Rin Tin Tin

by Susan Orlean

  Rescued by Rover was produced by Cecil Milton Hepworth, who went on to direct and produce more than four hundred films, including The Egg-Laying Man, Baby’s Toilet, How It Feels to Be Run Over, and Explosion of a Motor Car. Rover, in Rescued by Rover, was played by Hepworth’s pet collie, Blair. The film opens with Rover out for a walk with his owner’s baby and the baby’s nanny. The nanny is an irresponsible flirt and is so busy making eyes at a soldier on the street that she doesn’t even notice a beggar woman sidling up to the stroller and grabbing the baby. The beggar runs off, and Rover and the nanny run home to report the terrible news to the baby’s parents, played by Hepworth and his wife.

  In the end, of course, the baby is rescued by Rover. The dog, using amazing powers of reasoning, deduces that the beggar probably lives in the poor section of town, so he races there, searches until he locates her, races back home, and convinces the distraught parents to follow him to the beggar’s hideaway, where at last father, mother, and baby are joyfully reunited. What’s interesting is that the only character in the movie who knows the whole story—who sees as much as the camera does—is Rover.

  Rescued by Rover was a low-budget enterprise—it cost $37 to produce—but it made Hepworth a rich man. It was so popular that it was played constantly; the repeated screenings wore out the original negatives, so Hepworth actually made the whole film over again, shot by shot. Those negatives wore out as well, and Hepworth had to make the movie for a third time. Its success also had collateral impact: “Rover,” an unusual dog name before the film was made, suddenly became the most popular one in the country, and animal films became a rage.

  Hepworth produced some of these animal films; he made a version of Black Beauty and then featured his collie, Blair, again in a 1907 film called Dumb Sagacity. Blair/Rover became enough of a star that when he died, his passing was announced with great solemnity in the company newsletter. “The Hepworth Manufacturing Company have just suffered quite a severe loss in the death of their famous old dog Rover,” the newsletter stated. “This faithful animal had been Mr. Hepworth’s constant companion even before the Hepworth Company had been founded, and was the general pet of the studio at Walton-on-Thames. He was the first animal to play an independent part in a cinematograph film, and was the hero of many pictures. . . . Many others besides the Hepworth Company will deplore the death of this old favourite.” Blair’s success as Rover had come to overshadow his real identity; he wasn’t even called Blair in his obituary.

  After Rover’s success, dozens of other filmmakers began working with animals. In many cases, the results were long, mostly unedited spools of documentary footage—lions lolling in zoos; elephants marching in parades; bullfights; horse races; boxing matches between cats. A meek British schoolteacher named Perry Smith made a number of films starring wild and domestic animals, including Tiny Honey Gatherers, Snakes and Their Habits, Peculiar Pets, and Fun in a Bear Pit. His magnum opus was a time-lapse film about mold, which he shot at home; the mold got out of control and contaminated his entire house.

  Many studios kept animals on hand to use in films. Mack Sennett collected the largest Hollywood menagerie, which included Teddy, a Great Dane who could drive a train; Josephine, a monkey who could drive a car; and a trained chicken named Susie. An independent animal trainer rented out a troupe of monkey actors, known as the Dippity-Do-Dads, that appeared in many films. Universal Films decided it needed a dog star equal to Rover and held open casting. The job went to a mutt named Brownie who eventually starred in twenty-six films. Charlie Chaplin wanted a dog sidekick, too; he auditioned a dachshund, a Pomeranian, a poodle, and a bull terrier but wasn’t satisfied with any of them. His studio took out an ad, declaring, “Chaplin Wants a Dog with Lots of Comedy Sense.” He eventually found the dog he wanted, a sad-eyed piebald mongrel, at the City of Los Angeles pound.

  Laurence Trimble had been involved with animal films since their earliest days. An outdoorsman and an oddball, Trimble grew up in a small town in Maine and moved to New York in the early 1900s to try his hand as a writer. He found work as a freelancer for local papers. He often brought along his dog, Jean, a black-and-white collie, when he was reporting. One day, he and Jean were at Vitagraph Studios to write a story about the movie in production, which starred Vitagraph’s biggest attraction, the petite, doleful Florence Turner. One of the scenes called for a dog. Apparently the dog that had been brought in for the job failed to perform adequately and Trimble, who was watching the proceedings, suggested giving Jean a chance. The director agreed. Jean played the part perfectly. The studio offered the dog a contract on the spot and threw in a screenwriting contract for Trimble just for good measure.

  Of course, this story is almost laughably implausible, and yet it is the same sort of story that is repeated throughout Hollywood history, used to explain the innocent, almost accidental but also seemingly fated moment when life marvelously changes course. It paves over the bumpy road of tiny, unplanned steps you might have taken to advance from being a small-town kid from Maine with a pet collie to being a movie director with a famous dog—steps that are so many and so hard to retrace that it is natural for the story to blur into a fairy tale. And movies seem so dreamlike and enchanted that everything associated with them seems just as dreamlike and enchanted—including the moment you are transformed from a mortal creature in the real world, who will age and bleed and then die, into a splash of light on a movie screen, who will last forever and never change.

  However they really did get their break, Jean—whose signature talent was an ability to untie knots—soon appeared regularly alongside Turner, and Trimble advanced from his screenwriting job to directing. The dozens of features he directed starring Florence Turner and Jean were so successful that Trimble was earning the equivalent of about $50,000 a week. But he was moody and restless. He and his wife, the screenwriter Jane Murfin, wanted more control over their films, as did Turner. In 1913, the three of them moved to England and set up as an independent studio. The experiment failed and they returned to California three years later. Meanwhile, Trimble started making peculiar short movies; one, for example, showed nothing but the actors’ hands and feet. When he needed twenty-four wolves for a film, he bought the wolves from a wildlife supplier in California and shipped them to Canada. Rather than training them in the conventional manner, he moved into their den and lived alongside them for months, sleeping in a hole in the enclosure, as the wolves did, and eating off the ground with them. Perhaps unsurprisingly, his personal life was unsettled; he and Murfin fought all the time.

  In 1916, Jean died. Trimble and Murfin decided they wanted to develop another dog actor, but one that could be more of a dramatic actor than Jean was, and would stand out among other dogs in Hollywood, who were usually in comic roles. They were familiar with German shepherds; the dogs were starting to show up in the United States from Europe, and the alert and somewhat grave aspect of a German shepherd face appealed to them. In 1920, Murfin and Trimble traveled around the United States looking for the right German shepherd for their plan and then looked in Europe when they didn’t find the ideal dog at home. By one account, they found their dog, Etzel von Oeringen, in Berlin; by other accounts they found Etzel in White Plains, New York, through a breeder who had just imported him from Germany.

  Etzel was three years old when Trimble and Murfin first saw him, and even though he was a beautiful animal, he was not lovable. He was a driven, aggressive military guard dog who, Trimble later said, “had never played with a child, had never known the fun of retrieving a ball or a stick; had never been petted; in short, had never been a dog.” Trimble changed the dog’s name from Etzel to Strongheart and shipped him to Murfin’s mansion on Ivarene Avenue, up the hill from Gower Gulch, a section of Hollywood where actors dressed in cowboy costumes gathered every day, hoping to be cast as extras in a western.

  Strongheart’s first film, The Silent Call, released in 1921, is about an animal that is half wolf, one-quarter coyote, and one-quarter dog, and hi
s struggle to choose which part of his nature—predatory or protective—he will favor. Flash, as the wolf-coyote-dog is known, lives on a ranch herding and guarding the livestock. As the film opens, Flash has been wrongly accused of killing sheep and chased off the ranch. Flash is distraught but resigned to his fate and eventually finds companionship in the wilderness with a female wolf.

  Back at the ranch, a drama is unfolding, and Flash learns of the troubles. He must decide whether to stay with his wolf mate and live as a wild animal or go back to the ranch to help his former master, and perhaps win his way back into his master’s graces. He has paid the cost of being misjudged and misunderstood; now he struggles with the conflict, possibly irreconcilable, between what is wild and what is tame in his character.

  Ads for The Silent Call urged audiences to “See the Wonder-Dog of All Dramas—Strongheart, the Killer—More Human than Human!” The reviews of the film were more qualified, criticizing it as too derivative of Jack London, but Strongheart’s performance was praised. The New York Times called him “a magnificent creature, and an excellent photographic subject, and an interesting performer. He is not one of your tiresome trick dogs, but an apparently independent animal.” The reviewer added that even when the story dragged, “Strongheart’s scenes are exceptionally well made and entirely enjoyable.” Many reviewers singled out a scene near the end of the film, when Flash rejoins his mate. The female wolf has just given birth, and an explosion has trapped her and the pups in their cave. When Flash—Strongheart—discovers this, he throws himself to the ground and weeps. It was reported that Strongheart actually produced real tears in the scene. This is physically impossible—dogs don’t cry tears—but was accepted as truth and brought Strongheart great acclaim. Audiences were entranced. The film was a hit and reportedly grossed $1 million, an extraordinary amount in 1921. Strongheart’s noble, contemplative face was an electrifying contrast to the most popular American dogs at the time—Boston terriers, Airedales, collies, beagles, cocker spaniels, and bulldogs. Just one year after the film was released—and undoubtedly as a result of it—German shepherds became the most popular breed in the United States.

  A profile of Strongheart in Photoplay Magazine took his skills as an actor seriously. “While other screen canines appear only in comedy, Strongheart is making a drama. And so his position is entirely unique. . . . When he thought his puppies were killed in the movie he cried with an apparent depth of suffering that only a human is supposed to be capable of.” Strongheart was “a dramatic dog, an emotional actor . . . and now he takes his place among the premier dogs of the screen.”

  Strongheart, “the most intelligent dog that ever lived,” according to the magazine, made a triumphant publicity tour around the country, accompanied by his mate—a slim, silver-coated German shepherd named Lady Jule. His next film, Brawn of the North, was a “snow,” as the genre of silent films shot in wintery locations was known. Again, the theme of the movie was the dog’s struggle to discover his true nature: Is he tame, allied with his human caretakers? Or is he wild, at home with the wolves?

  An ad for the film promised nothing but melodrama:

  Hold your breath a hundred times on Strongheart’s trail of thrills—follow his tracks up to the snowlands. Great drama there—of a woman driven into marriage in self-defense, finding love at last for the man; love, too, for the giant dog; and a woman’s greatest love for the child that was born in the snows. Then she lost them all when the wolves swooped out of the night. And—the end of this great drama—well, it just can’t be described. By all means see it! Fighting a famine-mad wolf pack, guarding a child against the slinking circle, listening for the cry of a demented mother, but only hearing a she-wolf’s mating call.

  From the beginning of Strongheart’s success, Murfin and Trimble were applauded as the shrewd acting coaches who had shaped him into a star. They would have undoubtedly inspired Lee while he was working on his screenplay for Rinty and trying to imagine a career in Hollywood. The New York Times ran an interview with Murfin called “Writing for a Dog Star,” in which she credited some of Strongheart’s authenticity to scripts that required him only to do what was natural. In a good animal film, Murfin explained, “you cannot let your dog give your baby a bath, for instance, no matter how funny, because dogs don’t give babies baths under any conceivable circumstances.” Lee seems to have taken Murfin’s advice to heart.

  Besides praising Strongheart’s films in its reviews, the Times published at least two more feature stories about him—one, written by Trimble, about how he trained Strongheart, and another in which Strongheart himself visited the newsroom and was “interviewed.” The paper viewed Strongheart not as a novelty but as an important new figure in cinema. “He has a fine head, on which a worried intelligence is written, especially in the different looks he gives with his eyes,” the story in the Times explained. Another writer described the dog as “the essence of tragedy.”

  After having made only six films—all of them huge successes—Strongheart fell against a lamp on a movie set. The burn on his leg grew cancerous and he died in 1929. Today he is mostly forgotten. All of his movies except for The Return of Boston Blackie have been lost—like many silent films they were treated offhandedly, either cut up to be reused as stock footage or simply left to crumble in their cans by studios that have long since gone out of business.

  What remains of Strongheart’s flash of fame is a brand of dog food that is still manufactured under his name and two books, Letters to Strongheart and Kinship with All Life, written by J. Allen Boone, a friend of Trimble and Murfin. Boone was a correspondent for the Washington Post, an occasional film producer, and a distant cousin of Daniel Boone. He developed a unified theory about humans and animals that he called Totality. For a while, he cultivated a friendship with a housefly he named Freddie, whom he conversed with “not in a condemning way but as a fellow being”; Freddie reciprocated by visiting Boone at his shaving mirror every morning at 7:00 a.m., allowing Boone to pet him and answering to his name.

  Boone took care of Strongheart for a year while Murfin and Trimble were tending to business in New York. At first, he had been reluctant. “The difficulty was Strongheart himself,” Boone wrote. “He was too mysterious, too self-contained, too capable.” Eventually, Boone felt that Strongheart had accepted him. Their relationship grew deep. Strongheart slept in Boone’s bed every night, and Boone came to believe that Strongheart was there to teach him “new meanings of happiness . . . of devotion . . . of honor . . . of individuality . . . of loyalty . . . of sincerity . . . of love . . . of life . . . of God.” When Strongheart died—or “disappeared from the earth scene and human visibility”—Boone started writing him letters. He addressed each one “To Strongheart/Eternal Playground/Out Yonder,” and used them to tell Strongheart “things that are in my mind and heart about us, things too intimate and deep to discuss with most human beings.”

  Boone was irked each time someone referred to Strongheart as “dead.” He had just “changed his world,” Boone explained. “From this vantage point, I want to tell you once again why I am insisting that you are a great dog, instead of were one . . . the popular belief has you listed as a ‘dead dog’ and me as a ‘living human.’ Well, let’s see about it.” Each letter ended with Boone’s confident salute, “I’ll be seein’ you.” According to Boone, Strongheart was more than a dog and more than an actor: he was a transformational being. “He emancipated millions of men, women, and children from monotonous and unsatisfying behavior patterns,” Boone wrote. “He took away for the time being their friction and discontent. . . . He had what they wanted, what they needed. I doubt if anyone ever turned away from him unsatisfied or unnourished.” Were people fascinated by Strongheart because he was well trained and a good performer? No, Boone explained, it was far more magical than that. “What they were really doing,” he wrote, “was looking through a moving transparency on four legs, and seeing a much better universe than the one they had been living in.”

&nb
sp; Boone’s beliefs were extreme, but something did make these movies soar. The Return of Boston Blackie, Strongheart’s last film, was shot in 1927. The story follows Boston Blackie, a bad guy who has just been released from prison and has resolved to become a good guy. His old criminal pals pressure him to make one more score, but his dog, Strongheart, acts as his moral guardian and helps him stay on the right path. It is Blackie—not his dog—who is tugged between two worlds—his wild, criminal side and his tame, reformed side; the dog is unconditionally good. Like many silent films, The Return of Boston Blackie is sometimes broad and overly schematic, but it is also fast-paced and engaging. Strongheart is a big, gorgeous dog with a sharp economy of movement and a look of concerned attention on his face, and he is commanding and charismatic as he growls at Denver Dan, chases after Necklace Nellie, busts out of a trap, and leaps out of a plane. At those moments, as J. Allen Boone would agree, it is as if he is still here in this world and never went away.

  5.

  Not long ago, I was introduced to Willie and Louise Benitez, who live in Murfin’s old house in the Hollywood Hills. The house has a red tile roof, dormer windows, and a small yard that tumbles down a series of terraces to the street. It is a charming place, almost elfin, with a tangle of jacaranda trees shading it; the Benitezes’ dog, Beauty, was dozing in the one spot of sun in the yard when I arrived.