I Toto: The Autobiography of Terry, the Dog Who Was Toto by Willard Carroll, Timothy Shaner (Designed by)

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For true Wizard of Oz fans, Lassie was the weakest of the litter, Roy Rogers's Bullet just a blur, and Rin Tin Tin just a hollow joke. So it makes sense that Terry, the cairn terrier who achieved immortality as Dorothy's ever-faithful Toto, would finally bark out his memoirs. Almost too good to be true.

From the Publisher

During the expansion of the Ventura Freeway in Los Angeles, Willard Carroll unearthed a leather-bound scrapbook from a site that was once a pet cemetery. To his delight and amazement, its yellowing pages contained the rags-to- riches story of Terry, the cairn terrier who played Toto in the enduring film The Wizard of Oz.

Reprinted here in its entirety, I, Toto traces the canine star's tragic beginnings (she was abandoned because of housetraining failures until trainer Carl Spitz took her in), her exhilarating film career (she made almost a dozen movies with stars such as Shirley Temple, Spencer Tracy, and, of course, Judy Garland), her days as the top-billed star with the Hollywood Motion Picture Dog Review, and her happy retirement in Southern California. Best of all, it offers the inside scoop on Toto's signature role, her co-stars, and the making of The Wizard of Oz.

Author Biography: Willard Carroll owns the world's largest collection of Wizard of Oz memora-bilia, which is documented in his book 100 Years of Oz (Stewart, Tabori & Chang).

Publishers Weekly

"I don't mean this to sound full of myself but this Wizard of Oz story? It's all about me!!! I'M IN ALMOST EVERY SCENE IN THE PICTURE!!!" A leaf from Judy Garland's long lost diary? Secret tapes of a Munchkin? No, it's the original diary of Terry, the dog who played Toto in the classic 1939 MGM film. Writing in plain, even humble prose (although she describes her part as vital and her performance as flawless, she understands that Judy Garland was the star of the film), Terry also reveals the grueling before-scenes enemas, snafus on the set and the great difficulty of playing a scene with flying monkeys. A curious cross between Oz trivia, a parody and a chronicle of Terry's actual career (she made 14 movies and worked with Shirley Temple, Spencer Tracy and Joan Crawford), this entertaining and fanciful "diary" also reveals intriguing facts about the economics and mechanics of training animals for films and, specifically, the career of Carl Spitz, Terry's manager and one of the most respected animal trainers in the business. While Carroll, a Wizard of Oz fan, is not as overtly clever or deliciously mean-spirited as Patrick Dennis, the author of Little Me, the classic 1961 parody of star autobiographies, he isn't debilitatingly fawning, either. This fun little tome should both amuse and please dog lovers, as well as fans of Oz and collectors of Hollywood arcana. (Nov.) Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

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