by Susan Orlean
17.
By the fourth season the show was faltering. Bert had always expected that it would need, in time, what he called “a shot in the arm.” He replaced Douglas Heyes as the head writer and considered leaving Corriganville for a location in Oregon. He knew there were limits to the show’s basic setup, especially because there was only one possible outcome to all of the episodes: triumph over adversity, aided by the dog. Repetition was inevitable. The characters themselves didn’t offer a great deal of variety. Women occasionally appeared as guest stars in episodes like “Boone’s Wedding Day” and “Hubert’s Niece,” but none appeared regularly. The rest of the cast, except for Rinty, were white male military personnel.
Rin Tin Tin wasn’t the only iconic animal star beginning to age. Lassie was adding celebrity guest stars, such as Brooklyn Dodgers catcher Roy Campanella, to attract new viewers. The Adventures of Champion, starring Gene Autry’s horse, was canceled in 1956 after one season, and its replacement, My Friend Flicka, another horse show, lasted only until 1957. Television wasn’t getting rid of animals, but they were no longer cast as creatures that were omniscient and heroic. They were talking horses like Mr. Ed or an absurdist pig like Arnold Ziffel on Green Acres. Just as the heroic animals in silent film became comedians in talkies, animals on television were becoming jesters, something Rin Tin Tin had never been.
• • •
By this time, Bert also had much more on his mind than Rin Tin Tin. He had launched his two new shows, Circus Boy and Tales of the 77th Bengal Lancers, and then introduced his most ambitious television project, a brooding police drama called Naked City, starring James Franciscus and John McIntire. Bert loved Naked City as social commentary; while he wasn’t active in politics, he was a committed liberal, and he encouraged the show’s writers, Stirling Silliphant and Howard Rodman, to focus as much on the criminals’ stories as on the police.
It was a writer’s show, and Bert was quickly developing a reputation in Hollywood as a writer’s producer, siding with them against the studios even when it cost him. He seemed, as always, to enjoy taunting executives. “I find they are pedestrian people,” he told a reporter from Variety. “Their consensus is cliché. Something is good because they’ve seen it before.”
He didn’t always win his battles. For the first season of Naked City, Silliphant wrote an episode in which James Franciscus’s character watches an inmate being executed. ABC was outraged, but Bert insisted he wanted to use the episode; the network responded by canceling the show. (The following year, Naked City was brought back for four more seasons, at the urging of the show’s principal sponsor, the tobacco company Brown & Williamson.)
Bert was also developing a moody, existential series with Silliphant as the chief writer. The show, Route 66, was almost plotless; it followed two young men and their experiences as they roam across the country in a Corvette. To add to the show’s realism, Bert wanted to film entirely on the road, rather than on a set or at a studio; this had never been done for a television show. “The studios weren’t interested in it because they felt nobody would sponsor a show about two bums on the road,” Bert explained in a Variety interview. “So I put my own dough in it and got it made.”
Route 66 debuted in 1960 to good ratings and even better reviews, and for that moment, Bert, who still looked so young that he often got carded when he ordered drinks, was one of the most successful producers in Hollywood, with three acclaimed shows on the air. “Television has few success stories to match that of Herbert B. Leonard, the cherubic proprietor-producer of ‘Naked City’ and ‘Route 66,’” the Los Angeles Examiner reported in 1961. “Seven years ago, at the age of 30, Leonard borrowed a thousand dollars to launch the Rin Tin Tin series. . . .” As Bert himself once put it, “I don’t know how I got to be so good.”
But in the meantime, he was having less luck with The Adventures of Rin-Tin-Tin. The ratings were slipping. With so many new projects, he couldn’t have had as much time to spend on it. Besides, the show was no longer new. The excitement of the early seasons was missing. Screen Gems’ publicity department decided to try making Lee Aaker more of a star. “Nothing is more modern than modern youths,” one of its press releases declared. It continued:
They are up on nuclear weapons, stratosphere ships, moon rockets. . . . Eleven-year-old Lee Aaker is no exception. “Sure I get a kick out of rocket ships and everything like that,” says Lee, “and I bet kids playing in that kind of TV show must have a lot of fun. But, well, maybe you’d call me old-fashioned, but I get more fun out of playing with Rinty and riding my horse.” Although Lee does keep up to date as all modern kids are doing, he still does prefer the things which interested boys years ago, animals, Indians, etc. “I get a big kick out of being in a cavalry troop and riding hard with all the soldiers,” Lee says.
The press release inadvertently pointed out the show’s greatest liability. It was, in fact, very old-fashioned, built on a belief in gallantry and an innocent affection for a dog. There was also an unwavering respect for official power—as Rip Masters said, in more than one episode, “It never pays to defy the authority of the U.S. government!” In the beginning, the show fit the tone of the time, but it began to seem out of step. The world was shifting. Defiance was in the air. The first of the baby boomers were growing up; they were teenagers. As their attitudes began to take shape, and especially as they began to pull away from their parents, they became a new and potent force, and popular culture reflected it. In came Marlon Brando and Elvis Presley and American Bandstand, Allen Ginsberg’s Howl in 1956, Jack Kerouac’s On the Road in 1957, and William S. Burroughs’s Naked Lunch in 1959. In 1955, Rebel Without a Cause, starring James Dean as a disaffected teenager, was celebrated as a definitive portrait of American suburbia, and Blackboard Jungle, with its cast of sneering punks and the first rock-and-roll sound track in film, made city teenagers seem predatory and cruel. The prospect of comfortable postwar affluence in bedroom communities filled with pliant, pink-cheeked babies was curdling. Affluent bedroom communities were dull and deadening, and the babies had become bored adolescents. A dog hero and a cavalry troop began to seem like an artifact from another time.
In the spring of 1959, the 164th episode of The Adventures of Rin-Tin-Tin was broadcast. It was an unusually bleak story about a poor farm family, the Barkers. As the episode begins, the head of the family, Manley Barker, has disappeared, stirring suspicion that he is responsible for a string of robberies in the area. He has left a cryptic farewell note for his wife that says, “I have to face it. I’m a failure. Please try to understand.” The banker in town swoops in to foreclose on the Barkers’ house, and the wife of the banker, a gloating crone named Emma Crabtree, announces that the Barkers’ two children will be taken away from their mother and put in an orphanage.
Rin Tin Tin has only a small role in the proceedings, helping Lieutenant Masters track down Manley Barker. Once they find him, it becomes clear that Barker has nothing to do with the robberies; he left his family because he believes he’s a disappointment to them. “I reckon I’m just a failure,” he tells Lieutenant Masters, gloomily. He agrees to come home, and even though his name has been cleared, nothing has improved: the family is still broke. The threat of the foreclosure and the orphanage is brandished once again by Emma Crabtree, until her husband, the banker, has had enough of his horrible wife; he steps in and declares he is going to buy the house and let the Barkers live in it together for free. The Barker children and their friend Rusty celebrate; the orphanage—always a theme, overtly or otherwise, in The Adventures of Rin-Tin-Tin—has been narrowly avoided.
This episode was called “The Failure,” and it was the last episode of The Adventures of Rin-Tin-Tin ever shot. After its glorious start and wide success, the show was over. Nabisco had informed Screen Gems that because of the falling ratings, it was canceling its sponsorship. It was the end of a relationship between Nabisco and Rin Tin Tin that had spanned decades. “Being a sucker for nostalgia, it set me thinking about
some of the fun we have had during our association with you,” Nabisco’s advertising manager wrote to Lee when the decision was announced. “It is going to be rather strange not seeing the publicity releases about you and Rinny, such as the one which is in front of me now entitled ‘Ten tricks to teach your dog’ by Lee Duncan. I am sure you are aware of the fact that everyone here at NABISCO knows how much you and Rinny have meant to us.”
ABC began broadcasting the show in reruns twice a week, and CBS picked it up for Saturday mornings. Screen Gems reported the good news about the bad news. “As if we didn’t have trouble enough counting all that Hanna-Barbera loot; and the Dennis the Menace shekels,” the memo, titled “Rin-Tin-Tin Re-Runs Wild!” said. “We dusted off Ol’ Rinty and Rusty and Rip and turned them loose on the CBS Network Saturdays at 11 a.m. If ratings mean anything at all, EVERY kid in the United States is watching the RIN TIN TIN show—WITH TWO HEADS!!”
18.
All this time, Bert and Lee never stopped thinking about the movies. Lee, in particular, always held out hope that the story of his life would be made into a film. The television series didn’t quell that desire; in fact, now that another generation was embracing Rin Tin Tin, he seemed more determined to explain that the dog was not merely a fictional character on TV. He also wanted it known that he had a story, one that even now seemed to astonish him, as if his whole life had come to him as a surprise.
Back in 1953, when they first met, Bert had told Lee that he was eager to make the movie based on Lee’s life. He had convinced Columbia Pictures to back the project, and he hired Douglas Heyes to write the screenplay. According to the contract, the movie “shall star the dog Rin Tin Tin who is used in the television series of pictures . . . or another German shepherd of similar appearance.” Bert hoped Jimmy Stewart would play Lee; if Stewart wasn’t available, then perhaps James Brown would take the role. Bert told a friend that he pictured the movie being about “how Lee got the dog, the dog’s love life, Lee’s love life, and how it affected their relationship.” It seemed like a sure thing, especially once the television show took off and gave Bert the credentials of a viable producer. “‘Rin Tin Tin’ Vidpix Series Prompts Theatrical Biopic of Famed Film Dog,” Daily Variety reported, saying the film would be released in early 1955.
Then nothing. Lee referred to the film in a letter to Bert in 1958, saying, “Our greatest hope is that we will have a fortune to share and that we can make the RIN TIN TIN story before too late,” but that was it. The next public mention of the film didn’t come until a year later, when the New York Times ran a story headlined “Rin Tin Tin Script Posing Problems.” By then, Stirling Silliphant, who was the head writer on Naked City, had replaced Douglas Heyes as the screenwriter on Rin Tin Tin and Me, as the script was being called; Silliphant confessed to the Times reporter that the project wasn’t going well. He was confounded by the challenge of writing for a dog. “The approach I’m following is the same as you would if you were writing a movie in which the central character were a deaf-mute,” Silliphant explained.
And then, once more, nothing. It ate at Lee that the movie wasn’t getting made. This wasn’t just another project to him: it seemed like he thought it would sum up everything his life had been. And what an unusual, funny life it had been, full of serendipity and myth, acclaim and reversal; the sweep was cinematic in its improbability. As much as Lee wanted other people to know the story, it was as if he needed to see it on the screen to understand it for himself. He talked about the movie often, to everyone. An article in the newsletter from the Fred Finch home, where Lee had spent those hard years as a little boy, noted, “One of the unfulfilled dreams which Lee had talked to us about in recent years was the making of a full-length movie of the story of Rin Tin Tin, to be actually the story of his own life and including significantly the Fred Finch Children’s Home.”
19.
In 1957, while he was in Minneapolis doing an appearance with Rinty, Lee had a mild heart attack. He came home to Riverside and recovered, but he was discouraged. Eva confided to a friend that Lee thought he might never be “active” again—that is, he would not be strong enough to do a lot of travel. Later that year he developed diabetes. From that point on he sounded different—valedictory, reflective, as if he were looking back from a distant place. “That’s what made it a real full life, my dogs and my cattle,” he told a newspaper in 1958. He told another, “It’s nice to have lived a real story.”
He then had a stroke. He had always been fit—lean, strong, rugged, athletic even at sixty, his cowboy build little changed from his twenties. But this series of illnesses, one after another, overwhelmed him, and after the stroke he was housebound—not even able to wander out to the barn to see the animals on his own; this must have felt like death to him.
I had come to feel that I knew Lee Duncan. He had become as familiar to me as a family member, and, as is often the case with a family member, he also remained a mystery. He was at once ingenuous and impenetrable. In some ways his life seemed so simple, but that simplicity made it hard not to wonder if there was more hidden beneath it. Lee’s devotion to Rin Tin Tin was so absolute that everything else, even his identity, seemed withered by comparison. He would have been difficult to have as a friend or a husband or a father, because he wasn’t really entirely there, except in connection to Rin Tin Tin. But I had grown to feel real affection for him. He seemed so guileless, forever the boy left at the front door of the Fred Finch home or the man in that last newsreel with old Rin, his face lit with joy as the dog leaped and landed in his arms, the prize of a lifetime.
So why was Rin Tin Tin so important to him? Vanity would not have been enough to drive him this hard, especially because most of his vanity pertained to Rinty. Whatever attention Lee was paid he deflected back toward the dog. Making money mattered, but it was never the single principle that shaped him; Lee was a sloppy deal-maker, an indifferent bargainer, and even though in Hollywood he briefly developed a taste for cars and clothes, he lived most of his life unassumingly, splurging only on more countrified luxuries like nice saddles and purebred cattle.
Lee simply believed in what he found in Rin Tin Tin. He believed in the good luck that visited him when he first came upon the puppy, and in the solace and friendship he had with him, and in the epic story told through the dog, a story of valor and loyalty and strength and truth. And he believed that those qualities would always matter and always prevail, and as part of that epic story they would transcend time, always compelling and forever unknowable. He believed in the dog, and that was what his life was about.
As I was coming to understand Lee, I was inching along right behind him—doubting that any one thing could mean so much, while all along believing that understanding Rin Tin Tin and his story would explain something important about how we make sense of the strangeness and solitude of existence. It was what I believed in, just as Lee believed in Rinty.
I had finished reading through almost all of Lee’s papers at the Riverside Museum, starting every morning before the sun became so punishing that shades had to be drawn and the parking lot pavement got tacky. I began noticing letters that Eva had sent canceling some of Lee’s travel plans, and notes from Wauhillau LaHay and Screen Gems executives asking after Lee’s health. Then I came across letters Eva had written to people who owed money for their puppies, asking, with a new urgency, when they were going to pay. I knew that I was edging toward the inevitable. My perspective was one that the people involved could have never had: a bird’s-eye view of a road and its end point that a traveler on that road could never have seen. No matter how I had prepared myself for it, I gasped when I came to the last note in the box, written by Eva and addressed to the American Kennel Club in September 1960, informing the club that her husband, Lee Duncan, had just died and that she needed the ownership of the dogs transferred to her name.
THE LEAP
1.
Lee never stopped saying “There will always be a Rin Tin Tin,” but he never followed th
at statement with another sentence or two addressing all the questions such a statement raised. To him, the permanence of Rin Tin Tin was plain truth and needed no embellishment; he never saw the need to explain how this immortality would be achieved or whom he pictured taking over as the dog’s custodian when he was gone. I don’t mean arrangements for the actual dogs living at El Rancho Rin Tin Tin: after Lee’s death, those dogs obviously belonged to Eva and Carolyn. What he never specified, and what remains a puzzle, is whom he pictured as the steward of everything the dog had come to mean—the whole range of it, from the puppies he was breeding, to the character on the television show, to the dog he hoped would be portrayed in the movie about his life, to the image of the dog, the iconic Rin Tin Tin, that was now spread around the world through merchandise and performances as well as movies and TV.
In interviews Lee often complimented Carolyn’s talents as a dog trainer and more than once said that he expected her to be in charge of Rin Tin Tin “one of these days.” After Rin Tin Tin IV died, she was given the honor of choosing Rin Tin Tin V from among the many Rin Tin Tin puppies being whelped at the ranch. This designation was a serious matter to Lee, like choosing the next Dalai Lama or an heir to a throne. The publicists at Kenyon & Eckhardt always made sure to note that Carolyn was the only person besides Lee who did any of the dogs’ training.
But Carolyn stopped thinking of herself as her father’s successor the moment Bert turned up at the ranch. She felt shunted aside, and her attention shifted from dogs to horses, and then from horses to a boyfriend. She got married when she was just nineteen. “My father was going to leave Rin Tin Tin to me. That’s what I had always heard, my whole life,” Carolyn told me. “But it was just talk. He believed Bert was his true heir and he gave him everything.”