Native Dancer

by John Eisenberg

  “He was the Babe Ruth of our game,” recalled longtime Daily Racing Form columnist Joe Hirsch, a close friend. “There were always people around him. I said when he died [in 1996] that it was the first time he’d ever been alone. He was just a great people person.”

  “I conducted a poll in 1955 at Garden State Park: I asked fans if they could name the horse that had won the Triple Crown in 1948,” TV executive Tommy Roberts recalled. “Only about 20 percent knew it was Citation. This was just seven years later. They didn’t know Citation. But they all knew Eddie Arcaro.”

  Even his dark moments were imbued with a certain allure. In 1942, before the film patrol was popular, he had intentionally smashed his horse into one ridden by a rival whose horse had hit his in a prior race. The rival flew into the infield and Arcaro was suspended indefinitely after admitting to stewards he was “trying to kill the s.o.b.” It was an embarrassing blemish on his record, but to many fans, merely indicative of the passion that made him such a great jockey.

  He had ridden only occasionally for Vanderbilt over the years, seldom on the stable’s top horses. Vanderbilt would surely have used him more, but poor timing had interfered: Vanderbilt’s stable hadn’t been strong enough during and right after the war for Arcaro to commit to it under a contract arrangement, and Arcaro was heavily booked when Vanderbilt’s stable made its comeback starting in the late 1940s. Vanderbilt had ended up putting Guerin under contract after the young Cajun, whom Arcaro had mentored, rode Bed o’ Roses and Next Move to so many big wins. Thus, although Arcaro, America’s jockey, was a perfect fit for the Dancer, Guerin had the mount.

  Did Arcaro want the mount on the Dancer? “I’m sure; and I’m also sure Eddie tried to submarine Guerin a few times,” Joe Hirsch said. But as the Derby neared, Arcaro was mostly upset that fans and experts were already comparing the Grey Ghost to racing’s greatest champions, even though the Dancer had only made ten starts. Comparisons to Citation particularly annoyed Arcaro, who had ridden Citation to his greatest triumphs and believed the Calumet star was a horse without peer.

  Out of loyalty to Citation, Arcaro had subtly started taking shots at the Dancer. It had started during the previous fall, after the Dancer had rallied to beat Arcaro and Tahitian King in the Anticipation Stakes, a tune-up for the Futurity. Guerin told reporters the Dancer was “just playing” when he trailed and a victory had always been assured. Irritated, Arcaro lashed out at Guerin after the Futurity, in which Tahitian King came close to pulling off the upset.

  “You’re not going to tell me your horse was ‘just playing’ this time, are you?” Arcaro snapped within earshot of reporters.

  “Oh, no, that’s a real good colt you were on, Eddie,” replied Guerin, embarrassed at having to defend himself when he had just been trying to compliment the Dancer after the Anticipation.

  Arcaro was no fool. He knew the Dancer was special. But he felt it was too soon to shower such praise on a colt who had never raced outside of New York and, in his opinion, had merely defeated the same inferior East Coast competition over and over, mostly in races lacking early pace. The Master had serious doubts about how the Grey Ghost would respond in the Derby when confronted for the first time with speedy front-runners such as Correspondent.

  For now, though, he would wear Vanderbilt’s silks in the Wood Memorial, temporarily teamed with Guerin and the Dancer. His chances of success were slim. Social Outcast was a Maryland-bred chestnut who had romped with the Dancer as a youngster at Sagamore Farm and, like the Dancer, was a grandson of Discovery, but the comparisons stopped there. Social Outcast had earned just $29,100 as a two-year-old, winning only maiden and allowance races, and had yet to win in six starts as a three-year-old. But he had finished second in the Remsen Handicap as a two-year-old and recently run well behind Royal Bay Gem in the Chesapeake Stakes, losing a three-way photo finish for second. He was improving.

  Conspiracy theorists believed that Winfrey and Vanderbilt were running Social Outcast in the Wood and bringing in Arcaro just to ensure a faster early pace and prep the Dancer for the Derby. In reality, Social Outcast wasn’t comfortable as a front-runner, preferring to come from off the pace, like the Dancer. Winfrey and Vanderbilt were running him because they were still trying to gauge his Derby potential.

  The Wood had been run at Jamaica since 1925, evolving into the East’s top race for likely Derby contenders. Five horses other than the Dancer and Social Outcast were entered this year, with the race billed as the richest for three-year-olds ever run in New York, its purse totaling $123,750. It was certain to provide a better test for the Dancer than the Gotham, even though Laffango was out Invigorator and Tahitian King were in, as was a long shot named Jamie K.

  In the week between the Gotham and the Wood, run on successive Saturdays, the Dancer worked once, on Tuesday, covering a half mile on Belmont’s training track and then a mile in 1:402/5, with the last quarter in twenty-seven seconds, on the main track. It was an average work, and by Friday, according to Evan Shipman’s column in the Morning Telegraph, many Belmont horsemen were expecting the Grey Ghost to lose for the first time the next day.

  Shipman wrote, “The public has put its faith in Native Dancer. The aura of invincibility sheds a golden glow on him, and the crowd takes a warm and commendable delight in frank hero worship. [The] horsemen are reacting strongly to this uncritical admiration, insisting not only that the Dancer can be beaten, but that he will be beaten in the Wood. Their attempt to maintain a cool detachment in the face of the adulation inspired by the Dancer’s record inclines these critics, we believe, to prejudice. We suspect that envy and a human tendency toward iconoclasm have played a part in their attitude.”

  Vanderbilt also scoffed at the critics, using his trademark wit to suggest that, indeed, they were just jealous. “The main trouble with Native Dancer is the same thing that used to be the matter with Citation—he goes back to the wrong barn,” Vanderbilt said. Someone else’s barn, in other words.

  Saturday’s weather was vastly improved from that of the week before. Sunshine and warm temperatures lured more than 40,000 fans to Jamaica. NBC was back for another national TV broadcast, with Ca-posella calling the race and Renick handling the interviews. The atmosphere in the paddock wasn’t as electric as before the Gotham, but with the Derby now just a week away, the anticipation was still palpable. Six Wood winners, including Gallant Fox and Count Fleet, had gone on to win at Churchill Downs. Here, perhaps, was the best of them all.

  The entry of the Dancer and Social Outcast went to the post as a 1–10 favorite, the teaming of an unbeaten colt and Arcaro proving irresistible to bettors. Of the $448,689 wagered on the race, $362,620 was bet on the entry. Invigorator was the second choice at 6-1, followed by Tahitian King at 15-1 and Jamie K at 16-1. Arcaro had given up the mount on Tahitian King even though the colt was out of a mare named after Arcaro’s daughter. Despite the sentimental attachment, the Master had become frustrated with Tahitian King’s lack of progress. Hedley Woodhouse would ride Tahitian King in the Wood, and he was expected to set the early pace.

  Sure enough, Woodhouse took the lead once the starting gate opened and held it through the first turn and up the backstretch, setting the dawdling pace the Dancer was accustomed to: a quarter mile in 24⅘ seconds, a half in 50. Guerin, forced to place the eager Dancer closer to the front than usual, was running second, ahead of Invigorator. Social Outcast was near the rear.

  Heading into the second turn, Invigorator, Native Dancer, and Tahitian King were virtually even. They all began to run. Guerin took out his whip and struck the Dancer once—it was just the third time in the Dancer’s eleven races that Guerin had used the whip—and the Dancer surged into the lead, opening up three lengths on Tahitian King as they turned for home.

  He was a fearsome sight coming through the stretch, his powerful body pushed to its limit. After meandering to the finish line in the Gotham, he almost resembled a greyhound at full speed now, kicking so hard that you could draw a horizontal straig
ht line from his airborne back feet to the tips of his forelegs. With the crowd roaring its appreciation, he reached the finish line four and a half lengths ahead of Tahitian King. Invigorator was far back in third, Social Outcast a distant fourth. “Even those customers who had bet against him were viewing the grey colt with admiration,” James Roach wrote in the New York Times.

  Not even his persistent skeptics could find fault in this performance. After the slow start, the Grey Ghost had covered the final half mile in 47⅕ seconds, a rousing finish that drew him within a second of the track record for nine furlongs, held by an older horse who had carried nine fewer pounds. If the Gotham had raised doubts about the Dancer, the Wood had quelled them.

  “I don’t know if any horse is going to beat Native Dancer [in the Derby], but the ones around here don’t have a chance,” said Arcaro, confirming that he would ride Correspondent in Louisville.

  Swept up in the moment, Guerin repeated the comment that had irked Arcaro months earlier. “He was just playing out there,” the jockey said of the Dancer. “I could have gone to the lead earlier, but I decided to wait.” Why, then, did he use the whip? “I hit him just once to see what he would do, and he responded,” Guerin said.

  Standing in the winner’s enclosure, in the shadow of the grandstand, the Dancer was a portrait of power and glory. He had won eleven races without a defeat and earned $341,995, each a record for a horse heading into the Kentucky Derby. A TV audience numbering in the millions had just watched him win the Wood with ease. His moment to make history was at hand.

  There were horses waiting in Kentucky to take him on. Royal Bay Gem, the little black colt, was all heart. Straight Face, the Green-

  tree gelding, had a champion’s pedigree. The speedy Correspondent, with Arcaro directing him, would pose a sterner challenge than the Dancer had ever faced. But the Dancer was on another plane, seemingly invincible, his forceful finishing kick yet to encounter a wall it couldn’t knock down. Alben Barkley, the Kentucky lawyer who had served as Harry Truman’s vice president, had once said that “one of the joys of man is to see a real thoroughbred horse perform,” and after this performance, seen by millions on TV, there was little doubt that the Dancer had a firm hold on the country’s hearts. Later that week in Queens, not far from Jamaica, a construction worker would remove $13,000 from his widowed mother’s safe-deposit box without her knowledge, buy a car, drive to Churchill Downs, and bet everything on the Dancer to win the Derby, vividly illustrating the difference between the Dancer and his likely Derby rivals. The others were capable, talented, even dangerous in some cases. But the Grey Ghost was a horse who could make you lose your mind.

  ELEVEN

  As stable hands on Churchill Downs’s backside watched NBC’s telecast of Native Dancer’s victory in the Wood Memorial, an obscure brown colt rested in his stall in Barn 12. If the famous undefeated Dancer was at one end of the Derby spectrum one week before the race, the colt, named Dark Star, was at the other end: largely unknown, perhaps not even worthy of running in the Derby. The $87,000 the Dancer had earned in 110 seconds in winning the Wood was almost three times as much as Dark Star had earned in his entire career.

  The owners and trainers of horses in the Derby mix still had four days to decide whether to enter, and Dark Star’s trainer, Eddie Hayward, and his owner, Harry Guggenheim, were still trying to make up their minds. Dark Star had shown flashes of ability at times in his nine-race career but had finished last in a thirteen-horse field in the Champagne Stakes the previous autumn and out of the money in the Florida Derby in March, raising doubts about his capacity for handling top competition.

  Hayward, a fiftyish Canadian-born trainer who had never run a horse in the Derby, had decided to give Dark Star one last chance to prove himself—in the Derby Trial, the one-mile event run at Churchill Downs on the Tuesday before the Derby. If Dark Star ran well in the Trial, he would be entered in the Derby; the year before,

  Hill Gail had won the Trial and come back later in the week to win the Derby, so it was a reasonable plan. On the other hand, if Dark Star ran poorly in the Trial, as Cousin had the year before, he wouldn’t go in the Derby.

  Dark Star’s sire, Royal Gem II, was an Australian horse who had competed Down Under from 1944 to 1949, winning twenty-two races at every distance from five furlongs to a mile and a half. His reputation spread to America, and Warner Jones, the eminent Kentucky breeder, put together a syndicate that bought the horse for a sum estimated at $150,000. Royal Gem II sailed for America on a Swedish vessel, accompanied by his trainer. Twenty-five days later, Warner Jones met them in port in San Francisco and transported them to Jones’s Hermitage Farm in Skylight, Kentucky, where Royal Gem II started his stud career.

  One of the first mares he was bred to was Isolde, a nine-year-old who had won some allowance races and competed until age six, and had yet to produce a stakes winner. She gave birth to a foal on Jones’s farm on April 4, 1950, a week after Native Dancer was foaled some sixty miles away at Dan W. Scott’s farm. Jones raised the baby along with some others from Royal Gem II’s first crop, then put them up for sale as yearlings. Guggenheim, a prominent philanthropist from one of America’s wealthiest families, bought Isolde’s son for $6,500, picking out the horse himself. Royal Bay Gem, now one of the most prominent three-year-olds in the Derby picture, was also sold out of the crop.

  Harriet Jones, Warner’s wife, later told Cincinnati Times-Star columnist Douglas Allen that there were two brown yearlings to choose from in the sale, and Guggenheim had “picked out one” and “picked up the other,” ending up with the wrong horse. “When we discovered [the mistake],” she told Allen, “we offered to let him switch, but he said, ‘Never mind, I’ve got this one now and I kind of like him.’ ” Guggenheim later denied the story.

  Like Alfred Vanderbilt, Guggenheim was descended from the cream of America’s Gilded Age. His grandfather Meyer Guggenheim was a Jewish industrialist who immigrated from Switzerland to Philadelphia to escape anti-Semitism in 1848, and with the help of his sons, developed a worldwide empire of mining and smelting interests that was generating immense wealth by the turn of the century. Harry, born in 1890, fought as a naval aviator in World War I and fell in love with air travel. By 1950, he had served as the American ambassador to Cuba, bankrolled rocketry pioneer Robert Goddard’s early experiments, founded Newsday, a Long Island newspaper, with his wife, and established a foundation that funded aviation research and helped the American airline industry get off the ground.

  At age sixty-two in 1953, Guggenheim was friendly with Vanderbilt, traveled in the same social circle, and shared interests, but he was closer to Vanderbilt’s mother, Margaret Emerson, his Long Island neighbor. Every year, he visited Margaret at Sagamore Lodge in the Adirondack Mountains, where she brought together figures from politics, business, and the arts. Signing the camp’s guest register on August 6, 1950, Guggenheim wrote, “Even these grim times look better with Margaret at Sagamore.”

  Guggenheim had owned, bred, and raced horses since 1934. He started with six yearlings, calling his outfit the Falaise Stable, then changed the name to Cain Hoy Stable after his 27,000-acre Cain Hoy Plantation in North Carolina. Over the years, he had invested neither as much time nor as much money in racing as Vanderbilt; he didn’t own a horse farm, preferring just to board his mares at Claiborne Farm in Kentucky. Now, though, with his business demands ebbing in the 1950s, he was becoming more involved in racing. The Jockey Club had made him a member and assigned him to a task force charged with improving the conditions at New York’s overcrowded tracks. And his stable was becoming more prominent. Cain Hoy had produced the Kentucky Derby favorite in 1951, a colt named Battle Morn who ran sixth, disappointing Guggenheim but whetting his appetite.

  Moody Jolley, a hard-edged, taciturn Tennessean, had trained Battle Morn and was still working for Cain Hoy when Dark Star turned two and began racing in 1952. The colt broke his maiden in February and then won the Hialeah Juvenile Stakes, a three-furlong race
with nineteen entrants, finishing two lengths in front of the pack and earning almost double his purchase price. Guggenheim was pleased at the success of a horse he had selected himself.

  After finishing third in Belmont’s Juvenile Stakes in his next start, Dark Star developed osselets and had his ankles fired, like the Dancer, and was sidelined for four months. Returning in September, he won an allowance race on the Widener Straight Course, then finished a distant third to Native Dancer in the Futurity. A week later, he all but quit in the Champagne in a miserable performance. At the end of the year, twenty-two two-year-olds were ranked ahead of him on the Experimental Free Handicap.

  Guggenheim, who had been known to change trainers, parted ways with Jolley in November. Cain Hoy’s new trainer was Hayward, a former jockey who had conditioned horses since the late 1920s. Guggenheim’s expectations were high, perhaps unreasonably, when he turned Dark Star over to Hayward with a record of three wins in six starts and earnings of $24,087. “Now train the horse and win the Derby,” Guggenheim reportedly said.

  Hayward had moved slowly. Dark Star began his three-year-old season with a victory in a seven-furlong allowance race at Hialeah in February, then finished out of the money in the Florida Derby and second behind Correspondent in an allowance race at Keeneland. That was his most recent start. With the Derby looming, Dark Star had never won any race longer than seven furlongs and had never won a stakes race longer than three furlongs. That was hardly a Derby rÉsumÉ.

  Hayward had not given up, though. The colt had run well in finishing second to Correspondent at Keeneland, and Hayward was hopeful of seeing the performance repeated or bettered in the Trial. The Keeneland race had been Dark Star’s first with Henry Moreno, a twenty-four-year-old California-based jockey whose contract Cain Hoy had just purchased. Maybe the horse and jockey were a good mix.