by Jane Leavy
The state and city were given three seats each on the school board in exchange for public funding. In 1882, when the legislature expanded St. Mary’s purview to allow parents to apply to a justice of the peace to commit a child they deemed beyond their control, they were required, as a condition of admission, to designate the school superintendent as legal guardian.
The boys, who were allowed to go home for ten days at Christmas, adopted the language of incarceration to describe themselves. After 1937, when the state of Maryland designated St. Mary’s as the repository for youthful offenders sentenced by the courts and the school accepted no other students, the language caught up with the reality of the place. Until 1940, the rate of parole violators was less than 5 percent. Twenty thousand boys were processed through St. Mary’s by the time the state withdrew its support in 1950, having concluded that the institution violated separation of church and state.
Because St. Mary’s accepted orphans, and perhaps because the adult George Ruth said so little about his parents, many writers, teammates, and friends assumed he was an orphan, an assumption he did his best to quell. He had a good mother and father, he protested, having forgotten which parent had died when. “Get me right now, I’m no orphan!” he barked at Harry T. Brundidge of the St. Louis Star in May 1929. “All that stuff about my being an orphan kid, too tough for my aunts and uncle to handle, and about being shoved into a reform school for bringing up are a lot of boloney, just plain, every-day applesauce and hooey.”
His protestations were to no avail. His visage can be seen today on highway billboards and airport video screens, courtesy of the Foundation for a Better Life, a nonprofit organization dedicated to creating inspirational public service campaigns, hailing the drive that propelled him “from orphanage to the Hall of Fame.”
Because St. Mary’s accepted “incorrigibles”—and perhaps because George Ruth was delivered to the moral hospital in the custody of a Baltimore City police officer—others would conclude he had been committed to the institution by court order. Although multiple biographies refer to a friendly, unnamed magistrate who provided the legal basis for his commitment, no documentation of such an order has ever been produced. None was found among the writs of habeas corpus on file at the Maryland State Archives. No public notice was published in the Baltimore Sun, customary when underage offenders were sent by the courts.
More to the point, his sister Mamie Ruth Moberly was adamant that George Ruth Sr. paid tuition, making his son one of 110 boarding students admitted to St. Mary’s in 1902. “Daddy had to pay for Babe to be out there,” she said. “Orphans was different. Babe was different. He still had a daddy.”
The single handwritten ledger to survive the 1919 St. Mary’s fire did not note whether George Ruth paid tuition for his son, which the archivist at Catholic Charities said was the norm. In the absence of definitive information, history rendered its verdict: “I was a bad kid” is the first line of his The Babe Ruth Story. That would become the subtext of his life.
“They told him he was a bad boy, so he grew up thinking he was a bad boy,” his daughter Julia recalled.
“When I was small I suppose I was raising the devil more or less,” he would tell a reporter two years after his release from St. Mary’s. “At least that is what they said.”
His occasional protestations and frustrations fell on deaf reportorial ears. “All that stuff about my being a tough kid is boloney, too,” he told Brundidge. “I was a pretty good kid when my old man decided I would be better off in St. Mary’s Industrial Home, a Catholic school in Baltimore, because the fathers would keep an eye on me better than he could. I was just six years old when I went to that place, and it wasn’t a reform school either. It was a good place. There’s been a lot of talk about my being a hell-raiser in St. Mary’s and that the brothers were glad to get rid of me, but you can put it down in your paper that some of the brothers cried when I left there. I’d been there so long. I didn’t get in any more trouble than any other boy, although I didn’t fall for all the rules and regulations but nobody else did.”
IV
For the ancients—that is, anyone born before the twenties—gods and saints were celebrities. In the twenties, celebrities became gods. Virtue was passé. Celebrity was no longer predicated on skill but, as Tommy Holmes observed in the Eagle on personality:
“Commonly described as a red-necked, strong-arm guy who might be driving a truck were he not freighted with the ability of hitting a baseball harder than any other living man, Ruth nevertheless has personality—an attractive, vivid, compelling personality—to everyone who comes into the slightest contact with him. The Ruthian personality as much as the Ruthian wallop is responsible for the Babe being the greatest figure baseball ever had.”
Ruth occupied a unique position in the pantheon of the new American elect. He was a willing, even joyful collaborator in the construction and marketing of his public persona, “the first athlete to be sold as much for his color, personality and crowd appeal” in the words of Grantland Rice, unofficial mythologist of the golden age of sports.
And he was the first athlete to be recognized as an entertainer who transcended and expanded the parameters of athletic fame. The usually understated W. O. McGeehan compared him favorably to Chaplin in a June 1927 column in the New York Tribune, writing, “If there were any way of appraising the drawing power of the Babe I think that he would be shown to be the greatest money maker as an entertainer for all time.”
This marked a profound shift in the perception of athletes as performers. If, as the historian Ann Douglas argues in Terrible Honesty: Mongrel Manhattan in the 1920s, Ruth was responsible for the annexation of sports “by the burgeoning entertainment industry,” then why shouldn’t they be able to argue, as Walsh prompted Ruth to do, that he should be paid not just for what he did at the ballpark but for who he brought to the ballpark? He was creating a whole new fan base. People who didn’t know or care where first base was needed to see and be seen with Babe Ruth. He was the reason Jake Ruppert had just announced that seven thousand new seats would be added to the ballpark by opening day.
People like Vin Scully’s mother, a redheaded Irish girl just off the boat whose new beau took her to Yankee Stadium to learn about America. “One of the first things he said was, ‘You must see Babe Ruth,’” said her son, who would become a defining voice of the game. “She had no idea what baseball was about. But that’s how important it was. One of the first things this American wanted to show an immigrant was Babe Ruth.”
Ruth always envisioned for himself a bigger kind of stardom than baseball afforded. When he didn’t like Red Sox owner Harry Frazee’s salary offer for 1920, he took himself to Hollywood and allowed his winter secretary to let it be known that he might just abandon baseball for the soundstage. In 1922, “Ruthing” became a verb in Motion Picture News reviews touting “box office home runs.” In 1923, Heywood Broun of the New York World cast him as a fictional left fielder named Tiny Tyler, whose only weakness is “a fast blond on the outside corner of the park,” a line far less remembered than his lede after Game 2 of the 1923 World Series: “The Ruth Is Mighty and Shall Prevail.”
Ruth was the perfect hero for an unprecedented time because he, too, was unprecedented. He was unexplainable by any precedent other than himself. And in the 1920s, newness was everything and everything seemed new: IQ tests and opinion polls; sex ed, sex appeal, and birth control clinics; neon signs and skywriting; social X-rays, and acting out, a Freudian term of art that might have been invented for Babe Ruth.
Like all the newfangled consumer gadgets then flooding the marketplace—radios, Victrolas, automatic clothes washers, vacuum cleaners, pop-up toasters, do-it-yourself television kits—Ruth expanded notions of the possible.
It was his good fortune to become famous at the precise moment in history when mass media was redefining and amplifying what it meant to be public, and when societal upheaval was creating a new caste system for celebrity. Among the casualties of
the Great War were old money and the old aristocracy; out of the ashes rose consumerism and marketing and a new, more equitable American star system featuring rags-to-riches heroes: Babe Ruth, Jack Dempsey, Clara Bow, and Rudolph Valentino. Their ascendance from lower stations, palpable need for public approbation, personal tragedies, and failings—and, critically, their triumphs over those tragedies and failings—affirmed the animating principle of the American dream.
If the twenties were a monument to modern man’s creative capacity for mischief, as E. B. White wrote, Ruth was the chief mischief-maker. In a city of rule breakers—everyone who bent an elbow in 1927 was breaking the law of the land—he was rule breaker in chief. He never embodied the traditional public virtues that defined ancient celebrity, and he didn’t have to. Instead, he gave the public glimpses of a bad boy having the time of his life. Hadn’t they told him he was a bad boy? He did his adult best to fulfill the mandate: punching out umps, chasing after boobirds in the grandstand, driving the wrong way up a one-way street (“I’m only going one way!”), sleeping with other men’s wives but ignoring his own. Everybody loved, forgave, and maybe envied the Babe for being himself.
“Babe was an internationally innovative figure in the new twentieth-century stardom precisely because he was never qualified to fulfill the expectation of virtue,” explained Hans Gumbrecht, the author of In 1926: Living at the Edge of Time, a panoramic study of life on the cusp of the twentieth century’s most transformative year. “This made the non-virtuous side of his private life interesting and authentic. Unlike a saint he was somebody whose life people could compare themselves to. He could sail through weaker seasons because of the interest in who he slept with, how much he ate, what he lost gambling, what caused his stomachaches. This was a first.”
In virginal, tightfisted Columbia Lou, Ruth—and Walsh—had the perfect foil. He was a mama’s boy; Ruth was the motherless man-child who gratefully guzzled the pickled eels Mom Gehrig prepared for her Louie and his pal Babe. Though eight years Ruth’s junior, Gehrig represented a passé kind of fame—“pre-stardom,” Gumbrecht called it. “There was little interest in the Ironman’s private life in part because he didn’t have much of one until disease gave him some charisma.”
The New Yorker dismissed him with the cruelest cut a celebrity-conscious magazine could muster: as unfit “in any way to have a public.”
“The Bambino,” on the other hand, John Kieran opined in the New York Times, “does not have to step out of character to be what he is—an appealing, swashbuckling, roistering, boisterous figure who is as natural a showman as the late Phineas T. Barnum.”
Visionary though he was, Christy Walsh couldn’t have foreseen that a century after the fact historians would be analyzing, hailing, and occasionally bemoaning his precedent-setting partnership with Ruth. But what Walsh did understand was this: stars were no longer marketed just for their specific skills, but for themselves.
The 1926 promotional flyer he drew advertising his services featured a halo of stars with the names of his celestial clients inscribed within—Frank Carideo, Hunk Anderson, Pop Warner, John McGraw, Tad Jones, A. A. Stagg, Connie Mack, Babe Ruth, Nick Altrock, We Mean Well (a thoroughbred), Lou Gehrig, and Dean Crowell:
Stars available for personal appearance, Merchandise Endorsements, Exhibition Baseball Games, Vaudeville, Moving Pictures, Radio and All Forms of Commercial Contracts, under Christy Walsh Management.
Walsh recognized the public’s desire to know the people behind the flickering images and the crackling voices, to be near them, to be like them, to experience their “personal appearance.” Notions of stardom—and what it meant to be famous in America—were evolving as quickly as the technology of mass communication. The vocabulary of fame hustled to keep up: “celeb” was becoming slang just as Ruth was leaving St. Mary’s. The United Press anointed him “a star” two months before his major-league debut. Grantland Rice elevated him to the rank of a “superstar in an age of stars” in 1919, four years after the superlative was coined by hockey innovators Frank and Lester Patrick for their superstar wingman, Cyclone Taylor. Ruth’s home-run spree in September 1927 prompted Paul Gallico to advocate the retirement of the word “super”—Ruth had made it superfluous. “These supers don’t last,” Gallico lamented in the Daily News.
It was a speeded-up time: the dawn of hectic and hurry. The city was changing at breakneck speed, which is how Ruth lived, setting a pedal-to-the-metal example for the rest of the country. Walter Winchell popularized “the Big Apple” in a column proclaiming the city as “the pot of gold at the end of a drab and somewhat colorless rainbow.” The city even smelled different—modern. The first espresso machine in the city perked up Greenwich Village. Carbon monoxide flooded the streets, replacing the earthy odor of manure. The clip-clop of horseshoes on cobblestones was drowned out by the honking horns of cars—27 million of which would be on American roads by 1929.
Returning to New York after an absence of three years, F. Scott Fitzgerald described the change in his 1932 short story “My Lost City”: “The restlessness of New York in 1927 approached hysteria. The parties were bigger . . . the pace was faster—the catering to dissipation set an example to Paris; the shows were broader, the buildings were higher, the morals were looser, and the liquor was cheaper.”
No one lived bigger, faster, or looser than Ruth. Take the week of September 11, 1927:
On Monday, September 12, his only day off, Ruth appeared in court to face charges that he had assaulted a cripple at the corner of Seventy-second Street and Broadway. On Tuesday, the Yankees clinched the pennant and Ruth hit his fifty-first and fifty-second home runs. On Wednesday, he hit his fifty-third home run. On Thursday morning, he filmed a cameo at the Hebrew Orphan Asylum in Upper Manhattan for Harold Lloyd’s final silent film, Speedy, an homage to the last horse-drawn taxicab in New York.
Lloyd was a baseball fan and one of Walsh’s Hollywood connections. He paid Ruth $5,750 for a morning’s work, featuring a harrowing ride to the Bronx in a half-cab created to allow for tracking shots.
Delivered somewhat safely to the stadium, Ruth went 1 for 4 with a double and a run scored.
The next day, Ruth was cleared of charges in the assault case and carried from the courtroom on the shoulders of his ardent admirers.
It wasn’t just the tempo of the city that had changed. The tempo of change itself had accelerated. It was as revolutionary a moment in technology and perception as the advent of the computer age would be seventy-five years later. Electrified, the countryside outshone the stars. Aviation and radio altered the fundamental experience of time and space. The world seemed to be getting at once bigger and smaller every day.
When Ruth was a Red Sox rookie in 1914, stardom was local, a small print story, circumscribed by distribution of the daily newspaper and the 11.94 words of the average telegram. Fame for the most part was historical, after the fact. Seven years later, communications were still so low tech that fans living on the East Side of Manhattan persuaded Charles Farbizo, a neighborhood resident, to take his flock of carrier pigeons to the Polo Grounds and send inning-by-inning dispatches from the four-game series between the Yankees and the Cleveland Indians that would decide the 1921 American League pennant. Ruth was photographed releasing one of the pigeons on September 26. Farbizo promised to make himself available for the World Series, Ruth’s first as a Yankee.
By 1927, pigeons were has-beens. Airmail was in the wind. Voices were in the ether. The first words of the commercial radio age were uttered at 6:00 P.M. on November 2, 1920, from the Pittsburgh studio of station KDKA: “Is anyone listening out there?” Seven years later, Leo Rosenberg’s question was answered with a resounding yes. The NBC radio network went live on New Year’s Day 1927 at a gala at the Waldorf-Astoria with a signal that reached as far as Kansas City. Everybody who was anybody was there—except Ruth, who was starring in a vaudeville show at the Pantages Theater in San Francisco with boxer James J. Corbett.
That month, the
first telephone call between London and New York was placed from the AT&T building at 195 Broadway. (It cost seventy-five dollars for a three-minute call.) And Philo T. Farnsworth filed patent application no. 1,773,980 for an “image dissector tube” he called a “television system.”
On April 7, the smiling image of Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover was beamed from Washington, D.C., to AT&T headquarters on a 2 by 21/2-inch screen, the first demonstration of television technology. “Human genius has now destroyed the impediment of distance in a new respect,” Hoover told the company execs and scribes gathered to witness the event.
The Yankees opened their season at the Stadium on April 12 with Graham McNamee, the father of play-by-play, interviewing Ruth from a bunting-draped field box—a first in what would become ubiquitous pregame radio shows. The Yankees allowed the game against the Philadelphia A’s to be broadcast, the only one that season. Unlike their counterparts in Chicago, which began broadcasting Cubs and White Sox games daily in 1924, the Yankees were slow to grasp the advantages of building a radio audience and the advertising revenues that would come with it. Their season would conclude with the first coast-to-coast broadcast of the World Series, carried by two national radio networks, NBC and CBS.
Although thousands of baseball fans still craned their necks to follow the games on newspaper scoreboards in Times Square, the new locus of the printed word, thousands more brought traffic to a standstill on Radio Row on Cortlandt Street on the Lower West Side, home to a growing stretch of radio shops.
The ink-stained wretches in the press box furiously feeding copy into the newest teletype machines—capable of transmitting forty words a minute—were too busy and too self-involved to realize that this marked the end of their dominion. Nearly 250 daily newspapers would fold in the ten years following the birth of network radio in 1927. The future was at hand. Now on sale from Brush Research Laboratories in Zanesville, Ohio: the “Mystic” Radio Bug and headset, a miniature, ceramic crystal radio made to look like an insect with prototypical earbuds that required neither batteries nor electrical current to operate.
