One Summer: America, 1927

era showed that the bullet that killed Berardelli was indeed fired from Sacco’s gun – or else the evidence had been tampered with in a way that requires a substantial edifice of conspiracy.
    The last word on the matter should perhaps be left to Avrich. ‘It is frustrating to ponder,’ he wrote in 1991, ‘that there are still people alive – the widow of Sacco among them – who might, if they chose, reveal at least part of the truth.’ None ever did. They are all dead now.

C HAPTER 25
     

     
    AS HE BECAME famous, Babe Ruth discovered that celebrity had a distinct downside, notably that he couldn’t go into many public places without being bothered, occasionally dangerously so. In 1921 he was drinking in a speakeasy in New Jersey when a drunken customer started to harass him. They exchanged words and stepped outside. Harry Hooper, a fellow ballplayer who was drinking with Ruth that night, emerged from the men’s room to find Ruth gone. Looking outside, he discovered Ruth standing stiffly with a gun held to his head. Luckily Hooper’s timely arrival frightened Ruth’s harasser and he fled into the night. After that, Ruth limited his drinking to the safety of his residence.
    By 1927 that residence was the Ansonia Hotel, a wonderfully vast and eccentric Beaux Arts palace on Broadway between Seventy-Third and Seventy-Fourth Streets. The Ansonia was an apartment hotel – a popular new concept in the 1920s – which meant that it combined the spaciousness and permanence of an apartment with the conveniences of a hotel: maid service, concierge desk, daily replenishment of towels and so on. According to various accounts, the Ansonia featured a lobby fountain with a live seal and a ‘roof farm’ where the management kept cows and chickens to provide milk and eggs for favoured residents. It had three restaurants,including one that could seat 550, and the world’s largest indoor swimming pool in the basement. Pneumatic tubes shot messages from the front desk to any desired residence.
    The Ansonia’s thick walls provided superlative soundproofing, which made it attractive to musicians – Enrico Caruso and Arturo Toscanini were among its distinguished residents – but it was also popular with writers, theatrical people, ballplayers and others of a slightly vagabond nature. The novelist Theodore Dreiser lived there for some time. The impresario Florenz Ziegfeld had a thirteen-room suite on one floor where he lived with his wife and a smaller suite one floor above where he kept his mistress.
    The Ansonia also featured in baseball’s darkest episode. It was there, on 21 September 1919, that a group of gamblers ostensibly led by the mobster Arnold Rothstein (though he always vehemently denied it) met with some underpaid members of the Chicago White Sox and agreed to fix the World Series. Ruth was not living there at that time. In 1926 he moved into an apartment that was eight, eleven or twelve rooms in size, depending on which of his biographers you decide to credit. Whatever its dimensions, it was an exceptionally comfortable place.
    Ruth in 1927 was the best-paid player in baseball and proud of the fact. Before the season he had held out for a more generous contract, which Jacob Ruppert was loath to grant given Ruth’s advancing age and abdomen, and Ruppert’s own financial setbacks in Florida from the previous autumn’s hurricane. Eventually, Ruppert caved in and gave Ruth a three-year contract at $70,000 a year, and acted as if he had been almost mortally wounded by it. The newspapers made great play of how enormous Ruth’s salary was. On his pay, newsmen calculated, Ruth could buy a new car every week or a new house every month. By baseball standards, Ruth’s salary was enormous – nearly half the Yankees’ total payroll and more than the totals earned by the next five best-paid players in the club combined. This, however, was more a reflection of how modestly compensated baseball playerswere in the 1920s than of how fabulously rich Ruth had become.
    Compared with other celebrities, particularly Hollywood stars, baseball players’ earnings were modest indeed. Ruth’s salary of $1,350 a week compared with $4,000 to $5,000 for Clara Bow and Buster Keaton, $15,000 for Tom Mix, $20,000 for Douglas Fairbanks, and a truly satisfying $30,000 for Harold Lloyd. All these paled when compared in turn with the sums earned by mobsters like Arnold Rothstein and Waxey Gordon, who were said to take in $200,000 a