Sun City, Ariz. -- On her right hand, Julia Ruth Stevens wears a ring dotted with so many diamonds and sapphires that it might have been a gift from a sultan or a Texas oil baron. Maybe even Barry Bonds.
Stevens says she received the ring from her father, Babe Ruth, exactly 62 years ago. If you doubt her, she quietly leads you to a wall of family photographs at her home in this Phoenix suburb.
There, she points to a portrait of her father, then wavy-haired and dapper, and to a dazzling jewel fastened to his necktie.
The gems in the picture and the ones on Julia's finger are identical.
Babe Ruth didn't buy diamonds for everybody. Julia Ruth Stevens recalls how she got hers.
" I was 15 years old. It was my last year of summer camp," she says. " I had an opal ring I used to wear. I looked down one day and the stone was gone. I called my mother, crying. . . ."
The Babe had the jewels reworked into a ring. It was waiting for Julia when she returned home.
" All these things are so vivid in my memory. . . ."
Sitting in her living room last month, Julia Ruth Stevens told stories that seemed remarkably fresh, as if the man she was remembering just had stepped out for a cigar.
Not so. Babe Ruth died on Aug. 16, 1948, two years after he began suffering the blinding headaches later diagnosed as a symptom of terminal throat cancer.
But, unlike most deceased people, Ruth never dropped from public view. He lives on as an enduring symbol of power and strength, the baseball figure who invented the home run and, legend has it, the $100 lunch tip.
This year, memories of Ruth are especially keen. Had he lived, the Babe would have turned 100 years old on this coming Monday. That milestone has focused new attention on his life and times. It also has brought a new wave of questions for Julia Ruth Stevens, his closest surviving relative.
Many stories to tell
When people ask, she is generous with her stories about eating, bowling, traveling and growing up beside Ruth. Other than when reporters call, however, neither she nor her husband, Brent, talk about her Babe connection. Of the couple's friends here, only their real-estate agent and a next-door neighbor know.
She says: " I want people to like me for who I am, not for who my father was. With some people, you're never sure."
And Julia Ruth Stevens has not made a career of appearing in public as the Babe's daughter. For years, she has represented her father at Hall of Fame induction ceremonies in Cooperstown, N.Y. Cold weather has become a bother, so she'll skip Baltimore and the Babe Ruth ceremonies here this month. She plans to come here for a Ruth banquet in May.
She's happy to talk about " Daddy," she says, because of the wonderful life he gave to her. Listen for a few minutes and there's every reason to agree. J. Paul Getty's kids may have had more advantages, but few children of the 1930s, or any era, led a more privileged life.
As a child, she lived on the seventh floor of a lavish midtown Manhattan apartment building -- the entire seventh floor. The family apartment consisted of six bedrooms, four bathrooms, a large kitchen, dinette, living room, trophy room and foyer. A butler and a cook looked after the place.
At 16, in an era when Atlantic City, N.J., was considered a rich man's paradise, she cruised with her parents to Hawaii.
A year later, she accompanied them on an around-the-world tour, with stops in Tokyo, Hong Kong and St. Moritz.
The best part simply was being Babe Ruth's daughter, Julia Ruth Stevens says.
" I thought I was awfully, awfully lucky because I realized I had a famous father. He adopted me a year after marrying my mother. He gave me his name. As far as I was concerned, he was my daddy, the only one I ever had or knew."
She remembers big and small things. She says she still can hear his squawky voice, and still can feel the Babe's touch. She can see him, at home, relaxing in his smoking jacket and leather slippers. She laughs out loud about the banter that surrounded Ruth's frequent checkers games with his most spirited opponent, his mother-in-law.
She remembers her father eating sensibly, and none of those 10-hot-dog binges that have become part of the legend. A Ruthian breakfast? " Lamb chops or an omelet," she says. " Mother made sure he ate well."
Most of all, she remembers a close, happy family led by her late mother, Claire, and a generous, attentive Ruth.
This picture differs sharply from the recollections of Julia's late sister, Dorothy Ruth Pirone. In her autobiography published six years ago, Pirone writes of an unhappy childhood and accuses Claire Ruth of mistreating her.
Stevens' first recollection of Ruth, at age 4 or 5, is of " a real big man coming to the house" to see her mother, then barely 22 years old.
Julia's mother, Claire Hodgson, was a dark-haired beauty who had come to New York from her home in Georgia. At 14, she had married a Southern aristocrat almost 20 years older than she. The ill-fated marriage produced a baby girl, Julia, but soon fell apart. A restless Claire escaped to the big city seeking a career as a fashion model.
Claire and Babe's romance was an open secret for five or six years, but marriage appeared out of the question for Ruth. For one thing, he already was married, to Helen Woodford, a coffee-shop waitress he had met in Boston during his playing days with the Red Sox. For another, though Babe and Helen long had been living apart, Ruth, a Catholic, refused to consider divorce.
Circumstances changed suddenly in 1929. Helen, who had been living near Boston, was killed when fire destroyed the house she shared with a man who neighbors assumed was her husband. The Ruths' adopted daughter, Dorothy, away at boarding school, was spared.
The death of the first Mrs. Ruth removed a major obstacle for Babe, and he married Claire about three months later. A year after that, the blended family formally merged into one when Babe adopted Julia and Claire adopted Dorothy. The new family actually was considerably larger. For most of Babe and Claire's marriage, the couple also shared their New York apartment with Claire's mother and two of her brothers.
Ruth had been a major cavorter during his first marriage, driving his wife to nervous exhaustion with his drunken binges and infidelity. But that changed when her mother entered the picture, Stevens says.
Gone were the days when Ruth tipped $100 for a ham sandwich. Claire took over the household finances, limiting him to the $50 checks she wrote when he needed pocket money for haircuts and cigars.
Ruth's drinking and eating marathons also slowed. " He loved food, no question about it," says Stevens, who recalls her father's affection for roast beef, steaks and shrimp.
Claire insisted that Babe stick to a healthier diet, and, for the most part, he did. But he still managed an occasional indulgence.
" He loved oyster stuffing in a turkey. I don't know where that idea ever came from," Stevens says. " It was fine if you liked oysters. I generally picked it out and gave it to him."
Some of Ruth's friends resented Claire's tightfisted control over the Babe. But Stevens says her father never did.
" In a lot of ways, she was rather strong-willed," she says of Claire. " But she had to be to keep Daddy in tow. And she did it in a way that Daddy
didn't mind.
" If she would say, 'I don't think we should do such and such,' he wouldn't argue. He'd say, 'All right.' I think he felt she was a better manager of the house, social life and things like that than he was."
If Claire took over the Babe's social life, she also played a role in his famous feud with teammate Lou Gehrig.
The Yankees sluggers were opposites: Gehrig, a frugal mama's boy who rarely missed his 10 o'clock bedtime, and Ruth, the carouser who never met a curfew he expected to keep.
But they were close pals through the 1920s, batting back-to-back in the Yankees lineup and teaming up on off-season barnstorming tours. Away from the ballpark, Gehrig's mother took a liking to the Babe's daughter, Dorothy, often inviting her to spend afternoons with her and Lou at the Gehrig home.
Family matters
One of Dorothy's overnight visits led to a fight that turned the families against each other for years.
The little girl arrived at the Gehrigs' home with worn, old play clothes. Stevens recalls that Dorothy had packed the things herself while her mother was out of town. But for Ma Gehrig, it was just another example of Claire Ruth's favored treatment of Julia and her neglect of her adopted daughter.
Stevens recalls: " Mrs. Gehrig said, 'Mrs. Ruth's daughter [Julia], she goes to the ballgames in silks and satins, and poor little Dorothy has nothing but rags to wear.'
" When Mother heard about that, she said, 'Tell Lou's mother to keep her mouth shut.' And that was that. Lou wouldn't stand for anyone speaking about his mother."
It took Gehrig's fatal illness in the late 1930s to reconcile the families.
The Babe didn't defer to Claire on all family matters. His nod was required before Julia could join her parents on their around-the-world trip in 1934.
The voyage was part of a baseball tour for major-leaguers playing exhibition games throughout the Far East. Babe preferred that Julia stay home and begin college, but lost the argument.
Sixty years later, Stevens still marvels at the adventure. A rare photograph of the Babe playing before a crowd of 100,000 in Tokyo hangs on her living-room wall.
Sister's resentment
As exciting as the trips were, they split the Ruth family for months on end. While Julia traveled, Dorothy, four years younger, stayed at home, cared for by her grandmother and uncles.
Dorothy resented the exclusion. And, as Stevens later learned, she had other deep misgivings about her childhood, most relating to her feelings of mistreatment by Claire.
All the heartache tumbled out in " My Dad, The Babe," her autobiography, published in 1988. In the book, Pirone sums up her problems with Claire, writing: " As the months went by, my position in my new mother's heart became clear: I was excess baggage. Raising me was a burdensome job, like a stack of unexpected paperwork dropped in her lap."
She accuses Claire of withholding affection and treating her cruelly. One of the slights she recounts was the lineup of the girls' bedrooms. Julia's was next to her mother's, and Dorothy's room, converted from maid's quarters, faced a courtyard.
The book's bombshell is Pirone's revelation that she is, in fact, the biological daughter of Babe Ruth.
Pirone says the Babe admitted this to her twice. Many years later, she writes, the story was confirmed in a deathbed confession by a woman claiming to be her mother. The woman, a close family friend, told Pirone that she gave up the baby to Ruth, who agreed to raise it with the first Mrs. Ruth.
The story clashes with the version the Babe told publicly: that he and his first wife plucked Dorothy from an orphanage. In her book, Dorothy blames Claire Ruth for perpetuating the story.
" There's no problem being adopted, except that my mother wasn't," says Linda Tosetti, Dorothy's daughter.
Dorothy's assertions about her true parents leave Stevens skeptical. The portions of the book about her mother devastated her. The wounds were so deep that Julia and Dorothy never spoke again.
" If Mother had been alive, Dorothy would never have written the book, because Mother would have blasted her from here to kingdom come," she says.
As adults, Julia and Dorothy made an uneasy peace, socializing now and then. But the book wasn't the first flare-up. When Claire Ruth died, the sisters clashed over the Babe's World Series mementos.
" That estranged us terribly," Stevens says.
Dorothy suspected Julia of hiding the rings, plaques and other mementos, which were tremendously valuable. Stevens said she had no idea where they might be.
" I remember one time we were in Cooperstown and Dorothy walked right by me, without even nodding or speaking," Stevens says.
" Later, I said, 'Dorothy, you and I are the only ones left. Our uncles are dead. Mother is gone. Daddy is gone. We should try to be friends.' We had some wonderful times together, but they'd never last."
Now, Stevens sits in her living room, surrounded by memories of perhaps the most famous father any kid ever had. Behind her is a picture of the Babe in a classic home run pose. A few feet away, there's another of Babe with Julia on her wedding day.
The daughter smiles.
" When you come right down to it, there are a few people alive who knew Daddy, but no one who lived with him except me," she says. " I'm the last of the Mohicans."