Pappyland

by Wright Thompson

  The night before the Oaks, Julian took a bunch of his whiskey to a charity event in Lexington. The longer we spent together the more I saw him quietly using his supply of Pappy to help people. The charity sold three 10-year-old bottles, three 12s, two 15s, along with a 20, a 23, and one of the truly impossible to find 25-year-old decanters.

  “How much all together?” I asked.

  He said, “$178,000.”

  “Who bought it?”

  “A car dealership guy in Lexington.”

  “Who gets the money?”

  “Lexington Cancer Foundation.”

  We were walking through the grandstand toward the concession concourse. People stumbled around us all fucked up. I mean, shitrocked. The surest way to tell the people who had arrived here for an anachronistic weekend versus those who came every year was to look around and see who could hold their booze. Because everyone was drinking like they needed to forget some horrible thing they’d done. Some people rolled with it, and others . . . well, at that moment, I caught a falling drunk girl.

  “Whoa!” Julian said, laughing. “Some of these people aren’t going to make it through the day.”

  4

  WE GOT TO KNOW EACH OTHER. I worked even on the first day to sort out what was authentically Julian and what I was projecting onto him. At the start, I saw him most clearly as the gatekeeper to a great bourbon whose roots give it a sense of permanence in an industry given over to fads and to marketing sold as tradition. He was careful never to speak ill in public of other whiskey makers but I had no such reservations. Julian never oversold his story to me, like, say, the folks who claim a family recipe for whiskey they buy in bulk from someone else. It’s a line that was hard to hold and ever harder to see, especially for the customers, but one Julian walked with care.

  That night after the races, he and I had a plan to drive out to a party at his family’s old distillery. It’s now home to Bulleit. Tommy Bulleit uses the old office that belonged to Julian’s father and grandfather.

  I wanted to go for the same reasons Julian did not.

  He’s an outwardly confident guy who still carries inside him a scar. He doesn’t know Tommy Bulleit, who might be a lovely guy. But the idea of Tommy Bulleit’s using the distillery the Van Winkle family built leaves Julian feeling hurt and angry. If he’s being honest, he is worried that the farther his family gets from that distillery, the more likely the same phoniness is to infect them, too. Maybe that’s why Julian tells everyone he meets that he doesn’t make whiskey while the Bulleit folks talk about their old family recipe, which was once made for them by a competitor that was owned by a Japanese beer company, which was owned by the same Japanese conglomerate that long ago made the Zero fighter airplane. The Zero killed a great many Americans in the Pacific and probably tried to kill Julian’s father. All of that is to say that enemies can become friends—my wife’s grandfather invited his German guards to their POW camp reunions—and the world can evolve and shrink, but for certain kinds of men, like my own grandfather who refused to buy Japanese cars, there always remains a scar that never goes away. For Julian, physical proximity to the Stitzel-Weller distillery is that kind of scar.

  His modesty is a way to protect himself and his progeny against decadence and decline. He will not praise himself, but luckily other people in the bourbon world will do it for him. His connoisseurship is rooted in his lifetime of tasting bourbon, which would make him at the top of his profession if that were his only skill. It isn’t. There’s something more intentional and personal at work when he sits down to curate the barrels that eventually become Pappy Van Winkle. He is not finding a technically perfect taste, which doesn’t exist, or trying to use his sophisticated palate to put out a product that the focus groups and market research tell him will stun the critics and wow the customer. He is trying to sell a whiskey that tastes like the Stitzel-Weller that exists mostly now in his mind. He never lost that taste, even if his family lost the facility that made it.

  That night at Stitzel-Weller, the new owners, international conglomerate Diageo, were launching a high-end bourbon with a big fancy dinner, cohosted by the Southern lifestyle magazine Garden & Gun. “Stitzel-Weller, baby,” Julian said again, a bit more wistfully this time. “I hope I know the guy at the guardhouse. It’d be fun to see him. He worked for my dad. . . . It was like 1972, he was twentysomething. I actually worked with him as a teenager. He’s been there forever. It’ll be a crazy night.”

  “I just want to watch your face,” I told him.

  He smiled. “It will be tough for me to keep my mouth shut,” he said.

  5

  KENTUCKY IS AT THE CENTER of the Van Winkle family mythology, and in the days before I met Julian at Churchill Downs, I drove around the horse farms and pastures east of Louisville. It’s impossible to separate Julian from his home state. It’s no coincidence that bourbon and thoroughbred racehorses come from the same place because both are made or broken long before anyone ever sees them. I rolled down the windows and let the big engine on my car roar and growl as I made the kind of aimless country laps that defined my high school summer days.

  Exploring this part of Kentucky is one of my favorite drives in the world, following State Highway 1967 and Iron Works Pike, turning on narrow lanes built alongside short stone walls. Above me stretched a canopy of green leaves. The sun coming through the branches landed on the blacktop in dappled patches of light. My purpose wasn’t completely aimless though. I’d driven here, over hill and dale, with a mission: to find the ruins of an old mansion, hidden from the road by pastures and oaks, which I’ve had described to me in such fanciful terms that I don’t fully believe anything that dramatic could really be standing. A local horse lover told me which unmarked iron gate to approach, and when my car got close, the gate opened. The land is now owned by one of those powerful families who’ve long come and gone from the world of thoroughbred racing. This one made its money in the life insurance game. I’m a middle-aged man with elevated liver enzymes and high cholesterol, so I’ve had to consider dying as a real thing, and I find my immediate reaction is this strange desire to leave behind monuments to myself, whether they come in the form of a book about bourbon or in letters to friends and family. The monuments we erect—shouting into the wind that we were once alive and had hopes and dreams—often end up becoming a shrine to the fallacy and futility of that desire itself.

  A man in a pickup truck eyed me suspiciously. The road cuts through manicured pastures and rises slightly, headed toward the interior of the property. Once upon a time, this land belonged to a business partner of the Hearst family, who made his millions during one of the many California gold rushes. As an old man, he built a mansion for a new bride, nearly fifty years his junior, and for twelve years, it hosted the kind of parties that will make the papers this week in Louisville; grand affairs, the mansion glowing like an ocean liner. He named it Green Hills after the view. Twelve years later, he died without a will and the land went to auction to be split into pieces. The guy who bought this part couldn’t pay the stiff taxes on a mansion he couldn’t afford to keep in the first place. So he tore it down. Most of it, that is.

  I’m reminded of a drive through Tuscany with my friend Fred Marconi, who had picked me up at a train station so we could go watch Siena play Florence in soccer. Rows of trees lined the road, pine and cypress. Castle keeps rose from the hills. He drove past the exit of the stadium. There was a place he wanted to show me first.

  “Our Little Big Horn,” he said. Marconi’s family has lived in Siena for at least five hundred years—the paper trail ran out before relatives did—and he is proud of his history. This wasn’t some old man talking. He was a forty-two-year-old graffiti artist who plays bass in a rock band. He’s got a Ramones tattoo. He baptized his three-year-old son on the 750th anniversary of the battle that took place on the peaceful field he was driving me to see. Changing lanes, he swerved in and out of game-day
traffic, telling the story.

  “This was one of the biggest battles in the Middle Ages,” he said. “It was September fourth, 1260. Dante talked about this battle in The Divine Comedy and said it was a terrible day. The Sienese turned the Arbia River into a red river of blood. We actually exterminated the Florentine army.”

  After the battle, the city-state of Siena flourished. Work started on a cathedral, which would be the biggest in the world. Some businessmen founded a bank. The reign lasted almost three hundred years, then the Florentine army got its revenge, taking the town. The cathedral remains unfinished.

  6

  UP TO THE RIGHT, I saw a flash of white through the trees.

  Then it came into view, like something on Marconi’s Tuscan hilltop, the strangest thing: four Corinthian columns and the wide marble and stone entrance stairs, the only part of Green Hills that remains. It was stranded out here like Ozymandias, except instead of sand stretching to oblivion, it was green Kentucky bluegrass. I sat on the steps and let the silence swallow me as I tried to imagine this place lit on a Derby weekend and the sound of the band flowing from the house, filtering out into the night. Big flowing dresses and gentlemen in imported shirts and ribbon ties, and the underside of that world, too. I liked how I felt out by these columns and what the view made me consider, and how those ideas fit so cleanly into the way I was thinking about Pappy and the Van Winkles, and about me and my own family, too. These ruins are shocking and yet clarifying. America is such a young country. We haven’t been through nearly the national life cycles of so many nations around the world. Other places have grown accustomed, even numb, to the way cultures rise and fall and then try to pick themselves back up again. Horse racing, like bourbon, makes these big ideas small enough to see. I can close my eyes and hear the parties. Imagine making a drive out here and seeing the lanterns hanging from the trees, and the house glowing in the distance, the sound of music audible first, then the faint murmur of dozens of conversations, and finally the liquid treble of clinking champagne flutes and double old-fashioned crystal. When I open my eyes, the party stops. I am here and the air is cold and there are four lonely columns where an entire world once stood—a world that, in the decadence and majesty of its apogee, must have seemed invincible.

  * * *

  • • •

  EVERYWHERE AROUND THIS HILLTOP were warnings to the owners and trainers in Louisville this weekend who imagine they are making history. Domino, a famous stallion, was buried in a grave with a worn marker just on the side of the road. Domino only produced nineteen foals yet is in the pedigree of the greatest horses that ever lived: Secretariat, Seattle Slew, Affirmed, Assault, Bold Ruler, Whirlaway, War Admiral, Gallant Fox, Omaha, Native Dancer, American Pharoah. Of the thirteen horses to win the Triple Crown, nine have Domino in their family tree. Now he was forgotten on the side of a road.

  7

  I CHECKED MY MAP and pulled into one of the many smaller farms cut out of what used to be the grand Elmendorf Farm, where Green Hills glowed at night. In a small white office, a woman sat behind a small desk, the front door open to catch the breeze. I breathed in the sweet smell of freshly cut grass. Across from the office is the old Elmendorf cemetery. Fair Play and Mahubah, parents of the famed Man o’ War, were buried beneath a statue.

  Man o’ War himself lived out his days nearby on Mt. Brilliant Farm. When Greg Goodman, heir to a Houston air-conditioning fortune, bought Mt. Brilliant, he found a collapsing barn on the property. Clearly visible on one of the stall doors, bleached by the sun, was the name of its former resident: Man o’ War. He could not believe what he’d found, something not even his real estate agent had known. He owned the great champion’s stallion barn! “It still makes the hair on my neck stand up,” Goodman said. “It’s Mount Vernon. . . . George Washington slept here.”

  The hidden history of Kentucky is everywhere, relics of the booms and busts of people who tried to grab a piece of that permanence only to have it slip through their fingers. Most of these farms are owned by someone who made a breathtaking amount of money doing something else. In the rush of their purchase, most never stopped to think that they were probably buying from someone who’d lost a similarly breathtaking fortune. Nearly every horse farm comes with the silent warning of the construction magnate who took on one project too many, the coal baron who couldn’t survive his industry’s decline, the industrialist family that burned through its inheritance. That’s what has always struck me at the Triple Crown races in general and the Kentucky Derby in particular. Our national psyche is nakedly on display in the owners’ boxes: the rich and nervous owners; the flavor-of-the-month celebrities in big hats; the ballplayers with cash in their pockets for the first time; the new-money families desperate to get something; the old-money families desperate to keep it. Pick almost any famous old horse and its farm and the story will be the same. Take Man o’ War. The Goodman family owns his old home now and perhaps it will remain theirs for generations, or perhaps some tech billionaire will buy it if the air-conditioning money ever runs out. The current belles of the American economy are always on display in Kentucky, especially in May at Churchill Downs. Man o’ War’s barn was built by a wool mogul who had a horse in the Derby eighty years ago, racing against horses owned by the heir to the Mars candy fortune, a glass magnate, a gambler famous enough to be on the cover of Time, a paper magnate, a Texas ranching family whose descendants are still fighting over the land, and Marshall Field.

  This year wasn’t that much different. There were two oil and gas men, a pesticide executive, a chemical salesman, a high-interest mortgage lender once called a “loan shark” by the governor of California, a pro-hockey team owner and powerful Trump supporter, two investment bankers, and a cofounder of A&M Records. The whole thing, to be honest, is right on the line between ritual and campy reenactment. Horse ownership seems like a renaissance fair for millionaires. Churchill Downs is safe harbor in a world that didn’t want them to have those fortunes and is always trying to take them away.

  They all see themselves reflected in a great horse’s eyes, which actually shine or glow with something primal, often mistakenly described with human emotions like fire and rage. Really it’s a mystery, hundreds of years of breeding firing pistons on some unseen genetic engine that a few animals have and most do not. It seems like destiny, which is what the owners are really buying, for the animal and for themselves, but is often just luck. The fight to beat those odds is the bedrock of Kentucky. Its traditions and rituals, especially bourbon and racing, strive to push that knowledge out of sight. Man o’ War is buried next to his most famous son, War Admiral, who won the Triple Crown but lost the famous match race to Seabiscuit. Seabiscuit’s grave has been lost, at least its exact location; it’s somewhere beneath a parking lot owned by a California religious cult.

  Seattle Slew, who won the Triple Crown forty years ago, is buried at Hill ’n’ Dale Farm near Lexington, which used to be owned by a construction mogul and is now owned by the son of a horse breeder. Hill ’n’ Dale stallion manager Aidan O’Meara met me at the barn as he took the former champion Curlin out for some guests. One of the people asked whether Curlin was a kind horse, a question O’Meara tolerated with a smile. Thoroughbreds are the equine equivalent of pop stars—they’re divas and brawlers, egomaniacs. But he knew racing fans like to project human qualities onto the animals. Horse people hate that. In some ways, the desire to make them pets takes away from their magnificence—the things about DNA and bloodlines we still don’t understand; centuries of breeding to create the perfect running machine.

  O’Meara recalled the day Seattle Slew arrived, struggling to recover from an operation, in the last two months of his life. “It was almost like a presidential motorcade,” he said with his Irish accent, standing by Slew’s old stall. “There was five cars in front and five behind the van. It was early, early morning. I can still see the cars coming up over that little hill, all the lights. He just came in as
cool as you like. He strolled into that stall.”

  Six or seven weeks later, unable to recover from the operation, the horse died—on the twenty-fifth anniversary of his Kentucky Derby win. It was a day much like this one. O’Meara and his team pulled Seattle Slew out on a tarp. A man with a backhoe dug a grave and they tied the horse’s legs together and lowered him into the ground.

  Most horses have only their heart and hooves buried, but O’Meara and his team buried all of Seattle Slew: a sign of respect. He knows it’s silly to get too emotionally attached to a horse he only knew for a few weeks, but that’s how O’Meara felt that morning: like something powerful had left the earth. There was a brief yet tangible hole left by Seattle Slew’s life force, the unknowable thing that made him so rare and coveted, a convergence of blood and genes that advanced analytics still haven’t decoded. All these generations of boom and bust and all these billions of dollars made and spent to chase something that almost never arrives.

  “I still remember,” O’Meara said. “We lowered him down into the grave. I was holding his head. We had a blanket we put over him. People always talked about the fire in his eyes. I can still remember when we pulled the blanket over him, I looked into his eyes one last time. I still get chills talking about it. The fire was gone.”