The Eighty-Dollar Champion - Elizabeth Letts [109]
Many of the great “old money” families had fortunes so large that they had been relatively unaffected by the financial turmoil of the 1930s. But as the 1950s drew to a close, there was a new focus on merit and equal opportunity. Yet here, at the National Horse Show, the world remained comfortably and familiarly stratified. The working folk sat up in the bleachers; the fine folk came and went in chauffeured Bentleys and clustered in the boxes along the promenade. Down in the basement, an army of grooms, mostly African-American, tended to the horses. In those days, Sprague notes, “every decent stable had a tack man,” whose only job was to polish the leather and brass, and stable workers for the Mexican team, tasked with keeping the horses spotless, “did not use a pitchfork to clean the stables, but did it by hand.”
A series of photographs in Life magazine painted the scene downstairs. A man clad in custom-made riding clothes sits on a canvas director’s chair in a tackroom that has been gussied up to look like the drawing room of a country manor. In the next pictures, an African-American groom fusses over the horse, removing the neat bandage from the dapple gray’s braided tail, picking his hooves, and tucking the rider’s white gloves up under the saddle billets; meanwhile, the rider seated in the spotless tackroom pulls on his boots. In the final picture, the rider, astride his immaculate horse, parades across the arena wearing a silk top hat, his expression one of hauteur. The groom will stay behind downstairs, waiting until the rider returns. After handing over the reins, the rider will head out for a night on the town.
This was the life at the National Horse Show. Sometimes the owners made their way down the steep ramp to the stabling area, wanting to show off their mounts to their important guests. The grooms stayed downstairs, lovingly tending to the horses, carrying water, cleaning stalls, polishing boots and tack, and often sleeping in the stalls alongside a skittish horse that needed a companion.
Ring stewards dressed in red waistcoats and gray top hats bowed to the winners with a precise degree of shading that indicated the social standing of the competitor. Down in one of the tunnels was the Turf and Tack Club, where competitors and show committee members gathered for cocktails. After the show each night, a never-ending circle of dinner parties followed. Out the back door, on Fiftieth Street, the Belvedere Hotel was rumored to be the site of frequent illicit assignations. Until the early 1950s, the exhibitors stayed at the Waldorf-Astoria, but by the late 1950s, the hotel of choice was the Astor, along the strip of Broadway known as “the Great White Way.” The Astor, with its elaborate roof gardens and grand anterooms, filled an entire block on the west side of Broadway between Forty-fourth and Forty-fifth streets; it was constructed of red brick and limestone with a green slate mansard roof. Designed as a successor to the Waldorf-Astoria, the hotel had been built in 1905, another edifice of the Gilded Age. Akin to the rest of the world so deeply admired by the horse show crowd, the Astor was “the epitome of an age that was soon to end.”
In a tackroom in the basement stables, a competitor looks over his equipment before his class begins. Outside the tackroom, a groom is preparing his horse for the competition. (illustration credits 19.1)
Nobody was thinking about change, but change, nonetheless, was coming. You saw it in the exuberance of the ticket-holding crowds who thronged through the doors, drawn in by a love for horses, by the spectacle of beauty and youth, and by the drumbeat of danger that thrummed in the