He finally got the puppies on the boat. His captain, Otto Sandman, intervened and helped Lee find a more sympathetic officer at the Remount Service, who issued the necessary papers. Lee was ecstatic; he told Sandman that if he ever bred the dogs, he would send him a puppy. At last, he boarded the ship. He had his gear, a few war trophies—his Bosch Magnetos, two small dueling pistols given to him by an old lady in Toul who had done his laundry during the war, a propeller, and a clock taken from a German Fokker plane—and his puppies, Rin Tin Tin and Nanette.
Rin Tin Tin’s life turned out to be extraordinary, not just because things went his way but because so often they came close to going the other way. At his birth, he had survived a bombing that had killed many other dogs; then he had been found by someone who was eager to take care of him; he could so easily have been left behind in France, but he wasn’t. Lee saw no accident in any of this. He believed that the dog was destined for greatness, and he was lucky to be his human guide and companion.
8.
I went to the Meuse Valley not long ago and spent a week wandering around Toul and Verdun and Fluiry to see where Rin Tin Tin was born. I don’t usually visit the birthplace of celebrities and stars, and have never understood why so many people do. I assume it is because they think it might supply some clue about who the person was and who they became, or maybe the desire is actually more primitive—an urge to absorb something in the air, as if the place itself breathed out the deep essence of the person, the way a volcano vents the deep essence of the earth. Maybe it also provides the idea of a beginning, proof that something large and fully realized was once a pinpoint of an event. Seeing a beginning allows you to retract time like a measuring tape. That was something I wanted to experience about Rin Tin Tin, especially because I was still adjusting to the idea that he had been a real dog and not just a character, which was all I had ever known him to be. Once I stumbled into his real story, I wanted every bit of evidence that he had been born, and lived, and died.
Before I went to France, I thought it wise to find Fluiry on a map, so I would know where I was headed. I could find no such place. I searched for it on Google and Mapquest and finally on a real paper map, but no matter how closely I examined the snarl of little thready French roads, all those primary and secondary routes with their hash of letters and numbers and the long, multi-hyphenated names of tiny towns, I couldn’t find it. The war had redrawn the map of the region: many villages, including the red-roofed market towns of Beaumont, Bezonvaux, and Ornes, had been so wrecked by the German assault that they were consigned to history, never to be rebuilt; the government proclaimed that these villages had “died for France.” A 1919 French law granted each of the ghost villages a town committee and a president, similar to a town council and a mayor. But Fluiry wasn’t on the list, so I decided to just go to the Meuse Valley and try my luck.
It was late summer, when the light was liquid and everything green was etched with gold. I took a train to Nancy, an elegant old city of fountains and figurine shops, and then drove to Toul, a few kilometers away, assuming that someone in Toul could direct me from there. It was midafternoon, midweek, midmonth. Toul was as quiet as a soundstage: every fixture of life was in place but every door was locked, every window shuttered. Finally, I happened on a café near a small town square with a dribbling fountain. A half-dozen people were having wine and coffee around a small round table; they had the brash, happy drunkenness of employees who had just been unexpectedly given the afternoon off. All of them were smoking so furiously that it looked as if they were sitting around a small campfire. I sat at a table nearby and ordered a coffee. After a minute I gathered my nerve and my high school French and leaned over to ask if any of them knew how to get to Fluiry.
They sucked their breath almost as one, and then they frowned at me. “Fluiry?” one of them repeated.
“Yes, Fluiry,” I said, trying to go lightly on the r—not easy for an Ohioan, but I tried.
“Fluiry. Fluiry?”
“Yes, Fluiry,” I said. I had a copy of Lee’s notes with me. I held out the pages and read the part where he had written, “I had been sent to Fluiry on the morning of the fifteenth.”
At first, they shook their heads. My heart skipped. No one spoke. The fountain dribbled. At last, one of the smokers put his cigarette down and beamed at me. “Oh,” he said, triumphantly, “you mean Flirey!”
Another one gasped. “Oh, oui, oui! Flirey!” I could discern no difference at all in what they were saying but they were now congratulating themselves as if they’d cracked an Aztec code. Then they all lit new cigarettes and poured wine and went on with their afternoon recess.
“Excuse me,” I said, after a moment, enunciating as carefully as I could. “Do you know how to get to Flirey?”
The road to Flirey rose and dipped along a ridge, the soft fields falling away in every direction, the huge churches perched here and there, looming and gloomy and dark. Just outside of Toul I passed a hippie couple walking on the shoulder of the road carrying a million bags and packs and baskets and boxes—they looked more like a parade float than actual people. A raggedy dog ambled along with them; hard to tell what he was at first, but when I glanced back at them in my rearview mirror, I could see that the dog had the high forehead and erect ears of a German shepherd. A minute after I passed the hippie couple, I slowed for a leathery old farmer walking with his dog. It was also a German shepherd, glossy and muscular, lashing the farmer’s legs with his thick tail as they strode along.
I knew that seeing these dogs was merely coincidence—that since I’d begun thinking about Rin Tin Tin, I was seeing him everywhere, and this after so many years of feeling like I never saw German shepherds anymore. It was as if the sheer force of thinking about the dog had made him materialize, as if I had been seeding the clouds with memories of Rin Tin Tin until it rained.
I had Bruce Springsteen on a German radio station, the road skimming along beside quiet fields and quiet houses and the occasional cow, and then, suddenly, I was in Flirey.
It was nothing much, a cluster of fawn brown houses, a monument honoring General Pershing’s army, a schoolyard, a stop sign. At the center of town there was an informational plaque explaining Flirey’s history of ruination and its ever-changing name. As if to try to outrun its misfortune, the town had renamed itself time and again—Fleury, Fleury-aux-Bois, Fluirey, Fluiry—which is why it had been so hard to find on maps.
I drove down an alley off the main road. The village houses went on for a short distance, and then the alley narrowed and the houses petered out. Off to my right was an open expanse, empty except for a rusty soccer goal, a life-sized plastic clown bobbing gently on a rusty spring, and one large white sheep, his mouth pressed firmly to the ground, chopping at the grass around the soccer goal. Even if this was the right place, the field Lee had been sent to inspect, the remains of that kennel probably would have since sunk beneath ninety years of accumulated soil and gravel and grass. I sat for a while, watching the sheep work his way industriously around the soccer goal, trying to imagine what it had been like in 1918, which was of course unimaginable, and waiting for someone walking by to lead me to a spot and say, “This happened here,” as if that alone would make it come alive again.
But no one appeared other than two schoolkids, who skittered like mice across the alley and into a dark doorway, moving so lightly that they didn’t even leave a wake of disturbed molecules behind. This field, a smooth green square in a small town, might have been the starting point, where the puppy was found, and from here everything else happened, history and stories unspooling, lives changing, from a point that had long since disappeared. When the sheep finally finished his assault on the grass and raised his head, I started the car and headed for Verdun.
I had come to see where Rin Tin Tin was born, but what you see in the Meuse Valley, besides clusters of houses and nice old farms and a patchwork of fields, is many, many cemeteries. The dead are all soldiers from World War I. I passed a Ger
man cemetery at Andilly with 33,000 graves; a Franco-British cemetery at Choloy-Ménillot with many thousands more. The Douaumont Ossuary at Verdun, a terrifying gray building shaped like a jumbo jet plunging nose-first into the ground, holds the remains of 130,000 unidentified soldiers, the jumbled bones of French and German boys laid to rest according to where they were found on the battlefield, their remains commingled and then parceled out, like an annotated map of the dead. On the outskirts of Flirey, I pulled over onto the side of the road just to stretch my legs. When I got out of the car and looked around, I realized I had parked in front of yet another cemetery, the Necropolis Nationale, a pie-shaped plot cut into a mossy hillside with 4,379 French soldiers’ graves. After reading some of the tombstones, I realized that many of the soldiers had died on the same day in 1918.
A few miles past the necropolis, I drove by an ornate iron gate trimmed with gold medallions. It was so striking and singular in the middle of these farm fields that I doubled back to look at it, thinking it might be a grand estate or a country club. It turned out to be the St. Mihiel American Cemetery, a burial ground operated by the American Battle Monuments Commission, which oversees American military cemeteries in foreign countries. There are eight American military cemeteries in Europe. St. Mihiel is the third largest: forty acres, four thousand dead. The cemetery director, a stout, cheerful man named Bobby Bell, came out of his office to greet me when I walked in. He told me he had worked at a number of the American cemeteries in Europe—two others in France, one in England, and one in the Netherlands. He said he liked St. Mihiel most of all, and he showed me around with as much enthusiasm as if he were trying to sell me a plot.
The constant presence of death I was encountering while searching for Rin Tin Tin’s birthplace was starting to depress me, but the cemetery at St. Mihiel was actually one of the most beautiful places I’ve ever been. The crosses on the graves were a luminous white, lined up with an almost Moroccan symmetry against the geometry of freshly mowed grass and sharply sheared boxwood hedges and soldierly rows of linden trees. The names on the graves had another sort of symmetry, matching boys with their home states: Howard Lewis of Colorado; Vincenzo Brandolini of Connecticut; Jens Larsen of Iowa; Pinckney Rouse of North Carolina; Stanley Stubensz of Michigan. It was a mathematical sensation, walking up and down the green rows, the late light throwing long lines across the flat field, two graves per stride, fifty strides per row. The steady repetition was like a drumbeat, hypnotizing. I walked on and on, reading name after name, soothed by the rhythm of my steps, the soft spongy ground yielding under my feet, and by the flashing white of the crosses as I passed them, the whoosh of the wind tossing the linden trees’ leaves with exaggerated drama, the way little girls toss their hair. At last I stopped at the end of a row, in front of a statue of a young army officer in a field uniform, trench helmet in hand. Above the figure was engraved “Il dort loin des siens dans la douce terre de France”—He sleeps far from his family in the gentle land of France. Beneath that, on the pedestal, it said:
BLESSED ARE THEY THAT
HAVE THE HOME LONGING
FOR THEY SHALL GO HOME
9.
As I drove away in the dusky light, I kept seeing the tailored rows of graves, those tiny repositories of stories that are hardly remembered, all those sad and broken boys resting in the velvet lawn of St. Mihiel, forever. Almost one hundred years of resting there, enough time to be forgotten, the lives that continued after theirs ended having now filled up the space that opened up when they died, so their absence now has been lacquered over, smoothed out, almost invisible.
What lasts? What lingers? What is snagged by the brambles of time, and what slips through and disappears? What leaves only a little dent in the world, the soft sunken green grave, the scribble on a scrap of paper, the memory that is bleached by time and then vanishes bit by bit each day?
Could it be that we fill out our lives, experience all that we experience, and then simply leave this world and are forgotten? I can’t bear thinking that existence is so insubstantial, a stone thrown in a pond that leaves no ripple. Maybe all that we do in life is just a race against this idea of disappearing. Having children, making money, doing good, being in love, building something, discovering something, inventing something, learning something, collecting something, knowing something: these are the pursuits that make us feel like our lives aren’t flimsy, that they build up into stories that are about something achieved, grown, found, built, loved, or even lost.
Thanks to Lee Duncan, Rin Tin Tin left a great deal behind—in, among other places, the municipal museum in Riverside, California. When I first visited there, three years before my trip to Flirey, I was startled to discover no fewer than fourteen boxes of Lee Duncan’s papers and Rin Tin Tin memorabilia, meticulously organized and indexed and mostly untouched. It was like coming upon a gift that had been selected for me and then sat waiting almost half a century for me to come by and open it.
That day at St. Mihiel, I found myself thinking about why I had been drawn to this particular story, at this moment, when I could have chosen any story to pursue. I knew that I loved the narrative of Rin Tin Tin because it contained so many stories within it: it was a tale of lost families, and of identity, and also of the way we live with animals; it was a story of luck, both good and bad, and the half turns that life takes all the time. It was a story of war as well as a story of amusement. It was an account of how we create heroes and what we want from them. It laid out, through the story of Rin Tin Tin, the whole range of devotion—to ideas and to a companion—as well as the pure, half-magical devotion an animal can have to a person.
It was also the story of an extraordinary journey—across land and sea, in war and in peacetime, from poverty to wealth and back again, from obscurity to fame—and, from there, into the murky world of the once famous and almost obscure. It was also a journey through time. For me, the story of Rin Tin Tin let me cast a line into the pool of my childhood memories, an undertaking that felt more urgent every day I walked farther away from the edge of that pool. I began the story of Rin Tin Tin soon after my father had died and my son had been born; the idea of continuity was suddenly very real to me. Reeling Rin Tin Tin into the present would not only revive his story but also perhaps clarify my own—the story of who I am and how I happened to become the person I seem to be.
In truth, though, this pursuit had begun not with a story or an idea but with a feeling. I had come upon a mention of Rin Tin Tin quite by accident while researching another story, and my reaction was so strong that it made me feel as though I had been waiting for decades just to be reminded of him again. And after my visit to St. Mihiel, a monument to what might otherwise crumble to nothing, I began to understand that what drew me to Rin Tin Tin most of all was his permanence—how he had managed to linger in the minds of so many people for so long, when so much else shines for a moment only and then finally fades away. He was something you could dream about. He could leap twelve feet, and he could leap through time.
THE SILVER SCREEN
1.
It took fifteen days to cross the Atlantic. The troops were then taken to a reentry camp, where they were debriefed and deloused. Many society women worked as camp hostesses, welcoming back the troops and tending to minor needs. Lee and his shipmates were sent to the reentry camp in Hempstead, Long Island; one of the hostesses there was Mrs. Leo Wanner, the deputy sheriff of Nassau County and also, coincidentally, a breeder of German shepherds. A few months before Lee’s ship landed, one of the buildings at Wanner’s kennel, Meadow-brook, had burned down. Seven of her dogs were killed, including her champion, Filax, whom she had loaned to the Belgian army and who had come back to Long Island after he was wounded.
Wanner met Lee while she was greeting soldiers at the camp, and of course they discovered their mutual affection for German shepherds. The troops were to be interned at the camp for ten days, and Lee had nowhere to keep his puppies. Wanner offered to take care of them until he was disc
harged. When Lee was ready to head home to California, however, he received word from Meadowbrook that Nanette had developed pneumonia and was too weak for the long train ride to California. Lee reluctantly agreed to leave her at Meadowbrook, on the promise that the kennel manager would ship her west as soon as she improved. In the meantime, Wanner offered Lee a Meadowbrook puppy to keep Rin Tin Tin company on the train ride home.
In his memoir, Lee wrote that the Meadowbrook kennel manager was “none other than the famous B.B.B. of Hollywood and picture fame.” I could never track down a Hollywood dog trainer with those initials, but Lee was obviously impressed by whoever B.B.B. was, and this might have been the first moment the idea of training a dog for the movies started to form in his mind.
Rin Tin Tin—Rinty, as Lee called him—was a bossy young dog, and when he was introduced to the new puppy from Meadowbrook, he bit her on the ear and left her with a permanent scar. In spite of this rough introduction, she became his companion and eventually his mate. Rinty’s sister Nanette died shortly after Lee left Long Island, so Lee decided to name the new puppy Nanette II in her memory. When Rin Tin Tin became an international star, Nanette was often referred to as his wife.