by Jane Leavy
In short order, they found themselves standing in the back of the great cathedral among the fifty-seven pallbearers whose names had been published in the morning paper—New York governor Thomas E. Dewey and New York City mayor William O’Dwyer, as well as the mayors of Boston and Baltimore; baseball commissioner Happy Chandler and league presidents Ford Frick and Will Harridge; Brother Charles from St. Mary’s, Emory C. Perry, Paul Carey, and Melvin Lowenstein; Joe DiMaggio and Frank Crosetti, on leave from the team in Washington; Ed Barrow, Jack Dempsey and Bobby Jones; Bob Meusel, Earle Combs, Mark Koenig, Lefty Gomez, Waite Hoyt, Joe Dugan; Bojangles and Bill Bendix; the writers Grantland Rice, Bill Corum, Bugs Baer, Bob Considine, Fred Lieb, Joe Williams, Westbrook Pegler, Jim Kahn, Rud Rennie, Burris Jenkins, Alan L. Gould, John Kieran, Dan Daniel, Dan Parker, John Drebinger, Walter Winchell, Ed Sullivan, and Frank Graham.
All the writers had their say—biographer Marshall Smelser counted 490 columns in New York City alone. Everyone would remember Granny’s line: “Game called on account of darkness. Babe Ruth is dead.”
But no one wrote it better than Frank Graham. “They say he is dead but it is very hard to believe because he was so alive.”
Though listed among the pallbearers, Christy Walsh stayed in Los Angeles. On the morning of the sixteenth, before the news reached the West Coast, he had written the Babe a thank-you note for three autographed baseballs he had just received. Then he sent Claire an awkward condolence note via Western Union: “There were just too many extra innings for Babe’s poor overworked heart.”
He organized a Mass, open to all denominations, at the Church of the Blessed Sacrament in Hollywood for the morning of the funeral. He gave an interview to the Associated Press that bore the headline: “Fun-Loving Babe Wised-Up Under Christy Walsh.” And he prepared a ninety-second radio address, delivered on KECA, about the last baseballs autographed by the Babe.
“From Memorial Hospital, New York, a package arrived yesterday. Inside were baseballs for three little fellows in Los Angeles—Robert, Wayne, and Donald Billings. Each ball autographed in the old familiar hand of their hero. Even in his dying hours Babe Ruth was thinking of boys. And even before the lads could claim their sacred souvenirs, Babe Ruth had breathed his last.”
He crossed out a line he’d written about Babe addressing the package himself. He appeared with the boys and their autographed baseballs in the next day’s edition of the Herald Express, a new iteration of the newspaper that first hired him as a cartoonist in 1911.
In the years to come, Walsh stayed busy, though he had to work at it now. Staying busy was integral to his belief system. “If you want something done now, then always give the job to a busy man,” he told his nephew Richard, time and again.
He gave interviews about the Babe; newspaper friends gave banquets in his honor when he published a 1949 follow-up to his encyclopedic 1934 history of college football, and four years later, Baseball’s Greatest Lineup. He produced glossy annual sports calendars and got the formerly silent Harold Lloyd to speak on behalf of them. He was elected president of the Los Angeles branch of the Society of the Friendly Sons of St. Patrick, an extraordinary honor for a teetotaler, his grandson says. Cheap as he was, he was known to serve liquor stored with mothballs, causing guests to flee fund-raisers he hosted.
He continued to name his annual All-American football teams, which were increasingly eclipsed by those selected by Look and Collier’s magazines. He hosted an annual breakfast for the “Morning After the Rose Bowl Society of Inquisitive Reporters and Cautious Coaches” at the second coming of Walshchateau in North Hollywood.
He was up on a ladder in the attic on the afternoon of December 29, 1955, making preparations for his annual Rose Bowl breakfast, when he suffered a fatal heart attack. He was sixty-four years old. A dinner in his honor given that evening by the Sports Ambassadors of Pasadena went on as planned, though his death had not been announced. He’d rather die than face such an onslaught of praise, his nephew said.
His old friend, the baseball lifer Fred Haney, gave what amounted to a eulogy: “Babe himself was not a well-educated man. He’d take a few drinks, run around and do a few things and it was all kept from the press. I think that was one of the greatest journalist jobs ever done and Christy never got credit for it.”
Babe Ruth stopped traffic on Fifth Avenue on August 19, a gray, dismal morning brightened only by the umbrellas shielding the huddled masses lining the sidewalks of New York, seventy-five thousand strong, his second sellout in as many days. Francis Cardinal Spellman, who had witnessed and testified to the miracle of the Called Shot in Chicago, conducted the funeral Mass at St. Patrick’s, with the help of forty-four priests, including Father Kaufman. Six thousand mourners attended, only half of whom were seated; the others were crammed in the aisles and chapels and open spaces at the rear of the cathedral, pressed in among the pallbearers and the casket.
Young Jack McKinney, who would become a Pennsylvania coaching legend at St. Joseph’s College and later NBA coach of the year in 1981, found himself among the celebrants, wedged between Governor Dewey, Bill Bendix, and the Babe. “He had not yet been wheeled forward for the Mass,” McKinney remembered. “They turned the Babe around so he was facing the altar. Then they started playing hymns.”
It was a singular moment for a thirteen-year-old: to encounter death and greatness in such proximity. He and his dad didn’t stick around for the Mass. They weren’t dressed for that. His father gave him the signal and they made their way out of the front entrance to the cathedral.
On the way home, in the car, he turned to his father and offered the only eulogy offered that day.
“Holy smokes, the Babe.”
IV
George Herman Ruth Jr. was buried in section 25 of Gate of Heaven Cemetery in Westchester County, some twenty-three miles from the Yankee Stadium, surrounded by some two hundred thousand Catholics, including a few old friends—Gentleman Jimmy Walker, who admonished him about disappointing the dirty-faced boys of America, as well as Westbrook Pegler and Bob Considine, the first and last mythologists of his life. His grave is up a slight rise, just off Cardinal Avenue, overlooking a man-made lake, the Taconic Parkway, and the railroad tracks of what used to be known as the New York Central and a trickle of the Bronx River heading for the city.
There’s nothing subtle or understated about the gravesite, dwarfed as it is by a sandblasted statue in Westerly granite of Jesus blessing a young baseball player. It is engraved with the words of Cardinal Spellman: “May the Divine Spirit That Animated Babe Ruth to Win the Crucial Game of Life Inspire the Youth of America!”
Claire Ruth was buried beside him in 1976. She died of breast cancer, having refused to seek treatment because of what she saw him endure during the last years of his life. After his death, she maintained a prominent public presence at Yankee Stadium in the box set aside for her along the third base line, attending important occasions, including the October 1, 1961, game when Roger Maris broke the Babe’s home run record. That day, “she might have shed a tear,” Julia said. “But, like Mother used to say, ‘Well, Lindbergh was the first to fly the ocean. But you never heard anything about anyone who did it later.’”
Bus tours arrive in advance of every opening day. People leave him gifts, as if trying to return a favor. Hot dogs are a favorite, some of the plastic dog toy variety. Yellow plastic carnations. Airplane bottles of Smirnoff vodka. Casino chips from the Jackpot Casino in Las Vegas. Cigars. Wedding favors. Neon green Top Flite XL golf balls. And baseballs, lots and lots of baseballs, some autographed to him on the sweet spot, some inscribed with his major-league records, some with his most famous aphorism—“Never Let the Fear of Striking Out Keep You from Playing the Game.” Some of the balls have been there so long, exposed to the elements and the trampled dirt surrounding the headstone, they look like something he threw in the dead ball era.
It’s hard to surprise the Babe’s caretakers. They are accustomed to seeing footprints in the snow, to
license plates arriving from Indiana, Arkansas, and Minnesota. Interest peaked in the days when the Curse of the Bambino still prevailed. Nuns arrived with curse-breaking cookies they baked in Boston. A Beantown radio station sent a drive-time broadcast crew—they wanted to know if they could camp out with the Babe. The trunk of their white stretch limo was filled with beer. A guy showed up in a 1920s baseball uniform with a plastic recliner prepared to spend the night.
Then, one day during the 2004 American League Championship Series, when the Yankees blew a three-game lead over the Red Sox, the section foreman noticed a beat-up car cruise to a stop on Cardinal Avenue. A guy in a white cook’s apron got out, retrieved an insulated delivery bag from the trunk, and walked up the hill toward Jesus. He extricated a white, square cardboard box, still spewing steam, from the bag and placed it on the ground in front of the headstone.
It was a large New York–style pizza—none of that Chicago, deep-dish stuff for the Babe—with plenty of sausage and peppers.
The delivery boy opened the box before backing down the hill and driving away.
Author’s Note and Sources
Twenty-six years ago, I decided to write a novel about Babe Ruth. It wasn’t an original idea. Heywood Broun beat me to it, creating the first fictive Babe in a 1923 novel called The Sun Field. Even then the Babe seemed too big for fact.
I never got past chapter one. One thing led to another, including biographies of Sandy Koufax and Mickey Mantle. Finally, in the summer of 2011, I went to North Conway, New Hampshire, to visit Babe Ruth’s daughter Julia Ruth Stevens, who at the age of ninety-six still called her father Daddy. I figured if I was ever going to make good on my promise to myself I’d better get going.
One thing I knew for sure: I was not going to write a biography of the Babe. An all-star roster of sportswriters and historians—beginning with Dan Daniel and Tom Meany, followed by Robert Creamer, Ken Sobol, Robert Smith, Kal Wagenheim, Marshall Smelser, and Leigh Montville—had already done an admirable job of that. They had the advantage of knowing the Babe, or covering him, of interviewing teammates and opponents, and his closest friends and family. What more was there to say? And, more to the point, who was left to say it? Most of the people on a biographer’s interview wish list were dead. And no one at the Babe Ruth Birthplace and Museum had contact information for his extended family, most of whom didn’t know each other or much of their familial history. No one had ever constructed a complete family tree. (At the celebration of his one hundredth birthday, museum officials set out a table with a sign-in sheet for family members, in hopes of filling in the gaps, but it was stolen during the party.)
There was also the issue of primary source material. The Babe wasn’t Lyndon Johnson, who left behind enough material for Robert Caro’s five volumes of biography, or John Adams, who conducted a twenty-year correspondence with one of America’s most literate first ladies. Primarily Babe Ruth wrote his signature. That’s always been a quandary for practitioners of sports biography, which existed for the better part of the twentieth century as a literary subgenre dominated by what Mickey Mantle called “all that Jack Armstrong shit.”
Finding a new George would be like recovering the upright piano stuck in the muck at the bottom of Sudbury’s Willis Pond—the one Bostonians believed to be at the heart of the Curse of the Bambino, a spell that cast New England into eighty-six years of darkness after he was sold to New York. Retelling his life in fiction wouldn’t demand dredging up any new facts.
And yet as I immersed myself in the Ruth oeuvre in advance of meeting Julia, I found myself troubled by the facts or, more precisely, the lack of them—and how little seemed to be known about the Babe as a babe. It was as if his life began on June 13, 1902, the day he arrived at St. Mary’s.
A passing comment from Julia, mentioned in the nicest possible way, changed everything. Babe Ruth’s parents had separated when he was eleven years old. Divorced, in fact.
She didn’t realize the import of the revelation. “Well,” she said, “I just thought everyone knew!”
No one knew. Babe Ruth made sure no one knew. Although he made repeated and ineffective attempts to correct the misimpression that he was an orphan, he never went further, eschewing every opportunity to tell the truth about his parents’ marriage. Not once, in any of the thousands of interviews or ghostwritten columns under his byline, did he set the record straight. And why would he? The facts were ugly. Who’d want to talk about that?
Julia’s revelation provided the key to unlocking the mystery of her father’s childhood—the missing boy in the Babe Ruth story—and a narrative that was surely as compelling as fiction. As Jimmy Breslin once said of him, “he was more than real.” The more I dug, the more real he became.
There was a new story to tell, after all. And, as it turned out, there was a new way to get at it.
The presumed disadvantage of writing about Ruth at such a remove proved to be an advantage. In the years since Montville published the last major Ruth biography, The Big Bam, in 2006, the digitization of state birth, death, marital, and census records, as well as the availability of newspaper archives searchable by name, provided access to material beyond the reach of previous biographers. As Smelser, a history professor at the University of Notre Dame, noted in his 1975 Ruth biography, there was almost no “archival” material available when he researched his book.
Little wonder then that when I asked Bob Creamer, author of Babe, one of four major biographies published in 1974, and the first serious attempt to chip away at the veil of hagiography, if he knew about the divorce, he said, no, he hadn’t done much with the childhood. He would have had to scour every 1906 edition of the Baltimore Sun to find the story of the Ruth divorce that I accessed with one click of a mouse. No doubt, as more of the past goes digital, histories, including this one, will be rewritten over and over again.
Those online resources were augmented by extensive interviews with his surviving family members, as well as records accessed through the Maryland State Archives, the Massachusetts Archives, and the Babe Ruth Birthplace and Museum, and others accessed at www.ancestry.com and www.geneaologybank.com. The current zeal to connect with and document the past, facilitated by those websites, led me to additional members of the Ruth and Woodford families and connected me with a slew of savvy amateur genealogists and cyber sleuths.
Fleshing out the character of Christy Walsh, the man behind the Big Fella, was easier than I expected, thanks in part to his facility for promoting himself as well as his clients. His 1937 self-published memoir, Adios to Ghosts, which appeared in serial form in the Sporting News in January 1938, was invaluable not just for the facts he shared about the Christy Walsh Syndicate but for the insights it offered into how he thought and operated.
But the key was the acquisition of a mother lode of previously unexamined documents—letters, bank statements, check stubs, legal papers—contained in four auction catalogs assembled by Heritage Auctions for its 2010 Christy Walsh sale. The unpaginated volumes, created for marketing purposes, weren’t offered as part of the auction. But that trove of material, inherited by Walsh’s step-grandchildren, was generously made available to me by Chris Ivy, Director of Sports Auctions for HA, and by step-granddaughter Kelly Merritt. She also gave me recordings of Walsh’s speeches, radio broadcasts, and interviews with the Babe, not to mention Irvin Berlin’s song, “Along Came Ruth,” with the special baseball lyrics penned by Walsh. Interviews with Kelly, her brother Frank; Walsh’s nephew, Richard; and especially his grandson, Bob, gave me a feel for the man that no documents could convey.
The 24/7 coverage of Ruth, inaugurated by the New York Daily News, was a godsend. I relied extensively on reporting in the News, the New York Times, and ten long-gone New York dailies; also, the Boston Globe, the Baltimore Sun, the Chicago Tribune, the Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times. G. H. Fleming’s Murderers’ Row, a retelling of the 1927 season through daily news stories from New York’s best sportswriters, provided a trove of
material culled from otherwise difficult-to-find resources.
Thanks to the Baseball Index, which lists just about everything ever written about Babe Ruth, I was able to locate pertinent stories in the archives of Baseball America, Baseball Digest, Liberty magazine, Literary Digest, and the Sporting News; through the Sports Illustrated vault, I was able to find everything the magazine had published about him. I also reviewed Radio Digest, Variety, and the New Yorker, whose coverage included a 2002 piece by Roger Angell titled “Babe Ruth: My Teammate, My Lover,” a satirical same-sex love letter addressed to “my bambino.” (In response to the publication, Angell told me, “several people in sports said, ‘I didn’t know that.’ I said, ‘It’s a joke!’”)
Those news accounts were supplemented by the Ruth archive at the National Baseball of Fame, whose librarians allowed me to copy their entire collection of clippings and documents. The Christy Walsh scrapbooks, recently digitized by the HOF staff, re-creating the barnstorming tours he organized, and the coverage he generated, were indispensable.
Equally important for color and detail was the local coverage of Ruth’s visits to each of the cities on the 1927 tour, accessed through www.newspapers.com, www.newspaperarchives.com, www.proquest.com, and www.newsbank.com, and through the kindness of librarians and historians at local collections and historical societies. Other resources included the Xaverian Brothers Records at University of Notre Dame Archives. Notre Dame also supplied eighty-eight letters between Christy Walsh and Knute Rockne in the athletic director’s records. I drew additionally upon the Joseph Medill Patterson Papers at Lake Forest College; the Kenesaw Mountain Landis archive at the Chicago History Museum; and the Library of Congress, for both General John J. Pershing’s papers and those of Edward L. Bernays, not to mention all the “By Babe Ruth” columns from 1921 to 1922.