The Eighty-Dollar Champion - Elizabeth Letts [124]
Harry dragged his heels but finally agreed to it; the movie people had told him that Snowman could be an ambassador for the sport. But they were talking about filming the movie in Los Angeles. Harry could not let Snowman go to California—he was busy with his students, and gearing up for the fall season.
The movie people offered to substitute another horse, but Harry said no, and if other horses were going to play Snowy as a foal or as a plow horse, Harry wanted to see them himself, so that he could make sure the stand-ins looked right. There was nothing worse than a horse movie in which it was obvious that the people who made it knew nothing about horses.
But the movie people did not seem to understand his demands or why they were important to him. Any whitish horse would do, they insisted, making vaguely menacing statements about why he had better agree. Maybe they weren’t used to people disagreeing with them. Most everyone was just so flattered when Hollywood came calling.
But this Hollywood trio was about to come face-to-face with Harry de Leyer’s famous stubbornness. No horse could play Snowman in the movie unless he vetted it first.
Finally, an agreement was hammered out. Harry would take Snowy to Baltimore to film the jumping scenes, and if another horse would appear as Snowy in the movie, Harry would get a chance to approve.
Soon it was March, and the show season opened again—and this time it was clear from the start: Snowman was unstoppable. As the drumbeat started building up to the National Horse Show, once again Harry and Snowman held the lead for the Horse of the Year trophy. Once again, spectators lined up to watch his thrilling performances. Now everybody wanted a piece of this horse.
Snowman had brought so much interest to show jumping that the prices of other horses were going up. Snowman was not for sale, but another rising star, Windsor Castle, Snowman’s big rival at last year’s Washington show, had sold after a win at Devon to Si Jayne and Howard Marzano, a pair of investors from Chicago, for $25,000. In June, when Harry and Snowman returned to Fairfield, the Hartford Courant blared, “$80 wonder horse worth $25,000.” Suddenly, the price of show jumpers was garnering the kind of attention that had previously been reserved for racehorses. That weekend, Snowman took home the championship, beating Windsor Castle for first place.
That summer bad news came from back home in Holland. Harry’s mother was suffering from cancer. It was time for the family to make a visit—and, in an incredible stroke of good fortune, Snowman was invited to do an overseas tour of exhibitions. Nine years after arriving in the United States as immigrants, Harry and Johanna were bringing the whole family—four-legged and two-legged—for a visit back home.
Snowman rode abroad in style in a specially equipped turboprop plane, just like the ones that ferried the Olympic horses to and from Europe. Their departure was filmed by a crew from MGM, which captured the moment when Snowman walked up the ramp to the waiting aircraft. Harry rode with Snowman and brought five-year-old Marty along on the plane. The crossing took eighteen hours, with a stop for refueling. Many horses are frightened on airplanes and have to be tranquilized, but Snowman took the trip in stride. Along with the other children, Johanna made the journey in relative comfort on a passenger airline.
For the rest of his life, Harry would remember the moment he walked with Marty and Snowman across the tarmac in Amsterdam. It had been less than a decade since he and Johanna had left home on the SS Volendam, his beloved mare Petra left behind, his hopes and aspirations tucked away with his saddle and boots in the solitary crate that had contained all of their worldly possessions. Striding across the tarmac