Rin Tin Tin

by Susan Orlean

  I don’t remember how my grandfather reacted when we brought back the broken dog, but I do remember that it was not put back in its usual place on the desk, where we could still look at it, but in a high cabinet with a door that was shut tight. We never saw it again. I’ve never asked my brother or sister whether they recall the incident or think it happened this way, because I’m not sure I want to know if I’m remembering it correctly or not. What matters is that it’s the story I’ve always told myself. I have come to believe that I’ve been looking for that dog ever since that day.

  6.

  Eva once told a friend that Bert was “planning to run the present TV pictures for two or three years and then make an entirely new series with Rin.” That may have been Bert’s plan, but it wasn’t working out that way. The show was in reruns on CBS from October 1959 until September 1964, and then the network decided it had reached its limit. The Adventures of Rin-Tin-Tin had been on television for a total of ten years: it was starting to look old. Television shows in the 1960s were more designed, more stylish, more movielike, than The Adventures of Rin-Tin-Tin, with its switch-hitting cast and Corriganville setting, and in 1964, everything on TV was in color.

  The declaration that “television has few success stories to match that of Herbert B. Leonard, the cherubic proprietor-producer” might have been published just a short time earlier, but the success that had inspired that newspaper story about Bert now felt far away. Coming so soon after his quick, starry start, the stalling of his career was abrupt, even in Hollywood, famous for meteoric rises and falls. His three big shows, which at one point were all on the air simultaneously, tailed off one by one. Naked City was canceled in 1963. The reruns of The Adventures of Rin-Tin-Tin went off the air in 1964. Route 66 was canceled, also in 1964. Bert had launched a show in 1958 called Rescue 8, about a team of Los Angeles Fire Department rescue specialists, which had the makings of a hit—it was the first “emergency” show on television, predating the popularity of the genre by a decade. But it ran for only two seasons and was canceled in 1960.

  He was the kid with the quick fists, a fighter, and even with this run of disappointment, Bert got to work on new shows. He developed a series called The Freebooters, based on an Isaac Bashevis Singer novel, and a western, Kingfisher’s Road, but wasn’t able to sell either one. In 1967, he made a pilot for a campy TV comedy called The Perils of Pauline. When he wasn’t able to attract a sponsor or a network, he wove together the three episodes he had made and released it as a film, to little notice.

  The next year, he seemed to right the ship: he produced a successful movie called Popi, starring Alan Arkin as a Puerto Rican widower trying to find a better life for his two young sons by having them pretend to be orphans. The movie got some attention, and Arkin was cited for his performance. For that moment, it must have felt to Bert that he was once again the man who was marveled over in the Los Angeles Examiner.

  But one fairly successful movie couldn’t fix everything that was going wrong. He had probably been spending too freely since The Adventures of Rin-Tin-Tin became a hit. He and his third wife, Jenny, had four daughters. He was also helping care for the children of his brother Roger, who had worked for Bert as a location manager. In 1962, Roger was indicted on murder and conspiracy charges in a mob shooting in a Sherman Oaks restaurant. The charges were later dropped, but Roger was then indicted on federal perjury charges. His case never came to trial because he died from a brain hemorrhage shortly after being released on bail. He left no money for his wife and children, and Bert worried about them—he adored Roger’s widow, Blanca, and was especially attached to his niece Patty, among Roger’s four kids, so he bought a house and motel for Blanca, to provide her with a source of income and a place to live.

  He and Jenny divorced, so he was paying child support and alimony, and then there was his expensive affection for gambling. In spite of having produced three hit television shows in quick succession, he admitted to a friend that he’d “never made real money.” His financial situation was like a stage set, an elegant facade propped up by spindles of lumber with no actual foundation. He started to fall behind on payments to his lawyers and accountants and credit cards. When the flow of income from his television series slowed and then stopped, he was almost broke.

  Through all this, he never stopped thinking about Rin Tin Tin. He believed there was still some life in the character. He told Sam Manners that he believed Rin Tin Tin was “a magic name that would go on and on.”

  He sketched out a score of new story ideas in which Rinty would star. One was a series starring Rin Tin Tin as a seeing-eye dog. Most guide dogs for the blind were German shepherds, and the series would highlight the dog’s intelligence and intuition. Bert started researching details. “Call Braille Institute. Who teaches recent blind people?” he wrote in a note to himself. “Are the teachers also blind people? If a blind person dies can the dog be used by other blind person or does family of dead blind person adopt the dog?” In the margins of this note there was tiny, barely legible handwriting. After studying it, I figured out that he had been calculating the amount of money he was going to leave each of his daughters in his will. This same calculation appeared in the margins of many of his memos and scripts, and even on scraps of paper in his files, as if he was always measuring and reconsidering what he would leave behind.

  He had more ideas for Rin Tin Tin: he was never short of those. After he read a newspaper article about the illicit trade in endangered species, he wrote a script called Rin Tin Tin the Tracker, in which the dog worked with a team of Fish and Wildlife agents. He described another idea, Rin Tin Tin the Ultimate Weapon, as a canine version of Spider-Man. In a note describing it to his agent, he wrote, “Instead of an intern reporter being bitten by a spider, Rin Tin Tin’s body is invaded by a horde of fleas from a lab chimp who thinks Rin Tin Tin is a chimp.”

  There was also Rin Tin Tin Private Investigator, Rin Tin Tin the Wonder Dog, and Rin Tin Tin, Secret Agent, about a fourteen-year-old computer whiz who owns the smartest dog in the world, a German shepherd named Rin Tin Tin 10th. “You see, Luke’s great-great-great-grandmother loved the original Rin Tin Tin, a great Warner Brothers movie star dog so much she somehow found out where Lee Duncan, the owner and trainer of that famous dog lived,” Bert wrote. “And on a Sunday afternoon in 1931 [she] traveled by car on a very rough road all the way to Riverside and bought a Rin Tin Tin puppy from Mr. Duncan for seventy-five dollars. . . .” This particular story proposal intrigued and also unnerved me. Bert had no way of knowing Jannettia Brodsgaard, but this perfectly summarized her pursuit of Lee and Rin Tin Tin. That rough road out to Riverside was familiar to Bert as well, although it may have begun to seem like something that had happened a very long time ago.

  7.

  Bert always toyed with the idea of somehow reviving the original show—a crazy notion, maybe, but it stuck in his mind. There was precedent for the idea. The Mickey Mouse Club had begun just one season after The Adventures of Rin-Tin-Tin on ABC and was canceled in 1959. But in 1974, Walt Disney and Stanley Moger, a media syndication executive, thought it might be time to bring back the show. After all, in 1974, baby boomers were in their twenties and early thirties, and many of them had young children of their own. They might be feeling the first twinges of nostalgia for their youth. Moger traveled around the country, offering the show to local stations. To his delight, he discovered that his hunch was right—more than half the television stations in the country bought The Mickey Mouse Club reruns, and the show had a huge audience when it ran.

  Moger is an intense, chatty man with a thatch of thinning brown hair and a rumbling, gravelly voice, like a radio announcer’s. I visited him in his New York office, which is lined with pictures of himself shaking hands with or hugging or standing close to dozens of actors and politicians, a mosaic of Moger’s face beside a celebrity face, shining in the silvery spray of camera flash. The first thing Moger did when I arrived was to wordlessly point to a cardboard box on h
is desk. Then he pulled off the lid and held it out so that I could admire the contents, like a waiter in a fancy restaurant serving duck à l’orange. Inside the box were the costume and gun Lee Aaker had worn in The Adventures of Rin-Tin-Tin. The gun looked real. The boy-sized cavalry uniform, faded now to a pale blue-gray, had a name tag in the pants on which someone had written, incorrectly, “Lee Acker.”

  “I was in the Beverly Hills Hotel in 1975 and got a call from this fellow, Herbert B. Leonard,” Moger said, leaning back in his desk chair. “He had a high-pitched little voice, just a tiny voice. He said how impressed he was with what we’d done with The Mickey Mouse Club, and he said that he wanted to do the same thing with Rin Tin Tin.” Moger put the costume and gun back in the box and replaced the lid. Then he told me that after they had gone into business together, he and Bert fought over money. Moger got hold of the costume—he never quite explained how—and held it hostage, telling Bert he wouldn’t give it back unless they settled their disagreement. Apparently, Bert’s reluctance to settle was stronger than his desire to get the costume back, so the strategy didn’t work. Now Bert was dead and Moger had Rusty’s uniform. Their relationship ended the way many of Bert’s relationships did—with a few unpaid bills and a comingling of admiration and exasperation. “He was a charming guy, but there was always an angle with Bert,” Moger said. “He had a real habit for self-destructing.”

  At their first meeting, Bert explained that he had a chance to get the rights to the show from Screen Gems if he acted quickly. Moger was interested, so he watched a few episodes of the show. Afterward he called Bert and said he thought syndicating the show would be impossible. “I told him it was crazy,” Moger said. “I said, Bert, you’ve got snarling dogs, you refer to Indians as ‘redskins,’ there are no black kids or Hispanic kids, it’s a lily-white show. How are you going to sell this in today’s world?”

  Moger’s complaint was more about the trappings of the show than its content. Bert was proud of the “moral lessons” that were woven into The Adventures of Rin-Tin-Tin, which reflected his own progressive ideas. For instance, the episode called “The Legend of the White Buffalo”—Bert’s personal favorite—is pointedly egalitarian. The episode begins with white hooligans shooting buffalo on an Apache hunting preserve. Apache braves and Rin Tin Tin apprehend them, and the cavalry is called in to mediate. The buffalo poachers expect to be let off because they are white and the cavalry soldiers are white. But Lieutenant Masters takes them into custody, prompting one of the poachers to sneer, “Whose side are you on, soldier?”

  “Whichever side is right,” Masters tells him.

  “He’s an Injun, ain’t he?” the poacher says. “I’m a white man! That makes me right.”

  “Right or wrong,” Masters says, “isn’t a matter of the color of a man’s skin.”

  The white buffalo of the episode’s title is a mystical creature that appears only once in a lifetime to avert disaster, but it will appear only to someone whose heart is “brave and true.” An Apache elder tells Rusty the legend, saying, “If it is real or just a dream, I cannot say.”

  The poachers’ friends decide to set off a buffalo stampede for revenge. Thousands of the animals bear down on Rusty and Rinty. Just as they are about to be crushed, the white buffalo appears before them, like a cumulus cloud; the stampeding herd sees the white buffalo and halts in place, and the boy and the dog are saved. When Rusty gets back to camp, he tells the story of the stampede and the white buffalo to Kemali, one of the young Apaches, who accepts the story for what it is—something that no one will ever completely understand. “Who can explain it?” Kemali says. “Who can say?”

  Bert knew that the format and some of the content of the show needed to be changed. He told Moger he would edit out the offensive language, the outdated scenes and the dog fights. Then he proposed shooting three-minute “wraparounds”—short scenes that would introduce each episode. The wraparounds would feature Rip Masters—actor James Brown—sitting in a barn, describing his days with the cavalry and Rin Tin Tin to a multicultural group of children. Then the scene would fade and the old show would begin, as if it were part of Masters’ recollection. The show would end by fading in once again to Lieutenant Masters talking to the kids. The original episodes would be tinted sepia, to make them look far away, to emphasize that they were being remembered. Bert had already been in touch with James Brown. Even though Bert said he had become “most uncooperative and bitter” by the end of the original series, Brown was willing to do the new openings for the show.

  Bert cleared space in the dining room of his house on Los Feliz and summoned the writers from the early days of the show. At his dining room table, they edited all the episodes, snipping out anything that could be considered offensive. Bert wanted to shoot the new scenes at Fort Apache, in Corriganville, but the Los Angeles Police Department had already dismantled it in order to use the area as a firing range. Instead, Bert sent James Brown, the crew, and the cast of children, made up of boys and girls and including an African American, a Jew, and a Hispanic, to a film location in Kanab, Utah, next to where Clint Eastwood was shooting The Outlaw Josey Wales. Eastwood loaned them the wagon Brown leaned against while he talked to the kids.

  Stanley Moger’s company, SFM Entertainment, agreed to finance the wraparounds, and Bert budgeted $3,600 for each one. But a weather delay in Utah and a hiatus while Brown recovered from pneumonia drove the cost to ten times what had been planned. After Bert had run through close to $800,000 to shoot just twenty-two of the wraparounds, Moger decided he’d spent enough. The remaining episodes were edited and tinted, but they wouldn’t have the modern-day bookends.

  This scrubbed-up version of The Adventures of Rin-Tin-Tin was announced with a triumphant press release. “After Coca-Cola and IBM, Rin Tin Tin is probably the most widely known and immediately identifiable name in the world today. Astoundingly, this is despite the fact that millions of children and their parents (and perhaps their grandparents) have never seen the heroic dog on television,” the press release began. “This universal awareness can be accounted for only by the realization that the television series and the value it projects and espouses—bravery, loyalty, and morality—have become as much a part of the American tradition of fairness, fraternity and freedom as baseball, Sunday afternoon football and hamburger with all the fixings.”

  There was a huge press party at the Waldorf Astoria in New York to celebrate the first episode on the air. In a story headlined “Old Dog, New Tricks,” the New York Times remarked on Bert’s clever fix, noting “the rerunning of ‘Rinny,’ the heroic German shepherd who actually had his origins in pre-television movies, involves quite an unusual recycling job.” By the end of 1976, the show was airing five days a week in more than 85 percent of the country.

  The Adventures of Rin-Tin-Tin was no longer in prime time; stations could schedule it whenever they wanted, and many ran it early in the day, when the audience consisted of children too young to go to school. This annoyed James Brown, who complained to a newspaper about the new viewers. “All they know is ‘Doggy, doggy,’” he said. “They wouldn’t know an Indian from a schmindian.” But the fact is that they had managed to make Bert Leonard a success once again.

  8.

  Almost sixty years after the first Rin Tin Tin was born, half a century since he’d starred in The Man from Hell’s River, Rin Tin Tin was still alive. In this incarnation, though, there was no longer a dog on a set learning to bark on cue. For the moment, the actual dog seemed to have dematerialized—to have melted away from real life, only to live as a character on screen.

  The tinted, edited episodes ran in syndication from 1976 until 1978. Then stations stopped renewing their contracts. As much as the editing and wraparounds had helped, television was changing once again. After decades monopolizing home entertainment, network television was suddenly upended by cable television. In 1975, Home Box Office was founded, and Showtime began the following year. The first videocassette recorders for
home use were also being introduced. In the middle of the 1970s, there wasn’t a single video rental store in the United States, but by 1978 there were 3,500, and by 1979 there were 10,000. The most popular early rentals were children’s movies. It was stiff competition for the shows that were on the air, particularly an old children’s show like The Adventures of Rin-Tin-Tin.

  Bert drew out yet another idea for Rin Tin Tin from what seemed to be his inexhaustible supply of ideas for extending the life of the character. The wraparounds and tinting had been refreshing, but they hadn’t really renewed the show. He thought what the show needed was color—full color, not just the tawny tinge of sepia that had, in fact, made the show look even older, preserved in amber. If only Screen Gems had spent $5,000 more to film in color when the show was first being made—but they hadn’t. However, Canadian engineers had just invented a method for adding color to black-and-white footage. Computer technicians could undo Screen Gems’ mistake, reviewing every frame and applying red or blue or yellow or green onto every bit of gray.

  It cost a fortune to add color to black-and-white film, and it’s hard to determine where Bert found the money. He was always good at charming people, inflaming potential investors with the same excitement he felt for his projects. People trusted him. In 1978, for instance, Eva Duncan turned over all the copyrights to Rin Tin Tin that were in her name. “I never doubted Bert for a moment,” she explained in a deposition. “That’s what I said all these years that we’ve worked with him.”

  Bert must have borrowed against everything he owned or seduced an investor. On his own, he couldn’t have afforded the nearly $3 million he spent to have sixty-five episodes of the show colorized in a lab in India. The moment the first episodes were finished and sent back to him, he screened them for television executives. They did look different; the colorization brightened everything. But the effect was more like a watercolor paint-by-number version of The Adventures of Rin-Tin-Tin than a film shot in color the first time around. Still, Bert was optimistic.