The Little Girl Who Fought the Great Depression: Shirley Temple and 1930s America (16 page)

Shirley and Bill Robinson truckin’ on down in
The Littlest Rebel
(Photofest/Twentieth Century–Fox).

Lincoln takes Virgie over to his desk and gently extracts the facts of the case from her. When she describes how her mother “went away,” Virgie breaks into sobs, and Lincoln sympathetically lifts her onto his lap. Ultimately, the president dispatches an order to General Grant, freeing her father and Colonel Morrison. Virgie has won the greatest heart of all. An early draft of the script had Lincoln writing his Gettysburg Address while still under her spell, but the veteran script doctor Raymond Griffith protested that viewers’ credulity would snap. “If you ever even suggest that Shirley Temple was the inspiration for the Gettysburg Address,” he warned, “they’ll throw rocks at us.”
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In the film’s concluding scene, we see Virgie and the bars of the jail behind her. Then the camera pulls back to reveal a long table, covered with a cloth and the remnants of a banquet celebrating the officers’ pardons. She is singing “Polly-Wolly-Doodle,” with the men joining in. Cary and Morrison rise on each side of her in the final chorus and simultaneously plant kisses on her cheeks.

Like Shirley Temple’s smile and sunny disposition, Robinson’s virtuosity was repeatedly portrayed as a natural gift rather than a product of work and craft. Robinson himself shrewdly played the part of the naive artist for white journalists. “I don’t know how I do it,” he told the
New York Times
’s S. J. Woolf. “I just dance. I hear the music and something comes into my head which I just send down to my feet. And that’s all there is to it.” Woolf observed, “He brings up pictures of those happy-go-lucky darkies who lolled about columned plantation homes—who danced because they had no cares and who sang because they couldn’t help it.” Another white interviewer noted approvingly, “His southern upbringing and innate modesty makes [
sic
] Bill tactful about observing Jim Crow laws, written and unwritten.”
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Racist constraints on Robinson deeply offended African Americans who admired his artistry. The avid proponent of the Harlem Renaissance Alain Locke declared in
The Negro and His Music
that “for two generations the American Negro dancer has been in vaudeville chains. His accomplishments within such a narrow compass of routine foot work and acrobatic eccentricity have only been possible through sheer genius; but what . . . [a host of dancers, including] Bill (“Bojangles”) Robinson could have done in a freer medium with more artistic background can only be imagined.” Locke continued, “A Bojangles performance is excellent vaudeville, but listen with closed eyes, and it becomes an almost symphonic composition of sounds. What the eye sees is the tawdry American convention; what the ear hears is the priceless African heritage.”
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Whites and blacks joined in celebrating not only Robinson’s artistry but also his tireless philanthropy. He performed at numerous charitable and police benefits and gave generously to the poor and needy, to African American hospitals and orphanages, and to civic efforts on behalf of playgrounds in Harlem and a traffic light at a dangerous intersection in his hometown of Richmond, Virginia. To African Americans, however, Robinson was not merely a specialty act and a comfortingly sunny personality but one of the greatest stars of stage and screen, as well as a spectacular rags-to-riches story, a stature that earned him both adulation and scrutiny. For black newspapers and many of their readers, his presence in a movie was reason enough to attend, and they regarded him as fully the costar of Shirley Temple, not merely a supporting player.

Nonetheless, a subject of heated, if largely subterranean, debate among African Americans was whether his role as a model Negro (from the white point of view) was compatible with being a “race man.” Attending a stage revue in which Robinson told the racial jokes that had long been a staple of his act, a black youth heckled, “We don’t want to hear that old ‘Uncle Tom’ stuff. . . . We came here to see you dance.”
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The journalist and critic Ralph Matthews fumed, “The big names among Negro performers are only those who have appealed to the whimsicalities of the white race and conformed to their idea of what a Negro should be.” Robinson, he said, was “always presented as an old Uncle Tom” in his films with Shirley Temple. Yet, while castigating Hollywood’s timorous deference to southern white racial prejudice, Matthews did not blame Robinson himself. Renzi B. Lemus, the venerable head of the Brotherhood of Dining Car Cooks and Waiters, saw the issue in terms of protecting African American jobs. Accordingly, he rushed to the defense of Robinson and similar actors. “Why not leave Bill Robinson alone?” Lemus asked, arguing that black actors working in Hollywood were far preferable to grease-painted imitations. The latter had often claimed major African American roles as late as the mid-1920s.
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Thus, African American pride and frustration with Robinson inevitably reflected the larger problem of claiming respect, wealth, opportunity, and a measure of happiness in 1930s America.

Robinson rarely answered his critics directly. Still, in an interview with a black journalist, he declared, “There are so many who innocently feel that I haven’t my race at heart. This is not true. I am a race man! And I do all in my power to aid my race. I strive upon every turn to tear down any barriers that have existed between our two races and to establish harmonious relationship for all.”
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Nonetheless, Robinson knew the truth of Paul Laurence Dunbar’s poem “We Wear the Mask.” His grin hid at least as much as it revealed, including the dedicated practice and discipline by which he achieved his virtuosity and also a hot temper dating back to his childhood. His given name was Luther, but he appropriated his brother Bill’s name instead in a boyhood fight and went by it for the rest of his life. His very nickname, Bojangles, pointed to that temper, deriving from “jangler,” meaning a quarreler or squabbler, though this meaning too was masked in reports to the white press.
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His temper only occasionally flared onstage in response to hecklers, but offstage it was much more in evidence. The “Dark Cloud of Joy” could turn stormy in his encounters with Hollywood directors and producers.
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More generally, his quarrelsome nature, his gambling habits, and the racial tensions of American life all led to scrapes with blacks and whites alike. His body bore scars from razor and knife slashes, and a bullet fired in 1898 remained lodged in his knee. By the time of his success with Shirley Temple, he habitually carried a gold-inlaid, pearl-handled .32 caliber revolver, a pistol permit, and affidavits from numerous police chiefs and eminent officials as a kind of passport through white America. Robinson managed to keep most of his fans, the white ones especially, from seeing all of these dimensions. Again and again, white critics lauded this irrepressibly jolly man who was part of “a naturally jovial race.”
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No doubt they would have been surprised to hear Robinson’s outburst at a New York Yankees baseball game when he was in his mid-sixties. As his third wife, Elaine, recalled, “Bill was betting some man a hundred dollars that someone would hit a home run. This big [white] man in the back yelled, ‘Oh, sit down. We don’t want to touch your dirty money.’ And Bill couldn’t believe that the man had said that. He yelled back, ‘Dirty money? Yeah, pretty, white Shirley Temple money. That’s where I got it. Teachin’ white Shirley. It’s filthy, dirty money!’ ”
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At last, a golden opportunity to press for African American rights did emerge when Robinson met President Franklin Roosevelt. Not allowed to plead for his people to President Lincoln as Uncle Billy in
The Littlest Rebel
, when Robinson stood face-to-face with Roosevelt, he seized the moment. “By the way, Mr. President, I see you got some kind of New Deal going,” he said, undoubtedly smiling all the while. “Just remember, Mr. President, when you shuffle those cards, just don’t overlook those spades.”
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When in 1949 Robinson died at the age of seventy-one, he received one of the largest funerals in the history of New York City. An estimated half-million mourners lined city streets for eight miles as his flag-draped hearse slowly rolled from Harlem’s Abyssinian Baptist Church through Times Square to the Evergreens Cemetery in Brooklyn. At the funeral, Adam Clayton Powell Jr., the church’s pastor and first African American congressman from New York, eulogized Robinson. “Bill was a credit not just to the Negro race but to the human race,” the civil rights leader said. “He was Mister Show Business. He was Broadway. And who is to say that making people happy isn’t the finest thing in the world?”
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The question was rhetorical, of course, but it pointed to Robinson’s effort and achievement, even as it aimed to forestall black criticism.

Criticism came quickly, nonetheless. Five days after Robinson’s funeral, a letter to the editor of the
New York Amsterdam News
declared, “Although it is unfortunate that Bill Robinson died, the type of entertainer who died with him is well gone. Recognizing that Bill began his career many years ago in an altogether different age, it is understandable that he would have played the ‘Uncle Tom’ role to gain fame and fortune. But in the opinion of many he portrayed that role when it was wholly unnecessary.” Writing in the
Chicago Defender
in 1953, four years after Robinson’s death, Langston Hughes more eloquently expressed the same impatience: “Uncle Tom did not really die. He simply went to Hollywood. . . . Long ago in America,” he continued, “the stereotype of the Negro as a humorous clown was born. That shadow of the South is still over the Negro in professional entertainment. A superb dancer like the late Bill Robinson told jokes shaming his people because he danced in that shadow.”
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The difficulty of assessing Robinson’s example remained, and central to that difficulty was the nature of his smile. Was it a sign of his emotional strength or weakness? Was his ability to sustain it as he danced along the color line with Shirley Temple a triumph or a surrender? African Americans debated such questions during Robinson’s lifetime and still more so after his death. Whatever their individual answers, his smile was emblematic of the emotional work that African Americans had been expected to perform through the Great Depression and of their growing refusal to do so. That smile compressed volumes of African American history and resilience, artistry and accommodation, pride and pain. It was a history that the young Shirley Temple could scarcely imagine.

CHAPTER 4 THE MOST ADORED CHILD IN THE WORLD

“I used to sleep with a clothespin on my nose, and two cotton balls,” Oprah Winfrey once recalled. “And I couldn’t breathe and all I would do is wake up with two clothespin prints on the side of my nose, trying to get it to turn up. I wanted Shirley Temple curls; that’s what I prayed for all the time.” The paradoxes of modern celebrity are many. That Oprah Winfrey, born in rural Mississippi in 1954 and rising out of a broken family, poverty, racism, and sexual assault to become the most admired and richest African American woman of her generation, ached as a little girl to look like Shirley Temple is by no means the strangest.
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Crucial to Shirley Temple’s amazing fame in the Great Depression—and its endurance for generations—were the strong bonds forged between vast, diverse publics and the adored curly-haired child. Celebrity and fans became inextricably linked in the chains of the Hollywood empire. Although such fans have frequently been portrayed as passive, they participated actively and creatively. Yet the choices presented to them were distinctly limited, just as were those of the Temple family in working within the studio system. All were captivated by processes larger than themselves. For the star system served as a key agent in a larger consumer system, and Hollywood’s golden age must be understood as an integral part of the development of a modern consumer culture. That culture especially transformed the United States, penetrating deep into the lives of children as well as adults, and it was rapidly changing the lives of families around the globe.

Even today, the breadth and depth of Shirley Temple’s fame in the Great Depression remain astounding. The top box-office star in the world for four consecutive years, from 1935 through 1938, she exerted a personal appeal for many moviegoers that no adult could match. Stimulated at every opportunity by Fox Film and later Twentieth Century–Fox representatives and their allies among film distributors, exhibitors, the press, magazines, merchandisers, and advertisers, her worldwide fame rivaled any celebrity’s of the time. In the mid-1930s her fan clubs comprised 384 branches with a total of 3,800,000 members. Had they been a city unto themselves, it would have been larger than any in America other than New York. On the occasion of her seventh birthday, twenty thousand admirers in Bali gathered to pray for her good health. A Japanese movie magazine filled two issues solely with photographs of Shirley and sold a million copies. Remarking how deeply American movie culture had penetrated the interior cities of China, the writer Lin Yutang observed: “A street peddler with Shirley Temple postcards always does a roaring business before schools and at luncheon hours.” Even in 1940 with war raging in Europe, the German satirical magazine
Simplicissimus
gently spoofed Shirley Temple’s fame, depicting the child star in the front row of a schoolroom as she responds to the teacher’s instructions to the class to write their names, “No, ma’am, I’m not giving any more autographs!” With only modest exaggeration, a 1939 Hollywood trade paper marveled, “There is no country in the world, both civilized and uncivilized[,] where at some time or another her pictures have not been shown. In the Orient she is called ‘Scharey,’ in Central Europe it is ‘Schirley,’ but throughout the English speaking world ‘Shirley Temple’ stands as a universal symbol of childhood. No child in history has been so well known or universally beloved.”
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