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watched it being moved with us. They were in their nineties at the time. The stars really lined up out here.”
Leigh and her family mainly live in Pacific Palisades, but have their home here and strong family ties to
Montecito. “My great uncle William Riley McKeen was an inventor and had a house here on Jameson Lane in
the 1920s with a private beach somewhere near the Miramar,” says Leigh, adding, “He was the owner of the
McKeen Motor Car Company and was a builder of internal combustion-engined railroad motor cars (railcars),
constructing 152 between 1905–1917. The Union Pacific had asked him to develop a way of running small
passenger trains more economically, and he produced a design that was ahead of its time.”
Leigh’s sister, Laurie Brecheen Ballard, lives here too, on Padaro Lane, and is a sculptor. One of the
pioneering female polo players, “[Laurie] was the first non-spouse woman playing member at the Santa Barbara
Polo Club back in the 1970s. She was a ‘one-goal’ player and really, really good. She had a lot of back problems,
so now she does some riding but is mostly a sculptor and is represented by a couple of galleries here and on the
East Coast doing equestrian sculptures.”
[Polo Players are rated yearly by their peers in the USPA (United States Polo Association) on a scale of minus 2
to 10 goals. The term “goal” does not refer to how many goals a player scores in a match but indicates the player’s value
to the team. Each player is ranked according to their performance, during the course of the year, in main tournaments
around the world. Minus 2 indicates a novice player, while a player rated at 10 goals has the highest handicap possible.
There are only a handful of 10-goal players in the world and about two-thirds of all players handicapped are rated at
two goals or less.]
An Early Start
Leigh and her sister grew up riding and playing tennis daily on a remote ranch their parents had in Arizona.
“My mother was a Yankee from the East Coast, and my father was from Louisiana. They were both sort of
rebellious and started the first tennis club in Arizona, and then they bought this ranch in the middle of nowhere,
twenty miles from the nearest paved road that some crazy architect and his rich wife built. Beautiful, but really
remote,” says Leigh.
“My parents’ only rule was ‘no saddle,’ so I was always riding bareback with my sister. I also started playing
competitive tennis at age seven. My parents had deliberately chosen a very unusual life. They were a little older
and sort of retreated from the whole East Coast WASPy upbringing of my mother and my father from his
corporate existence,” explains Leigh, adding, “One of the reasons they moved down there was they didn’t want
us to watch television – ever – so we didn’t even have one, which is ironic since my sister ended up working in
advertising and I work in television. They wanted us to only listen to classical music, which we did for a long
time. They wanted us to have this very free existence, but again safe enough – so ‘no saddle.’ We literally just ran
around, we’d go out, find the horses, climb on, and off we’d go,” says Leigh.
“‘No saddle’ because if you get your foot hooked in the stirrup you could be dragged and it is very dangerous,
and we were literally in the middle of nowhere surrounded by thousands of acres of national forest and they didn’t
want to be telling us that we couldn’t do things. They figured that if we fell off with no saddle we’d be fine, and
in general they were right, although I have scars from head to toe. I grew up like a little wild Indian,” says Leigh,
noting she then started riding English and somehow fell in love with it in the middle of “all these cowboys,” and
so the foundation for polo was there.
Leigh reports she went to boarding school in New England at Abbot, which is now Phillips Andover,
followed by college at Mills in Northern California, then back to Arizona for law school. After about a year in
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a passion for Polo