Long before he became a Grammy-winning composer who wrote some of pop music’s most enduring standards – Raindrops Keep Fallin’ On My Head, Close To You – Burt Bacharach was an avid horse fan, long on enthusiasm if short on knowledge.
“When I was a kid growing up in New York, it was fascinating for me to look at the Daily Mirror and see which horses were going to run,” said Bacharach, whose Blue Seas Music stable houses more than 30 horses. “I just looked at the names of the horses and followed the jockeys without having the knowledge about horses.
“In fact, I knew so little about it, when I finally went to the track, I looked in the program and saw ‘114’ next to the horse. So I thought the horse weighed 114 pounds.”
What a difference horse ownership makes.
Saturday at the Breeders’ Cup, at Churchill Downs in Louisville, Ky., Bacharach will be on hand to watch his dark brown colt, Soul of the Matter. The colt will race as one of the favorites to win the event’s most prestigious race – the $3 million Classic.
Bacharach is scarcely a newcomer to thoroughbred success. His first horse, Battle Royal, won his first race nearly 25 years ago. Heartlight Number One earned an Eclipse Award – racing’s equivalent to a Grammy – in 1983 as the country’s top 3-year-old filly.
Soul of the Matter placed fifth in the Kentucky Derby in May and won the Super Derby in Louisiana in September. And at Santa Anita last month, Bacharach was in the money again when his long-shot entry, a 2-year-old colt named Afternoon Deelites, paid $23.40 as the winner of a $34,000 maiden special-weight race.
“I’m thrilled that we’re in a position to be going back to Churchill Downs,” Bacharach says. “I consider myself very, very fortunate to have a second horse the caliber of Heartlight.”
Bacharach is the lone owner from the entertainment field to enter a horse in this Breeders’ Cup. But his presence underscores the growing racing success of entertainment figures – particularly from the music industry – in the past five years.
This year alone, Albert Broccoli, producer of James Bond films; Berry Gordy, founder of Motown Records; and Jerry Moss, the M of A&M; Records, landed big-earning stakes winners. Broccoli’s Brocco and Gordy’s Powis Castle ran in the Kentucky Derby, and Moss’ Sardula won the Kentucky Oaks.
Tommy Valando, whose firm has published Broadway scores of Fiddler on the Roof and Cabaret, entered the racing spotlight when his Fly So Free earned an Eclipse Award in 1990 as Juvenile Colt of the Year.
Gordy was planning to enter another graded-stakes champion, Alex The Great, into the Breeders’ Cup but changed his mind because of the 5-year-old’s recent poor performances. “He needs some rest,” Gordy said.
Likewise, Moss was pointing Sardula to the Breeders’ Cup, but those plans were nixed last month when the 3-year-old filly injured a foot.
Other entertainment personalities have scored trackside triumphs this year, though not at a stakes level. Kevin Costner’s Proudtobetogether broke his maiden in July at Hollywood Park. Country singer Reba McEntire owns two horses that won allowance races two months ago in Kentucky. McEntire owns several others with Fort Lauderdale-based country music promoter-publisher Joe Gehl, a longtime horseman who has owned a handful of graded-stakes winners. On Oct. 16, Inthefastlane, a 2-year-old filly owned by David Milch, producer of the ABC-TV series NYPD Blue, broke her maiden by 10 lengths at Santa Anita in Arcadia, Calif.
Big list of big names
And while theater genius and horse owner Andrew Lloyd Webber might not have introduced any stakes-quality horses from his barn this year, the mastermind behind such blockbusters as Cats and Phantom of the Opera indulged his mammoth racing appetite on Aug. 13 in Webberesque fashion: For the third straight year he sponsored a day at Sandown Park in Esher, England, and named each of the card’s seven races after one of his musicals.
Among those on the list of horse owners who have not landed recent stakes winners are King World Productions Chairman Roger King; entertainment mogul Merv Griffin; actor John Forsythe (Griffin and Forsythe are on the board of directors of Hollywood Park); actor Albert Finney; country singer-songwriter Dwight Yoakam; Rolling Stones guitarist Ron Wood; TV-documentary producer Alan Landsburg (In Search Of…, Kennedy, Gimme A Break); Broadway director Sam Shepard; TV producer Ed Friendly (Laugh-In, Little House on the Prairie); producer James Burrows (Cheers); and actor Steven Ford, son of former President Gerald Ford, who served as VP of Turfway Park in Florence, Ky., from 1989 to 1994.
Some former owners have become breeders exclusively. David Cassidy, star of ’70s sitcom The Partridge Family, and former Tonight Show maestro Doc Severinsen have horse-breeding operations. In an interview five years ago, Severinsen was lamented a missed opportunity to buy a unknown colt for $60,000.
“Keep an eye on this horse,” Severinsen said. “He is going to win the Kentucky Derby this year. His name is Sunday Silence.”
Numerous celebs have hopped into, then out of, the thoroughbred industry – such as actors Sylvester Stallone and Jack Klugman, whose colt Jaklin Klugman finished third in the 1980 Kentucky Derby, English rock idol Sting and rapper Hammer.
That’s entertainment
But despite the unpredictable odds for success in thoroughbred racing, more and more entertainment figures have continued to try their hand at horse ownership over the years. According to Peggy Hendershot, manager of information services of Thoroughbred Racing Communications, the national media relations office of thoroughbred racing, ownership among entertainers has gradually expanded because the entertainment highbrows have been transformed from fans to owners.
“There has been an increase in the number of people buying horses as opposed to just going to the races,” Hendershot said. “It seems as though entertainment people in the ’40s and the ’50s loved to go, but only to watch it. Now they want to have a hands-on experience, want to enjoy the total ownership.”
When Bing Crosby founded the San Diego oval Del Mar in 1937, few entertainers were owners, save most notably Fred Astaire. A year later, when movie mogul Jack Warner helped open Hollywood Park, many of Tinseltown’s best-known fell in love with horse racing, yet only a handful of stars – Betty Grable, Harry James, Greer Garson – decided to settle into the sport of kings.
“Back then it was a free-wheeling society and racing kind of fit in with Hollywood’s let-the-good-times-roll mode of life,” said Bob Benoit, a longtime publicist with Hollypark who now owns a public relations firm Benoit & Associates. “The track was the place for entertainers to go to, just like a basketball or a football game is where today’s entertainers go.”
Still, more celebrities own horses than ever. And as Benoit tells it, contemporary entertainment personalities treat horse ownership much more as a business than their predecessors.
“They’re interested in successful enterprises, not just a flip way of having some fun,” Benoit said. “Not that the owners in the past did not want to win, but it wasn’t as dog-eat-dog.”
Not all hobby horses
The stars’ horse ownership still is not exactly dog-eat-dog.
“It sort of like between a business and a hobby,” Bacharach says, “but you’ve got to treat it like a business.”
Because of Soul of the Matter’s upcoming Breeders’ Cup race, Bacharach maintains daily contact with his trainer, Richard Mandella.
Gehl, who owns more than 20 horses, talks with his trainers every day as well. Gordy’s longtime chief of staff, Roger Campbell, also serves as vice president of Gordy’s Vistas Stable and handles its day-to-day affairs.
“What we do in the racing business is the same thing we did in the entertainment business,” Campbell said. “In the record business, we had to find the talent and help them reach their full potential. In this case, we rely on our bloodstock agents. They find the talent, and then we turn the horses over to our trainer, Rodney Rash, who trains them to reach their full potential.”
Although Gordy makes it clear he does not want Vistas to go into the red, the man behind the careers of Diana Ross, the Temptations, and the Jackson 5 also seems genuinely enamored with his stable, which Campbell says has “about eight to 12 horses.”Moreover, Gordy seems to evoke the friendly racing spirit of the past when he points out that his horses are often locked in competition with horses owned by Bacharach and Moss.
“Burt and Jerry are very close to me, and whenever our horses run together, I always do an exacta or a trifecta with their horses,” Gordy says.
Winning as a rush
While racing has become a serious business for entertainment swells, Gordy says he speaks for many when describing what it feels like to own a winning horse.
“The moment you know they’re going to win, it’s just incredible, especially since most of my horses come from behind,” said Gordy, who won with his first horse, Argument, in 1980. Like most of his colleagues, Gordy notes that winning a major race was more exciting than any personal achievement, primarily because of the unpredictability of a horse race.
“I just thought owning horses would be a wonderful business anyway,” Gordy said, “because when artists become stars, they’re different than when they weren’t stars. But I noticed that when Argument became a star after winning the Washington D.C. Million, he was still the same old Argument.”