THE KENTUCKY DERBY : A Trainer With Good Numbers

LOUISVILLE, Ky. — Where’s Doris Day when you need her?

Loretta Young, call your agent. Have I got a part for you!

How about this for openers? We’re at the Kentucky Derby, right? Right away, we got a three-handkerchief picture. Stephen Foster. My Old Kentucky Home. Beautiful Ohio. Rated PG. Disney would drool. All it needs is a dog.

It’s as all-male as Custer’s Last Stand. As stag party as a poker game in a fire house.

You all know what a horse trainer is like, right? This grizzled old party in a Civil War hat that looks as if he stole it off a hanged horsethief. He don’t say much, just stands there and looks at people as if he just caught them palming an ace or climbing in his bedroom window.

“Yup” or “nope” is an oration for these guys; they make Calvin Coolidge look like the life of the party, the James Gang like insurance salesmen.

No one ever saw any of them smile. They look like a group photo on death row.

The love interest is a horse. But these are a bunch of guys who know horses for what they are--a bunch of double-crossers who will jump shadows, refuse the bit, toss the rider and in general find ways to lose.

A horse will get sore on you, will bow, run down in the heels, cough, bleed, cast himself in his stall--anything but win. Trainers are very unsentimental about horses.

They can tell by feeling a colt’s ankles when he’s starting to come down with something, which is most of the time. They know how fragile horses are, know that most of them are Dead End Kids at heart. They have no interest in doing anything you want them to do.

Into this dour fraternity comes this schoolmarm, all sugar and spice and everything nice. And not just any old teacher. This one was one of the runners-up in the Miss America contest. It’s not one of those pictures where Loretta Young pretends she’s a boy for the first eight reels, and then her cap falls off or her blouse gets wet and the cowboy gets a look and says, “Wait a minute! You’re not Joe!”

You can tell right away what Dianne Carpenter is. You could put Dianne Carpenter under an oil rig in a pair of dirty overalls and tuck her hair under a cap and take all her makeup off, and nobody would mistake her for someone called Joe. Not unless you’d call Grace Kelly Joe.

Dianne used to be Miss Mississippi, no less. You know how it’s not enough to be 36-22-34 and look good in a bathing suit anymore to win at Atlantic City? Well, Dianne looked good in a bathing suit, all right. She’d look good in a flour sack.

Since she couldn’t play the ocarina or recite “Invictus” for company, she decided to show horses. One of them pinned her under him one day, which should have taught her all she ever needed to know about horses right there. But Dianne decided they should be taught some manners.

She got a job teaching kids the principal parts of the verb to be and what Shakespeare meant by, “To be or not to be,” in a high school in Cherry Hill, N.J.

The charm of this institute of secondary learning was that it was by Garden State race track, and pretty soon our heroine was spending more time teaching horses how to run around two turns than students how to undangle a participle.

Dianne makes a nice change from the American Gothic gallery of thoroughbred horse trainers. Five-foot-two, eyes of blue, hair of blonde and lips of red, she’s the only conditioner in shed row in designer glasses and lipstick.

She’s traded in her off-the-shoulder gowns and high heels for jeans and snakeskin boots. No trainer ever showed up Derby Week before with glitter sprinkled through the hair and perfume behind the ears.

You can get 30-1 if you like the chances of her horse in the Kentucky Derby but you could have got nearly that--21-1--if you’d liked him in the Jim Beam last month, which he won gamely. It’s a good thing his trainer is pretty because Kingpost, Dianne’s horse would have a tough job getting a dance if he were in a stag line. Not that it would bother him. He’s been neutered. His owner notes that he looks a little like an anteater with a saddle on him.

To Dianne, he looks like a young Redford and Newman with elements of Omar Sharif. He may not be the best horse in the race but he’s the most pampered. Dianne has never even yelled at him. He’s the only horse in the race whose handler will say, “Poor baby!” if he throws in a clunker.

If he wins, of course, he becomes an instant movie star. Much has been made of the possibility of a filly, Winning Colors, winning this race. That will be considered a blow for femininity everywhere.

But, shoot! Fillies have won the Derby twice in 114 years. It’s practically commonplace.

No filly has ever saddled a winner, though. And they’ve never had a Miss Mississippi in the winner’s circle.

This may be a year when a lot of longshots come in. The horse is a gelding, the trainer a honey and, if we can find Doris Day for the part, an Academy Award is not completely out of the question.