My Career Went to the Dogs
My movie marketing career had very little to do with animals, dogs or otherwise. I did some work on the advertising for the Benji movies, but nothing of consequence.
Very early in my career, I was with an ad agency involved with the advertising for MGM’s Saturday matinee re-release of The Yearling. My client had, it’s fair to say, a rather bizarre devotion to the series of family films that MGM was running as matinees, and The Yearling was the first.
The ad that we were working with was a shot of the boy carrying the fawn, but it was larger than we had space for. My solution to making the ad smaller, I proudly announced, was to “crop the dog,” thereby not showing the animal’s entire body. Suffice it to say that the client was not too pleased that I thought the fawn in his precious movie was a dog.
The only other connection to anything with animals in my marketing career was on a film called The Bear. It was a pickup for our company, which meant that it was produced independently, and then we bought it for distribution.
The Bear was an interesting movie made by a talented director named Jean-Jacques Annaud. Two bears were on the screen for virtually the entire movie, and as I recall, the only humans were two hunters, who were shown only briefly and who spoke almost no dialogue.
Six executives, including me, flew to Paris on the Concorde to get our first look at the movie we had bought. We huddled in a small room with Mr. Annaud, and he presented a three-hour version of the film on a Moviola. For those too young to know what that was, it was a machine that ran the film and had a very small screen on which it could be watched. Directors used it to experiment, splicing film together in the editing process. Very, very pre-digital.
So there we were in a small room in Paris, standing in front of this little machine, when Annaud announced that the sound was not ready, so we would be watching the film without sound. But not to worry, he said, because since most of the sound in the final film would be bear noises, he would stand next to the Moviola and mimic bear sounds himself, to give us a flavor of what the finished product would be like.
So for three hours we watched footage on this little screen in Paris, with a Frenchman making bear noises. I remember looking at Jeff Sagansky, the president of production for our company, and I knew that he was thinking, as I was, how surreal and ridiculous the situation was.
Three months later, we had a screening of a rough cut of the movie in Paramus, New Jersey. We had invited an audience in, and as was standard procedure, we would hand them comment cards, soliciting their opinions when the film was concluded.
Jeff and I were standing in the back of the theater when two things of note happened. First, we both realized that the bear noises were exactly the same as in Paris. To this day I believe that every bear noise in the finished film actually consists of the director mimicking bear noises. He would deny it, and I certainly could never prove it, but I think it’s true.
Second, a woman stormed out of her seat and walked out. She saw Jeff and me as she was leaving, and somehow she knew that we were executives with the company that owned the movie.
There had been a brief scene that showed one bear humping the other, probably because that’s what bears do. But she was outraged, claiming that she was told that the film was appropriate for family viewing. Yet in her eyes it was nothing more than bear porno! With full frontal bear nudity!
It was a weird night at the movies.
It wasn’t until I was writing TV movies that I was turning into a real-life dog lunatic, and I decided to put a golden retriever in one of my movies. It was called Deadly Isolation, and was the story of a woman who lived with her senior golden on the coast of Maine.
There is no reason to bore you with all the details of the plot. I’ll just say that a man comes to the house, pretending to be something and someone he is not. His goal, in order to pull off a nefarious scheme, includes getting the woman to fall for him.
One scene in the script had the woman, the bad guy, and the golden go out on the ocean in her boat. When she is not looking, he throws the dog into the water. Then he jumps in to heroically save the dog, earning the woman’s gratitude and adoration in the process.
Brilliant stuff.
Unfortunately, the film was a very low-budget production, and there was apparently not enough money to have the scene shot out on the ocean. So instead they shot it in what was little more than a viaduct, about as wide as a half-dozen bowling alleys.
For some reason, they used a Bernese mountain dog instead of a golden, which was fine. But when the guy throws the dog into the placid body of water, the dog starts swimming happily along, and it’s all the guy can do to catch up to it.
Not my finest creative moment.
When I started writing Andy Carpenter novels, I gave Andy a dog named Tara. (Where would I have gotten that name?) Andy is also into dog rescue and runs the Tara Foundation. As you can probably tell, this was not exactly a huge stretch for me.
And the books were doing reasonably well. People seemed to like them, and they got a bunch of award nominations. Bury the Lead was even chosen by Janet Evanovich as a Today Show Book of the Month, and we went on the show together, where Janet was incredibly complimentary and gracious.
I had decided that I wanted to try other things, and since the books were selling only moderately well, the sixth in the series, Play Dead, was going to be the last one.
That book more directly involved a dog in the plot, and the publisher decided to put a golden retriever on the cover. And sales went through the roof, or at least my version of a sales roof.
People would e-mail me with the same message: they loved the book, but were embarrassed to say that they bought it only because of the dog on the cover. That was fine with me; I wouldn’t have cared if they’d bought it because the Devil made them do it, as long as they bought it and liked it.
Pleased with the spike in sales, the publisher prevailed upon me to write another “Andy,” though persuading me was not exactly a tough hill to climb. I love working on those books; when I start a new one, writing the ensemble cast makes me feel like I’m reconnecting with old friends. As long as people keep reading them, I’ll keep writing them.
A couple of weeks later, the publisher sent me a mock-up of the book jacket for the next one, even before I had come up with a plot concept.
It had two dogs on the cover.
A Bernese and a golden.
So I wrote the book, New Tricks, to the jacket. I’ve got a hunch Hemingway never worked like that. But I didn’t care; people were buying the books.
It will come as no surprise that every “Andy” since then has had a dog on the cover, and I’d be very surprised if any of the future ones do not.
I am crazy about dogs, but I’m not above using them to make a profit.
You know the old saying “You only exploit the ones you love.”
Jenny
Since I got into rescue, I seem to attract distraught women. Before I got into rescue, I attracted almost no women, but that’s a longer story.
This particular distraught woman was named Mary, and her family had two dogs, Ben and Jenny. Ben was a golden retriever and Jenny a smallish Lab mix, and Mary and her family, which consisted of a husband and two small kids, couldn’t keep them.
Circumstances were forcing them out of their home and into an apartment, where the dogs were not allowed. So they had set out to find good homes for their dogs. They would place them only together, since the dogs were buddies, and we completely understood that.
The dogs were young, maybe two or three years old, and therefore added a significant amount of energy to the house. Our house is rarely lacking in canine energy, so it was an adjustment, more for us than for them.
They were the two fastest dogs I had ever seen, and both handled a tennis ball like Roger Federer. And they were great friends not only with each other but with the other dogs as well.
Ben died prematurely at the age of six, the victim
of cancer. Cancer in goldens is a horrible problem; if you walk into a vet oncologist’s office, half of the practice is golden retrievers.
Jenny is ageless, just as active and lightning fast as the day we got her. She could jump over any fence we might use to contain her, but she has no reason to. She’s no dummy.
She’s also supremely, annoyingly affectionate. Like most of the dogs, she’ll come over to be cuddled but simply cannot get close enough. She literally sleeps on my pillow at night, and I’ve woken up many times with her tongue licking my ear. I don’t recommend that to anyone.
Jenny is epileptic, but her seizures are infrequent and mild. She is going to live forever, which is fine with me.
Disaster
I had no idea where we were stopping, probably somewhere in eastern Colorado. It sort of didn’t matter, since every place looked the same. Especially at that point, since it was eleven o’clock at night.
We stopped for gas, and then drove about half a mile to a huge grass and dirt field. Far off in the distance were highways seemingly surrounding the place, but it wasn’t too noisy, and we could walk the dogs without interference.
Because it was secluded, and because the dogs were not having a meal at this stop, we decided that rather than set up the fencing, we were going to walk them on leashes. It was the second time we’d done this, and we were pretty good at it.
We took them off one RV at a time. I put a leash on each one, and then helped them down the steps to one of our team waiting to walk them. When they’d done what they had to do, we loaded them back on and went on to the next RV. It sounds methodical and overly careful, and it probably was, but it felt like the only way we could be in total control of things.
I had neglected to bring choke chains, which was not very bright of me. While the name sounds cruel and punitive, choke chains are the proper devices to use when walking dogs. This is especially true of our dogs, most of which are not used to being walked on a leash. But since I hadn’t brought chokers, we attached the leashes directly to each dog’s regular collar.
Mary Lynn was walking Jenny, a smallish Lab mix who is mostly black, with white markings. She is by far the quickest and most agile dog we have, and one of the smartest. She’s amazingly fast, and can jump higher than any dog I’ve ever seen.
Suddenly, and I have no idea how it happened, Mary Lynn was no longer walking Jenny. Instead, she had somehow escaped the leash.
Mary Lynn screamed, and by the time I looked over, there was no sign of Jenny. She had taken off running at high speed into the darkness, off in the direction of a highway that had to be half a mile away. It was a distance that Jenny could cover very, very quickly.
So we spent a full minute staring into the darkness, screaming “JENNY!” There was some highway noise around us, and I couldn’t imagine she was still close enough to hear us, but we kept yelling.
This wasn’t the worst nightmare I could foresee for this trip, but it was close. I had no idea what we could do. We certainly couldn’t just continue on our merry way, leaving her behind. We would never see her again; maybe no one would ever see her again.
It was even worse than if a dog was to get sick and needed to be hospitalized. In that case we could find a vet and leave the ill dog there. Then we could fly back whenever it was well enough to come home.
But this left us paralyzed, and the possibilities for dealing with it were not very appealing. We could load all of the dogs into two RVs, leaving one of them behind with a few people to search. Or we could leave one person behind, who could follow in a rented car if Jenny was found.
We were all stunned. The entire purpose of the trip was to care for these dogs, and even though it was nobody’s fault (except mine for forgetting the choke collars), we would always look back on the trip as a tragic failure.
The only positive aspect to this was that before we left, Debbie painstakingly prepared all new collars and tags, with our new contact information, for the dogs to wear. They had our Maine address and my cell phone number. It was a small consolation, but at least if Jenny was found, the person finding her would know whom to call.
There was nothing to do in the moment except begin walking in the direction that Jenny had run. I didn’t know what we could accomplish, but Erik and I started doing so. The others would stay behind, to take care of the dogs that we hadn’t lost.
And then suddenly I thought I saw some motion in the distance, and a few seconds later, Jenny went by us, a blur in the night. She headed straight for the closed door of the RV that she’d been riding in and started scratching at it, panting heavily but with a big smile on her face. She’d had a great adventure, but it was time to go home.
Everybody surrounded her, petting her, and someone attached another leash to her collar. But it wasn’t necessary; Jenny had no intention of running away. Been there, done that. She just wanted to get back with her friends, and Debbie opened the door and let her in.
Apparently, Jenny was enjoying the trip a hell of a lot more than I was.
The incident had left everybody shaken and had cost us more than an hour. We were all tired, and nobody was eager to spend another night trying to sleep on the vehicles. We asked the GPS to find us a nearby hotel, and fortunately there were a couple of them only six miles away.
We drove there, and the first one we reached had a NO VACANCY sign up in front. If it was full, it must have been cheap; this was not exactly a Four Seasons we’re talking about. Fortunately, the second one was nicer and had vacancies, so we parked in the rear of their parking lot, and Debbie and I went into the office.
We rented six rooms for eight people, since Joe and Terri would obviously share a room, as would Erik and Nick. We made plans to get together at six o’clock in the morning. That would give us five hours sleep, or I should say it would give them five hours sleep. Emmit, Debbie, and I would stay on the RVs, since there was no way we could leave the dogs alone. Any sleep we got would be a bonus.
I finally fell asleep for a couple of hours, and then reluctantly made the rounds at six o’clock. I was amazed at how everybody once again got up eager and ready to go. They claimed to be looking forward to the new day, even though it promised to be pretty much like the old day, which had not exactly been a barrel of laughs.
Cyndi Flores reported that it took a couple of hours for the room she was in to stop shaking, but she finally realized it was just the residual effect of being on the RV for so long.
I tipped the person at the front desk, and we all took turns taking showers in the rooms, then had coffee in the lobby. Once we’d accomplished this and were feeling human, we walked and fed the dogs, and we were back on the road by about seven thirty.
There was no way we were going to stick to our original schedule, so I called ahead and moved the room reservations in Maine back a day. The people at Damariscotta Lake Farm were completely amenable to the change, amazingly so since the five rooms we were taking represented all the rooms in their hotel.
Then I adjusted the flight reservations for people to get back home, a process that I expected to be a hassle, but which turned out not to be very difficult at all. When I was finished, all the flights were rescheduled for Saturday, and unless something went very wrong, we would definitely make it.
I hoped it would be the only time we’d have to make these changes. Jenny, for her part, promised not to cause any more problems.
Tommy and the Snake
One of the many awful aspects of the Katrina disaster was the effect on the animals in the New Orleans area. I doubt that anyone can forget the heart-wrenching stories of people being rescued but then being told that they could not take their pets with them. Many, many animals died in the storm and its aftermath, and a great many more were never reunited with their owners.
Rescue groups from all over the country descended on the area to provide assistance, and California groups were at the forefront. Dogs were brought back to California and other states to be placed in homes, a fact that I had mixe
d emotions about.
There was no question that these animals deserved to be saved, but the truth is that animal rescue, especially in California, is a zero-sum game. The number of homes willing to take in dogs is far less than the number of dogs needing those homes, so when one dog is rescued, another isn’t.
So I wasn’t entirely comfortable with the time and effort spent to put the Katrina dogs in a priority position, while just as worthy dogs already in California were being put down by the thousands. I understood and approved of the motivation, but it seemed unfair.
Nevertheless, when another group called us and asked us to take a small golden mix from the Katrina area, we did so. Nobody knew his name, and we called him Tommy. Tommy was less than forty pounds, probably eight years old, and in pretty good shape physically.
As in all adoptions of Katrina dogs, we had to agree that if the owner ever turned up and was searching for Tommy, we would give him back. We obviously had no problem with that, but it never happened. I always felt bad about that, because Tommy was a well-cared-for dog and must have had an owner or owners who loved him.
So Tommy joined the crew without a hitch. It was amazing, and it happened almost every time; after fifteen minutes, you could never tell which dog was the new one. They just seemed to blend in and be accepted by the group. It was nice to see Tommy, who had been through so much, living such a peaceful, safe existence.
One evening about six months after we got him, Tommy wasn’t around at dinnertime, a very unusual occurrence. I went out on the property to look for him and saw him coming up the path to the house. He seemed a little unsteady on his feet, but not too bad, and I walked back with him.
I tried to feed him when we got there, but he had no interest. He was also drooling, something I had never seen him do before, and when I went to wipe it off, I noticed that his neck was swollen.
Our vet’s office was closed, so I rushed Tommy to an emergency hospital, and they immediately knew what had happened: he had been bitten by a rattlesnake. Debbie and I knew that there were rattlesnakes in the area, but we had never seen one on our property. I hadn’t noticed the small marks on Tommy’s face. He must have seen the snake and went over to check it out, only to get bitten in the process.
Dogtripping: 25 Rescues, 11 Volunteers, and 3 RVs on Our Canine Cross-Country Adventure Page 15
