Rin Tin Tin

by Susan Orlean

  The army, looking to reassure families, published pictures of demobilized dogs relaxing at home, over captions like “This is Caesar on the front lawn” and “Here is Spike in Civilian Life.” They also published excerpts from letters that described successful reunions. “DOLF arrived yesterday in excellent condition. . . . He knew each and all of us immediately.” “Thank you for your good care and training of our dog MIKE . . . he still remembers the tricks he knew before he entered the service.” “I want to thank you for the wonderful dog you returned to us. SMARTY is a perfect example of health and alertness. It was a genuine sacrifice for Herbie to donate his dog to the armed forces, but now he is receiving his reward by receiving a dog more beautiful and better trained than he ever thought possible.”

  Newspapers also reported on successful reentries. According to one 1944 story, “Goofy, The Warrior Dog, Comes Home,” service in the army had actually improved the dog’s behavior. After seventeen months at the front, Goofy was happy to be home with his family in Pennsylvania and even had a joyful get-together with his best friend, a Belgian shepherd named Wacky. Then the mailman arrived. “The mailman was nervous about Goofy,” the story reported. “He remembered that Goofy had bitten him before joining the army.” Goofy sniffed the mailman’s shoes but didn’t bite him. The mailman, sighing with relief, remarked that they must have taught him manners in the army.

  Dogs for Defense was disbanded at the end of World War II, but dogs remained part of the military, and most of them still came from private donations, although the terms of the donations changed. In the future there would be no progress reports and no trip home at the end of service. Donated dogs became permanent property of the U.S. military, as had always been the case with other animals that the military procured—horses, camels, mules, donkeys. Dogs were used in Korea and Vietnam, in Desert Storm and Desert Shield, and in Iraq and Afghanistan.

  A few years ago, I watched an army unit audition some potential recruits. The testing took place on a carpet-green soccer field in a suburb of Boston on a bright morning in May. When I arrived, half a dozen people were gathered at the field, resting against their cars, their arms crossed, watching each dog go through its paces before three army officers, who were wearing fatigues and clutching clipboards to their chests. Most of the dogs were Doberman pinschers and German shepherds, and each of the owners said they’d brought the dog because it was too aggressive to be a pet, or too dominant, or too mean. They viewed the army as a sort of last-chance resort for bad dogs. This was entirely different from what was taking place in 1942, when sending your dog to the K-9 Corps was like offering a piece of yourself in the hope of being able to serve.

  Everyone I tell about Dogs for Defense is astonished by it. Some are horrified. People who didn’t grow up during World War II, who have only known wars that seemed optional or ill considered or entrepreneurial, have trouble imagining the intimate sacrifice of sending a pet to war. Never mind that many of their fathers and grandfathers fought in the war: giving a pet away for that purpose seems somehow more shocking. Most of us realize that bad people do bad things and good people have to fight them. A dog has no such knowledge, and the thought of sending it off to war seems like a betrayal of the human-dog relationship, which is founded in trust and in the dog’s unspoken promise not to eat us when it probably could.

  15.

  By 1947, after all the dogs that survived the war were petted into docility and sent home, Lee and Rin Tin Tin III headed back to El Rancho Rin Tin Tin. Lee was once again at loose ends. His tax returns show scant earnings—$1,150 from selling a few colts; $210 from the sale of puppies; and $3,225 for boarding horses. Eva’s secretarial salary was paying their bills.

  As always, Lee’s thoughts turned to the movies. After spending four years at Camp Haan, Rinty was mature and well trained. Lee didn’t have much footing in Hollywood anymore, but he was determined to try again with this new Rin Tin Tin.

  The movie industry was nothing like the Poverty Row he had walked down with Rin Tin Tin in 1920, but it was still a surprisingly small town. People bumped into people and made deals. At a horse show, Lee met a retired movie executive named George Schaefer, who happened to be toying with the idea of starting a new production company. Lee described Rin Tin Tin III to him. Schaefer was a fan of old Rin, and after the horse show he came to Riverside to see Rinty III. According to Lee, Schaefer was so impressed that he “telephoned for his attorneys and associates to join him at the ranch,” and that evening, at Lee’s dining room table, Schaefer incorporated a new production company, Romay Pictures, to produce a film starring the dog.

  Once again, Lee also had an idea for a screenplay. At the time, hundreds of European war orphans were being placed in American foster homes. Lee thought a movie could focus on an orphan boy who overcomes his war trauma by developing an attachment to a dog. Perhaps the dog could in some way be orphaned, too, and the dog could also be saved from loneliness by the boy’s devotion. It was the story Lee never tired of, no matter how many years he was away from Fred Finch. Even now, so long after he had lost his first dog, he never stopped believing that a dog could make you whole. Now he was circling back, hoping it would start his life up again.

  But did anyone still remember Rin Tin Tin as a movie star? It had been years since Junior’s bumbling efforts in Law of the Wolf and Hollywood Cavalcade, and even longer since old Rin had been in his prime. Schaefer, clearly, was willing to take the chance.

  Schaefer’s partner, William Stephens, wrote a script based on the story Lee suggested, and The Return of Rin Tin Tin was shot that year. The young actor Robert Blake (then known as Bobby Blake) stars as Paul, an emotionally damaged orphan from an unnamed war-torn country. Paul’s American foster mother is unable to form a bond with the troubled boy, so she places him at a California mission in the care of a wise priest—a version of Lee’s experience at Fred Finch. Rin Tin Tin III plays a dog that has escaped a cruel owner and finds refuge at the mission just as Paul arrives. (As gossip columnist Louella Parsons noted, the film was “based on the old reliable formula of a boy, a dog and a priest.”) In the end, Paul and Rin Tin Tin heal each other. “I can’t love nobody!” Paul sobs in a pivotal scene, hugging the dog. “But I love you, Rin! I love you!”

  Rinty performs the requisite leaps and jumps, and once again he plays a character who is wronged, who suffers, and whose goodness ultimately saves him. But his role in the film was quite different from roles old Rin had played. In his movies, the first Rin Tin Tin was the star, but he was also much more. His thrilling stunts were pivotal to the plot. His perspective was the omniscient one in the story. His intelligence and resolve provided the plot’s deus ex machina. His performance was the film’s power. Less was asked of Rin Tin Tin III in The Return of Rin Tin Tin. He was a beautiful animal and he was billed as the star of the movie, but in fact he is just one character in an ensemble, less central to the story than the mop-topped, wincing Robert Blake. The dog’s stunts are impressive, but they embellish the story rather than propel it. The relationship he and Blake develop is the axis of the film, but the character that struggles and changes is the boy, not the dog.

  Unlike old Rin, this new Rin Tin Tin has none of that internal clash between his wildness and his civility, between his wolfishness and his capacity to become attached to humans. He does not symbolize any friction between superego and id. Rinty’s struggle here is just circumstantial: he needs to stay away from his cruel owner. The first Rin Tin Tin always managed to seem a little better, a little smarter, a little more spiritual than the other characters in his films. In The Return of Rin Tin Tin, for the first time, he is just a dog.

  Before releasing the film, Schaefer hired Buchanan and Company to research whether audiences were still interested in Rin Tin Tin. In November 1946, the Brooklyn Eagle carried news of the Buchanan study:

  A nationwide survey, covering cities of all sizes from rural communities to the largest cities in the country . . . has revealed that the best-known m
otion picture “personality” ever to appear on a screen is Rin Tin Tin, the animal star. . . . The survey revealed that 70.3 percent of those people queried—ranging in age groups from six to fifteen years and sixteen to forty-five—knew the name of Rin Tin Tin. This is a larger percentage than has ever known of any film star’s name. Of the people who had heard of Rin Tin Tin’s name, 94.6 percent identified him correctly as the animal star of motion pictures.

  The numbers astonished everyone, even Lee. The filmmakers were elated. To ensure that this huge number of people who recognized Rin Tin Tin would see the film, Romay launched an aggressive publicity campaign, almost contemporary in its reach. One contest offered a “genuine RIN TIN TIN pup” to the person who came up with the best name for the puppy. True Comics, Parents Magazine, and Calling All Boys agreed to feature the movie on their covers. Gaines Dog Food, which had supplanted Lee’s long relationship with Ken-L-Ration, placed full-page ads featuring Rinty in Life and the Saturday Evening Post (“A Wise Dog feels it in his bones—the marvelous difference when EVERY INCH of him is nourished by GAINES!”). Theater owners were given advice on how to draw patrons to the film: they might offer huge barrels full of animal crackers in the lobby as an enticement; encourage war veterans to march in formation to the theater on opening night; ask schools to encourage students to make Rin Tin Tin drawings in art class and write “Why I want to see Rin Tin Tin on the screen” essays in English class. The school’s orchestra members and their dogs could parade through town.

  He had died fourteen years before The Return of Rin Tin Tin was released, but the first Rin Tin Tin seemed more present than ever. It was as if he had never gone away. Lee was “constantly amazed” that children who were far too young to have seen a Rin Tin Tin film, who couldn’t possibly be nostalgic for the old dog, responded to the new one as if he were an old friend; they “called Rinty by name, knew him, loved him, asked for autographed pictures.” Lee supposed they had learned about the dog from their parents. One contest to promote the film was called Memories of Rin Tin Tin. It was an essay competition; the topic was “Why I Liked the Old Rin Tin Tin and Am Looking Forward to ‘THE RETURN OF RIN TIN TIN.’” According to the publicity material, “Millions of people remember the greatness of Rin Tin Tin and you can take advantage of this to resell the adults in your town on him by promoting this contest.”

  Popular culture is a period of time captured in a look and a gesture. Popular performers are made by time and then undone by it, as they age out of relevance. Rin Tin Tin, and the idea of heroic devotion that he represented, was proving to be something more. Parents were passing him along to their children. He had beaten time. He had become a classic.

  • • •

  The reviews were enthusiastic:

  “Every bit the performer and as camera-wise as his celebrated grandfather, Rin Tin Tin III carries on a distinguished heritage.”

  “The current dog star is Rin Tin Tin III . . . He carries on the tradition nobly and measures up to his predecessor in talent and screen personality.”

  “The dog definitely justifies his star billing.”

  The only sour note came from the American Humane Association, which complained to the Motion Picture Association of America about several scenes in the movie. In one, Rinty’s former owner tracks him down and beats him. The scene was “objectionably suggestive of cruelty to animals.” (In a side note, the AHA also disapproved of a scene in which the priest, Father Matthew, is shown telling a lie, “a specious line of reasoning unbecoming a Priest and is certain to give widespread offense.”)

  Lee took good care of his dogs. But in early Hollywood, animals that were not recognizable stars often had a rotten time. Horses got the roughest treatment: they were tripped, shocked, raced into open trenches, run ragged. To make a horse fall on cue, wires were strung around its ankles or threaded through holes that were drilled in its hooves; the rider simply yanked the wires to pull the horse up short. In 1935, 125 horses were wire-tripped in The Charge of the Light Brigade, and 25 of them were killed outright by the fall or euthanized as a result.

  Four years later, the director of the Tyrone Power movie Jesse James wanted a shot of a cowboy on horseback jumping into water. A stunt-man rode a blindfolded horse into a greased chute on a cliff above a lake. When the horse hit the water, it broke its back and had to be destroyed. This was a defining moment in the film industry. Only the first frames of that shot were used in Jesse James, but the entire sequence of the animal plunging toward the water—hunched, helpless, stiff-legged—was circulated by people concerned with animal welfare. The American Humane Association, which had been founded in the late nineteenth century to protect animals and children, issued a report reproaching the movie industry, citing Jesse James as a particularly egregious example of how animals were treated. (In England, the animal protection group Dumb Friends League called for similar reform the same year.) The Motion Picture Association of America, responding to the complaints, added a section to its production code in 1940 prohibiting the use of tilt chutes and trip wires, as well as other abusive practices, and the AHA opened a Hollywood office to enforce the new standards.

  The scenes in The Return of Rin Tin Tin that were “suggestive of cruelty to animals” remained in the film despite the AHA’s misgivings. There was never a charge that Rinty was actually being hurt, just that the scene depicted cruelty. The Return of Rin Tin Tin was released in the same year as Gentleman’s Agreement, Duel in the Sun, and The Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer—formidable competition. It still managed to be a success, drawing audiences that were as devoted to the dog as those that had gathered to see old Rin a decade earlier.

  16.

  “HEY KIDS! Big Special Stage and Screen Show with a Dual Appearance of the Most Famous Dog in All the World. On our stage In Person Lee Duncan and Rin Tin Tin III. See this Marvel of Canine Intelligence in an Amazing Array of Uncanny Stunts and Feats. His Understanding of his Trainer’s Commands Astonishes Everyone . . . And on our Screen See this same ‘Dog With a Brain’ in The Return of Rin Tin Tin!”

  In November, Lee left Riverside with Rinty and set out on an eight-week tour of the country to support the film. The studio publicist had been swamped by requests. “Rin Tin Tin is certainly popular,” she wrote to Lee, forwarding notes from veterans’ groups, hospitals, Boy Scout troops (“The scouts wish Rinty to autograph special slips of paper”), kennel clubs, and orphanages. Mayors and governors asked Lee and Rinty to stop by when they were in town.

  Eva and Carolyn accompanied Lee on a few of the visits. The press paid them little attention. One article mentioned that Eva was a “weary but well-dressed looking woman”; Carolyn was “their plump eight-year-old daughter.” Otherwise, they receded into the background or stayed at home in Riverside.

  “Famous Dog Will Be Here Wednesday!”

  “Orthopedic Kids Hated to See Rin Go!”

  “Rin Tin Tin Welcomed by Mayor.”

  “Dog Star Signs City’s Guest Register.”

  “Movie Star from Famous Family Comes to Town with a Fur Coat.”

  Lee wouldn’t stop working. He went on yet another tour, another round of personal appearances. A visit to the local Goodwill, the hospital, the orphanage; a stop at a dog show, a county fair, a parade; a demonstration at a kennel club, a town hall, on the tarmac of the local airport. He wanted the story to keep winding off its spool, trailing the silvery filament of memory.

  THE PHENOMENON

  1.

  By the time I managed to locate Bert Leonard, all that was left of him fit into a small unit in a self-storage facility in Los Angeles that was hemmed in by concertina wire and a row of spindly palm trees. Coincidentally, the facility was right down the road from the house Bert owned when he was producing The Adventures of Rin Tin Tin in the 1950s. Because it was one of the most popular television shows in the world, Bert had been able to afford a Tudor mansion with a tennis court in a fine neighborhood near Griffith Park. Years later, when his money ran out, he was
forced to sell. Now the only real estate he still had was a plot in Forest Lawn Cemetery in the Hollywood Hills, where he was buried in 2006, and this storage unit, which enjoyed few of the particulars of the neighborhood. It was on a bleak and creepy back lot, as blank as a tomb, and the chain-link fence running along the sidewalk was clogged with flyers and newspaper pages that the wheezy California wind had slapped up against it.

  Bert’s unit was in one of the buildings farthest from the entrance. A short man with fading Iron Maiden tattoos and a patchwork denim vest was tinkering with a car engine nearby, but otherwise the place was still, except for the distant gurgle of traffic. As I climbed a short flight of stairs, a light above the landing snapped on, and I was so startled that I blurted out something like “Hey!” and then had to take a moment to calm myself down. In the stuffy quiet, I heard a soft flutter. A little bird had made her nest on a rafter in the hall. She hopped to attention as I stood there, and then she watched with a shiny eye as I reached for the lock on Bert’s door. Why would a bird choose to live here, in a storage building, on a pad of hot concrete, instead of in, say, the Santa Monica wilderness? Nature is so mysterious. I fumbled for the key.

  I had been looking for Bert Leonard for years. In his day he had been the quintessential Hollywood character, but there was no longer any evidence of him there—no relationship with any movie studio, no projects in development, no deals about to be made. He had no address or phone number that I could find. I called all the friends of his I could locate, and after telling me how fond they were of Bert, and also how much money he owed them, they each admitted they hadn’t talked to him in ages and didn’t know where he might be. It was incredibly frustrating; I was desperate to ask him about working with Lee and how he came under the spell of Rin Tin Tin and a million other questions that felt crucial to me.