by Jane Leavy
Glenn E. Thomas, the wealthy Studebaker dealer who had arranged a fishing outing for the Babe in January, put himself at Ruth’s disposal, helping him fulfill his promise to take Gehrig hunting. Thomas staged an outing to the Farmers Gun Club in Orange County near the present site of the Los Alamitos Race Course. Again, he brought along his publicist, a professional photographer, and a cameraman, who filmed the scruffy, unshaven Babe happily lying in the dirt with his shotgun and a wreath of dead ducks.
He also filmed Ruth passed out dead drunk in his duck blind, chin collapsed on chest, thick hair matted and unkempt—much to the amusement of an old-timer sitting beside him, who can be seen in the background tippling from an imaginary cup.
The 16mm footage, spliced into a roll of home movies featuring the likes of Charles Lindbergh, remained unwatched and undisturbed until Thomas’s daughter and her stepdaughter shared it with author Chris Epting in 2012. Epting dug up Thomas’s account of his harrowing night in Ruth’s duck blind at the Long Beach Police Historical Society: “Thomas was afraid that Ruth might accidentally shoot him. Thomas reported that on the second night of the hunt he stayed with Gehrig.”
With the cameras rolling in the clear light of day, the Babe sat still while young Lou patiently picked through his mop of unruly hair, seeking nesting critters in the Ruthian roost. One of the still images lives on as wall art in the Bass Pro wilderness shop in Rancho Cucamonga, California, and at some of the chain’s other seventy-six locations in thirty-four states.
They were scheduled to board the Santa Fe Chief for New York on Saturday, November 5, with planned stops in Albuquerque, New Mexico; Emporia, Kansas; and Gary, Indiana. Local newspapers published their schedule in advance, promising that Ruth would detrain and greet local fans. Occasionally, as at Emporia, the schedule proved erroneous, requiring a retraction. “Today’s Tragedy: Portly Pullman Passenger Nearly Mobbed.”
The weather eased their departure by turning surly.
Ruth returned to Wrigley Field to visit Harold Lloyd, who was busy shooting the final scenes for Speedy, his last silent movie, having coaxed the best acting performance of the Babe’s life a month earlier in New York.
In gratitude, Louella Parsons reported in her gossip column, Ruth had given him the bat he used to hit his sixtieth home run. Lloyd’s architect was busy adding a special niche to the game room of the new $1 million estate Lloyd was building in Benedict Canyon.
The provenance of the alleged artifact was dubious at best; comedian Joe E. Brown and reporter James E. Kahn also claimed to be in possession of the precious totem, the latter donating his Babe Ruth bat to the Hall of Fame the year it opened in 1939.
Parsons also said that Ruth was planning to return to his farm—the one he no longer owned—to begin training for the 1928 season.
Also that week, Ruth and Gehrig addressed the Wampas Club, a prominent assembly of Los Angeles PR men, on their favorite topic. “How to Hit Them and for How Much.”
Walsh issued a triumphal press release summarizing the Symphony of Swat, with a crescendo of unverifiable statistics: they had traveled 8,000 miles, playing before 220,000 people and signing 5,000 baseballs. Of the twenty-one games they played in twenty cities in nine states, thirteen were broken up by fan enthusiasm. Schools were closed in three of jurisdictions. Offers for thirty-nine additional games were received from nineteen states.
Ruth led in homers but Gehrig had the better batting average—.618, 55 hits, and 13 home runs. Ruth hit .616, with 61 hits and 20 home runs. The Copper Cup was his, along with $28,281.93 he netted during the tour, according to Walsh, plus $3,000 for modeling those overalls in Kansas City. Ruth said he paid Gehrig $9,000, more than his 1927 Yankee salary. The Bustin’ Twins also shared $4,700 in “pick-up” money, Walsh reported.
Asked about his intentions for the off-season, Gehrig said he planned to play a lot of basketball. The Philadelphia Warriors of the American Basketball League immediately expressed interest in signing him.
Ruth, who had received a telegram in Fresno offering a fat sum for a vaudeville tour, turned it down cold. “It’s been a rough season,” he said. “I ain’t going to do a thing except you know what.”
The Fresno Bee went with a cleaner version of his remarks. “I need lots of rest,” Ruth said. “I’m going to spend a lot of time hunting and fish and taking things easy.”
Epilogue
I
August was the cruelest month for the Ruth family of Baltimore City: George Sr., Katie, and their youngest child, William, had all died in the eighth month of the year.
Babe’s sister, Mamie, knowing she would soon be the only surviving member of the family, told her husband she was going to New York to see if she could help. There wasn’t much anyone could do. Toots Shor, the bon vivant restaurateur, sent catered meals Ruth couldn’t eat. Father Kaufman said he looked like “a triangle standing on its point.”
On August 8, he developed bronchial pneumonia and required an oxygen tank. On August 9, he signed a new will—misspelling his name, “Georgge,” and naming Claire as chief beneficiary with Julia and Dorothy sharing the remainder after her death. He also left $10,000 in cash to Mamie, and $5,000 each to Claire, Julia, and Dorothy.
By the time Mamie arrived, she told Mike Gibbons in 1991, “I don’t think he knew what he was doing or what he was saying.”
He asked to see Ford Frick, but when Frick arrived on August 13, lacked the breath to whisper in the old ghost’s ear. Dorothy reported the arrival of the redheaded woman from Greenwood Lake named Loretta, who claimed to have been Ruth’s girlfriend for the past ten years. In her memoir, Dorothy said Claire gave her $25,000 to go away when she threatened to make the affair public.
Ten thousand telegrams and letters—including one from the White House—arrived in two days, along with offers for an equal number of blood donations, which were politely declined. A bottle of pine cologne, a gift from Betty Grable, was accepted and gratefully acknowledged. (The Babe liked a little in his evening bath.) He reciprocated with an autographed picture from their visit to the set of The Babe Ruth Story.
On his bedside table stood a statue of St. Martin de Porres, the patron saint of orphans and mulattoes. Born in Lima, Peru, to a Spanish nobleman and an Indian woman, de Porres had been abandoned by his father, who was ashamed of his son’s swarthy complexion, a suggestive detail to those inclined to believe the rumors about Ruth’s racial heritage.
But St. Martin de Porres was also the patron saint of the Knights of Columbus, the organization Ruth had joined in Boston in 1916, and which had sponsored so many of the barnstorming games. The statue had been given to him by a fellow knight.
On August 12, the hospital announced his condition was critical. Two days later, doctors began issuing hourly bulletins. On the fifteenth, Paul Carey reached Julia at the nearby hotel where she was staying with Claire, “I think you’d better get over here.”
On Sunday, August 16, he managed to get out of bed and sit in a chair for twenty minutes, but his breathing was labored. His temperature continued to rise. He told Claire, “Don’t come back tomorrow, because I won’t be here.”
Slugger rallies. Pulmonary complications. Family at bedside. Slugger sinking rapidly. Slugger failing.
The slugger had never failed at anything and he certainly wasn’t going to fail at this. At 6:45 P.M., May Breen DeRose read him a telegram. As she got ready to leave, he lurched out of bed and started across the room. “Where are you going, Babe?” the doctor asked.
“I’m going over the valley.”
At 7:30 P.M., he received a final blessing. Minutes later he fell into a deep coma. He was pronounced dead at 8:01 P.M.
Father Kaufman told the flock of boys waiting beneath Ruth’s window that it was a beautiful death.
The autopsy results, reported two days later in the New York Times, sounded anything but beautiful, revealing that the cause of death was not, as previously supposed, cancer of the larynx, but a very rare and aggressive form of nasopharyngeal cancer
that had spread to his neck, his lungs, and his liver.
His granddaughter Linda offered a different opinion. “I think baseball killed him; not cancer. He had no more worth in his head.”
II
August 17, 18, and 19 were undeclared days of national mourning. He now belonged to history, a point underscored by Claire’s hurried, furtive attempt to hide a few of his baseball belongings from representatives of the Hall of Fame when eventually they came calling. The executors of his will, Paul Carey and Melvin Lowenstein, had decided to give all his baseball memorabilia to Cooperstown.
“Just a minute, just a minute,” Julia remembered her mother saying. “I’ll be right there in a minute.”
She saved a loving cup trophy, his hunting cap, a white silk dress scarf, and a handful of bats stowed in a duffel bag in a closet.
His death was announced in the Daily Mirror in 172-point type reserved for declarations of war and peace. The Sporting News rushed a special section into print. Sportswriters published stories they had buried at his request like the one in the Oakland Tribune about a poor southern farmer who arrived at his hotel at midnight in a downpour with a horse and wagon saying his boy was sick and needed the Babe. And the Babe got out of bed and went. In another iteration, it was daytime and he took a cab.
It was the undertaker’s idea to have a public viewing in the Rotunda at the Yankee Stadium. One thing Julia and Dorothy agreed on: neither liked the idea. Dorothy’s objections were institutional—she shared Claire’s bitterness toward the Yankees. “He had to die to get back in,” Dorothy said.
Julia’s objections were aesthetic and historical. She didn’t want anyone to remember him this way. “Poor Daddy, he looked so awful. I hated to think of all those people going by and seeing him look like that. He looked so old, so sad.”
Laid out in a blue double-breasted suit and a blue-and-gold tie, with black rosary beads wound around his thick fingers, he was a shriveled husk of a man. The undertaker had done the best he could. The wispy, radiation-rotted hair had come back in dark and was slicked back to camouflage the insult of the autopsy. But as Julia recalled, “Golly gee, he was 53 years old, and he only weighed 150 pounds.”
The Babe came home again with a police escort, making the trip from the Universal Funeral Chapel at Fifty-second Street and Lexington Avenue in eighteen minutes flat, the exact time it took for the cops to get him from the Mulberry Street jail to the Polo Grounds in 1921. The Yankees were out of town, in Washington for a three-game series. Pete Sheehy, the clubhouse man who went to work for the team in 1927, stayed up all night scrubbing the concrete floor with his tears.
When Babe Ruth returned to the house he built at 3:48 P.M. in an African mahogany casket lined with eggshell velvet, thousands of fans were waiting for him. The catafalque was positioned between pillars adorned with the jaunty new Yankee top hat and bat logo introduced in 1946. Urns filled with red, yellow, and white gladiolas stood at attention along with three of New York’s finest. At one end of the coffin stood a six-foot crucifix and a vigil candle; at the other end a screen of potted palms and huckleberry sprays. The lid was folded back like a blanket. A spray of American Beauty roses from Dorothy rested on the closed end. Claire arranged for a grand blanket of orchids and roses and asked the Babe’s fans not to send any others.
The clot of mourners hugging the Stadium wall along 158th Street parted to allow Claire, Julia, and her husband, Richard Flanders, who would be dead six months later of heart failure, entry through the press gate. Dorothy didn’t accompany them to the private viewing. By then, their estrangement precluded mourning together. The hospital rewrite of Babe’s will hadn’t helped.
Julia wouldn’t remember much about the day. “It’s almost like I was sleepwalking through it,” she said. “It was quiet. As quiet as you could get in New York City. And bare. Absolutely bare. There were flowers. There was light.”
The gates were scheduled to open at 5:00 P.M., close at 10:00, and reopen again the next morning. Within an hour, a prayer rail and rug placed alongside the casket had to be removed. There were simply too many people who wanted to be able to say, “I saw Babe Ruth.” The procession of mourners surrounding the Stadium was rerouted so that the line cleaved at the foot of the bier, allowing the Babe’s people to surround him, too.
Packed elevated trains arriving on the IRT tracks showered passengers emerging from the IND stop beneath 161st Street and River Avenue with sparks as they screeched to a halt. So many came, police announced, that at Mrs. Ruth’s request the Stadium would remain open all night. An honor guard arrived at midnight to stand vigil.
Aloysius White, a twenty-six-year-old Army veteran who had lost his right leg in Italy, stood in line with a blind man and his guide dog, keeping company with a full moon. White told reporters that when he was a boy in St. Joseph’s Orphanage in Poughkeepsie, Ruth took 250 of the kids to a game at the Stadium.
In the morning, charter buses arrived from Maryland, Delaware, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Connecticut. People came dressed for a ball game in short-sleeved shirts and shirtwaist dresses. Vendors sold hot dogs and photographs of the Babe. It was hot and humid, pennant-race weather.
A fifty-year-old woman fainted.
Mike Klepfer, a nine-year-old boy from Binghamton with a bad case of asthma and a tough-guy dad who worked on Manhattan’s waterfront, arrived with his father at 10:00 A.M. It was already too late.
Every summer, Mike spent a month in the city with his father. Every morning, Mike’s father gave him enough money for subway fare, a bleacher seat at Yankee Stadium, and a hot dog. Only twice did his father accompany him: on Babe Ruth Day in April 1947, when Mike saw his dad cry, and on August 18. “It took an hour to walk to the back end of the line, longer. I kept asking, ‘Will we make it, Dad? Will we make it?’” Klepfer recalled. “We just inched and inched. No water, no food. You had to go all the way down the left field line and go counterclockwise around the ballpark. It was six or seven people wide all the way around the Stadium. We were six hours on line.”
They never made it into the Rotunda. By 4:00 P.M. his father was out of time and patience. They quit the line and Mike would always feel that he had quit on the Babe. Which may explain why when he had the opportunity many years later, after outgrowing asthma and his career as a New York State Trooper, he befriended the next Babe Ruth—Mickey Mantle—acting as his bodyguard and confidant late in life.
George Lois, the son of a Bronx florist, who later put Mantle in TV commercials for breakfast cereal, cut school to go see the Babe. He cut the line. So he didn’t wait long, an hour maybe, to get a look at him, and then wished he hadn’t.
He’d delivered flowers to hundreds of funeral parlors and had seen hundreds of bodies in hundreds of coffins but he had never seen anything quite like this. A profusion of unwanted floral arrangements—one a gigantic baseball, another an approximation of crossed bats—stood at attention by his coffin. “It looked like Lenin’s Tomb,” Lois recalled. “It shook you up. I remember really sweating. Everything was done richly. The coffin looked like a rocket ship or something. Everything was first class. Maybe not in taste but first class.”
Some boys wore sneakers and chewed gum. Some wore ties and jackets. Little League teams were summoned from the diamond in dirty uniforms to pay their respects. Newspaper photographers noticed the Negro teams especially: the Gramercy Boys Club, the Harlem Flashes, and the Harlem River Athletes.
VIPs were whisked inside. Ruth’s friend Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, and Beau Jack, the boxer, with his three children. Jim Barton, who introduced Babe and Claire. Hank Greenberg and Leo Durocher, that sonofabitch. Frank Haggerty, an eleven-year-old boy from Danvers, Massachusetts, who had corresponded with Ruth in 1947, volunteering to represent him at the funeral of Brother Gilbert, the athletic director from Mount St. Joseph’s, who claimed a pivotal role in the Orioles’ signing of the Babe. Ruth had cabled his grateful acceptance without disclosing his dislike for the man.
Y
oung Frank was a hot commodity at the viewing—a new angle on life’s oldest story. He had dressed for the occasion in a spiffy new plaid sports coat. A host of reporters had offered to escort him. But he arrived with Brother Samuel, a member of the Xaverian Order who had the advantage of being Brother Gilbert’s blood brother.
Frank had pull. He was the designated representative of the Youth of New England. He was hustled to the front of the line where somebody put a baseball in his hand and one of the photographers, all of whom knew who he was by then, said, “Why don’t you brush a tear from your eye?”
So he did.
Several versions of the photograph went out on the wires with several different captions: “A Sight to Remember,” and “Boy Cries Over Body of Babe Ruth.”
He never actually said he’d been crying.
The calculus of grief was difficult to ascertain. The Journal-American estimated that sixty souls a minute filed by his casket; the New York City Police revised that figure upward to eighty a minute; the Associated Press counted two thousand an hour; the New York Times respectfully disagreed: six thousand, the paper of record claimed, meaning that when the gates closed at 7:35 P.M. on August 18, seventy-seven thousand had filed by Ruth’s bier.
Three-year-old Harry Escobar, who came in his Yankee uniform with a black armband his father had taped around his left sleeve, filled the front page of the Daily News, giving a face to the tabloid’s perfect headline: “Ruth’s Last Gate, His Greatest.”
III
Hours earlier, in Chester, Pennsylvania, an Irish police captain named Paul McKinney picked up his son in the family car and said, “C’mon, Jackie, we’re going to see the Babe.”
That evening in New York City, they went to see The Babe Ruth Story. They elbowed their way through the sodden crowd outside St. Patrick’s Cathedral the next morning. There were seventy-five thousand people in the street waiting for the hearse to arrive—another sellout. McKinney found a fellow Irish cop, flashed his badge, and said, “Sergeant, I’ve driven all the way from Pennsylvania with my son to see the Babe.”