CROWNING GLORY : Cars Go Too Fast for Howard B. Keck; He Prefers Horses, Such as Ferdinand

There is in horse racing today only one breeder with a chance to win the 1986 Triple Crown.

He is Howard B. Keck of Los Angeles, a retired oilman whose hobby for the last half-century has been creating things that go fast.

Animate things or inanimate, four-legged, or four-wheeled, it doesn’t much matter. His bag is the engineering.

Three years ago, Keck created the horse that won the Kentucky Derby earlier this month under a 54-year-old rider, Bill Shoemaker.

That is, after many months of study and consideration at Keck’s home here and on a farm in Kentucky, he decided to mate Ferdinand’s mom and pop. Now owned by Keck’s wife Elizabeth, Ferdinand will try for the second jewel in the Triple Crown, the Preakness, Saturday at Baltimore.

Three decades ago, Keck bred a race car that won the Indianapolis 500 in successive years, 1953 and ’54.

That is, he made the decisions that took the car off the drawing board and equipped it with the latest in mid-century innovations before he put it into the hands of a driver who was as gifted and competitive as Shoemaker, the late Bill Vukovich.

It was in a car driven by Vukovich that one of the Keck team’s most clever innovations was first exhibited. They called it fuel injection.

All things considered, Keck rates as a most unusual speed merchant. He is the only man whose entries have won both the Indy 500 and the Kentucky Derby.

It is a parlay that may never be equaled, although A.J. Foyt, a four-time Indy winner, has a shot at it. His horse, Rare Brick, won seven straight races and was to have entered the Kentucky Derby this year if he had run well in the Arkansas Derby, but he was injured and taken out of training in early April.

Still, Keck hasn’t given his unique accomplishment much thought. “I feel fortunate,” he said in a recent interview.

Then he dropped the subject.

“I’ve never kept a scrapbook,” he said. “I don’t keep many souvenirs, and I can’t remember much about (Indy). I got out a long time ago. Of the two, I prefer horse racing to auto racing for one reason. Horses never crash and burn.”

As an Indy car owner, Keck never had to worry about scraping up enough cash to keep the operation going. Until the 1980s, he was president and chairman of Superior Oil, which he sold to Mobil two years ago for a tidy $5.7 billion.

A tall, cold, quiet, somewhat rumpled man, Keck, now 72, inherited more than $100 million from his father in the 1960s and ran it into $260 million. He is on Forbes’ list of the nation’s 400 wealthiest men.

So he sure wasn’t squeezed out of auto racing. He just didn’t like accidents.

“(Keck) was 9 years old when he saw his first (auto) race,” an acquaintance said. “He loved those fast cars. He loved to engineer them--to improve the breed--but then he got to a point of no return. It was kind of ironic--he improved them too much. He couldn’t stand to see the wrecks when they got to going so fast.”

So, in a manner of speaking, Keck traded his car for a horse.

That was in the mid-1950s, when he said goodby to the Torrance plant where he had built cars and hello to a Kentucky farm, where he began to breed thoroughbreds.

“I had cars at Indianapolis for six years,” Keck recalled. “I got out the last year I won. I didn’t even go back to see the race.”

In an era before rear engines, wings and sidepods, Vukovich in 1954 became the first Indianapolis driver to average a breathtaking 130 m.p.h.

“I didn’t want any more of that,” Keck said. “There was an obvious potential for disaster, and I didn’t want to be responsible. Soon afterward, they killed 80 people in one accident at LeMans.

“Personally, the worst for me was that the year after I got out, Vukovich was killed at Indianapolis. I haven’t been to a race since Vukovich died.”

Nor does he watch horse races, these days, as a rule. He said he has been to the Kentucky Derby only four times in 30 years. He is never seen at Hollywood Park, and rarely at Santa Anita.

The spectacle of the contest grips him not at all.

At Churchill Downs this month, he placed no bets on Ferdinand, who paid $37.40. On the afternoon of the biggest handle in turf history, a $13-million afternoon, Keck didn’t contribute a dime.

“I never bet,” he said.

In the old days, Keck maintained a similar detachment from auto racing.

Former business friends remember that he was on a golf course a thousand miles from Indianapolis the day his car first qualified for an Indy race.

A breathless young employee found him on a green and said, enthusiastically: “We just got the word, Mr. Keck. You qualified.”

Keck’s smile was brief and not very warm. “Thank you,” he replied. Then, turning to another golfer, he said, “You’re away.”

Warm has never been the word for Howard Keck. A formidably private man, he seems at all times to be elusive, reserved, reticent, almost reclusive. In the year or so it took him to dispose of Superior Oil in 1984, no financial reporter could find him. To this day, most sportswriters don’t like to interview him. He is estranged from some of his family.

Conviviality is time-wasting, a like-minded spirit once said. Keck has always been too busy for it.

The son and grandson of wildcat drillers, he was born in Trinidad during World War I when his father, William M. Keck, was drilling in the British West Indies. About the same time, W.M. put together Superior Oil.

At 20, Howard went into the oil fields himself after high school and never got around to college.

One of six children, he is the father of three daughters and a son. The son chose banking over oil.

Howard’s office is in downtown Los Angeles. With his wife Elizabeth, he lives in a king-sized French chateau on several acres of Bel-Air.

The Keck house is one of the most remarkable in a remarkable neighborhood. Genuinely royal French in every architectural particular, it could be the setting for a TV series rivaling “Dallas.”

Indeed, the members of the oil-rich, feuding Keck family, who for years have fought for money and power in a petroleum empire, are a kind of California counterpart of the oil-rich, feuding Ewing family of Dallas.

For a visual TV intro, the Kecks’ Bel-Air chateau would be at least as fulfilling as the sprawling Ewing ranch house.

Elizabeth Keck, who married Howard 30-some years ago, has been a lifelong Francophile. If she couldn’t live in the French countryside, she would bring it to California, and did, erecting an austere, entirely authentic 17th Century stone mansion, and installing a collection of priceless 17th and 18th Century French furniture.

Her bedroom lamps “once graced the boudoir of Marie Antoinette,” a Herald Examiner writer, Hunter Drohojowska, reported after the Kecks had built the house seven years ago.

In a high-powered TV series that might be labeled, let’s say, “Bel-Air,” many of the scenes, unlike those of “Dallas,” could be drawn from real life.

One scene, for example, would have to be played at the Houston airport. There, a dozen or so years ago, Howard Keck and his brother, W.M. Jr., returned to company headquarters from a business trip to Canada.

Nothing unusual about that, you say?

Suppose they landed in company jets--two of them?

That’s the way the family traveled in those days. As president, Howard allowed W.M. Jr. to use a corporate plane, just as long as it wasn’t the one he was in, and provided W.M. Jr. didn’t call up on the radio. Howard wasn’t speaking to him.

Imagine them radioing the tower for permission to land in Houston:

“Here comes Mr. Keck from Winnipeg in a Gulfstream,” a controller says.

Seconds later, he says: “Here comes Mr. Keck from Winnipeg in a Gulfstream. Wait a minute, what is this?”

It was merely a family war. W.M. Sr., who died at 84 in 1964, had granted sole corporate power to “my son Howard.” But W.M. Jr. was the older son, so Howard had to keep fighting for his rights until W.M. Jr. died in 1982.

Then, almost immediately, their sister took up the challenge.

The “Bel-Air” cameras will now focus on Mrs. Willametta Keck Day, who wants brother Howard to sell the company. Keck bitterly declines. So Day takes her case to a group of investment bankers. In a stormy scene, Keck still refuses to sell.

Day at last wins a proxy fight and encourages a group of outsiders to work up takeover bids.

Frustrated, Keck resigns as Superior’s head man. But he continues to fight Day for six months, when he abruptly reverses position, and starts soliciting buyers himself, shocking the whole family. When Mobil finally takes him up, they swing the fifth-largest merger ever as Day and Keck walk away into the sunset with packs of new money.

They walk away separately, though, and not happily. Day goes home--and promptly sues Keck, again.

What’s wrong now?

She thinks he’s charging too much to run the family’s trusts, the W.M. Keck Foundation and five others.

The suit is pending.

Keck today is the unpaid president of the foundation, he said. His new vocation is private investor. He works out of a high-rise office on Flower Street that would please J.R. Ewing.

From picture windows on the 36th floor of the Bank of America building, Keck can see a lot of California, which gets him one up on J.R., who can only see Texas.

From time to time, “Bel-Air” flashbacks show Keck hunting big game, Keck playing big-time polo, Keck advising Vukovich at Indianapolis, Keck breeding Ferdinand in Kentucky, and Keck toying with a big telescope. He is also an amateur astronomer.

The 400-inch telescope Caltech is constructing for a Hawaii installation soon--it will be the world’s largest spyglass--was financed with $70 million from the W.M. Keck Foundation.

Let J.R. top that.

The female star of “Bel-Air” is Elizabeth Keck, the stylish builder of the mansion and the legal owner of Ferdinand.

It has been said that Elizabeth is the only Keck who has never feuded with Howard.

One flashback shows them eloping to Reno. She is 18 at the time, he is in his 30s.

That was four adult children ago, although a friend, Santa Anita publicist Jane Goldstein, says Elizabeth doesn’t look it. Howard maybe, but not Elizabeth.

Elizabeth’s background, like Howard’s, is in oil. Her father was a doctor, but the oil fields lured him away from his practice. She can understand it. Oil is like that.

In “Bel-Air,” nonetheless, her dinner guests aren’t all oilmen, or even horsemen. The viewer is more likely to see an episode with Armand Deutsch at the Kecks’ buffet table, or William French Smith, or the Ronald Reagans.

There will also be episodes in which Elizabeth, a former Juilliard student, is playing the piano, or painting. She is a prominent abstract painter.

In the beginning, she didn’t share Howard’s passion for horses, preferring to shop for 17th Century furniture. But one day when she couldn’t even find an 18th Century teacup, she came home and said: “Howard, I’d love to own a horse some time. May I?”

Brightening, he replied: “My dear, I’ll make a deal with you. Any horse you want, it’s yours.”

Before long, Elizabeth was racing as many as 15 of Howard’s best thoroughbreds at the same time, mostly on California tracks.

On a trip to the Kentucky ranch with her husband, she spotted an awkward young colt with what people said was a kind of gentle, bovine face. For her, it was love at first sight. She had to have him, she said.

This was Ferdinand.

Why did she name a horse after a bull?

As Howard tells it, he returned from an African safari not long ago with a quaint present for his wife, a soapstone rendering of a water buffalo. Noticing a bullish resemblance, she called it Ferdinand. And when Howard’s next present was a horse, the name came to mind again.

Well, why not?

The Kecks are confident that Ferdinand will go on to win the Triple Crown. Just in case, though, the breeder has resumed breeding.

He doesn’t expect to have a Kentucky Derby winner every year, but he’ll keep trying.

“It’s a fascinating business,” Keck said. “You’re watching four generations at one time. The most interesting thing is the young stock. I breed my own, you know--don’t sell much, don’t buy much--so the keeping track is what’s fun. Planning ahead. Watching the results.”

Sometimes it can be frustrating.

“Half of your horses never make the race track,” he said. “The object, of course, is to breed the best with the best--but the Mendelian theory (covering the laws of heredity) doesn’t invariably apply to the breeding of horses. This isn’t an exact science.”

Thinking it over, he said that, to an investor, the difference between auto racing and horse racing is that it’s much harder to improve the breed in Kentucky than in Gasoline Alley.

More than 30 years after commissioning his last race cars, he said: “It’s too easy to make them too fast.”

The Kentucky Derby is run in 2 minutes every May, give or take a few seconds. The averages at Indianapolis the same month, which were just reaching 130 m.p.h. in Keck’s day, are over 160 today. On a typical lap, an Indy car goes well over 200.

“That’s too swift for me,” he said.