by Jane Leavy
Dr. Kinder was at the Friday-night fights at the Boston Garden. Helen had declined to go because she had a cold. She hadn’t seemed well since her last hospitalization, neighbors said. Dorothy would confide later in her friend Carolyn Rendon that her mother said she knew she was going to die, Rendon recalled. “She was quite sick before she burned in the fire. She was taking all kinds of medication for something.”
The fire alarm was called in from Fire Box 425 at 10:04 P.M. Captain John J. Kelly of the Watertown Fire Department fought his way up the stairs, crawling on his hands and knees through smoke and flames to find a woman facedown on the bedroom floor. She was in her nightclothes, lying by the door.
News accounts reported that she died at the scene. In fact, according to the Watertown Police report, she lived for twelve hours after the alarm was called in.
She had received mouth-to-mouth resuscitation from members of a volunteer group called the Box 52 Association before doctors arrived.
Watertown Police Log, January 12, 1929, 12:15 A.M.: “She was rescued by Capt. Kelly, Hoseman Devaney and Officer Clinton. I met them on stairway and assisted her to the home of Aubrey Bichard 35 Quincy St. I sent an emergency call for a doctor and Dr’s Kelly and Butler responded.”
The entry did not say in what condition she spent her last hours. She was pronounced dead at 10:41 A.M. the next day, according to the police report.
Paged at the Boston Garden, Edward Kinder had made his way back to Watertown, and then to the Bichards’, where he collapsed, dropping to the floor with a moan, according to neighbor Dorothy Sweed, whose father had called in the alarm. “Then he came to a bit and mustered up strength enough to go to view the burned body,” she told reporters.
“She is my wife; her name is Helen Kinder,” Kinder told the medical examiner, George L. West.
Plans were made to bury her on Sunday morning in the Kinder family plot in St. Joseph Cemetery in West Roxbury. A grave was dug in the reluctant winter soil.
The next morning, news of the death of the wife of the prominent Watertown dentist appeared on the front page of the Boston Post. A photograph of the deceased appeared on an inside page. An anonymous caller tipped off the police to the case of double identity and offered information that Helen may have been “under the influence of narcotics, and that the fire in which she died may have been of incendiary origin,” as the Universal Service, a Hearst-owned news agency that served its morning papers, would report the next day.
By then, the prominent Watertown dentist had disappeared. And the fire inspector who had answered the alarm, and who had described her body as “slightly burned and probably suffocated,” had concluded that the fire was caused by “overloaded electrical wires” resulting in a short circuit in the living room which had been caused by “amateur work” and “wiring spliced and taped with no solder.” Nothing in two subsequent visits by state fire marshals changed that assessment. The fire had started in a first-floor partition—in the dining room, according to the initial report—and then worked its way up through the ceilings and walls to the upstairs bedroom, moving with rapidity and sufficient intensity to cut a hole in the floor large enough for a radiator to fall through. Police estimated the damage at four thousand dollars.
Babe Ruth had spent that Friday training at Artie McGovern’s Manhattan gym, “his portly waistline encased in a rubber shirt,” the Times reported. (Photographic evidence of his sweaty diligence would appear in the Sunday paper.) At City Hall that morning, Mayor Jimmy Walker had accepted on his behalf a ceremonial bat made from rare lignum vitae wood excavated in the Panama Canal Zone with a promise that he would make sure to get it to the Great Bambino.
In October, the Yankees had fashioned another World Series sweep, brushing aside the St. Louis Cardinals, prompting a raucous, sudsy, well-fed trip back to New York aboard the Yankee Special—thanks to a clothes basket full of ribs Ruth had delivered to the train. He led a conga line of celebrants through the aisles, smashing straw hats in jubilation and separating gentlemen from their shirts. Jake Ruppert was relieved of his silk brocade nightshirt. “My, that Baby Ruth is a bad boy,” the Colonel said.
Crowds gathered at midwestern railroad crossings and train stations to hail the victorious Yankees. This was customary for Ruth, whose “progress through the countryside was like that of a president or a king,” Frank Graham wrote. “And the Babe never failed them. He would leave his dinner or a card game, even get up out of bed, to go out on the platform and greet his admirers and shake the hands stretched up to him.”
On this trip, Ruth made sure to put in a good word for Governor Al Smith, who had opposed Prohibition, was an early supporter of Sunday baseball, and was waiting for the Babe in his suite at the Biltmore Hotel upon his return to New York.
He stayed just long enough for the former governor to appoint him “the boss of the Youth of America.” Walsh had planned a reprise of the 1927 barnstorming tour, which was to begin at Dexter Park three days later, before heading to upstate New York. An AP reporter reached Ruth in Watertown, New York, to inform him of the death of Jack Dunn, the owner and manager of the Baltimore Orioles, who had ransomed young George Ruth from St. Mary’s Industrial School. Ruth called him “a fine fellow and a good sportsman.” He did not attend the funeral.
By January, he was back to offering opinions on things he knew about, expressing his disdain for a proposal to add a tenth hitter to the batting order to hit for the pitcher. He said it would take all the strategy out of the game.
On Saturday night, January 12, he attended a party at the Westchester home of his teammate Joe Dugan, where some time before midnight he received a telephone call informing him about Helen’s death. Ruth was on a train to Boston by 1:15 A.M.
Christy Walsh was in Portland, Oregon, at the Hotel Benson, arranging syndicate bookings for the coming season, when he received a telegram from his wife, Mada, at 5:45 P.M. on January 13: “NEWSPAPERS TRYING TO LOCATE YOU OR BABE.”
Wires from the New York Daily News and the New York American followed in short order.
RE DEATH OF MRS BABE RUTH REPORTS HERE THAT SHE AND BABE WERE SECRETLY DIVORCED THREE YEARS AGO AND SHE MARRIED DR E H KINDER DENTIST SECRETLY PLEASE WIRE COLLECT IMMEDIATELY WHETHER ANY TRUTH TO THESE REPORTS.
Editors at the American, trading on their relationship as longtime subscribers to Ruth’s column, asked for “any private information or angles on the case.”
In the nine years Walsh had managed Ruth’s career, assuming responsibility for his financial life and his public image, nothing approached the magnitude of Helen’s death as a challenge to his public relations skills. And none of the previous crises—not Dolores Dixon’s paternity suit, not the bellyache heard round the world—implicated him personally and legally as this did.
The timing was awful: to be three thousand miles away and three time zones behind the news was a nightmare. Unable to reach Ruth by telephone and unsure of all the facts, Walsh released a carefully crafted statement, a primer in the practice of damage control intended, in modern parlance, to “get out ahead” of the story he knew was coming. He extolled Helen’s virtues as a wife and mother, calling her “a grand little woman.” It was a masterpiece of modern spin, preempting the bad news he knew would soon appear in print with just enough of the truth that no one could accuse him of lying. But his statement was also brazenly misleading in its portrait of the Ruths’ marriage.
“Despite the unconfirmed inferences printed today I can positively say Babe and his wife were not divorced. Both of them were in my New York office with me three weeks ago. We were going over personal and business matters and she was calling him ‘Hon’ and ‘George’ just as she had for years at Yankee Stadium. . . .
“I have just received a wire saying he and his wife were going next week to visit his sister in Baltimore and to spend several days there at St. Mary’s Industrial School, where he got his start in life.”
He was far less circumspect in an undated letter to Ruth, written a
fter speaking with Claire Hodgson.
Be careful Babe. Be careful what you say and what you do. In spite of the horrible tragedy everything will work out right if you are CAREFUL in what you say and do.
You have many well-meaning friends but remember few if any of them are properly equipped in experience and complete understanding of circumstances to guide you properly. I am asking Bihler to go to Boston so he can help you in my absence. Joe understands everything as well as I do and realizes fully just what might happen if you do certain things or fail to do them.
In spite of whatever may have happened in recent years Helen was your loyal supporter to the last. I know she loved you deeply Babe from many conversations I had with her and I know that your heart is very, very heavy today. You must bring Dorothy closer to you now and I am sure everything is going to work out right.
He authorized the Bank of Manhattan to provide $15,000 cash from Ruth’s emergency fund to cover expenses and ordered assistant Joe Bihler to take the next train to Boston. Bihler wired Walsh to say that Ruth had told him his help wasn’t needed. “Said he is getting good advice.”
A fraught and sleepless Ruth was met at the Back Bay train station by Arthur J. Crowley, the son of Boston’s superintendent of police, Michael H. Crowley, and a battalion of reporters. A sensational account of the meeting was carried by the Universal Service, a Hearst-owned news agency that served its morning papers. “Where is my baby? Where is my little girl, Arthur? I have got to see her. It isn’t true, Arthur. It can’t be true.”
Crowley escorted Ruth to his usual suite at the Hotel Brunswick, room 574, the only constant in a surreal return to the city where as a young man he first fell in love.
Though police had enough information by late Saturday night to corroborate Helen’s identity, the story did not hit the papers until Monday morning. The time of her death, the delay in making the identification, and the undeveloped state of broadcast news gave Ruth time to compose himself and to approve a dignified statement composed by his lawyer that he delivered to a waiting horde of newsmen.
The four-sentence statement scribbled on hotel stationery acknowledged the separation that had been in effect since 1925. “My wife and I had not lived together for the last three years. During that time, I have seldom met her. I’ve done all that I can to comply with her wishes. Her death is a great shock to me.”
That morning police brought two of Helen’s sisters to Watertown to identify her body. “Leave the talking to the Big Boy,” they said, after making the identification.
Ruth had no comment.
On orders of the Middlesex County district attorney, the funeral of the woman known as Helen Kinder was canceled just hours before it was to begin, but not soon enough to prevent the erroneous death certificate from being published on the front pages of newspapers across the country. (It also gave January 12 as the date of her death.)
A full investigation worthy of the wife of the King of Clout was opened. A second autopsy was ordered, which was complicated given that her body had already been embalmed. The undertakers brought her back to the medical examiner’s office. The contents of her stomach were sent to Harvard Medical School to be examined for traces of drugs and poison.
IV
Just as Walsh feared and anticipated, the story of Helen’s death proved incendiary. Rumor kindled by accusation and recrimination, fanned by competitive zeal, and fed by animus and grief burst into a conflagration of competing headlines, beginning with Monday morning’s New York Daily News: “Mrs. Babe Ruth Dies in Love Nest Fire.”
In the anguished four-day pause, while city and state fire marshals checked and rechecked the wiring at 47 Quincy Street and medical examiners checked and rechecked the cause of death, there was no end to speculation. The stories grew only more heated.
On Monday, Helen’s brother Thomas, a former Boston police officer, charged foul play. “What is there to prove the house wasn’t fired? What is there to prove that she wasn’t murdered?”
Another Woodford brother, William, a New York attorney and former Boston city alderman, tearfully told reporters, “Helen was a good girl but she was secretive. For a long time my mother and sisters wondered what was the matter with her. But now I guess I have the key to those words she said to me: ‘I have found a doctor who will give me opium tablets.’”
Press-box scuttlebutt concurred. “The boys in Boston all said Helen was with the doctor for the drugs,” Marshall Hunt of the Daily News said later. “He could give her prescriptions.”
Edward Kinder’s brother insisted to the press that the couple had married two years earlier in Montreal. And the Universal Service, continuing its sensational coverage, distributed a florid dispatch from the scene of the fire. “On the front lawn today, near the ruined walls of the pretty house, among other debris from the fire, lay a badly burned caracul coat of expensive make. It bore the label of one of Boston’s leading establishments and neighbors identified it as belonging to Mrs. Kinder.
“On the ground nearby, where it fell from the pocket of the coat were the rosary beads that belonged to Mrs. Ruth. A charred doll and some other playthings of Dorothy’s were scattered about, where they fell when thrown from a window by some one during the fire.”
The neighbors expressed shock at the deception perpetrated in their midst and responded with neighborly pique. “Mrs. Kinder, as I knew her, was a short, good-looking but somewhat coarse woman, apparently given to a generous use of cosmetics,” noted Mrs. Bichard. “She was always nicely dressed.”
And then Edward Kinder turned himself in to Watertown police. During four hours of questioning, he told police that no, he and Helen had never been married and he had never said they had been—nor did he remember telling the medical examiner that Helen was his wife. No, he hadn’t gone to New York. He had walked the streets of Boston fearful of the story becoming public and spent Sunday in seclusion at his father’s suggestion. Yes, the Babe knew full well where his wife was staying. She had come to work for him as a housekeeper two years earlier.
Watertown’s chief of police, John F. Milmore, pronounced himself satisfied with the doctor’s account of events and moral conduct. Kinder promptly dropped from public view.
The pressure on Ruth to respond to the press of events mounted throughout the day. Thanks to the good advice of counsel and his own innate sense of decency, he had maintained a degree of dignity that had eluded virtually everyone else connected to the tragedy. He had managed it largely by remaining quiet and by remaining out of sight. Now he invited twenty reporters to his suite in the Brunswick. “I’m in a hell of a fix boys,” he said, his voice breaking. “This thing has licked me. The shock has been terrible. I hold nothing against my wife. She was the victim of circumstances. I still love her. I have fine memories of her.”
Then, gulping for air and composure: “What I’m going to say I can say in a very few words. Please leave my wife alone. Let her stay dead.”
No one, including her family, would let Helen be.
MRS. RUTH MURDERED, HER MOTHER DECLARES
BALL PLAYER REFUSED DEMAND FOR $100,000 WITH CONTEMPLATED RENO DIVORCE
—PALM BEACH POST, JANUARY 15
The story, another courtesy of the Universal Service, detailed a meeting in Christy Walsh’s New York office in December, attended by Helen and her youngest sister, Nora, at which Babe told her he wanted a divorce so that he could marry Claire Hodgson. Except for the resurrection of the 1925 front-page photograph by some newspapers around the country, Claire had managed to stay out of sight. And Ruth, in his mourning clothes and somber silence, had cut a sympathetic figure while Helen’s reputation had been torched—as a married woman living with another man, her funeral service could not be conducted in a Catholic Church.
Nora had lived with Babe and Helen at the Ansonia in the early years of their marriage and had gotten a taste of their high life. Babe introduced her to Flo Ziegfeld and suggested she might like to join the Follies. She declined, according to her dau
ghters, because she didn’t want to run around in short skirts.
Sitting in the family parlor with her mother, waiting for the Boston medical examiner to complete his autopsy and issue a death certificate in Helen’s real name, Nora told reporters about accompanying her sister on subsequent trips to New York to see the Babe play ball and getting an eyeful of Claire as well. “She was popular with the players from the way she was greeted by most of them,” Nora said. “Helen pointed her out to me and remarked, rather grimly, ‘That’s Claire.’”
Helen had been coached by her attorney and had a ready reply when Babe informed her that he wanted a divorce, so he could give Claire’s daughter, Julia, a last name, Nora said, re-creating the conversation between Helen and Babe in Walsh’s office for the Universal Service reporter.
Well, Helen said to him—and Christy Walsh will tell you this is so:
“All right, I’ll go to Reno and get a divorce quietly so your reputation in baseball won’t be ruined but you’ve got to pay my expenses out there and give me one hundred thousand dollars.”
And ‘Babe’ told her to go to hell, that he had given her enough money already.
Mrs. William Woodford, 60-year old mother of the dead woman, said she was familiar with this story and that it was all true.
“So, you see, my daughter didn’t marry Dr. Kinder.”
And, she added, climactically, with a fierce gleam in her ordinarily faded eyes:
“Helen never died by accident. She was done to death.”
Nora also told the reporter that Ruth had chased Helen around the Sudbury farm with a loaded shotgun.
The attorney retained by the Woodfords immediately issued a statement saying that Nora was not authorized to speak on behalf of the family.
Asked to respond, Ruth again exercised unaccustomed understatement. “It isn’t true. That’s all I have to say about the charges at the present time.”
In the same story, also carried by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Edward Kinder acknowledged that he and Helen had lived together as man and wife “off and on for almost two years.”