Secretariat (21 page)

Keck is the president of the Superior Oil Company, a Houston-based giant whose sales in crude oil and natural gas ranged between $100 million and $200 million last year. Keck has been associated with Claiborne Farm as a client and owner for many years.

“What do you think?” Keck asks Seth.

“Well, you’ve got a lot of mares that will suit the horse. And you don’t have any Bold Ruler blood, Mr. Keck. I know it’s a lot of money, but if he wins the Triple Crown he’s going to be worth a lot more than this. If he doesn’t, well, he’s still going to be a hell of a stud horse.”

And Keck is in.

Brooks and Lasater buy it up as quickly.

Brooks is the owner of Brooks Buick, a successful auto dealership in Baltimore. He and his wife raise thoroughbreds at their 126-acre Hillstead Farm in Glyndon, Maryland, a mile down the road from Sagamore. They are small-market breeders, owning only a few mares. Seth doesn’t know David Brooks. Penny knows them because Lucien happens to train their horses, and she has them on her list. At the barn one morning, they had mentioned to Penny that they would be interested in owning a share of Secretariat.

Brooks is at his Florida home in Lost Tree Village, a swanky, sporty, fenced-in resort community set on a golf course. Among his neighbors are Perry Como and Jack Nicklaus. In fact, Brooks has just finished playing eighteen holes of golf with Laddie Dance, who has already bought his share, when Seth calls. David Brooks, a distinguished-looking man who bears a resemblance to TV commentator Howard K. Smith, has already thought about the price and is delighted with a chance to have access to such a prospect for his mares. He’s in, too.

Dan R. Lasater is living in a rented chalet on Lake Hamilton in Hot Springs, Arkansas, where he spends winters watching his horses race at Oaklawn Park. He has just returned from the racetrack, where he goes mornings to watch the horses work, and decides to call his office.

“Have you gotten ahold of Seth Hancock yet?” a secretary asks.

“No. Why?”

“He’s been trying to reach you.”

“Did you give him my number here?”

“No.”

Lasater fumes. “Look,” he snaps, “anytime somebody like that calls, be sure to give them the number down here. Someone calls like that it’s usually important.”

Off the phone, he quickly calls Claiborne, but Seth is out to lunch. Lasater is frantic. He rushes down a pathway to the cabin of his general manager, John Fernung, and bounds through the front door, telling him about the message. “I think he’s calling about Secretariat.”

In fact, Seth has been calling everywhere to reach him. Dan Lasater is young, personable, landed, and extremely rich, a newcomer to thoroughbred breeding but just the kind of breeder Seth wants in the syndicate. For Lasater, this would have been unthinkable just ten years before.

Lasater grew up in a poor family in Kokomo, Indiana, living in an eight-by-twenty-four-foot trailer until he was nineteen years old, the son of an employee at the Delco Radio Corporation. After graduating from high school, Lasater got a job with a McDonald’s hamburger outlet, sweeping a parking lot for sixty cents an hour. But Lasater quickly worked his way up, becoming a manager of a store, a reader and disciple of McDonald’s
Wonderful Training Manual,
with chapters on hamburgers, milk shakes, and french fries. He turned workers into perfectionists, doling out responsibilities to the milk shake and the french fries makers. He was nineteen. Then he got bored. So he sought and found a financial backer for a fast-food restaurant in Kokomo, and he made that a success, underselling McDonald’s. With the same backer, he then helped found the Ponderosa Steak House chain, offering a nine-ounce steak, an eight-ounce potato, a salad, and a roll for $1.39. The company prospered and survived hard times. In 1972, Dan Lasater decided to retire as the executive vice-president in charge of Ponderosa Systems operations.

He was twenty-nine, and he had $30 million.

Now Lasater has four farms, including a 480-acre nursery in Goshen, Kentucky, that is devoted exclusively to raising thoroughbreds. He has thirty-four mares, a flourishing multimillion-dollar investment in land and horses, and he wants a chance for a share in the red horse. Returning the call, Seth offers him one and Lasater takes it.

Not all businessmen and foreigners jump for shares. That they don’t, in fact, leads to the selling of one share to the only practicing professional in the syndicate, George Strawbridge, a thirty-five-year-old Latin American history teacher from Widener College.

This begins when Seth traces English bloodstock agent George Harris to an apartment in New York. Working out of the Heron Bloodstock Agency in London, Harris has just arrived in America. Harris promises to call Seth back and starts to contact clients, the first one overseas.

Failing to reach breeder Henry Berlin at his business in Barcelona, Spain, Harris makes contact with him finally in Normandy, France, where he owns and operates a stud farm. Berlin, hearing the price and the plea that he has but a couple of hours to make a decision, complains to Harris that the urgency is
so
typically American.

“I can’t make up my mind in a couple of hours,” Berlin tells Harris. “I’ll need a chance to think about it.”

Sorry. There is no time. Harris needs a commitment from his client now. So he calls Peter Fuller, a Cadillac dealer from Boston, but he declines, too. “Not at this time,” says Fuller, owner of Dancer’s Image, the disputed winner of the 1968 Kentucky Derby.

So Harris then calls Strawbridge, reaching him at his Augustin Stable in Chesapeake City, Maryland. Strawbridge, an heir to the Campbell Soup fortune, not only teaches history in Chester, Pennsylvania, but rides to hounds and in steeplechases and races a string of fifteen horses, jumping and running on the flats.

“How do you evaluate him?” he asks Harris.

“He’s got spectacular breeding. He’s a bit high but I think it’s sound. If he runs like he did as a two-year-old, he’ll be a buy.”

Strawbridge regards the offer as an excellent speculative opportunity. “I’ll go,” George Strawbridge says. The call lasts no more than three minutes.

And John Finney? Well, he’s still waiting for word, either from Penny on the Irish offer or from his Hialeah operative. Finney is leaving the clubhouse of the golf club one morning when, passing by the first tee, he hears his name ring across the fairway.

“Hey, John!”

Finney looks up. There, standing at the first tee 100 yards away, standing there and waiting to tee off for a round of golf, is Rokeby trainer Elliott Burch, who is leaning on his golf bag.

“I got the phone call!”

Finney gallops over to the tee. He listens as Burch explains the details: “One hundred ninety thousand a share. Thirty-two shares. She races him for a year.” John dashes to a telephone.

Quickly now, trying to organize his forces, sensing he is fighting time, Finney calls an associate at Fasig-Tipton, Larry Ensor. John is now hunting shares for American clients such as Bertram Firestone, a Manhattan real estate developer, and Howard Gilman, chairman of the board of the Gilman Paper Company in New York.

Finney reaches Ensor, explaining to him the details of what he has just heard. “Look,” Finney says. “I’m calling Firestone; you call Gilman and see if he wants in. I don’t know if I can get him or not, but if we’re gonna do it, we’re gonna have to move fast.”

Before he contacts Seth, Finney wants to reach his clients, so he calls Firestone at his Connecticut home, advising him of the terms of the deal.

“He’s $190,000 a share,” Finney says at one point in the discussion. “Do you want in?”

“That’s a lot of money,” Firestone says.

“Well, I’ve already told you that I was a consultant to the estate and I advised them to sell. By definition it can’t be a good time to sell and a good time to buy. If this is the best risk for them, obviously they’re passing the risk as a potential buyer on to you. But I don’t think the horse’s value can ever diminish to less than $100,000 a share. If Secretariat falls on his ass, he could be worth only $100,000 a share. Maybe $125,000. If he wins the Triple Crown, the upside potential is only $20,000 to $30,000 to $40,000. I’d say that if he wins the Triple Crown, he’ll probably be worth $230,000 a share. The downside potential is much greater than the upside potential.”

“What do you think?” Bert says.

“You’re on a 60 percent value trip and a 40 percent ego trip. But, if you’re building a stud and want the very best, and if you want to take a chance on what I think is the best prospect combining pedigree, conformation, and ability that I’ve seen in twenty years, then go ahead. He has that downside potential if he doesn’t run up to snuff in the Triple Crown. But if the horse succeeds, there will not be a second chance. This is it.”

Suddenly Firestone’s wife, Dariel, an heiress to the Avon cosmetics fortune, picks up an extension phone. She has been hearing part of her husband’s side of the discussion. “What are you two men doing?” she asks. “It sounds very exciting.”

“Yes it is,” says Finney, “but it’s a little scary.”

Once again Finney runs down the colt’s upside and downside potential, the terms of the contract, and the urgency of this matter at hand. The Firestones hedge.

“It’s obvious you haven’t reached a family consensus,” Finney says. “I’m going to hang up the phone and stay off. Call me when you’ve decided. But
don’t
take more than ten minutes.”

Precisely twelve minutes later—Finney glances up at the clock—the phone rings. It’s Bert.

“We’re in,” he says.

Larry Ensor, meanwhile, is speaking to Howard Gilman at the offices of the Gilman Paper Company in New York. Ensor tells Gilman that a decision is urgent. Asking for time to consider it, Gilman calls his brother Charles on the office intercom, telling him the details of what Ensor has just told him.

“How much?” asks Charles.

“A hundred and ninety thousand a share.”

“How does that pay out?”

“You can’t make a business analysis of that kind of thing,” says brother Howard.

Ensor holds as the Gilmans talk it over on the intercom.

“Well, what kind of
investment
is it?” asks Charles.

“You can’t make an analysis. You’re figuring human things, you’re figuring genetics, you’re figuring health, and these things can’t be put on a balance sheet.”

The Gilmans are relatively new to bloodstock breeding. They own the 5500-acre White Oak Plantation about forty miles north of Jacksonville, Florida. Most of the land is planted in southern pine trees, the principal wood for making paper, though they do have about 100 acres under grass and sixteen mares nibbling at it. The Gilman Paper Company breeds for the marketplace, and Howard Gilman sees the share as a sound commercial gamble.

“If it works out, we’ll do extremely well,” Howard says. “There should always be a salvage value in any case. We’re not buying a complete pig in a poke.”

“If you think it’s all right, then go ahead,” says Charles.

“Try to get it for us,” Howard tells Ensor. “You’ve convinced me.”

Ensor now calls Finney, telling him that the Gilmans want a share. Armed with the two commitments, John calls Claiborne. He holds the phone for forty minutes, unable to get through, and he imagines Seth fielding calls from all over, picking up one voice after another, calling and answering and calling again. Finally, still not having spoken to Seth, John calls his father Humphrey, for years a close confidant of Bull, and asks him to “put in a good word for Firestone and Gilman.” Humphrey calls Seth.

“John has been trying to reach you and hasn’t been able to,” he says to Seth. “He’s very much interested in a share or two. He’s down in Florida. Bert Firestone is interested in a share and so is Howard Gilman. Will you please call John?”

“I’ll call him,” Seth says.

Reaching Finney in Florida, Seth tells him he has one available share and will give it to Firestone. Seth knows Firestone, the owner of Chance Hill Farm, has been an active bloodstock buyer and has acquired quality mares for breeding.

“He’s getting the first shot,” Seth tells John.

Finney adds, “If you can get a share for Gilman, I’d very much appreciate it.”

“Who’s Gilman?” asks Seth.

Finney outlines the Gilman breeding program, telling Seth that the Gilmans would also be sending high quality mares to Secretariat.

“There isn’t a share available now,” Seth says. “But there might be one later.”

Seth tells Finney that John Galbreath, owner of Roberto, is considering the purchase of a share. If Galbreath declines, says Seth, the vacant share will go to Gilman.

At least, thinks Finney, Firestone has a share.

It’s Monday, and Seth is trying to tie it all together.

For days he has been working to track down F. Eugene Dixon, calling his office in Philadelphia and places where he might be found in Florida. Dixon is a fifty-year-old sportsman, philanthropist, and horse breeder, and Seth can’t reach him now because he is living on his fifty-six-foot yacht
Wayfarer,
with a permanent crew of three, somewhere off the Florida coast. But Seth keeps trying. Dixon has been an active buyer of bloodstock, purchasing $1 million worth of horses at the dispersal sale of his late uncle, George D. Widener, from whom he inherited part of his fortune. “I pride myself on being one of the few members of the Widener family who has ever held a job,” says Dixon.

On Monday, Dixon is sitting at the Bath Club in Miami Beach when he hears his name being called by a page. Sitting at poolside, he sips a daiquiri on the rocks, and picking up the phone talks briefly to Seth. He takes a share.

On Monday there is one more share to sell, and Seth is talking to John Galbreath, trying to sell it to him. Galbreath owns the 618-acre Darby Dan Farm off the Old Frankfort Pike in Lexington, one of the nation’s most prosperous private thoroughbred nurseries. For years Galbreath has been a leading importer and buyer of running horses at retail prices. He purchased Swaps for a record $2 million in 1956, the year that magnificent chestnut broke four world’s time records and equaled a fifth. He later imported Ribot, sire of Graustark and His Majesty, from Italy.