After several successful shows, Frazee went to New York City, where in 1913 he built the Longacre Theatre on West 48th Street and staged hit plays such as Fine Feathers by Eugene Walter and the musical Adele.

He also promoted a boxing match between Jess Willard and Jack Johnson on April 5, 1915 in Havana, Cuba and was reported by then to be a millionaire.

[1][2] Frazee bought the Boston Red Sox baseball team from Joseph Lannin for a reported $675,000 after their victory in the 1916 World Series.

The team finished sixth in 1919, and after that season Frazee started selling players to the New York Yankees, most notoriously Babe Ruth.

He was the subject of an unflattering portrait in Fred Lieb's account of the Red Sox, which further insinuated that he had sold Ruth to finance a Broadway musical.

[3] Additionally, Frazee's theater ventures didn't generate even a fraction of the capital needed to meet the Red Sox' expenses.

With the note from Lannin that he had used in part to finance his purchase of the Red Sox having come due in November 1919, Frazee had little choice but to take the Yankees' offer.

In this way, if Johnson ever yanked the franchise out from under Frazee, any prospective owner of a Boston American League team would risk being left without a place to play.

However, Frazee had stopped paying installments because of a dispute over who owed Boston's share of MLB's settlement with the Federal League.

Lannin also threatened to sell his interest in the Fenway Realty Trust, which would have opened the door for a new owner to buy into the park if Frazee lost the franchise.

Lannin agreed to pay the Federal League bill and would not oppose Frazee's purchase of Fenway.

[4] Over the next three years, Frazee sold virtually all of the Red Sox' top players to the Yankees, netting him a total of $305,000.

Notably, the players sent to Boston suffered a rash of injuries[4] However, this is belied by the fact that Barrow became general manager of the Yankees in 1921.

Although he was forced to sell to a syndicate of Midwestern businessmen fronted by Johnson crony Bob Quinn, he held out for $1.2 million—nearly double what he paid for the team in 1916.

[4] In 1929, Harry Frazee died of kidney failure in his Park Avenue home with his wife and son at his side.

In 2005, ESPN Classic aired an episode in The Top 5 Reasons You Can't Blame... series in which it examined the sale, and explained why Frazee cannot be held as the scapegoat: An "honorable mention" was Shoeless Joe Jackson.