They may be more mangled than even that.
My Lady Friends debuted in 1919 about 3 weeks before Ruth was sold, and was apparently a moderate hit.
It’s not easy to research Frazee’s financial concerns, but every time I look into it, everything points to his primary source of debt being the Red Sox. It seems that the myth was he sold off the Red Sox to finance his theatrical projects, when reality might be that he used his theatrical projects to finance the Red Sox…