The Little Girl Who Fought the Great Depression: Shirley Temple and 1930s America (15 page)

Stock minstrel materials pervade the sequence, from the anthology of tunes Robinson hums as he dances (including “Old Kentucky Home,” “Carry Me Back to Old Virginny,” “Old Black Joe,” and “Year of Jubilo”) to the dancing couple’s abrupt retreat when Colonel Lloyd appears. Yet Robinson’s virtuosic dance on the master’s flight of stairs is also an improvisational flight of freedom.
²⁰
In his ability to endow a simple nursery rhyme and hackneyed minstrel tunes with dazzling artistry and vitality, he shows his refusal to be defined as simply a servant. Indeed, he suggests an alternative to Colonel Lloyd’s authority, one based on the power to delight rather than denounce. Instead of commanding, he charms. Instead of stamping his foot in exasperation (a gesture shared by Colonel Lloyd and his granddaughter), Robinson’s Walker teaches her how to tap it. “I want to do that too,” the little girl says after Robinson’s solo dance. He takes her hand with courtly grace and leads her in a stair dance exquisitely attuned to her talent.

Bill Robinson and Shirley join hands in a production still for the staircase dance from
The Little Colonel
. (Photofest/Fox)

By every indication, Bill Robinson and Shirley Temple had great respect and affection for one another. She cherished his warmth and talent, and he never lost a chance to praise her. Photographs of her took pride of place in his dressing room and in his apartment. Nonetheless, as the African American jazz pianist Hazel Scott later recalled, “He had no illusions about a Black man’s privileges. He knew that
only
as her butler, her trusted servant, could he take the hand of the little golden haired child and teach her to dance.”
²¹

In teaching Shirley the dance, Robinson pared it down and showed her how to keep her steps close and precise. To gain an extra tap or step, he had her kick the stair riser with her toe. As an adult, she remembered, “Every one of my taps had to ring crisp and clear in the best cadence,” and she repeated her routine until she got each tap just right. Yet this was the opposite of drudgery. “The smile on my face was not acting; I was ecstatic.”
²²
Robinson’s recording of the pair’s taps for the soundtrack perfected the performance, here as elsewhere giving her steps a precision that they lacked.

Ultimately, the little girl proves to be fully her grandfather’s equal in courage and his instructor in forgiveness. Together, they foil dastardly swindlers, bent on extorting the deed to her father’s valuable land, and Colonel Lloyd, softened by his granddaughter’s blend of honey and vinegar, is reconciled with his daughter and son-in-law. In the closing scene, as the black-and-white film bursts into pastels and the soundtrack plays “Dixie,” the family is joyfully reunited in a Technicolor embrace.
²³

The
New York Times
’s Andre Sennwald, while chiding Fox’s “ruthless . . . exploitation of Miss Temple’s great talent for infant charm,” still noted that the Radio City Music Hall audience “applauded ‘The Little Colonel’ for eleven seconds after Miss Temple faded out in Mr. Barrymore’s arms.” Small-town audiences were equally enthusiastic, as exhibitors reported in the “What the Picture Did for Me” section of
Motion Picture Herald
. “The color sequence left the audience gasping it was so beautiful,” J. R. Patterson of the Majestic Theatre in Fort Mill, South Carolina, wrote, and exhibitors from Oscoda, Michigan, Montpelier, Idaho, Tilbury, Ontario, and Lebanon, Kansas, all agreed.
²⁴

In setting and theme,
The Little Colonel
was a prelude to Shirley Temple’s last film of 1935,
The Littlest Rebel
. Having reunited her unreconstructed grandfather and his Union veteran son-in-law in the earlier film, she was ready to patch up the ultimate American family quarrel, the Civil War. As a theatrical property,
The Littlest Rebel
was already old-fashioned in 1911 when Edward Peple created it as a four-act melodrama, starring the child actress Juliet Shelby (later known as Mary Miles Minter). By November 1935, when Twentieth Century–Fox released its film version, it had become “a claptrap skeleton,” calculated to serve as a sequel to
The Little Colonel
by reuniting Shirley Temple and Bill Robinson in another moonlight-and-magnolias story of sectional cleavages set in the South.
²⁵

Edward Peple’s version of
The Littlest Rebel
is another reminder of how the road to reunion between North and South was paved on the backs of African Americans. As Peple wrote in the foreword to the novelized version, “This story deals, not with the right or wrong of a lost confederacy, but with the mercy and generosity, the chivalry and humanity which lived in the hearts of the Blue and Gray, a noble contrast to the grim brutality of war.” As for the enslaved portion of humanity whose condition lay at the heart of the conflict, Peple appeared to think freedom was a great mistake. As another of her slaves prepares to run away to the Union army, the noble plantation mistress tells her faithful but feckless house slave, Uncle Billy, that her chief concern is for their welfare: “It makes me sad to see them leaving one by one. They are such children, Uncle Billy; and so helpless without a master hand.”
²⁶

Following Peple’s play, a generation of silent films, including D. W. Griffith’s
The Birth of a Nation
and a version of
The Littlest Rebel
, plowed this fertile ground of racism, well fertilized with the manure of nostalgia. The coming of sound amplified the message with unconvincing southern drawls, blackface dialect, and minstrel music. King Vidor’s
So Red the Rose
, based on Stark Young’s novel and released less than a month before the Fox production of
The Littlest Rebel
, included slaves enthusiastically cheering their master as he leaves to fight the infernal Yankees.
²⁷
The climactic and most lucrative production of the decade was David Selznick’s version of Margaret Mitchell’s
Gone with the Wind
, released in December 1939. More than these films,
The Littlest Rebel
was calculated to please northern and southern whites alike, while offering the barest crumbs of consolation to African Americans. As the trade paper
Variety
observed, “All bitterness and cruelty has been rigorously cut out and the Civil War emerges as a misunderstanding among kindly gentlemen with eminently happy slaves and a cute little girl who sings and dances through the story.”
²⁸

The Littlest Rebel
was a romance on several levels, and the terms of these romances reveal much about the emotional needs of the film market in the midst of the Great Depression. As the country faced widespread unemployment, want, and uncertainty, the film reminded moviegoers how Americans had endured far worse in the Civil War and recovered. Shirley plays the part of Virginia, the devoted daughter of invincibly honorable Confederate Captain Herbert Cary, and Bill Robinson serves as their steadfast enslaved house servant Uncle Billy.

In the waning months of the Civil War the Confederate cause is all but lost, but, as little Virgie, Shirley wins the heart of every good man she meets. Apart from her doting father, her first great conquest is the Union commanding officer, Colonel Morrison, who captures her father, despite her best efforts to conceal him. Even so, he is deeply touched by news that her father only returned to attend Mrs. Cary in her final illness. Morrison has, he reveals, his own little girl much like Virgie, and the father-daughter bond is stronger than sectional division or the dictates of war. Instead of taking Virgie’s father prisoner, Morrison tells his foe how he might find a spare Union officer’s uniform and transport his daughter safely to Richmond, pledging him only not to spy on Union operations in the process.

The innocent conspiracy is quickly foiled, however, and Cary is arrested as a spy, and Morrison as a traitor. Awaiting execution in adjoining cells, they bond in a show of cheerfulness with Virgie during her daily visits. To Uncle Billy’s banjo accompaniment, she sings the minstrel staple “Polly-Wolly-Doodle,” giving the chorus a special twist for Depression audiences as she banishes “Mr. Gloom.” By this time, Virgie regards Colonel Morrison as a “second daddy” and lovingly kisses him near the mouth, just as she does her father.

The other romance in
The Littlest Rebel
is between little Virgie and Uncle Billy. Yet here the roles of little mistress and servant are kept firmly in place. He can teach her dances and act as her guide, but their affection is determinedly kept within the boundaries of innocent playmates—at least as that bond was represented in the mainstream white press. Nonetheless, one African American movie theater gleefully promoted Bill Robinson and Shirley Temple as an interracial couple: “SHOT AND SHELL COULDN’T PART THESE SWEETHEARTS!” Among the African American patrons in Oakland, California, watching the couple was a ten-year-old boy, the future artist Robert Colescott. “What if America’s sweetheart had been a black girl?” he later wondered. “What would it mean to a white man to see himself as a Bill Robinson, caught in that image and playing second fiddle to a black girl?” The impish painting that sprang from these subversive questions was
Shirley Temple Black and Bill Robinson White
(1980), the title gleefully punning on Shirley Temple’s married name.
²⁹

Although Uncle Billy was a thoroughly contented and credulous slave in the original play, his character acquired more dignity in the film version, while still staying within the stereotype of a courteous and steadfast Uncle Tom. To take but one instance, early in the film, Uncle Billy, explaining the Civil War to little Virgie, reports that he heard a white gentleman say, “There’s a man up North who wants to free the slaves.” When she asks what that means, he replies, “I don’t know what it means myself.” As
Variety
’s reviewer observed, the line “is spotted and delivered by Bill Robinson in such a way as to possibly cause northern eyebrows to tilt. Just a slight tilt.”
³⁰

As a foil, Willie Best played the “coon” part of James Henry, a ludicrously simple-minded, lazy, and easily frightened young slave.
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Rounding out the slave population on the plantation are the patient, loving Mammy (Bessie Lyle) and a group of children, who are tongue-tied in little Virgie’s presence. Their bashful ignorance and Virgie’s noblesse oblige fully accredit the plantation myth of the Old South.

Still, just as in
The Little Colonel
, Robinson’s character is most able to proclaim his authority and dignity through his virtuosic dancing. When Uncle Billy and Little Virgie turn buskers to raise their train fare to Washington in an effort to free her father, they perform a dance shuffle on the plank sidewalk. Robinson initiates skipping crossovers, back flaps, and other steps, tunes, hums, and interjections, and Shirley imitates him. White onlookers quickly cluster around the odd couple, and once again, as in the ballroom performance in
In Old Kentucky
, Robinson is not simply a dancer but a racial exhibit. The racial imitation and masquerade at the heart of blackface minstrelsy are epitomized in this duet, which culminates in another staircase dance.
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Robinson’s status as dance instructor to little Virgie in this scene amused rather than threatened white viewers. A critic in the
Atlanta Constitution
wrote, “To see Shirley imitating Bill Robinson, not only in tap steps but in gestures and cast of countenance, is to see one of the most laughable sights on the screen.” The African American
Chicago Defender
, by contrast, was delighted to see Shirley Temple “truckin’ on down” with Bill Robinson as if fresh from a Cotton Club revue.
³³

In the original play of
The Littlest Rebel
a ragged and emaciated Virgie finally appeals to General Grant to pardon her father and Colonel Morrison. In the film version a notably plump, well-dressed Virgie and Uncle Billy take the matter directly to the White House. Soon they are ushered into Lincoln’s presence. The president, played by Frank McGlynn Sr., who made a career of Lincoln roles, rises from his desk, shakes Virgie’s hand, and then extends his hand to Uncle Billy. It is the film’s one explicit if fleeting suggestion of the dignity and freedom owed to African Americans, and it was intended to emphasize Lincoln’s magnanimity rather than Uncle Billy’s equality. At first Billy fails to grasp the president’s hand, because, presumably, a white man has never extended his hand to him before. (In a line later cut from the script—could it have been at the request of Bill Robinson?—he says incredulously, “I’se a slave.”)
³⁴
Then he shakes it.