The Big Fella

by Jane Leavy

  It fell to Julia to address the press when he was released on February 15, 1947. She said he just wanted to go home and look out the window at the Hudson River. That night on the radio Walter Winchell reported that Ruth had lost 125 pounds while in the hospital. Ruth was incensed and demanded a retraction. “When I die my bones will weigh more than 100 pounds,” he said.

  Dorothy wrote in her memoir that he was in so much pain that spring that he became addicted to morphine, an addiction she also claimed he overcame before his death, putting himself “into the hospital for drugs” and “staying clean until the very end.” Even a soft-boiled egg became painful to eat. He had a butcher on Ninth Avenue grind chopped sirloin for him and took it with him on golf outings when he was well enough to play. Beer was sustenance now.

  Babe and Claire made plans to go south, the way he always had in February for spring training. They stayed with his friend Ray Kilthau in Miami Beach and visited the Yankees’ new spring training stadium, Al Lang Field, in St. Petersburg. He pointed to the weathered facade of the Gulf Coast Inn, which, Red Smith wrote later, had stood in “an everlasting distance beyond the outfield wall” of the old ballpark. “He remembered how he’d really got his adjectival shoulders into a swing and had knocked the indelicacy ball against the Anglo-Saxon hotel out there.”

  In Ruth’s absence, Emory Perry, a Chicago businessman who, along with attorney Melvyn Lowenstein and executor Paul Carey, had assumed a greater role in his affairs since the rupture with Christy Walsh, wrote to baseball commissioner Happy Chandler describing Ruth as “a mighty sick boy” with “not too long a time upon this earth.”

  They had spoken on the telephone the day before. Perry wrote on February 21 to recapitulate the conversation so that the commissioner could share his thoughts with other baseball bigwigs: “Babe has been led to believe that the Doctors are in a quandary as to what his illness might be and have told him that it is an unusual case. This has placed him in a rather good frame of mind, which is a good thing. It would be most detrimental for him to hear over the radio or read in the papers what might actually be the truth of the matter.”

  Perry urged Chandler to declare opening day “Babe Ruth Day” at every major-league ballpark. While he doubted Ruth would be strong enough to attend, perhaps he’d be able to listen to the tribute on the radio. The suggestion was quickly adopted. Perry then suggested making it an annual event with proceeds going to the Babe Ruth Foundation, which would be established in May. Baseball higher-ups had no intention or interest in doing that, though several lent their names to the foundation’s board.

  American League and Yankee team officials conferred about Ruth’s financial situation and whether some degree of support should be provided. Ed Barrow confirmed that “Ruth had been obliged to dispose of some of his principal in order to meet hospital bills etc.”

  Terms of the 1927 trust prohibited him from withdrawing funds from the account, other than the quarterly dividend checks he received. He had money in the bank—$107,611 in cash and $78,017 in U.S. savings bonds at the time of his death, according to an estate tax appraisal reported in the New York Times in 1951. (His net estate, including the trust, was $360,811 at that time.)

  He also had an insurance policy worth $10,343; a motorboat; a Lincoln Continental from Ford worth $4,210; baseball memorabilia valued at $1,175; 55 Mexican pesos; and five shares in the George H. Ruth Candy Company, which had no value at all.

  The Yankees and American League officials settled on giving him a $5,000 honorarium and an RCA television so that he could watch baseball.

  Christy Walsh came east for Babe Ruth Day. He hadn’t flown since Knute Rockne’s death in an icy airplane crash over western Kansas on the last day of March 1931. The Rock had been en route to Los Angeles to do work for Studebaker and to sign the $25,000 movie deal Walsh had negotiated. In Walsh family lore, his life was spared when his train arrived late and the plane took off without him.

  That’s not what he wrote in his syndicated column that week, describing his attempt to warn Rockne off “his airline intentions” at dinner the night before his flight. The coach “scowled with good nature, and said, ‘Aw you’ve got to get over that.’”

  The future was in the air, Rockne said.

  Acceding to his wife’s plea not to fly, Walsh planned to take the train to Los Angeles, the wire services reported. He was in South Bend when word of the crash came clattering across the tickers, the news editor of the South Bend News-Times recalled, tearing stories off the wire machines in the newsroom until editors forcibly ejected him.

  Walsh never got over Rockne’s death, the first celebrity casualty in the skies. But he was at Newark Airport to meet Babe and Claire when they returned from Florida in time for Babe Ruth Day. He brought a plaque from Eddie Rickenbacker honoring Ruth’s thirty-minute victory over a fifty-pound sailfish—an odd pretext for renewing a relationship that had dwindled to a cursory correspondence featuring requests for autographed photographs.

  Walsh also brought his son, Christy Jr., with whom he had reconciled, to Ruth’s apartment. “Christy Jr. couldn’t understand why Babe didn’t recognize his dad,” recalled Christy Jr.’s son-in-law Matt Cwieka. “Christy Sr. said, ‘It’s okay.’”

  The Daily News dug up Johnny Sylvester, the New Jersey boy whose life “Dr. Ruth” was credited with saving in 1926, and brought him to see the Babe. Sylvester was by then a Princeton graduate and worried that Ruth wouldn’t recognize him.

  But his concern was misplaced. It was the Big Fella who was barely recognizable. His appearance was shocking. Just a couple of days before the ceremony at the Stadium, he attended the annual Banshee luncheon at the Waldorf-Astoria with Bob Considine. “Bugs” Baer, who wrote Ruth’s act for vaudeville, was the emcee. Noticing the Duke of Windsor among the gathering of fifteen hundred editors and publishers, he ad-libbed: “Hey, Duke, you’re outranked. We’ve got some other nobility in the house. A famous king—the King of Swat.”

  And then he summoned Ruth to the stage to say a few words, not realizing how difficult that might be. His cheeks were sunken, almost caved in, the fullness gone from the familiar features, shoulders, chest. He held his double-breasted windowpane sports jacket close as if worried it might fall off him.

  He opened his mouth to speak but his voice only cracked. He tried again. The result was no better. His hand fluttered to his chest and then to his throat. Turning away from the microphone, fighting back tears, he allowed Baer to help him back to his seat.

  On his day at the Stadium, he was in better spirits and better voice, calling the umpires “three blind mice” and chuckling at his own corny joke. But his laugh became a cough and the cough didn’t want to end. He said, “I never knew what sickness was until now.”

  The press was careful never to use the word “cancer,” but the stooped, ashen figure who leaned into the microphone that afternoon, exposing the wispy steel wool remains of hair that barely covered his skull, spoke to no other diagnosis. He said that his voice felt as bad as it sounded—a death rattle carried on the Mutual Broadcasting Network and broadcast in every ballpark in the majors. His appearance led to unseemly requests, unhelpful speculation, and unwanted advice.

  First thing Monday morning American League president Will Harridge sent a note of congratulations and a stack of 8-by-10 glossies for Ruth to sign when he had the time, by which Harridge meant while there was still time.

  Ruth sent the Yankees a letter of heartfelt thanks.

  John Rattray, the Marysville chiropractor Ruth had traveled ninety miles out of his way to see twenty years earlier, had wired the Babe in January “in a vain attempt to delay the operation that was performed to stop his headache,” he wrote in a promotional brochure for his practice circulated at the time of Ruth’s death.

  Rattray was convinced he could have restored the Babe to full health and that he died not of cancer but as the result of nerves severed during surgery. “Of course, at that time, Babe Ruth was so famous that he was be
yond personal communication,” Rattray’s daughter Pat Johnstone noted.

  Bernarr Macfadden, the herald of the physical culture movement, would put Ruth on the cover of his magazine of the same name three months after his death, declaring that had he been “put on an exclusive grape diet he might have returned to the baseball field for many years of active service, notwithstanding his age.”

  Ruth chose another course. He consented to an experimental form of chemotherapy and radiation then being tested on mice at New York’s Mount Sinai Hospital, where doctors reported that tumors treated with the drug “melted away.” On June 29, he began receiving daily injections of Teropterin (pteroyl triglutamic acid), a developmental drug which was being used in trials with children with leukemia at Dana-Farber Hospital in Boston and on a woman with breast cancer at Harlem Hospital in New York. He was among the first patients anywhere, if not the first, to receive the combination of chemotherapy and radiation for nasopharyngeal cancer.

  Ruth knew it had rarely if ever been used on humans. He asked no questions but knew the risk. “I realized that if anything was learned about that type of treatment, whether good or bad, it would be of use in the future to the medical profession and maybe to a lot of people with my same trouble,” Ruth told the ghostwriter of the autobiography he was too ill to contribute much to.

  Which belies the much-repeated claim that he was oblivious to the nature of his illness. What else could he have meant when he told Connie Mack, “The termites have got me.” He was dying, not stupid. “He figured it out,” Julia Ruth said. “So Claire had to tell him eventually.”

  The improvement was dramatic. His pain abated, along with his need for narcotics. Able to eat again, he gained twenty pounds. By August, the mass in his neck and the enlarged lymph nodes had completely disappeared. In September, doctors reported the breakthrough at the International Cancer Congress in St. Louis. Ironically, Ruth made the most important news of his life as an anonymous patient in the lead story of the September 11, 1947, Wall Street Journal, declaring that scientists were on the verge of a cure for cancer.

  The claim proved to be wildly overoptimistic, the Babe’s recovery short-lived. Nonetheless, the knowledge gained from his case helped shape the combination-therapy approach that became standard treatment for the disease.

  Although Teropterin is no longer used to treat nasopharyngeal cancer, a closely related drug, Methotrexate, remains a standard treatment for a variety of other cancers, including leukemia and uterine cancer, as well as Crohn’s disease and rheumatoid arthritis. The authors of a 1999 paper published in the Laryngoscope concluded that “Ruth had contributed as much in death as he had in life, which only adds to his immense legend.”

  In April, he had signed a contract with the Ford Motor Company as an evangelist for American Legion Junior Baseball. In exchange, Ford, the only company that saw fit to employ him, gave him the Lincoln and $500 for each city he visited. He would travel fifty thousand miles for them during the last two years of his life. Why did he go? Because he felt better. Because they paid him. Because he didn’t know how to stop being Babe Ruth.

  In November 1947, Ford hired a twenty-three-year-old former military flight nurse named Aline Maas to accompany him to Omaha to receive an award from Father Flanagan and Boys Town. It was a long way to go to be remembered. “He was withering away,” Maas told the Chicago Tribune decades later. He was depressed, distressed, resigned. “A big puppy dog,” Maas said.

  All the old gratifications were gone except the ever-present cigar plugged in his mouth and the kids waiting to see him. He got off the train frequently to sign autographs. Sister Mary Bertille Geffert, a Franciscan nun at Boys Town, made him vanilla ice cream from her secret recipe to soothe his throat, which worked well enough to allow him to talk about Brother Matthias, telling the boys how Big Matt stationed Little George in a corner and threw balls at him every day until he learned to hit them in self-defense.

  That evening he received the first annual Boys Town service award for the advancement of youth. All the big shots in Omaha assembled at the Paxton Hotel. Among them was Johnny Rosenblatt, who had been struck out by him in October 1927. He was then engaged in building Johnny Rosenblatt Stadium, the future home of the College World Series, and getting himself elected mayor. Rosenblatt brought along his young son, Steve, who remembered the conversation between his dad and the Babe. Rosenblatt had continued to play baseball, he told Ruth, and had faced Satchel Paige in 1935, who came down off the mound, halfway to home, to warn him, “You will never see strike three.”

  Which he didn’t. “Struck out by Babe Ruth and Satchel Paige. How many people can say that?”

  Dim as it was in the ambient light of the Art Deco mezzanine, Steve could see his father’s purpose. He just wanted to make a dying man smile.

  Which was also Aline Maas’s purpose when she asked Ruth on the long train ride home what he considered his most important contribution to the game. His response was quick and unequivocal: “That I got baseball salaries up.”

  It was a widely held, though undocumented, belief, touted by his teammate Waite Hoyt: “Every big leaguer and his wife should teach their children to pray, ‘God bless Mommy, God bless Daddy, and God bless Babe Ruth.’”

  And by Ford Frick in 1933: “Babe instituted big salaries all the way down the line.”

  In January 3, 1941, Friday magazine, a short-lived left-wing weekly that advertised itself as “the magazine that dares to tell the truth,” sent veteran sportswriter Ed Hughes to Ruth’s apartment to provoke the otherwise unoccupied Bambino into politicizing the issue by linking it to his banishment from baseball. “‘Why not speak out?’ I prodded. ‘You know you’re being sidetracked because you jacked up the wages of all ball-players. What are you afraid of—offending the magnates’ feelings?’”

  Hughes’s editors stretched Ruth’s one, bland quote into a provocative headline and a three-page magazine spread: “Why the Babe Was Banned.”

  “I don’t care about hurting the magnates’ feelings. They certainly have not spared mine. But I don’t want to say anything that makes me look like a bad sport. You know—on account of the kids.”

  The assertion that he fundamentally altered the salary structure in big-league baseball does not stand the test of time. After analyzing decades of major-league-baseball data, Michael Haupert concluded that Ruth’s salary had no measurable effect on the average major-league salary, during his career or afterward. “He was an outlier,” Haupert says. “The general salary trend was being driven by attendance and general salary increases during the 1920s and the effects of the Great Depression and World War II thereafter. That doesn’t mean Yankee wives shouldn’t have gotten down on their knees in thanks because Ruth’s performance lifted the team to such a degree that it drove higher attendance, which is what fueled their higher salaries. And some of those players were making 50 percent of their salary on their World Series checks.”

  IV

  Babe Ruth arrived in Los Angeles on May 1, 1948, with Claire, Julia, Emory Perry, and his new male nurse, Frank Dulaney, to assume his duties as technical adviser to The Babe Ruth Story. They were met at the station by William Bendix. There was no band of orphans, no bouquet of roses for Claire, no Christy Walsh.

  Most of the movie had been shot. The trip was promotional and motivational. The book and the film made from it had given him a purpose—as well as income. That spring, he donated the original manuscript to Yale University; it was accepted on the pitcher’s mound by the team captain, George Herbert Walker Bush. He attended a book party at the office of his publisher, E. P. Dutton & Co. in New York, where Bennett Cerf and Papa Hemingway stood in line for his autograph. When his co-author, Bob Considine, asked him to sign his copy, Ruth asked him his name.

  Considine had hired Fred Lieb, who had the advantage of actually knowing the Babe, to lend the oeuvre the patina of authenticity. The Hollywood script doctors undid whatever truths might have found their way into the manuscript. Ruth emerge
d, in the person of William Bendix, as a caricature of a caricature. Even the most credulous moviegoers would have had a hard time believing the phantasmagoric cinematic dimensions of the Called Shot, conflating it with the 1926 story of Johnny Sylvester, the allegedly dying New Jersey boy who wasn’t dying, wasn’t in the hospital, and certainly wasn’t in Chicago as the movie script has it, with Ruth appearing at his bedside deus ex machina, promising a lifesaving home run at Wrigley Field. Thus healed, the screen version of Johnny leaps from the stands, pleading with the Babe Ruth not to retire.

  Charlie Root pointedly said he refused to perpetuate a falsehood and declined the opportunity to play himself.

  The movie folks took him to the studio to see the faux baseball diamond and grandstand laid out on a soundstage that passed interchangeably for Wrigley, Fenway Park, Comiskey Park, and Yankee Stadium. Louella Parsons introduced him to Betty Grable and June Havoc, who swooned over him while Claire queried the dominatrix of hearsay about the Babe’s appearance. “Don’t you think he looks better? He has put on a few pounds.”

  They took him to San Fernando Park, a baseball field sometimes used as a Hollywood location, where the Babe tried to show Bill Bendix how to look like he was slugging the ball. Roy Del Ruth was shooting close-ups that day of the sixtieth home run and gave Bendix thirty swings. “Gosh,” said Ruth after the long at-bat, the Bakersfield Californian reported. “I wish I could have done it that way. If you miss in Hollywood, you get 29 other chances.”

  And they took him to Gilmore Field to see the Hollywood Stars, the Pacific Coast League franchise owned by Bob Cobb and a pantheon of Hollywood movie stars, including Gary Cooper. Ruth was greeted with an ovation and a visit from a few of the players on the visiting Portland Bears, a Yankee farm team. It was awkward. They were young men in the thrall of full-bodied youth, eager to get on with it. They knew it was supposed to be important. But really, they just wanted to play ball. Besides, it was hard to make polite conversation with someone who couldn’t talk. “They didn’t want anybody talking to him for that long,” said Charlie Silvera, a catcher who had been at Yankee Stadium on Babe Ruth Day. “He was frail, my goodness he was frail. He was as cheerful as he could be.”