The Dachshund in Theatre
Most people are aware that actor Marlon Brando, shown here with his favorite miniature longhair, "Maria" (who snacked on hotdogs and butter) loved dachshunds.  Fewer know that the dachshund has long been the favored canine of the Hollywood glitterati.

Other movie star celebs bitten by the dachshund bug include Clark Gable, Errol Flynn, Carol Lombard, the he-man of he-men John Wayne, and more recently, international singing and movie sensation Madonna!  The dog's affable good spirit, quiet but dignified good looks, and slightly unusual elongated appearance have long made it a favorite of creative thespians around the world.  This tradition began with Shakespeare, as noted above, and spread from playwright to actor, and has been handed down among generations of the world's great screen and stage stars -- persisting to this day!

It should come as no surprise that in Los Angeles County the dachshund outsells every other AKC-registered breed by a factor of 2-to-1.

Here we see one of Hollywood's most famous mom's, actress Joan Crawford, at home with one of her lovely pet dachshunds. She was, as the story goes, more enamoured of her dachshunds than even of her own children. As a result, her kids wrote nasty tell-all books about her when they became adults, and the book and movie "Mommy Dearest" were the result. Crawford was fortunate that her dogs, unlike some of the smarter dachshunds, were not taught to read and write, sparing her the humiliation of a critical memoir from her ostensibly beloved canines. As you sill see in these pages, however, most dachshund owners were and are much nicer than Joan Crawford.

The Egyptian Queen Cleopatra originally introduced the dachshund to Western Europe when she brought her dachshund brood to Rome to wed Marc Antony.  Centuries later, screen superstar Elizabeth Taylor, trained as a method actor, acquired an entire litter of dachshunds which she later bestowed as a gift upon her then-husband Richard Burton, when the two completed filming the movie "Cleopatra."

A little know piece of dachshund movie trivia: the part of the pet dog of Dorothy (herself played by Liza Minelli's mother, Judy Garland, who passed away on the day of the Stonewall riots in New York's Greenwich Village, a day which, to many, symbolizes the start of the contemporary gay civil rights movement) in the Wizard of Oz, was originally scripted for a miniature dachshund named Otto shown here taking a walk with his actual owner, actress Margaret Hamilton, who played the Wicked Witch of the West in the movie).  Lingering post-war hostility toward the Germans, however, caused the studio to insist upon the substitution of a Norwich terrier to be called Toto, a dog of then-more-acceptable British descent.

(In this rare still shot from unreleased footage, we see Dorothy singing "Somewhere Over The Rainbow," with Otto behind her. This scene had to be re-shot after the studio fired Otto, and the original footage has never been shown.)

Like the ignorance of the film studio executives (since the dachshund originates not in Germany but in North Africa in the age of the Pharaohs), the mere inversion of two letters in the dog's name is indicative of the stultifying effect that the grip of Cold War McCarthyism had upon creativity in Hollywood film-making at the time.  Indeed, in our modern age it seems almost a miracle that a film with powerful socialist themes like "The Wizard of Oz," with its patent titular reference to the deposed Czars of the old Russian Empire, could even have been produced in that conservtive era.

The upshot for Otto, and dachshund admirers everywhere, came nearly a decade later when, in the sunset of his short dog life, he starred alongside Bob Crane as the pet dog of Colonel Wilhelm Klink (played by monocled German actor Werner Klemperer, son of  the great Jewish-German symphony conductor Otto - no relation to the dog - Klemperer) on "Hogan's Heroes."  Here, Otto is shown with Klemperer in character as Klink, along with co-star John Banner as Sergeant Schultz, in this memorble episode of the humorous series.

Most people are aware that Gary Berghoff, known, loved, and remembered with fondness by many from his days as Radar O'Reilly on M.A.S.H., is a devout animal lover. Fewer are aware that he personally keeps 5 (count 'em, five!) dachshunds: two smooths, two long-hairs, and one wire hair. Although they never appeared on the show, his dachshunds inspired the sweet, kind, and helpful manner of the Radar O'Reilly character.

Of course, there is also the co-star of MGM's animated masterpiece "All Dogs Go to Heaven" -- an ink-and-paper dachshund named Itchy Itchiford.

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Page 2 Dachshunds in Art

Page 3 Dachshunds in Literature

Page 4 Dachshunds in Theatre

Page 5 Dachshunds in Philosophy

Page 6 Dachshunds in Politics

Page 7 Dachshunds in Sport

Page 8 Dachshunds in Fashion

Page 9 Andouille The Ultimate Dachshund Himself!