The Big Bam: The Life and Times of Babe Ruth

by Montville, Leigh

  Of course no one is exhorting Babe Ruth to get down after the whip or any such thing as that. But still, if a man can hit better for having a mild little something the night before, why—why not?

  On the day the story appeared, though, the subject of sudden worry went 5-for-6 against the Dodgers in a 15–2 exhibition win in Brooklyn. Never mind. The final calibrations had been made to give the first-day crowd what it wanted. The Babe knew what was expected.

  “I’d give a year of my life to hit a home run today,” he said before the game.

  The moment came in the third inning. The opponent was the Red Sox, and their pitcher was veteran Howard Ehmke. The Babe had flied out to center in the first and came to the plate this time with the Yankees ahead, 1–0, and runners on first and second. There was no way to work around him.

  Ehmke was one of those deliberate, slow-motion craftsmen who can be maddening to watch. He would hem, haw, adjust, and study before performing the one act he seemed to wish to do least in the entire world: release the baseball. His repertoire of pitches matched his demeanor, mostly running from slow to slower to slowest. He would have been perfect as one of John McGraw’s Giants in the ’22 Series, lulling the Yanks and the Babe to sleep.

  A succession of slow breaking balls—strike, ball, foul tip, ball—left the count at 2–2 when Ehmke hemmed and hawed his fifth serving of grapefruit toward the plate and the Babe uncoiled. He hit a rocket that drew the assembled spectators out of their new seats to watch it travel well into the right-field bleachers, putting a first dent on some of that two million linear feet of lumber when a fan ducked out of its path. Hosanna. The largest crowd in baseball history delivered the largest ovation in baseball history.

  Ruth happily tripped around the bases and tipped his cap twice before he went into the dugout. Christy Walsh had brought his friend and only nonsports client, historian and writer Hendrik Willem van Loon, to describe just this kind of moment for the Walsh syndicate.

  “The fans were on their feet yelling and waving and throwing scorecards and half-consumed frankfurters,” van Loon wrote, “bellowing unto high heaven that the Babe was the greatest man on earth, that the Babe was some kid, and that Babe could have their last and bottom dollar, together with the mortgage on their house, their wives and furniture.”

  The Yankees won the game, 4–1, Ruth’s homer the difference. For the rest of his life, when asked about the home runs he had hit, he always would say this was his favorite. Theater never merged better with sport. He gave ’em exactly what they wanted when they wanted it.

  In the second game ever played at the Stadium, he had a triple that traveled 480 feet in the air, then bounced 20 more feet toward the faraway center-field wall. In the third game, bottom of the ninth, bases loaded, he stroked another long shot over center fielder Shano Collins that was called a game-winning double when the first two runners scored for a 4–3 Yankees win but probably would have been the first inside-the-park homer if Ruth had been allowed to keep running. Four days later, with chain-smoking President Warren G. Harding in attendance, the Bambino unloaded a fifth-inning shot into the stands in right, deeper and higher than his opening-day blast.

  He circled the bases, tipped his cap, bowed toward the presidential box, went into the dugout, then came back out and pinned a poppy on Harding’s overcoat. Everybody smiled. Harding, alas, would be dead within four months of a heart attack in San Francisco. Ruth would be fighting for the batting title and the home run title and leading the Yanks to another pennant. He was back.

  His personal life had not changed as much as the papers or he said it had. The addition of Dorothy to the mix in Sudbury had not stabilized his marriage with Helen. The pictures in the rotogravure sections looked great, but he simply now was an absent father as well as an absent husband. When he was on the road, he still was definitely single.

  Temptation was not something he had to seek. Temptation would find him.

  “If you weren’t around in those times, I don’t think you could appreciate what a figure the Babe was,” Richards Vidmer said. “He was bigger than the president. One time, coming north, we stopped at a little town in Illinois, whistle stop. It was about ten o’clock at night, raining like hell. The train stopped to get water or something. It couldn’t have been a town of more than 5,000 people, and by God, there were 4,000 of them down there standing in the rain, just wanting to see the Babe.

  “Babe and I and two other guys were playing bridge. Babe was sitting next to the window. A woman with a little baby in her arms came up and started peering at the Babe. She was rather good-looking. Babe looked at her and went on playing bridge. Then he looked at her again and finally he leaned out and said, ‘Better get away from here, lady. I’ll put one on the other arm.’”

  He and Helen had been married now for nine infidelity-filled years. Helen, it was suggested by friends, also had begun to look other places for companionship. Like her husband, she also had found the joy of drink. The waitress was having more and more trouble in keeping pace with the baseball player, the potentate, the national fascination. The Babe felt at ease at the perpetual banquet table. The waitress shied away from it. The fog was all around her.

  “As I remember her, she was not a bad-looking gal, but cerebrationally she was not an eight-cylinder, double-overhead cam job,” Marshall Hunt said. “I think the Babe tried to make it work a few times, wanted it to work, but they were just going in different directions.”

  A messy bit of business was taken care of in the first weeks of the season. Four months earlier, on the night of the Jimmy Walker speech, as the Babe left the Elks Club, he was handed a summons. A pregnant 19-year-old woman from the Bronx named Dolores Dixon had hit him with a $50,000 paternity suit.

  The details hadn’t become public until March, when the suit was filed. Ms. Dixon, a telephone operator, alleged that she had been “automobiling” with Ruth four and five times per week during the previous summer and that he had assaulted her on a yacht in Freeport, Long Island. She said he called her “my little watch charm” because she was only five feet tall and “my little golf girl” because he would tell people he was playing golf when he actually was with her.

  Ruth was at spring training with Helen and Dorothy in New Orleans when the news broke. He quickly called the charges “blackmail.” Helen stood by him. This was when Hunt, pressured by his Daily News bosses to ask the tough questions, called back and asked for someone else to do the job.

  “I asked the Babe about it, and you could tell he didn’t like it,” Hunt said. “He said he didn’t know the girl, but the way he said it you knew he was lying. He knew that girl. I said, ‘Okay, Babe. That’s what you say. That’s what I’ll put in the paper.’ I wouldn’t press him.”

  The case fell apart in April when Ruth’s lawyer, Hyman Bushel, produced a witness named Robert McChesney whom Bushel said would testify that all of this was a plot to extort money from the Babe. Before McChesney ever testified, Dixon dropped the suit on April 27, 1923, and faded into obscurity. The Babe had escaped, reputation enhanced or intact, depending on the observer’s point of view.

  In May, in Washington, a far more important meeting with a woman occurred. Her name was Claire Merritt Hodgson, and she was, in her own words, “a professional model and a three-and four-line actress.” Appearing in the capital in a play called Dew Drop Inn, she went to the ball game with her roommate and the play’s star, James Barton. A friend of the Babe’s, Barton introduced the woman to the famous man during batting practice. A lifelong dance began quietly.

  “The sum total of this first meeting was, I am sure, typical of any single woman’s reactions to meeting a man,” Hodgson remembered in 1951 in The Babe and I, a book she wrote with sportswriter Bill Slocum. “He is famous, so it’s nice to say you met him; he is pleasant, he has a growling voice, a pleasant-enough smile, and he’s married. I knew he was married for the same reason I recognized him on sight. I read the papers.”

  Hodgson was a Georgia girl wh
o had her own action-packed tale to tell. Married at 14 to wealthy 33-year-old hotel owner Frank Hodgson, a mother at 16, she had left Hodgson and Georgia in 1920, heading to New York with her daughter and a maid to find her own kind of fame. Three years later, Hodgson had died and she was a widow, working as a model and bit-part actress. Her mother and two brothers had followed her to New York, and they all lived together in an apartment.

  Ruth surprised her after the first meeting at the ballpark, sending Eddie Bennett, the hunchbacked batboy gnome, to the dressing room of the National Theater that night with a nicely written invitation to have dinner. Hodgson accepted, she said, on the condition that her girlfriend could come along. Ruth accepted her acceptance and told her to bring her girlfriend to his hotel suite the next night. Hodgson balked. His suite? He explained that he couldn’t go to a restaurant because there would be too much attention. He promised that the room would be safe for single women, mainly because it would be filled as usual with people. She went.

  The man she found, she said, was far different from the image the public had of him. The room indeed was full of people coming and going, a hullabaloo, and she sat with the Babe on the side. He had been drinking and talked about his insecurities. He wondered if the critics were right about 1922 and if he was indeed finished. He was afraid that 1923 wasn’t going to be any better. He thought that people hated him, despite the attention and cheers. He said he pretty much hated himself.

  “You drink too much,” she said. “Drinking is not good for you.”

  “You sound like Miller Huggins,” the Babe replied.

  The melancholy evening wore on, and at the end he told her that she was the first “dame” who ever told him he drank too much. She didn’t know how much she liked the word “dame,” but decided she liked the man. She thought he was a big kid, lonely, out in the big sea with the sharks. She wondered if she ever would see him again.

  He phoned the next morning, came to the show that night with catcher Benny Bengough. The relationship had begun. He was on the phone every other night from the road as he went off to St. Louis, Chicago, Cleveland, and Detroit and her show went to New Haven. When they both finally wound up back in New York, he asked for a date. She was soon “the other woman.”

  “I was not breaking up a home,” she wrote. “It was broken.”

  She was strong and self-assured, forceful, as different from Helen as possible. She was very pretty, maybe beautiful. She would grow to be disliked by the writers. (“A gold digger,” Marshall Hunt said. “I never knew why the Babe stayed with her.”) Yankees teammates would tell other, unkind stories about her first meeting with the Babe, inferring she had known other ballplayers before she met him, notably Ty Cobb. It didn’t matter. She had captured this man in ways no other woman would.

  He had found much more than a lover. Claire Merritt Hodgson was soon confidante and mentor, someone to listen to him, someone to defend him. She would share a drink and a laugh, was a conspirator in keeping the affair secret. Her home on West 79th Street became his home, even if no pictures or traces of him were evident, part of the secrecy. He also inherited her daughter, Julia, her brothers, Eugene and Hubert, and her mother, Carrie, a clandestine family that was far closer to a family than any he’d ever had.

  It was a dizzying accumulation of obligations. He now had a wife, a full-time mistress, a farm, an apartment, a mistress’s apartment, an adopted daughter, an adopted family. The phone kept ringing and he kept answering, and he also had a whole other life as a bon vivant. He was seen at ringside for at least four major prizefights during the 1923 season. He talked with Boy Scouts in his spare time, telling them not to smoke. (He lit up a cigar as soon as he left.) A one-inch story in the Times reported that in Philadelphia, on a day off, as a favor to Rev. William Casey, rector of Ascension Parish, he played first base in a twilight benefit game for the Ascension Catholic Club. The Ascensions lost, 2–1, to the Lit Club, but he had a hit and scored a run and handled 15 put-outs. He was a busy man.

  Oh, yes, and the Yankees were running away in the pennant race. And he was on the way to the best overall season of his career.

  In the middle of that 1923 season, an interesting controversy developed. The Babe’s favorite new bat was ruled illegal.

  Slumping slightly, he had been convinced by retired Tigers outfielder Wahoo Sam Crawford to try a new bat called “the Betsy Bingle,” which Crawford had invented and was trying to market. Selling for eight dollars, as opposed to two dollars for the normal bat, the Crawford bat was constructed of four pieces of lumber glued together instead of turned on a lathe from one piece of wood. The effect was supposed to make the bat stronger on all sides. The hitter no longer had to position the bat a certain way to take advantage of the strongest grain in the wood. The grain on this bat ran sideways.

  Ruth started using the bat on July 2, and the slump was done. He had 27 hits, including six homers, in his next 65 at-bats. Superstition and performance merged. Ruth loved the Betsy Bingle. He was hitting close to .400 and had 28 home runs when American League president Ban Johnson declared the bat illegal on August 11.

  “I can see no reason why Johnson should bar the Crawford model bat,” Miller Huggins said, filing an appeal. “The rules simply state that the bat must be round, made entirely of hard wood and conform to certain dimensions.

  “The new bat used by Ruth is made of hard wood and is perfectly round. The rules do not state that the bat be made out of one piece of wood. Ruth’s bat is not a trick bat, but simply an improvement on the old style. A four-piece bat is much stronger than a one-piece affair and of course has more driving power.”

  Humorist Will Rogers dragged the situation into a column he wrote about new President Calvin Coolidge. At 2:47 on the morning of August 3, after the sudden death of Harding in San Francisco, the quiet man from New England had been sworn into office by his father, a notary public, in the kerosene-lit family living room in Plymouth Notch, Vermont. Worries were everywhere that Coolidge would be a do-nothing president, and Rogers had various suggestions about actions that Coolidge should take.

  “Now they’re trying to make Babe Ruth change the style of bat he uses,” Rogers wrote. “Can you imagine a President standing idly by and not doing a thing?”

  The league office offered an explanation eight days later. The problem with the bat was not with the four pieces of wood, but with the glue. The glue increased the velocity of the ball off the bat. If the glue were allowed, other substances, such as rubber, might also be inserted into bats. The appeal was denied. The Babe had been using a forerunner of the corked bat.

  Never mind. On August 12, the first day back to a normal bat, against the Detroit Tigers, he went 3-for-4, including his 29th homer.

  He finished with gaudy numbers and his first American League Most Valuable Player Award. (Instituted a year earlier, the first award was won by George Sisler of the St. Louis Browns.) Teams had decided to walk the Babe even more this season, to pitch to the number-four hitter, Meusel, surrendering a record 170 bases on balls. The Cleveland Indians intentionally walked him four times in one game. He had responded by becoming more selective, hitting .393, which would be the highest average of his career. His home run total suffered, though his 41 led the league, and he had 13 triples, 45 doubles, and 205 hits. He drove in 130 runs, and the Yankees won the pennant by 17 games over the Detroit Tigers.

  The magic story of the season—and there always seemed to be at least one magic story in every season—had come in Chicago. The Yankees and White Sox were tied, 1–1, going into the fourteenth inning, and Mark Roth, the traveling secretary, was nervous. The team was scheduled to catch a train home, and now there was a good chance this wouldn’t happen. Ruth, getting ready to go to the on-deck circle, noticed Roth’s concern.

  “What’s the matter?” he asked.

  “We’re missing the train,” Roth replied.

  “Is that all?” Ruth replied, in best magic-story fashion. “Watch.”

  One pitch
was thrown by Mike Cvengros, a strong-armed left-hander. One swing was taken by George Herman Ruth, another strong-armed left-hander. The tie was broken, the White Sox were retired quickly in the bottom of the inning, and the Yankees made the train.

  “Why didn’t you tell me about that before?” George Herman asked as the story went onto the pile.

  The opposition for the World Series once again was the Giants. The matchup once again easily was cast as the brain matter of McGraw against the brawn matter of the Babe. Despite McGraw’s triumphs in the last two Series, there was a sense that the results would be different this time. The Babe’s season had convinced skeptics.

  “Yes, sir, the Babe’s grown up now,” the Washington Post said. “This week McGraw’s task of being ‘acquainted’ with a Ruth weakness will call for extra attention and a special code of wig wags inasmuch as the 1923 Ruth is not the adulation-drugged Sultan of Swat of 1922.”

  To enhance arguments on his side, the Babe hit a blast over the right-field bleachers at the Polo Grounds in a charity game on October 2 against the Baltimore Orioles. This was a strange event. He wore a Giants uniform and played with a team filled with Giants, and the manager on the bench was John McGraw. The proceeds went to John B. Day and Jim Mutrin, who were the owner and manager of the first baseball team ever to play in New York. It all had been scheduled long before the World Series matchup had been assured.

  For good measure, Ruth returned to the Polo Grounds for practice the day before the Series started and belted a dozen over the right-field fence. He told reporters that after a year of playing in Yankee Stadium, right field looked awfully close at the Polo Grounds. Heck, pop flies became home runs.