The Selling of the Babe Read Online Free PDF Page B

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