by Susan Orlean
And then I found him, but in the worst sort of way: I ran across his obituary. That led me to his daughter Gina. A few months later, we met at her house in Los Angeles and talked; it was edifying, of course, but I wasn’t satisfied. I was getting ready to leave Gina’s house when she mentioned, almost off-handedly, a storage unit. She might have the key. She went upstairs, and I sat in her living room, wound up and eager, the way you feel right after you pull the lever on a slot machine. A minute passed, and then Gina came downstairs and handed me a key, warning me that she had no idea what was in the unit. She said there had been a problem with it when Bert was still alive—unpaid rent, that sort of problem. For the moment, Gina’s mother, Jenny—one of Bert’s four ex-wives—was taking care of it, but no one in the family had had a chance to look through the stuff to see whether it was even worth keeping.
• • •
The key fit into the lock but the shackle was stuck. I thumped the lock against the sheet-metal door, and it rang like a bell, the sound skipping down the empty hallway. Another thump and it opened.
Storage units have a deep, mute privacy about them. I once followed around an auctioneer who was selling off the contents of units whose renters had fallen behind on their payments. No one was allowed to examine the contents in advance of bidding, and whenever one of the units was opened, it was as riveting and uncomfortable as watching someone’s clothes being torn off. We couldn’t begin to guess what we would see once the lock was clipped off and the steel door of the unit was rolled away; it might be a bunch of broken dinette chairs; a pile of dirty laundry; a tumble of books, lamps, and knickknacks; or a mountain of gold.
The last few years of Bert’s life had been difficult. He was deeply in debt and had no permanent home, so he had to get rid of anything that was not essential to him or was hard to carry around. What he’d held on to was now in front of me, stacked to the ceiling of unit 3482. The room was about the size of a New York City parking space, and it was so crowded that it was difficult to wedge myself in, but I went at it, shoulder first, until I was inside, jammed against a file cabinet. I dug a flashlight out of my pocket and pointed it at the tallest stack of boxes, which had bulged and spread like pancakes under their own weight. I could hear the little bird in the hall whistling a reedy tune as I swept the light over the squashed boxes and their labels, which said “Rin Tin Tin,” “Rin Tin Tin,” “Rin Tin Tin.”
2.
There was a lull in Lee’s life between when he and Rinty III made The Return of Rin Tin Tin in 1947 and when he met Bert in 1953. In the past, Lee had always lined up the next film or the next publicity tour before he finished the current one. But this time, after they toured, he and Rinty came back to Riverside and stayed.
He spent hours in the Memory Room, where he received visitors and told them stories about the early days with Rin Tin Tin. He also became preoccupied with training his horses. If he was working with one of them and it was time to pick Carolyn up at school, he sometimes went to collect her in a horse-drawn carriage, which she found mortifying.
At that point the Duncans were comfortable but by no means rich. Eva continued to work as a secretary, and they still hadn’t been able to afford a new house; it was always on hold, always the thing they would do when Rin Tin Tin had his next big success. So where was that success? The Return of Rin Tin Tin had been reasonably profitable and popular, not a blockbuster but not a flop, either; but somehow, nothing happened after it. Lee had a contract with Romay Pictures for a new Rin Tin Tin series, but before the next film was made, the company had shut down after going bankrupt. On film, German shepherds were actually enjoying a resurgence: Harvey, Rex III, Zorro, and Mr. Lucky starred in films in the late 1940s, and a charismatic shepherd named Flame, trained by a young man from North Carolina named Frank Barnes, was playing the lead in three different series.
The movie Lee most wanted to get made was his story—the story of how he had come out of the orphanage, gone to war, found a puppy, and made the puppy a star. It was not really vanity as much as it was a kind of validation, and it was always on his mind. There had been that first false start at Camp Haan; now Lee proposed the story to Everett Freeman, a Hollywood writer who had just completed the screenplays for The Secret Life of Walter Mitty and Jim Thorpe—All-American. Freeman, intrigued, began working on a film treatment. It looked like the film would go forward, but then Freeman wrote with disappointing news, saying that “the material, thus far, has not developed into a successful dramatization” and he was abandoning the project. (He added that Lee’s story had inspired him to write a man-and-his-dog musical with “the makings of a wonderful movie” that could use Rinty in the starring role, but Lee wasn’t interested.)
Lee was in his fifties. He wasn’t old, but without offering any explanation he told James English that he didn’t think he would do any more extended road trips. He might have simply gotten weary of life on the road, but the statement seems to imply something more than that.
At least Lee was giving some thought to the future. Rin Tin Tin III was also no longer young. The dog was seven when The Return of Rin Tin Tin was made, and even though he was still active and only slightly past his prime, he was beginning to slow down. Lee designated one of Rin Tin Tin III’s pups as the next official Rin Tin Tin. He also seemed to designate his own successor: he began telling people that Carolyn, then just eight years old, would eventually be in charge of the dogs, as if he were also preparing for his own departure from the stage.
3.
The real excitement in the entertainment business at that moment was focused on the new medium of television. The technology had been developed in the late 1920s, but American companies didn’t begin mass-producing television sets until after World War II. In the mid-1940s, there were only 17,000 sets in the country, most of them in the Northeast. Then, very suddenly, television got its footing. By 1949, 250,000 new sets were being sold in the United States every month, and more programs were being developed all the time. The first children’s show, Bob Emery’s Small Fry Club, debuted in 1947, and in 1949, Hopalong Cassidy became the first children’s show with a western theme. Actor William Boyd, who had started his career as a romantic lead in silent films, played the white-haired Hopalong, a sincere, fatherly cowboy who urged fans to swear to an eight-point creed that included being kind to animals and taking care when crossing streets.
Hopalong Cassidy sprang out of the television in a way movie characters never had: he became merchandise. One million Hop-along Cassidy jackknives were sold in the first ten days they were available. He wore a black shirt, so children’s clothing manufacturers, which had always considered black too grim for kids, began producing the shirt in small sizes and sold out of them almost immediately. Along with Hopalong hats, lunchboxes, watches, plates, towels, soap, and dozens of other products, merchandise from the show quickly added up to a $200 million industry.
In Hopalong’s wake followed a host of other westerns, including Sky King; Steve Donovan, Western Marshal; The Gene Autry Show; and The Lone Ranger. At the center of all these shows was a strong but somewhat remote male who handed out perfect justice—an idealized father, in other words, which probably appealed to the generation of youngsters who might have lost a father for a short time, or forever, in the war. Westerns suited a postwar world perfectly: they portrayed a universe in which armed authority solved problems, and in which even good people were capable of violence if violence was called for.
In westerns, the emptiness of the landscape had the unformed, open feel of early America. People were inscrutable strangers or went by nicknames; they had no past and no connections, whether they were orphans or not. The distinction between good and bad was sharply drawn. Westerns put things right with the world. During the war, men were, by necessity, often absent from home and women had new authority. But in a western, the way things had always been was restored, the familiar order reinstated. Men towered over the landscape and women shrank in it, reduced to being tiny decorat
ions. For Americans, a western was a fish-eye mirror of a national character; for people in other countries, who consumed these entertainments as quickly as they could be made, a western was the fantasy of rebirth, the past cast away—an inspiring sort of newness, raw and elemental. By the end of the decade, nearly thirty prime-time westerns were in production and westerns accounted for seven of the ten top-ranked shows.
No one had forgotten Rin Tin Tin, but people in the entertainment business wanted to put him on television, not on a movie screen. To counteract the growing influence of television, movies were getting bigger and more spectacular—and less suited to the solemn dog stories that were Rin Tin Tin’s specialty. Lee was skeptical; he didn’t think much of the new medium. Nevertheless, producers and directors began visiting El Rancho Rin Tin Tin, trying to convince him that television would be an ideal home for Rinty. Michael Curtiz, who had directed Casablanca and Mildred Pierce, came to call, and wrote a treatment for a Rin Tin Tin television series, which he considered financing himself; nothing came of the project, and it’s hard to know whether Lee rejected it or Curtiz decided not to risk his own money. Lee had other suitors: producer Richard Talmadge; director William Collier Jr.; Apex Film Corporation (which ended up producing the Lone Ranger show); Harry Webb, who had produced and directed films at Mascot Pictures; and Chester Franklin, who had directed many of old Rin’s films, including Tough Guy, The Silent Accuser, and his first star vehicle, Where the North Begins. Another producer, Alfred Seale, wanted to develop a documentary-style show starring Rin Tin Tin—almost like a canine talk show—with Rin Tin Tin as the host and guest spots for, as Seale suggested, “seeing-eye dogs, hero dogs (i.e., a dog who has wakened a family in a burning house), field winners, dogs who have contributed to medical science, etc.”
Lee turned them all away. He had always been so committed to keeping Rin Tin Tin in the public eye that his resistance is puzzling. But maybe he was being contrary simply because he felt the right thing hadn’t yet come along.
4.
Bert never expected to work in television; he was a film guy. He dismissed television as a fad that would pass or at least never challenge the film business. Bert had come to Hollywood in the late 1940s after graduating from high school, spending a little time at New York University, and serving as a navy fighter pilot in World War II. After the war, he lived for a while in Mexico with his brother, Roger, and once said that he began each day “screwing the six broads” who were living in Roger’s house. He loved women; he had a tendency to fall for those who were inappropriate or unavailable. By the time he was in his twenties, he had already been married and divorced.
He was curious about the movie business. His uncle, Nathan Spin-gold, was on the board of directors at Columbia Pictures, but Bert wanted to make his own way, and he refused to ask Spingold for a job. He moved to Los Angeles and got an entry-level position with Sam Katzman, a producer who went by the nickname Jungle Sam. Katzman was proud to be known as the biggest, crankiest cheapskate in Hollywood. His movies were terrible. One of his affectations was to walk with a cane that had a middle finger carved at one end. Whenever anyone dared to ask him for money, he raised the cane as his answer. Katzman liked Bert and began teaching him the business. No one had ever treated Bert like a son before that. His own father, a traveling salesman, was mostly absent during Bert’s childhood. He showed up only when Bert became successful and there was money around to be borrowed.
Where Lee Duncan was a cipher—opaque in his manner and veiled in dreams—Bert was his opposite—bold and brash, carnal, concrete. He was small and broad, with peachy cheeks, a tangle of pitch-black hair, and an impish smile. He was not exactly handsome, but he had a shine in his eyes that captured people. He didn’t mind confrontations, and he took pride in firing off argumentative letters to people he disagreed with. In New York’s Hell’s Kitchen, where he grew up, there were plenty of kids with fast fists, but Bert had the fastest. He boxed with the Catholic Youth Association and never lost a match. Even as a grown man he was always ready for a fight. He once fought an actor, George Maharis, during an audition for Bert’s show Route 66. Maharis, who was younger and fitter than Bert, lost the bout, but he got the part.
Once Bert began working at Jungle Sam’s he was so intrigued by the process of filmmaking that his preoccupation with women, at least for the moment, receded. Whenever the other young employees at Jungle Sam’s invited him to parties, promising Bert that he would end up with a girl or two, he declined. He preferred spending his free time learning how to load the camera or adjust lights. “These other guys hated me because I didn’t want to get laid,” Bert told a friend. “So that was my introduction to the film business.”
In 1949, Bert was promoted unexpectedly while on a film shoot when the production manager dropped dead. Katzman, anxious to keep up with the shooting schedule, asked Bert if he thought he could finish the film—that is, manage it through its completion—and Bert said he could. Over the next four years, he managed the production of eighty more Katzman movies, most of them sensational quickies such as Killer Ape, Jack McCall Desperado, and Sky Commando. He made himself indispensable to Katzman, who wanted him to stay at the studio forever. To keep Bert from wandering, Katzman gave him an unlimited betting account with the two biggest bookies in Hollywood and an assistant to place and manage his bets. There wasn’t a horse race in the country that didn’t interest Bert, so he made ample use of Katzman’s credit line. But he was not fooled. He knew that Katzman expected him to end up so deeply in debt that he could never quit the job.
5.
A few years ago, during a deposition for one of the many lawsuits that eventually arose concerning the rights to the Rin Tin Tin character, Bert was asked how he first got involved with Rin Tin Tin. The deposition was videotaped, and I came across a copy of it in Bert’s storage room. Bert was in his late seventies at the time of the deposition, but his face was still as smooth and round as a kid’s, and he was wearing a fashionable collarless shirt. When the lawyer asked him to describe how he got his start with Rin Tin Tin, Bert became impatient. “That’s like . . . like saying, how did they build this building,” he said, his voice starting to rise.
Bert’s relationship with Rin Tin Tin was assembled from so many small bits and pieces and grew to be so essential to him that it was difficult to single out one simple moment when it all began. But at least one such point was the Sunday afternoon in 1953 when Bert drove out to Riverside with a stuntman, Hugh Hooker, who thought Bert and Lee should meet. Bert knew who Rin Tin Tin was; as he later told a reporter, “I was only ten when the original Rin Tin Tin died, but I, like millions of others, never forgot him.” Still, he was reluctant. Bert wasn’t interested in television, but he was thirty-one years old, he’d already been working in Hollywood for five years, and he wanted more autonomy, regardless of the betting account covered by Jungle Sam. After thinking it over, he agreed to ride out to Riverside to see what he might see.
Their first few minutes together must have been awkward: Lee, who was certainly wearing his usual cowboy clothes, with maybe a dog or two by his side, maybe holding court in the Memory Room; and Bert, jangling and hurried, young, maybe chewing on one of his favorite cigars, wondering what exactly had brought him out this way. In his later recollections of the meeting, Bert implied that a few of the directors wooing Lee were at the ranch when he and Hooker arrived, so his youth and lack of Hollywood status would have been that much more uncomfortably apparent. Working in Bert’s favor was the fact that Lee liked young people and also liked to think he had a talent for recognizing the spark of specialness in an individual. Lee was sure he had discovered that talent with his dogs, and he thought he had the same aptitude with human beings. In Bert he saw something that he liked.
Bert also saw something he liked, and he left the meeting resolved to win Lee’s approval. The idea for the show came quickly. “I was shooting something at the Corrigan Movie Ranch for Katzman, and I was thinking about all those director
s, all trying to please Lee Duncan so they could get the rights to Rin Tin Tin,” Bert told his friend Rob Stone, in a long conversation Stone taped with him before he died. “I took a walk and went up to . . . Fort Apache, and I sat down and had a box lunch, and in about three and a half minutes I had the whole format.”
It had dawned on Bert that a military western might be a perfect vehicle for Rin Tin Tin and the story could be a classic setup—a boy, a dog, a man, and a fool, thrown together by circumstance, facing life and its vicissitudes together. Later, he would say that even though his idea was good, “the only genius connected with the show was the dog himself.” Bert’s genius, though, was in finding the perfect story for Lee.
As Bert envisioned it, the show would be set in Arizona around 1870—more than forty years before Arizona became a state, when it was still wide-open territory. The boy and his dog would be lone survivors of an Indian raid. A U.S. Cavalry troop, led by a serious and principled lieutenant and a warm but bumbling sergeant, takes the boy and his dog under its wing. The solemn, gallant dog would serve as a canine double for the solemn, gallant lieutenant, and the childish man a foil for the mannish boy who is trying his best to appear grown-up.
Bert scribbled down his idea and convinced Douglas Heyes, a screenwriter, to work on it with him. “We put together a whole presentation the following weekend and went out to see Lee,” Bert told Rob Stone. “And Lee being a flyer, an army man, he loved my idea of the cavalry, and he said, I’m going to do this with you. He was a flyer and I was a flyer, so we had that in common. He said, I’ll do it, and I said, how much do you want? He told me ten percent and I said it sounded okay. I made the deal right there. We shook hands. He never wanted to sign another contract. He said, Bert, you’ve got my handshake.” Bert gave him ten dollars to make their agreement official.
