Winners for Sale

Ten years ago, at 51, Cinemagnate Louis B. Mayer discovered that all work and no play were making him, a dull boy. He tried golf, and decided he was not the type. Then he bought a race horse, and found a plaything that appealed to his instinct for high drama and fascinating figures. He confided to friends: "I'm going to run this stable the way I run my studio --build it on personalities." But once the heady smell of the stables got him, things got out of hand.

In an era when horse racing was changing from rich man's sport and poor man's ruin to big business, Metro-Goldwyn's Mayer became one of the top spenders. He sank more than $5,000,000 in horseflesh and horse farms. A man who likes to run things himself, he found that he was working harder at his hobby than at running Hollywood's richest movie studio. Last week, after convincing himself it just wasn't fun any more, L.B. sold out.

It took the tuxedoed auctioneer 2 3/4 hours to sell 60 sleek thoroughbreds for a record $1,553,500. The setting was impressive; a pale half-moon hung over the infield at Santa Anita; there were as many rows of press tables as at a heavyweight fight. Powerful spotlights flooded the auction ring in front of the clubhouse, making the horses nervous as they were led in one by one, numbers glued to their hindquarters. Everybody who amounted to anything in Southern California's racetrack and cinema industries (an almost interchangeable cast of characters) was there.

Mayer to Warner. L.B. watched intently, talked little, listened closely as his friend and lawyer, Neil McCarthy, bid up to $135,000 for the mare Busher. McCarthy figured he had a good buy even though the 1945 Horse of the Year was a semi-cripple. Said he: "I've already been offered $50,000 for her first foal. . . . What better investment could a man make?" Most other bids looked dizzily high. Mayer had picked a good time to sell.

The man who seemed to care least how much he spent was rival Movie Tycoon Harry M. Warner. He bought the apple of L.B.'s eye, a soft-eyed filly named Honeymoon, for $135,000. Then Warner, afflicted with the same fever Mayer once had, paid the evening's top price--$200,000--for Stepfather, a Kentucky Derby hopeful.

Although the sale ended Louis B. Mayer's big day as a racehorse owner, he was not through with horses. On a 504-acre ranch at the edge of the Mojave Desert, he still has a splendiferous breeding farm, with 15 different kinds of grass, a resident veterinarian, and everything but gold-handled pitchforks. There he keeps 74 of the finest brood mares in the land, whose offspring he will raise and sell each season as yearlings. Breeding, says L.B. now, is the side of the horse industry that is really sporting.

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In a big week at Santa Anita, a seven-furlong world record was equaled, and five days later a three-furlong world record was broken. Then, at week's end, mighty Armed made his big try for the $100,000 Santa Anita Handicap, and 85,500 fans saw him finish out of the money. Olhaverry, a Chilean-bred grey stallion, won.

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