|
Terry (1933 - 1945)
Exact dates for Terry's birth and death are not known. Most sources list her date of birth as 1933. Biographies generally agree that she died sometime around the end of World War II, with most listing 1945, the year her last known film was released, as the date of her death. The earliest record of Terry is her owner and trainer Carl Spitz's own account of how she was brought to him around 1933 by a couple from Pasadena after their own attempts to housebreak the pup had failed. Spitz was both a well known obedience trainer in the Los Angeles area, and also owned and trained many canine stars of the screen, including Buck the St. Bernard in Call of the Wild, Prince the Great Dane in Wuthering Heights, and Mr. Binkie the Scottish terrier in The Light That Failed. Spitz trained Terry for several weeks, and succeeded in housebreaking her. When her owners at first tried to back out of Spitz's standard fee, then tried to trade him a used car which he could tell would not last a month, Spitz kept the dog. Terry soon found work in films, starting with the Shirley Temple film Bright Eyes in 1934, and followed by Ready For Love (1934), with Ida Lupino, Dark Angel (1935), with Merle Oberon, Fury (1935), with Spencer Tracey, The Buccaneer (1938), with Frederic March, and Barefoot Boy (1938). Terry also appeared in several short pieces, including a Three Stooges comedy. However, Spitz had always found Terry difficult to work with, and so shy that she would hide under furniture or draperies at the slightest noise. By 1938, Spitz decided that Terry would never be a star, and kept her largely as a non-working pet. That was until he received a memo from MGM's production department, asking for a dog to play Toto, and Spitz noted that the attached illustration of Toto by W.W. Denslow from the original edition of The Wizard of Oz closely resembled a cairn terrier. Spitz brought Terry to producer Mervyn LeRoy, who immediately cast her as Toto. Unaware of how desperate MGM had been to find a suitable dog for the part, and convinced that because of her temperament and unwillingness to perform that Terry would not last more than two weeks, Spitz accepted a mere $125 a week for her services. While Terry in fact lasted throughout the film's production period, accidents, delays, and a constant change in directors put enormous amounts of stress on her and her trainer. Director Richard Thorpe nearly made Terry the star, placing her in nearly every scene. The bulk of the footage was dumped in the trash bin when Thorpe was replaced by George Cukor, who stayed just long enough to put the film back on track. He thought well enough of Terry's performance to use her in a cameo during the opening scene of The Women, released the same year as The Wizard of Oz. Cukor's successor, Victor Fleming, used Terry more sparingly, and it was during his tenure that Terry's foot was injured when one of the Winkie guards stepped on her during a chase scene in the Witch's castle. During King Vidor's direction of the Kansas scenes, Terry was nearly blown away by one of the wind machines used during the cyclone sequence. By the time filming ended, Terry, like her co-stars, was exhausted. Both The Wizard of Oz and Terry's portrayal of Toto proved so popular that a craze soon developed for cairn terriers, and many people began naming their dogs "Toto." Indeed, Terry became so identified with the character that Spitz changed her name to Toto. Toto/Terry appeared in several more films over the next few years, including Bad Little Angel (1939); Son of the Navy (1940); Calling Philo Vance (1940); The Chocolate Soldier (1941); and Twin Beds(1942); with Oz co-star Margaret Hamilton. Spitz gave Terry a rest from films for a while, during which time she had at least one litter of puppies, one of whom later appeared with Jack Benny in the comedy George Washington Slept Here (1945). That same year, Terry appeared in her last known film, Easy to Look At. Shortly after, Terry died and was buried in Carl Spitz's backyard. Thirteen years later, Spitz was forced to relocate when the Ventura Freeway was built through his property. The old kennel grounds, and presumably Terry's grave, were plowed and paved over. The continued interest in The Wizard of Oz has come to include an increasing interest in Terry. In 2001 I, Toto, a book about the canine star that is part tongue-in-cheek pseudo-autobiography, part serious film history, was written by Oz fan William Carroll.
|
|||||||||
