“O.K.,” Miss Copestake replied.
“If things go like this next week, we won’t have any graduation, I warn you!” Miss Saunders shouted after her retreating novices. “Now I’d like the advanced class out here, if I can manage to have a little peace and quiet.” Then, slamming down her microphone on a table in front of her and lighting a cigarette, she remarked sotto-voce to a friend standing nearby, “Well, poodles are intelligent, anyway. I often like to remind myself of that.”
| 1951 |
A PREFACE TO DOGS
JAMES THURBER
As soon as a wife presents her husband with a child, her capacity for worry becomes acuter: she hears more burglars, she smells more things burning, she begins to wonder, at the theatre or the dance, whether her husband left his service revolver in the nursery. This goes on for years and years. As the child grows older, the mother’s original major fear—that the child was exchanged for some other infant at the hospital—gives way to even more magnificent doubts and suspicions: she suspects that the child is not bright, she doubts that it will be happy, she is sure that it will become mixed up with the wrong sort of people.
This insistence of parents on dedicating their lives to their children is carried on year after year in the face of all that dogs have done, and are doing, to prove how much happier the parent-child relationship can become, if managed without sentiment, worry, or dedication. Of course, the theory that dogs have a saner family life than humans is an old one, and it was in order to ascertain whether the notion is pure legend or whether it is based on observable fact that I have for four years made a careful study of the family life of dogs. My conclusions entirely support the theory that dogs have a saner family life than people.
In the first place, the husband leaves on a woodchuck-hunting expedition just as soon as he can, which is very soon, and never comes back. He doesn’t write, makes no provision for the care or maintenance of his family, and is not liable to prosecution because he doesn’t. The wife doesn’t care where he is, never wonders if he is thinking about her, and although she may start at the slightest footstep, doesn’t do so because she is hoping against hope that it is he. No lady dog has ever been known to set her friends against her husband, or put detectives on his trail.
This same lack of sentimentality is carried out in the mother dog’s relationship to her young. For six weeks—but only six weeks—she looks after them religiously, feeds them (they came clothed), washes their ears, fights off cats, old women, and wasps that come nosing around, makes the bed, and rescues the puppies when they crawl under the floor boards of the barn or get lost in an old boot. She does all these things, however, without fuss, without that loud and elaborate show of solicitude and alarm which a woman displays in rendering some exaggerated service to her child.
At the end of six weeks, the mother dog ceases to lie awake at night harking for ominous sounds; the next morning she snarls at the puppies after breakfast, and routs them all out of the house. “This is forever,” she informs them, succinctly. “I have my own life to live, automobiles to chase, grocery boys’ shoes to snap at, rabbits to pursue. I can’t be washing and feeding a lot of big six-weeks-old dogs any longer. That phase is definitely over.” The family life is thus terminated, and the mother dismisses the children from her mind—frequently as many as eleven at one time—as easily as she did her husband. She is now free to devote herself to her career and to the novel and astonishing things of life.
In the case of one family of dogs that I observed, the mother, a large black dog with long ears and a keen zest for living, tempered only by an immoderate fear of toads and turtles, kicked ten puppies out of the house at the end of six weeks to the day—it was a Monday. Fortunately for my observations, the puppies had no place to go, since they hadn’t made any plans, and so they just hung around the barn, now and again trying to patch things up with their mother. She refused, however, to entertain any proposition leading to a resumption of home life, pointing out firmly that she was, by inclination, a chaser of bicycles and a hearth-fire watcher, both of which activities would be insupportably cluttered up by the presence of ten helpers. The bicycle-chasing field was overcrowded, anyway, she explained, and the hearth-fire-watching field even more so. “We could chase parades together,” suggested one of the dogs, but she refused to be touched, snarled, and drove him off.
It is only for a few weeks that the cast-off puppies make overtures to their mother in regard to the reestablishment of a home. At the end of that time, by some natural miracle that I am unable clearly to understand, the puppies suddenly one day don’t recognize their mother any more, and she doesn’t recognize them. It is as if they had never met, and is a fine idea, giving both parties a clean break and a chance for a fresh start. Once, some months after this particular family had broken up and the pups had been sold, one of them, named Liza, was brought back to “the old nest” for a visit. The mother dog of course didn’t recognize the puppy and promptly bit her in the hip. They had to be separated, each grumbling something about you never know what kind of dogs you’re going to meet. Here was no silly, affecting reunion, no sentimental tears, no bitter intimations of neglect, or forgetfulness, or desertion.
If a pup is not sold or given away, but is brought up in the same household with its mother, the two will fight bitterly, sometimes twenty or thirty times a day, for maybe a month. This is very trying to whoever owns the dogs, particularly if they are sentimentalists who grieve because mother and child don’t know each other. The condition finally clears up: the two dogs grow to tolerate each other and, beyond growling a little under their breath about how it takes all kinds of dogs to make up a world, get along fairly well together when their paths cross. I know of one mother dog and her half-grown daughter who sometimes spend the whole day together hunting woodchucks, although they don’t speak. Their association is not sentimental, but practical, and is based on the fact that it is safer to hunt woodchucks in pairs than alone. These two dogs start out together in the morning, without a word, and come back together in the evening, when they part, without saying good night, whether they have had any luck or not. Avoidance of farewells, which are always stuffy and sometimes painful, is another thing in which it seems to me dogs have better sense than people.
Well, one day the daughter, a dog about ten months old, seemed, by some prank of nature which again I am unable clearly to understand, for a moment or two, to recognize her mother, after all those months of oblivion. The two had just started out after a fat woodchuck who lives in the orchard. Something got wrong with the daughter’s ear—a long, floppy ear. “Mother,” she said, “I wish you’d look at my ear.” Instantly the other dog bristled and growled. “I’m not your mother,” she said, “I’m a woodchuck-hunter.” The daughter grinned. “Well,” she said, just to show that there were no hard feelings, “that’s not my ear, it’s a motorman’s glove.”
| 1932 |
“For Heaven’s sake, why don’t you go outdoors and trace something?”
THE DOG STAR
SUSAN ORLEAN
Rin Tin Tin was born on a battlefield in the Meuse Valley, in eastern France, in September, 1918. The exact date isn’t certain, but when Leland Duncan found the puppy, on September 15th, he was still blind and nursing, and was nearly bald. The Meuse Valley was a terrible place to be born that year. In most other circumstances, the valley—plush and undulating, checkered with dairy farms—would have been inviting, but it rolls to the German border, and in 1918 it was at the center of the First World War.
Lee Duncan was a country boy, a third-generation Californian. One of his grandmothers was a Cherokee, and one grandfather had come west with Brigham Young. The family ranched, farmed, scratched out some kind of living. Lee’s mother, Elizabeth, had married his father, Grant Duncan, when she was eighteen, in 1891. Lee was born in 1893, followed, three years later, by his sister, Marjorie. The next year, Grant took off and was never heard from again. Lee was a great keeper of notes and letters and m
emos and documents. In thousands of pages, which include a detailed memoir—a rough draft for the autobiography he planned to write and the movie he hoped would be made about his life—there is only one reference to his father, and even that is almost an aside.
After Grant abandoned Elizabeth, she was unable to care for her children. She left them in an orphanage in Oakland. Neither she nor the children knew if they would ever be reunited. It wasn’t until three years later that she would reclaim them.
In 1917, Duncan joined the Army. He was assigned to the 135th Aero Squadron, as a gunnery corporal, and was sent to the French front. His account of this time is soldierly and understated, but he vividly recalled the morning of September 15, 1918, when he was sent to inspect the ruins of a German encampment. “I came upon what might have been headquarters for some working dogs,” he wrote. As he strolled around, he saw a hellish image of slaughter: about a dozen dogs, killed by artillery shells. But hiding nearby was a starving, frantic German shepherd female and a litter of five puppies.
From the moment he found the dogs, Duncan considered himself a lucky man. He marvelled at the story, turning it over like a shiny stone, watching it catch the light. He thought about that luck when it came to naming the two puppies he eventually kept for himself—the prettiest ones, a male and a female. He called them Rin Tin Tin and Nanette, after the good-luck charms that were popular with soldiers in France—a pair of dolls, made of yarn or silk, named in honor of two young lovers who, it was said, had survived a bombing in a Paris railway station at the start of the war.
In May, 1919, after the Armistice, Duncan returned to the United States. It would have been easier to leave the “war orphans” behind, but, he later wrote, “I felt there was something about their lives that reminded me of my own life. They had crept right into a lonesome place in my life and had become a part of me.” Before they reached California, however, Nanette developed pneumonia and died, and Duncan got another German shepherd puppy, named Nanette II, to keep Rin Tin Tin company. After Duncan had been back home for a while in Los Angeles, where Elizabeth was then living, he began to feel restless and anxious. He experienced spasms, probably as a result of his war service, and he found it difficult to work. His one pleasure was to train Rinty, as he called him, to do tricks.
By then, Rinty, a rambunctious, bossy dog, was nearly full-grown. He had lost his puppy fluffiness; his coat was lustrous and dark, nearly black, with gold marbling on the legs and chin and chest. His tail was as bushy as a squirrel’s. He wasn’t overly tall or broad, his legs weren’t particularly muscular or long, but he was powerful and nimble, as light on his feet as a mountain goat. His ears were comically large, tulip-shaped, and set far apart on a wide skull. His face was more arresting than beautiful, his expression pitying and generous and a little sorrowful, as if he were viewing with charity and resignation the whole enterprise of living.
German shepherds were a relatively new breed, and very new in this country, but their popularity was growing quickly. Duncan got to know other shepherd fanciers, and helped found the Shepherd Dog Club of California. He decided to enter Rinty in a show at the Ambassador Hotel, in Los Angeles. An acquaintance named Charley Jones asked if he could come along. He had just developed a type of slow-motion camera, and he wanted to try it out by filming Rinty.
Rin Tin Tin and a female shepherd named Marie were competing in a jump-off for first place in the “working dog” part of the show. The bar was set at eleven and a half feet. The judge and show officials gathered beside it for a close look. Marie took her turn, and flew up and over. Rin Tin Tin then squared off for his leap. “Charley Jones had his camera on Rinty as he made his jump and as he came down on the other side,” Duncan wrote. The dog had cleared the bar at almost twelve feet, sailing over the head of the judge and several others, and winning the competition.
Something about watching Rin Tin Tin being filmed stuck with Duncan. In the weeks that followed, he was seized by a desire to get the dog to Hollywood. “I was so excited over the motion picture idea that I found myself thinking of it night and day,” he wrote.
In 1922, Duncan married a wealthy socialite named Charlotte Anderson, who owned a stable and a champion horse called Nobleman. The couple had probably met at a dog or a horse show. Still, the marriage was curious. Duncan was good-looking and was always described as a likable man, but he spent all of his time with his dog. It’s hard to imagine him presenting an alluring package to a woman like Anderson, who was sophisticated, older than Duncan—he was twenty-eight, she was in her mid-thirties—and had been married before. It’s even harder to picture Duncan having a romantic life; he made no mention of it, or of Anderson, in his memoir.
Duncan’s devotion was to his dog. When he wasn’t training Rinty to follow direction—which he did for hours every day—he took him to Poverty Row, in Hollywood, where the less established studios were. The two of them walked up and down the street, knocking on doors, trying to interest someone in using Rinty in a film. This wasn’t as implausible as it might sound: in those years, bit players were often plucked from the crowds that gathered at the studio gates. Moreover, in 1921, a German shepherd named Strongheart had made a spectacular and profitable appearance in The Silent Call. Strongheart was the first German shepherd to star in a Hollywood film, and his grave, gallant manner and the still-novel look of German shepherds caused a sensation. The dogs were now as sought after in Hollywood as blond starlets. Duncan probably brushed past other young men with their own trained German shepherds, all inspired by Strongheart, as he went from door to door.
Then Duncan got a break: he secured a small part for Rinty in a melodrama called The Man from Hell’s River. Rinty—who is not in the cast list but is mentioned in the Variety review as “Rin Tan”—plays a sled-dog team leader belonging to Pierre, a Canadian Mountie.
In time, Rin Tin Tin made twenty-three silent films. Copies of only six of those films are known to exist today. The Man from Hell’s River is not among them. All we have is the movie’s “shot list,” which was a guide for the film editor. Parts of it read like a sort of silent-film found poetry:
Long shot dog on tree stump
Long shot wolf
Long shot prairie
Long shot dog runs and exits
Long shot deer
Long shot dog
Medium shot girl
Close-up shot little monkey.
And, at the end:
Med shot dog and puppies
Med close-up more puppies
Med shot people and dogs.
Rinty was soon cast in another film, My Dad, a run-of-the-mill “snow,” which is what silents set in wintry locations were called. It, too, was a small part, but, for the first time, he was given a film credit. In the cast list, he appeared thus:
Rin-Tin-Tin…………By Himself.
Finally, Duncan got through the door at Warner Bros. One of the smallest studios, Warner Bros. had been founded in 1918 by four brothers from Youngstown, Ohio, who set up shop in a drafty barn on Sunset Boulevard. That day, Harry Warner was directing a scene that included a wolf. The animal had been borrowed from the zoo and was not performing well. According to James English’s 1949 book, The Rin Tin Tin Story, Duncan rubbed dirt into Rinty’s fur to make him look like a wolf, and persuaded Warner to give Rinty a chance to try the scene. Rinty performed brilliantly, and Warner liked what he saw. He agreed to look at a script that Duncan had been working on for Rinty, entitled “Where the North Begins.” While writing it, Duncan had studied the dog’s facial expressions. He was convinced that Rinty could be taught to act a part—not just to carry a story through action but “to register emotions and portray a real character with its individual loves, loyalties, and hates.” A few weeks later, Duncan got a letter from the studio: Warner wanted to produce his screenplay and cast Rin Tin Tin in the lead.
Production began almost immediately, with Chester Franklin, an accomplished director, in charge. Claire Adams, Walter McGrail, and Pat Hartiga
n—silent-film stalwarts—were cast opposite Rinty. The film was shot mostly in the High Sierras. “It didn’t seem like work,” Duncan wrote. “Even Rinty was bubbling over with happiness out here in the woods and snow.” Rinty sometimes bubbled too much, chasing foxes into snowdrifts, and, once, attacking a porcupine, which filled his face with quills. Otherwise, Duncan was proud of the dog’s performance, which included a twelve-foot jump—higher than the one at the Ambassador Hotel.
To advertise the film, Warner Bros. distributed promotional material to theatre owners which included ads, guidelines for publicity stunts, and feature stories for local newspapers. The features were meant to make the filming of the movie seem almost as dramatic as the movie:
HUNGRY WOLVES SURROUND CAMP
Movie Actors in Panic When Pack Bays at Them
GREAT RISK OF LIFE IN FILMING PICTURE
THE MOVIES NO BED OF ROSES
Chester Franklin, Director, Tells Hard-Luck Story of Blizzard.
The publicity stunts, which studio marketing people referred to as “exploitation,” included suggestions that theatre owners “get a crate and inside it put a puppy or a litter of them” for the lobby (“You will be sure to get a crowd”); partner with a Marine recruiter and place signs outside the recruiting office saying “WHERE THE NORTH BEGINS AT THE [BLANK] THEATRE is a thrilling picture of red-blooded adventure. Your adventure will begin when you join the marines and see the world”; or, as one, titled “HOLDING UP PEDESTRIANS,” proposed, “Get a man to walk along the principal streets of the city stopping pedestrians and asking them the question, ‘Where Does the North Begin?’ and upon their answering (or even not answering) he can … tell them it begins at your playhouse.”
The Big New Yorker Book of Dogs Page 23
