Rin Tin Tin

by Susan Orlean

  Lee did give Bert the rights to the dog as a cinematic character, but not the training and breeding of the dogs themselves. It is hard to know what Lee thought would happen with it all after he was gone. He couldn’t have expected Bert to take over the kennel—Bert was a producer, not a breeder, not a dog lover. Lee liked and respected Frank Barnes, and Barnes might have been a logical person to step in if Carolyn didn’t take that role. But Barnes never got more involved than working as the trainer for the show. The truth is, there was no one else at all. For someone who believed he had created something sweeping, permanent, and everlasting, Lee never seemed to have a picture of the future in his mind.

  2.

  In 1956, in his usual pile of fan mail and puppy requests, Lee had received a letter from a woman named Jannettia Propps Brodsgaard, a German shepherd breeder from Texas. She explained to Lee that she’d been trying to track him down for years, and that she had wanted a Rin Tin Tin dog ever since seeing Where the North Begins, in 1923. “Two years ago I decided I would get one,” she wrote. “Then I got cold feet, afraid you might not talk to me. I am not one of those rich Texans you hear about. Just a plain old country girl.”

  Like Lee, Brodsgaard had grown up in a lonely place. Sinewy and tall, with a long jaw and a hard gaze, she was born and raised on the plains of West Texas at the Matador Ranch, where her mother was a cook and her father was a ranch hand. The ranch comprised almost a million acres of open range. As a child, her closest companion was a timber wolf she managed to tame. Brodsgaard didn’t get her first German shepherd until she was in her twenties, when she and her husband were living in Houston and happened on a stray. Even in pitiful condition, the stray reminded Brodsgaard of her old pet timber wolf—and of the pleasure she felt when she first saw Rin Tin Tin on screen. She took the stray home, fattened her up, and started breeding her. Then she began looking for Rin Tin Tin.

  She learned from a magazine story that Lee lived in Riverside; like a lot of people trying to reach him, she simply addressed her letter to “Lee Duncan, Owner of Rin Tin Tin, Riverside, California,” and it was delivered to him. They began corresponding. They agreed on their feelings about dogs; they preferred a shepherd with a light-colored coat, for instance, rather than a dark gray coat like the first Rin Tin Tin’s. Lee, in fact, was dedicated to breeding for that paler color because he believed that the harsh lighting needed to make old Rin visible on film had damaged the dog’s eyes. Brodsgaard was just as particular. “I guess you think I am crazy,” Brodsgaard wrote in a letter to Duncan, “[but] a dog just HAS to be a certain color.” They had both grown up in so much vacant space, and both seemed to have the habit of mind that focused on a single purpose, as if to make up for not having a talent for connecting with other people.

  In 1957, Lee sold Brodsgaard a male puppy he considered the pick of his current litter. When the puppy arrived in Texas, Brodsgaard telegrammed to say she had named him Rinty Tin Tin Brodsgaard and that he was perfect. The arrival of the first Rin Tin Tin puppy in Texas was newsworthy—this was, after all, the zenith of the television show’s popularity—and a writer from the Houston Press was stationed at Brodsgaard’s house to report on the event.

  This puppy was only the first of four dogs Brodsgaard bought from Lee, and they became the foundation of what Brodsgaard’s granddaughter, Daphne Hereford, now calls “the living legacy of Rin Tin Tin dogs in Texas.” Daphne framed a copy of Lee’s letter to her grandmother confirming the sale of that first puppy and has it hanging on a wall in her house in Texas. I noticed it the first time I visited her there, and when I went back to see her a second time, I made sure to look at the letter closely. Lee could never master a typewriter; he either dictated all his correspondence or wrote a draft in longhand, and then Eva typed it and presented it to him for his spider scrawl of a signature. Their typewriter had a few hiccupy keys and a smudgy ribbon. The stationery was their ranch letterhead: EL RANCHO RIN TIN TIN was displayed in large block letters across the top of the page; beneath it was a pencil drawing of the Duncans’ house on Field Lane, with two riders on horseback next to the house. Suspended over the whole scene, peering out from a gigantic lucky horseshoe, bigger than the house, the horses, and even the people, was the handsome head of Rin Tin Tin.

  3.

  After Lee’s death, Eva was alone at the ranch. “The dogs are my salvation,” she wrote to a friend. “I don’t know what I would have done without them. I’ll always keep the dogs, they mean so much to me and I plan to keep on going the way Lee would want us to.” But with Lee gone and Carolyn living too far away to help, Eva’s plan quickly proved unworkable. She never was a dog person. What she loved was art, and she spent all her free time taking classes and painting. The ranch had been Lee’s, the dogs had been Lee’s, and she hardly had a place in it.

  After a few months, she decided she really didn’t want to stay on the ranch, and, in fact, she didn’t even want to stay in Riverside. Instead, she wanted to travel around the world with a friend of hers, the Australian pop singer Helen Reddy, and then move to a condominium somewhere close to a beach. She put the ranch on the market and sold it for $80,000 to the first person who looked at it, a local banker who wanted to move in as soon as possible. She needed to dismantle the place before she left on her trip—to pack everything and find homes for all the animals. She was keeping only one dog, a young sable male she had named Vincent Van Gogh.

  By then, there was only a small number of dogs left at the ranch. Screen Gems wanted one of them to give to a Rin Tin Tin merchandise licensee. Eva sold a few of the others, and she gave the rest of the animals, including the one-eyed fighting dog Hey You and Lee’s palomino horse Deputy-Master, to a family named Crawford who lived nearby in Riverside.

  She still had to deal with the Memory Room—all those clippings and pictures and mementos and letters gathered over decades, worn now from being held and handled and remembered. This had been Lee’s private room. It was the repository of a life Eva hadn’t really shared and had often resented. Still, she couldn’t quite bring herself to throw the contents away. She realized that it was the record of something significant. She also still hoped that Lee’s story would be made into a film. She had caught Lee’s yearning for it, and asked Bert about it frequently; he had assured her that it would happen sometime soon. Everything in the Memory Room was part of that.

  In the end, what she did seemed to express her ambivalence toward Rin Tin Tin and all he had meant in her life. She didn’t empty the room and throw the contents away, nor did she make sure they were protected. All she could bring herself to do was to gather everything hurriedly and ask her neighbors, the Crawfords, if she could leave it in their shed. The way she left things made it seem as if she expected to come back for it someday.

  But she never came back: she moved to a condominium south of Riverside and never sent for the papers, never traveled to Riverside to collect them, never left instructions for how she wished them to be disposed of or archived, and they were still in the Crawfords’ shed when she passed away. They sat untouched in the shed for a decade, the acid of the paper slowly eating up the clippings, the photographs fading, seeming to belong to no one. At some point the Crawfords decided to move, and they asked one of Dr. Crawford’s employees, Freeda Carter, to help them pack. After she finished in the house, Carter decided to look inside the shed, in case they had left something behind. And there she found what she always calls “the treasure.”

  When Carter told Dr. Crawford about the papers, he told her not to worry—he would arrange for someone to haul them away. But throwing the Duncan papers away felt wrong to her. “I grew up with Rin Tin Tin, and so did my children,” Carter explained when we talked some time ago. “I just didn’t want to do that.” So she asked Dr. Crawford to wait, and the next day, with a borrowed pickup truck, she took it all home.

  Carter spent the next year sorting it out—smoothing the creases in the pages and the dog-show ribbons, brushing the dirt off the booties Rin Tin Tin wore as p
art of his army-issued uniform. She spread everything out around her house while she fussed over it, reassembling and restoring the Memory Room. It took over her house and her life. Every surface was covered with some clipping or picture: “I was constantly saying, don’t sit on that! That’s 1937!” she explained. In the end, she donated it to the Riverside Municipal Museum, where it was boxed and filed and indexed and recorded—permanent and preserved at last.

  4.

  For Bert, the idea of Rin Tin Tin “going on forever” meant something different than it did to Lee. They shared an ambition, but the two men came to their relationship with Rin Tin Tin from opposite directions. Bert was passionate about stories; Lee was passionate about his dogs. Bert wasn’t on the field in Flirey, didn’t scramble to get the puppy home on a troop ship, didn’t knock on doors along Poverty Row with the notion that his clever dog might have a place in the movies. Bert grew up knowing Rin Tin Tin not as a dog you might hike with through the Sierras but as an actor and a character—as a story. He loved stories; in fact, he sometimes choked up when he told a story because he was so moved by the power of a narrative, the way it could lift you and carry you along. He loved the Rin Tin Tin story, and he devoted himself to doing whatever he could to keep it going.

  The dogs themselves were fungible; in Bert’s opinion, Rin Tin Tin was now an acting meritocracy, not a hereditary monarchy. But in the end, Bert and Lee cared about the same thing. They both believed the dog was immortal—that there would always be a Rin Tin Tin, whatever that might mean. As Bert wrote to Eva, in 1962, “For all of us, Rin Tin Tin seems to go on forever.”

  El Rancho Rin Tin Tin was now a banker’s home, and Lee’s dogs were scattered. In Texas, though, Brodsgaard was raising Rin Tin Tin puppies with the idea that she was carrying on the line. Since the momentous arrival of Rinty Tin Tin Brodsgaard, several other kennels in Texas had gotten puppies from Lee, so Brodsgaard was no longer the only breeder in Texas to have some of Duncan’s dogs. But she was the most single-minded, just as Duncan had been.

  In 1965, when she was well into middle age, Brodsgaard unexpectedly found herself raising two toddlers—her granddaughters, who had been left by their mother in the Brodsgaards’ care. Eventually the younger of the two girls went back to California to be with her mother, but Daphne, who was five when she was deposited with her grandmother in Houston, never lived with her mother again. When I first met Daphne and learned this about her, I couldn’t help noting the similarity between her childhood and Lee Duncan’s.

  Daphne practically grew up in the Brodsgaards’ kennel. “Dogs were all that Daphne knew, they were her life,” Daphne wrote in her self-published memoir, which is told in the third person, as if she viewed her personal history as a kind of saga. “When it came time in school to learn fractions in the 5th grade, the only way it made sense was when her teacher compared the pie pieces of fractions to a litter of puppies.” Daphne was a natural with the dogs, and at a very young age she felt a passion for Rin Tin Tin that was as thorough as her grandmother’s.

  In 1965, Carl and Jannettia Brodsgaard divorced. Jannettia was left with nothing except her dogs; she had no marketable skills. Then by chance she was contacted by a construction company looking for dogs to guard worksites. Brodsgaard’s dogs had never been trained for security work, but what happened next, according to Daphne’s book, was remarkable: Brodsgaard went into her kennel, picked out the dog she thought might have a chance at passing as a security guard, and gently told him “that if he wanted to continue to eat, he had to act like a guard dog. Amazingly enough that is exactly what he did.” And just like that, Brodsgaard had a successful guard dog company.

  Of course it couldn’t have been just like that, but by the time I met Daphne, I was used to the idea that everything connected to Rin Tin Tin was full of happenstance and charm, lightning strikes of fortune and hairpin turns of luck; from a standstill, life around Rin Tin Tin always seemed to accelerate out of the depths of disappointment to a new place filled with possibility. Just like that, wonderful things happened to someone who otherwise would have been luckless, friendless, abandoned. This is what the story of Rin Tin Tin had become in my mind—a myth—and why it had drawn me in, as it had drawn in all these other people. The facts were all interesting, but they were mere armature; the rest was like an ancient legend, wondrous, lifting everything around it, as buoyant as a dream.

  5.

  Everything changed for German shepherds on May 17, 1963. That day, Life published a photo essay by Charles Moore titled “They Fight a Fire That Won’t Go Out,” about the violent police response to civil rights protests in Birmingham, Alabama. The text that accompanied the photos began, “ATTACK DOGS. With vicious guard dogs, the police attacked the marchers—and thus rewarded them with an outrage that would win support all over the world for Birmingham’s Negroes.” The story reported that Birmingham’s police commissioner, Eugene “Bull” Connor, had allowed white spectators near the police action on purpose. “I want ’em to see the dogs work,” Connors was quoted as saying. “Look at those niggers run.”

  No one who has seen these photographs could easily forget them: shot in rich, silky black-and-white, they capture a horrifying moment on a Birmingham street. Three of the pictures show a thin, elderly man in a porkpie hat being bitten by two German shepherds. The fourth is a shot of a Birmingham officer with his dog, a black-and-cream shepherd, standing up on its back legs, its teeth bared, straining at the leash.

  German shepherds had always been popular service dogs, from the very beginnings of the breed, when Max von Stephanitz gave some of the first of his dogs to the German police to demonstrate their responsiveness and courage. During war, German shepherds’ strength and intelligence made them ideal military dogs, and they became the breed most often used by police. Even though they were bred to work herding livestock, they became associated around the world with war.

  Because German shepherds looked like wolves, they were sometimes assumed to be more closely related to them than other breeds of dogs even though they are not. Many early Rin Tin Tin movies played on that misperception, and so did Hitler’s celebration of the German shepherd as “wolflike.” In the 1920s, a sheep farmers’ association in Australia began a campaign against German shepherds, asserting that they were part wolf and likely to breed with wild dingoes. In response, the Australian government banned the import of German shepherds to the country that wasn’t repealed until 1974.

  In the United States, German shepherds came to be viewed as an extension of the police, representing order and authority; during the 1960s, when those qualities were being questioned, everything associated with them was questioned, too. Dozens of other photographs documented police violence, but Charles Moore’s pictures of the attacking dogs were the most searing, because they made the police seem like animals themselves, and because they made the scene look like a war. They brought to mind the image of Nazi guards patrolling World War II concentration camps with their slinking German shepherds, and sometimes the association was not only conceptual. A 1961 article in the Jackson, Mississippi, newspaper reported that two German shepherds, Happy and Rebel, were making the Jackson police department’s “orders to racial demonstrators more meaningful.” The writer then added, “Harry Nawroth of Springfield, the former Nazi storm trooper who trained killer Dobermans to guard Hitler’s airports, trained both Happy and Rebel.”

  According to historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr., the photographs of Bull Connor’s police dogs lunging at the marchers in Birmingham “did as much as anything to transform the national mood and make legislation not just necessary . . . but possible.” Jacob Javits, the former Republican senator from New York, said the pictures “helped to spur passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.”

  For German shepherds, the taint lingered. Beginning in 1969, the popularity of the breed went into decline, even while other large breeds like Rottweilers and Doberman pinschers gained. There were more dogs in the United States than ever, but the breeds
that were becoming most popular were golden retrievers and Labrador retrievers, always smiling, and cocker spaniels, always quivering.

  I was eight years old when the Charles Moore pictures were published. I was devoted to Life as a kid, and fought my brother and sister for dibs on each new issue, so I saw this issue as soon as it arrived. At that age, I don’t think I understood what civil rights were, but that wasn’t required in order to understand that something terrible was happening in those pictures. Because I loved dogs and suffered from the unrequited desire for one, and especially because I wanted a German shepherd, Moore’s images of those snarling German shepherds hit me hard. And yet I still loved Rin Tin Tin—I watched the reruns on Saturday mornings, and when my family visited my grandparents, my brother and sister and I drifted upstairs to my grandfather’s office, where he kept the untouchable plastic Rin Tin Tin figurine. It was so noble, with its smart, beautiful face and little waves of plastic etched fur, always standing at attention between my grandfather’s Paymaster 8000 Check Printer and his manual adding machine.

  This is what finally happened. One day, my grandfather gave in, or grew tired of us gazing at the dog, or suddenly thought better of his strictness about it, and he agreed to let us take the Rin Tin Tin home and play with it for a day. We didn’t dream that we would be keeping it, but being allowed to even touch it was amazing, a crack in the invisible wall around my grandfather’s world. And what I remember is that we took the figurine home, and in our excitement, as we fought over it, the dog’s right leg broke off, leaving a hole in the bottom of the hollow body.