Rin-Tin-Tin, a German Shepherd, an icon of the 1920s and early 1930s, was as famous a movie hero as Rudolph Valentino or Douglas Fairbanks. His athletic feats astonished audiences – he could scale an eleven-foot fence, leap over chasms, and climb trees. His acting brought tears, laughter, and amazement. At train stops, when he was on tour, crowds gathered to give him ice cream. Thousands of children wrote him fan letters, and he answered with a paw-autographed photograph. This book is a biography of both Rin-Tin-Tin and Lee Duncan, his owner and trainer. It places their lives in the context of their times, especially France, where they met, and Hollywood, where Rin-Tin-Tin became a star. At the heart of the book are the questions: “Why did a dog, at that particular time, become so famous?” and “How much of the legend of Rin-Tin-Tin is really true?”
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Ann Elwood lives in Cardiff-by-the-Sea, California, with six cats, a desert tortoise, seven box turtles, and a German Shepherd, Louis, who looks something like Rin Tin Tin in his soulfulness. Now, she teaches history part-time at California State University, San Marcos, spends time with Louis and the other animals, and writes the books she has always wanted to write but never had the time for.
Ann Elwood lives in Cardiff-by-the-Sea, California, with six cats, a desert tortoise, seven box turtles, and a German shepherd, Louis, who looks something like Rin Tin Tin in his soulfulness. At night she can hear the ocean when the tides are high. When she was a child in New Jersey, her family had a shepherd dog, Mac, who died a tragic death, shot because someone thought his foaming-at-the-mouth fear of a thunderstorm meant he had rabies. After college, she taught elementary school for a few miserable years, then moved to Camden, New Jersey and landed a job as a typist-clerk at the Philadelpha Bulletin. When her boss discovered she had difficulty typing up circulation figures with twelve carbons, she was fired and found another job writing copy for a paternalistic insurance company that offered a low salary and delicious free lunch. One of the typesetters had the magical ability to square up a stack of paper into a perfect cube. Eventually she moved to a studio apartment on Irving Place in New York City, and, after a few months of writing copy for a textbook company, went on to freelance as a writer of anything anyone would pay her for. In 1967, she moved to Los Angeles, where she was advertising manager for a publishing company. Then the West Coast was a mecca for writers and adventurers. Within a couple of years, she visited a Malibu beach house, fell in love (long-distance) with Bob Dylan, met Thomas Pynchon (he wouldn't remember it), and saw Hair. In 1972, she returned to freelancing. The following year she moved to Cardiff and adopted her first dog as an adult - Puppy, a mixed breed who looked something like a fox. (To show you how inappropriate Puppy's name became, she'll tell you this: Puppy died at age 17.) She wrote articles for Irving Wallace and his son, David Wallichinsky (People's Almanac and Book of Lists), and did other wonderful things she won't mention here. With Carol Orsag Madigan, she wrote several non-fiction books. A desire to delve more deeply into ideas finally drove her to graduate school in 1981. Her dissertation focused on an order of 17th and 18th century French nuns so she had to spend a happy year in France doing research. During that year, while not in the archives, she drank local wine with fellow historians and traveled the country with Puppy, who had far less trouble than she did communicating with the French. Now, she teaches history part-time at California State University, San Marcos, spends time with Louis and the other animals, and writes the books she has always wanted to write but never had the time for.
Until Ann Elwood brought him alive I could not imagine why anyone would want to know about Rin Tin Tin. Ms Elwood brings him alive and has sorted through the truth and the lies of his history. She has done a thorough, entertaining, study of the dog, his training and his owner. It is fascinating and a very good read.
This book tells the true story of Rin-Tin-Tin, and how he came to be one of the great movie stars of American film...a story as fascinating as any of the fictional plots of Rin-Tin-Tin's famous films.
It is also the story of Lee Duncan, the WWI soldier who rescued Rin-Tin-Tin from WWI-ravaged France, brought him back to America and made him famous. Duncan's story itself is fascinating...a complex and ambitious character with a talent for spinning stories who cannot resist the compulsion to mythologize himself as well as Rin-Tin-Tin. Ann Elwood's dogged efforts to disentangle the web of myth and reality are an interesting part of this book.
Also hugely rewarding are the great details of social history gathered by Elwood...stories about the experience of American soldiers in World War I, and of early Hollywood, where movie stars went duck hunting in Venice Beach and the Warner Brothers scrambled to establish a business making movies... and succeeded thanks in part to the popularity of their canine star. Ann Elwood is a great storyteller who has done thorough research and lets the fascinating facts speak for themselves!
Full disclosure - I am a friend of the author but it doesn't matter. Were I so fortunate as to stumble over this absolute delight of a book in an unlived alternate life somewhere else, I'd still love it! Why? Because it pulled me in to a world about which I knew nothing. RIN-TIN-TIN:THE MOVIE STAR is exhaustively researched yet not remotely pedantic. Ann Elwood's warmth and concern for the actualities of a dog movie star's life dissolve the usual flags indicating academic research, yet leave the quotable facts available. The multi-layered tale of a French WWI puppy and his enigmatic owner, transported to Hollywood in its heyday, is told with humor, accuracy and an expansive analytical style that will fascinate even cat people.
Most readers now extant were not alive during an epoch in American history when studio shots of canine faces adorned movie posters outside a thousand theaters. The rise of the dog movie star is a curious social artifact that Elwood deciphers with intelligent, thought-provoking verve, enhanced by explorations of the storyboards of Rin-Tin-Tin's movies. And the wealth of accompanying archival material, especially photographs, provides a guided tour to a significant but forgotten time.
Highly recommended for cinema buffs, dog lovers, historians of post-WWI American culture and everyone else who loves finding that special, unusual book that turns out to be a goldmine of provocative ideas.
