Nothing But Money

Warrington awoke in a stranger’s house, as he did every school day morning. It was not his house, and it was not his choice. Warrington was seventeen, in his junior year at the Gilman School, an exclusive all-boy prep school located on sixty-eight acres in an affluent corner of the city of Baltimore. It used to be called the Gilman Country School for Boys, but the trustees—in an effort to make the school seem a bit less pretentious—dropped the “Country.” It was one of those schools that made a point of wearing its history on its sleeve, rhapsodizing about its founders and insisting that it catered to students “from all backgrounds and segments” when it really served only the sons of the affluent and influential. They were Warrington’s classmates, and—truth be told—he fit right in.

He and his peers were being prepared “for college and a life of honor and service.” This was not a matter of choice. They were to become “men of character,” although the type of character was never specified. They would learn to go out and conquer the world, or at least acquire as much of it as possible. Some of Warrington’s peers had started Gilman in kindergarten and were planning on making it all the way through to the bitter end, spending twelve of their most formative years lugging satchels of books across the rolling green lawns that took them from grade to grade. Warrington was one of the Gilman lifers.

He and his 971 classmates all wore identical navy blue suit coats, white shirts and school ties, usually accompanied by khakis and Top-Siders without socks. Some—like Warrington—had their initials monogrammed in shirt cuffs. They were the sons of senators, CEOs, tycoons, moguls, big-time lawyers, big-money doctors. There was lots of old money and even a little new. He fit right in. He was just like nearly all his classmates—white, wealthy and without restrictions to opportunity. Nearly every one of them saw the world as his for the taking.

But Warrington also knew he was unlike his classmates. Almost every student came and went to school every day, being that it was a day school. Only two students actually lived on the Gilman grounds, in a little apartment that was part of the headmaster’s home. One of those two was Francis Warrington Gillet III. Warrington was aware that the other kids got to go home and see their moms and dads and siblings and dogs every night. All the other kids were well aware that Francis and his roommate, the son of a United States congressman, did not.

The symbolism of his involuntary living arrangements sometimes gnawed at Warrington’s very soul. Mostly he tried not to think about it, especially on these days in the middle of the 1970s when he was late once again for the morning chore known as algebra II.

Every junior had to take it. Warrington hated it. It did not highlight his strengths. It was unpleasant. He was pretty lousy at it. The combination of waking up alone in the headmaster’s house and the prospect of wrestling around with algorithms was enough to make him want to hide back under the covers and stay there for the day. But he could not. He was, after all, a Gillet.

Being a Gillet could be something of a chore. It seemed, on its face, quite impressive. Often people assumed he was the heir to the guy who invented the razor blade, or something like that. He was not. He was, instead, the great-stepgrandson of the cereal heiress Marjorie Merriweather Post. On his mother’s side were two United States senators, Millard Tydings and Joseph Tydings. His father’s father was a big war hero in World War I. His stepfather, John Schapiro, owned racetracks and lived with his mother and siblings on an enormous horse-farm estate. Warrington’s home was not just a home; it was Tally Ho Farms in Worthington Hills, four hundred acres of stark white fences and green, with the Schapiro/Gillet family horses cantering in the misty dawn. It was a lot, this image of impregnability. And what was worse? It was just that—an image.

There was a part of Warrington that was happy that he lived at the headmaster’s little apartment. He was aware that if he were, in fact, living at home like all the other kids, he’d never see his mother and stepfather anyway.

They were always away at events—fox hunting, charity parties, that sort of thing. His stepfather preferred to spend his time at his racetracks rather than at Tally Ho. Whenever Warrington ate dinner at home, he’d sit down at the table with his real sister and stepbrother and the food would be prepared and presented by servants. Mom and Dad simply weren’t part of that scene. Even calling them Mom and Dad seemed wrong. Thus Warrington had convinced himself that staying at the Gilman School was not such a bad thing. At least you didn’t have to confront the empty chairs every night at the dinner table. At least you could pretend that you didn’t really care.

“Those values did not get instilled,” Warrington said. “Everybody’s busy on a highfalutin lifestyle. They’re too busy. The kids of these types of families get lost in the shuffle. The parents are too busy to sit down for three hours to do math homework . . . Rich people do not have time to run around with children, to run around to Little League and soccer and football. On the weekend, you’d go fox hunting. You were misled into thinking that you were just like everybody else.”

Of course, not caring wasn’t so easy on this particular morning. The schism between the Gillet family image and the Gillet family reality had hit home hard the previous weekend. At the age of seventeen, Warrington III had met Warrington Junior for the first time in his life.

His real father had just shown up, out of the blue. He might as well have been the last emperor of China. Here he was presenting himself to his son, who was by now a junior in high school and who had not seen his father during his entire conscious existence. Kindergarten, elementary school, junior high school, almost all of high school—no father. Now here he was, this stranger with the same name, blown up on the doorstep like a guy with a subpoena. Of course when Warrington saw his father for the first time in seventeen years, he knew immediately who he was. This stemmed in part from the fact that Warry Junior looked exactly like Warry III.

He was a handsome guy, this stranger, with a Kirk Doug las chin and all his hair at age forty-five. The man had perfect posture for a tall guy, and even more perfect teeth. He wore a very nice suit jacket but no tie and appeared self-confident and yet informal at once. He was charm personified. He was the prodigal dad.

Warrington couldn’t really call him Dad. He knew the man solely through washed out photographs and bitter stories told by his mother. When he was a toddler, probably two years old, his mother had discovered that Big Warry was screwing around as much as possible with as many women as he could track down. Warrington’s mother, herself the daughter of money and privilege, wasn’t going for that. Out the door went Big Warry, and off to Palm Beach he slithered, living la dolce vita without so much as a post-card home to his namesake or anybody else at the Tally Ho Farms that Warrington called a home.

Here was a guy his mother referred to as “the bon vivant playboy-about-town who never worked a legitimate day in his life.” The closest his father came to actual work was at one point becoming president of the Game Conservancy USA, a nonprofit effort to support wildlife conservation and raise money for anti-poaching efforts in Tanzania. Otherwise he spent his days hanging around other people’s houses and trolling for a wealthy woman who might want to marry him. It was difficult to explain why Warrington would even give the man a second thought, but he did. His explanation would have been that he’d always wanted a father, even one who forgot about him for nearly his entire childhood.

His stepfather, John Schapiro, didn’t really count. Granted the man wasn’t abusive. In the two years after he moved into Tally Ho, he hadn’t beaten Warrington or sent him to bed without supper even. He just wasn’t what Warrington imagined a father was supposed to be. He owned racetracks and spent nearly all his time there. When he was home, he could speak passionately about only one subject—information contained in the Racing Form. He got Warrington—who’d begun riding at an early age—reading it by the sixth grade. There was some connection. They could talk horses, which to Warrington were about sport and to Schapiro were about money. Sometimes his stepfather would pick him up at Gilman and take him to the Pimlico Racetrack for the day. He’d let him use his allowance to place bets. He put Warrington in touch with one of his bookies to bet on the football spread. Twice he flew Warrington and his siblings out to Las Vegas and let Warry roll the dice at the craps table. Warry, his stepfather explained, was lucky.

“The last thing a real father would do—the last thing I would do with my child—is let him call a bookie on the telephone. But if I was married to some babe with renegade kids, you wouldn’t care about them. They’re not your kids.”

For Warry, the equestrian kinship with his stepfather ended there. In all the years from middle school into high school that Warrington competed in steeplechase, he could not remember his stepfather (or his mother for that matter) showing up to cheer him on. They were elsewhere, along with his real father and any sense that he would be allowed to have a family life that involved actual family.

Yet when his real father showed up, Warrington could not simply turn away. He wanted to. It would have been justified. He could not. On this morning, he should have tried to forget the entire weekend. He was late for algebra II. Thinking about algebra II was somehow more inviting than thinking about his father’s visit. He knew he had to focus and couldn’t be distracted by familial sideshows. Every year about 10 percent of the class would not make it to the next year, and each year Warrington wondered if he would make the cut. He’d gotten almost all the way through junior year, and figured he could stick it out to the end. But as he dressed himself for class, he couldn’t help remembering one particularly strange moment during Dad’s sudden weekend visit to Tally Ho.

The two were alone, and Warrington suddenly realized that this guy in front of him was trying to give him advice. That was strange, given that the guy had forgotten he had a son through three presidential administrations and Wa tergate. But there it was, his father—his real father—giving Warrington advice. Was it about how to become a man of character? Did it involve a “life of honor and service”? Not quite.

Preakness Day at Pimlico, the biggest race in Maryland. This wasn’t your average day at the track. This wasn’t just a back alley crap game. This wasn’t three-card monte. This was Pimlico, where the United States House of Representatives once adjourned for the only time in its history to attend a horse race. Nobody remembered the horses—Parole, Ten Broeck and Tom Ochiltree—but everybody called that day the Great Race. And the Preakness was the Great Race on an annual basis. It was the high church of high stakes. It reeked of history, from its place as the second jewel in the Triple Crown to the tradition of painting the wrought iron horse-and-rider weather vane atop the Old Clubhouse cupola the colors of the victorious horse’s silks as soon as the race was run. On this day odds were the painter was going to be dipping into his cans of pink and black—the colors of Affirmed, a three-year-old Thoroughbred out of Harbor View farms who was favored to win.

Tradition was not on the mind of the nineteen-year-old Villanova freshman named Francis Warrington Gillet III who stood at the cashier’s window, trying to convince the guy behind the iron bars that placing a bet with a $5,000 personal check from a teenager was a perfectly normal occurrence. The guy wasn’t buying his pitch.

The clock was ticking and Warrington knew he had to do something drastic. He wanted Affirmed to win and Alydar to place, and the guy behind the window was practically laughing in his face. The guy had his suspicions. Five thousand dollars was a lot of money for a kid Warrington’s age, regardless of the last name involved. Warrington was dropping every name he could think of to sway the guy, but it wasn’t working. Then he got an idea: why not take the check directly to a trustee of Pimlico his stepfather knew?

Warrington knew that being the stepson of John Schapiro might make the difference. John Schapiro was a devoted gambler. It made him feel alive. He spent most of his waking hours thinking about the next horse race, the next poker game, the next interlocution with his bookie. He knew everybody at the tracks, from the stable boys to the trustees of Pimlico.

There was only one problem with the whole scenario: Warrington knew very well that there wasn’t a thin dime in his checking account. He was betting it all on the idea that the stars in the heavens would fall into alignment just for him. He craved quick cash (who didn’t?), but he also sought that feeling of euphoria that comes when you take a chance and you’re right. He knew he wasn’t taking the biggest chance of all time. Affirmed had already won the Kentucky Derby with Alydar placing, and he was favored to do the same today. But you never knew what was going to happen when you plunked your money down at the cashier’s window. Alydar, after all, was the only horse to have actually beaten Affirmed. You were always taking a chance. And Warrington liked taking chances. Of course, it helped if you actually had some money to bet. With only a few hours to post time, he did not.

He did, however, have his stepfather’s name to drop. He went to Plan B. He managed to talk his way into the trustee’s office less than an hour before post time, and dropped Schapiro’s name as many times as he waved the check in his hand for the important man to see.

He made sure to return to the same cashier, just to see the guy’s face when he noticed the trustee’s signature on it. The guy said, “Are you sure you want Affirmed to win?” Warrington nodded, and walked away with his tickets, filled with both excitement and fear. He got as close to trackside as possible to watch his life either soar into the heavens or crash into the mud. It was now out of his hands as the horses assembled in the paddock and the race time buzz began to grow.

The way nineteen-year-old Warrington saw it, pretty much everything was out of his hands. He’d gone to Gilman as his mother had instructed and somehow managed to graduate. No high honors, but a diploma nonetheless. He’d been accepted at Villanova and was planning on declaring a major in economics. All of this made his mother quite happy. Outside his mother’s view, he lived a different life. A second life. He lived his stepfather, John Schapiro’s, life.

He read the Racing Form daily and bet on horses with his stepfather whenever he could. He would regularly visit his real father in Palm Beach, where he learned what it’s like to live well, but he had come to terms with his stepfather. He was learning some interesting things. The man introduced him to the adrenaline of high risk, and it was as addictive as any narcotic. He had come to love taking chances, and the bigger the better. He really had no expectations of failure. He was absolutely positive he would do well, be rich, meet lots of beautiful women. He was nineteen. He had all the time in the world.

The gates crashed open and the Preakness was off. Believe It—who’d finished third behind Affirmed and Alydar at Kentucky—took the lead along the rail. Affirmed remained along the outside, running head-to-head with Believe It by the first turn. Warrington appreciated that moment. He knew Affirmed had been trained by veteran Luz Barrera and Believe It had been trained by Barrera’s son, Albert. At that moment, it was father against son.

An also-ran, Track Reward, pulled ahead in the first quarter mile, but then Affirmed took his place out front by the first half mile. Alydar was still well back. By 1:11, Affirmed led Noon Time Spender by a length, followed by Believe It and then, close behind, Alydar. And then Alydar began to move.

Warrington’s stomach began to roil and quail. Five thousand dollars he did not have. What would he do? What would happen when the check bounced and his stepfather got a call from the president of Pimlico? Would he be banned from the track? Would his stepfather? Would the police be summoned? What would they call the crime? Fraud? Deceit? A stupid teenager trick? Would he be kicked out of Tally Ho for good? Would Schapiro sit down that afternoon and rewrite his will?

Affirmed and Alydar were now neck and neck. Heading into the final stretch, Affirmed was in front in the middle with Believe It coming on strong at the rail, and Alydar pulling up fast on the outside. The jockey riding Alydar began hitting his horse with the whip in is left hand, then switched to his right to slap furiously away. In the upper stretch, from where Warrington was sitting, it was tough to see which horse was out front.

“The race was unbelievable. The turns are going up and down, up and down. If Alydar had won, I’m out. I collected $15,000. I took $5,000 of the winnings, went over to the window and got my check back and ripped it up.”

He stepped back outside and looked up at the cupola to see the painter going to work, coloring pink and black on the weather vane that glinted in the sun. Pink and black were now Warrington’s favorite colors. He looked at the $10,000 in his nineteen-year-old hands. He couldn’t wait to tell his stepfather what he’d done. He would appreciate the temerity, the fearlessness of such a crazy stunt. Turning $5,000 he did not have into $10,000—now that was the difference between recklessness and confidence.