Friday, July 03, 2009

Del Mar and Joe Palmer’s Saratoga:  Two of a Kind

After my last change of address, I began putting books back on shelves at the new abode, only to realize that my copy of the fabulous Joe Palmer anthology, "This Was Racing," was missing. I was sick, because I knew the book was out of print, and I remained sick until just the other day when I was able to buy a replacement. I'll be more careful this time. The Palmer collection will not leave my side, even when I go swimming.

This always was the time of the year when re-reading Palmer was de rigueur, because the opening of Saratoga loomed. Palmer loved all of racing, but especially places like Saratoga. "A man who would change (Saratoga) would stir champagne," he wrote. ". . . It is a successful turning back of the pages, a stroll through the mirror, the slow drop of Alice down the rabbit-hole. It is a month of living in about 1910, though some visitors insist that the hotels take this too literally. . . Saratoga is slightly contagious, but you can't catch it at Jamaica."

Palmer was only 48 when he died, of a coronary, in 1952. He was, according to his friend and colleague Red Smith, "America's best-known racing writer, and in the opinion of many the best writer of sports anywhere." The last day he was alive, Palmer covered the races at the old Jamaica track, filed his column and went home. His final words were entertaining and informing readers of the New York Herald Tribune while his family, out on Long Island, was thinking about funeral arrangements. According to Smith, the prolific Palmer had another half-finished column in his typewriter the night he died.

Executives of Saratoga might have been better served quoting Palmer recently when they held the track's annual media tease. Instead they talked about Rachel Alexandra, and her non-showdown with Zenyatta, and along the way they twitted Del Mar pretty good. At least I think they were twitting. I'll have to ask Del Mar, which usually knows a twit when it sees one.

Charlie Hayward and his first lieutenant, good friend Hal Handel, have always known how to draw a crowd, but they might have further swelled the room if they had put a second sign outside the door that said, "This Is Also Beat Up on Del Mar Day." Del Mar could have flown in a delegate, to make sure nobody was misquoted.

Hayward referred to Del Mar as "the minor-league Saratoga of the West." Keeping with baseball analogies, Handel said that Del Mar was "our Triple-A affiliate."

Gee. For a long time, I thought that Del Mar was one of the places to be for summer racing, so how wrong can you be? I thought to call Joe Harper, who's in charge of the turf meeting the surf, for a reaction, but I knew he would be too consumed with laughter to make any sense over the phone. Once the paroxysms had subsided, Harper might be expected to say, in his puckish way: "Charlie and Hal could well be right. I've never seen a race at Saratoga, so I'm in no position to compare. I did get to Saratoga, which isn't easy, for a TRA meeting once, but I didn't stick around for the races."

Joe Palmer would have been appalled. Spending a day in Saratoga Springs without watching one horse? He would have called that sacrilegious, or worse. "It would be like an acrophobe visiting the Grand Canyon, or someone with hydrophobia booking a week in Venice," he might have written.

There was nothing Palmer disliked about Saratoga, even the gouging. "You will notice," he wrote in that anthology that's still at my side, "that the gentry who kick and bawl about prices and practices at Louisville around Kentucky Derby time seldom have much to say about fleecing in Saratoga, yet I can assure you that over a distance of ground, Louisville couldn't give Saratoga a pound."

I've been to Saratoga many times, going back to the day Onion beat Secretariat and earlier, and I know where Palmer was coming from. But I'm still not cancelling my reservations for Del Mar. When it comes to summertime racing, palatable gouging is a two-way street.

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Friday, June 26, 2009

Lucy of Overbrook Farm

The first time I talked to William T. Young's daughter Lucy was on the phone. She was in France with her husband, the famous trainer Francois Boutin, and I was in California, groveling for an interview so I could write a story about Arazi. The colt had blown their doors off at Churchill Downs, in one of the most electric performances the Breeders' Cup had ever seen, but not long afterwards he had undergone surgery on both knees, and I was hoping Boutin would tell me how that might play out going into the 1992 Kentucky Derby.

"You wanna talk to him?" Lucy said, not exactly out of earshot. Her father was tactful and soft-spoken. Lucy was brass and knuckles.

The voice from across the room spoke only in French, and none of the words sounded like yes.

"You ask the questions, I'll ask him, and I'll give you the answers," Lucy said to me. "OK?"

Through his wife, Boutin told me all I needed to know about Arazi, or at least all he wanted me to know. Even among friends, he was tight-lipped, and in the company of journalists, tight-lipped turned to taciturn. When the American trainer Ron McAnally, who was a friend, once asked Boutin an innocent question about Arazi, the Frenchman said: "You're beginning to sound like those journalists."

Around Lucy, though, Boutin took on a civility that seemed beyond him otherwise. I stopped by the barn at Churchill Downs shortly after Arazi had shipped in from France for the Derby.

"Will you do me a favor?" she said. "If you need to use my name, will you drop the 'princess' stuff. I haven't been married to that guy for a lot of years."

Her husband before Boutin was Mario Ruspoli, who was billed as an Italian nobleman. If Ruspoli was a prince, that made Lucy a princess, but the bio on Lucy in one of the Derby media guides was running one marriage behind. I told Lucy that she'd never be a princess in my paper.

Arazi bombed in the Derby, of course, and Boutin could have told them so. His heart was never in his colt running in that race, but he was caught between a pair of strong-willed owners, Allen Paulson and Sheik Mohammed, who had bought in for half of the horse for $9 million.

Working on Pacific time, I had time to go to the barns after the race. Boutin and Lucy were there. Ah, fair Lucy, my favorite buffer. Boutin would talk to his friend McAnally in English, but when he talked to me, he needed Lucy to translate. Boutin didn't like Pat Valenzuela's ride, but he said that wasn't the only reason Arazi lost.

The next year, Boutin was at Santa Anita for the Breeders' Cup. Before Arazi, he had trained Miesque for back-to-back wins in the Mile in the early years of the series. I found him and Lucy on the track apron, opposite the sixteenth pole. Boutin was dying. He had smoked a lot of cigars, and had cancer of the lung, and I believe cancer of the liver as well. Movie-star handsome, he had lost all of his gorgeous silver hair. He covered his head with a checkerboard touring cap and was resting on a shooting stick. Again, Lucy got me through an interview, this one more awkward than the rest. "I have not won the tough race, but I have not quit running it yet," he said.

Inger Drysdale, married to the trainer Neil Drysdale at the time, was nearby with a camera, and I asked her to take Boutin's picture. It would not be a flattering shot, but the trainer and Lucy had no objections. "The paper gave me $300," Inger told me later. "Most I've ever been paid for a picture."

I thought of all these stories when Bill Young died several years ago, and thought of them again recently when Bill Young Jr., his son and Lucy Young Boutin's brother, announced that the family-owned Overbrook Farm in Kentucky was getting out of the horse business. Many years after Boutin's death, Lucy married William Hamilton, a New Yorker cartoonist, novelist and playwright. No one this side of Liz Taylor has married more interesting men than Lucy Young. Hamilton's cartoons are known for harpooning the rich, and he once wrote a play about two swells who woke up one morning to find out that they had turned black. "The fascination," he said in an old interview, "comes from being near money but being far enough away that I couldn't quite get my fingers around it." That concern may now be moot. I read someplace where one of their first post-nuptual discussions was whether to buy an apartment in Manhattan, or keep her private plane.

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Friday, June 19, 2009

A Dream Cast for a Flick About a Dream Horse

Corrected version--Sorry, folks, I wanted Diane Ladd as Penny Chenery, but it's actually Diane Lane, as someone quickly noticed. Mea culpa.


'Tis the season to be writing about the upcoming Secretariat movie, by Disney. Casting is already under way, with Diane Lane having been hired to play Penny Chenery, the owner of the great champion. I would have preferred another Diane--Ladd--who was once the first choice to play the lead in a proposed film about the late Mary Bacon. The project was abandoned because a punk at a studio, who didn't know the front end from the back end, said that the treatment was "too episodic," whatever that means.

Since there has been no announcement about the rest of the cast for the Secretariat picture, I thought I'd swing from the heels and give the Disney folk some help. At the usual price, which is to say, whatever they'll give me.

They should hire Mickey Rooney to play Lucien Laurin, Secretariat's sawed-off worrywart trainer. Rooney might be a tad long of tooth, but otherwise he's a perfect fit. He's been playing in horse movies since he was a little shaver, and he's always been a little shaver. He's been betting horses almost as long. Laurin's French-Canadian accent would take some work.

For Eddie Sweat, Secretariat's loquacious groom, there's Charles S. Dutton. This role should not be a cameo. Sweat was an unsung member of the Secretariat barn crew, an engaging personality to be reckoned with. I can smell a supporting-actor Oscar if Dutton gets the part and they let him run with it.

For Ron Turcotte, where is a Frankie Darro type when you need one? Tom Cruise is not tall enough. Even though he could be glib like Turcotte, Cruise has never been convincing playing a character who has to get his nose dirty. For Turcotte, I want Johnny Depp. I really don't know, Depp might be too tall, but if that's the case, let him play the part on his knees, the way Jose Ferrer did as Toulouse-Lautrec. Either way, I can just see Depp sitting in the Churchill Downs jockeys' room after the Kentucky Derby, smoking a foot-long cigar and saying to the first newspaperman through the door, "Hey, Dave Feldman, still think Bold Rulers can't go a mile and a quarter?"

To play Feldman, who had been writing all week that Secretariat wasn't bred for the Derby distance, it's too bad Jack Gilford's not alive. Jack Klugman could do it. Mel Brooks even, if we could afford him. Is Lou Jacobi still around?

As Jimmy Gaffney, one of Secretariat's exercise riders, I'd use either Jake Gyllenhaal or Mark Wahlberg. For Frank "Pancho" Martin, the trainer of Sham, I didn't have to think long. Andy Garcia.

Disney should also know that I'm a script doctor. Here are my production notes:

Don't change Sham's name to Flicka.

Don't decide that Sham needs a female jockey, and give the part to Penelope Cruz.

Don't make the Belmont a photo finish just because a studio wunderkind who doesn't know the front end from the back end thought the real race was boring.

Don't shorten up the running of the Preakness so that the movie only shows the run from the quarter pole to the wire.

Don't pander to the Social Security demographic by making Secretariat a gray.

The days that Onion and Prove Out upset Secretariat, let Allen Jerkens play himself.

Don't shoot the Kentucky Derby scenes at Pomona.

Don't shoot the Preakness at Agua Caliente.

Don't give Eddie Sweat a love interest.

Don't hire a band on a flatbed that follows Secretariat around the track playing "Jeepers Creepers" (it didn't work the first time in a disaster called "Going Places" in 1938--and the band was Louie Armstrong's).

Use Chic Anderson's original call of the Belmont.

Don't hire a ham actor from England to play Jimmy "The Greek" Snyder. And if there's a cameo part for the Snyder character, make it a very small part.

Don't have Lucien Laurin and Pancho Martin arm-wrestling at the barn a half-hour before the Derby.

Don't have Diane Lane, as Penny Chenery, attempt to explain her evolving surname changes. This is only a two-hour picture.

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