by Susan Orlean
The Mascot serials brought another, younger audience into Rin Tin Tin’s thrall—a demographic that included Bert Leonard and Daphne Hereford’s grandmother, who first decided she needed a Rin Tin Tin puppy of her own after seeing the Mascot serials in a theater in Texas. My father saw them when he was a kid in Cleveland. I once asked him if he had ever seen The Lone Defender, and he was taken aback, as if it was no question at all. “Of course,” he said. “Everyone saw them. Everyone.”
Then, out of the blue, Lee decided to take Rin Tin Tin on the vaudeville circuit. He wrote in his memoir that Rinty had conquered silent film and talkies, and that he wanted to see if they could master vaudeville as well. The real reason still seems mysterious. Vaudeville tours were grueling, hardly the ideal experience for an aging dog. Lee was still engaged to his “girl,” Eva Linden, but he didn’t seem to have been in any particular hurry to get married. The appeal of the vaudeville circuit might have been that it allowed Lee to do what he liked best—spend time with Rinty—while sharing him with thousands of people who felt almost as strongly about the dog as Lee did.
“We would like very much to represent your act in this territory,” a representative of the John Billsbury Agency Vaudeville Attractions wrote to Lee in 1930. Other vaudeville agents solicited him, too, and once he came to an arrangement with one of them, he and Rin Tin Tin started a nine-month national tour. The promotional material for the tour had the pitched, exaggerated tone of carnival barking. Even if he had been kicked off the Warner Bros. lot, Rin Tin Tin was still a star, and there was no superlative too grand for him. Here is one press release:
The dog that all the world loves . . . Rin Tin Tin, the leader of the canine kingdom. . . . The master dog has been so ably trained that he approaches histrionic perfection. . . . In nine years Rin Tin Tin has seen the shifting sands of time flow toward him with nothing but gold and brightness. . . . Rinty is the richest dog in the world . . . he has filet mignon for his breakfast. . . . Cerbereus, the three-headed dog that guards the door to Hell, cannot be compared to Rin Tin Tin the master dog of the movies. Cerbereus pushes people into perdition but Rin Tin Tin saves them.
The tour began at the Albee Theater in Cincinnati. Lee and Rin Tin Tin were the fifth act on a bill that also included Mr. Wu and his Chinese Show Boat (“featuring Miss Jue-Sue-Tai and a dancing chorus of almond-eyed girls with a Chinese girl band”); a cowboy singer; two brothers, Ward and Van, who played violin and harp; a comedy and musical team called Off Key; and a song-and-dance act called Frabell’s Frolics. In other cities, the bill included the Murphy Brothers in Rhythm and Taps, a pianist, the Tillers Sixteen Sunshine Girls (“fresh from England”), and, as Lee recalled, “Harry Holmes with a lot of merry nonsense and a very clever bantam rooster that was supposed to lay an egg every performance although I think personally, Harry must have been somewhat of a magician.” Duke Ellington and his Cotton Club Orchestra appeared with them in New York City.
Lee and Rin Tin Tin’s act was similar to the show they put on at movie theaters. After taking the stage, Lee told the audience how he had trained Rinty using the squeaky rubber doll, the toy he had first given Rinty in France, when he was just a puppy. He explained how Rinty had a “strange love” for the doll, and that to his mind this kind of attachment made Rinty seem like a human being; he was caught in the “magical and inescapable grip” of the doll the way some people were obsessed with baseball or orchids or stamp collecting. Then Lee demonstrated Rinty’s training, running him through a repertoire of tricks, many of which he had performed in his films.
Dog training during this period was often limited to the swift kick and the slap, so Lee’s approach was not typical. Lee liked to emphasize that he had never “trained” Rin Tin Tin, perhaps because of the association between obedience and fear. Instead, he preferred to say he had “educated” him. In fact, he had trained the dog intensively, relying on the attachment he and Rinty had developed from the time the puppy was just a few days old. This bond, combined with Lee’s tenacity as a trainer and Rinty’s intelligence and eagerness to please Lee, made their performance both surprising and moving to their audiences. According to James English, who wrote a biography of Lee in 1946 based on Lee’s notes, Rin Tin Tin was not “a trained dog but an enthusiastic one,” guided by affection rather than tyranny. For Rin Tin Tin, English continued, “work was play and companionship with his master and friend was ample reward.”
Lee and Rinty took their vaudeville act to dozens of cities, and they were a success at each stop. The audience seemed to include everyone, of every age and gender. After a show in Portland, Oregon, Lee and Rinty were scheduled to appear at a party at a local high school. But the ads for the appearance in the newspaper were addressed just to boys, which set off a citywide protest. The newspaper ran several stories to correct the mistake, quoting Lee saying, “Rin Tin Tin was much displeased and showed his displeasure by barking energetically when he learned the invitation extended by him to the boys of the city failed to mention the girls. Now Rin has many admirers among the girls and he wouldn’t hurt their feelings in the world.”
Reviewers of the vaudeville show called Rinty “the Barrymore of dogdom” and said that what made the act exceptional was that it avoided the broad strokes of slapstick. Several other dog acts were on the vaudeville circuit at the time, but most of them consisted of the animal clowning around, teetering around on its hind legs, walking on a tightrope, or jumping through hoops wearing a funny hat. Instead, Rinty’s vaudeville performance demonstrated his talent as an actor. It was another triumph. After a show in Kansas City, the Greyhound Bus Company, out of respect and admiration, provided a new deluxe coach bus for Lee and Rinty, to carry them privately and in the finest style to their next show in St. Louis.
• • •
They were earning $1,000 a week, a great deal of money, but it was hard work. In one typical month, Lee’s schedule included Houston, Galveston, San Antonio, Austin, Waco, Dallas, Fort Worth, Wichita Falls, Abilene, and Amarillo. Before he’d begun the tour, Lee’s mother had asked him if she could tag along. Lee apparently declined but reminded her in a telegram: SORRY I COULD NOT LET YOU COME. IMPORTANT WE ALL WORK TOGETHER WHILE BIG MONEY IS TO BE MADE.
After nine months on the road, Lee and Rinty returned to California, filmed another Mascot serial called The Lightning Warrior, and then embarked on a vaudeville tour in March 1931. This tour was also a hit, with ads trumpeting “its feature attraction, Rin Tin Tin, unquestionably the best known dog in the world and the most remarkable canine actor that has ever been brought to the stage or screen!”
At the end of the tour, Lee took Rinty for a rest at his house in Malibu. One afternoon, a rogue wave hit the beach and surged over it, swinging through Lee’s house like a wrecking ball. The house was a total loss. A story in the Los Angeles Times was headlined “Storm Wrecks Actor’s Beach House.” The caption under the photograph of Lee and Rinty standing beside rubble read, “Duncan and Rin Tin Tin, noted motion-picture dog which he owns, looking over the smashed abode. Both were in the house when it was crushed, but escaped injury.” Considering how badly the house was damaged, it seems miraculous that they survived.
Lee’s 1931 tax return shows a total income of $17,000, from Mascot Pictures and personal appearances. Item 15 lists the loss of the Malibu house and furniture, for which he had no insurance. Although the value of Lee’s 1931 income would be close to $200,000 in today’s dollars, the loss of the Malibu property and the mortgages on his two Beverly Hills houses meant he was squeezed. He and Rin Tin Tin had had a triumphant vaudeville tour, but things were tougher than they appeared.
• • •
The series of recent calamities—getting dumped by Warner Bros., being swindled, the collapse of his bank, the loss of his beach house—didn’t lead Lee to think about what would be, for him, the greatest calamity of all: that someday Rin Tin Tin would die. According to Lee, Rin Tin Tin was still “bubbling over with life and vitality.” His work schedul
e remained busy: he was beginning a new Mascot serial, Pride of the Legion, and three others were already lined up. The veterinarian who had just performed his annual exam proclaimed the dog to be in perfect health.
One newspaper report claimed that Rin Tin Tin blacked out occasionally on film sets, but I never found anything to corroborate that, and Lee’s notes include no mention of anything being wrong with the dog, although he might have found it too upsetting to think about or too disturbing to admit. Indeed, he resisted imagining Rinty’s death so completely that he ignored the plainest fact of their intertwined lives: the man will outlive the dog. In the case of a famous dog like Rin Tin Tin, it would have been useful to prepare a successor. Rin Tin Tin and Nanette had had at least forty-eight puppies, but Lee hadn’t trained any of them for a career in the movies. He sold or gave away all but two youngsters. He believed his life began the day he found Rinty. It was impossible for him to imagine his life without him.
3.
He died on a warm summer day in 1932. A United Press bulletin broke into radio programs that afternoon with the announcement: “Rin Tin Tin, greatest of animal motion-picture actors, pursued a ghostly villain in a canine happy-hunting ground today.” In his memoir, Lee’s description of the event is simple. He had heard Rinty bark in a peculiar way, so he went to see what the matter was and found the dog lying on the ground; within a moment he was gone. The story was soon floated on the great raft of legend. It was rumored that Rin Tin Tin had died at night; that he had died on the set of Pride of the Legion during a rehearsal; that he had died while leaping into the arms of Jean Harlow, who lived near Lee on Club View Drive; that he had collapsed on Lee’s front lawn and Harlow had raced over to comfort him, where she “cradled the great furry head in her lap, and there he died.”
The news was met with widespread communal grief. The day after his death, an hour-long tribute to Rinty was broadcast on radio networks across the country. “Last night a whole radio network and thousands of radio fans paid homage to a great dog,” one radio announcer explained, “a gentleman, a scholar, a hero, a cinema star—in fact, a dog which was virtually everything we could wish to be.”
Theaters posted death notices in their windows, as if they had lost a member of the family. Every newspaper ran an obituary and, in many cases, a long feature detailing the dog’s career, as if his life had defined a time period that was now at an end. The Chicago Tribune summed up its story by saying that with Rin Tin Tin’s death “the greatest of all dog actors became a memory and a tradition.”
Fox Movietone’s newsreel featured a long piece about the dog’s death, titled “Rin Tin Tin Plays His Final Role,” which was the main newsreel feature, following a short clip of Herbert Hoover droning on woodenly about his reelection campaign. The footage was taken from one of Rinty’s last public appearances, at an orphanage in Buffalo, New York. The orphans are smudge-faced, pale, and dressed in tattered hand-me-downs, but they light up with excitement when they see the dog. Lee tells them he will have Rin Tin Tin do some of his tricks, and he needs a volunteer. The kids shriek and bounce as Lee selects one of them, a small boy with a jagged row of dark bangs. Lee, pointing at the boy, tells Rinty to “get the bad guy.” Rinty pretends to attack him, and the boy’s face flashes back and forth from terror to exhilaration to bashfulness. After a moment, Lee says, “Okay, Rinty, kiss and make up.” The dog stands up on his hind legs and licks the boy’s face, as the kids in the audience holler in delight. Lee, watching the dog, is beaming, radiant.
Then Lee calls the dog to come to him. Rinty pauses for a split second and then springs into his arms. Dark-coated, bright-eyed, he is just as slim and strong-looking as he ever was, just as light on his feet and explosive in his leaps, and in Lee’s embrace, he looks surprisingly small, not at all like a grown dog. Holding him, Lee wears a look of joy so tender and uncomplicated that, for an instant, he is transformed again into a hopeful, lonely boy. The camera lingers for a moment, and then the Fox Movietone announcer says, “Rin Tin Tin: only a dog. But millions who he delighted will mourn his passing.”
It is hard to imagine this kind of reaction today to the death of any actor, let alone an animal actor. Did movies simply mean more in 1932? Or was this response particular to Rin Tin Tin? And was this outpouring of grief really for Rin Tin Tin, one individual dog, or was it more for what was being lost with Rin Tin Tin—the innocent belief in a hero, the hope that one silent, strong, and loyal being might have the capacity to be great?
The condolences came from all over the world. “Allow me to say I love you,” one man wrote to Lee, “because I loved, and still shall love, your Dog . . . by you and by his many friends like myself, in the world, he shall still live. Rin Tin Tin can never die. . . . He was one of God’s spiritual ideas, especially endowed.” Another wrote, “Be assured that all who knew Rinty, and there were millions, share in your sorrow for his loss.” Another: “I have had the gratification of shaking hands with more than one President of the United States, but all of this I would gladly forgo if I could have said that I had stroked the head of Rin Tin Tin.”
Circus sideshow operators begged Lee for the right to display Rin Tin Tin’s body, the way they had once competed to display the body of Jesse James. That may sound macabre and degrading, but Hollywood in 1932 wasn’t far removed from the world of carnivals and freak shows; in fact, among the other Variety obituaries from the month Rin Tin Tin died were notices for Charles Gantz (“a midget, survived by three brothers and two sisters, all normal size”); a gymnast named Irene Berger, who had died in a “thrill plunge”; and medicine show operator Mozell Lamb, a murder victim (“I love him and he was going to leave me, so I shot him,” Mrs. Lamb told police).
Cities and towns campaigned to be chosen as Rin Tin Tin’s final resting place, knowing that tourism was sure to follow. Lee declined all of these offers. He buried Rinty with the squeaky doll the dog had adored in a bronze casket in the backyard of his house on Club View Drive, with only a handmade wooden cross marking the grave.
In his memoir, Lee talked about the world’s response to losing Rin Tin Tin and the way the dog was memorialized in the media. The one thing he didn’t do was express what this loss felt like to him. He had begun writing his memoir in 1933, partly for his own sake but also with the expectation that it would be published or used as the basis of a biography. In the section he devoted to Rinty’s death, he did something he did nowhere else in the manuscript: he put a placeholder in—a parenthetical, underlined note saying “Mr. Duncan will give full details of his death”—as if he just couldn’t bring himself to talk about it yet.
In public, Lee made few statements about Rin Tin Tin’s death, and gave only a few interviews about it. But some time later he published a poem called “Rin Tin Tin, Dedicated by his ‘Love Master,’ Lieutenant Lee Duncan.” In simple phrases, the poem described his life with the dog, ending with these lines:
A real selfish love like yours old pal
Is something I shall never know again
And I must always be a better man
Because you loved me greatly, Rin Tin Tin.
4.
If you take the Paris métro to the Mairie de Clichy station and walk north along the Rue Martre, past the long blocks of shabby tire shops and falafel stands, you will eventually come to a small bridge that arches over the Seine. The bank on the far side is steep, slick with moss, and sags toward the river like an old man’s shoulders, as if it were just too weary to hold itself up anymore. Le Cimetière des Chiens—the Cemetery of Dogs—is a few steps west of the bridge, sagging on that saggy bank, under a heavy canopy of huge, drooping trees.
I had come to Le Cimetière des Chiens to find Rin Tin Tin on a hot day in August. It was the kind of day when Paris feels becalmed, stewing in the thick air, and the few people outside at midday move at a sleepwalker’s pace down the quiet streets. Just a few cars puttered by in the dull sunlight as I walked alone down Rue Martre, and I was alone in the cemetery as I roamed a
mong the tombstones of Titi and Hippy and Poucy and Rhum, looking for the grave of Rin Tin Tin.
When Lee buried Rinty, he probably thought he would spend his life in his Beverly Hills house, and that he would therefore always be near Rinty’s grave. But in 1933, just months after the dog’s death, Lee’s money ran out and the mortgage on the house slid out of reach. When the bank foreclosed he moved to the small house in North Hollywood that he had originally bought for his sister, Marjorie.
There is no mention anywhere of when Lee moved Rinty’s casket, but this would have been the logical time to do so, while he still had access to the backyard in Beverly Hills. He could have moved the casket to Marjorie’s backyard, but Lee’s living there might have felt temporary and he certainly would have wanted to bury Rin Tin Tin somewhere he could always visit. He could have buried him in a pet cemetery. There were a number of them in the United States—the oldest one in the country, Hartsdale Pet Cemetery, in New York, had opened in 1896, and the oldest in California, Cal Pet, in 1918. It is surprising that Lee wouldn’t have preferred being closer to the grave and puzzling that he would have gone to the trouble and expense of moving the body to France when he could have buried him nearby more easily. Of course, Rin Tin Tin had been born in France, so burying him there did have a satisfying symmetry. Maybe a fan paid for the expenses, or a friend. Le Cimetière des Chiens has no record of when Rin Tin Tin arrived and was reburied there, and will say only that “someone” paid the annual fee for the grave, at least for a while.