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Rin Tin Tin: American Hero

Lee Duncan rescued the puppy who would become Rin Tin Tin from the ruins of a German encampment in World War I.Credit...Rin Tin Tin/Lee Duncan Collection of the Riverside Metropolitan Museum

Do dogs deserve biographies? In “Rin Tin Tin: The Life and the Legend,” Susan Orlean answers that question resoundingly in the affirmative, while also asking a harder one: Can a dog deserve an Oscar? At the first Academy Awards, presented in 1929, the charismatic German shepherd who fought off gangs of villains in movies like “Clash of the Wolves” and “Jaws of Steel” won the vote count for best actor, but the Academy blinked, recalculated and gave the honor instead to Emil Jannings. Not that the public would have necessarily protested an Oscar for Rin Tin Tin. “He is a human dog,” one fan wrote to his trainer, “human in the real big sense of the word.” As for Jannings and his colleagues, there may have been some doubt. A few years earlier, Movie magazine ran a feature asking “Are Actors People?”

“Big” is certainly the word for the sweeping story of the soulful German shepherd who was born on the battlefields of World War I, immigrated to America, conquered Hollywood, struggled in the transition to the talkies, helped mobilize thousands of dog volunteers against Hitler and himself emerged victorious as the perfect family-friendly icon of cold war gunslinging, thanks to the new medium of television. Whether he was rescuing a damsel in distress with a crane or herding bad guys on the frontier, Rin Tin Tin “played out the founding principles of the nation,” Orlean writes, sounding more like Ken Burns than like the author of “The Orchid Thief” (1998), her best-selling exploration of the more obsessive corners of the American character. But by the end of this expertly told tale, she may persuade even the most hardened skeptic that Rin Tin Tin belongs on Mount Rushmore with George Washington and Teddy Roosevelt, or at least somewhere nearby with John Wayne and Seabiscuit.

Like the British royal family, Rin Tin Tin was actually German, scion of a breed developed in 1899 as part of an effort to create a standardized Teutonic dog army. At Verdun, the trenches were teeming with dogs of all breeds, from anonymous “mercy” dogs carrying medical supplies to “demolition wolves” jury-rigged with bombs, as well as a few named heroes like Satan, a French mongrel who roamed the battlefield in a backpack and gas mask.

On Sept. 15, 1918, an American soldier named Lee Duncan discovered a litter of shepherd puppies in the ruins of a German encampment. He kept the two prettiest and named them Rin Tin Tin and Nanette, after a popular good-luck charm. A ­melodrama-minded screenwriter could not have dreamed up a more perfect rescuer than Duncan, who carried in his pocket until the day he died his admission papers from the orphanage where he spent much of his childhood. “I felt there was something about their lives that reminded me of my own life,” Duncan later wrote of the puppies. “They had crept right into a lonesome place in my life and had become a part of me.”

After the war, Duncan brought Rin Tin Tin back to California, where he broke into Hollywood after one of his spectacular jumps was caught on film at a dog show. His first bit part, in a 1922 sled-dog picture (or “snow,” in the lingo of the time), was credited to “Rin Tan.” But a year later, “Where the North Begins,” based on a script by Duncan, pushed him to the front ranks of the more than 50 German shepherds then working in Hollywood, including Wolfheart, Fangs, Thunder, Lightnin’, Klondike, Chinook, Kazan the Dog Marvel, and Grief.

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Credit...Jason Holley

Orlean, like Duncan’s unpublished memoir, has little to say about the training techniques that produced Rinty’s amazing feats, though it does come as something of a letdown to learn that the heroic German shepherd who could leap 12 feet and jump through plate-glass windows was buried with his squeaky doll. Duncan’s own emotional life seems equally arrested in a childlike, presexual state: his first wife, a socialite who went completely unmentioned in his memoir, named Rin Tin Tin as a co-respondent in her divorce filing, while his much younger second wife (their wedding had a canine theme) reacted to Duncan’s death in 1960 by selling El Rancho Rin Tin Tin in the orange groves east of Los Angeles and traveling the world with her friend the singer Helen Reddy. (Hear me roar, indeed.) Women, Orlean shows in one of the book’s many fascinating tangents, were crucial to the popularization of dog training — restyled as dog “obedience,” to the dismay of purists — but they are largely absent from the story of Rin Tin Tin. “No, there was never any rivalry,” Duncan’s only child, Carolyn, said when Orlean visited her cluttered house in Michigan, where a portrait of Rin Tin Tin hung over a StairMaster. “The dogs always came first.”

Rin Tin Tin himself is also strangely absent from the story, or at least strangely indistinct. “I often wonder what Rin Tin Tin was really like as a dog,” Orlean writes, and her thorough investigations never quite get close to an answer, though she does note that he “wasn’t very friendly.” Rin Tin Tin Jr., who took over the franchise after Rin Tin Tin died in 1932, was lazy and stupid — “Home Robbed, Film Dog Sleeps,” The New York Times announced after a burglary at a house where he was staying — and was quickly shunted aside. And don’t even get Orlean started on “the pretty but imaginary Lassie,” who had no business posing on the cover of TV Guide in 1955 with Rin Tin Tin, “a dog who had a real life and ended up becoming an actor.” Never mind that by the heyday of the television series “The Adventures of Rin-Tin-Tin,” which began in 1954, Rinty had been played by more than 20 different dogs. “The issue of bloodline seems like a will-o’-the-wisp, a distraction, a technical issue,” Orlean writes. “The unbroken strand is not one of genetics but one of belief.”

Orlean herself is one of the believers, drawn to the subject by memories of the Rin Tin Tin figurine on her immigrant grandfather’s desk, a mysterious symbol of steadfastness and incorruptibility and the notion that “something you truly love will never die.” But every time her ruminations start tending toward the ponderous, someone else shows up to remind you what real derangement looks like. There’s the journalist J. Allen Boone, amanuensis of Strongheart, another 1920s movie-star German shepherd, who developed a theory of animal-human psychic entanglement called “Totality” and later objected whenever anyone referred to Strongheart as “dead.” As for Peter the Great, another Rinty rival from the silent era, he was described by one admirer as “a genius second to none,” not to mention a staunch prohibitionist who tried to keep his handlers away from “fiery liquor.” (Naturally, he was shot to death in a drunken brawl.)

The contemporary “human uprights” (to borrow a dog trainer’s term) Orlean tracks down are no less odd, like the Peruvian man she meets at a dog agility demonstration who considers himself a reincarnated German shepherd, or Daphne Hereford, a Texas breeder who owns many of Rin Tin Tin’s descendants as well as many Rin Tin Tin trademarks, and announces, “I am Rin Tin Tin.” But Orlean bats an eye only when the local historian who takes her on a tour of the former ranch where the TV series was filmed shows up in an 1870s cavalry uniform. “I have a Cheyenne look, too,” he says, before leading her up to the crest of the hill where Rinty posed at the end of every episode, “a depthless silhouette against a Western sky in a placeless place somewhere in the timeless history of America.”

Orlean wants to see the Rin Tin Tin obsessives she meets mainly as dreamers looking for some lost wholeness rather than hangers-on with a stake in a valuable piece of intellectual property. It certainly helps that they tend to end up almost broke or living on the road. Orlean, mercifully, doesn’t delve too deeply into the tangled legal dispute between Daphne Hereford and Bert Leonard, the producer of “The Adventures of Rin-Tin-Tin,” or the murky story of Lee Aaker, the child actor who played Rinty’s TV sidekick, who may or may not have become a special-needs ski instructor in the Eastern Sierra but at one point was definitely sued for impersonating himself. The leap from eternal life to “Endless Lawsuit” is a lot shorter than 12 feet.

Lee Duncan never got the biopic he dreamed of, but Orlean has been played on the big screen by no less than Meryl Streep, thanks to “Adaptation,” Spike Jonze’s brilliantly loony remix of “The Orchid Thief.” Rin Tin Tin, meanwhile, has enjoyed only a modest afterlife since his TV show was canceled in 1959, the victim of a cultural shift away from its “unwavering respect for official power.” In the 1970s, Disney rereleased tinted versions of the old shows updated with “wraparound” segments in which Lt. Rip Masters described his adventures with Rinty and the cavalry to “a multicultural group of children,” though the true spirit of the times may have been captured by “Won Ton Ton: The Dog Who Saved Hollywood” (1976), to the dismay of Bert Leonard and his lawyers. (“It’s absurd to be sued by a dog,” the spoof’s director said, “especially a dog who’s been dead for the past 20 years.”) More recently, the comeback vehicle “River of Gold,” featuring Rin Tin Tin as a stalwart 1860s Kansas farm dog, was derailed in 1994, partly by competition from a script called “Snow Dogs” (relation to the 2002 Cuba Gooding Jr. comedy unclear).

Given Hollywood’s appetite for recycling the hits of the past, it’s hard to believe Lee Duncan’s beloved dog won’t have another day. In fact, if studio executives are looking for a role for Rin Tin Tin XI — or Rin Tin Tins Rin-Tin-Tin, as the official pedigree has it — they might consider “Rin Tin Tin the Ultimate Weapon,” a Spider Man-inspired idea hatched by Bert Leonard, in which “Rin Tin Tin’s body is invaded by a horde of fleas from a lab chimp who thinks Rin Tin Tin is a chimp.” Heck, with a big enough budget, it could even be a Broadway musical.

RIN TIN TIN

The Life and the Legend

By Susan Orlean

Illustrated. 324 pp. Simon & Schuster. $26.99.

Jennifer Schuessler is an editor at the Book Review.

A version of this article appears in print on  , Page 1 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: Best Friend Forever. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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