Rin Tin Tin

by Susan Orlean

  Unlike the eager reception he and Moger had gotten for the edited, modernized version of the show, however, the colorized Adventures of Rin-Tin-Tin didn’t find any takers. What was popular at the time was Mork & Mindy and Battlestar Galactica, and Buck Rogers in the 25th Century and Nickelodeon, a new cable channel, the first to be especially programmed for children. Even scrubbed of anachronisms and infused with color, The Adventures of Rin-Tin-Tin still seemed out of place. “Evidently, the Western is not where kids’ heads are today,” Bert wrote to his agent. “Space and special effects, car chases . . . are in vogue. And so Rinty hasn’t happened yet.” Bert’s use of the word “yet” is particularly striking in this context. He was still sure that Rin Tin Tin would live another day. “Eventually, the quality of the show will make it once it gets on the air,” he added in his letter to his agent. “When that happens, the success will come from the original quality of the program and the greatness of the star, Rin Tin Tin, and NOT from colorization.”

  9.

  Bert became as adamant as Lee had been in protecting the dignity of Rin Tin Tin, even at a cost. In 1976, a producer named David Picker began work on a film that spoofed early Hollywood and Rin Tin Tin’s career. The film’s original title was A Bark Is Born, but Picker renamed it Won Ton Ton: The Dog Who Saved Hollywood and offered Bert a fee for permission to base the story on Rinty. Bert needed the money, but he refused Picker’s offer and then sued him for infringing on Rin Tin Tin’s name and character. Both Picker and the film’s director, Michael Winner, thought Bert’s reaction was ridiculous. Winner, speaking to an audience of film students in New York before the film’s release, said, “It’s absurd to be sued by a dog, especially a dog who’s been dead for the past twenty years.”

  Bert lost the lawsuit, but he felt he’d made an important point: the movie was insulting to the character of Rin Tin Tin and exploitative of the years he’d devoted to cultivating him as a familiar name. As his friend Max Kleven explained to me, “Rin Tin Tin was like religion to Bert. It was serious. It was not something you poked fun at.” You certainly didn’t make a film like Won Ton Ton that, according to Variety, left “no stone unturned in straining for broad, low laughs in the worst possible way.” It was so bad that the reviewer speculated that it might actually have been designed to lose money for its investors to provide them with tax write-offs. Before the fight over Won Ton Ton, Bert had had business dealings with David Picker, and at one time even talked to him about producing his films, including the movie of Lee Duncan’s life story that Bert and Lee were so anxious to make. Picker could have been useful to him, especially when Bert’s circumstances went from difficult to hopeless, but Won Ton Ton was something Bert never forgave.

  At what point does devotion become a form of willful blindness? It would be impossible to commit to anything or anyone if you didn’t have a certain capacity for self-delusion and obliviousness. After all, there is nothing in the world that’s perfect—nothing that doesn’t require, on occasion, the averted glance or the moment of selective deafness or the carefully calibrated memory lapse in order to remain lovable. To be passionate about something requires the ability to forget what’s wrong with it. But how much forgetting is the right amount? When is loyalty more about forgetting, and the love of being in love, than about the truth of what’s at hand? Knowing how to gauge the nature of devotion—that is, knowing the difference between those instances when your glance has been averted too many times and those when you gave up on something far too fast—seems a life skill, a talent. Just to realize when enough is enough would be a gift. But it seems we are forever weighing things with a finger on the scale, always too quick to give up or too ardent by half.

  Lee devoted his whole life to Rinty, at a cost of never seeming to get a hold on anything else that mattered, like his family or his friends, and never to have found a sense of his own existence except through the experience of the dog; and there were moments in Bert’s life, like this one, when it would have been easier and perhaps more sensible to move on. He was still young enough. But he didn’t make that choice. What is it about Rin Tin Tin that was so compelling? What made this one character outlast everything around him, leaving in his wake Strongheart and dozens of others no one remembers; finding generation after generation to admire him; engaging one person after another to devote their lives to him? And how could I marvel at Lee and Bert and later Daphne when I had stepped in line right behind them, just as beguiled by the story of this real and not-real dog, while the rest of my life ticked away? What could account for the perfect irony that I was now telling the story of that story, doing exactly what Lee and Bert and Daphne had done, advancing the story yet again?

  Nothing would last if we all gave up quickly, or even gave up when it was logical to do so. Even ideas wouldn’t last, because they, too, become frayed and worn without their defenders. Bert’s fierceness about Rin Tin Tin might have been a terrible mistake for him personally, but he ended up as a steward in a remarkable episode that has outlasted every expectation. Being forgotten, washed away—that is what is typical in human experience. Anything that can withstand that inevitable decline is fascinating because it has managed to do what none of us can do: it has lived on when everything else is destined to die.

  We want things to last because life without them would be bewildering, an endless question of why anything has value or feels familiar and how any of us could be connected to anything outside ourselves. Those lasting things have been floated through time on someone’s ferocious devotion and the will to remember only what was shiny and promising, even when that person is sometimes sunk in the process. The rest of us get the benefit of what comes of that—those things that stretch past a vanishing point, that we can follow through life’s scattering of moments and emotions, so we can experience something that feels whole and everlasting, the mark that is indelible.

  10.

  There were still real Rin Tin Tins being born all this time, in Texas, where Jannettia Brodsgaard and Daphne continued to breed the dogs descended from the four puppies Brodsgaard had gotten from Lee. Brodsgaard still operated her guard dog business, Bodyguard Kennels, and Daphne, who married a deputy sheriff and had two children, launched her own, called Super Dogs, Inc. In 1979, Brodsgaard decided to retire. She wanted to keep breeding German shepherds, but she was more involved with her new hobby, raising exotic birds. Daphne, in the meantime, expanded Super Dogs.

  Daphne’s interest in Rin Tin Tin had come to her almost automatically, since she’d grown up with Brodsgaard’s Rintys; now Rin Tin Tin was her passion. “Most people devote themselves to family and home,” she told me once. “Any man who was with me would have to know they would never be anything to me other than second to Rin Tin Tin.” She ran Super Dogs for a few more years but then decided she wanted to get out of the guard dog business and open a pet shop instead.

  She found a space in Houston’s Town and Country Center mall. “She designed a magnificent pet shop with vignettes of an old western town, complete with carpeted floors, and all the foo-foo associated with a plush shop,” Daphne wrote in her memoir. By any description, it was a highly unconventional pet shop. Except on Saturdays, when breeders sometimes brought in puppies for display, there weren’t any animals in the shop. Instead, Daphne saw it as a referral source for anyone interested in pedigreed dogs, horses, and cattle, which could be viewed at the shop on videotapes supplied by breeders. It was like a salon for an online dating service. Eccentric as it was, Daphne says it was a “tremendous success” until the recession rolled through Houston in 1984, wiping out scores of businesses, including Daphne’s shop, which for the year it operated was called El Rancho Rin Tin Tin.

  When I first got interested in the story of Rin Tin Tin, Daphne emerged immediately as the present-day custodian of the dog’s legacy. Even though, at the time, Bert was still alive and working on Rin Tin Tin scripts, he was not in the public eye. Eva Duncan died in 2000, and Carolyn had little connection to Rin Tin Tin, other tha
n the few pictures in her dining room and Bert’s phone number on a memo pad next to her kitchen sink. Daphne, on the other hand, had registered ten Rin Tin Tin trademarks, reserving the use of the name on, among other things, “dog clothing, dog collars, dog leashes, dog shoes,” magazines and pamphlets, posters, stickers, the Rin Tin Tin Fan Club, the Rin Tin Tin Canine Ambassador Club, dog food, live puppies, and “entertainment services in the nature of an ongoing television series in the field of variety and motion pictures featuring a German shepherd dog as a live or animated character.” She also registered the Internet domains Rintintin.com and Rintintin.net. If you went looking for something related to Rin Tin Tin, Daphne is who you would find.

  Daphne is compact and sturdy-looking and has an upturned nose and crinkly reddish brown hair that she usually yanks back in a pony-tail. She has a voice that comes only from a lifetime of dedication to cigarettes. Her manner is brisk and commanding and at the same time engaging. She has the air of a grudge-holder and someone who might keep very close track of whether you agree with her or not. Her personal history is littered with friendships and partnerships that came apart. She is what some people would call controversial or maybe, more simply, plainspoken. Once when I was with her, I wondered out loud what the B in “Herbert B. Leonard” stood for, and she shot back, “That’s easy! Butthead.” At the time we met, she was living in Latexo, a speck of a town outside the slightly bigger speck of Crockett, Texas. At that moment, she happened to be the mayor of Latexo, which consisted of approximately 250 residents. She was also the managing editor of the local paper, the Houston County Courier; she was preparing to open the first ever Rin Tin Tin museum in her garage to display her eight thousand pieces of Rin Tin Tin memorabilia; and she was the founder and chief executive officer of ARFkids, a nonprofit organization that provided German shepherd service dogs to autistic children. The name ARFkids was an acronym for “A Rinty For Kids.”

  Daphne is divorced and her two children are grown; at the time of my visit she was living in a narrow brown house on a featureless state highway outside of town, with her dogs Miss Piggy, Xanada, Little Rin, and the Old Man, Rin Tin Tin VIII. That weekend, she was matching some puppies with their new ARFkids families, who had gathered at her house to get acquainted with their dogs. Two other families at her house that weekend were picking up puppies they’d bought as pets.

  It was a humid day and so hot that the air seemed to be buzzing. There was a bit of a riot at Daphne’s house, puppies tumbling and yipping and the autistic kids careering from parent to puppy and back again, while some of Daphne’s dogs, kenneled in her backyard, watched the crowd with excitement and then hurled themselves at the chain-link doors of their runs every minute or two, making a metallic crash. Daphne didn’t seem to notice the chaos; she went about her business, occasionally hollering at someone to do this or that or at one of the dogs to be quiet and then picking up whatever conversation she had just dropped as if there had been no interruption at all.

  She led me inside her house, which was almost more chaotic than the backyard because there were animals everywhere and several visitors and neighbors milling around. She wanted to show me some material about her grandmother and introduce me to a few of her dogs—especially the Old Man, a huge, slow-moving German shepherd with a blocky head and a coat as thick as mink. The Old Man was Daphne’s special dog; this was when I learned that she was thinking of having him stuffed when he died. She obviously adored her dogs, but she introduced them to me with a dismissive sweep of her hand, saying, “Here they are, my bacon-stealing flea circus.” Then she grabbed one of the dogs by the nose. “Hey,” she scolded, “quit your countersurfing.”

  At first the story of Rin Tin Tin had seemed touching and a little mournful, like an old folk song. This was because of the dark presence of war in the early years of the story, and also because of Lee’s difficult childhood, and his vulnerability: the more I came to know him, the more he seemed almost lost in the world except for his connection with the dog. It pained me to follow Lee along, watching him attach ever more deeply with old Rin, as if he believed he had willed away the hard fact that our dogs will die before we do.

  And then at some point the story took a turn. I was in Texas and in Los Angeles on and off for several years, and I began to feel like everyone I met or heard about in connection to Rin Tin Tin was a little crazy—even the side players and background people and definitely the main characters in the narrative. Every one of them had a facet that glinted with just a bit of madness. A singular passion helps you slice through the mess of the world, but I had also come to believe that cutting such a narrow path plays tricks with proportion and balance and pushes everything that much closer to the edge. It’s not that passionate people are crazy: it’s that by necessity, they have traded the sweep of a big view for one that’s contracted and focused, which can give their world a peculiar shape. I remember sitting with Sam Manners and hearing his stories about the cast of the television show—which stuntman had been murdered by his wife, which one had hired a private eye to spy on Bert—and all the while I was thinking, boy, this is all starting to sound a little nuts. It seemed that the narrative had begun to curlicue and twist into a slightly cracked comedy.

  I myself began to feel like I was getting a little unhinged, launching into arguments whenever anyone made a comment equating Rin Tin Tin with Lassie, or asked me, as they always did, whether there was just one Rin Tin Tin, or—even more simply—why I had spent years writing a book about a dog. One afternoon, I went to interview a man in Los Angeles who collected merchandise from television shows. His apartment was dim and stuffy, and nearly every surface was hidden under a Leave It to Beaver lunchbox or a Smurf figurine. He had a collection of Rin Tin Tin memorabilia that I was excited to see, and I had skipped doing something more conventional, like going to the beach, in order to see his Fort Apache play set and Rin Tin Tin thermoses. He was a sweet, odd man who lived alone and could recite where and when he had gotten each of his television collectibles. My first thought was that he was weird to have such a rarefied pursuit and I couldn’t imagine fixating so completely on anything. And then I looked around the room and took note of the fact that the only people in it were this sweet, odd man and me.

  It was inevitable that at some point, Herbert B. Leonard and Daphne Hereford would collide, and they did. It didn’t happen all at once. For ten years or so, they pursued their individual and passionate relationships to Rin Tin Tin, more or less unknown to each other, essentially out of each other’s way. Bert was still casting around in Hollywood for a project, while Daphne’s interest was in the real dogs—breeding them, promoting them, keeping the Rin Tin Tin name alive.

  11.

  In 1984, Bert edited together five of the colorized Adventures of Rin-Tin-Tin episodes to distribute as a movie-length feature, but he never managed to get it released in theaters. Just a year later, however, a new cable channel, the Christian Broadcasting Network, approached him with the idea of remaking the show with a new cast but with the original story of the orphan, the dog, and the cavalry. Surprisingly, Bert said no. He wanted Rin Tin Tin to star in a television show, but he now thought that the story of the cavalry was past its prime. Instead, he told CBN he wanted to develop an idea he had for a show he called Rin Tin Tin K-9 Cop, about a police officer, Hank Katts, and his unusually gifted German shepherd police dog. Katts lives with his nephew Stevie, whose policeman father—Katts’s brother—had been killed in the line of duty. The boy’s mother had moved in with Katts in order to provide her son with a surrogate father.

  Evangelist Pat Robertson, who had founded CBN, loved the idea and ordered twenty-two episodes. The series, which was called Katts and Dog in Canada, and Rin Tin Tin K-9 Cop everywhere else, was going to be shot in Canada rather than on location in California. As happy as he was to have a project finally get under way, this presented a problem for Bert. He had just gotten married for the fourth time. He was fifty-nine, his new wife, Betty, was twenty-five, and he
was so infatuated with her that he couldn’t bear to be away from home; he later described his relationship to her as an addiction. He decided to stay in Los Angeles and left the show in the hands of his assistant producers in Canada, who resented his absence and began scheming to elbow him off the show.

  Then another problem arose: in the middle of the first season, Pat Robertson called to say a handful of viewers had complained that the show was “salacious” because it portrayed an unmarried man and woman living together, even though their relationship was platonic. Bert asked Robertson what he expected him to do. “Kill her off,” Robertson told him. Bert pointed out that the show was a hit, but Robertson insisted. Bert never responded well to executive authority. “Bottom line,” Bert wrote in a note to a friend, “I left the show before the end of the second year.” The character of the mother was subsequently killed off, as Robertson had requested, and the show ran for more than one hundred episodes, but Bert had little to do with it except for getting a small amount of money for the right to use Rin Tin Tin’s name.

  He was never very good at picking his battles. “Bert could never face the fact that he had goofed,” Sam Manners told me. “He couldn’t even watch the show. For him, it was too heartbreaking to see.”