Rin Tin Tin Read online

  Lee’s memoir, unfortunately, doesn’t cover this period of time. In fact, the memoir ends abruptly, at the end of page 124, in midsentence, in the middle of one of the condolence letters from which Lee was quoting. The letter is from a fan who sounds fumbling, apologetic, mournful. It begins, “Rin Tin Tin was the unusual, exceptional, even marvelous. . . . Pardon my saying for a livelihood I go from door to door selling articles for household use, and in many many places they own German Police Dogs, some beautiful, some very vicious, but each place I am protected, and I often think this is”—and then there is no more. That is the last page. The rest of Lee’s notes were lost, and there is no other trail leading from Beverly Hills to Rinty’s Parisian grave.

  • • •

  Le Cimetière des Chiens was founded in 1899 by a group of intellectual pet lovers that included Emile Zola, Marguerite Durand, and Camille Saint-Saëns, after Paris passed a law prohibiting animal graves within one hundred yards of human habitation. Except for the companion dogs of royalty, pets were a relatively new notion at that time. Dogs, the very first domesticated animals, had lived with people for thousands of years, but until the nineteenth century, they usually had jobs—hunting or herding or guarding. Keeping an animal in the house is so familiar now that it’s easy to forget how fundamentally odd it is, and what a leap it must have been to share living quarters with a nonhuman life form just to have its company. Dogs worked hard for the privilege, developing as a species the capacity to empathize, or appear to empathize, with human beings better than any other animal; it’s this talent, rather than their intelligence, that accounts for their being the preeminent animals in our lives.

  Once dogs became valued as companions, they were elevated to a quasi-human status and were often treated like small, mute people. In the 1800s, a wave of bestselling dog autobiographies were published—life stories purported to be written by the dogs themselves—including Memoirs of Bob, The Spotted Terrier: Supposed to Be Written by Himself and The Life of Carlo the Famous Dog of Drury Lane Theatre, which began, “My mother was so gentle, she would not have hurt a worm . . . my father I never saw as he lived in a distant part of town and visited my mother but seldom.” A proper Parisian dog of that era had a wardrobe of shirts, gowns, bathing suits, and underwear, as well as personalized calling cards and stationery, and of course wedding clothes, since dog weddings were common.

  At the time, it was believed that dogs had deeper feelings and a greater capacity for expressing them than people did, and that their faithfulness was unimpeachable. This was the period when fascination with the incredible journey first began—that is, the story of a dog separated from its owners by accident that somehow overcomes circumstance to make its way home. This canine Odyssey has been repeated countless times. The stories might or might not have been true, but they were supported by the belief that a dog really could be that loyal. Even Victor Hugo had an incredible-journey story, claiming that his poodle, which he accidentally left behind on a trip to Moscow, made its way home, on its own, to Paris.

  Dogs, it was believed, remained loyal even after we were gone. In the nineteenth-century imagination, dogs were the most indefatigable mourners. They were said to visit their masters’ graves on their own, lying on the freshly turned dirt for days, inconsolable. If their grief was too much to bear, dogs sometimes committed suicide; newspapers of the period carried frequent reports of these canine deaths. One of the great attractions of having a pet, then, was believing it would miss us and mourn us and always remember us, even if friends and family let us down. The grieving dog was such a fixture in the Victorian mind that it crowded out an unalterable fact: a dog’s life is a short one, so most of the time it is we who are mourning them.

  Le Cimetière des Chiens is an elegant space, set off from the street by a baroque stone entryway and a curlicued iron gate; it is very Parisian, shady and somber, filled with spindly rose bushes and gnarled topiary. Inside, near the guardhouse, gravel paths radiate outward from an enormous stone sculpture of a Saint Bernard named Barry. More than three thousand animals are buried in the cemetery—mostly dogs and cats but also birds, a horse, several monkeys, and at least one pig.

  I read Barry’s gravestone (“He Saved Forty Lives”) and then started down one of the gravel paths. A few wild-looking cats were loafing on a tombstone, watching me with narrowed eyes and then vanishing as soon as I got close, as if they were some sort of optical illusion. The graves were arranged in haphazard rows, a jumble of shapes and sizes, like a mouthful of very bad teeth: big marble mausoleums beside tiny tombstones beside small granite markers that bore laminated photographs of the deceased. I passed the graves of Funny and Dou Dou and Dick and Ching Ling Foo (“My Best and Most Devoted Friend. He Loved Only Me”); Waddle and Cowboy and Rita and Tushy; Riki-Tiki and Mizouky and Chiquito and Meryl. The headstone for Harry, a stout black Labrador, had a glass globe on top that was filled with three half-gnawed tennis balls. A basset hound named Piggy was memorialized with a photograph of him in better days chewing on a lumpy knucklebone. The oldest graves—for Belgrano, who left this world in 1906, and Mireille, gone in 1903—were as smooth as pats of butter, the carvings of their names almost melted away.

  The cemetery guard was a short man with a rosy face and the body of a bowler, a tight fit in his little guardhouse near the entrance. He had given me a map to the cemetery, and I noticed Rin Tin Tin’s grave marked on it along with some other famous animals, but as soon as I saw the name, I folded up the map and stuck it in my backpack. I wanted to find the grave on my own.

  While I walked along, I felt suddenly and unaccountably reluctant to find it at all. Maybe I was a little superstitious about something that seemed so significant to me, and I was braced for the letdown that I know occurs when an event you have anticipated for a long time finally takes place. Under the full, fat branches of the chestnut trees, the air in the cemetery was cool and soothing. It struck me that Le Cimetière des Chiens would be a very pleasant place for a picnic if you didn’t mind being surrounded by a few thousand dead dogs.

  I sat down on a double gravestone for poodles named Oona and Uttawah to bide my time. My mind wandered. Were Oona and Uttawah just friends or were they mates? Could they have been siblings? Why were they buried together? I looked around, leaning a bit heavily on Oona. Someone had left a plastic figurine of Doc, the most senior of the Seven Dwarfs, across from Oona and Uttawah, on Toby the schnauzer’s grave. Insects clicked and buzzed in the grass. One of the stray cats reappeared and rubbed its back on the headstone of Iris the collie, using raised letters that said “My Love Is Stronger Than Death” to scratch his itch. Bijoux the spaniel was lucky; I could see he had recently received fresh flowers. Someone had left plastic flowers for Twigsy and also a rubber duckie that looked like a ghost duck, bleached of color by the sun and rain. I wished I had a brought a picnic with me. I decided to walk around a little more. Look at all these graves. A fat husky named Ferris. Next to him, Tessa. Then another Tessa. Many, many Ulysses. Who names a dog Ulysses? So French. I bet there aren’t two dogs in the United States named Ulysses.

  And then there it was, just across from me: a small rectangle of dark marble, stacked on a slightly larger rectangle, with a tarnished bronze marker that said:

  RIN TIN TIN

  LA GRANDE VEDETTE DU CINEMA

  Rin Tin Tin, the great film star. On top of the marble was a broken metal fitting that might have once held a statue or urn. Someone had placed purple and white lilacs, fake but nice-looking, in a planter beside the gravestone. Next to that, a red-and-white pinwheel, the kind a child might carry, spun in the breeze, whirring into pink. The ground on one side of the gravestone, damp and velvety with bright green moss, had heaved up and shifted, tilting the grave as if it were being tossed on a wave in the sea.

  It was a hunk of stone and a moldering bit of ground, and of course nothing, nothing at all, of the idea of what he had been. For all I knew Rin Tin Tin wasn’t even buried here, which almost stands to reas
on, since no one had convincingly explained how he might have gotten here from Beverly Hills. But it was enough to know that this was a marker for him, a sign that he had lived. If only feelings and ideas and stories and history really could be contained in a block of marble—if only there could be a gathering up of permanence—how reassuring it would be, how comforting to think that something you loved could be held in place, moored and everlasting, rather than bobbing along on the slippery sea of reminiscence, where it could always drift out of reach.

  The modesty of the grave made me sad, but I knew Lee believed that there would always be a Rin Tin Tin, so this was only a click in a turning wheel. The first Rin Tin Tin died but he still lived—and lives still—an idea more than an entity, always different but essentially the same. Remembering was what made him permanent. I brushed away the leaves that had fallen on the gravestone, straightened the plastic lilacs. I shoved the bottom rectangle of marble with my foot to see if I could kick it back into alignment with the other piece. It moved not a bit. The heave must have occurred years ago, and now, as crooked as it was, the stone was firmly settled into place and would stay that way.

  The guard was playing solitaire in his booth, twiddling his moustache as he stared at his cards, and it took him a moment to notice me standing at the door. I asked him if he could tell me anything about Rin Tin Tin’s grave. My bad French made him grin. He said that many, many people have come looking for it. “A few years ago, an American came,” he said. “He wanted to make a big monument for him, a big statue instead of his small grave, but . . .” He shrugged. “No news!” he said, and shrugged again. “No news!”

  I asked him who had left the flowers and the pinwheel.

  He sighed. “An old lady. She used to come regularly and put the flowers on his grave. At first she put fresh flowers, and then she put plastic flowers.” He started to shuffle his cards again and then stopped, tapping the deck on his desk, the sharp knocking sounding like a woodpecker drilling into a tree. I thanked him and started to leave, and as he cut the deck he called to me. “I haven’t seen that old lady in some time. No. I think perhaps she is dead. That’s what I think.”

  5.

  And then there was Junior. Soon after Rin Tin Tin died, Mascot Pictures announced that Rin Tin Tin Jr., the mature and impeccably trained three-year-old son of Rin Tin Tin, would be stepping in as the successor to his late father. None of these facts were true. When Rinty died, Junior was only eleven months old and mostly untrained, a big clumsy puppy with a black-and-tan coat and a long black tail. Privately, the studio knew the dog wasn’t ready. The filming of Pride of the Legion was postponed for a year so that Lee could train Junior and introduce him to the public over the course of a national publicity tour. The highlight was a visit to the 1933 Chicago World’s Fair, where Junior was featured at the Hollywood concession and rode in a pony-drawn Tom Thumb hansom cab.

  Lee never liked the dog. For one thing, he thought he was too big. Rinty never weighed more than eighty-five pounds, but Junior was already close to a hundred and he wasn’t yet full-grown. His face was pretty but blank, a bit needle-nosed and pinched. He wasn’t smart. His legs were too long. Most of all, he wasn’t his father.

  Nevertheless, Lee made a go of it; he didn’t have much choice. He needed to make a living, and working with a dog was the only job, except for selling guns, that he had ever had. Even though his training was minimal, Junior did well enough on the tour, making the standard visits to hospitals and orphanages, receiving keys to cities, and meeting reporters at daily papers, although what brought him the most coverage was the fact that on his trip with Lee from Burbank to Chicago he became the first dog to ever fly on a commercial plane. Upon their arrival, according to the studio press release, they disembarked and “were met by a special automobile and escorted to the Palmer House, where they had their own suite.” Everywhere they went, in fact, Lee and Junior were treated as celebrities, which must have been at odds with Lee’s actual circumstances of being broke, at loose ends, and mourning old Rin. And yet the sleight of hand—presenting Junior as a finished product—seemed to work. Junior was described in the press as “the famous motion picture dog,” as if Rinty had not departed this world but simply changed bodies. It must have left Lee with mixed feelings, but Junior was proof that the legacy was established: there would always be a Rin Tin Tin.

  Mascot Pictures was quietly hedging its bets. In its 1934 contract with Lee, it specified that the term “artist” referred to Lee and “the son of that certain famous dog named Rin Tin Tin and which is known as Rin Tin Tin Jr.,” but added that the studio had the right to use the name Rin Tin Tin Jr. for any other dogs needed to play the movie roles, a provision that had never been in any contract for old Rin. A subsequent contract was even more equivocal. “You warrant that Rin Tin Tin Jr. is an experienced dog accustomed to working in motion pictures . . . and that he will readily respond to instructions given by you . . . You further warrant that Rin Tin Tin Jr. is sufficiently trained and can comply with the requirements of his role. We shall have the right to ‘double’ or ‘dub’ the acts, poses, plays, and appearances of the dog and as well, the barks, grunts, groans, and all other sound effects to be produced by the dog to such extent as we may desire.”

  Pride of the Legion was the first Mascot film that supposedly starred Junior, but the dog in the movie was more likely a stand-in, because it has a much lighter coat and broader face than Junior. Critics noted that the movie, which was released in 1934, had a tired plot, but praised Junior (or whichever dog it really was), saying he was “not the least of the actors by any means.” Reviews of Junior’s subsequent movies varied. In Tough Guy, which starred a young, chunky Jackie Cooper, the New York Times reviewer wrote that Junior appeared to be “well fitted to pad along the first-run trail in the footprints of his illustrious ancestor.” By contrast, a Variety review of Caryl of the Mountains, released in 1936, pointed out that the film starred two Hollywood legacies—Francis X. Bushman Jr., whose father had appeared with the first Rin Tin Tin, and Junior—and added that neither Bushman nor Junior had his father’s talent. Even the best reviews of Junior’s films were brief and flat compared to the kind of reviews the first Rin Tin Tin had always received. Certainly, the world in 1934 was different than it had been in 1924. Maybe everything was a little flat by then.

  In 1934 Lee and Junior were earning $330 a week from Mascot, one third what they had been paid a few years earlier working at Warner Bros. To make more money, Lee started to focus on selling puppies; he also put his champion saddle horse up for stud. He placed a full-page ad that featured pictures of Junior and the horse, Deputy-Master, with the simple headline “A Few Colts and Pups for Sale” in a local magazine. He listed his address as Club View Drive in Beverly Hills, although it is almost certain that he had moved out by then.

  In 1936, burglars broke into Marjorie’s house in North Hollywood, where Lee was living, and stole several hundred dollars’ worth of jewelry and clothing. The New York Times, which had always been reverential when it came to the first Rin Tin Tin, used the robbery to make fun of Junior. In a story headlined “Home Robbed, Film Dog Sleeps,” the reporter noted tartly that Junior managed to sleep through this real home invasion, even though in his last film he had been shown capturing “a whole robber band” single-handedly.

  The story was just a few paragraphs long and tucked away on an inside page, but it spoke volumes. In the 1920s, there was no disparity between Rin Tin Tin’s role as a hero in the movies and the public belief that he truly was a hero. The studio publicity that exaggerated his feats and referred to him as a Red Cross dog was partly responsible for this perception, but it was more than that. When old Rin was in his prime, film was still so novel, so amazing, that it had a sort of transformative quality—what a film presented to the audience seemed to be its own reality, without any ironic shade dropped over it.

  In the 1920s, the invincibility that Rinty embodied was still possible to imagine, something you could as
pire to, even if it remained out of reach. But by 1936, very little seemed invincible. Europe was churning as Spain descended into civil war, Italy invaded Ethiopia, and Germany reoccupied the Rhineland. The Depression was entering its eighth harsh year. The “black blizzards” of dust in the Great Plains destroyed crops for the third season in a row. Hopelessness snapped people in half. The hairline crack between appearance and possibility spread wide and became a chasm of defeat and cynicism. A movie was no longer something more fabulous than anything on earth; it was just a muffling, air-conditioned, momentary escape, and when the lights came back on, there was the hard world again—a place where nothing was more than it seemed, some things were less than they were supposed to be, and hero dogs slept through robberies.

  6.

  When Rin Tin Tin first became famous, most dogs in the world would not sit down when asked. Dogs performed duties: they herded sheep, they barked at strangers, they did what dogs do naturally, and people learned to interpret and make use of how they behaved. The idea of a dog’s being obedient for the sake of good manners was unheard of. When dogs lived outside, as they usually did on farms and ranches, the etiquette required of them was minimal. But by the 1930s, Americans were leaving farms and moving into urban and suburban areas, bringing dogs along as pets and sharing living quarters with them. At the time, the principles of behavior were still mostly a mystery—Ivan Pavlov’s explication of conditional reflexes, on which much training is based, wasn’t even published in an English translation until 1927. If dogs needed to be taught how to behave, people had to be trained to train their dogs. The idea that an ordinary person—not a dog professional—could train his own pet was a new idea, which is partly why Rin Tin Tin’s performances in movies and onstage were looked upon as extraordinary.