by William Nack
Among the Midases of the sport are Mellon as well as McKnight, who raised the Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing Company from a modest adhesive tape and sandpaper firm to a $1 billion empire.
Seth speaks to their representatives.
Mellon is in his room at Claridge’s, in London for a week on business and to see his colt, Mill Reef, when he receives a telegram from his New York office telling him the terms of the Secretariat contract.
Paul Mellon, sixty-four, is the son of financier Andrew Mellon—secretary of the treasury under presidents Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover, ambassador to the Court of Saint James’s, and the original benefactor of the National Gallery of Art, which he built for $16 million and adorned with his $50 million art collection: Rembrandts, El Grecos, Botticellis, Goyas.
Paul never shared his father’s interest in finance, preferring William Blake to Pittsburgh banking, but he did acquire his father’s enthusiasm for philanthropy and art collecting. He has given millions to conservation projects, such as Cape Hatteras State Park, millions more to Yale, his alma mater, and even more millions to the gallery, of which he is the president and chief benefactor.
“Giving away large sums of money nowadays is a soul-searching problem,” Paul Mellon has said. “You can do as much damage with it as you do good.” Mellon writes poetry, rides to hounds, owns a rare book collection of numerous volumes, and is the owner and head of a 4600-acre estate in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia, with a whitewashed stone farmhouse with French windows.
Reading the cable in his room at Claridge’s, Paul Mellon cables back that he accepts the terms of the syndication, authorizing purchase of a share pending the approval of Elliott Burch, his Yale-educated trainer.
“It’s too much money,” Burch complains, talking to Seth from his Florida home near Hialeah. But yes, he says, Rokeby will buy a share.
The Rokeby acceptance is valuable and important to any syndicate, especially to commercial breeders such as Salmon, for Mellon’s presence will ensure that one of Rokeby’s superbly bred mares will be sent to Secretariat once a year. His is a private, not a market, venture. Mellon breeds to race, seeking intrinsic excellence in his horses, not commercial quality.
Ars gratia artis.
If Secretariat fails as a stallion, he will manage to fail on his own, not through the lack of depth in the mares that Rokeby sends him. For a commercial breeder, then, Rokeby is the perfect colleague on a breeding syndicate: Rokeby yearlings sired by Secretariat will not be offered competitively at yearling sales, where they would depress demand for his progeny, but their success on the racetrack will serve to drive up the value of shares in the stallion and his offspring sold commercially.
The Mellon acceptance is part of no pattern. No dominant theme of acceptance or rejection emerges among the owners of large private farms in America, such as Rokeby, though there is a tendency toward rejection among members of this class of landed wealth. John Hay Whitney of the Greentree Stud is only one. Seth experiences his severest disappointment during the days of syndication when he reaches Robert Kleberg, owner of the King Ranch of Texas, at his small farm in Florida. Kleberg presides over a colossus legendary in its size and scope, the very symbol of Texas itself—over giant herds of beef cattle, over quarter horses, over 650 oil and gas wells, over enough land to embrace all Rhode Island and parts of Massachusetts, and stables of horses that race under his brown silks with the white running W. The King Ranch bred and owned the great Assault, the 1946 Triple Crown winner and Horse of the Year, among other lesser lights.
Seth offers and Kleberg declines; the colt does not fit into his breeding program. Much traditional money fails Seth. Michael G. Phipps, sixty-three, who would die two weeks later of a heart attack, also declines the offer when Seth calls. Seth calls the Calumet Farm, reaching farm manager Melvin Cinnamon, who also turns down the offer. Some of the richest are the most reluctant of all.
“That’s too much money!” Nelson Bunker Hunt, son of billionaire oilman H. L. Hunt, tells Seth. “You act like he’s won the Triple Crown already.”
The winds are warmer in Florida, where Seth contacts trainer Johnny Nerud at William L. McKnight’s Tartan Farm. There Nerud manages McKnight’s growing thoroughbred holdings.
“I am in the breeding business, and I’m breeding horses for Mr. McKnight, and he wants the very best horses I can get him,” Nerud would say. “So I have to buy the best available—and at all times. It has nothing to do with how much money they are. But it’s: ‘Do I like ’em?’ ”
McKnight can buy anything Nerud likes. At eighty-five, he’s one of America’s wealthiest men, a powerful industrialist who went to work for 3-M as an assistant bookkeeper in 1907, when it was making sandpaper; became its president in 1929, when its sales were $5 million; and rose to become its chairman of the board in 1949, when sales were $1 billion. Retiring in 1966, McKnight went home with more than $200 million in stock.
John Nerud has invested in mares and stallion shares for McKnight, with his patron giving him wide latitude in decision making. Nerud has just finished morning training hours at the farm in Florida when Seth calls him.
“A hundred and ninety thousand.”
“Well.” Nerud thinks about it. “For that kind of money, I’ll have to ask Mr. McKnight. But I’m sure it’s all right.” The latitude has its limits. “When I spend two hundred thousand dollars of Mr. McKnight’s money, I think I’m obligated to tell him.”
Nerud quickly reaches his patron, who is at home in Florida busy running his empire.
“I bought a share of a horse.”
“Well, that’s good. Who’d you buy?”
“Secretariat.”
“That’s good. How much did you give for him?”
“Probably better if I don’t tell you,” says Nerud.
“I’ll find out anyway.”
“Well, I gave $190,000.”
“That’s all right,” says William McKnight.
Among the acceptances by Mellon and McKnight, among the refusals by Kleberg and Phipps, Whitney and Calumet and others, Hancock seeks out foreign bloodstock breeders and their agents, finding them in Europe, Canada, and America. The devalued American dollar has enriched the value of their currency in America—their pounds, yen, dollars, and francs, both Swiss and French—and they’ve been spending them hungrily on American bloodstock. In 1972, 25 percent of all select yearlings sold in America were bought by foreign interests. Among the foreigners, then, Seth finds enthusiastic investors in Secretariat. That Yoshida’s agent, Jim Scully, is the first buyer actually to seek out a share in the colt is evidence of this.
It is eleven o’clock in Zurich, Switzerland, when the telephone rings in the modernistic fourth-floor office suite of Walter Haefner, who is working at his desk. Through the window Haefner can see the Lake of Zurich, dotted now and then with sailing ships, and beyond a rim of small mountains. On the telephone is Murray McDonnell, Haefner’s representative in America, calling to tell him he now owns a share in Secretariat.
Haefner is a Swiss banker, a member of the board of the Union Bank, the biggest bank in Switzerland. He is the sole distributor for the Chrysler Corporation in Switzerland, the owner of that firm’s Swiss assembly plant, and the sole distributor for Volkswagen there. Haefner is a wiry, engaging man of sixty-three, the owner of two frosty gray eyebrows that jump up and down when he speaks. A continental sportsman in the best tradition, he loves the sports of speed, bobsledding in Saint Moritz—ninety miles an hour down an icy track—and riding racehorses. Speed is what attracted Haefner to racing, when he first had a chance to ride a racehorse in Paris in 1959. “I loved it, the sensation of speed on the horse.”
He has been an active buyer of bloodstock in America, and he has been waiting for McDonnell to call him since he was told a week ago that Secretariat might be syndicated and he might have a chance to buy a share.
“Don’t hesitate!” Haefner had told him then. “That sounds too good. Don’t tell me about figure
s, don’t worry about that.”
Haefner picks up the phone and hears McDonnell’s distant voice. He looks at his watch, sees it’s eleven Zurich time, and figures it’s five in the morning in New York.
“What are you doing up so early?” Haefner asks him.
McDonnell tells him that Seth has offered him a share and that he took it for him, for $190,000, and he wants to tell him about it.
“Murray,” Haefner tells him. “We have done many good things together, but this is the best ever.”
The search for foreign gold goes on.
Seth reaches French trainer Alec Head at his training quarters, Villa Vimy, at Chantilly. Head is part of a long line of French horsemen reaching back to William Head, an Englishman who started as a jockey in England, crossed the channel in 1880, and settled in La Croix Saint Oven, where he established himself as a trainer. Alec is the grandson of William Head and the son of Willie Head, for decades a leading horseman in France and the father of Freddie Head, France’s leading jockey. Their business ties to Claiborne Farm are numerous. When Seth calls Alec at Chantilly, business between them goes on. Head buys a share in Secretariat for Jacques Wertheimer, one of his owners.
Seth now moves to contact E. P. Taylor, the Canadian thoroughbred giant whose fortune is in forestry, mining, real estate, farm machinery, and thoroughbreds. He is the owner of the Windfields Farms in Canada and America. In Maryland it’s a 400-acre tract of land where he stands stallions Northern Dancer and Royal Orbit at the stud. Taylor is in Nassau, the Bahamas, so Seth speaks to a representative in Canada, asking him to contact Taylor. Taylor is almost certain to buy a share.
He is among the world’s foremost market breeders, America’s fourth leading breeder in money won during 1972, when horses bred by him won 308 races at $1,433,489. Every year from 1960 through 1969, horses bred by Taylor won more races than the horses bred by any other breeder. He has been an enormous shaping force in Canadian racing—the father of the sport there—and a participant in America, where he won the Derby and Preakness with Northern Dancer. His activities have been felt most strongly in the bloodstock industry—he buys and sells yearlings, buys mares, stallion shares, and land.
Reached by his man in the Bahamas, Taylor takes no time to make up his mind. “I thought it was a good buy,” he says. “If you’re a breeder, it’s a matter of simple common sense: you have a good chance of getting your capital costs back in two, three, or four years.”
As Taylor’s acceptance is no surprise, neither is that of insurance millionaire Jean-Louis Levesque. “And will you please put the share in the name of my son Pierre?” he asks.
Across the Atlantic, meanwhile, the market for Secretariat is alive with hope and money in the British Isles.
Hugo Morriss, the prominent English breeder, buys a share from Seth. And through Charles Kenney, one of the three members of the Claiborne advisory committee, Mr. and Mrs. Paul Hexter of Ireland and Miami buy a share. They are prominent in European racing, and through Mrs. Hexter they have powerful ties to Claiborne Farm. Her father, Rent-A-Car and Yellow Cab king John D. Hertz, owned and bred the great Triple Crown winner Count Fleet. Hertz, whose Stoner Creek Stud adjoins the Claiborne Farm, was a long-time friend of the Hancocks, both Seth’s grandfather and father.
Kenney is the manager of Stoner Creek, and through him the Hexters have entree to the horse. They have told Kenney already that they want a share in him. Seth calls Kenney, knowing he represents them, and asks him to contact the Hexters and find out if they want a share. Kenney does; and they do.
So the Paul Hexters own a share.
On to Ireland.
Captain Tim Rogers, still waiting for Finney to call, is relaxing in an easy chair in his country home outside Dublin, in a sitting room hung with paintings of horses, a window facing a hedge and lawn in front and, beyond that, fields running flat under oaken post-and-rail fencing. Though he regards the chances of importing Secretariat as “problematical,” Rogers has taken home with him a feeling of excitement over the possibility.
“We might have done it,” he has told his wife. “There is a chance.”
Seth reaches Rogers in the sitting room.
“Captain Rogers, this is Seth Hancock. I’m calling because Mrs. Tweedy has authorized me to syndicate Secretariat, and I’m in the process.”
Rogers listens on in silence.
“And we wanted to know if you would like to take a share. The price is $190,000 a share in thirty-two.”
For Seth, the call is innocent of any meaning beyond the selling of Secretariat; he does not know about Rogers’s offer made to Penny through John Finney. So he doesn’t know he’s telling Rogers, for the first time, that Secretariat will not be standing in Ireland and there will be no international bloodstock coup, no world-record $6.5 million spectacular. Rogers, curiously, is also of two minds at the moment—bitterly disappointed yet somehow relieved—ambivalent, as Finney was ambivalent. For Rogers, it has to do with how he feels toward Bull.
Rogers and the elder Hancock had been friends as well as business acquaintances. Rogers had bought the stakes-winning Dike from Bull, importing him to Ireland, and his fondness for the American had run deep: “A man I admire more than anybody else,” Rogers would say. Rogers believes that Bull, were he alive, would never have permitted a foreign syndicate to purchase and export Secretariat. “I knew that if Bull Hancock had been alive, there would have been no chance of buying this horse.” So making the quiet but powerful move to buy the colt, Rogers is “desperately keen” on succeeding, but he feels vaguely guilty about it, feels that if he pulls it off, if he succeeds as a thief in the night, he will have somehow taken advantage of Bull’s son, while he is trying to establish himself—in effect, parlaying Bull’s death into a major Irish bloodstock coup. He buys a share.
Hanging up, Rogers quickly calls Jonathan Irwin, who is in Dublin, and he tells him what has just happened.
“If you want a share in the horse, you better ring him straightaway,” Rogers tells Irwin.
It is getting late, for Irwin almost too late.
Irwin calls Seth, asking for a share, and Seth tells him, “I’m sorry, Jonathan, it’s blocked out. Unless someone else drops out.”
“What?”
Irwin can hardly fathom it. He is flabbergasted. “Miserable. Bloody miserable. One minute I had a chance to buy the whole horse, and the next minute I couldn’t even get a damn share in him!” He’s crushed until the next day, when Seth unexpectedly calls him back. Someone has backed out, and Irwin grabs the share for the Meiwa Stud of Japanese industrialist Tadao Tamashima.
In America again, Seth has been working Kentucky bloodstock breeders and agents, and among them the offer has been both accepted and turned down.
Seth tries the Hurstland Farm of the Nuckols brothers, a successful thoroughbred nursery with more than fifty mares and almost 1000 acres of land. Charley Nuckols declines the offer, advising Seth that they are in the process of buying up bloodstock owned by a close relative. So Seth moves on.
On Saturday he calls the Delray, Florida, home of Warner Jones, Jr., the seventy-ninth member of the Jockey Club, a close friend of Bull since boyhood, his traveling companion when their parents sent them to Europe to study the breeding business, the great grandson of the founder of Frankfurt Distilleries.
Jones is gray haired now, lean, athletic, and wearing a perpetual tan. He is sixty-one, he smokes unfiltered Camel cigarettes and has a bullfrog deepness in his voice.
Jones has been a thoroughbred market breeder since 1937, the year he sold the first yearlings he ever bred at his 800-acre Hermitage Farm in Goshen, Kentucky, east of Louisville. He bred Dark Star, sold him to Captain Harry Guggenheim for $6500 as a yearling and watched him win the 1953 Kentucky Derby in a tight finish with Native Dancer. He has bred almost thirty stakes winners in his life.
“Life is a game and money is what we keep score with,” he has said.
At the moment now Warner Jones is keeping score.
“I’m a market breeder, Seth. I’d like to buy one but I’d rather buy a mare.” What Warner is thinking is that he could buy two mares, for $95,000 each, for the price of one share in Secretariat, and breed and sell their foals.
“That’s good,” Seth says, piqued. “You know, I don’t need you.”
“Am I going to be able to breed to him if I don’t take a share?”
“No.”
“That’s a lot of money,” Warner says. Seeking time to think about it, though he says he’s already made up his mind to buy a share, Warner says he’ll call Seth back on Sunday. He wants time to drive to Hialeah and see the colt just one more time. He calls Lucien, who’s at Hialeah, and asks him if he can drive over to see the colt at the barn and off goes Jones, along the highway from Delray to Hialeah. “I wanted to confirm my mental picture of the horse: that he was the best-lookin’ horse I’d ever seen.” Arriving at the Meadow Stable at Hialeah, he asks the stablehand to lead the colt from the stall. Jones studies him methodically, as Charles Hatton studied him at Saratoga the summer before, looking at the straightness of the hindleg, the hindquarters, the head. “He’s got a beautiful head and he’s wide between the eyes. That’s an indication of brains in a horse, and he’s got a real beautiful jaw that you want in a stallion, just the kind you want. You don’t want a stallion to have a narrow little head like a mule’s head. This horse doesn’t. He has a strong, masculine jaw.”
He has seen what he came to see. Warner Jones is the only buyer to steal a last-minute peek at the goods.
On Sunday, Seth is taking it easy, relaxing in front of the television set in his home. He has the syndication nearly wrapped up. He is watching a sports special as he dozes. The phone awakens him. It’s Warner.
“Seth? I think this is the best-lookin’ horse I ever saw. I also think it’s too damn much money. But you put me down for a share anyway.”