Neither of the Benitezes had ever heard of Strongheart before they bought the house. When they first moved in, a few neighbors told them that the house had belonged to Rin Tin Tin, but when they researched it, they discovered the mistake and found the house’s connection to Strongheart. Since then, they have been trying to collect as much Strongheart memorabilia as they can, although there is little of it to be found. Louise showed me what she had managed to dig up: some newspaper clippings and snapshots; a photograph of Strongheart with several koalas sitting on his back, taken in an animal sanctuary in Australia; and a copy of Screen Almanac, featuring a picture of Strongheart with Lady Jule in the bridal suite of a Manhattan hotel.
I had been under the impression that Murfin lived in a mansion. She was a very successful screenwriter, and after her divorce from Trimble she married a prominent actor, Donald Crisp. She was a woman of means. Every description of her house made it sound a lot grander than the Benitezes’ stucco cottage. I didn’t know how to ask about this discrepancy without sounding insulting. Then I remembered an interview in which Trimble said that Murfin’s house was on Ivarene, which was a block away from the Benitezes’ house. I mentioned this to Louise. She looked at me for a moment and then started to laugh. “This wasn’t Murfin’s house!” she exclaimed. “This was the doghouse! This was Strongheart’s house! Murfin’s house was up the hill!”
She pulled out a photograph of an elegant white house with a formal driveway and an imposing front entryway, set on a hill with no other house in sight. Murfin’s nearest neighbor, well out of view, had been Roy Rogers. The photograph must have been taken when Murfin and Trimble were having a party, because the house was lit up and there were black Ford Model As and Chrysler Maxwells parked all along the road. Murfin’s property had extended from the mansion down the long hillside to the Benitezes’ cottage. The mansion is gone now, and something else has been built in its place, but the doghouse, which is as grand as a doghouse could possibly be, remains. As I was leaving, Louise told me that she hoped to write a children’s book about their unusual circumstances. She said she was planning to call it I Live in the Doghouse.
6.
Why were animals so popular in film, especially so early in the history of movies? It was partly a matter of convenience: animals were available, didn’t need to be paid, and could be directed and manipulated easily. Additionally, people are fond of animals, enjoy looking at them, and experience little of the self-consciousness they might have when viewing other people—the “otherness” of animals makes them easy to watch.
As cultural critic John Berger has written in his essay “Why Look at Animals?” the advent of film corresponded with our becoming modern and was an important part of what spurred us toward that. Film took what was seemingly inviolable—the irreversible nature of time and the impossibility of revisiting a moment—and defied it. No one thought that a movie was real life or that time was indeed reversing, but the gauzy, timeless time within a film and the ability to create something that seemed to contain a refracted bit of reality is powerful even now, in spite of how accustomed we are to it, and was shockingly powerful when people first experienced it. More than many modern developments, film set us apart from the natural world, with its rules that cannot be altered.
The invention of cinema came at the moment when animals were starting to recede from a central role in human civilization; from that moment forward, they began to be sentimental—a soft memento of another time, consolation for the cost of modernity. The ability to feel emotion about animals came to be a marker for being human just as humans began living apart from them, and it remains that way today. In the science fiction movie Blade Runner, the only way to tell whether an individual is a natural-born human or a machine-made replica of a human is to measure that individual’s reaction to a description of animals suffering; a real person experiences sadness and discomfort, whereas a replicant experiences nothing. Movies about animals brought together these two divergent endpoints—the new man-made world that film symbolized and could conjure and even control, and the lost world of our life with animals.
The irony is that people began regarding animals differently at the same time they were becoming more like them. At the beginning of the twentieth century, huge numbers of people began leaving farms and the countryside, pulled like iron filings by the magnetic draw of cities, looking for the “modern” life, and for jobs. In 1920, for the first time in our history, most Americans lived in cities—often detached from their families, packed into tenements that must have seemed like stockyards, harnessed to factory jobs that were as monotonous and depersonalizing as the kind of work previously reserved for beasts. Lee, for instance, reacted to “modern city living” as if he were a dog confined in a cage. People began dreaming about animals because animals reminded them of a more tender time. But they also may have cared about animals more because they saw more clearly into their lives.
7.
Rin Tin Tin moved into the dreamtime of film with the ease of a natural. Charley Jones noticed the dog’s magnetism and used him in several other short films for Novagraph in 1921, doing everything from riding a steeplechase horse to driving an aquaplane to diving off a thirty-foot pier. Jones also used Lee in one of the films, having him work a punching bag with the lightweight boxer Leach Cross, for which Lee got $250.
That same year, Lee married a wealthy socialite named Charlotte Anderson, who owned a fancy stable and a champion horse named Nobleman. Most likely, they first met at a dog or horse show—their social worlds would not have overlapped otherwise. The marriage is curious. Lee was good-looking and always described as a likeable man, but when he and Anderson met, he was living with his mother and spent all of his time with his dog. It’s hard to imagine him presenting an alluring package to a woman like Anderson, a sophisticated, worldly divorcée who was quite a bit older than Lee. It’s even harder to picture Lee having a romantic life—he made no mention of it, or of Anderson, in his memoir.
Lee’s devotion, before and after the wedding, was to the dog, and it was about to pay off. When he wasn’t training Rinty to follow directions—which he did for hours every day—he took him to “Poverty Row” in Hollywood, where the studios were located. They 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: the movie business in 1922 was still nearly homemade, and bit players were often plucked from the crowds that gathered at the studio gates. Moreover, ever since Strongheart’s spectacular and profitable appearance in Silent Call in 1921, German shepherds were as sought after as blond starlets. Lee probably brushed past other hopeful young men with their own trained German shepherds as he went from door to door.
At first, Lee got nowhere. “I was told they were not interested in my dog or my story,” he wrote about his visit to one of the studios. “To them I was just another dog trainer with his dog.” Then, unexpectedly, he got a break: he secured a small part for Rinty in a melodrama called 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 belonging to a Canadian Mountie.
Unfortunately, as with seventeen of Rin Tin Tin’s twenty-three silent films, no copy of Man from Hell’s River exists today. All we have is the movie’s “shot list,” which was a guide for the film editor who cut and pasted the footage together. Parts of it read like a kind 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 then, at the end:
Med shot dog and puppies
Med close-up more puppies
Med shot people and dogs
Two months after this debut, Rinty was cast in another film, a run-of-the-mill “snow” called My
Dad. It, too, was a small part, but it marked a significant step: for the first time, he was given a film credit. In the cast list, he appeared thus:
Rin-Tin-Tin . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Played by himself
In his wanderings on Poverty Row, Lee finally got through the door at Warner Bros.—on what pretense, he never explains, and no record exists to detail it. One of the smallest studios in Hollywood, Warner Bros. was founded by the four Warner brothers who came to Hollywood from New Castle, Pennsylvania, and set up shop in a drafty barn on Sunset Boulevard. The day Lee managed to get in the door Harry Warner was directing a scene that included a wolf. The animal being used had been borrowed from the Los Angeles Zoo and was not performing well. Lee’s version of what followed is another Hollywood fable: he liked to tell people that he rubbed dirt into Rinty’s fur to make him look like a wolf, and convinced Warner to give Rinty a chance to try the scene. Rinty performed brilliantly, and thus the dog’s eight-year relationship with Warner Bros. began. However it happened—and chances are it wasn’t quite as Lee described it—Harry Warner liked what he saw in the dog, and he also agreed to look at Lee’s script for Where the North Begins. He promised to let Lee know within thirty days if he would make him an offer for either the dog or the script.
While Lee awaited word from Warner Bros., he got another small part for Rinty in a film directed by William Desmond. The shooting took ten days. When it finished, Lee got a letter from Warner Bros. with the answer he had hardly dared to imagine. The studio wanted to buy his screenplay for Where the North Begins and cast Rin Tin Tin in the lead.
• • •
Lee was so excited that he hardly heard what he would be paid, although he would have accepted any offer. Production on Where the North Begins began almost immediately, with Chester Franklin, an accomplished director, in charge. Claire Adams, Walter McGrail, and Pat Hartigan—silent-film stalwarts—were cast opposite Rinty. The film was shot in the High Sierras and followed Lee’s screenplay almost exactly as he wrote it. “It didn’t seem like work,” he wrote. “Even Rinty was bubbling over with happiness out in the woods and snow.” Rinty sometimes bubbled too much, chasing foxes into snowdrifts, and in one case attacking a porcupine, which filled his movie-star face with quills. Otherwise, Lee was proud of the dog’s performance, which included a twelve-foot jump—three inches higher than his show-winning jump in Los Angeles—and scenes in which he was required to fight wolves. “Rinty loved a fight with man or beast,” Lee wrote, referring obliquely to Rinty’s famously short temper. At least in the fight scenes, both Rinty and the wolves wore light muzzles so that none of the animals risked getting hurt.
The movie premiered at a small theater in Glendale, a few blocks from where Lee had lived with his mother and sister. At the end of the film, the audience applauded for what felt to Lee like hours. Then Lee and Rinty took the stage. At first Lee was terrified. In the past, anytime he had needed to speak in front of a group, his stage fright had been so paralyzing that he had had trouble uttering a word. But with Rin Tin Tin at his side he found his voice. “I felt that everyone was watching him and not me,” he explained. He saw himself there just to serve the dog and explain him to the public. It was the role Lee would play for the next thirty-eight years.
To advertise the film, Warner Bros. distributed promotional material to theater owners that included prewritten ads and publicity stunts, as well as feature stories that could be offered to 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 MOVIE’S NO BED OF ROSES
Chester Franklin, Director, Tells Hard-Luck Story of Blizzard
Other story suggestions were less dramatic. One piece about actor Claire Adams and her fondness for clothing was headlined “Knows Canadian Garb from Alpha to Omega.” The publicity stunts, which studio marketing people referred to as “exploitation,” included suggestions that theater 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”); place signs in a military recruiting office saying, “WHERE THE NORTH BEGINS AT [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 stunt 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.”
“Here is a cracking good film for almost any audience,” Variety declared when Where the North Begins was released nationwide. “A film packed full of the old heroic stuff and having as its leading character a dog actor, ‘Rin-Tin-Tin.’ . . . It has the conventional hero and the conventional heroine, but Rin-Tin-Tin is the show. A good many close-ups are given the dog and in all of them he holds the attention of the audience closely for a good many facial expressions are gained of him.” In closing, the reviewer added, “The dog, incidentally, is a police dog and a good actor.” Another review praised Rinty’s eyes, saying they conveyed something “tragic, fierce, sad and . . . a nobility and degree of loyalty not credible in a person.”
The New York Times was more ambivalent, comparing Rin Tin Tin to the prevailing German shepherd champion, Strongheart: “Rin-Tin-Tin has splendid eyes and ears . . . but this dog engages in a pantomimic struggle that is not always impressive, at least not as realistic as the work of Strongheart.” Motion Picture Magazine’s story “The Rival of Strongheart” went further, noting that Rin Tin Tin “is now competing with Strongheart for the canine celluloid honors.”
According to Variety, the film caught on “like wildfire.” It quickly earned $352,000, a big success. Still, it wasn’t quite at the level of Strongheart’s Silent Call, which had broken attendance records in Los Angeles when it was shown eight times a day for thirteen weeks.
8.
Strongheart was setting the pace, but after starring in just one movie, Rin Tin Tin was already a celebrity. It had happened so fast, really; soon after Where the North Begins was released, thousands of fan letters for Rin Tin Tin arrived at Warner Bros. each week. The movie was playing all over the country, and—as was typical with popular films—most theaters extended its run as long as people kept showing up. A film as popular as Where the North Begins might stay in a theater for months, playing several times a day. Fans might come to see it a half-dozen times. Television didn’t exist and movies were still such a new form of entertainment that a hit film was a spectacle, a national event that everyone wanted to view.
Inspired by Strongheart and now Rin Tin Tin, German shepherds took over Hollywood. Wolfheart and Braveheart; Wolfang and Duke; Fang, Fangs, Flash, and Flame; Thunder, Lightning, Lightnin’, and Lightnin’ Girl; Ace the Wonder Dog, Captain the King of Dogs, and Kazan the Dog Marvel; Rex, Pearl, Thorne, and Saccha; Silver Wolf, Silver Streak, Silver King, and King; Fearless, Leader, Tarzan, and Napoleon; Champion, Dynamite, Klondike, and Lobo; Zoro, Ranger, Smoke, and Smokey; White Fawn, Grey Shadow, Zandra, and Cyclone; Grief, Chinook, and Peter the Great. More than fifty of them were working in Hollywood during that period, playing serious, heroic figures in films that, like them, are now mostly lost or forgotten: A Flame in the Sky, Courage of the North, The Silent Code, Avenging Fangs, Fangs of Destiny, Wild Justice.
The dogs in these films were always heroes, and in real life dog heroes were also having their day, making news with genuine accomplishments. In 1925, for instance, a sled dog named Balto led a team carrying diphtheria antitoxin to Nome, Alaska, saving the town from epidemic; the dog team was celebrated around the world. Just three years later, there was another occasion for celebrating dogs’ selfless service to humankind, when the nation’s first seeing-eye dog, Buddy, began guiding a young blind man named Morris F
rank.
Dogs, in fact, were perfect heroes: unknowable but accessible, driven but egoless, strong but tragic, limited by their muteness and animal vulnerability. Humans played heroes in films, too, but they were more complicated to admire because they were so particular—too much like us or too much unlike us or too much like someone we knew. Dogs, on the other hand, have the talent of seeming to understand and care about humans in spite of not being human and perhaps are better at it because of that difference. They are compassionate without being competitive, and there is nothing in their valor that threatens us, no demand for reciprocity. As Lee knew very well, a dog can make you feel complete without ever expecting much in return.
Even as this sea of German shepherds rose around him, Rin Tin Tin was singled out. He was praised by everyone from director Sergei Eisenstein, who posed for a picture with him, to poet Carl Sand-berg, who was working as a film critic for the Chicago Daily News. “A beautiful animal, he has the power of expression in his every movement that makes him one of the leading pantomimists of the screen,” Sandberg wrote, adding that Rinty was “phenomenal” and “thrillingly intelligent.” Warner Bros. got fifty thousand requests for pictures of Rinty, which were signed with a paw print as well as that spidery handwriting of Lee’s, saying “Most faithfully, Rin Tin Tin.”
From the start, Rin Tin Tin was admired as an actor but also seen as a real dog, a genetic model; everyone, it seemed, wanted a piece of him. As soon as Nanette started having puppies, Lee began distributing them—especially to some of Rin Tin Tin’s most celebrated fans. Greta Garbo and Jean Harlow each owned a Rin Tin Tin pup, as did W. K. Kellogg, the cereal magnate, and a number of directors and other movie stars. (President Herbert Hoover didn’t own a direct Rin Tin Tin descendant, but he did have a German shepherd.) Some of the puppies went far afield. The Japanese government was so impressed with Rin Tin Tin that it directed its consul in California to begin buying as many Rin Tin Tin puppies as possible; the puppies were then shipped to Japan and raised with the hope of breeding them.