Cobb (35 page)

“Well, don't ask me,” said Cobb, bristling. “I have no opinion. Where do you get off coming to me?”

Rice was taken aback. “I'm sorry,” he apologized, “I shouldn't have brought it up. But you're the biggest name around and the game might need some defending if Chase is working with gamblers.”

Months after he reproached Rice for mentioning Chase to him, Cobb acknowledged to another reporter, not for attribution, that he had been well aware that Chase was “dumping” for bookmakers. The suspected Chase was dealt to the Chicago White Sox early in the 1913 season for players worth nowhere near his value. From there he went to the Federal League and after that to Cincinnati, where he was exposed by Cincy manager Christy Mathewson and others as a bribe-taker and passer. Inexplicably, no action whatever was taken against Chase. In 1919 he was signed by the New York Giants, in what was seen as an obvious attempt to whitewash a man valuable at the box office. With the Giants his gambling became so glaring that at long last Prince Hal was banned from the majors forever.

Rice, whenever he retold the story, felt that it showed how little Cobb cared about a potential scandal damaging baseball. The writer felt that he had been indifferent, too busy with his own projects, to help root out an open-and-shut scoundrel. Rice came out of the experience saddened and disillusioned.

ALMOST EVERYWHERE
Cobb looked these days, there was money to be made—not in two- or three-figure deals, but in record high numbers. “I was worth two hundred thousand dollars in cash and paper by 1917,” he once divulged to his hunting companion, ex-big-league catcher Muddy Ruel. “Now I know the stock market pretty well.”

Pioneering California orange growers asked him to endorse their fruit; spas springing up in Florida wanted use of his name. He was offered a starring role in a stage play. Real estate ventures atop his Arizona copper shares paid off. “I had not one loser,” he claimed.

With both hands cupped to collect, Cobb was having a wonderful time—off the field. “I was in hog heaven,” he put it. “I came into the league with a two-dollar glove, now they're selling fifty thousand gloves a year with my name on them.” His patented bat outsold all others. It was said that barbers saved his hair clippings for sale to fans. When he advocated a big breakfast, kids ate hearty.

He had been Woodrow Wilson's guest at the White House in 1913. Comparing their Georgia beginnings, Wilson mentioned that Cobb's
populist qualities made him somewhat more a favorite down home than the president of the United States. “Well,” said Cobb, “I voted for you against the damned Republicans.” He expressed the hope that his country would stay out of the looming world war and found Wilson doubtful. “They'll be sinking our shipping soon,” predicted Wilson, according to Cobb.

On trips to New York, Cobb had grown more than somewhat stagestruck. One of his big fans was playwright George Ade, author of such comedies as
Sultan of Sulu
and sketches for
Eddie Foy and the Seven Little Foys
. Through Ade he met young John Barrymore, Will Rogers, and Jack Norworth, the 1907 Tin Pan Alley composer of “Take Me Out to the Ballgame.” George M. Cohan, an acquaintance of the Peach since 1909, was a Broadway songwriter-producer so popular that he had turned down ten thousand dollars per week from the Loew's Circuit to hit the boards as a vaudeville headliner. That impressed Cobb.

In 1911, George Ade offered Cobb ten thousand dollars—not per week, but for a three-month run of his play—to perform the co-lead in a touring comedy titled
The College Widow
. Expert coaching would be provided.

“Not interested,” said Cobb. “I'd go out there and make a horse's ass of myself.”

But ten thousand dollars was hard to reject in a pre–income tax era. (Such a tax was about to be imposed.) And acting wasn't all that much of a crazy venture. Big-league players were earning far more than their team salaries to cavort in off-season burlesque, “vaud,” and even the legitimate theater. John McGraw, reported show business journals, was paid $2,500 per week for his Keith Circuit monologue, “Inside Baseball.” McGraw could talk all night—about McGraw. Rube Marquard danced the “Marquard Glide” with Blossom Seeley at Hammer-stein's Theater in 1911–12. Earlier, two oddballs of the game, Rube Waddell and Bugs Raymond, starred in
Stain of Guilt
. Laughing Larry Doyle, a .300-hitting Giants infielder, played the villain in another melodrama, and so dignified a man as Christy Mathewson had worn greasepaint in 1910 in a number called “Curves.” Before them, Turkey Mike Donlin of the Giants, despite serving six months in jail for striking an actress, had drawn raves from
Variety
for his comic hoofing in an act, “Stealing Home.”

Cobb reconsidered. In
College Widow
he would be playing a masculine college sport hero, after all, and with proper coaching and the fame of his name, might satisfy the critics. He asked Eddie Foy if he should risk such exposure and Foy said, “Go ahead. You can't be booed more than they boo you on the field in Boston, Cleveland, Philly, and fifty other places.”

“What if I forget my lines?” asked T.C.

“Make them up,” said Foy. “Ad-lib your way if you forget.”

“There's a lot of yelling in this play,” said a worried Cobb. “Too much loud stuff.”

“Pretend you're addressing an umpire,” chuckled Foy. “You're good at that.”

In
College Widow
, he was cast as Billy Bolton, an All-American halfback, opposite starlet Sue MacManamy as the distraught college widow. They opened in Newark, New Jersey. Although Cobb blew up in a few lines, he always recalled that the critics were kind. “Not bad for a tyro who stutters a bit,” wrote one reviewer. Under hot lights his makeup ran, so that Cobb was wiping his brow while pleading to the widow, “Marry me and we'll live happier than any lovebirds!” Someone in the audience gave out a ballpark-type Bronx cheer. The crowd laughed. Cobb glared.

As the tour traveled south to Georgia and the Carolinas, he found that this was such hard work that swigs of bourbon between acts were needed to get him through a performance. With wife Charlie and his two children in the audience one night, he was left speechless when the kids screamed upon his entrance, “There's our daddy!” Another upsetting moment came when he was required to kiss his costar. He made fumbling, fast passes at Sue MacManamy's lips. The drama critic of the Birmingham, Alabama,
News
, a sportswriter assigned to follow Cobb around, reported that he handled romance and comedy so stiffly that the play was a flop. For that the critic received a stinging Cobb letter, saying, “I make more money than you do … I'm a better actor and ballplayer than you—where do inferiors get off criticizing their superiors?”

At most stops in Dixie the opus played to capacity crowds, but it was plain that people came less for laughs than to see the Georgia Peach up close in person. He quarreled with George Ade over the lack of punchlines given his role.
College Widow
's best line came when gridiron
hero Billy Bolton has been enrolled by his father in a Baptist college. Upon returning from a trip abroad, Father learns that Billy has switched to a Methodist school. Father is aghast. “Well,” he roars, “you're a hell of a Baptist!” Cobb did not like playing straight man, and some rewriting was done to give him more prominence.

Although applauded, he was soon fed up. In New York one day he was driving his open two-seater auto through Central Park when a mounted policeman galloped up and arrested him. He asked why. The cop replied, “Never mind, get out of the car.” Grabbing Cobb's coat, the man began dragging him out. Doing what came naturally, T.C. descended and punched the cop so hard that the man's helmet flew off and he staggered away bleeding.
I'll get ninety-nine years for this
, thought Cobb. But then he saw a photographer hiding in the bushes and realized that it was a setup. Press agents for
College Widow
had planted a fake policeman as a means of creating newspaper publicity. Cobb's fists had spoiled the stunt.

Bright stage spotlights, he believed, were hurting his vision, and after six weeks on the road and despite a three-month contract, the Peach quit. He walked out on Ade in Cleveland, leaving the cast without a leading man. Long after the play folded he was quoted, “I looked silly as an actor, but the money was right.”

Two early photos of the Georgia Peach.

Cobb during the early Detroit years.

The Detroit Tiger outfield, 1907–1912. Left to right: Davy Jones, Ty Cobb, Wahoo Sam Crawford.

Detroit Manager Hugh (Ee-yah) Jennings on the coaching line.