by Josh Dean
Because of the close association with hunting, dog shows began as a high-society affair in America, too. All the wealthiest families had kennels on their estates, and the handlers who ran them worked tirelessly to improve the quality of their stock. The conformation record books are filled with titans of American business—the names Belmont, Morgan,* Whitney, Gould, and Rockefeller were all commonly glimpsed in the show programs*—and shows were regularly featured in magazines and newspapers alongside news of other popular sports. “Everybody,” wrote a New York Times reporter of an early show’s attendees, “was fashionably dressed and wore an air of good breeding.” (I’m fairly certain no pun was intended.)
To give you an idea of just how prized a top dog was to society folk back then, consider that in 1908, a Ford Model T cost $825, while, according to Mark Derr, in his fascinating and fact-dense A Dog’s History of America, “the most desirable purebred dogs routinely started at $1,000 and ran to $5,000.”
The country’s top dogs were featured in Popular Dogs magazine, a weekly filled with profiles and new stories as well as promotional ads for champions, show listings, classifieds, and small boxed advertisements for products like Vermicide Capsules and the delouser Pulvex, which, according to its slogan, “Actually kills fleas instead of stupefying them!”
No show got more play, of course, than Westminster, which even then was world-famous. And the January 11, 1929, issue of Popular Dogs offered the following important news: “For the first time, perhaps, in the history of dog shows, canine reciprocity will be the order of the day, meaning that special precautions are to be taken lest the dogs endanger the people and the people annoy the dogs. There will be no biting of spectators at the Garden show this year, nor will there be any sticking of fingers in dogs’ eyes by a too interested public.” New wire cages, it reported, “will make accidents impossible, unless, of course, the spectator goes out of his way to make trouble for himself.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
Westminster: Welcome to
the Big Time, Kid
* * *
It takes all your time, all your money, everything you got. If you’re lucky, you might win enough money to get across the George Washington Bridge.
—OWNER OF A CHOW CHOW, IN THE BENCHING AREA AT WESTMINSTER, 2010
* * *
The Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show, held every February, is and has always been the most famous and important dog show in America. It is a vast and overwhelming two-day affair that brings nearly three thousand dogs and exponentially more breeders, owners, handlers, salespeople, psychics, dog masseuses, and hairstylists to New York City, where they take over Madison Square Garden while living on takeout and Chablis across Seventh Avenue at the Hotel Pennsylvania.
The seventeen-hundred-room Pennsylvania, a slightly dowdy grande dame that is the city’s fourth-largest hotel, transforms itself for the occasion into the world’s most dog-friendly hotel, complete with “his and her relieving areas”—the boys’ room is the one with plastic fire hydrants, in case you are confused—the world’s largest “doggie spa,” and a makeshift “Paw Mall” of vendors hawking treats, leads, combs, and dog-imprinted gear. The Pennsylvania’s PR machine loves to promote all this, celebrating the “five-paw service” overseen by doggie concierge Jerry Grymek, who spends eleven months concocting puns that he wields liberally in person and in press releases. Jerry is fully to blame for all the quotation marks in this section.
The ostensible purpose of Westminster, according to the Kennel Club’s bylaws, is “to increase the interest in dogs, and thus improve the breeds, and to hold an Annual Dog Show in the city of New York.” All those things remain true. It’s the one time each year that cabdrivers will talk about dog shows and will be able to explain the origins of the Norwegian buhund* between conspiracy rants, thanks to live coverage on the USA Network. The show has been on TV since 1948 but has really become a cultural touchstone since it began airing in primetime on USA, where it is one of that channel’s most-watched specials. In 2009 David Frei, the club’s director of communications and the voice of Westminster to millions of Americans—he’s the droll one who explains the derivation of the buhund’s name—celebrated his twentieth year on the air or, as the official press release called it, “140 years (oops, that’s dog years).”
TV is one reason Westminster is such a big deal. The other is that it is a champions-only show and an invitational; the top five American dogs in each breed are automatically eligible to compete. The remaining entries are accepted via lottery and only finished champions are eligible to enter.
The nation’s top dogs begin to arrive on the Friday before the traditional Monday start, and by midday there are stacks of crates teetering on the sidewalk outside the Pennsylvania. Inside, bemused Europeans in orange clogs and unseasonably short pants snap pictures and ogle the various breeds wandering the lobby.
Placards advertise the Skybark VIP Pooch Event in the Skytop Ballroom (“VIP,” by the way, stands for “very important pooches”). As noted, these and other puns are the work of Jerry Grymek, a thin Canadian with a small silver loop on his upper ear.
Jerry, whose hotel badge actually reads DOGGIE CONCIERGE, said that 460 dogs were scheduled to arrive, with another 360 due the following day, most during the 1:00 P.M.–to–3:00 P.M. dog check-in. In total he was expecting between 800 and 1,000 canine check-ins. Three of the last four Best in Show winners, he was pleased to report, had stayed at the Pennsylvania.
Jerry’s tasks include managing the vendors, acting as liaison between owners and the hotel, and generally facilitating dog comfort, which often means handing out special cookies that bulge in his pant pockets like nuts in the cheek of a squirrel. Though it’s not something he advertises, Jerry will occasionally fulfill more unusual requests for returning customers. “We don’t have room service, but sometimes a guest I know really needs something for an upset dog,” he said. “I’ve gotten meatballs with extra sauce, pizza slices, and cheeseburgers—hold the onions.”
No dog is too big for the Pennsylvania—“We took a bullmastiff that was two hundred twenty pounds”—but handlers who bring multiple dogs will be asked to book more than one room.
“You see that bloodhound?” he said, pointing across the lobby to a dog waiting its turn on a stage where David Frei was running a satellite media tour for local TV affiliates. “That dog”—whose name, I later learned, is Harvey—“is a contender for the record of world’s longest ears. His late grandfather, who recently passed, currently holds the title.”*
Jerry led me down some stairs and into the Paw Mall (which, frankly, could use another pass by the pun committee), where we had just missed Annie Germani, the pet communicator, currently out to lunch. Jerry pointed out the “his-and-hers canine loo” (that’s Canadian for “bathroom”), as well as the rather luxe display by the DogPedic memory-foam mattress company, which sells beds in three sizes, and can be purchased for two payments of $19.99 plus shipping and handling. If I came back in a day, Jerry said, I could meet Montel Williams, DogPedic’s celebrity endorser and one of a surprisingly large and fervent community of famous dog-show enthusiasts.*
“We call this Dogtors corner,” Jerry said, and I must have looked confused, because he clarified. “Like doctors. Only dogtors.”
He meant that this would be your therapeutic zone, which included Annie Germani as well as masseuse Debbie Zimmerman, a graduate of the Ojai School of Massage and a specialist in animal massage, preventative sports massage, Veterinary Orthopedic Manipulation (VOM), as well as obedience and agility training, behavior training, and crystal healing. Debbie charges a dollar per minute and said that typical massages range from twenty minutes of sport work in the case of dogs prepping for agility competitions to a more comprehensive thirty- to forty-minute rubdown for the conformation dogs, meant to help them loosen up.
“I remind people that they need to stretch their dogs,” Debbie said. Over the course of the weekend, she estimated she’d do eighty-five massa
ges and that she could easily do more, “but I don’t have enough hands.” Because, like humans (including this one), not every dog finds massage all that relaxing, Debbie also wields Chill Out aromatherapy spray, a pleasant mist that includes essence of lavender and chamomile.
“It helps calm them down,” Debbie said, and as if I had just stepped into a commercial in progress, a woman lingering nearby interjected, “It really works.”
I wasn’t sure what if any of this stuff Jack would use—though certainly the Chill Out spray is worth a test—but I could imagine that Kimberly might want to use the roomy bathing tubs, if not the whirlpool. He would definitely enjoy the Jog-A-Dog treadmills, which like all products targeting this market come in three sizes. An older golden retriever with wisps of gray in his face was plodding along effortlessly on the largest size, looking as if he could do it for days.*
How long have you been doing this? I asked Jerry.
“For a dog’s age,” he answered. “Easily seven years.”
Obviously a single show can’t occupy his entire year.
“Three hundred sixty days a year I’m in public relations,” he clarified. “Five days a year it’s pooch relations.”
I must have had the look of someone who’d just been bludgeoned by one too many hits of bad wordplay, because he smirked and said, “I have so many more.”
How many?
“How much time you got?” he said. “You know how I write them down?”
He reached inside his suit jacket and pulled out a pencil with a rubber dog head for an eraser.
If you have ever been to Madison Square Garden for a basketball game, a circus, or a concert, you would likely not recognize it during the two days of Westminster. The arena’s floor has been covered in green carpeting, on which six show rings have been roped off, all of them surrounded by the throngs of spectators who invade one another’s personal space for eight hours of Best of Breed competitions, commencing at 8:00 A.M. sharp.
But that’s just part of the experience. Westminster is one of the last surviving benched shows, and thus all the dogs showing on a particular day must be benched—on display—with their breeds, from open to close, so that the fifteen thousand–plus spectators in attendance for the day session can cycle through, stare at, photograph, and, with permission, pet them. Not that people always ask for permission; it’s pretty common to witness a dog owner scolding someone’s child for reaching out and petting a dog’s face. This seems mean, and certainly people could be nicer about it, but the owners are (mostly) looking out for the child’s well-being. Dogs are often tense with strangers, and if you don’t give them a chance to sniff some part of you first, to gain their trust, they might snap at an unfamiliar thing thrust into their face, especially when this takes place in a hot, crowded tunnel jam-packed full of humans and canines. Benched shows are very popular with crowds, but owners tend to hate them. Whereas once they were common, today there are only six benched shows a year.
Professionals like Heather and Kevin get a bit of a break. One section of the labyrinth under the Garden is set aside for multibreed handlers, so that they can have all their dogs in one location and not have to scramble through the crowds to retrieve dogs when the time comes to get them ready for the ring.
Heather’s day started with Shumba, a shy Rhodesian ridgeback who practically cowered on the grooming table. This being Westminster, Heather was dressed a bit more formally than usual, in a sparkly ivory blazer with intentional crinkles in the fabric, a black skirt, and a pair of nice but sensible black Geox shoes.
Rhodesians were the second-largest entry in the field, after Aussies, and forty-three of these long, lean, tannish red dogs with the raised hair along their spines (that’s the “ridgeback”) were crammed into the ring for a first pass by Dr. Richard Meen, a solidly built man with slick gray hair and a bow tie, who looked like an Oxford economist or the guy who’d play the stern dean of students in a Hollywood movie about fraternities.
The rule of thumb is that a judge takes two minutes per dog over the course of a particular show, so seventy-five minutes had been allotted for the Rhodies, from eight-thirty to nine forty-five.
Shumba looked much less nervous in the ring and got the competition off to a good start for Team Bremmer. Meen chose a male, then pointed to Shumba as Best of Opposite, giving her a coveted second place in breed at the country’s biggest dog show. At Westminster, second (or third, or fourth) is not a disappointment; on the contrary, it is a career accomplishment for most dogs.
Jack, meanwhile, had some time to kill. To save money, he and Kimberly had been staying at the Affinia, another nearby hotel that welcomes dogs, where they were sharing a room with two friends from Pennsylvania and their Pyrenees shepherd, as well as a junior handler who sometimes worked with them. It was a crowded house. The Affinia also hadn’t embraced its four-legged guests with quite the élan that the Pennsylvania had—and with no Jerry of its own, how could it? Most notable, there were no sawdust-lined his-and-her canine loos, and Kimberly said that by the time she checked in at 3:00 P.M., the patch of rooftop Astroturf set aside for dogs “already reeked of pee.”
So instead she walked Jack a few blocks to the Pennsylvania to use the potty. Jack, like many dogs, preferred a soft, “natural” surface to the concrete of Manhattan’s sidewalks. They went back again the morning of the show, both to use the facilities and to get him on the Jog-A-Dog. This served two purposes. One, it allowed him to burn off some nervous energy and also to have some fun—Jack loves treadmills. Two, it helped speed up his digestion. “You really want them to have a BM before a show,” Kimberly explained. (As opposed to during a show.) “He’s had some issues,” she said, then was quick to add, “They all do.” She’d learned that one way to avoid the issue was to get him running shortly before the show. It’s like clockwork. “You start moving and things get moving.” So she took him to the treadmill, and sure enough he crapped.
This being Jack’s first Westminster, expectations were low. No matter how well he’d been doing, even after the big weekend in Wildwood not even two weeks earlier, Kimberly wasn’t so delusional as to think her dog was ready to contend for the claim of best Australian shepherd in America.
She hadn’t necessarily even wanted to enter Jack—he was still so young (the second-youngest Aussie in the field), and the combined cost of entry and handling fees was over a thousand dollars—but Heather talked her into it. The idea being that he could gain valuable experience in the big, chaotic atmosphere of a major show, and anyway what the hell? He’d gained entry into the world’s most famous dog show, so why not give it a shot? “I have to admit it’s pretty cool to say my dog is showing at Westminster,” Kimberly said as we stood ringside.
Are you nervous? I asked her.
“My stomach tells me yes,” she answered. “But I don’t feel nervous mentally.”
I pointed out that it should help that expectations were low; she didn’t come expecting to win, not with fifty-some Aussies, many of which had been campaigned for more than a year.
Kimberly started to agree and then stopped. “Heather would tell me, ‘You always come to win,’ but I don’t expect him to win. If he makes at least one cut, I’ll be happy. If he doesn’t make any cuts, I’ll be demolished.”
I asked how Jack was taking to New York.
“You know how hyper he is? He walks around Manhattan so calm. He could be a city dog.” She glanced up at a clock. “Okay, I have to go wash my dog’s feet.”
I think I’ll wear pink tomorrow,” Heather said as she fluffed the fur on Jack’s rear in the moments before heading to the ring. “The sparkles are working well.” So far she and Kevin had shown three dogs, and two of them had been rewarded with Best of Opposite ribbons. Already the show was a success.
Kimberly and I walked out toward Ring 4, where the Aussies would assemble. “Let’s go up to the seats so I can just get rid of nervous energy,” she said.
Because of some late scratches, the actual numb
er of Australian shepherds entered turned out to be just over forty, most of them black tris assembled in front of Mrs. Lynette Saltzman, a regal woman with dark hair and a necklace of pearls. Kimberly pointed Jack out to a curious spectator sitting nearby and breezed quickly through his biography. “It took him two months to get to thirteen points, then another two months to get the major, because we couldn’t find one. Then he showed once in December, then at Wildwood, and then here. He’s not been around the block much.” Jack was still maturing, she explained, and most of his rivals were a good year or two older.
There were a few familiar dogs, including Beyoncé, a female black tri who was America’s number-one Aussie, and Spooner, Summer’s father. To make the most of the limited space, Judge Saltzman split the dogs by sex, so that Jack first matched up against all the boys. The numbers were randomly assigned, but the randomness had been fortuitous for Jack, who was stacked in a group of black tris—three on either side of him, so that his unique look stood out even more than usual. Heather’s black-and-white ensemble matched him perfectly. A man sitting just in front of us pointed him out to his son and said, “Look at that one. He’s beautiful.”