by Susan Orlean
Lee enjoyed the fact that he could now live well, but he never seemed to want or welcome attention for himself. He was a true Hollywood spouse, happy for the access it gave him, and for the money he earned, but he was most comfortable in a somewhat secondary role as a helpmate to a star rather than a star himself. There was more for him to manage all the time, which is perhaps another reason why he seemed to have no social life. In fact, when he finally mentions in his memoir that he had “met” a girl, while shooting on location, it comes as almost a shock.
Even after he and the girl, Eva Linden, got engaged, he was far more preoccupied with Rinty than with any other part of his life. They had what seemed to be endless publicity tours and movies and endorsement deals, and there was now even a Rin Tin Tin radio show, The Wonder Dog. Rinty did some of the barking on the show, but a human actor named Bob Barker did most of it. In truth, the dog’s connection to the show was more abstract than actual. He rarely even figured in the plots except at the very end; in that sense, he was already beginning his transformation from a real dog into an idea and a character. The radio plots were wild. One episode was “a thrilling story of a heroic dog and a milkman, who upset the carefully laid plans of a criminal breaking into the house of the manager of the milk company.” Another, called “A Trip to Mars,” was described as “a story in which an inventor and scientist and his party, who have been shot to Mars in a giant torpedo, are saved from death at the hands of giant men by the heroic action of the inventor’s faithful dog.”
In 1926, Rin Tin Tin appeared on an experimental television station in New York City called W2XCR. Around that same time, he also became a character in books. One of the first, The Little Folks’ Story of Rin-Tin-Tin, was published in 1927. In contrast to his masculine movie persona, the book casts Rinty as a doting nanny left to care for four children while their parents are out of town. As the parents are preparing to leave, Mother instructs Rin Tin Tin to “be sure to feed Baby Carol, to see that she has her naps.” Rinty is also expected to cook for the kids; one of the chapters is titled “Rin Tin Tin Makes Sure That Lunch Is Satisfactory.”
13.
I often wonder what Rin Tin Tin was really like as a dog—not as a movie dog or a radio dog or a book dog or a television dog, but just as a dog. We know he liked to chase squirrels and skunks and foxes. He liked to run. He was muscular, not cuddly and soft. In his films, he looks so keyed up that he sometimes appears high-strung, but he was comfortable in crowds and in unfamiliar places. Maybe that intensity was just his attention to Lee and the anticipation of his next instructions.
He wasn’t very friendly. The only person he was especially interested in was Lee. Von Stephanitz, who founded the breed, believed that German shepherds should bond only with their master; he considered excessive and promiscuous friendliness to be a weakness in a dog. Lee, taking this advice, raised Rin Tin Tin in the most cosseted fashion, rarely letting anyone else handle him. Actors who worked with Rin Tin Tin complained that he was mean and temperamental and that his only good quality was that he didn’t drink. He was rumored to have bitten Jack Warner as well as several of his costars. But cinematographers were impressed by his patience: because of his dark coat, he had to be lit carefully so he was visible in these black-and-white films, and often had to stand still for long stretches while the lights were set for scenes.
His reputation for viciousness may have been nothing more than some contrarian Hollywood mythmaking. Maybe he played his fight scenes too enthusiastically (they do look realistic), and maybe he was not friendly, but a dog with a genuinely bad temper would be impossible to manage on a film set around a large crew or in the sorts of places that Rinty visited frequently, such as hospitals and orphanages. If Rin Tin Tin really was nasty, he was an even better actor than he was given credit for, since all of his movies included at least one scene in which he had to appear affectionate, toward either his master or his mate, or often with his puppies.
Or was the dog who appeared affectionate a different dog? Was there more than one dog being presented as Rin Tin Tin? Lee stated many times over the years that Rin Tin Tin was the only dog to appear in his movies, and that no doubles were used. He was adamant about it. But in a 1965 interview with the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner, Jack Warner said, “I guess there is no harm now in revealing what was secret information for so many years around the lot. It had occurred to us, when we realized Rinty’s earning capacity, that our investment would be lost if anything happened to him. Therefore, with Duncan’s consent, we agreed to breed and train a kennel full of doubles that could be used if our hero were ill or injured or even killed in some of the dangerous stunts we planned. Eventually we had 18 Rin Tin Tins and we used them all. Each animal was a specialist. One was used for attack scenes, another was trained to jump twelve-foot walls, a third was a gentle house dog, and so on.”
Was this true? It stands to reason that other dogs would have been used when Rin Tin Tin was tired, or had to do something dangerous—he was too valuable to risk injury—or to perform a stunt he wasn’t able to do, especially as he got older, just as there are almost always stunt doubles for human stars in films. Rin Tin Tin starred in twenty-two silents and seven talkies in just eight years, a breakneck pace, and he was not a young dog during most of that time. It would have been easy to use another dog to fill in for him in scenes that weren’t close-ups, especially any in which he was doing something any well-trained German shepherd could do, like running or jumping. The fact is that dogs of the same breed do look a lot alike.
Only nine of those early films still exist, so we are able to assess just a small sample of his work. The dog starring in those nine silent films appears to be the same dog in the close-ups. In the long shots, the dog really could be any dog, since all you see is a German shepherd–shaped blur. In a few fight scenes, it looks as if a stuffed model is used.
Jack Warner didn’t have any cause to say there were eighteen Rin Tin Tins if there was only one. Lee had more reason to deny that other dogs were used in the movies: maintaining that Rinty never had a double was a point of pride for him. It was a question of both the dog’s identity and his own. He had one star, his war orphan pup, and that is what he wanted the world to see.
Over time, the story of Rin Tin Tin did end up forming a continuous multiple-strand loop of identity both bona fide and assumed—real individuals playing invented characters, and invented characters meant to represent real individuals played by other individuals chosen because they suited the role. Rin Tin Tin grew from being one dog to being a sort of franchise. And as his fame grew, Rin Tin Tin became, in a way, less particular—less specifically this one single dog—and more conceptual, the archetypal dog hero. I think that’s why the first question I was asked whenever I told someone I was writing about Rin Tin Tin was always, “Was there really just one?”
14.
At Warner Bros., it was Sam Warner who thought it would be a good idea to have people talk in a movie. At his urging, the studio bought the rights to Vitagraph, a system for adding music to film, and he believed that it could be developed to add spoken dialogue to film, too. His hunch, which was shared by a number of other Hollywood executives, was correct. In October 1927, Warner Bros. released The Jazz Singer, and actor Al Jolson’s ad-libbing was such a sensation that it changed the movie business forever. Unfortunately, Sam Warner, who had been so certain that the future of film included sound, died of a cerebral hemorrhage the day before the film premiered. As he predicted, talkies took over from silents quickly and completely, wiping them away, altering the entire industry, eliminating whole categories of jobs and an entire generation of actors who couldn’t or wouldn’t make the transition. Only ten years after The Jazz Singer was released, no more silent films were being made.
Did Lee see the changes on the horizon? On one hand, he and Rinty had never been busier. In 1927 Rinty made Tracked by the Police, Dog of the Regiment, Jaws of Steel, and Hills of Kentucky (which featured one of his puppies, Rin Tin Tin Jr
., in a small role). In 1928, he starred in A Race for Life, Rinty of the Desert, and Land of the Silver Fox, and, in 1929, The Million Dollar Collar. Lee’s contract with Warner Bros. was up for renewal the following year, but it must have seemed like a sure thing. After all, thirteen different films starring Rinty were playing at theaters across the country.
And yet, there were warnings. In May 1929, recognizing the new standard set by The Jazz Singer, the studio cast Rinty in a movie that was billed as “five percent dialog”—in other words, an awkward hybrid of a silent and a talkie. The Variety reviewer sniffed that the film, Frozen River, featured “a lot of badly synchronized barking.” In an interesting bit of backtracking, the movie was then rereleased as a silent, with the sound track removed. Later that year, Rin Tin Tin’s twenty-second film, Tiger Rose, premiered in a vast, 2,600-seat movie palace, but at least one review treated it as if it was an artifact of a former time, calling it “strongly suggestive of the old Warner programmers,” but pointing out that Rinty seemed like a “much less prominent doggie than in the days when mutts were glorified by Hollywood.” The review was eerily prescient. “Rinty . . . has been scissored almost out of the picture,” the reviewer added. “He now merely peeps through his paws and gets patted a couple of times. No more saving the express train or racing miles for the United States Marines.”
That December, a Warner Bros. executive instructed a lawyer to draft a letter to Lee. Its purpose was to inform him that his contract was being canceled: the studio did not plan to make any more movies with Rin Tin Tin. “It has been decided that since the talking pictures have come into their own, particularly with this organization,” the letter stated, “that the making of any animal pictures, such as we have in the past with Rin Tin Tin, is not in keeping with the policy that has been adopted by us for talking pictures, very obviously, of course, because dogs don’t talk.”
Lee was on Sound Stage One of the Warner Bros. studio lot when he was handed the envelope containing the letter and his termination papers. A studio executive standing nearby overheard Lee tell the messenger delivering the envelope that he had been expecting bad news. He walked to a spot where he thought he was out of sight, and read the letter. Then without any fanfare, he packed up his Warner Bros. office, retrieved his dog, and went home.
He left behind an oil portrait of Rin Tin Tin that hung in the Warner Bros. Hall of Fame—the first dog portrait to have enjoyed that honor at the studio. But he took all the other mementos that had accumulated in his office over the years: the drawings of Rin Tin Tin that had been sent to him by fans; the bas-relief plaques they had made for him; the carvings in redwood and gumwood; and the statuettes of ebony, ivory, clay, paste, soapstone, chalk, and Plasticine—all the awkward, handmade, heartfelt representations of the dog who had once been his personal war trophy and pet but had been shape-shifted and amplified and projected on the boundless scope of a public dream. Rin Tin Tin had always been Lee’s private story about the possibility that love could be constant. This setback was real, but the dog was now something communal, a shared story about courage and endurance. He flickered past on a screen but he was fixed in immortality.
HEROES
1.
Was the advent of sound the real reason that Warner Bros. canceled Rinty’s contract? Only three years before, Rin Tin Tin had been the biggest box office star in the country. The decision to abandon him seems precipitous. But sound was more than just an added dimension in a movie; it made movies totally different. In silent film, an animal could seem omniscient and often wiser than human beings. With dialogue, the difference in stature between a mute dog and a talking actor was insurmountable. A dog might jump twelve feet and convey, through looks and action, its capacity for empathy, but no dog, not even a wonder dog like Rin Tin Tin, had more than a few syllables to say.
Dogs found a place in the early talkies, but most of the time they were cast in supporting roles or as comic sidekicks rather than in the dramatic roles they had played in the silents of the early 1920s. In 1929, MGM released Hot Dog and College Hounds, two short films directed by comedy veterans Zion Myers and Jules White that starred fifty dogs dressed in human costumes. There were no human beings in the films. The dogs acted out plots lifted from recent MGM films and seemed to speak, thanks to the magic of human voice-overs matched roughly to the movement of the dogs’ mouths. These Dogville shorts were such a hit that Myers and White made six more, starting with All Quiet on the Canine Front and ending with Dogway Melody, a takeoff on Broadway Melody, which had elaborate musical numbers and a dance performed by a dog in blackface makeup.
The Dogville movies are engrossingly bizarre. They were meant to be light comedy, but their plots are sometimes uncomfortably adult, involving war, murder, infidelity, and attempted rape. Some of the dogs in the series became well known, especially Jiggs, a mutt with a pushed-in nose who was supposedly able to really talk, although his vocabulary was limited to “Mama,” “Papa,” and “hamburger.” But none of the Dogville dogs became a star in their own right.
In 1929, when the first Dogville shorts were released, the world was on its heels, looking for some comedy. The stock market had collapsed in October, and the U.S. economy was spinning into deflation. Lee was hit hard. Soon after his Warner Bros. contract was canceled, his bank failed, just days after he had deposited $24,000—possibly one of his last Warner Bros. paychecks—in his account. He needed money, so he decided to take some out of a laundry business he had invested in a few years earlier. He discovered then that the investment was a scam; there was no laundry business and no money. His business advisor, who had arranged the investment, committed suicide soon after.
In his memoir, Lee gamely describes the end of his eight-year relationship with Warner Bros. as “a much-needed vacation.” He decided to use the time to do what had always felt most satisfying to him: he took his dog to the mountains and spent a few weeks alone with him.
Rinty was now twelve years old. He was fit but he was stiff, and there were flecks of gray around his muzzle; he was an old dog. His contemporary, Strongheart, had died that year. After Trimble and Murfin divorced, Strongheart bounced from studio to studio, with none of them promoting him consistently; at the time of his death he was already fading from view. He had been a beautiful dog, Lee wrote, and then added, “Why he did not make more pictures, I do not know.”
Lee knew a trip to the mountains would be demanding, and that the walking might be too much for Rinty, so he built a sort of sedan chair for him, with a canvas roof to block the sun, and mounted it on the back of one of his pack mules so that the dog could ride through the mountains like a rajah. Lee and Rin Tin Tin had made many such visits to the Sierras before the movies, before the money. They were back where they had started, just a boy and a dog in the mountains, as if nothing much had changed.
Lee was thirty-nine, still what we would consider a fairly young man, but for the dog—for all dogs—time dashes forward at a speed we humans can hardly perceive, until the day we realize that the puppy is no longer a puppy and has outpaced us. And yet a part of us lags behind, still seeing that old dog as a young dog even when he is standing at life’s finish line. On this trip to the Sierras, in their slow advance across the mountain range, Lee hiking beside the mule while Rin Tin Tin rested in his travel bed, the arc of their extraordinary time together was almost complete.
This trip was also their purest moment together as companions. “I think it was on these trips that I really came so close to Rin-tin-tin,” Lee wrote. “Although all his life he had lived close to me, out on this trip it seemed just the opposite—I was living close to him.”
2.
As it turned out, Rinty was not done with the movie business. In 1930, Mascot Pictures, an upstart studio that made movies and serials, offered Lee and Rinty a contract. The pay was less than Rin Tin Tin had earned at Warner Bros., and the status was several notches down, but Lee accepted and he and Rin Tin Tin went to work on The Lone Defender.
A cowboy story told in twelve short episodes, The Lone Defender starred June Marlowe, who had appeared with Rinty in many silent films, including Clash of the Wolves and Find Your Man. It was a sound picture, so at some point between their idyll in the Sierras and principal photography on the film, Lee must have retrained the dog to follow hand signals, since he couldn’t direct him with voice commands anymore. In some scenes—or perhaps most scenes, according to skeptics—Lee used a stand-in to spare Rinty from the most demanding tricks.
The Lone Defender received disparaging reviews, and the scenes of cowboys on horses galloping across the plains are so long and boring that they look like an equine aerobics class. But audiences loved it anyway. In fact, The Lone Defender was so popular that many theaters ran it during regular showtimes, rather than on Fridays and Saturdays, when serials were usually shown.
Mascot quickly signed Rin Tin Tin for sequels, which turned out to be just as popular. Each episode ended with a cliff-hanger. The wait for the next installment of the serial was a delicious agony. One of the serials was shown at a 1932 meeting of the Colonial-Tribune Mickey Mouse Club No. 111 near Chicago. At the end of the show, the Mouseketeers found the suspense almost unbearable. “The picture ended at the most critical moment,” the club secretary wrote, “leaving the children unable to suppress the disappointment that showed on their faces, though anxious enough to attend the next meeting and see the startling outcome of these adventures.”