Teddy the Dog

Biography

"Keystone Teddy" the Wonder Dog, arguably the first canine superstar of the American cinema, was a fawn or lightly marked brindle Great Dane featured in numerous shorts at Mack Sennett's Keystone Film Co. The popularity of Teddy was such that he became one of Sennett's highest paid "actors," commanding the sterling salary of $350 a week. He performed with some of the top stars at the studio, including Baby Peggy, Chester Conklin, 'Charles Murray (I)", Ford Sterling, and Slim Summerville. Teddy also provided stalwart support to "America's Sweetheart, Canadian-born Mary Pickford, in her sentimental pot-boiler Stella Maris (1918), wherein America's Best Friend was billed rather pompously as "The Sennett Dog." Aside from such august company, Teddy's most frequent co-stars were ophthalmologically challenged Ben Turpin and Pepper the Cat. The star of at least 18 movies, his most famous picture was the short Teddy at the Throttle (1917), a classic of the canine genre that was highly evocative of the Keystone product. The film combined absurd chase scenes, including a race against time to save the heroine (Sennett bathing beauty Gloria Swanson) from being run over by a train, slapstick comedy, satire and animal comedy. The film also co-starred future Best Actor Academy Award-winner Wallace Beery as the heavy. In the movie, Teddy the Wonder Dog -- who was then relatively underpaid at $35 per week -- sang with Gloria, danced with her maid, and saved her by stopping a train, thus enabling her to be reunited with her true love. Interestingly, Swanson claimed that she did not recall making the film, in which she was upstaged by the famous pooch. Teddy appeared with fellow Sennett superstar Mabel Normand in The Extra Girl (1923) (a.k.a. "Millie of the Movies"), one of his last flicks. He retired from the Hollywood "dog eats dog" rat-race in 1923.