Rin Tin Tin

by Susan Orlean

  LaHay took on Rin Tin Tin with her usual zeal. Even her memos seemed to crackle. She began by issuing a thirteen-point list of publicity ideas, including “Make Rin Tin Tin reporter for a day at the Journal—have him cover interview of guy like Milton Berle—make it very cute” and “Dog presents pup to winner on ‘Queen for a Day’” and “Set up photo shoot of female dogs swooning at Rin photo.” She rousted Lee from Riverside and sent him to New York with Rinty for three days of magazine interviews, press conferences, a meeting with Boy Scouts, a performance at a rodeo in Madison Square Garden, and an appearance on the television game show I’ve Got a Secret, where celebrity panelists tried to guess contestants’ “secrets” (Lee’s being that he had trained Rin Tin Tin).

  Lee was accustomed to doing press tours, less accustomed to being managed with such vigor by someone like LaHay, although he seemed to roll along with it. She wrote to him with advice and suggestions all the time. Before one press event, she sent a note telling him to be sure to mention cats as well as dogs in his opening remarks because “many of these people are very fond of cats . . . and we don’t want them to think we’re forgetting their pets. It might hurt their feelings.”

  She wanted more publicity for Eva and Carolyn Duncan. In the past, they had avoided almost all attention, but LaHay wouldn’t hear of it. “You have to go to work, darling,” she wrote to Eva. “First off, [I want] a picture of Carolyn and Rinty in a training pose. Not just the two of them looking at the camera, but an actual working picture. Like making him sit up or beg or what the hell. Exactly how old is Carolyn? (We can lie a little.) The Teens in the News section is very anxious for this, so the sooner, the better, honey.”

  LaHay crafted a marvelously fictitious biography for Rin Tin Tin that circulated to the press—one more addition to the many versions of his life that had been concocted over the years. In LaHay’s account, Rinty’s mother was a German police dog from Buffalo, New York, that had been recruited for the army expeditionary forces by Flight Commander William Thaw of the 135th Aero Squadron—the same Thaw who really had been a pilot in the Lafayette Escadrille—and that this Thaw-recruited, Buffalo-born police dog had given birth to Rinty in the basement of an American Red Cross hospital in France. According to LaHay’s account, Lee somehow found Rinty in the hospital and “kidnapped him”; later the puppy accompanied Lee on his many (fictional) combat flights. Rinty, as LaHay explained, lived in sybaritic luxury. His valet curried him every morning with a buttersoft rubber brush and bathed him every afternoon in a porcelain tub. He lived in a miniature stucco palace with electric lights, plumbing, a sterling silver food trough, a radio that was always tuned to classical music, and a large mailbox, which was bursting with ten thousand fan letters a week.

  The part about the fan letters was true.

  Dear Rinty, I watch your show every Friday night and I think you are the smartest dog in the world.

  Dear Rinty, I like it when you leap through glass at a bad man. Say hello to Rusty for me.

  Dear Mr. Duncan, My name is Janice. For a girl, I like dogs and horses very much. Rin Tin Tin is and always will be my favorite dog.

  Dear Mr. Duncan, I like Rusty just like a brother and I do mean brother. I have made up a song I will write down here but first I would like to know if you could send me a picture of Rusty and Rin Tin Tin. I have not got the notes and tune to the song but I am working on it.

  The fans of The Adventures of Rin-Tin-Tin wrote thousands of letters each week requesting photographs and autographs. Other fans wrote with urgent questions. Did Rinty really have a solid gold dog license? Did he really know how to count/read/fly? Were his meals catered by Romanoff’s Restaurant in Beverly Hills? Did he wear a hairpiece on his tail to make it look so bushy? (Duncan assured fans that Rinty “grew every single tail-hair himself.”)

  Some fans wrote just to say hello. In the Riverside archives, in the enormous stack of fan mail sent to El Rancho Rin Tin Tin, I found a batch of letters one little girl had written to various Rin Tin Tin cast members, sent in care of Lee and Eva. I was marveling over the Duncans’ patience with the girl—Eva had replied personally to almost all of the girl’s many letters—when I came to Eva’s final reply, which she had sent after almost a year of regular correspondence. “I must say, Marcy, you are the most ‘writingest’ fan we have,” Eva wrote. “Please let me get this straight with you . . . I would be deeply grateful to you if you would PLEASE stop sending mail to Rancho Rin Tin Tin! Don’t you think you are overdoing it a little? There is mail for either Rusty or Boone or Sergeant O’Hara in our mail box every week from you.”

  Lee got hundreds of letters from dog owners, for whom he had become a sort of paradigm, the perfect dog owner of the perfect dog. By 1954, more than 40 percent of American households included at least one dog. Mixed breeds were the most common, and the most popular purebreds were beagles, boxers, cocker spaniels, and dachshunds. German shepherds and collies, the two breeds now in prime time, were the fifth and sixth most popular breeds. Just as he had in the 1920s and 1930s with old Rin, and then again in the 1940s with Rin Tin Tin III, Lee stood out as the person who could serve as an intermediary between people and this nation of dogs.

  This perception was strengthened after he wrote a story in 1956 for a popular general-interest monthly, The American Magazine, called “Your Dog Can Be a Rin Tin Tin.” The story was prominently featured beside a piece by then Senator Lyndon Johnson called “My Heart Attack Taught Me How to Live.” Lee described his training philosophy (“You must be a little smarter than your dog, and you must have the patience to get to know him really well. The rest comes with experience”). His dogs were gifted, he added, but he assured readers that every dog had the potential to be as obedient and responsive as Rinty.

  This was an interesting departure from the early days of Rin Tin Tin, when the emphasis was on how peerless he was: he was a “dog among millions,” as James English wrote, a dog you could dream about but would never be lucky enough to own. Now, instead of being a miracle, he was a model. He was the dog you could aspire to have, and maybe even manage to have, at home. In the early days of Hollywood, movies were alchemy, and movie stars, including Rin Tin Tin, were unattainable; they lived on huge screens in the dark, with the power to awe and amaze. Television, however, was a small box in your living room, and the stars on it were also scaled down, familiar and friendly and available. This intimacy made all the difference in the world.

  After “Your Dog Can Be a Rin Tin Tin” was published, Lee was swamped with requests and questions and confessions. People with dogs they could no longer take care of asked if Lee would take them in. People with misbehaving dogs hoped he could work a miracle. Could he suggest how to keep a dog from digging holes? Barking at the mailman? Stealing food from the table? “Dear Mr. Duncan, my male dog is a coward,” one letter began. “Now my female dog is shy and also a coward. Would you please take a few minutes of your valuable time and help a fellow dog lover?” Another letter, from a dog owner in Baltimore, began, “How do you teach a dog to stay out of incinerators? Because every time my dog is off the leash he is in it.”

  People often asked Lee how to get their dogs (or, in one case, their cheetah) into show business. Other fans, sure their dogs were more than ready to be stars, wrote to brag: “I am writing to tell you about my beautiful and intelligent Samoyed. He has learned to count by barking. He counts two for the number of parts the Bible is divided into, four for the number of Gospels, ten for the commandments, and four for the number of ribs I broke when I fell last year.” Others complained to him of their dogs’ lack of genius. “Dear Mr. Duncan, I am writing to you about my two dogs, Pogo and Topper,” a man from Kansas City wrote in 1955. “They are not too exceptionally bright but they catch on to most things. They can do things like jumping through hoops, etc. My problem is that I can’t get them to limp. I’ve tried working with a sling but after I take it off they still won’t do it. Would you please tell me what method you use in teaching your dogs to
limp?”

  German shepherd owners, in particular, turned to Lee. Some wrote with minor questions: How did you cure a German shepherd suffering from dry skin? What food did Lee think was right for the breed? How did he spot a good puppy? Others presented what sounded like serious problems. One note, written on flowery stationery, began, “Dear Lee, My German shepherd dog has one terrible trait and that is viciousness.”

  Many people said they remembered Rin Tin Tin from the period when the dog had appeared in air-conditioned movie palaces in the downtowns of the big cities—the old, crumbling city centers, which were now being abandoned for the suburbs. Rin Tin Tin marked the turn of time for the world they knew then, which by 1954 had begun to fade. “In this day and age, there are few things absorbing enough to take one’s mind off the greedy and streamlined tempo of living, but yesterday I lived in the golden, silent 1920s again,” one man from North Dakota wrote to Lee in 1954. He said he had grown up watching Rinty’s early movies, and he and his friends believed that everything depicted in Rinty’s movies really happened—they thought the movies were more or less documentaries, and that cameramen followed Rin Tin Tin around recording his exploits. Later they concluded that Rinty was too talented to be real—they decided he had to be a mechanical dog. Eventually they came to realize that Rin Tin Tin was in fact a real dog, extraordinarily talented and extraordinarily trained. In closing the man wrote, “This shepherd definitely had a part in my boyhood that will never be forgotten. And now at last Mr. Duncan I have the opportunity to thank you for having a part in such a beautiful story, for having had some part in my happier boyhood days, for finding that wonderful wonder dog, Rin Tin Tin.”

  In the 1920s and 1930s, Lee and Warner Bros. had been flooded with unsolicited screenplays for old Rinty, and now Lee and Bert received the same gush of television episodes from fans. The proposals ranged from pedestrian to absurd. One suggestion, for an episode the writer called “Rin Tin Tin and the Imposter,” included “a half-breed Indian, a Gorilla-type man, an Air Robber, and a Sweet Girl of Fourteen Years.” Most solicitations were returned to the sender with a standard gentle refusal, such as “Thank you for submitting ‘Rin Tin Tin and the Imposter,’ which I am returning herewith,” or “I am returning to you the script entitled ‘The Pebble That Grew and Grew.’ Unfortunately, the story has no value to us.”

  A few, at least, must have caught Lee’s attention. One called for Rusty to be “made painfully aware of the fact that he has no father . . . this all builds to make Rusty suffer the agony of all unwanted children.” When Rusty decides to run away, “Rin Tin Tin senses his inner trouble and refuses to be left behind.” The episode resolves with an unorthodox but fascinating plot twist: the 101st Cavalry arranges to adopt the boy. The sergeant makes Rusty “the legal son of each and every man in the outfit . . . while most boys only have one father, he has fifty.”

  Bert received countless suggestions, too. He was developing two new shows to go on the air in 1956—Circus Boy, which would star child actor and future Monkee Micky Dolenz, and Tales of the 77th Bengal Lancers—and was eager to work on others. Even the head of marketing at Screen Gems, a man named Ed Justin, pitched a series idea to him. In his cover letter Justin proudly announced to Bert that he had written the whole show—an outdoor adventure series that he called The Big Beaver—at home on a Saturday morning. Bert couldn’t resist responding sarcastically, “Dear Ed, I think you’re wasting your time as a merchandising man and that you should come out here and write the scripts.”

  The most unusual suggestions came from an aspiring writer named Warren Eugene Crane, who sent Bert a list of twenty prospective television series. Some were uninspired (Quirks in the News, The Philatelists’ Hour) and others were wildly uncommercial (I Love a Poem Each Day, Your Handwriting Tells a Story). But a few stood out as the work of a man with a sort of prophetic genius: Charge of the Lighter Brigade was “a series I propose about weight reduction”; Crane Family Recipes would be “A Broadcast of Recipes of Delicious Foods concocted from Recipe Book of My Wife which contains some excellent dishes to tempt the palate of the epicure”; and the peak of Crane’s creativity, Paw ’n Maw, which would be “a series of humorous telecasts based on a family of droll frontiersmen and women who joke about danger as if it were a pastime.”

  12.

  With the show’s success, El Rancho Rin Tin Tin became a destination: a place where you could see, in real life, the miracle dog of television. Lee had always kept old Rin to himself, but now he welcomed visitors to the ranch and encouraged them to play with Rinty. He always brought them to the Memory Room, urging them to sit a while so he could unfurl his stories of the past.

  The fact that this dog, Rin Tin Tin IV, wasn’t the dog that actually appeared on television didn’t make Lee uncomfortable. If he worried, he wouldn’t have welcomed visitors who might have pointed out the disparity. For one thing, the various dogs used on the show looked enough alike, and enough like his Rinty, that it would have taken close examination to tell them apart. But anyone could figure out that Rinty lived in Riverside while the show was being filmed sixty miles away, making it obvious that the dog at El Rancho Rin Tin Tin couldn’t have been also on the set. But no one complained.

  Swept up in the rush of attention from the television show, Carolyn and her mother tried to fit into the latest version of their domestic life. It had never been easy for them to live with the famous dog and the famous man behind the dog, but now it was even more difficult, especially for Carolyn, who once told me that she had “the weirdest childhood in the world.” Every kid she knew watched the show and fantasized about living the life she was living, with Rin Tin Tin in the backyard, but she felt lost in that life, an odd afterthought—the little sister, awkward and unexceptional, to a dog. After her photograph appeared in an article about the Duncans in Western Horseman, for instance, she got three marriage proposals. Another teenage girl might have been flattered, but Carolyn felt demeaned by it, certain that the suitors just wanted a way to get closer to Rinty.

  At least they now had some money, and Eva finally got the house Lee had been promising her since they moved to Riverside. A local architect designed a long structure with an elegant entrance, big jalousie windows, and the first kidney-shaped swimming pool in Riverside. Eva chose the interiors: metallic wallpaper and freestanding planters, all-electric appliances and foldaway bathroom scales. On the floors, she went for white carpeting. (“Brave woman,” one reporter noted.)

  It wasn’t ostentatious the way a Hollywood house could be, but by Riverside standards it was a showplace. The local paper ran a two-part feature about it, and the Riverside City Panhellenic Society included it on its 1958 Home Tour. “Here is the house that Rinty built, complete on the anniversary of his beloved owner’s 40th year in show business,” the tour pamphlet stated. “Linen draperies . . . a fabulous bath . . . notice the custom-built furniture, the tanned-to-order leather, the hand-woven blinds . . .”

  I spent long days in Riverside so I could read Lee’s papers, which were stored in big cardboard file boxes in the annex of the Riverside Municipal Museum. I knew I was lucky. Lee was a saver and a carbon-copier and a newspaper clipper, so his life was documented and preserved. The index of the material alone was several inches thick.

  I commuted to Riverside from Los Angeles, driving seventy miles almost directly east, across the San Jacinto fault, on highways that got emptier and straighter as I went along. I whipped past road signs for places you never visit in California, like Avocado Heights and South San Jose Hills and Diamond Bar and the Phillips Ranch, which are lined with rows of identical houses that from a distance look like angry welts. I made the drive so often that I did it almost automatically, barely aware that I was driving, and I was often startled to find myself in Riverside when I felt like I had left Los Angeles just moments before. There was a big billboard saying WE BUY UGLY HOUSES a few miles outside of town, and if I wasn’t lost in a reverie I noticed it and would realize I was almost there.r />
  This was the drive Lee took when he left Hollywood. Back then, Interstate 60 wasn’t a divided highway; it had just two lanes, and they were rough and rutted by flash floods. It was a long way, literally, and an even longer way, by every other measure, from the gloss of Hollywood to the dust of Riverside. By the time the television show was on the air, Lee had been away from Hollywood for twenty years, and even though he made the drive on occasion to visit the set of the show or attend to business with Screen Gems and Bert, he was never at home in Hollywood again.

  Often, as I drove to the museum, I took a detour down Field Lane to look at the house that used to be called El Rancho Rin Tin Tin. Field Lane was near the freeway entrance. It is a small road that runs along a park and a golf course at the northern edge of the city, where the Pomona, the Riverside, and the Moreno Valley freeways meet. Riverside is arid and open and hot as hell, and anything that isn’t sheltered by the local oaks or ponderosa pines is so baked it seems radiant. Field Drive, though, is in the gully of the Santa Ana River, and it wanders in and out of the trees, so to drive along it was like driving through a strobe, a blast of sun followed by a wall of shade. If I left my car window open I could always hear the crack of golf swings coming from Fairmount Park.