One Summer: America, 1927 Page 15

  His extravagance was legendary. On one road trip, he wore twenty-two silk shirts in three days, then gave them all to the chambermaid upon departing. In Cuba, he lost $26,000 on a single horse race, and $65,000 in a few days. “It has been necessary for his employers to have him followed by detectives to protect him from himself as well as from confidence men, blackmailers, racetrack touts and bookmakers, gamblers and scheming young ladies,” noted The New Yorker in 1926. Despite his wealth, often he didn’t have the cash to pay his income tax bills, including in 1927 when Ruppert made him the highest-paid baseball player in history. Over the course of his career, by his own estimation, he lost or wasted well over a quarter of a million dollars.

  His teammates did what they could to help him, taking it in turns to go through his mail to alert him to anything important. “Ruth had 24 secretaries,” Hoyt once observed. Doc Woods, the team trainer, once found $6,000 worth of checks in mail that Ruth had discarded. Woods also commonly faked Ruth’s signature on baseballs and photographs, and reportedly faked some ten thousand signatures in one year.

  His appetites for sex and food, both seemingly boundless, were a source of perennial wonder. Marshall Hunt, sports editor of the New York Daily News, told how on road trips they would drive out into the country looking for restaurants that did chicken dinners. “What Babe really wanted,” Hunt said, “was a good chicken-dinner-and-daughter combination, and it worked out that way more often than you would think.”

  His indiscretions often led to complications. Fred Lieb (the New York Evening Telegram sportswriter who first called Yankee Stadium the House That Ruth Built) once watched as Ruth was chased through a train in Shreveport, Louisiana, by a woman (reputedly the wife of a state legislator) armed with a knife. Ruth only escaped by jumping off the train and then back on again just as it was departing. On another occasion he was chased “near naked” out of a hotel by an aggrieved husband with a gun. When someone asked his Yankee teammate Ping Bodie what it was like to room with Ruth, Bodie replied, “I don’t know. I room with his suitcase.”

  As the 1920s progressed, Ruth increasingly stayed at better hotels than the rest of the team, at his own expense. There he would hold court to anyone who cared to drop by. Waite Hoyt once counted 250 visitors to his suite over the course of an evening. Ruth seldom knew who any of the visitors were. At a party in his rooms at the Book Cadillac Hotel in Detroit, Ruth famously stood on a chair and shouted, “Any woman who doesn’t want to fuck can leave now.”

  If sex was unavailable, he just ate. Marshall Hunt swore he once watched Ruth down eighteen hot dogs at a sitting. Several witnesses reported seeing him order a dinner that consisted of double helpings of everything—two porterhouse steaks, two mountains of fried potatoes, two salads, two slabs of apple pie with ice cream—then come back six hours later and consume the same meal again; in between he ate eight hot dogs and drank six bottles of pop. “Lord, he ate too much,” Harry Hooper, a teammate, told Lawrence Ritter, author of The Glory of Their Times. Over the course of his career, it was calculated that Ruth had gained and lost two and a half tons.

  On the whole, he got away with his wayward lifestyle, but when he faltered, he faltered spectacularly. In 1922, he had a dreadful year. He was suspended on five separate occasions for various behavioral breaches and altogether missed about a third of the season. He squabbled endlessly with his manager, the long-suffering Miller Huggins. Once when Huggins criticized Ruth and his teammate Bob Meusel for their lack of discipline and output, Ruth carried the diminutive Huggins to the rear platform of the observation car and dangled him upside down over the rails until he withdrew his complaint. After Huggins’s death, one of his sisters claimed that Ruth had taken five years off his life.

  In the winter of 1922, at what was supposed to be a testimonial dinner, Jimmy Walker, soon to be mayor of New York—and a man who knew a thing or two about high living—publicly castigated Ruth, calling him “a great athlete, but also a great fool.” Ruth, he said, had let everybody down by his loutish behavior during the season. “Worst of all, worst of all,” Walker went on, “you have let down the kids of America. Everywhere in America, on every vacant lot where kids play baseball, and in the hospitals too, where crippled children dream of movement forever denied their thin and warped little bodies, they think of you, their hero. They look up to you, worship you. And then what happens? You carouse and abuse your great body.… The kids have seen their idol shattered and their dreams broken.”

  Ruth by this point was sobbing piteously—but worse was still to come. As he left the dinner that evening he was served a summons on behalf of one Dolores Dixon of Brooklyn charging him with being the father of her unborn child. Ruth was in the embarrassing position of not being able to recall whether he had slept with the woman or not. In the end, it appeared that he had not. “Dolores Dixon” turned out to be a fictitious name, and the woman in question was unable to supply dates or places that tallied with Ruth’s known movements. The suit was dropped, but not until Ruth had been made to look exceedingly foolish.

  In 1925 everything went wrong again. He arrived at spring training forty pounds overweight, and struggled to regain his form. In early April, as the Yankees were playing a series of exhibition games on the way home from spring training, Ruth began to feel unwell. By the time the team reached Asheville, he was feverish and barely coherent. Outside the train, he collapsed. As he was obviously in no state to play in an exhibition match, Miller Huggins, the manager, told him to continue on to New York. At Grand Central Station he collapsed again and went into convulsions. He was rushed to St. Vincent’s Hospital.

  Rumors circulated that Ruth had eaten too many hot dogs. The episode became known as “the bellyache heard round the world.” The hospital was curiously vague about Ruth’s condition and treatment, which led others to suppose that he was being treated for syphilis or some other venereal embarrassment. It now seems evident that whatever ailed Ruth, it was seriously acute and almost certainly gastric. Ruth was in bed for a month and weak enough to need a wheelchair for several days beyond that. Altogether he spent almost seven weeks in the hospital. When he did return to the Yankees, he was sporting a fresh abdominal scar and was a ghost of his former self: he had lost 76 pounds during his illness, and was now a trim but feeble 180 pounds, compared with the 256-pound tub of joviality he had been less than two months earlier. His legs were especially thin. He looked, said one observer, like “a bag of oats on two toothpicks.”

  But almost at once he returned to his former habits and within a month was becoming an overweight glutton again. On a road trip in August, the Yankees played appallingly and Ruth contributed very little. More than once he fought with teammates. In St. Louis after Ruth stayed out all night, Huggins fined him $5,000—a huge sum, double some players’ annual salaries—and suspended him indefinitely. Ruth fumed and ranted, but he eventually grew contrite and was reinstated to the lineup. He hit 10 home runs and batted .345 in the last 29 games of the season and didn’t cause anyone any trouble at all, but by that time it was too late. The Yankees finished the season in next-to-last place, with a record of 69–85 and attendance down by 700,000.

  In 1926, as so often with Ruth, he rebounded. He went through an intensive six-week fitness regime, shed forty pounds of doughy fat, and took almost nine inches off his waistline. He had a good season, too: he hit 47 home runs, batted .372, and drove in 146 runs. Above all, he behaved himself, by and large. But in the World Series against the Cardinals, Ruth ended the year with an astoundingly ill-judged play. With two outs in the ninth and the Yankees trailing by one run, Ruth walked and then—to everyone’s astonishment—tried to steal second base. He was thrown out by ten feet, ending the game and giving the Cardinals the World Series. “I guess I did something rash,” Ruth conceded. It was, by nearly everyone’s estimation, one of the most foolish plays ever made in a World Series, and it undid nearly all the good that he had achieved during the season.

  So at the start of 1927, Babe R
uth was in need of redemption again. That, however, wouldn’t be easy. He was thirty-two years old and suffered from low blood pressure, chronic indigestion, and occasional shortness of breath. This was not a man in his prime. It seemed highly unlikely that he would have a good year. In fact, and amazingly, he was about to have rather more than that. He was about to have a year that no one who knew baseball would ever forget.

  * * *

  * Ruth didn’t entirely give up pitching. He made three pitching appearances for the Yankees in 1920 and 1921—and won all three games.

  10

  In the summer of 1927, whenever Babe Ruth was missing from his usual haunts, he could often be found in a movie theater somewhere, sitting in a middle seat near the front, his broad face a picture of pride and delight as he watched a six-reel film called Babe Comes Home, starring himself and the Swedish actress Anna Q. Nilsson.

  Shot in twenty-two days the previous January at the studios of First National Pictures in Burbank, California, the film was by all accounts dreadful. No copy of it survives, so exactly what the plot consisted of is uncertain, but it was said to have been loosely modeled on Babe Ruth’s own life, except of course that in the movie he didn’t eat like a glutton, swear profanely, or have sex on the floor at frequent intervals. The movie was not in any case a success. The big hit of the season was a steamy offering called Don Juan, in which Hollywood heartthrob John Barrymore managed to plant no fewer than 143 kisses on compliant females—so many that hardly anyone later remembered that the movie was even more memorable for containing a sound track. Although Don Juan offered only recorded music and not speech—and hence was not a talkie—it still preceded The Jazz Singer as a sound picture by several months.

  In Manhattan, an even greater hit was not a feature film but a Fox Movietone newsreel, showing exclusively at the new Roxy Theatre, of Charles Lindbergh’s departure for Paris from Roosevelt Field. This, too, had a novel element of sound. Loudspeakers were set up in the theater wings, and a technician with good timing played a separate sound track so that the engine’s initial sputters and final triumphant roar matched the images on the screen. It wasn’t the most high-tech performance even for the age, but it brought six thousand patrons to their feet every time it was played.

  Against this, Babe Comes Home was pretty tame stuff. It was also notably unlucky in its timing, for it was released on May 22, the day after Lindbergh’s arrival in Paris, when the world was fully caught up in the joyous mania of that achievement. But the movie was sufficiently bad that it probably wouldn’t have found a following anyway. All this was a particular shame for Nilsson, who is forgotten now but was once so popular that she received thirty thousand fan letters a week. In 1925 she was seriously injured in a fall off a horse, and spent a year immobilized while convalescing. Babe Comes Home was intended to be her comeback movie, but it died quietly, unmourned by anyone but its male lead.

  Also easing his way into obscurity by this time was the increasingly hapless and marginalized Francesco de Pinedo. Pinedo and his two loyal crewmen had managed to get to Newfoundland ahead of Lindbergh but then were pinned down by rough seas—one of the common and inescapable drawbacks of seaplanes. Lindbergh had actually flown straight over them on May 20. Pinedo was able to get away three days later, but engine troubles brought him down in the sea 360 miles short of the Azores, and he had to be towed into the port of Fayal by a passing Portuguese fishing boat. By the time his arrival was reported, Lindbergh was the world’s hero, and nobody was interested in an Italian who reached his destination at the end of a tow rope.

  Still Pinedo pressed on, but the final stages of his journey became small paragraphs tacked onto other aviation stories. On June 11, he reached Lisbon. On June 15, a small report in the Times noted that while flying to Barcelona Pinedo had been forced down by bad weather near Madrid and had had to complete his journey by train. When at last he made it back to the Bay of Ostia, near Rome, the wider world hardly noticed.

  With Lindbergh at sea and out of touch but for a daily ghostwritten (or at least ghost-assisted) dispatch to the New York Times, which was nearly always agonizingly dull, the world craved some fresh excitement. Happily, things were beginning to stir at Roosevelt Field again. After Lindbergh’s successful flight, no one was sure what would become of the two remaining teams—whether they would just pack up and go away or try flights of their own. Charles Levine, the injunction against him lifted, now abruptly made it clear that he still intended for his plane to fly.

  Early on the morning of June 4, the Columbia was wheeled onto the grassy runway and Clarence Chamberlin, dressed in a leather jacket, knickerbocker breeches, and patterned stockings that could be seen from half a mile away, emerged from the hangar, waved to the crowd, and climbed alone into the cockpit. Levine’s belief seemed to be that if he couldn’t get to Europe sooner than Lindbergh, he could at least get there more strangely. Nearly everything about the production was a little odd. For one thing, he and Chamberlin refused to say where the plane was headed. Nor would either say why Chamberlin was unaccompanied when the cockpit had a second seat for a navigator and copilot.

  Then something even more unexpected happened. As Chamberlin brought the plane around to its takeoff position, he slowed for a moment and a bald, stocky man in a business suit bolted from the sidelines and climbed hurriedly into the plane. To everyone’s astonishment, it was Charles Levine.

  Levine’s wife, in evident confusion, cried out in dismay: “Oh-h-h! He’s not going? He’s not going!” When she saw that indeed he was going, she swooned and fell into the arms of the man standing behind her. Clarence Chamberlin later confided to a reporter, however, that Mrs. Levine had actually known all along that her husband was going, so the theatrics, it appears, were for the sake of the press.

  Minutes later, the Columbia was airborne and the second flight of the summer to Europe was under way—though where exactly it was bound not even the two men aboard knew. Their tentative plan was to try for Berlin, but in truth they would be happy to land almost anywhere.

  Levine quickly proved himself almost totally useless. He had no navigational skills at all and in the one moment that Chamberlin let him try to fly he almost immediately put the plane in a dangerous spin. His only real contribution was to reach for things behind the seat and help keep Chamberlin awake. Quickly they realized that navigating a route to Europe was not as easy as Lindbergh had made it look. By the time they reached Newport, Rhode Island, barely an hour into the flight, they were four miles off course and their earth inductor compass was not working. They were never quite sure where they were at any point after that. Luckily, Europe was a big target and Chamberlin was the world’s most laid-back pilot. It was just a question of going in the right direction, he insisted.

  Chamberlin was about to become—albeit briefly and somewhat tepidly—nearly as famous as Lindbergh. Thirty-three years old in the summer of 1927, he came from Denison, Iowa, a town much like Lindbergh’s Little Falls, one state to the north, though slightly more in the mainstream as it was on the Lincoln Highway. Chamberlin’s father ran a jewelry store and repair shop, so the family was comfortable. Growing up in Denison at the same time was a girl named Donna Mullenger, who would later become famous as the actress Donna Reed. Today people in Denison remember her with great fondness. Hardly anyone remembers Clarence Chamberlin.

  Chamberlin’s mother was English and, for reasons unknown, when Clarence was about ten she moved back to England, taking Clarence with her. Chamberlin’s autobiography is wondrously unrevealing on all aspects of his private life—he doesn’t even disclose his wife’s first name; she is simply “Mrs. Chamberlin” throughout—and he says nothing of his English interlude other than that he hated it. After about a year, mother and son returned to Denison and family life resumed as before.

  After high school, Clarence attended Iowa State College, as it then was called, and acquired a degree in engineering. He learned to fly while serving with the Signal Corps during the First World War.
He became a flight instructor and never saw battle—indeed, never left America. Like most other pilots, after the war Chamberlin took whatever work he could find. For a time he was an aerial photographer. Several well-known photographs of important events as seen from the air, such as Yankee Stadium on its grand opening in 1923, were taken by Chamberlin. Like Lindbergh, he had also crashed a lot of planes—about ten, by his own estimation—and was involved in a fatal crash in an air race in 1925 when a passenger riding with him was killed. Chamberlin didn’t actually know the passenger—he was just a young man who had asked if he could go along for the ride. Oddly, Chamberlin seems never to have bothered to learn the man’s identity. In his autobiography, Chamberlin merely records that he himself was knocked unconscious in the crash and learned afterward “that my companion had been killed.” Chamberlin was seriously injured in the crash himself and was told by doctors that he probably wouldn’t walk again, but clearly he proved them wrong. He was, if nothing else, resilient.

  Early on the morning of June 5, passengers on the Cunard liner Mauretania, bound for New York from Cherbourg, were startled to see an airplane drop out of the sky and circle the ship just above deck level. The plane was recognized at once as the Columbia. Most of the passengers—who by chance included Raymond Orteig, returning to America from his summer home in France to present Lindbergh with the Orteig Prize the following week—assumed the visit of the Columbia was a kind of salute. The two men aboard waved in a friendly manner. In fact, Chamberlin was trying to find out where he was. He was looking for the ship’s name, to check against a list of sailing times in a copy of the New York Times he was carrying. Knowing how long the ship had been at sea would give him an idea of how much ocean he still had to cross. As it happened, he only just missed dropping down on the Memphis and being able to exchange waves with a presumably bemused Charles Lindbergh. Using the Mauretania’s wake as a kind of pointer, Chamberlin adjusted his course, rose back into the clouds, and carried on toward Europe.