Rin Tin Tin

by Susan Orlean

  The train ride back to California was tonic. Marching bands blared a welcome at many of the stops, crowds greeted the soldiers, Red Cross girls served ice cream. Lee fed his ice cream to Rin Tin Tin, and the dog developed a passion for it that he retained for the rest of his life.

  Lee was heading home, but he wasn’t sure where he was going. He was twenty-eight years old and still looked fresh and rugged, like a young cowboy, with a narrow frame and hardly any hips. He had a broad forehead, an aquiline nose, bright dark eyes, a flirtatious arch in his eyebrows, and a toothy smile. His hair had turned white at some point in his teenage years and he began to wear it longish and slicked straight back so that it looked like a silver cap, a bright shock against his skin. With the horror of the war now behind him, his only plan was to return to his job in the gun department at Bernal Dyas. What he wanted was to sweep back all the time that had passed since he left for France and find life just as he had left it.

  But of course nothing, really, was the same. California—the whole country, in fact—had changed since he’d left for the war. Bernal Dyas Sporting Goods had changed: the store had moved to a new location, and the gun department was now in the basement. It was a beautiful basement with a scale-model log cabin, a shooting range, and artificial trout pools for practice casting. Even so, Lee felt suffocated below ground. He found it disturbing to be around guns and ammunition. He spent as much time in the mountains as he could, hiking and swimming, but his distaste for guns was so strong that he stopped hunting, something he had done since he was a boy. At the store, business in the gun department had fallen off; Lee believed this was due to the war and the way it had peeled away the romance of shooting. “Every time I looked at a gun,” he told an interviewer many years later, “I remembered the buddies who didn’t come back.”

  Perhaps worst of all, Lee’s dog Firefly had died while he was away—news his mother delivered to him only after he got home. Then, a few days after settling in at home, Rin Tin Tin developed distemper, and for three weeks the dog was so sick that Lee wasn’t sure he would survive. Lee doted on him and fed him a home remedy of raw egg white in cherry wine, which he was convinced saved Rin Tin Tin’s life.

  Single and unmoored, he whiled away a year working at the store and playing with his dogs. Then the war came back to him. He developed a twitch in his left hand and a spasm on the left side of his face. He began having nightmares. He couldn’t stand being inside. He wrote in his memoir, “Things were so changed from the old days. I was restless and couldn’t get my feet on the ground, as it were.” His mother, who worked as a housekeeper, and his sister, who gave piano lessons, worried about him; they wanted him to settle down and hoped he might tease out a promotion at work and feel more contented. Instead, Lee asked the store for a leave of absence. He decided the cure was to look for a job outdoors—any job, the harder the better. He worked for several months on the crew building the Chalk Hill section of the highway running from Los Angeles to San Francisco. When the road was finished, he returned uneasily to the Dyas gun department.

  Meanwhile, just a few miles away, in Hollywood, the new industry of moviemaking was thriving. The first studio had opened in 1911, and by 1919 more than 80 percent of the movies being made in the world were coming out of Hollywood. Lee had a friend in the business, a barrel-chested comic named Eugene Pallette who was building a career as a character actor. By the time Lee came back from the war, Pallette had already appeared in almost one hundred films, including Texas Bill’s Last Ride, Birth of a Nation, Gretchen the Greenhorn, and Tarzan of the Apes. Lee and Pallette began taking Rin Tin Tin on trips in the Sierras; while Pallette hunted, Lee taught Rinty tricks. His plan for Rin Tin Tin was quite modest: he wanted to breed him and Nanette, sell a few puppies, and maybe make a name for himself and Rin Tin Tin at dog shows.

  2.

  Lee was not the only soldier to have brought home a dog, and he was one of many to come home with stories praising the German shepherds they’d seen in battle. As a result, the popularity of the breed in the United States after World War I grew quickly and somewhat heedlessly. Everyone wanted one of these remarkable dogs, and the rush to produce German shepherd puppies was already creating genetic problems such as weak hips and bad eyesight. The Shepherd Dog Club of America, trying to slow the deterioration of the breed, hired experts from Germany to tour the United States and conduct a “breed survey,” analyzing pedigrees and making recommendations to improve the breed’s genetics. Lee got to know other German shepherd fanciers in Los Angeles, and in 1922 he and a few others founded the Shepherd Dog Club of California. They scheduled their first show for the upcoming season in Pasadena.

  Rinty was three years old. He had lost his puppy fluffiness; his coat was lustrous and dark, nearly black, with gold marbling on his legs and chin and chest. His tail was as bushy as a squirrel’s. He wasn’t overly tall or overly broad, his chest wasn’t especially deep, his legs weren’t unusually muscular or long, but he was powerful and nimble, as light on his feet as a mountain goat. His ears were comically large, tulip-shaped, and set far apart on a wide skull. His face was more arresting than beautiful, his expression worried and pitying and generous: instead of a look of doggy excitement it was something more tender, a little sorrowful, as if he was viewing with charity and resignation the whole enterprise of living and striving and hoping.

  The dog show in Pasadena did not go as planned. Rinty demonstrated his athleticism but also his hot temper. He snapped and barked at the judges and was nearly unmanageable, all of which Lee ascribed to his “lack of ring technique” and being “so full of life and vigor.” The trip ended terribly. After the show, while Lee was walking Rinty, a newspaper delivery truck passed them on the street, and a worker pitched a heavy bundle of papers off the back of the truck. The bundle slammed into the dog, knocking him over. His left front leg was broken in four places.

  It took nine months to heal. For those nine months Lee lived in dread that the dog’s toes would rot off or the bones would heal crookedly (he had made the cast himself, out of plaster of paris), or that the dog would become wincing and shy as a result of the accident. Rinty had already been inseparable from Lee, but his injury made him even more so; the first day Lee left him to go to work, the dog moaned so loudly that the neighbors thought there had been a death in the Duncan family. When Lee finally removed the cast, he could barely stand to watch as Rinty took his first steps. But the dog healed so well that within a month he was ready to jump and run again, and Lee decided to enter him in a big German shepherd show at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles.

  An acquaintance of Lee’s named Charley Jones, whose daughters took piano lessons from Marjorie Duncan, asked if he could come with Lee to the show. He had just developed a type of slow-motion camera, and a dog show, with all its activity, seemed a good opportunity for trying it out. Lee agreed, so Jones set up his camera to film Rinty and some of the other dogs performing that day.

  In his memoir, Lee made no mention of how Rin Tin Tin did in the conformation competition. What mattered—and what would come to matter more than Lee could possibly imagine—was what took place during the “working dog” part of the show. Rin Tin Tin and a female shepherd named Marie were tied for first place and had to compete in a jump-off. The jump, a wall made of wooden planks, was set at eleven and a half feet. Both dogs cleared it. The wall was raised three inches. The judge and show officials gathered beside the jump for a close look. Marie took her turn, flying up and over, but hit the top plank with her back feet. Rin Tin Tin then squared off for his leap. “Charley Jones had his camera on Rinty as he made his jump and as he came down on the other side,” Lee wrote, “and Rinty jumped over the head of the judge and several others.” The dog had cleared an obstacle of almost twelve feet. It was an amazing jump for any dog, especially one who was only eighty-five pounds. Jones was delighted with his new camera and the film he had shot. Lee assumed Jones was just conducting a casual experiment and seemed to pay it little mind. He was mo
re excited about the mentions Rinty got in the Los Angeles newspapers. He decided then to start a scrapbook, “never dreaming,” as he wrote, “that some day Rinty would be in all the newspapers all over the world.”

  But something about Rin Tin Tin being filmed must have stuck with Lee, because in the weeks following the show, he was seized by a new desire to get Rin Tin Tin into Hollywood. “I was so excited over the motion picture idea that I found myself thinking of it night and day,” he wrote. “I wanted to talk pictures instead of guns.”

  Lee was an avid reader of Physical Culture, a magazine founded in 1899 that preached self-improvement and self-reliance, with features like “I Had Appendicitis and Cured It Myself” and “Learn How to Breathe and Laugh at T.B.” The ads in the magazine were for products that offered to help develop a better version of yourself: bodybuilding systems (If a Jelly Fish Could Slap a Rat in the Face he would do it. But he can’t. He has no arms. Neither does he have a backbone. How much worse off is a man who was given a good backbone and a pair of arms—and won’t use them); beauty helpers such as the Genuine Patented Nose Adjuster (Special sizes for Children. A Perfect Nose for You); or cosmetics (Gertrude Follis left home an Ugly Duckling. Now New York Artists Pay to Paint her Likeness and Her New Beauty Was Won in Three Months); and etiquette books that promised to teach behavior and leave you “free from all embarrassment.”

  After the war, the magazine expanded its mission to include the idea of wealth. Getting rich, it suggested, was the ultimate form of self-improvement, especially if it was the result of doing something you enjoyed. The article that advanced this theory, and caught Lee’s attention, was called “Why Not Make Your Hobby Pay?”

  This is familiar thinking now, but in the 1920s, it was surprising. Work had always been just work, and it had never promised to be fulfilling, or even satisfying—nor did it generally have anything to do with the hobbies you liked or the idea of fulfilling some personal vision. If you were fortunate, you had a job and you would prosper—perhaps even become wealthy. Happiness was seen as something that came from being rich, rather than from what you did in order to become rich. But the war had blurred that line of thought. There was the exhilaration of peace, the buzz of new factories, the energy of new prosperity. So many of the new things to buy—especially things like cars and radios and movie tickets—seemed to promise that you could aspire to do anything, go anywhere. You could actually strive to be happy, and it suddenly seemed reasonable to expect satisfaction in your work. The magazine urged readers to share stories of how they had made money from their hobbies and offered a prize for the best and most inspiring example.

  What Lee enjoyed was his dog. If you are to take his memoir at face value, he had few friends, no interest in girls, and no hobbies that didn’t include the dog. He also happened to think that Rin Tin Tin was showing “signs of genius.” After reading “Why Not Make Your Hobby Pay?” in 1921, and feeling the influence of Hollywood, right over the hill from home, he decided to do just that: he would write a screenplay starring Rinty. He wanted to win the magazine contest, but he also started to imagine that he could go the next step—convince a studio to make a movie based on a story he wrote, starring his dog.

  3.

  In the 1920s, movies were a constant in almost everyone’s life. One out of two Americans saw a movie every week. Everyone wanted to write a screenplay, and there were scores of “systems” marketed to help the amateur. According to an ad for one of them, the Irving System, “Millions of People Can Write Stories and Photoplays and Don’t Know It!!” Advertisements for the Elinor Glyn System were more spiritual, asking, “Don’t You Believe the Creator Gave You a Story-Writing Faculty, Just As He Did the Greatest Writer?”

  Lee did believe he had that “story-writing faculty” and he had a story idea, inspired by a folktale about a prince and his beloved dog. According to the tale, Prince Llewellyn was hunting wolves on his estate one morning when he realized that his constant companion, his dog Gelert, was missing. Llewellyn rode home and went into his son’s bedroom because he thought the dog might be resting there with the boy. He found the room in shambles, the bed drenched with blood, the dog cowering in the corner. The prince took this to mean that the dog had killed his son, and enraged, he pulled out his hunting knife and stabbed the dog. As the dog was dying, Llewellyn noticed a flash of movement beside the bed; there he found the child unharmed, lying beside the body of a timber wolf, which Gelert had obviously killed to protect the boy. Llewellyn realized his terrible mistake, but it was too late to save the dog. Gelert’s final act, before succumbing, was to lick the prince’s hand, forgiving him for his fatal misjudgment.

  Lee titled his screenplay Where the North Begins. Instead of a prince, his main character was a fur trapper; the dog is a stray that has been raised by wolves. The trapper, Dupre, comes to trust the dog because he helps him fight off a crooked trading-post owner and his henchman. But then Dupre is told that he must destroy the dog because it has killed a child. He reluctantly agrees, but the dog escapes and rejoins the wolf pack. Later, when Dupre learns that the accusation was false, he goes into the woods to find the dog. Instead of hating Dupre for betraying him, the dog holds no grudge, and they are reunited as loyal companions.

  As different as the setting was, Lee’s story kept the themes of the Llewellyn legend intact: the intimacy between a man and a dog; the dog’s virtue and his mute acceptance of being wrongly accused; the blinding effect of human rage; a dog’s capacity for forgiveness and absolution; the human need to assign blame; the dog’s generous, Christ-like martyrdom. For someone like Lee, whose father had abandoned him, a story about a father so devoted to his child that he would kill for him may have been an exquisite fantasy.

  The structure of the Llewellyn story and Lee’s version of it are interesting not only for what is included but for what is left out. The fight between the dog and the wolf is not described in the folktale at all; the story is about misjudgment and regret and forgiveness, rather than the spectacle of the fight. There is no bloody battle in which the dog triumphs, yet he is clearly a hero. He is not a conventional action hero, elevated by strength and valor. What ennobles the dog is his compassion—for the child, who is in danger, but also for the prince, who has erred. The dog absolves Llewellyn even as Llewellyn kills him.

  In Where the North Begins, the pivotal violence also takes place offscreen. Once again the dog is steadfast and loyal, accepts being unjustly accused, and ultimately forgives his master. The dog embodies a rich, mythic sort of heroism, an empathy that is broader and deeper and more pure than what an ordinary human would be capable of. This is the quality that eventually lifted Rin Tin Tin from the world of novelty into something classical.

  Since films in 1921 had no sound track and no dialogue, everything had to be conveyed by action or facial expression. The only language was the small amount of text on the intertitle cards, which amounted to just a few dozen words. A dog was at no disadvantage to a human in a silent film; both species had the same set of tools for telling a story—action, expression, gesture. In fact, an animal acting without words looked natural and didn’t fall into pantomime and exaggeration the way human actors in silent film often did. Before writing his screenplay, Lee studied Rinty’s facial expressions and tried to think how they could be used in a movie. He became convinced that Rinty could be taught to act a part—not only to carry out a story through action, but “to register emotions and portray a real character with its individual loves, loyalties, and hates.”

  Just before Lee finished the script he received a letter from an executive at Novagraph, a newsreel company, informing him that it had purchased Charley Jones’s film of Rinty jumping the wall at the dog show to use in a newsreel. There was a check inside the letter for $350—a huge amount of money for Lee, about three months’ salary at his Bernal Dyas job. The executive mentioned that the clip was already one of Novagraph’s most popular and would be playing soon at a theater in Los Angeles.

  Le
e was so astonished that he refused to cash the check for weeks. He was afraid it was a mistake and he would get a second letter demanding the money back. But Charley Jones assured him it was real. Once the fact of it sank in, Lee made the decision to commit himself to getting Rin Tin Tin into the movies.

  The day Lee finished the draft of Where the North Begins, he asked for another leave of absence from Bernal Dyas. His mother was dismayed, and with some good reason: Hollywood in the 1920s could be a dark place. Narcotics were common; directors and producers were a motley group that included tramps, medicine-show barkers, lumberjacks, and swindlers. Marjorie also worried that having Lee participate in such a tawdry business—especially working with a dog—would disgrace her and ruin her fledgling music school. Lee refused to change his mind in spite of the pleas from his mother and sister. “They told me how that afternoon one of the neighbors had said, ‘Why, the idea of him trying to make a living off of his dog!’” Lee wrote. “Mother and Marjorie had a big cry.”

  4.

  Dogs have been in movies ever since there have been movies. If you take into account Eadweard Muybridge’s “The Horse in Motion,” a series of sequential photographs that was produced in 1882 and is considered the forerunner of film, animals were part of the medium from the start. The first dog featured in a film was in Auguste and Louis Lumière’s Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory, made in 1895. The dog, who is uncredited, comes waggling into the frame to greet the workers as they walk out of a factory gate. The first instance of a dog performing as a fictional character was in the 1905 British film Rescued by Rover. The film is a landmark on several accounts: It was the first film to star a dog and it is the earliest example of a movie conceived as a narrative. The entire film is only six minutes long, but it has a real story with a cinematic arc that moves from exposition to crisis to resolution, told through a series of related and continuous shots rather than just being a pastiche of moving images. It was also the first known instance of a film using paid, professional actors, and the first and last time—according to the self-effacing British Film Institute—when British cinema “unquestionably led the world.”