Santa Anita Park

Santa Anita Park is the racetrack where O. J. Berman says he first encountered Holly Golightly. In his account, the track is the starting point of her passage from a teenager living around racing stables to a prospective Hollywood screen-test candidate—and of the independence that led her to abandon that prospect.

Berman’s First Encounter

Berman recalls finding Holly at Santa Anita, where she spent every day and was attached to a jockey. He says he learned she was fifteen and living with the jockey, then warned him to end the arrangement lest the vice squad become involved. Berman presents himself as having first recognized her professional potential while she was still a child at the track.

His memory emphasizes how little he knew about her beginnings. Holly wore thick glasses, and her accent left him unsure whether she was a hillbilly or an Okie; he guesses that no one would ever know where she came from. He calls her a liar so persistent that she might no longer know her own origins. The track encounter thus introduces both the raw material Berman claims to have shaped and the uncertainty surrounding Holly’s identity.

From the Track to Hollywood

Berman says he spent a year smoothing out Holly’s accent. French lessons, he explains, gave her a way to imitate French before she learned to imitate English. He also says that he modeled her after Margaret Sullavan while allowing for the individual qualities that made people interested in her. The account makes the racetrack the first step in a deliberate transformation: Berman found Holly there, then tried to turn her unusual presence into a screen persona.

According to Berman, Holly attracted influential interest, and Benny Polan, whom he describes as a respected man, wanted to marry her. Berman believed that her prospects were advancing when she was considered for a nurse’s role in The Story of Dr. Wassell, directed by Cecil B. DeMille and starring Gary Cooper. He had arranged for a screen test and expected Holly to return for it.

Departure and Significance

Instead, Berman recounts, Holly telephoned from New York the day before the test and said she did not want the part. When he demanded to know what she wanted instead, she told him he would be the first to know when she found out. Berman dismisses her explanation as nonsense, but the sequence establishes that she chose to leave a promising opportunity rather than pursue the future he had arranged for her.

Santa Anita Park matters in Berman’s retrospective because it anchors his claim to have discovered Holly and exposes the limits of his authority over her. He can describe the lessons, image-making, and career opportunity he helped provide; he cannot make her want the role. The contrast between the girl he first watched at the track and the young woman who departs for New York turns the location into the beginning of a trajectory defined as much by refusal as by professional ambition.