"A Nice, Quiet Life"

At home with the folks who own Affirmed

They certainly look like winners. She in her tailored white suit and pink blouse, as blonde and nearly as smooth-cheeked at 41 as when she first stepped into the winner's circle as a teenager. He in a natty tan suit, his wiry, curly hair gone gray at 66, but otherwise the same trim, erect, rangy 190-pounder who played end for Georgia more than four decades ago. Since their marriage in 1972, Patrice and Louis Wolfson--the owners of Affirmed--have been one of the most successful racing couples in the sport. Their Harbor View stable is now the leading money winner. They did not buy Affirmed; they bred him through three generations, and Wolfson has turned down an offer of $8 million for the nation's prize Thoroughbred. Says he: "When you breed and race a horse like this, you wouldn't take $15 million or $20 million."

Publicity shy to the point of reclusiveness, the Wolfsons have been tugged into the glare of attention by their success. But they have each been in the public eye before, separately and for quite different reasons. For much of his career, Louis Wolfson was the ultimate outsider--a notorious corporate takeover artist who also went to jail for selling unregistered stock and who was involved in a curious affair that brought about the resignation of a U.S. Supreme Court Justice, Abe Fortas. In 1958, Wolfson bought his way into racing, then devoted his considerable energies and talents to becoming a success at his new sport.

Patrice was born to racing. The cherished only daughter of the late Hirsch Jacobs, who saddled more winners than any trainer in racing history, she has been a well-known figure in the sport since she was a little girl. She is as quiet and reserved as her husband is confident and outgoing. Friends say the marriage of opposites, of blood and money, has worked out very well indeed.

Hirsch Jacobs grew up on the sidewalks of Brooklyn, one of ten children of an immigrant tailor. He left school at age 13, became a steam fitter and spent his idle hours hanging around New York race tracks. He sidled into training and did so well that he caught the eye of one Colonel Isidor Bieber, a high roller and Broadway ticket broker. Bieber asked Jacobs to be his trainer and partner, and the pairing was to last more than 40 years.

Jacobs, Damon Runyon once insisted, could talk to horses. As Runyon once wrote: "I have eavesdropped [on] him around the stables many a time and heard him soft-soaping those equine characters. He generally wins their confidence and learns all their troubles. I do not say that they up and tell him, understand. No, I do not say that, because it is something I cannot prove, inasmuch as Hirsch Jacobs himself denies there is any open banter between him and horses. But if they do not tell him, who does?" Runyon had good reason to wonder where his longtime friend got his tips. In 43 years as a breeder and trainer, Jacobs saddled 3,569 winners and collected more than $12 million in purses.

Bieber and Jacobs typically bought cheap, bad-legged nags at claiming races--events in which any horse entered can be claimed for a predetermined price. Then Jacobs, using a combination of home remedies and equine psychoanalysis, would turn the beast into a champion. If, for instance, Jacobs thought a horse simply needed peace and quiet, he would remove him to a dark, remote stall. If a horse wouldn't eat, Jacobs would move him next door to a horse that ate like one, chop a hole in the wall so the hunger striker would observe the mad gluttony in the next stall and, sure enough, the power of suggestion usually worked. Once Jacobs determined from what he felt was a pained expression on a mare's face that her shoes were too tight, and another time he diagnosed a horse's problem as loneliness. Solution: find another lonely horse to share the stall. Jacobs and Bieber raced their horses often, or as one critic sniffed, they ran them "like a fleet of taxi cabs."

The snickers stopped in 1943, when Jacobs claimed an unimpressive colt named Stymie for $1,500 and turned him into one of the most spectacular horses of all time. Stymie won more than $900,000 in purses, allowing Jacobs and Bieber to buy a 283-acre breeding farm in Maryland. They called it Stymie Manor. Jacobs, meanwhile, had married Ethel Dushock, daughter of a well-to-do manufacturer from Yonkers, and raised a family of two boys and a girl.

Patrice Jacobs, named after Damon Runyon's second wife, grew up in the warm comfort of her family's spacious red brick colonial home in Forest Hills, Queens, a horseshoe's toss from both Aqueduct and Belmont. She was educated by nuns, at her Catholic mother's request and with her Jewish father's consent, and sent off to Virginia's very white-glove Marymount College. She inherited her father's fierce passion for horses, even spending college weekends trackside at Laurel, Bowie or Pimlico while classmates went off to football games. Hirsch did his best to insulate his daughter from the touts, railbirds and assorted other lowlifes who populated his world. "Dad doesn't allow me to hang around the barns too much while we are at Belmont and Aqueduct," she once told a reporter, "but at Saratoga [then, as now, a more genteel track] I get out there with him and the horses on a pony."

After graduating from Marymount, Patrice moved back with her parents, wrote a few articles for the Morning Telegraph, painted a little and tried to help run the growing Jacobs-Bieber empire. Horses became her life. Every year her father let her pick a couple of home-breds from his stable as her own. Hail to Reason, which was one of them, be came the nation's top two-year-old in 1960. When the horse became permanently disabled the following year, Pa trice cried for two days. Says she: "My dreams were shattered."

Patrice became a familiar figure in the winner's circle, often on her father's arm, but she led a very cloistered life.

"She was always in the company of her parents," says a racing insider.

Jacobs eventually became a millionaire in his own right. Yet it remained out of the question for him to join, say, the Jockey Club, that Caucasian circle of Anglo-Saxons who for generations controlled the racing industry. In fact, Jacobs found himself on the side of the upstart Horseman's Benevolent and Protective Association in the 1960s when it challenged the hegemony of the Jockey Club and the New York Racing Association. After one H.B.P.A. meeting, Jacobs was heard to mutter against the that the Italians and dispute was Jews." "a classic case of the bluebloods One other exclusive club remained just beyond Jacobs' grasp, despite a number of attempts to crack it. The winningest trainer in history somehow could not take the Kentucky Derby, the Preakness or the Belmont Stakes. When the 1970 racing season opened, however, he was sure his luck had changed. "The real horse for us this year will be Personality," he told his son John. Personality won the Preakness by a neck and High Echelon, another Jacobs horse, won the Belmont. Jacobs did not see either victory; he died of a cerebral hemorrhage in February 1970. Patrice was simultaneously liberated and devastated by her father's death. She had not had much of a social life until then. Though only 32, rich and attractive, she was too grief-stricken to want one. She turned for support to one of her family's closest friends, Louis Wolfson, whose wife had died in 1968.

For years Wolfson had occupied the box at Aqueduct directly behind the Jacobs', and the two men liked to talk breeding between races. Both self-made men, both outsiders in a way, the two respected each other. Wolfson had once named one of his mares after Patrice. In 1972 Louis and Patrice were married. "At that point, he was one of the closest friends I had in the world," Patrice explained last week. "He's a very kind man, a very considerate man."

Like Jacobs, Wolfson is the son of an impoverished immigrant. The elder Wolfson worked as an iceman, clothes presser and fruit peddler in St. Louis--where Louis was born in 1912--then took his family to Jacksonville, Fla., to launch a junk business. When Louis shattered his shoulder playing for Georgia in the Yale Bowl, he gave up his dream of pursuing an athletic career and slater becoming a coach, quit college and I went home to the family junkyard.

The Wolfsons soon branched out. The firm bought $275 worth of surplus building materials, then resold the stuff piecemeal for $100,000. By the end of World War II (Louis was 4F because of a bad kidney and his injured shoulder), the firm was doing $4.5 million a year. Before the company was dissolved in 1948, Louis bought two shipyards, one a Navy surplus, for $4 million. He later unloaded them for a $10 million profit. Two congressional subcommittees and a federal grand jury investigated the transaction but could prove no wrongdoing. It was the first of many brushes with the law.

Wolfson's next coup was gaining control in 1949 of Capitol Transit, the Washington, B.C., bus system, for $2.2 million and selling it seven years later for $13.5 million--after Congress investigated sharp fare increases, deteriorating service and alleged financial improprieties, and then refused to renew his franchise. He bought control of Merritt-Chapman & Scott, a respected construction firm, and in half a dozen years had raised its net worth from $8 million to $132 million. He also used the firm to absorb companies that made everything from ships (the aircraft carrier Kitty Hawk) to movies (The Babe Ruth Story). He failed in efforts to buy the Brooklyn Dodgers, the Washington Senators and the Baltimore Colts.

The financier's boldest takeover attempt was his 1954 assault on Montgomery Ward. He spent $500,000 soliciting proxies, and barnstormed the country to line up nearly a third of the mailorder firm's voting stock, but ultimately failed to gain control. So he went after a slightly smaller target: American Motors. Wolfson had bought $4 million of AMC stock before Chairman George Romney talked him out of a takeover and converted him " into a messianic promoter of the Rambler. Wolfson would talk up the little car to barbers, taxi drivers, anyone he encountered, even offering to finance their auto purchases interest-free from his own pocket. "People were mailing me checks for $50 a month," Wolfson once recalled. He eventually sold out his holdings in American Motors and made a $2 million profit.

Wolfson's luck with the law ran out in the 1960s. Tried two times on securities-related charges, he spent nine unpleasant months in a Florida federal prison. It was during his jail term that Wolfson attained perhaps his greatest notoriety: Abe Fortas resigned from the Supreme Court in 1969 after admitting that he had concealed the fact that he was receiving $20,000 a year for giving unspecified help to the Wolfson family foundation.

The ex-convict remains bitter about his prison stint. Some Wall Street lawyers found the sentence extraordinarily harsh for an offense customarily punished by fines. The episode also brought to a standstill a project that was beginning to preoccupy Wolfson more than any business deals: turning his 478-acre

Harbor View Farm near Ocala, Fla., into a world-class racing stable. A half dozen years after its birth in 1958, Harbor View be came racing's second top money-winning stable (after Wheatley), but the purses dried up with Wolfson's conviction. Reason: some states will not renew the racing license of anyone convicted of a serious crime. Wolfson felt that his crime was not sufficiently serious, but after a friendly New York racing-board member warned him that his 1969 application would be rejected, Wolfson chose not to apply. He stayed out of racing until 1971, when New York, Maryland and Florida all granted him licenses. Last year the Wolfsons' stable ranked fourth in winnings.

To concentrate on racing, which now takes up about 80% of his time, Wolfson has virtually dismantled his corporate empire, once estimated at being worth close to $100 million. The Wolfsons sold Harbor View Farm last year, but kept the name and now own some 250 horses. Despite their success on the track, expenses are so high ($3 million a year) that the Wolfsons have not always been in the black during the past few years. Affirmed has solved that problem. Some of the Wolfsons' horses are kept in Kentucky, where Louis is respected as a smart and honest man. Says one of Kentucky's leading racing figures: "He went from a leading owner to a jailbird, to a man who couldn't race, to a leading owner -- and he never cried. I have a lot of respect for him." Says Editor Kent Hollingsworth of The Blood-Horse: "When he looks at you with those terribly sincere blue eyes, you believe him."

One man who believes is Lazaro "Laz" Barrera, Affirmed's trainer and a kind of latterday, Cuban-style Hirsch Jacobs. Son of a part-time jockey, Barrera, 53, was born on land that later became a racetrack in Havana. He began training at 16, moved to California in 1959, and worked for almost anyone who would hire him. In 1976 Barrera developed Bold Forbes, a sprinter notoriously weak at long distances, into the winner of the Kentucky Derby and the Belmont. He was the leading trainer in both 1976 and 1977. Last year his horses earned $2.7 mil lion, and this year-- with Affirmed cleaning up-- he has already won over $1 million. Barrera gets along just fine with Wolfson: "He leaves me to do my job -- he's a nice man to work for."

Barrera raised eyebrows when he kept Affirmed in Cali fornia this spring, where heavy rains hampered training and the horse ran against competition considered to be inferior to that back East. But Affirmed won the Santa Anita Derby and the Hollywood Derby, and obviously was in magnificent shape for the Derby and the Preakness. Like Cauthen, Barrera has enormous confidence in his horse. Says he: "If Affirmed was a baseball player, he'd be Joe DiMaggio. He does things so easy."

Another Wolfson family favorite is Stevie Cauthen, whom Patrice finds uncannily compatible with her horse. "This Thoroughbred and Cauthen both seem so mature," she says. "But they're both so young. Both are very businesslike. Cauthen came in to ride in his first derby, and it was like he'd done it all before. And Affirmed was just like him, totally calm. The horse is quiet--the boy is quiet. Both are natural athletes. Affirmed has a beautiful look about him, and Cauthen's just the same."

The Wolfsons divide their time among their Clermont Farm near Saratoga Springs, New York, a house on Long Island, a condominium in Bal Harbour, Fla., and wherever their horses are running. They are becoming familiar to the racing public as a strikingly handsome couple who like to hold hands and gaze lovingly at each other. Louis keeps his weight down by eating cottage-cheese-and-peaches lunches and doing 15 minutes of calisthenics a day. Patrice has given up her painting under the pressures of racing and of managing the various Wolfson households. "I'm busy being a housewife," she says. "I keep a nice home for my husband. I've tried to make life very simple. We have a lovely life together. A nice, quiet life."

More and more, that life is revolving around Affirmed. They travel with the horse, fend off would-be buyers and curious reporters, and spend long evenings at home laying plans for his future (they intend to race him next year as a four-year-old). "It makes me remember so much," Patrice says. "My father was a great trainer and breeder, and that's what we've done with Affirmed. We bred him, raised him and raced him. And we did another thing my father used to do: the Bieber-Jacobs stable believed in running rather than training. Affirmed is an iron horse. He has run 14 times and won 12. He was the richest three-year-old ever to enter the Kentucky Derby."

A guess might be made that Patrice Jacobs sees in Affirmed a chance for vindication of both men in her life--for the attainment of the one goal denied her father and a way of bringing honor to her husband, who has been attacked so often in the past. That would only be a guess, of course. One sign of good breeding, in a horse or a human, is self-control, and Patrice Jacobs Wolfson controls emotions as carefully as Stevie Cauthen controls her horse. She will say just this: "Aside from having good health, my husband and I want only to win the Triple Crown."

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