her home in the 1941 Beldame Stakes, an important middle-distance race at Aqueduct. She finished a close second.
At her side in 1947 was a colt by the stallion Piping Rock, and the gallery at the sale was advised that she was in foal to him again. So Chenery, seeing a once-speedy race mare with a Piping Rock foal beside her and another advertised within, jumped into the bidding and moved it upward, finally upward to $30,000. The gavel slammed down, and they were his. Then down to The Meadow went Imperatrice. Later in the year Dr. William Caslick, a veterinarian, made his regular rounds of the Chenery broodmares to pronounce them either in or not in foal.
Chenery happened to be at The Meadow that day. Caslick moved from mare to mare, coming finally to the stall of Imperatrice. He walked inside and began the examination, inserting his hand in the mare’s rectum and reaching far inside, to where he could feel the outside of the uterine wall through the intestines. He was feeling for the fetus.
Moments passed. Caslick probed carefully for the signs of life. More time passed. Chenery, standing by Howard Gentry, wondered out loud what was taking so long.
“That mare’s empty,” Caslick finally said.
Chenery plopped down on a bale of straw: “Thirty thousand dollars, and empty!”
Imperatrice did not stay empty long.
In the autumn of the year, another kind of milestone was reached. Hundreds of men and women drove or walked the twelve miles from Lexington to Faraway Farm, filing through the gates until all of them, some horsemen and some not, gathered near the grave and listened as the mayor of Lexington gave a speech, and the head of the American Horse and Mule Association, Ira Drymon, delivered a eulogy. Bull Hancock was among the breeders there.
The mood was reverential. Man o’ War was lying in an oak coffin at the edge of an open grave. The top of the coffin was open. Man o’ War had died with an erection, and someone had discreetly placed a black cloth or blanket over it. He had suffered a series of heart attacks within a forty-eight-hour period, getting to his feet repeatedly until the last one put him down for good. He was thirty then, extremely old for a horse. The crowd listened as the eulogy ended, watched as the coffin was closed. They had paid the ultimate tribute to a racehorse—giving him a funeral fit for a prince of the blood, celebrating the cherished belief in Kentucky that Man o’ War was the greatest horse America had ever produced.
In the winter of 1948, trainer Jimmy Jones saddled Citation for the Ground Hog Course at Hialeah Racetrack in Florida, where many top three-year-olds would begin their campaigning for the Triple Crown. On May 1, he won the Kentucky Derby by three and a half, beating a stablemate, Coaltown. Two weeks later he won the Preakness Stakes at Pimlico by five and a half lengths. On June 12, at Belmont Park on Long Island, he raced to an eight-length victory in the Belmont Stakes. Thus Citation became the eighth Triple Crown winner in American turf history and earned a reputation as one of the greatest runners of all time.
In 1949, the winnings of the Chenery horses soared to $141,005, with Hill Prince winning the World’s Playground Stakes at Atlantic City, worth $11,275, and the Cowdin Stakes at Belmont Park under Eddie Arcaro. Hill Prince was voted the leading two-year-old in America. The value of Princequillo’s stud services started climbing. At Claiborne Farm, meanwhile, Bull Hancock was engineering the masterstroke in modern American breeding, the pièce de résistance.
Toward the end of 1949, sometime in the fall of the year, Dr. Eslie Asbury, a Cincinnati surgeon, received a telephone call from Hancock, his long-time friend and counselor on thoroughbred breeding. The call concerned Nasrullah, the Irish stallion that Hancock wanted to import to America. He had tried twice without success to purchase him. Foaled in 1940 at the Aga Khan’s Sheshoon Stud in Ireland, Nasrullah was a son of the unbeaten Nearco, the greatest racehorse of his day in Europe. Nasrullah was a stubborn if gifted animal, a rogue at the barrier, a rogue sometimes in the morning. If the spirit did not move him to gallop on the racetrack, which was often, an umbrella opened behind him usually did; that became one of the techniques used to make him run at Newmarket. He was a champion two-year-old in England, and Hancock believed the horse was unlucky when he finished third in the 1943 Epsom Derby. Bull Hancock liked him.
In fact, Hancock tried to buy him once in 1948 for £100,000 in partnership with Captain Harry F. Guggenheim, the copper baron, and banker Woodward, but the pound was devalued and the deal caved in with it.
And now a year later Hancock had tried again and finally succeeded in getting him. Nasrullah, at last, was coming to America.
“We have the horse,” Hancock said to Asbury. “Do you want in?”
Asbury did not hesitate. Nasrullah was not new to him. Years later he recalled that he and Hancock had often spoken of Nasrullah’s prospects as a sire, his racing record, his temperament, and the vigor he might infuse into American strains. Hancock had always wanted a stallion from the Nearco line, a powerful line only tokenly represented in America at the time. Nearco had been the leading sire in England in 1947 and 1948 and was on his way to being the leading sire again in 1949. Asbury recalled that he and Hancock had spoken specifically about the invigorating effect the Nasrullah blood might have on the blood of Sir Gallahad III and Bull Dog, the sons of Teddy. “We had felt Nasrullah was an out-cross for all the Teddy blood here,” said Asbury. “We had so much Teddy blood here, especially at Claiborne and in my own mares.”
Hancock told Asbury that the syndication was almost complete: the stallion had been acquired for $340,000 and the price was $10,000 per share. The syndicate included some of the most prominent names in American turf: Guggenheim and Woodward, H. C. Phipps, and George D. Widener, chairman of the Jockey Club, among others.
The announcement that appeared on page 572 of the December 10, 1949, issue of The Blood-Horse began ironically in the passive voice:
The purchase by a syndicate of American breeders of the nine-year-old stallion Nasrullah was announced this week by Arthur B. Hancock Jr. of Claiborne Stud, Paris. The son of Nearco-Mumtaz Begum by Blenheim II … was purchased from Joseph McGrath of the Brownstown Stud, County Kildare, Eire.
The resurgence of the Hancock dynasty was now at hand.
The following year, in 1950, Hill Prince finished second in the Kentucky Derby, a race Hancock and Chenery always wanted to win. The son of Princequillo romped to a five-length victory in the Preakness Stakes, worth $56,115 to Chenery, and to victories in the Withers Stakes and the Jerome Handicap. As Hill Prince was making a run for Horse of the Year honors on the East Coast, a five-year-old horse named Noor beat Citation fairly four times. For the showdown, Noor came east to meet Hill Prince in the two-mile Jockey Club Gold Cup. Hill Prince rolled to the lead and never lost it, easily winning the race his sire won in 1943. Noor, an Irish-bred horse, finished second. The significance of these events was only gradually dawning.
Hill Prince was named Horse of the Year in 1950.
Prince Simon, another son of Princequillo, was among the best three-year-olds in Europe. He was owned by William Woodward. And Noor was a son of Nasrullah, one of his first sons imported to America.
Nasrullah had arrived in America in July 1950, and he started his first days in stud there—his paddock was near that of Princequillo—in the early part of 1951.
That same year, with one champion son of Princequillo in his barn, Chenery sought another from him. But he didn’t return Hildene to him. Instead, in 1951, Chenery sent Imperatrice to Princequillo, and on January 9, 1952, she had a filly foal at The Meadow. She was a bay, and Mrs. Helen Bates Chenery—who named most of the horses—called her Somethingroyal.
Jockey Eddie Arcaro was riding Bold Ruler toward the winner’s circle late that afternoon of 1956, moments after the colt had raced to a two-length victory in the Futurity at Belmont Park, when Mrs. Henry Carnegie Phipps stepped forward to meet them. Bold Ruler had just beaten the fastest two-year-old colts in America, running in near-record time, and he was dancing home, his nostrils flaring hotly, his neck bowed and lathered with sweat, moving