“It’s a biography of a dog?”
That’s the question most will ask about Susan Orlean’s new book, “Rin Tin Tin: The Life and the Legend,” and it’s a fair one. But Orlean, who already flashed her talent for engaging with the esoteric with her best-seller, “The Orchid Thief,” is convinced this famous dog’s story contains within it many other tales.
“It was a tale of lost families, and of identity,” she writes. “It was a story of luck, both good and bad, and the half turns that life takes all the time. It was a story of war as well as a story of amusement. It was an account of how we create heroes and what we want from them. It laid out, through the story of Rin Tin Tin, 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.”
She’s just getting warmed up. Orlean goes on to explain that it’s also the story of “a journey through time,” and “of who I am and how I happened to become the person I seem to be.” There are pocket histories of dog training, the orange industry in Riverside, Calif., and the early days of film and television, as well as insights into the changing nature of stardom, a primer on the birth of merchandising and quite possibly the only acknowledgement ever of Hitler and Anne Frank’s shared passion in German shepherds.
Orlean sees her story as an ambitious, sweeping epic, and she’s not entirely wrong. Unfortunately, there’s a gaping hole at the center where a compelling central character ought to be and not much plot-wise to propel the narrative forward. What we’re left with is mostly a series of fascinating, loosely connected, often beautifully written digressions.
The problem is simple: Rin Tin Tin — who began life as a real puppy on the killing fields of France during World War I before becoming a movie star and then essentially a brand name referring to the descendents of the original dog and to the characters that lived on in films, TV shows, books, etc. — may be a symbolic vessel for many truths, but ultimately he’s still a dog. As a dog (or a series of dogs), he doesn’t have the kind of emotional inner life desired for a subject of a relatively straightforward biography. Orlean clearly realizes this but never figures out what to do about it.
From a narrative standpoint, most of the book pivots around Lee Duncan, the man who found the original Rin Tin Tin during the first World War and then made his life’s work the dog and his legacy. At first glance, Duncan seems cut from the same cloth as John Laroche, the fascinating oddball at the center of “The Orchid Thief.” Duncan, orphaned as a child, bonds with several generations of Rin Tin Tins in a way he never does with humans. Though he marries twice, his first wife leaves him because of jealousy over Rin Tin Tin. When Orlean asks Duncan’s only child, Carolyn, if, “she felt sibling rivalry toward [his] dogs,” her response pretty much sums it up: “‘No, there was never any rivalry. The dogs always came first.’”
These pointed details notwithstanding, Duncan remains a cipher throughout, never really coming alive as a character. Orlean is notably handicapped by the fact that Duncan died in 1960, but when the author describes him as “impenetrable” after writing about him for 200 pages, you can’t help but wonder whether she’s subtly admitting defeat.
She does slightly better with Bert Leonard, the producer of the successful 1950s television series “The Adventures of Rin Tin Tin,” who later becomes a keeper of the dog’s flame following Duncan’s death. Leonard comes off as a charismatic rogue, deeply flawed but principled. Some of the book’s most enjoyable passages quote from his indignant letters to studio executives. But Leonard, too, is already dead when Orlean finds him; and while he’s livelier on the page than Duncan, he still feels flat. It’s not until Orlean encounters Daphne Brodsgaard, a colorful Texas woman who breeds Rin Tin Tin’s offspring and founds a museum devoted to his legacy, that she finds a subject to really sink her teeth into.
“She wanted to show me some material about her grandmother and introduce me to a few of her dogs — especially the Old Man, a huge slow-moving German shepherd with a blocky head and a coat as thick as mink. The Old Man was Daphne’s special dog; this was when I learned that she was thinking of having him stuffed when he died.”
Orlean is an exhaustive researcher and the nuggets she excavates — no matter how much she digresses — are often the best stuff. In a section exploring early animal films, she writes that one pioneer, Perry Smith, “made a number of films starring wild and domestic animals including ‘Tiny Honey Gatherers,’ ‘Snakes and Their Habits,’ ‘Peculiar Pets’ and ‘Fun in a Bear Pit.’ His magnum opus was a time-lapse film about mold, which he shot at home; the mold got out of control and contaminated his entire house.” But a collection of interesting facts is not a story.
Orlean spends an awful lot of space expounding on deeper meanings — the importance of Rin Tin Tin to her and to America, the significance of something permanent in a culture of disposability — so much so in fact, that it almost seems like she’s trying to justify this entire endeavor to herself.
In the book’s final third, she finds her groove as she details the toll her subjects’ single-minded obsession with Rin Tin Tin had on their lives. “At what point does devotion become a form of willful blindness?” she writes. But Orlean doesn’t lack self-awareness. “How could I marvel at Lee and Bert and later Daphne when I had stepped in line right behind them, just as beguiled by the story of this real and not-real dog, while the rest of my life ticked away?” In the end, her failure is not that she can’t keep from getting in line behind her characters but that she can’t make readers want to as well.