Smiley Ratliff's escape bid

Last Monday morning, a trio of sad men sat together and wept quietly. The greatest racehorse in the history of, well in the history of publicity anyway, which had never lost a race, had come in fourth.

On Wednesday morning, another trio of possibly sadder men sat in a plane with their chins up, no tears, one of them was, so to speak, the horse himself, the most touted favourite for the Democratic sweepstakes. He, too, had lost the New Hampshire trials.

There's nothing cute or contrived about the coincidence of these two scenes. The fact that they occurred to me spontaneously in combination proves, according to old Sigmund Freud, that they have, for me at any rate, a strong emotional connection. I believe they have a real connection. They are about the same thing. They tell us something that is comic, or disturbing, or both about contemporary journalism, about the media's irresistible urge for hype. Let me elucidate.

The first, the weeping trio consisted of an owner, a trainer and a manager. Their failed darling was a filly by the name of Devil's Bag, which as a two-year-old had won its first half-dozen races – nothing historic or spell-binding about that. Indeed, I doubt that one American in a thousand, in ten thousand, had ever heard of Devil's Bag two weeks ago and yet, suddenly, zooming out of the columns and columns of statistics about horses that looked to the average laymen like pages from the telephone directory, came the name of Devil's Bag.

I suppose the sports writers, feeling the breath of spring in their nostrils, could not smell a superstar in the offing and – at more and more frequent intervals these days – sporting writers compete to spot a superstar in the cradle. Somebody interviewed Devil's Bag's trainer, a shrewd, melancholy-looking man. He said that in all the years he'd seen and handled horses, there was nothing like Devil's Bag.

Of course, his word alone would not have done it. The record, always a winner in the first six races, was impressive but by combining the record with rather awesome bloodlines and adding the word of the trainer, glory be! There was the superstar of 1984. It took only one week for the word to get out to the learned that here was a horse that by May Day and the arrival of the Kentucky 'Dar-bee' or Derby, would reveal itself as the equal of Secretariat, if not of the immortal Man o'War.

In that same week, Devil's Bag was syndicated to the tune of $36 million – that's when the hype hit the fan magazines and the television networks. And then, last weekend, the magical nag ran in its first long-distance race while money hit the bookmakers with the fury of a hot day on the commodity market. So, Devil's Bag was a distant fourth.

Two days later, I went through the New York Times and, being now in San Francisco, the Los Angeles Times also and the San Francisco Chronicle, carefully combing column by column. There was not a single mention anywhere of the horse of the century. This may suggest to the unfooled reader that maybe Devil's Bag is not the horse of the century. Still, $36 million have gone out to back that hunch.

The other sad trio, flying off now to the Southern trials, was made up of three Democrats – a campaign manager, the campaign press director and the object of their nursing care, the candidate himself, Walter Fritz Mondale, former Vice President of the United States and declared and accepted by every political writer, wiseacre, congressman as THE Democratic favourite to run against Lovable Ronnie in the Grand National next November. The, er... inevitable Democratic superstar, the man who more than any man we could remember in modern times had the presidential nomination of his party locked up in February.

New Hampshire, as I mention every four years, is a small, not very populous state of New England, very beautiful, very conservative, almost always sure to vote Republican in the general election. Why, then, all the fuss about the Democratic primary election there?

Mainly because it's the first primary, the first trial of strength. Also, because since 1952 when New Hampshire established its trial heat as the first of the nation's presidential primaries, nobody who lost there has ever gone on to win the presidency. Well, we knew long ago that Fritz Mondale was the favourite candidate of the main American national labour union, of the schoolteachers' union, of the Automobile Workers Union, of the steel workers, of the farm cooperatives, that he'd been syndicated for I don't know how many millions of dollars producing a campaign fund 10, 20 times as lavish as that of his scraping rivals. John Glenn of Ohio is two or three million dollars in debt. There is also McGovern, who ran once in the Grand National and lost miserably. And the Reverend Jesse Jackson, the first black runner and a yearling from Colorado called Gary Hart.

Well, Mondale was a certain-to-win New Hampshire as Devil's Bag. The only question was how impressive his margin would be. He lost by 29 per cent of the vote against 41 per cent for the yearling, this obscure, 47-yearling, Gary Hart. Mondale didn't weep. He stuck his chin up and he said it was a good thing. It just showed that now the runners could get down to running seriously. We didn't know then that to Mondale New Hampshire was just a practice early-morning canter.

Well, I'm not going to go on about Gary Hart. Next Tuesday, there are nine primary races, mostly in the South, and next Tuesday, to ginger up reader and viewer interest, is being called Super Tuesday. Maybe after that, we will have to tell you the life story of Gary Hart. Maybe not.

What has barely been noticed is the glee of the White House. If the Democratic voters of the country are already in doubt about who their superstar is to be, if they're troubled to spot their true standard bearer, well, then how are they going to mobilise their legions and their passion and their money in favour of the one man who will oppose the mighty Reagan in November? The more uncertain the Democrats are about who shall lead their party, the more uncertain will be the sound their trumpet gives out. It is a mischievous, happy thought for Mr Reagan, who is the real winner of the New Hampshire primary.

Meanwhile, there's a story much more engrossing and delightful, but not without its tragic overtones and I would be derelict if I didn't pass it on to you because it tells, alas, of a notable, an historic failure in Anglo-American relations. The breakdown occurred in December – a breakdown in the negotiations between the British government and a single American explorer, but I don't remember anyone reporting it. I may just have been asleep, or in New Zealand.

Come to think of it, New Zealand would have been the most likely place to hear about it because it concerns the South Pacific and the yearning of one American, fed to the teeth with the noise and conflict and vulgarity and madness of modern civilisation, to decamp to his own tiny, remote Utopia. If it had not been for the alert Barry Bearak, a staff writer on the Los Angeles Times, we would, perhaps, never know about the marvellous legend of 'Smiley' Ratliff, a living doll – a very fractious doll, I must say – of a man right out of Mark Twain.

'Smiley' Ratliff – he's never known by any other name – is a Virginian, a back-country type from the Virginia-Kentucky border. Son of a horse trader, brought up in a small, dusty, coal town. After little schooling, he took to coaching the local school football team. Then he went down the mines and he worked 20 hours a day and he discovered that that was a fool's game. He saved enough to lease a mine, pick up casual labour, work it, buy coal cheap and sell it dear, year after year. He made a pile of money and a much larger pile, about ten years ago, when the Middle Eastern oil crisis made coal mines precious items to own and more precious to sell.

As far as people close to him can guess, 'Smiley' Ratliff is now worth somewhere between fifty and a hundred million dollars. He has a big colonnaded mansion where two roads meet, Frog Level and Plum Creek. It sits on 20,000 acres he's fenced off from what he considers to be a world gone crazed. He has five Rolls-Royces, he has portraits of his ancestors who go back, Smiley says, to the first Earl of Derwentwater. 'It's certainly the same family', he says. He points to his chin. 'We bear the same cleft.'

But Smiley belies his name. He is a frustrated, furious man. The world, in his time, has gone to pot and four people, in the main, are responsible. A thousand guesses would not compose that quartet. You might guess at Franklin Roosevelt who, it seems, turned everybody into a greedy socialist. Earl Warren is the second, the justice of the Supreme Court who pronounced the famous ruling integrating the black and white races.

'Roosevelt', he says, 'Warren, Sigmund Freud and Elvis Presley.

'Freud fixed it,' he says, 'so people think committin' a crime is not their fault. It's their daddy's fault cos he bought 'em red underwear for Christmas.' Presley? 'He started all that screamin' and shoutin' that ruin't the music.' So what to do?

Smiley sees the public debt producing a total crash of civilisation so that 'they'll be killin' cows in the fields. Night riders will slay the helpless. Criminals will go a'swarmin' in battles for food.' He decided to get out and he knew where. He spent two years flying and sailing and mooching the whole length of the Pacific and, at last, he found it – an island only twelve miles square – Henderson Island, twelve hundred miles south of Tahiti. He was going to excavate, clear the jungle, build an airstrip and live with the birds.

Then, he discovered it was British Crown property. Environmentalists lobbied in Westminster. Smiley would imperil certain protected species. Certain doves, parrots that feed on nectar. A rare sort of snail. 'Hell!' said Smiley, 'I wouldn't hurt no damn snails! I'd love 'em to death!' But the British Parliament said no. Smiley is crushed. Like the rest of us, he must put up with civilisation and democracy.

And why not? Why not! He's told us why not. 'If democracy was so damn perfect, why isn't heaven a democracy? Heaven is the most totalitarian state that ever existed. God don't ask the angels for their opinion and if God don't have advisers, I rest my case.'

This transcript was typed from a recording of the original BBC broadcast (© BBC) and not copied from an original script. Because of the risk of mishearing, the BBC cannot vouch for its complete accuracy.

Letter from America audio recordings of broadcasts ©BBC

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