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Gordon Bennett, the Madcap, Scandal-Mongering Publisher Who Built the Newport Casino

Today in Britain people utter ‘Gordon Bennett’ when someone says something unbelievable, disgusting, surprising or outrageous.

They probably don’t know they’re referring to the man who gave Newport one of its most iconic buildings, the Casino.

He did it as a result of a bet. He also liked to drive carriages wearing nothing but a white silk top hat, and he nearly killed Winston Churchill’s mother doing it.

His exploits earned a headline in the UK Daily Mail as recently as 2016. “Meet the rogue whose exploits were so outrageous we STILL cry out his name when we are shocked,” it ran.

James Gordon Bennett

He was born James Gordon Bennett, Jr., on May 10, 1841, the son of a Scottish immigrant who founded the New York Herald. Bennett Senior changed the newspaper industry with such innovations as the presidential interview, woodcut illustrations and cash-in-advance for advertisers. He acquired great wealth, which he passed down to his son.

When Gordon Bennett, Jr., turned 16, his father gave him a 70-foot yacht. He turned into an avid yachtsman, winning the first transatlantic yacht race in 1866. Though his detractors said he just stood on the deck drinking booze while his crew did all the work.

Bennett’s friend Julius LeBlanc Steward was a guest on Gordon Bennett’s yacht Namouna. He painted Bennett, in white suit, and guests on the yacht.

Among his peccadillos were an inordinate fascination with owls and Pekingese dogs. He collected both, and penned editorials extolling owl conservation. When he built a new Herald building, he had his architect include 26 owl sculptures along the roof.

He depended on his Pekingese dogs to vet job applicants. If his dogs liked a candidate, he got the job. One candidate hid veal in his clothes to win a spot on the newspaper.

James Gordon Bennett spent recklessly on mansions in Newport, R.I., New York, the English countryside and Paris. Once he met with a reporter in a hotel bar, and the thick wad of banknotes in his back pocket made sitting uncomfortable. So he threw it in the fire.

Newspaperman

James Gordon Bennett

With his father’s blessing, he started the Evening Telegram, a gossipy tabloid that became the New York World Telegram.

At 26, his father turned over the Herald to him. He ran it ably, raising the newspaper’s profile by sponsoring explorers. It was the Herald that sent explorer Henry Morton Stanley to find the missing missionary, David Livingstone. After Stanley immortalized himself by saying, “Dr. Livingstone, I presume,” Gordon Bennett cabled him to stop talking. He wanted the press attention for himself.

Less successful was his sponsorship of the USS Jeanette expedition to the North Pole, which resulted in the deaths of 20 people from starvation. The tragedy increased the newspaper’s circulation, though.

He also sponsored sports trophies for ballooning, international yachting, auto, soccer and airplane racing.

Like many Gilded Age millionaires, he pursued sports avidly. Gordon Bennett is credited with organizing the first polo match in the United States. He also served as the youngest commodore of the New York Yacht Club.

He especially liked to drive carriages four-in-hand, though without his clothes on. One night he was driving his coach at breakneck speed with his friend Leonard Jerome and his young daughter Jennie. The coach rounded a sharp bend and he lost control. Jennie survived the accident, grew up and gave birth to Winston Churchill.

Gordon Bennett with his Pekingese

Paris

In 1877, at 36, he got engaged to Caroline May, a wealthy socialite, but she called it off. He had shown up at her house party drunk – probably on razzle dazzles, a potent concoction of brandy and absinthe. Before all the guests, he urinated into either the fireplace or the grand piano.

Her brother Fred then followed him into the street the next day and whipped him. Then he challenged Gordon Bennett to a duel, which they fought. But both missed.

Humiliated, Gordon Bennett moved to Paris, where he ran the Paris Herald. It eventually morphed into the International Herald Tribune.

The incident with Caroline May put him off marriage until he was 73. Or maybe he had another reason.

Newport Casino

Newport Casino, 1900

He founded the Newport Casino, according to legend, because he bet his friend Augustus “Sugar” Candy that he wouldn’t ride his horse into Newport Rhode Island’s exclusive Reading Room. Candy took the bet and the horse thumped its way into the library.

Banned from the Reading Room, Gordon bought an estate across the street from a vacant lot in Newport. He then hired Stanford White to design his own personal club.

White combined elements of the Shingle Style and the Japanese Pavilion at the 1876 Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia. The Casino featured the new sports of tennis and polo. It ended up being the site of the first U.S. Open, and now houses the International Tennis Hall of Fame.

Gordon Bennett!

Gordon Bennett married Maud Potter, widow of the son of the founder of the Reuters news agency. The marriage lasted five years, until his death on May 14, 1918.

He named James Stillman as executor of his will, but he died weeks later. Stillman named his friend James O. Bloss as his executor, and Bloss died suddenly weeks later. Bloss named his companion and housemate, John William Sterling, as his executor, and he also died in a matter of weeks. Together, their estates amounted to $76 million.

Painting: On the Yacht “Namouna”, Venice, by Julius LeBlanc Stewart. This story was updated in 2022.

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Harry Grant Wins the Vanderbilt Cup

Harry Grant was the first race car driver to win the Vanderbilt Cup twice – and the only one who died trying for the Astor Cup.

Harry Grant wins the Vanderbilt Cup, 1910

The Vanderbilt Cup, ‘the great Long Island race,’ was the first major trophy in American auto racing and a major international sporting event.

Grant didn’t drive in his first race until 1907, when he was 30 years old, but quickly established himself as one of the finest racecar drivers in the country.

Harry Grant

Harry Grant was born in Cambridge, Mass., on July 10, 1877. His father, a mining engineer, died in a mining accident in Colorado when Harry was young.

His first automotive job was with the Stanley Brothers. who made steamers in Watertown, Mass. He jumped to Locomobile, then to ALCO in its Providence, R.I., factory. He moved up to salesman at an ALCO dealership in Boston and immediately began pestering his boss to get into racing.

Harry Grant made his racing debut on the dirt horse track at the famous Readville Race Track in Boston, where some of the best racing in the country took place. He finished first in the shorter race and second in the longer one.

Within a year he ranked among the best drivers in the country. He excelled especially at climbing hills. In 1908 and 1909, he won 20 out of 20 hill climb races.

Vanderbilt Cup

The 1909 Vanderbilt Cup was a 278-mile-long stock car race over Long Island roads, many unpaved. Illustrator Peter Helck reminisced about the race in the 1948 Vanderbilt Cup program:

To one man went the honor of winning the 1909 and 1910 Vanderbilts. He was Harry Grant, a big solid chap, and tester for Alco. Unemotional and steady, never swayed by the speed extravagances of his rivals, his Cup victories were the result of sticking resolutely to schedules which in his judgment were destined for success.

In 1909, when the fanatic drive of Billy Knipper’s Chalmers had seemingly clinched the Cup at 225 miles, it was the unswerving Grant who subsequently thundered home in the long, rakish Alco chasis, a winner by five minutes over Parker’s Fiat, and averaging 62.8 mph for the 278 miles.

The high point of Harry Grant’s career came a year later, when he won his second consecutive Vanderbilt Cup.

A 1914 racing program described him:

One of the big men of the racing game, both physically and mentally, he is a credit to the institution in every way…

For the next few years he continued to race, finishing well in the Indianapolis 500, which was rapidly becoming the most important race in America.

On Sept. 27, 1915, Harry Grant practiced for the Astor Cup on Long Island in a Maxwell racer. While speeding at 100 mph his car burst into flames and he was badly burned. Ten days later, Harry Grant died at the age of 38.

With thanks to the Vanderbilt Cup Races blog.

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The Forgotten Glory Days of the Readville Race Track

The Readville Race Track in its glory days was a place where politicians, socialites, sportsmen and gamblers mingled; speed records were set for horse racing and auto racing; and the first airplane designed for combat was tested. For years the sports pages and the society pages were filled with news from Readville Race Track.

Readville Race Track. Photo courtesy Boston Public Library, Leslie Jones Collection.

The Readville Race Track was originally the site of Camp Meigs, a Civil War training camp 10 miles south of Boston proper. The 54^th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry Regiment trained there, as did other military units.

Harness racing at Readville Race Track. Photo courtesy Boston Public Library, Leslie Jones Collection.

In 1869 the Norfolk County Agricultural Society bought the land and held agricultural fairs on it. They built a half-mile track for horse racing. Then in 1895 the New England Trotting Horse Breeders’ Association bought it and built it into a harness racing mecca. It had a mile-long track, stables, bleachers, a restaurant, a hotel and a 3,400-seat grandstand, described as ‘a model of comfort and good taste’ by the Norfolk County Gazette.

Readville

Originally called the Readville Trotting Park, the track opened on Aug. 25, 1896 and offered the finest harness racing in America. Crowds came by rail from New York, Boston and Connecticut and passed through the grand columned entrance gate.

Readville made front-page news in 1897, when a pacer named Star Pointer broke the two-minute mile, the first standardbred racehorse to do so. The track made international news again in 1903 when a trotter named Lou Dillon ran the first two-minute mile. The Boston Post reported the race ended with a 10-minute fan frenzy, men throwing their hats in the air and women ‘screaming like mad.’ Two years later, Readville staged the most spectacular harness racing event in history, the $50,000 American Trotting Derby, won by Allan Winter.

In 1903, auto racing started at Readville and caught on quickly. On Memorial Day 1905, 12,000 people came to see a race of ‘gas burners.’ Readville held the first recorded stock car race in history in 1906. All the great auto racers came there to race — Barney Oldfield, Francis Edgar Stanley, Harry Grant, Louis Chevrolet, often setting world speed records:

For years horses and cars shared the same dirt track, which threw up so much dust it rendered goggles useless. In the early ‘30s, a new, harder auto track was laid with fill from the newly-dug Sumner Tunnel.

Coincidentally, next door to the track was an airplane manufacturer, the Sturtevant Aeroplane Company. It tested its A-3 battleplane on the Readville track.

Gas burners at the Readville Race Track. Photo courtesy Boston Public Library, Leslie Jones Collection.

Gas burners at the track. Photo courtesy Boston Public Library, Leslie Jones Collection.

By the 1930s, the track had declined, and on May 31, 1937, Readville held its last auto race.

Last Days

The track still had a use during World War II, when U.S. Navy pilots practiced touch-and-go landings on the old oval track.

The race track eventually became a Stop & Shop warehouse, its glory days forgotten. On Oct. 10, 2007, a plaque was laid on the former grounds by former Massachusetts Gov. Paul Cellucci, Boston Mayor Tom Menino, historians, harness racing fans, sportswriters and the New England Harness Writers Association.

With thanks to T he History of Harness Racing in New England by Robert Temple; Readville: The Story of the Readville Race Track, by Walter Barrett, Jr.; and the Boston Public Library, Sports Temples of Boston. This story was updated in 2022.

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