The opening of Belmont Park is destined, probably, to make a difference, to emphasize again the social side of the sport. The country club on the grounds—the club within a club, as it were—will draw a different set of people from those whom a mere jockey club can attract. It will be used quite independently of any question of racing by all the little communities of Long Island. If Hempstead and Westbury and Roslyn and Cedarhurst will come there to dine, and use it as the object of an automobile trip or a drive, there will be a well-established social life connected with it before the next race meeting opens.
I do not believe that any nation derives, as a whole, quite the delight from a race track that we do—with our Puritan traditions. To the English it is the national sport; to the French the extravagance of the smartest people; but to us, though both these elements may enter in, it is an intense excitement, which many of us have been brought up to think wicked. The mere word “horse-racing” would have struck terror to the hearts of our grandmothers, and thus a sport perfectly harmless to most of us has acquired a most alluring flavor of naughtiness. It is this feeling, this common sense of emancipation, that holds together a race-going crowd with a general sense of gayety. For as a nation we are not conspicuous for gayety. If we do not take our amusements solemnly, like the English, we at least take them strenuously. In this respect, racing has changed a good deal in the last twenty years. We are a little more serious about it than we used to be. In my recollection of the old days at Jerome Park, the clubhouse—certainly the feminine portion of it—took the sport itself much more lightly. The drive out in somebody’s coach, and the wonderful clothes one could wear and see, were the most important features of the day. You did not find the ladies in the paddock, as you see them now. Nor did they as openly transfer crisp bills from their own pretty purses to the bookies. Mild “pools,” in which one drew for one’s number quite irrespective of tips and inside information, were the only ladylike form of betting. There was something quite casual and social in the way in which everybody sat about on the lawn, under, I verily believe, the most brilliant parasols that the world has ever seen; the clubhouse behind us, and on the side a long line of coaches. It was a very long line, yet we could all tell them at a glance.
But this has changed now. Automobiles have driven out coaches. Not but what one still sees them, beautifully appointed, at any track; but instead of being the chosen means of locomotion for the fortunate, they are merely a picturesque way of wasting time. The consequence is that at Belmont Park one notices a distinct modification in the gorgeousness of the women’s clothes. In this country we have never gone the lengths of English women, whose clothes at Ascot and Epsom seemed to me quite as suitable to a ballroom. Still, our best dressed women have always felt hitherto that the races afforded a unique opportunity—especially when approached on the top of a smart coach. At Jerome and even at Morris Park, where New York could pour out in electric hansoms, this was still the rule, but to Belmont Park the trip in an automobile over dusty Long Island roads, or even on the Long Island Railroad, will not permit the same elaborate dressing.
It is not, however, only the chance to see and wear good clothes that gives races their charm to feminine eyes. Perhaps their chief attraction is the flavor of the great world. The penalty of leading a sheltered life is having a limited outlook, and the obverse of being select is being narrow. Women are beginning to see this. Society is unquestionably growing more and more friendly to the successful outsider, the people who are, as the phrase is, “doing something.” So far literary stars have had the main share of notice, but great actresses, great artists, even great scientists, have nowadays much more attention paid to them than the merely well-bred and socially available can hope for. Even the most exclusive of our great ladies no longer take pride in never having heard the name of anyone outside their own circle. We have not become such lion hunters as the Londoners, but we enjoy very much having pointed out to us, here a great plunger from Chicago, there a dancer never before seen but from across the footlights. The race track is an excellent field for such experiences. Not, of course, that these experiences must be carried too far. It is one thing to see the celebrities of the stage, but quite another to hear them calling our husbands and brothers by their first names. A recent instance of this kind has been brought to the attention, so it is said, of the governors of Belmont Park, with the result that box holders have been implored to be more circumspect in their choice of guests.
But of all our tracks, Saratoga offers the most amusing phases to the observer of things social. Smart New York appears to think that Saratoga ceased to exist from the time when it was no longer the Newport of our grandmothers, until rediscovered in the interests of racing by the late Mr. William C. Whitney. The true situation is infinitely more amusing.
Saratoga, with its enormous hotels, teeming with a society busy and well entertained, has been perfectly satisfied with itself in spite of the fact that smart New York knew it not. The United States Hotel has represented all that was socially delightful to many people who never heard of the “Four Hundred.” And now suddenly into this community comes the smartest of New York’s racing section—the Whitneys, the Mackays, the Wilsons and the young Vanderbilts, and several more of like sort. And not only do they come, but they come under circumstances that render almost impossible the exclusiveness that has been regarded as essential. This year, I believe, the Mackays and a few others are renting separate houses, but hitherto it has been hotel life for everybody. Hotel life, which New Yorkers so scorn! A “cottage”—i. e., a suite of connecting rooms in a great caravansary—was the utmost seclusion possible. After the publicity of the race track, this was the only refuge. Then to meet the crowd again at dinner at Canfield’s (the ladies penetrated no further than the dining room even in the palmy days), and later, perhaps, to listen to the band at the Grand Union. This is a life in contrast to the seclusion of the cliffs at Newport. Verily racing makes strange companions.
There is something particularly gay in the atmosphere of the place. Any serious business other than racing is so plainly lacking. As the meeting is in summer, a great many men choose their holiday so as to take it in. The result is that we suddenly find ourselves in the midst of a class of idle men—at leisure and eager to be amused, almost like a foreign community. No one who has been to Saratoga will ever repeat the worn platitude that American men do not know how to enjoy a holiday.
We must remember, too, that for the feminine element racing is one of the few opportunities for—can we use so ferocious a term as “gambling” for the risking of a mild fiver on a “sure thing”? People are fond of saying that women are born gamblers; meaning, I suppose, that they love it better than men do. But it seems to me that this is only half the truth. The element of chance has charms for all of us, and women have so few opportunities to indulge it. They do not usually speculate in Wall Street; their daily occupation is not a gamble, as so many businesses are; the private wager is almost unknown to them. Until bridge swept over us, women could not, while spending as much money as they pleased, have any of the fun of losing it. Perhaps, in spite of all the talk about the intellectual stimulation of bridge, it owes some of its popularity to the same causes that the races do.
Not but what I believe that the interest of many women is a truly sporting one. Feminine love and knowledge of horses have increased wonderfully in the last twenty-five years. Our mothers and grandmothers rode, but took it as an elegant relaxation, or even as a mere means of locomotion. In this country the true sportswoman—the woman who hunts and drives four-in-hand and tandem—is a fairly recent development. In England we have only to go back to the novels of Whyte Melville to see that even in the middle of the last century she was a known type. It is not at all uncommon for women over there to know quite as much about horses as their brothers, to understand the horses and the cattle and the pigs. For Englishwomen to own a racing stable is no novelty, while here the joint experiment of two of our best known ladies was very much talked about, and endured but a short time.
The sport is essentially a sport for men. Women are merely onlookers; and in so far as it has a social side, even that side is controlled by men, serving thus as the great exception to things social.