The Eighty-Dollar Champion - Elizabeth Letts [71]
Everyone knew the owner of Duffy Stables: Ben C. Duffy, president of the second most powerful advertising firm in the country, Batten, Barton, Durstine & Osborn, and, according to Time magazine, “probably the best-liked man along Madison Avenue.” A chain-smoker of Lucky Strikes, one of BBDO’s big accounts, Duffy was conscious of images, and at Duffy Stables, everything was top of the line. Ben Duffy had worked his way up from the mailroom to become one of the most powerful ad men in America, and he understood the image horses projected: money, power, and an alliance with the ruling class.
No horse entered in this show would have a chance to beat Andante. If she won one more time, she would retire the challenge trophy. A horse had to win the trophy three years in succession in order to earn the right to bring it home. It would make a great photograph for the papers—the ad man and his prize horse, winning and retiring the trophy. Duffy had no doubt already imagined how that trophy would look gracing the mantelpiece of his Westchester, New York, estate.
Andante’s rider, Dave Kelley, an affable man and a superb trainer, was thought by most horse people to be one of the best professional riders on the East Coast. An air force veteran who had served in World War II, he was liked and admired by everyone. With Andante, he had won the year-end high-point Horse of the Year Award in ’53, ’54, and ’56. Most people thought he would have won in ’55 too, except that he offered to ride his point rival Joe Green’s horse Belmont at the 1955 National Horse Show after Joe broke his pelvis in a bad fall at Piping Rock. With Belmont out of the running, Andante would have been assured the crown, but thanks to Kelley’s performances at the National, Belmont had ended up as the leading point winner that year, beating out Andante for the crown. At the big shows, Kelley sometimes rode ten or fifteen different horses, competing against himself. This year, Kelley and Andante looked to be an unbeatable combination.
On June 9, 1958, Harry rose at four in the morning. The de Leyers did everything together as a family, and getting ready for a show was no exception. While other trainers worked alongside professional grooms, Harry and Johanna treated the trip to the show as a family outing. Chef and Harriet were up early too, helping out with the horses, feeding, grooming, bandaging legs, loading tack and horses onto the van. Part of a generation that believed that boys and girls had different responsibilities, Harry did not think that girls should have to do heavy barn work, like mucking stalls, but Harriet was a spunky tomboy with a mind of her own and jumped right in to help in whatever way she could. She already maneuvered around the horses as well as a girl twice her age. When all of the barn work was done, Johanna took the children back to the house and got them cleaned up and dressed in their Sunday clothes—all but for baby William, who was going to stay with a neighbor.
Johanna and the children rode in the station wagon, and Harry drove the van with the horses. Sands Point was in Port Washington, about thirty-five miles west along the North Shore. When they arrived at the show, the grounds were already bustling with people. A thousand horses had been entered into the show. The stabling area was filled with grooms, riders, and trainers crisscrossing from the barns to the exercise paddocks and schooling rings.
The de Leyers did not have money for the kinds of fancy custom-made drapes, hand-painted tack trunks, and embroidered blankets that the other stables used to identify their horses. It was customary to hang a horse’s ribbons next to his stall, on a wire suspended between two nails. At the beginning of the show, the de Leyers’ wires were bare and their stalls undecorated. The halters that hung by the stall doors were well oiled and broken in, but they did not sport the fancy brass hand-engraved name tags that the other horses had.
Horse shows featured