The Era, 1947-1957: When the Yankees, the Giants, and the Dodgers Ruled the World (23 page)

Frisch met with his new team, players named Verban, Ramazzotti, Jeffcoat, Reich. “We’re going to hustle just like my ballclub in St. Louis,” Frankie Frisch said, “that great club they called the Gashouse Gang.”

A morning drizzle wet Wrigley Field. It was hard to hustle, even in spikes, without slipping. The Phillies scored five runs in the third inning and defeated the Cubs and Frisch, 9 to 2. Eddie Waitkus made eleven putouts at first base, in his graceful way, and got a hit.

Waitkus went back to the Edgewater Beach on a cheerful team bus. The Phillies were coming along. They would win some games.

Ruth Ann Steinhagen returned to the hotel in a taxi. She felt a little breathless. She ordered a few more drinks. She still felt breathless. She had been properly brought up. She was a proper person. She was conscious of a sense of sexual arousal, without understanding much about it, and she felt acutely uncomfortable. She loved Eddie Waitkus, but he had done this to her. In a careful hand, she wrote a note:

Dear Eddie:
It’s extremely important that I see you as soon as possible.
Please come soon. I won’t take up much of your time. I promise.
Ruth Ann Steinhagen

She called for a bellhop and told him to deliver the note to Waitkus. She tipped the bellboy fully five dollars. (One dollar was a healthy tip in 1949.)

Now Ruth Ann waited in her room. When she heard nothing by 9:30, she became angry and depressed. When and if Eddie Waitkus did call, she would stab him to death and then turn the gun on herself. Then she felt calmer. If Waitkus called, she would simply
show
him the knife and the gun, tell him of the murder-suicide plan and let him call the police. After a while, Ruth Ann undressed, put on a nightgown, and went to sleep.

The phone woke her at 12:40
A.M.
“This is Eddie Waitkus. What’s so darned important?”

Ruth was startled. (“He was so, you know, informal.”) She said she could not discuss anything on the phone. “Can you come up tonight for a few minutes?”

Waitkus said he could.

“Give me a half hour to get dressed.”

When Waitkus knocked at 1:10, Ruth Ann hid the knife in the folds of her skirt and let him in. Waitkus moved past her quickly. He said something, but Ruth Ann later told a psychologist that she was so excited she did not hear the words.

Waitkus dropped into a chair near the window. “What did you want to see me about?” he asked, staring at her.

“Wait a minute,” Ruth Ann said. “I have a surprise for you.”

She went to the closet where she had hidden the rifle. Then she turned and pointed it at Waitkus. He said, “Baby, what’s this all about?” He rose from the chair. “What’s this all about? What have I done?”

“You’ve been bothering me for two years,” Ruth Ann Steinhagen said. “Now you are going to die.” She pulled the trigger.

Waitkus slammed backward against a wall, a bullet in the right side of his chest. He rolled to the floor. “Oh, baby, what did you do that for?” he said.

Ruth Ann knelt beside the broken ballplayer. She took his hand. “You like doing that, don’t you?” Waitkus said.

Ruth Ann withdrew her hand. She thought, Now is the time to shoot myself. But she suddenly felt frantic and couldn’t find the box of bullets. Waitkus began to moan.

Ruth Ann called the hotel operator and said someone had been shot. “Please send a doctor.”

Waitkus continued to moan. Ruth Ann couldn’t stand his cries of pain.

She was standing in the hall with her hands over her ears when a doctor and a house detective arrived.

An ambulance took Waitkus to Illinois Masonic Hospital. He had lost a great deal of blood and was “deeply critical.” Two days later, he began slowly to rally. Surgeons performed a series of operations, cutting away part of Waitkus’s right lung and chest musculature. After excruciating rehabilitation, he was able to resume his baseball career with good success in 1950.

The hospital bill, $4,000, was sent on to the Philadelphia ballclub. The Phils declined to pay and eventually took Waitkus to court, forcing him to settle the bill.

Ruth Ann Steinhagen was arrested on the charge of “assault with intent to kill.” Psychiatrists and psychologists diagnosed her condition as “acute schizophrenia in an immature individual.” At an Illinois state mental hospital, clinicians called her neat, cooperative, and generally cheerful. Only twice did they record intense emotional outbursts, once when she described the trade that sent Waitkus to Philadelphia and once when she was required to undergo a complete physical examination, disrobing in front of a male physician.

In 1952, Ruth Ann was found to have recovered her sanity. The charge against her was dropped because when she shot Waitkus, doctors said, she had not known right from wrong. In 1955, she was released into society, a free woman. Her present whereabouts are not known.

Waitkus suffered recurrent episodes of pain. “So bad,” he once remarked, “that I wished that the girl had finished the job.”

After his major league career ended in 1955, he worked in several department stores as a public relations man. “By then,” says his teammate Russ Meyer, “he was in pain all the time and drinking too much. He’d go out for a three-hour lunch, get stewed, and come back and be rude to the customers.”

Waitkus entered a Boston hospital in 1972, suffering from cancer in the lung that had been torn up by Ruth Ann’s bullet. He died on September 15, at the age of fifty-three.

The shooting fired the imagination of Bernard Malamud, who fictionalized the episode in his famous novel
The Natural
. Ballplayers were troubled by the incident, but only briefly. Their patterns of behavior did not change. Ballplayers on the road were a heedless, wanton lot; they still are, risks be damned.

Besides, I doubt that one major leaguer in a hundred has heard the story of Ruth Ann Steinhagen and poor, dead, reckless Eddie Waitkus.

O
UT FRONT
, pages ahead of the sports sections, headlines bannered the Great American Red Scare. “The scare had been unsettling the country for some time,” Gordon J. Kahn, a historian and the author’s father, summarized in an early edition of the
Information Please Almanac:
“Back in 1939, Representative Martin Dies, a Texas Democrat, threw suspicion on little Shirley Temple, who was eleven. Maybe she was a Red! Now ten years later it became a favorite sport for eager-eyed legislators to hunt for communists in government, schools, movies, even the clergy.

“Bigger Red Scares were developing abroad. In September of 1949, a fourteen-word White House announcement broke the news that Russia had exploded an atomic bomb.

“The ‘secret’ was no longer ours.”

Some who confused baseball with Shangri-La assert that the game transcends politics. It did not in the tortured summer of 1949.

Across an epic life, Paul Robeson was a Phi Beta Kappa scholar, an All-American end, a lawyer, an actor, a singer, and an orator of unforgettable power. During the 1930s he came to admire the socialist ideal, and later the Soviet Union. There is no evidence that he ever joined the Communist party in the United States or anywhere else. He was an American radical, strong, sensitive, outspoken, headstrong, and described to this day in Harlem as “the tallest tree in the forest.”

In 1943 Robeson’s basso rang across Broadway in a performance of
Othello
that was dark thunder. He was forty-five years old and at his very peak. “I marvel,” he said, “about the patience and the patriotism of my own Negro people. They cannot vote in some places, but they buy bonds. They cannot get jobs in a
lot
of places — but they salvage paper, metal, and fats. They are confronted in far too many places with the raucous, Hitleresque howl of ‘white supremacy’ — but they give their blood and sweat for red, white, and blue supremacy.”

A few weeks before Christmas 1943, Robeson and several black newspaper publishers presented themselves at the winter meetings of the sixteen men who owned major league ballclubs. Robeson’s prestige and presence were such that he was permitted to address the owners and Commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis.

“I come here,” he began in the matchless basso, “as an American and as a former athlete. I come because I feel deeply.” He spoke first to the theme of disturbance — riots in the stands — which some argued would inevitably follow baseball integration. He had played football at Rutgers, three varsity seasons of integrated games. There were no disturbances at all. Now on Broadway, he was Othello, a Negro protagonist who seven times a week strangled a white heroine, played by the beautiful, young Uta Hagen. There had not been a single disturbance at the Royale Theater, either. Robeson’s voice rose in passion. Negroes were fighting for America on distant seas and far-off continents. They were fighting for their country. Some were dying for their country. It would be a fine thing, would it not, to give these self-same Negro soldiers, and every other Negro who was good enough, a chance to play baseball in the major leagues?

When Robeson finished, the owners erupted in applause. Cold-eyed, thin-faced Kenesaw Mountain Landis spoke to reporters later. “No law,” he said, “written or unwritten, exists to prevent blacks from participating in organized baseball.” This was not true. Apartheid was the greatest unwritten law in baseball history; it was baseball’s First Commandment.

When Jackie Robinson was permitted to join the Dodgers four years after this speech, Robeson attended a small reception and promised Robinson whatever support he could provide. Robinson thanked Robeson and moved on.

By 1949, with feral Red baiting abroad, Robeson took certain extreme positions. On a tour of Europe, he spoke against the cold war. Should hot war break out between the Soviet Union and the United States, Robeson added, blacks would not or should not fight for America. They had nothing to fight for.

Robeson amplified in Harlem on June 19. “I love the Negro people from whom I spring. . . . Yes, suffering people the world over — in the way that I intensely love the Soviet Union.

“We do not want to die in vain anymore on foreign battlefields for Wall Street and the greedy supporters of domestic fascism. If we must die, let it be in Mississippi or Georgia.

“Let it be wherever we are lynched.”

The
New York Times
headline the next morning read:
LOVES SOVIET BEST, ROBESON DECLARES
.

Each of thirty-seven newspapers owned by William Randolph Hearst, from the New York
Journal-American
to the
Los Angeles Examiner
, published an editorial labeled
AN UNDESIRABLE CITIZEN.
“It was an accident unfortunate for America that Paul Robeson was born here.”

Representative John S. Wood, a conservative southern Democrat from Georgia, who was chairman of the notorious House Un-American Activities Committee, decided to convene a special hearing. The issue: loyalty of American Negroes. The NAACP wired Wood in protest: “There never has been any question of the loyalty of the Negro.”

Wood responded that he had not meant to imply that there was. His committee was merely answering requests from Americans of “the colored race” for a forum to “express views contrary to the views of Paul Robeson.” Wood sent a telegram to Jackie Robinson inviting him to testify.

This was a request, not a subpoena, but it was weighty. If Robinson declined to testify he could, in the perfervid climate, stand accused of agreement with Robeson’s politics and indeed with the politics of Joseph Stalin. Robinson went at once to Branch Rickey.

In a highly emotional meeting, Rickey told Robinson that it was an honor to testify in the Congress of the United States. This was indeed a wonderful opportunity to speak out beyond the world of baseball. Some might oppose his testifying. Such men might well be secret Communists themselves.

“I’m not sure, Mr. Rickey. I’m not a politician. I’m not a speech maker. You know. I’m a ballplayer.”

“And an uncommonly fine one,” Rickey cried. “Don’t worry about the speech. The congressmen expect a prepared statement, of course. Don’t worry about that. I know you pretty well, Jackie. I’ll write the statement.”

Rickey enlisted the help of two former newspapermen who worked for him: Arthur Mann and Harold Parrott. Neither had any idea how to write what Rickey envisioned: the credo of an American Negro.

Rickey tried himself. The result was flowery, wordy, preachy. It was not in Rickey’s nature to concede that he had failed, but he admitted to me long afterward, “I was a bit presumptuous to believe that I, as a white, could speak for a Negro.”

More meetings followed, and Robinson expressed serious doubts about testifying. Some congressmen leaked the plan to invite Robinson to the Capitol, and scores of letters arrived at Ebbets Field urging Robinson “not to be a tool of witch-hunters.” Phone calls to the Robinsons’ tidy brick home in St. Albans, Queens, warned him that to speak out against Robeson was to be “a traitor to the Negro.” Robeson himself sent a letter to Robinson saying, “The press badly distorted my remarks in Europe.”

But Rickey persisted in trying to sweep away Robinson’s doubts.

“To tell you the truth,” Robinson told his employer, “I don’t like having to defend the patriotism of Negroes. It’s like having to defend my own patriotism, when you think about it.”

“Not at all, Jackie,” Rickey argued. “The issue here is not patriotism. It’s your sense of social responsibility.

“The issue is how best can an enlightened Negro right the glaring wrongs in America?

“To say, as Mr. Robeson has said, that Negroes everywhere are waiting to betray Americans in mortal combat against the Reds?

“To suggest, as Mr. Robeson suggests, that the only hope for freedom American Negroes possess is a bloody Red revolution?

“Your triumphs on the ballfield give the lie to that.

“Speaking responsibly to the Congress of the United States can be your greatest triumph of all. It will forever establish the Negro’s place in baseball and all America.”

Years later Robinson said, rather glumly, “With Mr. Rickey putting it that way, what the hell could I do? I didn’t know everything I should have known about the cold war. I had a sense that anti-Communist stuff, the witch-hunts, were dangerous. They came out of a lynching mentality. I didn’t think this white congressman from Georgia, Wood, was any hero. My mother, who grew up in Georgia, got out as quickly as she could.