by Mim E. Rivas
But she was not famous because of her childhood troubles or because she was beautiful and inordinately rich. She was famous because she was her father’s daughter—fearless, blessed with an irrepressibly rebellious spirit, a gregarious, barbarous wit—and was such an original that her favorite pale gray/blue color was eventually named “Alice blue.” She was endlessly forgiven for smoking wherever she pleased, for racing a motorcar from Newport to Boston (not the daintier electric horseless carriage most female drivers preferred, but the noisier, faster gas-run automobile), for traipsing around the White House with her pet garden snake wrapped around her arm, for jaunting off to foreign destinations whenever she liked, and for her bold disdain of anything or anyone who struck her as boring or too much of a do-gooder. When a frustrated adviser once implored Teddy to control her, Roosevelt’s famous reply was: “I can do one of two things. I can be President of the United States, or I can control Alice. I cannot possibly do both.”
Instead, in a canny PR move, Teddy encouraged his daughter to be of service as his emissary to certain affairs of state he was unable to attend, a role she played masterfully. In that capacity she had come to the Louisiana Purchase Exposition to preside in her father’s place during the Opening Day festivities on the Pike.
Alice’s name had been romantically linked to a handful of eligible sons of the European nobility (and it was assumed with her money and her family’s political might, she would certainly want to marry a title) as well as several young American bluebloods. But Congressman Nicholas Longworth, thirty-five years old to her twenty, was not yet considered to be one of Alice’s suitors. Not that he was an unlikely candidate. Besides being from a prominent Cincinnati family, he was a Republican, as was Alice’s father; he was a Harvard graduate and a member of Harvard’s very exclusive Porcellian Club, as was her father. Longworth had also been moving quickly up the political ranks and seemed to have a promising future (eventually making him Speaker of the House). He was known in some circles to have a propensity to be a womanizer and to have a propensity to drink, but neither traits were necessarily political liabilities, and what seemed to make up for those or any other shortcomings was his virtuosity at the violin. Hearing him play, gentlemen removed their hats in awe; ladies swooned. In another day and age, he would have been a rock star.
In front of the Silver Horseshoe Building, a receiving committee comprised of world’s fair officials and some of the well-known members of Beautiful Jim Key’s entourage waited anxiously in the rising noonday heat until they finally spotted Miss Alice Roosevelt, on Longworth’s arm, “comin’ down the Pike,” as the saying soon to be coined went. Among the greeting committee were Jim’s two grooms, brothers Stanley and Sam Davis, both in their early twenties, from Shelbyville, Tennessee, where the Equine King had been born and bred. There was also the much-publicized Monk, the smallish, scruffy stray dog who had become Jim’s self-appointed bodyguard and traveling companion. Then there was the celebrity horse’s famous promoter, Albert R. Rogers, who stepped forward to greet the President’s daughter and Congressman Longworth before ushering them through the archway into the packed auditorium.
Inside, as Rogers led Alice and Nicholas down to their front-row seats, the temperature and humidity had risen to summerlike highs in an auditorium packed well over its capacity. A noisy buzz of anticipation already running through the crowd was amplified with excited comments spurred by Miss Roosevelt’s presence. Energy, heat, and the loud volume of voices conspired to become intolerable.
Then: a hush. On a stage that was set as part classroom and part business office, with a bizarre string of what looked like garlands of garlic but were actually five thousand rabbit’s feet dangling above the stage, Dr. William Key seemed to materialize without an entrance. Standing quietly, he commanded an instantaneous silence. The program described him as mulatto, and in that mix his skin had the tint of a seasoned penny, with bloodlines of black, white, and Native American in his features. With his long white hair and beard in the style of General Custer, Doc Key was dressed in fashionable equestrian attire. He stood with the bearing of an aristocrat and took in the audience with a piercing intensity—all creating an aura of a tall, powerful man, even though his wiry frame was average to slight. Just as mesmerizing was his voice—soft and rich in texture, yet large and resonant enough to fill the hall. The voice of a horse whisperer. Like a cool breeze sweeping through the audience, its sound—pleasant, intelligent, kind, with tinges of both humor and authority—put everyone at ease, as if they’d forgotten the sticky spring weather.
Some reporters who interviewed William Key tended to depict his accent in the stereotypical Southern black dialect exaggerated by minstrel shows. But, in fact, aside from a Tennessee country cadence, Doc Key’s articulate use of the English language was finely cultivated from years of public speaking. That may have surprised Princess Alice, though she, of all people, should have known better than to believe everything she read in the papers.
As he prepared the audience for Jim’s entrance, Key must have felt kindly toward Alice Roosevelt, given his esteem for her father. Dr. Key’s friends at some of the humane societies were not happy with the hunting enthusiast of a President, despite his much publicized 1902 refusal to shoot a bear cub on a hunting trip and despite the “Teddy bear” craze that followed and had yet to abate. The President had benefited from the ingenuity of a shopkeeper-turned-manufacturer named Morris Michton, who saw the news item as a marketing opportunity. His wife made the first prototype, which sold after five minutes in his front window, followed by a deluge of orders. Michton made a mint, and the stuffed toy bears would keep Teddy’s namesake for posterity.
William Key had other reasons to see Roosevelt as a man of character. Three years before, Theodore Roosevelt had invited Booker T. Washington to dinner and had become the first president in American history to meet with a Negro leader in the White House, making Washington the first African-American so honored. The historical gesture was meaningful not only because Dr. Key was a personal friend of Mr. Washington’s; Bill Key also admired the President for doing what was only right because he recognized Roosevelt’s courage in being willing to incur the political wrath of many Southern states. The vitriolic condemnations followed swiftly, including some southerners’ blasts terming the dinner a “crime equal to treason,” with newspapers proclaiming that no true son or daughter of the South be allowed to accept invitations to the White House.
The backlash had stung Alice too. The year before, when she visited New Orleans, public sentiment against her father prevented her from being invited to the Mardi Gras Ball. At the time and throughout her life, she remained an outspoken advocate for civil rights.
While Dr. Key was obviously pleased to have the President’s daughter and her distinguished escort in seats of honor for the show, Beautiful Jim Key—upon his theatrical entrance—was apparently indifferent. He glanced not at the front private boxes, where dignitaries typically sat, but all the way to the back, like a politician letting the folks in the rear seats know he was one of them. A down-to-earth famous horse. Or perhaps it was his way of checking to make sure there were no empty seats. Doc Key had admitted to reporters that Jim performed better for larger crowds and actually turned in halfhearted efforts when the applause was not to his liking.
After finding this crowd to his liking, Beautiful Jim Key turned his head from side to side, showing his best profile—the left one and the right one—milking the moment.
The Arabian-Hambletonian mahogany bay, standing at sixteen hands high, bore the traits of his ancestors with distinction—from his sleek, sinewy lines to the grace with which he moved, to his curly black mane and long, ropey black tail that nearly touched the ground. With splashes of white here and there, in a star on his forehead, on a blaze down his nose, in a half stocking on a foreleg and one full stocking on a hind leg, he actually looked like the equine blue-blood Messenger—foundation sire to lineages both Thoroughbred and Standardbred, and Jim’s grea
t-great-great-great-grandsire. Much was often made of Jim’s wide-set eyes—said to be a measure of intelligence, an Arabian trait—but it was his constantly moving, tapered ears that were most distinctive, as he listened to the roaring applause with the delight of a connoisseur, one ear actively wagging in order to catch every ripple of the sound waves that surrounded him.
Throughout Jim’s opening demonstrations, expressions of incredulity fluttered through the crowd. Many were keeping a close watch on Dr. Key, trying to discover any secret signals that he might be sending Jim, even as all the questions came, in no order or prior planning, from audience members. Off to the side of the stage, Dr. Key had his back to Jim, both of his hands inert, one holding a riding crop as he prompted individuals in the crowd to stand and move into the spelling exercises by asking Beautiful Jim Key to spell their given names.
With each request, Jim trotted to a rack holding cards of all the letters of the alphabet, out of order, and selected letters, one by one, with his mouth, carrying them individually to an adjacent rack—like a long music stand—with a thin nickel rail that let him slide the cards into slots. The more ordinary names were easy for him: “M-A-R-Y,” “T-H-O-M-A-S,” “G-E-O-R-G-E.”
“Can he spell Alice Roosevelt?” shouted a man in the back.
“Well, Jim?” asked Dr. Key.
With a bent shrug of his front legs, Jim Key bowed his head up and down. Kid’s stuff. He’d been reading and spelling the President’s name for the last three years. Then he curled back his lips, showing clenched teeth in the form of the grin he practiced when grabbing coins in his teeth. A gasp shot through the crowd. It was the famous Teddy Roosevelt grin.
Doc Key shook his head. Even he was amazed. “Grin, Jim”—he beamed proudly at his protégé—“grin!”
Alice bubbled with laughter. With a flirtatious flick of his tail, Jim looked at her out of the corner of his eye, and for a moment the two celebrities connected on a visceral level, sensing a shared history. Both Jim Key and Alice Roosevelt had lost mothers early in life, both had once been given up for crippled, causing Jim to almost die and Alice to spend her childhood in metal leg braces. With the knack that certain horses have for picking up on the energies of certain personalities, Jim zoned in on her survival skill, her scathing wit, and instinctually knew that his great reward would be if he could get her to laugh again. Dutifully he headed to the rack, drew each letter without hesitation and placed the cards quickly—A-L-I-C-E, then a space, R-O-O-S-E-V-E-L… but just before he placed the letter T into position, another voice from the crowd cried, “Nicholas Longworth!”
The wagging ear caught the word, and Jim, as though he understood and had planned the joke he was about to make, shrugged his forelegs once more, placed the T, and spelled out the congressman’s last name, adding it to the same rack, making it read “Alice Roosevelt Longworth.”
The crowd erupted into laughter and cheers, none more enthusiastically than the guest of honor and her escort. Skeptical reporters, on the constant lookout for chicanery, were momentarily stunned. Over the next week, however, pens scrawled and presses rolled as the incident went the rounds of the nation.
With all his intellectual talents, it appeared that Beautiful Jim Key was also prescient. Two years later, on February 17, 1906, in an elegant ceremony for one thousand in the East Room of the White House, Alice Roosevelt married Nicholas Longworth. The society pages covered the event from every angle, making much of the fact that it had been thirty-two years since a presidential daughter had married in the White House, the last being Nellie Grant. To make sure she didn’t abide too much by convention, Alice made even more headlines when she insisted on borrowing a sword from one of her father’s guards in order to cut the wedding cake.
It took a horse with a sense of humor to convince a generation of its human responsibility to care for animals, proving our interconnectedness by demonstrating his capability of thoughts and feelings as complex as our own. Given the underlying prehistory, that seems fitting, because once before, six thousand years ago, when Beautiful Jim Key’s ancestors stood on the brink of extinction, the human race—fulfilling our own quest for survival—had rescued and domesticated the equine species. In return, horses have existed to serve humankind, as our primary mode of transportation (up until the last hundred years), as beasts of burden in our work, as soldiers in our wars. The current equine population, an estimated sixty-five million horses around the world, serve now at our pleasure. For that pleasure, for their noble majesty, for their six thousand years of service, we owe them an everlasting debt.
Evolutionary theorists have said that horses defy all principles of adaptation that stem from the theory of the survival of the fittest. The species, they say, has not needed to become fitter but has remained almost unchanged throughout the millennia, as close to perfection as any species can be. They are magical, supernatural creatures by virtue of the fact that when, by all the force of the universe, they should have perished, somehow they didn’t.
The same journey into life happened for a horse from Tennessee in the spring of 1889.
PART ONE
of the HISTORY
2
Inauspicious Beginnings
A number of years ago, amidst the Nesaen pastures of Persia, the great Sheik Ahemid, a powerful ruler…ruled in love and firmness…. For there was in his dowar…the fair Lauretta, with a lineage carefully kept on tablets of ivory that reached back to the broods of Pharaoh, comrades, friends of the tented tribes whom long association, love and kindness had nearly brought up to their own plane, and when to their animal instincts had been added wits and a reasoning sense, they feel and know all of ambition, love and hate.
—ALBERT R. ROGERS,
“Beautiful Jim Key: How He Was Educated,” first edition, 1897
August 7, 1897. Nashville, Tennessee.
The train depot on the corner of Church and Walnut.
ALBERT ROGERS WAS LATE. He hoped his two new business partners, Dr. William Key and his uncanny horse Jim, wouldn’t mind. Taking care of last-minute arrangements for their trip to New York and for the press party he was hosting a week later on Saturday, August 14, he had struck upon an idea he was sure could make their fortunes.
It was to be a pamphlet, a quality brochure, perhaps a short biography of the horse and a little on his enigmatic trainer. Since he had only a week to conduct interviews, write, and publish the booklet, Rogers had already made notes for the preface, asking in writing: “How was Jim Key taught? How did his teacher, Dr. Key, come to notice the extra intelligence this horse possessed? What breed is he? And a dozen similar questions are asked so often, that the writer has tried to give in the following pages, the answers to them all.”
The moment he began the interview process, en route to New York, he seized on the romantic story of Jim Key’s parentage, which was exactly what he needed to facilitate the horse’s entrée into high society. That was, in part, what he had said he could help make happen when he convinced Dr. Key to let him be their promoter.
At age eight, Jim was not yet a star. Even though he was a veteran performer of medicine shows and county fairs, he had only just that summer made his debut as an “educated” horse at the Tennessee Centennial Exposition, basically as a novelty attraction within a larger exhibit. Rogers had discovered him there, only days before the three embarked on this train ride and grand experiment to make kindness to animals a household ideal. With no small effort, he had managed to persuade Doc Key not only that Jim was ready for the big time but also that he, Albert R. Rogers, was the man who could get him there.
At the train depot, William Key had been unruffled by Albert’s tardiness and instead went about reassuring Jim—who wasn’t the least bit fond of train rides, especially long ones—that the adventure ahead would be well worth the trouble. Moving with the energy and gait of a man much younger than his sixty-four years, the Doc proceeded next to lead Jim toward the foot of the ramp to the Nashville, Chattanooga & St. Louis Railway
s private boxcar that Rogers had secured for him.
Now reassuring the Doc that he would be just fine, Jim wore an expression that would become familiar in the press, his nostrils flaring with an aristocratic sniff of disdain—as if bored already with the fuss. Then Jim Key flashed a toothy, aw-shucks grin that, with a knowing twinkle in his eye, made him look like a country boy punch-drunk on his good luck to have been marked by stardom.
In moments, eighteen-year-old Stanley Davis, Jim’s valet and groom, appeared on the platform, having stowed the steamer trunks and large crates that held the props used in their demonstrations. Like Jim and Doc Key, Stanley—the younger brother of Lucinda Davis Key, the Doctor’s third wife, recently deceased, as well as being the younger brother of Maggie Davis (later to become William Key’s fourth wife)—had been born and raised in Shelbyville, the seat of Bedford County in the heart of Middle Tennessee that was about sixty miles south of Nashville. Unlike Jim and the Doc, Stanley had never been out of state, and he was having a hard time concealing his excitement and his nervousness. Dr. Key had arranged for Albert Rogers to hire Stanley for their trip up north not because of their family ties but because his brother-in-law would be an asset in their work. Stanley was likeable and good-looking—with his warm, curious countenance, cream-and-coffee coloring, and thick, shiny black hair—all pluses when it came to dealing with the public. He also happened to have a gift for tending horses and other animals, traits that showed he had the makings of a first-rate veterinarian. While Bill Key had received no formal veterinary training, he was determined that Stanley attend veterinary college and become licensed as soon as their traveling days with Jim were over. It is doubtful that either knew how long those days were to be.