Neverisms

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fourteen

Never Have Your Dog Stuffed

Book, Song & Movie Titles

In 1943, seven-year-old Alan Alda was diagnosed with polio. At the time, polio was one of the world’s most dreaded diseases, viewed by many people as a kind of modern-day plague. When a case of polio was diagnosed in a community, it was common for frightened parents to keep their children away from swimming pools, movie theaters, and other public places where the odds of contracting the viral infection would be increased. There was no cure for the disease, and there would be none for more than a decade, when Jonas Salk’s first effective polio vaccine became available in 1955.

Alda’s father was Robert Alda, a singer and actor who eight years later would win a Tony Award for his role in Guys and Dolls, and his mother was Joan Brown, a former Miss New York. After the diagnosis, the anxious parents did everything they could to find medical care for their only child. From their son’s perspective, though, the method they chose felt more like torture than treatment.

More than a half century later, as Alda began to write his autobiography, he recalled an excruciatingly painful treatment regimen—originally developed by Sister Elizabeth Kenny—that involved the application of steaming hot woolen blankets to his legs and a stretching of the leg muscles that caused the young lad to feel as if his limbs were being ripped off.

Within a year, Alda was polio-free. And even though Alda’s parents were assured that their son was no longer contagious, the boy was declared off-limits by the parents of almost all of his former friends. In an attempt to raise the spirits of their increasingly lonely child, Mr. and Mrs. Alda one day surprised Alan with a large black cocker spaniel. There was an instant connection between boy and dog, who was soon named Rhapsody (the name chosen because Alda’s father had just landed his first movie role, playing the composer George Gershwin in a film biography titled Rhapsody in Blue).

At age eight, when Alda’s spirits had improved enormously, fate delivered another crushing blow. His beloved Rhapsody died suddenly—and painfully—after eating chicken bones that had been discarded with some leftover Chinese food. The next day, Mr. Alda and his son wrapped the dog in a blanket and carried him to a dry riverbed near their house. As they started to dig a grave, tears began streaming down Alan’s cheeks, and by the time the hole was finished, he was crying uncontrollably. The distraught father, not sure what to say, ultimately proffered the first thought that occurred to him: “Maybe we should have the dog stuffed?” Alan, who couldn’t bear the idea of seeing Rhapsody tossed in a hole and covered with dirt, agreed: “Okay, let’s stuff him!”

Later in the day, Alan and his father found themselves in a local taxidermy shop, trying to describe their dog’s personality and explain his favorite expressions. Six weeks later, the dog finally arrived—but it was far from the Rhapsody that Alan remembered. The stuffed animal was totally unrecognizable, now looking almost like a rabid dog about to lunge. Visitors to the house began to avoid the living room, where the dog had been placed. And when the dog was banished to the front porch, postal workers and delivery people refused to go anywhere near the house. Alda was only eight, but he was learning his first major life lesson:Losing the dog wasn’t as bad as getting him back. Now that he was stuffed, he was just a hollow parody of himself. Like a bad nose job or a pair of eyes surgically set in eternal surprise, he was a reminder that things would never again be the way they were.

As the years passed, the notion of stuffing a pet dog became a kind of metaphor for Alda, reminding him that it was a mistake to cling to the past, no matter how much he wanted to, and that he must accept the changes that life presented, no matter how difficult. Alda shared the story—and the life lesson—in his 2005 autobiography, appropriately titled:

Never Have Your Dog Stuffed: And Other Things I’ve Learned

Book titles that begin with the word never have been very popular over the years and, in at least one case, quite influential in changing some longstanding human perceptions. In 1948, the Canadian Wildlife Service assigned Farley Mowat, a well-known Canadian naturalist, the task of investigating the reason behind the declining caribou population in northern Manitoba. At the time, most officials suspected the local wolf population, and this belief was the rationale for a proposed plan to greatly reduce, and possibly even eradicate, wolves from the region. After spending two summers and one winter in the frozen tundra, Mowat made a discovery that would forever change his life. The wolves, instead of devastating the caribou herds with their marauding ways, subsisted primarily on small mammals, especially rodents. In a report of his findings, he concluded:We have doomed the wolf not for what it is but for what we deliberately and mistakenly perceive it to be: the mythological epitome of a savage, ruthless killer —which is, in reality, not more than the reflected image of ourselves. We have made it the scapegoat for our own sins.

More than a decade after his discovery, Mowat chronicled his experiences in a 1963 book that was subtitled The Amazing True Story of Life Among the Arctic Wolves. The book’s title was perfectly suited as well:

Never Cry Wolf

The title was borrowed from a centuries-old saying that has long communicated an important life message: never lie, for if you do, people will not believe you when you are telling the truth. The saying, and the story behind it, is based on Aesop’s famous fable “The Boy Who Cried Wolf.” Shortly after Mowat’s book was published, the Canadian Wildlife Service was overwhelmed with letters from concerned citizens voicing opposition to the slaughtering of wolves. Even though the Wildlife Service denied any plans for such an eradication, and despite the many critics who disputed Mowat’s findings, this single book substantially changed the way people viewed Canis lupus. In a 2001 article in The Canadian Historical Review, historian Karen Jones hailed the book as “an important chapter in the history of Canadian environmentalism.” In 1983, Mowat’s book was adapted into the popular Disney film Never Cry Wolf, with actor Charles Martin Smith giving an unforgettable performance as the Canadian naturalist.

From the very beginning of the film industry in America, movies have also been given neveristic titles, many borrowed from popular catchphrases:

Never Send a Man to Match a Ribbontitle of a 1910 silent film

Never Say Dietitle of 1938 Bob Hope & Martha Raye film

Never Put It in Writingtitle of 1964 Pat Boone film

Never on Sundaytitle of 1960 film starring Melina Mercouri

Never Give an Inchtitle of 1977 film starring Paul Newman,

the first film to be broadcast on HBO

Never Talk to Strangerstitle of 1995 film starring

Rebecca De Mornay & Antonio Banderas

Song titles beginning with the word never have also been popular over the years, including a Sophie Tucker classic about philandering husbands:

“Never Let the Same Dog Bite You Twice”

This is the title as well as a recurring lyric in one of Tucker’s most famous songs, originally sung in the 1920s and preserved on her Golden Jubilee Album (2005). The song was written by the legendary Sammy Fain, who took a popular American proverb and applied it to cheating men. Here are the most famous lyrics from the song:Never let the same dog bite you twiceDon’t let no man two-time youNever pet or play with a dog that bit you once