Rin Tin Tin

by Susan Orlean

  • • •

  The current owners of the house, a young family named Bradshaw, bought the place in 1997. Boyd Bradshaw told me he knew when they bought the house that there was a Rin Tin Tin connection to it, but he didn’t know much about it. Since then, he and his wife, Lisa, have learned about the Duncans and decided to preserve the original house as best they could. They had modernized some of it, taking out the twin beds in the master bedroom and some of the boomerang room dividers, and adding a large family room for their kids, but otherwise, Boyd said, the house was almost exactly as it was when Lee and Eva and Carolyn had lived there.

  I visited the house one afternoon after many hours in the archives, when my head was full of Lee Duncan. It was the day I came across the pamphlet for the Riverside Home Tour, and I was trying to imagine Lee’s reaction to it. I wondered if he was pleased to be living in a house that was newsworthy or whether the house made him feel like a hayseed guest. He once told a reporter that he sometimes missed their rickety old house because he hadn’t had to worry about putting his hat in the wrong place or tracking dirt on the white rugs.

  He was probably glad to have finally made Eva happy, after keeping her waiting for her house for twenty years. But in truth, his life was with his dogs and his horses, and the new house was far removed from that. It wasn’t a house that fit naturally on an old California property where you’d keep cattle and horses and dogs; it looked suburban, as though it belonged in Orange County. Field Lane had been a dirt road on the outskirts of town when Lee and Eva moved there, and the original house was just as unassuming. But then Field Lane was paved and landscaped, and split-levels with circular driveways were soon cropping up all around them. The old house probably began to look a little out of place by the time it was torn down; the new house better suited this revised version of the neighborhood. It is an attractive house, a place that would have been considered “artsy,” and Eva, who had begun making clay sculptures and paintings, undoubtedly loved the modern feel of it and appreciated that she could display her art on all the built-in shelving. It was Lee who must have felt out of place.

  Boyd Bradshaw showed me around, pointing out with pride the architect’s innovative touches. We walked outside and circled around the blob-shaped swimming pool, and then crossed the yard to look at the kennel. It was an overgrown, cobwebby A-frame shed—not a miniature stucco palace at all, no matter how Wauhillau LaHay’s publicity had described it. But it looked like it had been a fine place for a real ranch dog to live.

  When The Adventures of Rin-Tin-Tin became a hit, Bert also moved into a new house—the big Tudor on Los Feliz, with a swimming pool and a tennis court, just a block from Griffith Park. Bert was only thirty-three years old, but the success of the show gave him stature. He never lacked for self-confidence, but now he could afford to indulge himself a little. He liked to take meetings in a bathrobe, clenching the fattest cigar he could find between his teeth. He was an avid tennis player and could hold his own on his backyard court, even though he liked to smoke those fat cigars while he played. Sam Katzman wasn’t paying for his gambling anymore, but he still had what appeared to be an inexhaustible credit line, which many people thought Screen Gems covered as a thank-you for bringing them Rin Tin Tin.

  As a courtesy, Lee always offered Rin Tin Tin puppies to people involved with the show, and Bert took one of the puppies as a pet. I don’t know the dog’s name or anything about him other than the fact that he was from one of Lee’s Rin Tin Tin litters. It was nice for Bert and Willetta’s baby, Steven, who was then eighteen months old and toddling around, to have a pet.

  At some point in this sparkly time, Bert’s father, Morton, made one of his rare visits to Los Angeles. Morton was alone at the house one day, taking care of Steven—helping out, evidently, which was something Bert said he rarely did. At some point, Morton left Steven alone near the pool with the dog. After some time Morton returned to the yard, but he was too late. He found Steven in the pool: he had drowned.

  I can imagine no experience worse than losing a child, and in this case the tragedy was compounded by the fact that Bert’s own father, who had never been fatherly to him, was involved in it. What really happened can never be known, but as a rule, dogs don’t push children into swimming pools out of malice; in fact, there are many stories of dogs saving people from drowning. If the baby and the dog were rough-housing, there is certainly a chance the dog accidentally knocked him in. Morton was said to have claimed that the dog had pushed the child in, as if to suggest that the dog’s actions had been deliberate. It was like an eerie reprise of the Prince Llewellyn story and so many other Rin Tin Tin silent-film plots that involved misjudgment and accusation: it is possible that child fell in and the dog jumped in to save him, only to be accused of a terrible thing. It was an awful irony that the dog was related to Rin Tin Tin. Losing a child at the exact moment he was proving his talent for communicating to children made it that much more painful for Bert. The sadness of it wouldn’t stop, and within a few years, Willetta and Bert separated. Soon after their separation, they divorced.

  13.

  Rin Tin Tin was being reborn in the middle of the biggest baby boom in history. It began in 1946 when veterans came home from the war and got married. Seventy-seven million babies were born in the United States between 1946 and 1964. My family was a typical product of that period: my father was in the service in World War II, where he had served in Army Intelligence and then returned home to Cleveland, his hometown. He and my mother got married in 1950. They moved from the city to a newly built house in the suburbs. My brother was born in 1951, and my sister and I followed in 1953 and 1955. In our suburban neighborhood, every house seemed to have at least two or three kids, and new elementary schools popped up like mushrooms. It was like living in a children’s village. There were more of us than adults. After dinner, on most nights, all the children on my street came out to play for one last hour before bedtime. We poured out of our houses in our pajamas, and in that shimmery time just after sundown we rode our bikes up and down the sidewalk, caught fireflies, traded baseball cards, lit punks, and ran zigzagging across lawns with sparklers, leaving glittering trails in the fading light. Then we went home and watched TV.

  The babies of the boom consumed all entertainment rapaciously, gobbling up movies and comic books and toys as well as TV. The effect of all these children, the mass of us, must have been bewildering to our parents, almost like witnessing an invasion of hungry aliens, and intriguing to sociologists and marketers. Children, and especially teenagers, had never been observed and measured and considered as a group before, but now sheer numbers made them a moving force. Beginning with the baby boom, anything manufactured or produced was evaluated for its potential to appeal to all these eager children. Not only did they have their own tastes, but they also seemed to dictate what the rest of their families, including their parents, watched and ate and bought. A 1955 issue of TV Guide carried a story titled “Who’s Boss of Your TV Set?” The answer, according to the social scientists, was kids.

  • • •

  In December 1954, a five-part serial about the frontiersman Davy Crockett, starring a character actor named Fess Parker, ran on the ABC show Disneyland. The network was counting on it being a simple success. Instead it launched a frenzy—not just for the show but also for the 3,000 products that Disney licensed with the Davy Crockett name. Within a few months, Americans spent the equivalent of $800 million on Davy Crockett merchandise. They bought 14 million Davy Crockett books; 4 million recordings of the show’s theme song, “The Ballad of Davy Crockett” (“Da-veee, Davy Crockett, king of the wild fronteeeer!”), and millions of other Davy Crockett–branded toys and clothes. Hopalong Cassidy had sold a good number of black cowboy shirts and white hats, but the scope of Davy Crockett sales was far bigger. Some observers wondered if the rage might continue until literally every child in America had a full complement of Davy Crockett paraphernalia—coonskin hat, rifle, powder horn, book, and record. />
  Merchandising was a new idea, but Davy Crockett made it clear that pairing up products with a television show could be overwhelmingly potent. Just five episodes made Davy Crockett the king of the toy department. Some producers were still skeptical of all these products, especially since much of the merchandise had nothing to do with the show or character itself except that it featured the image or name. It was one thing to sell a coonskin hat just like the one Davy Crockett wore, but what was the exact meaning of a Davy Crockett wristwatch? A Davy Crockett hot chocolate mug? Bert, however, believed that marketing was the future of television. In 1955 he told a reporter that he believed that merchandising of television shows might one day “be as economically important as television itself”—a radical idea at the time, but one that, at least in the case of children’s television, turned out to be true.

  • • •

  Almost as soon as The Adventures of Rin-Tin-Tin was on the air, you could buy a Rin Tin Tin cavalry mess kit, uniform, hat, bugle, gun, and holster, as well as a recording of the 101st Cavalry bugle calls, cavalry belt-and-suspender sets, a Rin Tin Tin–branded pocket knife, a telescope, a walkie-talkie, a beanie, a pennant, a 3-D color viewer with viewer cards, a brass magic ring, a pinback button, a Wonder Scope, a lunch box, a thermos bottle, a wallet, slippers, jigsaw puzzles, and all sorts of mechanical games. Cheerios cereal included premiums for The Adventures of Rin-Tin-Tin plastic totem poles; Nabisco Wheat Honeys offered coupons for six different Rin Tin Tin masks. For a box top plus one dollar, you could have a Rin Tin Tin T-shirt; for more box tops and more dollars, you could get Rusty’s uniform or a televiewer with twenty-four 3-D adventure slides. You could even buy a Chrysler that was endorsed by “the best mounted cavalry in the world”—namely, Lieutenant Masters, Sergeant O’Hara, and Corporal Boone, who appeared in uniform at Fort Apache beside the car in a 1956 Chrysler ad.

  And then there were all the Rin Tin Tin products: dog brushes and leashes and collars and beds; plush-toy Rin Tin Tins; metal Rin Tin Tin coin banks, bookends, and doorstops; matchbook covers, letter openers, and paperweights featuring his picture; playing cards and wristwatches; Rin Tin Tin costumes, complete with rubber German shepherd face masks. The Breyer Molding Company in Chicago produced the eight-inch plastic Rin Tin Tin that my grandfather always kept on his desk, enticingly out of my reach. The Hartland toy company made another, smaller plastic Rin Tin Tin. Royal Doulton, Martindale, and Premier Porcelain made Rin Tin Tin figurines in fine materials, in a variety of poses, including Rinty in his signature stance on a rock ledge.

  Companies’ fortunes were made on Rin Tin Tin products. They were “presold to 13,750,000 kids” in a “once in a blue moon” opportunity, according to an ad in Merchandising News magazine for the Pekett Headwear Company, which owned the license to produce Rusty’s official cavalry hat. Marx Toy Company sold millions of plastic Fort Apache models in the United States and Europe. Hermann Handkerchief, Gem-Dandy Accessories, Bradley Watch, Brewster Shirt Company, Spec-Toy, Craftint, Esquire Novelty, Yunker Manufacturing, puzzle makers Gabriel & Son—all were at their production limits by 1955, trying to satisfy the demand for Rin Tin Tin items.

  A license to manufacture a Rin Tin Tin product was gold, and all manner of crackpots and con artists approached Lee and Bert with schemes. Proposals for Rin Tin Tin–branded dog training schools, jewelry, and canine horoscopes arrived almost every day. “Mr. Duncan, it is apparent that you are a person who is very much interested in dogs, and also one who isn’t unwilling to make a great deal of money,” a piano teacher named Francis Bloom wrote to Lee in 1955. Bloom hoped to get Rin Tin Tin’s endorsement for a flushing dog toilet he’d patented, which was designed in such a way that the dog wouldn’t get its foot caught in the drain nor be squirted by the flush water.

  Everyone seemed to want to be part of the phenomenon. People offered to appear on the show, or allow their dogs to appear on the show, or write episodes of the show. In the 1950s, many major newspapers had a reporter covering dog shows and pets. Alice Scott, the “Blue Ribbon Dog” columnist for the Los Angeles Examiner and author of How to Raise and Train a Pekinese, proposed to Lee that she leave her job and start “The Rin Tin Tin Fan Club for the Children of America,” which would hold meetings “each month, in each community of the United States.” Other offers of help were less welcome. In 1955, a songwriter recorded a studio demo of his song “The Ballad of Rin Tin Tin.” He sent it to Lee with a note saying, “Honestly, sir, I believe that another Davy Crockett hit is in the making. I feel certain, sir, you will go for the song. It has punch and personality. We should sell a million copies.” Lee passed the song along to Bert, who listened to it and replied, “Dear Lee, I think the recording is pretty dreadful.” (Lee wrote back to the man offering a kinder version of Bert’s reaction, explaining, “Mr. Leonard . . . feels that it is not exactly what he is looking for.”)

  The companies that did make deals with Screen Gems wanted the show to help promote their products. The crayon and paint-by-number companies wanted an episode to include a scene of Rusty learning to paint and draw. The hat manufacturer wanted to be sure Rusty wore his hat in as many scenes as possible. Nabisco, which was using Sergeant O’Hara in many of its commercials, threatened legal action if O’Hara didn’t appear prominently in enough episodes. Karastan knew it couldn’t have its Rin Tin Tin rug actually appear in the show—Karastan rugs wouldn’t have existed in 1870—but the company’s sales manager requested a publicity shot of Rin Tin Tin in a room with one of the rugs “looking at it with jealousy or love,” or a shot of Rusty making Rinty jealous by pointing to the rug. When the toy gun company worried that Rusty wasn’t shooting enough, Ed Justin, who handled merchandising for Screen Gems, sent a memo to Bert, urging him to appease the company. “Bert, if possible, work in an occasional bit in which Rusty uses his new guns,” Justin pleaded. “We had better show him shooting at targets or shooting the heads off rattlesnakes, or doing something with those guns from time to time.”

  Many stores set up special Rin Tin Tin promotions. Bullock’s, a luxury department store in Los Angeles, decorated its toy department to look like Fort Apache and stocked it with the full array of Rin Tin Tin merchandise. When Lee appeared there with Rinty and Lee Aaker, 3,000 people showed up and another 2,500 had to be turned away. Kresge’s, a five-and-dime chain, set up larger-than-life Rusty and Rinty cardboard cutouts at the end of every aisle in a few of its stores to promote Rusty bugles and gun-and-holster sets. The promotion was so successful that Kresge decided to set up the same displays in every one of its 650 stores around the country.

  Bert paid close attention to the merchandising; he considered Davy Crockett a benchmark they should meet and, he hoped, exceed. His exasperation with Screen Gems now had a new point of tension—he was convinced they were missing opportunities left and right. Bert wrote an angry note to Ralph Cohn about one event in Albuquerque, complaining that 17,000 people had showed up but the store had run out of all its Rin Tin Tin merchandise. When I first read the letter, I thought that number sounded improbably large, and that it might have been a typo, but given the excitement about Rin Tin Tin at the time, I’m not so sure.

  14.

  It must have been gratifying but also a little odd for Lee to see this happening, to see his dog on thermoses and bookends and mechanical games. He had experienced Rinty’s fame before, but in the 1920s and 1930s fame meant selling lots of movie tickets and signing lots of autographs and perhaps endorsing a variety of dog food. Now it was no longer enough for fans to watch passively—people wanted celebrity in some form right in their pocket. Merchandise had made that possible. Just like that, you could own a piece of a star; you could own part of what seemed enchanted.

  Lee visited the set on occasion and made a few merchandising suggestions. He liked the idea of manufacturing a “Do-It-Yourself rocking dog with a Rin Tin Tin head in place of the usual horse head,” and he planned to write a book about dog training, which would expand on the article he wrote for
The American Magazine. He even appeared again on television, overcoming his dread of being on camera enough to do a commercial with Rinty for Pal Tiny Bits dog food; it ran during The Adventures of Rin-Tin-Tin. But he spent most of his time in Riverside with his dogs.

  He had always bred and sold puppies, relying on the sales for his income during the years when he didn’t have movie work. German shepherds were now more popular than ever. According to one breeder, the Rin Tin Tin show had “set the country on fire and is making heads spin among shepherd breeders.” Lee’s German shepherd puppies were the most prized of all, and he had more requests than he could satisfy, even though he charged $250 for a puppy—equal to about $2,000 today.

  Screen Gems liked giving Rin Tin Tin puppies to its most important accounts, so they often sent Lee requests to ship a puppy to someone like the president of Esquire Novelty or an important executive at Nabisco. Rinty was “procreating like mad,” according to Ed Justin. At one point, Screen Gems sent a memo requesting five puppies to send as a gift to an advertiser. “Five puppies impossible,” Justin replied. “Rin Tin Tin has slipped disk.”

  For many people, a Rin Tin Tin puppy was an aspirational acquisition. “We are far from wealthy people,” one woman wrote to Lee in 1958, “but I no longer can resist writing to ask you the price of one of Rin Tin Tin’s female puppies. I just hope and pray it will be possible somehow for me to buy one of Rinty’s dogs.” One man hoping to get a Rin Tin Tin puppy wrote that his German shepherd had served with Dogs for Defense; unfortunately, after the war, the dog became overly protective of his son and too dangerous to keep. He said the boy still cried out in his sleep for the dog; could they possibly get one of Rinty’s puppies? “Perhaps we are reaching too high for our pocket book, as we are working people,” the letter continued. “But we feel if we can possibly manage to have one, we sure will try.”