The Big Bam: The Life and Times of Babe Ruth

by Montville, Leigh

  “There was a chance it would prove nothing, and there was a chance it might prove harmful to me in my condition,” the Babe said. “I was in pretty bad shape. The matter was left up to me. It wasn’t an easy decision.”

  He took daily injections for six weeks. He didn’t stay in the hospital for all of that time, but came in every day for his shots. The teropterin seemed to work. His symptoms quieted a bit. He could eat some soft foods. He started to regain some weight. His hair, lost during the radiation treatments, came back. The lymph nodes in his neck shrunk down to nothing. The doctors in the study were so excited that they rushed out a paper that was delivered at the International Cancer Congress in St.Louis. They thought they had cured this form of cancer. They mentioned a “52-year-old man” but didn’t mention Ruth’s name. His case was seen as a scientific miracle.

  He’d signed a contract for a ghostwritten book, The Babe Ruth Story, so he spent stretches of time with the writer, Bob Considine. A top general columnist with the Hearst syndicate, Considine had become famous with Thirty Seconds over Tokyo, written with Ted Lawson, a flier who had lost a leg in the bombing raids on the Japanese city during World War II. The book was a great success and was made into a movie starring Spencer Tracy and Van Johnson.

  Considine didn’t have much more luck with the failing Ruth than previous famous writers, working as his newspaper ghosts, had had with the healthy Ruth. A half-hour into an interview session, Ruth would suggest that they take a ride, hit some golf balls, maybe play nine holes, do something. Off they would go to the golf course in the Babe’s Lincoln Continental.

  They would stop at a butcher shop on Ninth Avenue to pick up some hamburger that he would have cooked for lunch at the golf course. Some days he could eat it. Some days he could eat nothing more than a two-minute egg. The golf was sad. The same drives that went for 300 yards now went for 100, 150. The wooden shaft did not bend anymore.

  This was no way to write a book. Ruth was far too sick to concentrate and tell his story. Considine realized he was in trouble, so he brought in Fred Lieb. The sportswriter from the New York Telegram became the ghostwriter for the ghostwriter.

  “I wrote the book,” Lieb said. “I dictated that book for about a week to ten days before the 1947 World Series. Considine didn’t know enough about Ruth. See, I was with Ruth from 1920 to 1934. Considine didn’t come to New York until around 1933.”

  The Babe went to the 1947 World Series with Claire, the Yankees matched against the Dodgers. He became a focus of attention. People noticed when he arrived or exited. The new medium—television—focused its cameras on him often. His discomfort was obvious.

  In January he returned to the Neurological Institute for 17 days and was cleared at the end to go to Florida with Claire and his male nurse, Frank Delaney, to resume as much of his life as he could stand. He still felt awful when his birthday came on February 7, 1948, but at least he wasn’t in the hospital.

  “I’m full of aches and pains,” he told a reporter on the doorstep to his surfside bungalow at the Golden Strand Hotel in Miami Beach. “My arms hurt, and I can’t stretch them out. My neck hurts, and I’m hopeful the sun will do the job.”

  The sun did turn out to be good medicine, although no papers would be written about it for any scientific journals. By the end of six weeks, the patient said he felt “100 percent better” and a “new man” as he returned to New York. The book was about to be published, and he felt well enough to go to a book-signing party at the offices of the publisher, E. P. Dutton.

  “A lot of publishers were there because it was obvious the Babe’s days were numbered,” Considine said. “Bennett Cerf stood in line to get the Babe’s autograph. Ernest Hemingway was there. The books were just about running out, the end of the line near, and I said, ‘Jeez, I’d like to have one too.’ Babe opened a book and wrote, in his marvelous Spencerian handwriting, ‘To my pal, Bob….’ And he looked up and said, ‘What the hell is your last name?’ I’d spent two months with him.”

  The book was being made into a movie, also titled The Babe Ruth Story, the screenplay written by Considine. The Babe had been hired as a “technical adviser,” supposedly to teach William Bendix, the star, how to hit 60 home runs a year. Or to look like he could hit 60 home runs a year. The real job, though, was publicity. The Babe and Claire and Julia and her husband went to Hollywood at the end of April, arriving on May 1.

  Joe L. Brown, son of comedian Joe E. Brown, had been hired by Allied Artists Studio as “special sports publicist” for the picture, a job that basically entailed helping the Babe. Brown appeared at nine in the morning and stayed with him until he went to bed. Every day started with a visit from a doctor who would swab some medication in the back of Ruth’s throat. The Babe would have to say, “Ahhhhh.”

  “Take a look at this,” Babe said one day to Brown after the procedure.

  “Don’t show him,” the doctor said.

  “It’s okay,” Ruth said.

  He opened his mouth and said, “Ahhhhh.” Brown looked inside and saw a large hole. The cancer had eaten away the back of the Babe’s throat.

  The movie people only needed one day of publicity shots—Ruth posed with Bendix and co-star Claire Trevor—so the rest of the time Brown took him wherever he wanted to go. They wound up one day at Twentieth-Century Fox, watching Betty Grable make a movie. They sat in two director’s chairs at the side of the set. Grable did some scene.

  “Look at that babe, will ya?” the Babe said. “If I’d only known her when I was younger. We’d have had some fun.”

  On June 13, 1948, he was in a baseball uniform for the last time. Yankee Stadium was now 25 years old, and the Babe’s number 3 was retired as part of the silver-anniversary celebration. A two-inning old-timers’ game was played between the gray and bald 1923 Yankees, the first team to play in the Stadium, and a team of more recent alumni before the start of the regular game between the Yankees and the Cleveland Indians. The Babe was the manager of the 1923 squad. Ed Barrow, his old nemesis, now 80 years old, was the manager of the later alumni.

  The day was rainy and cold. The ceremonies were maudlin, and wreaths were placed in front of center-field monuments that had been erected for Ruppert, Miller Huggins, and Gehrig. “Taps” was played for all deceased members of the Yankees family. Six of the Murderers’ Row Yankees of 1927 already were gone. Gehrig, of course, and Huggins and Urban Shocker. Tony Lazzeri had been found at the foot of the stairs in his home in 1946, dead either from a heart attack or from an epileptic fit. John Grabowski, a backup catcher, had died in a fire, and finally, Herb Pennock, the Squire of Kennett Square, had died five months earlier in January of a cerebral hemorrhage.

  There was little doubt that Ruth would soon join the list. He arrived at the Stadium later than the other players, accompanied by a friend and his nurse. Again, he was frail and shrunken, wrapped in his big overcoat. He slowly changed into the pinstriped uniform, the whole deal, including baseball shoes and stockings, posed for pictures, then added the overcoat again.

  “What took ’em so long to retire your uniform?” Waite Hoyt asked. “They retired mine in 1930 when they sent me to Detroit.”

  The Babe smiled.

  Everything was an effort. He waited in the runway that ran from the dugout to the clubhouse as the ceremonies began, but his nurse suggested that he should go back to the clubhouse where it was warmer. When his time was near, he came back through the runway and sat in the dugout. He picked up a fielder’s mitt that some present-day player had left on the bench and said, “Christ, you could catch a basketball with this.” He talked a bit with Mel Harder, now the Indians’ pitching coach, remembering a day when he had gone 5-for-5 against Harder. It was a thousand years ago.

  He stepped out of his overcoat and went onto the field when his name was called by Mel Allen—“George Herman Ruth…Babe Ruth”—and used a bat as a cane as he walked toward his old teammates and the crowd noise churned around him. Again he went to the microphone….

>   “Ladies and gentlemen,” he said in the battered, painful voice, “I want to say one thing. I am proud I hit the first home run here in 1923. It was marvelous to see 13 or 14 players who were my teammates going back 25 years. I’m telling you it makes me proud and happy to be here.”

  He never would be back.

  Eleven days later, he checked into Memorial Hospital. Amazingly, during those 11 days, he had been to three last stops—St. Louis, Sioux City, and Sioux Falls—for Ford Motors. He ran into John Drebinger, the Times sportswriter, in the hotel in St. Louis. Drebinger saw him, didn’t want to be a bother, but Ruth lit up.

  “Hey, you old bastard,” he said to John Drebinger. “How’re you doing, Joe?”

  The cancer was everywhere now, in his liver, his lungs, his kidneys. A young Dominican priest, Father Thomas Kaufman from St. Catherine of Siena Parish, was assigned to him. Father Kaufman had a link to Ruth because he was from Baltimore and for one day during a family crisis he and his brother had been residents of St. Mary’s Industrial School for Boys. Ruth liked that. He knew by now he had cancer. He also knew that he was dying. He was resigned to his situation.

  The room on the ninth floor quickly filled with boxes of mail. People also sent good luck charms, many of them religious icons that had worked in their own situations. A statue of Blessed Martin DePorres, known as the Negro saint, stood on the Babe’s nightstand. On July 21, Ruth’s condition worsened, and Father Kaufman gave him the Last Rites of the Church. It was a strangely controversial move. The priest received a lot of positive mail, but also some hate mail from Catholics who thought that Ruth’s profligate life didn’t deserve forgiveness. One was written entirely in ecclesiastical Latin.

  Ruth rallied the next day. On the night of July 26, he even left the hospital, taken to the Astor Theater for the premiere of The Babe Ruth Story. This was another controversial move. Dorothy was irate.

  “I was totally taken by surprise,” she said. “When I had left Dad that afternoon, he was sedated, and I had no idea that he would be at the theater that night…. It occurred to me there was only one person who could have bypassed the security guards so easily—Claire. When I confronted her, she admitted she was responsible. She told me that it was necessary for him to be there and, after all, no harm had been done.”

  He arrived at the theater with no expression on his face, a sick man in a place where he shouldn’t have been. He was taken back to the hospital halfway through the movie. The movie was so bad, so cliché-filled and unbelievable, that people said they wished they also could have left. The Babe Ruth Story was killed across the board by the critics.

  “No home run,” Wanda Hale of the Daily News said. “It’s no more than a scratch single, a feeble blooper back of second base.”

  The wait for Babe Ruth to die began. He was beyond treatments, and all efforts made now were to make him as comfortable as possible. The visitors’ list to the ninth-floor room was cut down to family and closest friends. No ballplayers were on the list. Dorothy was surprised one afternoon to arrive and find a tall, attractive, redheaded woman in the room. The woman introduced herself as Loretta. She said she had been the Babe’s girlfriend for the past ten years.

  Dorothy was stunned, then pleased. She liked the idea of Loretta.

  “She was his constant companion and catered to his every need—she even went hunting, fishing, boating, and golfing with him,” Dorothy said. “I’m glad that at last he was able to find some pleasant female companionship. Lord knows, he deserved it.”

  The fog settled in for one last time. Loretta? What else did nobody know about the life of Babe Ruth? What else would nobody ever know?

  Dorothy would claim, years later, that she was his natural daughter, born out of wedlock to a family friend, Juanita Ellis. True? False? There were no documents to prove what she said. There also were no documents to disprove it.

  The question of race would linger. Was the Babe, by legal definition, a black man? He had heard the bad words for as long as he played. He had been handed the wrongful stereotype that would be attached to the black athlete—the natural talent, abilities transmitted by the touch of God, not acquired through industry and intelligence. He never had the chance to manage a team. So many of the pieces fit. If not a black man, he had been touched by the prejudices against a black man.

  The truth? The fog settled in for one last time.

  On August 9, the Babe signed a revised will that Claire and his lawyers had drawn up. On August 11, it was announced that he was on the critical list. Major League Baseball asked that a minute of silence be observed before all games to pray for his recovery. Neighborhood kids and photographers clustered outside the hospital.

  On August 16, at 8:01 P.M., the Caliph of Clout, the Monster of Mash, the Home Run King, the Sultan of Swat, the Bam, the Big Bam, the Bambino, the Babe, George Herman Ruth, 53 years old, but thought he was 54, died in his sleep. There were no last words.

  “The Babe died a beautiful death,” Father Kaufman said to reporters outside Memorial Hospital. “He said his prayers and lapsed into a sleep. He died in his sleep.”

  The first suggestion was to hold the wake at the Universal Funeral Home on Lexington Avenue. That was soon changed. The Babe instead lay in state for two days and nights at Yankee Stadium. An estimated 77,000 people came past to pay their respects. Another 75,000 watched the funeral cortege as it left St. Patrick’s Cathedral on August 19, 1948.

  The morning had been rainy, but the sun broke out when the services ended and the long procession drove slowly through the city.

  EPILOGUE

  BABE RUTH is buried in a hillside plot at the Gate of Heaven Cemetery in Valhalla, New York, next to Claire, who died in 1976. His statue stands at the entrance to the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York.

  The fascination with his career and life continues. He is a bombastic, sloppy hero from our bombastic, sloppy history, origins undetermined, a folk tale of American success. His moon face is as recognizable today as it was when he stared out at Tom Zachary on a certain September afternoon in 1927.

  If sport has become the national religion, Babe Ruth is the patron saint. He stands at the heart of the game he played, the promise of a warm summer night, a bag of peanuts, and a beer.

  And just maybe, the longest ball ever hit out of the park.

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  BOOKS

  Allen, Frederick Lewis. Only Yesterday: An Informal History of the 1920’s. New York: Harper & Row, 1931.

  . Since Yesterday: The 1930s in America. New York: Harper & Row, 1940.

  Allen, Lee. The American League Story. New York: Hill & Wang, 1965.

  Barrow, Edward Grant (with James M. Kahn). My Fifty Years in Baseball. New York: Coward-McCann, 1951.

  Beim, George (with Julia Ruth Stevens). Babe Ruth: A Daughter’s Portrait. Dallas: Taylor Publishing, 1998.

  Berg, A. Scott. Lindbergh. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1998.

  Breslin, Jimmy. Damon Runyon: A Life. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1991.

  Chapman, John. Tell It to Sweeney: An Informal History of the New York Daily News. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday & Co., 1961.

  Creamer, Robert W. Babe: The Legend Comes to Life. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1974.

  Crenson, Matthew A. Building the Invisible Orphanage: A Prehistory of the American Welfare System. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998.

  Daniel, Dan (with anecdotes by H. G. Salsinger). The Real Babe Ruth. St. Louis: C. C. Spink & Son, 1948.

  Eig, Jonathan. Luckiest Man: The Life and Death of Lou Gehrig. New York: Simon amp; Schuster, 2005.

  Fowler, Gene. Beau James: The Life and Times of Jimmy Walker. New York: Stratford Press, 1949.

  . Skyline: A Reporter’s Reminiscence of the Twenties. New York: Viking Press, 1961.

  Frick, Ford. Games, Asterisks, and People: Memoirs of a Lucky Fan. New York: Crown, 1973.

  Gilbert C.F.X., Brother. Young Babe Ruth: His Early Life and Baseball from the Memoirs
of a Xaverian Brother. Edited by Harry Rothgerber. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland & Co., 1999.

  Goldman, Herbert G. Jolson: The Legend Comes to Life. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988.

  Harris, Paul F. Sr. Babe Ruth: The Dark Side. Glen Burnie, Md.: Self-published, 1998.

  Holtzman, Jerome. No Cheering in the Press Box. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1974.

  . Jerome Holtzman on Baseball: A History of Baseball Scribes. Champaign, Ill.: Sports Publishing, L.L.C., 2005.

  Keene, Kerry, Raymond Sinibaldi, and David Hickey. The Babe in Red Stockings: An In-Depth Chronicle of Babe Ruth with the Boston Red Sox, 19141919. Champaign, Ill.: Sagamore Publishing, 1997.

  Kelley, Brent. In the Shadow of the Babe: Interviews with Baseball Players Who Played With or Against Babe Ruth. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland & Co., 1995.

  Lardner, Ring, Jr. Some Champions, Sketches, and Fiction by Ring Lardner. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1976.

  Leuchtenberg, William E. The Perils of Prosperity: 19141932. University of Chicago Press, 1958.

  Lieb, Fred. Baseball As I Have Known It. New York: Coward, McCann & Geoghegan, 1977.

  Meany, Tom. Babe Ruth. New York: A. S. Barnes & Co., 1947.

  McCarthy, Kevin. Babe Ruth in Florida. Haverford, Pa.: Infinity Publishing, 2002.

  Miller, Ernestine. The Babe Book. Kansas City, Mo.: Andrews McMeel Publishing, 2000.

  Morley, Christopher. Christopher Morley’s New York. New York: Fordham University Press, 1988.

  Pilat, Oliver. Pegler: Angry Man of the Press. Boston: Beacon Press, 1963.

  Pirrone, Dorothy Ruth (with Chris Martens). My Dad, the Babe: Growing Up with an American Hero. Boston: Quinlan Press, 1988.