One Summer: America, 1927

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 eventually grew contrite and was reinstated to the line-up. He hit 10 home runs and batted a very respectable .345 in his last twenty-nine games 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 just 69 wins against 85 losses 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 40 pounds of doughy fat, and took almost nine inches off his waistline. He had agood 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 Ruth was in need of redemption again. That, however, wouldn’t be easy now. He was nearly 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.

C HAPTER 10
     

     
    IN THE SUMMER of 1927 whenever Babe Ruth was missing from his usual haunts he could often be found in a cinema 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 First National studios 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 modelled 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 heart-throb 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 soundtrack. 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 aFox 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 theatre wings and a technician with good timing played a separate soundtrack 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 22 May, the day after Lindbergh’s arrival in Paris, when