When Our Sport and Cinema Raced in Lockstep

[Wandering Eyes]

Hollywood at the Races: Film’s Love Affair with the Turf, by Alan Shuback

Book Review, by T.D. Thornton

Considering that Bing Crosby’s heyday was in the 1930s, a wide swath of readership for Hollywood at the Races: Film’s Love Affair with the Turf will have only a hazy idea of who the charismatic crooner was beyond knowing that Bing sings that catchy “surf meets the turf” tune they still play at Del Mar every day.

And that sepia-toned starlet whose photo graces the front cover alongside Crosby? I have to admit I had to flip to the credits to learn it was Marlene Dietrich, the most glamorous and highest-paid actress of that same era.

This disconnection between present and past shouldn’t deter you from picking up a copy of Alan Shuback’s new book. Rather, it’s the chief reason to delve into Hollywood at the Races, published in November by University Press of Kentucky. In it, Shuback puts forth the valid premise that the golden age of Hollywood and horse racing spanned 1930-1960, and that over time, rapidly changing technologies and shifting social mores “undermined the customs of both filmgoing and racegoing.”

Shuback, a former correspondent for Daily Racing Form and Sporting Life, can trace the fusion of his twin passions–turf and cinema–precisely to March 2, 1957. He was then an impressionable nine-year-old, and he vividly recalls that as the day when a suburban New York TV station followed one of the Laurel and Hardy features he so loved with the telecast of a horse race, something he had never seen before. Shuback heard a name he liked–Bold Ruler–and rooted that horse home in the Flamingo Stakes and subsequent triumphs. This hooked him for life on the sport, and he has gone on to combine that passion with his zeal for the movies.

Hollywood at the Races first focuses on filmmaking as it relates to the evolution of racing in Southern California, and from a Thoroughbred enthusiasts’ perspective, this first third of Shuback’s book is the most engaging.

The genesis of still pictures shown in rapid, moving sequence traces to a $25,000 gentleman’s bet in California in 1872 in which a photographic experiment proved that a horse does lift all four feet off the ground in full gallop. By the first decade of the 20th Century, moving pictures were all the entertainment rage across America.

Soon after, Hollywood was firmly established as the world’s epicenter for all things film. Within the next 20 years, the number of racing-themed films shot up to more than 60 per decade, with many of them following the popular plot of an improbable long shot winning a big race for down-on-their-luck connections.

But early on, “Los Angeles was a far cry from New York when it came to entertainment and sporting venues,” Shuback notes. The first version of racing at Santa Anita existed between 1907 and 1909, until “California’s moralizing middle class put it out of business” by outlawing betting on horse races. A decade later, it was illegal to have a drink anywhere in the nation thanks to Prohibition.

Thus, film stars of the day–Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Douglas Fairbanks, Mary Pickford and Rudolph Valentino–were all dressed up with no place to go.

“Actors are a convivial, fun-loving group known for their capacity to spend money, especially on frivolous things like wild parties, roulette wheels, and racehorses,” Shuback writes. “With opportunities for moral transgression in California dwindling to a precious few…Hollywood adopted the motto “Go thou, and sin elsewhere.”

In the Roaring Twenties, that meant traveling the “Highway to Hell” from Hollywood to Tijuana, 135 miles south. This massive migration of conspicuous consumption, Shuback explains, begat the West Coast racing circuit.

At first the stars gamboled and gambled at Hippodromo de Tijuana, and their patronage “naturally attracted other people with more dollars than sense.” That track was eventually upstaged by the more opulent Agua Caliente, which opened in December 1929, only weeks after the devastating stock market crash that would launch the nation into a decade of hardship.

But to a large degree, “Hollywood would never feel the full effects of the Depression,” Shuback writes, because “moviegoing provided the American public with an inexpensive and blessed distraction from their personal economic woes.”

Elsewhere in America, the Depression became the catalyst for legalizing pari-mutuel wagering to raise new tax revenues, and California (struggling outside of Hollywood) soon re-legalized horse betting.

When the new Santa Anita opened on Christmas Day 1934, Hollywood forgot all about Mexican racing. At a time when a day at the track was considered “one part equine sport, one part gambling opportunity, and one part social occasion,” the races were the place to see and be seen.

Studio mogul Hal Roach–the producer who made the nation laugh with Our Gang and Laurel and Hardy–was instrumental in getting Santa Anita up and running. Many Hollywood bigwigs invested $10,000 in Santa Anita just to guarantee lifetime box seats on the finish line.

Bing Crosby was one of those investors, but he became better known for his role in founding Del Mar. He also owned two horse farms, and tried to establish a breeding foothold in California by importing Thoroughbreds from Argentina.

Del Mar had not yet proven itself as a resort destination, but Crosby never flinched financially. He took out a large loan against his own life insurance policy to put the seaside oval on the racing map, and on Del Mar’s opening day in 1937 a horse he owned won the very first race. The on-track partying continued long into the night, fueled by free-flowing booze and impromptu clubhouse skits performed by Bing and his A-list pals.

Glitz aside, the economics of starting a racetrack from scratch were daunting. Crosby and the other investors hemorrhaged money, but true to Hollywood’s “show must go on” mentality, they persevered. Bing eventually made his investment back, but by 1946 running Del Mar had become a “burdensome chore.” He put his 35% share up for sale ostensibly because his aspiration had switched to owning a pro baseball team.

Trading Del Mar for a stake in the Pittsburgh Pirates seems like a botched bet in hindsight, but the real shocker that Shuback reveals is how Crosby stayed away from Del Mar for three decades thereafter, returning only briefly just before he died in 1977. Today, Bing is considered emblematic of Del Mar. Why did he turn his back on the showcase track he helped create? Shuback left the details of this fascinating breakup on the cutting room floor. I was left wanting to know more.

Another startling subplot worthy of deeper explanation was Shuback’s revelation that three of the most powerful producers in Hollywood–Jack and Harry Warner (Warner Bros.) and Harry Cohn (Columbia Pictures)–combined forces to open Hollywood Park in 1938 largely because Santa Anita at that time denied Turf Club memberships to Jews. They didn’t appreciate being shut out of the venue where a lot of move-making wheeling and dealing took place, so they built a competing track that was more inclusive.

The jacket flap describes the book as a “gossipy” history, and that tone is befitting of the middle third of the read, in which the more entertaining vignettes pair the names of old-time screen stars with ribald tales of racetrack depravity.

Did you know that Bob Hope (who still has a stakes race named after him at Del Mar) was not at all enamored of horse racing, but pretended to be as a networking favor to his buddy Bing? Or that Desi Arnaz (another Del Mar stakes honoree) was known for downing highball after highball in the clubhouse, then smashing glassware and throwing chairs after bad beats?

More than a few iconic funnymen were lifetime losers at the windows. Mickey Rooney (saddled with the burden of being typecast as a child jockey until he was 30), Chico Marx (always blabbing about confidential tips), and Bud Abbott (a near pauper late in life) are among the famous who were not so rich because of bad gambling habits. Al Jolson went to frantic extremes not to be viewed as a loser, while Jimmy Durante flaunted his pari-mutuel disasters, milking them for comedic value.

Despite these highlights, the stars-at-the-races section of Shuback’s book is where the attention of the racing-centric reader will wander. Repetition creeps in as storylines overlap, and the deeper into the book you go, the longer the gaps devoted to cinema instead of racing.

Shuback does not pull any punches in tying together the rise and fall of Hollywood and horses, noting that America’s decades-long decline of personal interest in the horse has not only eroded the sport, but how the animal is perceived in our cultural consciousness.

He draws relevant parallels between the sport being corporatized and marketed as strictly a gambling product to how movie studios shifted toward formulaic scripts and endless action-film sequels and prequels, squeezing originality out of film making.

Just as these points are being driven home, Shuback veers off into a late-book digression that tries to sum up in 12 pages everything that’s gone wrong in American racing over the past 60 years (“Racing Says No to Television,” “The American Thoroughbred as Junkie”). This section doesn’t quite work, because it’s a little late in the script to spring dense concepts like pharmaceutical abuse on the reader after a steady stream of entertainment industry-related tales.

Shuback’s book was in production while the 2019 equine welfare crisis unfolded in California, so that topic wasn’t specifically included in the book. But even absent that discussion, Hollywood at the Races does manage to point out how on numerous occasions, power players of bygone eras were trying to warn us that the sport would wind up in trouble if it kept shifting focus away from the horse.

“Horsemanship is showmanship,” was the mantra preached by Mervyn LeRoy, who not only produced “The Wizard of Oz,” but served on the Hollywood Park board of directors from 1941 until his death in 1987. “The track is a stage; the horses are the star performers.”

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