Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig barnstorming in Waco, Texas, 1929 (author's personal collection)
Author Tony Castro's Gehrig & The Babe: The Friendship and The Feud profiles the lives of baseball legends Lou Gehrig and Babe Ruth against the backdrop of post-World War I, the Roaring Twenties and the Depression.
The book, due out in April from Triumph Books, is being highly acclaimed in pre-publication reviews. Pulitzer Prize-winning author Ira Berkow said of Gehrig & The Babe: "Gracefully written, deeply researched, full of passion, insights and surprising twists. A triumph."
He was interviewed by Ashley Chase.
How did you come up with the idea for Gehrig & The Babe, and why did you decide to focus on their feud?
My late friend and agent Mike Hamilburg loved to say that every book has its own godfather. In the case of Gehrig & The Babe, there were two. My longtime writer pal Dave Thomas used to spend too much time for his own good on the basketball courts and at Los Angeles Lakers games. Like a lot of Lakers fans, for years he lamented the feud between stars Kobie Bryant and Shaquille O’Neal that broke apart their brief dynasty, possibly while they still had a few more NBA championships in their future. I had just written Mickey Mantle: America’s Prodigal Son, and one day Dave pulls me aside and says: “Kobie and Shaq were the modern day Ruth and Gehrig. Their feud ruined those great Yankee team of that era, and who knows how many more pennants and World Series championship they could have won.”
That got me thinking. I was working on DiMag & Mick: Sibling Rivals, Yankee Blood Brothers and it dawned on me that, for a future project, a dual biography of Ruth and Gehrig would make a perfect third book of a Yankee legends trilogy. It seemed like something I was destined to write.
I had been raised a Yankee fan with huge color posters of Joe DiMaggio and Mickey Mantle on my bedroom walls. I met Mantle shortly after his retirement on my first newspaper job, and we’d played golf together in Dallas in the early 1970s. Then in the late 1970s, while a Nieman Fellow at Harvard, I hosted Robert Creamer, author of what many consider the definitive biography of Babe Ruth — Babe: The Legend Comes to Life — at a dinner and wine and cheese gathering there at the Nieman House. We hit it off, and Creamer wound up staying in Cambridge an extra couple of days while we took in a Boston Red Sox game and spoke extensively about Ruth, Gehrig, the Yankees of yesterday and today, and Mantle and DiMaggio, of course. Coincidentally, in the mid-1980s, when I joined Sports Illustrated, I was hired to replace Robert Creamer, though replacing Creamer would be like trying to replace Babe Ruth.
As to why I focused on the feud between Ruth and Gehrig? Well, in undertaking Gehrig & The Babe, I thought I knew almost all there was to know about Ruth and Gehrig, but, wow, was I wrong. I knew they had been great players, so you assume those had been great teams with championship hardware by the caseload. Perhaps, that’s how we always think about the great ones in any sport. And, if we haven’t lived in their time or anywhere close to their era, you just think their greatness equaled World Series titles, for to the truly great athletes, championships are the mark of greatness. Mickey Mantle used to say that the only time he cried after losing was after the seventh game of the 1960 World Series that the Yankees lost to the Pittsburgh Pirates. The Yankees won three blowout games and scored more than twice as many runs as the Pirates, but Pittsburgh won the championship on Bill Mazeroski’s ninth-inning walk off homer. “All our home run power and greatness,” Mantle said, recalling that series with a bitter scowl. “Some greatness, huh?”
Well, the same could possibly be said about those legendary Ruth-Gehrig teams from 1925 to 1934. They were known as “Murderers’ Row” and the 1927 Yankees are generally recognized as the greatest of all baseball teams. But for all their Bambino and Iron Horse bluster, those teams won only three World Series championships: 1927, 1928, and 1932. In six of those other years —1925, 1929, 1930,1931, 1933, and 1934 — the Ruth-Gehrig teams didn’t even win the American League pennant! In contrast, Joe DiMaggio’s Yankees of the 1930s, 1940, and early 1950s won ten World Series championships, and Mickey Mantle’s teams of the 1950s and early 1960s won seven. Heck, the Reggie Jackson Yankees of the 1970s won only one fewer world title than Gehrig and the Babe.
So I began looking into why those of us who grow up with baseball are raised with these seemingly misleading stories of the greatness of Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig. Individually, yes, they were incredible, saving and re-inventing the game while putting up records and statistics that lasted half a century and longer, many of them broken only by bionic-like powered men created by science. But the incredible individual accomplishments of Ruth and Gehrig, while a dynasty of numbers, failed to translate into a dynasty of championships.
This book’s other godfather is Johnny Grant, the longtime Hollywood promoter who befriended Babe Ruth in Tinseltown in 1941 while he was in Los Angeles filming The Pride of the Yankees. Johnny had a knack for engaging people in marathon personal conversations, which is how he got to know the Bambino so intimately. Over time Johnny became the “Mayor of Hollywood,” an honorary title given to him for his years of service to the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce. About the time that Dave Thomas suggested the Ruth-Gehrig friendship and feud as a subject of a book, Johnny Grant approached me to assist him in helping organize and write a retrospective of his life in Hollywood. Johnny’s career included helping save the famous Hollywood sign and having hosted hundreds of Walk of Fame inductions, being photographed alongside a succession of stars as their names were immortalized on the sidewalks of Hollywood. During our work on this project, I learned of his friendship with Ruth, and he was most gracious and unselfish in sharing his recollections. Johnny and I spent countless hours talking about Babe at the Roosevelt Hotel, which was Grant’s home and hangout and where Ruth lived during his visits to Hollywood.
“There are two people I’ve known that I could spend a lifetime talking to,” Johnny used to say. “One was Babe Ruth. The other was Marilyn Monroe.”
Well, of course!
What would you say are some of the most common perceptions and misperceptions about Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig?
Where do you start? I think that a great deal of what we know about Ruth and Gehrig is sports mythology — heavily embellished stories and whoppers created by the writers of that time who were under competitive pressure to capture new angles about the country’s biggest stars playing in the nation’s media capital.
The names of Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig are intertwined in Americana and baseball lore in a manner almost befitting that of historic brothers or rivals. In truth, they were both and they were neither. They were teammates, a designation often as misleading as it is all-encompassing. Their lives and their careers happened to overlap during a troubling period of the nation: where at one point the excess of the 1920s belied the outlawing of alcohol and where at another the country’s obsessive inwardness blinded it to the external forces that would forever change the world. Some might suggest that Babe Ruth symbolized the America of the Roaring Twenties, Prohibition, and the Jazz Age — and Gehrig the sobering wake-up call of the Great Depression and the New Deal. That, however, might be as romantic as the notion that they were true contemporaries, which arguably they were not — at least not in the world of professional sports where often the designation of teammates can include a worldly veteran nearing the end of his career and a naive rookie barely beginning his. Though the names of Ruth and Gehrig will forever live inseparably in baseball legend, their differences offer testament perhaps to the incredible bonding forces of the game, both for players and for fans.
Gehrig & Ruth is the first book that explores not only the Ruth-Gehrig relationship during the Yankees’ first glory period but also the feud that no one for years wanted to talk about. What was that feud about and who was to blame?
Put the blame squarely on Lou’s overbearing mother, Christina Gehrig. She was an overly protective mom who well into Lou’s manhood remained the most influential female in his life, setting the stage to ruin all his future relationships with women — except for the one with Eleanor, the woman he married. And Lou allowed this. Their relationship even bordered on the Oedipal. For crying out loud, Lou would even take his mother to spring training with the Yankees, something no other player did. Christina Gehrig was also a hyper-critical person about other women and made some harsh comments in public about the way Ruth’s second wife Claire dressed the Babe’s adopted daughter from his first marriage. When this got back to Ruth, he went berserk in a clubhouse scene telling Gehrig in the Babe’s anatomically colorful language just what his mother could do with her opinions —and Gehrig and the Babe had to be separated by teammates.
But there was more. Ruth had been already resentful of Gehrig over what he felt had been Lou’s betrayal in a contract-negotiating ploy the Babe had concocted. The Babe wanted the two of them to hold out together, figuring they could extract a tremendous contract concession from the Yankees. Gehrig, however, caved in and — without telling Babe — signed a new contract for a fraction of what he could have gotten. Ruth was understandably furious.
It all led to a feud that grew so nasty and divisive that in their final year together on the 1934 Yankees, the two men rarely spoke. Often that season, Ruth would homer, circle the bases and arrive at home plate just as the waiting Gehrig — who followed him in the batting order — had turned away so as not to shake his hand. The feud was cemented for good during Ruth and Gehrig’s final barnstorming trip to Japan after the 1934 season. Claire Ruth and Christina Gehrig continued their increasing verbal exchanges and hostilities over what Mama Gehrig believed to be Claire Ruth’s mistreatment of Babe’s first daughter. Yes, Lou had taken Mama Ruth to Japan with the barnstorming team.
After Ruth retired in 1935, the two men didn’t speak for almost five years – until the day Gehrig, dying from ALS, was honored at Yankee Stadium on July 4, 1939, where he delivered his famous “I consider myself the luckiest man on the face of the earth” speech. There, in an emotionally charged scene, Ruth rushed to Gehrig’s side and embraced him — and they were photographed in that now equally famous photograph of the two of them together again, the Babe’s arms locked around Lou’s neck.
How did you research the book, and did anything especially surprise you in the course of your research?
I spent an extraordinary amount of time in the newspaper archives of the 1920s and 1930s in New York, Baltimore, Boston, Washington, D.C. and the Baseball Hall of Fame. I also had the good fortune of having known three incredibly unselfishly helpful men who shared their memories and recollections: Robert Creamer, the Babe Ruth biographer; Jimmie Reese, the former major league player who once roomed with Ruth; and Johnny Grant, the legendary “mayor of Hollywood” who became Ruth’s friend and confidant during the making of the Pride of the Yankees, the biographical film about Lou Gehrig. I wasn’t working on Gehrig and The Babe when I knew Creamer or Reese, but I filled several reporters notebooks with notes about our conversations that proved to be invaluable.
There were also the books that have been written over the years about Gehrig and Ruth, from the sentimental accounts by their loved ones and the biographies of which Robert Creamer’s Babe: The Legend Comes to Life and Jonathan Eig’s Luckiest Man: The Life and Death of Lou Gehrig are the best, though I suspect, judging from the excerpts I’ve read, that my friend Jane Leavy’s forthcoming The Big Fella, Babe Ruth and the Advent of Celebrity will be equally extraordinary.
If anything surprised me in the research it was discovering the unexpected extent to which Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig were metaphors for the hopes and expectations of the post World War I period and the Roaring Twenties, as well as a nation struggling through the Depression and the period leading up to World War II. As the poet Rolf Humphries has noted, in the profession of anxiousness, there is an element of fashion. In the 1920s and 1930s, that fashion was also a last vestige of stability: pinstripes, the New York Yankees, and Ruth and Gehrig. A lesson to be reaffirmed in the story of Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig is that we don't mind our heroes flawed, or even doomed. In America, failure is forgiven of the big swingers, in whom even foolishness is flamboyant — because the world will always belong to those who swing from the heels. The unique relationship between America and baseball must be understood to fully appreciate Ruth and Gehrig’s place in the equation. This was the age when baseball players were the princes of American sports, along with heavyweight boxers and Derby horses and the galloping ghost of a running back from down South. Long before baseball Ruth and Gehrig, long before baseball became an industry of multinational owners and millionaire players, Walt Whitman had written, “Well, it’s our game. That’s the chief fact in connection with it: America’s game. It has the snap, go, fling of the American atmosphere. It belongs as much to our institutions, fits into them as significantly as our Constitution’s laws, is just as important in the sum total of our historic life.” Baseball is, to be sure, an American cultural declaration of independence. It has come to express the nation's character.
What are you working on now?
I am working on two biographies, one about Joe DiMaggio and the other about Napoleon Bonaparte. I know. Napoleon would seem to come out of left field for a baseball writer. But the truth is that I’ve never really considered myself a baseball writer, certainly not a sportswriter. My books aren’t the kinds of books a sportswriter would write, in that I mean they’re not focused on runs, hits and errors but on the hearts and souls of those athletes of whom I’ve written. I was a political writer for four decades, and my first book — written when I was a young reporter — was a civil rights history centered around Cesar Chavez that became required reading in American and Ethnic Studies courses in college and universities. And I spent my Nieman Fellowship at Harvard studying the French Revolution and Napoleon. Even while working on DiMag & Mick, I was also writing my biography of Ernest Hemingway. Both books were published by Lyons Press in 2016.
What can I say I’m still trying to connect the dots between 19th century France and baseball!
I call my DiMaggio book — Joe DiMaggio: And The Great American Dream — “The Natural meets The Godfather” because DiMaggio’s heroics were every bit as incredible as those of the mythical Roy Hobbs, while the Italian experience was as traumatic as the hopelessness that led some to organized crime in an America seeming to offer little upward opportunity to Italians unable to hit big league pitching or engage in the underworld.
As for my other book… Napoléon Bonaparte n’était pas un empereur — il était un Christ dans son esprit... Napoleon Bonaparte wasn’t an emperor — he was a Christ in his own mind. This eccentricity was the product of his ambition and his faith, and Napoleon and The Christ is the story of arguably the two most remarkable figures of world history — and how their lives intersect in the French Revolution era: the greatest military general searching for answers in the believed-to-be-miraculous burial shroud of Christendom’s prince of peace.
