The Big Fella

by Jane Leavy

  In New York, he had the security of the family he had thought to begin with Helen and in Claire a worldly woman who imposed the discipline he needed and looked the other way when she had to because she had no other choice. Her apartment, where he kept his slippers under the bed, was the only one in America where his photograph could not be hung on the wall, Claire said.

  In the evening, when he got home from the ballpark, he’d inquire about plans for the evening. “He’d ask Mother if anybody was coming to dinner,” Julia recalled. “If she said no, he’d get into his pajamas. And we had a cook that was horrified that he would come to the dinner table in his pajamas. Never saw such a thing in her life.”

  Sometimes, Julia said, he wore them even when they had people over. After all, they were made of the finest Egyptian cotton.

  He didn’t have a lot of friends. Perhaps a half a dozen or a dozen people he really liked, whom he would call to come over for an after-dinner drink: Peter DeRose, the composer, and his ukulele-playing wife, May Singhi Breen; June and Lefty Grove; May and Tony Lazzeri; Doc Painter, the Yankees’ chiropractor, and his wife, Eleanor; Juanita Jennings Ellias and her husband, Charlie, the accountant for Yankee Stadium concessionaire Harry M. Stevens, also a friend of Ruth’s.

  “He didn’t like to be alone,” Julia said.

  In fact, he couldn’t be by himself, Claire would confide to family members in the years after her husband’s death. When you have a childhood like his, there’s a kind of loneliness that sticks with you the rest of your life, Julia believed. “That’s the reason he liked to have people over to the house. He’d call and say, ‘Come on over and have a drink.’

  “And they always came. Nobody ever said, ‘Gee, we can’t.’”

  V

  On April 17, 1929—three months and four days after Helen’s death—Babe and Claire were married before the 6:30 A.M. Mass at the Church of St. Gregory the Great on West Ninetieth Street in Manhattan. Only the timing was surprising. Ruth had rung up sixteen hundred dollars in long-distance telephone calls to Claire during spring training. The early hour, intended to foil inquiring reporters and accommodate opening day festivities at the Stadium, failed on the first score and proved unnecessary on the second. A photographer hid a flash bomb behind the altar, “strong enough to split a granite block,” Westbrook Pegler wrote in the Chicago Tribune. And the game was rained out, allowing for a champagne breakfast in the new fourteen-room family apartment at 345 West Eighty-eighth Street, where, Red Smith wrote, the Eighteenth Amendment did not apply. Ruth showed reporters the bedroom that had been fitted out with twin beds for twelve-year-old Julia and nine-year-old Dorothy, who had not yet joined the family.

  Julia, who had spent the night at a girlfriend’s house, learned about it from the headline of a soggy tabloid she saw lying on the sidewalk outside her school. “Babe Ruth Wed.” When she got home they could tell by her face she knew. “They said, ‘Well, you must have expected that this was going to happen,’” she recalled.

  He gave Claire a $7,000 diamond bracelet and, on her first day at Yankee Stadium as Mrs. Babe Ruth, a first-inning opposite field home run that sailed past her in the third base box she would occupy for the next fifty years, as it traced its unusual path into the left field stands. He tipped his cap as he rounded third and blew her a kiss.

  Babe also found time on his wedding day to autograph a photograph of himself for a former mistress—“Lest you forget Many happy evenings we have spent together.”

  The new, reformed Babe was a gentleman.

  Claire was as sophisticated and assertive as Helen was withdrawn and malleable. Helen Ruth had entertained neighborhood children in Sudbury with milk and cookies while playing an upright piano in their rented cabin on Willis Pond. Claire Ruth went to the Aeolian Hall on Fifth Avenue to procure rolls of music for the player piano that dominated the living room.

  Helen told reporters in 1921 she wanted to kidnap her husband so they could take tramps in the woods; Claire wanted to reform him. She would put him on diets and on a fifty-dollar-a-week allowance, announcing to the press, “He realizes now mother knows best.” She was speaking of orange juice but nobody missed her point. Asked about plans for a wedding party, Ruth had replied, “No wedding party. Parties are over.”

  She would limit the flash in his wardrobe and put an end to politicking after the 1928 presidential election and the embarrassing headlines that appeared when he refused to pose with Herbert Hoover. “She did not think it was good for his image to favor one man over another,” according to Julia.

  He didn’t vote either. “Because Mother told him not to.”

  Or read, he told Carl Sandburg, the “Noted American Poet,” as he was identified in the 1928 spring training story in the Chicago Daily News: “Poet Fans Babe Ruth with 750 Words.” Ruth swatted away Sandburg’s condescending inquiries about the great events of the day—all of which were calculated to make him appear stupid. Did he know Clarence Darrow? Yes, he had given him an autograph just the other day. What were his favorite passages in the Bible and Shakespeare? Ballplayers don’t read. Not good for the eyes. Favorite author? Christy Walsh was his stock answer. Claire read aloud to him.

  She traveled with the team and answered all his calls—a lot of them from women. Her presence—and her increasing control of his diet, his money, his schedule—was the source of much ridicule, especially in opposing dugouts, where what passed for small talk was unrecognizable in fashionable salons. “Your face is certainly getting fatter,” Browns manager Dan Howley told Ruth on Claire’s first visit to St. Louis.

  “Yeah?” questioned the unsmiling Ruth, spitting a gob of tobacco juice twelve feet. “Well, I don’t hit or run or slide with my face.”

  “Is the wife on this trip with you?”

  “Sure.”

  “Having a hard time dodging the old phone calls?”

  “Aw, go to hell.”

  Her mother was very jealous, no question about it, Julia said.

  Fidelity is not now and was not then included among the myriad regulations in the major-league baseball handbook. Faithful? “No,” said Julia’s son, Tom Stevens, “and mother doesn’t think so either.”

  Babe Ruth remained faithful only to who he was.

  VI

  On February 2, 1930, the Supreme Court of the City of New York granted an order of adoption making nine-year-old Dorothy, the little girl Ruth had called his daughter since 1922, his legal offspring. In a highly unusual and highly publicized ceremony on October 30, 1930, with both girls looking on, Claire also formally adopted Dorothy, and Babe formally adopted twelve-year-old Julia.

  Julia was compliant and grateful—for the name he gave her and the attention he lavished on her. He may not have been her biological father, but she regarded him as a kind of savior, particularly after the 1938 blood transfusion he provided when she had strep throat at age twenty-two.

  “After they were married and Dorothy came to live with us, Mother said to Dorothy, ‘You’ll have to teach Julia to call him Daddy.’ I got onto it after a while and then I got to the point where I couldn’t say Babe.”

  She was still calling him Daddy on her 102nd birthday.

  She called him a cupcake. He called her Butch. He fixed one-eyed eggs and fried baloney for breakfast, and he made his own green tomato relish and barbecue sauce to take along on hunting trips for venison. (She would inherit the recipes, which her grandchildren are hoping to replicate. Early attempts failed the taste test. They just didn’t taste like Daddy’s.)

  He liked to roughhouse, wrassle on the floor. So what if they broke the crystal on the watch he’d bought her? Don’t cry. I’ll get you another one.

  He took her to football games, and to Artie McGovern’s gym when she needed to lose weight, arranged for her to sing on the radio, and taught her to dance like a lady. They practiced the fox-trot to the player piano in the apartment’s foyer. Imagine: Babe Ruth, who eschewed underwear and borrowed a teammate’s toothbrush when he came to the big
leagues, believed that every proper young lady needed to know how to dance. And how to follow.

  He had very definite ideas about how to raise a young lady. She had to be home by midnight. Or else. Even after she was of age. He told her: “Don’t ever marry a baseball player.”

  So omnipresent would he become in her life that she couldn’t recall meeting him. “It seemed like he’d always been there.”

  Dorothy’s Daddy was never there enough.

  No matter how many Christmas trees they decorated, or episodes of The Lone Ranger they listened to or times he tossed his big raccoon coat at her to see if she could catch it, which was impossible because it weighed more than she did, Dorothy needed more.

  By the time she was ransomed from Brooklyn—about two months after Babe remarried, according to her memoir—she had become a truculent child, hostile and resentful, in her words. When he introduced her to Claire as her new mother, she dismembered the doll she was brought as a present, tearing the wig from its head, the arms from its sockets, and poking its eyes out for good measure. “Claire tried to make overtures,” her daughter Genevieve Herrlein said, “but she wanted no part of that.”

  He had rescued Julia from fatherlessness but had consigned Dorothy to it when he separated from Helen, abandoning her as he had been abandoned, leaving her in the care of an unstable parent who sent her to live among the nuns just as he had been sent to live among the brothers at St. Mary’s. It was a pattern Dorothy would repeat in her life as a parent, her daughter Genevieve Herrlein said, leaving her and her brother, Danny, in the care of the Ruths’ former maid, Nora McIntyre, for a year and later placing them in a Catholic boarding school for three months while she traveled with her second husband.

  “She didn’t talk about Helen much,” Dorothy’s friend Carolyn Rendon said. “She told me her mother died in a fire. I said I was sorry. She’d say, ‘Nobody loves me.’

  “And I said, ‘Oh I’m sure Babe—’

  “And she said, ‘I think Babe loves me, but he isn’t around long enough to show it.’”

  Nor, Rendon and others say, did he see how she was treated when he was away.

  Not surprisingly, given the holes in his childhood and the lack of them in his schedule, he had neither the time nor the resolve to fill in the gaps in her history when she inquired about them. She was never told the details of Helen’s death, learning about the fire after stumbling on press clippings while assembling a scrapbook about her father’s career with Claire’s mother. Nor would he answer questions about the identity of her biological mother, according to the family maid, saying he could not do so while Claire was still alive.

  And so he bequeathed her a lifetime of bitterness and enmity, much of which found its way into the pages of a score-settling memoir, My Dad, the Babe, published a year before her death in 1988. She described Claire as a “mommy dearest” drunk who consigned her to the maid’s quarters, a room so small she could count all the flowers on the wallpaper, and cited a litany of stepdaughter injustices: inferior schools, missed trips abroad, hand-me-down clothes, while Julia got all the latest fashions.

  Of course, Dorothy didn’t help, her daughter Linda said. “When they’d say, ‘Stay clean for the press,’ she’d go out and help a neighbor pick coal and come back black,” she said.

  Her wardrobe was the putative cause of the falling-out between Ruth and Gehrig. When Dorothy arrived at Mom Gehrig’s house looking particularly shabby one day, Christina Gehrig complained to someone who told someone who told Claire that it was shameful the way she dressed Dorothy. Claire complained about Christina to Babe, who told Lou, who said you can’t talk about my mother that way.

  That was the end of the friendship.

  Her efforts, and subsequent ones made by her daughters, to answer questions about her birth raised in Helen’s will were thwarted by New York State law, which gave judges the right to seal the birth certificates of adoptees in 1924 and made it mandatory fourteen years later. A letter from her father to be given to her after his death, supposedly containing information about her birth, never materialized.

  All of which seemed moot, she wrote, when Juanita Ellias, an old family friend, came to live with Dorothy in the last days of her life and made a deathbed confession that she was Dorothy’s birth mother and the Babe was her biological father. The unsubstantiated revelation, made in conversation with Dorothy’s late daughter, Ellen Hourigan, was recorded in handwritten notes provided to Chris Martens, who collaborated on Dorothy’s memoir. The notes conclude: “At this time I have no proof only Juanita’s word.”

  Definitive scientific proof may never come to light. Two of Dorothy’s daughters, Donna Analovitch and Genevieve Herrlein, doubt the story and still wonder about their ancestry. Their sister Linda Ruth Tosetti is unequivocal in her belief that “I have his blood in my veins, as my mom did before me.”

  But one fact remains incontrovertible. Ruth’s silence left room for ambiguity and doubt. He bequeathed his daughters a legacy of animosity and mistrust, which was unfortunate as they had more in common than their relationship with him. Both women lived with unknowns: Julia never knew her biological father; Dorothy never knew for certain the identity of her father or mother. But the rifts of a splintered childhood never mended. When the Yankees observed the fortieth anniversary of his death—a year before Dorothy’s own passing—Julia and Dorothy ate at separate tables and sat on opposite sides of the baseball diamond.

  The schism remains. Ruth’s descendants tell his story, extoll his virtues, and express their pride on separate websites: Julia’s family call theirs “Babe Ruth Central, The Site That Ruth Built.” Tosetti calls her webpage “The True Babe Ruth, The Official Babe Ruth Family Site.”

  The issue isn’t money, Analovitch said. It’s a far more precious commodity. “It’s all about who’s going to be at Cooperstown,” she said. “Who benefits from the fame.”

  VII

  After Babe Ruth climbed down from the pedestal of young shoulders that carried him halfway around the bases at Sodality Park, he and Gehrig made a break for it. For a minute, it seemed they had negotiated safe passage. But the car and driver designated to ransom them from the ballyard were nowhere to be found, and the masses converged upon them. The Cirone brothers disappeared into the crowd, unnoticed among the paying customers.

  “Police and traffic officers tried to shield them but were powerless before the adoring crowds,” the Mercury-Herald reported. “Suddenly a big closed auto containing three girls came along the street. A police whistle shrilled and the girl driver jammed on her brakes, afraid she was being arrested. Someone pulled open a door of the auto and Ruth and Gehrig were shoved in.

  “Two policemen climbed on each running board and the girls were told to ‘Drive ahead.’”

  The young ladies did not recognize their famous passengers, which was as unusual as it was comic, a getaway scene Harold Lloyd might have written as a sequel to Speedy if Hollywood was making sequels in 1927. This time, with the Babe dashing from the ballpark, fleeing the maddening crowd with the help of law-breaking Keystone Coppers and—oh, the irony!—into the arms of improbable anonymity.

  How many teenagers in America in the fall of 1927 would fail to recognize Babe Ruth? Did he get the joke? Did it please him to be unrecognizable just for an instant?

  The San Jose police pushed Ruth and Gehrig into the back seat and directed the hijacked car to take them to the posh Spanish Renaissance Sainte Claire Hotel, where they would change for dinner with Pop Warner.

  “Flustered and not knowing whether they were being robbed or arrested the frightened girls drove on,” the paper reported. “When they found they were rescuing the famous Babe Ruth, however, they broke into laughs of joy and showed their surprise and pleasure. It was a thrill that comes but once in a lifetime.”

  The girls made no comment.

  Chapter 16

  October 28 / San Diego

  REAL BASEBALL GAME PROVIDED AS VEHICLE TO SHOW BABE, GEHRIG

>   —SAN DIEGO EVENING TRIBUNE

  PAIR OF HOME-RUN SWATTERS DUE TO ARRIVE IN SAN DIEGO AT NOON; PLAN BIG RECEPTION

  —SAN DIEGO UNION

  I

  Before checking out of the Carrillo Hotel in Santa Barbara, Christy Walsh sent an SOS to Knute Rockne at Notre Dame. Needed: “four GOOD tickets” in a “FRONT box” for the November 12 game at Yankee Stadium between the Fighting Irish and the Cadets of West Point for Babe and Lou. “He says the last time I got him football tickets they were ROTTEN,” Walsh wrote. “He would like a FRONT box. But if the FRONT boxes are all gone he would prefer four GOOD ones in a reserved section.”

  He assured Rockne that the tour had been “a smashing trip all the way” but allowed that it had been taxing. “Four more games and the long grind is over,” he said, which is as close as his professional ebullience ever came to wavering.

  Smashing and wearing. Baggage and tempers had been lost, itineraries and judgment scrambled. Walsh had inexplicably scheduled a Friday-afternoon game in San Diego and one the following afternoon 340 miles north in Fresno, which meant spending Saturday night at a church banquet in the San Joaquin Valley instead of attending a midnight frolic at the Mayan Theater in Los Angeles with Charlie Chaplin, Bill Tilden, Joe E. Brown, et al., in advance of the Sunday game at Wrigley Field.

  Walsh arranged an overnight at a Los Angeles hotel en route to San Diego, allowing for a quick how-do-ya-do with the press to gin up sales and a night in L.A. for the Babe.

  The next afternoon, in San Diego, Carl Klindt, a debonair local sports fixer—promoter of amateur and semi-pro baseball games; manager of a multitude of baseball teams, including an all-star girls squad that competed on the beach in bathing suits; lifeguard at the Mission Beach Plunge pool (though he couldn’t swim); booker of fishing charters, quail hunts, and duck drives; author of the San Diego Sun’s “Powder and Hooks” column; and all-around hail-fellow-well-met—was waiting for them on the field at City Stadium, along with five hundred lucky children who had caught balloons bearing free tickets dropped from the roof of the Union Building that morning.