The Big Bam: The Life and Times of Babe Ruth

by Montville, Leigh

  “All I can say,” the doctor said, “is that unless somebody is appointed to act as guardian over him at the dining table, he won’t be a baseball player very long.”

  Marshall Hunt noted that the doctor had made this diagnosis without ever seeing the patient in Hot Springs “at 11 o’clock at night, ordering sirloin steaks smothered with pork chops and devouring them in the same elapsed time and with the thoroughness it takes Henry Ford to fetch a flivver from the mines of Minnesota and relay the product to an Indiana farmer.” The Babe was moaning again, hanging on to the shoulder of Yankees scout Paul Krichell when he walked through the hotel lobby on the way to the train.

  Krichell, who would accompany Ruth back to the big city along with Bob Boyd, the one-armed sportswriter, went on a mission in the morning to buy some pajamas for the Bambino, who always boasted that he slept in the nude. Krichell was looking for size 48, but the best he could find in the town was size 42, color passionate pink. He said the plan was to slit the back on the tops and just throw away the bottoms. Better than nothing.

  The news of the Babe’s collapse, of course, already had made headlines because, as with any head of state, the reports of all his ailments made headlines. (Hunt, after all, had written that entire article about the Babe’s corns.) This notoriety caused a problem when the 3:50 train out of Asheville missed a connection to the northbound train in Salisbury. When the northbound train arrived in Washington and reporters found no G. H. Ruth on board, a fast rumor started that he had died.

  The rumor was spread by a Canadian news agency and picked up in England, where the London dailies, working on tight deadlines, produced front-page obituaries on the American baseball star. The Evening News said that “he was equally successful at batting, fielding and pitching, but his smashing hits were his specialties.” It also said he was handicapped by the fact that “he was putting on fat.”

  While the English mourned a character they never had met or known, the character spent a relatively uneventful night in his lower berth on a later northbound train. He tried breakfast again in the morning, couldn’t hold it down, and was still feverish and woozy as the train approached New York. The last stretch was called the Manhattan Transfer, the place where an electric engine was added to the train to bring it through the tunnel under the Hudson River and into the city.

  The Babe, helped by Krichell, went to the washroom to freshen up for his public. Once there, Ruth realized he hadn’t brought his comb, so Krichell went to find one. When the scout came back, the Babe was on the floor of the washroom, unconscious. He not only had fallen but had hit his head. Krichell, unable to rouse the slugger, notified the porter that he needed help, and the train arrived at Penn Station and a grand melodrama began.

  Helen and a friend, Mrs. C. C. White, were waiting at the station…

  Ed Barrow and a couple of Yankees officials were waiting…

  The gathered writers and photographers from all of those New York newspapers were waiting…

  Assorted fans and the ever-present New York curious were waiting…

  The Babe was unconscious in his berth, where he had been carried.

  Helen and Barrow, noticing that their man had not disembarked with the rest of the passengers, went onto the train, where they found him, still unconscious and in the midst of great activity. A doctor was called. A porter with a wheelchair arrived and was rejected. A stretcher and four men to carry the patient were called. Helen, “an attractive young woman in a blue coat with some vague kind of fur border and a diamond bat pin that looked as though it must weigh several ounces,” began to cry softly. The four men with the stretcher arrived and wanted to slide the Babe through a window, but the window was too small. A man was sent for a screwdriver to unscrew the frame and make the window larger.

  One odd moment seemed to follow another. The ambulance called from St. Vincent’s Hospital—“where the Babe has a season’s ticket,” one writer said—broke down. Another ambulance had to be called. A train carrying the entire roster of the Boston Braves, on their way back to Boston, stopped at the next track. Pitcher Rube Marquard and manager Dave Bancroft came to the Babe’s train, seeking information. They had heard that the Babe had died, were relieved that he hadn’t, but were saddened that he was knocked out and in need of medical treatment.

  The four men with the stretcher finally hoisted the great man through the expanded window. They carried him through a crowd, put him on a freight elevator. He awakened long enough to say, “Helen, I feel rotten.” He then went into convulsions. He had one, two, three convulsions. A physician gave him an injection. He had another convulsion. He had to be held down.

  Helen rode in the front seat of the ambulance, still crying every now and then, looking back at her husband. He had another convulsion. The ambulance did not travel fast. The driver explained that he didn’t have a bell to warn the taxicabs that he was coming. The Babe had another convulsion, the largest, while being transferred from the ambulance to St. Vincent’s. Seven men held him down.

  Two hours later, all this had passed. He was sitting up in bed, talking and laughing.

  “Ruth’s condition is not serious,” Dr. Edward King, the Yankees’ team doctor, announced at last to reporters. “He is run down and has low blood pressure, and there is the indication of a slight attack of the flu. What he needs is rest. He should have been in bed a week ago.”

  “The Big Bam yesterday just about beat a long throw from Death, the outfielder in Life’s game,” Damon Runyon tapped out in a hurry for the New York American. “He slid in safe over the home plate of rest and medical attention.”

  W. O. McGeehan of the New York Tribune won the phrase-of-the-day contest with “The Bellyache Heard Round the World.” The Babe, after all of this, was fine.

  Or was he? The doctor said that the great man would be better in three or four days and might even be ready for the Yanks’ opener on Tuesday at the Stadium, knowing the great man’s recuperative powers. The three or four days passed, and the opener took place, and, alas, the recuperative powers did not seem to be working. He still ran a fever. His stomach still bothered him.

  Here the fog rolled in. He had a medical problem, which never was adequately revealed. He had an operation on April 17, that much was certain, the scar on his abdomen being visible later to his teammates in the locker room. The nature of the operation was what was in doubt.

  The hospital, Dr. King at the podium, talked about an abscess, an infected area, in the stomach that had to be treated. The hospital never deviated from this diagnosis, which led to the popular thought that piles of hot dogs and gallons of soda pop, all part of a general gluttony, had sent the Sultan to his knees. This served the public well, a cautionary tale for mothers to tell their indulgent children.

  Baseball people always whispered a more titillating story involving gluttony of another kind. The Babe had syphilis. The Babe had gonorrhea. The Babe had any—maybe every—disease ever associated with carnal moments. Ed Barrow whispered this to at least one reporter. Claire Hodgson stopped short of naming diseases but years later talked about secrecy and “different mores” when the operation took place.

  Possibly some other situation altogether could have been involved, some hernia or rupture or some need for a colostomy bag for a time, some kind of nether-region difficulties that no one wanted to detail for strangers. The net result, whatever the problem, was that the Babe stayed in St. Vincent’s Hospital for a lot longer than expected. And Helen soon joined him.

  On April 24, she was admitted for “a nervous condition from worrying about her husband” and put in a ward two floors above that of her husband. Again, the fog rolled in. Was that nervous condition helped along by the discovery that her husband had a sexually transmitted disease? Fog. Claire Hodgson also was on the fringe of this situation. She couldn’t see her lover, the visitors’ list being restricted to Helen, Dorothy, and Barrow, but were there phone calls? Hodgson had spent that time with the Babe in Hot Springs a few days before He
len and Dorothy had spent time with him in St. Petersburg. Had Helen found out about Claire? A doctor wasn’t needed here to see that something was ready to burst.

  The Babe made his first public appearance on May 2, when a group of sportswriters was allowed to visit. Propped up in his bed and wearing white pajamas, he said he felt “weak as a kitten,” like “a featherweight,” and said his problem was no more than his yearly battle with the flu. He said indigestion had no part in his sickness.

  “That indigestion stuff is a lot of bunk!” he emphasized. “Every time anything happens to a fellow they say he’s overeating. Why, I don’t eat more than two-thirds of the club. I don’t mean two-thirds put together. I mean man-to-man. I’ve had indigestion for ten years.”

  He didn’t venture to Yankee Stadium for the first time until May 19, six weeks after he was stricken in Asheville. He got into a traveling gray Yankees uniform that sagged around his 6-foot-2 frame, down now maybe as low as 180 pounds, and took batting practice served up by his chauffeur, Thomas Harvey, who also wore a Yankees uniform. It was baby steps. He managed to hit only one ball into the stands, was exhausted, and returned to the hospital for the night.

  This workout routine continued until his release on May 24. His return to the lineup didn’t come until June 1 at the Stadium. It was an awkward moment. The other players were careful around him. They were convinced that his problem had been venereal disease and didn’t want to use the same towel or touch where he had touched.

  “The club had to have a male nurse in the dugout to make sure he didn’t go against the doctor’s instructions,” pitcher Bob Shawkey told Ken Sobol years later. “You know, he wasn’t allowed to shower with the other players or anything like that.”

  Walter Johnson was on the mound for the Senators, not exactly an easy way for Ruth to return, and he was 0-for-2 with a walk in six innings of a 5–2 Yankees loss. His test of stamina came after the walk in the fourth inning, when Bob Meusel tripled behind him. Ruth pounded around the bases and clearly gave out on the stretch from third to home, first slowing, then throwing himself at the plate as a big, rolling bundle, easily tagged out by catcher Muddy Ruel.

  Westbrook Pegler wrote that Ruth was “out both ways” when he lay on the ground for a minute to catch his breath after the play ended. Pegler also said the Babe looked “weak and wan” and “had wasted away to a couple of carloads since he developed that national ache in his stuffing” and now resembled “a bag of oats on two toothpicks.”

  The writers were glad to have him back.

  The Babe had played on only one bad club in his career, the 1919 Red Sox under Ed Barrow. He now was on his second. The Yankees had fallen apart in his absence. They were thirteen and a half games out of first place on June 1, the day he returned. Teams sometimes seem to get old overnight. This was one of them. Miller Huggins already was adjusting his lineup, talking about plans for “next year.”

  The addition of Ruth to this sinking ship was not a positive. Not for the team. Not for Huggins. Not for Ruth. Helen was still in St. Vincent’s, wouldn’t leave for a month after her husband left, and now the Sudbury farm was up for sale. Something had happened. The marriage unofficially was finished, and the Babe was liberated. A liberated Babe Ruth on a bad team with an undersized manager he didn’t respect was a convergence of meteorological conditions that meant trouble. The storm soon began.

  The admonitions of the many doctors and well-wishers were forgotten with a return to a semblance of health. Two weeks, three weeks, one month back, and the Home Run King was back in overdrive off the field. If anything, he was even more earnest in his pursuit of all pleasures. Even his teammates were stunned at the increase in his activity.

  “The ballplayers sensed Ruth’s tension, realized that something frightening was happening within that gigantic legend that Ruth had become,” Waite Hoyt would write in a short 1948 book called Babe Ruth As I Knew Him, a frank account of life with the Babe. “His fabulous personal escapades were shaded with pathos, for the Babe no longer was sampling life. He was wolfing it down in immense, oversized doses. Although we all recognized his undiminished baseball genius, we knew we were witnessing the gradual disintegration of Ruth, the man.”

  He was not pleasant to be around…when he was around. He was just running, running, running. He and Hoyt weren’t even talking. Ruth had been told something that Hoyt allegedly said, probably on the subject of Claire Hodgson, and promised the pitcher he would never talk to him again. He would, however, still shout at him and fight him.

  A fly ball was hit to right field at the Stadium and dropped in front of Ruth for a base hit. Hoyt, pitching, thought Ruth had pulled up short on the ball, dogged it. Hoyt put his hands on his hips, looked at Ruth, and shook his head as if to say, “You should have caught the ball, you big baboon.” Ruth noticed. Back on the bench at the end of the inning, he told Hoyt never to show him up again. Back in the clubhouse after the game, the argument started again.

  Hoyt, knocked out of the game, already had showered and was naked in front of his locker. Ruth was in uniform. He called Hoyt a bunch of names and said he would punch the pitcher in the nose.

  “Well, you’re not tied,” Hoyt said.

  Ruth attacked, taking a kick with his spikes still on his feet. Punches were exchanged. Poor Miller Huggins jumped in the middle, took a couple of punches, but broke up the fight. That was life with the Babe.

  Huggins had become more and more distressed with his star. The manager’s history of confrontations with Ruth was not good. They argued all the time, back and forth, semi-comical stuff, but Huggins seldom was able to voice his real thoughts. Every time he was ready to say something, to truly read out the Caliph of Clout, the caliph would unload another couple of clouts. An oft-told story centered on the manager’s long dissertation with traveling secretary Mark Roth one day about how this was it, the end, he was going to say something to Ruth the next time he saw him. A game was played, Ruth hit the big homer to win it, then he walked past Huggins and Roth.

  RUTH: Hey, keed.

  HUGGINS: Hey, Babe.

  Ruth kept walking. Roth asked Huggins why he didn’t say anything to the slugger. Huggins replied, “I just did.”

  This was different now. Huggins hired a private detective to trail Ruth in Chicago and St. Louis on a western road trip in the last half of August. The report from Chicago was not good. As expected, Ruth was out every night. Barrow later told Fred Lieb, the writer, that the detective reported that Ruth had been with six different women in one night in Chicago. Huggins waited.

  St. Louis might have been Ruth’s favorite town on the road. Things happened in St. Louis. Marshall Hunt told the tale of a layover in St. Louis, a few hours before catching the next train to Hot Springs. Ruth was met at the station by a bunch of fans and obliged them with autographs as he and Hunt made their way to a taxi stand. He was still signing, still surrounded, as he and Hunt got into the taxi. The driver asked where they were going.

  “The House of Good Shepard,” the Babe boomed.

  Everyone in the crowd knew what that meant. The House of Good Shepard was the most famous whorehouse in the city. The people started chanting, “House of Good Shepard, House of Good Shepard,” as the taxi took off, the Babe smiling and waving. He was greeted with equal hospitality at the establishment itself, where he was known to one and all. He and Hunt had a terrific dinner, the Babe availed himself of the product once, twice, “and I think he got a free one, one on the house,” Hunt said. They were back at the station for the nine o’clock train. That was St. Louis.

  “The House of Good Shepard,” Hunt said, “served the best steaks in the world.”

  Huggins waited. By August 29, the Yankees had lost 10 of 14 games on the trip. Ruth was 12-for-49 in those games, four homers, a .245 batting average. He had stayed out all night in St. Louis and didn’t arrive until an hour before game time. Huggins and Waite Hoyt, the starting pitcher for the day, were the only people in the clubhouse.

 
“Ruth had white flannel pants and a blue, sort of navy, jacket on,” Hoyt said. “And a panama hat. Tan and white shoes, black and white, I forget which, and little Huggins was in there and said, ‘Don’t get dressed, Babe, don’t put on your uniform.’

  “What are you talking about?” the Babe said.

  “I’ll tell you, Babe, I’ve talked it over, and I’ve come to the decision you’re fined $5,000 for missing curfew last night and being late today,” the manager said. “You’re fined and suspended. The suspension runs the rest of the season.”

  Ruth, speechless at first, became very angry. He said he would talk to Kenesaw Mountain Landis about this. He would talk to Col. Ruppert. We’d see about this fine and suspension. Ruppert had handed back a $1,000 fine Huggins tried to impose on Ruth earlier in the season.

  “No, I talked to Ruppert first,” Huggins said. “Ruppert agreed that a suspension was the best thing to do.”

  Huggins told Ruth that Mark Roth had a ticket for him for a train back to New York that night. Ruth stormed out of the clubhouse. He was walking out of Sportsman’s Park in his white flannel pants and blue, sort of navy, jacket and panama hat as Ray Gillespie, a young sportswriter for the St. Louis Globe-Democrat, was arriving.

  “Where are you going?” Gillespie asked.

  “I’m going to New York,” the Babe said.

  “You’re not going to play?”

  “No, I’m going to New York.”

  “How come?”

  “You better ask Hug.”

  Gillespie went to the Yankees dugout and found Urban Shocker, whom he knew from the time Shocker played with the Browns. Shocker introduced him to Huggins as “a good guy.” Huggins gave him the story. The Babe was fined $5,000 and suspended indefinitely for “insubordination.”

  Gillespie hurried to a telephone. The Globe-Democrat, like most newspapers, put out a great number of editions. This story could hit the streets within the hour. Except his bosses didn’t believe him. The idea of a $5,000 fine was almost inconceivable. The managing editor finally came on the line. He told Gillespie to go back and check with Huggins again. Gillespie checked. He reported back that Huggins said all of the same things all over again. The managing editor grunted.