by Jane Leavy
Even in the giddy ghosting days of 1927, there were intimations the system couldn’t last. Jack Dempsey’s October testimony in a lawsuit against his former manager (and Walsh client), Jack Kearns—in which he contended that he couldn’t be called to account for statements in his columns because he hadn’t read any of them—drew the reproach of a nationally syndicated literary critic in the October issue of the Bookman. “The Bookman’s Notes” column outed the ghosts of Dempsey, Ruth, Lindbergh, Queen Marie of Romania, Henry Ford, Paul Whiteman, Helena Rubinstein, and Aimee Semple McPherson.
Privately, Walsh railed against bookish types who looked down on the business that he had perfected. Denied membership in a club of publishing elites in 1925 despite the patronage of Hendrik Willem van Loon, Walsh vented in a reply to him that “some of the little Kikes who publish books for a living are not nearly so low in the order of social welfare as a Syndicate Man.”
Ford Frick, who was one of the Syndicate Man’s two highest earners—accumulating ten thousand dollars from his ghosting gig—hit a new low in September 1925, when he wrote a first-person column for the Evening Journal declaring that he had “no brief” for the Babe while taking the Yankees to task for having one set of rules for the Big Fella and another for everyone else. A few days later, under Ruth’s byline, he crafted a mea culpa written to coincide with the Babe’s reinstatement. It was a tour de force. Ruth fell on his rhetorical sword, confessing all, taking full responsibility, even accepting the manager’s prerogative to ask him to bunt.
So serious was he about reform that for the first time in eight years he was going to forgo a lucrative off-season. He had turned down a fifteen-thousand-dollar offer to play in Japan three months earlier, and now, as an act of penance, he had rejected seven thousand dollars for a series of games in Canada.
With the exception of one brief December wire dispatch datelined Sudbury, Massachusetts, in which Helen denied she was seeking a divorce, no one followed up on the separation agreement; no one followed the money. The Babe cleaned up his act. He learned, as Paul Gallico wrote in Farewell to Sport, what “every celebrity in the United States must learn—to perform his peccadillos in strict privacy if possible. Formerly Ruth had perpetrated his right out in public.”
When Ruth retired in the depths of the Depression, there were no more stories to write about inflated baseball salaries. During the war, readers wanted and needed their sports and their sportswriters to entertain and divert—the reason President Roosevelt insisted that major-league baseball, even in its diluted state, soldier on. The Herald-Tribune’s sports editor, Stanley Woodward, quit “the toy department” to cover the war. Upon his return, he created what most believe to have been the best sports section in newspaper history at the Tribune, where “godding up” ballplayers was not tolerated.
Sportswriting would not fully emerge from its journalistic coma until 1957, when Mickey Mantle and a band of marauding Yankee revelers tangled with a bowling team from Washington Heights at the Copacabana. The scoop belonged to New York Post gossip columnist Leonard Lyons, who was making his rounds of Manhattan nightspots when fisticuffs were exchanged. But the story would be turned over to a new generation of sportswriters known as the Chipmunks, for whom questioning authority was a generational prerogative. The sports pages would never be the same.
In the absence of further scrutiny in the fall of 1925, Walsh delved into his usual bag of tricks. On September 24, Ruth was sworn in as a lieutenant in the New York City Police Reserves. The papers were bemused. “Sultan, lieutenant, private—it’s complicated,” opined the New York World.
He was escorted to police headquarters by Lieutenant James Dunedin of the Reserves, booking agent for the Keith vaudeville circuit, which put things in perspective. At his swearing-in, he was presented with “badges, clubs and other symbols of authority,” the New York Sun reported, including a shiny silver whistle. He was also fingerprinted before being assigned to the recreation division of the Reserves.
Meanwhile, Walsh arranged for another mea culpa, this time in Collier’s—“Babe Ruth—I have been a Babe and a Boob,” which appeared on October 31, 1925, the same day he was to make his first payment to Helen. He owned up to five hundred thousand dollars in losses through gambling, partying, lawsuits, blackmail, and general excess. “I was going to be the exception, the popular hero who could do as he pleased,” Ruth declared. “But all those people were right. . . . I’ve got to face the fact and admit I’ve been the sappiest of saps.”
Ruth vowed to return to the woods, to shed the wise guys and the avoirdupois. But the monetary losses were most pressing. He didn’t have enough money to pay Helen. And when he found himself short of funds in March 1926 he turned to Walsh for a $4,000 loan.
Walsh was as tight with money as Ruth was profligate. He still deposited ten dollars a month in the bank account he opened when he graduated from college, which he would leave to his son, Christy Jr., in his will, with the admonition that he do the same. But he was more than happy to make this loan, which gave him the leverage he needed to assume complete control of Ruth’s finances. He stated his terms in early March 1926 and minced no words. His wife was in the last months of a difficult pregnancy. His father was dying. His patience with Ruth, expressed in exasperated letters to Frank Hilton at the Bank of Manhattan, was fraying.
In his absence, Ruth had turned to others for guidance and advice, giving Father Quinn equal authority over financial matters, as he made clear in a June 3, 1926, letter to Walsh:
Dear Christy:
This will more fully explain my telegram of March 19th, at the time you advanced Four Thousand ($4,000.00) Dollars to me. I accepted that amount on the terms of your letter of March 16th, 1926, as follows:
(1) I agree that I not invest any money in real estate, or in any other manner for a period of ten years from this date, without the approval of Father E.J. Quinn and yourself.
(2) I further agree that I will not borrow on or in any way use the insurance money which is now to my credit in the Equitable Life Assurance Society, for a period of ten years from date—except with the approval of Father Quinn and yourself.
(3) In addition to this, I agree to let you retain One Half (1/2) of my share from the profits on “RUTH’S HOMERUN” candy to be invested by you in securities or other high grade, conservative investments for me. Any securities you purchase must be with our joint approval and I will not sell them or transfer them or borrow money on them for a period of ten (10) years, from this date without the approval of Father E.J. Quinn and yourself.
In a copy of the letter found in Walsh’s files after his death, Quinn’s name was struck from each paragraph. Ruth and Walsh initialed their consent to the change. With that okay, Walsh assumed unilateral control over Ruth’s financial life.
Eight months later, Ruth opened the irrevocable trust account at the Bank of Manhattan with the $33,000 check that Walsh tricked him into signing, which brought forth a spate of good press praising Ruth’s financial probity and self-restraint.
But Walsh knew that Ruth could no longer count on the gentle treatment to which he had become accustomed. Patterson had put him on notice: he had to behave, or at least learn how to fake it. Skepticism now informed assumptions about his future as a ballplayer too. By the end of the 1925 season, many writers thought—and wrote—that Ruth was on the “down grade,” as McGeehan put it, and “possibly through.”
In lowering expectations, they inadvertently set the stage for a miraculous reincarnation.
Ever resourceful, Walsh cast Ruth as a nouveau Bernarr Macfadden, selling newspapers on a complete package of dietary and illustrated exercises from the Babe. (He recommended a lot of soft-boiled eggs in the morning and hot fruit juice with dinner.) Then he got Knute Rockne to endorse a mail-order exercise regimen—“Babe Ruth’s Complete Course”—which came with an autographed bat to use with stretching exercises. “You know how easy it is for a fellow to get out of shape,” the Babe declared in the advertising co
py that appeared in Collier’s. “I do. Believe me, men, I know. My batting average dropped, too—just because I let myself go to pot, physically. But I came back. You can, too!”
V
The day the Bams played in Denver, chapter 1 in the syndicated thirty-part life story of twenty-five-year-old Henry Louis Gehrig appeared in the San Francisco Examiner. The Yankees’ chiseled first baseman revealed that he had been called “fatty” in his youth and that boys in his Upper Manhattan neighborhood “threw the ball wide to me just to get a good laugh when I started to waddle after it.”
The game at Merchants Park had to be called in the ninth inning due to a predictable lack of good-quality baseballs—three of which had exited the park thanks to the Babe—and an overnight train departing at 6:30 P.M. that would take them through the Rockies to Ogden, Utah, ten miles east of the Great Salt Lake.
Al Warden, sports editor of the Ogden Standard-Examiner, who did a lot of business with the Christy Walsh Syndicate, met them at Union Station, a railroad hub where they were to transfer to the Southern Pacific Railroad for the second leg of the trip to Northern California. Warden had dug up a couple of local VIPs and a movie star no one had ever heard of and whisked them away for a half-hour tour of the six-mile-long Ogden Canyon. Ruth pronounced it marvelous. Gehrig was disappointed by the absence of cowboys and Indians.
They received an invitation to return in November for a hunting expedition, an offer Ruth said they would consider as plans for additional “picture work” in Hollywood had been canceled. The option that Walsh had negotiated with First National Pictures for a second feature film would never be picked up.
Instead, they went to Chicago for the big game between the Fighting Irish and the Trojans of USC on November 26. Walsh dragooned them into appearing in full football regalia at the pregame banquet he hosted at the Palmer House, where Ruth, in Notre Dame pants that refused to tie around his middle, addressed Knute Rockne, Tad Jones, Pop Warner, and the crème de la crème of American football writers, assembled fans, and boosters.
“It’s a pleasure and inspiration,” he boomed into a microphone, “to have a fellow like Gehrig as a runner-up in the home-run race. Lou’s a great first baseman. And he protects his father and mother.”
Encouraged by a vociferous round of applause, Ruth plunged ahead, praising Gehrig’s pleasant smile and his qualities as a son and a roommate while Gehrig looked on sheepishly in his USC uniform. “He doesn’t snore, and he could sleep on a meat hook. And—he protects his mother and father.”
Someone pulled on the sleeve of his jersey and whispered, “You said that once.”
“Lay off,” he barked, and the microphone caught it. “I’m making this speech.”
Nobody read that story in the morning paper.
Chapter 12
October 21–22 / Bay Area
RUTH, GEHRIG ON KGO TONIGHT WITH SANTORO
POST-ENQUIRER ARRANGES FOR RADIO INTERVIEWS OF GREAT HOME-RUN HITTERS
—OAKLAND POST-ENQUIRER
SOCKOLOGY MADE EASY
—SAN FRANCISCO CALL
I
On Friday morning, October 21—some twenty-four hours after crossing the Continental Divide—Ruth, Gehrig, and Walsh made a brief stop in Sacramento, California, birthplace of the transcontinental railroad, en route to the Bay Area. Abe Kemp of the San Francisco Examiner boarded the train, found them filling up a compartment in car number 19, and sat down for a chat on the art and science of hitting home runs.
“I couldn’t explain the secret of it to you if I wanted to,” said Ruth.
“Gosh,” blushed Gehrig, “if the judge (that is what Lou calls his pal) can’t tell you, I certainly can’t.”
“A lot of it is in the eye,” said Ruth.
“And the swing,” offered Gehrig.
“You must have good eyes, then,” we said.
“Sure,” admitted Ruth, “but a lot of times, I never see the ball. That’s right: look at me funny, but I tell you, lots of times when I sense the ball is coming in a certain place, I just close my eyes and swing.”
“How did you feel when you made that sixtieth home run?” we ventured.
“You don’t think I burst into tears, did you?”
Into the breach stepped Gehrig. “The judge was sure tickled, but I’ll bet there wasn’t a happier man in the ball park than I was.”
“I don’t know what is responsible for a streak of home runs,” Ruth said. “But I know this, a man can’t worry and hit home runs.”
J. E. Doyle of the Oakland Post-Enquirer boarded the train in Benicia and joined the conversation. While Gehrig took a turn driving the locomotive and tooting its whistle, Ruth continued the colloquy. “Do you think you will break your record next year?” Kemp asked.
“I’m going to try hard to,” Ruth replied. “That is only natural, but let’s talk about something else.”
Nobody wanted to talk about anything else. Not when Frank “Lefty” O’Doul, Ruth’s former teammate, met their train at the pier in Oakland. Not when Mayor “Sunny” Jim Rolph and his chief of police met them at the Ferry Building in San Francisco. Not when they arrived at the Hotel Whitcomb, which briefly served as City Hall after the 1906 earthquake, with its gilded lobby filled with rare Jane-sero wood paneling, marble columns, inlaid ceilings, Austrian crystal chandeliers, a cornucopia of Tiffany glass, and well-heeled admirers.
Not on Saturday morning when they distributed one thousand autographed baseballs and handkerchiefs to boys and girls gathered at the Knights of Columbus Hall. Not when they played the first of three games in the Bay Area at Recreation Park that afternoon. Not when they ascended to the Whitcomb’s Roof Garden for a Saturday-night dinner dance advertised in the morning Chronicle: it cost $1.50 to get on their dance card. Babe was a mighty fine hoofer if he did say so himself, which he did, telling a reporter from Los Angeles that he had worked as a ballroom professional.
And surely not during a forty-five-minute radio interview with KGO broadcaster Al Santoro, sports editor of the Oakland Post-Enquirer, which Walsh had shoehorned into the brief respite between the 2:45 P.M. game and the dinner dance.
“Their appearance marks another scoop for the Post-Enquirer,” the paper bragged in its Saturday edition. “Thanks to arrangements made by this paper thousands have heard the voices of many celebrities including Harold ‘Red’ Grange, Jack Dempsey, James J. Corbett, Gertrude Ederle, Helen Wills, and others.
“Ruth and Gehrig will stand before the KGO microphones tonight at 6:30 P.M. Their athletic prowess astounded the nation. Add to that their personality, their clean living and their excellent speaking voices and you have everything you need to make a radio attraction. Santoro will do his regular show at 7:15 P.M.”
(The Examiner also boasted an interview with the Bustin’ Twins at 7:00 P.M. on its station KYA from the Clift Hotel. “The Babe is getting to be quite a radio talker,” Abe Kemp wrote in advance of the show, but the paper didn’t advertise the show or offer details from the interview.)
KGO broadcast out of a state-of-the-art facility in Oakland. It was one of seven affiliates linked by 1,709 miles of AT&T cable six months earlier, when NBC created the Orange Network to serve the Pacific Coast, and was one of three GE stations designed to cover the entire country.
Because of the dinner dance, the interview was instead conducted in a converted second-floor hotel room at the Whitcomb, the former studio of KFRC, the official station of the San Francisco Bulletin, which broadcast from the hotel until 1925, using an L-shaped transmitter on the roof suspended between two hundred-foot ship’s masts.
A photograph memorialized the occasion: Ruth and Gehrig in dinner attire, holding either end of a Louisville slugger, and talking into a microphone perched atop a carved wooden lamp stand, an accommodation devised in the early days of radio to mitigate “mike fright.”
Ruth knew all about that. He was one of Harold Arlin’s first celebrity interviews on Pittsburgh radio station KDKA, which also broadcast the firs
t national election returns and the first major-league baseball game, with Arlin at the mike (a converted telephone receiver), on August 5, 1921. A month earlier, when the Yankees were in town for an exhibition game against the Pirates, Arlin had provided Ruth with a prepared script for what was almost certainly his first radio interview. But Ruth went mute when the microphone went live. Arlin grabbed the script and read, “This is Babe Ruth,” while Ruth leaned against a wall smoking a cigar. For days afterward, Ruth received kudos on his smooth delivery.
Ruth fared better six months later when he went on WWJ in Detroit, the first commercial station in the nation, to promote his vaudeville show: “Just let me say that it’s a great pleasure to talk with you through the ether. . . . And by the way—I’m singing this week at the Temple. Come and hear me. There are always plenty of doctors on hand.”
He would never acquire the practiced, honeyed delivery that Christy Walsh mastered for the college football interview shows he hosted and as a narrator of sports films, but his voice was surprising nonetheless. Stilted as it could be, Ruth’s voice was deeper and more polished than the guttersnipe listeners expected, and carried unexpected authority and authenticity. The mistakes made him real.
What made Santoro’s interview unusual was the fact that it was unscripted and “a three-cornered air talk.” His paper was part of the Hearst chain and carried Ruth’s columns. Walsh had brought Ruth to the newsroom during his 1924 visit to the coast for one of his “editor-for-a-day” gigs; the paper recycled three-year-old photographs in advance of the 1927 interview, showing Ruth poring over copy with the dapper, mustachioed sports editor with a radio voice. He had been to Santoro’s home for one of his famous Sunday spaghetti dinners where the guests included athletes, sportswriters, and bums off the street.