Native Dancer by John Eisenberg Read Free Book Online

the rolling limestone hills north of Baltimore, where he owned a summer estate, he purchased a 250-acre tract from a farmer
     and gave it to Margaret with plans to turn it into a horse farm for her stable. He would spend $500,000 on indoor and outdoor
     training tracks, a barn with fifty stalls, two paddocks, and housing for workers. Privately, he hoped the farm—to be named,
     naturally, Sagamore Farm, after the racing stable—would lure his daughter to Maryland more often.
    Within months, the farm was bustling with grooms and exercise riders as the barns, paddocks, and racing strips were built.
     Another three-year-old ran well for Sagamore in 1928, a colt named Don Q. who finished well out of the money as one of eighteen
     starters in the Preakness, then ran seventh among twenty-two starters in the Kentucky Derby. By the end of the year, Margaret’s
     horses had won twenty-one races and she had divorced Raymond Baker and within twenty-four days married her fourth husband,
     Charles Minot Amory, a Harvard graduate from Boston society.
    The stable’s rise matched young Vanderbilt’s growing interest in racing. He followed his mother’s horses in the newspapers
     and, school vacations permitting, by her side, and traveled with her every August to Saratoga, where he spent mornings at
     the barn, afternoons at the races, and evenings at dinner with racing’s upper crust. He sat for hours with Colonel E. R. Bradley,
     the master of Idle Hour Farm, learning from one of the nation’s eminent breeders and horse owners; Bradley later sent him
     racing books and magazines, solicited his opinions on equine matters, and offered a free stud service to his first mare. Bud
     Stotler also spent many hours with the young man, answering his many questions around the barn and during the races.
    During the school year, Vanderbilt arranged to receive the
Daily Racing Form
at St. Paul’s, the boarding school he attended in Concord, New Hampshire; the paper came in the mail in an unmarked envelope
     to prevent the deans from suspecting his mind might not be on his studies. He read it under his bedcovers, by flashlight,
     after lights were out; his mind was, indeed, distracted. He ran an annual betting book on the Kentucky Derby, cashing in big
     in 1929 when none of his classmates backed the long-shot winner, Clyde Van Dusen.
    In the late 1920s, Margaret let him make some breeding decisions and pick out several yearlings and follow them as if they
     were his own. One won a stakes race at Aqueduct, and when another won at Saratoga in 1928, the local newspaper labeled Vanderbilt,
     fifteen, as “the youngest owner on the American turf.” That he would follow his mother’s lead and have his own racing stable
     was already apparent.
    He used his allowance money to buy his first horse in August 1931, just before starting at Yale. He slipped away with Stotler
     one night at Saratoga, went to the yearling sales, and came home with a smallish chestnut filly that had cost $250. The filly,
     which he named Sue Jones—a dull name not up to the high standard of cleverness he later set—joined Margaret’s stable and debuted
     on June 16, 1932, at Aqueduct, finishing third. The
Blood-Horse
, a prominent racing industry journal, noted the debut of young Vanderbilt’s silks, which incorporated the same cerise and
     white colors as Margaret’s, only in a pattern of diamonds instead of blocks.
    Plainly more interested in racing than literature or economics, Vanderbilt lasted just three semesters at Yale before dropping
     out. “I believed I had discovered what I wanted in life, and I was right. I wanted racetrack,” he later told interviewers.
     Conveniently, Margaret was tiring of the expense of keeping the farm and stable running, especially after her father died
     in 1931. Emerson’s will stipulated that Margaret pass the farm on to Alfred when she died, but she decided to step up the
     timetable and give it to him when he turned