A Brief History

On August 17, 2009, ABC news published an article concerning how pop star Lady “Gaga herself remains 100-percent woman, a fact that required reiteration after an up-skirt photo sparked rumors that she’s a hermaphrodite.” This article, however, concerns famous women who actually did have “wieners,” by which we of course mean wiener dogs (seriously, what kind of site did you think you were on?!). Should you be disappointed, we gladly recommend the tasteful articles from our Naked Ladies series. In the meantime, without any further ado, let us get on with the “Wiener Women”…

Digging Deeper

10. Liliane Kaufmann

Liliane Kaufmann, wife of Edgar J. Kaufmann who commissioned the home Fallingwater from Frank Lloyd Wright in 1935, bred, owned and raised long-haired dachshunds as show dogs. Accordingly, at Fallingwater’s bookstore, visitors can purchase a book entitled Moxie, The Dachshund of Fallingwater. Moxie, the lead character, was inspired by successive litters of long-haired dachshunds raised by Liliane Kaufmann in the 1930s and ’40s. The book, written by Cara Armstrong, is about life at Fallingwater as seen through the eyes of a talking dog.

9. Frida Kahlo

The famed Mexican painter and her husband, fellow painter Diego Rivera, also owned a dachshund. Her favorite breed, however, was the xoloitxcuintli (show-low-eats-queen-tlee) whose ancestry can be traced back 3,000 years to the Aztecs. She often depicted this hairless breed of dog in her artwork.

8. Jean Harlow

Jean Harlow, the platinum blonde bombshell of Hollywood in the late 1930s, is seen above with her dachshund named Nosey. At the time of her untimely death from kidney disease at the age of 26, she was engaged to William Powell (ex-husband of Carole Lombard from below). It was Powell who then took over the care of Harlow’s aging dachshund.

7. Carole Lombard

Carole Lombard, the highest-paid star in Hollywood in the late 1930s, had a little dachshund named Commissioner that ignored her husband Clark Gable during their marriage. Nevertheless, after her death in a tragic airplane crash in 1942 following her participation in a war bond rally in which she raised a record-breaking 2 million dollars for the war effort, the dog would not leave Gable’s side.

6. Doris Day

Actress and animal rights activist Doris Day ranks among the world’s famous dachshund lovers. In 1978 she founded the Doris Day Animal Foundation (DDAF), a national, nonprofit charity with the mission of helping animals and the people who love them. Now in her 90s, she often surprises people by rounding up stray dogs and cats and bundling them in her car to take them home and look after them. She once refused to tell an interviewer just how many animals lived with her for fear of being considered “wacko” by the public.

5. Joan Crawford

Infamous actress Joan Crawford may have been maligned by her daughter in Mommie Dearest, but she clearly loved her three dachshunds: Baby, Bübchen and Schmeltzy. A lover of dogs all her life, she did not restrict herself to Dachshunds. Her daughter once claimed that all her mother wanted was “fans and puppies, not human beings.”

4. Adele

Acclaimed singer Adele’s dachshund Louie is appropriately enough named after Louis Armstrong. Louis is a little celebrity himself in the music world; he has accompanied Adele to interviews, and it was once even reported in the news that he suffered a case of food poisoning after being given some bad lamb kebabs at a party Adele was invited to. One fan has even bothered to create a Facebook page named “Adele and Louis,” however, it has not received a lot of traffic and does not seem to be updated on a regular basis.

3. Elizabeth Taylor

One of the all-time most famous actresses in cinematic history, Elizabeth Taylor reportedly bought a litter of dachshunds after studying for her titular role in Cleopatra because the long-deceased Ptolemaic Queen of Egypt had been depicted in pictographs with long-bodied and short-in-stature dogs. Though the modern dachshund hails from Germany, these Egyptian dogs, however, might be related to them. Recent discoveries of mummified dachshund-like dogs in ancient Egyptian burial urns lend credibility to the theory that the earliest dachshunds were bred in Egypt.

2. Queen Margrethe II of Denmark

Queen Margrethe II of Denmark and her husband Henrik own and have owned a large array of dachshunds, both smooth and wirehaired. In 2006 Henrik created some controversy when he said he liked his dogs “grilled or sautéed”. He developed this taste while he studied in Vietman during his youth. As the honorary President of the Danish Dachshund Club, he justified this by saying that “the dogs have been bred to be eaten anyway, like chickens,” and he invites other Danes to try eating dog meat themselves.

1. Queen Victoria of the United Kingdom (also Empress of India)

Queen Victoria was enamored with the breed, loving dachshunds so much that she arguably deserves credit for their popularity in Britain. Appropriately, she once said, “Nothing will turn a man’s home into a castle more quickly and effectively than a dachshund.” Yet, she did not allow hers to breed due to finding it “immoral”… Of course, this prudish mindset did not apply to her, and she procreated no less than 9 times herself.

Should you be a wiener fan (at least you should be by now), we also direct you to read our latest article on the subject: “10 Men with Small Wieners.“

For anyone wishing to immortalize their own wiener dog, we here at History and Headlines highly recommend seeking the services of the artist Marta Gil-Vaz. She has painted the following beautiful portrait of the author’s dachshund:

For information on how to contact Marta, we refer you to our History and Headlines article: “The Vet Clinic in the Gambia: Charity for our Four-Legged, Furry Friends in Africa” 🙂

Question for students (and subscribers): Have you ever owned a wiener dog? Please let us know in the comments section below this article.

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Historical Evidence

For more information, please read…

Armstrong, Cara. Moxie: The Dachshund of Fallingwater. Bright Sky Publishing, 2010.

Coile Ph. D., D. Caroline. Dachshunds (B.E.S. Dog Bibles). B.E.S., 2009.