THE CALUMET DYNASTY had its beginnings far from the lush bluegrass pastures of Kentucky—in a cramped rented room in downtown Chicago that served as a combination laboratory, office, and bedroom for an ambitious baking powder salesman cum entrepreneur.
William Monroe Wright got his start peddling door-to-door in the 1870s, his charm and persistence quickly sending him up the corporate ladder at the Royal Baking Powder Company, then the nation’s leading producer of an ingredient as essential to American housewives of the latter nineteenth century as flour and butter. But Wright was an independent sort, and at age thirty-seven, restless and dissatisfied with a middle-management position, he took a big gamble: he quit his job and sank his entire life savings of $3,500 into the quest to find a better baking powder.
Wright came by his pioneer spirit naturally, imagination and inventiveness seemingly coded into the family DNA. Back home in his native Ohio, two of his second cousins were embarking on a path that would make the Wright surname the most famous in the history of aviation. Orville and Wilbur Wright shared not only a common ancestry with William Wright but also the desire to push boundaries. At a time when the Wright brothers were just starting to envision a machine that might give man wings, their cousin William was already acting on a dream of his own.
In 1888, William Wright moved his wife and young son into a four-hundred-square-foot loft room that would double as their home and, on the other side of a curtain partition, his new company’s makeshift lab. After a year of trial and error, he discovered that by adding egg whites to the traditional formulation he could make a double-acting baking powder. The key chemical in traditional single-acting baking powder, calcium phosphate, reacts at room temperature to produce bubbles that plump up batter. By adding the sodium aluminum phosphate found in egg whites, Wright created a more powerful leavening agent because this new compound would spark a second rise once the batter reached the right temperature in the oven or on the stovetop.
Wright hoped that seemingly simple innovation would turn out to be the recipe for success. First, though, he would need to find a name for his new company, one that would resonate with prospective customers. He hit upon a name that was already familiar to his target market of Midwestern housewives since it adorned many local landmarks and was rooted deep in the region’s heritage. “Calumet” was the name the French had given to the Native American peace pipe offered to Père Marquette when the Jesuit missionary explored the Illinois Territory back in the seventeenth century. In keeping with that history, cans of Calumet Baking Powder would prominently feature what would become the company’s trademark: the profile of an Indian chief in full headdress.
Manufacturing his new product by night and selling it by day, Wright soon turned Calumet into a staple in kitchens across the Midwest. Within three years, he had enough business to expand his operations from the cramped rented room to a three-story factory on Chicago’s west side.
By the turn of the century, sales were surging, but Wright found himself restless once again and losing interest in the day-to-day management of the company. With the success of the business allowing him more leisure time, he started to indulge in a passion he had inherited from his father: a love for fast trotting horses. In an era when far more Americans still traveled by horse and buggy than the newfangled contraption known as the automobile, Wright was hardly alone in his fascination with trotters. It was a time when harness racing reigned supreme—dwarfing Thoroughbred racing, not to mention baseball, boxing, and all other spectator sports—and the Standardbred was the most popular breed in America. Wright loved “talking horse” with other Standardbred enthusiasts, and as his interest in racing deepened, he let more of the management of the Calumet Baking Powder Company fall to his only child, Warren.
Though Warren Wright was just in his mid-twenties at the time, he’d already built a long, albeit eclectic, résumé. He’d started early, dropping out of school and joining the workforce when he was barely in his teens. Fed up with the austerity his father had mandated during the year spent experimenting with baking powder formulations, young Warren had left home and taken a job as an assistant cowhand at a Texas ranch owned by a family friend. After just a year, his mother demanded he return home where she could keep a closer eye on him. Not easily deterred, he got himself a paper route in Chicago. When that didn’t bring in enough cash, he came up with a novel way to augment his sales: he would chase after horse-drawn trolleys, hop aboard while they were in motion to avoid paying the fare, and hawk his newspapers to riders between stops. When his mother found out, she put an end to that job, too, fearing for his safety. At fifteen, he finally found a position that would mollify his mother and that was more suited to his own persistent nature: bill collector for a wholesale grocery firm. He excelled at it, and within two years he was able to persuade his father that the family business could use his talents in the same capacity. By 1900, Warren had taken over day-to-day management of the Calumet Baking Powder Company and was running the office with the efficiency of a quality-control engineer.
Short, stout, and bespectacled, the soft-spoken young man seemed shy and unassuming at first glance. But he ruled the company with the firmness of a field general. Although friends fondly referred to him as “Napoleon” and “the little giant,” his employees didn’t find his manner or management style quite as endearing. They never knew where they stood with him. His moods could be mercurial: one minute charming, the next cold and impassive. Salesmen bridled as he verified the charges on their expense accounts for accuracy and honesty, “raising hell,” as one put it, when the numbers didn’t add up. His attention to detail—from the sales quotas to the performance evaluations he instituted—was in sharp contrast with the relaxed way his father had been running the company for years. While the elder Wright was affable and unassuming, as comfortable gabbing with his secretary as with his top executives, the son kept all their employees at a distance. His intense blue eyes watching over everything from his desk in the main office, Warren made everyone uncomfortable. As one former Calumet salesman recalled, “The old man would be sitting there kidding with everyone in the office, then Warren would walk in and you could hear a pin drop.”
Father-son battles became commonplace, as the pair clashed over the direction the company should be taking. William Wright was satisfied with the way things were: he wanted to sit back and enjoy the profits from the company he had built. Warren craved more: he wanted to plow the profits back into the company so he could make it bigger and better. Ambitious as ever, he moved production into larger and larger factories, expanded sales into more and more territories, and advocated branching out into subsidiary enterprises.
Through the first decade of the twentieth century, he was able to take ever-increasing control of the company as his father’s horse habit grew. By now, William had gone from just talking horses to buying them. Needing a home for his new purchases, he bought an estate in horse country outside Chicago and named his new venture after his company: Calumet Farm.
It wasn’t long before he became more preoccupied with Calumet the farm than Calumet the company. Taking advantage of William Wright’s preoccupation with horse racing, Warren assumed even more control over the company’s direction. In 1914, Warren formally succeeded his father as president and promptly put all his expansion plans into high gear. Not content with simply selling more baking powder, Warren bought a chemical plant to supply the raw ingredients, a printing company to make the familiar Indian-head labels, and a factory to manufacture the cans that would contain the product. That vertical integration coupled with his micromanagement of all facets of the business, from the scrutiny of every penny spent to the efficiency standards and monitoring systems he implemented in the factories, streamlined the company and facilitated his true mission, which was to corner the baking powder market. He mounted aggressive advertising and guerrilla marketing campaigns, going so far as to use smear tactics to suggest that competing products contained ingredients that were unhealthy if not downright dangerous. All of Wright’s efforts combined to put Calumet well on its way to becoming a household name in kitchens across America.
While Warren was busy poring over the company spreadsheets and lording over the boardroom, his father was dreaming of the day when the Calumet name would be as synonymous with harness racing as it was with baking. That wouldn’t happen overnight.
William Wright’s first foray into horse breeding was truly seat- of-the-pants. He had bought a speedy two-year-old named Glendora G, but unfortunately the filly went lame within a year, ending her racing career before it could begin. Left with limited options, Wright decided to breed her to the stallion next door. Never mind that no one on his new farm knew much about horses or breeding. When the time came for Glendora’s blind date at the neighboring farm, delivery of the filly was entrusted to Wright’s driver, a man who knew far more about automobiles than horses. With one hand on the steering wheel and the other grasping the end of Glendora’s lead strap, the driver roared down the road with the filly in tow. Half a mile later, she trotted up the driveway of the stud farm, drenched with sweat and nostrils flaring. Before she could even catch her breath, Glendora was bred and, in 1916, produced a leggy bay colt Wright named Peter Manning after a friend of his.
The colt was so quirky and unruly that Wright decided to geld him. When finally deemed ready for fast company, Peter Manning was shipped to Lexington, Kentucky, where he caught the eye of a well-known trainer. After taking him out for a test drive, the trainer convinced his biggest client to make an offer on the big-strided gelding. The next day, at the urging of friends, Wright sold Peter Manning for $21,000, the largest sum that had ever been paid for a three-year-old gelding. It was a decision that would become one of Wright’s biggest regrets.
At the time, though, Wright had a lot on his mind. His health had been deteriorating, to the point where doctors feared he would not survive. He decided to sell off his farm and most of his horses. Even his foundation mare, Glendora G, went at the fire-sale price of $80. It would take a series of seven major surgeries to restore his health—and rekindle his passion for the trotters.
Wright had watched from afar as Peter Manning won race after race for his new owner, ultimately shattering the world record for the mile in 1922 with a time that would remain unchallenged for sixteen years. Though he was sorry he’d sold the speedy gelding, Wright took immense pride in having created such a superstar. Bitten by the breeding bug, he wanted to prove that the record-breaking gelding wasn’t just a fluke and that he could produce many more just like him.
First, he would need a new farm to start over again. During his numerous visits to Kentucky over the years to look at stallions and young stock, he had been impressed with the lusher land, the warmer climate, and the more relaxed Southern lifestyle. In 1924, the seventy-three-year-old Wright lighted upon the perfect property in Lexington: Fairland Farm, already a famous Standardbred nursery known for its natural beauty, the excellence of its bluegrass, the gently undulating ground that promoted good drainage, and the copious ancient hardwood trees that afforded ample shade for mares and foals. What made Fairland Farm even more appealing was the availability of several adjacent tracts of land, bringing his total acquisition to 407 acres. His new venture would bear the name of his erstwhile one: Calumet Farm.
Along with the $2 million he spent for the property, Wright purchased Fairland Farm’s foundation sire, Belwin, for a record $50,000. A few weeks later, he also bought his new stallion’s harem—the seventeen broodmares that had built Belwin’s reputation as the most influential sire of his age. The seventeen new mares joined Wright’s other recent purchases—including Glendora G, whom he’d tracked down after a long search and bought back—to form a broodmare band that was unequaled in America. For Wright, money was no object when it came to building his Standardbred empire. In just five years, he would spend more on the farm and the bloodstock than any other breeder ever had in such short order.
No matter how much Wright spent, his new old-money Kentucky neighbors scorned him as a carpetbagger with unrealistic aspirations. They would laugh behind his back when he’d assert that his goal was “improvement of the breed.” As for Calumet, they dismissed it as nothing more than an “old man’s plaything.” None of that made any difference to a septuagenarian pursuing his dream with the energy and enthusiasm of a teenager chasing after his first love.
Wright was so absorbed by this new venture, spending hours on end planning future matings to build his racing stable, that he had barely a moment to think about Calumet Baking Powder. On those rare occasions when he dropped by the company headquarters, he’d head right to Warren’s office and begin to talk horse, anxious to share Calumet Farm’s latest conquests. He’d regale his son with tales of high-priced horse purchases and of Calumet trotters traveling from city to city to compete on the Grand Circuit, the series of championship harness races famous throughout North America as “The Ragin’ Grand.” As Warren listened, all he could think about was how much money this extravagant horse habit was siphoning from the company’s coffers. Inevitably, he would explode. His voice booming through the closed door of his office, he would rail at his father for wasting company funds on a frivolous pastime.
For his part, William couldn’t understand what the fuss was about. After all, their company was flush. Not only had Calumet become the world’s leading manufacturer of baking powder, but it was selling two and a half times more than all its competitors combined. The Calumet Baking Powder brand was now a bona fide American institution, its Indian-head label a fixture in virtually every kitchen, restaurant, and home economics class the land over.
By 1928, the company William had started with $3,500 was worth a cool $32 million. That’s the price tag its chief suitor put on it. The Postum Cereal Company, waging a series of major acquisitions that would transform it into America’s dominant manufacturer of packaged grocery goods, desperately wanted to add Calumet Baking Powder to a shopping list that boasted everything from Jell-O to Maxwell House coffee to Birds Eye frozen foods. Postum, which within a year would be known the world over as the General Foods Corporation, made Warren Wright an offer he couldn’t refuse. Warren made the deal, drew up the papers, and went to Calumet Farm to get his father’s signature. William blanched, stunned that his son had gone behind his back and made a deal for something the old man saw as his baby. For the next week, the two fiercely battled over the future of the company. In the end, Warren prevailed and William signed the sales agreement.
It turned out to be a stunningly prescient move. Within a year, the stock market crash had plunged the nation into the Great Depression, and the Wrights, having sold the Calumet Baking Powder Company at the height of the boom for a whopping $32 million, emerged as one of the richest families in America.
William Wright was enjoying the spoils of his windfall. As the vast majority of Americans were trying to claw their way out of the Depression, he was plowing millions of dollars into Calumet Farm. He more than doubled its size, ultimately expanding to 1,200 acres. In addition to remodeling and enlarging the handsome brick mansion that came with the property, he built an opulent stallion barn renowned as the finest in Kentucky, scores of superb stables to shelter the rest of his growing herd, and miles of well-groomed roads and white plank fences crisscrossing the farm. He was even more extravagant when it came to buying up bloodstock. In a few short years, he had expanded his broodmare band to more than two hundred and had made Calumet by far the largest and most expensively stocked breeding establishment in North America.
All of that was done in the pursuit of one goal: to breed a horse that could win trotting’s most coveted prize. The Hambletonian Stake was the richest and most prestigious harness race in the world. Wright had, in fact, been instrumental in devising that annual championship for the best three-year-old trotter—the Kentucky Derby of harness racing. To win the Hambletonian would be the ultimate validation for Wright as both breeder and owner. For years, it proved to be an elusive goal. Finally, in 1931, a bay colt he had bred stunned everyone by making the Hambletonian the first win of his career.
In an ironic twist of fate, Wright didn’t see Calumet Butler capture the big prize. He had suffered a stroke three months earlier and, on the day his greatest wish was fulfilled, lay in a coma back at his farm in Kentucky. At the ceremony following the race in Goshen, New York, Dick McMahon, Wright’s farm manager and Calumet Butler’s driver, accepted the championship cup with tears in his eyes. “Ever since he founded Calumet Farm, it has been Mr. Wright’s ambition to breed there a colt that would win the Hambletonian Stake under our colors,” McMahon said, his voice cracking. “Now he has done it and this is the happiest day of my life, but the pitiful thing about it is that Mr. Wright will never know.”
Two weeks later, William Wright died without ever having regained consciousness.
UPON HIS FATHER’S death, Warren Wright inherited the bulk of a $60 million estate—including Calumet Farm and all 550 horses on it.
Though Warren wasn’t particularly enamored of trotters, which he dismissed as slow and boring, he did share his father’s passion for horse racing. What he loved was the heart-pounding rush of Thoroughbreds, the exhilarating sight of the fastest breed hurtling flat out down the stretch. Warren was already beginning to dabble in Thoroughbreds at the same time as his father was building America’s premier Standardbred stable. At first, trips to the track were just a chance for Warren and his wife, Lucille, to spend a pleasant afternoon watching the races and hobnobbing with high society. Flat racing by this time had become more glamorous, and the track was a place for the rich and famous, dressed to the nines, to see and be seen.
As time went on, Warren’s interest in racing was fanned by his growing friendship with fellow tycoon John D. Hertz, the founder of the eponymous car rental empire and an avid Thoroughbred breeder and owner. Warren and Lucille accompanied Hertz to the 1928 Kentucky Derby and got so caught up in the excitement that they bet $25,000 on their friend’s colt Reigh Count. As the horses thundered down the homestretch, Lucille jumped up and unconsciously began to pound on the back of the man in the box in front of her while cheering Reigh Count on. For his part, Warren couldn’t imagine anything more thrilling than the sight of his friend’s horse drawing away to a three-length victory and of his friend striding into the winner’s circle to accept the Kentucky Derby Gold Cup.
When his father died leaving a huge inheritance, Warren was primed and ready to make the plunge. Barely a month after William Wright’s death, Warren went on a shopping spree that would give the next incarnation of Calumet Farm its start. At the 1931 Saratoga Yearling Sale, he purchased his first three Thoroughbreds for a total of $13,000. Two months later, he traveled to Lexington for the Keeneland Fall Sale and, with Hertz at his side whispering advice and placing the actual bids, Wright added eleven more—all of them broodmares—to his rapidly expanding Thoroughbred stable. While the first three yearlings were shipped to Hertz’s trainer in Chicago to prepare them for racing the following year as two-year-olds, the broodmares were simply sent four miles down the Versailles Pike to join the Standardbreds at Calumet Farm.
To make room at Calumet for his new purchases, Wright began to take apart, horse by horse, the Standardbred empire his father had built. By early 1933, only 152 of his father’s 550 trotters remained on the farm, which now housed his first 46 Thoroughbred acquisitions. By that summer, all but one of the remaining Standardbreds had been auctioned off. The only one he kept was his father’s favorite mare, now well into her retirement at thirty-four.
Though his father had had great success with trotters, Warren saw them as a bad investment. As a businessman, he recognized that it was impossible to make a profit in harness racing. “My father did better than anyone else,” he said, “but except for enjoyment, he was just throwing money away.”
To Wright’s way of thinking, it was Thoroughbreds that offered the real possibility of making money. Thoroughbred racing was now enjoying a surge in popularity at the very time sports were starting to evolve from leisurely pastimes to big business. The opportunity presented by that recent phenomenon in what had become America’s fastest-growing sport was not lost on Wright.
Back when his father was getting into trotters just after the turn of the century, Thoroughbred racing had been reeling. At the height of the temperance movement, antigambling reformers had forced many states to outlaw betting—a ban that virtually destroyed flat racing throughout the nation. Spurred by a series of race-fixing scandals involving unsavory bookmakers and drugged favorites, the antigambling crusaders took dead aim at the 1908 Kentucky Derby by outlawing the only form of wagering then allowed at Churchill Downs. In desperation, Churchill Downs responded by exploiting a loophole in Louisville’s antigambling law to introduce pari-mutuel wagering—a European practice in which all bets were placed in a centralized pool from which odds could be calculated and payouts shared among the winning ticket holders after the track’s commission was deducted. Though the replacement of bookmakers with pari-mutuel machines may have put a tourniquet on racing in Kentucky, it couldn’t stanch the bleeding elsewhere. At the time, only twenty-five racetracks remained operational in a nation that had boasted more than three hundred of them just a decade earlier. Within a few years, the antigambling wave would sweep Thoroughbred racing out of every state save Kentucky and Maryland—leaving trotters as the only alternative for enthusiasts interested in simply seeing horses compete for the pure sport of it. Even after states started lifting their gambling bans in the teens and embracing pari-mutuel wagering as the wedge through which flat racing could be revived, that couldn’t reverse the precipitous decline in attendance, purses, and bloodstock prices that forced many stables to fold and some of the bigger ones to move abroad.
Not until the end of World War I, when a new era of prosperity and optimism sparked the cultural revolution known as the Roaring Twenties, would a confluence of forces rescue American racing from extinction. Of all the sports and entertainment diversions drawn into the vortex of the live-for-today hedonism that defined that decade of decadence, none benefited more than horse racing. Not only did Thoroughbreds far surpass trotters and reclaim supremacy as The Sport of Kings, but they also enabled horse racing to once again rival baseball and boxing as the king of sports.
Leading the charge of athletic titans into the Roaring Twenties was a strapping chestnut colt whose name would become as synonymous with that so-called Golden Age of Sports as the two sluggers famed for making baseball and boxing the most popular of spectator spectacles. Just as Babe Ruth did with his towering home runs and Jack Dempsey with his pulverizing knockout punches, Man o’ War captured the nation’s imagination with an incomparable twenty-eight-foot stride that left rivals and speed records ravaged in his wake. Dominating one race by an incredible hundred lengths and whipping the first-ever Triple Crown winner by a stunning seven lengths in a 1920 match race as captivating as Dempsey’s heavyweight title fights, the Thoroughbred aptly nicknamed “Big Red” was, in the words of the eminent turf writer Joe Palmer, “as near to a living flame as horses get.” A savior carrying horse racing out of the darkness on his broad back, Man o’ War drew record crowds wherever he ran and millions more visitors to the Lexington farm where he stood from his retirement until his nationally broadcast funeral. Burnishing his legend as the greatest racehorse who ever lived, Man o’ War’s supreme legacy may have been making his sport not just respectable but also glamorous.
That was the fashionable setting that called to the Wrights and other Chicago socialites. Society columns devoted much ink in describing Wright and his elegant young wife at the races. Accompanying photos would catch Warren chatting with the city’s rich and mighty, nattily attired in a double-breasted suit, a boater or a homburg hat covering his close-cropped white hair. At his side would be the lanky beauty Lucille, sporting a chic designer dress with the dark curls of a debutante wave just peeking out from beneath a flapper cloche or a wide-brimmed hat. The Wrights looked and felt at home in their owner friends’ boxes, catching up on the latest society gossip between races.
Like Wright’s friend Hertz, these horse owners were wealthy magnates who indulged in racing not as businessmen but as sportsmen. It wasn’t called The Sport of Kings for nothing—only those with king-sized bank accounts could afford it. Like Wright’s father had done with trotters, these Thoroughbred owners weren’t in it to make a profit. But Wright never did anything just for the fun of it.
To be sure, he had heard the old racing axiom, “If you want to make a small fortune with horses, start with a large one.” But with his business sense, he was convinced that he could do something few others accomplished or even aspired to: make money racing.
One look at the rising purses told him it was possible. In 1930, the Triple Crown winner Gallant Fox emerged as the first horse ever to earn more than $300,000 during a single season. That’s ten times more than Calumet Butler earned the following year, when he won harness racing’s biggest prize for Wright’s father. No wonder Wright thought the future was in Thoroughbreds.
But it would be a lot more difficult to put Calumet Farm in the black than Wright imagined. In 1932, the debut of the Calumet racing colors appropriated from the baking powder label—devil’s red jockey silks with blue bars on the sleeve, blue collar, and blue cap—was anything but splashy. For the whole year, Calumet won just one race and a total of $1,150. The following year, the growing stable managed nineteen wins yet still earned only $22,055 in a season during which Wright had shelled out $180,000 for broodmares alone. Although Calumet’s annual winnings continued to trend upward through the thirties, Wright was nowhere near breaking even. The savvy business mogul who had boasted of having “made a fortune saving money” was now pouring $200,000 a year into his new farm and stable—with scant revenue to show for it.
Wright couldn’t understand what was going wrong. He had bought the best broodmares money could buy and bred them to the best stallions available. And he thought he had just the right horseman caring for them. Along with the farm, he had also inherited his father’s trainer, Dick McMahon, the crusty old handler who drove Calumet Butler to his Hambletonian win. Though McMahon’s expertise was only with trotters, Wright figured that there couldn’t be much difference between Standardbreds and Thoroughbreds, so he let McMahon stay on as farm manager. McMahon kept things the way they’d always been at Calumet and other top Standardbred farms. He continued to turn mares and weanlings out in the fields 24/7 with only three-sided loafing sheds to provide shelter from the howling winter winds, supplementing pasture forage with a small portion of hay and grain that was fed from long community troughs in the sheds. Problem was, when Wright would stop by the farm, his Thoroughbreds looked ribby and dull-coated.
Wright pored over farm journals, scribbling notes on the newest horse remedies and additives. He bought the latest fad vitamins and patented supplements. Before long, every horse on the farm was getting seven different pills and powders with their feed. But none of that worked. The horses he bred still looked unthrifty and were performing poorly on the track. Worse, they were breaking down with alarming regularity under the increasing workloads that were supposed to make them race better.
For years, Wright had blamed the trainers that he hired and fired with stunning regularity. In what became a rite of fall, Wright would replace his trainer at the end of each season in the hope that the latest hire would be the one to saddle a Kentucky Derby winner. But every spring, his hopes would be dashed. His frustration peaked when his prized three-year-old, Bull Lea, went into the 1938 Derby as the second favorite only to lug home a humiliating eighth. Wright was so discouraged at Calumet’s performances and prospects that he confided to Lucille that he was seriously considering selling off his racing interests.
One day the following spring, as he was chatting up one of his stable hands, Wright could no longer hide his exasperation. “I have the best mares in the country—everyone tells me that—but I can’t raise a good horse,” he grumbled. “What’s the matter?” The stable hand, who had previously worked at one of the nation’s top Thoroughbred farms, decided to take a chance and give his boss a dose of reality. He told Wright that mares and weanlings at other Thoroughbred farms were always brought into the barns at night and fed ample helpings of oats and hay in individual stalls. The man had been horrified at the way Calumet’s horses were being cared for. He explained that horsemen familiar with both breeds would commonly say, “You can turn a Standardbred and a Thoroughbred out all winter on the same rations, and in the spring the Standardbred will be fat and healthy and the Thoroughbred will be skinny and poor.”
The longer Wright listened, the redder his face got. He stomped over to McMahon’s office to chew him out. Slamming the door behind him, Wright yelled, “You don’t know how to run a farm!” Just like that, McMahon was out of a job and Wright took over active management of Calumet.
Upon taking the reins, Wright resolved to reverse the first failure he had ever experienced and redoubled his efforts to build a Thoroughbred empire. He poured millions more into sprucing up the farm itself: building a sumptuous new barn with a handpicked pine-plank interior trimmed in chrome, converting some of his father’s loafing sheds into actual barns that could be closed up in inclement weather to shelter mares and weanlings, installing a six-furlong training track and cavernous training barns. But the most significant upgrade would involve not bricks and mortar but flesh and blood: he needed to find a trainer masterful enough to judge and develop talent.
ONE STEAMY AFTERNOON in that summer of 1939, Wright watched in dismay from his owner’s box at Chicago’s Arlington Park as one of his best horses got trounced by a longshot hay burner. Barely able to contain his fury after the race, he blurted out, “Any trainer who can beat my horse with that pig is the best trainer in the world!” Glancing down at his program, Wright immediately recognized the trainer’s name. As coincidence would have it, this was the very trainer who had guided a sore-footed unknown named Lawrin to an upset win over Wright’s favored Bull Lea in the previous year’s Kentucky Derby.
In the instant it took to make that connection, Wright set his sights on the trainer he now viewed as the future savior of Calumet Farm: Ben Jones, a rough-and-tumble Missouri cowboy known simply as “Plain Ben.”
Lawrin’s stunning upset in the 1938 Derby had burnished the fifty-five-year-old trainer’s reputation as a wily horseman—said by some to be “half horse” himself—and put him on Wright’s radar. Since Jones was in the longtime employ of another stable, Wright would have to bide his time. Early in 1939, Wright heard a rumor that Jones was thinking of quitting. So when the trainer once again upset one of Calumet’s stars that summer day at Arlington Park, Wright figured it was time to make his move.
Wright made a beeline to the clubhouse box where Plain Ben, easy to spot in his trademark white Stetson and black cowboy boots, sat watching the races. “Phone me this evening at the Drake Hotel,” Wright said simply and left. On the telephone, he invited Jones to dine with him the next morning. When they met up in the luxury hotel’s opulent dining room, they made a striking picture: the tall, powerfully built cowboy with the bulldog jaw towering over the stout businessman. At breakfast, there would be no small talk between the plainspoken horseman and the punctilious millionaire.
“Ben, I want you to train my horses,” Wright said straightaway.
“Mr. Wright,” Jones responded, “I’m afraid your horses aren’t good enough.”
Startled, Wright shot back, “Well, by George, if I’m not raising them good enough, I’ll buy them for you.”
Ever the aggressive negotiator, Wright then made a lowball offer to Jones: an $8,000 annual salary and 5 percent of the horses’ winnings. Jones insisted on $15,000 a year and the standard 10 percent commission. Unable to come to terms, the two men parted, Jones heading home to Missouri to mull it over. He had to weigh the appeal of working for a rich farm like Calumet against the stable’s chronic underachievement and Wright’s penchant for firing trainers at the drop of a race.
The longer Jones spent mulling it over, the more impatient and nervous Lucille Wright got, fearing that some other stable would snap the trainer up before these two bullheaded men could come to an agreement. So she reached for the telephone, hoping she could push things along.
“Mr. Jones, we have never met,” she said, introducing herself. “Things look sad right now, but we are serious about racing. Please come to Churchill Downs and talk to me.”
“When do you want me there?” Jones said without missing a beat.
“Yesterday,” Lucille replied firmly.
A few days later, Jones showed up at Churchill Downs for their meeting. As Lucille reached out to shake his hand, he immediately whipped off his Stetson, slipped it under his arm, and bowed slightly. Standing in the shadow of the racing mecca’s signature Twin Spires, neither the mistress of Calumet nor the object of her desire could escape the powerful symbolism.
“I know all about you,” Lucille said, “and the one thing I want more than anything else is to win the Kentucky Derby.”
Plain Ben leaned down, kissed her on the cheek, and said simply, “That’s what I want—and we will get it.”
SOON AFTER HIS arrival at Calumet later that summer of 1939, Jones checked out the yearlings in the stable to see which ones would make the best prospects to race as two-year-olds. Of the twenty youngsters romping in the farm’s pastures, only one, a rugged little colt with powerful hindquarters and a long and luxuriant tail, could catch Jones’s eye. This was the homebred son of top European sire Blenheim II—an Epsom Derby winner Wright had bought a quarter interest in for $60,000 from the Aga Khan three years earlier—and a well-bred though temperamental Calumet mare named Dustwhirl. By the time he was two, the colt had matured into everything Jones expected—and then some. With his flaming-red tail practically scraping the ground, the smallish chestnut went by the nickname “Mr. Longtail,” the given name Whirlaway, and every epithet his exasperated trainer could think of calling him.
High-strung and hard to handle, Whirlaway tried Jones’s patience right from the start. To be sure, the colt could gallop tirelessly, running hard in his morning works without losing any of his edge. The problem was getting him calm enough to race. He was wild and wild-eyed, ever in motion, jumping and rearing at the mere sight of his tack. It took several men just to saddle him.
If he was rank and knuckleheaded off the track, he was completely crazy on it. That was clear right from his racing debut in a five-furlong sprint for maiden two-year-olds during the spring of 1940. He was all over the track, mainly on the outside rail, and though he did manage to win by a nose on sheer talent, that erratic racing style would become as much of a trademark as his long tail. In race after maddening race, he displayed a zany habit of veering wide off the stretch turn and drifting out from the inside rail to the middle of track, often bolting straight toward the outside rail. His antics inspired newspapermen to throw a thesaurus full of pejorative adjectives at him, ranging from “willful” and “unmanageable” to “dimwitted” and “nitwitted.” Not that Jones could argue with them. “Dumbest horse I’ve ever trained,” he’d growl, shaking his head.
Thus began Jones’s mission to cure Whirlaway of his temperamental behaviors, not to mention his addled habit of careening out in the stretch. That summer Jones made taming “my problem child” his own personal project, devoting his full time and attention to Whirlaway while letting his son Jimmy, as the stable’s assistant trainer, handle all of Calumet’s other racehorses. Every day, from before dawn to quitting time, would be dedicated to trying to instill some horse sense into this head case. Riding alongside Whirlaway on his own white stable pony, Plain Ben—part horse whisperer, part psychoanalyst—employed a kind of aversion therapy to desensitize the colt to all the scary sights that caused him to shy at the racetrack. Jones would spend hours on end in the hot summer sun trying, under calm and reassuring conditions, to get Whirlaway past the issues that haunted him on the track. One day would be spent simply standing at the starting gate to cure his penchant to startle at the sound of the bell; the next day would be spent just saddling him over and over again; another day would be spent acclimating him to the inside rail as groups of horses galloped by; and so it went. Though the tedious repetition eventually quieted some of the quirky behaviors, nothing seemed to cure Whirlaway’s habit of veering out in the stretch.
Only his sublime speed and explosive kick enabled the colt to compensate and overtake everyone to win seven of his nineteen starts as a two-year-old. But against stiffening competition, the problem would be harder to overcome in the three-year-old prep races leading up to the 1941 Kentucky Derby. Making matters worse, Whirlaway was off his form early that spring. In an effort to restore the colt’s old snap and spirit, Jones wanted to lay him off for a couple of weeks of rest and relaxation. Problem was, Wright had other ideas. Desperately wanting to win the prestigious Flamingo Stakes, he was pressuring Jones to run his precious “Whirly” in Hialeah Park’s marquee race. Jones was used to deflecting Wright’s heavy-handed micromanagement, having angrily thrown away the vitamin supplements his boss insisted he give the horses and instead stubbornly sticking to a straight diet of oats, hay, and grass. So when now faced with Wright’s insistence on running the Flamingo, Jones decided to invent a slight foreleg injury to buy Whirlaway time to rest and regain his strength.
As soon as the colt was sufficiently recharged, Jones entered him in a sprint to sharpen him both physically and mentally. Wright was on a fishing trip aboard a friend’s yacht in the Florida Keys when the morning papers were delivered and he spotted Whirlaway’s name in the Tropical Park entries for a 51/2-furlong allowance race. Enraged, he immediately put to shore in a motor launch and jumped into the limousine he had waiting for him at the dock to whisk him to the Miami track. Once there, he rushed to his owner’s box, where he found Jones sitting and watching the races before Whirlaway’s, and began railing at the trainer.
“This is a mile-and-a-quarter horse, not a five-and-a-half-furlong horse!” Wright yelled. “I want him scratched!”
“I’m not going to scratch him!” Jones shot back, jumping to his feet and towering over his angry boss. “This is my way of training, and I think he should run. He needs this race.”
The heated argument continued to escalate right up to post time, the faces of both men becoming redder with each passing barb. Still angry, they stopped arguing just long enough to watch Whirlaway capture the sprint in his usual rousing style—coming from way off the pace, veering out in the stretch, then catching up in the very last stride to win. Not until many of Wright’s friends had stopped by to congratulate him would he cool off enough to speak with his trainer. Finally, he took Jones aside and said sheepishly, “I’m never going to train another horse. From now on, you are doing the training. Use your own judgment, and do what you think is best.”
If only taming Whirlaway were as easy as handling his owner. With each passing prep race, Whirlaway’s Kentucky Derby hopes faded further. In the most important test of his career, the Blue Grass Stakes, he veered so far out on Keeneland’s stretch turn that he transformed a sure win into a six-length loss. When the same thing happened in the Derby Trial at Churchill Downs four days before the main event, Calumet’s Derby dream was turning into a nightmare and Whirlaway himself was turning into a national punchline.
Not even the eminent Grantland Rice, the Man o’ War of sportswriters, could resist needling the frustrated Jones. “They tell me your horse is a halfwit,” Rice quipped.
“I don’t know about that,” Jones replied dryly, “but he’s making a halfwit out of me!”
Clearly at his wit’s end, Jones decided to take a big gamble after the Derby Trial by changing jockeys just days before “The Run for the Roses.” He needed a rider who was strong enough to keep Whirlaway from veering out in the stretch but who at the same time had a light enough touch to keep from hanging on the colt’s notoriously sensitive mouth. Only one jockey had both the strong body and the soft hands to fit that bill: Eddie Arcaro, who was already a decade into an incomparable career that would stamp him as “The Master.” Arcaro had ridden some eight thousand horses, including Lawrin to his Derby upset for Jones, but never anything like the unpredictable mount he would be introduced to at Churchill Downs a couple of days before the big race.
During the morning works that day, Jones stationed himself astride his fat white pony right off the stretch turn, just a few feet out from the inside rail, and ordered Arcaro to ride Whirlaway through the narrow hole between the two obstacles. As Arcaro breezed Whirlaway around the turn, he couldn’t for the life of him see how there would be enough room to squeeze between the rail and the trainer’s mount. The jockey finally shook his head and thought, “If that old man’s game enough to sit there, I’m game enough to run him down!”
Even though Arcaro managed to expertly steer Whirlaway through the opening on the inside rail at the very spot where the colt would always bear wide, Jones was still taking no chances. On Derby Day, in the paddock right before the race, he suddenly yanked out a pocketknife and muttered, “I’ll fix that stupid sonuvabitch.” As Arcaro blanched in fear for his mount’s safety, Jones used the blade to cut away the inside cup of the blinkers Whirlaway had been wearing to improve his focus. “That should keep him from bolting,” Jones said emphatically. The makeshift one-eyed blinker, with a leather cup blocking peripheral vision of the right eye and nothing obstructing the left, would encourage the colt to focus on the inside rail while discouraging him from veering to the outside since horses usually won’t run where they can’t see. As he led Whirlaway out for the post parade, Jones had one last trick up his sleeve. “Eddie,” he said in his final instructions to the jockey, “don’t take the lead until you’re headin’ for home. This horse can pass any livin’ horse. Just wait for the straight part of the track, ’cause when he’s got horses to pass, he won’t run wide.”
As the eleven starters paraded onto the track to the strains of “My Old Kentucky Home,” all eyes in the largest crowd ever to see a horse race—the first to crack a hundred thousand spectators—fixed on the flaming chestnut they had made the slight betting favorite as well as the usual big fan favorite. No one was surprised to see Whirlaway break slow from the gate and settle in at the back of the field, biding his time down the backstretch. Skimming the far turn, Arcaro expertly started threading Whirlaway between horses with a quarter mile to go as the crowd roar crescendoed in anticipation. The jockey positioned his mount in fourth place and, following Jones’s prerace instructions to the letter, continued to coast around the bend. Whipping off the turn between the bunched horses, Arcaro finally let him rip. Hitting the homestretch straight as a flaming arrow this time, Whirlaway unleashed a cyclonic burst of speed to shoot past the frontrunners as if they were standing still. His long tail billowing behind him like a banner flapping in the wind, he accelerated through the stretch to open eight lengths of daylight and shatter the track record for a mile and a quarter with a mark that would last more than two decades.
The only spectator at Churchill Downs who didn’t see Whirlaway’s thrilling triumph was the one who’d actually named him: Lucille Wright. She had arrived at the Wrights’ trackside box dressed for the occasion in Calumet’s colors—resplendent in red shoes, a navy blue suit, a red blouse starred in blue and white, and a small blue hat ornamented with a red veil and red crocheted ball hatpins—and eager to cheer on her Whirly. But as soon as he broke from the starting gate, she closed her eyes and tucked her head into her husband’s shoulder. She spent the entire race that way, every few seconds nervously asking Warren, “How’s he doing? How’s he doing?” Not until Warren and the deafening crowd let her know that Whirly had indeed won did she finally open her eyes. When she did, Warren saw they were brimming with tears of joy.
In that moment, the dream of the Wrights, like all Thoroughbred owners, had finally been realized. No sooner had Warren accepted the Kentucky Derby Gold Cup and the record $61,275 first prize in the winner’s circle than he set his sights on the Triple Crown. With an instant replay in the Preakness Stakes, Whirlaway unleashed his patented burst from dead last to win commandingly by more than five lengths. Then, with a chance to become only the fifth horse to win the Triple Crown, he turned the Belmont Stakes into a front-running romp, his waving tail likened to a mocking banner that teased his vanquished foes.
Sweeping the Triple Crown in such stirring style, Whirlaway emerged as a national sensation and Calumet the toast of the racing world. After ten years of red ink, Calumet Farm had finally made it into the black, thanks largely to Mr. Longtail’s 1941 winnings of $272,386. That year Calumet led the nation with $471,091 in winnings, shattering the record for annual earnings by almost $150,000 and more than tripling what Wright’s stable had ever won before. Now that Calumet had finally reached the pinnacle, the big question was whether it had staying power.
WHIRLAWAY WENT ON to become the first horse ever to win more than half a million dollars, breaking Seabiscuit’s record, before a leg injury forced his retirement in 1943. The two-time reigning Horse of the Year received a hero’s welcome at Calumet, where he would stand at stud and remain the fondest of favorites with the Wrights.
For all the esteem in which they held their Whirly, though, he was not the most important horse gracing Calumet’s pastures. That distinction would belong to the big brown colt who had so disappointed Warren Wright in the 1938 Kentucky Derby: Bull Lea.
When Wright had purchased him for a mere $14,000 at the 1936 Saratoga Yearling Sale, it wasn’t with a plan to make Bull Lea into a herd sire. The colt turned out to be a decent though hardly special runner, winning only ten of twenty-seven starts and $94,825, before a bowed tendon forced his retirement the following year. His breeding prospects weren’t expected to be any better than his racing performances had been. In the beginning, his services were hardly in demand, even at the modest stud fee of $500. A few breeding seasons to him sold for just $250 and others were given away for free, yet he still failed to have a full book his first year at stud.
That would all change after his first foal crop hit the track running as two-year-olds in 1943. Though hardly known as a stayer when he was on the track, Bull Lea, through some sort of genetic fluke, was siring horses that could run all day. The parade of Bull Lea champions would begin flowing as if they were coming off a conveyor belt.
His first foal crop alone boasted two all-time greats: Armed, an ornery little brown gelding who succeeded Whirlaway as history’s richest racehorse with $817,475 in winnings, and Twilight Tear, a big bay who became the first filly ever selected Horse of the Year. In 1947, the season Armed trounced 1946 Triple Crown winner Assault in a $100,000 match race to secure his own Horse of the Year honors, Calumet became the first stable to break the million-dollar barrier in annual earnings. With a record one hundred trips to the winner’s circle that year, horses carrying the devil’s red won a mind-boggling $1,402,436 to more than double its own national earnings mark.
By the time Bull Lea’s fifth foal crop yielded the greatest racehorse this side of Man o’ War, there simply was no catching Calumet.
The first time Plain Ben laid eyes on that bumper crop of 1945, as he leaned on the fence grading the farm’s four dozen yearlings on conformation and movement, two bay colts stood out. One was a mahogany bay named Coaltown but better known around the farm as “The Goose” for the way he snaked out his long, thin neck while running. The other was a rangy blood bay named after the Medals of Honor awarded to America’s World War II heroes: Citation. If there wasn’t much in Jones’s grades to distinguish between the two bays that day, it wasn’t long before Citation raced to the fore.
Even before Citation’s three-year-old campaign could begin in earnest, no less an expert than Sunny Jim Fitzsimmons, the esteemed trainer of Triple Crown winners Gallant Fox and Omaha, had already anointed “Big Cy” the greatest racehorse of all time. “Better than any horse I ever saw,” he declared, “and I saw Man o’ War.”
One horseman who remained unconvinced was Eddie Arcaro, the peerless jockey tapped to ride Citation in the 1948 Kentucky Derby. Of Calumet’s two Derby entries, Arcaro actually preferred Coaltown, the pert sprinter, to Citation, the versatile champion notorious for running only as fast as needed to win.
A couple of days before the Derby, Arcaro grabbed Jones’s arm in the hotel lobby and pulled him off to the side. “Tell me the truth,” the jockey said, “can Citation beat Coaltown at a mile and a quarter?”
The trainer’s reply was short and pointed. “Citation can beat Coaltown doing anything.”
In the paddock just before the post parade, Arcaro was still having second thoughts when he nervously turned to Jones and asked, “Gee, Ben, are you sure I’m on the right one?”
“You’re on the right one,” Jones snapped with an air of finality as he grabbed the jockey’s left shin and hoisted him up into the saddle.
Right out of the gate on the sloppy Churchill Downs track, Arcaro would have one more pang of doubt as Coaltown sped to the lead and kept pouring it on, showering Citation with mud balls down the backstretch while opening up seven lengths on the field. Well aware that Citation was lazy and inclined to loaf, Arcaro urged him forward with a cluck, and the colt shot into high gear. Like a greyhound running down a rabbit, Citation caught Coaltown coming around the stretch turn and then darted past his stablemate as they hit the straightaway. Citation was still opening up daylight when he crossed under the wire three and a half lengths in front.
It was the closest any horse would get to Citation that spring. He dominated the Triple Crown campaign with speed and stamina to burn, capturing the Preakness by five and a half lengths and the Belmont by eight. Running his streak of stakes wins to a record fifteen in a row, he sealed his near-unanimous selection as 1948 Horse of the Year. He would go on to become the first horse ever to earn a million dollars, dominating all comers over every distance from five-furlong sprints to two-mile marathons.
In debates from barrooms to backstretches over history’s greatest racehorse, Citation would be rivaled only by Man o’ War. When it came to comparing stables, of course, there was no debate.
No stable ever dominated racing as Calumet Farm did in the 1940s. From 1941 to 1949, Calumet boasted two Triple Crown winners, four Kentucky Derby champions, and five Horse of the Year honorees. The stable led the nation in race earnings for seven of those nine years, smashing the million-dollar mark each of the last three. For that, Wright could thank Bull Lea.
Of all the bets Wright made on breeding stock, the $14,000 he had paid for Bull Lea turned out to be the best investment since the $3,500 his father put up to start the Calumet Baking Powder Company—as America’s prepotent sire produced progeny that would win more than $13.5 million on the racetrack. With Bull Lea affording Calumet Farm a production line evoking the baking powder empire’s conveyor belts, Wright had the entire farm and stable running with the well-oiled efficiency of his old company.
Thus had Wright achieved everything he’d ever imagined. Just as he had taken Calumet the company to the pinnacle, so had he built Calumet the farm into a Thoroughbred dynasty that was not only generating huge profits but was also thoroughly dominating The Sport of Kings.
AS CALUMET GREW more powerful and dominant in the late forties, Warren Wright was becoming increasingly frail and sickly. Lucille could see that her septuagenarian husband was having trouble, and she winced as she watched him struggling to keep up his daily routine at the farm.
By 1946, Warren, too, was beginning to see that his life was changing and that there was no fending off the ravages of aging. He started to think about his legacy and what would happen to the glorious empire he’d spent two decades building. One day, he sat down with Lucille and asked if she would want to keep Calumet after he was gone. When she asserted that she would, he started to methodically teach her everything she would need to know to run the farm as he had. He told her he’d written in his will that the farm would go to her to do with as she saw fit. Keep it as long as you enjoy it, he said, but “if it causes you any heartaches, sell it.”
There was a lot for Lucille to learn. Though she had always ridden—one of her earliest memories was of being plopped on a horse before she’d even started walking—she hadn’t any interest in racing until she married Warren. But even as Warren was throwing all his energy into building his Thoroughbred empire, Lucille stayed mostly in the background, leaving the management of the farm and racing stable completely to him.
In the early years, when Warren was poring over pedigrees and searching for the finest mares to breed to his stallions, Lucille’s main contribution was to come up with catchy names for the resulting foals. That turned out to be a good thing since Warren’s attempts had been pedestrian, albeit family-centric, naming Calumet’s first two racehorses Lucille Wright and Warren Jr. Lucille seemed to have a flair for picking punchy names. When Dustwhirl started to produce, for instance, Lucille decided to give the mare her due by naming the first four babies Dust By, Whirlette, Whirl Right, and, most famously, Whirlaway. Dustwhirl’s final foal would be named Good Ending.
Back when Warren first realized he needed to spend more time at Calumet to make sure things were done “the Wright way,” Lucille jumped at the chance to make the move from Chicago. She had been born in Maysville, Kentucky, so this was a sort of homecoming for her. It was rumored that her ancestors traced all the way back to early Kentucky settler days and that her father had fought in the Civil War. That pedigree made it all the easier for the Wrights to fit in with Kentucky blue-blood society. While Lexington locals felt William Wright’s fortune had a sort of unseemly newness to it, the family’s greenbacks had lost a bit of their crispness by the time Warren and Lucille moved to Kentucky, making them look a lot more like “old money.”
Once they’d settled in on the farm, Lucille got back to her riding. As a young girl whose father forbade her from riding alone out of safety concerns, she had nevertheless done it when he wasn’t looking—standing on a tree stump, coaxing one of his horses over, and jumping on for a gallop. Always a daredevil and tomboy at heart, she grew up to be confident in the saddle, never balking when one of her Calumet mounts seemed a bit wild. Warren sometimes would blanch as he watched her riding through some rank horse’s antics. He feared that one of those Wild West moments was going to leave his wife injured. Finally, he put his foot down. “One day I was riding a mare that was a real buzz saw and Mr. Wright grounded me for good,” Lucille later recalled.
When Warren started to feel his age, he brought Lucille in on the nuts and bolts of Calumet’s management. She learned how to read a pedigree and a race record—and what to look for in potential matches for the farm’s stallions. Warren figured Lucille had enough horse sense to be able to learn the ropes with a little coaching. “Mr. Wright always had faith in me as a horsewoman,” she would say years later. “At first I didn’t agree with him, but I kept deeply interested and learning. After a while, I didn’t want to be just an owner and a fan. I wanted to be the best. Mr. Wright always said to aim high. He wasn’t starting horses to finish second or third. He always went for first.”
By 1948, Warren’s health had deteriorated to the point that he was in and out of the hospital. In the fall of 1950, he checked in to a New York City hospital not knowing whether he’d ever be able to come back to the farm he loved. For the next four months, Lucille stayed with him, sleeping in a chair next to his hospital bed at night. When he died at the age of seventy-five on December 28, 1950, reporters quickly started asking what was going to become of the farm. The day after he died, Lucille told everyone, through their thirty-year-old son, Warren Jr., that Calumet would continue and it would be run as it always had been. When Warren’s will was read, Lucille learned that she had inherited, along with the farm, the bulk of the Wright family fortune.
Lucille chose to grieve in private, staying away from the racetrack even on occasions that featured memorials to her late husband. It wasn’t until a full year after his death that she decided it was time to go back to living her life. She sold the palatial Palm Beach estate that she and Warren had always enjoyed during the racing season at Hialeah. She bought a lavish Spanish-style stucco mansion in the affluent Bel Air district of Los Angeles, dyed her hair blond, and decided to spend her winters on the West Coast. The rest of the time would be spent in Lexington. “I’m back in harness, running Calumet as I think Warren would have wished it,” she told a reporter. “I think I’m probably better qualified than anyone else. For eighteen years, I watched Calumet develop from a hobby that neither of us knew much about to the leading money stable of the country for seven of the past nine years.”
Lucille started showing up at the track once again, appearing elegantly clad, her blond hair in a fashionable do. It wasn’t long before friends started looking for a new mate for the beautiful—and very rich—widow. One of the eligible bachelors they chose was a thrice-divorced raconteur who couldn’t have been more different than her Warren. Whereas Warren appeared aloof and austere, Gene Markey was a charmer, a bon vivant, a man about Hollywood famed for his squiring of a bevy of beautiful movie stars. Whereas Warren was short and stout, Markey was tall, dashing, and debonair, his round face punctuated by bushy flyaway eyebrows that arched impishly as he held court. With a flair for the dramatic and a gift for gab, Markey loved to tell stories—be it at the society soirees he enlivened with his Dartmouth-honed repartee, in the juicy romance novels he authored from experience, or in the risqué screenplays he scripted before the Motion Picture Production Code enforced morality. When he was a producer and associate producer at 20th Century Fox in the late thirties, his movies, ironically, included the popular Shirley Temple vehicles Wee Willie Winkie and The Little Princess.
For all his film credits, Markey was best known for the glamorous trio of stunning movie stars he married during what he half-jokingly called “my turbulent days.” In the 1930s alone, he wed two leading ladies celebrated for their exotic beauty, first Joan Bennett and then Hedy Lamarr. No sooner had he been divorced for the second time than World War II abruptly altered the course of his life. Markey, who had joined the Naval Reserve after seeing combat as an Army lieutenant in World War I, was called to active duty in the wake of Pearl Harbor. Earning Navy promotions to the rank of commander and then commodore, he served as assistant intelligence officer on Fleet Admiral Bull Halsey’s staff at Guadalcanal and won the Bronze Star (for leading a reconnaissance mission in the Solomon Islands) along with the Legion of Merit and a Commendation Medal.
After the war, while serving as special assistant to Secretary of the Navy James Forrestal, Markey wasted no time resuming his courtship of Hollywood glamor girls. Given that he was never considered conventionally handsome and was starting to become portly, a 1946 Washington Times-Herald headline asked, “Other Men Say: What’s Gene Markey Got That We Haven’t Got?” The article chronicled how Markey had “become the most sought after unattached man in the cinema firmament, so sprinkled with far handsomer, richer male stars.” It was accompanied by a photo of Rudolph Valentino with a caption that read, “Not so hot—by comparison. Though all American womanhood swooned over him in his day, Rudolph Valentino was no Markey.”
Myrna Loy, who that year became the third movie star to marry Markey, would provide this answer to the riddle posed by the newspaper’s headline: “Gene could charm the birds off trees, although birds were never his particular quarry—women were, the richer and more beautiful the better, and I never knew one who could resist him. He could make a scrubwoman think she was a queen and a queen think she was the queen of queens.”
A year or so after Markey’s 1950 divorce from Loy, he was introduced to Lucille Wright, the queen of Calumet, by mutual friends in the Bel Air society set. Asked to escort Lucille to a formal dinner, Markey went home resolved to learn more about his latest quarry. He did his research that night, querying her old friends about her likes and habits. One of the things he discovered was that her childhood nickname was “Zookie.” On their next date, as the pair stepped out of the Bel Air house where they’d just had dinner, Markey put his arm around her shoulders, leaned in, and whispered in her ear, “What now, Zookie?” Like so many women before her, Lucille was smitten.
Markey courted her with a flourish, and the couple began spending more and more time together. By the end of the summer of 1952, they announced their engagement. The news shocked many of Lucille’s Chicago friends who never thought she’d remarry after all those years with Warren. Some, though, said they expected it, having noticed how devoted Markey had become. After two false starts, the couple was finally married early that fall in New York City by a justice of the peace.
Gene Markey’s arrival in Bluegrass Country would transform Calumet Farm, almost overnight, from a social wallflower into the belle of the ball. With his presence adding a touch of glitter and glamor, Calumet’s imprint expanded beyond the sports section to the lifestyle pages. The stuffy dinner parties that the Wrights had occasionally hosted gave way to the Hollywood-style bashes that the Markeys would routinely throw for Gene’s A-list pals. Frequent houseguests ranged from Hollywood royalty, like his close friends John Wayne and Douglas Fairbanks Jr., to real royalty, like the international playboy and racehorse owner Prince Aly Khan.
Be it formal dinners or wild parties that lasted from dusk till dawn, Markey played the consummate host. He’d often relieve the butler and mix drinks for the guests himself. He took special pride in his “Passion Punch,” a potent concoction he’d perfected while stationed in the South Pacific containing three different types of rum sweetened with an assortment of exotic fruit juices. By the second round, even the most experienced of tipplers were woozy and wobbly. With Markey at center stage, Calumet could give Leslie Combs’s Spendthrift Farm, the neighboring Thoroughbred empire celebrated as much for its lavish parties as its peerless breeding operation, a run for its money. It wasn’t long before Combs, the horse trader famed as “the prince of the Thoroughbred party circuit” for wining and dining well-heeled investors, took a shine to Markey and his Hollywood cronies. Though lacking the manor-born Southern hospitality and thick Bourbon accent that made “Ol’ Cousin Leslie” a master salesman, Markey was accepted—and assimilated—into Bluegrass high society far more readily than any of the Wrights had been. “No duck ever took to water as I have taken to Kentucky,” Markey liked to say.
For all his newly minted good-ol’-boy charm, Markey commanded—and demanded—respect. Everyone was instructed to address him by his naval rank—first as “Commodore” and later, following his retroactive promotion to rear admiral, as “Admiral.” Even after officially retiring from the Navy in 1956, he would proudly insist on always being called “Admiral Markey” and would throw away any mail addressed to a “Mr. Markey” without even opening it.
To encourage her new husband’s desire to resume writing, Lucille decided to build him a log cabin as a studio not far from the main residence. She transported an authentic eighteenth-century log cabin from western Kentucky and furnished it with such pioneer period pieces as a butter churn, a hanging fireplace kettle, and Kentucky rifles. There, scrawling in longhand at an antique pine desk, Markey would pen novels ranging from Kentucky Pride, a rip-snorting adventure romance about life in Lexington after the Civil War, to Women, Women, Everywhere, a comic pulp about “the world’s most experienced lover” based at least partly on his own playboy past. Whiling away the hours in the cottage he dubbed his “chicken coop,” kicking back in his comfy moccasins while a flock of hens clucked just outside his window, he was the very image of a country squire.
For Lucille, who proclaimed she “never knew what love was” until she wed Markey, theirs was a true storybook marriage. Having the first time around married a man twenty-one years her senior, she could now enjoy the companionship of one her own age. If Warren Wright had proved a master at making money, Gene Markey excelled at spending it and enjoying it. As a wedding present, Lucille gave her second husband, along with a large sum as “spending money,” matching Rolls-Royces—one to chauffeur him around Lexington and the other to accompany the couple wherever they traveled.
It was the road Rolls-Royce that would run up the miles on the odometer, since the globetrotting Markeys spent only a few months of the year at Calumet. The rest of the time they passed following their horses on the track during the fashionable Saratoga and Hialeah race meetings—summering at their Saratoga Springs home, wintering at their Miami Beach estate on exclusive La Gorce Island. Lucille, who had accompanied Warren to Europe just once in thirty years of marriage, joined the Admiral on frequent trips abroad. They would sometimes spend fully half the year, from spring till fall, jet-setting around Europe. Despite the omnipresence of their racehorses among the favorites, it wasn’t out of the ordinary for the Markeys to miss the Kentucky Derby itself while vacationing in England or France.
When they were at home in Lexington, the Admiral made a daily habit of sauntering down to Calumet’s training track at dawn, clad in his morning coat and ascot, to watch their young racehorses work and to share his thoughts with Plain Ben and Jimmy Jones. Lucille, whose main contribution throughout Warren’s reign had been naming the horses that would carry the devil’s red, ceded much of that responsibility to Gene while holding all other farm decision making for herself. Eschewing Warren’s trademark micromanagement style, she was content to leave the racing stable in the capable hands of the father-son team renowned as “the Jones Boys.”
Despite a changing of the guard—with Lucille having succeeded Warren at the farm’s helm and the aging Plain Ben having assumed the title of the stable’s general manager while promoting Jimmy to trainer of record—it was still business as usual for Calumet. In 1952, a rugged Bull Lea son named Hill Gail ran away with Calumet’s record-breaking fifth Kentucky Derby Gold Cup. The stable continued to top the earnings list with annual purses exceeding $1 million, and Bull Lea reigned supreme as the nation’s leading sire with offspring winning more than $1.5 million a year. But, with Calumet’s fortunes so tied to Bull Lea’s, all that was about to change dramatically.
FOR TWO DECADES, Calumet Farm had owed much of its glory to the foundation sire upon whom Warren Wright had built history’s most dominant dynasty. Soon after Bull Lea had transitioned from the racing stable to the breeding shed, Ben Jones had given Wright two pieces of advice regarding Calumet’s prodigious progenitor. First, Jones cautioned, don’t breed Bull Lea to many of the outside mares lined up on a waiting list overflowing at $5,000 a pop: “That would be like owning a hammer and hitting yourself on the head with it.” And as for Calumet’s surpassing band of broodmares, Jones’s advice was even more succinct: “Breed ’em all to Bull Lea.”
The problem was, all of Bull Lea’s sons turned out as unsuccessful at stud as they had been unbeatable on the track. The very offspring that had stamped Bull Lea such a prize stud—his résumé boasting a Triple Crown winner, three Kentucky Derby winners, and fifty-eight stakes winners—would themselves fail to live up to expectations in the breeding shed. By the time everyone realized just how poorly Bull Lea’s sons were producing, too many breeding seasons of top Calumet mares had been wasted on those highly touted young stallions.
As Bull Lea aged into his twenties with no heirs apparent, Lucille compounded the problem with her refusal to buy new stallions, insisting that Calumet continue to rely on its homebreds. Making matters worse, she began selling off many of the dams that Warren had assembled into racing’s best broodmare band. With each passing year, the dependable Calumet bloodlines were getting thinner and thinner.
If the devil’s red no longer seemed quite as daunting in the starting gate or as ubiquitous in the winner’s circle by the mid-1950s, only a dynasty like Calumet could keep running so well on fumes and on automatic pilot. When Iron Liege and Tim Tam gave Calumet back- to-back Kentucky Derby wins in 1957 and ’58, the Markeys missed it all while vacationing in Europe. It wouldn’t be long before the Markeys’ absentee ownership caught up with them: Calumet’s dominance was fading in direct proportion to its breeding prospects. At a time when expenses were so high that the horses carrying the devil’s red had to win at least $600,000 a year just for Calumet to break even, the stable’s colors came to symbolize red ink. By 1959, after three straight years leading the nation with about $1 million in purses, Calumet’s annual earnings had dropped below $500,000 for the first time since World War II and the number of trips to the winner’s circle had dipped below fifty for the first time since the simultaneous prewar arrivals of Ben Jones and Whirlaway.
Much like the red ink on the ledger, the writing was on the wall. The seeds of the inevitable decline of the dynasty had been sown. Even as Lucille Markey continued to reign as Bluegrass aristocracy and to bolster her stature as racing’s grande dame, Calumet was contracting and its winnings were plummeting.
All of which was opening the door for a new breed of owner—for, specifically, an outsider like Louis Wolfson.