Famous Hollywood Peeps in Horse Racing
Every company in Hollywood has initiated stern drives designed to cut down the use of studio telephones - for calling bookies, laying bets, or getting the latest racing results.
This resulted in the wholesale introduction of radios, and orders had to be issued to cope with this crisis.
Some fanatics had private telephones on their desks wired directly to bookie offices; the phones were finally removed by official fiat.
One movie star bets as high as $15,000 on a big race; one producer established himself as a one-man 'winter book' on the Kentucky Derby and took $20,000 worth of bets from colleagues at his studio.
One executive rises early during the racing season and goes to his office several hours at his stable watching his horses work out.
The wide influence of Hollywood's passion for horseflesh is seen in such curios as the Motion Picture Democratic Committee's recommendations for the 1939 Los Angeles primary elections, which were printed as a racing form.
Under each nominee's name were parenthetical comments, of which a few are worth preserving for posterity.
It is said that Groucho Marx once appeared in the offices of an executive at the MGM studio dressed in a jockey's uniform because, he said, 'This is the only way you can get to see a producer these days.'
The story may be apocryphal, but the point is well taken. It is wearying to recall the time and emotion which adults in the movie colony devote to discussing the speed with which four-legged animals can traverse an elliptical course.
The Nirvana of a goodly share of the movie makers is Santa Anita, some fifteen miles from Hollywood, one of the most beautiful and lucrative temples to racing in the world.
Santa Anita is also famed for the fact that during its first season (1934), so much money was taken in that the officials of the organization took the unprecedented step of reducing their share of the intake.
The length of the season has been reduced on three occasions, and yet the golden tide goes higher.
Santa Anita was born in the mind of Hal Roach, the whilom director and producer of the 'Our Gang' comedies, who approached some four hundred people to invest in the stock.
Many movie people were on the favored list, but only Bing Crosby, W.S. Van Dyke, and Henry King invested. Wealthy Californians in Los Angeles, Pasadena, and San Francisco came to the rescue and bought into the enterprise. Mr. Roach became the president of the organization.