The Selling of the Babe (4 page)

After the federal government instituted the draft, Johnson, as unable to see past his own self-interest as he was to see his shoes due to his massive belly, put in a request to the War Department that each team be allowed to exempt eighteen players from service. The proposal got him laughed out of Washington as hopelessly out of touch and put ballplayers everywhere under the bull's-eye of local draft boards. All the request did was make an already uncertain situation even more tenuous, and cause the public to view ballplayers as slackers desperate to avoid serving their country. It was a public relations disaster, one that would eventually put the whole season at risk.

Of all the club owners in the game, perhaps none was as affected as fifty-five-year-old Philadelphia A's owner and manager Connie Mack. Mack, who had already been in the game for more than thirty years, including nearly twenty as a magnate, had already weathered several financial storms. Now he saw war and decided to hunker down in his own trenches, try to save as much money as possible, and wait it out. He had already sold off many of his players during the Federal League war and decided he would sit out this one, too. Most fellow owners came to the same conclusion.

Not Harry Frazee. The Boston owner did things his way.

Who was Harry Frazee? Even today, it depends on who you ask and how much they've cared to examine the question. For years, Frazee was considered the unqualified villain in the sale of Ruth, a man sportswriter Fred Lieb dubbed an “evil genie,” and charged with raping the Red Sox even as Lieb asked for free tickets to the plays Frazee produced. In baseball history, the theatrical portion of Frazee's biography was widely dismissed as inconsequential and consistently ignored. Yet in the world of musical theater, where his ownership of the Red Sox was seen as an interesting yet rather insignificant sidelight, Frazee was considered something of a forgotten genius, a visionary and a pioneer.

Neither characterization is wholly accurate, wholly false, or complete. To separate Frazee the theatrical entrepreneur from Frazee the baseball magnate is to fail to view him in his full dimension and complexity, and to lose sight of a human being in favor of a historical caricature.

To put it mildly, Harry Frazee was nothing like most of the other men who owned baseball teams. They were black-and-white, with all the personality of a tinted tin portrait. Frazee was all garish color and traveled with his own orchestra making up the sound track. In more modern terms, he was as brash as Bill Veeck, as outspoken as Mark Cuban, and as independent as Al Davis. And Ban Johnson hated him.

Everything the other owners were, who almost without fail were longtime baseball men who had been in the game for years, moneyed friends of Johnson, or both, Frazee was not. Johnson represented baseball's conservative hierarchy that sought to preserve their little fiefdom with as little interference as possible; it was a dirty little secret for instance, that Johnson owned part of several American League clubs, and that he often arranged “trades” between teams that weren't necessarily equitable, but helped both his bank account and those owners he favored. It smacked of “syndicate baseball,” the holding of a financial interest in multiple clubs by a single individual. In the 1890s that had caused National League fans, rightfully, to question the integrity of the game. This was little different. In a sense, over time the American League became Johnson's own private fantasy league. In the end, he always won and everyone involved knew enough not to complain very hard about the arrangement.

From the start, Frazee was a threat, not in terms of trying to seize Johnson's power for himself, but in exposing it. A native of Peoria, Illinois, Frazee, born in 1880, got his start sweeping up a theater as a boy, learning the business from the bottom up a self-made man in every way possible. Like every other boy at the time, he also played some baseball on his school team, where he was a teammate with Harry Bay, later an outfielder with Cincinnati and Cleveland.

At age sixteen, he left home, determined to find his place in the world, and became the business manager of the Peoria Theatre, which meant he probably did everything there was to do but sing and dance. When a show came through town and the advance agent backed out, Frazee took over, going on the road ahead of the production, booking theaters, drumming up publicity, and meeting everybody who was anybody in the theater world all across the Midwest.

He was only nineteen when he got his start in baseball. The Western Association, a minor league, disbanded in midseason. Frazee treated the Peoria ball club like a play, taking them on a barnstorming tour to little towns where Peoria meant the big city, and made money. He also learned a valuable lesson: baseball and the theater were not all that different. You sold tickets, you put on a show every day, and the real money wasn't on the field, but in the front office. No matter how much the players earned, the guys who owned the team usually made more.

He stumbled upon a show called
Mahoney's Wedding
and talked a few investors, including Harry Bay, into providing some seed funds and then took it on the road, putting on a professional play in places that had never seen the likes of one before. He reportedly earned Bay a 1,000 percent profit and suddenly had no lack of suitors wanting to back his next venture. Over the next few years he kept striking gold again and again, eventually moving from the small towns to Chicago, where he built the Cort Theatre, enabling him to make money not just with his own shows, but with somebody else's.

By 1910, Chicago had grown too small for him and he took on New York. He was just as successful there as he was in Chicago, embraced by the elite, and in 1912 gracing the cover of the
New York Clipper
, a theatrical and sporting newspaper, already so well known the paper didn't see the need to identify his photograph with a caption. No wonder, he'd been printing money with a string of hits, then taking them on tour and making even more. He wisely branched out, spreading his risk, opening all sorts of other businesses, buying real estate, building the Longacre Theatre, investing in the stock market, and rubbing shoulders with an ever increasing roster of A-list celebrities, friends, or acquaintances with every notable actor in the country, like Frank Morgan, Nora Bayes, and every playwright, producers like the Shuberts, and composers like the Gershwin brothers. Nearly every day his mailbox bulged with another new play, and letters from young men of means—and young women—pleading for a job, for a way to learn the theater business, or for a break as an actor. He learned that power and money made him attractive, that access to young actresses opened a lot of doors and lot of wallets. He soon had an empire that stretched from New York to Chicago, making million-dollar real estate transactions and always parlaying what he had just done into what he wanted to do next, using some of his own money and a lot of somebody else's.

He was no dummy. The theater was a cash business and Frazee took full advantage of that. The Harry H. Frazee Collection held by the University of Texas consists of more than eighty boxes of material, mostly consisting of plays, sheet music, and a hodgepodge of financial records, some personal but primarily theatrical, literally tens of thousands of documents. It is clearly an incomplete picture of his finances, for it contains very little corporate data and includes only a smattering of baseball-related material, most confined to a single box. Short of a full forensic accounting, which would take an expert months, it is dangerous to extrapolate with certainty much of anything from the collection apart from the complexity of his financial arrangements, but it does include some intriguing items. For example, if one is to take Frazee's personal federal tax worksheets at face value, over a twenty-year period Frazee personally earned any income at all only twice, in 1925 and 1926—when
No, No, Nanette
was the biggest hit the theater had ever seen. Similarly, if one is to believe the existing records, of the dozens of shows he produced, only
Nanette
was profitable. Yet at the same time, most of Frazee's shows ran for hundreds of performances and he lived the high life each and every day for nearly three decades. How?

Like a lot of rich people, like Ban Johnson, like Yankees owner Jacob Ruppert and a lot of other men in baseball and business, Frazee buried his wealth in corporations, trusts, and assorted other properties. It mattered little if the money was in his name as long as he had access to it. For people like Frazee, debt is actually a good thing. As part of the deal to get Congress to support a national income tax in 1913, the Revenue Act included two very important elements to secure the support of the wealthy and influential: it made corporate tax rates much lower than individual rates, allowing the wealthy to disguise their wealth in corporate holdings, and it made interest payments deductible. This was not done so much to help out the little guy buying a bungalow but the big guy buying everything else. To men like Harry Frazee, money was a river that ran past. Whenever he needed any, he just reached in and fished some out. The whole time, he usually controlled the flow of the stream.

For Frazee, life was both a party and a performance. He lived high, usually with a drink in his hand, but he had a brilliant sense of what the public wanted before anyone else knew it. Although mischaracterized for years by a series of bumbling sportswriters as a minor figure in the theater, as the lyricist Irving Caesar later described him, “Frazee never drew a sober breath in his life, but he was a hell of a producer. He made more sense drunk than most people do sober.” He viewed baseball as “essentially show business”—as “entertainment”—the ballpark a stage, and the players as actors, and every game a performance.

In a sense, he and Babe Ruth had a lot in common—they didn't just break the mold of what a person could be, they smashed it to bits. Neither man knew it yet but they were both revolutionaries in a sport that was distrustful of change. And in the spring of 1918, both men were about to undergo the greatest transition of their lives, both on the precipice of everlasting fame as something other than what they had been before. Neither would have existed without the other. For now, however, neither man was looking much past the upcoming season.

It is something of an accident that Frazee even owned the Red Sox in the first place. Ban Johnson ran major league baseball like a private club and Frazee, who many thought was Jewish due to his strong ties to both the theater and New York, simply wasn't part of the in crowd. But two years earlier, just before the start of the 1916 season, then Red Sox owner Joseph Lannin, a hotel man, flush with confidence after winning a world title in 1915 and in the wake of the collapse of the Federal League, decided to cash out. Besides, his major investor, Charles Somers, was out of money and Lannin never really had the cash to buy the team in the first place.

Ban Johnson sensed weakness. When star outfielder Tris Speaker balked at signing a reduced contract and held out, the league founder pulled the trigger on Lannin. Johnson cut a deal with the Indians—which Johnson owned a part of—to trade Speaker for pitcher Sad Sam Jones, infielder Fred Thomas, and, most notably, $50,000, the biggest transaction in baseball at the time, but still a bargain for Speaker. Only then did he tell Lannin, and the club owner had little choice but to accept the deal—he didn't have the money to say no. Although the Red Sox, buoyed by the performance of a host of younger players, including Ruth, won another pennant and a world championship for Lannin in 1916, owning the Red Sox had been nothing but a headache. He was losing money and saw war in America's future. Claiming he was “too much a fan” to put up with the game's hardball politics, he decided to get out. Johnson himself pondered buying the Red Sox, or at least having a straw man buy it for him and cut him in.

There is an old adage in Boston that the city's three favorite pastimes are sports, politics, and revenge. Now Lannin, having experienced the other two, decided it was time for revenge.

Up to this point, Johnson's fingerprints were on every sale of an American League team—he usually picked the buyer, sometimes set the price, ordered the seller to the table, and often provided the financing through one of a series of financial angels, all of whom owed Johnson their loyalty when it came to deciding league matters. The result was a lucrative little fiefdom.

This time, however, Johnson miscalculated. Lannin was still stinging over the Speaker deal and when he decided to sell the Red Sox, he cut Johnson out. He ignored entreaties from people like Joe Kennedy, the grandson of infamous Boston politician Honey Fitz, and found his own buyer—Harry Frazee.

Frazee had been angling for a ball club since at least 1909, when he first inquired into buying the Red Sox, and in subsequent years had made noise about buying Boston's National League team, the Braves, as well as the Cubs and Giants, but baseball's cliquish power structure put Frazee off. They didn't trust him—that he was “too New York” was a slur—and it didn't help when he paired with boxer Jim Corbett and began managing the boxer Kid Chocolate, and put the money up for the famous bout between Jess Willard and black champion Jack Johnson in 1915. Why, he even employed
black actors
. In a lily-white sport, Frazee was a wild card.

He convinced an associate, Hugh Ward, to kick in some funds and offered Lannin $675,000 for the Red Sox, far more than anyone else. That was enough to get Lannin out of debt and walk away with a profit—particularly the way the deal was structured. Lannin was so eager to sell, he took only half the money up front—Frazee could pay the balance on the installment plan.

The deal was done before Johnson even heard about it. He was livid at being cut out and kept in the dark, and almost from the start did everything he could to muck things up, particularly when Frazee started making wild offers for talent, trying to tempt the Senators into selling Walter Johnson for a reported $60,000. At a time when every owner in the game was cutting salaries, offers like that made playing hardball at contract time more difficult.