Risk-taking may have been the
overriding character trait of Alice Green Hoffman. Coming to the remote island
of Bogue Banks in 1915 as a single woman was certainly a gamble, but Alice had
an early attraction to betting and had become accustomed to winning long before
she started losing.
"Races at Longchamp" by Manet. Note stylish women watching.[i])
Between 1889
and 1914, Alice Green Hoffman spent a good deal of her time in Paris and at the
track. Her fascination with horseracing is described in her unpublished
autobiography.[ii]
She entitled one long section, “Racing,” ending her first paragraph with what
could be the metaphoric topic sentence of her life: “It did not take me long to
learn that racing odds can change, and usually do, with every tick of the
clock.”
Her interest in horseracing began in
her late 20s when she met in Paris Princess Victor Duleep Singh, the former Lady Anne Blanche of Coventry, living in exile after marrying the son of a maharaja. [iii]
Lady Anne Blanche Conventry, the future Princess
Victor Duleep Singh from East Meets West: Prince and Princess Victor Duleep
Singh.
The exact
location of the meeting was 21 Square du Bois de Boulogne, where Alice’s sister
Grace would later (1895-1899) live —a location close to two famous horseracing
tracks— Longchamp and Auteuil.
21 Square
du Bois de Boulogne, showing location close to Bois du Boulogne [iv]
In 1892,
Alice and another friend Helen Benedict rented a place in the same neighborhood, at
55 Champs-Elysees. Going to races and betting were popular pastimes for their
social set. Initially, Alice says she went only to “big” races “because
everyone did.” But soon, she would be going much more regularly. As time went
on, Alice did not restrict her horseracing excursions to nearby Bois du
Boulogne tracks, but also went some distance to races in Enghien, Colombes, Chantilly,
Deauville, St. Cloud, Maisons-Lafitte, Tremblay and, even at times, out of
country—for example, to Brussels.
Alice's Paris residence was surrounded by tracks, but Enghien and Maisons-Lafitte would have been a long ride.
When in
Paris, with money to spare, she bet at the track and at the card table. A game she bet on heavily, one time losing as much as $3,000 playing at a casino, was Chemin de Fer, also known as Shimmy, where players bet one at a time against each other. Playing
cards at home was also a popular social activity among her friends and another way to
satisfy her gambling instincts. The connection she made between the card table and the track became
apparent when she named a horse Flush Royal.
Around 1895, when Alice rented a place on the Avenue du Bois de Boulogne, she began owning and racing her own horses. This was ten years before she
married. The desire to own racehorses, she claims, came from her attraction to racing
colors. The colors she would register for her horses were a combination of
white, emerald green and black. Colors she had seen on women depicted at
jockeys in a Revue Magazine: white
jacket, emerald green sleeves and black velvet cap.
Edgar Degas painting detail showing racing colors [v]
But, her love
of the track had to be more than a fascination with colors. Going to the races
meant being outdoors or as she says, “in the air all the afternoon,” and it
gave the ladies an opportunity to show off fancy dresses—often “mousseline de
soie”—among well-outfitted gentlemen of means. But, Alice could have satisfied her
love of the outdoors, of high fashion and high society in strolls along Paris boulevards.
I believe the excitement and rush of risk-taking with monetary rewards trumped all
other reasons for her attraction to horseracing. She became addicted and
admits, “When I finally began to go regularly I don’t think I missed a
race-meeting in ten years.”
High fashion at the races in Longchamp[vi]
Her normal
strategy was to pick her horses at home before the races, bet 200 francs ($40
in prewar money, in 1900 a
princely sum) on each race until she won, then increase her bet with her
winnings in subsequent races. Sometimes, however, she was forced to stop,
having lost all her money, but, other times, she won big. For example, one day
at St. Cloud, where heavy rains turned the track into “a veritable swamp,”
Alice says, “I put all my winnings on Bethsaida and came home with a small
fortune.” At Tremblay, she played the field and was rewarded with 20-1 and 10-1
returns.
With her
own horses, her luck was mixed. The first racehorse she owned, she says, “never
did anything outstanding, but managed to get into the money often enough to pay
for his keep and training.” Her second horse, “a little filly,” was even less
of a racer. Her third horse, recommended by Princess Duleep Singh, was bought
about three years into Alice’s marriage. The horse cost 2,000 francs and,
initially made 10,000 francs, but, unfortunately, Alice’s luck was about to
turn.
This was
Flush Royal. Planning to race him as a thoroughbred, believing steeplechase
jumps to be too dangerous, she still thought she should insure him and was
delighted to find an insurer willing to put a 3,000-franc value on the horse. She
entered Flush Royal in a race against two horses from the Vanderbilt stable,
which had won the Grand Prix at Longchamp in 1908. Flush Royal won and paid
five to one. Later, he and Alice lost big at a small track in Brussels.
Around 1910-11,
Flush Royal, injured by another horse, was killed. To get the insurance company
to pay, Alice, who as a result of her recent divorce had gone to Canada for a
visit, did what she would continue to do the rest of her life with property
losses, threaten to take her case to court.
The risks
she was taking attending races and taking her horses to various tracks included
more than losing money or risking a horse’s life. She put her own life in
danger. Many of these trips were made before the days of automobiles. Roads
were primitive, “bumpy” and dangerous in more ways than one.
Bandits
knew passengers were carrying “considerable sums of money.” Even though police
patrolled the route, one time, she found “a bullet-neatly embedded in the back
panel” of her carriage and realizes, “Had it gone through it probably would
have got me somewhere about the waist....”
She also
describes hailstorms and flooding on these trips, which put her life at risk,
as did rowdy fans. At the track, crowds sometimes got out of control. She
describes fires breaking out in the stands on one occasion and being “literally
tossed up like a cork on waves” when a riot broke out.
The death
of Flush Royal, Alice’s divorce and, finally, the outbreak of World War I were
all factors leading to the end of Alice’s racing days, but her risk-taking
continued and went far beyond the card table and the track. Real-estate
speculations in New York and in North Carolina replaced actual betting. Purchasing
and remodeling properties, she gambled and, unfortunately, lost. Attempting to
raise cattle and run a dairy farm in North Carolina are two other examples of lost
bets.
Alice
herself makes a mental connection between gambling at the track and speculating
on land with digressions that appear, incoherently with no particular reference
to dates, in her chapter on “Racing.” For example, on page seven of that
chapter, out of the blue, she remembers buying lots in Jamaica, L.I., having
gone to a real estate auction with her friend Edna Ryle. She concludes the
paragraph by stating: “I got rid of them in due course, and made a neat
turnover....” But, as discussed in “Alice’s Financial Misadventures I. II, and III,
she was rarely this lucky, and in the end, lost all her real estate in France,
New York and North Carolina.
Despite her
losses, we have to be grateful for Alice’s risk-taking. If she had not been a
gambler, she may never have come to North Carolina in search of a “Paradise of
a Home.” She found her paradise on Bogue Banks, a long-shot bet that paid off
in a legacy as its “Queen,” first-lady of what would become Pine Knoll Shores.
[ii]
Autobiography of Alice Green Hoffman,
East Carolina University Joyner Library Special Collections.
East Meets West:
Prince and Princess Victor Duleep Singh.
[iv]The
Theordore Roosvelt Center is one of the best sources of photos concerning Alice
and the family of her niece, Eleanor.
These photos are from http://www.theodorerooseveltcenter.org/en/Advanced-Search.aspx?r=1&st1=5&t1=%22France--Paris--Bois%20de%20Boulogne%22&v=expanded
[v]
http://www.allposters.com/-sp/Racehorses-in-a-Landscape-detail-Posters_i403230_.htm
[vi]
http://www.lomography.com/magazine/299068-vintage-photographs-of-fashionable-women-at-the-longchamp-races-in-paris
[vii] https://pinsndls.files.wordpress.com/2013/02/les-modes-1904.jpg