The Big Fella

by Jane Leavy

  Little birdies keeping the News in the know reported Claire’s presence in a front-row box at the Stadium, “from which she has observed nearly every game this season.”

  The New York Journal added more juicy details: “Huggins knew of her and told him to spend less time in social pursuits. He had visited her apartment before the western trip, and she had been in Hot Springs at the same resort last spring.”

  The hoopla and hysteria were punctuated with occasional pleas for perspective. From Frank Wallace in the New York Evening Post: “His is a big soul made bigger by our applause. And a big soul needs room to roam. Smaller souls might well close their eyes at times like these and let these big souls roam; else they stifle and die and lose the thing that makes them big.”

  From Heywood Broun in the New York World: “The present moral indignation about his conduct is the phase of the controversy I can’t abide. . . . It isn’t the long hours but the short hits to which they object.”

  From Christy Walsh, nothing. He was neither seen nor heard. His only apparent role was to assemble a voluminous clip file documenting the humbling of the Babe, each story meticulously delineated by thick, red crayon.

  Ruth arrived at Grand Central Terminal at 10:40 A.M. on September 1 and was met on the platform by two porters—who carried his portable phonograph and suitcase filled with nine pairs of white flannel trousers—and a Catholic priest, Father Edward J. Quinn, newly ordained and serving at the Augustinian Academy on Staten Island.

  As they trudged out of the subterranean darkness into the starry vaulted light of the terminal’s main concourse, thousands of New Yorkers “cheered till the very girders rang with the echo,” the Evening Journal reported.

  The beleaguered Babe straightened his worsted shoulders and smiled.

  Part pastor, part bouncer, part spokesman, Quinn cut a swath through the throng. His most urgent task was to get Ruth to shut his mouth. “The way this thing has been handled is very much to be regretted,” he told the New York Telegram. “All the good things which Ruth has done have not been mentioned. All the trash that could be dug up has been thrown into his face by some of the newspapers. All that Ruth did for St. Mary’s and Catholic Church charities and for orphans never will be known to the public. But I know it and I am here to defend him.”

  With that Quinn joined the upright cadre of men who seemed to appear whenever Ruth was most in need of uprightness. Unlike Jack Dunn—who had “almost been a mother to me,” Ruth had said in June—and Brother Matthias and Christy Walsh, each of whom had some legal or institutional history with the Babe, Quinn materialized out of nowhere. He was identified the next morning as “a friend from St. Mary’s,” “a friend of the couple,” and “a lifelong friend and counselor of the player,” whose task in New York, Fred Lieb wrote in the New York Telegram, was to “bring Ruth to his senses.”

  Quinn’s family in Jessup, Pennsylvania, told the Scranton Times he was Ruth’s “spiritual advisor” and an old family friend.

  Almost immediately came a dispatch from Baltimore: “Ruth’s Action Depresses St. Mary’s School Boys,” and the announcement that Brother Paul was en route to New York to impress upon the Babe the effect of his conduct on the boys when they heard their hero had fallen from grace.

  Quinn was only five years Ruth’s senior—far too young to have served at St. Mary’s during Ruth’s tenure. Quinn was an intellectual, not an incorrigible, with a BA from Villanova College and an MA from Catholic University. As a boy growing up in baseball-mad Lackawanna County, he was a delegate to the Catholic Total Abstinence Union Baseball League Convention, along with Mike McNally from neighboring Minooka. Later, Minooka Mike—Ruth’s teammate with the Red Sox and then the Yankees—introduced the Babe to the pleasures of Lackawanna Valley, including its many bars and ballplayers. Perhaps he also introduced him to Quinn.

  Outside Grand Central, on Vanderbilt Avenue, Quinn ushered the penitent into a pink-striped taxicab, which was held up in traffic by a thicket of camera shutters and reporters occupying “a large procession of machines, as in a politician’s entourage,” the American said.

  “Come up to the hotel later, boys,” Ruth called out. “Maybe I’ll have something to say then.”

  The convoy lit out for friendly territory—Helen Ruth’s five-room suite at the Concourse Plaza. It was a swanky joint, completed in 1923 after Ruth made the Bronx swank enough to matter. The lobby was thick with more reporters and one process server—Ruth’s chauffeur had been in an accident earlier that week. “He shoved his way through the scribes, sent the process server flying over a nearby desk and stamped to his rooms alone, like an injured child,” teammate Waite Hoyt said later.

  Reporters trailed him all the way to the bedroom door and watched as he sat himself down on the side of his wife’s bed. “Oh, Babe! How glad I am to see you,” she said, throwing her arms around him, unmindful of her injured finger and the newspapermen who filled the open doorway. Ruth blubbered and “made a strange noise like a little boy who has been forgiven,” the American reported.

  The priest closed the door, sequestering himself with the couple. None of the reporters could have missed the symbolism: the Babe following the Church in the person of Father Quinn, returning to his spiritual and marital home. Turned out he was more than a pastoral adviser—he was a marriage counselor, too, as Lieb reported, having “recently patched up the marital differences between the Babe and his wife and brought about a reconciliation” no one previously acknowledged was necessary.

  Lieb also reported that Father Quinn had been in close touch with the Yankees, acting as a liaison between the front office and its wayward son.

  After a tactful pause, the gentlemen of the press asked to have a word with Mrs. Ruth and a photo. Behind closed doors, the penitent husband could be heard making the request in “a loud contralto voice,” the New York Evening Post reported.

  Tearfully, she relented. “The little woman was fetching despite her indisposition,” the Post continued. “Her auburn hair lay loose on her pillow. Her face was pale but pretty. Her third finger on her left hand was bandaged. It had been infected, she explained.

  “One newspaperman professed to see something symbolic in this. He was jubilant when Mrs. Ruth confirmed his suspicions by saying that her wedding and engagement rings had had to be filed off the swollen number but that she had had them repaired and would put them back on as soon as the swelling subsides.”

  A series of photos documented the “tender” reconciliation: Babe, head in hands, weeping; Helen, hands raised, railing and pleading, “Why do you bring all this trouble upon those who care the most? Think about Dot.”

  The photographers suggested something more intimate. Ever compliant, Ruth buried his head in her bosom. Their tears mingled on her crisp white sheets. “The Babe sobbed aloud and comforted the missus with affectionate pats,” the Washington Post reported. “The scene was so obviously sincere and so moving that reporters and photographers in Mrs. Ruth’s room, completely forgotten for the moment by the Babe and his wife, backed into corners or silently from the room, overcome with embarrassment.”

  As promised, Ruth had something to say, a revelation of sorts to share with the press. “‘My wife’s the only gal,’ he declared in the American. ‘I never knew she was so sensitive before when other women were mentioned.’”

  No one asked about the white gauze bandage wrapped around her left wrist. But the interview had to be cut short when Helen complained of feeling faint and collapsed.

  Also, Ruth had an appointment at Jacob Ruppert’s brewery at Ninety-second Street and Third Avenue in Yorkville, where he was expected to perform further acts of contrition.

  That was all staged, according to granddaughter Linda Ruth Tosetti.

  Before heading downtown, Ruth mugged for Fox Movietone cameramen on the windy roof deck of the hotel, grinning and brushing his hair from his brow with the vast emptiness of Yankee Stadium looming over his shoulder.

  Meanwhile, across town
on the Upper West Side, “the party of the second part” went into seclusion. Heavily veiled, Claire Hodgson quit her apartment in a limousine, with its shades drawn, for a month in the Bahamas.

  The furor did not disappear with her.

  On September 2, the Evening Graphic published a first-person tell-all in which the Babe humbly confessed the American public’s love for him. The New York American identified two particular devotees: Bee Palmer, the “Shimmy Queen,” and Miss Rose Davis of Maxine Elliott’s Theatre. And the Washington Post reported: “It was definitely learned today that [Mrs. Ruth] commissioned a New Rochelle attorney with offices in New York to prepare papers to be served on Ruth in a separate maintenance action.”

  What the press did not know—or did not report—was that a separation agreement had already been signed on August 4, 1925, in Richmond County, otherwise known as Staten Island, a favorite jurisdiction for celebrities wishing to keep legal proceedings on the q.t. Walter Winchell, the gossip columnist who preferred not to be the subject of gossip columns, filed for divorce in Staten Island.

  The agreement called for Helen to receive four annual payments, beginning in October 1925, of $20,000, $30,000, $25,000 and $20,000. In addition, she was to receive $100 a week until the first payment was made; she would also receive their property in Pasadena, Florida, and the farm in Sudbury; a Packard; and Dorothy.

  The agreement was witnessed by E. J. Quinn, the same E. J. Quinn identified in press accounts as having effectuated a reconciliation. Presumably this was not one of his customary priestly functions.

  Quinn himself was something of an enigma. A solemn young man with preponderant eyebrows, a high forehead, and owlish black spectacles, who smoked cigars and burned holes in his habit with the ashes, he liked the ponies and he liked his drink. He gave the benediction at the New York State Democratic Party convention in 1932 and returned to Villanova as procurator in the 1950s. “He was kind of a wild man, very like Babe Ruth,” recalled Father George Riley, who served with Quinn later in his priestly career.

  According to family members and other members of the order who served with him, Quinn, who died in 1967, never acknowledged his relationship with Ruth; nor have any of Ruth’s closest surviving relatives heard of him. Whether this was a belated nod to clerical privilege or a function of estrangement or perhaps embarrassment is impossible to say. But he was a trusted figure at a critical juncture in Ruth’s life and posed a significant challenge to Walsh’s eminent domain.

  Babe Ruth repented. He broke all records repenting, Bill McGeehan wrote. And then he apologized. He apologized to Ruppert, to Barrow, to Huggins. And then he apologized again. Runyon called it an apology for hitting .260.

  He went straight to the Stadium after making his amends at Ruppert’s brewery and was cheered by everyone except his manager, who refused to see him and refused to reinstate him, allowing the story to percolate for another five days while Ruth was buffeted by the ill winds of unaccustomed public animus. The leisurely exercise of managerial justice was made possible only by the Yankees’ dismal record, for which Ruth bore a goodly portion of the blame.

  Prohibited from joining his teammates for batting practice, he took his bows from a grandstand box with Ruppert and Quinn close by. He offered to pitch every fifth day upon his return in addition to playing the outfield. Huggins was unmoved. After the game, Ruth drove the priest back to Staten Island, which remained his religious posting until 1932.

  Huggins finally relented on September 5 after announcing he was paroling Ruth to the custody of his wife. The anointed “night watchman” fled to Sudbury as soon as practicable.

  Ruth returned from exile on September 7, the same day he learned that his English bull terrier, Dot, had run wild on the farm in Sudbury and killed a neighbor’s pedigreed cow, resulting in another lawsuit that would cost another five thousand dollars. He hated the place, he told reporters, hated winter farming, and was planning to sell and build something in Florida. He hit safely in nine straight games—batting .346 with 10 home runs and 30 RBI in the last three weeks of the season.

  Joe Patterson’s decision to treat Babe Ruth like news prompted a public display of soul-searching, chest beating, and chutzpah in New York City sports pages. He had made patsies out of every Yankee writer who had hidden what he knew out of custom and habit, which is to say everyone. He had exposed a raw nerve that ran through the coverage of every “gee whiz” columnist who had elevated Ruth to saintliness. While Ruth dangled in sackcloth, the biggest names in New York sportswriting publicly wrestled with—and debated—their role. Were they cheerleaders or journalists?

  “How Great Is the Responsibility of Baseball Writers, If Any, in Player’s Plight?” asked Dan Daniel in his column in the New York Telegram.

  Plenty, replied Broun, in the World. “Babe Ruth never went about and requested baseball writers to doll him up as an ideal for growing boys. The reporters did that on their own responsibility. Now that the crash has come they ought to take the consequences and not try and shoulder the burden off on the shoulders of Ruth.”

  Embarrassed and defensive, Daniel called out those among the sweaty literati who accepted filthy lucre from ghostwriting syndicates as if they were the only culprits: “It is not true that baseball writers have held up Ruth as an ideal for growing boys. Can anybody produce a story written by anybody not connected with the Ruth syndicate in which the Babe is pictured as a mental and moral ideal?”

  In his indignation, Daniel neglected to mention his own past efforts at ghostwriting. In fact, “the unholy union,” as Detroit News managing editor Malcolm Bingay called it, was so pervasive that by the time Walsh closed up shop in 1937, he estimated that he had paid thirty-seven ghosts $100,000 for copy that filled 5,641 solid pages of newspaper type (worth $3 million in free advertising for the big leagues at prevailing advertising rates, by his calculations).

  Editors like Shirley Povich of the Washington Post, who couldn’t afford to buy Walsh’s airy impersonations, resorted to cheeky headlines to try to sell readers on actual journalism. “Charles Lindbergh, Vice President Charles G. Dawes, Aimee Semple McPherson, and Others Will Not Cover the World Series for the Post,” he wrote in advance of the 1924 World Series between the Senators and the Giants. “The Baseball Classic Will Be Covered by Baseball Writers. Reach for a Post instead of a Ghost.”

  Ruth, who “covered” fifteen consecutive World Series for the Christy Walsh Syndicate—and once threw a newspaper out of a hotel window after seeing the poor play his column had received, according to a syndicate dispatch—wasn’t in his assigned seat at Griffith Stadium the following year when the series between the Pittsburgh Pirates and the Washington Senators shifted to the nation’s capital. As Povich told it, Ruth had been sent to the hospital with acute appendicitis. His ghost was also missing in action. Walsh, who never did any writing unless a ghost was sick or drunk, sized up the situation, bellowed into a telephone, “Get me an operator,” and began to dictate, Povich said. “Washington, D.C., by Babe Ruth, paragraph, quote. ‘As I lie here, in Washington’s Emergency Hospital . . .’”

  Povich misremembered some of the particulars. Ruth was not in a Washington hospital; he did not have appendicitis. He had what the Post described as an infection high on his left leg, causing him to limp badly, which physicians thought might be the reoccurrence of the abscesses he suffered in the spring. They importuned him to return to New York for treatment. Dire headlines—“Ruth Quits Series”—followed him home, declaring further surgery was in the offing. Instead he treated the leg with ice packs at home and improved enough to leave five days later for a little moose hunting in Maine and New Brunswick, Canada. In the Post, an unnamed staff writer, who sounded a lot like Povich, bemoaned the loss of Ruth’s bons mots: “162 union writers and 29 players, umpires and wives and children of players experting on the series have altruistically agreed in the emergency to put forth special efforts to fill the aching void.”

  Walsh possessed the Irishman’s gift fo
r blarney and the adman’s knack for selling baloney as truth. In his worldview, ghostwriting was a venerable, solemn, and honorable craft, no different than speechwriting for pols or the disciples—no one believed that Matthew wrote the Gospel of Matthew, did they?

  That’s what he told Alva Johnston in the New Yorker in 1935. His defense was as ingenious as it was disingenuous. He claimed the moral high ground on the theory that Ruth’s columns were authentically unauthentic. “I wouldn’t insult the intelligence of the public by claiming they write their own stuff,” Walsh said. An inexperienced ghost makes the mistake of trying to write the way his celebrity talks. “This is an error. He ought to write the way the public thinks his celebrity talks.”

  Ruth’s columns, which ran in Hearst papers across the country and in the two Hearst flagship papers in New York, the Evening Journal and the American, sounded exactly like him—if you believed that “bunk” was the only four-letter word in his vocabulary. They ranged from insipid to innocuous. One early effort presented a “Glossary of Terms in Daily Use by Ball Players but Not Readily Understood by Fans,” including “Giving It the Old College Try” and “Barber—Name Applied to Person Who Talks a Great Deal,” which explained the stropping motion Ruth and Gehrig employed throughout the 1927 tour when a windy guest overstayed his welcome.

  But content was never really the point. The ur-narrative was no different than today’s ghostwritten Twitter feeds or the first-person postings on Derek Jeter’s “The Players’ Tribune.” The bylined columns Walsh peddled sold the illusion that Ruth was knowable, that he was speaking directly to the man in the stands, or the boy on the street corner waiting for the afternoon paper to arrive. Banal as they might have been, they played an indispensable part in shaping Ruth’s image, while casting a roseate glow over the golden age of sports. They built a reservoir of good feeling and, ironically, trust that came in handy in moments of crisis, while adding nearly $160,000 to his bank account between 1921 and 1936.