Criminal - Masterpiece

Episode Date: November 24, 2023

In the 1950s poodles were all the rage — one tabloid even reported that when a girl “makes the big time she traditionally acquires 3 things — minks, gems, and a poodle.” But one poodle in particular put the breed on the map. His name was Masterpiece… and police in 13 states knew exactly what he looked like. This episode originally aired in 2018. To listen to more family-friendly episodes of Criminal and This is Love, check out our playlist here. Criminal is going back on tour in February! We’ll be telling brand new stories, live on stage. You can even get meet and greet tickets to come and say hi before the show. Tickets are on sale now at thisiscriminal.com/live. We can’t wait to see you there! Say hello on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. Sign up for our occasional newsletter, The Accomplice. Follow the show and review us on Apple Podcasts: iTunes.com/CriminalShow. Sign up for Criminal Plus to get behind-the-scenes bonus episodes of Criminal, ad-free listening of all of our shows, members-only merch, and more. Learn more and sign up here. Listen back through our archives at youtube.com/criminalpodcast. We also make This is Love and Phoebe Reads a Mystery. Artwork by Julienne Alexander. Check out our online shop. Episode transcripts are posted on our website. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Hi, Phoebe and Lauren. I'm a big fan and very excited to see you live in Los Angeles this February. Someone called into Criminal Plus recently with a question about our upcoming tour. I'm going to be bringing my 13-year-old son to the show who has never heard the podcast. So my question for you is, what would be the best episodes to play for him before we come to the live show. Thanks. A few episodes that came to mind were He's Neutral, the one about the Buddha statue, Kids on the Case, about a girl who solved a robbery at her grandmother's house, and Triassic Park, about people stealing petrified wood and then thinking they've cursed themselves. We've actually got an entire playlist of criminal and this-is-love episodes

that are family-friendly. We put a link in the show notes. We were also remembering an episode we did about a very famous poodle. And with the national dog show that happens every Thanksgiving, we thought it'd be a good time to revisit Masterpiece. Here's the show. There's no mystery at all why it's been such a popular breed, and not only just among rich

old ladies, but with people all around the world of all different backgrounds and socioeconomic circumstances. This is Bud Bacone. He's the managing editor of the American Kennel Club Gazette, which has been published monthly without a single interruption since 1889. It's a remarkably cool dog. No more handsome dog either. They're beautiful animals, very smart, but complex. And that's what makes them so companionable. They have a complex character, kind of a human-like character. And that's what endears them to owners especially, is that very interesting, almost human personality

that a good poodle will exhibit. In 1955, a now-defunct tabloid reported that when a girl makes the big time, she traditionally acquires three things, minks, gems, and a poodle. Women were even cutting their own hair short and fluffing it up to look like poodles. Elizabeth Taylor was said to have done this with her hair

to look more like her tiny poodle. In 1950 New York City, women were still looking to Paris for fashion, to Europe for literature, for architecture, for any kind of a refined pursuit. So on, you know, in the Upper East Side of New York City, circa 1955, you bet a wealthy old widow with a lot of money was going to be seen with a poodle. The American Kennel Club is the governing body for the world of purebred dogs, managing the National Registry. They're basically the gatekeepers of what counts as a purebred dog. Do you have a

dog? I do not. I have two cats. But you like dogs, I would assume. Yes, but in my eternal effort to remain impartial among our dog fanciers, I don't have a dog. So I'm free to report on the fine qualities of any one of our purebred breeds without fear of being biased towards my own breed. So if I asked you your favorite breed, you wouldn't tell me? I certainly would not. They're all God's children. We love them all equally here. What's interesting is that the lobby of the American Kennel Club on Madison Avenue

looks exactly as you might think. The lobby of the American Kennel Club is a lot of dog paintings and dark wood. Yes, and you may have also caught the skeleton of early Fox Terrier Belgrave Joe is just around the corner. This is Bryn White. I met her in the library of the American Kennel Club in New York City. She's the archivist for the AKC. So I manage our book and ephemera and photograph and archival collections all in relation to the development, appreciation, and sport of the purebred dog.

You're wearing a dog pin. Do you always wear dog pins or dog-themed things when you come to work? I don't. Today was a special occasion. But I am a terrier person, a terrierist. A terrierist? Yes. That's what I've been told. I grew up with an obscure breed of dog.

I'm a librarian by trade, but I think I got my foot in the door because they thought I could understand, because I grew up with a Welsh terrier. I've been thinking about, this is real, a black Russian terrier. Oh, that is a very interesting choice. I like it because they're so big, and in the Wikipedia page, they're pulling a little cart full of stuff. So this is the home of the purebred dog. What is the AKC position on mutts?

I don't think I should talk about that. Okay. For much of the 20th century, the beagle topped the American Kennel Club's list of most popular breeds. But then, in the 1950s, things changed and the poodle started to catch up. This is due in large part to one man, a mysterious Russian count named Alexis Pulaski. His obsession with poodles, and one poodle in particular, a dog he named Pulaski's Masterpiece, not only put the dog on the map, but would lead to a 13-state alarm, and in the end, break Pulaski's heart. I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal. We'll be right back.

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a special series from Pivot sponsored by AWS, wherever you get your podcasts. Count Pulaski was born in St. Petersburg in 1895 and arrived in New York City in 1926. Little is known about his early life, except he apparently served in the Russian Imperial Army and was adamantly anti-communist and a big supporter of the Tsar. He's circulating in the upper echelons of society. He's using his title and his accent and his wit to kind of institute himself among kind of the uptown crowd of New York City.

One of the men he meets is named Gilbert Kahn, a wealthy New York City banker. Gilbert Kahn is a poodle man, while Count Pulaski grew up around Doberman Pinschers. And Pulaski agrees to babysit Kahn's poodles. He babysits these poodles in 1938, and it's love. Pulaski was so taken with these poodles that he wanted to be around them all the time. He starts a breeding program and then gets Gilbert Kahn and a few other rich New Yorkers to bankroll a new store, Poodles Inc. What is Poodles Incorporated? It is located on West 52nd Street a few doors down from the famous 21 Club. And it is a, you would say that is a salon, a boarding house or resort, and a boutique or haberdashery, if you will. And it caters exclusively to poodles. It's a club for poodles or it's a club for poodle owners? It's a store to purchase goods for your poodle

and to get your poodle's haircut and then to also board your poodle while you're going out on your exotic vacations that don't involve the dog although they're mostly selling things to facilitate you taking your dog on your exotic vacations. Poodles Inc. was an immediate success. The sky was kind of the limit. They offered 16 different hairstyles.

What types of hairstyles? They had one that was named after Mae West. The Mae West was like a bouffant. They offered a flat top called the Tom Collins. If you wanted your dog's leg shaved to look like it was wearing bell bottoms, you could ask for the sailor clip. You could even get your poodle a mustache. So were they also dyeing the dogs?

I'm not sure if they did at Poodle's Ink, but that did, in this kind of craze instigated by Pulaski, they did offer rinses for coats of dogs to be dyed pink, blue, green, whatever color you were. So it seems to me that what you're saying is that poodles in the 1950s, they started to become a showpiece. So it was a part of your outfit that you were wearing. And because they were so customizable, you could really have something that looked unique to you because you could pick the color, you could change the haircut. Yes. Pulaski also had a fashion line for poodles that kept up with what was trendy. He convinced high end designers to create dog versions of whatever they were selling to department stores.

So a year after the store is open, Pulaski has a litter on August 4th, 1946, and there is the largest dog in the litter. He takes a special liking to, he observes him over the course of six to eight weeks and decides that this dog is something special and then subsequently names him Pulaski's masterpiece. He just saw this innate charm in this dog. He saw a capacity to be trained in the dog. He later talks about how he admired Masterpiece's clean habits. He would lay out a piece of paper when he went to bed at night in

case the dog needed to relieve himself while he was asleep. And he did not do that one night and woke up and Masterpiece had nudged a little trading card into the spot. He just searched for anything he could to replace the missing piece of paper. So he views this dog as having very aristocratic tendencies. When Masterpiece was one year old, Count Pulaski showed him at the Westminster Dog Show, the most prestigious show of the year.

Masterpiece didn't win, but he did get attention. Pulaski would continue to enter masterpiece and competitions, but it was important to him that dogs were primarily bred to be members of the family. He said, the word pet often is used in a derogatory sense by show breeders, but the poodle should be bred primarily as a pet for temperament, willingness to please, and a radiation of charm. It was originally a hunting and retrieving dog. It was often used in duck hunts. And that show dog silhouette idea we all have of the poodle was actually born in practical purposes.

Like trimming the legs made it easier and more quick for them to to swim they even say putting ribbons on their tails was a way they kind of followed them through the fields so because a standard poodle at least has kind of a wild haircut with with a lot of hair up front and then none and then a little bit of hair sometimes around the ankle. Yes, that's what we call the lion cut. And it is said to have evolved from how they were cut back in the day when they had a more functional purpose. Would you describe what Masterpiece looked like?

Yes, I should say he was a gray toy poodle. He was about 9 1⁄2 inches tall and about eight pounds. Really little? Really little. And he was not cut in that lion cut we associate with show poodles. Pulaski designed what he called a rigid masculine cut for Masterpiece that just trimmed him in the midriff. So he had his own silhouette. What does a rigid masculine cut even mean? I really don't know. Pulaski was really into these kind of contradictions in relation to the dog. He liked to joke that he was the most useless-looking utility dog in the world, that he looked like Louis XVI posing for a portrait in his little gray wig,

that he looked like an aristocrat, but he had the soul of a rowdy stevedore. That's kind of one of the things I love about him is, yeah, just these— it doesn't even make sense at a certain point, these notions he has about this dog embodying everything at the same time. Very quickly, Masterpiece became a staple of New York society, and Count Pulaski was invited to exclusive cocktail parties. Masterpiece was the guest of honor and would perform his tricks for all these rich socialites. One of his trainers was the former lion tamer at the Bronx Zoo.

He's giving Masterpiece special instruction in old circus tricks and tragically dies before Masterpiece learns to walk a tightrope. But Masterpiece does walk on his hind legs. Pulaski's favorite trick is to ask, are you a communist, Masterpiece? And he shakes his head, no. I think a lot of his tricks kind of involved him interacting with Pulaski, like it was kind of a two-person show and expressing himself through grunts and barks and head shakes or however. His fee for modeling was $25 an hour, often more than the humans he was posing alongside.

He showed up in ads for stockings, beer, furs. He did a spread in Vogue. He even had his own bank account. It was reported that Rita Hayworth's third husband, Prince Ali Khan, offered Pulaski $25,000 for Masterpiece, and Count Pulaski turned him down. This led to Masterpiece's reputation as the most valuable dog in the world. There's no system for measuring this. But, I mean, the system was in that he said that

Masterpiece claimed, he made $11,000 a year in stud and modeling fees. And by stud fees, we mean the right to breed the female dog to Masterpiece. The owners of Masterpiece's offspring include Judy Garland, Eva Peron, Gary Cooper. The list goes on and on. Masterpiece was invited to Paris for Fashion Week. He went to Cuba as a Goodwill ambassador.

He performed on television, this nine-inch dog jumping over a line of Great Danes. He led a parade of 70 poodles down Fifth Avenue to the department store Milgram's, where he took his seat in the front window on a green velvet throne. All of this to say that Masterpiece was well-known. You couldn't get much more famous or recognizable. We'll be right back. What software do you use at work? The answer to that question is probably more complicated than you want it to be.

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approach. Noom takes into account your unique biological factors, which also affect weight loss success. The program can also help you understand the science behind your eating choices Bye. goal. Stay focused on what's important to you with Noom's psychology and biology-based approach. Sign up for your trial today at Noom.com. It's around 1.15 in the afternoon in late May at Poodles Inc. And the usual crew is there. Pulaski fields a phone call, and he and his associate go downstairs, and they're gone about 15 minutes. When they returned, they found some customers who were interested in purchasing a dog. Whenever someone came in to buy a new dog, it was Pulaski's habit to show off Masterpiece. They couldn't have Masterpiece, of course, but they could be assured they were getting something close. He called for the dog,

but Masterpiece didn't come. Pulaski went downstairs to the basement to look for him. No Masterpiece. They searched the store. The dog was gone. The next day, a person comes forward claiming to have seen a dark-haired woman in a red coat leaving the store at around 1.30 p.m. with a little gray dog healing by her side. And the only reason he even registered this as, you know, not common sight, was that the dog did not have a leash. And so it is deemed, based on this very deemed credible witness, that Masterpiece has been kidnapped, or dognapped, if you will. Word of the dognapping reached newspapers all across the country.

One article read, an anti-communist poodle dog disappeared today, and its owner said a female may be the cause of it all. Count Pulaski pleaded with the public for Masterpiece's safe return. He offered another poodle in Masterpiece's place. He said, I can't understand who would take the dog. Stealing a dog like that is like stealing the Hope Diamond. Dog groomers all over the city were put on alert to watch for Masterpiece. Thousands of leaflets were spread across New York.

They start making appearances on TV shows. They have headlines. They select Masterpiece's grandson, Johnny, as the Ken most closely resembling him, and they start trotting him out on the TV shows. They do an on-the-scene recreation of the dog napping, and they are said to have sent out a 13-state alarm on this dog. One of the theories is that because Masterpiece was so well-trained, he rarely barked. So maybe he just calmly followed the woman in the red coat out of the store. As Pulaski

himself had once said, what he loved so much about the poodle was its temperament and willingness to please. What do you think happened to Masterpiece? I mean, maybe it was premeditated. Maybe this woman saw that big parade of poodles to Milgram and thought there's going to be an opening in here somewhere. Or maybe she just saw the opportunity at the moment. It presented itself. Maybe. I mean, maybe there was no criminal intent originally. We can't allow for the possibility that that masterpiece just went with her. I'm getting away from this count. I'm sick of this count. I mean, maybe he didn't understand that it was forever,

the full ramifications for his action. But, I mean, there's a chance this woman thought that she was rescuing him from this kind of silly egomaniac or in this life as a show pony. Maybe it was a vindictive act against Pulaski. Maybe it was a communist. She was wearing a red coat. It kind of goes on and on. Count Pulaski held out hope that whoever had taken the dog would send a ransom note, that there was some possibility of Masterpiece coming home.

I mean, all these things that he cultivated about the dog, about the breed, and this dog in particular, like, led to this happening. And the one thing is, as dog napping was starting to happen, poodles are the most kidnapped dog. There had been a high-profile case of seven or eight poodles being held for ransom. I mean, even Patricia Highsmith wrote a novel in the early 70s, A Dog's Ransom. That was about the kidnapping of a poodle. It was like the initiating action.

But obviously ransom did not factor into this. I mean, there's a chance he was sold on the black market. Ali Khan. In some way, possibly. And this was a problem before the new problem emerged, which was puppy mills. But this was something that would happen for people who wanted a purebred dog. I mean, the value of the dog is knowing who the dog is and asserting who thisred dog. I mean, the value of the dog is knowing who the dog is and asserting who this dog is. I mean, he was kidnapped at the height of his beauty and manhood,

according to Pulaski, but when he was kidnapped, he was considered the most famous off-screen dog, like the most famous dog who wasn't a Hollywood star, who wasn't Rin Tin Tin or Lassie. And if you can't on a Hollywood star, who wasn't Rin Tin Tin or Lassie. And if you can't say this is him, then I don't know where the value is. But I mean, it seems very feasible that you just start cutting that dog differently and who's ever going to know its masterpiece. I mean, the dog could have just lived out his days in Staten Island as a domesticated pet. I mean, there's just, I mean, there's no telling.

Masterpiece was never seen or heard from again. Almost a year later, a reporter visited Poodle's Inc. and wrote that the entire shop felt like a memorial to the dog. There were still photos of Masterpiece all over the walls. In one corner, Masterpiece's green velvet throne with canopy sat empty. In 1956, Pulaski closed up shop. He turned his attention towards a poodle encyclopedia. He called it Pulaski on Poodles. He had a hard time finding a publisher, though Winston Churchill, a poodle man himself,

did ask to see a finished copy. In his chapter, Poodle's Eye of Known, Pulaski writes extensively about Masterpiece. They have a copy at the AKC archives. It sits alongside a big black scrapbook that Pulaski made. He titled it Mr. Poodle Himself. On the front is what might be the first attempt at photoshopping. Pulaski took a picture of himself and then pasted a picture of Masterpiece under his arm.

The poodle held its position at the top of the American Kennel Club's list of most popular breeds until 1982, when it was overtaken by the cocker spaniel. Today, it's a Labrador retriever. Count Pulaski died in 1971 at the age of 73. His obituary in the New York Times is short, but does make space for one important fact. In 1953, a silver-gray male poodle named Masterpiece was stolen from the store and never recovered. Criminal is created by Lauren Spohr and me, Thank you. masterpiece on our Facebook and Twitter pages, at Criminal Show, and Instagram at criminal underscore podcast. We're also on YouTube at youtube.com slash criminal podcast. And you can sign up for our newsletter at thisiscriminal.com slash newsletter. If you like the show, tell a friend or leave us a review. It means a lot. We hope you'll join our new membership program, Criminal Plus.

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Light as a feather, stiff as a board. Does that count? Light as a feather, stiff as a board. Now, I don't think it counts, but was light as a feather, stiff as a board, was that there were enough fingers under your body that it would lift you? Here's the thing about light as a feather stiff as a board, it didn't work. No, it did work. It never worked. It didn't work. Megan, did it ever work? I don't know what you're talking about. Oh! To learn more, go to thisiscriminal.com slash plus. Criminal is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.

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