Rin Tin Tin

by Susan Orlean

  16.

  Bert hadn’t forgotten his promise to Eva that he would get the story of Lee’s life on the screen. In one of the last letters they exchanged, Bert wrote to Eva, “I have tried to sell the Rin Tin Tin story. . . . I have not yet been successful but I do think that it is still a possibility.” On couches and at coffee shops, he continued to work on Rin Tin Tin and Me, a script he’d been working on for almost fifty years. He was now writing it himself in the form of a treatment that could be expanded into a script. He began it by describing the bond between the man and the dog “nurtured in the simplicity and loneliness of Duncan’s early background” and how finally “the career which had skyrocketed Lee to fame has come to an ignominious end.”

  The outline of the story followed the outline of Lee’s life, but the character was not quite Lee. In the script, the character of Lee was bolder and cockier than Lee had been in real life, and he was also, in Bert’s words, “incredibly weak and impressionable with women; even more so if they [were] beautiful.” It was as if Bert was grafting some of his personality onto the cinematic version of the Lee Duncan he was creating. He was perhaps beginning to feel the urge that Lee had had for so long—to put his life into a story, and then on screen, to give it some order and logic, and also expand it so it took on the shimmering, vast scope of a myth. It was his version of a Memory Room, in the form of a movie, where he had always felt most at home.

  One of his drafts began, “In 1921, Lee Duncan was an unemployed veteran of WWI. He had no experience in training dogs. But he had dreams and he had Rin Tin Tin. And he had an imagination. So, we begin with a fable . . .”

  In late 2002, during a routine trip to the dentist, Bert was told that something was amiss. Further examination revealed that he had a malignant growth in his throat. The first doctor he consulted told him there was nothing to be done and he had only a few months to live, but a second doctor agreed with what Bert felt: he wasn’t ready to die. He had surgery and a course of chemotherapy, and it seemed like he was cured. He wanted to get back to work on River of Gold and Rin Tin Tin and Me, even as he was convalescing. He spent hours with his niece Patty and his friend Rob Stone, trying to figure out how to create something out of his remaining rights to Rin Tin Tin. He wanted to work, to make a deal, but he also began to sound like a man who was taking final stock of his life. “I’ve made a lot of mistakes,” he told Stone. “But I had a good ride. I stood on principle. I want it all but I still want to do what I want to do. I haven’t given up. I haven’t got a complaint in the world. I’m one of the lucky guys who did what he believed. I’ve made some stupid, stupid decisions, but you know, it was a lot of fun.”

  The cancer recurred in 2005. This time the surgery included the removal of his voice box. He wrote a note to Patty saying, “I’m tough but at 83, I’m scared.” He moved in with Max Kleven for a time, and even though he had dropped to a skeletal 136 pounds, he wanted to work on his scripts. It kept him going, just imagining the movies getting made.

  At night, Kleven read him sections of River of Gold or Rin Tin Tin and Me out loud. As Bert listened, tears rolled down his face. Patty paid to have a nurse, Maria Briseno, move out to Kleven’s to help take care of Bert. He wrote notes to his daughters, saying Briseno was his angel, that he didn’t know what he would have done without her. One afternoon, Patty drove to Kleven’s house to pay Bert a surprise visit. She walked into the living room and came upon Bert and Maria dancing to a Frank Sinatra record, cheek to cheek.

  He got sicker; he left Kleven’s house and moved in with his daughter Victoria. He wanted to work on his scripts and also re-edit episodes of The Adventures of Rin-Tin-Tin. Through hand gestures and notes, he indicated what he wanted changed; a friend who had access to an editing room worked on them. When they were completed he brought them back for Bert to screen.

  He died on October 14, 2006, in the living room of the house his ex-wife Jenny shared with their daughter Gina. Several of his daughters were there. Sam Manners went to Bert’s funeral expecting to see thousands of people; after all, Bert Leonard had been such a big figure in town. But only a few people attended the service. Mourners were given a card with a picture of a young Bert standing in front of a plane. So many of the people who knew him when he had a golden touch in Hollywood had died before him, or turned against him, or simply forgotten him. But his work had been bigger than that. Millions of people around the world had been affected by the story of a boy and a dog that he had concocted on his lunch break that day in Corriganville.

  In his will, besides leaving money to his daughters and his ex-wife Jenny, he specified that 10 percent of his estate go to Lee Duncan’s family and another small portion to the estate of Douglas Heyes, who had written most of the episodes of The Adventures of Rin-Tin-Tin. Of course, there was no money; there wasn’t even enough money in his bank account to cover his funeral expenses. It was a purely symbolic gesture; he knew exactly what he had and didn’t have: in the margins of his notes and papers, he had time and again tallied up how much he owed and to whom. But in his mind he never gave up the hope that things were about to straighten out, that his luck would change. Maybe he just wanted to make a final gesture to the two men who had been right beside him when everything in his life was in its place, when the world was listening to the story he was telling.

  “This sounds like a fairy tale, doesn’t it?” Bert asked Rob Stone in a long talk they had shortly before the surgery that took his voice away. “But it’s all true. My life has been something built on more than money. I think—I think it was built on dreams. I cared about these things. I cared about all of these things.”

  17.

  On the day when I was in Texas, the ARFkids families, the puppy buyers, and I left Daphne’s house, piled into our cars, and drove to the local agricultural arena to watch an agility demonstration by two dogs and their trainers. The arena was an open-air building with high rafters and a sloping roof, the sort of place that birds seem to view as a ready-made housing development for birds, so there was peeping and fluttering and nervous preening going on just overhead. A sign in the grandstands noted that the arena was “The Resting Place of Wimpy—#1 Grand Champion Stallion at the 1941 Southwest Exposition and Fat Stock Show in Fort Worth.” Wimpy, according to the plaque, possessed a good temperament, endurance, and intelligence. The plaque seemed to imply that Wimpy was buried under the dirt floor in front of us, a disconcerting image, but I couldn’t think of another way to interpret it. In the arena, the dogs bounded over obstacles and dropped their fetched toys on command, eyes locked on their trainers the entire time. The ARFkids—some silent and withdrawn and others, including a pair of towheaded twin girls, twirling like tops—watched the dogs and bounced and fidgeted and didn’t watch the dogs and pointed at the birds in the rafters and the ones taking dust baths beneath the stands.

  The man sitting next to me was one of the puppy buyers. His name was Herbert Molina; he lived in Florida but had grown up in Peru watching The Adventures of Rin-Tin-Tin on television. I remembered seeing the spreadsheets showing international sales of the show, and Peru was up near the top. Molina was about my age, and I realized that probably the only thing our childhoods had in common—his in Lima, Peru, and mine in Cleveland, Ohio—was that we had spent hours of them watching The Adventures of Rin-Tin-Tin. Molina was wearing an oxford shirt, which he unbuttoned while we were talking to show me a German shepherd T-shirt he had on underneath. He said he’d been waiting to get a Rin Tin Tin dog his entire life, and he couldn’t believe he was finally going to bring one home. “I think,” he said, raising his eyebrows, “I was a German shepherd in my previous life.”

  Reincarnation and transubstantiation were everywhere I looked, or so it seemed. When Eva Duncan was deposed in the matter of Leonard v. Hereford, she was asked if she knew of people who had large collections of Rin Tin Tin memorabilia. “There was one girl, yes, that I knew but I can’t remember her name,” Eva responded. “She claims that her dog was—how would you
say it—was reincarnated, a Rin Tin Tin reincarnation.”

  “So the original Rin Tin Tin was reincarnated into this dog?” asked Daphne’s attorney.

  “Into her dog, yes,” Eva replied. “She used to write us letters, reams of letters telling us about this dog. And she would collect all the Rin Tin Tin memorabilia that she could find.”

  “Oh, my goodness,” the attorney said. “So then we’re not talking about bloodlines anymore. We’re talking about something else. We’re talking about spiritual succession?”

  “Right, reincarnation,” Eva said. After a moment, she added, “You get a lot of goofy people in this business.”

  Over the years that I’d been in contact with Daphne, there were times when she seemed to appreciate my interest in preserving and extending, in my own way, the legacy of Rin Tin Tin. But there were other times when I suffered what many people around her have suffered, namely, her indignation and sense of insult over something I did or a perceived threat to her dominion over Rin Tin Tin. During one of the periods when she was mad at me, she wrote me a letter reproaching me for something I had said to someone. She ended the letter in high dudgeon, with the simple electrifying statement: “I am Rin Tin Tin.”

  At the time of this particular visit, though, we were on good terms, and after the obedience demonstration, we came back to her house for the official opening of the museum. Some of its contents were things Daphne had collected, and another significant portion came from two collectors, Edythe Shepard and her husband, Shep, who had gathered German shepherd figures of every sort and style after a chance encounter with a German shepherd statue they liked at a garage sale. After a short ceremony on her lawn, Daphne opened the doors to the museum and everyone filed in. There were shelves of German shepherd objects made of porcelain, ceramic, iron, bronze, and glass; German shepherd plush toys in every possible size; carnival clays and Royal Doultons; Rin Tin Tin books and posters and pictures; oil paintings, needlework portraits, and pedigree cards. I wandered through, pausing every few feet to examine a new version of Rin Tin Tin I had never before seen.

  On a shelf near a dark corner in the back of the garage I spotted something familiar, and I hurried over. There it was, leaning against the back of the shelf: the Breyer plastic Rin Tin Tin figurine, with its ridges of fur, its alert stance—my grandfather’s toy, the Rin Tin Tin that enraptured me and frustrated me and finally came to such a bad end. I almost hesitated to look at it too closely because I knew that in real life it could never be as big as it was in my memory, nor as wonderful and desirable, because only something remembered can stay intact and perfect and never fade or fail.

  • • •

  But I reconsidered, and a few weeks after I came back from Texas I looked around on the Internet and found one of those Breyer Rin Tin Tins and bought it—and it sits on my desk to this day. There was something gratifying about being able to do that, and disappointing. It finally summed up a certain open equation in my life, but it also reduced a persistent memory, and even a persistent melancholy, into an eight-inch plastic figurine. I was happy to have it, but I sometimes missed the bittersweet weight of my memory, of recalling those days at my grandfather’s desk, of feeling so sharply the aches and joys of childhood and the mystery of my family, of realizing that my hunger for that toy had led me to spend these years of my life learning the story of Rin Tin Tin.

  There were moments, like the day my Breyer toy arrived, when I began to wonder if the legacy of Rin Tin Tin was finally contract-ing—whether the big sweep of his story, the international acclaim, the century of prominence, might shrink to the size of an eBay listing. I had haunted the website since starting to trace the story of Rin Tin Tin, and there were never fewer than several hundred Rin Tin Tin items listed—packets of View-Master slides for ten dollars; dexterity puzzles for a couple of bucks; Fort Apache play sets for $149. With the television show off the air, the movie rights tied up in knots, Lee and Bert both gone, it sometimes felt as if Lee’s promise that there always would be a Rin Tin Tin had been reduced to some toys and comic books for sale. It seemed like such a compacted version of what Rin Tin Tin had been. A more optimistic viewpoint might be that, these days, living forever means having been enough of a material presence in the world to win a permanent place on eBay. But Rin Tin Tin felt bigger than that; at least that was what I had made myself believe.

  As it happened, Daphne’s entire Rin Tin Tin museum ended up on eBay just two years after its grand opening. I was browsing through the usual offerings of cereal premiums and Rin Tin Tin beanies when I saw it, listed with a starting bid of $75,000 and a “Buy It Now” price of $100,000—the entire contents of the world’s only Rin Tin Tin museum, “the chance of a lifetime for one lucky bidder.” According to the ad, the museum was “conservatively valued at $100,000–$200,000 but due to circumstances beyond our control we MUST part with it. Immediately!” It seems that in the two years that had passed since the opening, Daphne’s legal bills had continued to grow. Max Kleven, who now owned many of the rights to any new projects involving Rin Tin Tin, had sued Daphne over the issue of her trademarks. In addition, she had begun a lawsuit against First Look Studios, the production company to which James Tierney sold his portion of the Rin Tin Tin rights, after the studio announced plans to make a movie based on “the true-life story of Rin Tin Tin.” Daphne argued that the film violated her rights to the Rin Tin Tin name. Even as the lawsuit was filed, the production got under way and the head of First Look announced, “We are very excited about being able to have such a property.” The film was shot in Bulgaria and featured a Bulgarian cast, including one young actor who told a reporter, “I never actually learned English. Most of the things I know came from The Cartoon Network.”

  There were other lawsuits, too, for infractions real or theoretical, and then Daphne’s health began to decline and she decided that selling the museum was the only sensible option. She said she wasn’t going to give it to her son or daughter. “My kids aren’t getting anything from me and they know it,” she said. As much as she hated Bert Leonard—and the feeling was certainly mutual—at that moment she would have found a lot to discuss with him. They both had come to know well the pain of parting with something you believed was priceless, especially when it was, ironically enough, to cover the cost of protecting it. And of course they shared the persistent, fundamental belief in Rin Tin Tin, even when that belief threatened to ruin them. “I used to joke that Bert and I should have gotten married,” Daphne said to me recently. “After all, we really had a lot in common.”

  The eBay listing for the museum didn’t draw any bidders, but Daphne eventually sold the contents to a German shepherd aficionado, Debra Hnath, who lives in Oklahoma. The official Rin Tin Tin of the moment, Rin Tin Tin XI, whose pedigree name is the oddly repetitive Rin Tin Tins Rin-Tin-Tin, was also sent to Oklahoma to live with Hnath in order to continue breeding more Rin Tin Tin puppies, under an agreement between Hnath and Daphne that eventually became deeply disputed and, finally, formed the basis of another lawsuit. Maybe this final piece of litigation changed Daphne’s mind about choosing an heir apparent. Maybe family took on a new importance in her life, because she recently told me that when she retires she intends for her son and daughter to jointly take over the position of chief executive officer of Rin Tin Tin Incorporated.

  At the end of that hot, hot day at Daphne’s house in Texas, when the celebration of the museum opening was over and the puppies had been paired up with their new families, I got ready to drive to the Houston airport for my flight back to Boston, where I was living at the time. I noticed that there was one puppy—a tiny, dark, wide-eyed female—still sitting on Daphne’s lawn, her head resting on her paws. She had been sold to a family in Boston and was going to be shipped to them the next day. As I said goodbye, Daphne realized I was heading to Boston myself, and she asked if I could take the puppy with me as hand luggage, saving her the shipping fee.

  I was happy to do it—she was an adorable puppy, a bit
shy and worried-looking, with a wrinkly brow and a whip of a tail and feet like little black paddles. She sat in a heap on my backseat during the drive from Crockett to Houston, glancing out the window and then quickly looking away. I realized that she probably had never been in a car before. After thirty miles or so she started to look a little peaked, and when I stopped to let her amble around on a patch of grass behind a fast-food joint, she promptly threw up and then fell asleep.

  On the flight home, she sat at my feet, and when she wasn’t napping she gave me a melting look that had the terrible effect of making me hope the people who had bought her had changed their minds and that the puppy would end up staying with me. Just like that, the German shepherd I had dreamed of as a kid, the dog I had wanted from the beginning of time, would finally, at last, belong to me.

  But when we landed and I carried her out to the baggage claim the whole family was there, as of course I knew they would be, and they squealed and shrieked with excitement when they spotted me—when they spotted the puppy, that is—and they raced up and pried her out of my arms, and within a moment, they were gone and she was gone and I was left without her, standing by the baggage carousel. I had no right to cry about it, but I couldn’t help it. For that moment, at least, after a lifetime of imagining it, that shy, worried, tender, heroic, brave, loyal, gallant puppy had been mine.

  18.

  For me, the narrative of Rin Tin Tin is extraordinary because it has lasted. He is that rare thing that endures when so much else rushes past; he is the repeating mark in our memory, the line that dips and rises without breaking. It is the continuity of an idea that makes life seem like it has a pattern that is wise and beautiful and indelible, one thing leading to the next; the individual beads of our lives, rather than scattering and spilling, are gathered up and strung along that endless line.