The Little Girl Who Fought the Great Depression: Shirley Temple and 1930s America (11 page)

Yet accurately estimating that attendance, even within the United States, remains difficult. A 1936 survey asked adults how often they went to the movies, and, if they were parents, how often their children attended. Among respondents, 13 percent said they attended movies more than once a week, 24.9 percent attended once a week, 12.1 percent went more than once a month, 13.2 percent went once a month, 21.1 percent attended less than once a month, and 15.7 percent never went.
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A 1937 survey indicated that 50 percent of Americans regularly attended the movies. (By contrast, only 7 percent of French citizens did.)
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Another study, published in 1939, gave a more conservative estimate of the American moviegoing population. Noting that weekly movie ticket sales amounted to 85 million in a nation of 130 million, the author judged that many of these sales represented repeat visitors, so that perhaps only 40 million truly had a movie habit.
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More recently, the film historian Lary May has carefully examined inflated industry figures and concluded that in 1929, weekly movie attendance was 37.6 million. In 1931, by cutting ticket prices, exhibitors pushed ticket sales to 45.1 million a week. Box offices languished in 1932 and early 1933, the nadir of the Depression, but the weekly average of patrons increased to 54.6 million by 1941 and over 70 million by 1945.
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Beginning in 1933, exhibitors erected smaller, more economical movie houses across the country at the rate of a thousand a year. They expanded beyond their base in urban middle-class areas to cultivate less-developed markets, including urban working-class neighborhoods and cities and towns in underserved regions, such as the South, the Northwest, and the hinterlands in general. Previously, many small towns lacked proper movie houses at all and relied on shops and other facilities to screen films on Friday and Saturday nights. The construction of new theaters, together with the lifting of Sunday closing laws in many areas, allowed movie theaters to serve as important social centers and sites of civic renewal, open six or seven days a week. They sponsored numerous popular gatherings, from bank nights and amateur hours to high school graduations, charity drives, and club events. Although viewers did not shed their distinctive class, racial, and ethnic consciousness in the theaters, they had a sense of participation in a broadly shared social activity, national mass culture, and imaginative life. Yet these theaters were not equally accessible to everyone. Even though movie attendance increased among young adults from Southern and Eastern European backgrounds, racial segregation remained widespread. Nonetheless, eight hundred new theaters catering to African Americans opened in the 1930s, as did more theaters welcoming Mexican Americans.
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To an extraordinary degree, those with any money to spare in the Great Depression spent it at the movies. During the golden age of Hollywood, between 1930 and 1945, the movie industry received eighty-three cents out of every dollar spent on entertainment. Furthermore, precisely because moviegoing was such a popular activity, those who could not afford a ticket often found themselves socially isolated. “Two people can’t be friends when one is working and making money and the other is unemployed,” said one man in 1935 who had long been out of work. “It just don’t work out. The people who have the money don’t want to stay at home and do nothing all the time. They want to go to a movie or take a ride, and they can’t be expected to treat the other couple.” A similar “shadow of humiliation” fell on the children of the unemployed. For instance, rather than confess to his moviegoing friends that his mother did not have a cent to give him, a boy of eight said, “Mother doesn’t want me to go to movies, but she gave me some money for candy instead.”
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Movie theater design itself shifted in the direction of egalitarianism. The ornate motion picture palaces of the 1920s, built in styles evoking aristocratic and oriental fantasies, with exotic trappings, boxes, balconies, loges, and differential ticket prices, now acquired the taint of the profligate capitalist order that had led to economic collapse. Theater designers in the Depression favored smaller, sleeker, self-consciously “modern” structures, in which, literally and figuratively, everyone sat on the same level. Movie theater names changed too, expressing the new democratic and nationalistic ethos. Popular 1920s names, such as Alhambra, Granada, Tivoli, and Rialto, gave way to Roosevelt, Washington, Lincoln, and Liberty.
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Shirley Temple exerted a special appeal on this expanding movie market in small towns and rural areas as well as big cities. Yet even after she won the part in
Stand Up and Cheer!
, Fox Film was not quite sure what to do with her. Right after filming the “Baby Take a Bow” number, the rotund head of Fox studios, Winfield Sheehan, pressed a minimum contract onto George and Gertrude Temple for Shirley. They happily signed, with Shirley earnestly printing her own name, four days before Christmas 1933. Shirley would now receive $150 a week, plus an additional $25 a week for her mother’s assistance, with an option to renew the arrangement for seven years. Soon thereafter, Sheehan had Shirley’s birth certificate altered, subtracting a year from her age, a common practice with child performers, so that she would seem still younger and more prodigiously talented. This deception fooled not only the public but Shirley herself, who discovered her true age from her mother only in 1941, when she turned thirteen.
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Gertrude, Shirley, and George Temple beam over a lucrative new contract with Fox, July 1934. (© Bettmann/Corbis)

The contract itself lasted only half a year. Almost immediately after the release of
Stand Up and Cheer!
, various figures from Educational Films and elsewhere laid claim to Shirley’s earnings. With the help of a lawyer, Loyd Wright, and after a good deal of public bluffing, the Temples negotiated a new seven-year contract with Fox in July 1934. Under its provisions, Shirley would receive $1,000 a week, and Gertrude Temple $250 a week for her services as hairdresser. In addition, bonuses for each completed picture beginning at $15,000 and rising to $35,000 would accrue in trust accounts on Shirley’s behalf. Perhaps to make this agreement attractively tangible to a six-year-old girl, Fox also provided her a scooter, a doll carriage, a skipping rope, picture books, blocks, and a game of jacks.
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Preserving the image of little Shirley as mistress of her own destiny, a
Newsweek
article showed her signing the contract and beaming at the camera as her parents smiled approvingly. In a drawing for
Vanity Fair
the caricaturist Miguel Covarrubias imagined still more smiles, as a confident Shirley signs the contract with a large
X
, thus exaggerating her childishness, to the rapacious delight of toothy film moguls. The golden-haired girl with precisely fifty-six curls appeared to have the Midas touch.
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Fox Film executives were eager to secure an exciting new child actress, even if she proved to be only a shooting star. Under pressure from their chief creditor, the Chase National Bank, they needed to make appealing movies under tight budgets. And so Winfield Sheehan, eager to exploit his new gold mine before it petered out, placed Shirley Temple in as many feature films as he could. After
Stand Up and Cheer!
, he quickly lent her to Paramount for major roles in
Little Miss Marker
and
Now and Forever
, in addition to assigning her brief appearances in other Fox films. The hectic pace continued with two more starring roles in Fox productions, all released before Christmas 1934.

Stand Up and Cheer!
gave Shirley Temple the break her mother had dreamed of, but the movie that established her as a star was the first of her two Paramount pictures,
Little Miss Marker
. Based on a Damon Runyon short story, it revolves around the question, what is a little girl really worth? Once again, Shirley plays a motherless little girl, but this time she almost immediately loses her father too. A well-spoken man, now destitute and desperate, he pleads with an off-track bookmaker to take his little daughter as security for a twenty-dollar bet.
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In the argot of bettors, she is his “marker,” his IOU. The bookmaker Sorrowful Jones (played by Adolphe Menjou) at first turns him down flat. But Shirley’s Marthy instantly pierces through his callous facade to see into his emotional depths. Looking intently at him, she says, “You’re afraid of my daddy. Or you’re afraid of me. You’re afraid of something.” She has identified fear as the chief obstacle to a healthy sentimental economy as Roosevelt did for the financial one. Sorrowful lifts her up and returns her searching gaze. “Take his marker,” he tells his astonished assistant. “A little doll like that is worth twenty bucks, any way you look at it.” The clerk, nicknamed Regret, replies sardonically, “She ought to melt down for that much.”

Adolphe Menjou as Sorrowful Jones appraises Shirley as Marthy in
Little Miss Marker
. (Photofest/Paramount)

When her father loses his wager, instead of reclaiming his daughter, he turns on the gas in his room and kills himself. Little Marthy, an unredeemed IOU, becomes Little Marky, punning on the word “marker.” A sweet little girl left to the custody of hardened men is a situation rich in comic possibilities. Sorrowful quickly wins his money back by joining a betting pool in which each of his cronies guesses Little Marky’s weight. As the men pass her around and heft her, the explicit comparison is with picking up and fondling a voluptuous woman. The “little doll” is thus also a marker for a grown-up one. But one might see this as an attempt to place Marky on the scales by which these men customarily determine value—in terms of money and, at times, sex, but not sentiment. Sorrowful wins the bet when, on her own initiative, Marky conceals a large saltshaker in order to confirm his estimate of her weight. Then, reluctantly contemplating turning over Marky to the police, Sorrowful sees a way to get still more money from the girl: he makes her titular owner of a racehorse, the true owner, Big Steve, having been temporarily suspended from racing because of infractions.

Sorrowful might be said to be not just a bookie but a comic version of the disillusioned, untrusting economic man of the Depression, with a single worn suit, no family, and no woman on whom to lavish gifts or affection. The film has already suggested that his stinginess sank his romance with the beautiful nightclub singer Bangles Carson (played by Dorothy Dell). Emotionally as well as financially, he is a tightwad.

As Little Marky, Shirley melts his frozen feelings and also loosens his purse strings. When Bangles orders new clothes for her, Sorrowful pays for them without complaint. Soon he moves out of his spare apartment (a “fleabag” in Runyon’s story) to a spacious new one with a modern kitchen, a large living room, and at least two bedrooms. Still later, he buys a new suit (Menjou himself had the reputation of being the best-dressed man in Hollywood) and makes a resplendent appearance. The economics of consumer spending and sentiment turn together.

In
Runt Page
and, to a large extent, in the “Baby Take a Bow” number in
Stand Up and Cheer!
, the “make-believe” of Shirley Temple’s characters had been in the service of adults. But in
Little Miss Marker
her capacity for make-believe is part of her distinguishing childish innocence. Orphaned by her father’s suicide, she is sustained by a book of Arthurian legends. She projects their titles and attributes onto the raffish characters about her, with unintentional mock-heroic effect. The gamblers pin their hopes on Dream Prince and similar horses, or, like Sorrowful, Regret, and Bangles, they no longer truly dream of anything. When Marky starts to adopt their tough talk and to give up on her fairy tales, they avidly seek to restore her faith and sense of wondrous innocence by arranging an elaborate Arthurian ball. These doubly depressed adults need the emotional qualities of childhood, including the ability to play and pretend, every bit as much as children do. In staging a costume ball for Marky, they ironically pay tribute to her priceless innocence as many American parents did with their own children—by lavishing her with treats in order to relish her response.
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The plot contains still more twists and turns, but ultimately Marky repairs the broken relationship between Sorrowful and Bangles—and even turns the gangster Big Steve from a heel into a hero.