Secretariat (31 page)

“Don’t worry about it,” Whittaker said, according to Turcotte. “He’s not going to be in the Derby.”

So Angle Light, with Turcotte hitting him surreptitiously a couple of times around the turn, drilled five-eighths in 0:59 on a track he did not like, an extremely sharp move for him under the circumstances. After getting off Angle Light that morning, Turcotte was more certain than ever that Laurin did not plan to run him in the Derby.

In Louisville, meanwhile, the center was not holding for Edwin Whittaker. He spoke to Laurin by telephone and told him the details of the syndication offer. Laurin told him that he didn’t think it was a good deal. “Don’t sign anything,” Lucien said.

It didn’t matter. The syndication failed. The deal fell through later that night. Whittaker then tried to reach Laurin, and finally found him at the Executive Inn. There was no answer from his room, so Whittaker had Laurin paged and arranged to meet him in the hotel restaurant.

Soon after, Whittaker and his attorney, who was in Louisville to represent Whittaker on the sale of the horse, came into the dining room together. Whittaker spotted Laurin, and across the table from him he saw Penny Tweedy. She was in a sour frame of mind. For the moment, she was angry at Lucien. She had flown to Kentucky the day before, on Tuesday, specifically to attend the social functions—but Lucien hadn’t been in the mood. By the time Whittaker arrived, she had had a couple of drinks, and when she saw him approach the table, she thought: “Here he is, worming his way in again.”

Whittaker sat down on Laurin’s left and on Penny’s right, and they began talking. At one point, she would recall, “Whittaker pulled this same wormy act of, ‘Oh, I don’t know whether I’m going to run in the Derby; my horse isn’t worthy of it.’ ” Penny Tweedy didn’t believe Whittaker.

They spoke of the syndication that had fallen through, and Penny Tweedy listened to Whittaker explain the details.

Then Whittaker, with only limited experience as an owner, said deferentially, “Well, I don’t know much about horses.”

“Mr. Whittaker, you know a lot more about horses than you make out to know,” Penny told him. “You’re a sneak.”

Whittaker’s back came up. “Well, thank you very much. I’ve never been called a sneak before, but there’s always a first time. How do you think I’m a sneak?”

“Well, you sneaked in with Angle Light.”

“I’ll tell you what,” Whittaker said. “Why don’t you buy Angle Light?”

They did not raise their voices as they spoke. Their tone was calm and conversational, but it was borne on the back of its meaning to other tables nearby, where patrons of the Executive Inn picked up on it. In fact directly behind Penny, unknown to her but listening to the conversation, sat veteran jockey Walter Blum, who was in town to ride Royal and Regal in the Derby.

Penny accused Whittaker of worming his way into the barn, of talking out of both sides of his mouth, of not giving Laurin any direction.

“I’m not having anything to do with this,” Lucien said at one point, as Whittaker would recall it. “I’m going to let you two fight it out between you.”

“If you have to choose between Mrs. Tweedy and myself,” said Whittaker, “you’ve only one choice, Lucien. Why don’t you make it? Just give me up. There’s no way I’m going to buy horses for you like the Meadow Stables are buying for you. You’ve spent your whole life to get where you are now. Why give it up?”

“Nobody’s going to tell me who to train for.”

Some who heard the conversation thought Penny was worried that Angle Light might cause interference in the race and compel a victorious Secretariat’s disqualification. It would have been a legitimate concern. But later Penny said that was not what provoked her that night. “I don’t understand yet why I had to get rid of Whittaker,” she would recall. “I don’t know why. I think I was worried about Lucien’s loyalty.” She was not worried about Angle Light’s interfering with Sham. In fact, at one point, she insisted to Whittaker that he enter the colt in the Derby. “You owe it to me to put Angle Light in the Derby,” she said to him. “You owe it to me.”

“The only reason you want Angle Light in the Derby, Mrs. Tweedy, is so that when you win the Derby, which you will, you will have Angle Light in there and then you can say that Secretariat beat Angle Light. But that’s a foregone conclusion. What Angle Light did the other day in the Wood, you’ve got to be realistic about it. Angle Light didn’t beat Secretariat. Sham beat Secretariat.”

Whittaker fell silent now. Laurin listened silently, too, while behind Penny, Walter Blum was listening unabashedly.

“You and your smooth talk,” she said to Whittaker. “Why don’t you pick up your marbles and go home?”

She was angry now, and at one point she looked around and sensed that someone was behind her, so she turned her neck further and saw the face of Walter Blum about six inches away from hers. He smiled. She knew there was no hiding what she’d done.

“Isn’t this interesting?” she asked.

“Yes,” said Walter Blum. “It’s
very
interesting.”

Whittaker had had enough. “I don’t mind picking up my marbles,” Whittaker told her. “But I’m not going home, Mrs. Tweedy. I think I’ve had enough of this, Mr. Laurin. Mrs. Tweedy.” He started to rise. “I think we’ve discussed this quite far enough. I think I’ll go to bed.”

“Why don’t you sit down and discuss it?” she said.

“There is no point of it. If I do, I’ll probably put myself down to somebody else’s level here, and I don’t want to go that low tonight. Mrs. Tweedy, if it will make you feel any better to have Angle Light in the race, after you win the Kentucky Derby and you get up there in the winner’s circle, just remember that Angle Light was in the race.”

Whittaker had already made out a check to cover entry fees for Angle Light. The entries were to be drawn in the morning, and now he set the check in front of Lucien. When Whittaker came to the table that evening, he wasn’t sure whether Angle Light would be in the Derby. Laurin had already told him that Angle Light didn’t care much for the track at Churchill Downs.

“There’s no sense running him if he doesn’t like the track,” Laurin told him.

But now it was late Wednesday evening in the dining room of the Executive Inn and he had just been tongue-lashed by a woman in a public place. If it wasn’t pride, then perhaps it was because he had always wanted to run a racehorse in the Kentucky Derby—it was his great ambition—and now time was running out and the syndication had fallen through and he had to act. “I suppose all the time I wanted to enter the horse in the Derby,” he later said. Whatever it was compelling Edwin Whittaker, he had made up his mind by the time he decided to leave that table to its inhabitants.

“Lucien,” said Whittaker, “enter Angle Light in the Kentucky Derby.”

“Who should I put on him?” asked Laurin.

“John LeBlanc is here . . . Put him on.”

Whittaker said goodnight and turned and left, moving now toward the end of one of the most aggravating experiences of his life.

On Thursday morning, Whittaker answered the telephone in his motel room. It was Lucien.

“I want to have dinner with you and Mrs. Whittaker,” Lucien told him. “Mrs. Tweedy wants to apologize. I’m insisting she apologize.”

“Lucien, you’re a very foolish man,” Whittaker told him, as he recalled it later. “You should never tell a woman to apologize to a man. It’s against their egos.”

But Laurin insisted on it, and that evening he met the Whittakers for dinner in the same dining room where the incident had occurred the night before, though they sat at a different table. Laurin kept fidgeting as he waited for Penny Tweedy, watched for her to come in. She was late. When she finally arrived, she went to Whittaker’s side and stood there.

“Mr. Whittaker,” she told him, “I want to apologize for last night.”

“Mrs. Tweedy, it’s not necessary. Mr. Laurin had no business asking you to apologize.”

For some, then, Derby Week lurched to a close.

Secretariat walked that Thursday morning, as he usually did the day after a workout, with Davis leading him around the shed.

Davis galloped Secretariat on Friday, and he thought the colt moved well under him. “Don’t worry about it, Baby,” Davis told Sweat. “Everything’s gonna be all right.”

On Friday, too, Penny Tweedy drove to Claiborne Farm to have lunch with Bull’s widow, Waddell, and Seth and Ellen Hancock. They ate in the big house across and down the road from the main gate of the farm. After lunch, Mrs. Hancock said, “Penny, I’m sure you know I’d be thrilled if you won the Derby, but you must understand that I’ll be rooting for Sham. Bull wanted to win the Derby more than any other race, and he could never win it in his lifetime, but if he could do it after his death, well, I still wish he could.”

Turcotte relaxed that night, for him a pleasant Derby Eve. At ten o’clock he bought a
Racing Form,
and went upstairs to his room. He spread out the
Form
and its
Derby Supplement
and read it in bed.

There was a story on Lucien headlined, “Laurin Keeps Cool Despite Pressure Level,” and in the facing column a story on Turcotte pointing out that only two jockeys—Isaac Murphy and Jimmy Winkfield, two brilliant black riders of years ago—had ever won consecutive runnings of the Kentucky Derby. Turcotte fell asleep with the light on and the paper spread out in front of him. He was having no trouble sleeping.

By Friday evening thousands of people were arriving and reveling in Louisville. They spent the night in swank motels and hotels. They parked their cars in double files on Longfield Avenue, waiting for the main gate to open, while others slept the night in pup tents pitched along the side of the road. They slept in sleeping bags, in cars. The Derby was still the old country fair come to town, a race born in the days when the feed and grain dealer from Paducah could match his bay mare with the banker’s roan across the river. Now the week of revels had ended. The fair was about to begin. It was passing midnight, Saturday.

At four o’clock Secretariat was awake and peering from his stall in search of breakfast, his two quarts of oats. Derby Day had begun. Turcotte awoke early, too, dressed and turned off the light that had been on all night and left his room. He joined Laurin and Jack Tweedy and Ed Whittaker for breakfast and the drive to the barns. Because he had no mounts before the Derby, Turcotte wanted to take a ride around the racetrack on Billy Silver, to get a feel of the texture of the track.

Sweat and Charlie Davis got Secretariat ready for a walk around the shed. It would be his only exercise until Sweat took him to the paddock for the ninth race. Davis then led him from the stall, at the end of a chain and leather lead shank. As Secretariat started around the shed, he suddenly jumped and danced a few steps, sashaying here and bouncing there.

Nearby, Sweat saw Turcotte saddling Billy Silver, and he told Turcotte that he thought the red horse might be back again, as he had been in the days of the Gotham. In fact, Sweat told him, Derby Day was the first day since the Wood Memorial that he thought Secretariat was himself again, and he was back just in time.

Outside the shed, Lucien and turfwriter Joe Hirsch stood talking. Laurin was wearing a fedora, tinted glasses, and a topcoat. The temperature had risen to forty-one degrees by six o’clock, and it was growing warmer as the sun mounted a cloudless sky. But it was still cool at eight o’clock, and Lucien stood shivering with his hands in his pockets. Events of the week had hounded and pursued him. He had lost seven pounds in the two weeks before the Derby, and through the final week he appeared increasingly harassed and harried. Yet he never lost his sense of wit and humor.

Churchill Downs opened at eight sharp, and the thousands began moving across the brick-lined walks through the marigold and tulip gardens and through the white mansion of the clubhouse and grandstand. The weather grew balmy, reaching toward a cloudless sixty-nine degrees. All morning, the crowd flowed steadily off Fourth Street into the Downs. The 45,000 seats had already been sold long ago, so most of those arriving early came to settle on blankets in choice locations on the infield. The crowd spread across acres of greenery stretching from the clubhouse to the far turn, swelling in size from 25,000 people at nine o’clock to more than 50,000 people at ten. Endless lines filed through the tunnel connecting the grandstand and the infield. By early afternoon there were more than 75,000 people in the infield. With them, the population of Churchill Downs climbed to a record 137,476. They were an active but not unruly crowd.

The infield was a tropical fish tank of colors and bodies of divergent and often lovely shapes. They wore cut-off blue jeans and pink and yellow halter tops, lime-colored pantsuits and avocado jumpsuits. There were hot pants of pale pink and almond brown and fiery orange, shirts of burnished gold, and hats from which ribbons flowed rich with ivory lace, and bare legs and bare feet everywhere. Among them drifted maxidresses and miniskirts and sunglasses tinted green and blue, round as insect eyes, and taffeta bows and Bermuda shorts.

Frisbees rose and dipped through the late morning, sailing into noon. Radios played rock. Off to the side a group of young men, holding the corners and sides of a blanket, threw a woman ten feet in the air, then fifteen feet, while crowds gathered cheering her higher and higher. A man climbed a flagpole near the center of the infield, and crowds raised their hands and chanted him on and on.

Beyond the gamboling, meanwhile, greeting customers of Churchill Downs on Derby Day, a woman stood outside a gate and handed out religious tracts: “Bet on a winner. Bet on Jesus.”

Barn 42 was quiet through the afternoon, quieter than it was the year before, thought Eddie Sweat, who sat on a beach chair outside the barn and waited.

Lucien and Penny stopped by at 2:40. Laurin went inside the shed and peeked in at Secretariat. The red horse spent most of the afternoon hanging morosely about the back of the stall. Sweat said the colt wanted to be left alone, didn’t want to be bothered with anything, and that was an encouraging sign. Laurin spoke briefly to Eddie, then left in the car again with Penny. At the racetrack, rumors were circulating that both Angle Light and Secretariat were going to be scratched.