After moving to Florida in 1989, Guerin worked as a mutuels clerk at Calder and Gulfstream, then became ill with a blood disorder and died of heart complications in 1993. He was sixty-eight. His obituaries pointed out that he had won 2,712 races over thirty-five years but would be remembered for losing the Derby in 1953: even in death, he couldn’t escape that defeat. “Eric Guerin was a good man and a good rider, and he helped Native Dancer on numerous occasions,” Daily Racing Form columnist Joe Hirsch said. “ The worst thing that can be said about him is that maybe he didn’t help that one time.”
Guerin’s final rites, held in the winner’s circle at Gulfstream, were poignant. A musician played “The Lord’s Prayer” on a harmonica, and Guerin’s son, Ronnie—the youngster of “Hi, Ronnie” fame, now almost fifty—spread his ashes in the flower beds. Ronnie then turned to the small circle of mourners and said, “I would like to think that somewhere my father is riding Native Dancer right now—and Dark Star, you don’t have a chance this time.”
Vanderbilt remarried in 1957 to twenty-year-old Jean Harvey of Chicago. They had three children and traveled extensively, often with Broadway producer-director Harold Prince and Prince’s wife, Judy. “Alfred loved to travel, to probe, to learn, and to have a good time,” Prince recalled. “We went to the Greek islands together, the four of us, and stayed on Mrs. [Joan Whitney] Payson’s boat. Then we went to Russia. That was fun. We arrived at the airport in Moscow, and the minute they saw his passport, they went nuts. It became clear that this was one of those names they had studied in their history books. But what they had been damning to hell, the capitalist Vanderbilts, they also were duly impressed by. It was like the czar was coming back. They saw Vanderbilt and decided I wasn’t Harold Prince, I was Prince Harold. We got on the coattails of that. We stayed a block from Red Square. They gave Alfred and Jean the Lenin Suite.”
Ultimately, Vanderbilt’s third marriage also ended in divorce amid rumors that Vanderbilt, at sixty-two, was personally and professionally fond of Robyn Smith, a twenty-nine-year-old female jockey. (Smith later married Vanderbilt’s friend Fred Astaire, after Vanderbilt had introduced them.) Years later, Vanderbilt’s daughter, Victoria, said that when she had asked her father about his life, he replied, “It’s pretty simple. I went to the races, got married, got divorced. Went to the races, got married, got divorced. Went to the races, got married, got divorced. Went to the races.”
Although his racing stable never ranked among the national leaders after the 1956 dispersal, he remained prominent in the industry. He made the cover of Sports Illustrated in 1963, the headline reading, “Alfred G. Vanderbilt Rebels Against Racing’s Establishment.” In the article, written by Alfred Wright, Jimmy Kilroe, the director of racing at Santa Anita, said, “Looking at it from the standpoint of racing officials, owners, breeders, trainers, jockeys and the racing press, I would have to say Vanderbilt is the most respected man in racing today.”
Through the years, he remained involved in the industry as a Jockey Club member, president of the Thoroughbred Owners and Breeders Association, and chairman of the New York Racing Association for four years in the early 1970s. He was honored with the Eclipse Award of Merit, for lifetime contributions to the sport, in 1994. The New York Turf Writers voted him the Man Who Has Done the Most for Racing four times.
“Racing was his heart and soul,” his daughter Victoria said at a memorial service after his death. “Sure, he loved pretty girls and travel, his kids, his books and music, chicken hash at the ‘21’ Club and a good game of charades. But none of that could compare to his passion for the sport of kings.”
It remained the constant in his life even as his travels around the world took him away for months at a time every year. He always came back to the races and his beloved morning routine. “Even as he got older he continued to go to the track every single morning,” Heidi Vanderbilt said. “He just loved the horses, the sport, the people. He loved watching the horses. He loved the casual conversation that’s really what the track is all about. He would go and talk and watch. That was his breakfast.”
Gradually, the way of life he had been born into—the life he had always known—ceased to exist. Louis Cheri, his valet and confidant, died. Sagamore Farm was sold to a developer in 1986. “He was a witness to huge changes in lifestyle,” Harold Prince said. “Things that had been taken for granted started to just go away. But I never heard him call attention to it.”
Society changed profoundly around him, with generations of “new money” surpassing the old and its world of understated manners. “He still had a lot of money, but he didn’t have billions, and he had devoted his life to a sport you don’t make money in,” Alfred Vanderbilt III said. “I think his expectation was, ‘I’m still going to be Alfred Vanderbilt tomorrow,’ and that would be a constant But it wasn’t. Things turned on their head in a lot of ways in the sixties. After the Beatles went on Ed Sullivan, what had been high [society] practically made you a pariah. All of our parents were baffled by what was happening and why, and he was no different.”
But he still had his friends and family, his books and music, his dry wit and nonconformist’s outlook. “I interviewed him late in life, and he didn’t look down on new things, like so many older people do,” Tim Capps said. “There was a traditional part of him that wished racing could be like it was, when you drew 40,000 fans and everyone wore a coat and tie, but he knew the world had changed. That told me, ‘Here’s a guy who has lived his life as a progressive, always a little ahead of other people.’ ”
There was sorrow later in his life. His eldest son from his third marriage, Nicholas, was reported missing on a climbing expedition in British Columbia, Canada, in 1984, and never found. Then, sadly, the onset of macular degeneration robbed him of much of his sight “His life was filled with joy until the unfortunate latter days,” Clyde Roche said.
Though virtually blind, he still went to Belmont almost every morning, then returned in the afternoon for the races. “I would talk to him every day by the rail,” Allen Jerkens said. “His chauffeur would bring him, and he would bring cookies for the people he liked, people who rode the ponies and such. They’d come up to him and say, ‘Mr. V., where’s my cookie?’ A lady made them for him. Sometimes he’d be a little tired and go home early. He couldn’t see well. He’d go by voices mostly. But he still came.”
Harold Prince and Vanderbilt had lost touch after Vanderbilt’s third divorce, but they reconnected one day at Belmont in the early 1990s. A mutual friend, Tommy Volano, a music publisher and horse owner, brought them together. “ Tommy said to me, ‘I want you to come to Belmont with me. I’ve got a reason,’ ” Prince recalled. “I said, ‘Great’ He had cooked up a lunch with Alfred, who could no longer see. Alfred would sit under the TV monitor and listen to the races. Sit there all day. He couldn’t see the races, but he could hear them, and he so wanted to be there. It was wonderful to see him again. And it was the last time I saw him.”
Vanderbilt was still racing a small stable, with his horses now trained by Maryland-based Mary Eppler. She won some stakes races for him, and then Vanderbilt, at age eighty-three, sent her to a 1996 Florida sale of unraced two-year-olds with orders to find a Kentucky Derby prospect. She delivered. A colt named Traitor, purchased for $102,000, won the Futurity—the same race for juveniles that Native Dancer had won in 1952—and finished second in the Champagne Stakes. He was considered a top contender for the Kentucky Derby the next spring.
“ Traitor looked like another great horse, and Dad was very excited,” Heidi Vanderbilt said. “It brought back memories of Dancer. Dad thought he could get to the big races again with Traitor.”
The Dancer’s Derby loss had become a painful memory for Vanderbilt through the years. He had never entered another horse in the race and didn’t even return to Louisville for years. Then his passion was rekindled when Traitor came along. “Before Mary bought Traitor, I told her that I was getting pretty damn old, and that if I’m ever going to win a D
erby, I’d better do it soon,” Vanderbilt told Los Angeles Times racing writer Bill Christine one morning at Hialeah in March 1997.
It didn’t happen. Traitor had surgery to remove chips in his right knee in the fall of his two-year-old year, then missed two weeks of training the next spring when he lunged into a fence after a workout at Hialeah. He was declared out of the Kentucky Derby, then was permanently retired when he tore a ligament in his left foreleg during a gallop at Pimlico before the Preakness.
Vanderbilt was devastated.
“It was a huge disappointment,” Heidi Vanderbilt said. “He’d had this wonderful career in racing, with this gap of one race, and when Traitor couldn’t go, Dad realized that he wasn’t going to have that race. There was no way to make it okay. You couldn’t say, Well, I’ll get it later.’ If he hadn’t been blind, this might not have become an issue. It wasn’t like he talked about it. He rarely referred to it. But I knew what happened. When Traitor got injured and he was so upset about it, it had to do with Dancer losing the Derby. He was upset about Traitor, but also about Dancer. I think it’s common as you get older to choose the things you didn’t have and reflect, and that certainly happened with Dad and the Derby. He never put on a grand opera about it. He never spoke in these terms. But not winning the Derby was very important to him. That loss in 1953 was a very big sadness and a very big sorrow.”
On November 12, 1999, Vanderbilt spent the early morning at Belmont, then returned to his home near Mill Neck, on Long Island, and went to his bedroom to take a nap. He never awakened. “My father went to the track this morning,” Alfred Vanderbilt III poignantly told reporters who called within hours, working on obituaries. In death, at age eighty-seven, he was recalled as a racing man without peer, an owner, breeder, track operator, and industry leader, and, perhaps, the last great sportsman.
A memorial service was held, appropriately, in the clubhouse at Aqueduct, and hundreds of mourners came to pay their respects on a foggy, misty morning. Harold Prince, Clyde Roche, and Vanderbilt’s daughter Victoria were among those who spoke, and at the end of the service, the mourners were asked to turn to the track. A filly ridden by a jockey wearing Vanderbilt’s cerise and white silks came out of the mist and raced through the stretch as the crowd applauded. It was the last ride for Vanderbilt’s colors.
In one of his last interviews, Vanderbilt told turf writer Tom Keyser of the Baltimore Sun, “I’m interested in what happens in racing because it’s been my whole life, but it ain’t what it used to be.”
No one could argue. Racing had fallen far from the high of the early 1950s, when crowds of 50,000 routinely attended major events and the sport was deeply ingrained in the public’s awareness. Although still a multibillion-dollar industry with its share of intense fans, and still popular in Kentucky, Southern California, and across the country during the Triple Crown, racing was no longer regarded as a major sport in America by the end of the century. It had been passed and lapped many times by pro football, pro basketball, hockey, golf, and even stock car racing.
The biggest blow, unmistakably, was the rise of other forms of gambling, beginning in the 1960s. Racing no longer had the betting market cornered once gamblers were able to go to Las Vegas or buy a lottery ticket to scratch their itch. The sport’s concurrent decline in popularity was not a coincidence. Although the rise of off-track betting and simulcasting increased betting totals, fans were discouraged from going to the races, thus emptying grandstands and ruining the atmosphere.
“In their anxiety to get more betting, they took the people out of it,” Allen Jerkens said. “In the fifties, people would bring fifty dollars to the track, and if they blew it, they blew it. Now there are all these gimmick bets, and so many races to bet. How much does the public have to bet? In the old days, you would go to the paddock, look at the animals, make a decision, and bet. Now you’re too busy betting on a simulcast race, betting numbers, betting gimmicks. It’s taken away the horse part of the game. A lot of the younger people aren’t interested in the animals themselves. That hurts racing.”
Industry infighting and numerous political missteps were also ruinous, as was the sport’s inability to connect with a younger crowd. Fabled champions such as Secretariat and Seattle Slew resonated beyond the sport’s boundaries, but overall, racing failed to maintain even a semblance of the vast constituency it had gripped in Native Dancer’s day. In the end, critically, it failed to use television correctly, stubbornly clinging to the outdated notion that the medium might ruin attendance as other sports, most notably pro football, used it to catapult to spectacular prominence.
“The people in racing have only themselves to blame,” Joe Tannenbaum said. “They continued to see TV as a nemesis, and the sport virtually dropped off the screen, except for the major events. And that was very, very damaging.” Added Tommy Roberts, “It’s just incredible, looking back and knowing what you know about the power of TV. You say, ‘How could they be so blind?’ But they were.”
The sport still had a wondrous past and a sizable following, however, and as the century ended, there was a rush to put the chronicle of American racing history in order. A panel of racing experts convened by the Associated Press was asked to select the best horses of the century. Native Dancer tied for third with Citation, behind Man O’ War and Secretariat and ahead of Triple Crown winners such as Seattle Slew and Affirmed. One could only wonder what Eddie Arcaro, who died in 1996, would have said about a tie between the Dancer and Citation. A similar panel commissioned by the Blood-Horse placed the Dancer seventh.
“He’s never really received the acclaim he should,” said Tommy Trotter, a panelist in the end-of-the-century voting. “Secretariat was beaten once as a two-year-old. Native Dancer was unbeaten. Secretariat was beaten three times as a three-year-old. Native Dancer lost once by a head. Secretariat didn’t race as a four-year-old. Native Dancer didn’t race much, but he carried 130 pounds and 137 pounds and won and was voted Horse of the Year. It might be that people don’t think of him because he seldom won easily, but his record speaks for itself.”
Joe Hirsch said, “He was one of the unluckiest horses of all time. He had a remarkable record, winning twenty-one of twenty-two. To win them all wouldn’t have been human. But if not for those inches that cost him the Derby, he would have gone undefeated. And while they talk about a Triple Crown being rare, an undefeated career is really rare. Colin went undefeated in 1905. So did Personal Ensign eighty years later. That’s it, two in history. And Native Dancer was almost the third. If he’d won the Derby, somehow made up those final inches on Dark Star, there’s no telling what people would think of him now.”
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thanks to the many people who donated their time and their memories of racing’s golden age. Here are those who were interviewed or helped in any way: Claude Appley, Mary Appley, Ted Atkinson, Dale Austin, William Boniface, Tim Capps, Costy Caras, Frank Chirkinian, Bill Christine, Frank Curry, John Derr, Judy Ohl Deubler, Leonard Dorfman, Dominick Dunne, Dorothy Everson, Clem Florio, Bob Fortus, Jackie Gibson, Tom Gilcoyne, Beth Guerin, Dr. Alex Harthill, Joe Hickey, Allen Jerkens, Joe Kelly, Blanche Kercheval, Ralph Kercheval, Tom Keyser, Leonard Koppett, Chick Lang, Charles Ray Leblanc, Jinx McCrary, Jim McKay, J. C. Mergler, Mervin Muniz, William Passmore, Lulu Pate, Pete Pedersen, Joe Pons, Harold Prince, Laura Riley, Tommy Roberts, Dr. Jack Robinson, Clyde Roche, Chris Schenkel, Dan W. Scott, Dan W. Scott III, Bayard Sharp, Bill Shoemaker, Bert Sugar, Joe Tannenbaum, Tommy Trotter, Alfred Vanderbilt III, Heidi Vanderbilt, Jeanne Vanderbilt, Carey Winfrey, Elaine Winfrey, Vic Ziegel.
The Maryland Jockey Club, Churchill Downs, Alfred Vanderbilt III, Carey Winfrey, Claude and Mary Appley, the Library of Congress, the Baltimore Sun, the Enoch Pratt Free Library in Baltimore, the New York City Public Library, the Keeneland Library, and the Maryland Horse Breeders Association provided microfilm and/or hard copies of old newspapers and magazines, or other research tools. Ray Paulick of the Blood-Horse was kind to grant access
to his magazine’s incredibly comprehensive morgue files. Books that helped provide background and understanding included Their Turf, by Bernard Livingston; The Fireside Book of Horse Racing, edited by David F. Woods; The Tumult and the Shouting, by Grantland Rice; The Best Sports Stories of 1954, by Arno Press; The Thoroughbred, by E. S. Montgomery; This Was Racing, by Joe H. Palmer; The Fifties, by David Halberstam; The Fifties: The Way We Really Were, by Douglas T. Miller and Marion Nowak; and The American Dream: The 50s, by the editors of Time-Life Books. Gerry Strine’s superb 1985 interview with Bill Winfrey, published in the Blood-Horse, was invaluable, as evidenced by the credit it receives throughout the text. Also helpful, not to mention inspiring, were John McNulty’s classic 1953 New Yorker article, “A Room at the Barn,” Marshall Smith’s 1953 Life feature on the Dancer, and the turf writing of columnist Evan Shipman and others from the long-defunct Morning Telegraph. Those were the days.
Special thanks to my agent, Scott Waxman, for helping make the book a reality; Les Pockell at Warner Books, whose suggestions for the manuscript were insightful; Alfred Vanderbilt III, who took a keen interest in the project and helped in countless ways; Olive Cooney, who provided origins of inspiration, a stack of research material, and lots of enthusiasm; Beverly Bridger at Sagamore Lodge, who helped me understand the Vanderbilts; the editors of the Baltimore Sun, who gave me a year off to write; Steve Proctor of the Sun, who read the manuscript and made helpful suggestions; and Jean Eisenberg, who read every version of the manuscript as it progressed. Most important, I’m grateful to my wife, Mary Wynne, and my children, Anna and Wick, for their patience, understanding, and love. This book is for them.
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