Walsh was a lawyer who placed his degree from St. Vincent’s College on top of the dresser drawer about two minutes after he received it and took a job as a cartoonist. He had worked enough around the newspaper business to figure out what was attractive and what wasn’t when slipped under the green eyeshades of the country’s most powerful editors. He also knew how to sell. Wearing a double-breasted suit every day, and a Kelly green tie in support of the ongoing Irish struggle for independence, he was an engaging presence, a dapper charmer.
Walsh’s one ghostwriting experience had been with Eddie Rickenbacker, the world war flying ace and automobile racer. Rickenbacker, who shot down 26 enemy planes over France, was the guest referee for the 1919 Indianapolis 500, the first race since the war ended. Walsh convinced him to lend his name to a ghostwritten account of the race, then sold the upcoming story to 37 newspapers. On the given day, Walsh typed like a madman with an account of Howard Wilcox’s 88-mph victory in 5 hours, 40 minutes, and 42 seconds. Rickenbacker took a fast read and made a few changes. All of the papers used the story, 16 on the front page. Walsh and Rickenbacker split a profit of $874.
When he was fired from an advertising job at Maxwell-Chalmers Automobiles in Detroit, in part for printing an issue of the house organ on St. Patrick’s Day that, instead of providing the usual news about horsepower and sales figures, issued a call for Irish independence with a lead article by republican leader Eamon de Valera, Walsh decided it was a sign telling him to go off on his own. He started with the idea of ghosting some show business names, like moviemaker D. W. Griffith, soprano Mary Garden, or Broadway songwriter Gene Buck, but soon switched to sports. This sent him to the Babe.
Why not work with the biggest emerging name of all? Walsh took out a $2,000 loan and journeyed to New York to meet his man. His man wanted nothing to do with him. Offers and strange people were coming at the Babe every day now, and he simply walked past all of them as if he were on the way to another train. The burns from Havana and the movies were still sore. The few times Walsh approached, there was a crowd around and the Babe waved him off and simply kept moving.
Walsh’s answer was to stake out the Ansonia Hotel, where the Babe and Helen were staying after two months in Sudbury. He hoped he could catch his man coming or going. The problem was that the hotel had three doors on three different streets, and Walsh always seemed to be at the wrong one. Time became a factor, because now he learned the Babe was departing for Hot Springs the next day.
Wondering what to do, frustrated, Walsh sat in a neighborhood delicatessen that doubled as an illegal liquor store. The phone rang. He could hear the owner taking an order for “Mr. Ruth” for a case of beer. Walsh quickly had a suggestion about who could deliver that beer.
“Do you know who I am?” he asked as he helped the Babe put away the bottles in the kitchenette.
“Sure I know you,” the Babe replied. “Ain’t you been bringin’ our beer for the past two weeks?”
Walsh laid out his offer. How much did the Babe get for each of those little stories when he hit a home run in 1920? Five bucks. How would $500 sound? Logic soon won the argument. On the next morning, Walsh hurried with a contract to Penn Station, where the Babe and Helen were supposed to leave.
The Babe was waiting. Walsh described the moment in a short memoir, Adios to Ghosts.
“The train leaves in 15 minutes and there he beams, belted camel-hair coat with cap to match, over-size cigar all aglow, and surrounded by the customary gallery of admirers,” Walsh wrote.
Mrs. Ruth stands nearby and gives me my first close-up of a mink coat; a luxurious, bulging wrap which probably set her man back a cool five thousand. While she obligingly diverts the autograph addicts, I spirit Babe through an iron gate, produce a badly wrinkled contract in the form of a short, informal letter and without question, he inscribes “George Herman Ruth” in the correct spot and I go in search of a ghost to do the writing.
The deal was a start for Walsh. He would build a syndicate that included the greatest names of American sport, from Knute Rockne to John McGraw to Ty Cobb to Doc Kearns, the manager of Jack Dempsey. He would sell their stories to countless papers across the country, his ghosts churning out the words, everyone making money. The deal was even better for the Babe. Walsh would turn out to be much more than the man behind the ghosts; he would become the man behind the Babe.
In short order, he became Ruth’s friend, business manager, and booking agent. He was the voice of moderation that Helen never could be. He was the fiscal bodyguard against the hornswogglers and fast talkers, the friends of the “Queen of the Underworld” who wanted to take the Babe’s money. He was the painter of a picture that all of America wanted to admire. A new concept that would be called “public relations” was emerging with people like Edward Bernays figuring out different ways to sell products and ideas, ways to create “image.” Christy Walsh was a part of that.
He would become the first personal PR man in sport. No image would be created any better than the one around the Behemoth of Bang.
The foundation of that image—the sight of a white ball, with red stitching, flying through the air to previously uncharted destinations—soon was back in public view. The new year was no different from the old year.
A few columnists had written that the 54 home runs in 1920 were “a fluke,” never to be matched again. The well-padded Bambino, still carrying some of that Havana weight, soon crumpled that opinion and swatted it into the nearest wastebasket. The Yankees had switched training sites to Shreveport, Louisiana, and he hit town, straight from Hot Springs, with the easy air of royalty.
A local dealer gave him a new green Essex roadster to use during his stay; a proclamation of the mayor, which referred to him as “His Majesty, Babe Ruth, the Sultan of Swat,” allowed him to drive without a Louisiana driver’s license; and local high school students presented a five-foot floral bat. He hit nine balls out of Gasser Park on his first day, hit a home run in a practice scrimmage the next, struck out three times on the third day, then walloped three homers and collected six hits against a visiting minor league team on the fourth.
Nothing had changed.
The bamming and whamming resumed as if it never had stopped. The extracurricular life, with its assault on the seven deadly sins from lust to gluttony and straight through to pride, resumed now that Helen was back at home. Teammates told a story of a car chase and a gun on a Louisiana night, Ruth saved at the last minute from the wrath of a local man. There was a story of the green Essex simply left in the middle of the road while the Babe rode off in the car of a local widow woman, and another of a woman with a knife on a train. A high school girl asked sportswriter Jimmy Sinnott of the Mail if he could fix her up with Ruth.
“Why would a nice girl like you want to get mixed up with a guy like him?” Sinnott asked.
“Oh,” she said, “it would give me some standing in my class and sorority if I could tell them I had gone to bed with a national hero.”
Beer consumption and food consumption were added up in daily, startling statistics. The long balls kept flying. The national hero was the attraction of attractions.
“In the Yankee-Dodger sette at Ponce deLeon Park yesterday afternoon about 12,000 persons saw the mammoth slugger circle the bases,” Fuzzy Woodruff of the Atlanta Constitution wrote as the Yankees and Dodgers stopped in his town on the way north. “They threw every kind of fit known to medical science when he slid into the plate with all the grace of a bear coming out of hibernation.”
When he hit New York and the season started, he was 5-for-5 on opening day, had five home runs before the end of April, and went from there. Observations were made immediately that he was ahead of “his pace” for 54 in 1920. Attending a performance of Dunninger, the mentalist, at the Hippodrome, Ruth was asked to write down how many homers he thought he would hit during the year. Ruth wrote, and after mentalizing, Dunninger said the word “sixty.” Ruth held up his blackboard. How did the guy know?
T
he Yankees of 1921 had undergone some off-season reconstruction. Again, the Red Sox had been involved. The biggest move was that Ed Barrow, no fool, had sent himself to New York. The Yankees business manager, Harry Sparrow, had died, and Barrow took himself out of the Boston dugout and back into a front office. He was back with the Babe, resurrecting their tenuous relationship, but more importantly he was back in a situation where his owners had cash. He could make moves, the same way he could when Harry Frazee gave him freedom to spend with the Red Sox in 1918 and he wound up with a world championship. It is a baseball fact that the presence of money makes baseball executives smarter.
(One Harry Sparrow story. In May 1919, anarchists had sent bombs to the residences and offices of many famous people in New York. The bombs all were enclosed in bags from Gimbel’s Department Store. A friend shipped some lobsters from New Brunswick, Canada, to Sparrow. The wrapping had come apart in transit, so someone in the Yankees office put the package in a Gimbel’s bag on Sparrow’s desk. The lobsters, alive, made a little clicking sound as they moved inside the bag. Sparrow discovered a clicking Gimbel’s bag on his desk and just about fainted.)
Barrow’s first move was a deal with his old boss. Frazee sent Waite Hoyt, Wally Schang, Harry Harper, and Mike McNally to the Yankees for Muddy Ruel, Del Pratt, Sammy Vick, and Hank Thormalen. It didn’t seem like a bad deal for the Boston owner at the time, value for value, but again, it would be tilted wildly against him when the 21-year-old Hoyt, known as “the Brooklyn Schoolboy,” 10–12 in his two seasons in Boston, almost immediately became a top-line pitcher in New York.
With Ruth whaling and with Hoyt added to Carl Mays and Bob Shawkey as the stars of a solid rotation, the Yankees sprinted to the front in the pennant race with the Cleveland Indians, a two-team affair that would stretch across the season. Not only was Ruth hitting homers, but his average consistently hung around the .400 mark. His name was everywhere.
The effects of Christy Walsh’s whispers in his ear already were evident. The business manager had presented Ruth with a $1,000 check on the day he returned from spring training, and that had opened communication. Ruth suddenly was sending a telegram to child actor Jackie Coogan, ill in a New York hospital with bronchitis. He was posing with Georges Carpentier (George and Georges), the French boxer challenging Jack Dempsey. He was visiting St. Paul’s Orphanage in Pittsburgh and talking to the national convention of Presbyterians at a banquet in St. Louis. He even had his own mascot in the dugout, three-year-old Little Ray Kelly. Hurtling down Riverside Drive one morning, the Babe had stopped at the sight of Little Ray, attired in a Yankees uniform, playing catch with his father. Three years old, the kid was good. The Babe recruited him on the spot to be his personal mascot at all home games. The arrangement would last for the next decade.
“Do any of the other players mind that the Babe has his own mascot?” Little Ray would be asked.
“Who would mind?” Kelly always would reply. “He’s Babe Ruth!”
How famous was Babe Ruth? The newspapers reported that a kid who gave his name as George Kelly applied for an American passport in London. He had “an extensive repertoire of American slang,” but his English had a French accent. The American consul was suspicious. What to do?
“Who is Babe Ruth?” he asked.
George Kelly did not know. Request denied. He couldn’t possibly be American.
In the second week of June, Ruth’s performance became a bit ridiculous. He hit seven home runs in five days. The culmination of the streak was back-to-back performances against the Tigers. On June 13, nobody else available, he voluntarily was the starting pitcher, back on the mound for one of two times during the year. He pitched five innings for the 13–8 win, striking out Ty Cobb. He hit two homers, the second into the center-field bleachers at the Polo Grounds, the first time that part of the park ever had been reached. On June 14, he hit two more in a 9–6 win. The second shot also went to the center-field bleachers, deeper than the one a day earlier. He now had 23 homers, well ahead of his “pace.”
The Los Angeles Times was moved to write an editorial declaring him the nation’s foremost hero. It said that in England the hero was an agreeable prince, in France a general, in Russia a “blood-stained Bolshevik,” in Italy a leader of the Fascists, and in the United States a baseball player.
“True, he couldn’t be elected president,” the L.A. Times declared. “His popularity would defeat him; for to put him in the White House would be to take him out of baseball.”
The Babe, heroic as he might have been, also continued to make his obligatory motor vehicle headlines. The fact that he now was driving a maroon 12-cylinder Packard that looked like a rocket ship and sounded like a fuel-burning calliope brought a certain interest from law authorities. The players called the car “the Ghost of Riverside Drive.” He would pull up at the clubhouse, half the time missing a stolen radiator cap, steam and water shooting into the sky. He was as inconspicuous as a brass band.
Stopped for speeding in April—doing 27 mph up Broadway—he appeared contritely before Magistrate Fredrick House in traffic court, pleaded guilty, and was fined $25. Everybody laughed. Stopped again in June—this time doing 26 mph on Riverside Drive in the early hours of the morning—the reception was not as pleasant when he stood before Magistrate House again. The magistrate fined him $100 and sentenced him to a day in jail.
“Mr. Ruth, you were before me on April 27 on a similar charge,” Magistrate House said. “I am sorry to see you back here, for I told you that you would have to answer as well as any other person. I find that anyone coming before me on April 27 and then again on June 8 is not showing proper respect for the law.”
The day in jail began immediately. The Bambino was not prepared for this.
He was fingerprinted and found himself in a cell with three chauffeurs, all convicted on the same charge. They were even worse repeat offenders than the Babe and had been sentenced to five days in jail. A fourth chauffeur, Chester Williams, also sentenced to a single day, also was in the cell. He later reported on the activity. He said that a game of craps was started quickly by the other three chauffeurs. The Babe was not a participant. Neither was Chester Williams.
“They seen that I had some money on me when I was going to pay my fine, and they wanted me to shoot with them,” Williams said. “They didn’t have 50 cents between them, and they wanted me to go up against that with my roll of bills. I told them nothing doing. Then they abused me something terrible. They pinched me and kicked me and called me names. There were some roughs in the cell, I can tell you. Mr. Ruth was the only gentleman among them.”
A single day in jail did not last 24 hours for any prisoner. Under court rules, the day ended at 4:00 P.M. Ruth was sentenced at 11:30, so actually he had to serve only four and a half hours. The Yankees were playing the Indians at 3:30 at the Polo Grounds, so his goal was to leave the Mulberry Street jail and hurry to the game.
The dice-rolling chauffeurs were taken to the Tombs at 1:30, and he and Williams were left alone. Ruth mostly stayed in a corner of the cell because he had spotted a photographer on a third-floor fire escape across the street, trying to get a picture that captured both baseball star and prison bars in the same frame. He and Williams could hear the photographer’s boss giving instructions.
“Do you see anything?” the boss shouted from the street.
“I see a shadow,” the photographer replied.
“Snap the shadow,” the boss said.
Ruth was allowed to have his Yankees uniform and lunch brought to the jail. He ate the lunch and put on the uniform inside the cell. He then put on his street clothes over the uniform. He told Williams, “I’m going to run like hell to get to the game. Keeping you this late makes a speeder out of you.” At 4:00, he started running. He was released, cut through 20 photographers, two movie cameras, and an estimated crowd of 1,000 on the street, jumped into the Packard, described by the Associated Press as “a maroon torpedo,” started the engine, sent the crowd scampering
, and hurried uptown.
Magistrate House remarked that the King of Home Runs was the second king he had put in jail for speeding in a week. He also had sentenced Frisco Rooney, the King of Jazz, the first famous dancer of the Jazz Age, to a day in jail. The theater where Frisco was appearing had protested that he would miss the matinee. Magistrate House said rules were rules. The Babe was lucky. His matinee started later.
Reporters tried to follow him to the Polo Grounds, but he lost them in Central Park. It was estimated that he covered nine miles in 19 minutes, which meant he had to be speeding again. He was on the field at 4:40 and walked to lead off the sixth inning. He then stole second, but died on the base paths. He batted again in the eighth, but grounded out. The Yanks scored twice in the ninth to win the game.
He then drove home.
Events like this caused the newest pitcher, the 21-year-old Hoyt, heading toward a 19–13 season, to stare at Ruth, to study him. Everybody on the Yankees—probably everybody who ever saw him—stared at Ruth sometimes, but Hoyt never would stop. He was fascinated with the big man. He felt a force, a strength emanating from Ruth, a predestination to greatness, that he never had felt from any other ballplayer, or any other person. He would struggle for a lifetime to put it all into words and was contemptuous of anyone else who tried, feeling that all attempts fell shallow and short.
“The first time I ever saw Babe Ruth was in the Red Sox clubhouse in July of 1919,” he said years later. “I’d just come to the team. He’s sitting there, and he didn’t look like a monster nor anything, but he had black curly hair that dripped down over his forehead like there was spilled ink on his forehead, and he was utterly unbelievable.”
Ed Barrow, who took the new pitcher around the room, made the introductions. The new kid…meet Babe. Babe…meet the new kid. Typical stuff.
The Big Bam: The Life and Times of Babe Ruth Page 16
