Kitabı oku: «Secretariat»

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Preface to the 2010 Edition

SECRETARIAT

CHAPTER 1

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 3

CHAPTER 4

CHAPTER 5

CHAPTER 6

CHAPTER 7

CHAPTER 8

CHAPTER 9

CHAPTER 10

CHAPTER 11

CHAPTER 12

CHAPTER 13

CHAPTER 14

CHAPTER 15

CHAPTER 16

CHAPTER 17

CHAPTER 18

CHAPTER 19

CHAPTER 20

CHAPTER 21

CHAPTER 22

CHAPTER 23

CHAPTER 24

CHAPTER 25

CHAPTER 26

CHAPTER 27

CHAPTER 28

EPILOGUE

Author’s Note

“Pure Heart” by William Nack

APPENDIX A Secretariat at Stud

APPENDIX B Secretariat’s Racing Record

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Copyright

About the Publisher

Preface to the 2010 Edition

Nearly forty years have passed since Secretariat swept to three record-smashing victories in the Triple Crown—an unprecedented tour de force that confirmed him as the most capable and charismatic racehorse in the modern annals of the turf—and today his legend as a Thoroughbred, with all that word implies, remains as vibrant and secure as ever.

Horsemen have always been loath to compare horses from different eras, seeing any attempt to do so as a diverting but futile exercise. Could Secretariat have beaten Man o’ War or Citation? Could either of them have whipped Swaps, Seattle Slew, or Native Dancer? Or run down the immortal Count Fleet or Dr. Fager? Or out-gutted Seabiscuit at his match-race best? To all such facile questions, of course, there are only facile answers. The only thing that is really certain, after the passage of two decades since his death at Claiborne Farm, is that Secretariat continues to be viewed as the modern standard against which all members of his tribe are judged.

“His only point of reference is himself,” turfwriter Charles Hatton wrote after witnessing the colt’s thirty-one-length victory in the Belmont Stakes.

If anything, time has only enriched and embellished his name. On ESPN’s acclaimed TV series portraying the fifty greatest athletes of the twentieth century, he was ranked thirty-fifth, the only quadruped honored in the series. In another end-of-the-century event celebrating the decade of the 1970s, the U.S. Postal Service put his comely mug on a thirty-three-cent postage stamp. A three-quarter-sized bronze statue of Secretariat, commissioned by philanthropist Paul Mellon and depicting the horse in full flight, his head and forelegs thrust forward, decorates the middle of the walking ring at Belmont Park—a symbolic centerpiece forever representing the best of the sport and the breed. And a full-sized statue in bronze, with jockey Ron Turcotte aboard and groom Ed Sweat trying to restrain the thoroughbred, was unveiled in 2006 at the Kentucky Horse Park in Lexington—just down the road from Claiborne Farm, where Secretariat died at age nineteen, on October 4, 1989, and where a loyal network of old friends, many of them anonymous, have kept his grave in flowers through the years, a symbolic reminder of the hold he has had on the memories of those who saw him run almost four decades before.

It was there at Claiborne, one early afternoon in 2009, that actress Diane Lane visited the storied horse cemetery behind the office, its rows of gray headstones engraved with names long celebrated in the richer histories of the American turf: Bold Ruler … Round Table … Gallant Fox … Damascus … Buckpasser … Mr. Prospector … and Secretariat. As she left through the cemetery gate, a gray-haired gent in a black windbreaker stopped behind her and bent over Secretariat’s grave, plucking a single red rose from a vase of flowers tipped against the headstone.

“Here,” the old gent said, handing the rose to Lane. “The horse asked me to give this to you. Wanted you to have it.”

Diane smiled, almost purring. “Thank you,” she said. Lifting the stem in both hands, she touched the rose like an artist’s brush to her exquisite face. “I will treasure this,” she said.

At the moment, the acclaimed actress was at the bustling center of the richest, most extravagant tribute ever paid to the life and legend of Secretariat—a full-length feature film starring Diane as Penny Chenery Tweedy, the woman who drove Secretariat’s career in place of her dying father (played by Scott Glenn), and the brilliant John Malkovich as trainer Lucien Laurin, the man with whom Penny shared the glories, the tumults, and the pressures that attended the leading of this magnificent chestnut, recently syndicated for $6 million, through the turbulent waters of the Triple Crown. I was down there, too, a hired hand observing the making of the film. Walt Disney Pictures, with Mayhem Pictures producing, had just begun shooting it at a rainy churchyard cemetery in rural Lexington, where the scene was the burial of Chenery’s mother, Helen Bates Chenery, and where Diane perfectly evoked Penny’s patrician reserve and grieving beauty beneath panoplies of black umbrellas.

It was, with Lane and Malkovich leading the way, a surpassing cast and crew. They all gathered later at Keeneland racecourse to film a reenactment of the scenes that unfolded at the ′73 Belmont Stakes, the race regarded by most horsemen as the greatest performance ever by an American thoroughbred; among the familiar faces dressed for their parts were James Cromwell as breeder Ogden Phipps, Fred Thompson as Claiborne president Bull Hancock, and Nelsan Ellis as Sweat. Behind the camera was the peripatetic Dean Semler, whose cinematography in Dances with Wolves had won him an Oscar in 1990. Movie locations mimic the collapsible world of the traveling circus, moving from place to place, and after a week at old Keeneland, in the middle of the Blue Grass, the Secretariat troupe packed up and hauled its cameras and trailers seventy miles west to Louisville. Since 1875, the year of its inaugural running, River City had been home to the Kentucky Derby, with its signature Twin Spires, its massive clubhouse and grandstand, and its ancient vault of echoing sounds and memories.

Disney had acquired the rights to this book for the making of the movie, and the film company, at Mayhem’s urging, had retained me as the technical consultant on the film. For those who had been at Churchill Downs on May 5, 1973, it was impossible to wander those historic grounds and that movie set last year—among throngs of extras dressed in the polyesters of the early ′70s, amid fleets of old cars imported from the late ′60s, and around the five attractive chestnuts wrangled from all over to play the horse—and not recall that sublime magic of Derby week some thirty-six years before.

I can close my eyes and see the scenes unfolding one by one:

 The morning of May 2, Thursday, two days before the witching hour, when a hand-wringing Lucien and Penny, still agonizing over Secretariat’s stunning defeat in the Wood Memorial eleven days before, sent him out for a last, crucial morning workout at the Downs. As the colt flew down that stretch, sizzling a final 220 yards in 0:113/5 seconds, Turcotte’s blue and white jacket was billowing like a parachute on his back. Later, Sweat, a rub rag dangling from his back pocket, was whistling as he led Secretariat back to the barn and washed him off with soap and water, the colt’s golden coat shining wetly in the sun.

 The late afternoon of May 5, Derby Day, when the backstretch silence was broken as the loudspeakers blared, “Horsemen! Bring your horses to the paddock for the Derby!” And there was Secretariat, Eddie leading him, walking around the clubhouse turn toward the paddock, the colt’s head bobbing, his mouth grinding on the bit, until he strode into the straightaway past the clubhouse seats, where thousands pressed forward to see him, and he stopped and raised his head and stared a few seconds at the mammoth stands and raucous crowds, still as a piece of statuary, before dropping his head and walking on.

 At the top of the stretch at Churchill Downs at 5:38 P.M., the hour had come round at last: Secretariat was battling his arch rival, Sham, and they were nose and nose through the first 100 yards into the lane when Secretariat began to pull away, slowly but inexorably, and Sham began melting down the wick of that fiery pace as 130,000 people sent up a roar and Secretariat bounded home alone in 1:592/5—the fastest Kentucky Derby ever run—the first horse ever to shade two minutes for the mile and a quarter. In the doing, he pulled off the unprecedented feat of running each successive quarter-mile split faster than the preceding one—0:251/5, 0:24, 0:234/5, 0:232/5, and 0:23 flat—literally running faster and faster as the race went on.

He electrified the crowd that afternoon, and I can hear their echoes in that hallowed grandstand yet today. Secretariat had been voted the nation’s Horse of the Year as a two-year-old in 1972, and he had already shown himself to be a horse of gusting speed and highest quality, but the Kentucky Derby was his first transcendent moment as an equine athlete, the performance by which he joined the racing gods—the likes of Man o’ War and Count Fleet, Citation and Native Dancer, Swaps and Dr. Fager—and announced that he belonged in their pantheon. The Preakness reaffirmed his Derby brilliance, while his pièce de résistance, the Belmont Stakes, left him spinning in an orbit all his own, alone.

By the close of the 2009 Triple Crown season, a total of 1,382,316 thoroughbreds had been born and come of age in North America since 1970, the year of Secretariat’s birth, and not only did he still own the Kentucky Derby record by himself, no horse had come remotely close to equaling his world record at Belmont—a mile and a half in 2:24 flat.

He was sui generis, to be sure, an inspiration not only for documentarians and big-screen movie makers, but also for journalists and novelists and would-be poets.

Charles Hatton had been the dean of American turfwriters for decades before the rise of Secretariat, and he had seen them all since the era when Man o’ War and Sir Barton strutted their stuff on the racing stage; in the end he declared Secretariat to be the most capable racehorse he had ever seen. Nothing delighted Hatton more than seeing the colt fly through his morning workouts. The week before the Belmont Stakes, on the morning Secretariat worked a mile in the astonishing time of 1:34⁴/5, faster than the best older horses were racing in the afternoons, New York Times columnist Red Smith climbed to Hatton’s eyrie above the giant Belmont grandstand and asked how fast the colt had worked.

“The trees swayed,” Charlie told Red.

Upon the colt’s retirement, it was Hatton who penned the most lyrical farewell:

Weave for the mighty chestnut A tributary crown Of autumn leaves, the brightest then When autumn leaves are brown Hang up his bridle on the wall, His saddle on the tree, Till time shall bring some racing king Worthy to wear as he!

SECRETARIAT

CHAPTER 1

It was almost midnight in Virginia, late for the farmlands north of Richmond, when the breathing quickened in the stall, the phone rang in the Gentry home, and two men came out the front door, hastily crossing the lawn to the car.

They swung out the driveway onto the deserted road and took off north. It was one of those hours when time is measured not by clocks but by contractions; the intervals between were getting shorter. In a small wooden barn set off at the edge of a nearby field, beneath a solitary light in an expanse of darkness, a mare was about to give birth. The men were rushing to the barn to help her.

The man behind the wheel was Howard M. Gentry, sixty-two years old, for almost twenty years a manager of the Meadow Stud in Doswell, one of the most successful breeding farms in America. Sitting with him in the front seat was Raymond W. Wood, a railroad conductor, fifty-four years old, Gentry’s long-time friend and neighbor, for years his steady companion at straight pool, and himself a modest breeder of thoroughbred horses.

It was the night of March 29, 1970, not the kind of night for anyone to leave the velvet green warmth of a pool table and rush outdoors. The weather had been bleak all day—the sky perpetually overcast, a drizzle falling through the morning and afternoon, and a fog that clung to the farm and the uplands and the bottomlands of Caroline County. A wind, mounting occasional gusts, blew out of the north from Washington. The temperature had been in the high forties during the day, but by evening it had dropped into the thirties, and sometime past eleven o’clock, when the call came, it was almost freezing.

Gentry instantly recognized the voice of Bob Southworth, the nightwatchman at the foaling barn. In a characteristic monotone Southworth told him what he had been waiting to hear. “Mistah Gentry! You better come on down here to the foalin’ barn in the field. That mare’s gettin’ ready to foal.”

That mare is what put an edge on the moment for Gentry. He had delivered hundreds of foals in the years he worked around thoroughbreds, but that mare was not just another broodmare carrying a foal by just another sire. Down in Barn 17A, the two-stall foaling barn near the western border of the farm, an eighteen-year-old broodmare named Somethingroyal, a daughter of the late Princequillo, was going into labor for the fourteenth time in her life. She was carrying a foal by Bold Ruler, the preeminent sire in America, year after year the nation’s leading stallion. It was a union of established aristocracy.

Somethingroyal was the kind of mare breeders seek to raise dynasties. She was the dam of the fleet Sir Gaylord, probably the most gifted racehorse of his generation, the colt favored to win the 1962 Kentucky Derby until he broke down the day before the race. She was the mother of First Family, a multiple stakes winner in the mid-1960s. In 1965 she bore her first Bold Ruler foal, a filly called Syrian Sea, winner of the rich Selima Stakes in 1967. Another Bold Ruler filly, The Bride, was a yearling, and tonight Somethingroyal was having her last Bold Ruler foal: the stallion was dying in Kentucky.

So Howard Gentry felt more anxious than usual to get the foal delivered. The foal would be virtually priceless, and Gentry hoped the delivery would be easy. Gentry had stopped to see Somethingroyal earlier that night, just before he went home for supper at six. She didn’t appear to be near labor then, but when he and Southworth made the rounds two hours later, as they often did together during breeding season, her condition had begun to change. Labor seemed imminent. The mare was “waxing heavily,” as Gentry called it, with milk congealing at the tips of her nipples like beads of candle wax, the tentative sign that labor is near—perhaps a few hours away, perhaps a day. It was then he decided to stay awake, instead of going to bed at nine, his regular time, and to call Wood and ask him to wait it out over a pool table.

Gentry edged his beige 1969 Chrysler across the highway dividing the farm, past the big house on the hill, past the towering stand of trees around the house, around the gravel driveway crunching underneath, down the gentle slope and past the fences and the pastures and through the gate where the broodmares walk to and from the fields during the day, and finally stopped about a hundred feet from where the lights were burning and where Bob Southworth, standing by the stall, was waiting.

Gentry and Wood cut across the wet grass on the field, walking briskly—hurrying—through the pasture toward the barn. Wood jogged to keep up, stumbling once in the dark, skimming through the pastureland to keep up with Gentry, midwife for Somethingroyal.

Gentry looked in the stall and walked quietly inside. Somethingroyal was breathing quickly now. Her nostrils were flared. She was walking the stall and seemed edgy, nervous. Gentry felt her neck and shoulder. She was warm and sweating lightly.

“She’s gettin’ ready,” Gentry said. A quick routine began. He checked for the iodine, the enema, the cup for the iodine, and the bowl for the water to wash the nipples for the suckling foal. Then he spotted his Unionalls, picked them off the hook, and slipped them on. The three men waited at the door, watching the old mare pace the stall, circling it as if caged, and they spoke idly in unremembered conversations.

At midnight, almost to the stroke, Gentry saw Somethingroyal stop pacing and lie down, collapsing her bulk on the bed of straw. She faced the rear of the stall, lying on her left side. Gentry slipped on his rubber gloves and dropped to his knees beside her. Her water bag broke, spilling fluid from her vagina. Any moment now, the foal.

Just past midnight, the tip of the left foot appeared, and Gentry waited for the other. In a normal birth, the front feet come out together, with the head between the legs, so Gentry watched and waited. When the foot failed to emerge, he decided to wait no longer. He feared the leg might be folded under or twisted, a position that could cause injury to the shoulder under the extreme pressures of birth. So, kneeling closer to the mare, he reached his arm inside the vagina and felt the head, which was in a good position, and then dropped his hand down to the right leg and felt for the hoof. As he suspected, he found it curled under, so he uncurled it gently, bringing the leg out of the vagina. “Won’t be long now,” he said to Wood.

Somethingroyal pushed, paused panting, and pushed again. Gentry guided but did not pull the legs—not yet. He always waited for the shoulder to emerge before pulling. The legs came out together. Then the head, with a splash of white down the face, slipped through the opening. A water bubble preceded it, and Gentry slit the bubble open. The neck slipped out, slowly, and finally the shoulders emerged. The mare paused, and Gentry took the front legs and waited for her to rest, always letting her lead: push and relax, push and relax.

Somethingroyal pushed, straining, and Gentry pulled on the legs, hard. It was a good-sized foal. Then he called Wood to his side, telling him to put on a pair of rubber gloves. Returning, Wood kneeled down next to Gentry and took one leg, Gentry the other.

“Take it easy now,” Gentry told him. “No hurry—and not too hard—take your time.” They pulled together for several moments. As the foal came out, and Gentry saw the size of the shoulders and the size of the bone, he feared the foal might hip lock—his hips were so wide—and have difficulty clearing the opening. When the rib cage cleared, Gentry guided the hips.

Moments later the foal was out and lying on the bed of straw, the mare was panting and sweating, and Gentry was asking South-worth for the cup of iodine. Southworth broke the umbilical by pulling the foal around to the mare’s head so she could lick him. Gentry cauterized the wound with iodine and gave the foal four milliliters of the combiotics—an antibiotic combination of streptomycin and penicillin—as a precautionary measure, and Southworth rubbed him down with a towel to dry him and circulate the blood.

Gentry looked at his watch. It was ten minutes after midnight, March 30, 1970, the moment the whole foal emerged. He was a chestnut, with three white feet—the right front and the two behind. The colt lay at his mother’s head when Gentry, looking at him, stepped back and shook his head and said to Wood, “There is a whopper.”

CHAPTER 2

The Virginia of Caroline County—acres of porous soil and roughly tree-mantled countryside—is not the Old South of cotton farms and magnolias under moonlight and willowy, straight-backed women drifting among the lawns and gardens of the Tidewater. This is not the Virginia where buses stop at overlooks on any of the approved tours, lying outside the limits of the Tidewater and far to the southeast of the Blue Ridge Mountains and the Shenandoah Valley, with its pungent orchards and its own haunting song.

Caroline County seems closer in spirit to Stephen Crane than Stephen Foster—a starker and less storybook Virginia than the mountains and the valleys, a place where old times are often just as well forgotten. It is tomato and melon country—watermelons and muskmelons—and it has fields for grazing horses and cattle and cultivated stretches for growing corn and soybeans, but it was not always so prosperous or so peaceful there.

The Meadow is part of a neck of land almost midway between Richmond and Washington. For four years, two armies crawled around it feeling for each other’s jugular. The fighting began just seventy miles to the north, at Bull Run, and it ended not far to the southwest, at Appomattox Court House. The Morris family, living on The Meadow at the time, hid the family silver in the well. Some of the largest set-piece battles of the war, with their cavalry sweeps and scouting parties, took place nearby. The land, and whatever civilization had been built on it, came out of the war years badly gored.

The war radically altered the course of the lives of the people who somehow survived it and left James Hollis Chenery the sole male support of three families, including the Morrises of The Meadow. The war had left the Morrises and other families nearly destitute, though it did not destroy them. Chenery ended up as a clerk in a dry goods store in Richmond.

The war also picked up Richard Johnson Hancock in the Deep South, marched him into Virginia, and then left him nearly dead outside a city in the Shenandoah Valley. Hancock was born in Alabama, the son of a farmer, but he was raised and ultimately orphaned in Louisiana, where he joined the Bossier Volunteers when the war broke out. Hancock’s unit was ordered to Virginia and eventually came under the command of Stonewall Jackson. Hancock was wounded three times in the next two years, the first time superficially at the Second Battle of Manassas on August 30, 1862.

The second wound gave him a limp, but it also remade him into a Virginian and in time led him to found what would become one of the largest and most important thoroughbred breeding establishments in the world. In July of 1863, Hancock was jumping a fence in an assault on Cemetery Ridge during the Battle of Gettysburg when a Union soldier turned on him and fired. The ball struck Hancock in the hip. He was dispatched to a Confederate hospital in Charlottesville. While convalescing, Hancock often attended Sunday services at the Christian Church, and one morning he met Thomasia Overton Harris. She was the daughter of John Harris, a prominent landowner on whose 1450-acre farm, called Ellerslie, about one hundred slaves bred and raised livestock and planted corn and tobacco.

The courtship that developed was interrupted when Hancock, recovered from the hip wound, rejoined the Bossier Volunteers. The fighting in the months that followed carried him to the mountains, to the Shenandoah Valley beyond the mountains, and finally to the city of Winchester in the valley. There, on September 19, 1864, a Union soldier shot him in the stomach as he and other members of the unit retreated south from the city. He was a prisoner of war and badly wounded, though he was not either very long. Hancock, with some help, contrived to escape, slipping away unseen and skirting Sheridan’s right flank at Cedar Creek, making his way to the Confederate lines and then on to Ellerslie. There, in November of 1864, he and Miss Harris were married. Richard Hancock had always liked thoroughbreds, and when he returned to the farm after the war, one of the things he wanted to do was raise them at Ellerslie.

James Hollis Chenery had no such visions. He was only sixteen years old when he started work at the dry goods store in Richmond. Sixteen years later, when he was thirty-two years old, Chenery married his second cousin—it was in the family tradition—Ida Burnley Taylor. They had six children, one of whom died young. Ida Chenery, a disciplinarian, pushed and raised and shaped them.

The oldest boy, William, went through journalism school and rose to be the editor of the Rocky Mountain News and then an editor at Collier’s magazine. A daughter, Blanche, attended the University of Chicago, married an advertising man, and settled down in Pelham Manor, New York, where practically the whole family wound up living at one time. The youngest boy, Alan Chenery, went through Richmond Medical School and became a urologist with a practice in Washington, D.C. Charlie, the only one of the children who did not go to college, eventually worked for his brother Chris. And there was Chris.

Christopher Tompkins Chenery became what he set out to become—a man of substance and horses and a part of the landed gentry. He was born in Richmond on September 19, 1886, but his parents soon moved to Ashland, north of Richmond and just south of The Meadow, where he acquired a feeling for the land and place that never left him.

Helen (Penny) Chenery Tweedy, Christopher Chenery’s youngest daughter, once wrote in a personal family history that poverty was a central emptiness in their lives:

The boys went barefoot from March first to October first to save their shoes. They did not have servants other than a cook, but they were too proud to admit it, so Chris would wait until after dark to carry the laundry in a wagon down to a colored washerwoman so the neighbors wouldn’t know. The best Christmas present was a tangerine in the toe of their stockings—a rare luxury. But they were a close family, fiercely fond of each other and fearful of insult…. Each of the boys grew up craving something—mostly to be relieved of poverty. Bill wanted books, Charlie, the third son, loved cards and girls, but Chris loved horses. A distant cousin, Bernard Doswell, still had a half-mile track at his place adjoining The Meadow, and when they weren’t out in Caroline, Chris would walk the seven miles to exercise the few remaining horses. He not only loved them, but they became a symbol to him of all the things he couldn’t have…. His mother kept his feet on the ground, however, and ruled him and his brothers with a magnificent and ladylike temper. If they got out of line, they spent a week in the yard or cut an extra cord of wood. There was no appealing for clemency or using boyish charm with her. She stiffened their spines and sent them out into the world with a great sense of family obligation.

The children shared their opportunities for education. Each boy was allowed to attend Randolph-Macon College in Ashland for two years, but was then expected to quit and work three years to allow another of the boys his two years of study. And that is what sent Chris Chenery into the mountainous terrain of West Virginia when still a boy of sixteen.

By then he had already finished two years of college at Randolph-Macon, and he had taken a job as a surveyor with an engineering party laying tracks for the Virginian Railroad, one of America’s largest lines of coal carriers. He worked there for three years, and when he left, in 1907, he took with him enough money to return to college, this time to study engineering at Washington and Lee. Scholastically, he behaved like a man possessed, poring over the texts, teaching a course in engineering, and pushing himself to the top of his class. By the time he graduated in 1909, he had acquired a Bachelor of Science degree in engineering, a Phi Beta Kappa key, and a taste for wild adventure that sent him west, beyond the Appalachians to the Pacific. There he joined another engineering party that reconnoitered the uncharted interior of Alaska by pack train, looking for potential railroad routes from Cook inlet to the Yukon. The job involved surveying 600 miles of land in difficult weather. “It took two polar bears to live through one winter,” said turfwriter Charles Hatton, a friend of Chenery. The terrain was hazardous, the mosquitoes in the summer malevolent.

In idle moments Chenery read and reread the complete works of William Shakespeare and the Bible from Genesis to Revelation, and in later years he quoted liberally from both, especially when he was with people educated in the arts and letters he had missed.

“When he got back to Oregon,” Penny Tweedy wrote, “he was quite a ‘hell-raiser’ and the minister’s daughter he wooed in Portland spurned him. Later he found her again in Chicago, and after two stormy, indecisive years they were married.” Her name was Helen Bates, and she descended from a long line of New England homeopaths who moved slowly from the east coast to the west, by way of Rochester, Minnesota. Helen Bates was pretty, resented her richer cousins’ hand-me-downs, and found a favorite uncle who sent her to Smith College. She went to Chicago to strike out on her own and improve herself, there married Chenery and left Chicago when America entered World War I:

Christopher “joined up” right after they were married in 1917. Helen did not relish living with her mother-in-law in Ashland. Mrs. Chenery had remarked, hearing that Chris was engaged to an Oregon girl, “I thought they only had barmaids out there.” But these two strong-minded women survived, and Chris survived the war—spent ignominiously teaching cavalrymen to ride at nearby Fort Belvoir.

Chenery left the service in 1918, and in the next decade he switched from engineering to finance and began one of those inexorable American climbs to the presidency of a string of utility companies. In 1927 he quickly became wealthy and began to acquire all the accoutrements of money and position and substance as they had been defined for him and as he had defined them for himself. He moved to Pelham Manor, New York, and founded the Boulder Brook Club—a riding club—in Scarsdale. He played some polo and fox hunted with the Goldens Bridge Hounds. He had an office in Manhattan. And he sent his children to good schools. Chenery was never a haughty man, never a man who flaunted his wealth, and he was enough of a romantic and sentimentalist to want to finally return to The Meadow.

One day, in 1935, he took his daughter Penny and his wife Helen to see a boarding school that Penny would attend in Washington, D.C. She would recall the day many years later, picture it as she and her father and mother drove south toward Richmond from Washington and bumped toward The Meadow, where he had spent summers as a youngster, toward Ashland where he had grown up and learned to know the country to which he was returning now:

We drove south for several hours that day, on narrow roads that went up and down like a roller coaster over countless hills. The brown winter woods and the sluggish creeks had a sameness that depressed me; they were so unlike the twisting roads and sudden vistas of my familiar New England, but I was excited to be going back to dad’s home—not really his, but his cousin’s, where he had spent his happiest summers.

Chenery drove farther south, toward the “wooded hills dropping down to deep-cut brown rivers, and wide old fields lying in between,” across the dirt roads climbing to a bridge, high and rickety, that delivered them from Hanover to Caroline County:

Here indeed were the broad fields of the farm, but they were sandy and bare of soil. The car climbed a hill with a commanding view of the river flats to find—a gas station, two old pumps and a shed along side the road. About two hundred yards behind it stood an unpainted three-story, gaunt, old, stark wooden house. It stood amid some handsome old trees but the ground around it was bare. A mongrel dog lay under the porch, the chickens pecked around the steps. My memory fills in tattered children and a few pigs, but I wouldn’t swear to it.

The car nosed into the drive and the yard. There was a silence, and Penny Tweedy recalled her father looking perplexed, then angry:

Still standing were a tall story-and-a-half building at one corner of the yard—the office, he fumed. At the other were two smaller shacklike structures, but with definite architectural details, which were the smoke house and the old kitchen. The remnants of a classic revival cupola capped the well house. Below, in a wide loop of the river, there had once been rich fields. Slave labor had built a dike around them to keep the river out, but after the Civil War, it was breached by high water, and the cove, as it was called, was now covered by an immense tangle of brush, trees and brambles. It had been overgrown even when dad was a boy, and he had heard stories of a runaway slave who lived down in there. No one had ventured down in many years.

Chenery stopped the car in the yard and climbed out, looking at the house and the trees and the land around it. He told his wife and daughter to remain in the car, warning them that the house might be full of lice. Chenery went inside, but he didn’t stay long. Moments later he walked back to the car. He said nothing as he slid inside and drove off to the house across the road. Penny wanted to ask him what The Meadow homestead was like inside, what it looked like, but she saw his expression and decided to say nothing at all. He bought The Meadow a year later.

Thus Christopher T. Chenery had repossessed his childhood, reclaiming some old hills and remembrances and a place to raise horses. But if there was some of the Gatsby romantic in him—something of a man trying to recapture his past—his brothers hardly shared his enthusiasm. They were against his buying back The Meadow, Penny said:

They thought Chris was crazy to buy it back—that was all behind them—and Virginia would never leave the shackles of its backward economy, especially rural Virginia. The Depression was easing, but the specter of poverty never left any of them.

But Chenery had made his money by stringing utilities together, and he was on his way to being a millionaire several times over again. By 1936, he had already been the president of the Federal Water Service Corporation for ten years, and that year he also became chairman and director of Southern Natural Gas Company. Deep in the Depression, Chris Chenery was making money and incorporating his holdings and sharing his stock with the family, and with the gold he set about in earnest to rebuild The Meadow.

He spent thousands of dollars making it a showplace, rebuilding and enlarging and refurnishing it:

He built stables for one hundred horses, a mile training track, breeding sheds, hay barns, and an office—the old one had been beyond repair. The poor country boy eventually spent his winters in Palm Beach buying at auctions the things that were symbols of wealth in his childhood. He first acquired oriental rugs, then turned to nineteenth-century paintings, and finally to jade.

He had earned what he was spending and what he owned. He had a contempt for idle people and for laziness, a disdain for dullness and the weak witted. Education was not what set men apart. What distinguished them was the intensity of the drive and the energy and imagination they possessed and used.

Politically, he was conservative, a staunch anti-Communist—or, as he would prefer to say, an anti-Bolshevik. Financially, he was bold but careful, and when he invested in thoroughbreds in the late 1930s he made small and what appeared to be insignificant acquisitions of blooded horses. “The price does not always represent what a horse is worth,” Chenery once said. “It is only what some fool thinks he is worth.”

Among his first purchases was a filly named Hildene, a daughter of the 1926 Kentucky Derby winner, Bubbling Over. He paid only $600 for her. “Hildene showed speed, but she tired badly eight times in eight races,” he said. So he retired her to the stud, and there she produced a family of some of the finest horses on the American turf.

Sometime during the Depression, when he was getting started in racing, Chenery acquired a set of jockey silks. They were some old silks that had been abandoned, no doubt discarded by some owner who went haywire for a decade and then dropped off into the perpetual twilight that came in October of 1929. The silks were snappy: white and blue blocks on the shirt, and blue and white stripes down the sleeves. And a blue cap.

CHAPTER 3

In the end it was the land that made them all—the land that raised the horses and made room for the people and supported the empires of chance they built on it.

It was blocked off in white and creosote fences and planted in clover and grass, a deep green shag rug that ran, as if unrolled, across a boundless countryside. The land is where the horses were born, on farms such as Hamburg Place in Kentucky, where still stands a single barn—a historic marker now—in which five Kentucky Derby winners were foaled: Old Rosebud (1914), Sir Barton (1919), Paul Jones (1920), Zev (1923), and Flying Ebony (1925). It is where the horses were raised and weaned, where they romped and grazed and grew to young horses on the racetrack. Some were returned to it as pensioners, many more to serve in studs and nurseries. A chosen few were buried on the land, the best beneath granite headstones chiseled in their names and, at times, in epitaphs rendered in the style of Boot Hill:

HERE LIES THE FLEETEST RUNNER

THE AMERICAN TURF HAS EVER KNOWN,

AND ONE OF THE GAMEST

AND MOST GENEROUS OF HORSES.

That is the epitaph on the monument of Domino, the “Black Whirlwind,” who was buried in 1897 in a grave outside of Lexington. There was no faster horse than Domino in the sprints—he was the Jesse Owens of his species in the Gay Nineties—and when they retired him to stud, he whirled the wind again as a progenitor. Domino died at six, twenty years too soon for a sire of his prepotency, and he left only twenty offspring from his duty as a stud horse, eleven daughters and nine sons. But among the sons was Commando, a horse who would strike his and his sire’s names into the pedigree charts of champions for many years. Through Pink Domino, a daughter, his name would surface often in the family trees of numerous racehorses, appearing in the distant collateral reaches of the bloodlines of many modern horses, including the colt Gentry delivered that night at The Meadow.

Domino was a phenomenon, a complete thoroughbred, sui generis. He remains today one of the few American racehorses in history who left the land and became one of the fastest horses of his era, then returned to it and made an even deeper imprint on the breed itself. Most thoroughbreds, in the days of Domino and since him, left the land and failed at the races—if they ever got to the races at all, which many did not—or they raced through careers of declining mediocrity. Many colts were gelded along the way, destroyed for a variety of reasons, sold for use as saddle horses or jumping or hunting horses, or hitched to wagons or rented out, by the hour, at livery stables everywhere.

Scores of stallions, coming off superior racing careers, failed as stud horses, some more ignominiously than others. Sir Barton, winner of the 1919 Triple Crown, failed to transmit much of his speed to his offspring, and he finished out his stud career at a cavalry remount station in Douglas, Wyoming. Grey Lag, one of the most gifted runners in the early 1920s—winner of the 1921 Belmont Stakes and the prestigious Brooklyn Handicap—was virtually sterile when sent to stud. Returned to the races at age nine, he had trouble beating horses that could not have warmed him up in his younger days. He was retired a second time, given away, and a few years later was discovered again, at the age of thirteen, running against cheap $1000 claiming horses in Canada. Harry F. Sinclair, who raced Grey Lag in his prime while leasing oil fields at Teapot Dome, was in no need of more adverse publicity. Quietly, he dispatched an agent to Canada, bought the horse, and retired him to his Rancocas Farm. Grey Lag never raced again, living out his life as a pensioner. The other famous impotent, 1946 Triple Crown winner Assault, did the same, as did many fine geldings, such as Exterminator and Armed.

But most of the horses sent back to the farms, the many fillies and mares and the few colts and horses, were pressed into the service of breeding enterprises, of large stud farms such as Hamburg Place and Himyar, Rancocas and Idle Hour and Calumet Farm. The fortunes of the farms and their owners, in some ways, ran with the fortunes of the horses and the bloodlines they produced. All of them would rise to prominence in their day, wane, reemerge, or die away. There is no great Himyar anymore, no flourishing Idle Hour since Colonel E.R. Bradley died, though the land still raises horses. Sinclair sold the last of the Rancocas horses in 1932, all but Zev and Grey Lag. Hamburg Place, once the showplace of American breeding, bred its last Derby winner, Alysheba, in 1984. And Calumet Farm is no longer the 1927 Yankees it was when Bull Lea filled the farm’s stable with so many high-classed runners, three Derby winners and all those nimble-footed tomboys. But what is behind them, behind all the young horses and the new owners and breeders of thoroughbreds, is the land.

While Christopher T. Chenery was piecing together the shards of his family homestead, the descendants of Richard J. Hancock emerged as the leading breeders of thoroughbreds in America. It had taken seventy years.

R. J. Hancock founded Ellerslie Stud and within ten years of the war had bought his first stallion, Scathelock, and his first broodmare, War Song. That was the start.

Hancock’s rise to prominence as a Virginia breeder actually began after he acquired the stallion Eolus from a Maryland breeder, swapping Scathelock in an even trade. The transaction revealed Hancock’s shrewd eye for horses. Eolus sired a number of winners, giving a measure of prestige to the Hancock name among Virginia horsemen. Among the best was Knight of Ellerslie, who not only won the 1884 Preakness Stakes, but also made a name as the sire of Henry of Navarre, the chestnut colt who battled Domino, the Black Whirlwind, in one of the most celebrated struggles in the history of the American turf. High-rolling Pittsburgh Phil bet $100,000 on Domino and calmly ate figs out of a bag as he watched the two horses struggle to a dead heat.

Eolus died three years later, in 1897, but by then Ellerslie had become a major thoroughbred nursery in Virginia, selling its yearlings every year at auction, buying and raising its own bloodstock. And by then, too, Richard Hancock’s son, Arthur, had graduated from the University of Chicago, a reedy young man, six feet six inches and 165 pounds, who came home in 1895 to be about his father’s business. He became his father’s assistant, attending yearling sales and doing his novitiate on the farm. And then, within one three-year period, a series of events occurred in Arthur Hancock’s life that enlarged its scope and potential, multiplying the possibilities open to him as a breeder.

In 1907, seeking a man without local ties or friendships, Senator Camden Johnson of Kentucky invited Hancock to judge a class of thoroughbreds at the Blue Grass Fair in Kentucky. Hancock accepted. While he was there, he met Nancy Tucker Clay, one of the many Clays of Bourbon County. Like the Harrises of Virginia, the Clays of Kentucky were landed gentry, owning lots of land, acres of some of the choicest real estate in the Blue Grass country. Nancy Clay and Arthur Hancock were married the following year, in 1908, fusing a family owning one of the finest estates in Virginia with another owning miles of rolling greenery in Kentucky.

In 1909, Arthur Hancock took over the operation of Ellerslie from his aging father.

In 1910, within a span of four days, Nancy Clay Hancock’s father and mother died. Nancy Hancock inherited 1300 acres of property in Paris, Kentucky, rich farmland set off Winchester Road. So the events of the year made Hancock the steward of two manors, and they left him an heir to his fortune and name. Earlier in the year, Nancy Hancock had given birth to a son, Arthur Boyd Hancock, Jr., a man whose influence on American bloodstock would one day exceed that of his father. Arthur Hancock, Sr., did not take long to coordinate the operations at Ellerslie and Claiborne Farm, the name they chose for the land in Paris. The Hancock stud at Ellerslie survived the horse-racing blackout of 1911–1912, when the sport was outlawed in New York during an outburst of moral fervor, but Hancock had to cut back the broodmare band to all but about twelve mares. Over the next twenty-five years, Hancock’s long climb to preeminence as a breeder began. He moved his family permanently to the Kentucky farm in 1912, a move suggesting that he knew Kentucky would one day be the home of thoroughbred breeding in America.

A year later he bought the stallion Celt, a son of Commando, for $20,000 in a dispersal sale at Madison Square Garden. Under Celt, the Hancock stud regained the vigor it possessed in the days of Eolus. Hancock’s interest in foreign bloodstock heightened when the prices dropped in Europe at the start of World War I. In 1915 he bought the English stallion, Wrack, for $8000 from Archibald Philip Rosbery. It marked Hancock’s first major acquisition of a foreign stallion, and it launched a breeding operation at Claiborne Farm, where Wrack was sent to stud. Barns were built near Kennedy Creek. Part of the land was fenced with planking. A grazing paddock was built for Wrack to loll away his idle hours. And the farm itself expanded, growing in size from 1300 to 2100 acres.

The Hancock studs flourished in the 1920s, grew in influence and prestige. In 1921, Celt was America’s leading thoroughbred sire in the amount of money won by his offspring, his fifty-two performing sons and daughters winning 124 races and $206,167 in purses. Hancock reached out for more foreign blood. His acquisition of foreign bloodstock reached its zenith in 1926, when he formed a four-man group—composed of Hanover Bank president William Woodward, Marshall Field, Robert Fairbairn, and himself—and bought Sir Gallahad III, a French stallion and a son of Teddy, for $125,000. Sir Gallahad’s impact at the stud was felt almost at once.

Bred his first year in America to Marguerite, a daughter of Celt, he sired Belair Stud’s Gallant Fox. “The Fox of Belair,” as he came to be known, won the Triple Crown in 1930, the second horse to do it. Sir Gallahad III was the leading American sire that year, with just sixteen offspring winning forty-nine races and $422,200, a record in purses that stood until 1942. He led the sire list three more times, his horses winning more than the horses sired by any other stallion.

Through the importation of the potent Teddy blood, through Sir Gallahad III and later his full brother, Bull Dog, American and other imported blood was freshened and invigorated. Sir Gallahad III’s influence became unusually pervasive in his role as a “broodmare sire,” so pervasive that he led the annual broodmare sire list for twelve years, ten years in a row, from 1943 to 1952. The broodmare sire list is a special category that singles out stallions whose daughters are exceptional producers. For twelve years the daughters of Sir Gallahad III produced racehorses that won more money than the racehorses produced by the daughters of any other sire. No horse in American history, before or since, ever dominated that list so long. He sired La France, dam of the 1939 Kentucky Derby and Belmont Stakes winner, Johnstown; and he sired Gallette, dam of champion handicap mare Gallorette; Fighting Lady, dam of the speedy Armageddon; and Black Wave, dam of the 1947 Kentucky Derby winner, Jet Pilot.

In 1936, Hancock was instrumental in bringing Blenheim II, the 1930 Epsom Derby winner, to America. Blenheim II cost an American syndicate $250,000. Among Blenheim II’s first sons to reach the races in America was Whirlaway, winner of the 1941 Triple Crown, the fifth horse to win it.

Hancock’s fortunes as a breeder soared. In 1935, horses bred by Hancock won more races—392—and more money—$359,218—than the horses bred by any other breeder. He led the breeder lists for the next two years. Hancock was not racing his homebreds. Following a policy adopted originally by his father in 1886, he sold his yearlings at auction every year. Through the years, he developed a reputation as a breeder knowledgeable about bloodlines, both foreign and domestic, who could recall in minute detail the distant reaches of a pedigree.

By then his son Arthur was a student of breeding, too. “I grew up at Claiborne and when I was twelve, my father was paying me fifty cents a day to sweep out after the yearlings,” he once said. That was in the summer of 1922, the year before he left the public school system in Paris and went to Saint Mark’s Academy in Southborough, Massachusetts, a bastion of righteous Episcopalianism, where he subscribed to the Daily Racing Form, the industry’s trade newspaper and the horseplayer’s bible. He transferred to Woodberry Forest, a Virginia school, and there picked up his nickname, Bull, by which he would one day be known throughout all the major world marketplaces for the blooded horse. His central ambition was to be a thoroughbred breeder.

In the summers of his youth, when his jobs went beyond sweeping out after the yearlings, he worked with the broodmares, the stud horses, the yearlings, the farm veterinarian, alternating jobs summer after summer. He went to Princeton, played baseball and football, and earned letters. He was a six-foot-two raconteur with a reverberating baritone voice.

At Princeton he studied eugenics, French, and genetics. And when he graduated in 1933 he returned to Claiborne, as his father had returned to Ellerslie almost forty years before, to become his father’s assistant. He learned, as his father learned, from the grass up—about the care and feeding of the yearlings and the broodmares and the stud horses, starting from the beginning. He learned about the land, too, walking it so often that one day he would know every tree and plank on it.

“I never wanted to be anything but a horseman,” Bull once said. “I just never thought of anything else.”

CHAPTER 4

Claiborne Farm was no empire of prepotent young stallions and mares of promise when Bull Hancock returned to it in 1945, the year the air corps released him after his father suffered the first of several heart attacks.

Bull was thirty-five then and much had begun to wane since he became his father’s assistant. What he came back to was a farm with a twilight presence to it—old stallions and old mares and an aging, ailing owner who would not let go. Arthur Hancock, Sr., had been the leading breeder again in America, but there had been no infusion of fresh bloodstock. Breeding blooded horses is an enterprise that flourishes most vigorously with recurrent transfusions of young horses and mares of quality, with the culling of the failures and the replacement of the aging stock with younger animals. Stallions and mares—with some notorious exceptions—usually produce their finest offspring before they reach the age of fifteen.

In 1945, Blenheim II was already eighteen years old and beyond his prime, though he later sired several excellent runners. Sir Gallahad III, whose influence as a broodmare sire was growing, was a ripened twenty-five and only four years away from Valhalla. The younger stallions were not successful. In general, the 250 mares living on the farm, most of them owned by Claiborne’s clients, who boarded them there, were well bred but not exceptional producers. Hancock was unenthusiastic about the quality of Claiborne’s own mares. “We had gone twelve years without replacing stock,” he once recalled. “He [Arthur, Sr.] had sold everything. When I took over he had about seventy-five mares and I didn’t like any of them, except two. I started rebuilding. I made up my mind that my children wouldn’t have to go through what I did.” And by 1950, when he was refreshing the bloodstock with mares like Miss Disco, he already had two sons. The oldest was Arthur B. Hancock III. And the youngest, an infant at the time, was Seth.

The rebirth of the Hancock breeding dynasty actually began to take place six years earlier, launched by an event so inconspicuous that it stirred only the mildest notice of a day. It occurred when the Georgian Prince Dimitri Djordjadze and his wife Audrey, a Cincinnati heiress, decided to retire their little bay colt, Princequillo, and arranged to have him stand at stud in Virginia.

Almost two decades earlier, in 1928, two figures connected with the Belgian turf purchased a weanling—a colt by the stallion Rose Prince out of a mare named Indolence. The cost was 260 guineas. The weanling, shipped to Belgium, was named Prince Rose.

Prince Rose became the greatest racehorse in the Belgium of his day—probably the best that had ever run in that country—and one of its greatest sires. He had the bloodlines: Prince Rose’s sire, Rose Prince, was by Prince Palatine, a son of Persimmon, who was himself a son of one of the greatest sires in thoroughbred history, the undefeated St. Simon. As a direct male-line descendant of St. Simon, Prince Rose descended in what is called “tail male” from St. Simon, a potentially valuable genetic trait. The St. Simon male line produced an unusual number of superior horses.

As Prince Rose was establishing himself as Belgium’s leading sire, the American representative in France for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Laudy Lawrence, obtained the horse from Belgium on a three-year lease. Lawrence brought the horse to France in 1938 and installed him in his Haras de Cheffreville. In the spring of 1939, he bred Prince Rose to his mare Cosquilla, a daughter of Papyrus, winner of the Epsom Derby. She conceived. The breeding occurred in a turbulent time. War was coming to Europe. The German armies were menacing France. Pregnant, Cosquilla didn’t stay there long. She was dispatched across the English Channel, while in foal, to be bred in England the next spring.

In early 1940, as the Battle of Britain was about to begin, Cosquilla gave birth to her bay colt at the Banstead Stud at Newmarket, near Suffolk, about ninety miles outside of London. The air war over England began in July of 1940, and later that summer or fall—after the colt had been weaned—he was sent to Lawrence’s farm in Ireland. Then, in 1941, he and a number of yearlings were shipped across the North Atlantic, by then a lair of submarines, to New York. The colt disembarked as a refugee of sorts.

Named Princequillo, he was broken at the Mill River Farm in New York and put in training there. Prior to leaving the country again, Lawrence leased Princequillo to Chicago owner Anthony Pelleteri. One of the clauses of the lease permitted Pelleteri to run Princequillo in claiming races—in which the horse could be bought or “claimed” for a specific price—even though Pelleteri did not own him.

Pelleteri raced Princequillo for the first time under a $1500 claiming tag. No one took him.

He then ran the colt back for a $2500 claiming price, and again there were no takers.

Pelleteri then raced Princequillo for $2500 in his fourth start, winning with him then, and that was the last time Pelleteri had him. Trainer Horatio Luro, acting for the Boone Hall Stables of Princess Djordjadze, claimed him for the price. Luro ran him as a claimer, too. Aside from his pedigree, there was no apparent reason for anyone to believe that Princequillo would develop into the best longdistance runner in America in 1943. But he did, running best beyond a mile and an eighth.

In 1943, the spring classics were dominated by Count Fleet, an extremely fast horse who raced to easy victories in the Kentucky Derby, Preakness, and Belmont stakes and became the sixth horse in history to win the American Triple Crown. He won the Belmont Stakes by twenty-five lengths, the longest margin by which it had ever been won. Princequillo began his three-year-old year modestly. He won an allowance race in New Orleans, not a major racetrack compared with those in New York, then lost two others there, but he quickly became sharp. On June 12, seven days after Count Fleet rushed to his record-breaking clocking in the Belmont Stakes—clipping two-fifths of a second off War Admiral’s stakes record of 2:28^3/5 for the mile and a half—Princequillo ran the best race in his career. He defeated Bolingbroke, the great long distancer, beating him going a mile and five-eighths.

Princequillo then hooked the older Bolingbroke and Shut Out, winner of the 1942 Kentucky Derby, at a mile and a quarter in the Saratoga Handicap. Princequillo won it. The farther they ran, the better he liked it. He would leave the gate and simply roll on. A week after the Saratoga Handicap, he raced Bolingbroke over a mile and three-quarters, thus far the longest race of his career, and he won a head-bobbing stretch duel in record time. He closed out his year with a triumph in one of the longest races in America, the two-mile Jockey Club Gold Cup at Belmont Park.

Princequillo, by acclaim, was the best cup horse—that is, the best long-distance runner—in America, beating the most accomplished routers consistently. He won two more races in 1944, when he was a four-year-old, then pulled up lame at Saratoga. He won $96,550 and twelve of thirty-three races over three years.

Arthur B. Hancock, Sr., liked Princequillo’s racing record—his ability to stay a distance of ground—and he liked his pedigree. So he installed Princequillo at Ellerslie in 1945. There were no breeders leaping over one another to get their mares to Princequillo. He may have been the best long-distance runner in America, but he was not a fashionable stallion like Count Fleet or War Admiral. Princequillo was held in such uncertain esteem, in fact, that Hancock was unable to get enough mares to breed to him, the thirty-five or so mares needed to fill his book. But those who did decide to send him mares at Ellerslie made the difference. One was William Woodward. Another was Christopher T. Chenery.

CHAPTER 5

Princequillo was bred to Chenery’s Hildene in the spring of 1946, a year that ushered in a quick succession of landmark years in the fortunes of Hancock and Chenery and in the course of breeding thoroughbreds in America.

In 1946, the Hancocks sold Ellerslie, which had been losing money and declining as a stud farm for years, and consolidated all their thoroughbred holdings at Claiborne. Among the horses dispatched from Charlottesville to Paris was Princequillo. For him it was a long journey’s end. And Hildene, one of the last of the hundreds of mares bred at Ellerslie since the days of Richard Hancock’s Eolus, was returned to The Meadow in foal. The following year, in the spring of 1947, Hildene gave birth to a bay son of Princequillo. Chenery named him Hill Prince.

The racing fortunes of the Chenery horses were rising. More pivotally, 1947 was also the year that Chenery attended a dispersal sale of the estate of W. A. La Boyteaux at Saratoga and decided to join the bidding when the mare, Imperatrice, winner of the 1941 Test Stakes, was led into the sales ring. It was perhaps the most important decision of Chenery’s extraordinary career as a breeder.

Imperatrice was not much to look at, but she liked to hear her feet rattle. She was a big-barreled, short-legged, floppy-eared bay mare with a stirring gust of speed. Sprinting was her trump, but she had a depth of quality about her that almost carried her home in the 1941 Beldame Stakes, an important middle-distance race at Aqueduct. She finished a close second.

At her side in 1947 was a colt by the stallion Piping Rock, and the gallery at the sale was advised that she was in foal to him again. So Chenery, seeing a once-speedy race mare with a Piping Rock foal beside her and another advertised within, jumped into the bidding and moved it upward, finally upward to $30,000. The gavel slammed down, and they were his. Then down to The Meadow went Imperatrice. Later in the year Dr. William Caslick, a veterinarian, made his regular rounds of the Chenery broodmares to pronounce them either in or not in foal.

Chenery happened to be at The Meadow that day. Caslick moved from mare to mare, coming finally to the stall of Imperatrice. He walked inside and began the examination, inserting his hand in the mare’s rectum and reaching far inside, to where he could feel the outside of the uterine wall through the intestines. He was feeling for the fetus.

Moments passed. Caslick probed carefully for the signs of life. More time passed. Chenery, standing by Howard Gentry, wondered out loud what was taking so long.

“That mare’s empty,” Caslick finally said.

Chenery plopped down on a bale of straw: “Thirty thousand dollars, and empty!”

Imperatrice did not stay empty long.

In the autumn of the year, another kind of milestone was reached. Hundreds of men and women drove or walked the twelve miles from Lexington to Faraway Farm, filing through the gates until all of them, some horsemen and some not, gathered near the grave and listened as the mayor of Lexington gave a speech, and the head of the American Horse and Mule Association, Ira Drymon, delivered a eulogy. Bull Hancock was among the breeders there.

The mood was reverential. Man o’ War was lying in an oak coffin at the edge of an open grave. The top of the coffin was open. Man o’ War had died with an erection, and someone had discreetly placed a black cloth or blanket over it. He had suffered a series of heart attacks within a forty-eight-hour period, getting to his feet repeatedly until the last one put him down for good. He was thirty then, extremely old for a horse. The crowd listened as the eulogy ended, watched as the coffin was closed. They had paid the ultimate tribute to a racehorse—giving him a funeral fit for a prince of the blood, celebrating the cherished belief in Kentucky that Man o’ War was the greatest horse America had ever produced.

In the winter of 1948, trainer Jimmy Jones saddled Citation for the Ground Hog Course at Hialeah Racetrack in Florida, where many top three-year-olds would begin their campaigning for the Triple Crown. On May 1, he won the Kentucky Derby by three and a half, beating a stablemate, Coaltown. Two weeks later he won the Preakness Stakes at Pimlico by five and a half lengths. On June 12, at Belmont Park on Long Island, he raced to an eight-length victory in the Belmont Stakes. Thus Citation became the eighth Triple Crown winner in American turf history and earned a reputation as one of the greatest runners of all time.

In 1949, the winnings of the Chenery horses soared to $141,005, with Hill Prince winning the World’s Playground Stakes at Atlantic City, worth $11,275, and the Cowdin Stakes at Belmont Park under Eddie Arcaro. Hill Prince was voted the leading two-year-old in America. The value of Princequillo’s stud services started climbing. At Claiborne Farm, meanwhile, Bull Hancock was engineering the masterstroke in modern American breeding, the pièce de résistance.

Toward the end of 1949, sometime in the fall of the year, Dr. Eslie Asbury, a Cincinnati surgeon, received a telephone call from Hancock, his long-time friend and counselor on thoroughbred breeding. The call concerned Nasrullah, the Irish stallion that Hancock wanted to import to America. He had tried twice without success to purchase him. Foaled in 1940 at the Aga Khan’s Sheshoon Stud in Ireland, Nasrullah was a son of the unbeaten Nearco, the greatest racehorse of his day in Europe. Nasrullah was a stubborn if gifted animal, a rogue at the barrier, a rogue sometimes in the morning. If the spirit did not move him to gallop on the racetrack, which was often, an umbrella opened behind him usually did; that became one of the techniques used to make him run at Newmarket. He was a champion two-year-old in England, and Hancock believed the horse was unlucky when he finished third in the 1943 Epsom Derby. Bull Hancock liked him.

In fact, Hancock tried to buy him once in 1948 for £100,000 in partnership with Captain Harry F. Guggenheim, the copper baron, and banker Woodward, but the pound was devalued and the deal caved in with it.

And now a year later Hancock had tried again and finally succeeded in getting him. Nasrullah, at last, was coming to America.

“We have the horse,” Hancock said to Asbury. “Do you want in?”

Asbury did not hesitate. Nasrullah was not new to him. Years later he recalled that he and Hancock had often spoken of Nasrullah’s prospects as a sire, his racing record, his temperament, and the vigor he might infuse into American strains. Hancock had always wanted a stallion from the Nearco line, a powerful line only tokenly represented in America at the time. Nearco had been the leading sire in England in 1947 and 1948 and was on his way to being the leading sire again in 1949. Asbury recalled that he and Hancock had spoken specifically about the invigorating effect the Nasrullah blood might have on the blood of Sir Gallahad III and Bull Dog, the sons of Teddy. “We had felt Nasrullah was an out-cross for all the Teddy blood here,” said Asbury. “We had so much Teddy blood here, especially at Claiborne and in my own mares.”

Hancock told Asbury that the syndication was almost complete: the stallion had been acquired for $340,000 and the price was $10,000 per share. The syndicate included some of the most prominent names in American turf: Guggenheim and Woodward, H. C. Phipps, and George D. Widener, chairman of the Jockey Club, among others.

The announcement that appeared on page 572 of the December 10, 1949, issue of The Blood-Horse began ironically in the passive voice:

The purchase by a syndicate of American breeders of the nine-year-old stallion Nasrullah was announced this week by Arthur B. Hancock Jr. of Claiborne Stud, Paris. The son of Nearco-Mumtaz Begum by Blenheim II … was purchased from Joseph McGrath of the Brownstown Stud, County Kildare, Eire.

The resurgence of the Hancock dynasty was now at hand.

The following year, in 1950, Hill Prince finished second in the Kentucky Derby, a race Hancock and Chenery always wanted to win. The son of Princequillo romped to a five-length victory in the Preakness Stakes, worth $56,115 to Chenery, and to victories in the Withers Stakes and the Jerome Handicap. As Hill Prince was making a run for Horse of the Year honors on the East Coast, a five-year-old horse named Noor beat Citation fairly four times. For the showdown, Noor came east to meet Hill Prince in the two-mile Jockey Club Gold Cup. Hill Prince rolled to the lead and never lost it, easily winning the race his sire won in 1943. Noor, an Irish-bred horse, finished second. The significance of these events was only gradually dawning.

Hill Prince was named Horse of the Year in 1950.

Prince Simon, another son of Princequillo, was among the best three-year-olds in Europe. He was owned by William Woodward. And Noor was a son of Nasrullah, one of his first sons imported to America.

Nasrullah had arrived in America in July 1950, and he started his first days in stud there—his paddock was near that of Princequillo—in the early part of 1951.

That same year, with one champion son of Princequillo in his barn, Chenery sought another from him. But he didn’t return Hildene to him. Instead, in 1951, Chenery sent Imperatrice to Princequillo, and on January 9, 1952, she had a filly foal at The Meadow. She was a bay, and Mrs. Helen Bates Chenery—who named most of the horses—called her Somethingroyal.

CHAPTER 6

Jockey Eddie Arcaro was riding Bold Ruler toward the winner’s circle late that afternoon of 1956, moments after the colt had raced to a two-length victory in the Futurity at Belmont Park, when Mrs. Henry Carnegie Phipps stepped forward to meet them. Bold Ruler had just beaten the fastest two-year-old colts in America, running in near-record time, and he was dancing home, his nostrils flaring hotly, his neck bowed and lathered with sweat, moving powerfully toward his seventy-three-year-old owner. Turfwriter Charles Hatton watched her meet him.

“Mrs. Phipps was out at the gap to get him and lead him down that silly victory lane they had there. And she must have weighed all of ninety pounds, and here is this big young stud horse—and she walked right up to him and held out her hand, and he just settled right down and dropped his head so she could get ahold of the chin strap, and Bold Ruler just walked like an old cow along that lane and she wasn’t putting any pressure on him to quiet him down or make him be still. It was one of the most amazing sights I’ve ever seen. It was incredible to me because anyone else reaching for that horse—and he was hot!—you’d have had to snatch him or he’d throw you off your feet or step all over you. But not with her. For her he was just a real chivalrous prince of a colt. He came back to her and stopped all the monkeyshines, ducked down his head and held out his chin, and here was this little old lady with a big young stud horse on the other end and he was just as gentle as he could be.”

Even growing old, as her walnut face withdrew inside a frame of white hair, she had a mind as quick as a crack of lightning and always drove to the racetrack in the morning by herself, without a chauffeur, steering her Bentley south from Spring Hill, the marble palace on Long Island.

Mrs. Phipps must have seemed the picture of some innocent eccentric—the way she tipped back her head to see the road above the dash, the way she gripped the wheel with both hands, the way she climbed from the car with the poodles beside her and walked into the barn at Belmont Park. Her horses turned to watch her coming. She carried sugar, and she wore a plain dress, sometimes a stocking with a run in it and sometimes moccasins or gym shoes. The men at work in the stables stepped gingerly around her when she walked up the shed, some nodding deferentially and saying hello, and she returned the salutations but did not speak at length to them, only to Sunny Jim Fitzsimmons, her crippled trainer.

On summer mornings they would sit as if enthroned like ancients from another time. He was the sage, a former trolley car motorman from Sheepshead Bay in Brooklyn who became one of the finest horsemen of all time, the only man to train two winners of the Triple Crown, Gallant Fox and Omaha, and almost three and four in Johnstown and Nashua. She was the patron, fulfilling the aristocratic role, racing horses for the sport of it and never complaining, win or lose. She was the stable bookkeeper and knew how much each horse had won. She would ask how they were doing, how they were eating, and when and how they were working, and when and where they would race again. She was an independent little statue of a woman who went her own way, and she would walk up to the shed and stop to pet and feed her horses, complimenting those who had won, scolding softly those who had just lost: “You dope,” she would say, holding a cube of sugar. “I don’t know if I should give you one.” But she always did.

She was the grande dame of the American turf, and she hardly ever spoke in public. The news accounts in words attributed directly to her are sparse, and one newsman confided that he always left her alone when he saw her sitting in the box seat because he sensed a privacy inviolate.

She was born Gladys Mills on June 19, 1883, in Newport, Rhode Island, a twin daughter of Ruth Livingston and Ogden Mills, her name minted from a marriage between heirs of two of the largest family fortunes in America. The Livingstons were old American wealth and aristocracy, pre-Revolutionary real estate and later steamboats up the Hudson. The Millses were nineteenth-century nouveau riche. Darius Ogden Mills made millions in the California Gold Rush. His son Ogden became a financier, and a sportsman. He went into a racing partnership with Lord Derby of England, and together they operated a strong stable of racehorses on the Continent—so strong that in 1928, the year Mills died, it was the leading stable in France. The Mills-Derby racing venture continued to endure when Gladys Mills’s twin sister, the Right Honourable Beatrice, Countess of Granard, replaced her father and helped to carry the stable. By then Gladys Mills was an owner, too.

In 1907, when she was twenty-four years old, Gladys Mills married into one of the wealthiest and most powerful families in America, the steel family of her husband, Henry Carnegie Phipps. He was a son of Henry Phipps, who, with Andrew Carnegie, founded a steelworks so profitable that when J. Pierpont Morgan bought them out in 1901, Phipps’s share alone came to $50 million.

Gladys Mills and Henry Carnegie Phipps settled down in New York, in a home with a marble facade at Eighty-seventh Street and Fifth Avenue, and on the Long Island estate off Wheatley Road in Roslyn. Phipps was tall, distinguished, and played polo. Mrs. Phipps was small, with a flinty New England dignity about her, and a crack shot. In her later years she climbed into a swivel seat mounted on a swamp truck in Florida, and shot birds with a 12-gauge as she spun in circles. She bagged her limit in quail at the age of eighty-six.

Mrs. Phipps, in partnership with her brother Ogden L. Mills and his wife, bought horses for the first time in the mid-1920s and raced them under the nom de course of the Wheatley Stable. The stable flourished early, launched to a quick success after the leading American breeder of the 1920s, Harry Payne Whitney, a Long Island neighbor of the Phippses, offered her a choice of ten of his yearlings in 1926, reportedly to satisfy a gambling debt incurred during a high-rolling card game with Henry Carnegie Phipps. Whether out of luck or shrewdness—probably part of both—Mrs. Phipps and trainer Sunny Jim Fitzsimmons chose five yearlings that went on to win stakes for her and more than once whipped Whitney’s horses. Incredibly, the other five were multiple winners, too, though not of stakes. The best of the ten were Diabolo, a long-distance runner who won the 1929 Jockey Club Gold Cup at two miles, and the unbeaten but ill-fated two-year-old Dice (who died of colic as a youngster), as well as Nixie, Distraction, and Swizzlestick.

Her passion was for horses purely as runners. “I just like to see them perform as thoroughbreds,” she once said, in one of her rare public remarks. Her interest in horses involved her as a breeder soon enough. In 1929, the same year Diabolo won the Jockey Club Gold Cup, she purchased a broodmare, Virginia L., in partnership with Marshall Field, who had just helped finance the importation of Sir Gallahad III. Mrs. Phipps never bought a farm of her own for the breeding and raising of thoroughbreds. But she did meet Arthur B. Hancock, Sr., early in her career as an owner, and when she finally did decide to breed as well as race her horses, she became a client of Hancock at Claiborne Farm. Through the next forty years, most of her homebreds were foaled and raised in Paris, Kentucky. It was she who decided which of her mares would be bred to which stallion; she became a student of the pedigrees of all her horses, and though she took advice, she made her own decisions.

In her first twenty-five years as a breeder, by far the fastest thoroughbred she bred was Seabiscuit, the bay horse who bumped off War Admiral in the famous Pimlico match race on November 1, 1938, though “The Biscuit” did not carry the Wheatley gold and purple silks for her then. He had raced eighteen times as a two-year-old before he won his first start for her, thirty-five times in all that year with only five wins. He was just a sluggish selling plater when Mrs. Phipps, becoming impatient and discouraged with him, sold him for $8000 to Charles S. Howard. It was one of the rare mistakes she made in the business. Seabiscuit retired in 1940 with earnings of $437,430, a world record at the time.

The Wheatley-breds won more than $100,000 for the first time in 1935, winning 106 races and $113,834. Never again did they earn less than $100,000 annually. Among the best horses Mrs. Phipps bred were Seabiscuit, High Voltage, and Misty Morn, a daughter of Princequillo who won $212,575. Yet nothing she ever did compared in import to the purchase she made early in the 1950s, when she prevailed upon Hancock to sell her Miss Disco, upon whom the Phippses founded a dynasty.

Miss Disco came to Gladys Phipps at the end of a curious, sometimes unlikely series of events that began unfolding late in 1933, the year Alfred Gwynne Vanderbilt turned twenty-one. Vanderbilt had just begun to involve himself as an owner and breeder of racehorses, as a man of name, means, and ambition in the thoroughbred industry. He grew up, fatherless, with family fortunes on both sides of his pedigree.

He was the son of Alfred G. Vanderbilt, Sr., a wealthy sportsman who perished with 1152 others when a German U-boat sank the Lusitania off the Irish coast, and the former Margaret Emerson, the daughter of Isaac Emerson, a Baltimore chemist of modest means until he invented Bromo-Seltzer. Emerson acquired Sagamore Farm, an 848-acre stretch of rolling landscape in the Worthington Valley, and his daughter went into racing. Young Alfred acquired his mother’s passion for the sport, dropping out of Yale at the end of his sophomore year to raise and race the running horse.

In the photos taken of him in the early 1930s, he looks strikingly like the James Stewart of Destry Rides Again, and what adds to that impression is the whimsy of his humor. One year, prior to the running of a race in which his horse appeared to have no chance, Vanderbilt gave jockey Ted Atkinson a sandwich, a wristwatch, and a flashlight, advising him, “It may be dark before you get back.” He never took himself too seriously, not even as a breeder.

When Vanderbilt turned twenty-one on September 22, 1933, he was given $2 million in government bonds, the first of four such installments his father had left him. His mother gave him Sagamore Farm, which Isaac Emerson had given to her. With that, Vanderbilt had money and land, the means to buy and breed and raise and race horses of his own.

In August of 1933, he hopped into his sporty new LaSalle roadster, fire-engine red, and tooled north toward Saratoga. Beside him in the car was a set of his new racing silks, a modified version of his mother’s silks of cerise and white blocks. On the advice of trainer Bud Stotler, he was heading north with a check for $25,000 to buy a big, raw-boned chestnut colt named Discovery. Vanderbilt intended to buy him and race him in the Hopeful Stakes. Discovery had been bred by Walter Salmon’s Mereworth Farm, and he was a son of a fast if fiery rogue of a horse named Display. Display was a son of Fair Play, who also sired Man o’ War, and there was nothing docile about “Big Red.” But when bred to Ariadne, Display transmitted nothing of his unruliness to their offspring, Discovery, a colt of estimable poise and calm at the post. He launched his racing career in a blaze of indifference, but by the time of the Hopeful Stakes at Saratoga, he had matured considerably.