by Jane Leavy
He left Vancouver on October 28 aboard the Empress of Japan with Claire and Julia and Lou and his wife, Eleanor (enjoying a belated honeymoon). Whatever the state of the rift between them when they embarked for Japan—and no matter how much worse it was upon their return—it did not preclude an act of generosity on Ruth’s part, recalled by the New York Times reporter John Drebinger in an interview with Jerome Holtzman. Perhaps Ruth was trying to make things better between them. Or maybe it was just his way. “Lou never could forget he was a poor boy once and was always worried that he was going to lose his money,” Drebinger said. So Ruth advanced him the $5,000 each was to receive, telling Gehrig, “When the trip is over and you get your $5,000 you can pay me.”
One afternoon, Eleanor found Claire sitting by herself topside in a deck chair. A spontaneous hello, a crack in the frigid familial relations, led to a mutual understanding that the feud, instigated by Lou’s mother, was silly, which led to a spontaneous invitation to join the Ruths in their stateroom to partake in “an empire of caviar and champagne,” as Eleanor described it in her memoir, My Luke and I.
She partook for two hours while her anxious hubby (and most of the crew) searched the ship and scanned the horizon. When the iron-willed Iron Horse finally found his happily tipsy bride in the Ruths’ cabin, he refused to speak to her and spurned Ruth’s “Let’s be pals” bear hug when he barged into the Gehrigs’ stateroom later that day.
Eleanor denied subsequent rumors (circulated by her attorney, according to author Ray Robinson) that she had shared more than caviar and champagne with the Babe. Either way, the rift was irrevocable. It would remain so until July 4, 1939, when Gehrig, dying of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, the disease that would come to bear his name, gave his “luckiest man” speech at home plate at Yankee Stadium. And Ruth, resplendent in a white suit and an open-collared shirt, wrapped him in a bear hug and whispered something that made him smile.
As their motorcade made its way from the station in Tokyo on November 2, heading east toward Frank Lloyd Wright’s Imperial Hotel, a half-million Japanese lined the Ginza, shouting, “Banzai, banzai, Babe Ruth!”
The outpouring was balm to his soul. He called baseball his love game. In Japan, he found a place where baseball still loved him back. Connie Mack hailed him as a “peace promoter” on the front page of the New York Times, and said he looked better at the plate than he had in two years. Meanwhile, Moe Berg was photographing military installations with the help of Takizo Matsumoto.
On their way home, Babe, Claire, and Julia stopped in Manila and Singapore, as well as Bali and Java, where he pronounced himself unimpressed by the women, whom he found “too chesty and too black,” according to the United Press. He rode in rickshaws and passed through the Suez Canal en route to Marseille. He skied in St. Moritz. He was disdained in Paris. “Not much of a town,” he said.
He liked London better.
The more Ruth saw of the world, the more he missed the only one he knew. Two days after the Ruths disembarked in Manhattan on February 20, word reached the United States that a nationalist fanatic had stabbed the publisher of Tokyo’s third-largest newspaper in retribution for his disloyalty to the homeland in sponsoring Ruth’s barnstorming tour.
While the Ruths were still in Europe, Walsh had received an offer for the Babe’s services from the failing 101 Ranch Wild West Show. They’d pay him $75,000—or 30 percent of the gross—to ride an elephant behind a calliope playing “Take Me Out to the Ball Game.”
The only baseball offer came from Judge Emil Fuchs, owner of the Boston Braves, which looked swell compared with the alternative. The $25,000 salary included two fancy titles—vice president and assistant manager—and the glimmer of a prospect of a hope of succeeding Bill McKechnie as manager.
The Yankees gleefully granted him his unconditional release. By the time spring training camp opened, they had assigned his number 3 to a new right fielder, George Selkirk, and filled his St. Petersburg locker with kindling.
He hit a home run in his first game back in Boston as a member of the National League Braves off King Carl Hubbell, raising hopes of a miraculous reincarnation, only to spend the next two months dashing them. He went a whole month without hitting a home run and arrived in Pittsburgh in late May with a .153 batting average, two aching knees, and a shape that exceeded caricature. McKechnie had him batting third and staking out his old territory in right field on Saturday afternoon, May 25.
The Pirates pitching staff included two particularly familiar faces: his old friend and teammate Waite Hoyt, and his old tormentor from the 1932 World Series, Guy Bush. In the clubhouse before the game, according to Marshall Smelser’s account, starter Red Lucas expressed qualms about facing the Babe—even this old, doddering version of him. Hoyt assured him the solution was simple: throw behind him. “One base on four balls or four bases on one ball.”
Bush scoffed. Throw him sinkers, he said. He’d gotten Ruth out on sinkers in Chicago in 1932. Yes, Hoyt, pointed out, but Charlie Root had thrown him sinkers and they ended up in the center field bleachers.
In the top of the first inning, Lucas threw Ruth a sinker and it landed in the right field stands. He was replaced by Guy Bush, who’d hurled racial invective at Ruth from the top step of the dugout in Game 3 of the 1932 Series and hit him in the arm with his best fastball in Game 4. Hard enough that Ruth wouldn’t have been able to play had there been a Game 5.
There are many definitions of greatness. Surely one of them is the ability to summon the memory of it when fate, or in this case the opposing manager, offers an operatic opportunity to perform at your best one more time.
Ruth arrived at the plate with one on, one out, and a long memory. Like Lucas, Bush threw him a sinker. It, too, landed in the right field stands, though not by that much, for Ruth’s second two-run home run of the afternoon.
The Boston Globe dismissed these less than titanic blows as being “in the manner of ordinary sluggers.” But there was nothing ordinary about what followed.
Bush was still on the mound when Ruth came to bat in the seventh. Having also surrendered an RBI single to the old man in the fifth on yet another sinker, Bush reconsidered his approach. No more pussyfooting around. The Babe was getting his best stuff. But Bush’s fastball came in straight and far too true, between Ruth’s sagging waist and his aching knees, and caught a little too much of the plate.
A flock of Pittsburgh Press delivery boys and the usual neighborhood crew occupied the lower right field stands set aside every Saturday afternoon. Phil Coyne, a seventeen-year-old from the Oakland section of town located behind the ballpark, was there, as he would be many days thereafter. He would go to work as an usher two years later and continued to show Pirate fans to their seats until the end of the 2017 season, when he was ninety-nine years old. “The first two home runs we really didn’t pay attention to,” he said. “We just run around a lot. But the third one we paid attention to. A miracle happened and he hit it all the way over the fence.”
By which he meant the eighty-six-foot-high roof of the grandstand that had been extended into right field two years earlier. “That was a good, good, ways up there.”
The last home run of Ruth’s career, number 714, was one of those rainbows young Arnold Hano saw so many of in the Bronx, so high they “almost scraped the top of the sky.”
A bunch of kids ran after it into the hollow behind the ballpark; Phil Coyne couldn’t honestly say that he was one of them. The senior usher Gus Miller was dispatched and came back with a report that the ball bounced off a roof of a house on Bouquet Street. Phil was pretty sure that wasn’t true—Bouquet ran parallel to the ballpark.
As Ruth circled the bases, Bush tipped his cap. And the Babe tipped his. It was a bravura performance: 4 for 4 with 6 RBI.
He bypassed the Braves bench and headed directly for the Pittsburgh dugout, which was the only way to access the visiting clubhouse. He plopped himself down on the end of the bench beside a rookie pitcher, Mace Brown, who’d pl
aced himself there hoping to get in Ruth’s way. “Boy, that last one felt good,” Ruth said.
Duffy Lewis, a former Boston teammate and now the Pirates’ road secretary, pleaded with him to quit. Claire pleaded with him to quit. Walsh called from New York and ordered him to quit.
“I can’t,” Ruth said, explaining the commitment he had made to Judge Fuchs to appear at scheduled Babe Ruth Day events on the road trip. “I promised the old sonofabitch I’d play through the Memorial Day doubleheader in Philadelphia.”
The thing they accused him of lacking—a sense of responsibility—kept him going another two weeks. He never got another hit.
On Thursday, May 30, in Philadelphia, he hurt his knee trying to reach a ball hit in his direction in left field. At age forty, he was unable to move quickly enough or far enough to catch it. The ball rolled past him to the wall of the old Baker Bowl where he had played in his first World Series game. After the hitter was thrown out at the plate trying for an inside-the-park home run, Ruth stuffed his glove in his back pocket and headed for the clubhouse in deep center field.
He announced his retirement three days later.
IV
By unhappy coincidence, Ruth’s acrimonious separation from the Braves came just three months after Walsh’s equally acrimonious divorce from his wife, Mada. He withdrew from New York, from daily engagement in Ruth’s affairs, and from daily management of the Christy Walsh Syndicate in March 1935 to attend to litigation and a protracted custody fight, which would prove to be as sordid as any story he ever suppressed involving the Babe. His wife accused him of fathering an illegitimate child; he accused her of turning his son against him. After meeting with Christy Jr. in chambers, the judge called the eleven-year-old boy “a cream puff” and counseled, “what he needs is a good spanking.”
The timing of Walsh’s removal from the scene was ironic for him, given the New Yorker’s belated appreciation for “The Ghosting Business” he had built, expressed in an Alva Johnston profile published in November. It was just plain untimely for Ruth, who “covered” his fifteenth consecutive—and last—World Series for the Christy Walsh Syndicate that fall without Walsh at his side.
For the entirety of his adult existence, the dailiness of baseball, its rhythms and immutable schedule, had governed and organized his life. Rebel as he might, the expectations were ingrained—and reinforced by Walsh, who held him accountable by making it profitable to do so.
Now the two great organizing principles of his life, baseball and Walsh, were gone. The distance between them was more than geographical. To some extent, that was inevitable. They had played out their string. The market for has-beens in the depths of the Depression wasn’t what it is today. There was also tension between Walsh and Claire over control of the family pocketbook.
Ruth would continue to earn significant endorsement income from contracts Walsh had negotiated for the next three years, including those for radio shows with Sinclair Oil and Quaker Oats, and a sporting goods deal with A. G. Spalding. Those three endorsements alone generated $55,000.
Details of various endorsement contracts had been strategically leaked and often inflated over the years. But the first accurate dollar figures were reported as a consequence of a lawsuit Walsh filed against his wife stemming from their divorce, charging her with absconding with $23,931 in community property.
Newspapers that subscribed to the Christy Walsh Syndicate picked up the March 5, 1937, United Press dispatch promising “inside dope” on the endorsement game: Ruth’s $25,000-a-year deal with Quaker Oats; Walsh’s 50 percent take of the Babe’s ghostwritten stories; and his ten-cent take on the sale of every “All-American” sweater sold by Pacific Knitting Mills because he owned the rights to the title “All American Board of Football.”
When Walsh’s last contract with Ruth expired on May 1, 1938, he sent a letter marking the end of their formal relationship, which he called no “ordinary friendship” and “a bond of understanding and confidence.” He also prepared an itemized account of his stewardship of Ruth’s affairs during “17 years of congenial and mutually profitable relations.”
Walsh complained bitterly about paying alimony, legal fees, and medical bills for Christy Jr., whose health appeared more delicate to his mother than to his many physicians, but when all the legal wrangling was said and done, he told van Loon, “I do not owe a dollar to any man or any woman in the world . . . and I have a few dollars in the bank!”
In the fall of 1937, Walsh placed an advertisement in Editor & Publisher announcing that the Christy Walsh Syndicate had given up the ghost. With Ruth retired, Huggins and Rockne dead, and radio giving voice to a new generation of athletes, the ghostwriting business was DOA. The willing suspension of disbelief was no longer willing.
It was time to say adios to ghosts. He wrote and published the little memoir of that name in September (available by mail order for fifty cents) in which he revealed a few trade secrets, which everyone already knew, and got his name in the papers again. In October, he accepted a $10,000-a-year job as director of sports for the 1939 World’s Fair in Flushing Meadows.
Three months later, he gave up his three-year fight for joint custody of his son, surrendered his parental rights, and returned to New York, bringing his mother with him. He threw her a seventy-fifth birthday party at the Hotel Roosevelt, where he assembled an unlikely a capella quartet featuring Eddie Rickenbacker, Babe Ruth, Democratic party boss James A. Farley, and Governor Al Smith.
He threw himself into work and his new New York life, crowing in a letter to van Loon, “I am 44, still able to produce a family, do not smoke or drink; swear artistically, when the occasion demands; never gamble or play cards but won $3 the first and only time I played ‘Monopoly’; my temper is not uncontrollable (as was recently alleged in court) and I am not ‘imperious’ (as was further alleged); I have NO INTENTION OF MARRYING AGAIN, on the other hand, if a gorgeous creature, who is intelligent and congenial, comes along, my decision is subject to appeal. IMPORTANT: I have long, skinny legs, a funny looking Irish face but I am a hell of a lover!”
He changed his mind about matrimony after meeting Miss Margaret Merritt, a young hostess at the fair, his new “oh-my-goodness”—in Winchell’s delicious phrase. They would “middle aisle it”—as Winchell might have said—but not until after his dear mother’s death.
He created an Academy of Sports for the 1939 World’s Fair, which he envisioned as a gathering spot where luminaries of the sports world—most of them former clients—would meet with fans and give athletic tutorials. He stationed the Babe on a float in the April 1938 parade through Manhattan and Queens, touting “the world of tomorrow” being built in a former ash heap.
He had been hired for his contacts in the sports world and newspaper business, but his enthusiasm for employing them irked Commander Howard A. Flanigan, chief administrative assistant to World’s Fair president Grover Whalen. “It is evident throughout this report that Mr. Walsh is thinking of a ‘Christy Walsh’ show at the Fair and not a World’s Fair show,” he tutted in a memo.
Walsh fulminated in reply and threatened to quit, citing his lack of autonomy and vacation days, not to mention missed paychecks, but stayed on when Whalen granted him greater control of sports for the 1940 fair.
He continued to perform the occasional service for the Babe, but when executives at the Equitable Life Assurance Company with whom Walsh had worked to create Ruth’s annuities appealed to him to intercede with Ruth because new advisers were encouraging him to take money out of the account prematurely, Walsh pointedly declined. “This has been a headache to me for many years, with no compensation (and little or no evidence of gratitude) so I don’t feel like putting any more time in on the matter,” he told Equitable vice president William J. Graham in a November 1938 letter.
Apparently, the headache to which he referred—and which he would disclose a decade later to a friendly Los Angeles sports columnist—was Claire Ruth’s belief that he had structured the policy
in order to prevent her from having access to the funds in the event of a divorce. “Claire thought Walsh had been plotting directly against her, which was not the case,” the columnist wrote. “But she resented it, nevertheless. While they were friendly in ensuing years, the Babe and Christy never were as close again.”
In Walsh’s absence, Claire put her husband on a fifty-dollar-a-week allowance.
By the time the country emerged from the twin cataclysms of World War II and the Great Depression, the business model Walsh had created—“making the circus tent as large as possible without denigrating it to the point where people don’t want to pay for the ride,” as one modern agent described it—and Walsh himself had been completely forgotten.
No one would come along to take his place until George Weiss, who had succeeded Larry MacPhail as Yankee general manager, fired traveling secretary Frank Scott in 1950 for getting too close to the players. Scott then opened a business arranging side deals for the likes of Berra, Mantle, and DiMaggio, which earned him a prominent obituary in the New York Times in 1998, in which he was identified as “Baseball’s First Player Agent.”
By then, Christy Walsh had been dead and buried for forty-three years.
V
After leaving the Braves on June 2, Ruth went home and waited for the phone to ring.
It didn’t.
A month after he retired, Paramount News cameras were on hand to film his return to the field of play—in a celebrity softball game at the Westchester Country Club. Decked out in Napoleonic-era naval garb, with a bicorne hat, and whiskers drawn on his cheeks, he arrived in the company of a drum major, an accordionist, and a sax player. As club members looked on from lawn chairs, Ruth affected to cut a ball in half with his sword and then when the game began swung and missed at the first pitch. His faux whiskers spread a black stain across his face as he did battle with heat and exertion.
In August, Paul Gallico brought him to Jones Beach to hit fungoes into Zach’s Bay at a water circus promoted by the Daily News. When the tens of thousands of sunbathers gathered on the shore caught sight of him, “the crowd caught fire like a blaze running over a dry meadow,” Gallico wrote. Then the Babe began hitting balls from the stage, and hundreds of children quit the beach, churning the bay into foam, in hopes of corralling one of the white orbs that traveled farther and farther as he found his rhythm. At the evening performance, he launched phosphorescent balls into the night sky for thousands more screaming adherents—some 60,000 had come to see him that day—and Gallico wondered how it was possible that he remained unemployed.