They won’t sell you out to the tabloids. They stand by you even when the audiences won’t. They don’t take 10%. Yep, dogs are truly a star’s best friend.
The new coffee-table book “Hollywood Dogs” shows how tinseltown went to the mutts. Some of the photos in the book highlight dogs with starring roles, like Rin Tin Tin, Lassie and Toto, but many of the images — including the ones featured here — show actors with their own pets.
As gallery owner William Secord notes in the book’s forward, the images mirror the trends of ownership at the time. Boxers like the one owned by Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall were gaining in popularity, having only been imported from Germany in significant numbers in the 1930s. And the cocker spaniel, a favorite of starlets, was the most popular breed in America from 1941-52.
These pictures were taken by the studios to help humanize their stars, as author Robert Dance notes in the book’s introduction. “Given the unpredictability of even the best-trained dog, spontaneity emerges in the most carefully staged of photographs,” he writes. “No stranger to portrait sessions, Elizabeth Taylor was attractively caught off-guard when she decided to bathe her Cocker Spaniel, Amy, in front of the camera. Being upstaged by a dog was always acceptable, contrary to the unwritten rule of Vaudeville in which performers schemed never to follow kids or dog acts on the bill.”