Secretariat

by William Nack

  “See if you can get Mrs. du Pont for me.”

  Allaire duPont has been a client of Claiborne for many years, a person of taste and financial vitality in the breeding of American bloodstock.

  At her 800-acre Woodstock Farm in Chesapeake City, Maryland, she raises thoroughbreds, keeping thirty-five broodmares in the nursery, rides and looks after her great gelding Kelso—five times America’s Horse of the Year (1960–1964), five times winner of the two-mile Jockey Club Gold Cup, and the biggest money earner in the history of the sport, winner of thirty-nine of sixty-three starts and $1,977,896. “Kelly” was foaled and raised at Claiborne.

  Seth is depending on Mrs. du Pont to take a share. Lately she has been breeding mares to Claiborne stallions Round Table, Buckpasser, and Herbager, among others, and Seth has her high on the list as a potential buyer for a share in Secretariat. Reaching her at Woodstock that morning, he informs her of the essentials in what has become his standard sales delivery.

  “I called because Mrs. Tweedy has authorized me to syndicate Secretariat for her and I’m in the process of doing it right now. We wanted to know if you wanted a share. The price is $190,000 a share, in thirty-two shares, and Mrs. Tweedy is going to keep two under the Meadow Stud and two will be owned by the Chenery Corporation, which is a family holding corporation. The terms are 10 percent down and 40 percent when he passes his fertility test, the remaining 50 percent on January 15, 1974. He’ll continue to race in her colors and anything he might win will go to her.”

  After thinking about it a moment, discussing terms with Seth, Mrs. du Pont tells him that that is a sizable sum of money to ask for a breeding share and that she would have to consult her accountant before making such an investment. She promises to call him back when she makes up her mind.

  Mrs. Richard C. du Pont, an extremely active breeder in the bloodstock market, with close and traditional ties to Claiborne Farm, will call back later?

  It is, Seth knows, a lot of money, but not too much for what he sees as Secretariat’s potential worth as a stud horse. Yet now here are two active bloodstock investors hesitating over a commitment. For Seth Hancock it has suddenly become a discouraging early morning. He is shaken by the turn of things because, if Walter Salmon and Allaire du Pont refuse to buy a share, who will buy one? They are supposed to be among the surest, the ones most likely to join. It is as if he is trying to put a twenty-eight-piece orchestra together while the lead musicians are sitting around tuning their instruments. It is especially troubling because time is crucial. Seth soon finds they’re hardly alone.

  “People were saying, ‘Well, I don’t know, that’s an awful lot of money. I’ll call you back.’ ”

  “See if you can get E. V. Benjamin for me,” Seth asks Patti Tompkins.

  An old friend of Bull Hancock, a well-known horse breeder and bloodstock agent and the master of Big Sink Farm in Versailles (that’s Ver-sales, not Vers-eye), Kentucky, E. V. Benjamin is another of the breeders that Seth is counting on to buy a share.

  At the moment Benjamin is working in the library of his home, where he has his offices, and he is at the desk when Seth begins to lay out the terms before him, just as he had done with Mrs. du Pont.

  Hearing the price, Benjamin blanches.

  Benjamin, a successful commercial breeder, has not been a timid spender for shares in stallions. He paid $65,000 for a breeding share in Horse of the Year Damascus, $65,000 for a share in European champion Sir Ivor, $20,000 for one in Drone, and $35,500 for a share in grass specialist Hawaii, all Claiborne stallions. And now Seth is asking him to buy one share in Secretariat for $14,500 more than he paid for those four shares combined. It gives Benjamin pause.

  “I paid all kinds of money for shares in horses, but never a $190,000 deal,” Benjamin says.

  Benjamin, having been close to Seth’s father, wants to help Seth on his first major undertaking as the president of the farm. But first he has to make some calls, to find others who will share the risks with him.

  “I don’t know, Seth,” says E. V. Benjamin, squirming. “I might go, but that’s an awful lot of money.”

  Hanging up, Benjamin asks his thirty-seven-year-old son, E. V. (Tony) Benjamin III, if he wants a share in the red horse. Together they share ownership of Chou Crout, America’s champion sprinter of 1972, a five-year-old mare they are about to retire and send to Damascus. She could be sent to Secretariat in 1974. Tony is noncommittal, so the elder Benjamin turns to sources outside Kentucky, to New York and Ohio, looking for backers to share the cost of a share with him, finding one buyer in New York, a banker. At one point, Benjamin calls Seth back, one of two or three calls he makes during the day to Hancock.

  “I’m 75 percent sure,” he tells Seth.

  Not much later he calls back again. “Put me down for sure—and with a question mark.”

  It is still a cold February morning in Paris, and Seth is discouraged waiting for Salmon and Mrs. du Pont to call, waiting for Benjamin to try to round up support. News that he is syndicating Secretariat has begun to leak out from those he has called, and down in Florida bloodstock agent Jim Scully has heard the rumor and is slipping into a phone booth near Hialeah.

  Among others, Jim Scully represents Zenya Yoshida, the leading breeder of thoroughbreds in Japan, the owner of 200 broodmares there and an expansive tract of real estate in Kentucky known as the Fountainebleau Farm. It was Zenya Yoshida’s cousin, Shigeo Yoshida, who staggered the galleries in California when he bid $725,000 for Typecast.

  It is past midmorning. By now Seth is taking calls as well as making them, fielding them from all over. Then he hears Scully’s voice. Scully, a wiry, thirty-two-year-old former racing magazine writer, gets 5 percent commission on every dime Yoshida spends on bloodstock in America, 5 percent of the millions Yoshida has been pouring into the purchase of American bloodstock.

  “What are you doin’, Seth?” Scully asks.

  “Jim, I’m awful busy now.” Hancock has a sense of humor.

  “Wait a minute. What are you doin’? I’m here in a phone booth in Miami and there’s a lot of talk goin’ around.”

  “What do ya hear?”

  “I hear you’re doin’ Secretariat.”

  “You want one?” Seth asks him. Scully leaps. “Put me down for one,” he says, “for Yoshida.” Scully pauses, then adds quickly, “Put me down for maybe two. There’s another client of mine who might want one.”

  “One to a customer. But if I need any more help I’ll call you.”

  At the Big Sink Farm in Versailles, E. V. Benjamin is reaching Susan Proskauer at her home in Akron.

  They are old friends, and Benjamin is asking if she would like to be a partner in a share.

  Mrs. Proskauer was born Susan Sternberg in Breslau, Germany, and she remembers the day in 1938, at age twenty, when her father took her on a three-hour automobile ride to the base of the Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia. There he put her on skis and watched her escape from Germany. Her parents didn’t survive the holocaust. She later fled Czechoslovakia, when the Axis powers overran it, and finally found her way to America. Her first job was as a maid in Brooklyn, where she learned English, and even today her accent is distinctly German but with a trace of Flatbush Avenue in it. She became a dressmaker in Manhattan, later still a dress designer. In 1945, she married an Akron pathologist, Dr. George Proskauer, and fell in love with Chris Chenery’s Hill Prince in 1950, went into racing herself in the 1950s, and soon was involved in breeding horses. She met Benjamin, who introduced her to Bull Hancock.

  “What do you think?” Susan asks Benjamin.

  “I think we ought to buy a share,” says Benjamin. She agrees.

  Benjamin, with two partners and himself paying a third, dials Claiborne for the third time that day.

  “Erase the question mark.”

  So the day grinds on for Seth, the first and the slowest of them all, the longest and the most difficult.

  He is still waiting for Salmon and Mrs. du Pont to call back. Jo
hn Finney is still waiting, too, wondering what is going on in the matter of Claiborne syndicating Secretariat. And Tim Rogers and Jonathan Irwin are in Europe, waiting for word on their proposal.

  Seth calls the Greentree Stable of John Hay Whitney and Mrs. Joan Payson. He doesn’t talk to Mrs. Payson, though she is a partner in the racing farm and stable. Veteran Greentree Stable trainer John Gaver, who once trained the great Tom Fool, confers with John Hay Whitney on the offer, and Gaver recommends that Greentree decline the share.

  “You’re paying a hell of a lot of money for an untried three-year-old,” John Gaver says.

  Greentree then calls Seth back. They decline.

  Not all breeders are so hesitant as Salmon, Mrs. du Pont, Benjamin, and Greentree. Like Jim Scully, the enthusiasts add a sense of relief to Seth’s day. They are those who buy almost without question, without having to think for hours about it. On that first day the enthusiastic buyers are Milton (Laddie) Dance and Richard Stokes.

  They call Laddie Dance at his condominium on a glittering swath of beach in Boca Raton, Florida, where he and his wife Jean, heiress to an Oregon lumber fortune, are spending a part of a winter.

  The Dances are only small-market breeders, moving to build slowly upon a band of mares at their 320-acre Taylor’s Purchase Farm in Maryland, but Laddie is well connected in the industry and he has made known frequently his wish to be part of a Secretariat syndicate. He is Fasig-Tipton’s auctioneer, possessing one of those pneumatically deft larynxes out of an old Lucky Strike ad, and a wooden gavel to punctuate his fervent spiel.

  Lucien Laurin trains the Dances’ horses, and for weeks Dance has been telling Lucien he wants a share in Secretariat.

  Laddie has seen the colt run at Saratoga, has seen him, too, around the barn at Belmont Park, and he has already approached Penny seeking a share. He has written her a letter to make the request official, and she has included Laddie’s name on her list for Seth. The horse meets all of Laddie’s standards as a prospective sire.

  Seth discusses Penny Tweedy’s plans for Secretariat—all prospective buyers are asking him about that—and Seth says she is aiming him for the Triple Crown, by way of the Bay Shore, Gotham, and Wood Memorial, and later the Travers and Woodward. No one can take exception to that. Seth would recall Laddie as the first person he has reached who doesn’t say, “That’s a lot of money.” Laddie says nothing of the sort. He says, “I’m in.”

  Nor does Richard Stokes dwell hours on the question.

  Seth doesn’t know Richard Stokes, in fact has never spoken to or seen the man, but he is calling him at home now because Penny has him on her list. Stokes, a Virginian, had met Penny during a recent visit to The Meadow, at a time when she was still hoping the colt might one day stand at stud in Virginia. She had asked him if he would like a share in the horse if he were syndicated.

  Stokes, forty, a former gasoline station attendant who married the heiress to the Johnson and Johnson pharmaceutical fortune, runs a modest commercial breeding establishment at the 750-acre Shenstone Farm in Leesburg, a small town in the idyllic horse country of northern Virginia. Stokes has ten broodmares, one a daughter of Native Dancer that he thinks would fit Secretariat well.

  Stokes is at home on the farm when Seth reaches him, sitting in his modernistic library on his gingerbread tan leather short-backed chair looking out the glassed-in room toward the paddock. He hesitates only momentarily.

  “That’s a lot of money,” Stokes says to Hancock. “But I’ll have one. I like the horse.”

  For Seth, the day stumbles on as he waits for key breeders to call back.

  It is noon. Seth asks Patti Tompkins to stay with him at the office to answer phones for him. At times there are two or three people waiting to talk to Seth, idling on hold. Hanging up on one, he picks up on another. A worker in the office drives into Paris, to Overby’s Restaurant on Main Street, and buys lunches to go for Patti and Seth, who has a sixty-five-cent cheeseburger, french fries, and a Coca Cola. He eats his lunch between calls.

  It has been a long morning.

  At one point, as a courtesy, Seth calls the Cincinnati office of Dr. Eslie Asbury, the surgeon to whom Bull sold a share in Nasrullah for $10,000 in 1949. Asbury made a $700,000 profit on that purchase, by his own estimate. Now, almost a quarter of a century later, Seth calls Asbury to ask if he would buy a share in Nasrullah’s finest grandson for $180,000 more than the original investment. Dr. Asbury is not in, and Seth leaves a message relating details and asking Dr. Asbury to return the call.

  Arriving at his office, Asbury receives the message Seth has left and hardly thinks about it.

  “Bold Ruler just hadn’t had any record of horses that went on to win the classic races,” he would say. “The amount of money they were asking was based on the premise that he was going to be a great three-year-old.”

  Asbury isn’t sure of Secretariat. He decides not to return Seth’s call.

  “See if you can get Taylor Hardin for me.”

  It has been seven months since breeder Taylor Hardin, owner of Newstead Farm in northern Virginia, turned to Penny Tweedy at Saratoga, just minutes after the colt beat Russ Miron, and told her he wanted a breeding share in Secretariat.

  Hardin is now on the phone, and Seth is asking him if he wants a share. Taylor objects at the price, saying it is far too high. He says to Seth, “I heard this horse is sore, I heard he’s about to break down.”

  Seth bristles, listening to the old rumor. “Mr. Hardin, if you think he’s broke down, I wouldn’t ask you to go into the syndicate,” Seth says. Hardin declines the offer.

  It is nearing the end of the first day, and Seth Hancock has sold only six shares—to Phipps, Lockridge, Benjamin, Yoshida, Dance, and Stokes. It is still too early to assess the level of one share in Secretariat for $190,000, to know for sure whether there are twenty-two more out there. The offer has been turned down, but it has been accepted with alacrity, too, and there are still a number thinking about it.

  Among them are Walter Salmon and Mrs. du Pont.

  What’s keeping them? To Seth they remain pivotal, weather vanes and barometers of the industry’s intent, indicators of acceptance among potential buyers. Their hesitation has weighed down Hancock’s end of the day, causing him concern since early morning when they told him they would call him back. He’s still wondering which way they plan to move, in fact, when Patti Tompkins tells him Mr. Salmon is on the line. Answering, Seth hears Walter Salmon tell him: “I’ll take a share.”

  Thus a major commercial breeder, a businessman owning seven breeding shares in various stallions, has decided to pay more for a share in Secretariat than he has ever paid for a single share in his life.

  “Thank you, sir. I sure do appreciate it.”

  Four o’clock Friday afternoon the outlook has brightened.

  “How are you doin’?” Penny asks. He has just called to let her know.

  “I have seven positives. But I have a lot more to call me back.”

  His tone is matter-of-fact about the course of the day. Waiting for prospective buyers to call him back, Seth spends his evening working, casting about for more.

  For several hours Seth has been trying to track down Will Farish III, the breeder and owner of Preakness winner Bee Bee Bee. Farish’s family, his grandmother and aunt, have known the Hancocks for years, boarding mares at Claiborne. Will Farish is in the investment business in Houston, chiefly mining exploration for hard-rock minerals. He is a member of the Jockey Club, owns a racing stable, and has a ranch in Texas.

  Will Farish had told Seth months earlier, after seeing Secretariat run at Saratoga, that he would like a share in him if he ever were syndicated, and his enthusiasm for the youngster grew over the winter. He had been visiting his barn at Hialeah Park and watching him go to the track in the morning.

  It is Friday evening when Seth finally makes contact with Farish in Florida, where he is staying at a friend’s house. Seth reads the terms to Farish—the number of shares, the pl
ans, the price.

  “That’s certainly awful full,” Will says. “A heck of a price.”

  Yet Farish, discussing the upside and downside potential of the colt, feels that the price is justified given the booming nature of the bloodstock industry. “He had so many things about him that took the gamble out of it—being already the two-year-old champ and the Horse of the Year, and he’d already won an extraordinary amount of money and he was a beautiful individual and a son of Bold Ruler, and Bold Ruler is the phenomenal sire of sires. You could probably get your money back by selling sons and daughters of Secretariat in the first two years.”

  Ten minutes into the phone call, Farish owns a share.

  He makes eight, leaving twenty, and Hancock begins closing in. He goes to bed that evening still not knowing which way Allaire du Pont plans to move on the deal, but the pressure is lifting, and he’s far more optimistic than he was twelve hours ago. Salmon has given considerable relief, and Hancock is especially buoyed over Farish’s purchase because Farish is young, compared with others Seth has spoken to, and he is seeking rapport with breeders close to his age, with those he might know and do business with for many years to come. Now, what of Mrs. du Pont?

  She doesn’t keep him waiting long.

  Early on Saturday she rings Paris from Chesapeake City and sends Seth on his way at last, giving him the final boost he needs, the confidence that what remains is within reach and that, if he just keeps at it, it’s only a question of time. “I knew when Mrs. du Pont said yes that I had it.”

  Through the next three days, working to tie it together, Seth keeps mining the richest and most productive veins of the industry. Among those who bought shares in the first day are men who represent all the most powerful breeding groups in the country, and from them he continues to gather support, share by share—from those with foreign gold such as Zenya Yoshida, from Kentucky breeders such as E. V. Benjamin and Bill Lockridge, from the few superrich and the old rich such as Ogden Phipps, and most especially from the American businessman-as-breeder, such as Will Farish. Seth reaches out to them over the weekend, picking up one after another, confident as time passes that he is launched, inevitably now, upon a world-record bloodstock syndication.