CNN.com - Entertainment - Author escapes illness with stirring 'Seabiscuit'
A horse with heart, a suffering writer
| Laura Hillenbrand | |
By Jamie Allen
CNN
(CNN) -- Long before Laura Hillenbrand was the highly praised author of "Seabiscuit: An American Legend," a nonfiction Random House book that's being turned into a movie by Universal Studios, she had dreams of earning a doctorate in history, then teaching and writing about the subject.
This was in 1987, during Hillenbrand's sophomore year at Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio. She was in her physical prime, she says, "playing tennis and cycling long distances several times a week."
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But her body betrayed her ambitions. Hillenbrand came down with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (CFS), a debilitating illness that saps the energy from the body. There's no known cure.
Too exhausted to do more than survive in bed each day, Hillenbrand dropped out of college, never to return. Her professorial dreams were shattered.
"It was so demoralizing to lose my body and begin to realize that my whole future may be set on its ear," Hillenbrand, now 33, says. "The thing that helped me was, instead of spending my life thinking about how I can get over (CFS), now I spend my life thinking about how to get around it, and how to succeed in spite of it," she says.
It's working. As a field of modern-day hopefuls ready for a run for the roses at the 127th Kentucky Derby this Saturday, many observers in the horse world are also talking about the past.
Hillenbrand's earning raves for her retelling of Seabiscuit's improbable run in the 1930s, when he transformed from claimer horse with a "difficult" streak and the body of a cow pony to the celebrated champion of a country steeped in financial chaos and talk of a second world war.
"Seabiscuit: An American Legend" is a fast-paced history. It recaptures the lives of the men who came together, in an almost magical confluence of events, to bring Seabiscuit to the American people.
'Window to the world'
Hillenbrand, who lives in Washington, still suffers from CFS. In fact, the added stress associated with promoting the book has caused a relapse of vertigo, which keeps her from doing what she loves best: writing.
It was like that when she was trying to tap out 339 pages on Seabiscuit. Hillenbrand wrote her book one paragraph at a time, taking breaks between each one to regain strength and gather equilibrium.
Hillenbrand had earlier discovered writing as an escape from the misery of her illness. She capitalized on her childhood love of horses -- her father had a Maryland farm where she learned to ride, and he took her to her first horse race when she was 5 -- to write feature pieces for Equus and other horse industry magazines.
Though she rarely got out from behind her desk, it gave her "a window into the world," she says.
"Having this disease is like living in a phone booth," she says. "The world goes on around you, but you can't get out and you're in this extremely tiny place all the time.
"Writing has been my savior, in a way," she says.
Seabiscuit's run
Hillenbrand says she read about Seabiscuit when she was a child -- how the horse with the crooked legs and raggedy tail became a national sensation in Depression-era United States, hitting his career peak when he took on Triple Crown winner War Memorial -- two years his junior -- in a 1938 match race at Pimlico Race Track in Baltimore, Maryland.
The race split the nation between War Memorial's East Coast fans, and Seabiscuit's supporters from the West. Seabiscuit would win in a stirring stretch run, and that year the horse claimed more inches of newspaper coverage than Roosevelt, Hitler or Mussolini.
Hillenbrand believes the story of the horse lies as much in those who surrounded him, and her attention to them paints a picture of early 20th century America and its golden age of horse racing.
Seabiscuit's owner, Charles Howard, was a Buick dealer in San Francisco, California, who helped usher in the automobile in the American West while shoving aside the horse-drawn carriage. Seabiscuit's trainer, Tom Smith, was a western wrangler who once broke mustangs for soldiers in the Boer War.
The horse's jockey, Red Pollard, was abandoned at a racetrack as boy, and later was blinded in one eye in an accident involving a racehorse. He was on his way out of the sport when Seabiscuit came along and gave him the ride of his life.
"Red just perseveres," says Hillenbrand, who says she identified with Pollard.
Right rein, left lead
But perennial underdog Seabiscuit is the star of Hillenbrand's story. Though he was the grandson of the legendary Man O' War, his first trainer, the great Sunny Jim Fitzsimmons, found him impossible to work with.
"He was a very difficult animal," says Hillenbrand. "This was a horse who, if you pulled the right rein he'd go left."
Eventually, Hillenbrand writes, Smith took the horse under his care, and found something more -- the heart of a champion.
"He exhibited tremendous intelligence," says Hillenbrand. "And he liked to mess around with his opponents on the track. He didn't just want to beat them. He really wanted to break their hearts ... He would let them get ahead for just a minute and then turn it on and crush them."
Now, a new generation of readers is learning of Seabiscuit's accomplishments. Movie-goers might see it, too. Universal officials tell Hillenbrand that pending a work stoppage among writers, the project has received the green light.
Hillenbrand sees the acclaim as icing on the cake, or roses after a race. She says she found something extra in Seabiscuit's run, something that took her away from her own condition.
"This story, with people this vigorous, it was just an escape from a body like mine," she says. "I am the ultimate stationary person and these are the ultimate in vigorous people. It's been very therapeutic."
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'Seabiscuit: An American Legend'
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