Her real name was Terry, and—yes—she was a girl dog playing a boy dog in her most famous movie, The Wizard of Oz. A few years later, the canine star of Lassie was a boy dog playing a girl dog.
That’s Hollywood!
She began life as a shy little Cairn Terrier. According to her owners in Pasadena, California, she could not be housebroken. So they took her to Carl Spitz, a well-known dog trainer in Los Angeles. Keep her, they said. We don’t want her back. (This was good luck for both Terry and Carl Spitz.) In three weeks, he had her perfectly housetrained, and then she joined his collection of movie dogs.
In the silent film era, on the set, Spitz could give his dogs verbal commands. But in 1927, “talkies” arrived. Verbal commands no longer worked.
Spitz, in his homeland Germany, had developed a method of training dogs with silent hand commands, used for dogs helping the deaf. Now he could use that method of silent commands on set.
Terry was a sensation in The Wizard, and she became “Toto” forever. In 1939, when the film opened, she became as famous as Rin-Tin-Tin, possibly more so. Her paw, pressed to a stamp pad, “signed” thousands of fan letters.
She died in 1945, having performed in more than a dozen films. Spitz buried her in a plot on his ranch. In 1958, the Ventura Freeway was built. It literally plowed through Spitz’s ranch—and Toto’s grave.
In 2010, fans erected a memorial to Toto in the Hollywood Forever Cemetery, complete with a bronze statue.
Toto’s fame endures.