Rin Tin Tin

by Susan Orlean

  He churned out more television ideas: Lady and Jo, about a female trucker who takes her daughter with her on the road; a revival of Route 66 called On the Road Again. Others were just wisps of concepts, sometimes just a title written on a page: “New York City or Bust”; “The Nazi Olympics”; “The Slumbercoach Murders.” In one of his bulging file boxes, I found a few pages of a script he had worked on with veteran screenwriter Walter Bernstein, titled Rin Tin Tin—The Dog Who Saved Bert Leonard, written by hand on a yellow legal pad. The title might have been the result of a night spent joking around with Bernstein, but the content seemed genuine. It began:

  1. Night. Boy & Dog asleep. Noise. Dog out. Fights grizzly. Boy & Dad w/guns, kill bear. Dog wounded. Take care of him.

  2. Town. Wagons into town to sell wheat. No good. Rained. Finds out in gen. store about Cal. Gold strike. Ends with beat 35) who knows what may happen?

  3. End notes: ONE CAN’T GIVE UP. Message of the movie: The kid ready to give up but the dog won’t let him quit.

  Even as he was writing this, the temptation to quit must have been powerful. Bert was now living on borrowed money because he had no income and nothing in the bank. To make matters worse, one of his employees was caught embezzling from him, but not before she had made off with close to $100,000 of his savings, which he never recovered. He also made a disastrous investment in a Mexican beauty products franchise; when it failed, he owed a fortune to his lawyer, James Tierney, who had lent him the investment money. Because he had no cash, he gave Tierney his ownership shares of Naked City and Route 66 to settle part of his debt. It must have hurt to give away things he was so proud of—two-thirds of the work product that had made him such a notable Hollywood success. For the moment, at least, he held on to Rin Tin Tin.

  Tierney, a former federal prosecutor who had gone into private practice as an entertainment lawyer in Los Angeles, now was in control of Naked City and Route 66, but this cinematic windfall couldn’t distract him from his own troubles. A year earlier, in 1992, one of his clients told him he needed some cash. The client owned a number of valuable paintings, including a Monet and a Picasso, and, he explained, if the paintings disappeared, he could file a $17 million insurance claim for them. Tierney agreed to help him out. By their arrangement, Tierney broke into the client’s house and stole the paintings. Then he gave the paintings to a young lawyer in his firm for safekeeping. The young lawyer decided to stash the paintings in a warehouse in Cleveland.

  Unfortunately, the young lawyer also had some problems, including a volatile ex-wife, who also happened to be the first California highway patrolwoman to pose for Playboy; a jealous girlfriend; and a crack cocaine addiction. He was also, evidently, unable to keep a secret and ended up telling both his ex-wife and his girlfriend about the stolen paintings; they, in turn, both informed on him to the police, each hoping to beat the other to the $250,000 reward being offered for information on the case. When the young lawyer was arrested, he immediately pointed the police back to Tierney. Before long, Tierney ended up in prison and lost his law license, his house, and his marriage. When I interviewed him, shortly after he was released from prison, he was shuffling around, a little adrift, in a dreary apartment in Santa Monica, miles from the house he had once owned in Beverly Hills. He told me, with no apparent self-consciousness, that one of the jurors who voted to convict him had said that Tierney struck him as a man who would screw his grandmother “if he could make a buck on it.” Until his downfall, Tierney continued to represent Bert while at the same time lending him spending money.

  Bert’s income had dwindled to nothing and his debts had escalated, but he didn’t seem to understand the direness of his circumstances. An independent studio offered him $400,000 to produce a series of low-budget direct-to-DVD Rin Tin Tin films. But, just like Won Ton Ton, the project didn’t suit his idea of Rin Tin Tin’s dignity, so even though he was desperate he turned it down. Then he asked that same studio for $25 million to finance a film based on one of his favorite Rin Tin Tin screenplays—a western epic he called River of Gold.

  12.

  In 1993, Daphne sent a letter to Bert. It was the first time they’d been in contact. “Your dedication to Rin Tin Tin over the years is to be commended,” she wrote. “Like you, my dedication has lasted for many years. . . . I am very interested in a revitalization of Rin Tin Tin and would like to discuss with you the possibilities. I understand that both Lassie and Benji are presently working on feature films and a Rin Tin Tin film would certainly attract a larger audience.” She described her grandmother’s relationship with Lee Duncan, and said she felt she was now one of two families—her own and the Duncans—dedicated to preserving Rin Tin Tin’s legacy. She liked the possibility of teaming up with Bert to restart Rin Tin Tin’s movie or television career. Moreover, she thought the Old Man—Rin Tin Tin VIII—was a “mirror image” of the dog that appeared on The Adventures of Rin-Tin-Tin and would be a great movie dog. She could work with the dog on the film. She could step into the void that Lee had left, that Carolyn had never been offered, and that Frank Barnes, who had since died, had never taken.

  Bert interpreted Daphne’s letter as more ominous than a friendly suggestion for cooperation, and he replied a few weeks later with a six-page cease-and-desist letter, drafted and signed by his lawyer, James Tierney. Rin Tin Tin, Tierney explained, “has a very strong, widely recognized, and vivid secondary meaning,” which Bert owned as part of his copyright, and any unauthorized use of the name was a violation of Bert’s ownership. Daphne, though, owned the only Rin Tin Tin trademarks the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office had issued, so she felt she had nothing to worry about. When Bert didn’t reply to her lawyer’s response, she put the whole matter out of her mind and continued to do what she felt was her right and duty. She was busy breeding puppies and collecting as much Rin Tin Tin material as she could in preparation for opening the world’s first Rin Tin Tin Museum.

  A few months after Bert’s cease-and-desist letter, Lee Aaker contacted Daphne. This was unusual, because Aaker had rarely been seen since The Adventures of Rin-Tin-Tin ended its original run in 1959. Aaker was sixteen at the time the show ended, an awkward age for a child actor, and he had no luck landing adult roles. For one season, he worked as an assistant to Bert on Route 66, and then he decided to get out of the movie business entirely. He had only $20,000 left of the money he’d earned working on The Adventures of Rin-Tin-Tin; when his mother was asked, she said she “didn’t know” what happened to the rest. Aaker worked as a carpenter and then left Los Angeles and moved seven hours north, to Mammoth Lakes, a ski resort in California near the Nevada border, where he got a job as an instructor specializing in teaching children with special needs to ski.

  Ever since the show ended, there had been rumors about what happened to Aaker, as there often are about child actors. There were stories alleging that he’d become a drug addict and trafficker or been institutionalized after a nervous breakdown. It was hard to figure out what was true. One thing was certain: he was no longer working as an actor in Hollywood. He did, however, make occasional appearances at film festivals and memorabilia shows. He rode on a Celebrity Wagon Train at a rodeo in Newhall, California. He signed autographs at a Memphis film collectibles show. It wasn’t uncommon for retired actors to show up at these kinds of events, to sign a few autographs and greet fans. Many of the other Adventures of Rin-Tin-Tin cast members, including Rand Brooks, Joe Sawyer, and James Brown, made the circuit, too.

  Sometimes Aaker’s behavior was strange, although not so strange that anyone thought to wonder about it. Lots of child actors seem different when they grow up, and look totally different from when they were first in the public eye. Aaker was just a little more so. He didn’t always remember details about the show. He frequently seemed to go missing and then suddenly reappear. His phone number was unlisted and he was impossible to find, but then he would crop up in something like the All-American Cowboy Cookbook, contributing a recipe for Rusty’s Pork Chops (along
side such other recipes as Hoss Cartwright’s Nevada Nutty Slaw Salad and Clint Eastwood’s Spaghetti Western).

  Other times he made surprising efforts to get in touch with fans. Once, out of the blue, he called a Rin Tin Tin collector I know, a man named Scotland McFall, and suggested they go to an antiques show together. McFall was shocked but also thrilled. At the antiques show, McFall and Aaker stopped at a booth selling a Rin Tin Tin board game, and Aaker offered to sign it. The dealer immediately doubled the price on the game and sold it to a very happy buyer who’d watched Aaker sign it. A few minutes later, McFall and Aaker bumped into Rand Brooks, who had retired from acting and started a successful ambulance business in Los Angeles. Brooks and Aaker exchanged pleasantries.

  Aaker also came down from Mammoth Lakes when James Brown died in 1992. He gave the eulogy at Brown’s funeral. It was a sentimental reunion for the remaining cast members, even though in his last years Brown had been on a campaign against Rin Tin Tin, telling reporters that the dogs on the television show were unmanageable and vicious, and that his part in The Adventures of Rin-Tin-Tin had kept him from getting any other significant acting roles. He also told people that the original Rin Tin Tin, whom he’d never actually had contact with, was not in any of the early Warner Bros. films: Brown claimed that the dog in those movies was some no-name from the San Fernando Valley. But back in the days of the show, Brown had been close to everyone in the cast, and especially to Aaker. The truth was, the whole cast had a great time together, scrambling to shoot back-to-back episodes out on the dusty rocks of Corriganville; Aaker’s eulogy reminded them all of those old, happy days.

  Aaker’s call to Daphne, then, was remarkable, but it appeared that he did keep track of what had become of Rin Tin Tin, so it wasn’t surpassingly peculiar. He told Daphne that he would love to meet the current Rin Tin Tin. He said he was planning to make an appearance at an upcoming Hollywood collectibles show at the Beverly Hilton Hotel; perhaps they could meet there. Daphne, delighted by this, convinced a friend to pay for her flight from Texas to Los Angeles with a selection of her best Rin Tin Tin memorabilia and two of her dogs, the Old Man and his mate, Joanne.

  It all would have been so perfect—the reuniting of Rusty and Rin Tin Tin—and for Daphne, it would seem to demonstrate her legitimacy as the new keeper of the legacy. There was just one hitch: Lee Aaker wasn’t Lee Aaker. He was a middle-aged man named Paul Klein, roughly the same age as Lee Aaker and vaguely resembling him, if you squinted your eyes. Klein was a resident of Reseda, California, who hung out at a bar called the Cowboy Palace and sometimes pretended to be a police officer. He’d also been posing as Lee Aaker for years, riding Celebrity Wagon Trains, signing autographs, and even, in the case of James Brown’s funeral, eulogizing cast members of the show.

  The fraud was finally exposed in 1993, the same year Klein contacted Daphne, when the actor Paul Petersen, a star of The Donna Reed Show and a close friend of the real Lee Aaker, caught Klein pretending to be Aaker at an autograph show. After that, the real Lee Aaker came forward and agreed to an interview with The Globe, a tabloid magazine. He said that he had indeed been a drug addict and a dealer, and had suffered from paralyzing panic attacks, but that he’d been sober since 1980. He lived quietly, but, according to the magazine, the imposter was “making Lee’s life hell!”

  When I saw this story, I read it with a skeptic’s eye. Was this really Lee Aaker or was it a double-cross, another imposter posing as Lee Aaker complaining about an imposter? I had learned from several sources that Aaker lived in California; why did the article say he lived in Arizona? I was sure he taught special-needs kids how to snow ski; why did the article say he was a waterskiing instructor? Why would he give such a seemingly important interview to a tabloid magazine? And if this wasn’t the real Lee Aaker, did it really matter? The story of Rin Tin Tin, after all, was rife with moments when identity became murky, starting with Lee Duncan’s father, whose identity was molded to fit the story Hollywood wanted to tell. Cinema and theater spring from the idea that identity can be assumed—that an individual can choose a persona and wriggle into it as if it were a snakeskin. Whether this version of Lee Aaker was the real one or not was less interesting to me than the amazing fact that someone had gone to such lengths to pretend to be him.

  In a book about film and television westerns called White Hats and Silver Spurs, Aaker—presumably the real one—told the author Herb Fagen that what bothered him the most about the Paul Klein situation was that the other Rin Tin Tin cast members accepted Klein as real. “They told me they didn’t know [that he was an imposter], but I was upset,” Aaker told Fagen. “I had a grand relationship with these people. I choose to think they were fooled, too.”

  I found a photograph of some celebrities attending a western film festival in Atlanta. There were cast members from Buffalo Bill Jr. and someone from Maverick, and, smiling into the camera with their arms around each other, James Brown and Paul Klein. The caption described Klein as Lee Aaker. If I were Lee Aaker and saw the picture of my former costar, someone I’d worked closely with for four years, who had been a sort of father figure to me, standing with his arm around the shoulder of an impersonator, I would be devastated. At one point the real Lee Aaker was actually sued for impersonating himself and had to produce his Screen Gems contract, pay stubs, and Social Security card to prove his identity.

  Paul Klein died in 2007 after abdominal surgery. Someone who knew him “fairly well” left a post on a website describing him as “a good decent guy,” but then added, “I know 100’s of people who thought he was the kid on Rin Tin Tin. It is funny the two of them do look similar but sure not the same. So I don’t know what the real story is.” But another former friend of Klein’s told me that he actually wasn’t such a decent guy. He always played the angles and had gotten in trouble many times for petty theft and pretending to be a police officer.

  I have never been able to figure out what motivated Klein to engage in this fantasy or what he got out of it. It certainly wasn’t money, because most of the events he did were free, and most of the value he brought to things by signing them, like the Rin Tin Tin board game, accrued to someone else’s benefit. The payoff certainly wasn’t fame in the largest, glittering sense of the word. By the time Klein was impersonating Lee Aaker, decades had passed since Aaker had been a Hollywood star, and even at his most celebrated, Aaker was always that sort of demi-star, known by association; he was always “the little boy in the Rin Tin Tin show.” He would have been lucky to draw a middling crowd at a Hollywood autograph meet.

  A former friend of Klein’s told me that Klein used the assumed identity to pick up women at bars. But there must have been something more to it; Klein could have pretended to be Lee Aaker at bars and skipped the film festivals and the eulogies and the collectibles shows. Maybe Klein enjoyed seeing a few fans light up when he signed the back of their Rin Tin Tin comic books. Maybe having that power to thrill someone made him feel important; maybe he liked the idea that he was attaching himself to history, and that it just might bring him some small measure of immortality.

  After the fake Lee Aaker contacted Daphne, she saw the Globe article and realized she’d nearly been duped. Then the real Lee Aaker contacted her. Just like the fake Lee Aaker, the real Lee Aaker told her he was planning to attend the April 1994 Hollywood Collectors Show at the Beverly Hilton Hotel and would like to meet her there and have a chance to see the current Rin Tin Tin. According to Daphne, she flew to Los Angeles with the dogs and met with Aaker—the real Lee Aaker—and then worked for hours to set up her memorabilia display. The next day, the show opened. The whole episode of almost being suckered might have been redeemed by the good experience of meeting the real Lee Aaker. However, the first person to approach Daphne’s booth was a process server, who handed her papers notifying her of a federal lawsuit filed against her by Herbert B. Leonard for interfering with his ownership of Rin Tin Tin.

  How Lee Aaker came to contact Daphne is astonishing. According t
o Bert, Aaker had been in an airport in Texas and overheard someone talking about how she owned the descendants of Rin Tin Tin. Without telling her who he was, Aaker approached the woman—Daphne—and asked about the dogs. She gave him her business card, which indicated that she was the CEO of Rin Tin Tin Incorporated, and they had lunch. “In fact,” Daphne told me recently, “I paid.”

  Because he knew Bert, Aaker was puzzled by Daphne’s claims of being the owner of the Rin Tin Tin dynasty, so after the encounter he called Bert and told him about it. Bert was outraged. He and Lee Duncan had never signed a lot of formal papers; they made their agreements Lee’s way, with handshakes, but Bert’s lawyer assured him that his ongoing use of the Rin Tin Tin character was all he needed to protect his rights. Bert decided to press the matter in court. He asked Aaker to call Daphne and identify himself as the boy from The Adventures of Rin-Tin-Tin—without letting on that he’d met her in the airport. He wanted Aaker to encourage her to come to California so she could be served with the lawsuit within state lines. The strategy worked. In spite of the disagreeable surprise of her first visitor at the show, Daphne stayed in California so she could display her dogs and her memorabilia and tell visitors her version of the story of Rin Tin Tin.

  13.

  Over the next two years, Leonard v. Hereford “raged on,” as Daphne says. The central question had to do with money—who had spent money to build the Rin Tin Tin name and who deserved to profit from his celebrity. On another level it was a dispute over the more emotional question of who was the true custodian of the Rin Tin Tin legacy. What did Lee Duncan, the founding father, intend for the dog? Eva and Carolyn Duncan were both deposed in an effort to figure that out, and both of them suggested that Lee had seen Bert as his heir.