Native Dancer (6 page)

Plainly more interested in racing than literature or economics, Vanderbilt lasted just three semesters at Yale before dropping
out. “I believed I had discovered what I wanted in life, and I was right. I wanted racetrack,” he later told interviewers.
Conveniently, Margaret was tiring of the expense of keeping the farm and stable running, especially after her father died
in 1931. Emerson’s will stipulated that Margaret pass the farm on to Alfred when she died, but she decided to step up the
timetable and give it to him when he turned twenty-one.

It is doubtful anyone in America celebrated a more bountiful or conspicuous birthday in 1933. At the lowest ebb of the Great
Depression, Vanderbilt received from his mother Sagamore Farm and a racing stable, a burnt-gold Rolls-Royce, and the lifelong
services of valet Louis Cheri. From his father’s estate, he received more than $2 million, with three similar payments scheduled
for his twenty-fifth, thirtieth, and thirty-fifth birthdays. The
New York Times
noted in an article that another Vanderbilt scion had “reached his majority”—turned twenty-one—and was planning to devote
his money and time to racing thoroughbreds.

“I went to the races with Margaret once at Hialeah, and she enjoyed it immensely, but Alfred wanted it to be his own show,
and she graciously gave him the stable,” his friend Clyde Roche said. “For her, it was a circle of people who knew each other
and enjoyed the racing setting, but I don’t think she had a devotion to it. Alfred certainly did.”

Looking for horses to improve the stable, which had sagged, Vanderbilt focused on a big, heavy-looking two-year-old named
Discovery. Sired by Display, a Preakness winner nicknamed the Iron Horse, Discovery was owned by Walter J. Salmon, a New York
financier who, looking to cut costs, had leased the horse to Adolphe Pons, a horseman whose father had immigrated from France
and become associated with the Belmont family. Salmon wanted Pons to sell Discovery.

Stotler began negotiating a price after seeing Discovery win a race, and Vanderbilt, thinking the deal was done, put his silks
in his car and drove to Saratoga, expecting Discovery to run for him in the Hopeful Stakes. Instead, Salmon and Pons elected
to let the horse run in Pons’s colors once more, then called off the deal when Discovery ran third, raising his value. After
several more months of negotiations, Vanderbilt offered $25,000 and left on a four-month hunting expedition in Africa. He
had been at sea for a day when he received a simply worded telegram from Stotler: “Discovery yours.” It would be the most
important equine purchase of his life.

In Africa, Vanderbilt bagged a lion and several elephants, was chased by a rhinoceros, fished with Ernest Hemingway, and met
Beryl Markham, the female aviator. Upon returning, he jumped excitedly into the business of running a farm and a stable. His
hunger for knowledge was so intense that Stotler utilized him as an assistant trainer even though he was the boss, dispatching
him to small tracks to run minor horses, a seemingly thankless job Vanderbilt relished. He ran the stalls and established
a rapport with the other men on the backstretch, asking for no favors and insisting that he be called Alfred or Al.

Discovery ran well enough in the spring of 1934 that Vanderbilt took him to Louisville for the Kentucky Derby. Sent to the
post at 12-1 odds, he took a three-length lead into the stretch as jockey Johnny Bejshak furiously worked him. Pandemonium
reigned in Vanderbilt’s private box. Although Cavalcade rallied to win, Discovery finished second, and Vanderbilt never forgot
the sensation of holding a lead so late in America’s greatest race. Discovery eventually recorded several major wins that
year, but he was known more for losing a series of races to Cavalcade.

Racing as a four-year-old in 1935, Discovery had lost five in a row in the spring and was being dismissed as a disappointment
when “all of a sudden, he got good,” Vanderbilt recalled in a
Thoroughbred Times
interview in 1993. He won eight straight stakes races in seven weeks in New York, Chicago, Boston, and Detroit, setting several
track records while enduring an exhausting schedule of train rides. By the end of the year, the horse known as the Big Train
had traveled nine thousand miles and won eleven stakes races at eight tracks, with handicappers asking him to carry as much
as 139 pounds. It was a remarkable performance, and Vanderbilt was acclaimed for his willingness to run the horse anywhere
against anyone under any conditions.

Vanderbilt’s stable finished 1935 with more than $300,000 in earnings, tops in the nation, and thirty-seven stakes wins, the
most by any stable in twenty-five years. Less than two years after taking over, Vanderbilt was at the top of the game along
with Belair Stud, C. V. Whitney, Brookmeade Stable, and the rest of racing’s ruling class. He purchased a neighboring farm
to double the size of Sagamore Farm and spent lavishly to turn it into a showcase. “When he came in for a visit, we all lined
up, like a military greeting,” Claude Appley recalled. “He knew the breeding of every horse in the field, and we had a lot
of horses. He was an encyclopedia.”

It was inevitable that he would become more involved in the racing industry. Vanderbilts seldom lingered on any sideline for
long, and anyone with his enthusiasm and financial wherewithal belonged in racing’s hierarchy. The success of his stable led
the Maryland Jockey Club, which operated Pimlico, to give him a seat on its board of directors in 1936. Soon, when the board
was deciding whether to take out a liquor license—snobbish Pimlico had previously abhorred the idea—Vanderbilt, a nondrinker,
cast the tie-breaking vote in favor of alcohol, believing it would draw more fans to the track. Pimlico’s vice president resigned,
and a longtime secretary announced that his stock in the track was for sale. “I’ll buy it!” Vanderbilt roared. Before long,
he had purchased a controlling interest of Pimlico stock and was running the track as its president.

As his vote for liquor indicated, Vanderbilt had strong and unconventional ideas about tracks and racing. He was, at twenty-five,
a maverick, even though he was a member of high society. He believed that racing had been run for the sake of its wealthy
old guard for far too long and that the interests of the average fan had been ignored. There was too much emphasis on betting,
he felt, and not enough on making the race-day experience interesting for the customers. In general, he believed, an infusion
of spirit and innovation was needed.

“He was, as we’d say today, a guy who thought ‘outside the box,’ ” said Tim Capps, a Maryland-based racing author, historian,
and executive. “He was an iconoclast Didn’t fit the genre of the ‘old money’ crowd. He operated outside the framework of what
people thought third- or fourth-generation money ought to be like. He had a sense of what the fans wanted. He understood the
value of promotion. He was willing to take chances.”

At Pimlico, which had been losing money and fans, he increased purse sizes and inaugurated new races such as the Pimlico Special,
intending to attract better horses and give fans at least one stakes race every day. He installed a public-address system,
teletimers, cameras, and a starting gate with closed doors, the first on the East Coast Most famously, he spent $58,000 to
remove the hill in the infield that had given the track its nickname, Old Hilltop. Some saw the mound as historic, and many
old-timers were aghast, but fans had complained that they couldn’t see their horses run, and away it went “He was the only
guy who wanted to protect the public to the extent he did,” longtime California steward Pete Pederson said.

A hands-on boss, he demanded high standards from his employees and made sure those standards were met. “He would get up one
day and not shave, not wear a tie, wear a sport shirt, and go to the track unrecognized,” Alfred Vanderbilt III said. “The
next day, there would be hell to pay. He knew which pari-mutuel clerks had been rude, what was and wasn’t getting done, and
what needed to be done.”

Pimlico experienced a rebirth, drawing better horses and larger crowds. “It was my theory that if the product was right, everything
else would take care of itself, and that was how it worked out attendance picked up, business picked up, the net profit picked
up and the prestige picked up,” Vanderbilt told
Sports Illustrated
in 1963. Impressed with his progressive management, as well as his commitment to racing, the Jockey Club made him its youngest-ever
member in 1937, when he was twenty-five.

The Associated Press had labeled him “one of the most eligible bachelors between Bar Harbor and Palm Beach” in 1936 and asked
in a headline, “How Long Till Vanderbilt Weds? Society Wondering.” He had courted a coterie of women in society, the theater,
and the movies. Then he began dating Manuela Hudson early in 1938. She was the daughter of a San Francisco attorney and the
niece of Charles Howard, who owned Seabiscuit, the most popular horse in America. Vanderbilt and Manuela met at Santa Anita,
married in the summer of 1938, had a daughter named Wendy, bought a thirty-room house in New York, built another home overlooking
Sagamore Farm—then divorced in the early 1940s.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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