The Big Bam: The Life and Times of Babe Ruth

by Montville, Leigh

  The Babe told Fuchs that he couldn’t play and his knee was going to need some rest. He said he would appear at an exhibition game in Bridgeport to make the fans happy, but he would have to miss the games that week against the Dodgers. Since he was going to miss the games, he said he was going to go to New York with Claire to a party aboard the ocean liner the Normandie, to celebrate the completion of its maiden voyage. The Normandie was a modern shipbuilding marvel. The party was a big New York social event, and he had been invited, and he said he would go to “represent baseball.”

  Fuchs refused Ruth’s request. The Judge too had had enough of the grand experiment. Ruth obviously was not going to be his financial savior. The team was terrible, the Home Run King couldn’t stay healthy, and Fuchs’s bank note was due on August 1. What else could go wrong? The two men quarreled, and Ruth quit and Fuchs said he was fired, and that was the end. All that was left were the press conferences.

  Ruth, upset at some knocks about his play in the Boston press, called “the New York writers” to the clubhouse after the Braves beat the Giants, 2–0. He used all of the words in his vocabulary—many of the same ones he had used about France—in describing his relations with Fuchs. He used the phrase “double-crosser” often. The contract he signed, he said, was meaningless.

  “He can tear that up,” the Babe said. “I don’t want a thing from him—the dirty double-crosser. I don’t want to have anything more to do with a man like that. He’s no good. He gave out wrong statements about me, then denied it. He treated me rotten since I’ve been here.”

  A reporter asked whether Ruth had invested any money in the Braves. That had been a rumor.

  “Have I any money in the club?” the Babe said. “Don’t make me laugh. If I did, it would be gone by now.”

  How about his position as vice president?

  Ruth spit a stream of tobacco juice onto the clubhouse floor.

  “You know what they can do with that,” he said. “I never did find out what it meant anyway.”

  Fuchs fired back from his office that “nobody but an imbecile would act the way Ruth did.” He said he was firing Ruth on the advice of McKechnie, who long had complained about Ruth’s late-night drinking and carousing, a bad influence on his sinking team. The argument over the party on the Normandie was the final factor.

  The Babe and Claire packed the car and drove home to New York the next day, a seven-and-a-half-hour trip. She said that her husband cried on the trip and that June 2, 1935, was one of the blackest days in their lives. Two days later, the Babe called the New York writers to the apartment to deliver his final words on the Braves and Judge Emil Fuchs.

  “He’s a double-crosser,” the Babe said, pacing across the living room. “He would double-cross a hot cross bun.”

  There were rumors for the rest of the season that maybe he would be back in Boston. Fuchs soon left the operation, broke, and other buyers were suggested, buyers who might want the Babe back. Sophie Tucker, the last of the red-hot mamas, and comedian Joe E. Brown were listed among possible candidates, but nothing ever happened. The National League took control of the team at the end of the year.

  No one from baseball except a minor league team from Palatka, Florida, stepped forward with another job offer. The Babe declined Palatka. Col. Ruppert, just to make sure his team’s situation was clear, gave Joe McCarthy a two-year contract extension. The Babe was left to get healthy, play a lot of golf, and see what might happen next. Another circus called, but again he declined.

  He went to see the Braves play at the Polo Grounds. He went to a couple of Yankees games. Ford Frick, now the president of the National League, presented him with a lifetime pass to National League games. Nothing came from the American League. The Yankees made him pay for his tickets.

  He had a couple of automobile accidents. He was seen at heavyweight fights. He went hunting. On September 1, he played baseball again. A promoter asked him to travel to Minneapolis to play for the Minneapolis police department against the police department from St. Paul. The Babe went 1-for-4, a line-drive double, and the Minneapolis police prevailed, 10–4.

  On September 29, 1935, just as the major league seasons ended, he played again. For $3,000, he played with an all-star team of semipros and former minor leaguers against the New York Cubans of the Negro League at Dyckman Oval in Washington Heights in the Bronx. A crowd estimated as high as 10,000 came to the 4,600-seat ballpark that was the home field for the Cubans but also used for boxing matches and motorcycle races.

  Tom Meany, the sportswriter from the New York Telegram, showed up at the game to write a feature story. He contrasted the atmosphere here, at the end of the baseball season, with the excitement that had surrounded the Babe six months earlier when he homered off Carl Hubbell on opening day in Boston. Meany found it quite sad.

  “The spectators seemed to sense they were watching something pathetic, almost as if they had come across [famous Irish tenor] John McCormack acting as a singing waiter,” he wrote. “There were neither newsreel nor still cameras in evidence and no telegraph keys clattered brassily in the press box, which had less than half a dozen occupants. No civic dignitaries, not even an alderman, could be observed in the crowd.”

  Meany missed the point. This wasn’t pathetic; it was perfect. If this was to be Babe Ruth’s last baseball game, or maybe one of the last, it couldn’t have been at a better place. The ticket prices were inexpensive, $1.10 for box seats, 55 cents for grandstands. The day was warm for late September. The stands were filled with just folks.

  He was the people’s player, playing for people. He had done this forever. In the past 22 years, he had played baseball in big cities, small towns, a bunch of places in between. He had played between 200 and 250 ball games every year, 154 in big league parks, but the rest at the Dyckman Ovals of America.

  In how many towns and cities had he hit the longest ball anyone ever had seen? The news reports back to New York from the barnstorming road would be a paragraph, maybe two, and most of the time they would mention his one or two homers and half of the time would mention the longest home run ever seen in Rutland or Binghamton or Minneapolis.

  His best records weren’t recorded in books; they were kept in individual memories of an astounding sight witnessed on a warm afternoon, the memories transferred by word of mouth. There were no rules in many of these games he played. Sometimes he would bat every inning in these small towns. Sometimes he simply would stay at the plate, swinging until he hit one out. Sometimes batting practice would be as exciting as any local game ever played. He was the Bambino, the Bam, the Home Run King. He was the show.

  “You know how you’re supposed to pitch to Mr. Ruth, don’t you?” Christy Walsh would say to the starting pitcher of the small-town team.

  “Yes, sir,” the pitcher would reply. “Right down the middle.”

  The Babe had played with black teams against black teams, with white teams against black teams, with white against white. He was a nondenominational, nondiscriminatory belter. He played with the old guys against the young guys, with the young guys against the old. A 17-year-old girl named Jackie Mitchell struck him out once in Chattanooga, Tennessee. If you were a pretty good baseball player in the twenties, professional or amateur, big-city or small-town, the chances were pretty good that you played against Babe Ruth at least once in your life. If you didn’t, it was your fault. You probably missed the invitation.

  Dyckman Oval? This was home.

  The pitcher on the mound for the Cuban all-stars was Luis Tiant, called “Cuba’s Carl Hubbell.” Kept out of the big leagues for color, he would later have a son who would do quite well in major league baseball. Tiant battled the Babe, and the Babe battled back. There was a walk, followed by two fly balls to right, followed by a double. That was his day. The Cuban all-stars won, 6–1, the first game of a doubleheader.

  The Babe, scheduled to play only the first game, went to the plate while the teams rested between games. He thought the people deserved a litt
le bit more for their $1.10 or 55 cents. Clyde Barfoot, who once pitched a couple of times for the Pittsburgh Pirates, took the mound. Barfoot pitched. The Babe swung.

  Maybe a half-dozen balls went out of the park in the next five minutes, and finally, as if it were planned, he really caught one. It went over the center-field fence, crashed onto a garage. How far? Word of mouth would decide. Might have been the longest ball ever hit at Dyckman Oval.

  The Babe smiled and waved. Worn out, he went home to Claire for dinner.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  H E QUICKLY BECAME a man who played golf and drank in the afternoon. The life and times of Babe Ruth had ended. He wasn’t dead, no, but he was an inhabitant of that strange twilight that exists for men who have accomplished all they can early in life and will accomplish no more. The energy still ran through him, the need to move, do, be active, but there really was nowhere to go.

  “I played 365 rounds of golf last year,” he would say. “Thank God for whoever invented golf. I’d be dead without it.”

  He golfed. He bowled. He drank. He attended to the little bits of personal business of each day. He traveled. He went hunting. He went to Florida in the winter. A personal appearance here, a radio show there. He golfed. He bowled. He drank.

  He tried to kill the energy.

  The stories about him invariably were touched with melancholy. They were easy stories—the Tom Meany approach at Dyckman Oval, talking about John McCormack as a singing waiter—but now they were true. The athlete, no matter who he is, once removed from his uniform, looks much older. The Babe also looked lost.

  “Polo Grounds, N.Y., Sept. 30—George Herman Ruth has finally faded into legend,” the Associated Press reported when he and Claire appeared at the first game of the World Series between the Yankees and Giants in 1936.

  He was the most forlorn figure in the Polo Grounds today, snapped now and then by a photographer who noticed him in a box down the first base line near Mayor [Fiorello] LaGuardia and Jimmy Walker.

  But there was none of the fanfare that attended him at the Series last year. He sat with his wife and daughter and Kate Smith, the singer. And when the urchins came round for signatures, most of them wanted Kate’s.

  The Babe did nothing to brighten the picture. Two minutes into any conversation he started talking about his desire to be the manager of a major league team. He was fixed on the topic. As soon as he started to talk, sadness crept into his words. Bluster turned into bewilderment.

  “I wanted to stay in baseball more than I ever wanted anything in my life,” he would say about his frustration. “But in 1935 there was no job for me, and that embittered me.”

  The managing job never came. There were rumors, his name continued to appear often on lists of prospective candidates, but there was never even an interview. Col. Tillinghast L’Hommedieu Huston resurfaced once, announcing great plans to buy the Brooklyn Dodgers and install the Babe as his man in charge, but Huston’s wife put her foot down, and he retreated back to his manse in Georgia. The Babe coached first base for part of the 1938 season for the Dodgers, but that also didn’t work out. He was there to ride the elephant, help fill the many empty seats, not to inherit the manager’s job, which went to Leo Durocher.

  No one ever put a finger on why he wasn’t asked to manage. Was it because of his lifestyle, the way he had roared through the nights when he was young? Was it because he wasn’t cerebral, because he tripped over names and forgot facts? Did the owners think he was flat-out stupid? Was it because, simply, he was Babe Ruth? His presence still commanded any room he entered, heads turned. Was that it? Was he overqualified, too big for any owner or general manager to endure every day? How do you argue a point with the Home Run King?

  Maybe it was simple circumstance. The one logical place, the place where he should have gone, Yankee Stadium, was closed. Joe McCarthy was there until 1946, winning pennants and World Championships with this Joe DiMaggio kid and a new generation of players. The other possibility, Boston, the Red Sox, also was closed. Eddie Collins, the general manager, never wanted him. Tom Yawkey, the owner, listened to Eddie Collins.

  The other teams in the major leagues all had characters from their own histories, local names, to consider. There were managers too coming up from the minor leagues with proven records. The Babe never went down, showed what he could do. He turned down a couple of chances, and when he decided he would go to the minors, it was too late. No one was interested.

  Managing baseball, unlike playing baseball, is a political job. He was not a political person. He was Babe Ruth, dammit. The part he never understood was that the name, the carryover, was not enough. The aspiring manager had to hustle, call, charm. That was not his style. He waited. The call never came.

  He golfed. He bowled. He drank.

  Time blurred together. There was a family tragedy when one of Claire’s brothers, Eugene, 43 years old, gassed during the war, never healthy afterward, threw himself from the window of the Babe and Claire’s new 11-room apartment on Riverside Drive, 15 floors to his death, in January 1936. The Babe and Claire were in Florida, and he came back to handle the arrangements. There was a family emergency: Julia, in medical trouble with a severe strep infection in the summer of 1938, needed a transfusion. He rushed from a Dodgers game to the hospital and gave his blood. There were weddings and funerals, the ever-present car accidents, bumps in the routine, but mostly there was the routine.

  “I’m 43 on the head,” he said to sportswriters he invited to the apartment on his birthday in 1937, “but I can’t tell yet whether I’m just beginning to live. If it’s okay with everyone, I’d just as soon be 21 again.”

  Dorothy, the forgotten daughter, described an increasingly unpleasant everyday situation at home in her book My Dad, the Babe. No fan of her stepmother, Dorothy said Claire had developed a serious drinking problem. She said Claire sometimes would start the day with a shot of gin in her morning milk or soda and proceed from there. The arguments with the Babe at night came often, a matchup between Babe’s “you’ve ruined every friendship I ever had” and Claire’s “you’d be nowhere without me.”

  “Not only were her mental capacities for anything but baseball statistics and money slipping, but her lush beauty also was rapidly deteriorating,” Dorothy wrote about Claire. “Yet, though she was miserable, and made all of us around her miserable, it was still sad to stand by and watch this happen. My father and Claire had only been married for seven years, but she looked as though twenty horrendous years had passed. In her younger days, Claire could look terrific when she rolled out of bed in the morning; now she was overweight, wan, and desperately in need of help to pull herself back together again.”

  The Babe took refuge in his activities. He had been gone from the house all day most of the time when he played baseball, and he was gone all day now.

  He bowled five days a week during the winter when he was stuck in New York. The closest alleys to his apartment were two lanes in the basement of the Riverside Plaza Hotel. He would arrive at one o’clock in the afternoon, leave at five. If no one showed up, he would bowl alone. The manager of the establishment said he would bet there were weeks when Babe Ruth bowled more strings than anyone else in all of New York.

  Not a good bowler, only fair, a 177 average, the man with time to kill didn’t care. He liked strikes, yet bowled mostly straight at the head pin, rather than trying to hit the pocket. Spares were a nuisance. Waiting for the ball to be returned by the pin boy was a nuisance. He never would sit down at the bench and table with the score sheet. The energy had to be killed. He would stand and wait. If he became tired after a couple of strings, he simply would sit on the ball return and catch his breath.

  “The Babe showed no interest in his average,” P. J. McDonough, another bowler, said. “He was more impressed with his pin total. I would drop in from time to time and bowl with him. When I first mentioned average, he replied that he had knocked down more than 7,000 pins in four or five weeks.”

  H
unting and fishing took up more of his time, ate at the energy. He always had hunted, and he hunted more now. He hunted anything, anywhere. He came back from a trip to Nova Scotia in 1937 and drove his Stutz Bearcat off the boat from Yarmouth with one deer tied onto the front bumper, two more tied onto the front fenders, and a large, dead bear sitting in the rumble seat. The bloodstained car, not to mention the bloodstained passengers, made quite a sight in midtown Manhattan.

  He was either a good shot or a bad shot, depending on which hunting companion gave the appraisal. His choice of guns, they said, tended toward firepower more than accuracy. That was not a surprise. One of his favorite destinations became Greenwood Lake, a small resort town 50 miles northwest of New York City. He often fished and hunted in the area. He owned a speedboat and whirred around the lake and was known at the local taverns. Claire was never seen at Greenwood Lake.

  Dorothy reported that sometimes the hunting and fishing trips really weren’t hunting or fishing trips. The Babe would leave for three or four days, go wherever he went, stop at some market on the way home, buy a bunch of fish, then come into the kitchen, unshaven, and slap the fish on the counter at Riverside Drive as evidence of his good work. This procedure fell apart one time when he turned the bag upside down to pour out the fish and they were all individually wrapped in shopping paper.

  “That took some explaining!” Dorothy said.

  For all his hunting, fishing, and bowling, his favorite recreation—his prime energy killer—was golf. It had become his life. He was a very good golfer, a three handicapper, good enough to play in the top flights of club championships. He was long, but erratic, off the tee, solid with his irons, bedeviled by his putting. He played out of the St. Albans Golf Club in Queens but was available to tour any course at any time.