Native Dancer (13 page)

The horse made headlines in other ways, too. After a jog in the rain at Santa Anita on January 29, he broke free from Harold
Walker and Lester Murray, dumped Bernie Everson, bounced off the rail, and cavorted around the paddock for five minutes before
being caught. The Associated Press reported that he “jumped benches and plowed through flower beds, narrowly avoiding fences
and stands,” and finally got one leg tangled in his reins, enabling Winfrey to catch him.

“Harold had a raincoat on and it was flapping in the wind and that got Native Dancer going,” Claude Appley recalled. “He took
a big jump and Bernie was dumped, and he was gone. There were people putting in flowers in the paddock and they were hollering
like crazy in Spanish. It scared the hell out of everyone.”

Vanderbilt’s stable struggled through the meeting, seemingly operating under a dark cloud in the wake of the surprising news
that Bed o’ Roses had died at Sagamore Farm on January 5, an organic disorder cutting short her life just months after she
had been retired from racing. Kercheval had planned to have her bred that spring to Count Fleet, the Triple Crown winner,
but then she died and Vanderbilt horses made more than a dozen straight losing starts at Santa Anita.

The best three-year-olds of the meeting were Decorated, Correspondent, and Calumet Farm’s Chanlea, winner of the Santa Anita
Derby, California’s biggest three-year-old race, in which Social Outcast finished fourth. But the best three-year-old on the
grounds never raced. The Dancer made only one appearance under Vanderbilt’s silks, jogging around the racing strip before
47,500 fans after the first race on February 7. Track officials had asked Vanderbilt to show the famous Grey Ghost under colors
to boost attendance—some of the proceeds were going to charity—and promoted the appearance in ads as a chance to see “the
great horse of the year.” Everson was on him instead of Guerin because the horse’s romp through the paddock had occurred just
days earlier, and Everson was heavier and stronger. Guerin watched from the apron.

The
Los Angeles Times
reported that the crowd “gave the Dancer a big hand” as he circled the track and that he seemed to “sense the admiration
as he proudly bowed his head and jogged jauntily” with “precautionary bandages on his high-priced legs.” Vanderbilt watched
from his box with Jeanne and friends. Though ordinarily opposed to displaying his enviable assets, especially around the race-

track, he didn’t mind letting his Hollywood friends get a glimpse of his undefeated champion.

For the slender Everson, it was a rare moment in the spotlight, riding a champion for a cheering crowd while wearing Vanderbilt’s
silks. Exercising horses was not the career he had expected when he left school in Maryland at sixteen to become a jockey,
but he had failed to establish himself, then spent five years in the army during and after World War II, working overseas
in the office of a medical division that served in Italy and Africa. He settled for a career as an exercise rider upon being
discharged—he was married, had a son, and needed steady work—and was valued by Winfrey and Vanderbilt, who considered him
their top morning jockey. He would never achieve the great glories he had dreamed about, but with the crowd cheering him at
Santa Anita, he was, at least for the moment, a star.

Back in the obscurity of the morning, he was on the Dancer when the horse finally resumed training on February 18, some twelve
weeks after his ankles had been fired. Everson worked him three furlongs in 39 seconds, then breezed him the same distance
three days later, this time in 37⅕ seconds. Soon the Dancer was back to his usual morning workout schedule. Horsemen flocked
to the rail at Santa Anita to watch, as Winfrey oversaw the exercise from the back of a stable pony and Vanderbilt stood nearby.
On March 13, the horse worked seven furlongs in a pedestrian 1:28—he wasn’t ready to race yet—and boarded a train bound for
Belmont the next day. His Hollywood star turn was over. The Derby was seven weeks away. It was time to go to work.

On the long train ride back east, the Dancer again rode in a car with Murray, Social Outcast, and Mom, his favorite cat. The
horse, as always, drew great pleasure from playing with the cat, nudging her with his nose and nuzzling her while she slept.
Mom, as always, didn’t flinch at the touch of the massive animal looming over her.

Mom had been around Vanderbilt’s farm for years, delivering an occasional litter of black kittens who either remained in the
barn or found a home elsewhere along the backstretch. There were so many black felines in Vanderbilt’s barn that Vanderbilt
sometimes joked that he was “going to see the cats” when he left in the morning to see his horses work out The Dancer had
picked Mom out as his favorite, seemingly bemused by her imperturbable nature.

Not long after the horses disembarked from their California trip and were back in Barn 20 at Belmont in March 1953, Mom disappeared
into a crevice in a wall, set to deliver a new batch of kittens. Such moments were heralded with joy and laughter on the premises,
but this delivery stunned the grooms, exercise riders, and hotwalkers into silence. Out came five kittens, tiny, mewing, and
grey.

“That old cat ain’t never had nothing but black cats until now,” Lester Murray told John McNulty, “and now she have five just
as grey as that Dancer. Just as grey as him!”

The old groom just shook his head. His faith in the inexplicable had been justified.

“That Dancer,” Murray said, “he’s one powerful horse.”

T
he last Kentucky Derby Joe Palmer covered was the first to be televised live across America from coast to coast. That was
just a coincidence, but viewed through hindsight’s clear-eyed lens more than a half century later, the fleeting overlapping
of eras was flushed with symbolism that all but shouted a message. The country’s habits were changing, and if few knew yet
how profound those changes were, Native Dancer, being readied for his three-year-old season, would soon help illustrate it.

Palmer, at forty-eight, symbolized the country’s familiar syncopation of mainstream media, and in a broader sense, life as
it had always been. He was racing’s press box bard, a Kentucky native with a master’s degree who had taught college English
before switching to journalism. He brought wit and literacy to all of his endeavors—books on breeding and racing, columns
in the
Blood-Horse
, and his beat work and “Views of the Turf.” column in the
New York Herald Tribune
. He was also heard by millions on CBS radio’s national broadcasts of major races.

“Joe was one of the great writers of our era, a tremendous composer of English,” said John Derr, who worked as an announcer,
producer, and executive for CBS radio and TV for more than a quarter century beginning shortly after World War II. “Clem McCarthy
had been our race-caller and Joe came in and did a wonderful job. He did the radio broadcast of a number of Native Dancer’s
races [as a two-year-old in 1952], and people fell in love with the horse, with the way Joe described him in such endearing
terms.”

Newspapers and radio were long established as the country’s fundamental conduits of images, information, and opinion, the
channels through which racing—or any popular endeavor—was presented to most of the public. Palmer was at the forefront, a
respected pro who was brilliant on deadline and generous in spirit. He worked with binoculars and a flask of bourbon in front
of him and rows of admiring colleagues behind him, and no one was better at bringing to life the horses and horse people the
public couldn’t see.

Then he went to the Kentucky Derby in 1952, and suddenly, his kingdom was being threatened. The usual 100,000 spectators filled
Churchill Downs and watched Eddie Arcaro’s winning ride on Hill Gail, but a TV audience estimated at 10 million also watched
on CBS. Palmer worked the radio broadcast and wrote a story in the
Herald Tribune
, but for the first time, his words and images merely supported what many in the public had seen for themselves.

He was dead before the year was over, just as racing, encouraged by the popular Derby telecast, stood at the threshold of
a new era. It was about to be seen consistently for the first time by the vast audiences rushing to TV, which had emerged
from radio’s shadow since World War II and become a powerful force, expanding in size and influence as rapidly as any instrument
in history. The Dancer, championed as a two-year-old in the trusted organs of Palmer’s heyday—newspapers, radio, newsreels,
and weekly magazines—would now be followed unlike any great horse before him: with a TV signal beaming a live view of his
brilliance into millions of homes.

Such staggering fame had seemed unthinkable in 1939 when the National Broadcasting Company sent out its inaugural TV signal
to four hundred “receiving sets” in New York, the nation’s TV audience. Early programmers were drawn to sports because most
of the sets were in bars; within five months in 1939, NBC broadcast the first televised sports event, a Princeton-Columbia
baseball game, and the first televised boxing match, tennis match, pro football game, and major league baseball game. The
NFL game featured a kicker for the Brook-

lyn Dodgers named Ralph Kercheval. With millions of radio listeners still entranced by programs such
as Amos ’n’ Andy
and
Fibber McGee and Molly
, and early TV pictures ranging anywhere from murky to indecipherable, it was hard to imagine TV making a dent in radio’s
grip on the broadcast market.

“We watched TV in bars,” recalled Clem Florio, a New York-area boxer and horseplayer in the 1940s, “and also, the stores that
sold appliances always had TV going. The wrestling matches. They would drone on and on, and people would be out on the street,
packed around the store window, looking in. That was TV. You’d go, ‘This is coming from Madison Square Garden and we’re in
Ozone Park. How’d they do that?’ We’d watch it and then read about it the next day. It was a miracle. We’d first heard about
it at the World’s Fair in 1939. They had an exhibit. Then they started showing the wrestling matches. They’d hold on to each
other for hours, the most boring stuff in the world. They finally got smart and livened it up with guys gouging each other
and fighting with the referee and stuff. They were trying to sell the product—the TV sets, not the wrestling.”

Production of sets was halted during World War II, and only seven thousand were in use in 1946. But then mass-produced sets
with long-lasting cathode-ray tubes began selling more briskly after the war. “It all started to pick up after the war,” Florio
recalled. “That was the first time we saw the [boxing] fights. I did some exhibition boxing for TV, got paid two hundred a
fight to box two rounds with a guy in my stable. I was white and dark-haired, and the other guy had to be blond, or black.
They had to have contrast. It was going out as an exhibit. They were trying to figure out how to broadcast it, going through
a learning process. They would ask you to stay on one side of the ring, or close to this or that spot. They were trying to
figure out the angles.”

In 1948, NBC hired Milton Berle to host the TV version of a popular radio show,
The Texaco Star Theater
. A rubber-faced comedian weaned on vaudeville shtick, Berle was an instant hit with TV audiences able to see his slapstick,
sight gags, and mild vulgarities. He made the cover of
Time
and
Newsweek
in 1949, and as his popularity soared, so, almost directly, did that of the nascent medium. Friends met in homes with TV
to watch Berle’s show, then went out and bought their own sets. An industry formed around the CBS, NBC, ABC, and DuMont networks,
which organized schedules and developed programming.

Radio had controlled 81 percent of the broadcast audience when Berle first appeared, but it lost half of its listeners within
two years. Movie attendance dropped 70 percent. Television was taking over. Ten million American homes had sets by 1951. The
total had surpassed 17 million when Arcaro crossed the finish line on Hill Gail on the first Saturday of May 1952.

It was mostly an urban phenomenon at first: almost half of the 1.1 million TV sets in use in 1949 were in New York City, with
most of the rest in other major cities. Small towns and rural communities were left out, unable to pick up signals from urban
transmitting stations. But with movie theaters and minor-league baseball circuits closing in droves as city dwellers opted
to be entertained in their living rooms, all barriers limiting TV’s growth were bound to fall. The last obstacle was cleared
with the laying of a signal-carrying coaxial cable stretching from coast to coast, completed in 1951. Now small towns and
rural communities could have TV, too.

The first coast-to-coast national TV broadcast was on September 14, 1951, when millions watched President Harry Truman address
the Japanese Peace Treaty Conference in San Francisco. A month later,
I Love Lucy
premiered on CBS, starring Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz as a young couple in New York. Critics were dubious at first, but
the half-hour comedy soon had a weekly audience of more than 7 million viewers. On April 7, 1952, an episode
of Lucy
became the first American show seen in more than 10 million homes.