Native Dancer (7 page)

Their friends were Bill and Babe Paley, Jock and Betsey Whitney, and Tex McCrary and Jinx Falkenburg—other prominent couples
that had married around the same time and lived near each other on Long Island. Known in the New York papers as the Smart
Set, they turned heads when they made their entrances at restaurants or parties amid a tumult of laughter. Bill Paley was
the president of CBS, his wife a glamorous style-setter. Jock Whitney was an early venture capitalist, and like Vanderbilt,
a racing enthusiast and heir to a family fortune. Falkenburg, a pinup girl and B-movie star in the 1940s, now hosted a popular
morning radio talk show in New York. Her husband, an influential pioneer in public relations, was her cohost.

Vanderbilt’s mother, Margaret, also lived nearby on Long Island. She had given up on marriage after four tries but remained
as strongwilled as ever, favoring wide slacks and long cigarette holders. “She was a powerhouse,” Jeanne Vanderbilt recalled.
Her impact on her elder son was profound. She gathered people from the arts, politics, and business every summer at Sagamore
Lodge in the Adirondack Mountains, where she “camped” with cooks, maids, and fine linens and china. Howard Hughes and Madame
Chiang Kai-shek were among those who had visited—the Madame had come with her own silk sheets—and frequent guests included
composer Richard Rodgers, actor Gary Cooper, General George C. Marshall, and the Paleys and Guggenheims. Vanderbilt and Jeanne
instituted a similar tradition at Broadhollow, lording over starry weekends of dining, games, and conversation. An invitation
to spend a weekend with the Vanderbilts was coveted.

“The first time I went, I drove out and parked my car and was taken to my room, and I looked out the window and two people
were already washing my car. I’d been there two minutes!” Harold Prince recalled. “It was a window to a way of life that didn’t
exist much longer. There was a clock on your door that you set to tell [the servants] when they should wake you up. Louis,
who ran the house, was remarkable: quiet, gracious, and incredibly efficient. You went outside and there was a long lawn sloping
down to the swimming pool. You swam or played tennis. Dinner was magnificent. You played games after dinner. And so many fascinating
people were there.”

Recalled Clyde Roche, “I once had a friend who arrived for a weekend and put her bag down, and we sat and talked. When we
went upstairs, she came and knocked on my door and said, ‘This is so embarrassing, but I don’t know what’s happened to my
bag.’ I said, ‘Have you looked in your closet?’ She was so amazed. Everything had been taken out, pressed, and put in drawers.”

Broadhollow was, in a sense, a modern Shangri-La. George Abbott directed the children’s puppet shows. General Marshall, who
was overseeing the rebuilding of Europe after World War II, would arrive in a helicopter. The entire casts of Broadway shows
would come for brunch and play softball. Hounds chased foxes across the lawn on Saturday mornings. Vanderbilt was the centerpiece,
orchestrating the games and serving as the arbiter of taste and humor. By the fall of 1952, he seemed to have it all. He was
married to a beautiful woman and had a young family, traveled in glamorous circles, and backed one of racing’s most successful
stables.

The reality beneath that glittering outer layer was more sobering. His marriage to Jeanne was troubled; it would end in divorce
in 1956. “Alfred’s mother was married four times, and I think he was influenced by that,” Jeanne recalled. “He had that reserve,
didn’t show a lot of emotion, and I was from a big loud Irish Catholic family. That was appealing to him, and I think he tried,
but there was this big wall he just couldn’t break through.”

Moreover, he was less confident than he had been when he was younger, according to Jeanne. “Stanton Graffis asked us to go
to Spain with him when he was the ambassador there [in 1951–52], but Alfred wouldn’t go,” she said. “I think he was scared
[of the responsibility]. He had such great intelligence and common sense; that’s one of the things I liked about him—no nonsense,
no bullshit, just smart—but his self-confidence was sagging. When he was younger and running Pimlico and Belmont, he was tremendous.
He had so much drive, so many ideas, so much caring. He was so good at it. I think he lost heart when they didn’t want him
to run Belmont anymore. I think that setback really knocked him off his feet.”

Whatever the source of his malaise—his brushes with death in the war, his “setback” at Belmont, his marriage—it was eased
by his racing stable, which had struggled during the war but was thriving again, with Bed o’ Roses, Next Move, and Loser Weeper
winning races and thrusting Vanderbilt into the spotlight. Even in that success, however, there was a caveat—a Vanderbilt
horse hadn’t run in the Kentucky Derby since Discovery in 1934. For all that Vanderbilt had accomplished in racing, he had
barely competed in America’s greatest race.

He badly wanted a second chance, having never forgotten the elation he felt when Discovery turned for home with the lead at
Churchill Downs, but he had started to wonder if that time would ever come. Now Native Dancer had arrived, and his optimism
was soaring as he drove through the dark on his way to Belmont on the morning after the Futurity. The Grey Ghost certainly
looked like the kind of horse that could deliver the Derby glory he desired. Maybe, just maybe, his time had come. If he was,
in fact, experiencing a crisis of confidence, and stumbling in marriage, a horse was the perfect antidote. He was, after all,
a racing man, and all any racing man asked for, other than God’s grace, was one great champion to cheer down the stretch.

I
t seemed almost impossible, given his commitment to his stable, that Vanderbilt had gone nearly two decades without running
a horse in the Kentucky Derby. But despite spending hundreds of thousands of dollars and breeding his mares to expensive stallions
since the early years of Franklin Roosevelt’s presidency, he had not come close to producing another three-year-old worthy
of running at Churchill Downs on the first Saturday in May. Discovery, now a twenty-one-year-old stallion at Sagamore Farm,
was still his only Derby horse.

How had this happened? Part of the problem was the youthful enthusiasm Vanderbilt had exhibited after taking over the stable
in 1933. Naively, he had bought far too many horses, ending up with eighty-six in training—far more than Bud Stotler, or any
trainer, could handle. Most successful stables kept about twenty-five in training at any time. Vanderbilt had thirty-eight
two-year-olds alone in 1936; one of them, a black colt named Airflame, set a world record in a threefurlong dash and was pointed
for the 1937 Derby but failed to make it The overpopulation caused serious problems. Five years after leading the nation in
wins, with eighty-eight, and earnings, with $303,000, in 1935, Vanderbilt won just thirteen races and $38,000 in 1940.

Another problem was a change in trainers hastened when Stotler was involved in a serious car accident while driving to a race
in Havre de Grace, Maryland, in April 1939. Struck from behind in a thick morning fog, the trainer’s car careened across the
road and caught fire. It was initially thought Stotler wasn’t seriously injured. He tumbled out of the flaming wreck, asked
if anyone had seen his hat, and hitched a ride to the track to speak to his jockey about the upcoming race. Tests taken later
that day, however, revealed fractured vertebrae and other injuries that would force him to recuperate for months.

When his parting with Vanderbilt was announced eight months later, the Associated Press reported that Stotler, who had trained
for Vanderbilt and Margaret Emerson since 1925, was resigning because the stable was shrinking and Vanderbilt wanted to train
some of the horses himself, which was true. “He was there every morning, and although he was never officially put down as
the trainer, he was training the horses,” recalled William Boniface, a racing writer for the
Baltimore Sun
. Claude Appley said years later that another factor was paramount in Stotler’s departure, claiming Vanderbilt fired his mentor
after discovering that the small cash bonuses, called stakes, that the help was supposed to earn when a Vanderbilt horse won
a race weren’t being paid.

“Stotler got sacked over Airflame,” Appley recalled. “The horse went to Havre de Grace and won. A boy called Ernie James was
galloping him, and when they got back to the barn, Mr. V. said, Well, Ernie, did you get staked?’ Ernie was about half lit
up and said, ‘I ain’t seen no stake around here.’ Vanderbilt said, What do you mean? You get a stake for this horse winning.’
Ernie said, ‘I ain’t never seen it’ And Mr. V. sacked Stotler. Well, first [Stotler] had the accident. Then, after the accident,
he got sacked. I don’t know where the stakes were going, but they weren’t coming to the boys.”

Whatever its rationale, Stotler’s departure didn’t help the stable. With Vanderbilt increasingly distracted by his duties
at Pimlico and Belmont and his failing first marriage, he had little time to concentrate on conditioning and racing his horses.
He eventually hired another trainer, a low-key veteran named Lee McCoy, but the stable continued to slump in the early 1940s,
then was drastically pared when Vanderbilt joined the navy. He ordered many of his race-age horses sold, keeping only Discovery,
now a stallion, several mares, and a few youngsters. The stable won just eight races in 1943 and ten in 1945. Vanderbilt later
regretted that he wasn’t around to preside over the sale: among those sold was Miss Disco, a daughter of Discovery that later
foaled Bold Ruler, winner of the 1957 Preakness and sire of Secretariat.

Although a combination of factors had conspired to keep the stable from producing another Derby horse, the most important
was Vanderbilt’s mediocre record as a breeder through the late 1940s. He had faithfully bred up to two dozen horses a year
at Sagamore Farm, with Discovery as his centerpiece sire, and while his record wasn’t disastrous, he hadn’t bred many top
horses. A son of Discovery named New World had defeated Whirlaway as a two-year-old in 1940, then missed 1941 with an injury
as Whirlaway swept to a Triple Crown. That was Vanderbilt’s closest Derby call since Discovery, and it wasn’t very close.

By the late 1940s, Vanderbilt was upset. He hadn’t bred one of the more than two hundred horses in American racing history
that had earned at least $100,000; by contrast, William Woodward had bred eleven, H. P. Whitney ten, and E. R. Bradley nine.
Vanderbilt usually placed somewhere in the bottom of the top twenty of the annual breeders’ standings—based on the combined
earnings of the Vanderbilt-breds that raced for him and those he had sold to others to race—and he knew he should be doing
better with all the effort and money he was investing.

“Well, Alfred,” Vanderbilt’s friends often told him, “at least you had Discovery.”

That comment, intended as solace, irritated Vanderbilt as much as his continuing inability to breed a Derby contender. Owners
of his standing didn’t race just to win—that was crass—and certainly didn’t need the money. Their goal was to win with horses
they had bred. “My father firmly believed that improving the breed was the overarching obligation of the racing establishment,”
Alfred Vanderbilt III said, “and that the whole point of winning a race was that it showed your breeding was sound.” Vanderbilt’s
was disappointing.

He finally made a change in 1948, handing the decision-making in his breeding business over to Ralph Kercheval, a husky, handsome
Kentuckian. After starring at football for the University of Kentucky in the early 1930s, Kercheval had played running back
and cornerback and handled the kicking and punting for the National Football League’s Brooklyn Dodgers for seven years, taking
time off every fall from a full-time job with the Whitney stable. Sportswriter Grantland Rice had once called him football’s
best punter—an eighty-six-yarder he booted in 1935 stood as the NFL’s longest for more than a decade—and his credentials as
a horseman were just as strong. He had assisted top trainers such as Silent Tom Smith and Woody Stephens and directed the
Frank Frankel stable. During the war, he was stationed at an army remount depot in Nebraska, training horses used in cavalry
and artillery units.

Officially, Kercheval, at thirty-five, was hired to manage Sagamore Farm and oversee Vanderbilt’s breeding operation. “I’m
trying to start a new program, one of more winners,” Vanderbilt explained to reporters. Unofficially, Kercheval’s job was
to get Vanderbilt back to the Kentucky Derby. Vanderbilt had spoken about Discovery and the big race at Churchill Downs so
passionately during their interview that Kercheval, upon accepting the job, had pledged, “I’ll breed you a Derby horse in
five years or I’ll quit.”

Kercheval moved to Sagamore and immediately made major changes. Vanderbilt had previously bred his mares mostly just to Discovery
and other stallions in Maryland. That, Kercheval felt, was the primary problem. Although Discovery produced quality broodmares,
he wasn’t consistently passing his power and stamina down to the horses he directly sired. And while some of the other stallions
in Maryland were capable enough, they weren’t in the same league as Kentucky’s powerful array.