Secretariat (12 page)

Sitting in the clubhouse section that day in mid-July, watching Secretariat widen his lead through the final 200 yards down the lane, she began to sense within herself a feeling of resentment toward this red horse.

“I resented him because I was so high on Riva and I thought, ‘This isn’t fair; this lousy dude is so good-looking and if he can run, too, it isn’t fair.’ This was my immediate reaction after the first victory. I was very pleased, but I had this lingering resentment. Riva represented the golden boy, yes—and also the ugly duckling and the underdog because he is so oddly put together aesthetically. His legs are too long. He’s terribly narrow chested and ewe necked. You know how a sheep’s neck curves? And the head is a little small for the rest of the body and then the floppy ears. It just doesn’t all hang together. It works but it doesn’t look good—I thought it would be great if Secretariat turned out to be a winner, but in my heart I didn’t want him to jeopardize Riva’s eminence. But that was my own problem; I got over it.”

Chapter 12

Can the girl from Colorado find success and happiness among the ruthless and powerful men of New York racing? Well, most of them are old friends of my father and have been pretty helpful, and my faith in trying to play this game is based on having a stacked deck to play with. I’m banking on the Meadow mares having such superior qualities that they can overcome my inexperience, for I have undertaken to continue the operation of my father’s racing stable and breeding farm. I am optimistic that another good stakes winner will come out of the horses we have just sent to the track. I can’t believe the chain of winners is going to stop. Time alone will tell.

Penny Tweedy

addressing the Fortnightly Club of Denver,

March 1971

Penny Chenery Tweedy was at home in Denver when the phone rang for her on an autumn day in 1967. Answering it, she heard the imperative voice of her father’s long-time attorney, John Fager, who was calling from New York.

It was October 27, and the call marked the beginning of a time of transition and flux for her, a period of breaking away from her life as a housewife in Colorado and creating a place for herself in the eastern racing world. If there was not a touch of alarm in John Fager’s voice, there was a sense of urgency in what he told her that day.

Christopher T. Chenery had just turned eighty-one years old a month before, and his health was failing. There had been no sudden decline, but he was beginning to suffer moments when his thinking lacked clarity, moments of limited lucidity and impaired judgment; a mind as precise as a surveyor’s compass had been dulled by age. The lapses in clarity were threatening to affect the way he handled his corporate affairs and his management of the Meadow Stable and breeding farm. It was just such a matter involving the horses, in fact, that prompted John Fager to call Penny Tweedy. If anyone could help in dealing with C. T. Chenery, she could.

Chris Chenery had decided to sell four of his most prized broodmares for $40,000 each, an unwise decision. A breeder might sell or syndicate his stallions, might sell his colts and cull his cripples, but whatever else he might do, he should keep his well-bred broodmares, especially the stakes-winning mares that he bred, raised, and raced himself. The success of the stud depends upon the quality of the mares. Without Hildene and Imperatrice, Chenery would not have had such good fortune in the game. They were the foundation mares, the genetic underpinnings of the Meadow horses. And, though not deeply involved in racing at the time, Penny Tweedy understood the value of such mares to breeding.

The four mares were Speedwell, Bold Ruler’s first stakes winner, who was out of Imperatrice; Imperial Hill, a stakes-winning daughter of Chenery’s champion Hill Prince out of Imperatrice; Hula Girl, a daughter of Vanderbilt’s Native Dancer out of Imperial Hill herself; and finally Hasty Matelda, a stakes-winning daughter of the 1954 Preakness winner, Hasty Road, and the dam of the fleet Gay Matelda.

Understanding the source of the problem to be her father’s illness, but thinking she might persuade him not to go through with the deal, she flew to New York at once from Denver, meeting with him in the family home in Pelham Manor. When they spoke of the sale, he was adamant about it, she judiciously circumspect.

But there was no dissuading him. In fact, when she pointed out that The Meadow was in no need of cash, he told her she was looking at the wrong books.

When she failed to convince him to cancel the sale, there was an emergency meeting of the board of the Meadow Stud—Fager, Elizabeth Ham, Chenery’s wife, Helen, and Penny. The four board members spoke at length about the sale, talking over the possibility of disavowing the agreement, something they could have done if they chose, since the Meadow Stud was a corporation and all such agreements of sale are subject to ratification by the board. They considered refusing to ratify it, but they considered the consequences, too.

Penny Tweedy recalled: “We decided that the alternative of disavowing the agreement which Dad made would involve too much humiliation of the man who had developed all these things we were trying to protect, so we went along with it and sold the three mares (we were able to extract one on a technicality) for $40,000 each. The foal Speedwell was carrying at the time sold as a yearling for $40,000. A foal from Imperial Hill sold this winter [1971] for $66,000. I still get angry about this sale, but my father could still get angry then, too, and I dared not thwart him, even if he didn’t know what he was doing.”

The mare they were able to extract on a technicality was Hasty Matelda.

Helen Chenery died just three weeks later, and the loss of his wife wore further at Christopher Chenery, altering his attitude. Penny explained: “Dad seemed to give up trying. He was very docile when, at the next board meeting, a carefully prepared script saw me elected vice-president and John [her husband], Elizabeth, and me constituted as the executive committee. This gave us the tools to carry on the Meadow Stud operation. But did we have the skill? John was a tax lawyer and Elizabeth, who had followed orders for thirty years, answered every question with, ‘We’ll do it the same way Mr. Chenery did.’ I had doubts, but no experience and no confidence in my judgment, so I watched and studied, talked to everyone I could, read everything published about racing, and bided my time.”

The sale is what first propelled Penny Tweedy into racing and breeding horses at The Meadow. It taught her that the stable and the farm needed active management and guidance, that without leadership the breeding operation—and eventually, the racing stable so dependent on it—would slip quickly into twilight. By 1967, Chris Chenery was no longer paying attention to the horses as he once had. Like Arthur B. Hancock, Sr., twenty years earlier, he had been failing for several years to cull unproductive mares, a deadly kind of neglect in a breeding establishment, as Bull Hancock learned when he took over Claiborne Farm. Chenery was breeding them to stallions who were not siring winners. Now in his absence Penny became his surrogate, taking his place out of loyalty to him and to what he built in Virginia and out of fear, too, of what would happen to it if The Meadow were left to drift. “The sale made me realize that the horses just couldn’t sit there and run themselves, that into the void created by the departure of this very strong man a lot of people would move.”

She was christened Helen Bates Chenery, after her mother, but she was her father’s daughter.

She was supposed to be a boy, and almost from the start she swung into the orbit of her father’s fields of interest—first toward horses, which she learned to ride at age five, to the prep school of his choice, to war work, and to business school at Columbia University, where she studied corporate finance, and finally back to his horses again.

She was born in 1922, the youngest of Chenery’s three children, and grew up idolizing her father. She had an older sister, Margaret, and a brother, Hollis, who never had Chris Chenery’s interests in horses or business. Hollis was a scholar, brilliant, conceptual, moving comfortably from being a tenured professor at Harvard University to the position of chief economic adviser to Robert S. McNamara at the World Bank. McNamara was the only man Hollis ever met, he once conceded, who was more brilliant than himself.

When she and her father and mother drove south to see The Meadow in 1935, Penny had been attending elementary school at Pelham Manor, where the family lived on Park Lane, and was about to enroll in the Madeira School of Greenway, Virginia. Her father chose the school. “Madeira was a very horsey school outside Washington. It had riding clubs, and I took my own horse with me. I rode to hounds in the Fairfax Hunt.”

She had already been absorbing her father’s values, adopting his loves as her own, often traveling with him. “I rode from the time I was five and every weekend was spent at a horse show or watching my father play polo. My father really loved horses. I think a parent often communicates his loves to a child.”

Out of Madeira, Penny enrolled in Smith College, her mother’s alma mater, and studied American history in Northampton, Massachusetts. She made her debut with thirty other girls in Westchester County, New York, a swank suburb north of Manhattan. She graduated from Smith in 1943, about the time of year Count Fleet won the Triple Crown and her father was just beginning to renovate The Meadow.

After Smith, from 1943 to 1944, she was an assistant for the chief of electrical procurement at Gibbs and Cox in New York, a firm that designed landing craft for the Normandy invasion. The invasion put her out of work. Home in Pelham Manor, Penny plopped down at the breakfast table in a robe, on the verge of doing absolutely nothing; her father peered across the table at her and growled, “If the Bolsheviks take over this country and examine your war record, they’ll shoot you!”

She joined the Red Cross, going overseas to work in a Red Cross clubmobile. She was a doughnut girl.

She was home again by 1946, in Pelham Manor and not about to do anything in particular. Chris Chenery said to her one day, “Well, if you don’t want to get married, why don’t you get a job?” She mentioned that she did have a Bachelor of Arts degree from Smith, but he scoffed at that. “As far as the labor market is concerned, you are unskilled,” Chris Chenery told her.

So he made his daughter an offer. He told her to apply for jobs, to look for the highest paying job she could find, promising her that he would match the highest offer made to her and give her that amount in allowance to attend the Columbia school of business. She was one of only twenty women out of eight hundred men in the business school that year. She also met John Bayard Tweedy, a graduate of Princeton, who was attending Columbia law school at the time. Instead of marching out of Morningside Heights to Wall Street downtown, she followed the instructions detailed in a telegram John Tweedy sent her after going to Denver to set up a law practice: “Have job. Have apartment. Plan wedding.”

They were married in May 1949, and for the next eighteen years she was a star-spangled All-American housewife from the snows of Colorado, successful, her children’s mother and her father’s daughter, a doorbell ringer for Ike (her husband was a committeeman), and a dead ringer for the perfect woman in a Cheer commercial. Her voice was rich and warmly modulated, her hair light, her features sharp and photogenic, her skin healthy, and her eyes as clear a blue as the dome above the ski slopes at the resort she and John helped to build in Vail, above the three-mile slope called Riva Ridge.

Penny camped with her husband in Montana, where he loved to fish (“His father took him fishing, as mine took me riding”) and she cooked, though not well because she never liked it, and wore aprons, and did the dishes. She was diaper changer for Sally and Christopher and Kate and John. She rode to hounds on Crescent City, a son of Hildene, one of that mare’s few offspring who couldn’t run. “He was a chestnut, and all her chestnuts were bad.”

Penny was a fund raiser for the American Red Cross, the Mile-High United Fund, the Republican Party, the Symphony Fund Drive, the American Cancer Society, and the March of Dimes; a member of the Junior League of Denver; a member of the Children’s Theater Committee; and for seven years a discussion leader for the League of Women Voters.

After eighteen years of settled family living as a housewife in Denver (“I really enjoyed it, I worked very hard at it”), she woke up one morning in Denver and took the telephone call from John Fager.

C. T. Chenery was admitted to New Rochelle Hospital in late February 1968 with an acute kidney condition. He would never leave the hospital, suffering a series of small strokes, a gradual hardening of the arteries, and a long decline toward death. They had been awkward times for those seeking to protect him. Miss Ham, whose loyalty to Chenery was unquestioned, monitored his telephone calls to prevent him from embarrassing himself in business, Penny recalled, and at one point Chris Chenery refused at a board meeting to give Howard Gentry a raise. “Dad was devoted to Howard, but he felt Howard had enough. Howard was there and it was very embarrassing. Dad was a generous man. That’s when we realized we had to operate the farm for Dad’s benefit, behind his back.”

Behind his back in the late 1960s was a farm of 2798 acres, over thirty broodmares and six stallions and upward of fifty yearlings, two-year-olds, and older horses on the racetracks. Since that extraordinary year in 1950—when Hill Prince was Horse of the Year and the stable won $391,835—the Meadow horses had carried the stable and helped support the farm. Between 1951 and 1960, Meadow Stable horses won 231 races, many of them major stakes, and $2,627,734. The stable was a money-making enterprise, not just a hobby, and Chenery enjoyed it more than anything, more than stringing his utilities together and making millions in water companies and natural gas, because he loved horses.

He purchased his foundation mares at sales, just as he did his other fine broodmare, Iberia, the dam of Riva Ridge and the stakes-winning Hydrologist. Chenery’s sense of creative accomplishment attained its peak in the brilliant career of Cicada, winner of twenty-three races and $783,664—a world’s record for a female racehorse when she was retired in 1963. She was a daughter of Bryan G., a stakes winner whom Chenery bred and raced himself, and she was out of Satsuma, a daughter herself of Hildene—another Chenery homebred. So Cicada’s sire and dam were bred by The Meadow, and Cicada became Chenery’s greatest source of pride. He adored her.

Hildene, bred to Captain Harry Guggenheim’s stallion, Turn-to, had a colt foal named First Landing. He was the second highest earner of any horse to race for the Meadow Stable during its first thirty years, winning $779,577. First Landing was America’s champion two-year-old in 1958, winner of the Hopeful Stakes and the Garden State Stakes. Bred to Iberia in 1967, he sired Riva Ridge.

Through most of the 1960s, under Chenery’s direction, the stable and the stud made more money than it had the previous decade. There was never a year in which the Meadow Stable made less than $150,000. Between 1961 and 1968, when Chenery entered the hospital, the horses grossed $2,756,259, winning 144 races, and in 1967 alone—the year Chenery told his daughter that The Meadow needed cash—the stable had the third best year of its existence, winning 21 races and $508,646. Between 1940 and 1967, Meadow Stable horses earned a total of $5,914,912.