Rin Tin Tin

by Susan Orlean

  They still hadn’t settled on a catchphrase—the “trademark” that Rusty/Dusty/Dakota Bill would always say to the dog, that they hoped would become as popular as “Hi-yo Silver!” In his first draft, writer Douglas Heyes used the phrase “Go get ’em, Rinty!” but Irving Briskin—who seemed to relish criticizing Heyes—found it objectionable. “DON’T LIKE THIS” he scrawled across a copy of the script. “IT’S ORDINARY. MAYBE ‘FIGHT, RINTY!’, OR ‘TROUBLE, RINTY!’” He also attached a longer note, full of sharp remarks. “We have agreed that this would not be the expression we would use. We feel that you should get something better than that, like ‘Fight ’em, Rinty’ . . . or something other than an ordinary expression like ‘go get ’em.’ . . . I would also call your attention to what I call sloppy writing. You are going to try in one scene to have the Major walk in and call attention, you are going to have Dusty dive into a footlocker, you are going to have O’Hara rush across the aisle and open up another footlocker, you are going to have Rinty jump into a footlocker, then you are going to have O’Hara jump to attention. All of this in one scene! This is bad script writing and you are only kidding yourself. Again, I would like to warn you this is a story of a dog and a boy. I am not interested in the adults.”

  Bert told Briskin that he and Heyes had tried out all sorts of catchphrases, including “Charge ’em, Rinty!”; “Attack ’em, Rinty!”; “Fight ’em, Rinty!”; “Trouble, Rinty!”; “Forward, Rinty!”; and “Go, Rinty!” Then he remembered a cavalry expression, “Yo-ho!” which was used as a call to the troops if a bugle wasn’t available. He liked the sound of it. “This could be used as ‘Yo-ho, Rinty!’” Bert wrote. “I still personally like ‘Go get ’em, Rinty!’ because I think it has a certain rhythm and drive, and at the same time its literal meaning encompasses all the various actions into which he might be sent. However I am open to suggestions on this matter.” Everyone loved “Yo-ho, Rinty!” and Heyes was instructed to delete “Go get ’em, Rinty!” and replace it with “Yo-ho, Rinty!” in every script.

  Now they needed only to figure out a short “signature” sequence that would open every episode. After hours of tinkering, Bert finally had a forty-five-second opening that he was sure would “act as a calling card to all the kids to come and watch Rin Tin Tin.” The troops would line up for inspection. Then Rusty and Rinty would squeeze their way into the line and salute along with the troops. Bert thought it would be charming to see the dog and the boy—half as tall as the other troops—in formation, trying hard to look grown-up and serious and, in the case of the dog, human. Bert sent Cohn a script for the sequence, which came to be one of the most recognizable openings on television for years:

  A. CLOSEUP RIN-TIN-TIN

  —in a big head-and-shoulder close-up against a simple sky background. Over this: BUGLE CALL BEGINS

  EXT. INSIDE FORT APACHE STOCKADE—DAY

  B. ANGLE TOWARD BARRACKS WITH BUGLE IN FOREGROUND

  —as Troopers pile out of the doors, carrying rifles—dashing toward camera the one-shot formation, filling the screen

  C. ANGLE ON CATWALK UP TO RIN-TIN-TIN

  D. MEDIUM SHOT AT STABLE AREA—RUSTY

  —a rugged kid of eight or nine, coming from b.g. to f.g. carrying a much too large army saddle, puts it hastily on a saddle rack, and rushes toward the o.s. formation. He wears a makeshift cavalry uniform and a cavalry hat. Over this: SUPERIMPOSE:

  (Title)

  WITH RUSTY “B-COMPANY”

  E. ANGLE ON RIN-TIN-TIN

  As he leaps from the high catwalk to an army wagon below, thence to a rock, and finally hits the ground running.

  CAMERA HOLDS on him as he, too, dashes for the formation

  F. MEDIUM FULL SHOT

  as Rin-Tin-Tin reaches the empty place in line, and sits up at attention next to Rusty.

  G. TWO SHOT RIN-TIN-TIN AND RUSTY

  At attention. (Bugle call has stopped.)

  VOICE

  Eyes—right!

  After introducing Masters and O’Hara, the sequence comes to a close:

  Music hits a climax as we SUPERIMPOSE:

  (Title Card #1)

  AND STARRING

  (Title Card #2)

  RIN-TIN-TIN

  FADE OUT.

  INSERT FIRST COMMERCIAL

  9.

  Bert had suggested to Screen Gems that he shoot in Mexico to save money, but it was decided that the show would be filmed at Corriganville Movie Ranch, a two-thousand-acre spread in the valley north of Hollywood, near the Santa Susana Pass. In 1954, the ranch’s owner was Ray “Crash” Corrigan, a stuntman and actor with credits in such movies as Bela Lugosi Meets a Brooklyn Gorilla (he played the gorilla) and Captive Wild Woman (he played an ape). Corrigan bought the land in 1936 after being told that there was Spanish treasure buried on it. He never found treasure, but he soon realized that the ranch—studded with cactus and rock and pocked with caves and pools—was a classic western landscape and close enough to the studios in town to be an ideal movie location.

  The studios began using the ranch regularly; Corrigan also opened part of it to the public as a sort of western-themed amusement park (out-of-work actors performed gunfights and brawls for entertainment). John Ford used Corriganville for his classic film Fort Apache. Howard Hughes built a Corsican village set on it for filming Vendetta. Gentle, vaguely medical pornographic films known as “figure studies” were shot in a section of the ranch known as Silvertown. Sam Katzman shot dozens of films at Corriganville, so Bert knew the ranch well. For The Adventures of Rin-Tin-Tin, he took over the Fort Apache section of Corriganville, not far from the spot where he first came up with his idea for the show. At the same time, on other parts of the ranch, Lassie, The Lone Ranger, and Have Gun Will Travel were being filmed as well.

  The business of renting out a location like Corriganville for westerns was profitable for years—each time the genre started to seem out of date, it was retooled to suit the moment. From 1936 until the last set closed in 1966, Corriganville Movie Ranch was used in 3,500 different productions, more than any other location outside a studio. After westerns fell out of favor in the 1960s, Corrigan sold the property to Bob Hope, who subdivided a section and built Hopetown Homes, a neighborhood of suburban split-levels with aggressively irrigated lawns, curiously adrift in the empty, parched acreage. Then Camelback Mountain was dynamited flat to make way for the Ronald Reagan Freeway. That sliced the property in two, and before long the northern edge of Los Angeles inched its way up and over what had been the quiet, wild acres of the ranch. I was curious to see if anything at Corriganville still looked like the scenes from the show, so I went to visit it one morning. I was meeting a man named Greg Anderson, a local amateur historian who knew the area well and had offered to show me around.

  When Anderson approached me in the parking lot that morning, I couldn’t help but notice that he was dressed in an 1870s army uniform. “I’m in character,” he said, in response to the alarm on my face. He smoothed the brass buttons on his coat. “This one is cavalry. I have a Cheyenne look, too, and a few others, but this seemed right for today.”

  We headed down a path lacy with light filtering through the oaks, Anderson narrating what had been filmed in what spot and which movie star had stood on which hunk of granite and under which gnarled tree. We came to an empty concrete swimming pool veined with cracks, tufts of stiff grass pushing through. There were scrapes and chips along the edge. “Skateboarders,” Anderson said with disgust. “And to think that Johnny Weissmuller used to swim in this pool.” I grew up watching and hating those Weissmuller Tarzan movies, which played on late-night television in what seemed like an endless, dark loop. I must have seen this pool hundreds of times in those movies, but I would never have recognized it without the fake vines and fake palm trees used to dress the set.

  As we walked along, Anderson told me that he had always been a fan of westerns. When he discovered that so many of them had been filmed here, he became fascinated by the place and the many iden
tities it had been able to assume. He began taping every western on television in order to learn how to recognize as many Corriganville rock formations as possible. “After a while, I wouldn’t even really watch the movie,” he said. “I would turn the sound off and study each scene really carefully to figure out the location.” He assured me that he could watch any western that had been filmed here—no matter how much set dressing had been done—and tell me exactly which rock was which. He had spent a lot of time working on it, hours and hours.

  This seemed like an unusual sort of hobby, but no matter how specialized or particular a hobby might be, it always seems that someone has dug into it. Immersing yourself in a single interest so thoroughly sometimes means that the interest stops being something you do; instead you become a servant of that interest. But for many people, that kind of engagement is a comfort. Maybe embracing one thing that is so explicit is like whittling all you know and feel and care about into a single point—one that is so fine it can be threaded through life’s eye.

  Anderson stooped to pick up a piece of trash that was tumbling by. “You know, I have all this knowledge of this stuff now,” he said, glancing at me. “It makes me feel like I’m important.”

  We left Johnny Weissmuller’s pool and ducked under low branches. I asked Anderson if he could show me Fort Apache, where The Adventures of Rin-Tin-Tin was filmed, but he told me that the fort had been dismantled in 1967. He could tell how disappointed I was. As a consolation, he pointed out some other interesting movie rocks and said he could take me to see the crest of the hill where Rin Tin Tin posed at the end of every episode. We walked beyond the trees and the land opened up, the sky a huge sheet of blue, the upsweep of the black mountains in the distance and before us rocks scattered like a toss of giant dice. The hill was there, past the rocks, and the jut of the crest looked exactly as it had when the dog posed on it every week and filled the screen of the TV. It was around midday, and the color was blasted out of the red dirt and the gray rock and the tawny chaparral, the light bleaching everything, blazing against the granite, so that for a moment you could picture it all in black and white.

  10.

  In the fall of 1954, the American television schedule included puppets and comics, average families and aging celebrities, cowboys, detectives, and Mickey Mouse. Longtime stars Arthur Godfrey and Red Skelton hosted prime-time television shows. The Jack Benny Program featured a new comedian named Johnny Carson. On ABC, most nights began with a fifteen-minute segment of Kukla, Fran and Ollie, an ad-libbed puppet show featuring Ollie, the one-toothed dragon, and the red-nosed, arch-browed Kukla. Family life was showcased in The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet and Father Knows Best and the most popular show on television, I Love Lucy. The Lone Ranger held down Thursday night. The first prime-time game show, The $64,000 Question, premiered, as did the drama anthology The Millionaire.

  Another dog with Hollywood history was also debuting on the 1954 fall television schedule. Rudd Weatherwax had made a deal with CBS to develop a show around Lassie, and the Campbell Soup Company had agreed to sponsor it. Like Lee, Weatherwax was more interested in making movies than television, but after the 1951 film The Painted Hills, no offers for Lassie had come his way. In 1953, an independent producer approached him with the idea of bringing the Lassie character to television. By that time, Pal, the dog that had starred in the movies, was too old to work the long days on a set, but Weatherwax had several of Pal’s puppies—Lassie Junior, Baby, Spook, and Hey Hey—trained and ready for the new show. The show was being cast around the same time as The Adventures of Rin-Tin-Tin; in fact, Lee Aaker was one of the finalists for the lead in the show.

  Like The Adventures of Rin-Tin-Tin, Lassie featured a fatherless boy and his dog. The boy on the Rin Tin Tin show is an orphan who has lost both parents in an Indian raid; the boy on Lassie was less alone in the world, living with his widowed mother and his grandfather on a farm somewhere in rural America. Lassie’s world was gentle and pastoral. The dog provided companionship and lessons to the boy, Jeff, and helped him out of squeezes, which were usually no worse than an unexpected confrontation with a wild animal. (In later seasons of the show, Lassie lived with a different family, whose young son, Timmy, is far more disaster prone, and in time is threatened by a tiger in the woods, trapped in a mine, nearly drowned in quicksand, exposed to radiation, menaced by an escaped circus elephant, poisoned by nightshade berries, chased by a rabid dog, carried off in a balloon, struck by a hit-and-run driver, locked in a shed by an armed robber, and nearly killed by dynamite carried by an escaped lab chimpanzee.)

  Overall, the tone of Lassie was quieter and more domesticated than The Adventures of Rin-Tin-Tin, which often included “shooting, knifing, punching, war, arrow shooting, Indian attacks, scuffles, gun-butting (but no sword play, strangling, torture, or flogging),” according to the Motion Picture Association of America’s analysis. In fact, The Adventures of Rin-Tin-Tin was considered rough enough that censors in Britain removed certain scenes—especially ones that showed Rinty fighting—and Germany banned the show from playing on religious holidays. Some of the Rin Tin Tin episodes were almost comically violent, a matter that Bert and Screen Gems often squabbled over. In one such squabble, Bert conceded several points to the studio:

  The actual kill of the mountain lion will be done off scene, and the savageness of the situation will be held down. . . . We will get enough of it to make it exciting but definitely not gruesome. In Scene 103 we will show chicken feathers as if the wolves had gotten to the chickens, which I don’t think is too horrible as long as we don’t show any of the dead chickens, and we will eliminate the dead horse.

  And finally:

  Rusty will not be caught in a bear trap, but will be treed by the wolves, which will not be as bloodcurdling as the other situation.

  11.

  The Adventures of Rin-Tin-Tin was broadcast for the first time on October 15, 1954. The debut episode, “Meet Rin-Tin-Tin,” was the story of how the “Fighting Blue Devils” of the 101st Cavalry came to be stewards of Rusty and Rinty—or, as Sergeant O’Hara puts it, “How we found them two little orphans.” Only after I had learned Lee Duncan’s personal history did I realize how this story recalled his own time as an orphan, and also the orphaned French boy who had lived with his squadron during World War I—the “little chum” who had served as the squadron’s mascot until French authorities took him away.

  Bert and Lee were confident that Rin Tin Tin would be a triumph again, but even so, the reception The Adventures of Rin-Tin-Tin received must have been overwhelming. The show was an instant success by every measure. It had one of the fastest ratings climbs in television history and from its start was ABC’s second-highest rated show overall, trailing only the Walt Disney show. Nine million of the 30 million televisions in the United States tuned to The Adventures of Rin-Tin-Tin, several million more than were tuned to Lassie, which had premiered on CBS a month earlier. It was also a critical success. “Crammed with action, gun-play, and chase scenes of pre-musical-cowpoke Westerns,” wrote a critic in TV Guide. “It makes fine viewing for kids and nostalgic viewing for grown-ups.” Even The New Yorker paid its respects, running a “Talk of the Town” interview with “the proud, tall, long, four-year-old, hundred-pound, gray-and-white great-grandson of the original Rin Tin Tin.” At the end of the piece, which was mostly an interview with Eva Duncan, the writer, Philip Hamburger, noted that after dinner at the Stork Club, where he turned up his nose at the roast beef, Rin Tin Tin “drank milk out of a champagne glass” and “pushed a molting goose called Susie down Broadway in a baby carriage.”

  Lee and Rin Tin Tin were once again the center of the nation’s attention. How many years had passed? Decades, lifetimes, it seemed—and yet here they were, as if Rin Tin Tin was a fresh new discovery. The show was broadcasting in seventy other countries besides the United States, including Canada, France, Lebanon, Kenya, Pakistan, Nicaragua, Cuba, Thailand, Germany, Bermuda, Brazil, Italy, New Zealand, Surinam, and Ja
pan. Just as in earlier decades, Rin Tin Tin was everywhere. He was a single point connecting people all over the world, from all different cultures and circumstances, all of them watching as the camera angled up to the crest of a hill where a big dog stood at alert, a depthless silhouette against a western sky in a placeless place somewhere in the timeless history of America.

  Success kept them busy. At Corriganville Movie Ranch, the cast and crew worked six days out of seven, racing to shoot two episodes a week. They shot thirty or forty scenes every day. The schedule was so intense that none of the actors had time to launder their costumes. Directors rotated in at noon on Wednesdays. Robert Walker, a Hollywood veteran, directed the greatest number of episodes until, according to Sam Manners, he got fed up with Hollywood and left to become a Mormon priest. The stuntmen, who were paid $17 to fall off a horse, were black-and-blue from the long days.

  There was a flood of requests from schools and civic groups, hospitals, rodeos. Everyone wanted a visit from Rinty or from anyone connected to the show. Screen Gems, delighted and also besieged, hired a Kenyon & Eckhart executive named Wauhillau LaHay to manage the enthusiasm. LaHay was a political reporter before she joined Kenyon & Eckhart, and some years later, when she decided to leave the ad business, she became the White House correspondent for Scripps Howard newspapers. Her father was a lobbyist for the Cherokee Nation and the leader of the Oklahoma statehood movement, and LaHay liked to describe herself as “an Indian lass from Muskogee, Oklahoma.” She had an energetic social life, especially by the standards of the time; when she began working on Rin Tin Tin, she was midway through her third marriage. She had worked her entire adult life but liked to shock people by saying that she believed the best thing any woman could do was “find a nice man, marry him, have babies, and shut up.”