of a belt in favor of braces, a concession to his expanding girth.

  He wired Helen: “Meet me. The report that I am dead is a lie. Love.”

  En route to New York, he rallied, and availed himself of a light breakfast of bacon and eggs, juice, toast, coffee, and four porterhouse steaks, according to the newly vigilant New Yorker. He collapsed again, this time in the washroom, hitting his head against the basin of the sink as the train approached Manhattan on the afternoon of April 9. Somehow Krichell and the train’s private detective got his unconscious bulk back into his berth.

  Bulletins were issued; editions were held; headlines blared: “Ruth Shakes Off Coma,” “Babe’s Doctor Denies Brain Injury,” “Relapse Followed Fried Potatoes for Breakfast.”

  Helen and a friend arrived with Walsh to meet his train at Pennsylvania Station. The scene resembled something out of a Harold Lloyd comedy except for the severity of his condition. The first ambulance broke down. A congregation of press, police, and other interested parties gathered, including Rube Marquard and Jesse Barnes, heading north with the Boston Braves. They were turned away from his train car when they asked to pay their respects. Ruth was still unconscious.

  Another ambulance was called. The window in his sleeping compartment had to be removed in order to accommodate the Babe-laden stretcher. Finally, at 2:30 p.m., he was lifted through the window, taken down in the baggage elevator, and loaded into the ambulance, where he went into convulsions.

  Six attendants were required to hold him down.

  Sedatives were administered. Helen and Walsh accompanied him in the ambulance for a silent-movie ride downtown. The vehicle’s “bell” had failed, making it one of the few times Ruth went anywhere anonymously.

  Damon Runyon wrote in the American: “The ‘Big Bam’ just about beat a long throw from old Death, the outfielder in Life’s game. He slid in safe over the home plate of hospital rest and medical attention.”

  At St. Vincent’s Hospital, Walsh barred everyone from his room except Helen, Dorothy, and Ed Barrow. Even Jake Ruppert was kept at bay. Ruth rallied on a diet of poached eggs but continued to run a fever. A week after he arrived, the Yankee team doctor Edward King informed the press that Ruth had developed an intestinal abscess and would undergo surgery on April 17.

  Overnight the most accessible public personage in the United States became the least available. All updates on his condition would henceforth come from the Yankees, or from his doctors with the team’s approval, which meant little if any information would be forthcoming about the diagnosis or the procedure beyond its duration (twenty minutes) and its success (it was successful).

  That morning Jack Conway had reported in the New York Daily Mirror that Ruth’s condition resembled “a fistula.” The editors crowned the story with an ominous headline: “Feeling Grows That Babe Is Critically Ill.”

  (A fistula is an opening that allows gastric fluids to be discharged through the lining of the stomach, intestines, or colon, which can result from genetic diseases such as Crohn’s disease. According to Doris Keil-Shamieh, a distant cousin on Ruth’s father’s side of the family, inflammatory bowel disease, including Crohn’s, runs in her family.)

  The indolent sporting press propelled itself into a state of high dudgeon.

  Paul Gallico demanded that the Yankees allow one pool reporter to see Ruth once every day, warning that ink-starved wretches would inevitably start smelling rats, speculating about sinister causes and doubting “the communiqués that the Yankee offices have issued.”

  This was a first. Reporters were accustomed to believing what they were told, not reporting what they were told not to, and having complete access to Ruth. They besieged Barrow for details, who let it be known, off the record, that a social disease—not ballpark wieners—was the source of the infection. Even if Barrow’s diagnosis was accurate, Ruth would hardly have qualified as the first or last baseball player to contract such an ailment. More to the point, the diagnosis doesn’t match the cure. Surgery has never been a typical treatment for syphilis or gonorrhea. Claire Ruth, in her 1959 memoir, The Babe and I, posited yet another cause, which she said was too delicate to name at the time—a torn groin muscle.

  Whatever the diagnosis, Gallico wrote in his 1938 valedictory Farewell to Sport, the most remarkable feature of Ruth’s illness was the sympathy pains experienced by the vox populi: “A baseball player lay close to death and an entire nation held its breath, worried and fretted, and bought every edition of the newspapers to read the bulletins as though the life of a personal friend or a member of the family were at stake.”

  Doctors prescribed a liquid diet and solitary confinement. Hard to say which was the greater deprivation. No telegrams, no telephone calls, no visitors, Ruth complained to sports editors in a note blaming his unaccustomed silence and the absence of his promised columns on “hospital censorship.” It was published beside his first column upon his return to his literary labors: a cri de coeur on behalf of fat people, who hurt just as much as skinny ones in encounters with a surgeon’s blade.

  Nonetheless, he improved.

  Then, at 5:00 P.M. on the afternoon of April 24, at the entrance to St. Vincent’s Hospital, while in conversation with Dr. King, Helen Ruth collapsed.

  This was no swoon. This was a crack-up. Wire service stories spread the news with bells and clatter in newsrooms across the country. “Mrs. Babe Ruth Suffers Complete Nervous Breakdown.”

  She was admitted “in a nervous condition, brought on by worry over her husband’s illness,” King informed reporters.

  No one questioned the official explanation.

  She was confined to a room in the same wing of the hospital as her hubby and may or may not have seen his June “as told to” published in the Evening Graphic, in which he said, among other things: “It’s rather funny but the truth is that a home run is the nearest I ever got to a home. I have never known the pleasures of a home, a real home with the care and love of a mother.”

  It could not have improved her condition.

  He was released on May 25. His six-week stay in the hospital cost the Yankees $1,107.03 and the American League pennant. He returned to the lineup on June 1. It was something of an omen when, in the fourth inning, he was thrown out trying to score from first base on a double by Bob Meusel. He landed on home plate like a seal on a sandbar at low tide.

  IV

  The summer of 1925 was a sulky, desultory time for Ruth and the Yankees. The dark mood in the clubhouse was understandable. Languishing in the standings, the Yankees would finish seventh in the American League. Ruth’s mood was harder to comprehend: antic and manic, he ate and drank his way through June, July, and August, defying common sense and managerial dictates with a vengeance that was as selfish as it was self-destructive.

  When Brother Paul, superintendent of St. Mary’s, saw Ruth in Washington during the first week of June, the Babe confided that his legs swelled every afternoon and ached every night. Brother Paul advised him to sit out the rest of the season. When B
ig Matt had dinner with the Babe in New York shortly before the Yankees left for a fifteen-game road trip on August 14, “he found him still worried about his physical condition but hopeful,” Brother Paul told the Baltimore Evening Sun, and “apparently in the best of spirits.” Or so Matthias said.

  Yankee management was not so guileless.

  The inevitable and belated confrontation occurred when he showed up late for a game against the Browns in St. Louis on August 29 after staying out all night. “Don’t bother getting dressed, Babe,” Huggins said. “You’re not playing today.”

  BABE RUTH OUSTED; $5,000 FINE

  —NEW YORK SUNDAY NEWS

  He was suspended indefinitely, prompting questions in 24-point type about whether he had a future with the Yankees, and giving Joe Patterson, the publisher of the News, an opening to run the story every baseball writer in New York had been sitting on since Ruth’s car had been spotted nightly parked outside Claire Hodgson’s West Side apartment.

  Today’s scoops were the chum of press-box gossip—but nothing more—for yesterday’s sportswriters who, paradoxically, knew their subjects far better and wrote far less than their modern counterparts; today, reporters are expected to divine their inner thoughts while kept at a galactic remove by media-relations staffers who dole out access like carbohydrates.

  The writers who covered the Babe with centripetal force didn’t want to risk their entrée, as Marshall Hunt patiently explained to his managing editor after the Dolores Dixon affair. And as Richards Vidmer, of the Times, told Jerome Holtzman, he didn’t want to hurt anyone. (Later, as a reporter for the Herald-Tribune, he would keep Lou Gehrig’s ALS diagnosis to himself.)

  Maybe, too, they didn’t want anyone to know how much fun they were having. So the best stories went untold.

  Like the night Vidmer found ten message slips from the Babe under his hotel room door telling him to come on up for a nightcap—or twelve. Vidmer pointed out he was still hungover from the previous evening. “Well, goddammit, last night we killed a bottle of scotch between us and I had two home runs today,” Ruth replied.

  Or the time Ruth asked an elderly woman on the porch of a Hot Springs Hotel whether beer made her urine sudsy. “God, you gotta watch your talk, Babe,” admonished one of the reporters within earshot. To which Ruth replied: “Oh, for Christ sake. I used the word ‘urinate’ didn’t I?”

  The time he was chased stark naked through a train car by a woman, equally naked and armed with a knife, who was said to be the wife of a state legislator. In legend, Babe had told her she was the only one.

  The time a good-looking woman with a baby under her arm ventured close enough to the Yankee train for the Babe to give her a once-over. “Better get away from here, lady, or I’ll put one in the other arm.”

  The time he arrived in St. Louis and instructed the cabdriver to take him to the House of the Good Shepherd, a favorite destination in the red-light district, and the request was bellowed from the taxi line up and down the sidewalk for all to hear.

  The time in St. Petersburg, Florida, he disappeared into the woods with a voluptuous redhead, a member of a chorus line performing for the city’s dignitaries and their wives. Emerging hand in hand some twenty minutes later, Ruth and friend took their places among the invited guests. “Some were giggling inside,” Hunt told Kal Wagenheim. “Some were so shocked they couldn’t talk.”

  Occasionally, during late-night spring training fishing trips arranged by Hunt, Ruth would remember to ask, “You’re not writing this, are you?”

  To which Hunt would reply: “Good God, when are you gonna learn? Off hours, Babe, off hours.”

  Everything was off the record—unless Ruth went overboard. Sure enough, one night he did. Hunt wrote that story and sent a copy to general manager Ed Barrow, who was on the phone at 9:00 the next morning, screaming.

  “Let’s get this straight,” Hunt told him. “He’s fishing on his own. I’m fishing. We just happen to be together in a boat.”

  “Did you invite him?”

  “I invited him, yes. But I’m not responsible for him falling in.”

  “Well for God’s sake, knock it off for a while, will you?” Barrow said. “We’re not over spring training and we gotta get that Big Baboon back to New York in one piece.”

  The era of protection came crashing to an end on August 31, 1925, when Patterson lifted the de facto embargo on reporting about Ruth’s mistress, Claire Hodgson, and splashed her heavily painted kisser on the front page of New York’s biggest-circulation newspaper.

  The photo was sent to the Chicago Tribune and the Los Angeles Times via Telepix. Overnight, Claire’s slim, elegant silhouette—with a swath of alabaster décolletage visible at the collarbone and pert lips pursed in a slight pout—was everywhere. You could almost smell the Bellagio perfume that she preferred—and that Babe sometimes used in lieu of cologne—leaping from the page.

  Hers was the face that launched a thousand headlines. The ménage à Ruth took New York City’s fifteen dailies and approximately 3,625,922 readers hostage for a week. “Slightly more than 82,000 words written over four days” or “four times the amount in ‘Much Ado About Nothing,’” the New Yorker reported in its September 19 issue.

  The magazine’s fact-checkers credited the Evening Journal with 10,350 words, closely followed by the Telegram and the Times with 9,000 words each, not including, according to Paul Gallico’s jovial estimate, 396,578,298,400 editorials.

  And that was just in New York.

  By linking Huggins’s condemnation of Ruth’s “off-the-field misconduct” to his previously unreported relationship with Claire, a baseball story about a .266 hitter quickly became something much bigger and much more modern: “Fandom Tip Links Babe’s New Woes with Family Rift.”

  The first shot across the bow was a blind item in the News on August 30 in which “the Babe was asked about a fair fan, whom fans in the neighborhood of St. Petersburg, Fla., last winter noticed as being one of his most fervent admirers. He flushed brick red and seemed highly embarrassed.”

  He was also asked “about a reported quarrel at a Boston hotel, when Mrs. Ruth packed her trunks and told the wife of another player she was ‘through.’”

  The next day Patterson upped the ante, naming Claire as “the fair fan” and planting her picture on page 1. Julia remembered returning from an outing with her mother and the camera flash in the vestibule of their apartment at 315 West Seventy-ninth Street. “They had it in the Daily News the next day. I can’t remember how they put it: ‘Babe’s new girlfriend’ or something.”

  Claire was something, all right, alternately and alliteratively described as an “ardent admirer,” a “fervent admirer,” a “pretty admirer,” a “fair friend and admirer,” a “party hostess,” “the merry widow,” “the rich widow,” “the lady in the case,” and “the party of the second part.”

  Ruth made the front page in Chicago when he impulsively cashed in the train ticket the Yankees had purchased for New York and headed north instead to plead his case with Commissioner Landis, who was out of town and unlikely to have provided a sympathetic ear.

  The Tribune’s headline was far more daring and damning than any in the New York papers: “BABE RUTH, MAD, DENIES ORGIES.”

  Ruth admitted to having stayed out all night—with “friends”—in Cleveland, Chicago, and St. Louis, but only once in each city. Perhaps he didn’t realize the Yankees had their private eye on his tail. He parried the allegations and issued ultimatums, turning his ire on his manager—“It’s him or me!” Huggins was incompetent and worse, a .210 hitter.

  In fact, Huggins hit .265 during thirteen years in the National League and once led the league in on-base percentage. He was “a scrawny little man, touched by baseball genius,” Frank Graham wrote. No matter. Ruth swore he would never play for him again.

  “Let Ruth quit,” Huggins, Barrow, and Ruppert replied in resounding unison.

  “Ruth, bah!” said a teammate in St. Louis.

&nb
sp; In Chicago, Ruth had plenty to say: “He has been laying for a chance to get me and I gave it to him by staying out until 3:30 A.M. on Saturday in St. Louis,” Ruth told the Tribune. “As for the drinking charge, he’s a liar.”

  By way of explanation Ruth pointed out: “Anyway, it was too hot to sleep in St. Louis.”

  “Why that fine is a joke,” he continued. “They don’t give bootleggers $5,000 and men get out of murder charges for less. I haven’t killed anybody.

  “They think I haven’t been hitting ’em because I have been dissipating. I know why I have fallen off. For one thing, I tried to play before I was fully recovered from my recent illness. I was out so long that I needed a regular training trip to put me in trim. A man can’t jump from a hospital cot and into a baseball uniform and hit .350.”

  The Tribune also offered the first plausible explanation for Helen Ruth’s nervous breakdown in April. “Mrs. Hodgson in her solicitude for Ruth’s health is said to have called on Babe at the hospital during the latter’s recent illness. Mrs. Ruth also was a patient in the hospital at the same time.”

  The dam broke, propriety drowned in a flood of innuendo and pent-up reportage. Hearst’s Daily Mirror brazenly trumpeted new details of the “mystery diagnosis” that landed Ruth in St. Vincent’s Hospital in April: “The secret could not be kept, however, from Mrs. Ruth, who is reported to have in the shape of doctors’ reports material for successful prosecution of a divorce action.”

  Helen, who had been regularly briefing reporters by telephone between Broadway shows and denying reports that she intended to sue for separate maintenance, took to her bed at the Concourse Plaza Hotel overlooking Yankee Stadium. She was said to be suffering from another, albeit partial, nervous breakdown and an infection of the ring finger on her left hand, injured when she tried to remove her wedding and engagement rings.

  “These pictures have put Mrs. Ruth on her sickbed,” her husband fumed, as he boarded the 20th Century Limited and headed home to face the little woman.

  Paper by paper, edition by edition, detail by detail, the story ballooned. The elevator man in Claire’s building cataloged his frequent visits. The druggist at the Concourse Plaza testified to Ruth’s preference for a denatured alcohol easily distilled into gin. The president of the American League divulged Ruth’s failure to respond to a July summons to account for his behavior, saying, “Guess he was too busy writing syndicate articles.”