Paul Mellon and His Ponies, at Saratoga’s Racing Museum

No horse hockey here, only a solid, fascinating history of thoroughbred sport

Q uesting to explore upstate New York’s cultural treasures this summer, I realized I’d never been to the National Museum of Racing and Hall of Fame in Saratoga Springs. I’ve never been to a horse race — I’m a Methodist and betting’s a sin — but horses are beautiful, noble beasts. Breeding and racing thoroughbreds are science and culture in tandem, to use a horse term, and National Velvet, The Black Stallion, and War Horse are timeless classics. Secretariat and Sea Biscuit are still the stuff of four-hoofed legend, dauntless and heroic. The Ascot scene in My Fair Lady teaches us that the ravishing and the repellent sometimes run, again, in tandem. So, I got into my draft horse of a 20-year-old Mercedes and galloped to Saratoga.

Luscious gowns and aristocrats aside, and putting even the idle rich aside, and, yes, gambling’s an odds-on favorite to win a trip to the Hot Place, I don’t like animal sports. The abrupt, quick euthanizing of injured horses — majestic animals — is sick-making. Fillies are very young, which means not fully grown. Geldings are castrated. Ouch. Call me a softie.

All of this said, the breeding and racing of thoroughbreds is high heritage. The Museum of Racing is a fine museum and a first-rate educational institution. It’s open year-round, but should be understood and savored in the context of the Saratoga Race Course, where the ponies have been running since 1863. It’s the oldest high-end stakes course in the country. Today, I’ll focus on The Passions of Paul Mellon: Horses, Art, and Philanthropy, the museum’s unexpected and impressive salute to the great horseman.

I know Mellon (1907–1999) not as a Pillar of the Turf but as one of America’s most distinguished art collectors and museum patrons. He wasn’t a polymath. That would be his father, Andrew Mellon, the Gilded Age Pittsburgh potentate and Roaring Twenties secretary of the Treasury. Son Paul described himself as a passionate amateur, but when it came to horses, he knew his geldings, fillies, mares, and studs from foal to finish line to stud farm.

The exhibition begins with a jolt and eye-opener for anyone tuned to philanthropy or education in America and the U.K. Paul Mellon gave to British causes, too, since his mother was a Guinness heir — here’s to stout — and he spent time with her in England after his parents divorced. Mellon gave and gave and gave, to Yale, the Buffalo Bill Museum, Cal Tech, the National Audubon Society, a dozen causes in Virginia, and even to Harvard. Nobody’s perfect, and since antisemitism repelled Mellon, I doubt he’d give to Harvard today.

It’s said he gave around $800 million during his lifetime and hundreds of millions more in bequests. I went to his memorial service at Yale since I got a chunk of dinero from him and, besides, the British Art Center in New Haven, one of my favorite museums, is based on his vision, his collection, and his money. The president of Yale, where Mellon went to school, listed the causes he supported there, most with no fanfare. His stamp is everywhere. Looking at the list, visitors understand how worldly he was, given how absolutely his wealth sheltered him.

Wall panels, art here and there, and ephemera develop his philanthropy to the National Gallery in Washington, Yale’s museums, the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, which got his horse pictures, and, of course the Racing Museum in Saratoga. The National Gallery was very much Andrew Mellon’s baby. In 1936, he sent President Roosevelt a letter a few days before Christmas offering his princely — no, fit-for-a-king — art collection to the nation as well as a supertanker loan of money to build and to endow an art museum in Washington. This became the National Gallery.

During his 1932 campaign, FDR had trashed Andrew as a heartless plutocrat and bloodsucker, and he sicced the IRS on him as soon as he was inaugurated. Still, by 1937, we had our National Gallery. When Paul died, he left it his collection of unique wax sculptures by Degas from which the sculptor’s famous bronzes were made, lots of Impressionist paintings, and George Stubbs’s White Poodle in a Punt.

Then there were the horses. For a visitor like me who knew very little about racing or thoroughbred horses, Passions of Paul Mellon was the perfect primer. Mellon’s interest started with his mother, English and Irish and immersed in upper-crust horse culture. By the 1940s, after flirting with horses bred for steeplechase races, Mellon made the figurative jump to flat-course racers. Beguiling him were what he called “the color, the movement, the speed, the excitement, the competition, the skill of riding, the cleverness of the horses, that primitive thing called luck,” he wrote in his autobiography. “But mostly it was a love of the horses.”

Mellon is the only owner to win the Kentucky Derby, the Epsom Derby, which is the premiere British race limited to three-year old-horses, and France’s Prix de l’Arc de Triomphe, called the Arc and the world’s most prestigious all-ages-allowed race. In 1964, Quadrangle, his first big, glamour-race winner, won the Belmont Stakes and Saratoga’s Travers, now in its 155th year. Arts and Letters was second in the Kentucky Derby and the Preakness but won the Belmont, a near Triple Crown miss for Mellon. Mellon’s Mill Reef was the first American horse to win the Arc.

It wasn’t until 1993, though, that Mellon, age 85, saw his horse win the Kentucky Derby. Sea Hero thundered through a gap by the rail at the top of the stretch, inch by inch moved past the front-runner to win by two and a half lengths. Mellon, always dapper but understated in his brown felt trilby and tailored suit, could only manage, “I am in awe.”

We learn that each top horse is different, and it’s not just that one is faster than the rest. Mill Reef had superb balance and a fluid, balletic turn of hoof but was also temperamentally delicate and difficult to train, as were many of his prize-winning progeny. Arts and Letters pitched tantrums. “He was dangerous to be around if you didn’t know what you were doing,” his trainer said. Quadrangle was big, placid, and a loafer if he had a big lead. Mellon thought that Fort Marcy had a sense of humor bordering on cheek. When I got home from the museum, I read the profiles of all of Mellon’s top horses at the American Classic Pedigrees website. These horses knew they were stars and acted like it. Was I turning horse crazy? Not horse feathers, I think.

Mellon’s silks are in the exhibition, as are his riding boots. He rode superbly and well into his 70s and did 100-mile endurance rides. Mellon was, though, a patrician through and through. He was horse-crazy but cool as a cat about it. I’ve seen videos of Sterling and Francine Clark, founders of the Clark Art Institute, where I was a curator, when their horse, Never Say Die, won the Epsom Derby in 1954. They went berserk with joy. Even Queen Elizabeth went a wee cock-a-hoop when one of her horses won. If there’s a video of an ecstatic Paul Mellon, it didn’t make it to the show. He was inscrutable but deeply responsive to classic beauty, respecting it to the point of a very contained awe.

Mellon did indeed describe himself as an amateur, an amateur poet, scholar, horseman, farmer, and connoisseur of art, adding that the root of “amateur” is the Latin word for love. I’ll tolerate no room for knocking love. On horses, though, he loved them but was very, very knowledgeable about them. And savvy, too. He hired trainers in whom he had confidence and let them go to it. No micromanager he, and no master of the universe.

I’d call him less an amateur than a man for all seasons. As a poet, however, as much as he might have loved poetry, he shined best as a sincere naïf. One poem reads, “The day my final race is run / and win or lose, the sinking sun / tells me it’s time to quit the track / and gracefully hang up my tack / I’ll thank the Lord the life I led / was always near a thoroughbred.” Well said, and a well-done show.

The Museum of Racing is big. In more than a dozen galleries, it covers the history of racing, the different types of racing, and the Triple Crown winners. Since 1875, by which time the three key races were established, only 13 horses have won all three in a single year. Citation, Secretariat, and Seattle Slew were as famous as the marquee baseball, football, and tennis stars and considered four-legged exemplars of physical and mental prowess. Each Triple Crown winner and his particular year — no fillies have won — gets a profile in the show.

The museum’s history of the thoroughbred horse is a good example of complicated biology translated into language all of us can understand. Wall panels with high-quality, engaging illustrations take us from the 1680s, when Arabian-born stallions were bred in England with local running horses, to the development of English hereditary records, or stud books, in 1793 and American stud books in 1868. Breeders are obsessed with bloodlines, which, in America and the U.K., are more exactingly researched than anything the Mormons do with us humans.

Another wall panel details how owners and horse vets turn matchmaker among mares and stallions and then chaperone and coach. Don’t expect romance, though. Sometimes it’s more like Stanley Kowalski meets Blanche DuBois than Harry meets Sally. Usually it’s transactional. A stud fee can be as high as a million dollars.

Coming from the starting gate, a horse can reach 40 miles per hour in just six strides, a distance I, at this point, can cover in six months. The force on his front hoof as he hits the track is 2,500 pounds. He breathes five gallons of air a second at full gallop. A horse who nibbles on grass, seems tranquil, saunters around, and looks at the view is, we learn, made by God to move with the force of a cannonball.

There’s also a big gallery with a profile of every major prize-awarding racecourse. A gallery on silks — rider attire — is colorful and a salute to jockeys, the little people who steward a horse in those short minutes at very high speed and high tension. A small niche on the composition of tracks drives home how serious a place the museum is.

My only quibble is placing the history of the Saratoga Race Course in the basement near the bathrooms. Not ideal space. Goodness, it’s the reason the museum’s there and very distinguished. Would I go back to the museum? Possibly. Would I go to a premier race like the Belmont Stakes or Ascot, to which I’ve been invited? Seems like lots of trouble, though Ascot’s critical mass of feathered fascinators might persuade me. They challenge the laws of gravity.

Some self-examination would be good, too. Does thoroughbred racing have a scandalous past? Of course, it does. Anything involving money, prestige, and aristocrats is bound to attract shady people and practices. Doping, thrown races, and computerized bet-rigging are, shock of shocks, known to happen. I remember when an Epsom Derby winner was horse-napped in the early ’80s, possibly by the IRA, and ransomed. “Rigged” describes, say, an election, but the term descends from a rig, which is a stallion whose testicles are shoved into his abdomen so he can pass as a gelding, who, as a creature, tends to race less speedily. A hack describes, say, biased journalists peddling the will of oligarchs, but it started as the term for a mediocre horse.

Horse-swapping happens. A few years ago, a horse was disguised using hair dye and spray paint. Someone knowing Helen Frankenthaler’s work thought something was wrong when he noticed drips among the horse’s white socks. It’s a case of high art meets lowlifes. Aspects of racing like these would certainly enrich the museum.