Rin Tin Tin by Susan Orlean

Rin Tin Tin by Susan Orlean

This is a biography of both a dog and a legend.  It is truly the biography of Rin Tin Tin #1 – the original and Lee Duncan his friend, trainer, promoter and then it is the biography of the subsequent dogs and people who could not let the first Rin Tin Tin vanish into history.  It is a love affair with an ideal – a dog that brings every aspect of our love of pets and our projection on canines to the screen and imagination.   He is the dog that rises from his wolf pedigree to be something new in a decade when the dogs came out of the fields and in to our homes.

Lee Duncan was a child of a broken home, an orphanage and an inward personality that let him relate to animals more than people.  He was in WWI in France when he found one dog and her litter in a building that had served as a kennel for German shepherds in the town of Flirey, France.  He was the first person in to the town after the Germans had been driven out by bombing and he found a town empty of life except of this one litter. 

Lee gathered in the dog and her litter and eventually kept two for himself – Rin Tin Tin and Nannette – and after the war he managed to get them back to the states.  Something special about this dog led Lee to want to share Rin Tin Tin with the public.  He knew he had something that no other dog possessed and despite his shyness, he found a means to get the dog in to the silent pictures.

It is hard to grasp today, but Rin Tin Tin was the biggest star in Hollywood.  The silents were perfect and he and Lee gained both fame and money during his lifetime, but two things happened.  The movies became talkies and Hollywood said the one thing Rinty could not do was talk so he was dropped.  The second problem was the one all pet owners face – dogs do not live as long as humans.

There were more Rin Tin Tins – at least five generations made it to film, but none could have the expressiveness and responsiveness that number 1 had and by the time the TV series debuted in 1953 the newest generation of true Rin Tin Tins was a poor actor and had a stand-in for everything but the visits with Lee to promotional events.  During the last part of his active career Rinty also faced a competitor – Lassie.  But Lee always despaired that Lassie was a fictional being played by a dog named Pal – Rin Tin Tin was real, he had a family tree and a pedigree.  

Zanuck, Warner, Duncan and Rin Tin Tin

The book follows the fame of the dog, but it also follows the less than stellar lives of the people who became smitten with the Rinty mystique and could not move on or let the dog fade in to the past. And you might have to add Susan Orlean, who through this book has now brought the legend alive again.  I suspect she will not be the last to do this.  Maybe Rin Tin Tin will continue to live on forever – you can check him out on Youtube and reruns of his TV series can probably found on the web too, but sometime there will be a new live version.