Dogs in the roaring twenties: pets, fashion, and film stars

Part 1

Rin Tin Tin: from battlefield to box office

On September 15, 1918, Corporal Lee Duncan walked into the ruins of a bombed kennel near the French village of Flirey that had once supplied German shepherds to the Imperial German Army. There he found a starving mother dog and a litter of five newborn puppies whose eyes had not yet opened. He kept one male and one female puppy, naming them Rin Tin Tin and Nanette after small good luck dolls that French children gave American soldiers. Duncan later brought both dogs home to Southern California by ship and train, though the original Nanette died of illness along the way and was replaced by a puppy he called Nanette II.

In 1922 Duncan entered Rin Tin Tin in a dog show connected to the newly founded Shepherd Dog Club of California, and the dog scaled an eleven-foot, nine-inch wall to win the jumping event. A friend filmed the jump on a slow-motion camera, and that footage convinced Duncan his dog belonged in pictures. He walked Rin Tin Tin along Hollywood's Poverty Row until a Warner Bros. crew, struggling with an uncooperative wolf on a film called The Man from Hell's River, gave the dog a scene. Duncan then wrote his own screenplay, Where the North Begins, and Warner Bros. signed the pair to a contract in 1923. The film cost about a hundred thousand dollars to make and earned roughly three hundred fifty-two thousand dollars, helping pull the studio out of serious financial trouble.

If you can picture your own dog headlining a studio, Rin Tin Tin actually did it: he appeared in twenty-seven films between 1922 and 1931. Warner Bros. paid him about a thousand dollars a week, insured him for ten thousand dollars, and kept eighteen trained stand-in dogs to reduce strain on their star. His collar was lined with diamonds, which Duncan covered with a blanket whenever they left the studio.

Part 2

How one dog changed the popularity of a breed

Rin Tin Tin, along with an earlier canine film star named Strongheart, was credited with greatly increasing the popularity of German shepherds as family pets. Strongheart had already broken attendance records in Los Angeles with his 1921 film The Silent Call, playing eight shows a day for thirteen straight weeks.

Part 3

New products for a new kind of pet

The decade also saw canned pet food become popular, starting in 1922. Ken-L Ration launched in 1922 and became known for using horse meat, bought cheaply from a supplier named P.M. Chappel, as its main ingredient. Rin Tin Tin himself appeared in a promotional photograph for the dog food company Chappel Bros., signed by Lee Duncan in 1930. So even a famous movie dog was drawn into the era's growing business of selling food and products for dogs like yours.

Part 4

The end of the silent-film dog star

The arrival of sound pictures changed everything for Rin Tin Tin. The Jazz Singer opened in October 1927 and signaled that silent film was ending, and within two years the format was largely finished. Rin Tin Tin could be trained to follow hand signals instead of spoken commands, but the wilderness stories that made him famous were exactly the kind audiences were moving away from. Rin Tin Tin died on August 10, 1932, and newspapers across the country carried the news. If you ever wonder how a single dog could sum up a decade of Hollywood, his story of rescue, stardom, and a quiet fade with the coming of sound is a good place to start.