Bill Pearson, 82; Jockey and Dealer of Art and Antiques
"I'm reconciled to the fact that I will never get out of this life alive. And while I'm still breathing, I'm going to live it up."
-- Billy Pearson to Parade magazine, 1959
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Pearson obituary -- An obituary of jockey and art dealer Bill Pearson in the Dec. 10 California section stated that he donated a painting to Scripps College in Pomona. The college is actually in Claremont.
He was a small man -- 5 feet 2 inches and 105 pounds -- yet larger than life. He wrote his autobiography, "Never Look Back," in 1958, but added so many adventures over the last 44 years that he stacked up enough material for a whole series of sequels.
Bill Austin "Billy" Pearson, world-traveling jockey, megabucks quiz show winner, self-taught art connoisseur and dealer who made fortunes and gambled and partied them away with such high-living friends as director John Huston and actors Sterling Hayden and Burl Ives, has died. He was 82.
Pearson, who straddled horses from Santa Anita to Siam but preferred a well-stitched quilt to a thoroughbred, died Thanksgiving Day in Kingston, N.Y., where he lived in a 1730s stone house with his sixth wife, Margaret.
The inveterate chain-smoker and heavy drinker of the best that money could buy ended what his daughter Sarah Luck Pearson called his "magical life" by dying of pneumonia, after suffering from emphysema and heart disease.
Pearson was always a good story -- for the sports pages that recorded his 826 track victories; for television where he wowed viewers of "The $64,000 Question" and "The $64,000 Challenge" with his arcane knowledge of art; and on the pages of Architectural Digest, which raved about the 17 historic homes he refurbished and decorated with his eclectic art collection.
Fortunately for interviewers, his mouth was as good as his eye.
"It doesn't take a college graduate to appreciate a painting or a symphony, and it's proved by the fact that a snot-nosed 5-foot-2 ex-delinquent like me can be an art authority," he told a writer for a 1967 Times article. "And that's the way it should be."
As for what he really thought of horses, he told the San Francisco newspaper columnist Herb Caen in 1986, "I hate horses. They're dumber than canaries and don't know a thing about art."
In the early 1950s -- when Pearson was still riding at Santa Anita and Hollywood Park and tracks in Athens, Milan, France, Britain and Ireland, and in the former Ceylon, Malaya and Siam -- sports columnist Ned Cronin announced that he planned to make his fortune writing a book about Pearson.
