The Little Girl Who Fought the Great Depression: Shirley Temple and 1930s America (20 page)

She was ideally cast for the part. Self-reliant, enthusiastic, and adorable, she exemplified the child whom no adult with a heart could refuse. She aroused the passionate imitation of girls from toddlers to early adolescents around the world, the admiration of many boys, and the affection of mothers and fathers alike. Little wonder, then, that she figured conspicuously among Grumbine’s examples of effective advertising and merchandising. Not only did Grumbine note the success of department stores in encouraging girls and their mothers to participate in Shirley Temple events, such as birthday celebrations and Christmas greetings, she also investigated the specific ways in which objects associated with Shirley changed family’s buying habits. Interviewing children about their response to premium offers, she spoke with an eight-year-old girl named Carol. “I got a Shirley Temple drinking cup with Bisquick,” Carol reported. “Mother got the Bisquick because I wanted the drinking cup.” Carol said that her family used Bisquick “all the time now” and that her mother continued to buy it even when no premium was involved. Similarly, as Grumbine reported, Quaker Oats used Shirley Temple extensively in its 1937 advertising campaign on behalf of Puffed Wheat and Puffed Rice cereals. In a two-pronged assault on children and their mothers, Shirley’s image appeared in ads in juvenile and mass-circulation magazines as well as on advertising cards on buses, subways, and trolleys.
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Even advertisements aimed squarely at mothers, such as one in the April 1937 issue of
Ladies’ Home Journal
, often emphasized the point of view of the child. “This is
my
cereal!” a beaming Shirley Temple proclaims, as she munches dry Quaker Puffed Wheat right from the box. Quaker Oats encouraged other children to be equally assertive, while reassuring mothers of the cereal’s nutritional benefits.
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Other promotional schemes lauded by Grumbine turned children from consumers to sales representatives in their own right. One of the largest magazine publishers in the country, Curtis Publishing, appealed to girls’ desire for belonging by establishing a Junior Girls’ Club. By selling subscriptions to
Saturday Evening Post
,
Ladies’ Home Journal
,
Jack and Jill
, and other Curtis magazines, they could earn cash or prizes, such as a Shirley Temple doll. Other magazines and newspapers, including
Parents Magazine
, made similar offers, potentially linking mothers and daughters as a sales team.
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No sentimentalist, Grumbine thought of Shirley Temple’s popularity as a fad that would inevitably run its course. Child consumers might be independent, but they were also fickle. So she advised manufactures to exploit fads quickly, before they peaked. Selling through Shirley Temple was a race against time.
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Yet Shirley’s power on behalf of advertisers, merchandisers, and manufacturers directly corresponded to her power as a box-office star, and while it lasted it was immense, transforming the juvenile market as thoroughly as she did the movie industry.

A major element of this transformation occurred in children’s fashions. Shirley modeled stylish children’s outfits in virtually all of her movies, even those in which her protectors’ circumstances were supposedly modest. No less a figure than Twentieth Century–Fox’s vice president in charge of production, Darryl Zanuck, observed that her fans wished to see her well dressed. In a script conference for
Little Miss Broadway
he noted, “We should give her as many changes of costume as we possibly can, and all her dresses should be very smart and pretty. We should have the feeling that Pop and Barbara would keep the child well dressed, even if they had to sacrifice on other things.”
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Through her movie wardrobes Shirley helped dress designers mark a sharp divide between the juvenile and adolescent markets. Although she was beyond the toddler stage even in her early Baby Burlesk film shorts, she perpetuated a toddler look through the 1930s and popularized it for the children’s fashion industry, including Big Sister versions for girls up to age twelve. Such dresses had the additional virtue of being easy to manufacture. A fashion industry reporter noted enthusiastically, “They follow one pattern almost invariably: a skirt (about the size of a postage stamp) that falls in soft pleats from a round collar of a contrasting material or appliqué; no belt—Shirley wisely favors the pinafore fashion which shows off a small round tummy to best advantage; and, for trimming, a bow of baby ribbon or an appliquéd nursery figure. Even her party frocks use no trimming except touches of hand embroidery and edgings of narrow lace.”
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In addition to emphasizing the lack of a waistline, her dresses were exceedingly short. Even when she was standing, they scarcely extended beyond her panties.

Shirley Temple dresses dominated the girls’ fashion industry in the mid-1930s. In addition to the popularity of those clothes and accessories authorized to bear the Shirley Temple name, countless other look-alike versions proliferated, illustrated in advertisements and catalogs by girls with hair and features closely resembling the child star’s and often striking one of her characteristic poses. Such was the case with the largest department and mail-order concern in the country, Sears, Roebuck. A pioneer in mail-order sales to rural Americans since the 1890s, the company aggressively expanded into urban retail outlets beginning in 1925 and continued to do so through the 1930s. By the end of the decade, it accounted for 1.5 percent of total retail sales in the United States. Following Shirley’s phenomenal ascent in 1934, she played a starring role in Sears catalogs. In a page devoted entirely to Shirley Temple fashions, the fall 1935 issue breathlessly declared, “In big city stores they’re going like wildfire! Shirley and her cute clothes have stolen everyone’s heart; no wonder every little girl wants to wear the same styles!” Only the costliest offerings were worthy of the star. These ranged from washable dresses for girls age seven to twelve, styled in accord with Shirley’s latest movies, for $1.89 (twice the price of similar dresses in the same catalog without the Shirley Temple name) to a wool herringbone coat, leggings, and hat set for $10.95. Even for those who could not afford such clothes, the Sears, Roebuck catalog served as a “wish book,” filled with goods to dream about.
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Shirley models an accordion-pleated dress. (Photofest/Twentieth Century–Fox)

Shirley Temple similarly dominated doll industry sales. In 1934 Ideal Novelty and Toy Company’s plight resembled that of Fox Film. The company’s founder, Morris Michtom, a Russian Jewish immigrant, achieved his first great success with the famous Teddy bear, named in honor of Theodore Roosevelt. Using assembly-line techniques, Ideal became a leading manufacturer of composition dolls, notably its Flossie Flirt doll introduced in 1924. “Says Ma-Ma,” one advertisement declared, “rolls her flirty eyes from side to side, winks and blinks mischievously and also closes her eyes in sleep.” When sales slumped at the onset of the Great Depression, the company sought a new attraction. Watching the Educational Films movie short
Merrily Yours
late in 1933, Ideal’s dress designer Mollye Goldman spotted an unknown child actor: Shirley Temple. Goldman anticipated Fox Film’s Winfield Sheehan in sensing the five-year-old girl’s potential. Yet not until August 1934, when Shirley had indeed become a celebrity, did Ideal sign a contract with the Temple family and apply for a patent.
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Shirley Temple doll with polka-dotted dress, 1934. (Courtesy of The Strong,
^®
Rochester, New York)

In October 1934, just in time for the Christmas shopping season, Ideal breathlessly announced the introduction of its Shirley Temple doll in the toy industry trade magazine
Playthings
: “This newest Ideal doll will be an exact replica of ‘Shirley Temple,’ the sweetheart of America. She will come in an authentic Shirley Temple dress, packed in an unusually attractive Shirley Temple box and with a Shirley Temple button.” The following month Ideal ran another advertisement in
Playthings
, this time reproducing a postcard supposedly from Shirley herself, in childish printing, “‘I LOVE MY DOLL AND I PLAY WITH IT ALL THE TIME. IT IS JUST LIKE ME.”
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The look-alike doll would greatly intensify the process of imitation central to Shirley Temple’s success.

The company’s initial model, with loose strawberry-blond curls, open-and-shut hazel eyes, peaches-and-cream complexion, and rosy, dimpled cheeks, sported a red coin-dotted organdy dress like the one Shirley wore in her big dance number for
Stand Up and Cheer!
. The doll came in four sizes: 15 inches for $3, 18 inches for $5, 20 inches for $6, and 22 inches for $7. Even the smallest of these cost considerably more than many families could afford—$3 in 1934 was roughly the equivalent of $50 in 2013. The biggest, almost half the height of Shirley herself, was a distinct luxury. Nonetheless, all of these models proved enormously popular. To satisfy the rush of orders, Ideal hired additional workers and sold more than fifty thousand Shirley Temple dolls by Christmas.
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Ideal further stimulated demand by introducing a range of sizes and outfits keyed to each new Shirley Temple film. “Hitch your toy department to a star,” Ideal urged in another
Playthings
advertisement. “Every Shirley Temple talkie is a Shirley Temple Doll promotion.” Ultimately, the company offered Shirley Temple dolls in nine different sizes, ranging from 11 to 27 inches. The most lavish of them all, a 27-inch doll elaborately reproducing Shirley’s outfit in
The Little Colonel
, had “Flirty” eyes that moved back and forth, a taffeta dress available in pink or yellow, cotton pantaloons and long skirt trimmed with lace and picoting, and a matching taffeta hat with a silk ribbon and feather. While slimming the face mold of Shirley Temple dolls, reportedly in response to Gertrude Temple’s complaint that the original looked chubby, the company also introduced a Shirley Temple baby doll, depicting her as a two-year-old, available in models from 16 to 27 inches. Here was cuteness to fit every size, if not every purse.
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What remains astonishing is how many purses sprang open. Ideal’s Shirley Temple dolls accounted for almost a third of all dolls sold in 1935. Sales continued to be robust in 1936, the last year in which Mollye Goldman designed the dresses. Customers with still smaller purses could buy dolls made by Ideal’s various imitators and make their own outfits. Barred from using the child star’s name, these look-alikes sold under such sobriquets as Bright Eyes, Miss Charming, Little Miss Movie, and the Movie Queen. Although they lacked Ideal’s attention to detail, most of these were significantly less expensive, and they found ready buyers.
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Once purchased, often as a gift, Shirley Temple dolls entered deeply into the imaginations of young girls. Even a half century later, participants in an oral history project in Rochester, New York, spoke of such dolls as one of the highlights of their childhood. Six years old when she was given her doll around 1936, Ann Reebok remarked, “I guess the Shirley Temple Doll is the one that I thought I had to have forever.” Her doll became an active companion: “I played house with her. I put her to bed, she had naps, she had company. We had parties. We probably had dances.” Most of all, she combed Shirley’s hair: “I combed her and curled her until she had no hair left.” Similarly, Joanne Wasenske (born 1930) from Fairport, New York, said, “Shirley was very important to me. She went everywhere with me.” Remarking on a photograph of herself as a girl with her Shirley Temple doll, she added, “We were on our way to the beach for a picnic. I had on my bathing suit so, of course, she had on hers.” Lois Green-Stone (born in 1934), who grew up in Flushing, New York, imagined her “adorable” Shirley Temple doll as an extension of herself: “I related to Shirley Temple much the way I related to me. . . . I would get up and tap dance. I would imitate what I expected Shirley Temple was doing.” Even an older girl, Esther Camelio Zannie (born 1925), who was given a Shirley Temple doll at age twelve, regarded it as “the main thing” in her childhood. Yet for her the doll was not a playmate but an icon: “I think she was too pretty to play with. I more or less just kept her on my dresser. . . . I kept her for years and years.”
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