ORSON WELLES INTERVIEWS RIN TIN TIN

ORSON WELLES INTERVIEWS RIN TIN TIN

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ANNOUNCER
Ladies and gentlemen, the director of the Mercury Theatre and star of these broadcasts, Orson Welles.

ORSON WELLES: Hello, the Jeunesse Doree and all the ships at sea and in the maelstromed starry welkin!

This is ORSON WELLES.

Our interview tonight is with Rin Tin Tin The Great. renowned actor (said to be the greatest Hamlet of his generation), author of The Dark Bark, Djangoiste and raccoonteur extraordinaire. On this particular evening the Crosley service estimates that thirty-seven point 239 billion creatures, mortal and immortal, are listening to us on their Zenith Trans-Cosmic radios. Zut alors!


ORSON: Mr. Tin Tin, or should I use Rin Tin Tin, or Rinty or...?

RTT: Call me anything. Just don’t call me late for dinner. Ah, Orson…Rinty…just call me Rinty.

ORSON: We share a great many things in common Rinty; we are men of the world, masters of our various crafts, romantics at heart, and, above all else, lovers of the fine beautiful. You once loved Lady Day, Billie Holiday, I once loved Judy Holiday. Despite your TV work, you were essentially a noiriste. The synchronicity of it! Will you tell us how you came to who you were? Lets begin with your dam and sire, shall we?

RTT:I never knew them, Orson. I'm an orphan and I am an American, Chicago born. I guess my real name is Moishe Herzog, Junior. Yeah, I'm a dog but I never even saw a dog until I saw Hettie in Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show when it came to town. I was already seven years old! In fact I thought "dog" was my name. My owner was Moishe Herzog and I grew up in the back of his pawnshop. "Here, dog," he would say whenever he wanted to show me something in the Torah or more often to go down into the basement and get him a book or to bring up one of the lariats he would use to practice his rope tricks.. He was a strange guy. And, of course, so was I. All I knew was the pawnshop, the Torah, the Hebrew Spinoza and a variety of rope tricks. Though Moise would kill me for not saying "lariat." He was a great fan of the Wild West.

Here’s how it all started.


Picture this my friend. It's round midnight in Chicago and snowing -- I could see the flakes softly falling through the pawnshop window, no cars then so it's quiet, a hush. I am trying to sleep and not to sleep -- every night I had to go into the basement and bring up an old horse blanket and spread it right beneath the window. "Watch the shop, dog," Moishe would say as he left -- so this is how I thought I was to do it. Every night I tried to stay awake to watch the shop. Of course, I couldn't so when Moishe would come in the next morning and ask "Did you watch the shop last night, dog?" and I gave a little yap indicating, I guess, that I had, I felt incredibly guilty. He never seemed to notice that I was lying but I still felt guilty as hell.

Well, that night I was determined to stay awake and tried everything.

I was determined to memorize the Bible and was at all the "begats" and I thought that would keep me awake. The "begats" is one of the harder parts. The Book of Job? That's easy. But the "begats?" Oy veh! Suddenly there was a clatter and I was scared at hell because what I saw was this. Moishe in the fireplace (yes, we had one -- an old building --used to be the Marley Hotel I understand -- no gas, no coal furnace) -- but all dressed up in a red and white suit and cursing!

"Where the hell, am I?" Moishe asked.

I knew then it wasn't Moishe and, of course, what I should have done was, well, at least bark at him. But I didn't have time because -- get this -- there wasn't, for that instant (if that makes sense) any such thing as Time. I was frozen in that eternal instant and awake and watching what seemed to me to be a Santa Claus who had, perhaps, put too much rum in his eggnog. In other words I was caught in an eternal timeless instant watching God. Yes. Yes! Yes! Oh, it still affects me so.

Santa seemed confused. He didn't pay any attention to me at all. Just put down a sack he was carrying and looked around with a pissed off look on his face.

Suddenly, the door opened. It was locked and the door opened! and an elf came in.

Santa turned on the elf. "Did you screw up again? Isn't this supposed to be 19 Remington Avenue, Coatesville, Pa, 1958? Well, it looks a lot like a Pawnshop in 1917 to me!"

The elf just looked embarrassed.

"Pull the sled up out front. I'm not going up a chimney if I don't have to."

This is getting a little long.

Well Orson, Santa left. Time was again. I was changed forever. That little encounter with the Eternal changed me forever. I knew who I was and what I wanted to do. Santa left the sack behind and I took out what was in it: a banjo, a unicycle, A Charlie McCarthy doll and the Big/Little Book of English Poetry. Some kid in 1958 wasn't going to have a very nice Christmas. I got a rope from the basement, packed everything in the sack but the unicycle, tied the sack to my back got on the unicycle and hit the road. The rest is show biz history. Somehow I knew where I had to go. I got as far as the old Schubert theatre and cycled right in where some guys were practicing their act. Dec 25, 1917 7AM. Those guys were the Marx brothers. They were a bit surprised.

"I shot an elephant in my pajamas," I said (those were my first English words!)

"How he got in my pajamas I'll never know," Groucho replied. And we both laughed and eyed each other warily. Yes, always that...

My first act: I rode a unicycle and played the banjo while reciting scenes from Shakespeare in Yiddish. This is what I feel formed my sensibility. In other words – I performed America. I was a lousy ventriloquist.


ORSON: Of all your artistic endeavors; films, poetry, music, set and wardrobe design, and on the list goes, which gets most under your fur and why?


RTT: Yes, I did it all. And this will seem strange to you, Orson --after all I am being interviewed because of my work as a poet!-- but what I loved above everything else was Flamenco dancing. As I told you, I didn't know my parents but I love myself for the gypsy soul in me. This is funny. You want to know how I learned flamenco? This is the truth. I learned it with the help of Maria Ouspenskaya when we were making one of those Werewolf movies. I played the wolf -- see him briefly in the moonlight -- that lurks about wanting the soul of the werewolf. Or something! I forget.

Christ, it might even have been "Abbot and Costello meet the Wolfman." But one night Maria took me out to a bar in L.A. I had never been to before. ( I didn't think there were any): the "Ola Harpo!" and there I drank Sangria and saw flamenco dancing for the first time.

I'm sorry. I'm not very good as an audience and suddenly I was across from a very attractive young gypsy lad with a rose in my teeth. It just came naturally. Oh, how they smiled and applauded as I danced and I was overcome then by the duende. A flash of the tragic divine and I wanted it always and could get it yes I could of nights when the wolfbane bloomed and the moon was large and full and I was dancing with my gypsy friends!

I tried to teach it, off an on, to my Hollywood friends. None of them were any good. But we had a lot of laughs. Bogie almost got it. We would be on his boat with Bacall she laughing as Bogie tried to give himself over to those lunar rhythms and then gave up and he would grab me and bring me close and we would end up doing a tango there on his boat on the sea. A questioning but, perhaps, knowing look on Bacall's face as she watched us and sensed my discomfort. No, I am not implying anything of the usual here. It was the failure to attain the duende she sensed and my kindness when I covered it up with what was, of course, a COMIC tango. Poor Bogie. Bacall has a new movie I understand.


ORSON: Fascinating, and if we had time, there is much there to be pursued. Yet let us turn, if we may, to your early poems. Here is one I am fond of:

What a Little Moonlight Can Do

Three days after Bastille day
Behind the shut up café
In a broke down car
(Hard to gas yourself
If the car won’t start)
In Cross Plains, Texas
Thinking I saw nothing
More than myself
Reflected in my Les Paul
Black Beauty that night
I step out of my 1971
Ford Maverick the
Door operated courtesy
Light snicking on and
Look up at the sky
At all the tired animals
Stars bluewhitelonely
Thinking of that night
At the Three Deuces so
Long Ago and playing at
The Famous Door
The night Billy died
Errol Garner, Me, Oscar
Pettiford, Errol saying
You better than Django
But nobody will ever say it.
Not knowing Billy was dead
I was happy. Looking up
I say at the skyey animals
The old dog in the moon
Ending like this
Saying to the drunks
In the cowboy bar
This riff is based on Les Negres
By Jean Genet laughing
At myself really and now
Wanting it to end but
The car won’t start. Looking
Up I remember I told Billy
Radiance is the dealbreaker
And heard, radio definably off
Her singing “What a Little
Moonlight Can Do” and
That was the last time
I was truly happy and
I was there knowing
I would never try
To find the music again

Tired.

Pancake

Levelland

Mule Shoe

Sonora

Meadow

What vistas of hidden forgetfulness
Exhaustively at hand!




This is absolutely splendid, Rinty! The poem crosses so many lines, is inclusive in the way it brings the pathos of the great artist into sharp focus with its carefully chosen images. Bastille Day, of course! One feels the poem begins with the afterparty let down when freedom fails to live up to its promise. And then the emptiness: images of lonely, skywalking animals, brokedown cars behind honkytonk bars. The lacquered cruelty of the Les Paul reflecting it all back at you. And your love dead, unbeknownst to you. And the choppy, riff driven rhythm. Please tell us more!

RTT: Well, it's not exactly an early poem. There were all those poems I wrote with Don Marquis and those horrible "philosophical" poems I wrote after I read Heidegger but this lovely poem ( and it does everything you say it does and more!) was written around 1985.
The events took place in 1971.

Look, the Bastille day reference is there for several reason. It was the day Lady died and is described just that way in a poem of Frank O'Hara's.

A damn fine poem. Now we go all darkling. Orson, you know I killed O'Hara. Ran him down accidentally while I was drunk and driving a dune buggy on the beach on Fire Island. I recognized him and shouted "O! Frank O'Hara! Look out!" Which,since it follows his style and were the last words he heard, should have been his epitaph.

Why was I drunk and driving a dune buggy at night on Fire Island?

I warn you, Orson we will get into the strange and the very strange as we continue...but let's leave it alone for now.

The events in this poem really happened. This was one of the low points of a long life. I was playing country guitar -- not as Rin Tin Tin but as Merle Shepherd. I wore jeans, cowboy hat, a shirt with little sheep on it, and dark glasses and very uncomfortable Tony Lama Ostrich hide boots and had an act doing Hank Williams covers. I felt I needed to be lost -- I WAS lost. Sometimes I would get paid. Sometimes not. I even robbed a Dry Goods store in Fairy, Texas once when I was hungry and needed gas. Sometimes I couldn't help it and would play solid gone jazz and sneer at my audience and do an old Lenny Bruce schtick. I slept in my car and there was oblivion and I drank. I'll tell you why later. I get the idea you will know what to ask. But, yeah, I had the hose hooked up through the window and I was going to poison myself and then the damn car wouldn't start and the radio was off and I anyway heard Billy again there behind the cafe singing that song. And I remembered her for that instant and she was dead but -- and the stars bluewhiteand lonely, the tied animals...we are all so tired when these is death and I realized I shoudn't give myself to death but just go on...

"I was there knowing
I would never try
To find the music again

Tired.

Pancake

Levelland

Mule Shoe

Sonora

Meadow

What vistas of hidden forgetfulness
Exhaustively at hand!"



RTT: To sleep, perchance to dream, but in that dream...

So it went. But I did try to find that music again. As this poems shows...as this poem shows.



ORSON: How did you and Billie meet? Where you ever addicted to heroin?


RTT: No, I never had anything to do with the big H. Even when playing Jazz guitar. It killed so many of my friends. And my greatest love. I had a problem with the booze but not until after a certain day in November 1963.

Billy and I met in the late forties at a little Jazz club in Harlem. You should know, Orson. You went there thinking you were still loved after your production of the Blank Macbeth. I was playing. She came out and sang from --I don't know -- backstage or Eternity. We fell instantly in love as she and I became one song as she sang "Strange Fruit."

I guess just the title of that song describes our relationship...

Excuse me for a second, (weeps).

ORSON: When she died on July 17, 1959 you went to Cuba. You wrote this, you told me, looking over the Malecon from your hotel window after going to mass at the Iglesia de San Francisco de Asis over which portal is inscribed non est in toto sanctior orbe locus—no holier place on earth. Castro had just come to power and you wrote:

1953

1953 was a hard year for me.
Sad. I don’t know why.
I had work. Me and Bob Mitchum
Were friends at last. After all
Those misunderstandings. “You want to
Break out?” I asked him. “Then forget
All this crap about being a natural actor.”
I took his drink away. Got his attention.
“Acting is a craft. Don’t scowl at me.
You know I’m right. You’ll never
Do Shakespeare unless…” He eyed me warily.
“Yo, Rinty,” he said. “You have Billy”
( I had told him) “What do I have?”
He fired up another Chesterfield.
Squinted through the smoke.
“Nothing happens anyway.”

Nothing happens?
I knew what he meant.
I was getting there.

He grinned. “How the Hell did you
Do that to McCarthy?”
I gave him back his drink.
“Told him I was a commie, that’s how.
“I’m an American Icon, Bob. It was too much for him.
Goodbye Tailgunner Joe.”

Bob laughed but he didn’t believe me.
He was really quite a charming man
Guys who don’t believe in anything often are.
So he could be a gentleman to Rita Hayworth
Down in Mexico, her mind gone. But…
A bastard to everyone else.
Nothing in his eyes.

And I was sad there.
It was New York. September 13, 1953.
Another dive, Another gig.
Bob left with a blonde before I began to play.
I started to play but just walked out.
It was the night Jimmy and Tommy Dorsey had
Finally gotten together again.
They kept playing while I put down my guitar.

They never forgave me.

“A” train to Harlem.
Got in Billy’s DeSota and drove.

In a few hours
Lost in Pennsylvania.
Stopped. Don’t know why.
Got out. Looked up. Falling star.
Not me. Something from forever.

Finally found a town.
Asked a little guy outside a hospital for directions.
“We just had a baby girl,” he said.

I drove back to my life.

It seems to me that several important things are happening here. On the poetic level, there is a kind of hyper-realism, a cinematic use of hard focus and quick cuts to close ups, then a pulling away all within the context of a 'dialogue' between you and Mitchum. This severity dissolves toward the end in sadness and loss, and a bone to Creeley, perhaps "driving back to my life".

We are carried along perhaps a bit like a star-struck visitor to Schwabs reading Silver Screen and gaping at celebrity diners. I may be barking up the wrong tree here, but I think there's a deeper movement here. Perhaps it was just the rum?

RTT: There is so much here, Orson. So much strange. Remember those gifts from Santa I picked up in 1917 in that pawnshop in Chicago? The gifts that were to be delivered to a certain address in 1958 in Pennsylvania? Well, those gifts were intended for the young Joe Green! Yes, the poet right here. After my death I communicated through him as a kind of way to make up for the loss of the banjo and unicycle and Charlie McCarthy ventriloquist’s dummy and we are and have been cosmically and mythopoetically linked. The last lines in that poem -- well September 13, 1953 is his wife's birthday and the little guy I met outside of the hospital in Pennsylvania was her father and it was that new and blessed and splendid little life that brought me hope again.

The rest -- yes, I brought down McCarthy. If Rin Tin Tin was a communist then nothing meant anything. He never recovered. This is a poem about hope, Orson and damn fine it is that you notice all the slidings and blisses. Thank you.


ORSON:Eventually, you were forced to flea Cuba. What happened with you and Fidel that forced your return to the States

RTT: Do I sense a pun on “flee?” The first time I left Cuba I was sent. We’ll get into that. The second time was …here..here’s the poem:

Los Marielitos

You know Elmore Leonard
got a lot of his Florida schtick from me
when I was sobering up down in Miami.

I guess it was inevitable that I would
get involved with the mob after I fled Cuba
but it didn't start out that way.

May, 1980. They called us Los Marielitos.

I was one of 123,000 new Cuban refugees
that came to the USA in a short five months,
including about 5,000 of us who
were said to be hard-core criminals.

They crossed the ocean on a prayer.

On crowded, unsafe fishing boats.

On rafts held together by tires.

In search of a myth. Carrying only the
clothes on their backs, a passport, and a
crumbled piece of paper with a relative's phone number in the US.

I knew better.
The myth was over for me long ago.

I had Lassie's phone number but of course I would never call it.
She was probably dead and it was a whole new generation and
here I was, the icon of a previous generation, puking half
digested red beans over the side of a raft.

Back in the USA. Back in the USA
done in by the hype back then and by,
yes, my own yen to do serious theatre

Fidel expelled me because I was a drunk, because I was better than he was and he knew it, because he owed me BIG TIME, because he trid to kill me but failed and a voodoo curse was placed on his hairy ass that he could only avoid by getting me out of Cuba. The pretext was thatI was doing street theatre as Trotsky.


ORSON: We have this from that early period by in New York. I understand you did your own swordplay?

No, I Am Not Prince Hamlet Nor Was Meant To Be

You humans are so predictable.

In fact for years most dogs
were convinced that you were utterly
without self consciousness -- without Mind.

After all, we present a stimulus to you
and we ALWAYS get a predictable response.

The fact is we have such a horror

of the fact

that we can NOT be sincere
that we do whatever we can
to make it stop.

Yeah, a dog will pant
and bark and bring the
damn ball back again and again and again

-- we do it to keep from going mad,
to hope to experience
just for an instant unmediated
unironic consciousness, to --for just one instant
-- be THERE, be in the moment.

It never works.

Never.

That's why we die so young
and it is also why I was,
on a foggy evening OFF OFF Broadway
in a little theatre in the year 1959,

I was, simply put,


the best Hamlet of my generation.




ORSON: Obviously, you were in a philosophical mood here. The poem is quite different than the previous offering. Thoughts are heaved over the transom of regret to drag the depths of your dog nature. Images of Sisyphus and his rock, Skinnerian behavioral psychology, and Buddhist meditation are all brought together in a stunning denouement. Hamlets self-disillusionment is palpable here, yet it doesn't matter that you were "Off Off Broadway" does it? Humans, you seem to be saying, just don't get it. What are we missing?

RTT: This is a poem about consciousness. The first line-- changed at the end by the fact that I was Hamlet -- is Eliot's and is a deliberate deepening of his poem. It gives the facts. Dogs die young because they despair. I saw the eternal so most times I was able to overcome doggy consciousness. See yourself -- humanity -- from a dog's point of view. But I was never one to succumb to the dark.

I did all my own stunts. Always.



ORSON: In 'Road Kill' you seem to have come to some kind of crossroads. Perhaps the intimations of mortality were stronger. We all return to our roots as our time grows short. Here, unlike your other early works, you recognize something of your animal nature:

Road Kill

I ignore them.
The possum squashed on the macadam.
The unprophetic groundhog, in Texas
A holocaust of Armadillos, the skunk
“Skunk. God!” you say.
Driving on, a snake absolutely flat on the road.

There is no heaven of animals
A rabbit. A black and white cat.
A small dog stinking in the sun.

You see them and you make up a story.
The dog setting out to warn us all:
Fire, fire in the forest! The turtle there
100 years old!... what thoughts there, Rinty?
And what innocence for all of them.

I’m glad one of us knows the signs
To find our home.



We're all hoping to fine our way home in the end. Did your succeed here in saying what needed to be said?


RTT: This is a poem of divided consciousness. It’s again about that despairing time in Texas. There are two Rintys here. One of us can find the way home and that way is the way I knew I had to follow. I wanted to rescue what IS from death. Knew I couldn’t so wanted the poem to say “Seize the Day.”

ORSON: This may come as a surprise to you, but we have something quite special now. Would you read this for us please and comment on the wonderful artwork that accompanies it?

RinTinTology

I never met Django
Never really wanted too, I guess
We would have “eyed each other warily”
Like the time I met Senator Jack Kennedy
Was it 57?
In the Cozy Cole me playing there
Jack with Sammy
Sammy told me he was nervous.
Jack working on his charisma thing
And me.. height of my fame
Billy there Jack wanting her to come to his table
Her not noticing and me looking at her
Playing “Vous et Moi”
Sammy said “Man, come on down see who’s here.”
So afterwards I sit down next to the Senator
He in black glasses smoking a Kool
Undercover or something
Billie came over. She said she liked the man
Afterwards, knew his Daddy… called him
Mr. Death. “That boy has troubles”
She said. “He was just nervous meeting me”
I told her. She could see that.
Anybody could. “He eyed you warily
Behind those shades” We laughed.
Forgot about it. I had something he wanted.
And he had something…something…
Held back… connection to.. as if he knew
About us, about me and Billy,
Something he said. Joking about Howard Hughes.
Sammy told me Jack laughed afterwards.
“Said he was nervous. Something strange. Didn’t
Know why.”

In 63 in August Castro “eyed me warily.”
A little moonlight, bourbon on his breath,
Backstage, the little moon a paper one
For “Midsummers Night Dream” A wood near
Athens and I had transformed it, a bit of Brecht,
All of Shakespeare, Theseus nervous knowing
That Quince knew, Flute knew, Bottom breaking
the frame, declaring the revolution and me as Puck
Leaping, flying off that stage, like Peter Pan
TO FIDEL he standing up, smiling,
Me kneeling with the flowers but he
Afterwards backstage distant and cold wondering I thought
If the applause was for him or me.

Che was very nice, however.
Speaking one word… one word.
And I was in Dallas next was in Dallas then.

If I could play great jazz guitar
No hand…only paws.
Why couldn’t I
Slowly, hold breath, there he is
Pull the trigger
Of a Manlicher-Carcano 6.5mm rifle?




RTT: When I first came to Cuba I founded a wonderful proletarian theatre and our first play was a version of the Dream. Theseus and the rest of the ruling class are shot offstage at the end. I played Puck. This wonderful drawing shows me presenting flowers to Castro.
Castro feared my popularity. Ok. I’ll say it. You saw the Manchurian Candidate? That’s what those bastards did to me – they programmed me so that a certain word would trigger what it did. A few days after that I was in Dallas. I shot the president. I hope you will post all my poems in the JD right after that so that the story can be followed with that insight.

The artwork was, I think, part of the plot. It was done by the guy who played Flute in our performance.

I killed JFK. No wonder I was drunk and playing country guitar all those years. The word was “Rosebud.”




ORSON: When I was working on Citizen Kane, I often found myself staying up late and reading Yeats to settle me down. Do you have favorite poets that you turn to? If so, would you share a favorite with us?



RTT: Yeats, Auden, Eliot, the Bard. God bless all poets!




ORSON: Ah, I hear the chimes at midnight! Before we go, however, we must discuss the triad of works that marks
your greatness even as you prepared to leave this world. Lets begin with this remarkable view drawing on Homer's
great exposition of life's inevitable arc.

Letter from a Dog Before Troy

Dear Penelope,

It's windy here. Nine years in a tent on the beach.
Ulysses says they know what they're doing.

Right.

Nine years and for what?
What’s nine years to them?

Most of my life.
I’m tired. Don’t even ask me about the gods.
There’s a limit to loyalty.

But you already know that.

I know about the puppies.
You should have told me.
She told me, of course.
I don’t care.
Just get them out of Ithaca.

By the time you read this
I’ll be gone. I have..what..four more years?
Going to someplace where there are no men.
No gods.
Maybe a few rabbits.

Now you go on to treat the great themes of love, death and our position on the sacred wheel of time. There is bitterness here. God knows your life has not been an easy one, yet the loneliness of a world without men? What happened here?

RTT: Now you know. I changed history in a way I would never have wanted. Am I guilty or not. Somehow I can’t feel myself blameless.
Original sin.


ORSON: And yet you then can write:

All the Starry Animals

Looking up
I love them too --
All the starry animals.
Looking down
Or not.
Not saying anything.
Not saying nothing either.

There is a soul clearly in conflict here. Yet in the end there is acceptance. Is it merely what Eliot called
" the long looked forward to, long hoped for calm, the autumnal serenity and the wisdom of age" or is there something canine at work here?

RTT: The want for the love that moves the sun and other stars is there.

ORSON: And then there is this:

Old Dog: A Villanelle

I am an old dog and am gently trying,
To meekly go to the difficult dark..
Alone, alone I am slowly dying.

The slow snow drifts down and no wind sighing.
Take out a Zippo and light up a Lark.
No regrets none. No who and no whying.

Sad ghosts outside I hear them all crying.
Mort Sahl’s on TV. Makes a funny remark.
No, thanks Time/Life I guess I’m not buying.

Death’s at the door. The bastard is lying.
“Hey, Rinty! It’s Lassie!” One small sad bark.
Wilder wind now. The snowflakes are flying.

Good Night has come. There is no denying.
Unknown is that country. Stark is the bark.
I am an old dog and am dying, dying.

And you, who haunt me forever sighing,
Crying my name in the difficult dark.
I am an old dog and am dying, dying.
I am alone and am dying, dying.

I am an old dog and am dying, dying.
I am an old dog and am dying, dying

Alone, alone I am slowly dying
I am alone and am dying, dying.

And here we have the only reference in your work to Lassie. Lassie, who was better known, better paid, and more highly thought of than you, if for all the wrong reasons. Beyond that there are echoes of Dylan Thomas' raging against the dying of the light. Clearly the end is at hand. How were you able to do this remarkable work so near to death?


RTT: I never even knew what a villanelle was when I wrote it. The difficult dark – yes! Exactly and here is my epitaph.

I bark at at the dark until the darkness yields.
As you go stark. Babbling of green fields.




Yours,

Rinty



Orson: And on that noble note, my old faithful friend, our duet is done and for now we must bid adieu. On behalf of our listeners and our sponsor, The Jeunesse Doree, I would like to extend our heartfelt thanks to you, Rinty and wish you Dogspeed!


The Lonliest Ranger: And that concludes another exhilarating confrontation of Mr. Orson Welles and the finest minds of today's poetry.

We here at the Jeunesse Doree are pleased to have had you as our guests and look forward to seeing you again.

And please remember to investigate the brilliant, tragi-comic
adventures of the lost souls of the JD. Goodnight and have a pleasant tomorrow.

RIN TIN TIN: ARF! ARF!