Carry Me BACK: It Happened One Day

Carry Me BACK: It Happened One Day

By Jimmy Hatcher

Claudette Colbert 1903-1996

Jimmy Hatcher

Photo © by Vicky Moon

Claudette Colbert, an Oscar-winning movie star, was doing theater in Washington with co-star Joseph Cotton. She had been a frequent guest at Sun Valley, Idaho when Averell Harriman had been the CEO of the Union Pacific Railroad and also founded the resort.

Averell and his wife, Pamela, invited her to lunch one Sunday at their Middleburg estate near Foxcroft school.

Some months before, we had gone to Jeanne Paisley’s to try out a field hunter for Mrs. Harriman. The horse didn’t quite suit Pamela, but she did spy a glorious looking two-year-old in a paddock and since Averell had not yet bought her a birthday present, she decided the two-year-old would do just nicely.

As a three-year-old, the horse was sent to Scott Williamson for training And Mrs. Harriman and I had planned to go see him school the horse that Sunday afternoon. Mrs. Harriman thought Colbert would have a Sunday matinee so we booked the schooling session for late afternoon. It turned out there was no matinee, and Colbert was very interested in seeing the colt.

So over to Scott’s place we three went, with Pamela driving, Claudette Colbert sitting next to her up front and me in the backseat answering questions. After the colt had performed, it was back to the Harrimans we went, with the same order of seating.

Early the following year, the Harrimans were scheduled to go to Barbados with friends by private jet, so it was decided that I also would go along to see a horse we had bought for Mrs. Harriman to hunt. Katie Prudent had him in Florida trying to determine if it would make a decent show horse.

The jet had a back-of-the-plane seating area and after a while the Harrimans and their guests, including me, ended up there for lunch. I was seated across from a guest named Bubbles Hornblower, the widow of film producer Arthur Hornblower who had been a pal of Pamela’s. Harriman’s second husband, Leland Hayward. (Her first husband was Randolph Churchill, the son of Winston Churchill.)

After lunch, Pamela decided to take a nap and she put her newspaper over her face. Mrs. Hornblower and I got to chatting and I asked her how long she was staying in Barbados. Three days with the Harrimans, she said, and the rest with a friend from back home in Hollywood.

From behind the newspaper, Mrs. Harriman awoke and revealed rather loudly that Mrs. Hornblower’s host in Hollywood would be a certain Academy Award winning actress born in France. She won the Oscar for the 1934 film, “It Happened One Night.”

Said I, “Of course I know Claudette Colbert.”