The Little Girl Who Fought the Great Depression: Shirley Temple and 1930s America (12 page)

The work of emotional repair of adults’ relationships, and especially the repair of the sentimental economy of men, became a strong and abiding theme in Shirley Temple’s films. In the midst of the Depression a consecrated sense of childhood as a refuge from the anxieties of adulthood held immense comfort. The image of an adorable girl helped adult men and women to recall nostalgically their own childhoods and savor a vision of domestic bliss. In Shirley Temple’s feature films in 1934, including
Little Miss Marker
,
Now and Forever
,
Baby Take a Bow
, and
Bright Eyes
, caring, often emotionally wounded men receive a second chance to resume upright lives and to gain the love and admiration of a child—and the love and admiration of a woman as well.

Contributing to Shirley Temple’s popularity in the Great Depression was the widespread sense of shame and humiliation that her movies addressed. Vivid instances of this shame, especially as it related to the loss of male authority, emerged in one study of the effects of unemployment on fifty-nine white Protestant families in a metropolitan area near New York City in the winter of 1935–36. All the men had been out of work since 1931. “The hardest thing about unemployment,” one man said, “is the humiliation within the family.” He felt “very useless to have his wife and daughter bring in money to the family while he does not contribute a nickel. . . . He feels that there is nothing to wake up for in the morning and nothing to live for. He often wonders what would happen if he put himself out of the picture. . . . Perhaps she and the girl would get along better without him.” The same man “intimates that they have fewer sex relations—‘It’s nothing that I do or don’t do—no change in me—but when I tell her that I want more love, she just gets mad.’ ”
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Another out-of-work man in the same study said, “Before the depression, I wore the pants in this family, and rightly so. During the depression I lost something. Maybe you call it self-respect, but in losing it I also lost the respect of my children, and I am afraid I am losing my wife.” “There certainly was a change in our family,” a third unemployed man confided, “and I can define it in just one word. I relinquished power in the family. Now I don’t even try to be boss. She controls all the money, and I never have a penny in my pocket but that I have to ask her for it.”
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Pride thus became an overarching issue in the face of economic hardship. Surveying the plight of the poor around the country for the Federal Emergency Relief Administration, a key New Deal agency, the former journalist (and confidante of Eleanor Roosevelt) Lorena Hickok repeatedly encountered the reluctance and often refusal of people to register for the relief they so desperately needed. “God, how they hate it,” she wrote of unemployed white-collar workers applying for relief in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1934. An engineer confided, “I simply had to murder my pride.” An insurance man added, “We’d lived on bread and water three weeks before I could make myself do it.” “It took me a month” to apply for relief, a lumberman told her. “I used to go down there every day or so and walk past the place again and again. I just couldn’t make myself go in.”
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Although these people and their families may not have seen Shirley Temple’s movies, they nevertheless expressed feelings that were pervasive in this decade and that accentuated the sense of vulnerability of all but the most financially and emotionally secure.

Thus, viewers of even a slight Shirley Temple movie,
Baby Take a Bow
, might find in it aspects of their own defeats and dreams. Eager to reunite Shirley Temple and James Dunn after their success in
Stand Up and Cheer!
, Fox’s Sheehan cast them in a remake of the studio’s 1928 silent comedy-mystery
Square Crooks
. Two ex-convicts, Eddie and his friend Larry, are determined to go straight, work hard, and attain their visions of domestic happiness, which for Eddie and his wife, Kay, means a dream house in Yonkers and a child in the nursery. Yet their shameful past dogs the two men. They are hounded by a suspicious detective, who gets them fired from their jobs, and tainted by the unwelcome return of a ruthless criminal with the ominous name of Trigger Stone. The emotional anchor and radiant source of unconditional love in the movie is Eddie’s daughter, Shirley. Affectionate and trusting, she effortlessly penetrates her parents’ emotional evasions. She can tell when her mother is worried, she confides, because then “you look sick, and, when you look that way, it makes me want to cry.” In the sort of emotional grooming that characterizes so many of her films, Shirley coaxes a smile from her mother, confident that happy feelings will quickly follow. It is a lesson that Kay applies in the very next scene with Eddie, chasing away her own tears with a smile as he says approvingly, “Now it ain’t gonna rain no more.”

With her father, Shirley is a fount of affection and an eager playmate. At her birthday party, they perform a song and dance, “On Account’a I Love You,” in which they celebrate the foods and pleasures they enjoy together. In the number Shirley is always the center of the camera’s attention, and her father’s upper body is at times cropped from the picture frame. Wearing a very short, frilly dress and with her chubby legs and full cheeks, she seems scarcely more than a toddler, making her dancing ability seem almost preternatural. As Eddie, James Dunn heightens this doll-like quality, lifting her effortlessly and, at one point, pretending that she is his ventriloquist’s dummy. Even so, he in no way upstages her, as he performs elementary steps, falls over, and closes their song flagrantly off-key. As she sings, Shirley kisses and hugs him repeatedly, and the number ends in a further shower of smooches.
Baby Take a Bow
, like
Little Miss Marker
, proved to be among the most popular movies of the year.
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It is a striking measure of shifts in cultural attitudes that such flamboyant cuddling between Shirley and the fathers and father-figures in her films, deeply suggestive of pedophilia and incest to many critics today, clearly delighted Depression audiences. Even though Shirley’s first film shorts, the Baby Burlesks, outrageously played on her infant coquetry, the English novelist Graham Greene was unique among 1930s critics of her feature films in pointing to their scarcely sublimated erotic appeal to middle-aged men. “Watch the way she measures a man with agile studio eyes, with dimpled depravity,” Greene wrote in 1937. “Adult emotions of love and grief glissade across the mask of childhood, a childhood skin deep. . . . Her admirers, middle-aged men and clergy-men, respond to her dubious coquetry, to the sight of her well-shaped and desirable little body, packed with enormous vitality, only because the safety curtain of story and dialogue drops between their intelligence and their desire.” Determined to silence such scandalous sneers, Twentieth Century–Fox officials sued Greene, contending that he libeled the child and accused them of procuring Shirley for immoral purposes. The company knew that if Shirley’s flirtatiousness lost its veil of innocence, her career would be ruined. Their highly paid counsel Sir Patrick Hastings refused even to read the “beastly publication” in court, remarking that it was “one of the most horrible libels one can imagine about a child 9 years of age.” Lord Chief Justice Gordon Hewart agreed, calling Green’s article a “gross outrage.” Not only did he require the weekly
Night and Day
that published the offensive piece to pay £3,000 in damages, he also ordered Greene personally to pay an additional £500, as well as threatening him with criminal prosecution.
⁵⁷

A fan letter from a self-described “two-time loser” just out of the penitentiary when he saw
Baby Take a Bow
testified to a much more protective fatherly response. “I knew it was hokum all the time I was looking at it, but Kid, you got to me,” he wrote. “This can’t be such a tough world as long as there is people like you in it.” Shirley gave him an emotional and moral center, he said: “I just wanted to tell you you taught me a guy can go straight if he has got a reason for it, and you are going to be my reason from now on. I am going to see every one of your pictures just like you were my little girl.”
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The tumultuous year of 1934 concluded with the release of
Bright Eyes
just before Christmas. The story was especially written for Shirley, unmistakable tribute to her star status. So too were the simultaneous introductions of various products licensed in her name, including the first Shirley Temple dolls by Ideal Novelty and Toy Company. For movie exhibitors and merchandisers alike, the Christmas season represented their best hope of the year to get truly out of the red, and Shirley could help them do so.

As in
Stand Up and Cheer!
,
Little Miss Marker
, and
Now and Forever
, Shirley is already half-orphaned at the beginning of the movie, and in time she loses her mother as well. The questions propelling the story are, where will she live and who will care for her? Such a plot had a long history in sentimental melodrama but an especially sharp pang in the Great Depression. After the death of Shirley’s acclaimed aviator father in a plane crash, his fellow pilot and best friend, and Shirley’s godfather, Loop Merritt (played, in his third pairing of the year with Shirley, by James Dunn), strives to take her father’s place as the little girl’s protector and pal. A bachelor, he was once jilted by the socialite Adele Martin, and the wound has never healed. In order to provide a home for her little girl, Shirley’s self-sacrificing mother, Mary, has taken a job as a live-in maid with a loveless, snobbish, mercenary family, J. Wellington and Anita Smythe, their insufferably bratty daughter, and Mr. Smythe’s rich, irascible Uncle Ned.

As Christmas approaches, Mary and the other household servants contrive to make it a special celebration for Shirley, as do Loop and a band of irrepressibly jovial young aviators at the airport barracks, who dote on the little girl. Thus, in what was still the depths of the Depression, Christmas becomes another occasion of consumerist delight, like the fancy-dress Arthurian ball in
Little Miss Marker
and Shirley’s birthday party in
Baby Take a Bow
. Money alone may not be able to buy happiness, but materials lovingly bought and arranged—an elaborate birthday cake from a bakery, a beautiful doll and carriage, a lavishly decorated Christmas tree—trigger the wondrous surprise and gratitude of a sweet little girl and vicariously thrill her adult benefactors. Presumably, taking a child to this very movie, which opened in first-run theaters just before Christmas, gave similar pleasure to millions of viewers. As a model child, Shirley was also an exemplary consumer, and the movie provided ample opportunities for merchandising tie-ins. As the trade paper
Motion Picture News
noted appreciatively, “This sure-fire box-office attraction will draw in any locale and affords timely exploitation possibilities surrounding Shirley’s Christmas party sequence.”
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Shirley thaws flinty Uncle Ned (Charles Sellon) in a production still for
Bright Eyes
. (Photofest/Fox)

The great foil to Shirley’s wondrous innocence, sweetness, and love in the movie is the Smythes’ daughter, ironically named Joy and memorably played by eight-year-old Jane Withers, who became a child star in her own right in Fox’s B movies.
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Pampered and spoiled, she is mean, loud, and destructive. Rather than cherishing dolls, she “kills” one and proposes to “operate” on Shirley’s with a knife. When Shirley speaks trustingly of what Santa Claus might bring her for Christmas, Joy interrupts, “There ain’t any Santa Claus. . . . My psychoanalyst told me.”

On Christmas Day, as Shirley’s mother rushes toward a trolley to take her daughter a special cake, she is struck and killed by a passing motorist. There ensues a melodrama of contending custodians for Shirley. Mr. and Mrs. Smythe, contemptuous of this servant’s daughter, would cheerfully pack her off to an orphanage. Yet Shirley has penetrated the flinty exterior of Uncle Ned to his soft heart (as well as the tender heart of his niece Adele, Loop’s erstwhile fiancée), and he is determined to adopt her. To remain in his good graces and his will, the Smythes agree to lodge Shirley in their home—but only temporarily, they tell each other. Opposing both the obnoxious Smythes and imperious tactics of Uncle Ned is Loop. He willingly risks his life in a perilous flight to earn the money to give Shirley a home with him. At the conclusion of a custody hearing, a grandfatherly judge takes Shirley on his lap and, guided by her desires, constitutes a new family comprising those who love her most: Loop; his repentant fiancée, Adele; and regenerate Uncle Ned. Spurned and furious, Mrs. Smythe gives her daughter a slap in the final scene, to the delight of critics, exhibitors, and, quite probably, many viewers.
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In the course of the story Shirley is lifted or caressed by at least fifteen men, each of whom is utterly smitten by her infectious mixture of jollity, candor, and affection. The most famous scene is that in which Shirley performs the song “On the Good Ship Lollipop.” It is part of the Christmas party that Loop elaborately stages for her, including taxiing around the airport on the newly introduced fourteen-passenger, twin-propeller Douglas DC-2. The number is in many respects a distillation of the vicarious pleasure taken by adult men—and, presumably, the moviegoing public—in the performance of childhood innocence, whimsy, and delight. Although the song is ostensibly from the perspective of a child, like Shirley Temple’s movies as a whole, it is in fact a vision of childhood innocence carefully constructed by adults. To the accompaniment of composer Richard A. Whiting’s skipping rhythm and hopping ornaments, the lyricist Sidney Clare traces a magical flight to a land of sweets before landing in dreamland. (Sheet music of the song quickly sold over 400,000 copies, and it reached the position of number three on the charts in February 1935.)
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Supposedly to a recording over the airplane radio, Shirley performs the song with practiced assurance and broad pantomimic gestures. The dozen aviators (played by members of the University of Southern California football team) become a male chorus, singing an accompaniment as they present her with huge lollipops and boxes of candy. At one point they lift her and pass her gently down the aisle. The scene is a celebration of childhood innocence, but, as in Shirley’s previous films, that innocence contains an implicit contrast with a romantic adult alternative.