The Little Girl Who Fought the Great Depression: Shirley Temple and 1930s America (25 page)

Yet one small variation in the formula signaled the growing division between Gertrude Temple and Darryl Zanuck.
Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm
began and ended with Shirley wearing her iconic fifty-six curls, but when she went to stay with her aunt, Miranda immediately combed out her curls and tied her hair in two ribbons, one behind each ear. It was a concession to Gertrude Temple, who itched to change Shirley’s screen persona in more major ways. “I’d like to see Shirley, just once anyway, in a role which was a complete reversal of things she had done before,” Mrs. Temple told a reporter. “Let her get down and play in the mud—let her be human.”
³⁸

Despite Gertrude Temple’s qualms, this time the formula worked. Zanuck’s radically transformed Shirley Temple version of
Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm
pleased virtually all who consumed it, despite the misleading label of the Wiggin novel. “Why they name it ‘Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm’ is one of those mysteries,”
Variety
mused. “More fitting title would be ‘Rebecca of Radio City.’ ” Frank Nugent of the
New York Times
, an early detractor of the Shirley Temple formula, marveled at her achievement, albeit somewhat ironically. Observing that the original character of Rebecca scarcely existed in Zanuck’s version, he acknowledged that this radical departure was beside the point: “We had ceased to think of her as Rebecca, at all. She was just Shirley to us, and so far as we are concerned, Sunnybrook Farm could go peddle its produce.” Waving aside the blithe disregard for Wiggin’s treasured story, he declared, “Any actress who can dominate a Zanuck musical . . . with Jack Haley, Gloria Stuart, Phyllis Brooks, Helen Westley, Slim Summerville, Bill Robinson, et cetera, can dominate the world. We go even further: we venture to predict for Miss Temple a great future, and that includes singing, dancing, straight dramatic acting, or all three combined, if her fancy runs that way.”
³⁹

Motion Picture Daily
similarly applauded the movie as, above all, a vehicle for Shirley Temple’s extraordinary talent: “Singing, dancing, mimicking, exercising her magic personality . . . she is the Shirley of old.” The trade journal noted the enthusiasm of the preview audience. “Rattling in applause continuously and erupting into a roar at the conclusion, [it] gave emphatic evidence that Shirley’s ‘Rebecca’ should take rank with the most successful in which she has been starred.”
⁴⁰

Motion Picture Herald
’s William R. Weaver, perhaps attending the same preview, fervently joined in the applause for Shirley. Unlike earlier versions of
Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm
, “tenderly sentimental works aimed at the cardiac and lachrymal reflexes,” the Temple version “pointed at eye, ear and, in a sense, intellect. Rhythm and its uses, humor unrooted in precocity and, most of all, sheer professional ability to perform entertainingly, comprise the stuff with which this expert young lady demonstrates that she doesn’t need curls, tears and Jean Hersholt [her grandfather in
Heidi
]—or anybody else—to put her over.” Weaver confidently—and accurately—predicted that this box-office champion of 1935, 1936, and 1937 would win the title again in 1938. Far less accurately, he added, “There isn’t the slightest reason for thinking she’ll drop out of that top spot in the next ten or fifteen years.”
⁴¹

Despite such enthusiasm,
Time
magazine’s critic refused to buy the Temple formula. He especially balked at her glib dismissal of the importance of money in the Samuel Pokrass and Jack Yellen song “Come and Get Your Happiness.” When Shirley sang to her radio listeners, “with well-rehearsed and gleefully interpolated chuckles,” of the riches pouring down on those in ragged trousers on which they paid no income tax, “they will see that this Rebecca is a $2,400-a-week Hollywood specialist with no mortgage to pay off” or any of the other obstacles that the original Rebecca faced in Wiggin’s novel—and that millions still faced in the Great Depression.
⁴²
It was a rude reminder to Twentieth Century–Fox that for the vast majority of Americans, unlike the Temple family, a high income tax bracket was not the most pressing problem.

Zanuck dispensed with even the pretext of a juvenile classic in Shirley’s next two movies, dropping her squarely into Depression New York and contriving ways for her to put on a show. The first of these,
Little Miss Broadway
, threw in all of the most familiar Temple elements: girls in an orphanage, vaudeville veterans, a lovable uncle, a rich, imperious dowager, and a young romantic couple. The movie ends with Shirley and friends putting on a triumphant variety show and then leading her new mother and father to get a marriage license. Cupid has done her work once again. As the couple kiss, she exclaims what had become her signature line, “Oh my goodness!”

Although in one scene Shirley’s character blows out seven candles on her birthday cake, she was in fact ten, and her cuteness could not last indefinitely. The opening scenes in the orphanage posed special perils: possible invidious comparisons between Shirley and the other girls. The talented and attractive jazz trio the Three Brian Sisters, with whom Shirley sang the perky song “Be Optimistic,” presented the greatest risk. The eldest of the three, Betty, was five years older than Shirley, Doris only two years older, and Gwen exactly Shirley’s age, although Shirley was shortest. Pitch-perfect and adept at close harmonies, they exposed the limitations of Shirley’s pleasant but unremarkable voice. Ultimately, in the trio with Shirley, Betty wore glasses to make her appear studious, and Gwen was eliminated entirely. The sisters later attributed these decisions to Gertrude Temple’s vigilant protection of her daughter against potential rivals. Yet even in early story conferences, Zanuck himself had warned against “writing
too
cute lines for the other children.”
⁴³

Little Miss Broadway
pleased those who liked their Shirley Temple straight up. As William Weaver wrote in
Motion Picture Herald
, “If Darryl Zanuck had set out to produce for the young lady’s grandchildren one film which they could regard in reverent awe as the ‘typical Shirley Temple picture’ this would be it.” The story, he observed, was a quintessential Temple vehicle: “She is a cheerful, tearful tot in an orphanage. She is the precocious idol of a theatrical boarding house. She is persecuted by a rich old spinster in black alpaca. She cajoles a judge on the bench and she fixes things for a romantic couple. And she sings a lot and dances a lot and spends all her screen time being just Shirley Temple.”
⁴⁴

Yet was “just being Shirley Temple” still enough? A number of the local movie theater exhibitors who wrote to
Motion Picture Herald
did not think so. A faithful contributor, A. E. Hancock of the Columbia Theatre in Columbia City, Indiana, declared, “I’ll tell Fox and the whole world that they will have to come better than this one to keep Shirley on top. The scenario is trite and has not a new idea in it. All had been done before, the little orphan, the cruel aunt who breaks down finally under the winsome Shirley. . . . Too bad,” he concluded. “She has been a wonder but she is growing up.”
⁴⁵

L. A. Irwin of the Palace Theatre in Penacook, New Hampshire, still believed in Shirley’s talent but lamented the fare that Twentieth Century–Fox was giving her: “There sure is a gosh awful lot of orphans to scribble about. If Shirley does a story about each and every one of them, folks sure will get mighty sick of this type of story and most of our patrons are feeling that way about this routine plot already.”
⁴⁶

“Sorry, Shirley,” wrote an exhibitor from the Ritz Theatre in Stafford, Kansas, “but you can’t get them in any more. Since ‘Curly Top’ you have been steadily losing ground until now you can’t even get average Sunday business for me.” A man from the Paramount Theatre in Schroon Lake, New York, added the ominous report, “Many a time during the run of the picture I heard the remark, ‘She isn’t as cute as she used to be.’ ”
⁴⁷

For the moment Zanuck could shrug off such complaints.
Little Miss Broadway
finished among Twentieth Century–Fox’s most popular movies in the domestic market in 1938, closely followed by two other Temple films, so that Shirley retained her title of box-office champion for the fourth year in a row.
⁴⁸
No one else had ever come close to such success. Still, local exhibitors and Hollywood moguls agreed that her luster was fading fast.

For Shirley’s last film of 1938, instead of devising fresh innovations, Zanuck redoubled his bet on familiar situations, characterizations, songs, and dances, as if to cash in on Shirley’s popularity while it lasted. Originally titled
All American Dad
, it was variously known as
Lucky Penny
,
Little Lady
, and
Sunny Side Up
until Zanuck and the studio finally settled on
Just around the Corner
—a reference to the predicted return of prosperity popularly attributed to Herbert Hoover.
⁴⁹
In what would be Shirley’s last movie set entirely in the Great Depression, she has a broken-hearted widowed father for whom to find a new wife, another frozen-hearted tycoon to melt, and, in a mild twist, a spoiled rich mamma’s boy to turn into an all-American kid. Shirley’s character, Penny Hale, earnestly seeks to understand her architect father’s and the country’s economic plight. When he shows her a political cartoon, in which various figures—farmer, businessman, laborer, and housewife—all pull on Uncle Sam’s legs and demand, “Help me first,” she asks, “Why doesn’t somebody try to help Uncle Sam instead of pulling on him?” The plot ends in a ringing reaffirmation of “that good old American spirit” of confidence. Once again, Shirley lifts the country out of the Great Depression, just as she had in
Stand Up and Cheer!

Like
Little Miss Broadway
,
Just around the Corner
provided numerous opportunities for Shirley to sing and dance, including numbers with Bert Lahr, Joan Davis, and, most notably, Bill Robinson, in what would be their final pairing. Yet in the rush to keep the running time to seventy minutes, such interludes were brief.

By now the cheerleaders and detractors of such fare were predictable. William Weaver of
Motion Picture Herald
, who certainly needed no Uncle Sam to stoke his optimism, marveled, “This Shirley Temple matter is getting out of hand. All the rules say she’s overdue for a flop. . . . This film proves the signs mean nothing. . . . [It] is as near an approach to perfect box office as it is reasonable for any showman or customer to expect to lay eye upon.”
⁵⁰

By contrast, the
New York Times
’s Frank Nugent seethed with exasperation, a sign of the widening divide between film critics and Shirley’s diehard fans. “Certainly nothing so aggravating as this has come along before, nothing so arch, so dripping with treacle, so palpably an affront to the good taste or intelligence of the unwary beholder,” he sputtered. After sardonically recounting the film’s plot and situations, he concluded, “Shirley is not responsible, of course. No child could conceive so diabolic a form of torture. There must be an adult mind in back of it all—way, way in back of it all.”
⁵¹

Less irritated, the
New York Herald Tribune
’s Howard Barnes still reluctantly agreed. Although he praised Shirley as “the most talented acting tot of our time,” he lamented the unimaginative material that Twentieth Century–Fox furnished her. Granting the “extraordinary assurance and virtuosity” of her performance, he added, “The trouble is that we have seen all of Miss Temple’s tricks and pirouettes so many times before that they are apt to seem a bit monotonous in so dull a framework as this. . . . The new Shirley Temple picture,” he concluded, “is little more than a reprint of her previous song-and-dance successes” and so “a very ordinary entertainment.”
⁵²

Even an ordinary Shirley Temple film enjoyed box-office success, although
Just around the Corner
trailed previous Temple pictures in sales. The experiences of local movie exhibitors inevitably varied, but many filed reports similar to Sam Schiwetz of the Rialto Theatre in Three Rivers, Texas: “A good Shirley Temple picture that failed to draw. Business falling off with every Temple picture. Fox better give Shirley something different or she will be a has-been within a year.”
⁵³

Perhaps foremost among those worried about typecasting Shirley in predictable stories was her mother, Gertrude Temple. Publicly restless about Shirley’s material as early as
Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm
and alarmed by what she regarded as the thin substance and weak casting of
Just around the Corner
, she demanded a meeting with Zanuck. As Shirley Temple Black later recounted their interview, Zanuck listened patiently to her concerns but defended the formulaic character of Shirley’s films as necessitated by the star system. The business of the studio was not principally to develop Shirley’s growth as an actress, much as Gertrude Temple might wish it. Rather, it needed to capture or produce a personality for as long as it suited popular taste. “Now she’s lovable. The less she changes, the longer she lasts.” “You can’t create a public fad,” he insisted to Mrs. Temple. “Once you have a fad, leave it alone.”
⁵⁴

The year 1939 remains Hollywood’s annus mirabilis, with high movie attendance and an exceptional number of excellent films, including
Beau Geste
,
Dark Victory
,
Destry Rides Again
,
Drums along the Mohawk
,
Gone with the Wind
,
Young Mr. Lincoln, Gunga Din
,
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
,
Love Affair
,
Mr. Smith Goes to Washington
,
Ninotchka
,
Of Mice and Men
,
Only Angels Have Wings
,
Stagecoach
,
The Wizard of Oz
,
The Women
,
Wuthering Heights
, and
Goodbye, Mr. Chips
. Although Louis B. Mayer, head of production at MGM Studios, at one point had discussed with Zanuck the possibility of trading Shirley to play the part of Dorothy Gale in
The Wizard of Oz
, no serious negotiations ever followed. Given Judy Garland’s consummate performance in the role, only the most ardent Shirley Temple fans can regret this outcome. Still, Zanuck did respond to the increased emphasis on lavish color productions, of which
The Wizard of Oz
and
Gone with the Wind
were the most celebrated, with two full-length color feature films starring Shirley Temple. The first,
The Little Princess
, which offered a deluxe version of the formula he had established, achieved Shirley’s last financial and critical success for Twentieth Century–Fox.