Native Dancer

by John Eisenberg

  His comportment on the job was what mattered, of course, and there, he was a pleasure. He had sailed through his schooling in the fundamentals that troubled many other young horses, adapting easily to riding under tack, breaking from the starting gate, and “rating” behind other horses early in a race to save energy for the stretch. Although he occasionally dipped his shoulder without warning and dumped Everson—just to let everyone know he could, it seemed—he was adaptable and businesslike in his training and racing, seemingly endeavoring to get the job done without wasting anyone else’s time—or more importantly, his own. Winfrey had suggested to reporters that he could “train himself,” and horsemen familiar with the colt un-

  derstood. “He would look right at you with those big, bright, shining eyes, and you could almost see the wheels turning. I swear that horse could think,” recalled Dan W. Scott, the Kentucky farm owner who foaled the Dancer in 1950.

  Everson, who rode him almost every morning, marveled at his intelligence and natural curiosity. Trees and birds distracted him, and other horses could make him forget what he was doing. After observing steeplechase horses training in the infield one day, he abruptly jumped across shadows on the track a few days later, obviously impressed by what he had seen. His fascination with other horses, Winfrey believed, was the reason he wanted to race mostly in the middle of the pack until the home stretch, instead of in front.

  Yet as much as he preferred the pack, he was, in the end, fiercely competitive. Many thoroughbreds circled a track without seriously attempting to finish ahead of other horses, either not comprehending that the object was to finish first or not caring. Conversely, a rare few cared desperately, their innate competitiveness evident even in training. Native Dancer was an extreme case. Once his dash through the stretch began, his determination to finish first—his will to win—engulfed him. He often stared at his rivals as he passed them, his neck swiveling until it almost was wrenched. Some attributed this maddening habit to his inexperience, others saw it as evidence of an understanding that only a few champions had exhibited—the knowledge that his decisive move to the front had dealt his opponents a devastating psychological blow, underlining their inferiority and crumbling their desire to compete.

  “He would come from way off the pace and just blow them away,” Dan W. Scott said. “This was a horse that loved to run, loved to compete. And when you have a horse that is a competitor every time, there’s your champion. When War Admiral won the Belmont in 1937, he got stepped on and lost a lot of blood during the race, but he led the whole way. That’s a champion. Native Dancer was the same kind of horse. Nowadays, they have these monitors that measure a horse’s heart. Gosh, I would love to have monitored Native Dancer’s heart.”

  While it was a stretch to suggest that any horse understood his lot in the racing world, the Dancer seemed to understand he was a winner, plucked from the masses and elevated to a pinnacle. He strutted through his days with a haughty swagger, oozing superiority. And nothing was more cocksure than his come-from-behind racing style, which, unmistakably, had come from within the horse, not from his trainer.

  “A good horse always figures out the racing game sooner or later, and the style to which he is comfortable is the style he’ll race in,” Joe Hirsch said. “That was certainly the case with this horse. Winfrey had to go along with him. It wasn’t the easiest style, and it forced the horse to work harder, but the horse was up to the task and it suited Winfrey.”

  The great Exterminator had won many of his races similarly, making his move in the stretch on his own, without regard for the jockey’s suggestions, and winning narrowly, without exerting an ounce of extra effort. He had taught his jockeys how to win, it was said, and Guerin, who rode the Dancer, believed the big grey possessed the same sagacity. “He has all the instincts and reactions of a human being,” Guerin told Life magazine, “and sometimes I think he has more real sense of how to run a race than I do.”

  He was a prodigy, a youngster already exhibiting qualities of greatness. He was also, unmistakably, a star, blessed with an ineffable magnetism. Fans who came to see him invariably left the track talking only of him, as if no other horses had raced. He grabbed their eyes and held them, his spectral dashes through the stretch as riveting as the sight of Joe DiMaggio angling gracefully across the outfield grass in pursuit of a fly ball. People loved his eager white face bobbing up and down as he charged from the gate like the young colt he still was, flecks of foam gathering at the corners of his mouth. They loved the way he almost seemed to look for them in the stands, his eyes wandering until he really grabbed the bit and got serious. They loved the way he always knew where he was on the track, and what he was doing. They loved his amazing, athletic moves around the turns. They loved and understood his inherent laziness, his sweet tooth, his childish habit of playfully terrorizing those around him. It was all too human.

  Lester Murray had worked with horses for years, rubbing them and talking to them and watching them run, good ones and bad ones, characters and dullards, and he had never encountered such a blend of talent and individuality. The old groom didn’t like to let on, but the grey colt amazed him. He had never seen a horse that came from behind with such power and purpose in the stretch, almost making it seem as if the other horses were suddenly standing still. And he was a smart one, too, as observant and shrewd as any horse Murray had come across. Like a lot of people who had spent their lives at the track, the groom halfway believed in the inexplicable, and he was waiting for the day when the Dancer started talking back to him.

  Kneeling in the straw after the Futurity, Murray slowly removed safety pins from the row he had pinned to his pants and used them to fasten stall bandages to the Grey Ghost’s priceless legs. Dusk enveloped the barn and the Dancer whickered loudly.

  “You want food,” Murray said to the horse.

  There was no doubt; the Dancer’s afternoon meal was delayed until early evening on race days. Winfrey did not want to fill him up.

  Four quarts of oats were dumped into the cerise and white feed bucket. The Dancer dug in ferociously.

  The New York newspapermen who covered the racing scene had discovered Murray as a wellspring of material—“he’s the hottestgittin’ horse I ever saw,” he had told one reporter about the Dancer—and several stood outside the stall now, watching him work and asking for his unique insights into what made the grey colt tick.

  Murray whistled.

  “That’s how I get him to make water,” he said.

  They continued to watch the horse attack his food.

  “He knows me like a book, and I knows him,” Murray said idly, eyeing the colt with a fatherly pride.

  When the bucket was empty, Murray picked it up and whacked the Dancer on the ass. The horse didn’t budge.

  “He’s a big bum,” Murray said to the reporters, “and what I think he like is, he like standing in that winner’s circle and having his picture took.”

  THREE

  On the day after the Futurity, Alfred Vanderbilt rose early at Broadhollow, the 110-acre estate on Long Island where he lived with his wife Jeanne and their children, Heidi and young Alfred. He had slept little after a postrace celebration in Manhattan with Jeanne and friends at Le Pavillon, his favorite restaurant, but he was a racing man, and no matter what happened the night before, a racing man always began his day while the rest of the world slept.

  He was headed to Belmont to spend the morning watching Native Dancer and his other horses train, and also to enjoy reviewing the Grey Ghost’s victory with Bill Winfrey. Vanderbilt’s valet, Louis Cheri, was up to make sure he departed on time, and a driver was also up, offering to drive him to Belmont, but as usual, Vanderbilt slipped behind the wheel of his Mercedes and pulled away. Other men in his social circle preferred being driven, but Vanderbilt loved to drive. Moreover, he was uncomfortable putting on certain airs, especially around the track.

  His day always began with a commute to the barn to see his horses, no matter if he was in S
outhern California, where he spent part of every winter; Florida, where he owned real estate; outside Baltimore, at Sagamore Farm, his horse farm; or in New York. He cherished racing’s eternal morning routine, sipping coffee and trading opinions with horsemen amid the shadowy light and acrid smells of training hours. The afternoons, with their color and noise and racing thrills, appealed to the public, and Vanderbilt certainly enjoyed them, but he truly relished the quiet mornings when real horse people conducted the real business of horses.

  He was, in theory, out of his element on the backstretch, too lordly to commune with grooms, feed men, and exercise riders. His ancestry included two of the sovereign figures of America’s industrial age: his mother’s father, Isaac Emerson, the “millionaire chemist” from Baltimore who had amassed a fortune manufacturing and selling Bromo-Seltzer, the upset-stomach remedy; and his great-greatgrandfather, Cornelius Vanderbilt, the legendary Commodore, who borrowed a hundred dollars from his mother, built an empire of ferries, steamships, and railways, and left a $100 million estate, the largest ever probated in the United States, when he died in 1877. Their wealth was so profound it could still endow a man’s life generations later: Alfred Vanderbilt’s inheritances had included more than $10 million, a horse farm, and a racing stable. It wasn’t as much as the reported $40 million his cousin and Long Island neighbor John Hay “Jock” Whitney had inherited (“I wish I had his money,” Vanderbilt would later sigh, famously, about Whitney), but it was enough to ensure that Vanderbilt could do as he pleased in life.

  An independent thinker who had excelled as a racetrack operator in his twenties, he could have produced Broadway shows, directed a business conglomerate, or run for office—typical Vanderbilt endeavors—and whatever he chose, he surely would have flourished. But he wanted horse racing. Immersed in the sport since childhood, he had already lived a full, varied racing life. He had bred expensive horses, operated a top racing stable, even mucked a few stalls. He had been in charge of the daily operation of two tracks, owned a majority interest of stock in one, served as president of the Thoroughbred Racing Associations, and experienced racing’s highest honor, election to the Jockey Club, the sport’s august ruling body, at age twenty-seven. As if all that weren’t enough, he had hosted CBS’s TV broadcast of several major races, including the 1947 Belmont Stakes, and, legend had it, ghostwritten his share of newspaper columns after one of his friends in the racing press had passed out at the typewriter after a long day at the bar.

  The suggestion that he was too aristocratic for the backstretch would have dismayed him. He had unceasing respect for racing’s foot soldiers and their ritualistic tasks that underwrote his sport. He was a horseman himself, capable, knowledgeable, and instinctive; he had even overseen his horses’ training at times before hiring Bill Winfrey to run his stable in 1949.

  Lanky and pallid, Vanderbilt radiated the aura of a debonair schoolboy with impish gaps in his front teeth, dark hair that fell across his forehead in a boyish widow’s peak, and tailored suits that drooped on his thin frame. He joked about his looks, but he had dated starlets such as Ginger Rogers before marrying, and Jeanne, as a schoolgirl, had pinned up pictures of him in her room when friends were pinning up pictures of Cary Grant.

  “It was common to say he was our unofficial crown prince,” said theater producer-director Harold Prince, who met Vanderbilt in the early 1950s and became a close friend. “He was so glamorous, so attractive. Women surely liked him, but so did men. And he was worth liking. He was easy and relaxed and very smart and very inquisitive, very independent. When I first met him, I thought, ‘This is the crown prince who I used to see pictures of at the Stork Club with Ginger Rogers and other lovely ladies,’ and you saw his fedora and you saw how he looked, and it was almost Fred Astaire. He wasn’t really like Astaire, but there was a kind of imperial grace about him.”

  Among the wealthy men who invested in racing, only Vanderbilt came to the barn every morning, monitoring his horses and conversing with the grooms and jockeys, dropping the impeccable English he had learned at St. Paul’s and Yale for the rugged patois of the track. “I just can’t do that,” said Jock Whitney, who co-owned Greentree, another top stable, with his sister. The ease came naturally to Vanderbilt. For all his advantages, he had a knack for relating to—and looking out for—the common man. His friend Oscar Levant, the piano-playing wit, once told a reporter that Vanderbilt related better to the poor than to the wealthy because nannies and nurses had raised him.

  “As privileged as he was, and as much as he lived in luxury, he didn’t give a damn about that,” recalled Clyde Roche, Vanderbilt’s oldest lifelong friend. “He was totally indifferent to that sort of thing, perfectly comfortable in any setting. He didn’t want to be driven anywhere. One time I had aspirations to write something, and he said, ‘We’ll go for a long drive and talk it out.’ We drove from Long Island all the way up to the White Mountains in New England, stayed overnight at some hotel, and then Alfred said, ‘Well, let’s go home now,’ and we drove back. The trip was made solely for the purpose of him getting to drive.”

  Racing was far from his only interest. He loved opera, theater, music, and books. His close friends included George Abbott, the legendary theater director and producer known as Mr. Broadway, and Levant, an eccentric who virtually lived at Broadhollow. A nimble pianist himself, Vanderbilt owned a massive record collection and was deemed as knowledgeable about music as a professional. He and Levant could spend hours scouring Lower Manhattan’s used record shops for dusty gems. “Alfred had a wonderful ear,” Roche said. “Oscar and his friends thought the song ‘You Are From Another World’ would be the biggest hit, but Alfred listened to it once and said no, and he was right.”

  His more serious pursuits included raising money for veterans around the world and publishing a popular magazine for school-age readers. He also published a series of annual books on racing. Although he had no interest in riding horses or touring his barns with carrots, intent on making equine friends, he was an avid outdoorsman who loved to fish, sail, play tennis, and fly planes. “He probably would say, looking back, that he should have had a business or an occupation, but I don’t know of anyone who had more fun as he went through life,” his son Alfred Vanderbilt III said.

  His manner was reserved, and even cautious around strangers. “I hesitate to use the word ‘distance,’ but you didn’t encroach,” Prince said. “He was very friendly, very informal, there were lots of laughs, lots of everything, but there was a polite distance. It was part of his upbringing.” He had reason to be concerned. In 1951, a fifteen-year-old boy saw his picture in the paper and sent him a note threatening to kill him if he didn’t hand over $10,000; police arrested the boy with a toy gun at the scheduled “drop-off.”

  “His name was an iconic name, and I think it’s only natural that you develop some defenses,” Alfred Vanderbilt III said. “He would get letters from people asking for money and help doing this and that. One time he got a letter addressed to ‘Alfred Vanderbilt, United States of America.’ That really tickled him.”

  Born to prominence, he was famous for who he was, like members of Britain’s royal family or, later, the Kennedy children. The New Yorker, Time magazine, and the Saturday Evening Post had profiled him, intrigued by racing’s wealthy boy wonder as he matured into adulthood as a font of courtly contradictions: privileged but unspoiled, reserved in public but offhand around the track, a racing man who never drank and seldom gambled. Joe Palmer had titled his 1952 study “The Riddle of Alfred Vanderbilt,” astutely writing that Vanderbilt let you know him only as well as he wanted you to know him.

  Only those who knew him best knew of his most distinguishing characteristic: a devilish dry wit. He had once handed a sandwich, flashlight, and wrist compass to Ted Atkinson before the jockey rode a Vanderbilt-owned long shot in the Saratoga Cup. “It may be dark before you get back,” Vanderbilt explained. Many of his horses’ names had arch explanations or featured a wry twist on the names of the si
re and dam. When he married Jeanne, who was from a prominent family but Irish Catholic, he was dropped from the Social Register, the vanguard of old-school society. He responded by naming a colt Social Outcast. The sire’s name? Shut Out.

  To Vanderbilt, naming horses was a keen test of mental powers, and in time, he would be recognized as perhaps the best there ever was. His greatest hits included Splitting Headache (sired by a stallion named The Axe out of a mare named Top o’ The Morning), Ogle (by Oh Say out of Low Cut), and Dirty Old Man (by Tom Fool out of Last Leg). The name “Native Dancer” came from the caption of a picture he had taken of dancers in New Guinea, where he served in the navy during World War II. The names of the horse’s sire and dam, Polynesian and Geisha, had him thinking of the South Pacific.

  As broad as his interests were, racing was the only constant in his life, the common denominator connecting his days. “The track was what he loved the most; he resisted making a total commitment to anything else,” Roche said. That passion, like his wealth, was inherited, passed down on both sides of his family. Vanderbilts had been linked with horses going back to the Commodore’s days, and the Emersons—his grandfather, Isaac, and his mother, Margaret—had provided him with the tools of the trade: a horse farm and the origins of a racing stable.

  His father, Alfred Vanderbilt Sr., was the wealthiest man in America at the turn of the century. Lean and graceful, he was a spectacular horseman, “one of the most prominent in America,” according to the New York Times in 1911. He bred top horses at his farm in Newport, Rhode Island, and won blue ribbons at important horse shows in America and England, showcasing a team of greys. His specialty was coaching, a once-popular sport in which horse teams covered long distances led by whip-toting drivers in carriages. It was losing its public as automobiles clogged the roads, but Alfred Sr. did his best to keep it alive. He drove around New York in his red and white coach, set a land-speed record on the New York-to-Philadelphia route in 1901, then shipped seventy horses to England and set another record traveling from London to Brighton as thousands of cheering Britons lined the streets.