Lee Duncan, who rescued Rin Tin Tin in WWi France, poses with his offspring — who would star in everything from films to television shows to WWII propaganda shots. (Getty Images)
Rin Tin Tin’s offspring in WWII propaganda shots (
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They say every dog has his day, but Rin Tin Tin’s lasted half a century.
He surfaced with his tawny coat and expressive eyes at almost every important juncture of the 1900s — from World War I to the dawn of television — earning the reputation as the Zelig of pets.
At first, it seems overblown — even preposterous — to view a dog, whom most people under the age of 40 know only by name, as substantial enough to warrant a biography. Even author Susan Orlean never thought “in a million years” that she’d write about a book about a German shepherd.
But when Orlean, who wrote “The Orchid Thief” on which the Oscar-winning film “Adaptation” was based, came across a mention to “Rinty,” she began digging and was transfixed.
“I’m very interested in the distance between what seems familiar, but what is in fact very unfamiliar,” she says. “The things that seem ordinary, but when we look at them closely surprise us.”
Rinty achieved a kind of fame on parallel with Hollywood’s biggest legends. In the 1920s, Rinty was the Tom Cruise of his time, earning substantially more a week than his human counterparts. In the 1950s, his TV show “The Adventures of Rin Tin Tin” climbed in ratings faster than any show in the history of television.
But it was more than just money and fame that drew Orlean to write about the dog.
“The story just grew and grew until it was nearly unmanageable. I felt like I couldn’t write it without learning about World War I, without learning about the history of dog breeding, without learning about the Nazis,” she says.
It was the 12 generations of Rin Tin Tins — transitioning from war orphan to hero, silent-film star to yappy sidekick and finally from film to TV — that impressed her. She started to notice that “every time I turned around, there he was in the corner of the frame. It was really uncanny.”
ORlean writes that “Rin Tin Tin was born in 1918 and never died.”
That birth started with a man, Leland “Lee” Duncan, who grew up in a California orphanage, showing a early attachment to animals and a gift for teaching them.
In 1917, he reluctantly left behind his Airedale terrier to join the war, where he was assigned as a low ranking gunnery corporal.
Meanwhile, an estimated 16 million animals were deployed during the war, including horses, homing pigeons, oxen and of course dogs. Some served as messengers; others as “mercy” dogs who carried bags of medical supplies or provided physical comfort to dying men. “Cadaver” dogs were sent to survey the fields for the living, and “suicide” dogs were sent into battle strapped with ammunition.
German shepherds — which were developed as a breed in 1899 — caused a stir during and after the war. Just four years before the war, a German shepherd went for $10,000 (the equivalent of $215,000 today) though by wartime were common enough to be employed as canine troops.
Cpl. Duncan came across a bombed-out makeshift kennel built by the Germans for their dogs in the France.
The carcasses of 20 or more dogs, mostly killed by artillery shells, filled the place.
Miraculously, Duncan heard whimpering. Under the rubble, he found a German shepherd with a litter of five puppies — one of which he would take back to the United States and name Rin Tin Tin after a popular French doll that was a symbol of good luck.
Rin Tin Tin became a mascot for America, “an immigrant in a country of immigrants,” Orlean writes.
When Duncan returned to the US, he spent every moment training his dog. A friend invited him (and his dog) to a show, where he wanted to try out a new stopmotion camera. There, Rin Tin Tin made waves when he cleared an obstacle of almost 12 feet, an image captured on camera.
With thoughts of Hollywood, Duncan worked on a screenplay for Rin Tin Tin, while footage of his leaping dog was played in theaters across California as a popular news reel.
The breed was already gaining popularity in film and print. “German shepherds were as sought after as blonde starlets,” Orlean writes.
When Duncan finished his script, he shopped it around Hollywood and sold it as a silent film called “Where the North Begins” about a dog raised by wolves.
Overnight Rinty had become a celebrity. Warner Bros. studio scooped the canine up, paying him eight times as much as it paid its human actors — in one movie, he earned $1,000 per week, while the lead human, William Collier Jr., was paid $150.
In eight years, Duncan earned $5 million with Rin Tin Tin.
Warner Bros., which called Rinty “the mortgage lifter,” was worth $16 million in 1928 and just two years later, thanks in large part to the dog, was worth $200 million.
And Rinty had perks. A car and driver took him to work every day, and he got the key to New York City from Mayor Jimmy Walker. Thousands of fan letters arrived at the studio each week, which were returned with a set of paw prints.
He starred in 22 silent films and seven talkies from 1921 to 1929. In the movies, he water-skied, rode a horse, jumped over chasms, saved a kid from drowning, fed a baby lamb with a bottle and snowshoed. He was the front-runner to receive an Academy Award for Best Actor in 1927 until the judges took him off the ballot.
Behind the scenes, he was just a dog who liked to chase squirrels and skunks. He had a reputation for being unfriendly and was rumored to have bitten a few of his co-stars.
That the films were silent enabled dogs to become heroes in ways that talking pictures wouldn’t. Dogs were “unknowable but accessible, driven but egoless, strong but tragic, limited by muteness and animal vulnerability.”
But in 1929, when talking pictures took over, Duncan and Rinty were let go for good. One executive put it plainly: “Because dogs don’t talk.” Rinty was then a veteran at 12 years old.
Three years later, Rin Tin Tin passed away. Though he was no longer employed by the studio, every newspaper ran an obituary and radio stations around the country interrupted their programs to announce the news.
Rin Tin Tin had fathered 48 puppies, but Lee had not even trained one — possibly believing that his famous dog would live forever.
Rin Tin Tin Jr. — who was disliked by Duncan for being “blank” and “needle-nosed” — toured hospitals and appeared in four movies, but it wasn’t until Rin Tin Tin III that he became a star again.
Meanwhile, the role of a dog as a pet was also changing. Whereas dogs were once viewed as a step above livestock, they were now becoming part of the family.
Lee capitalized on it, becoming the first “Dog Whisperer.”
“Lee was an early proponent that you have to train yourself to train your dog. You have to think like a dog. That was a pretty unusual way of thinking at that time,” Orlean writes.
Rin Tin Tin III(which Orlean says may have not been related to the original ) knew 500 different commands and starred in western “Law of the Wolf.” But his biggest role was as a spokesperson for Dogs for Defense, a World War II outreach program in which the public was asked to donate dogs to the war effort.
Although he mostly greeted movie stars and helped with promotion, he also was used in dangerous tests at Camp Haan in California, such as wearing a canine gas mask in a gas chamber and carrying wire across a course mined with live explosives.
Back at home, the movie “Lassie Come Home” starring a female border collie became a big hit in 1943. Duncan and company viewed it as a sign and made “The Return of Rin Tin Tin” with Rin Tin Tin III in 1947.
Rin Tin Tin IV would later become the face of a popular TV show seven years later, catapulting Rinty into another round of celebrity.
It was the right time to make the transition from film to TV. In the mid-’40s, there were only 17,000 television sets in the country, but by the end of the decade there were 250,000 new sets sold a month.
“The Adventures of Rin Tin Tin,” a story about a boy and a dog in Arizona in the late 1800s, aired in 1954 to 9 million (out of 30 million) television sets in the US. The show climbed in ratings faster than any other in history.
The TV show, which was geared to kids, was rougher than its pastoral “Lassie” counterpart. But still it was a serious departure from the first Rin Tin Tin of the 1920s. Instead of an one of a kind dog, he “was a model” and “the dog you could aspire to have,” she writes.
Funny enough, it seems that Rin Tin Tin IV didn’t even star in the show because “he wasn’t good enough.”
“I have it on pretty good authority that they were not Lee’s dogs,” Orlean told The Post.
But it didn’t matter. Rin Tin Tin had become a franchise, a business, more than just one dog. He had done what he had sought out to do: make sure that Rin Tin Tin was immortal.
The last episode of “The Adventures of Rin Tin Tin” aired in 1959 to lackluster ratings. A year later, Duncan died, without ever seeing his life story made into a feature film — a project he desperately championed since discovering his German Shepherd in that bombed-out kennel.
As a seeming final nail in Rin Tin Tin’s celebrity coffin, in the ’60 and ’70s, German shepherds began to lose their appeal as pets, because of the dog’s close association with the police.
When photographer Charles Moore shot a picture of dogs attacking civil rights protestors in Birmingham, Ala., all hope of getting the most famous dog in the world back on the big screen or any screen at all seemed dashed.
There are still Rin Tin Tins. A woman in Texas who bought several puppies from Duncan now says that she has Rin Tin Tin XII. But lawsuits over who had the rights to Rin Tin Tin’s legacy raged throughout the ‘’80s and ’90s.
The story of Rin Tin Tin’s legacy had gotten “ridiculously complicated” because “Rin Tin Tin is a character, as well as a real dog, it’s uniquely complicated,” Orlean says. “The story is really about love and devotion to an ideal and that’s a bigger story than a pretty dog who can do tricks.”