The Upshot
a plainspoken guide to the news
Seventy-five years ago this Fourth of July, Lou Gehrig, known as the Iron Horse, suffering from the fatal neurodegenerative disease that now bears his name, retired at 36 from baseball. Standing in Yankee Stadium before more than 60,000 fans, he made his unforgettable declaration that despite his “bad break,” he was “the luckiest man on the face of the earth.”
Today the modest Gehrig seems the epitome of a quieter age in American sports — with the exception of one episode in 1936. He had hired Babe Ruth’s hard-driving agent, Christy Walsh, at the behest of his eager wife, Eleanor, who as the biographer Jonathan Eig has written, had a “vision” for Lou’s career. Mr. Walsh pushed him to campaign for the title role in the “Tarzan” movies, vacated by the Olympic swimmer Johnny Weissmuller when MGM surrendered the rights to the series to the producer Sol Lesser.
Rather than let the dignified Gehrig try out in private, Mr. Walsh, disinclined to waste a chance for publicity, had him photographed in a leopard-patterned Tarzan costume, and handed out the pictures in hopes of creating a public groundswell for Gehrig to be granted the role. Gehrig gamely told reporters, “I guess the public’s entitled to a look at my body.” Asked which Hollywood vamp he might want as “Jane,” the upright Gehrig intoned, “I could act much better with my wife in my arms.”
Poignantly in retrospect, the result was farce. Tarzan’s creator, Edgar Rice Burroughs, acidly told Gehrig by telegram that after seeing him in his ape-man costume, “I want to congratulate you on being a swell first baseman.”
After deciding that Gehrig’s massive legs were “more functional than decorative,” Mr. Lesser ruled him out as Tarzan, but he booked him to star in a quickie second-tier Twentieth Century-Fox Western called “Rawhide,” playing himself as a dude rancher in the imaginary town of Rawhide, Mont.; in one saloon brawl scene, he throws billiard balls at bandits.
A year after the movie’s release in 1938, Gehrig was found to have amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. Two years after that, he was dead at 37.
Looking today at this portrait of Gehrig as Tarzan cannot evoke the derisive laughter it did from many newspaper readers when it was published in 1936. Instead you think of the musculature that was destroyed by a vicious disease for which there is still no cure.
Thirteen months after his death, Samuel Goldwyn Productions released the biopic “Pride of the Yankees” — starring Gary Cooper and Babe Ruth playing himself — which culminates with the emotional scene of Cooper as Gehrig bravely pronouncing himself (minus Gehrig’s New York accent but with a spot-on rendering of the stadium’s acoustical echo chamber) “the luckiest man.”
There remains no more heartwarming film about baseball, and it was nominated for 11 Academy Awards. So in the end, Lou Gehrig finally achieved the success he once yearned for in Hollywood.