Rin Tin Tin Read online

Eugene Knispel is now a veterinarian in New Orleans. When I reached him by phone at his clinic, Dr. Knispel was completely startled by my call; he is now eighty-one years old, and it had been close to seventy years since he’d thought about giving away his dog. He told me that the dog had been named Ferdinand, after the bull in the children’s book The Story of Ferdinand, a gentle pacifist who refuses to perform in a bullfight. When the war began, Eugene was living with his mother, who was divorced, in an apartment on 97th Street in Manhattan. It was a tough neighborhood in those days, and because his mother worked, Eugene was often alone. He was very attached to the dog, whom he described as “not only my friend, but my protector.” Ferdinand must have seemed like quite a prize, because Knispel said only a few other kids in the neighborhood had a dog, and, what’s more, Ferdie looked like he could have been a cousin of the famous Rin Tin Tin. It was a hard knock when Knispel’s mother decided to take a job working on an estate on Long Island, where the dog would not be welcome. Knispel was thirteen when they moved, a difficult age to lose anything, especially a dog. He hadn’t known what to do with Ferdie until he heard about Dogs for Defense—he thinks it was probably in a newsreel at a movie theater. “I felt proud offering Ferdie,” he says. “I hoped he’d do well. After Pearl Harbor, for us kids, our motto was ‘Hitler stinks.’”

  He didn’t really remember whether Ferdinand was accepted by Dogs for Defense or not, or what had become of him. What he did remember is that he and his mother soon left Manhattan without the dog and he never saw Ferdie again.

  12.

  Although Lee wanted to reenlist, he was fifty years old and no longer eligible for active duty. His reputation as a dog trainer, however, made him valuable, and army officials invited him to Camp Haan, in Riverside, to help evaluate and train the donated dogs. Other Hollywood dog trainers, including Earl Johnson and Carl Spitz, were also working with the army, but Lee had a unique asset: Rin Tin Tin III. The famous dog could inspire people to donate their dogs for the war. Lee brought Rinty to Camp Haan, where he was tattooed with his army serial number and rank (sergeant), and put through the same six-week training as the other dogs.

  As in World War I, the dogs were trained as sentries, messengers, scouts, mine detectors, airplane spotters, and cadaver dogs. The U.S. Army Air Corps also began experimenting with dropping the dogs by parachute behind enemy lines. (One accounting of the program states that a purebred boxer named Jeff “made thirteen jumps, twelve successfully.”) General Douglas MacArthur wanted to use dogs in more than just a support role, so he sent a tactical unit of eight dog handlers and their Doberman pinschers—the official breed of the Marines, where they were affectionately known as Devil Dogs—to the Solomon Islands. The Marines and their dogs worked as an integrated team; the dogs made the amphibious landing and lived alongside them in foxholes. The dogs excelled at rooting out enemy troops and relaying messages when radios failed, which was common in the sodden South Pacific. The experiment was considered a great success for the war effort but less so for the dogs. Five were killed in combat and the remaining dogs were destroyed because they became infected with typhus.

  There was never a chance that Rin Tin Tin III would be sent overseas. He was assigned a public relations job as the celebrity spokesmodel for what was now known officially as the K-9 Corps. A 1943 press release from Camp Haan explained, “One of the hardest working and most ‘all out’ of the civilian volunteers in this war is a dog. A beautiful, intelligent, fearless animal, untiring in his effort to aid his country to the best of his very great ability. He is none other than Rin Tin Tin III, the grandson of the famous moving picture actor for whom he is named. . . . At first it was his owner’s intention that Rin enlist as a regular army war dog but it developed that Rin Tin Tin III could be of greater service by remaining in the capacity of a volunteer, free of the many restrictions necessitated by army life.” The German shepherd was soon named the “official dog breed” of the U.S. Army, and Rin Tin Tin III was held up as a singular example of what an American dog should be during wartime.

  Rin Tin Tin III and Lee made appearances throughout California to promote Dogs for Defense. Back at Camp Haan, Rinty was also used in various tests, many of which were dangerous. In one, he wore a canine gas mask in a functioning gas chamber, and in another, he carried wire across a course mined with live ammunition to assess a dog’s ability to weave among land mines. In his off hours, he greeted the movie stars and entertainers who visited Camp Haan, including Bob Hope, Jack Benny, and singer Kate Smith. The Camp Haan newsletter reported that after she visited the dogs’ kitchen, “Miss Smith was thrilled at the cleanliness and order prevailing throughout.”

  Hollywood was going to war, and the war was also coming to Hollywood. One of its unlikely fictional heroines was a British bitch named Lassie. The character had been introduced to the public in 1940 in the bestselling young adult novel Lassie Come-Home, which told of a beautiful collie owned by the Carracloughs, a poor Yorkshire family. When Sam Carraclough loses his job, the family is forced to sell Lassie to a rich, brutal neighbor. The story describes Lassie’s “suffering aristocratic majesty” and her determination to be reunited with the Carracloughs’ young son, Joe.

  Eric Knight, who wrote Lassie Come-Home, was born in England but raised in the United States. As a child, he never had his own dog, but he loved collies, which were the most adored dogs in Yorkshire. Knight worked in New York as a playwright and a reporter, and on an assignment for the Saturday Evening Post he went back to his childhood home in Yorkshire to investigate the region’s poverty. He was told that some families were so strapped that they had had to sell their collies just to make ends meet. His magazine piece, a fictionalized account of one such family, drew great praise, and a publisher urged him to expand the piece into a novel. A few months later he completed Lassie Come-Home.

  As far as we know, Lee never met Eric Knight, but they led uncommonly parallel lives. They were born just a few years apart in the 1890s. Both lost their fathers before they were old enough to know they had fathers, and both spent part of their childhoods away from their mothers. For Knight, it was when his mother took a job in Russia and he was sent to Massachusetts to live with relatives. Both men served in World War I and were involved in World War II. (Knight was a major with the U.S. Army Special Services.) Both saw characters they created come to life for the public. Unlike Lee, however, Knight never saw the full impact Lassie would have on popular culture. Three years after he published Lassie Come-Home, he was killed in the crash of a Special Services flight to Surinam.

  In 1943, the year Knight died, his book was made into the film Lassie Come Home. (The expression “come-home dogs” from the book title was British slang for dogs that find their way back to their masters, so the producers dropped the hyphen to make the title more universally understandable.) The film starred Roddy McDowall as the wistful Joe Carraclough. Sam Carraclough, the boy’s father, was played by actor Donald Crisp, who was particularly familiar with animal actors: his wife, Jane Murfin, had owned Strongheart along with her first husband, Lawrence Trimble.

  More than a thousand dogs auditioned for the lead. The character of Lassie was female, but in the film, and later on television, male dogs were cast in the role. This was because males have more luxuriant coats than females and, unlike females, they don’t go through an annual shedding period, during which they look mangy and threadbare. Males are also larger than females, so child actors look more endearingly childlike next to them (and because of this optical illusion, older, more experienced children could be used to play younger roles).

  The dog that won the part was a tricolor male named Pal, who was owned by animal trainer Rudd Weatherwax. Weatherwax had trained some star dogs, including Asta, the wire-haired terrier in the Thin Man movies, but his greatest hope had been to find a star-quality German shepherd, because they were the only breed regularly cast in leading film roles. When Weatherwax’s Hollywood business was slow, he trained problem pets for private clients. Pa
l had come to Weatherwax’s kennel as one of those problems; he was a dedicated car-chaser and barker, and he was driving his owner crazy. Weather-wax managed to cure Pal of barking but couldn’t break him of chasing cars, so his owner simply abandoned him at the kennel. Weatherwax liked Pal, but there was little call for collies in the movies, and he didn’t need a pet, so he gave the dog away to a friend.

  A few months later Weatherwax heard that MGM was casting Lassie Come Home, and he decided to get Pal back and take him to the audition. Other than his car-chasing, Pal was well trained, and he performed well enough to win the part. He was a beautiful and expressive animal with a special talent for looking miserable. This was an important star turn throughout the movie, and the result is extravagantly poignant; it was reported that Louis B. Mayer, the head of MGM, burst into tears when he first screened the film. When he dried his eyes, Mayer realized the appeal the film’s star could have. Dozens of different portraits of Lassie—that is, Pal—were released, and a press barrage ensued. After the film premiered, Weatherwax toured the country with the dog, performing in theaters and arenas throughout the country, just as Lee and Rinty once had. Within three years of the film’s release, collies became the third most popular breed in the United States.

  13.

  It was a novelty in 1943 for a collie to be a movie star: German shepherds had dominated Hollywood for decades. Other breeds and the occasional mongrel got movie roles, but ever since Strongheart appeared on screen, no dog other than a German shepherd had ever starred in a film or become a celebrity. What’s more, collies were such a contrast to German shepherds. Both were herding breeds, and they were about the same size, but in every other way, they were opposites. German shepherds were muscular, with thick, short coats and a tight outline. Their faces were keen and bright, with dark eyes and an intense, impatient expression, as if they were waiting for you to finish your sentence and get on with the urgencies of the day. Their posture, in a permanent quarter crouch, was unrelaxed, ready for action. They were well known as soldier dogs and police dogs; they were tough and rugged and businesslike. Collies, on the other hand, seemed contemplative and shy, with their hooded eyes and tipped-over ears and long, slim, fragile-looking muzzles. Even when they wagged their tails, they looked like they might break down and cry any second. They were bred to work in rough weather, but their coats, which had as much loft as a down comforter, made them look fancy, and their legs and feet looked too delicate to support their billowy bodies.

  In addition to being the first collie to star in a film, Lassie was the first female dog character to be the lead in a feature. Lassie’s character was not just coincidentally female—it was distinctly female, by traditional definitions: she was valued because she was beautiful, she was gentle and soulful, and she was willing to suffer for love. Before Lassie, canine characters in popular culture had always been male: they were action stars in action movies. Females, if they appeared at all, were always given minor roles. Many generations of Nanettes appeared on film alongside Rin Tin Tin, but only in cameos, as Rinty’s loving wife. One female German shepherd, Sandow, starred in three silent movies, including Avenging Fangs, but she was always disguised as a male dog.

  But the way we viewed dogs had changed significantly by this time. In the United States, pet ownership was exploding. Between 1947 and 1953, the number of dogs in the United States grew from 17 million to 22 million, and the dog population was growing four times as fast as the human one. It was more than just numbers, though; the way dogs lived with us had changed. They were not living in a shed in the backyard; they were living inside the house as part of the family. Before this, dogs had been ideal heroes because we knew them but we couldn’t really know them: they were familiar but they weren’t us. They were mysterious and enigmatic strangers. But as more people owned dogs, shared quarters with them, and let them lick up dinner leftovers, dogs lost some of that mythic otherness. People began to know dogs more and idealize them less; they became interested in stories about loving dogs rather than stories about marveling at them as superheroes. Lassie inspired love rather than awe. She was not larger than life. She was noble but not meant to be extraordinary. She was never described the way Rin Tin Tin had been—Lassie was the perfect devoted pet, a maternal sort of friend, not the Dog Wonder or the Wonder Dog of All Creation; not the Mastermind Dog or the Marvelous Dog or the Miracle Dog or the Dog Hero of Young America. She was elegant, melancholy, long-suffering, nurturing—an emotional vessel rather than a warrior, an athlete, or a super intellect, as German shepherd stars had been.

  Besides popularizing collies, Lassie Come Home was also the first time a dog movie was made expressly with children in mind. Rin Tin Tin’s films, as well as nearly all other movies starring dogs, were action films. They were full of crime and danger and adventure. The actors in Rin Tin Tin movies were all adults, and if children were featured at all, they were mostly incidental and usually just babies.

  Lassie Come Home was a departure. The story of Lassie’s journey is the narrative spine of the movie, but the thematic center is not the clever way Lassie overcomes hardship, as it might have been in a Rin Tin Tin movie; it’s the power of the relationship between a boy and his dog. The grown-ups in the movie are secondary, and they are either evil or ineffectual. The film presents the idea that children and dogs have interesting and compelling inner lives—and, more important, that children and dogs have a unique connection.

  Lassie Come Home and Lassie’s ascendance came at a time when Rin Tin Tin was most absent from Hollywood. In 1943, Lee and Rinty were still enlisted at Camp Haan, working with Dogs for Defense. Rinty hadn’t been in a film since Law of the Wolf, which was released in 1939. Lassie and Rin Tin Tin didn’t really overlap in Hollywood at this point, but the rivalry between the two dogs was set in motion. Press agents always delighted in rivalry between stars: if no real ones were available to exploit, they would often fabricate them. Friction between celebrities was exaggerated to tantalize moviegoers and keep them interested in stars even when they didn’t have a film in theaters. Famous Hollywood rivalries really did exist—sisters Joan Fontaine and Olivia de Havilland, for instance, wouldn’t speak to each other—but many others were mostly faked, such as the one between Fred Allen and Jack Benny. Dog actors had been pitted against each other in the press as well, but it had been decades since Rin Tin Tin had topped Strongheart in popularity and prominence, and no other canine actor had come close to Rinty’s appeal for years, so he hadn’t even had a reasonable rival. Lassie offered a new sort of competition. MGM played up the difference between Lassie and Rin Tin Tin, contrasting Lassie’s gentle nature to Rinty’s tendency to be involved in at least four or five fights in every film. Lassie, according to MGM, could do “everything but snarl.”

  Lassie Come Home was regarded as one of the best films of 1943, and MGM rushed to capitalize on its popularity by producing four sequels. These films had little to do with Knight’s book and were panned. By the time MGM released the last of the films, The Painted Hills, in 1951, the studio had fallen behind in paying Weatherwax for his work. MGM offered him the rights to the Lassie character in lieu of cash. Weatherwax accepted and toured the country for the next several years with Pal, who was billed as “famous movie dog Lassie.” In the meantime, Rin Tin Tin, who had never costarred with a kid, caught on to the trend for targeting a younger audience and made his first boy-and-dog movie, The Return of Rin Tin Tin, in 1947, a few years after Lassie Come Home.

  14.

  According to James English, MGM approached Lee in 1942 with a request for Rinty to appear in a war dog movie. Lee declined the “fat movie contract” because he was too busy with work at Camp Haan, but it seems more likely that the project just stalled. MGM did dispatch two writers to Camp Haan to begin taking notes on the war dogs, but, according to English, the writers were drafted into the army soon after arriving at Camp Haan and “that was the end of the war dog picture.”

  Nevertheless, Lee felt hopeful about his ne
w dog’s prospects. He liked the symmetry with the past. The first Rin Tin Tin had been a war dog, and so was Rin Tin Tin III. Lee took it as a sign. Maybe the charm had skipped a generation—Junior’s generation—and been strengthened through the trials of war. Lee began telling everyone that grandfather and grandson were “remarkably similar”—the way they behaved, their response to training. Even their misfortunes seemed alike: Rinty III was injured by a Jeep during field maneuvers, which reminded Lee of old Rin’s broken leg. It was an omen, he believed, that this was another extraordinary dog.

  In the meantime, Lee and Rinty were busy, and life felt purposeful. They visited army hospitals and orphanages, just as Lee and old Rin had done, and Lee helped process the dogs that were being trained at Camp Haan. He and Rinty would remain there until the war was over and the army told them they were no longer needed.

  The dogs of war came home with a certificate from the Quartermaster Corps:

  HONORABLE DISCHARGE. The War Dog ___ Tattoo No. ___ having served with the Armed Forces of the United States of America is hereby awarded this Certificate of Faithful Service and Honorable Discharge.

  Owners were assured that the dogs hadn’t been altered by their service in the war, but many were still uneasy. The 1946 hit film The Courage of Lassie was about a gentle collie whose war experience makes her into a killer (until Elizabeth Taylor helps her reclaim her previous pleasant temperament). According to Lee’s biography, rumors had begun to spread that “there was no way to rehabilitate a war dog. They had been taught to be vicious, they had a killer’s instinct.” The Quartermaster Corps announced that before the dogs were returned to their owners, they would be “reprocessed” to a “pre-war state of docility” by means of ample petting and lots of playtime.