Native Dancer

by John Eisenberg

  The brief marriage did help Vanderbilt pull off his greatest achievement at Pimlico. The best horses of 1938 were Seabiscuit, by then a rags-to-riches hero, and War Admiral, winner of the Triple Crown the year before. Tracks across the country were competing to hold a match race between the two, and Vanderbilt cleverly worked his way into the mix. Assured of Howard’s favor, having married into the family, he sweet-talked War Admiral’s owner, Sam Riddle, suggesting that War Admiral could beat Seabiscuit. Ultimately, he secured the race with a $15,000 offer, far less than other tracks such as Belmont had been offering. Seabiscuit defeated War Admiral before 40,000 fans at Pimlico and a radio audience estimated at 40 million.

  Pimlico was bathed in glory, and when Joseph Widener retired as president of Belmont in 1939, Belmont’s principal stockholder, C. V. Whitney, hired Vanderbilt to revitalize the prestigious New York track in the same manner. Many had thought Widener’s nephew, George Widener, another industry leader, would get the job, but Whitney was himself a bit of a maverick, and Vanderbilt was hired. Given a mandate to make Belmont more attractive to the general public instead of just to bettors and the upper crust, Vanderbilt performed his magic with purse sizes, new races, and more standing room, and Belmont flourished.

  When World War II broke out, Vanderbilt was stirred by a distant voice. “The idea of meeting your obligations in life came to him from what he knew about his father giving up his life jacket to a woman on the Lusitania; I think Alfred regarded that as the standard of conduct,” Clyde Roche recalled. The navy tried to give him a cushy recruiting job, but he joined the PT-boat service and led more than three dozen patrols in New Guinea in 1943 and 1944.

  “They’d take the boats along the coastline at night, turn down the engine, and float with the current in the dark until they heard the Japanese talking, at which point they’d fire, start the engine, and get out of there,” Roche said. “When I asked Alfred later if they destroyed a lot of Japanese installations, he said, in typical fashion, ‘Who knows? But if we didn’t, we wasted a lot of ammo.’ ”

  His wartime experience was hardly typical. “He used to say he was the only guy in the army who had Ginger Rogers’s home phone number,” Alfred Vanderbilt III said. When Dan Topping and Del Webb were negotiating to buy baseball’s New York Yankees in 1944, they reached Vanderbilt by phone in the South Pacific and asked if he wanted to join their group. “You know, I’m kind of busy,” Vanderbilt replied.

  When a Japanese pilot caught his boat in the open and began firing one afternoon, Vanderbilt, alternately driving and firing back, made a series of sharp turns to keep from getting hit and finally blasted the Japanese plane. He earned a Silver Star for bravery and later downplayed the honor, claiming it was awarded mostly because his squadron leader thought medals were good for morale. “He insisted that what he’d done wasn’t a big deal, but it was,” Roche said.

  His time on the front lines ended when he developed a fungus growth in his foot in 1944 and was sent to the hospital for a month. Certified as unfit for tropical duty, he spent six months on a cruiser in the Aleutians and was studying at a combat intelligence school in Honolulu when the war ended. He came home at age thirty-three to find he no longer had a job. Belmont had given the job of running the track to George Widener, and Widener never gave it back; the racing world would always suspect that Belmont’s board of directors was more comfortable with Widener’s traditional vision than with the maverick Vanderbilt’s. Although Vanderbilt always joked that he should sue to get his job back under the terms of the G.I. Bill, he was hurt.

  More somber and contemplative after the war, he told Joe Palmer he wouldn’t make any decisions for six months, then made a major one, marrying for the second time in 1946. Jeanne Murray had been a model and actress—she was one of the nurses in the movie Mr. Roberts—and now worked in the publicity office of the Stork Club, the popular nightclub. She had long harbored a crush on Vanderbilt from seeing him in newsreels and in the newspapers, and then her dream came true. “I was in the Stork Club one night and a man came over and said, Alfred Vanderbilt is here and would like to meet you,’ ” Jeanne recalled. “He took me to see On the Town on one of our first dates. We were married three months later.”

  They started a family—Heidi was born in 1948, Alfred III a year later—and moved to Broadhollow, a starry couple operating at the epicenter of society. “They were both bright and loved getting together with people and being around people,” Alfred Vanderbilt III said. “He had this innate sense of knowing how to make sure that his horses were talked about and he was talked about, and here was this woman who knew exactly all of the same stuff. She wasn’t so interested in horses, but she loved the celebrity and moved in it well. They had a Jack and Jackie thing going before the Kennedys, that ‘couple charisma.’ ”

  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.

  FOUR

  It 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 seve
n 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.