The Little Girl Who Fought the Great Depression: Shirley Temple and 1930s America (14 page)

The differences among these roles expose the workings of the color line in Hollywood. In African American specialty numbers, carefully embedded in movies with otherwise entirely white actors, Robinson strides and dances through black Harlem, elegantly dressed and self-assured.
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He smiles radiantly, twirls a walking stick, and carries himself with magnetic confidence. Because such possibilities were so rare in Hollywood films, African American moviegoers savored them. At a theater catering to black audiences in Kansas City, Missouri, on a hot August day in 1935, a “restless audience sat through the news-reels, the shorts,” and the bulk of RKO’s musical revue
Hooray for Love
awaiting the precious eight and a half minutes of Robinson’s performance in a Harlem sequence, “Living in a Great Big Way.” The specialty number treats a common plight of the Great Depression, a tenant’s eviction. As a jazzy orchestral introduction evokes a Harlem street scene, a beautiful, young light-skinned African American woman (played by nineteen-year-old Jeni Le Gon) follows her furniture down the steps of her former apartment and sits on the sidewalk. Her blues last but a moment, however, as the mayor of Harlem (Bill Robinson’s honorary title) strides resplendently from his office, beaming like the morning sun.
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Urging her to count her blessings, he coaxes a smile that makes her “the richest gal in Harlem.” Then, to the snappy number “Living in a Great Big Way” by Jimmy McHugh and Dorothy Fields, they join in a vivacious song and dance, claiming the beaming smile and prestige of the president (“I’m a Franklin D. Roosevelt”). Now feeling like a million dollars, she somehow persuades the landlord to relent. Meanwhile, Robinson continues the song’s gently swinging beat in a scat number with Fats Waller (in his first film role), then does an exuberant and increasingly virtuosic solo to the admiration of swaying black onlookers—and a white policeman directly behind him. “When Bill’s Harlem scene flashed, the applause was deafening,” wrote a correspondent for the African American
Chicago Defender
newspaper. “It was as if Bill was on the stage in person, smiling in response to the welcome, as if he knew and understood that he was the asset necessary to the happiness of the audience. . . . Many sat through the picture twice and many grumbled because there wasn’t more to see,” the reporter noted, “but the manager smiled in understanding.”
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Bill Robinson’s specialty number in Paramount’s
The Big Broadcast of 1936
is, if anything, still more exuberant than “Living in a Great Big Way.” As a stylish patron in a barbershop brought to his feet by the infectious taps of the Nicholas Brothers and a swinging band version of the Ralph Rainger and Richard A. Whiting tune “Miss Brown to You,” he becomes the Pied Piper of Harlem, leading everyone into the street in joyous dance. Here his authority comes not specifically from his office, as in “Living in a Great Big Way,” but from the entirety of his dress, demeanor, and expansive emotions and gestures, and he has an unmistakable masculine allure. Although such scenes are carefully circumscribed within their films and undoubtedly contain stereotypical elements, they nonetheless suggest what the emotional possibilities of full citizenship in America might be.

Robinson had brought tap-dancing up on its toes, making the older flat-footed buck-and-wing style seem leaden. Holding himself upright and making little use of his hands and arms, he danced principally from the waist down but with a clarity, precision, and intricacy to his steps that defied imitation. Though he occasionally leapt upward, he was not acrobatic. Instead, he often concentrated on close rhythms in which his feet came only an inch above the floor. Although he devised no new steps, he arranged them superbly. The jazz historians Marshall and Jean Stearns have described his footwork in his stage shows:

Sandwiched between a Buck or Time Step, Robinson might use a little skating step to stop-time; or a Scoot step, a cross-over tap, which looked like a jig: hands on hips, tapping as he went, while one foot kicked up and over the other; or a double tap, one hand on hip, one arm extended, with eyes blinking, head shaking, and derby cocked; or a tap to the melody of a tune such as “Parade of the Wooden Soldiers”; or a broken-legged or old man’s dance, one leg short and wobbling with the beat; or an exit step, tapping with a Chaplinesque waddle.

Instead of metal taps, he danced in split clog shoes, which had raised wooden heels and wooden half-soles, loosely affixed for greater flexibility and tonality.
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Adding to the virtuosity of his feet, Robinson projected a radiant, joyful personality, especially with his eyes and smile. About five feet seven inches tall, he retained a well-proportioned figure throughout his life, despite his daily regimen of quarts of ice cream. He also dressed sumptuously. In his stage appearances, he favored top hat and tails. His personal wardrobe would have furnished a small haberdashery. In 1936 it reportedly included “forty or fifty suits, numerous shirts made to order . . . thirty pairs of shoes . . . six overcoats . . . dozens of hats,” and “dozens of walking canes that are gifts from all over the world.” He wore a ten-carat diamond ring and affixed his tie with a six-carat marquise diamond. “There’s no use in going through life as if you were in a funeral procession,” he told a
New York Times
reporter. “After all, there’s a lot of fun in it, so why grump and grouse? Why not dance through life?”
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Robinson’s success led to more integral roles in three Twentieth Century–Fox films of 1935, but bigger roles meant placement in scenes dominated by whites. He is stripped of his power, prestige, virility, and belonging. He can still sustain a smile and embroider the most mundane domestic task with elegant and exuberant virtuosity, but a sense of white supervision is never absent. The genealogies of these performances are as palpable as if the ancestors’ portraits hung on the walls. His impeccable dress is now the uniform of his office as butler and a tribute to the wealth of his white employer, harkening back to the Uncle Tom of the Tom shows, in which the radical message of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel was quashed. And when white onlookers cluster around Robinson’s dances, regarding him as an exotic figure, there emerge the ghosts of a hundred blackface minstrel performers going back a century to Thomas D. Rice.

Bill Robinson leads the dancing throng in the “Miss Brown to You” number from
The Big Broadcast of 1936
. (Photofest/Paramount)

Producers for
In Old Kentucky
with Will Rogers and revivals of
The Little Colonel
and
The Littlest Rebel
with Shirley Temple cast Robinson not in a black metropolitan present but in a mythic white southern rural past, in which all African Americans are servants and either formally or practically enslaved. These films’ music emphasizes not uptown swing and sophistication but down-home folk tunes—at least as mainstream whites understood them, for in fact they leaned heavily on blackface minstrel material. Indeed, both
In Old Kentucky
and
The Littlest Rebel
include scenes of racial masquerade, in which Will Rogers’s and Shirley Temple’s characters black up. The scent of magnolia blossoms contains the sting of burnt cork.
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As a house servant in the film
In Old Kentucky
, Bill Robinson lifts the simplest of tasks in kitchen and dining room to an elegant performance, the sort to which Charlie Chaplin might have aspired if he could tap. Yet, instead of Chaplin’s dreamy lyricism, Robinson suggests a man for whom dance is as natural as breathing and rhythm as basic as a pulse. There is no ignoring the fact that he restrains the expansive mood and movements of his Harlem dances. He may caper, but he does not swagger. Unselfconscious and unobserved, except by the camera, he nonetheless retains the demeanor of a servant in a white man’s home. When his employer, a horse trainer named Steve Tapley, played by Will Rogers, walks into the kitchen at the end of the scene, Robinson’s bubble is instantly popped.

Later in the film, when Robinson’s character is brought from the kitchen to perform before white ball guests, he is introduced as the “boy” of “Mr. Tapley’s.” The smile he affixes and holds throughout his dance has a labored, almost ghastly quality, unlike his smiles in “Living in a Great Big Way” or “Miss Brown to You.” The ballroom remains the property of the formally dressed white men and women who stiffly watch his performance, and, under the circumstances, his effort to please and placate them becomes an eloquent measure of the continuous emotional deference demanded in the Jim Crow South—and interracial scenes in Hollywood. How much more circumscribed, then, should we expect the performances to be when Robinson dances with Shirley Temple in
The Little Colonel
and
The Littlest Rebel
?

In these two costume melodramas Robinson aided Shirley as she mended not only individual hearts but implicitly the heart of the nation. Ostensibly concerned with cleavages between North and South during and after the United States’ greatest calamity, the Civil War, the films provided both refuge and resilience for those experiencing the national ordeal of the Great Depression.

Although the war is over in
The Little Colonel
, it remains an emotional wound in need of healing. Based on the 1895 story by Annie Fellows Johnston and set in postbellum Kentucky, the film is, in the words of one critic of the day, “all adrip with magnolia whimsy and vast, unashamed portions of synthetic Dixie atmosphere.
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The stony heart that Shirley’s character must soften in this melodrama is that of cantankerous ex-Confederate Colonel Lloyd, who clings to the planter vision of the Old South and vows “confusion to all her enemies.” Such enemies include his daughter’s fiancé, who is doubly damned in the old colonel’s eyes as not only a Yankee but a former Union soldier—and one bearing the name of Sherman at that. When she defies her father’s command and leaves with her lover, Colonel Lloyd melodramatically declares his door forever barred to her. Played by Lionel Barrymore, the colonel embodies all of the stereotypes of the Kentucky gentleman, including white suit, walking stick, and luxuriant white locks, eyebrows, mustache, and goatee, as well as a violent temper, brutal racism, and the status to indulge both freely.

Six years later, as Sherman pursues investments in the West, Colonel Lloyd’s daughter returns to a cottage near her father’s house, now with her own young daughter, Lloyd Sherman, the “little colonel,” played by Shirley Temple. The child’s honorary rank has been bestowed by a western general in recognition of her conquest, “completely unarmed, except for . . . [her] golden curls, brown eyes, and dimples,” of the hearts of an army regiment. Back in Kentucky, the little girl, proud of her honorary title, swaggers around the plantation. It is amply staffed with an array of African American servants, for whom life seems unchanged since slavery. She orders the young black children about in her games. Stereotypical pickaninnies, they serve as foils to her imperious defiance of old Colonel Lloyd and innocent targets of his wrath. The girl’s mammy, played by Hattie McDaniel, generously dispenses cookies, folk wisdom, spirituals, and simple piety. Yet she remains a lovable inferior, comic in her illiteracy and great girth.

Shirley blacks up to hide from a Union soldier in
The Littlest Rebel
. (Photofest/Twentieth Century–Fox)

As Colonel Lloyd’s butler, Walker, Robinson preserves much of the tradition of blackface minstrelsy in which he had served his theatrical apprenticeship. Still, he remains more the author of humor than the object of it. Certainly he had little opportunity for self-assertion in his lines, but he expressed himself eloquently with his feet. Indeed, when he dances, his authority, artistry, and wit are supreme. In the most memorable scene in the film, the justly celebrated staircase dance in which Walker aims to coax the colonel’s granddaughter up to bed, Robinson adapted his signature stage routine from a collapsible set of stairs with five steps on each side to a flight of fifteen steps up to a landing and then ten more to the top. He gave each step a different pitch, so that the stairway became, in effect, a drum set on which he could create elaborate rhythms and patterns. Robinson gave various accounts of his inspiration for his stage version. At times he said it originated when, as a boy, he danced up the wide steps of a Richmond house in which his mother worked. At others he said the idea came in a dream, when the king of England was awaiting him at the top of a flight of stairs, and he danced up them to receive a crown. Robinson undoubtedly told these stories to bolster his claim to have originated a dance that, in fact, long antedated him, and that King Rastus Brown claimed he stole, though Robinson gave it his inimitable stamp. But such stories also point to the way in which the dance could be at once the exuberant delight of a maid’s son and an assertion of nobility.
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