The Big Fella

by Jane Leavy

  In May, Fox Movietone used newly acquired sound-on-film technology to produce the first of two special talking newsreels devoted to Charles Lindbergh: coming attractions for the future. Footage of his May 20 takeoff for Paris premiered five days later at the Sam Harris Theatre in New York. Their cameramen were also on hand to film his welcome home ceremony at the foot of the Washington Monument when he received the first Distinguished Flying Cross from President Coolidge. The ten-minute newsreel, narrated by McNamee, was distributed to theaters throughout the country for the benefit of those who’d been unable to listen to NBC’s live broadcast of the event—a first in broadcast history, which required linking eighty-two radio stations and twelve thousand miles of telephone cable.

  Three months later, McNamee spoke to an even larger audience, an estimated 50 million people who tuned in to hear his blow-by-blow account of the Dempsey-Tunney heavyweight fight in Chicago on September 22. His voice was heard at sheep stations in the Australian outback, on an iceberg in Greenland, in the United States Marine Corps regiment headquarters in Shanghai, and in Babe Ruth’s living room in Manhattan.

  Ruth, who had hit his fifty-sixth home run that afternoon, missed the “long count” in the seventh round when Dempsey failed to return to a neutral corner and gave Tunney time to recover from the knockdown. He had skipped out on his own party to fulfill a promise that his friend Harry M. Stevens, the Yankee concessionaire, had made to bring Ruth to a charity bazaar for a Catholic church in Westchester. He got back just in time to hear he had lost his bet on Dempsey.

  According to Radio Digest, 127 listeners dropped dead while listening to the fight.

  Sales soared. In the seven years between 1922 and 1929, the number of radio sets in American homes increased from one in every four hundred homes to a third of all American homes. A 1927 survey of listeners in Philadelphia and Buffalo conducted by H. S. Hittinger revealed that more than 60 percent of men and women liked to listen to sports on the radio.

  Regularly scheduled radio programming and movie showtimes required daily listings, which became prominent features in every American newspaper. They also required listeners and viewers to be on time and in time. Grandpa’s ponderous pocket watch was relegated to safekeeping with other family heirlooms. The times necessitated—and technology allowed for—a closer relationship with the clock. New quartz wristwatches made time available at the flick of the wrist. A temporal language emerged: buying, spending, borrowing, stealing, marking, wasting, doing, passing, and killing time, the latter being the one thing Ruth rarely did.

  Walsh was quick to position Ruth as a man of the moment, signing him to annual endorsement deals for Benrus watches. “It’s Jar-Proof!” World Series advertisements in Pennsylvania and Ohio newspapers proclaimed. With “Rustless Steel” parts and “Radiolite dials,” the Babe Ruth model, priced at only $37.50, was guaranteed to hug your wrist.

  “From the beginning fame has required publicity,” Leo Braudy wrote in The Frenzy of Renown, the definitive study of fame in America. “In great part the history of fame is the history of the changing ways by which individuals have sought to bring themselves to the attention of others and, not incidentally, have thereby gained power over them.”

  For Alexander the Great, that meant stamping his visage on the coin of the realm, where only gods had gone before. In the twenties, technology was producing what the historian Warren Susman called “new ways of knowing” almost as quickly as Ruth hit home runs. That also meant new ways of being known.

  Everywhere, there were new genres of information. Walsh made it his business to harness all of them in his bid to stamp Ruth’s mug on the American consciousness: the back pages of the tabloids, syndicated sports and editorial columns, three-dot gossip columns, and ghostwritten sports columns that fostered the illusion that heroes were talking directly to their fans.

  Comic strips, Sunday rotogravure sections, weekly magazines such as Vanity Fair, The Smart Set, and the New Yorker, whose editors called the city for which it was named a “gymnasium of celebrities.”

  Radio talk shows and gangster movies and chic urban comedies, book clubs, bestseller lists, and quickie books—Lindbergh’s autobiography, “We,” published just two months after he landed in Paris, sold 190,000 copies and earned him $200,000.

  Hit single records and record charts, neon signs and skywriting, advertising layouts and the packaged public personas of the new celebrities, actors, literary lights, pols, and sports heroes.

  Fox Movietone premiered its first biweekly talking newsreels in New York in October 1927 and around the rest of the country in December, with highlights of the Army-Yale football game and a New York City rodeo—a prototype of the sports highlight packages that would dominate TV sports news and fill time between innings at the ballpark. With them came changes in memory. Spectators began to seek verification in the projection and repetition of imagery rather than trust their own recall.

  Walsh saw to it that Ruth filled (and occasionally filled in for the authors of) those gossip columns and the ever-expanding airwaves. He would make bad romantic comedies, yak on talk shows, create comic strips to hawk breakfast cereal, and cut gramophone records for the 44 percent of American households with Victrolas. Ruth carried a portable record player with him on every road trip and sometimes staged impromptu concerts. One day in the fall of 1926, he held a barn dance beside a water tank when his train stopped to take on water in Montana.

  Ruth and Gehrig recorded a corny six-minute comedy sketch released by Perfect Records, a Pathé label for cheap American 78s, during the 1927 World Series. The writer wisely chose to remain anonymous. Gehrig’s Noo Yawk accent and squeaky high voice were so at odds with his corporeal self that people refused to believe he was doing the talking. Ruth’s basso profundo was equally surprising. He managed to sound dignified, if not exactly smooth, while engaged in the stilted repartee. He didn’t come off at all like the illiterate guttersnipe described in the newspapers.

  And he flourished in the camera’s lens, lighting up with the explosion of each magnesium flare. The camera magnified every ridge and invaded every pore, revealing the tobacco stains on his uneven teeth and the crooked bite behind the famous grin. Each blast of powder made his face seem even bigger than it was, which was plenty.

  The images were static, setup shots; the paparazzi were still decades in the future. Each of the “exclusive” photographs that Walsh orchestrated—and released to clients of the Christy Walsh Syndicate and stamped “No charge to Babe Ruth papers, not available to others”—was purposeful, intended to create what Gumbrecht calls “a motif of privacy” that fed the public desire to connect with him.

  What readers wanted in the twenties—and what newspaper editors needed to fill all those new column inches that Ruth inspired—was freshness. “What is it that is not already known?” said Gumbrecht. “The private life. I think the Babe was probably the first star in the sense that the persona became increasingly fascinating and continued to be fascinating after retirement. . . . Performance triggered the initial interest. But, then at a certain point you began to care.”

  Walsh made sure Ruth was photographed with every Tinseltown celeb that crossed his path or train platform—Marion Davies, for instance, old man Hearst’s girlfriend, when they changed trains at the same time in Chicago. Her new flick was playing on the same bill with Babe Comes Home in Kansas City. Though Walsh had met Hearst only once, his newspaper chain was the Christy Walsh Syndicate’s biggest account. No harm staying on his good side.

  Not surprisingly, Hollywood was first to recognize the value of marketing a private life as part of a public persona. And Walsh was a Hollywood guy. He saw to it that Ruth’s name was dropped liberally in the pages of Variety, Hollywood’s paper of record, and in movie fan-magazines whose reporters breathlessly recounted his initiation into the biz on the set of Babe Comes Home. How the cast and crew (lovingly) tricked him into chasing a wax mouse—Ruth called it a rat—under small pieces of furniture, and (not
so amusingly) tricked him into shoving a young boy as part of a scene in order to see if they could make the Big Fella cry. And he did!

  Oh, the human interest!

  In both his Hollywood features, Headin’ Home, released in 1920, and Babe Comes Home, based on a sportswriter’s short story “Said with Soap,” he played ballplayers remarkably like himself, the only role he could play, star turns that further eroded the line between public and private and furthered the notion that he was knowable. One month after the release of Headin’ Home, Current Opinion magazine named him “the Most Talked About American.”

  Every magazine in America—Time, Vanity Fair, Liberty, Popular Science, American Boy, and even Hardware Age—found a reason to put him on the cover. He was so much in the public domain that a brief retreat in the summer of 1929 set off an anxious search by newspaper photographers and this relieved headline: “Ruth Found After Evading Camera for a Week.”

  There was no frame he couldn’t or wouldn’t fill. No pose he wouldn’t assume. No one he wouldn’t pose with. Posing was the only time he stood still.

  He posed with athletes: Dempsey, Tilden, Zaharias, and Ed “the Strangler” Lewis. Generals: Alphonse Jacques of Belgium (outside the Palace Theatre in New York between vaudeville performances in 1921), Marshal Foch of France (“I suppose you were in the war?”), and John J. Pershing. Animals: chimp, greyhound, pigeon, turkey (dead and alive), tortoise, and lobster (on National Lobster Day). Royalty: King Prajadhipok of Siam and Queen Marie of Romania (he told her he was a king, too). Presidents: Coolidge, Harding, Franklin Roosevelt, George H. W. Bush as Yale’s first baseman, and Hoover, albeit reluctantly. (“A matter of politics,” he said.)

  He posed in camel hair, coonskin, camouflage, raccoon coats, and two-piece bathing suits sunbathing on the beach at the Hotel del Coronado, taking his ease before the 1927 season; in silk Sulka ties made especially for him because his neck was too big to buy off the rack, and in an editor’s green eyeshade; in monogrammed shirtsleeves and braces, whispering to a white sheet meant to evoke one of his many ghostwriters. In football helmets with Rockne, plus fours with Al Smith, and tennis whites with Bill Tilden.

  He welcomed photographers into his home, seated beside his first wife, Helen, at the keyboard of a pump organ he couldn’t play; wrestling on the grass with their daughter, Dorothy; and in later years, lying on a hospital gurney beside daughter Julia, donating blood for her when strep throat threatened her life; reclining in his Riverside Drive apartment in his paisley smoking jacket and red silk slippers; and subsumed by thousands and thousands of unnamed children: boys in ball caps and girls in baseball skirts, children on crutches and in wheelchairs, orphans, incorrigibles, and unfortunates, the dying and those who were said to be.

  Walsh made sure there were photographers at every orphanage and tubercular asylum they visited. Not that the Babe needed encouragement to pay these calls. At the Glen Lake Sanatorium in Minnesota in 1926, a photographer for the Minnesota Daily Star took what may be the least known and most affecting photograph of those visits: the Babe, surrounded by a tribe of sick children clothed only in loincloths. Ruth, who wore “the world as a loose garment,” biographer Tom Meany would say later, betrayed no hint of discomfort with their appearance or condition.

  Later, on the same tour, at the Firland Sanatorium in Seattle, he assumed his stance in an imaginary batter’s box with a young boy perched precariously on a folding chair behind him. Ruth looks toward an imaginary hurler, waiting for an imaginary pitch; the boy, all hollows and ridges, wearing an oversized catcher’s glove, an ill-fitting mask, a pair of white shorts, and nothing else, hunches forward, hands out, as if the Babe might actually swing and miss. There is nothing between them, no opportunity for eye contact, just their collusion in creating the odd tableau featuring a boy with a concave chest and a barrel-chested man clothed in the vestments of fame: silk shirt, expensive cuff links, and the Benrus watch he had been paid five hundred dollars to wear.

  The photo was intended to document the Babe’s good works and good heart, which it did, but it also revealed something far more interesting and far more human, which Marion Badcon, a reporter for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, captured in her description of “a big kid with a lot of smaller ones—a big kid who was a little awkward, a little hesitant, a little touched and very silent before the hundreds of youngsters whom he visited on his round of the children’s homes and hospitals.”

  His moment of timidity—the fraction of a pause before assuming the garrulous persona expected of him—was endearing and authentic. “But he grinned,” Badcon wrote. “And the kids grinned back. And then a baseball appeared.”

  “Deeds put a shine on him—always,” Roger Angell would say.

  He knew how far he had come from the boy he had been and how fast it had all happened. When it was time to fill out his 1927 application for Who’s Who in America, he refused to fill in the blank for occupation. “If they don’t know,” he said, “let them have their best guess.”

  The evolving technology of illumination and focus, the pop and hiss of every flashbulb exploding in his face, documented how surprised and perhaps grateful he was to be the center of so much attention. Only in the public embrace would he feel completely full.

  On those gala evenings when he got all dressed up in a tux with his white silk scarf to greet his public at some banquet or other, his daughter Julia recalled, he would stop at the front door to the apartment to allow for a moment’s inspection, asking the women in his life:

  “Am I a handsome fella or not?”

  Or not.

  In that question, in the patent need for approbation beneath the homely mug, people saw themselves, or somebody they knew. They couldn’t get close enough to him. But, oh, how they tried.

  V

  “The first hundreds broke through the ropes in the fifth inning,” Tommy Holmes reported.

  The precipitating event: Ruth doubled, one of two that cleaved the crowd in Horse Heaven.

  Boisterous crowds were nothing new at Dexter Park. Rosner and Strong were savvy promoters and longtime baseball men, each having served the game in various capacities for forty years. They had major-league ambitions and would, six months later, declare their intention to purchase the Dodgers, whom they routinely outdrew, and move them to a new 125,000-seat stadium in Queens. They would install a system for night games, designed by Rosner’s electrical engineer son, five years before anything comparable in the major leagues existed.

  Strong’s teams showcased Oscar Charleston, John Henry Lloyd, Dick Redding, Cristobal Torriente, John Beckwith, Chino Smith, and Smokey Joe Williams. Rosner’s teams featured minor leaguers on their way up and major leaguers on their way down—Dazzy Vance and Lefty Grove among them. He bragged he had the best semi-pro talent in the area, though he had turned away a shy young high school first baseman named Lou Gehrig in 1920 when he showed up for a tryout with his baseball gear in a beach bag.

  Ruth arrived by cab an hour early for his first visit one November Sunday in 1923 to find Rosner alone in his office in his empty ballpark. He had offered Ruth a choice between a flat fee or a percentage of the gate. “I want to be paid now,” Ruth said.

  “Wait a while, Babe,” Rosner said. “My crowd always comes late.”

  “Now,” boomed the Babe.

  Rosner gave him the promised nineteen-hundred-dollar flat fee and Ruth went off to get lunch. By the time he returned, a mob had formed, the stands were full, and he was short the additional four hundred dollars he would have earned had he taken Rosner’s offer of a percentage. When the game ended in the gloaming of that late November afternoon, Ruth made his escape, according to a special dispatch in the Chicago Tribune, by seizing the tail of a mounted police horse, which towed him through two thousand celebrants to safety.

  That was nothing compared to the free-for-all he faced now, four years later, which was enough to rattle whatever was left of Dexter’s bones. “It became so bad that unless an outfielder fielded a
ball cleanly the crowd gobbled up the ball,” wrote Tommy Holmes. “Every time a fly or grounder went past the infield there was a race between the outfielder and the spectators on the fringe of the crowd. Once Dean, the Bushwicks’ right fielder, fumbled and the ball was plucked from under his feet by one of the spectators before he could reach it.”

  Stan Baumgartner, the Bushwicks’ starting pitcher, who played eight years in Philadelphia for the Phillies and A’s, pretty much had his way with Ruth and Gehrig, as well as their Yankee teammate Joe Dugan, who was in left for the Babes, and Al Moore, a Brooklyn boy who did time with the Giants in 1925 and 1926.

  After Ruth grounded out in the seventh inning, the crowd bellowed its disappointment, realizing they had seen his last turn at bat. They had come to see him hit a home run—and he hadn’t been able to manage even one in fifteen batting practice swings.

  “Ruth, master showman that he is, made up for this disappointment by going on the mound to pitch,” Holmes wrote.

  It was the safest place in the ballpark. Though he hadn’t pitched in a major-league game since throwing four innings of relief against the Philadelphia A’s on October 1, 1921—one of five games he would pitch for the Yankees, all of which he won—Ruth often sought refuge on the mound during barnstorming games. If he couldn’t give the crowd at Dexter Park what they had come to see, he would give them a glimpse of the great left-handed pitcher he had been during the first five years of his career.

  Back in Boston, when he was known as “the speed boy,” he twice threw more than 320 innings in a 154-game season. He had a lifetime 2.28 ERA and surrendered only 10 home runs in 1,221.1 innings pitched. His glittering pitching line over ten years: 94 wins, 46 losses, for a winning percentage of .671, higher than Christy Mathewson, Roger Clemens, and Sandy Koufax. Of his 23 wins in 1916, 9 were shutouts, all were complete-game victories. He threw 13 scoreless innings in the 1916 World Series, then added 162/3 more when he beat the Chicago Cubs twice in the World Series two years later.