By Tobi Lopez Taylor
This essay is part of the ongoing Arizona Horse History Project series, which also includes posts on Penny Chenery and Secretariat, Hank the Cowdog, Man O’ War’s son By Hisself, Major-General Jonathan Burton, and Doc Pardee.
In October 1971, Hall of Fame jockey Bill Shoemaker won the sixth race at Santa Anita on a filly named June Almy, bred and owned by Frank Brophy of Phoenix, Arizona. For Shoemaker, it was just another day at the office. For Brophy, this filly’s name was a sly nod to his state’s storied past.
Frank Cullen Brophy was a native Arizonan, born in the border town of Bisbee in 1894. The son of banker and wealthy businessman William H. Brophy, Frank—who’d wanted to be a writer—became, as he called it, a “reluctant banker” at age 28 when his father drowned during a fishing trip near Tiburon Island off the coast of Guaymas, Mexico in 1922. Until that time, Frank admitted, he’d had a “prior lifetime of irresponsibility and fun with a token interest in Elizabethan English to vindicate the years of prep school and college [Yale] that my family had lavished on me. Fortunately, the spirit was willing, even though the flesh and its worldly knowledge seemed to be hopelessly inadequate to the job I faced” (Journal of Arizona History Vol. 15, No. 2, p. 172).
Over the next decades, Brophy learned on the job and eventually “served as a director, then president and chairman of the board, of the Bank of Douglas for 35 years until he resigned in 1958, ending a 70-year family tradition in Arizona banking” (Arizona Republic, 4 February 1978). Brophy’s first love, aside from his family, was decidedly not banking—it was ranching and horses. In 1920, the year after Frank wed Sallie Blake, the couple established a ranch on 160 acres in Phoenix, near what is now Northern and Central Avenues. In 1928, a year before the start of the Great Depression, Brophy’s mother founded the Jesuit-run Brophy College (now a high school named Brophy College Preparatory) in memory of her late husband and provided an endowment of $250,000 (Arizona Republic, 8 September 1928).
By the spring of 1933, Brophy College was in such severe financial straits that a benefit horse show was planned to raise money for the ailing institution. It was held in the arena of the Arizona Biltmore Hotel, and the master of ceremonies was C. W. “Doc” Pardee, well-known Arizona horseman, rider of Man O’ War, and friend of Frank Brophy; the latter’s horse Slippery won the show’s jumping class.
Although the Phoenix area would become famous in the 1950s for its celebrated Arabian horse ranches and the annual Scottsdale Arabian Horse Show, back in 1933 it was rare for any Arizona horse show to hold even one Arabian class. At the Brophy College benefit, the Arabian Stallions class had three entries. The winner, owned by Mrs. Pearl Gray Clyde, was Hassan, the first son of the famous champion stallion Antez (later the grandsire of Mister Ed); Clyde had paid Hassan’s breeder, cereal magnate W. K. Kellogg, $1,500 (equal to $23,000 today) for the colt a year earlier. In second place was a stallion, reputedly imported from France in 1928, called variously “Megmesi” or “Nejne Si.” (Stud book and pedigree information for this horse has yet to be found.) This French stallion was owned by the beautiful former Paris model, June Almy, a recent transplant to Arizona.
Fred then became a rodeo performer in noted promoter Tex Austin’s shows—or, as the same Tacoma Tribune reporter less accurately put it, “Tex Austin drifted through Arizona, and noting Almy’s art, lured him into joining the national rodeo. Almy agreed, for he was wearying of the west, and the big show moved into Madison Square Garden New York. After a tour of the provinces and prairies, Austin was ready to disperse it then, but Fred said: ‘Listen, Tex, let’s herd the whole outfit over to England and show them real cowboys.’”
Austin—born Clarence Van Nostrand in Missouri—made enough money in the rodeo business that he was able to buy 5,500 acres in New Mexico, where he established Forked Lightning Ranch, visited by the likes of Will Rogers and Charles and Ann Lindbergh. The main ranch house was one of the first works by noted architect John Gaw Meem, who also renovated the ranch house at Los Poblanos Ranch, in Albuquerque, for Albert Simms and Ruth Hanna McCormick Simms (mother of noted Arabian horse breeder Bazy Tankersley).
In 1924, Fred was just one of the hundreds of cowboys who participated in Austin’s exhibition at Wembley Stadium, in London—the first rodeo in England. While there, Fred “was said to have attracted the attention of the Dowager Lady [Michelham], widow of a banker [Herbert Stern, 1st Baron Michelham], when he gallantly doffed his 10-gallon hat to her while bulldogging a steer” (New York Times, 22 April 1965).
Baron Michelham, who died in 1919, had been a successful owner and breeder of Thoroughbred racehorses. The horse with whom he is most associated nowadays is the mare Plucky Liege (Spearmint–Concertina, by St. Simon), widely hailed as one of the most influential broodmares of her era. Among her produce were *Sir Gallahad III, sire of Triple Crown winner Gallant Fox (and grandsire of another Triple Crown winner, Omaha); *Bull Dog (grandsire of Triple Crown winner Citation); and Bois Roussel, a winner of the Epsom Derby whose likeness was sculpted by Arthur Gredington for the British ceramic manufacturer Royal Doulton. It is said that there is scarcely a Thoroughbred alive today that is not a descendant of Plucky Liege.
Baron Michelham’s widow married Fred in February 1926 in Clearwater, Florida; she was 43, and he was 38. Within months she became ill, and she died the following January, “leaving the bulk of her fortune, estimated at $50 million, to Mr. Almy. In the inheritance was said to have been a palatial house in Paris, which Lord Michelham had lent to Prime Minister David Lloyd George as his residence and British headquarters during the 1919 Peace Conference” (New York Times, 2 January 1927).
Not long after his first wife’s death, Fred received an invitation to a fashion show from a French salon that she had often patronized, and he decided to attend the event by himself. There, he met a 20-year-old British model named June Dibble. They were married the following month in Paris and began spending their way through the Michelham fortune. The media dubbed Fred the “Cowboy Millionaire,” and for a number of years, everything he and his new bride did seemed to make the papers.
Fred, however, hadn’t forgotten his Arizona friends. A newspaper article from January 1927, only weeks before his second marriage, noted that Fred had shipped two purebred Arabian stallions from Europe to General Levi Manning, onetime mayor of Tucson, Arizona, credited as the first breeder of purebred Arabian horses in the state. The headline read: “Fred Alma [sic] Coming from Abroad With Papers of Pedigree for Manning’s New Arabian Horses—‘Finest Ever Seen’” (Tucson Citizen, 19 January 1927). (Unfortunately, the names of these two horses are not known.) By this time, Manning already owned the Arabian stallions El Jafil (*Ibn Mahruss x Sheba), Jarad (Ziki x Tamarisk), Kalub (Ziki x Hasiker), and Saraband (Harara x Sedjur), all of which he had acquired from California with the help of a man named Hamilton Bassett, a self-proclaimed horse authority whose British-born wife passed herself off as “Lady” Betty Bassett. (One article about the couple noted incorrectly that Hamilton was “the first man to penetrate into [Tibet]” and that “Lady” Betty was the daughter of “Sir Joseph Grice-Emerson, and is a noted adventuress and explorer” (Republican-Gazette [Gove City, Kansas], 26 August 1915).
Fred and June began buying vast tracts of land in Arizona, including a 30-acre parcel in what is now metropolitan Phoenix, southwest of the intersection of Seventh and Maryland Avenues. While Fred purchased cattle, cars, and several Kentucky-bred racehorses, June became part of Phoenix’s social scene, showed horses, and even rode some of her husband’s racehorses at the Phoenix fairgrounds track.
By this time, Fred had become so well known across the U.S. that someone named a racehorse after him. Born in 1929, the equine Fred Almy (Jack Hare Jr–Eleanor S., by Ivan The Terrible), owned by Cora Polk, ran for nine seasons, started a whopping 194 times, and won 27, including the 1931 Juvenile Handicap at Agua Caliente, in Tijuana, Mexico—where the “Millionaire Cowboy” also ran his own racehorses. (Presumably, the human Fred Almy was aware of his namesake, but it’s not known what he thought of him.)
Things seemed to be going splendidly for the Almys. One Los Angeles reporter remarked, “Quite a character, this Almy. Known all over Arizona as the ‘Millionaire Cowboy.’ Owns about half the state of Arizona, his friends say, and the cattle roam far and free on his vast ranches” (Los Angeles Daily News, 4 February 1930). What Fred and June’s friends didn’t know, however, was that a large part of his fortune had been wiped out in the 1929 stock market crash. Within a couple of years, the thousands of acres the couple had purchased on credit went into receivership.
It’s unclear when June and Fred began to drift apart. In 1936, newspapers across the nation ran stories (complete with a topless photo) about June’s affair with a handsome married stockbroker named Jerry Wheelock. One reporter wrote, in a line that sounds particularly ludicrous to horse people, that Mrs. Wheelock demanded “a court snaffle to curb the Dawn Patrol canters of her playboy mate” (New York Daily News, 21 February 1936). By this time, June was living in New York and running a high-end florist shop. In 1939, June filed for divorce but asked for no alimony, as she was well aware that Fred had no money to give her (Albuquerque Journal, 10 November 1940). In fact, Fred was so poor that he didn’t have sufficient funds to attend his mother’s funeral. (Mrs. Almy wouldn’t have wanted him there, anyway, as she had cut him out of her will.)
As Fred’s adventures receded from the headlines, it was his ex-wife whose name was again on the ascendancy. June made the national news for the last time in early 1943 after reporters learned that she’d married a wealthy, divorced lumberman, Albert Stanwood “Stan” Murphy. When Stan’s former paramour—a washed-up actress named Madge Bellamy—heard the news, she became so enraged that she drove to Stan’s club on San Francisco’s Nob Hill, waited for him to exit, and then shot at him with her revolver, but missed. The Texas-born Bellamy, who later told reporters that she was a good shot and “could have hit him” if she’d really wanted to, found herself back in the limelight for the first time in decades.
Bellamy’s movie career had certainly had its highs and lows—early on, she’d appeared in two John Ford pictures, including The Iron Horse (1924), and she earned a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. However, as she grew more difficult to work with, the only parts she was offered were in lower-quality fare, such as 1932’s White Zombie (1932), starring Bela Lugosi. By the time she shot at Murphy, Bellamy hadn’t worked in pictures for six years. She never served time for her crime, and instead received a six-month suspended sentence for violating a gun law. Later in 1943, Bellamy sued Stan in Nevada, on the grounds that they had been married there in 1941. However, no evidence of their putative marriage ever came to light, and the case was dismissed. Stan reportedly gave her a six-figure settlement to get her out of his life.
Stan had become acquainted with Fred Almy several years before either of them met June. The two men had visited Arizona back when both of them were bachelors. In fact, in the summer of 1915, Stan and Fred dined together twice at Riverside, an amusement park south of downtown Phoenix that featured a large swimming pool, a zoo, and live music (Arizona Republic, 16 May and 20 June 1915). Stan married his first wife in 1917, and although the couple lived in California, they periodically visited Phoenix, where June and Stan likely became acquainted. As the San Francisco Chronicle noted, “No whirlwind romance was theirs, Stan and June having met some years ago when both had marital commitments” (10 January 1943).
The Murphys’ marriage appears to have been happier, and considerably more sedate, than their previous relationships. After 20 years of marriage to June, Stan died in April 1963 at age 70. Two years later, Fred Almy—who had eked out a living by hauling other people’s racehorses from track to track—died in his room at a seedy hotel near Hell’s Kitchen in New York. He was 77. For the next two decades, June lived quietly, never remarried, and passed away in San Francisco in 1986.
Three years after Fred Almy’s death, a chestnut filly was born on Frank Brophy’s 30,000-acre Babacomari Ranch in southern Arizona. Her sire, the stakes-winning Whodunit, stood at Claiborne Farm and was, like Secretariat, a grandson of *Princequillo. The filly’s dam, Flower Pot, a daughter of Delphinium, had been bred and raised by Brophy. By that time, Brophy had been breeding and racing Thoroughbreds in Arizona and California for four decades, had served on the board of the Arizona Racing Commission, and had been dubbed “the patriarch of Arizona racing.” There’s no indication that Brophy had kept in touch with June (Almy) Murphy since the 1930s. However, something about this particular filly clearly reminded him of the beautiful young model who, with her husband Fred, the onetime “Cowboy Millionaire,” kept Arizona residents—and the nation—riveted during the Depression as they blew through $50 million in track record time.
