Interview: Susan Orlean, author of Rin Tin Tin: The Life and the Legend of The World’s Most Famous Dog

By LEE RANDALL
Published on Saturday 18 February 2012 00:00

SUSAN Orlean tells LEE RANDALL why the story of Rin Tin Tin is packed with human drama

When Corporal Lee Duncan found a litter of German shepherd puppies on a bomb-blasted battlefield in eastern France, he took it for a lucky sign. It was 15 September, 1918. The blind, nursing puppies were just days old. Duncan kept a pretty, dark, male for himself, and brought it home to California after the war ended.

That puppy, with his “solemn air of an existentialist”, became Rin Tin Tin, one of the most famous canines in history. He starred in films, on television and at public appearances. He became so entrenched in the American psyche that, explains Susan Orlean in Rin Tin Tin, “He was an idea and an ideal… He was one dog and many dogs, a real animal and an invented character, a pet as well as an international celebrity. He was born in 1918 and he never died.”

The author’s “Rinty” is a Rosebud-like talisman from childhood: a plastic figurine of the 1950s TV star that her grandfather kept in his study, rarely allowing her to handle it. It was all but forgotten until, decades later, something reminded her of Rin Tin Tin and overwhelmed her with memories.

“I was thinking about memory. Why did I remember [the figurine] when there were so many other things in my childhood? Why do certain things stick? Why did this story of this dog stick for so many people for such a long time?

“But in a very separate way, it made me realise, ‘Wow, my grandfather was a kid, watching movies!’ I know that sounds silly, but I knew him always as an old man. The oddity of his interest in Rin Tin Tin made me feel how we’re very connected by our inner lives, though ultimately no-one can ever know someone else’s private life. Also, because my father had just died, I was thinking that I’ll never know what he thought about when he was a young man. That may sound like a far reach from writing about a dog in Hollywood, except to me that felt like what the book was about.”

British readers unfamiliar with Orlean’s journalism for publications such as the New Yorker, may have read her book, The Orchid Thief. Others may have seen the Charlie Kauffman-penned, Spike Jonze-directed film Adaptation, which took great liberties with the character called Susan Orlean played by Meryl Streep.

How does she choose her subjects? “I have a broad curiosity. Either I immediately think, ‘God, that’s a great story, I want to find out about that,’ or it’s something that just keeps recurring to me. Selfishly, I usually am writing to answer questions that I have. I’ve never had the luxury of projecting what my next piece will be, since it’s usually something I never dreamed I’d be writing about.” Explaining this story’s appeal, she writes: “I love the narrative 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 … it was a story of war… It was an account of how we create heroes and what we want from them. It laid out 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.”

Some of those people are rather remarkable. Lee Duncan’s tale is particularly heartbreaking, and includes abandonment by his father and three years in an orphanage, when his impoverished mother couldn’t cope with raising two children. That period transformed him into a lifelong loner whose most intense attachments were to animals – at the expense of his family.

A second great character is Bert Leonard, a loud, exuberant New Yorker keen to bring Rinty to the small screen. He met Duncan in 1953, after Rinty’s movie career had stalled. They were polar opposites, but agreed that the story should be told, in a way that “captured a quality of pure attachment, of bravery, of independence that was wrapped around a core of vulnerability”.

Orlean says: “There’s something tremendously sympathetic about Lee and his inadequacies. I think he was a kind person. I don’t think he was a flawed father because he was a bad guy. The same with Bert. He would have been easier to know, because he connected very well with people, but he has these big flaws in judgement and, like Lee, he was very single-minded. You can see something inspiring about someone who sees the world in this very purposeful way: this is what their life is about.”

Her research was prodigious, and naturally much had to be left out, though the book finds room for fascinating excursions into the history of the German shepherd breed and of dogs in military service, and the rise of obedience training for pets. But her greatest stroke of luck was discovering Bert Leonard’s storage unit – packed to the rafters with documents relating to Rin Tin Tin.

“Suddenly instead of it being just the story of Lee Duncan it became so much more multi-layered – about the father and son relationship that Lee had with Bert, and Bert’s own story, which began to track all the changes in Hollywood. That brought the story into the present time.”

In the book Orlean points out: “The invention of cinema came at the moment when animals were starting to recede from a central role in human civilisation.” From then on, we sentimentalised them, and “the ability to feel emotion about animals came to be a marker for being human”.

Rin Tin Tin’s earliest roles, in silent films, cast him as a classic hero who is endlessly tested, and surmounts an internal struggle. The films were so popular that he out-earned the studio’s human stars, and his puppies were sought by celebrities such as Jean Harlow and Greta Garbo. But TV’s Rin Tin Tin was more of a faithful animal sidekick – still exceptional, but lacking psychological depth – and the dogs were selected for their good looks. Not unlike the value shift we’ve seen across the board in our human world, I say.

“The first Rin Tin Tin was not a particularly pretty dog,” she agrees, “but he projected a quality of character that was really meaningful. It’s funny to think how much character mattered in those early films and perhaps we’d moved away from that. Hollywood changed. It was a smaller enterprise compared to what it is now.

“This is terrible to say, but someone wanted to interview me about the idea of giving a dog an Oscar, and I thought, well, if it is possible that someone like Kim Kardashian could get an Oscar, why is that somehow better than the idea of a dog getting an Oscar? ”

She writes movingly about how hard it was to complete the section of the book recounting Duncan’s last days. “Of course I knew that Lee was dead, I’d visited his grave! There was no suspense, and yet I felt like I was seeing it unfold, seeing this trail of crumbs as he began cancelling appearances. It really hit me. I closed up shop [early] that day. I felt like I lost him. Seeing the little trivia of his life, things that were so real, is very different from reading a Wikipedia entry.”

For me, tears welled at the death of the first Rin Tin Tin, in 1932, because that dog had been through so much, and was so loved – and needed – by his master. Nodding, Orlean says: “I was very affected. He had an amazing life and the fact that he and Lee still had essentially the same relationship they had from day one, a sort of lost boy and his dog. The moment when they go camping together when the dog is 12 years old, and Lee builds a little sedan chair for him so he didn’t have to walk – I can hardly read that and not get teary. It was as if Rinty could overcome every obstacle.

“You can’t believe he’s ever going to die, it doesn’t seem to be part of the script. He’s going to make it through another time, like Superman.”

“There will always be a Rin Tin Tin,” said Lee Duncan. When she started her journey, the question plaguing Orlean was “Why?” By its finish, she’d concluded: “I believe there will always be a Rin Tin Tin because there will always be stories.” And stories, she tells me, spring from our “very deep impulse to explain who we are both to ourselves and to other people. There’s this tremendous urge to put a framework around the puzzle of life, and to have episodes in your life have a kind of totality that makes sense.

“And if you’re a devoted storyteller, you’re telling not only your story, but the stories you’ve observed.”

Orlean’s own devotion to the craft has a worthy monument in this compelling work of art.

• Rin Tin Tin: The Life and the Legend of The World’s Most Famous Dog, is published by Atlantic Books, priced £16.99.

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AnnElwood

Saturday, February 25, 2012 at 03:54 PM

Actually, the story of Rin-Tin-Tin's birth very likely is myth. The first story that Duncan told (in October, 1919, to the Los Angeles Times) and that three officers of his squadron told goes like this: Duncan and his mates found an adult German shepherd male on the battlefield, and Rin-Tin-Tin was one of a litter born to him and a female German shepherd. That means he was born around the time of the Armistice. See my book, Rin-Tin-Tin: The Movie Star, available on Amazon. http:www.amazon.comdp1453866655

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