In the photos taken of him in the early 1930s, he looks strikingly like the James Stewart of Destry Rides Again, and what adds to that impression is the whimsy of his humor. One year, prior to the running of a race in which his horse appeared to have no chance, Vanderbilt gave jockey Ted Atkinson a sandwich, a wristwatch, and a flashlight, advising him, “It may be dark before you get back.” He never took himself too seriously, not even as a breeder.
When Vanderbilt turned twenty-one on September 22, 1933, he was given $2 million in government bonds, the first of four such installments his father had left him. His mother gave him Sagamore Farm, which Isaac Emerson had given to her. With that, Vanderbilt had money and land, the means to buy and breed and raise and race horses of his own.
In August of 1933, he hopped into his sporty new LaSalle roadster, fire-engine red, and tooled north toward Saratoga. Beside him in the car was a set of his new racing silks, a modified version of his mother’s silks of cerise and white blocks. On the advice of trainer Bud Stotler, he was heading north with a check for $25,000 to buy a big, raw-boned chestnut colt named Discovery. Vanderbilt intended to buy him and race him in the Hopeful Stakes. Discovery had been bred by Walter Salmon’s Mereworth Farm, and he was a son of a fast if fiery rogue of a horse named Display. Display was a son of Fair Play, who also sired Man o’ War, and there was nothing docile about “Big Red.” But when bred to Ariadne, Display transmitted nothing of his unruliness to their offspring, Discovery, a colt of estimable poise and calm at the post. He launched his racing career in a blaze of indifference, but by the time of the Hopeful Stakes at Saratoga, he had matured considerably.
The sale was delayed until after the Hopeful Stakes, so Vanderbilt didn’t get to run Discovery in the race. After the horse finished a sharp third in the event—behind High Quest—his price jumped from $25,000 to $40,000, the equivalent of $400,000 today. Vanderbilt left Saratoga without the horse, but he had been impressed by Discovery and continued following the colt’s career. He bought the horse when he had the first chance.
Discovery won eight of his sixteen starts as a three-year-old, including the Brooklyn Handicap against older horses. But even that hardly suggested what was coming when he matured to a four-year-old horse, 16.1 hands high and 1200 pounds, about 200 pounds heavier than the average horse. (A horse is measured from the ground to his withers, the highest part of his back, in a unit of measure called “hands”—a hand is 4 inches, so Discovery at 16.1 hands stood 65 inches from the ground to the withers.)
Though Discovery lost his first five starts as a four-year-old, he came alive when he broke from the barrier in the Brooklyn Handicap in June and carried 123 pounds for a new world’s record for a mile and an eighth, 1:481/5, the second year he won the race. And for the next six weeks, until August 10, Discovery rolled across the east and midwest in a boxcar on what remains among the greatest six-week grinds in racing history. As a horse running mostly in handicaps, Discovery had to carry whatever weights the track handicappers decided to load on him. The aim of handicapping horses with weights (inserting lead slabs in the jockey’s saddle) is simply to weigh down the horses—with the superior horses carrying more than their inferiors—so that all finish at the same time, in a dead heat. That is the theory, anyway. Discovery, a sensible horse, never paid any attention to that theory.
After the Brooklyn, he won the Detroit Challenge Cup carrying 126 pounds and then the Stars and Stripes Handicap in Chicago, spotting his rivals’ weight and winning by six. He kept winning with high weights everywhere.
Known as the “Iron Horse” and the “Big Train,” Discovery retired after the 1936 season with a lifetime record of sixty-three starts—twenty-seven wins, ten seconds, and ten thirds—and with a reputation as one of the greatest weight carriers that ever lived, a touchstone by which other handicappers would be measured. Vanderbilt sent him to Sagamore for stud duty beginning in 1937.
“There is no other horse in the entire range of turf history, American or foreign, that ever attempted to do anything so tremendous or came anywhere near Discovery to doing it so successfully,” wrote turf historian John Hervey.
Vanderbilt, for his part, did not confine his activities to racing during his first years as an owner. He was buying mares at auction to build up breeding operations. The most crucial purchase he ever made at a sale occurred at the dispersal sale of W. Robertson Coe in 1935, when a mare named Sweep Out was led into the sales ring. The mare was in foal to Pompey, a fast and game horse who won the Futurity Stakes at Belmont Park in 1925.
Vanderbilt bought her for $2000, and the following year she had a filly foal by Pompey that Vanderbilt named Outdone. In 1943, he bred Outdone to Discovery for the third time. She produced a good-looking filly foal in 1944. In fact, they were a grand bunch of foals at Sagamore that year, but Vanderbilt was not there to tend or race them. He had joined the navy in 1942 and was in command of a PT boat in the Pacific. While there, he instructed his farm manager and trainer to “go to the field and pick out twelve yearlings you like best, before they’re broken, and sell the rest.” Of the yearlings kept, none went on to any distinction either at the racetrack or in the stud. But of the twelve they sold, six eventually won major stakes races. One was Conniver, a daughter of Discovery, who was voted the leading handicap mare of the year in America in 1948. Another was the bay filly by Discovery from Outdone.
Sidney Schupper, not a major owner, bought the filly for $2000 and named her Miss Disco. Schupper raced her from 1946, when she was a two-year-old, until 1950, when she was six. She was a strikingly handsome, racy-looking mare with a beautiful head—a prominent forehead and the face penciled like that of an Arabian. She carried herself elegantly and liked to get her work done in a hurry. She won ten of fifty-four races and $80,250 for Schupper. Nor did she shy away from tangling with the boys. Miss Disco won the Interboro Handicap as a four-year-old, whipping colts over three-quarters of a mile, a sprint. She also won the New Rochelle Handicap. As a three-year-old, Miss Disco won the Test Stakes at Saratoga, a race in which a number of good fillies have run, if not won, over the years.
Miss Disco had speed, and she would transmit it to her many foals, one by one, especially the seal brown bay colt she foaled in 1954. Schupper did not own her then, not when she served in the stud.
At the close of Miss Disco’s racing career, Bull Hancock saw the potential in her as a broodmare, so he bought her from Schupper for himself, privately, for an undisclosed price. Bull had the Vanderbiltbred mare shipped to Claiborne Farm to join the bands of other mares. That was in 1950, when a rebirth at Claiborne Farm was in the making, and when Gladys Phipps prevailed upon Bull to sell the mare and he gave in, since she was an old client and wanted to own Miss Disco so badly.
Owned by Mrs. Phipps, the bay daughter of Discovery was bred to Nasrullah in 1951, and the following year she foaled a bay colt that Mrs. Phipps called Independence, a horse who would become one of the nation’s finest steeplechasers. Miss Disco was returned to Nasrullah in 1953, and in the spring of 1954 the whirlwind came, the horse for which all breeders tap their feet and wait.
The evening of April 6, 1954, at Claiborne Farm was perhaps the most remarkable of any in the long history of the American turf, certainly in the annals of Claiborne.
In the foaling barn set back off the road that winds through the farm, two foals were born that night thirty minutes apart. One was a bay son of Princequillo out of a mare called Knight’s Daughter. His name was Round Table, and by the time he retired as a racehorse at the end of 1959, running for Oklahoma oilman Travis Kerr, he had won forty-three of sixty-six races, been named America’s Horse of the Year in 1958, become regarded as the greatest grass runner in American history, and won more money than any horse in the history of the sport, $1,749,869.
Down the row of stalls Miss Disco gave birth to her son of Nasrullah who, by the time he retired in 1958, had been voted America’s Horse of the Year in 1957, won twenty-three races and $764,204, and earned a reputation as a magnificent cripple—one of the fleetest runners the American turf had ever known, and one of the gamest and most generous of horses. He was Bold Ruler.
Bold Ruler had a hernia as a foal, and he was so common looking that Hancock sequestered him in a distant paddock so that visitors to Claiborne Farm wouldn’t