Native Dancer

by John Eisenberg

  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.

  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.

&nbs
p; 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.”

  EIGHT

  The 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.