He caught Babe’s slide show
Actor Norman Lloyd recalls watching Ruth split his pants in the 1926 World Series.
Before stepping into Dodger Stadium this week, Norman Lloyd had attended one World Series. In 1926. As a 12-year-old boy at Yankee Stadium, he watched as Babe Ruth slid into second base and split his pants.
Now, a mere 91 years later, the actor — known as the rigid headmaster who fired Robin Williams in “Dead Poets Society” and the villain who fell from the Statue of Liberty in Alfred Hitchcock’s “Saboteur” — returned to the Fall Classic to watch a series between the Dodgers and Houston Astros that already has the makings of a Hollywood drama.
As Lloyd settled into his left-field chair, a rollicking crowd danced and hollered around him in the sweltering early-evening heat. The actor was a few days short of his 103rd birthday, and the ticket had been an early gift from friends who’d surprised him the night before as he watched the Dodgers on television.
“It is wonderful tobeata World Series again,” Lloyd said. “Baseball has always remained a passion for me, and I followed it religiously.”
Ever the dignified performer, Lloyd recounted the baseball of his youth in a deep, rhythmic voice, spinning his stories slowly and dramatically, even as the stands convulsed with wild energy around him.
On Oct. 2, 1926, the Yankees faced the St. Louis Cardinals in Game 1 of the World Series. Lloyd watched from the stands and still remembers the Yankees’ lineup.
“The Yankees had — now it’s like talking about a great religious figure — Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig and some other wonderful people, like Tony Lazzeri and Bob Meusel,” Lloyd recalled.
When Ruth, the Sultan of Swat, tore the seat of his pants, Lloyd and the rest of the crowd went crazy as Yankees trainer Doc Woods rushed onto the field with a needle and thread to fix his uniform right there on the field.
“An ordinary person would call time out and get a new pair,” Lloyd said. “Not the Babe. He stood up, on the base, hands on his hips, surveyed the crowd and stood there while they sewed him up.”
Lloyd, a Brooklyn-bred
with a new California law, the Healthy Youth Act, which requires schools to teach about adolescent relationship abuse and also focus on healthy attitudes, behaviors and relationships.
“Education will help us get beyond this sex harassment and discrimination stuff,” said Horak, 58, who has taught for five years. Previously, she was in sales and marketing for a biotech tools company. During that career, she said, she had wonderful bosses. But as a young scientist, she worked in a research lab where “the professor came in and gave me a booby-snatching hug.”
She wants to instill sexual respect as early as possible. “Once someone is a manager — 30, 40, 50 years old — forget it,” she said. “That cake has baked.”
I asked her if she thought Weinstein would have turned out differently if he’d been exposed to the kind of lessons her students are getting now.
“I would hope he’d think twice about it,” Horak said. “The reason I come to school every day is to hopefully influence that somehow.”
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On Tuesday evening, I sat in an auditorium on Fairfax Avenue and watched three high school students — Rachel Tokofsky, Alexa Hirsch, Lily Spar — give a 90-minute presentation on sexual violence awareness that they deliver to Los Angeles-area middleschool and high school students. The program was created under the aegis of the National Council of Jewish Women Los Angeles, whose dedication to socialjustice causes is admirable and unflagging.
“The Talk Project” was created by high school students in 2015 and attempts to raise awareness of sexual violence. So far, said Maya Paley, the NCJW’s director of advocacy and community engagement, 2,200 students in 15 schools have participated.
The program incorporates role-playing, audience participation and clips from the Kirby Dick/Amy Ziering documentary on campus sexual assault, “The Hunting Ground.” (The documentarians have just announced their next project will focus on sexual assault in Hollywood.)
Their talk was developed before the Weinstein story broke, yet is perfectly attuned to this moment. (Educators: You can invite them to your school.)
Students are introduced (always by peers) to concepts like “rape culture,” and how to turn it into “consent culture.” They learn about the number of students who report being assaulted in college, how colleges often mishandle the complaints, and about the importance of bystander intervention.
Which reminds me of something Horak said: “I don’t mean to sound like Homeland Security, but I teach kids, ‘See something, say something.’ ”
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After the New Yorker and New York Times broke the Weinstein story, the sexual harassment and assault accusations against men in the public eye have piled up like cars in a tule fog.
My colleague Glenn Whipp reported that 38 women accused director James Toback of sexual harassment, then heard from 272 others after publication.
Two women accused wheelchair-using former President George H.W. Bush of groping their rear ends while they posed with him for photos. (He apologized.)
The New Republic’s Leon Wieseltier has been accused of inappropriate workplace behavior, as has political journalist Mark Halperin. After CNN reported that several women accused him of rubbing his erection on them through his pants, which he denied, NBC and MSNBC severed their relationship with him.
The self-flagellating essays by men who witnessed bad behavior and said nothing are becoming a journalistic genre unto themselves. “There was nothing secret about this voracious rapacity; like a gluttonous ogre out of the Brothers Grimm,” screenwriter Scott Rosenberg, a Weinstein mentee, wrote on his Facebook page. “But everybody was just having too good a time. And doing remarkable work.”
Maybe so, but I’m pretty sure every woman I know would trade any transcendent Weinstein movie — any “Shakespeare in Love,” any “Pulp Fiction” — for a world where disgusting behavior like his ceases to exist.