Rin Tin Tin Read online

  Carolyn is now in her sixties, divorced, with three grown children. She lives alone in a small house in Michigan on a road as long and straight as a gunshot. Her neighborhood is neither city nor country: old farm gates open onto raw-looking subdivisions, gas stations border green cow pastures, and the few cars that whip by are a random mix of freshly washed sedans, muddy pickups, and panel trucks. Carolyn works part-time caring for an elderly neighbor, and helps take care of the toddler son of one of her daughters, who is a veterinarian.

  My visit was on a chilly fall day, the weight of the sky pressing down on a landscape stripped bare and drained of color. Carolyn’s kitchen was warm and cluttered, and we sat drinking tea near an oil painting of Rin Tin Tin that hung above a StairMaster. Next to the painting was a photograph of Lee and Eva before they moved to Riverside: Lee is dressed in white flannel trousers and a crewneck sweater, Eva is in a fox stole, and they look chic and sharp, almost glittering. On another kitchen wall was a picture of Carolyn at three or four years old—a round-faced girl with bright brown eyes and silky hair, sitting cross-legged on the ground, surrounded by German shepherds. I asked Carolyn what else her father had left her, and she waved her hand toward the pictures and then shrugged. “My father was a dreamer,” she said, after a moment. “There was an empire, but the only thing that was real in the empire was my father, and when he was gone there was nothing.”

  When Eva met Lee, in the 1920s on a film location, her expectation that he would provide her with a comfortable life was reasonable, but things changed; by the late 1930s their money was always coming and going, and Lee’s career was rocky. Eva’s secretarial job paid their bills. Lee promised Eva that he would build her a nicer house as soon as he could, and he did apply for a permit to tear down the old house shortly after they arrived in Riverside. But twenty years passed before they did any construction, and then the first thing Lee built was a new dog kennel. Everything else might have changed, but his attention to the dogs was, as always, absolute. Eva, and then Carolyn, too, orbited around that but never came close. I asked Carolyn if she felt sibling rivalry toward the dogs. She laughed and said, “No, there was never any rivalry. The dogs always came first.”

  Eva was disappointed by the life she ended up with, while Lee exulted in what Carolyn calls “his dreamland.” He was in his midforties when they moved to the ranch. He wasn’t old, but by then he had been marked by the heavy tread of big reversals: he had made a fortune and lost it; he had found his life’s great companion but outlived him; he had rocketed into celebrity and out of it. He seemed happiest settling in with his memories; he became, as Carolyn put it, “an old man with all this history and all these pictures.” Lee would have several more spins through luck in his life, but the move to Riverside marked a turning point and he turned with it; it was as if he were now viewing his life in a different way, compressed and distanced, through a long lens aiming back toward the field in Flirey.

  Junior made four more movies after the move to Riverside, but he didn’t star in any of them, and the reviews mentioned him only in passing or not at all. It wasn’t really Junior’s fault. Movies in the late 1930s still featured dogs, but mostly as supporting players—family pets or cute companions to the leading man. The gravity and nobility of the German shepherd almost seemed like an anachronism. According to Lee’s biographer James English, Lee had his own ideas about why Junior never enjoyed more celebrity—he thought the problem was that Junior wasn’t known to have a family life. Anytime Rin Tin Tin appeared in a film with Nanette or had a story written about his life as a father and “husband,” so to speak, his popularity soared. His movies often featured a scene, near the end of the film, with Nanette and their puppies. Junior was never publicly linked with a mate and none of his movies featured him as a father. Lee believed that “his popularity suffered accordingly.”

  But Junior was the dog he had to work with, and he tried. In postcards to Eva from movie locations, he wrote, “Junior has been doing some fine work in this picture” and “Rin worked fine all day, I am so proud of him, he improves every day.” It’s not clear if he believed this or perhaps was just trying to reassure Eva, who was home working at the orange plant and taking care of whatever new litter of puppies they had—and, later, Carolyn—while Lee was on the road.

  Junior’s last film was the 1939 pastiche Hollywood Cavalcade, produced by Darryl Zanuck and directed by Malcolm St. Clair, who had worked with old Rin more than a decade earlier on Find Your Man and Lighthouse by the Sea, among other films. It’s a corny tale about old Hollywood, with walk-on parts by nearly everyone under contract to 20th Century Fox at the time, including the Keystone Kops, bathing beauties, and the sly, snappy Don Ameche. Junior was cast in the role of his father, Rin Tin Tin, and Lee appeared in a small part as an inexperienced, naïvely optimistic young man, going door-to-door in Hollywood, begging to have someone put his dog in a movie.

  9.

  Here you can pick your narrative. Rin Tin Tin III, the next Rin Tin Tin in line, who was born in 1941, might have been one of Junior’s puppies, a chosen one who stood out from among all the other puppies, the embodiment not of his father but of his illustrious grandfather, old Rin, and who, like his grandfather, was marked for destiny. This is the narrative many people, including Daphne Hereford, choose to believe. Or you can believe that Rin Tin Tin III was a beautiful puppy purchased by Lee, quietly and without mention, from another breeder, and that he was a puppy as clever and responsive as old Rin, with that same compact build, but with a lighter sable and cream coat that was easier to light for film.

  The version of the Rin Tin Tin III story that Lee put forward is laid out in James English’s book. English had first met Lee in 1947, when he wrote a story about Lee for Boys’ Life magazine, called “Dogdom’s Royal Family.” They later worked together, using Lee’s memoir for background, on English’s book The Rin Tin Tin Story, which was published by Dodd, Mead in 1949. In the chapter called “Training a New Rinty,” English described Rin Tin Tin III as “a clumsy-footed puppy who stood out in one of Junior’s litters as had none before him. . . . It was like finding the original Rinty again. . . . Duncan knew he had found Rin Tin Tin III and once again he commenced thinking about the movies. This pup had it.”

  According to Carolyn, however, Rin Tin Tin III was unrelated to old Rin and Junior. She told me that Lee loved the idea of the continuing bloodline, but he was more interested in finding a perfect dog. Since he wasn’t impressed with Junior, it makes sense that he might look outside his own kennel. He just preferred that it be kept secret. Lee believed he had a knack for knowing a good dog. He trusted his instinct more than he trusted DNA.

  The question of pedigree is, in a sense, rhetorical. By definition, all German shepherds are related, all descended from von Stephanitz’s dog Horand. Pedigrees do mean a lot to dog people, of course, but in the continuing story of Rin Tin Tin, pedigree doesn’t seem as important as the idea of a character continuing, and lasting, across time. In that regard, the issue of bloodline seems like a will-o’-the-wisp, a distraction, a technical issue. The unbroken strand is not one of genetics but one of belief. Once upon a time, a hapless puppy was found, became a star, inspired people, stood for something, and endured. I am not concerned with chemistry or the specifics of genetics or with literal relations. The stuff that stays with us and manages to outlive its limits is what drew me to this story and what I wonder about—and what I hope might explain something about life to me.

  Lee could have made the whole issue of lineage irrelevant if he had shifted the narrative and made himself the central character of the legend. He could have chosen for the narrative to revolve around the great dog trainer Lee Duncan and his kennel of great movie dogs, instead of revolving around the great dog Rin Tin Tin and his descendants. Other dog trainers in Hollywood were doing exactly that, marketing their talent rather than some unique quality of their animals. Carl Spitz, who trained the dog that played Toto in The Wizard of Oz, opened the Hollywood Do
g Training School in 1927 to showcase his technique. It was Spitz whom directors hired for their movies; the dogs were almost incidental. The Weatherwax brothers, Rudd and Frank, were preparing their collie, Pal, to star in the upcoming Lassie movie, and to them, too, the dog was fungible—they were also preparing a kennel of other collies that would be interchangeable with Pal.

  Some trainers, like Blanche Saunders, were celebrities; no one remembers the names of Saunders’ dogs, but during her lifetime, she became synonymous with dog obedience. After working with Josef Weber, Saunders seemed to detour from the obedience world and opened a poodle grooming shop in a town house on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. Her client list included du Ponts and New York governor Tom Dewey. She also published a booklet called The Poodle Chart with schematics for trimming the breed’s mass of hair. But dog obedience remained her passion. In 1944, she began offering ten-week dog-training sessions for the public, which she conducted at gyms and armories around the city. “Etiquette Course for Dogs Open—Mongrels May Attend,” announced an article in the New York Times. The course completely sold out each time it was offered, but hundreds and sometimes thousands of people who hadn’t been able to reserve a place in the class itself came just to watch, looking on in astonishment as Saunders demonstrated that it was possible, for instance, to quiet a barking dog by holding its mouth firmly shut. At least twenty thousand people graduated from Saunders’ training courses. “Miss Saunders’ talents are now so much in demand that getting your dog into one of her classes is roughly comparable to getting your son into Harvard,” one magazine noted.

  There seemed to be no end to the interest in Saunders’ training techniques. She frequently appeared on radio and television. In 1948, she conducted an obedience demonstration with twenty-two of her students before an audience of seventy thousand who had gathered in Yankee Stadium to watch an Indians-Yankees game. “Even baseball players ran from their dressing rooms buttoning their uniforms as they came, in order to miss none of the fun,” reported the AKC Gazette. A Cleveland sportswriter noted that “the dogs got more applause than DiMaggio.” Saunders performed in Yankee Stadium seven more times. She also held a demonstration before an audience of thousands at the Rockefeller Center skating rink.

  She wrote several books about obedience, including The Complete Book of Dog Obedience, the first guide that helped amateur owners train their pets, and Training You to Train Your Dog, which was made into a three-part documentary narrated by actor Helen Hayes and broadcaster Lowell Thomas. In 1947, to her great satisfaction, the Girl Scouts of America added dog training to its scouting merit badges.

  One of the last photographs of Saunders before she died, at age fifty-four, of a heart attack, was taken right after one of her classes in 1964; it shows her demonstrating to a Girl Scout the proper method for putting a training collar on a dog. Saunders no longer looks like the tomboy who drove a tractor and sprinted beside her dogs wearing saddle shoes and men’s khakis. Her hair is cropped, frosted, and teased into a bouffant, and she is wearing an A-line skirt and a white blouse with a round collar, the sort of prim outfit you might expect on a boarding school headmistress. At that point in her life she drove a black Lincoln Continental rather than a tractor and had taken on the style of a Manhattanite. She never married, and after leaving Helene Walker, she lived alone except for her dogs. In the foreword to The Story of Dog Obedience, Walker wrote, “Blanche Saunders died the way she lived—quietly, and just after doing what she loved best, teaching people how to train dogs.”

  If there was a moment when Lee might have put himself forward instead of his dogs, and made a name for himself as a training expert, this was it. After all, he had proved himself by training Rin Tin Tin, and he could have parlayed it into personal fame at a moment when people all over the country were gobbling up any information they could about training their dogs. But he didn’t. While Saunders was performing in Yankee Stadium, Lee was at home in Riverside, preparing Rin Tin Tin III and looking for another chance at the movies.

  Rin Tin Tin III, who might or might not have been a direct descendant of his namesake, looked very little like the thin-lipped, narrow-hipped, dark-haired Junior. Rin III had a sable coat, heavy shoulders, a boxy chest, a blunt nose, and a dark shadow around his muzzle that always made him look like he needed a shave. According to Lee, he was a quick learner. By the time he was a year old, he supposedly knew five hundred different commands, and Lee thought he was as expressive as old Rin. He was also a more agreeable dog. Lee had insisted that he be the only person to handle old Rin and Junior, so both dogs were unaccustomed to strangers, and old Rin, especially, was unfriendly. By the time he was training Rin Tin Tin III, Lee had changed his philosophy. He wanted the dog to be more sociable, so he allowed his daughter, Carolyn, to play with him, and then he began encouraging visitors to the ranch to spend time with the dog.

  Lee had another bite at the movies in 1939, when he got a part for Rinty in Law of the Wolf, a cut-rate western produced by Metropolitan Pictures and written by Bernard B. Ray, a one-man movie factory who wrote under a dozen different creative rearrangements of his name, including Ray Bernard, Bernard DeRoux, Raymond Samuels, and Franklin Shamray. Publicity for the film announced that the role of the dog, called “Rinty” in the movie, was going to be played by “a grand son” of the original Rin Tin Tin. It’s hard to know with certainty which dog appears on screen, or even what the term “grand son” really meant—the peculiar phrase, sounding like but not quite being “grandson,” almost seems like a clever way of dodging the question of whether the dog was in fact a grandson of the original Rin Tin Tin. Some sources, including the Internet Movie Database, maintain that the dog in the film was Rin Tin Tin III. Dan Condon, a collector of silent-film memorabilia and a student of German shepherds, disagrees; he believes the dog in Law of the Wolf was neither Junior nor Rin Tin Tin III, but some other dog Lee used, perhaps because Junior wasn’t performing well and Rin III was still too young. In its praise for the film, Moviegoers Daily said it would attract “patrons of western films who remember the uncanny feats of the screen’s original and most famous canine hero”—both a fond reference to old Rin and a pointed failure to mention Junior.

  Even though Lee deflected attention away from himself and instead to his dogs, he did have one persistent wish for notice that seemed to contradict his constant modesty: he had his mind set on getting the story of how he found Rin Tin Tin memorialized on film. Lee was thrilled when two writers, Everett George Opie and Ruth Weisberg, began work in 1940 on a screenplay for Warner Bros. that was described as the “true life story of Rin Tin Tin and Lee Duncan.” Opie and Weisberg’s project was only the first attempt of many to make a movie about Lee’s experience. Over the next seventy years, the project was taken on again and again, without success, but Lee never lost hope. “He was always talking about doing a movie about it,” Carolyn told me. “Always, always, always.”

  In 1941, Junior, who was only eight years old, died of pneumonia. This time, however, there were no national broadcasts or major obituaries. Junior’s death went unremarked and apparently unnoticed by the public, and I have never been able to find any mention of what happened to his remains. I am certain that Lee mourned the dog. Even if Junior had been, ultimately, a disappointment, he had been old Rinty’s son.

  Junior’s death might have simply been eclipsed by world events: it occurred just a few weeks after the Japanese had attacked Pearl Harbor. Lee had learned of the attack from the radio as he was driving home from Palm Springs, where Rin Tin Tin III and Junior had appeared in a dog show. As soon as he heard the news, he decided that he would try to reenlist in the air corps if they would take him. He would find out soon that he was too old to reenlist; instead, it would be Rin Tin Tin who played a significant role in the war.

  10.

  Right after Pearl Harbor, the U.S. military called for the public to donate their dogs for use in the war. Thanks to Blanche Saunders and Helene Whitehouse Walker, the dogs of America
were now willing to sit and stay on command, and it was hoped that they were that much more ready to work on the battlefield. “It is an uncontestable fact that the eight years of preparatory work in conditioning the people and dogs of this country to obedience training is what enabled Dogs for Defense to get underway in record time,” Saunders wrote, with obvious pride.

  At the end of World War I, most of the military dogs in Europe had been returned to their owners or, more often, destroyed—except in Germany, where the training had continued apace. Germany had used more than 30,000 dogs in the war, and the German military knew their value, so they had kept an active corps. Another 25,000 trained German dogs had been sent to Japan during that time, where they joined a small cohort of Rin Tin Tin offspring, bred from the puppies acquired by the Japanese consul in the 1920s. (Rin Tin Tin had enduring popularity in Japan. In 1941, years after his silent films had vanished from theaters in the United States, Lee received an annual royalty check worth about $11,000 from Japanese distributors for the same movies, which continued to be shown in theaters there.)

  Even though the Treaty of Versailles, signed in 1919, limited the size and activity of the German army, it was being rebuilt—first in secret and then more openly. In 1932, the German government made the defiant announcement that it would no longer abide by the Versailles restrictions. Soon after, compulsory military conscription in Germany resumed. A new dog army was mustered as well. Most of the dogs were donated by German citizens, who for years had been advised to train their pets for a possible military use. In the mid-1930s, the German military asked families to hand those dogs over to the service. According to a Berlin newspaper, one recruiting rally brought the army almost 16,000 privately owned dogs.