Rin Tin Tin

by Susan Orlean

  The show was called The Adventures of Rin-Tin-Tin. (Bert hyphenated the name, just as Lee had, although Lee usually didn’t capitalize each part of the name.) The title focused attention on the dog, even though the show was, in fact, an ensemble piece, and Rinty was actually less central to the story than the boy, who was called Johnny in the proposal. Bert said the range of subjects that could be explored in the show was “limitless,” and he included a dozen suggestions for episodes involving long-lost gold mines, Apache coyote gods, land-grabbers, kidnappings, battles with Comanches, and outlaw gangs. For some reason, the stories came naturally to him, even though he was neither a Westerner nor a dog person. He just liked thinking up narratives. “God must have given me this thing for stories,” he liked to say. “I always thought a story had to have a point, and it had to have great feeling, and it had to grab you in the first minutes with some kind of feeling and excitement. And I could do that.” Lee liked the military theme and western setting, but what must have appealed to him the most was the story of an orphan boy and his dog.

  The official Rin Tin Tin was no longer Rin Tin Tin III. Instead, it was Rin Tin Tin IV, the “bundle of fur” that James English mentioned toward the end of his book. Rinty IV had been a very young puppy when his father, Rinty III, came home from Camp Haan. The anointing of the puppy as the primary dog at El Rancho Rin Tin Tin took place without any fanfare or notice. Rinty III was born in 1941, so by 1953 he would have been an elderly dog, perhaps retired, or he might have already died.

  There was no mention of the changing of the guard, which seems to indicate that Lee finally appreciated the power of Rinty’s legacy. With the fourth generation of Rin Tin Tins coming to the public’s attention, Lee knew that he had created something that meant more than any individual dog or moment—something with a kind of elastic reality. The intensity of his connection with old Rin was so special that all the dogs that followed merged in Lee’s mind into one dog—one vessel for containing and carrying forward what old Rin had begun. When old Rin was alive, Lee never talked about a succession, almost as if he didn’t dare mention the possibility that Rin Tin Tin would die. Now he prepared for it; he let it be known that while Rin Tin Tin IV was the current standard-bearer, three more Rin Tin Tins were being readied and there would not be disruption. He would make sure that there would always be a Rin Tin Tin.

  Lee realized that drawing attention to each new incarnation of Rin Tin Tin made the continuity less seamless. Instead, one dog now just gave way to the next, quietly and completely, as if they lived in a universe that had managed to exist outside the boundaries of time.

  6.

  Bert drafted a formal description for the show and flew to New York to meet with television executives. After explaining that the half-hour series would feature “the famous motion picture dog, Rin-Tin-Tin,” the proposal continued: “In contemplating any television series (or any project in the business world) one must first ask himself: WHY? Why, then, a TV series on the adventures of a dog—even one with so celebrated and memorable a moniker as Rin-Tin-Tin?” The show was aimed at children. They would love it, Bert explained, because they all go through a phase during which they devote all their affection to “some dog—the only creature with whom [they] can share unselfish loyalty and complete, wordless understanding.”

  The next section of the proposal was a surprise. It began, “A child’s grief over the loss of his dog is the most monumental sorrow he will ever experience.” Could Bert have written that? Could he even have thought such a thing? He grew up in New York City, without a dog. The paragraph continued: “After that [loss], he is prepared for anything that growing-up may do to him. A child and his dog together, enjoy the most rewarding of companionships—one which is never topped for pure rapport again in this life.” My guess is that Lee wrote this, or maybe he had told Bert about losing his pet lamb and his first dog.

  The next section seems to be in Bert’s voice again: “Today, many kids aren’t privileged to know this great and intimate experience. City-living, apartment-dwelling, the pace of a mechanized era, all make it increasingly tough on the old child-and-dog relationship. . . . Rin Tin Tin is the most famous name in the dog world. In this proposed TV series, he represents the ultimate of those noble characteristics which every kid attributes to his OWN dog—or which every luckless, dogless kid cherishes for the pooch he hopes to have some day. As the ideal dog, therefore, he is the natural idol of every kid, with or without a dog—and as such is a powerful magnet for TV viewers of ALL AGES.” Along with Rin Tin Tin, the show would feature “a rugged kid of the proper age: nine or ten years old” and, as the lieutenant, someone “clean-cut, virile, and dynamically right in his estimate and handling of any situation. Second, he must be attractive to women but not unduly attracted to any women he may meet in his adventures.” There would be action: “We’ll supply it in large quantities.” Bert, who would produce the show, described himself with some hyperbole. “There is no film-maker in Hollywood who has been so importantly identified with the production of such a vast number of motion pictures during the last seven years—or indeed, in any similar period in Hollywood history.” He included Lee in the proposal as well; Lee was “the real star of the series, the man behind the dog . . . his remarkable owner and trainer . . . a pioneer of the motion-picture industry . . . His reputation as Rin Tin Tin’s trainer and manager has made his a name of distinction in the Hollywood scene.”

  The executives at Screen Gems, the television arm of Columbia Pictures, loved the proposal and told Bert they wanted twenty-six episodes as soon as possible. They expected to syndicate the show—that is, to sell it to individual stations rather than to a national network. A network show had more impact and more prestige than a syndicated one, but in 1953 there were only four major television networks—CBS, NBC, ABC, and the DuMont Television Network, which was one of the very first but would be out of business by 1956. Screen Gems didn’t expect to attract a major advertiser—the prerequisite for a network show. The best such hope had been Quaker Oats, the parent company of Lee’s old supporter, Ken-L-Ration, but it passed because it was already committed to another animal show called Zoo Parade.

  Bert and screenwriter Douglas Heyes wrote four scripts and sent them to Screen Gems. The executives were not pleased. “They said, we’ve read your scripts and we, collectively, think they stink,” Bert recalled. “And I said, Yeah? Obviously I don’t agree. And they said, What are these, morality plays? And I said, I don’t know what you’re planning on making, but that’s what I’m making. They said I was wrong, and I said, I don’t think I’m wrong—it’s got action, it’s got people, it’s got the dog, and that’s what it should be. And they said, You’re going to go against our seven combined years of experience? And I said, Yeah, if I listen to you and I fail I’ve learned nothing. If I go my way, I learn something. I’m the best fucking production manager in the business—you think I need you guys? Forget the contract—I’m out the door.”

  The executives called his uncle, Nate Spingold, the head of Columbia Pictures, to tell him they thought Bert was crazy and that Spingold needed to straighten him out. “Nate said, Send me the scripts, let me have a look,” Bert recalled. “Nate reads them and says, These are brilliant, you Screen Gems guys are crazy. And that was the end of the discussion. That was the last bullshit I ever heard, but from that point on those Screen Gems guys hated me.”

  Despite their doubts about attracting a major sponsor, Screen Gems showed the scripts to the head of Kenyon & Eckhart, a large advertising agency in New York, before selling the show in syndication. To Screen Gems’ surprise, the agency liked the show and suggested that Nabisco, which manufactured Shredded Wheat cereal as well as Milk-Bone dog biscuits, might be interested in sponsoring it. After looking over the proposal and scripts, Nabisco agreed. The only stipulation was that Bert guarantee the show would contain no crime, violence, sex, or tasteless material; nothing “critical, contemptuous or scornful of the United States of America”; a
nd no scenes showing cast members eating competitors’ products—especially zweiback crackers and “edible ice cream holders.” In addition, Rin Tin Tin could never be shown eating ordinary pieces of meat, since that would compete with the prepared dog foods Nabisco manufactured. Bert agreed, and with Nabisco on board, ABC decided to buy the show. It would air on Friday nights at 7:30 p.m. on every station in the ABC network.

  In 1954, a new television show was something special, an event, announced with flourish. A show starring Rin Tin Tin was even bigger news because of the dog’s heritage. He was, in the words of many press releases and news stories, “the first fourth-generation Hollywood star in history.” As the Associated Press story put it, “The fabulous Rin Tin Tin is ready to romp to what may be his greatest fame—as a television star. When [the show begins] a new generation will be watching the heroics of a star that thrilled their parents a couple of decades ago.” The television columnist for the Los Angeles Mirror wrote, “Rin Tin Tin IV is carrying on the family tradition, set to bark on television in a series all his own.”

  Except for DuMont, ABC was the smallest of the networks, with only 40 affiliates, compared to NBC’s 164 and CBS’s 113. But ABC was on the way up. In the spring of 1954 the network was in the spotlight, thanks to the Army-McCarthy hearings, the Senate’s investigation into whether Communist-hunting Senator Joseph McCarthy had meddled improperly in the army’s treatment of one of his staff members. CBS and NBC, expecting the Senate hearings to be tedious, ran only evening recaps, while ABC, which had little other daytime programming, decided to broadcast the full proceedings live. As it turned out, the Army-McCarthy hearings were fiery and theatrical and drew millions of new viewers to the network.

  In addition to The Adventures of Rin-Tin-Tin, that fall ABC was introducing a number of new shows: the first telecast of the Miss America Pageant, with Bess Myerson and John Daly hosting; bandleader Lawrence Welk’s musical variety show; and a program called Disneyland, produced by Disney Studios to coincide with the opening of its first amusement park, in Anaheim, California.

  Bert came back from New York thrilled by the reception the show had received, but dreading one remaining bit of business—quitting his job. Katzman did not take the news well; after Bert told him, he chased him out of his office. “He was pissed at me until about two weeks before he died,” Bert later recalled. “I was at the race track and I ran into him. He looked shitty. I said, Sam, you can’t die until you make up with me. He was my mentor, my father. I couldn’t let him die still being mad.”

  In a sense, leaving Katzman and taking on the Rin Tin Tin legacy from Lee, Bert was trading one father for another. Katzman was more of a mentor, but Lee became the person Bert respected and felt indebted to, and with whom he shared a new devotion. His presence in Lee’s life was just as profound for Lee, who never had a son, never had a brother, and never knew his father. Lee was entrusting Bert with his life’s work; Bert was the heir he had hoped he would find. Somehow he forgot that he’d promised his daughter that role. Carolyn remembers her father announcing to her that Bert was “coming in”—his precise phrasing. I thought it an odd way of describing what was happening, although on second thought, it seemed fitting; it was as if Lee was trying to say that Bert was “coming in” to the family, which is what it felt like to him—much more than an ordinary business arrangement. Carolyn also remembers how keen Lee was about Bert. “He said, Bert is a really nice young man, he has a young family, and he’s going to do wonders throughout his career, and he’s going to make a lot of movies and promote Rin Tin Tin from here on out.”

  When Bert entered the Duncans’ lives, Carolyn was fourteen, edging toward adulthood; she had always been half in the shadow of the dogs and now she was in the shadow of this newcomer from Hollywood, who in an instant had stepped into a role she had strived for ever since she could remember. Even now, a grown woman with children and grandchildren, her face crumples when she talks about her father and Bert, how “their visions joined into what it would be, what it could be.” She talks about it with a quiet weariness, an emotion rubbed smooth, the sort of feeling that comes from having worked very hard to forget that something once hurt very much. “I saw my role with Rin Tin Tin really fading,” she said. “I knew that I—that I wouldn’t be part of it.” She never really felt close to her father again.

  7.

  The cast of The Adventures of Rin-Tin-Tin was assembled in early 1954. Ten-year-old Lee Aaker filled the important role of the boy, who was still known as “Johnny” in early drafts of the scripts, although Bert was considering “Dusty” and “Rusty” as alternative names. Aaker, whose mother owned a dancing school in Los Angeles, was a small, sturdy kid with floppy hair, a snub nose, and a wide face that looked as soft as putty. He had been acting professionally since he was eight years old. He costarred in several major films, including High Noon, Greatest Show on Earth, and Hondo, and at the time of the audition had just finished shooting an episode of Ford Television Theater, “And Suddenly, You Knew,” starring Ronald Reagan.

  For the role of Lieutenant Rip Masters, Bert wanted Richard Denning, a veteran actor who had starred in The Creature from the Black Lagoon. Denning was unavailable. Instead, the role went to a former professional tennis player from Texas named James Brown—classically handsome, tall and deep-voiced and dark-haired, with a flash of white teeth and a strong chin. Joe Sawyer, a character actor with a mashed, meaty face, was cast as softhearted Sergeant Biff O’Hara. Rand Brooks—Scarlett O’Hara’s weakling husband Charles Hamilton in Gone with the Wind—was cast as Corporal Boone.

  Lee was asked to train and direct the dog, but he decided against it. The long hours in Los Angeles didn’t suit him anymore. He seemed content mentoring Frank Barnes, the trainer who was then hired for the job. What he cared about more was having his dog in the show. This Rinty was big and blond with a saddle of dark fur, an aquiline nose, and a bright, beckoning look in his eyes. He was only two years old, but Lee had spent long afternoons at the ranch training him and thought he was camera-ready. Lee also had prepared a cousin of Rinty’s, Rin Tin Tin II (the nonsequential numbering was done by the AKC), and another named Hey You, to use as Rinty’s stand-in. When Hey You was a puppy, he had been pecked in the eye by a chicken and was left with a noticeable scar. But he was good at snapping and snarling on command, and Lee thought he’d be perfect for fight scenes.

  One afternoon, as the show was in preproduction, Lee brought Rinty to the set for Bert to see. He ran Rinty through a series of commands and did a scene. Bert watched him and was dismayed. He wasn’t a dog person, but he knew what he wanted, and it wasn’t Rinty IV.

  Sam Manners, the production manager for The Adventures of Rin-Tin-Tin, had been present when Lee brought Rinty IV to audition. Manners is one of the few people who worked on the show who is still alive. When I talked to him at his home in Los Angeles recently, I asked him what exactly was the problem with Rinty IV. He looked at me for a long moment and then started laughing.

  “Why didn’t we use him?” he repeated, cupping an ear toward me. “Why? I’ll tell you why.” He settled back in his chair. Then he said, “We could never use Duncan’s dog because it was stupid. It couldn’t do anything! Bert almost died when he saw that Lee’s dog just couldn’t do a thing.”

  Rinty IV stupid? I knew that old Rin was short-tempered and Junior was inept, but I was astonished to hear Rinty described as stupid; it was hard to believe that Lee would have presented a dog that wasn’t up to the job, especially because he could have chosen another one of his dogs if the one he had anointed as Rin Tin Tin wasn’t working out. I decided to ask Manners to elaborate, thinking he might have confused a dog or two—after all, the audition took place fifty years ago. But he insisted that he remembered like it was yesterday. A few weeks later, I was talking to one of the show’s stunt-men, Max Kleven, and he repeated what Manners had said—Rinty IV just wasn’t good enough to star on the show.

  Bert decided to use one of Frank Barnes’s
dogs: a cream-and-black German shepherd whose father, Flame, had been a movie standout in the 1940s and early 1950s. Bert thought that Flame Jr., whom everyone called by the initials JR, was “absolutely brilliant.” Bert told Rob Stone that, on command, Flame could open a specific drawer in a file cabinet, take out whatever object he had been told to retrieve, and deliver that object to whomever he was told to give it to.

  Sometime after that excruciating audition, Bert informed Lee that he was going to use JR as the main actor in the show, and that another one of Barnes’s dogs, Blaze, would be his double most of the time. Hey You would be used in the fight scenes. As for Rinty IV, Bert said he would be used occasionally, although there was no specific role for him. Most of all, Rin Tin Tin would receive fans of the show who wanted to visit El Rancho Rin Tin Tin. It was as if he were being made the king in a constitutional monarchy—the embodiment of the character, but with nothing much to do. “This Rin is a ranch dog,” Eva Duncan told a reporter for The New Yorker in an interview that year, which sounded as if she was acknowledging that living on the ranch was in fact his main job.

  Throughout the run of the show, the matter of not using Lee’s dog was handled gingerly. In 1958, Rin Tin Tin was nominated for a PATSY Award, the animal equivalent of an Oscar. The awards ceremony and gala at the Ambassador Hotel was going to be hosted by Roy Rogers’s horse, Trigger. (The previous year’s hosts were actors Piper Laurie and Ronald Reagan, and the PATSY went to Francis the Mule.) Before the event, Bert’s secretary sent him a note saying that Lee Aaker and his mother planned to attend, as did Lee and Eva Duncan, and Frank Barnes and his wife, Pauline. For the ceremony itself, a dog—a Rin Tin Tin, whether factual or fictional—had to be present. “As it stands now,” the secretary wrote, “JR will be the dog—but you can understand the abyss over which we tread on this question.”