Native Dancer (12 page)

O
ne evening in November 1952, a train pulled away from Baltimore’s Pennsylvania Station with twenty-eight horses and an army
of grooms attached to the rear in three special cars. The Vanderbilt stable’s annual trek to California was under way. Horses
such as Indian Land, Half Caste, First Glance, Whiffs, Parlor Pink, Newsmagazine, and Next Move—young and old, male and female—stood
in hay-lined stalls, wearing protective leather headgear and swaying with the train as it navigated the curving rails of central
Maryland, bound for Chicago and ultimately Los Angeles. Native Dancer, with Lester Murray hovering, was in a car with Social
Outcast, his fellow two-year-old. The Dancer’s favorite barn pet, an old black cat called Mom, was curled up in a box in the
corner. The Dancer occasionally leaned over and nuzzled the cat, who wasn’t the least bit afraid.

Vanderbilt had taken a stable of horses west for the winter racing season beginning in the mid-1930s, when he was young and
single and gambling had just become legal in California. Santa Anita was a splendid new track, opened on Christmas 1934, and
Vanderbilt, like many easterners, had been fascinated by news accounts of horses racing for substantial purses before large,
sun-drenched crowds of movie stars. He shipped Discovery out for the Santa Anita Handicap in February 1936, and although Discovery
ran poorly, finishing seventh, Vanderbilt, then twenty-three, so enjoyed attending the races and Hollywood parties that he
returned in December with twenty-seven horses, Bud Stotler, and his top grooms, jockeys, and exercise riders. He took over
a barn just inside the backstretch gate and stayed for the entire winter racing season. His colors were seen each day at the
races, and he made the rounds at night with such actresses as Joan Crawford and Ginger Rogers.

In the beginning, the size and scope of his westward trek made headlines. The cost and labor required to ship more than two
dozen horses from coast to coast boggled Depression-era minds. Horses had long traveled by train, but not so many at once.
It took hours just to get the animals from Sagamore Farm to the Baltimore rail yard and loaded onto the Capitol Limited; then,
halfway through the journey, they changed trains to the Chief in Chicago and continued on to the West Coast. Vanderbilt himself
made the trip with Stotler, residing in a private car. The massive adventure didn’t seem as outlandish to him as it did to
others. His father, Alfred Sr., had shipped seventy horses from America to England on a steamship before making a run at the
London-to-Brighton coaching record. Compared to that, this was easy.

Vanderbilt was a constant wintertime presence in California’s racing and social circles for several years in the late 1930s,
cohosting a kitschy roller-skating party with Rogers one year and dominating the three-furlong dashes for two-year-olds with
record-setting horses such as Airflame, Balking, Galley Slave, and Impound. “Horse racing was just coming to California, and
here comes this young guy, America’s most eligible bachelor, handsome, rich as hell, and a lot of fun,” Alfred Vanderbilt
III said. “All he had to do was see Ginger Rogers or someone at lunch and tell them that he was having a party, and word would
spread, and Hollywood would turn out. Henry Fonda, Jimmy Stewart, Claudette Colbert, Clark Gable—everyone wanted to be at
Alfred Vanderbilt’s party.”

He stopped coming when he married and divorced his first wife, took on the job of running Pimlico and Belmont, and joined
the navy, then resumed his annual trip when he married Jeanne after the war. Every autumn, he uprooted his stable and shipped
two dozen horses west They raced at Hollywood Park in November and December and shifted to Santa Anita after Christmas, staying
until the end of the Santa Anita meeting in March before making the long trek back across the country to Barn 20 at Belmont
in time to start the New York racing season in April.

The grooms and exercise riders rented small apartments in Arcadia, near Santa Anita. “We drew rent money from Vanderbilt wherever
we went on the road,” Claude Appley recalled, “and in California we stayed in a little place on First Avenue in West Arcadia.
It was always quite a time out there. Mr. Vanderbilt was friendly with the movie stars, and he’d bring them to the barn in
the mornings. Betty Grable came one day. Fred Astaire was around a lot; he liked the races. Mickey Rooney would come out and
go up to the track kitchen for breakfast and buy everyone something to eat.”

When Vanderbilt and Jeanne made the trip as newlyweds in 1947, they drove across the country by themselves, stopping in motels
at night. After that, they flew out every year, and Vanderbilt’s driver made the cross-country trip in Vanderbilt’s car and
met them there. The young couple rented a house in Beverly Hills and brought a staff of butlers and maids from Long Island.
“Alfred told me to have [socialite] Slim Hayward find us a place, and I wrote to her saying we needed six maids’ rooms,” Jeanne
recalled. “Slim never got over it. She wrote back, ‘Six maids? Are you kidding? There’s nothing out here with six maids’ rooms.’
We finally found a place that was suitable.”

Billy Passmore, a young jockey from Maryland, came out with the stable in 1949. “Vanderbilt was kind of taking care of me,”
said Passmore, who was Bernie Everson’s nephew and later became a racing steward in Maryland. “He’d come and pick me up and
bring me over to the house to swim, or take me out somewhere. We went through MGM Studios when Mervyn LeRoy was the president.
He and Vanderbilt were friends, and I got the royal tour. I met Peter Lawford and Clark Gable and Liz Taylor when she was
just a kid.”

Vanderbilt and Jeanne spent their days at the track and their evenings at parties and dinners. “At Santa Anita, people would
spend the day in our box or just drift by to talk,” Jeanne recalled. “The movie people loved the racing scene. The crowds
were big. Alfred’s horses were running and winning. Merle Oberon would come with us for the day and bring these delicious
tea sandwiches—made by her French chef, of course. In the evenings, we would be invited to someone’s house to eat and watch
movies. That was exciting, seeing the movies before they came out. The Astaires had us over. Gary Cooper and his wife. Sam
Goldwyn and Frances. We’d go to the Goldwyns for a movie, and Frances would be on the sofa with a box of chocolates when the
lights went out, and the box would be empty when the lights came back on, but she never gained a pound! Someone later told
me that she only ate dark chocolates which had no fat.”

Clyde Roche said, “Alfred moved in the top Hollywood circles, all the big producers and big stars. He enjoyed that circle
and the show business ambience, and they enjoyed him, respected his judgment and wanted his approval.”

Jeanne eventually tired of overseeing the house and talked Vanderbilt into moving into a bungalow at the Beverly Hills Hotel
in the early 1950s. “That was better. We’d have a nanny and maybe one maid, and we had the kids with us, and it was just much
easier,” Jeanne recalled. “Phyllis Astaire [Fred’s wife] helped move us out of the house and into the hotel. She came by with
a station wagon with sheets laid out in the back, and we piled a bunch of stuff in there.”

Santa Anita’s racing meeting was a splendid affair by the early 1950s. Many of the nation’s top stables sent their trainers
and some of their best horses, with the emphasis on the two-year-old and handicap divisions. Calumet Farm, the reigning superstable,
sent trainer Jimmy Jones, winner of five Kentucky Derbys, and signed Eddie Arcaro to ride its best horses. “You either went
to Florida or New Orleans or came out here in the winter, and the big money was out here,” recalled Leonard Dorfman, a longtime
California trainer.

Each racing day was an event, with huge crowds filling the terraces and grandstand. Los Angeles was swelling exponentially
with people and money, but it was still a frontier outpost in the sports world, without major league baseball or pro basketball,
and the recognition as a major-league racing circuit was welcomed.

“Racing was the only game in town,” said Dr. Jack Robinson, a veterinarian on the California circuit in those days. “There
were no Lakers, no Dodgers; the Rams were new. When one of the big strings of horses from the East arrived on the train, there’d
be a story and a picture on the front page of the
Los Angeles Times
sports section. That was news.”

The Hollywood crowd was deeply involved in the racing scene. Bing Crosby opened Del Mar, near San Diego—“where the surf meets
the turf,” he crooned in a hit song—and helped turn its summer meeting into a feast for stargazers. Many stars either owned
horses or frequently came to the races as fans. Dorothy Lamour, W. C. Fields, Edgar Bergen, Don Ameche, Ava Gardner, Red Skelton,
Desi Arnaz, Betty Grable, Mickey Rooney, and Jimmy Durante were among those who could be seen. Durante was at Del Mar so often
that the track named its turf course after him.

“The people who ran the tracks were intelligent enough to connect to the film industry,” longtime California steward Pete
Pedersen said. “Santa Anita had Lou Mayer and Cary Grant When Mayer died, people didn’t say, ‘Too bad about Louie Mayer.’
They said, ‘Who’s going to get his box at Santa Anita?’ Those were the glory years. Racing was the social thing to do, the
sport for people with money.”

Recalled jockey Bill Shoemaker, who was an apprentice in California in 1949, “Those were the best days of racing; the best
ever, really, with all the people and noise and enthusiasm. You could draw 70,000 for a major handicap race. There were no
other teams and sports competing for attention, and no off-track betting yet, so everyone came to the track.”

Vanderbilt’s stable was active, racing its best at Hollywood Park and Santa Anita. Bed o’ Roses raced for the first time as
a two-year-old at Santa Anita in 1949. Next Move ran fourth in the Hollywood Gold Cup in 1950, competing against males at
the end of her championship three-year-old season. She then lost the Santa Anita Handicap by a neck in March 1951.

As usual, Vanderbilt didn’t just race his horses: he became a prominent figure in the local racing hierarchy, never taking
a title but always volunteering opinions. In January 1952, he gave a controversial speech at a Los Angeles football writers’
luncheon, stating that jockeys were “getting away with rough riding” throughout California and tougher policing was needed,
and also that the racing strip at Santa Anita was “too fast and dangerous.” California’s stewards and track operators ripped
back, suggesting that if Vanderbilt was so displeased, he could take his horses and opinions back to New York.

Tempers had cooled by the fall of 1952 when it was time to head west again. Vanderbilt and Winfrey decided Native Dancer should
make the trip, even though the horse wouldn’t race again until the spring in New York. The Dancer was unbeaten and the Kentucky
Derby was coming up, and Winfrey and Vanderbilt didn’t want the horse out of their sight, especially with a minor but important
procedure scheduled to be performed on the Dancer’s ankles. Vanderbilt’s vet, Dr. William Wright, had spotted osselets—small
areas of swelling and leakage—in one fetlock, or ankle, several days after the East View Stakes in October. It was a common
problem, and Winfrey and Vanderbilt had elected to use a common treatment and “fire” all four ankles. The Dancer would be
given a local anesthetic and a tranquilizer as the ankles were painted with iodine, and then a hot iron would be applied,
leaving a checkerboard pattern and a solid, sealed mass where there had been swelling and leakage. Basically, the osselets
would be seared away, bolstering the tendons and reducing the chance of a breakdown.

Winfrey and Vanderbilt decided to have the ankles fired in California, with veterinarian Dr. John Peters handling the iron.
“It was the right thing to do and the only thing to do,” said Dr. Alex Harthill, the famed Churchill Downs veterinarian, who
was working at Santa Anita that winter. But the move was not without risk. The Dancer would be sidelined for six weeks while
his ankles recovered, and he couldn’t resume serious training until February. He would have only three months of conditioning
before the Kentucky Derby, with his first race just weeks before it. Winfrey would suddenly be operating with little margin
for error.

Vanderbilt’s horses arrived in California in mid-November, and according to Harthill, while Next Move and the others resumed
training and were pointed for the races, the Dancer was put on another train and sent to Brown Shasta Farm, a hilly spread
in Northern Cal-

ifornia, at the foot of Mount Shasta. Howard Oots, a Kentucky breeder and horseman, owned the farm and was friendly with Vanderbilt,
and it seemed like a terrific place to give the Dancer a brief vacation after his long racing campaign. “He was up there in
that beautiful country, happy as hell, running up and down those hills,” Harthill recalled.

His ankles were fired on December 1. “There had been some weakness,” Winfrey explained to reporters “and if anything went
wrong after a race or two as a three-year-old, it would have been too late to do anything about it except lay him up and miss
goodness knows how many valuable engagements.”

He convalesced at Santa Anita, where Harold Walker led him to the walking ring every morning and stood with him in the sunshine.
“The horse would stand there in the middle of the ring—what a big, good-looking sucker he was,” Leonard Dorfman recalled.
“They didn’t fire him very deep. It was just a precautionary thing. Winfrey thought the ankles were a little poochy. It wasn’t
serious. He came back quick.”

Being out of heavy training didn’t prevent the Grey Ghost from making headlines. He was named America’s Horse of the Year
in a poll of thirty-seven racing secretaries from Thoroughbred Racing Associations tracks, becoming the first two-year-old
to win the annual balloting. He also won the annual Horse of the Year poll run by
Turf and Sport Digest
, which surveyed the opinions of 176 racing writers and commentators. (One Count, winner of the Belmont and Travers in 1952,
won a third election in which twenty-five handicappers and newspapermen were polled.) Most significant, he was assigned 130
pounds, seven more than any other two-year-old, in the Experimental Free Handicap, a prestigious Jockey Club ranking in which
racing secretary John B. Campbell handicapped all of the nation’s top two-year-olds in a hypothetical race at one and one-sixteenth
miles on dirt. Tahitian King and Laffango received the second-highest assignments, 123 pounds.