Rin Tin Tin

by Susan Orlean

  Warner Bros. was, of course, delighted by Rin Tin Tin’s success. Even Jack Warner, the youngest of the brothers, who had been leery of animal stars ever since a monkey actor bit him, appreciated what Rin Tin Tin was doing for the studio. The first box office returns had been unbelievable, Warner told a reporter, and the studio wanted to “cash in” while Rin Tin Tin was “hot.”

  Before starting production on the next Rinty film, Find Your Man, the studio sent Lee and the dog on a four-month promotional tour around the country. They appeared at hospitals and schools and orphanages, gave interviews, and visited animal shelters. When describing a visit to one shelter, Lee sounded as if he was telling the story of his own childhood through Rin Tin Tin. “Perhaps if I could have understood, I might have heard Rinty telling these other less fortunate dogs [in the shelter] of how his mother failed in her terrific struggle to keep her little family together. Or, how he as a little war orphan had found a kindred spirit in his master and friend, also a half-orphan.” Of course, Rin Tin Tin’s mother had actually succeeded in keeping her little family together in the bombed-out dog shelter, against extraordinary odds. It was Lee’s mother who had, at least for a time, failed in her terrific struggle.

  In the evening, Lee and Rinty went to the theater, and after a showing of Where the North Begins, they came onstage. Lee usually began by explaining how he had trained Rinty. “There are persons who have said I must have been very cruel to Rinty in order to get him to act in the pictures,” especially in the scenes where the dog is shown “groveling in the dust, shrinking away, his tail between his legs,” which Rinty did not only in Where the North Begins but in almost every film that followed—all of his movies seem to have included a moment in which Rinty is shamed or punished or reproved. Lee would then demonstrate to the theater audience how he worked with the dog, saying it was best to use a low voice “with a tone of entreaty.” He didn’t believe in bribing Rin Tin Tin with food or excessive praise; he rewarded him by letting him play with the squeaky rubber doll he had first given to Rinty when he was a puppy. At this point in the show, Lee would run Rinty through some of his tricks—his pathetic belly crawling, his ability to stand stock-still for minutes on end, his range of expressions from anger to delight to dread.

  A writer named Francis Rule was at one of those performances, and he described it in detail. He said Lee began by calling Rinty onstage, and then, for laughs, scolded when the dog stretched and yawned and flopped to the ground. “There then followed one of the most interesting exhibitions I have ever witnessed,” Rule wrote. As Lee led Rinty through a series of acting exercises, “there was between that dog and his master as perfect an understanding as could possibly exist between two living beings. [Duncan] scarcely touched him during the entire proceedings—he stood about eight feet away and simply gave directions. And it fairly took your breath away to watch that dog respond, his ears up unless told to put them down and his eyes intently glued on his master. There was something almost uncanny about it.”

  Everywhere Lee and Rinty appeared, the dog was treated like a dignitary. In New York, Mayor Jimmy Walker gave him a key to the city. In Portland, Oregon, he was welcomed as “a distinguished canine visitor” and met at the train station by the city’s school superintendent, the chief of police, and the head of the local Humane Society; then he made a statesmanlike pilgrimage to the grave of Bobby the Oregon Wonder Dog, a local legend who was said to have walked from Indiana to Oregon to reconnect with his owners. During the ceremony, according to news reports, “Rin Tin Tin with his own teeth placed the flowers on Bobby’s grave and then in a moment’s silence laid his head on the cross marking the resting place of the dog who gave his life to give the world another stirring example of a dog’s devotion and faithfulness to his master.” The next day, at the Music Box Theatre, Rinty was presented with the Abraham Lincoln humanitarian award and medal for distinguished service.

  He stirred something in people. “The thing he possesses is the thing which few actors or actresses possess and that no dog on stage or screen today possesses, the power to realistically portray feeling or emotion,” one fan wrote to Lee, adding, “Yes, he is a human dog, for in the picture Where the North Begins, has he not shown that he was human—human in the real big sense of the word? Truly, Rin Tin Tin is without an equal. I have seen a number of dog pictures on the screen. They have been true dogs and good ones, but in none, with the exception of Rin Tin Tin in Where the North Begins have I been able to feel that the only difference between man and beast is perhaps in the way we walk.”

  Another fan wrote, “Rin Tin Tin registers more range of emotion than any other dog actor known to the screen has attained. He shows in his expression and acting such deep, human, contrasting feelings as trust and distrust, sorrow and joy, jealousy and love, hatred and devotion. These qualities, and his wonderful ability to carry his audience with him in sympathy, mark him as the greatest dog actor of the screen today.”

  For Lee, this leap from the basement of the sporting goods store to the stage of the Orpheum Theater in Chicago and the three-room suite at Boston’s Copley Plaza Hotel and the three-year contract with Warner Bros. was dizzying. It was as if, after a long night, he had awoken into a new life. With his Warner Bros. salary and the $60,000 he made on Where the North Begins, he set up a trust fund for his mother and bought new appliances for her kitchen. He also bought three lots in Beverly Hills, adjacent to the Los Angeles Country Club. He planned to build three structures: a house for Elizabeth, a house for himself, and a kennel for Rin Tin Tin.

  Not surprisingly, he became a target for swindlers and opportunists. In Chicago, he was accused of having contributed to the delinquency of a teenage girl. It was a fumbling attempt at blackmail and he had a sound alibi—he was with executives from a dog food company at the time of the alleged assault—so the case was dropped, but it made him aware of his vulnerability. In Boston, a woman carrying a Chihuahua stopped to admire the movie star. Rinty bit the Chihuahua. The aggrieved owner, with the help of a local lawyer, puffed up her damages to include not just the veterinary bill to stitch the Chihuahua’s ear but also the cost of repairing her coat, buying new silk stockings, and having some dental work. (After a year of negotiation, the woman settled for $25.) As Lee wrote in his memoir, he was learning what it meant to be famous, for good and for ill.

  In 1924 the studio began shooting Find Your Man. It was directed by Mal St. Clair and written by a “downy-cheeked youngster who looked as though he had just had the bands removed from his teeth so he could go to the high school prom,” according to Jack Warner. This youngster was Darryl Zanuck, the son of a professional gambler and the wayward daughter of a wealthy Nebraska hotel owner, both of whom abandoned him by the time he was thirteen. He came to Hollywood when he was seventeen. Zanuck’s first job was writing ads for Yuccatone Hair Restorer. Zanuck’s slogan, “You’ve Never Seen a Bald Indian,” helped make Yuccatone a success—until bottles of the hair tonic fermented and exploded in twenty-five different drugstores and the company was driven out of business. Zanuck left advertising for a job as a gag writer for Charlie Chaplin and slapstick director Mack Sennett. He met Mal St. Clair through Sennett. St. Clair had directed dogs in several of his films. The two decided to pair up and write a star vehicle for Rin Tin Tin.

  The movie Zanuck had in mind was set during the war and portrayed Rin Tin Tin as a Red Cross dog. The main human character is Paul Andrews, a disillusioned war vet “who has found that the ‘welcome home’ stories he had heard are merely fables.” Once Zanuck had finished a draft, he and St. Clair acted out the plot for Harry Warner, with Zanuck taking the part of the dog. Warner loved it, and the studio started production almost immediately. Billed as “Wholesome Melodrama at Its Very Best” and starring “Rin Tin Tin the Wonder Dog,” the movie became a “box office rocket,” in Jack Warner’s words.

  Zanuck always acknowledged that Rin Tin Tin was his ticket into Warner Bros., but he later told interviewers that he hated the dog and h
ated writing for him. Even so, he wrote five more scripts for Rinty. All of the films were great successes. By the time he was twenty-five, Zanuck was running the studio.

  9.

  Of all of the canine film stars, Peter the Great was perhaps the one German shepherd besides Strongheart who had a chance to equal Rin Tin Tin’s success. Peter had been imported from Germany in 1920 by two brothers, Edward and Arlis Faust, who, inspired by Strongheart, had spent months searching for a cinematic shepherd—just as Lee was trying to make his way into Hollywood. The Fausts’ search turned up Peter, a natural talent who could crawl like a cat and supposedly walk backward up a ladder, but was best known for what was said to be his extraordinary intelligence. In an odd and emotional little book that she wrote about the dog in 1945, author Clara Foglesong described Peter the Great’s aptitude as superhuman. “Exhaustive tests demonstrated a mental capacity almost beyond belief,” Foglesong wrote. “His intellectual faculties were various and of the highest order of the great. He was exacting and practical. All who came in contact with him agreed that he was a genius second to none.”

  Genius or not, Peter was a good actor. Besides starring in his own movies, which included Silent Accuser and Sign of the Claw, he doubled for both Strongheart and another German shepherd actor named Thunder, performing stunts they were not able to pull off. The Los Angeles Times declared Peter “so appealing that human players might well be jealous of his ability.” According to Foglesong, Peter was also a prohibitionist. “If there was one thing he objected to more than another, it was to see his masters indulge in the use of intoxicating beverages,” she wrote. “His only interest was in seeing that neither Edward nor Arlis indulged in the fiery liquor.”

  In at least one instance, Peter the Great failed at this task with tragic results. That day, a Mr. Richardson and his wife dropped by to visit Edward Faust. Mrs. Richardson insisted on petting Peter, even though he had growled at her and seemed to dislike her. The Richardsons quarreled about the dog, and the woman ended up storming out of the house. Faust and Richardson began drinking. Another friend came by, and after more drinking the three men decided to go look for the missing Mrs. Richardson. With Peter in the backseat, they drove to the home of Fred Cyriacks, a rich North Hollywood real estate developer, because they thought Mrs. Richardson might be with him. According to Faust’s testimony, the men rang the bell and Cyriacks came to the door. Richardson asked if his wife was inside. Cyriaks glared at him, said nothing, and then smacked Faust in the face. Then Cyriacks ordered his dog, which happened to be a German shepherd, to attack them. Cyriacks also grabbed a .30-gauge Winchester rifle. Seeing the dog and the rifle, Faust and Richardson ran back to the car and started to drive away. Cyriacks fired at the departing car, hitting the spare tire, the third man’s hat, and Peter the Great. The dog died in a hospital three days later, reportedly with his paws in the hands of Edward Faust.

  Faust sued Cyriacks for $100,000—his estimate of Peter’s value—and $25,000 in additional damages. Directors and producers attested to the dog’s value and Faust won the case; the award of $125,000 was at the time one of the largest in history. Cyriacks appealed the award, claiming the dog was worth only $250. The appellate court agreed with Cyriacks, saying the amount of the award had been “based on fanciful speculation.” Faust eventually settled for an undisclosed amount—whatever the amount, it was meager reimbursement for a dog that had been, by Foglesong’s description, “endowed with courage without vanity, power without savagery, tenderness without deceit.”

  10.

  No one wanted to miss seeing a Rin Tin Tin movie. Lighthouse by the Sea, written by Zanuck and released in 1924, concerned a pretty girl and her father, who was a blind lighthouse keeper. (The American Film Institute tags the movie with the keywords “Filial relations. Blindness. Bootlegging. Lighthouses. Maine. Shipwrecks. Dogs.”) Warner Bros. held screenings for the sightless, complete with a narrator on stage who described the action and read the intertitle cards, which included, “He’s so tough I have to feed him manhole covers for biscuits! This pup can whip his weight in alligators—believe me!” and “I thought you said that flea incubator could fight!”

  Rinty’s films were so profitable that Warner Bros. paid him almost eight times as much as it paid its human actors; even at that, Rin Tin Tin was a bargain. “The dog,” Jack Warner told one reporter, “is literally a bonanza.” Around the Warner Bros. lot he was called “the mortgage lifter” because every time the studio was in financial straits it released a Rin Tin Tin movie and the income from it set things right again. Lee, responsible for this bonanza dog, was given every privilege by the studio: a car and driver brought him to the set every day, and he had an office on the Warner Bros. lot, where he sifted through fan mail and little mementos that arrived for Rin Tin Tin.

  His sudden new wealth dazzled him. He had never imagined this part of the equation—he had only imagined the satisfaction of making Rin Tin Tin a star. In his eight years at Warner Bros. he earned the equivalent of $5 million. He started buying fancy clothes and cars. He had copies of his Rin Tin Tin and Nanette charms made in solid gold, and one pair made up in gold and cloisonné, which he carried with him every day. He began construction on the lots he’d bought in Beverly Hills. Club View Drive is not the most expensive street in Beverly Hills, but it is solid and prosperous, a badge of accomplishment. Today, the house Lee built is gone and it’s hard to know much about it because he never described it—in his memoir, he talked only about the kennel he built for his dogs.

  After finishing his house and the kennel, he built a house next door for his mother. Then he bought a house in North Hollywood for his sister, Marjorie. His biggest splurge was on a beach house for himself in a gated section of Malibu, where his neighbors were Hollywood stars. He invested some of his money and put some in the bank. He was no longer the leggy young soldier, but he was still as trim as a tennis player. With his slicked-back silver hair, high cheekbones, strong nose, and his newfound affection for sharp clothes, he looked at home in Hollywood. Even though he was married to Charlotte Anderson at the time, he hardly mentioned her in his memoir. He wrote only about life on the set and his publicity tours with the dog.

  No matter how much money he spent, there always seemed to be more coming in. Chappel Bros. introduced Ken-L-Ration, the first commercial canned dog food, in 1923. Phillip Chappel was so eager to have Rin Tin Tin as its spokesperson that with Lee watching he ate a can of the dog food to demonstrate its tastiness. Lee was convinced. Rinty was featured in ads for Chappel Bros.’ Ken-L-Ration, Ken-L-Biskit, and Pup-E-Crumbles brands, with the slogan “My Favorite Food, Most Faithfully, Rin Tin Tin.” It was the first of many endorsement deals that made Lee an even richer man.

  Rin Tin Tin’s athleticism first got him onto a movie screen, but it was his acting that made him a star. “Rin-Tin-Tin shows himself to be as effective a canine actor as ever,” Variety wrote of the 1925 movie Tracked in Snow Country. “The humans in the cast have very little to do.” One of Rin Tin Tin’s most admired performances was in the 1926 film The Night Cry. In the film, Rinty belongs to a young sheep rancher named John Martin. Some lambs on neighboring ranches are killed and Rinty is suspected of being responsible. The other ranchers confront Martin and tell him he has to destroy the dog.

  Meanwhile, Rinty is miles away pursuing the real sheep killer—a giant condor (played by the only giant condor in captivity at that time, a cold-eyed, hunchbacked creature named Bozo). Rinty is injured while chasing the condor and stumbles home. As he enters the Martins’ house, he gazes at the family with the tentative, humble eagerness that only a dog can convey; his expression also conveys the pride he feels in having chased the condor away, and his faith that Martin will take care of him and help him heal. But Martin, who is in the house with his wife and infant daughter, freezes at the sight of Rinty. For a moment, no one moves and nothing happens, but the subtle shift in Martin’s and Rinty’s expressions is remarkable. It is as if you can see the man waverin
g between his love of his dog, his obligation to his neighbors, his concern for the dog’s injury, his dismay at the idea of the dog as a sheep killer, and his refusal to believe that his trustworthy companion could be so disloyal. At the same time, as Rin Tin Tin approaches his master in a broken and broken-hearted shuffle, you can see him working through his own set of dissonant feelings—love of his owner, his need for help, the confusion over a rejection he doesn’t understand, and, finally, defeat. It may seem absurd to claim that Rin Tin Tin was a good actor, but after you see this scene, it’s hard to deny.

  Rinty’s physical feats were also magical. In various films, he gnaws through wooden doors, unties knots, climbs trees, vaults over huge chasms, saves someone from drowning by dropping a lifeline to him, feeds a lamb with a baby bottle, lights a wick and rekindles the light in a lighthouse, treads water for at least ten minutes, presses the lever on a police box to unhook the receiver and then barks for help, fights countless wolves and bad dogs and bad guys on land and in water. He crashes through dozens of plateglass windows, which were actually made of sugar; he was allowed to eat the sweet shards after the scenes were filmed. Sometimes his actions were simply too incredible for the critics’ taste. In the 1927 film Tracked by the Police, Rin Tin Tin operates a crane to rescue the female lead and also halts a flood by operating the mechanism of a dam; the New York Times griped, “His exploits in determining the levers that close the locks seem like asking almost too much of any animal.”