Rin Tin Tin

by Susan Orlean

  Dog training got its start in Europe, and by the late 1920s, in England, obedience competition was a growing sport. Helene Whitehouse Walker had read in an English dog magazine about these competitions and was intrigued. Walker was the tall, square-jawed, high-waisted American-born daughter of titled English nobility; she was also an enterprising and curious woman who chafed at the endless round of teas and luncheons that was the calling of her class and position. Her wedding to Charles Cobb Walker, a patrician Bostonian with a list of club memberships as long as his arm, had been a celebrated social event, but the marriage had foundered over what she called “differences,” and extracting herself from it had cost her the equivalent of more than $300,000. By 1929, she was looking for distraction.

  After her divorce, Walker had left Boston with her dogs and her two-year-old son and moved to Westchester County, New York, where she opened a poodle kennel she called Carillon. She was devoted to the breed, and was also eager to rebut the friends who thought poodles were sissies. At the time, purebred dogs were admired for their style but many people assumed that their breeding made them neurotic, genetically compromised, and stupid. Poodles, with their clownish mops of curly hair, were the easiest targets for ridicule, even though they were smart and sturdy dogs that had actually been bred as hunters.

  Walker went to England and stayed for more than a month to watch the obedience competitions and also to learn how to train her own dogs. It was an adventurous choice for the time: most dogs that required training, such as hunting or patrol dogs, were sent to professional handlers for weeks or months of schooling and then sent back to their owners with a set of instructions and a bill. Owners simply didn’t train their own dogs.

  Inspired by what she called the “thrilling sport” of obedience competition, Walker returned to the United States and urged the American Kennel Club to add obedience trials to its dog shows. The suggestion was politely declined. Walker approached smaller dog clubs, asking them to sponsor obedience competitions, but they declined as well. She decided to take matters into her own hands: in 1933, with 150 spectators and eight competitors—two Labradors, three poodles, two springer spaniels, and a German shepherd—she held the first obedience trial in the United States at her father’s estate in Mount Kisco, New York.

  She was delighted by how the event turned out, and she was stubborn. In spite of her initial rejection by the AKC, she went back to the board of directors; in the meantime she hosted more obedience trials at her father’s estate. She also offered small training classes at her home and began promoting her blunt and commanding slogan, “Train Your Dog,” everywhere she could. She thought that dog training would have a salutary effect on the world of purebred dogs because it would provide “an incentive to all breeders to breed for brains and for the original purpose of each breed, as well as for show points.”

  If obedience trials were added to the bill at dog shows, Walker reasoned, it might draw new audiences, especially “people who love dogs but have no understanding of the fine points of conformation.” She also believed that obedience had a value in itself—or, as she explained in an interview, she believed a well-trained dog was a benefit to everyone because it demonstrated how well dogs fit “our modern scheme of living.” Like Lee, who avoided having Rin Tin Tin do silly routines in his stage show and believed in training dogs to make them better companions rather than amusements, Walker felt it was important “to demonstrate the usefulness of the purebred dog as the companion and guardian of man, and not the ability of the dog to acquire facility in the performance of mere tricks.”

  Walker’s notions disturbed many members of the purebred-dog community. In a New Yorker piece called “A Trend in Dogs,” a Scottie breeder at the Westminster Kennel Club show is quoted saying, “The mere thought of obedience trials becoming fashionable, with nothing but a tractable nature counting in a dog’s favor and with nobody giving a damn about body points, positively makes me ill.” The Scottie breeder adds that she considers these so-called obedience people a plague. “The country is full of them, darling,” she explains. “Westchester alone is teeming with people who don’t give a whoop about lines and proportions any more. All they care about is”—she sniffs—“intelligence.” But outside the rarefied world of dog-show people, Walker’s timing happened to be perfect. The country was changing, and now that hundreds of thousands of dogs were living in suburban houses and city apartments, people wanted to learn how to manage their pets.

  In 1932, shortly before she held her first obedience trial, Walker advertised for a new manager to run her kennel. She ended up hiring a young woman named Blanche Saunders, who was a farmhand at Green Chimneys, a property that was owned by circus people who practiced trick riding and elephant training on the grounds. Saunders had worked on farms since graduating college with a degree in animal husbandry, but she had begun to be bored with farm animals and decided to answer Walker’s ad.

  Saunders was angular and blond, with a wide forehead, a decisive-looking jaw, and a pursed mouth. The daughter of a Baptist minister, she was the only girl among six siblings and very comfortable on large machinery. She had a penchant for clunky shoes and oxford cloth shirts and refused to admit that she was a very good cook because she thought it made her sound too girlish. In her introduction to Saunders’ 1974 memoir, The Story of Dog Obedience, Walker recalled coming to Green Chimneys along with her poodle, Tango of Piperscroft, to interview Saunders for the job. “She came running to meet me, all energy and enthusiasm,” Walker wrote. “She was in blue jeans with a red bandana around her head and had just finished a day’s work driving a tractor on the farm.”

  Saunders and Walker came from very different worlds but they found immediate kinship, and Saunders left Green Chimneys for Carillon. Her job there was to manage the daily workings of the kennel, but she became interested in the obedience training Walker was so enthusiastic about, so she asked if she could try her hand with one of the poodles, Carillon Epreuve, who was known around the house as Glee. Right away, Saunders saw that she had a knack for dog training; soon it became a calling, and Walker found the companion who was as devoted to the idea of obedience work as she was.

  In 1935, Walker submitted yet another proposal to the AKC concerning obedience trials. After three months of deliberations, the board of directors at last agreed to include obedience at its shows. Instead of bringing the two women on to run it, the AKC took charge of the new obedience program. Walker and Saunders were disappointed, but they now had time to attend to another mission: taking the idea of training to the general public, not just to the dog-show world. As Saunders later wrote, “Mrs. Walker and I were at last free to give full effort to the arousing of public interest in training dogs.” According to Saunders, as soon as they began urging people to train their dogs, “questions and pleas for guidance” had poured into Carillon Kennel from all over the country. They then decided to take their passion about training dogs on the road.

  First, they converted Walker’s Buick sedan to suit their unusual needs. They pulled out the backseat and replaced it with a wooden platform for the three poodles—Glee, Joyeaux, and Bon Coeur—who were coming along with them to perform in the training demonstrations. Then Walker bought a twenty-one-foot-long house trailer, which would serve as “the home of the human uprights,” as Saunders put it, that they would pull behind the car. They packed the trailer with maps, food for the dogs and themselves, and a list of the dog shows scheduled for the next several months.

  They left New York in the fall of 1937, around the time Lee and Junior were working on the last of their serials for Mascot films. Walker and Saunders drove until Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, which was holding a large all-breed dog show; Walker persuaded the show’s organizers to let them give a demonstration during a break in the proceedings. They had divided their responsibilities: Saunders put the poodles through their obedience routine while Walker narrated and handed out Train Your Dog pamphlets to the spectators. From the very start, they drew huge crowds. I
n her memoir Saunders recalled that at most of their stops, “the ringside was crowded because everyone was anxious to see the ‘two crazy women from New York with their three trick Poodles.’”

  They were a spectacle for many reasons. Poodles were rare at the time—in 1930, the AKC listed only thirty-four poodles in its registry; trained poodles were a curiosity twice over. In addition, house trailers were rare. To encounter two women traveling together, unaccompanied by men, was also unusual; to find these women in a house trailer with trained poodles was downright extraordinary. (“The courtly sheriff in Louisiana . . . looked at us in amazement when he heard that we had no men folk with us,” Saunders wrote.) Saunders carried a gun in case anyone found their unusualness too intriguing. “When we parked for the night,” she wrote, “the poodles became experts at finding hobos asleep under a bush and would chase them with fierce determination.”

  They traveled the way Lee had done so many times with Rin Tin Tin, stopping in all the small towns and midsized cities. They performed in Cincinnati, Louisville (where they needed a mule team to pull the trailer out of a sinkhole), Dallas, Fort Worth, Galveston, Hollywood, and even Juárez, Mexico. They passed homeless families camping on the side of the road—not a rare sight in 1937—and lines at soup kitchens in most of the towns.

  Although they suffered through sand squalls and a plague of stinging red ants, and had to minister to the dogs when they were injured by cactus spurs, Walker and Saunders also got the notice they were looking for, and the idea of dog obedience began to gain acceptance. Magazines, including Reader’s Digest, Town & Country, and Pageant, began reporting on their travels. Some magazines took what Saunders called “a different slant.” Parents Magazine, for instance, ran an article about them called “We Sent Our Child to a Dog School.”

  They were gone for three months and headed home at last in November 1937. By the time they got back to New York they had traveled ten thousand miles. They had performed before thousands of people and brought their passion for dog obedience to the public for the very first time. Within a few months of their trip, the number of obedience trials at American dog shows doubled and forty-two new obedience-training clubs had sprung up around the country. One unplanned result of their celebrity was that the number of poodles in the country grew even faster than the craze for obedience. The breed rose from a position of near-obscurity to one of the most popular in the country, exploding just the way German shepherds had a decade before.

  Walker and Saunders’ friendship must have been extraordinary. I have seen a picture of the trailer they used on the trek, hitched to the rear of the white, bulbous Buick (the caption reads “21-foot House Trailer in which the Writer, With Mrs. Walker and Three Poodles, traveled Coast to Coast on Behalf of Obedience”). What I wish I had is a picture of them together. Their relationship had the contours of a romance, or certainly an intense closeness, not just because they shared this interest and spent so much time in each other’s company but because they had set out to achieve something difficult and managed to do it together—and the satisfaction of that would have been impossible for anyone else to understand.

  Walker remained active in the obedience world and in poodle clubs for the rest of her life, but in 1943, she decided to close her kennel and gave Saunders the rights to the Carillon name and a few of her best dogs. Saunders was no longer her kennel manager at that time—she had left in 1941 to study with the German dog trainer Josef Weber, who along with several other prominent trainers had immigrated to the United States after World War I. After Carillon closed and Saunders moved away from Brewster, I do not know if the two women ever spent time together again.

  7.

  During this period, Lee was in limbo. He was growing tired of Hollywood and felt uninspired by Junior. He felt depleted if he wasn’t excited about a dog. At least his personal life was advancing: after a seven-year engagement, he and Eva Linden were getting married. Her parents had long disapproved of the match—Lee was eighteen years older than Eva—but in 1936, they finally gave in.

  The wedding was held in Yosemite National Park. It was an unconventional place for a wedding. The choice reflected Lee’s tastes much more than those of Eva, who was a city girl with a taste for art and music. So did the wedding’s canine theme. “The bridal supper table will be very effective with its centerpiece representing a miniature log house,” reported the San Fernando Valley Times. “Standing at a window [of the log house] looking out at his master will be a silver likeness of the departed Rin Tin Tin, the world-famous movie dog, which was made in France. Other silver dogs and horses will stress the appointments, to emphasize the great love for animals which is so dear to the heart of the bridegroom.”

  When they returned to Los Angeles after their honeymoon—which was also in Yosemite—Lee told Eva that he wanted to move. He wasn’t thinking about finding a different house in Los Angeles; he wanted to move to Riverside, a town on the banks of the Santa Ana River, a long sixty-mile ride from Los Angeles on a washboard road that wound around sage scrub and chaparral and rocky breaks. Riverside was California’s orange capitol. In 1870, a Riverside resident had planted three Brazilian navel orange seedlings in the front yard of her house. One of the trees was trampled to death by a cow and another died of unknown causes, but the third tree survived and flourished, and in time it became the parent tree of the entire California navel orange industry. Within a decade, the orange industry was thriving and Riverside was said to be the richest city per capita in the United States. Some twenty thousand acres of citrus were cultivated within the city limits, and Riverside’s oranges were shipped all over the country under dozens of different labels, such as Desert Dream Oranges, Riverside’s Best, Riverside Gold, Sunny Mountain, and Cal-Crest.

  Lee had visited Riverside in 1928, when Rin Tin Tin was filming The Race for Life at the local fairgrounds, and he liked the look of it. Although he was not thinking about leaving Beverly Hills at that time, he took an interest in a forty-acre spread on low, sloping land near the river, but the place wasn’t for sale. In 1937, though, when Lee was eager to move out of the city, the ranch came on the market at an attractive price—land in Riverside was going for 25 cents an acre—and he was able to put together enough money to buy it. Later that year, he and Eva, who had been living at his sister Marjorie’s, moved to Riverside.

  It was a modest place, and the house was a little ramshackle, considerably less grand than the name they gave it, El Rancho Rin Tin Tin. In spite of its wealth and a few fancy buildings like the Mission Inn and Benedict Castle, Riverside was still just a market town, without any of Los Angeles’s sophistication or polish. Movie people came to the Mission Inn now and then for a weekend in the desert, but otherwise Hollywood could have been a million miles away. Perhaps that is why Riverside suited Lee at that moment, when he seemed like he had had his fill of Hollywood, and he adapted immediately. In Los Angeles, he’d always worn the most stylish clothes, sweater vests and pleated knickers and starched, snow-white shirts, but now he refused to wear anything other than Western shirts with pearl snaps and a straw cowboy hat with a four-inch brim. It was almost as if that other version of him had never existed. Once he was in Riverside, he picked up where he’d left off in 1916, when he was a ranch kid in a checkered shirt and torn dungarees. Even when he traveled to New York City to appear on The Ed Sullivan Show in the 1960s, he wore—to the everlasting embarrassment of his daughter—his cowboy clothes and his big straw hat.

  It’s hard to know for sure why Lee fixed on his childhood, which had never seemed very happy, as his point of reference. It’s human nature to set a point in our minds when we feel triumphant and to measure everything that comes after it by how far we fall or rise from that point. For Lee, I would have expected that point would have been the glorious years when Rinty was making movies like Clash of the Wolves, when he and Lee were mobbed in theater lobbies, had endless money, and saw no end to their possibilities. Instead he retreated to his childhood—both actually, by moving
to the ranchlands of California, just like the ranch where he lived as a boy, and also symbolically, by completely abandoning the trappings of his successful Hollywood years. He certainly wasn’t trying to forget those early years with Rinty: as soon as he moved to Riverside, he converted a tack room in the barn into what he called the Memory Room, where he kept all the newspaper clippings and memorabilia from Rin Tin Tin’s early years.

  It seemed like a paradox, but the distinction eventually dawned on me: the Memory Room was set up to preserve the great successes of Rinty’s life, while Lee’s return to living on a ranch was a chance for him to reconnect with the great success of his own life. For Lee, that great success wasn’t the moment when he and Rinty had so much acclaim. It was when his mother had come to retrieve him from Fred Finch, pulling him back from “the dark well or canyon” into which he felt himself falling. Elizabeth had rescued him from being forever orphaned and alone, just as he, in the dark well of war, in the rubble of that ruined kennel, had rescued the puppy Rin Tin Tin. “Then came the ride back to the country, the life I love best of all,” he had written. And now came the ride back to Riverside, to the life he loved best of all.

  8.

  Eva was less enthusiastic about ranch life. By her daughter Carolyn’s description, Eva thought she was marrying a rich older man with a famous movie dog, and the retreat from Hollywood was a stinging disappointment. “It wasn’t at all what she thought she was getting,” Carolyn said. “My mother didn’t expect to be on a dirty, horrible ranch.” Eva got a job with one of the orange shippers after they moved to Riverside, then gave birth to Carolyn, and tried to adjust to what her life had turned out to be.