Bad behavior at dog shows caused concern in some circles. Across the Land of Fancy went a call for order and pleas for the respect that was due these supreme examples of the canine species. Judith Lytton’s prophetic Toy Dogs and Their Ancestors, read in both England and America, was as much about toy-dog breeding as it was on etiquette and fair play. Many pages were devoted to proper comportment. Lytton complained that her own countrymen, and women, when they weren’t shamelessly selling poor replicas of England’s heritage at inflated prices to unsuspecting tourists, were setting bad examples on a global stage. Her strongest objection went to the so-called “ladies,” crass types she said had crashed the gates and won respectability with their ugly dogs. “So bad a name do lady fanciers get,” wrote Lady Wentworth, using the term “lady” cautiously, “that, as far as the outside world is concerned, one might just as well become a professional card shark as a dog fancier!”46 The New York Times added a similar footnote to the 1892 Westminster show. “Some of the men who have dogs on exhibition,” it was conceded, “are about as bad as the women.”47
Thus the almost comical solemnity that reigns over Madison Square Garden each year when the boxing matches and rock concerts have cleared out. The final decisions of today’s show-ring judges are surrounded with as much high ritual as a papal blessing of the animals. But however hard authorities have tried to keep dog showing a dignified occupation for ladies and gentlemen, the impulse to continue opening the door and raising the volume has always had the last word. Early on, a cry for democratization came from within the fancy. “Kennel clubs were held up as vulgar breeding institutions,” the Times reported after the Westminster show of 1878, “where dogs are dealt in for profit, and complaint was made that in the struggle for prizes individual breeders have no chance with them.”48 Already by 1893, the Times recorded “Nearly One Thousand Pleading for Prizes,”49 and that number would grow by leaps and bounds. Expansionism was by no means an American invention. From the time of the very first competitions in England, promoters saw opportunities for profit and growth. Democracy always sells. So does aristocracy, and dog biscuits baked “By Appointment to Her Majesty the Queen,” like the ones manufactured by an American entrepreneur named Spratt who helped to make Crufts a premier venue. From the start, and despite all pretenses to upholding higher causes, dog shows have been about selling things and putting on a good performance, and various gimmicks have been tried to enlarge the number of spectators and paying contestants. Charles Cruft, a clever impresario, went so far as to include several separate categories of stuffed taxidermy dogs so he could boast that his event had more classes, and class, than any other in England. Like aristocratic owners who might attend events in spirit only, dogs could be entered as mere husks of their former selves. Cruft, the father of the modern dog show, who was called “the British Barnum,” spared no expense in showing Queen Alexandra herself in an opulently furnished viewing box of her own, forcing spectators to wonder whether Her Highness or the dogs were on display. The logo Cruft chose for his prestigious show was a crown—set above the head of a Saint Bernard.50
What was good enough for royalty became a minimal requirement for those highly born in the realm of dogdom. Back in New York, the owners of pooches a cut above the common riff-ruff took Cruft’s example and displayed their animals in as comfortable settings as the queen’s, as though these were their natural habitats. Between all the drama of showing and judging, ticket holders were invited to squeeze down crowded aisles of private cages and admire their occupants up close. Not far away from the jarred embryo specimens displayed at the first Westminster show, “some of the exhibitors asked and obtained permission to decorate the houses of their pets. Mr. Haines, of this City, and Mr. Baldwin, of Newark, both of whom exhibit Yorkshire terriers, will have their boxes lined with velvet. Others will doubtless follow their example.”51 Others doubtless did. “The kennels provided for these handsome animals were unusually spacious,” the Times reported from the main floor in 1883, “and they had to be, for some of the specimens exhibited were hardly smaller than ponies. Among these big dogs there was not much attempt at ornamentation. The animals themselves were sure to attract sufficient attention without the aid of ribbons, rugs, or tapestries. Some of the apartments for the smaller dogs, however, were gorgeously furnished with carpets, curtains, ribbons, and even mirrors.”52
The fancier the breed, the more ostentatious the natural surroundings. Many of the small and toy breeds were modeled after useless court dogs, and their owners played this to the utmost. “Some of these are housed in royal fashion, and bask all day among silks, satins, and velvets,” the Times noted in 1892.53 Aristocratic lapdogs, like those ethereal palace sleeve-dogs of ancient China, couldn’t be expected to live just anywhere. “The toy dogs,” said the Times article on the Ladies’ Kennel Association show of 1903,
as is usual with a crowd, attracted, in anything, more interest than any other class. Those delicate little animals, whose health must be preserved in glass houses, were gazed at with wonder and amusement. One of the most elaborate of the toy dog houses was a long, palatial like edifice chiefly of glass, with white woodwork. Within were four Japanese spaniels reclining and sleeping upon silk cushions, each one in his separate compartment. Blue curtains adorned the miniature windows, while to complete the luxury of this dog home four electric light bulbs suspended from the arched ceiling supplied the proper amount of light. Mrs. R. T. Harrison of this city was the owner of this elaborate dog house, with its tiny inmates. J. E. Dickert of Toronto showed two little toy terriers enclosed in a house partitioned off in the style of a stateroom. The dogs’ bed, with curtains to draw before it, was elevated about eight inches above the floor, and a box stood handy to assist the pets to clamber up and down as they chose.54
Smaller animals with limbs as fragile as their family trees were displayed like so many doggies in the window—or perhaps as laboratory samples pressed between glass to be scrutinized by a judge’s microscope. “Some of these pet dogs are entirely covered with glass,” read the story on another ladies’ show in 1901,
the front portion being arranged like a door, which is shut when the faithful attendant believes it is time for the delicate specimen of canine flesh to take its nap, and at the slightest suggestion of a cooler breeze the silk cushions and mufflers are brought into requisition. The extravagance to which continued devotion to pet dogs can go was illustrated in one section of the pet row, where a colored maid stands patient guard over her delicate charges all day long, occasionally taking them out, combing their hair, and rearranging the pillows with as much care and attention as though serving a human being.55
Spectators could safely assume these very public interiors for dogs mirrored their owners’ private lives. That was the whole point. A palatial home, replete with expensive furnishings, the latest technological advantages like electricity, and full-time “colored” servants, was the American dream. From the early years of the pedigree dog cult, having a purebred, whether large, medium, or petite, curled up in the front parlor enhanced not only the owner’s self-image, but the place that person held in society’s esteem. Behind the sleek glass surfaces and transparent motives of showing off dogs, however, all was not well in the Land of Fancy. One of the uglier instances of cheating involved a Boston terrier entered in a New York show and fed ground glass by a jealous competitor. The poor thing died before it could become a champion.56 Not all pedigree dog owners, it seemed, were ladies or gentlemen, no matter how opulent their natural surroundings or high-bred their animals.
Still, the fancy has never shied away from trying to live up to its name. Dog shows have always been glitzy events, part royal pageant, part circus, part Renaissance fair, and part society freak show. “DOGS HOLD HIGH CARNIVAL—SOCIETY VISITS ARISTOCRATIC CANINES IN THE GARDEN,” the Times heralded one event in 1892 with its gaudy processions, bright banners, and box seating.57 Dogs with dramatic coats were shined up for the crowd and paraded around the ring in heel positio
ns with tails raised proudly like royal standards. Some were clipped to look like kingly lions and escorted to center stage. Trumpets sounded to prick up the ears on breeds earning points for their prickiness. Every conceivable method was tried to keep the number of snooty entries rising and the audience coming back in droves, even stuffed and pickled dogs for public viewing.
Sometimes the fancy got too fancy for its own pants. “A big band of music was thought of but was abandoned. . . . It was found that every time the band started up every dog in the place joined in refrain, to the distraction of the musicians and the disgust of the audience.”58
CHAPTER SEVEN
ARISTOCRACY FOR SALE
Marge and Eunice, the bickering Boston terriers, managed to compose themselves before we reached the elegant Art Deco lobby of their apartment building. Upstairs and behind closed doors not five minutes earlier, they’d been engaged in mortal combat, but my encouragement as their chaperone was forcing them to act more sensibly. The two snorting sisters put on their public faces, paused briefly until I stepped forward, then slowly and self-consciously exited the vintage 1920s elevator lined in black patent leather. Like old friends, they passed magnificent columns of the finest black-and-gold marble and floated across an expanse of black-and-white parquet that mirrored their white bellies and white calla lilies spraying from alabaster vases set into alcoves along the walls.
Boston terriers have traditionally been called “tuxedo” dogs because of the design on their coats, but the interpretation could swing the other way. Why should markings be sexist? These girls could have been prim and proper debutantes gossiping about suitors at a cotillion, while skirting across a ballroom floor. Instead of evening jackets, the black patches might just as easily have suggested ladies’ shawls draped over the shoulders and coming to square points on both sides. Black was cut sharply by solid white on the forelegs, creating an effect of long gloves rising over the elbows. Angular heads were neatly compact, with black hair pressed closely to the skulls like conservative hairdos, and foreheads were sliced symmetrically at the center with thin white blazes, as though reserving spots for tiny tiaras or royal crests. Pink rhinestone collars glimmered on slender necks, but neither jewels nor markings were boldly indiscreet or “flashy” as they say in the show ring. Sharp fangs, protruding from under-bites and recently in use upstairs, were hidden from view as the breed standard required and public decency demanded.
Back in the Roaring Twenties, when the opulent Art Deco building of Marge and Eunice was constructed, Boston terriers were moving into a world of respectability. The breed was thought to belong in homes where nothing bad ever happened, spacious apartments and cavernous townhouses where black-and-white parquet pooches fit in with the decor and their owners’ sense of decorum. Here was a dog whose day had come, “our little aristocrat of the dog world,” proclaimed Edward Axtell, an early breeder, in The Boston Terrier and All About It: A Practical, Scientific, and Up to Date Guide to the Breeding of THE AMERICAN DOG.1 This wasn’t the first “purebred” born on our shores, to be sure, but it was the first useless canine house pet like court dogs of old, a companion animal suited to a class of people learning to frown upon practicality as a poor person’s concern.
In many ways, the Boston signaled its owner’s own arrival. Pulled from the rabble and polished to a state of inbred perfection, the “Black Satin Gentleman” had only recently risen from the depths of anonymity to live with the folks on the hill. “Although first fostered by coachmen, butlers, and grooms,” a writer for the American Kennel Club’s Gazette sighed with relief in 1924, “the aristocratic appearance and demeanor of the Boston Terrier soon was noticed and he quickly won a place in the house instead of the stable.”2 To a growing number of patrons, this dog was exactly where it was destined to be, and the metamorphosis from pariah to parlor poseur made for a classic Cinderella tale with powerful appeal to a nation of social climbers struggling to put their own pasts behind them. Following the paw prints of close relatives, English and French bulldogs, these pups with their impromptu pedigrees had been snatched from unworthy hands like pearls from swine, rescued from the midden heap, airlifted from the masses like misplaced royalty. They were precision “fitted to take their rightful position as an important member of the family in one of the homes of the ‘Four Hundred,’”3 one book brimmed with enthusiasm, and soon established residence among society’s “upper ten,” commented the Gazette as it narrowed the number of worthy owners still further. “You Can’t Keep a Good Dog Down,” sang the new arrival’s praises as one might ring in a new peer of the realm. “Although of Humble Origin, the Boston Terrier Has Instincts of a Gentleman.”4
An American success story, the improved-upon pooch was “equally at home in the drawing-room as in the stall,” and with that “indescribably human” expression, he was seen eating people food off china dishes, attending “subsequent teas and other functions,” and accompanying “Mrs. Ritz-Carlton” on her rounds about town. So well received was the handsome canine caller that leading aficionados and connoisseurs of other species were opening their doors to a dog that added “volumes to the general smart set up of the équipage.”5 Like the Dalmatian, for centuries a complement to stately processions, this bird of a similar feather was tied to the equestrian class, perhaps more intimately for riding in the carriage rather than trotting alongside. Here was a commoner ennobled, a mutt with a name for himself, a dog turned show dog. Apart from the occasional boo-boo on an Oriental rug, the well-bred terrier of Boston could be taken anywhere, and in formal wear at all hours of the night and day, a less than subtle hint that both dog and owner no longer needed to work for a living.
Miraculous transformations are seldom as elegant and effortless as society’s new arrivals would have us believe. Nor did the overdomesticated dude reach loftiness overnight, though he did have some help. The Boston’s record speed in achieving the “reproductive uniformity”6 required for breediness must have impressed Henry Ford, who was also trying to get Americans where they wanted to go on a grand scale. The drive for assembly-line perfection and brand-name identification was born of a sense of urgency so strong that the AKC declared its eagerness to “recognize” the Boston Terrier Club in 1891, two years before club members even had an exact dog whose “interests” to further! “I would like to admit the Club,” explained a member of the Stud Book Committee before the Boston was fully calibrated, “but it appears we have to take the dog, too.”7
Why bother inventing yet another pedigree house pet when the English were supplying a standard selection of classics that were tried, true, and color-coordinated? Because Americans were, quite frankly, tired of looking abroad for their self-esteem. Deciding that approval from afar was something they could finally forgo marked a coming of age for self-made Americans. Whether or not they even liked dogs, purebreds were basic fixtures for finer homes and vehicles, but why go all the way to London when they could run off their own? For as long as social climbers could remember, England had enjoyed a virtual monopoly on the world’s most noteworthy types and held the cards to their breeding standards, making locals feel they were along for the ride. “The English do things better,” Anglophile Outing magazine stated as its position on the growing divide over whether to go on imitating or choose another destiny. “There has been a conflict, sometimes bitter, between those who adhere strictly to English ideals and standards and those who would press into recognition the American changes.”8 Foreign show-ring judges, it was true, had been invited to lend an air of glamour and authenticity to local competitions. They decided who had the best dogs, but hosts on the receiving end didn’t always like the rulings of ungracious guests who obviously hadn’t taken time to survey the social terrain.
That violent split over Frenchies, a few years after Bostons were born, was fueled by the same resentment at arrogant experts. “Perhaps some of these, like Mr. George Raper,” one English critic said of his countryman behind that row over rose ears, “think nothing of ‘running o
ver to New York’ to judge a show there, returning to take a few British shows, and then ‘running back’ to fulfill more American or Colonial engagements in other countries.”9 Antipathy was brewing as early as 1881 when the New York Times reported the decision “to have all American judges making decisions even on dogs of the British Isles” at a major event.10 Assigning a “thoroughly Americanized”11 Englishman to referee shows across the country kept contestants happy for a time, though headlines like “English Experts to Judge”12 intimidated, and “English Judges Stir Dog Fanciers” hardly did justice to the hurt feelings of one group of ladies when aliens failed to see the virtues of their bulldogs, Pomeranians, and Japanese spaniels. “It has been several years since dogdom has been so disturbed and upset as it has been by the decisions of the English judges,” the Times noted with concern.13 Perhaps British loyalists were content to go on aping their oppressors, but rising numbers of disgruntled hobbyists wanted to end their reliance on foreign dogs and declare a second independence.
This wasn’t a class struggle but a struggle for some class. American consumers were desperate for status symbols to make them proud to be American, but prouder still for being prouder than other Americans who didn’t have them. The Boston terrier seemed to fit that bill. Where could rebels take their case for recognition? The AKC wasn’t the only dog authority in the world, but it was the US breed registry with East Coast society’s ear. Elders of Madison Square were in a perfect position to solve the national identity crisis. They were soon to have the final word on coat color, and memories of their social ties in these early years would live on long after the Whitneys and Rockefellers had left the show rings, leaving the AKC with a legacy to shield it from the ugliest scandals and making it the only dog authority most people have even heard of today.
A Matter of Breeding Page 16