by Susan Orlean
By the time Bert gave testimony, he was seething. Throughout his deposition, which was on videotapes that I found in his storage unit, he tapped the table impatiently, rolled his eyes, and looked like someone who felt sorely put upon. At one point Daphne’s attorney asked Bert: “Would you say keeping the name ‘Rin Tin Tin’ in the limelight so all little boys and girls could love him as much as you and Lee Duncan did would be a good idea or a bad idea?” Bert replied:
I am so outraged by this whole situation that I can’t tell you. But I have to explode and tell you that this woman is out of her bloody mind; that I and Lee Duncan for the last seventy years have given up a good deal of our lives to perpetuate, to spend millions and millions of dollars . . . to create the name, title and likeness and character, interior character, exterior look of this dog. And for some woman from Peoria, Texas, to come here and claim that she has any right to use the name “Rin Tin Tin” in . . . the commercial manner she has is the most absurd and ridiculous piece of thievery. She must be related to Jesse James.
The prickly exchange continued. The attorney once again asked Bert if he thought keeping Rin Tin Tin “in the limelight” for little boys and girls was a good idea, and Bert snapped, “I have done that for the last forty years. Duncan did that previous to that.”
“So you would say it’s a good idea?” the attorney asked.
“We have lived with that idea,” Bert snapped.
“Why?”
“Because,” Bert said slowly, “we . . . thought that—I personally thought that it was a great way to tell little morality stories. And that’s why Rin Tin Tin was a great hit for all these years and has carried on little positive experiences in life that express the most genuine reward for good deeds, love, the relationship with the dog and the boy and the cavalry and all the things that represent the good aspects of American life. And we did that not only—it wasn’t just a matter of making money. I always believed if you do something worthwhile, you’d make a lot of money. And that was the goal, to do something absolutely marvelous that people would identify with and love, and then out of that would come success and whatever the rewards were, emotional and financial. And that’s how I’ve lived with Rin Tin Tin.”
I have sorted out the many chapters of the Rin Tin Tin story in my mind and even thought of them with titles—the World War I Finding the Puppy period, the Breaking into Hollywood period, the Move to Riverside period, and so forth. The moment Daphne and Bert faced off in court began what I thought of as the Endless Lawsuit period. At the time, Bert was suing the producers of Rin Tin Tin K-9 Cop for cutting him out of the show; the City of Pearland, Texas, where Daphne was then living, was suing her to reduce the number of dogs she had on her property; soon, Bert would sue Daphne again over her trademark for Rin Tin Tin dog food, and Columbia Pictures would oppose her trademark on Rin Tin Tin “entertainment services.” Sony Pictures, for arcane reasons having to do with copyright and the fact that Bert owed them a fortune, was suing him for attempting to release the five colorized episodes of the television show as a film. The lawsuits came so thick and fast that I gave up trying to keep track of them: they seemed to boil down to one simple question—who owned Rin Tin Tin?—and one complicated one—what was Rin Tin Tin now that this one dog, born in 1918, had expanded exponentially into so many different forms?
What was Rin Tin Tin in 1923? What was he in 1983? In 2003? What about today, and what about tomorrow? Was Rin Tin Tin simply one dog found on a battlefield in France? Was he the qualities one particular dog was good at projecting as a film star? Was he the army’s mascot dog in World War II? A character in comic books, children’s books, and coloring books? A fictional dog of the 1890s that lived with a cavalry troop? Puppies that were related to the real dog found on the battlefield? Merchandise decorated with German shepherd imagery? A sweeping idea, like Hero Dog or Loyalty Personified? Was it, as Bert said once in an attempt to define what he believed he owned, “the actual dog and the look of the animal or some aspect of his ability translated into merchandising and publicity and the subtext of what the dog represented”? Was it all of these things, and more, and could that wide, wide range of manifestations really belong to anyone?
Sometimes it seemed fitting, though disheartening, that the Rin Tin Tin narrative made this detour into the courtroom. The United States had become, in the last twenty years, a little litigation-crazy. Every dispute that once might have been settled by the application of common sense or ideas of fairness and ethics now seemed to require a squadron of lawyers and multiple court filings. Lee Duncan never had a lawyer. He never had an agent. He was loath to sign contracts, feeling that his handshake was his word. He was one man with one dog and one idea, and he never saw it as more complicated than that. The world he belonged to was, in many ways, equally uncomplicated.
But Rin Tin Tin had become a compound entity at the same moment that entertainment was swelling into something gigantic and corporate: characters were becoming brands, movies were becoming franchises, and lawyers were stepping in to choreograph the structure and content of it all, adding the particular obfuscation of lawyering to something already tangled and confused. At any one time, Daphne seems to have been engaged in a royal flush of lawsuits. In Bert’s storage unit, I found boxes bursting with depositions, briefs, motions, and trial material. I often wondered what Lee Duncan would have thought of the fight between Daphne and Bert, and how dumbfounded he might have been, had he been in the deposition room, to hear one of the many lawyers say, in an attempt to summarize what was going on with Rin Tin Tin: “Let us stipulate that we have a stipulation.”
14.
The initial lawsuit between Bert and Daphne was finally settled in 1996. The two parties struck an odd compromise: Daphne agreed to assign the trademark for the Rin Tin Tin Fan Club to Bert. I don’t understand why he accepted this settlement, since he had no interest in running a fan club, but maybe wresting at least one of the trademarks from her made him feel he had made a point about his control.
The more meaningful outcome was that the lawsuit seemed to bring Bert’s attention back to Rin Tin Tin. That year, he drew up an extensive, detailed investment proposal for “Rin Tin Tin—The Motion Picture.” This movie was not the Lee Duncan story—he was still determined to make that as well—but instead his western masterpiece, River of Gold.
He had developed the script for River of Gold with writer Stephen Harrigan; it was about a farm family in the late 1860s and their struggles and adventures along with their dog, Rin Tin Tin. Bert wanted it to be his Gone with the Wind, according to Max Kleven. “He wanted it to be a big, sweeping movie,” Kleven said. “Farmers in Kansas, famine—something epic.”
In Bert’s mind, the movie was about loyalty. Rin Tin Tin’s role in it was as the “great American dog Hero . . . that stands for bravery, loyalty, and courage against evil of all kind. This movie . . . will encompass all the human and moral values.” He believed the movie would revive the Rin Tin Tin franchise for “aging baby boomers that are now between 40 and 50 years old and their children and grandchildren with whom they will want to share their favorite dog hero, Rin Tin Tin. We cannot let this movie fail them.”
In 1994, Disney Studios paid him $100,000 for a “first look” at his script, with the promise of $1 million if the studio decided to buy it. The deal was a great boost. It suddenly felt like the early days, when Bert was wooing Screen Gems with The Adventures of Rin-Tin-Tin—the same excitement and the same friction. In fact, before he went into one of his meetings with Disney, Bert jotted a note to himself: “Tone & attitude cannot be defensive in story meetings with Disney! Sit back and LISTEN.” It all seemed to be going well, but in April of that year, Frank Wells, a former Warner Bros. executive who was Disney’s president and had championed the Rin Tin Tin project, was killed in a helicopter crash. Many scripts at the studio, including River of Gold, stalled while Disney CEO Michael Eisner and studio head Jeffrey Katzenberg fought over filling Wells’s job. Finally, Disney decide
d to let its option lapse on River of Gold.
Bert took his script around Hollywood, knocking on doors the way Lee Duncan had more than seventy years earlier, offering his story the way Lee had offered his dog, hoping someone would see the same thing he saw in it, how it was electric with possibility, vivid and alive.
Warner Bros., Paramount, and Fox all politely declined River of Gold. One of their concerns was that a recent Lassie movie had flopped, leading them to assume that in 1994 there was little interest in dog movies. “The Lassie movie deserved to die. It was bad,” Bert wrote in his investment proposal by way of counterargument. He kept swinging. To a private investor, he wrote, “I would not like to guess but . . . I do instinctively feel we could achieve well up in the multi-million dollar figures. When one realizes Rin Tin Tin was as big a star in both silent films and the early talkies as many of his two-legged co-stars—why shouldn’t history repeat itself?”
An executive at New Line Cinema thought River of Gold would conflict with a script in development called Snow Dogs. Bert responded, with evident exasperation, “‘Snow Dogs’ has a group of no-personality Huskies. ‘River of Gold’ has an American—and world—icon, Rin Tin Tin.” British investors were tempted (“Bert, this movie project sounds so marvelous”); small studios liked it (“Script is a very pleasant surprise . . . would make a fun Alcon film”). But no one offered to buy it.
At one time Disney had proposed buying Rin Tin Tin from Bert. Not a script; it wanted to buy everything Bert owned that related to the dog: the rights to the character of the dog; scripts for four Rin Tin Tin movies that were already written; the rights to James English’s book The Rin Tin Tin Story, which Bert held; all the Rin Tin Tin comics and children’s books; the colorized television episodes and those that were in sepia or black-and-white; Bert’s small ownership position in 106 episodes of Rin Tin Tin K9 Cop; and the rights to develop more Rin Tin Tin television shows and movies.
Bert needed the money, but he refused to let go, even though his former lawyer, Tierney, told me that the Disney offer was generous—he remembers it as being close to $5 million. Even if he paid off his debts, Bert would have enough left to be comfortable. He wasn’t interested. “I’m not ready to retire,” he told his niece Patty. “I think I can make a couple of hit movies and at least one hit series on behalf of the Rin Tin Tin franchise.”
His debts mounted while his scripts sat in a box, untouched. By 2003, he owed one of his lawyers $600,000 and another $100,000; he owed producer Irvin Kershner, who had agreed to direct River of Gold, more than $100,000 that Kershner had loaned him to help with living expenses. He owed Stephen Harrigan $50,000 for writing River of Gold. Max Kleven, who had loaned him $350,000 and now wanted it back, was suing him. The judge in Kleven’s suit imposed a deadline of December 1, 2003. If Bert failed to make the payment, Kleven would take over the rights to all future projects based on Rin Tin Tin. To Bert, this would be like giving up all hope. He had an easier time releasing the rights on old projects, but giving up the rights to all future Rin Tin Tin projects was too hard. As he told his lawyer, “All I have left of my life’s work is Rin Tin Tin.”
He decided he could bear to give up a half ownership in Rin Tin Tin. The prospect of selling even that much was torture, but he was beginning to understand it was a necessity. He went back to Disney, hoping to reignite interest there, offering the half share to them for $5 million. “Rin Tin Tin is a great American icon waiting to be reborn in all its glory for the kids and families of the 21st century,” he wrote to Michael Eisner, the head of Disney, with his usual trumpeting confidence. Then the tone of his letter changed, almost as though he were stripping off a costume of bravery and standing naked on a stage. “Rin Tin Tin is like a family heirloom,” he wrote, “a first child, hard to give up, but maybe it is time. But like a good parent you want the best home for your first child, and that’s the reason for my writing you this letter.”
In the end, Disney’s interest was not reignited, and Bert’s agent contacted twenty other media companies to offer them the half share. He summarized the meetings to Bert in a bluntly worded memo. “It is important to note that in the twenty meetings to date, the unanimous opinion was that the $5 million is much too high. Classic Media”—the company that owned the rights to Lassie and The Lone Ranger and seemed like a likely taker—“thought the Rin Tin Tin properties were grossly overvalued and wouldn’t have gone over $500,000.”
This must have fallen on Bert with a thud. Time had whipped past him, and maybe past Rin Tin Tin. Bert still had that bright, boyish face and crinkled-up, smiling eyes; he could have passed for fifty-five or sixty, but he was now in his seventies, no longer the young success, the “cherubic proprietor-producer” who had just landed in Hollywood. He and Betty had two young daughters, so he now had six daughters to support. Bert sold the house on Los Feliz, losing money on the transaction, and moved with Betty and their daughters to Reno because it was more affordable.
The move might also have been an effort to restore their marriage. It was a tumultuous, broken-crockery sort of relationship, and Bert complained to friends that Betty was more attached to her young friends than to him, but he was hopelessly smitten with her. In the Rin Tin Tin movie proposal, amid hundreds of pages of spreadsheets and financial projections, he devoted a page to pictures of Betty snuggling him, the glaring camera making her blond hair look white. They finally divorced. It didn’t last: they soon got remarried. But nothing changed, and they separated again. Betty kept the Reno house. Bert couldn’t afford a place of his own; he was reduced to staying with friends and relatives. He would wear out his welcome on one couch and then pack his little Mazda coupe with his clothes and boxes of business papers and move to someone else’s couch every couple of days.
15.
By coincidence, at that same moment, Daphne was on the road, too. After she left Pearland, where the city had complained about the number of dogs on her property, she had moved to a thoroughbred farm owned by a friend. But then she left after she and the owner had, in her words, “a difference of opinion on the importance of continuing the Rin Tin Tin legacy.”
She had her El Dorado convertible, and all the time in the world, and most of all, the ambition to bring attention to her Rin Tin Tins. So along with her cat and her three favorite dogs—Rin Tin Tin VIII, Joanne, and Gayle—she set off on her ten-month road tour, appearing at pet stores, dog shows, children’s hospitals, parades, anywhere there was an interest in Rin Tin Tin.
If you could see the whole story of Rin Tin Tin at one glance, you would see that finally, at this moment, she and Bert and Lee were moving to the same beat, an accidental harmony that had begun in 1922 and kept pulsing more than seven decades later. Each of them had become a messenger trying to deliver the same story—by foot, along the sidewalks of Hollywood, or by Mazda coupe or El Dorado convertible, with the dog heeling alongside, or springing to life on a typewritten script, or sprawled on the backseat, along for the ride.
Everybody liked Bert; I heard this time and time again. He made “the best first impression of anyone in the world,” according to Tierney. He was a “charming rogue,” according to another business associate, an “immensely appealing man.” There “wasn’t anyone in the world that didn’t like him.” I had come to like him, too, even though I knew him only by way of other people’s recollections, and by reading through the scraps of his life in boxes stacked ceiling-high in storage unit 3482. He was sharp and funny; even his contentiousness had a certain honor. He loved writers, hated bureaucracy. He stiffed people out of money, owed something to everyone, but it wasn’t out of malice—he was always a hair’s breadth away from the next opportunity, which would set him right and allow him to make good on his debts. He believed in principle. He wanted to succeed but he cared about making it matter. He wanted Rin Tin Tin to tell stories that had a moral point and would entertain kids as they learned something important about life. He used Naked City to examine ordinary people who had fallen away from s
ociety and Route 66 to capture the real feel of the United States in 1960 rather than a set-directed soundstage version of it; he wasn’t afraid of making a television show that had a drifty, uncentered center that captured in its aimlessness something true about young people at that time. He didn’t love dogs so much as the ideas and stories that Rin Tin Tin could carry inside him.
Even in his humbling circumstances of homelessness he kept working. Back in 1986, he had teamed up with a writer, Chris Canaan, and they wrote a script called Calexico, which director Bob Fosse was planning to make as his next film at the time of his death. The main character in Calexico was Sam Maclaine, “a vibrant but rumpled man” who had fallen far down the well of Hollywood. But Maclaine was trying his best to clamber back. “Don’t call me history, kid!” Maclaine shouts in one scene. “Dead people are history!” Later, Maclaine adds, “Listen, punk, I ended up in the toilet because no-talent young cretins like you opened up shit factories all over Hollywood.”
Part of Bert’s appeal was that kind of belligerent optimism—it drove his brashness and his certainty that everything he touched would be fine. “I’ve survived the film and television business for forty-six years, enduring many dry periods,” he wrote to his lawyer in 2002, sounding as if this low point were just a difficult phase he would pass through, even though he had been reduced to borrowing money for food and gas. His third wife, Jenny Cobb, “came to the rescue,” as he put it, giving him a place to stay for stretches at a time. But there were moments when he couldn’t rally, when he was beginning to sound uncharacteristically defeated. “For a man who was a very rich and successful man, it is very tough,” he again wrote to his lawyer. “It’s hard to get any job when you’re 79; in my profession it’s impossible. I am really disgustingly broke. Nada income. Big talent in old body. Maybe I’ll make it back, maybe I won’t.”