Native Dancer (5 page)

His more serious pursuits included raising money for veterans around the world and publishing a popular magazine for school-age
readers. He also published a series of annual books on racing. Although he had no interest in riding horses or touring his
barns with carrots, intent on making equine friends, he was an avid outdoorsman who loved to fish, sail, play tennis, and
fly planes. “He probably would say, looking back, that he should have had a business or an occupation, but I don’t know of
anyone who had more fun as he went through life,” his son Alfred Vanderbilt III said.

His manner was reserved, and even cautious around strangers. “I hesitate to use the word ‘distance,’ but you didn’t encroach,”
Prince said. “He was very friendly, very informal, there were lots of laughs, lots of everything, but there was a polite distance.
It was part of his upbringing.” He had reason to be concerned. In 1951, a fifteen-year-old boy saw his picture in the paper
and sent him a note threatening to kill him if he didn’t hand over $10,000; police arrested the boy with a toy gun at the
scheduled “drop-off.”

“His name was an iconic name, and I think it’s only natural that you develop some defenses,” Alfred Vanderbilt III said. “He
would get letters from people asking for money and help doing this and that. One time he got a letter addressed to ‘Alfred
Vanderbilt, United States of America.’ That really tickled him.”

Born to prominence, he was famous for who he was, like members of Britain’s royal family or, later, the Kennedy children.
The
New Yorker, Time
magazine, and the
Saturday Evening Post
had profiled him, intrigued by racing’s wealthy boy wonder as he matured into adulthood as a font of courtly contradictions:
privileged but unspoiled, reserved in public but offhand around the track, a racing man who never drank and seldom gambled.
Joe Palmer had titled his 1952 study “The Riddle of Alfred Vanderbilt,” astutely writing that Vanderbilt let you know him
only as well as he wanted you to know him.

Only those who knew him best knew of his most distinguishing characteristic: a devilish dry wit. He had once handed a sandwich,
flashlight, and wrist compass to Ted Atkinson before the jockey rode a Vanderbilt-owned long shot in the Saratoga Cup. “It
may be dark before you get back,” Vanderbilt explained. Many of his horses’ names had arch explanations or featured a wry
twist on the names of the sire and dam. When he married Jeanne, who was from a prominent family but Irish Catholic, he was
dropped from the Social Register, the vanguard of old-school society. He responded by naming a colt Social Outcast. The sire’s
name? Shut Out.

To Vanderbilt, naming horses was a keen test of mental powers, and in time, he would be recognized as perhaps the best there
ever was. His greatest hits included Splitting Headache (sired by a stallion named The Axe out of a mare named Top o’ The
Morning), Ogle (by Oh Say out of Low Cut), and Dirty Old Man (by Tom Fool out of Last Leg). The name “Native Dancer” came
from the caption of a picture he had taken of dancers in New Guinea, where he served in the navy during World War II. The
names of the horse’s sire and dam, Polynesian and Geisha, had him thinking of the South Pacific.

As broad as his interests were, racing was the only constant in his life, the common denominator connecting his days. “The
track was what he loved the most; he resisted making a total commitment to anything else,” Roche said. That passion, like
his wealth, was inherited, passed down on both sides of his family. Vanderbilts had been linked with horses going back to
the Commodore’s days, and the Emersons—his grandfather, Isaac, and his mother, Margaret—had provided him with the tools of
the trade: a horse farm and the origins of a racing stable.

His father, Alfred Vanderbilt Sr., was the wealthiest man in America at the turn of the century. Lean and graceful, he was
a spectacular horseman, “one of the most prominent in America,” according to the
New York Times
in 1911. He bred top horses at his farm in Newport, Rhode Island, and won blue ribbons at important horse shows in America
and England, showcasing a team of greys. His specialty was coaching, a once-popular sport in which horse teams covered long
distances led by whip-toting drivers in carriages. It was losing its public as automobiles clogged the roads, but Alfred Sr.
did his best to keep it alive. He drove around New York in his red and white coach, set a land-speed record on the New York-to-Philadelphia
route in 1901, then shipped seventy horses to England and set another record traveling from London to Brighton as thousands
of cheering Britons lined the streets.

Alfred Sr. and Margaret Emerson were married to other people when they met in 1908 at the Plaza Hotel in New York, where Alfred
Sr. had a permanent suite. Margaret’s husband was the doctor on her father’s yacht, but he was also an alcoholic who beat
her, and she divorced him, claiming cruelty. (He knocked her out and put her on an eighth-floor window ledge at the Plaza
one night; fortunately, the night air revived her and she rolled back inside instead of off the edge.) Alfred Sr.’s marriage
also ended in scandal after his affair with Agnes O’Brien Ruiz, the wife of Cuba’s attachÉ in Washington; his divorce cost
him a reported $10 million. Ruiz committed suicide when Alfred Sr. took up with Margaret, but the scandal eventually subsided
and Alfred Sr. and Margaret were married in 1911.

Margaret, heiress to the vast Bromo-Seltzer fortune, was a strong, restless woman. Dark-haired, opinionated, and self-sufficient,

she rode expertly, beat all comers at croquet, won skeet-shooting contests on the Riviera, and had circled the world on her
father’s yacht several times. Fond of horses, she was a perfect match for Alfred Sr. They quickly had two sons: Alfred Jr.,
born near London in 1912, and George, born two years later. Their life seemed idyllic.

On May 1, 1915, in New York, Alfred Sr. boarded the
Lusitania
, a luxurious British steamship, bound for a meeting of the International Horse Show Association in England. He was looking
forward to a week of caviar, cocktails, and conversation on board, and like most of the almost two thousand passengers, had
paid little attention to a warning from the German government: “Travelers are reminded that a state of war exists between
Germany and her allies and Great Britain and her allies; that the zone of war includes the waters adjacent to the British
Isles; and that… vessels flying the flag of Great Britain, or any of her allies, are liable to destruction in those waters.”

Days later, the
Lusitania
steered right through the “zone of war” off the Irish coast instead of charting a more evasive route, and a German U-boat
captain fired a torpedo that hit the
Lusitania
and sank it. More than seven hundred passengers survived, but Alfred Sr. drowned after handing his life vest to a woman and
suggesting that the men endeavor to “save the children,” an act that, the
New York Times
wrote, “gave expression to the whole modern idea of civilization.”

It was a noble death, but it tore a devastating hole in the ornate tapestry of the Vanderbilt dynasty. The family fortune
soon began to shrink, carved up by a wicked scythe of taxes, marriages, children, divorces, the end of the railroad monopoly,
and the failure of future generations to continue making money.

Alfred Vanderbilt Jr. was two years old when the
Lusitania
went down. Although his father’s will generously stipulated that he receive $5.87 million in government bonds, with the principal
and accumulated interest to be paid in four installments as he grew into adulthood, he had lost his father. “His childhood
was a lonesome one,” the Associated Press reported in a 1936 profile of Vanderbilt. “Surrounded by luxury in houses full of
servants, he had little company.

His health was always delicate, and usually there was a nurse hovering with physicians making frequent calls.”

Margaret remarried in 1918 to Raymond Baker, the head of the United States Mint. (She was now known as Margaret Emerson McKim
Vanderbilt Baker and maintained a residence in Nevada for facilitating divorces.) Her boys, growing up without their own father,
increasingly turned to her father as a paternal influence. Captain Emerson, as he was known, was a mustachioed yachtsman and
world traveler with a $20 million estate. Margaret was the love of his life—his yacht was named after her—and he doted on
her children.

On a trip to Baltimore in 1923, Margaret took Alfred to see the Preakness Stakes, one of the biggest events in racing. They
watched the races from the Old Clubhouse, the Victorian manor overlooking the head of the stretch, and Alfred, at age ten,
cashed a winning bet on the Preakness. His horse, Tall Timber, finished fifth but was coupled with the winner. “The excitement
of being allowed to eat a hot dog with mustard, most of which ended up on my lapels, was forgotten when I saw the horses and
the bright silks of the jockeys coming down the stretch. I never got over that feeling,” Vanderbilt wrote years later in a
Daily Racing Form
essay.

Margaret had never seen Alfred so excited, and within months, she had bought a steeplechase horse, partly to appease him.
After winning several races with the horse, she decided to follow the lead of other society families and back a full-fledged
racing stable. She hired a broad-shouldered, no-nonsense trainer, Joseph “Bud” Stotler, who made some purchases at the Saratoga
sales. She named her outfit Sagamore Stable—a sagamore was an Indian tribal chief—and Margaret’s sprawling wooded retreat
in the Adirondack Mountains, which she had inherited from Alfred Sr., was named Sagamore Lodge. Her silks were cerise and
white in a pattern of blocks; Alfred Sr.’s coaching colors had been red and white, and cerise is a vivid purplish red.

Sagamore Stable experienced instant success when a two-year-old colt named Rock Man won the Incentive Stakes and Nursery Stakes
at Pimlico in 1925. As a three-year-old the next spring, he had the lead in the Preakness after a half mile and trailed only
one colt entering the stretch before fading. Disregarded at 42-1 odds in the Kentucky Derby five days later (before World
War II, the Derby was sometimes run after the Preakness), Rock Man pressed the leaders up the backside and into the homestretch
before tiring. He finished eight lengths behind the winner but stuck his neck out for third.

Another Sagamore colt, Lord Chaucer, showed even more promise as a two-year-old in 1926, winning the Hopeful Stakes at Saratoga.
Pointed for the classics the next spring, he was running third and taking the measure of the leaders on the turn of the Pimlico
Futurity when he collided with a rival and tumbled to the dirt. His leg broken, he was humanely put to death.

The stable thrived, recording forty-six wins and more than $125,000 in earnings in 1926 and 1927. Three years after its inception,
Sagamore was one of racing’s top fifty outfits. Sensing his daughter’s excitement, Emerson came up with an idea. Long entranced
by the rolling limestone hills north of Baltimore, where he owned a summer estate, he purchased a 250-acre tract from a farmer
and gave it to Margaret with plans to turn it into a horse farm for her stable. He would spend $500,000 on indoor and outdoor
training tracks, a barn with fifty stalls, two paddocks, and housing for workers. Privately, he hoped the farm—to be named,
naturally, Sagamore Farm, after the racing stable—would lure his daughter to Maryland more often.

Within months, the farm was bustling with grooms and exercise riders as the barns, paddocks, and racing strips were built.
Another three-year-old ran well for Sagamore in 1928, a colt named Don Q. who finished well out of the money as one of eighteen
starters in the Preakness, then ran seventh among twenty-two starters in the Kentucky Derby. By the end of the year, Margaret’s
horses had won twenty-one races and she had divorced Raymond Baker and within twenty-four days married her fourth husband,
Charles Minot Amory, a Harvard graduate from Boston society.

The stable’s rise matched young Vanderbilt’s growing interest in racing. He followed his mother’s horses in the newspapers
and, school vacations permitting, by her side, and traveled with her every August to Saratoga, where he spent mornings at
the barn, afternoons at the races, and evenings at dinner with racing’s upper crust. He sat for hours with Colonel E. R. Bradley,
the master of Idle Hour Farm, learning from one of the nation’s eminent breeders and horse owners; Bradley later sent him
racing books and magazines, solicited his opinions on equine matters, and offered a free stud service to his first mare. Bud
Stotler also spent many hours with the young man, answering his many questions around the barn and during the races.

During the school year, Vanderbilt arranged to receive the
Daily Racing Form
at St. Paul’s, the boarding school he attended in Concord, New Hampshire; the paper came in the mail in an unmarked envelope
to prevent the deans from suspecting his mind might not be on his studies. He read it under his bedcovers, by flashlight,
after lights were out; his mind was, indeed, distracted. He ran an annual betting book on the Kentucky Derby, cashing in big
in 1929 when none of his classmates backed the long-shot winner, Clyde Van Dusen.

In the late 1920s, Margaret let him make some breeding decisions and pick out several yearlings and follow them as if they
were his own. One won a stakes race at Aqueduct, and when another won at Saratoga in 1928, the local newspaper labeled Vanderbilt,
fifteen, as “the youngest owner on the American turf.” That he would follow his mother’s lead and have his own racing stable
was already apparent.

He used his allowance money to buy his first horse in August 1931, just before starting at Yale. He slipped away with Stotler
one night at Saratoga, went to the yearling sales, and came home with a smallish chestnut filly that had cost $250. The filly,
which he named Sue Jones—a dull name not up to the high standard of cleverness he later set—joined Margaret’s stable and debuted
on June 16, 1932, at Aqueduct, finishing third. The
Blood-Horse
, a prominent racing industry journal, noted the debut of young Vanderbilt’s silks, which incorporated the same cerise and
white colors as Margaret’s, only in a pattern of diamonds instead of blocks.