Rin Tin Tin gets the star treatment

RIN TIN TIN: The Life and the Legend, by Susan Orlean. Simon & Schuster, 324 pp, $26.99.

Stop that scoffing.

Yes, Susan Orlean spent nearly a decade of her life researching and writing a book about a long-dead, mostly forgotten movie-star dog.

Indeed, Orlean -- formidable New Yorker magazine writer and author of a nonfiction book ("The Orchid Thief") made into a Meryl Streep movie ("Adaptation") -- has traced the multigenerational history of a celebrity German shepherd with the sober meticulousness usually reserved for dynastic sagas of ruling families of middle-sized kingdoms.

So OK, there are times when her belief in the totemic importance of Rin Tin Tin feels at least as obsessive -- all right, perhaps a teensy bit deluded -- as the single-minded passions of the odd people Orlean chronicles, who devoted their lives to a charismatic canine with an impressive résumé.

In other words, this is a peculiar book but not a frivolous one. Nor is it a warm and fuzzy doggy bio about a cute orphan pup, discovered on a French battlefield in World War I and brought to Hollywood, where, in his silent-movie heyday, he earned more than his human co-stars and had his address listed in the L.A. phone book.

All that charming fluff is here, of course, but expressed in terms of a heroic journey that, as Orlean sees it, adds up to a great myth -- "like an ancient legend, wondrous, lifting everything around it, as buoyant as a dream." She begins with something Lee Duncan, Rinty's wartime rescuer, agent and lifelong friend, believed deeply, that the dog was immortal, that "There will always be a Rin Tin Tin."

In this somewhat grandiose pronouncement, Orlean sees more than a pedigree bloodline, though she does talk about all the Rintys -- actual descendants and close-enough facsimiles -- who made his name over the decades on the radio, in 22 silent movies, vaudeville, seven talkies and as the 1870 cavalry dog in the hit '50s TV series, "The Adventures of Rin Tin Tin."

But she also ties the dog's life to scholarly investigations into the impact of urbanization on human-animal relations, the history of unified standards in breeds, the deep dog-geek background on obedience training and, seriously, the competitive contrasts between Lassie fans and Rinty devotees. She tried to find the original dog's birthplace and visited his grave, which exists, mysteriously, in France. She gives a two-and-a-half page synopsis of one of the dog's six extant silent movies and describes all the animals Lee Duncan loved and lost before he found his soul mate.

Her most useful and disturbing research -- about the exploitation of animals in war -- deserves its own book. Anyone who knows "War Horse" -- from the book, the Broadway drama or Steven Spielberg's new Christmas movie -- probably recoils from the horse carnage in World War I. But how many know about the millions of animals, not just horses, deployed in World War II, Korea, Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan? After Pearl Harbor, the U.S. military urged people to donate their dogs for defense. Most were never seen again.

Periodically, Orlean attempts to explain to us, and perhaps to herself, what drew her so completely into this story. She keeps coming back to a plastic Rinty toy -- a "mysterious and eternal figurine" -- that her aloof grandfather kept on his desk and wouldn't let her touch. She was only 4 years old when the TV show began, but she believes it "became part of my consciousness, like a nursery lullaby you can sing without knowing how you came to know it."

Whatever her reasons, the result is a curious work, filled with dry descriptions of fascinating facts and passionate philosophical flights about an immortal dog "in a placeless place somewhere in the timeless history of America." As Eva Duncan, Lee's widow, said in a deposition about Rinty's intellectual property rights, "You get a lot of goofy people in this business." If the dog does have his day again, his immortality starts here.

Doggone! Five facts about Rin Tin Tin

1. He and his sister, Nanette, were named after French good-luck dolls that honored young lovers who survived a bombing in a Parisian railway station in World War I.

2. A deal with Ken-L-Ration dog food made him the first dog to get an endorsement deal. His slogan: "My Favorite Food, Most Faithfully, Rin Tin Tin."

3. Rinty did some of his own barking on his radio show, "The Wonder Dog," but a human actor named Bob Barker did most of it.

4. Poet Carl Sandburg, then a movie critic for the Chicago Daily News, praised Rinty as "A beautiful animal, he has the power of expression in his every movement that makes him one of the leading pantomimists of the screen."

5. Actors who worked with him, Orlean says, complained "that he was mean and temperamental and that his only good quality was that he didn't drink."

EXCERPT: From 'Rin Tin Tin: The Life and the Legend' by Susan Orlean

FOREVER

He believed the dog was immortal. "There will always be a Rin Tin Tin," Lee Duncan said, time and time again, to reporters, to visitors, to fan magazines, to neighbors, to family, to friends. At first this must have sounded absurd -- just wishful thinking about the creature that had eased his loneliness and made him famous around the world. And yet, just as Lee believed, there has always been a Rin Tin Tin. The second Rin Tin Tin was not the talent his father was, but still, he was Rin Tin Tin, carrying on what the first dog had begun. After Rin Tin Tin Jr., there was Rin Tin Tin III, and then another Rin Tin Tin after him, and then another, and then another: there has always been another. And Rin Tin Tin has always been more than a dog. He was an idea and an ideal -- a hero who was also a friend, a fighter who was also a caretaker, a mute genius, a companionable loner. 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.

There were low moments and setbacks when Lee did doubt himself and Rin Tin Tin. The winter of 1952 was one such point. Lee was broke. He had washed out of Hollywood and was living in the blank, baked valley east of Los Angeles, surviving on his wife's job at an orange-packing plant while Rin Tin Tin survived on free kibble Lee received through an old sponsorship arrangement with Ken-L-Ration, the dog food company. The days were long. Most afternoons Lee retreated to a little annex off his barn that he called the Memory Room, where he shuffled through old newspaper clips and yellowing photographs of Rin Tin Tin's glory days, pulling the soft quilt of memory -- of what really was and what he recalled and what he wished had been -- over the bony edges of his life.

Twenty years earlier, the death of the first Rin Tin Tin had been so momentous that radio stations around the country interrupted programming to announce the news and then broadcast an hourlong tribute to the late, great dog. Rumors sprang up that Rin Tin Tin's last moments, like his life, were something extraordinary -- that he had died like a star, cradled in the pale, glamorous arms of actress Jean Harlow, who lived near Lee in Beverly Hills. But now everything was different. Even Ken-L-Ration was doubting him. "Your moving picture activities have not materialized as you expected," the company's executives scolded Lee in a letter warning that they were planning to cut off his supply of free dog food. Lee was stunned. He needed the dog food, but the rejection stung even more because he believed that his dog, Rin Tin Tin III, was destined to be a star, just as his grandfather had been. Lee wrote back to the company, pleading. He said that the dog had "his whole life before him" and new opportunities lined up. His father and grandfather had already been celebrated around the world in silent films, talkies, radio, vaudeville, comics, and books; this new Rin Tin Tin, Lee insisted, was ready to conquer television, "the coming medium," as he described it.

In truth, Lee had no contracts and no connections to the television business and doubts about its being anything more than a fad, but with the prospect of losing Ken-L-Ration hanging over him, he rushed to find a producer interested in making a television show starring Rin Tin Tin. It couldn't be just anybody, though: Lee wanted someone who he felt really understood the dog and his profound attachment to him.

The winter went by with no luck; then spring, then summer. Then one September afternoon in 1953, a stuntman who knew Lee from his Hollywood days came out to visit along with a young production manager named Herbert "Bert" Leonard. The stuntman knew Lee was looking for a producer, and he also knew Bert wanted a project to produce. Even so, it was an unlikely match. Lee was a Westerner, an eccentric cowboy who was comfortable only with his dogs and horses; Bert was a young, loud New Yorker who gambled, smoked cigars while playing tennis, and loved attention, but had no interest in dogs. And yet their connection was lightning, and Bert decided he wanted to make a television show starring Rin Tin Tin.

At the time, Bert was managing the production of a low-budget thriller called "Slaves of Babylon"; during his lunch break the next day, he wrote up his idea for a show he called "The Adventures of Rin Tin Tin," starring the dog and an orphaned boy who are adopted by a U.S. Cavalry troop in Arizona in the late 1800s, during the Apache wars. As Bert recalled later, Lee "went crazy for it." The story was fiction, but it captured something essential in Lee's relationship to the dog, and in the dog's nature -- a quality of pure attachment, of bravery, of independence that was wrapped around a core of vulnerability. The show debuted three years later. It climbed in the ratings faster than any show in the history of television. Almost four decades after Lee first found Rin Tin Tin, the most famous dog in the world was born again. Lee had always been convinced that his dog was immortal. Now Bert was convinced, too. As he liked to say, "Rin Tin Tin just seems to go on forever."

From "Rin Tin Tin: The Life and Legend" by Susan Orlean. Copyright (c) 2011 by Susan Orlean, published by Simon & Schuster.