The Little Girl Who Fought the Great Depression: Shirley Temple and 1930s America (22 page)

In an industry replete with scantily educated boy wonders, Darryl Zanuck was one of the most phenomenal. The
New Yorker
writer Alva Johnston described him as a bantamweight version of Theodore Roosevelt, with piercing blue eyes, curly hair, an unruly mustache, a mélange of protruding and missing teeth, and a swagger in his walk. More fancifully, the rival producer David O. Selznick said that the sandy-haired Zanuck looked like “an ear of corn only a maniac would eat.” Still shy of his thirty-third birthday when he took command of Twentieth Century–Fox studios, and nineteen years Sheehan’s junior, Zanuck had already established himself as one of the greatest producers in Hollywood’s brief history. He had launched his career while still in his early twenties as a writer and adapter, and the lessons of this background informed all his later work. “Success in movies,” he liked to say, “boiled down to three things: story, story, story.”
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He worked on
The Jazz Singer
when he was twenty-five, then honed the cutting edge of tough, contemporary gangster films such as
The Doorway to Hell
(1930),
The Public Enemy
(1931), and
Little Caesar
(1931). He helped produce one of the most powerful of all early Depression films,
I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang
(1932), and contributed its chilling conclusion. There we see the protagonist James Allen, once an upright citizen, wrongly convicted and barbarously punished, reduced to a pathetically frightened figure constantly on the run. When his erstwhile fiancée meets him and asks how he lives, he replies as he shrinks again into the shadows, “I steal.”

A similar sense of toughness and topicality infused Zanuck’s production of the celebrated backstage musical
42nd Street
(1933). In addition, Zanuck vastly expanded the possibilities of movie biographies with such films as
The House of Rothschild
(1934) and
Young Mr. Lincoln
(1939). He also offered distinctly American interpretations of literary classics, such as
Les Misérables
, which he called “ ‘I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang’ in costume.”
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He would go on to make such acclaimed films as
The Grapes of Wrath
(1940),
How Green Was My Valley
(1941), and
Gentleman’s Agreement
(1947). In the course of his career, he molded a series of Hollywood stars from Rin-Tin-Tin to Marilyn Monroe.

Pulsing with nervous energy, constantly chomping on cigars, Zanuck grabbed the reins of power at Twentieth Century–Fox and pulled hard. He immediately discarded twelve of Sheehan’s film projects and halted another six already in production. Reversing the trend toward decentralized organization, Zanuck placed himself at the very center of all production as he expanded and thoroughly revamped the studio. He kept Dictaphones around his home, office, and projection room and poured all of his thoughts. Sweeping into the studio an hour or so before noon, he continued working long after others had left, at times until three or four the next morning. He selected story ideas from numerous book digests prepared for his perusal, immersed himself in script conferences, cast the roles, chose the production team, considered the music, sets, and costumes, and claimed many of the prerogatives of a director, from shooting instructions to film editing. He later said it was not simply the way he liked to work but “the only way I know how to produce.”
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The two most lucrative actors in the Fox stable that Zanuck inherited were the comedian Will Rogers and Shirley Temple. With his winning folksy manner and vast productivity, Rogers stood at the summit of box-office popularity, although Shirley was already advancing rapidly. Yet within months of the merger, on August 15, 1935, Rogers was killed in a plane crash. The devastating loss meant that Zanuck needed to pay especially close attention to his precious young charge, who continued to be immensely profitable to the studio. Only modest expenditures on her films reaped glittering gross returns: $1 million to $1.5 million on their first runs and even more on subsequent runs.
⁸
Later, Zanuck increased her budgets substantially, beginning with John Ford’s
Wee Willie Winkie
.

Although Zanuck clearly had no reluctance to break with precedents set by Sheehan, he nonetheless preserved much of the Shirley Temple formula concocted during her first year and a half at Fox. Beginning with
The Littlest Rebel
(released November 22, 1935),
Captain January
(released April 17, 1936), and
Poor Little Rich Girl
(the first of these three in production but released on July 24, 1936), he ultimately produced fourteen Shirley Temple films. Only one of these,
The Blue Bird
, was a commercial failure.

Quite early, Shirley Temple movies established their own genre, and soon, within the industry, they would be known simply as “Shirley Temples.”
⁹
In April 1935, only a year after Shirley’s breakthrough in
Stand Up and Cheer!
, a cartoon in
The New Yorker
paid backhanded tribute to the generic conventions. Pitching an idea in a script conference, a man declares: “. . . and here’s the surprise ending that knocks ’em cold, Mr. Feinglass. Shirley Temple is the killer.” As if she could ever be anything other than triumphantly virtuous! Indeed, Shirley had been foiling hardened criminals and converting soft-hearted ones as early as
Little Miss Marker
, and she continued her work as crime-stopper in
Baby Take a Bow
and
The Little Colonel
. All of these movies proved enormously popular, although some criticized the gangster elements as unsuitable for children, and
Baby Take a Bow
was banned for this reason in Nazi Germany. By the time Zanuck assumed control, such elements had been purged, although larcenous characters popped up occasionally.
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Yet Shirley stood for much more than virtuous innocence. Underlying the spirit of her films, the very essence of Shirley Temple’s appeal, as Sheehan, Zanuck, and virtually everyone else in the film industry agreed, was the charm of childhood, a charm best captured by a word consistently used to describe her: cute. “Cute,” as it came to be understood in the early twentieth century—as charming, adorable, and often diminutive—was an American linguistic and cultural innovation. Previously, “cute,” deriving from “acute,” meant shrewd, clever, often with an implication of deviousness. The shift in meaning signaled a new sentimental appreciation for figures and objects that combined the pert and the powerless: above all, small children and their accoutrements. Cuteness invited the beholder’s responses on various levels: aesthetic delight, moral protection, and possessive desire. It powerfully combined elements of sentimental reform and the rise of modern commercial culture, especially as they conjoined in admiration and indulgence of childhood’s innocence and wonder. From its inception around the turn of the twentieth century, this notion of the cute celebrated children’s freedom from the besetting concerns of adulthood, so much so that a “normal” childhood came to be understood as defined by an absence of those concerns, including the need to work for a living, to worry about adequate food, shelter, love, and protection, or to know mature sexual desires and relations. Benign parents and other protectors could cherish children’s eager imitations of adult life, even their play of work, marriage, and child rearing, safe in the belief in the boundary separating the realms of childhood and adulthood.
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Such a conception of cuteness depended on an economy of abundance, permitting childhood to be considered as a stage of life utterly distinct from maturity, one characterized by the pleasures of economic consumption rather than productive labor. To be sure, in the early twentieth century children still constituted an important sector of the labor market, despite attempts to pass meaningful child-labor legislation. At the same time, one of the defining aspects of American middle-class life came to be the enshrinement of children as objects of indulgent spending and the ability to protect them from working prematurely. Images of cute children were used from the turn of the twentieth century onward to advertise products specifically for children and also a wide variety of adult goods and services from radiators to life insurance, and even, as with Buster Brown endorsements, cigars and whiskey.
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In the effort to stimulate consumer spending, moreover, cute children achieved special prominence in movies from Hal Roach’s Our Gang series to
The Wizard of Oz
(1939), in radio serials and cartoon strips such as
Little Orphan Annie
, and in real life with the enormous fascination with the Dionne quintuplets, born in Ontario in May 1934, who costarred in two Hollywood feature films.

Although cuteness provided an obvious theatrical mode for staging Shirley Temple’s talents, above all, her remarkable camera presence, it entailed important requirements. The first of these was for her to remain distinctly childlike in appearance, manner, and feeling as she interacted and even imitated adults and appealed to their—and viewers’—solicitude. To this end, Winfield Sheehan and Darryl Zanuck did everything they could to exaggerate Shirley’s youth and diminutive stature. In addition to shaving a year off Shirley’s age, the studio often depicted her as still younger in some of her movies, as with the five candles on her birthday cake in
Baby Take a Bow
(1934), seven on her cake in
Little Miss Broadway
(1938), and eight candles on another such cake in
The Little Princess
, released on March 10, 1939, shortly before she turned eleven.

In addition, Shirley Temple’s juvenile appearance was consistently heightened to intensify her cuteness. All infant mammals share certain features: relatively large heads, prominent brows, large eyes, bulging cheeks, and short and thick limbs. As they mature, their snouts protrude, their bodies become larger with respect to their heads, and their limbs become larger with respect to their bodies. Adults innately recognize juvenile features and characteristically respond with solicitude and nurture. As an aesthetic, cuteness elaborates and extends this biological response from children to puppies, kittens, and the like and also to dolls, stuffed toys, and other inanimate objects with similar proportions.
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Shirley Temple was consistently presented so as to maximize her juvenile appearance and the responses that it prompted. The assiduously cultivated blond pin curls that her mother set each night perpetuated the baby ringlets that many infants (including Shirley) naturally outgrew. They also made her head seem especially large. Moreover, her broad brow and dimpled cheeks, small nose and chin, and plump, short torso and legs were all accentuated by costumes and camerawork. Frontal close-ups in her movies magnified her face to fill the screen and foreshortened her already tiny nose as she addressed viewers directly, often rounding her eyes in astonishment. Other close-ups locked her in embraces with adults—occasionally women but usually white male fatherly and grandfatherly protectors, their heads touching as she sat in their laps, scenes that further cued viewers’ own solicitude. Careful lighting enhanced these effects. The brilliant cinematographer Arthur C. Miller, who worked on most of Shirley’s films for Fox, later boasted, “I always lit her so she had an aureole of golden hair. I used a lamp on Shirley that made her whole damn image world famous.”
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Shirley in a characteristic expression of astonishment. (Photofest/Twentieth Century–Fox)

Shirley’s outfits greatly reinforced her juvenile appearance. “Keep her skirts high,” Darryl Zanuck ordered. “Have co-stars lift her up whenever possible to create the illusion now selling so well. Preserve babyhood.” Reviewing photographs of her in proposed costumes when Shirley was about ten, he complained, “You’ve got her looking like Mae West. Give her a streamline. Minimize her, back there. What do they feed her, Hershey bars?”
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From
Little Miss Marker
in 1934 through
The Little Princess
in 1939, the very titles of seven Shirley Temple movies emphasized her diminutive stature. Moreover, in all of her movies, Shirley was made to look smaller (and implicitly, more powerless) by contrast with bigger-than-average adults, men especially. Three feet tall at the beginning of her movie career in the Baby Burlesks, she was forty-three inches tall by summer 1934 according to one source, yet another reported her as only forty-one inches tall the following year and forty-nine inches tall in 1938. (She would ultimately grow to five foot two.)
¹⁶
Most of the leading men with whom she appeared were above medium height, and a conspicuous number were large, strapping figures. These began with Gary Cooper in
Now and Forever
and Joel McCrae in
Our Little Girl
, both of whom stood six foot three, and included barrel-chested John Boles in
Curly Top
and
The Littlest Rebel
, and six-foot-three Randolph Scott in
Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm
and
Susannah of the Mounties
. Cesar Romero accentuated his six-foot-two height by wearing turbans in
Wee Willie Winkie
and
The Little Princess
. Two of her dance partners were slender men who towered roughly two and a half feet above her: six-foot-three Buddy Ebsen in
Captain January
and six-foot-four Arthur Treacher, who appeared in four of her films, although they danced together only in the last,
The Little Princess
.
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