Toto-ly Unexpected Stardom for a Shy Cairn Terrier

When you think of the cast of characters from the legendary 1939 movie The Wizard of Oz, you could certainly make the case that the most popular character is not Dorothy, the Tin Man, the Scarecrow or the Cowardly Lion. For many movie buffs, the real star of the movie was Toto, Dorothy’s black Cairn terrier.

One thing’s for sure, Toto was definitely the toughest character in the cast. The movie’s producer searched for months to find the exact dog described in L. Frank Baum’s vivid tale, which was first published in 1900. The film’s casting department was given copies of the illustrations drawn by artist W. W. Denslow for the book’s first edition and was told to go out and find that dog.

Numerous dogs, most purebred Scottish terriers, were brought in to impress Oz producer Mervyn LeRoy, but he wouldn’t bite. He felt the dogs didn’t look enough like Denslow’s drawings. The tale of the tireless search for Toto was even picked by the entertainment newspaper Daily Variety and that’s where dog trainer Carl Spitz first saw the article. After examining Denslow’s illustrations, he knew the dog the artist had drawn was a Cairn terrier and he just happened to have one named Terry.

Spitz rushed right down to the studio and he was greeted like royalty, or at least Terry was. As Spitz came into the studio, with Terry trotting along at his side, people connected with the Oz film started yelling, "There’s the dog! We found Toto." Terry was a five-year-old female. Toto was supposed to be a male. But, of course, that’s what acting is all about.

Though a tried-and-true film veteran by the time she got the role in The Wizard of Oz, Terry did suffer from a bit of stage fright early in her life. Born in 1933, Terry was adopted by an elderly couple who lived in Pasadena, Calif. But when the couple first got the dog as a puppy, Terry was so shy that she hid under the bed for three straight weeks. The couple took the dog back to the breeder and demanded their money back. The breeder then took Terry to Spitz to try to train the dog out of her crippling shyness. Spitz met with some success, but the breeder never returned to pick up the dog. So, Spitz kept her, never thinking that the dog had a glittering future on the silver screen.

One day a director from Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer came to Spitz’s kennel looking for a dog for a film he was doing with Shirley Temple. The director liked Terry. Spitz didn’t think it would work out, but went along with the challenge. To Spitz’s amazement, Terry loved acting and appeared in the movie, Bright Eyes, in 1934. She went on to appear in other films before getting her big break with The Wizard of Oz.

Her shyness now a distant memory, Terry spent two weeks at Judy Garland’s house to get to know the young actress before they began filming Oz. While on the movie set, Terry learned lots of new tricks, including escaping from picnic baskets, jumping through open windows, leaping from a closing drawbridge, and grabbing a hot dog off a roasting fork.

The clever Cairn terrier had no problem with most of the stunts, but Spitz later admitted that Terry never liked being confined to the picnic basket that sat on the back of Miss Gulch’s (Margaret Hamilton’s) bicycle. Terry was only too happy to jump out as the nasty neighbor rode down to the county sheriff’s office.

But the canine star never got accustomed to the powerful wind machines used in the tornado scenes. When the machines were turned on, she was known to hide behind a number of the leading actors, quivering in fear. She also didn’t like standing still when crew members needed to test the sound and lighting. So, during the technical rehearsals, a stuffed dog was used as an understudy to give the star a breather.

Terry enjoyed undertaking all sorts of tasks in the film, and she took a particular liking to pulling back the curtain on the great Oz to reveal the mere mortal who utters the signature line, "Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain!"

Terry earned $125 a week for her performance, and was a real trooper. During the filming of The Wizard of Oz, one of the Wicked Witch’s soldiers accidentally stepped on one of Terry’s paws while chasing her in a scene. The intrepid pooch ended up with a sprain, but soldiered on despite her injury and completed the film on schedule.

Treated as a full-fledged cast member, Terry even attended the film’s premier at Hollywood’s Grauman’s Chinese Theatre in 1939. Her performance drew so many admirers that Cairn terriers surged in popularity during the 1940s. People identified Terry so strongly with the role of Toto that Spitz legally changed the dog’s name to Toto. Talk about typecasting!

Toto went on to make many more films, and was reunited with the actress who played the Wicked Witch of the West, Margaret Hamilton, in a 1942 comedy called Twin Beds. Onscreen and in real life, Toto and Hamilton got along famously.

During her nine-year movie career, the world’s most famous Cairn terrier made 13 films, and her passing in 1944 left a tremendous void in Hollywood among the ranks of canine actors. Terry/Toto had become as popular as megastar Rin Tin Tin. Not bad for a shy gal from Pasadena.

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Robert Grayson is a correspondent out of New Jersey for Only For Pet Lovers. Check out our site to view the rest of our articles and register for our online community for pet lovers like yourself. To keep up to date on what's going on in the pet world, visit our site and check out the pet news section.

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