Secretariat (19 page)

Lucien Laurin trains the Dances’ horses, and for weeks Dance has been telling Lucien he wants a share in Secretariat.

Laddie has seen the colt run at Saratoga, has seen him, too, around the barn at Belmont Park, and he has already approached Penny seeking a share. He has written her a letter to make the request official, and she has included Laddie’s name on her list for Seth. The horse meets all of Laddie’s standards as a prospective sire.

Seth discusses Penny Tweedy’s plans for Secretariat—all prospective buyers are asking him about that—and Seth says she is aiming him for the Triple Crown, by way of the Bay Shore, Gotham, and Wood Memorial, and later the Travers and Woodward. No one can take exception to that. Seth would recall Laddie as the first person he has reached who doesn’t say, “That’s a lot of money.” Laddie says nothing of the sort. He says, “I’m in.”

Nor does Richard Stokes dwell hours on the question.

Seth doesn’t know Richard Stokes, in fact has never spoken to or seen the man, but he is calling him at home now because Penny has him on her list. Stokes, a Virginian, had met Penny during a recent visit to The Meadow, at a time when she was still hoping the colt might one day stand at stud in Virginia. She had asked him if he would like a share in the horse if he were syndicated.

Stokes, forty, a former gasoline station attendant who married the heiress to the Johnson and Johnson pharmaceutical fortune, runs a modest commercial breeding establishment at the 750-acre Shenstone Farm in Leesburg, a small town in the idyllic horse country of northern Virginia. Stokes has ten broodmares, one a daughter of Native Dancer that he thinks would fit Secretariat well.

Stokes is at home on the farm when Seth reaches him, sitting in his modernistic library on his gingerbread tan leather short-backed chair looking out the glassed-in room toward the paddock. He hesitates only momentarily.

“That’s a lot of money,” Stokes says to Hancock. “But I’ll have one. I like the horse.”

For Seth, the day stumbles on as he waits for key breeders to call back.

It is noon. Seth asks Patti Tompkins to stay with him at the office to answer phones for him. At times there are two or three people waiting to talk to Seth, idling on hold. Hanging up on one, he picks up on another. A worker in the office drives into Paris, to Overby’s Restaurant on Main Street, and buys lunches to go for Patti and Seth, who has a sixty-five-cent cheeseburger, french fries, and a Coca Cola. He eats his lunch between calls.

It has been a long morning.

At one point, as a courtesy, Seth calls the Cincinnati office of Dr. Eslie Asbury, the surgeon to whom Bull sold a share in Nasrullah for $10,000 in 1949. Asbury made a $700,000 profit on that purchase, by his own estimate. Now, almost a quarter of a century later, Seth calls Asbury to ask if he would buy a share in Nasrullah’s finest grandson for $180,000 more than the original investment. Dr. Asbury is not in, and Seth leaves a message relating details and asking Dr. Asbury to return the call.

Arriving at his office, Asbury receives the message Seth has left and hardly thinks about it.

“Bold Ruler just hadn’t had any record of horses that went on to win the classic races,” he would say. “The amount of money they were asking was based on the premise that he was going to be a great three-year-old.”

Asbury isn’t sure of Secretariat. He decides not to return Seth’s call.

“See if you can get Taylor Hardin for me.”

It has been seven months since breeder Taylor Hardin, owner of Newstead Farm in northern Virginia, turned to Penny Tweedy at Saratoga, just minutes after the colt beat Russ Miron, and told her he wanted a breeding share in Secretariat.

Hardin is now on the phone, and Seth is asking him if he wants a share. Taylor objects at the price, saying it is far too high. He says to Seth, “I heard this horse is sore, I heard he’s about to break down.”

Seth bristles, listening to the old rumor. “Mr. Hardin, if you think he’s broke down, I wouldn’t ask you to go into the syndicate,” Seth says. Hardin declines the offer.

It is nearing the end of the first day, and Seth Hancock has sold only six shares—to Phipps, Lockridge, Benjamin, Yoshida, Dance, and Stokes. It is still too early to assess the level of one share in Secretariat for $190,000, to know for sure whether there are twenty-two more out there. The offer
has
been turned down, but it has been accepted with alacrity, too, and there are still a number thinking about it.

Among them are Walter Salmon and Mrs. du Pont.

What’s keeping them?
To Seth they remain pivotal, weather vanes and barometers of the industry’s intent, indicators of acceptance among potential buyers. Their hesitation has weighed down Hancock’s end of the day, causing him concern since early morning when they told him they would call him back. He’s still wondering which way they plan to move, in fact, when Patti Tompkins tells him Mr. Salmon is on the line. Answering, Seth hears Walter Salmon tell him: “I’ll take a share.”

Thus a major commercial breeder, a businessman owning seven breeding shares in various stallions, has decided to pay more for a share in Secretariat than he has ever paid for a single share in his life.

“Thank you, sir. I sure do appreciate it.”

Four o’clock Friday afternoon the outlook has brightened.

“How are you doin’?” Penny asks. He has just called to let her know.

“I have seven positives. But I have a lot more to call me back.”

His tone is matter-of-fact about the course of the day. Waiting for prospective buyers to call him back, Seth spends his evening working, casting about for more.

For several hours Seth has been trying to track down Will Farish III, the breeder and owner of Preakness winner Bee Bee Bee. Farish’s family, his grandmother and aunt, have known the Hancocks for years, boarding mares at Claiborne. Will Farish is in the investment business in Houston, chiefly mining exploration for hard-rock minerals. He is a member of the Jockey Club, owns a racing stable, and has a ranch in Texas.

Will Farish had told Seth months earlier, after seeing Secretariat run at Saratoga, that he would like a share in him if he ever were syndicated, and his enthusiasm for the youngster grew over the winter. He had been visiting his barn at Hialeah Park and watching him go to the track in the morning.

It is Friday evening when Seth finally makes contact with Farish in Florida, where he is staying at a friend’s house. Seth reads the terms to Farish—the number of shares, the plans, the price.

“That’s certainly awful full,” Will says. “A heck of a price.”

Yet Farish, discussing the upside and downside potential of the colt, feels that the price is justified given the booming nature of the bloodstock industry. “He had so many things about him that took the gamble out of it—being already the two-year-old champ and the Horse of the Year, and he’d already won an extraordinary amount of money and he was a beautiful individual and a son of Bold Ruler, and Bold Ruler is the phenomenal sire of sires. You could probably get your money back by selling sons and daughters of Secretariat in the first two years.”

Ten minutes into the phone call, Farish owns a share.

He makes eight, leaving twenty, and Hancock begins closing in. He goes to bed that evening still not knowing which way Allaire du Pont plans to move on the deal, but the pressure is lifting, and he’s far more optimistic than he was twelve hours ago. Salmon has given considerable relief, and Hancock is especially buoyed over Farish’s purchase because Farish is young, compared with others Seth has spoken to, and he is seeking rapport with breeders close to his age, with those he might know and do business with for many years to come. Now, what of Mrs. du Pont?

She doesn’t keep him waiting long.

Early on Saturday she rings Paris from Chesapeake City and sends Seth on his way at last, giving him the final boost he needs, the confidence that what remains is within reach and that, if he just keeps at it, it’s only a question of time. “I knew when Mrs. du Pont said yes that I had it.”

Through the next three days, working to tie it together, Seth keeps mining the richest and most productive veins of the industry. Among those who bought shares in the first day are men who represent all the most powerful breeding groups in the country, and from them he continues to gather support, share by share—from those with foreign gold such as Zenya Yoshida, from Kentucky breeders such as E. V. Benjamin and Bill Lockridge, from the few superrich and the old rich such as Ogden Phipps, and most especially from the American businessman-as-breeder, such as Will Farish. Seth reaches out to them over the weekend, picking up one after another, confident as time passes that he is launched, inevitably now, upon a world-record bloodstock syndication.

Among the Midases of the sport are Mellon as well as McKnight, who raised the Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing Company from a modest adhesive tape and sandpaper firm to a $1 billion empire.

Seth speaks to their representatives.

Mellon is in his room at Claridge’s, in London for a week on business and to see his colt, Mill Reef, when he receives a telegram from his New York office telling him the terms of the Secretariat contract.

Paul Mellon, sixty-four, is the son of financier Andrew Mellon—secretary of the treasury under presidents Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover, ambassador to the Court of Saint James’s, and the original benefactor of the National Gallery of Art, which he built for $16 million and adorned with his $50 million art collection: Rembrandts, El Grecos, Botticellis, Goyas.

Paul never shared his father’s interest in finance, preferring William Blake to Pittsburgh banking, but he did acquire his father’s enthusiasm for philanthropy and art collecting. He has given millions to conservation projects, such as Cape Hatteras State Park, millions more to Yale, his alma mater, and even more millions to the gallery, of which he is the president and chief benefactor.

“Giving away large sums of money nowadays is a soul-searching problem,” Paul Mellon has said. “You can do as much damage with it as you do good.” Mellon writes poetry, rides to hounds, owns a rare book collection of numerous volumes, and is the owner and head of a 4600-acre estate in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia, with a whitewashed stone farmhouse with French windows.

Reading the cable in his room at Claridge’s, Paul Mellon cables back that he accepts the terms of the syndication, authorizing purchase of a share pending the approval of Elliott Burch, his Yale-educated trainer.

“It’s too much money,” Burch complains, talking to Seth from his Florida home near Hialeah. But yes, he says, Rokeby will buy a share.

The Rokeby acceptance is valuable and important to any syndicate, especially to commercial breeders such as Salmon, for Mellon’s presence will ensure that one of Rokeby’s superbly bred mares will be sent to Secretariat once a year. His is a private, not a market, venture. Mellon breeds to race, seeking intrinsic excellence in his horses, not commercial quality.

Ars gratia artis.

If Secretariat fails as a stallion, he will manage to fail on his own, not through the lack of depth in the mares that Rokeby sends him. For a commercial breeder, then, Rokeby is the perfect colleague on a breeding syndicate: Rokeby yearlings sired by Secretariat will not be offered competitively at yearling sales, where they would depress demand for his progeny, but their success on the racetrack will serve to drive up the value of shares in the stallion and his offspring sold commercially.

The Mellon acceptance is part of no pattern. No dominant theme of acceptance or rejection emerges among the owners of large private farms in America, such as Rokeby, though there is a tendency toward rejection among members of this class of landed wealth. John Hay Whitney of the Greentree Stud is only one. Seth experiences his severest disappointment during the days of syndication when he reaches Robert Kleberg, owner of the King Ranch of Texas, at his small farm in Florida. Kleberg presides over a colossus legendary in its size and scope, the very symbol of Texas itself—over giant herds of beef cattle, over quarter horses, over 650 oil and gas wells, over enough land to embrace all Rhode Island and parts of Massachusetts, and stables of horses that race under his brown silks with the white running
W.
The King Ranch bred and owned the great Assault, the 1946 Triple Crown winner and Horse of the Year, among other lesser lights.

Seth offers and Kleberg declines; the colt does not fit into his breeding program. Much traditional money fails Seth. Michael G. Phipps, sixty-three, who would die two weeks later of a heart attack, also declines the offer when Seth calls. Seth calls the Calumet Farm, reaching farm manager Melvin Cinnamon, who also turns down the offer. Some of the richest are the most reluctant of all.

“That’s too much money!” Nelson Bunker Hunt, son of billionaire oilman H. L. Hunt, tells Seth. “You act like he’s won the Triple Crown already.”

The winds are warmer in Florida, where Seth contacts trainer Johnny Nerud at William L. McKnight’s Tartan Farm. There Nerud manages McKnight’s growing thoroughbred holdings.

“I am in the breeding business, and I’m breeding horses for Mr. McKnight, and he wants the very best horses I can get him,” Nerud would say. “So I have to buy the best available—and at all times. It has nothing to do with how much money they are. But it’s: ‘Do I like ’em?’ ”

McKnight can buy anything Nerud likes. At eighty-five, he’s one of America’s wealthiest men, a powerful industrialist who went to work for 3-M as an assistant bookkeeper in 1907, when it was making sandpaper; became its president in 1929, when its sales were $5 million; and rose to become its chairman of the board in 1949, when sales were $1 billion. Retiring in 1966, McKnight went home with more than $200 million in stock.

John Nerud has invested in mares and stallion shares for McKnight, with his patron giving him wide latitude in decision making. Nerud has just finished morning training hours at the farm in Florida when Seth calls him.

“A hundred and ninety thousand.”

“Well.” Nerud thinks about it. “For that kind of money, I’ll have to ask Mr. McKnight. But I’m sure it’s all right.” The latitude has its limits. “When I spend two hundred thousand dollars of Mr. McKnight’s money, I think I’m obligated to tell him.”