He said that the dog had “his whole life before him” and new opportunities lined up. 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.
“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. 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. 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 hour-long tribute to the late, great dog. 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. 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. There were low moments and setbacks when Lee did doubt himself and Rin Tin Tin. He was one dog and many dogs, a real animal and an invented character, a pet as well as an international celebrity. 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. And Rin Tin Tin has always been more than a dog.
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. 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. And yet, just as Lee believed, there has always been a Rin Tin Tin. 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. “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.
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