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“Rin
Tin Tin: The Life and the Legend” by Susan Orlean;
Simon&Schuster (288 pages, $26.99)
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They
called him the Dog Wonder, the Mastermind Dog,
America’s Greatest Movie Dog. He was listed in the Los
Angeles phone book, made more money than his human
costars and actually came unnervingly close to winning
the first Academy Award for actor. He was Rin Tin Tin
and, as Susan Orlean puts it, “He was something you
could dream about. He could leap twelve feet, and he
could leap through time.”
“Rin
Tin Tin: The Life and the Legend” is New Yorker writer
Orlean’s first original work since the celebrated
“The Orchid Thief,” and like that book, it’s a
story of magnificent obsession. Nearly a decade in the
making, combining worldwide research with personal
connection, it offers the kind of satisfactions you only
get when an impeccable writer gets hold of one heck of a
story.
Rin
Tin Tin (Rinty to his intimates) was not the first dog
on film; that honor went to 1905’s “Rescued by
Rover.” He wasn’t even the first Hollywood dog star.
That would be Strongheart, who was promoted as “More
Human Than Human.” But Rin Tin Tin was bigger than
them all, and he had a story so unlikely it would have
made a movie in itself.
The
tale begins with Lee Duncan, a boy who spent his
formative years in an orphanage in Oakland, Calif. “He
was always deeply alone, always had the aloneness to
retreat to, as if it were a room in his house,” Orlean
explains in a typically deft image. “The only
companion to his loneliness he would ever find would be
his dog, and for the rest of his life, his attachment to
animals was deeper than his attachment to any person.”
That
dog, Rin Tin Tin, was born on a World War I battlefield
in eastern France in September 1918. It always seemed to
American soldier Duncan an amazing stroke of good
fortune that he found this animal, a dog that so
obsessed him from the get-go that he cut short leave in
Paris because being without the puppy was more than he
could handle. “He believed the dog was destined for
greatness,” Orlean writes, “and he was lucky to be
his human guide and companion.”
That
greatness didn’t begin to manifest itself until 1921,
when a friend of Duncan’s who’d developed a
slow-motion camera shot footage of Rinty jumping over an
obstacle almost 12 feet high. The footage made its way
into newsreels and eventually landed the dog a contract
at Warner Bros., where he made nearly two dozen silent
features that earned him fans ranging from Sergei
Eisenstein to Carl Sandburg.
As
Orlean insightfully explains, “A dog was at no
disadvantage to a human in silent film; both species had
the same set of tools for telling a story — action,
expression, gesture. In fact, an animal acting without
words looked natural and didn’t fall into pantomime
and exaggeration the way human actors in silent film
often did.”
Rinty’s
career took a hit when sound films came in and Warner
Bros. dropped his contract, but things got even worse
for Lee Duncan when the great dog died in 1932. Though
the rumor that he expired in the arms of Jean Harlow was
likely not true, his death created a particular problem
for his owner. As Orlean writes in the book’s first
sentence, “He believed the dog was immortal.” How
was that going to happen?
The
major breakthrough in that department didn’t come
until more than 20 years later, when a young would-be
producer named Herbert B. Leonard, who cared nothing
about dogs, came to visit Duncan, a man who didn’t
care for TV, and convinced him that a Rin Tin Tin TV
show was the way to go.
Was
it ever. “The Adventures of Rin Tin Tin,” which
premiered in October 1954, was a huge success, playing
in more than 70 countries. It was so popular in the
United States that almost a third of the television sets
in the country tuned in when it was on. No one seemed to
notice, or mind, that, as Orlean discovered, the dog in
the TV series was not the advertised direct descendant
of the original Rin Tin Tin but another dog altogether.
Orlean
has not only ferreted out all kinds of fascinating Rinty
arcana, she is especially good at contextualizing what
it all means. She hypothesizes, for instance, that one
reason Rin Tin Tin has had such an extraordinary level
of success is because of how he fit in with the
relatively new transformation of dogs from work animals
to pets. “Keeping an animal in the house as a
companion is so common now,” she writes, “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 their company.”
It
turns out that Orlean’s deep interest in Rin Tin Tin
dates back to her childhood, to a fascination with a
plastic figurine of the dog that had a sacred place on
her immigrant grandfather’s desk, a passion of his on
which she intriguingly speculates. “My hunger for that
toy,” she concludes, “had led me to spend these
years of my life learning the story of Rin Tin Tin.”
It’s a shared obsession we are all the richer for.
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