Sport: Lady's Day in Louisville

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Churchill Downs in the pre-Derby dawn is a heady place. Drifting wood smoke, dampened by morning dew, cuts the sharp, ammoniac smell of the stables. From the tarns, where skittish thoroughbreds are breakfasting, comes the metallic clank of feed tubs, or an occasional hoof thump. Sleepy-eyed grooms and exercise boys, clutching their mugs of coffee, shuffle through the shadows.

Even at that hour, feed-box tips are in (he air. This week those tips had more than the usual ring of authority. Nobody had to look far to find the favorites in this week's 72nd Kentucky Derby.* They were two—Lord Boswell and Knockdown —and both belong to fluttery Cosmeti-queen Elizabeth Arden Graham, whose Maine Chance Farm Stable has the winningest ways in U.S. turfdom. Early this week, they were prohibitive favorites.

Anything can happen in a horse race—and Derby favorites have flopped 50% of the time. Tipsters last week were full of white hopes and dark horses. Other doting owners (some 18 in all) would not pay the $1,000 entry fee just to see their colors flutter on Derby Day. The Downs was alive with regional prides: Marine Victory, the Maryland horse; Pellicle, Kentucky's own; and a big Texas-born chestnut named Assault, which had won Jamaica's Wood Memorial Stakes—a proving ground for five Derby winners—in wagon-horse time. Assault is known as the New York horse.

The Arden Varsity. No geographical tag could be pinned on the Arden steeds. They had no place they could call home, despite their perfume-selling owner's sumptuous, 2,000-acre estate in Maine, and her only slightly less magnificent places in North Carolma and Arizona. Elizabeth Arden horses hit the road all year, trouping from track to track.

The horse of hers that horsemen like best is cranky, gluttonous Lord Boswell. He is solid brown, not too big, with slim neck and the kind of pointed head horses have in old racing prints. He tries to nip and kick his ancient Negro groom, who calls him "Boss Man." His appetite is so voracious that he has to be muzzled to keep him from eating his bedding. Not long ago, his stableboys found the glass of two electric light bulbs mysteriously crunched out, and Lord Boswell up on his hind legs licking another bulb. Now Boss Man has no light in his stall.

Last week, after waiting around to see which of several mounts he wanted in the Derby, 30-year-old Jockey Eddie ("Banana Nose") Arcaro, who has ridden the winners of three Derbies, climbed up on Lord Boswell in the 1⅛-mile Blue Grass Stakes at Keeneland in Lexington, Ky. What happened reminded oldtimers of such valiant past performers as Display and Exterminator. After almost getting left at the post, Boss Man got going when the race was nearly over, charged hell-for-leather through & around horses in the stretch, won by a neck. Said amazed Eddie Arcaro, who has ridden many a champion: "He's a hell of a horse—when you really dig into him."