This interview originally aired on Fresh Air on Jan. 9, 2012. Rin Tin Tin: The Life and the Legend is now out in paperback.
If you're a baby boomer, you might remember the old TV Series The Adventures of Rin Tin Tin, about a German Shepherd and a boy named Rusty who lived with a cavalry troop in the American West. In 1954, Rin Tin Tin was such a big star, he was "interviewed" by a writer for The New Yorker, who noted that he turned up his nose at roast beef and drank milk from a champagne glass. What many of us didn't know — until our next guest, writer Susan Orlean, told us — is that Rin Tin Tin, the TV star, was a reincarnation of an even bigger movie star who had dominated the silent screen in the 1920s, and nearly won an Oscar for best actor ... and that Rin Tin Tin was a real dog, rescued from a World War I battlefield by Lee Duncan, an American doughboy who devoted his life to training and promoting that dog and others that bore the Rin Tin Tin legacy.