The Long Journey To Be Top Dog

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Choosing the seven best-of-group champs is as complex as picking from among an aardvark, a giraffe, and a caterpillar. Each is a different type, bred for a different purpose. A dog gets to be best-in-show because it’s judged to be, say, a better affenpinscher than an competing basenji is a basenji. Yet winning in the Garden often has less to do with conformation than sentiment and pooch politics.

Having attended Westminster for eight decades, Love sees dachshunds differently than the rest of us. We may look at a young male and see a poorly designed suspension bridge. “I look for tone and balance,” Love says. “Psyche is practically a poster child for correct dachshund type—the one etched in the walls of the pyramids in Egypt’s 12th dynasty.”
    
Love’s own pedigree is impeccable. Her socialite mother was a Guggenheim; her stockbroker father claimed descent from Alexander Hamilton and King George IV. Young Iris was brought up in a Manhattan whitestone with a boxer, a Scottie, a French poodle, a Great Dane, a miniature pinscher, and 12 Skye terriers, the oldest of which was a bitch named Fingal. “One of Fingal’s sons married her,” Love says. “I wanted to call him Oedipus Rex.”

Love adopted her first dachshund from the A.S.P.C.A. and named him Baron Heinrich Schulz von Kraus. “Many Europeans of doubtful descent add a title to their names,” she explains. “I thought, Why not a dachshund?”
    
A lover of doggerel who laps up high-toned dog-show chitchat, Love speaks six languages—seven, if you include dachshund. “I’m a Trekkie,” she says. “I’m always trying to mind-meld with my dachshunds.” She almost always wears blue—the color the ancients wore to ward off evil spirits—and an air of perpetual wonder.
    
Her archaeological accomplishments range from the discovery of the base of the Winged Victory of Samothrace to the unearthing of the lost temple of Aphrodite Euploia, at Knidos, Turkey. When Love was excavating the Knidos ruins in the 1970s, her dachshies Carlino and Phyrne served as assistants, burrowing down holes with tape measures fastened to their collars. “Carlino was Phryne’s half brother,” she reports. “They bred in a Ptolemaic fashion.”
    
Carlino and Phryne were descendants of Cracker Jack, the only dachshund ever to win the hound group at Westminster two years in a row. Though Phryne never showed, her daughter, Liz the Lion-Hearted, turned pro in 1987 and won the puppy division of her very first event, the prestigious Knickerbocker Dachsund Specialty Show. Named for her co-owner, gossip columnist Liz Smith, the dog wowed Westminster in 1988, winning best of opposite in her breed.
    
Ever since, Love has taken over Tavern on the Green before the big show for a bash in honor of her breed. With its ice carvings of fire hydrants, dachshunds molded from chopped liver, and sparkling-water pooch bar, the Central Park soiree is the biggest doggie do in Manhattan. Love and her champs have shown up costumed as Egyptian deities, Roman emperors, and Indian chiefs (the dachshies came decked out in feathers and war paint, with bows and arrows strapped to their backs).

Love feeds them hors d’oeuvres on dachshund-shaped crackers and lets them sip from her vodka cocktail. “Dachshies are bons vivants who know how to hold their liquor,” she says. “It probably helps that they’re built so low to the ground.”

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