Native Dancer (18 page)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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