The Little Girl Who Fought the Great Depression: Shirley Temple and 1930s America (26 page)

For
The Little Princess
Zanuck cut up another children’s classic to fit Shirley. Frances Hodgson Burnett had published the original novella,
Sara Crewe; or, What Happened at Miss Minchin’s Boarding School
, in 1888. She later turned the story into a play and, in 1905, expanded it into a full-length novel. Mary Pickford had starred in a silent film version in 1917, the same year she made two other movies that Shirley would rework,
The Poor Little Rich Girl
and
Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm
. For Zanuck and his scriptwriters, the nub of the story proved irresistible. A young motherless girl, Sara Crewe, who has been raised in India by her rich and adoring father, is left at a fashionable London boarding school run by the imperious Miss Minchin. At first she leads a pampered existence as the school’s “show pupil.” Then, when her father dies and his fortune is apparently lost, Miss Minchin cruelly compels Sara to serve as a scullery maid and lodge in a cramped garret. Endowed with an indomitable imagination, Sara pretends that she lives in a room of rare splendor. An invalid gentleman and his Indian servant, living next door, contrive to make her dream come true. The gentleman proves to be her father’s friend and partner, and he becomes a second father to her, doubling her lost fortune and enfolding her into his own affectionate household.

Such a melodramatic plot of luxury and privation, of fortunes, affection, and fathers lost and restored, clearly provided much to appeal to a movie audience in the Great Depression and especially to Shirley Temple fans. After discarding several earlier treatments of the screenplay, Zanuck and writers Ethel Hill and Walter Ferris included what had become requisite elements for a Temple picture: a young couple for which Shirley could play Cupid and a partner (Arthur Treacher) with whom to perform a music-hall-inspired song-and-dance number, as well as a dream ballet. (Shirley performed expertly in the former but, a ballet novice, she was the only ballerina in the fantasy sequence not on pointe.) To intensify the drama, in what was sure to appeal to British audiences, the film’s creators moved the story forward a decade to 1899 and the Second Boer War, in which Sara’s father is reported to have died at the Siege of Mafeking. Sara refuses to believe that he is dead, however, and repeatedly searches for him at the nearby hospital. Finally, pursued through the hospital corridors by Miss Minchin and assisted by no less a personage than Queen Victoria, Sara at last finds her wounded, amnesic father and restores his mind, memory, and spirit. Joyfully reunited, father and daughter stand at attention as the aging Victoria leaves the hospital and the band plays “God Save the Queen.”

Shirley works as a scullery maid in a production still for
The Little Princess
. (Photofest/Twentieth Century–Fox)

In addition to talented character actors, several veterans of Shirley Temple films among them, the cast included South African–born Sybil Jason as Becky, the cockney scullery maid at Miss Minchin’s who becomes Sara’s devoted friend. Almost exactly Shirley’s age and height, she delighted the film crew with her accomplished cockney speech. Shirley, who did not attempt to alter her American accent, apart from her rendition with Arthur Treacher of the music-hall song “Knocked ’Em in the Old Kent Road,” later confessed jealousy at Sybil’s appeal. Shirley effectively channeled this envy to another target in the memorably naughty scene—unusual in her roles—in which she is goaded beyond endurance by the spiteful taunts of a snobbish schoolmate and dumps a scuttle of coal ashes on her head.
⁵⁵

The Little Princess
had a running time of ninety-one minutes, longer than any previous Shirley Temple film except
Wee Willie Winkie.
Lavishly produced and luminously filmed in Technicolor, it was Shirley’s most expensive vehicle to that time. At its release, Zanuck led the ballyhoo, calling it “the finest picture with which I have ever been associated.”
⁵⁶

No critic went this far, but Nelson Bell in the
Washington Post
proclaimed
The Little Princess
“Shirley Temple’s best picture to date.” He applauded the rich color, the dream ballet, the supporting cast, and Shirley’s own performance. Yet he could not resist deriding “the attempt to make the prodigious Miss Temple, with her round face and plump little body, serve as the symbol of persecution and the victim of deprivation that verges close to the borders of starvation.” Mae Tinee of the
Chicago Daily Tribune
expressed similar delight. “They say she’s at the awkward age,” she noted. “Nonsense. Shirley Temple will never have an awkward age!”
⁵⁷

Despite the success of
The Little Princess
, Gertrude Temple continued to chafe at the roles in which Zanuck cast her daughter. “No more backstairs waifs,” she insisted. The time had come for Shirley to portray the “everyday problems of a child.” Instead of settling for mediocre ratings, Shirley would either regain her place at the “top of the heap” or make “a graceful exit.”
⁵⁸
Zanuck ignored these demands, placing Shirley in another familiar situation, as the difference between his and the Temple family’s conceptions of Shirley’s career widened to a chasm.

In
Susannah of the Mounties
, Shirley continued the work of healing on behalf of imperial Britain begun in
Wee Willie Winkie
and pursued in
The Little Princess
, this time on Canada’s western frontier. Once again, she is already an orphan as the story begins, the sole survivor of a Blackfoot Indian attack. Scooped up by a handsome Mountie (Randolph Scott), she becomes the pet of the men on a military post. Like a B western, the movie included a young Indian boy, a noble Indian chief (played by the former Yiddish-theater actor Maurice Moscovitch in redface), and treacherous Indians and settlers in roughly equal measure, who together propel events to the point in which Randolph Scott would have been burned at the stake had not Shirley saved him in the nick of time.

Critics did not attempt to conceal their disappointment. “Heap big eyewash as cinema entertainment,”
Time
magazine grunted. “Strictly for the juvenile trade,” wrote
Variety
, adding ominously, “Youngster is growing up fast, and is losing some [of] that sparkle displayed as a tot.” Frank Nugent of the
New York Times
added sardonically, “The early Canadian Northwest Mounted Police certainly wore tricky uniforms. . . . Except for the fact that they are on the screen, people at the Roxy might almost mistake them for ushers.”
⁵⁹

The independent small-town exhibitors who wrote to
Motion Picture Herald
echoed such laments, and many felt that Shirley’s star was waning at last. “Fox’s darling is going the way of all child stars,” wrote A. E. Hancock of Columbia City, Indiana. “Each picture she slips a little more.” A woman from Konawa, Oklahoma, sadly agreed: “I believe Shirley Temple is outgrowing her popularity.” A man from the Plaza Theatre in Lyons, Nebraska, chimed in: “Shirley will have to make different and better picture[s] or she will be completely washed up.
⁶⁰

By this time virtually everyone, including Zanuck and his subordinates at Twentieth Century–Fox, Gertrude and George Temple, film distributors and exhibitors, reporters, and fans, sensed—and feared—that Shirley was at a crucial point in her career. The illusion of childhood could not last forever. What had been extraordinary was how long Zanuck had been able to sustain it. Perhaps he reasoned that, if Louis B. Mayer could bind and corset sixteen-year-old Judy Garland’s breasts in order for her to play Dorothy in
The Wizard of Oz
, he could certainly preserve the illusion of Shirley’s prepubescent girlhood for at least another year or so. Yet, no matter how much her age was trimmed in scripts and her costumes designed to deny any hint of maturity, signs of puberty could not be wholly disguised. (Her menarche occurred on her eleventh birthday, in April 1939.)
⁶¹

Yet, for the first time since Shirley’s spectacular breakthrough in
Stand Up and Cheer!
five years earlier, no new film project immediately followed
Susannah of the Mounties
. Instead, Shirley and her parents waited an agonizing six months for the next assignment from Zanuck. “Shirley has been merely cute long enough,” he declared in a widely circulated interview in late July 1939. Proudly calling her the “greatest theatrical attraction since Valentino” and the “outstanding child star of all time,” he added, “Shirley is more beautiful than ever, and she is certainly a much better actress than she was a few years ago.”
⁶²

Nonetheless, Zanuck acknowledged, the revenues from her films had not kept pace with their rising costs. “A slight apathy toward her pictures is becoming apparent in remarks from her fans and in letters, which they still write in very large numbers. They say they think there isn’t much to the Temple pictures any more, but they admit they still like to see this precocious 10-year-old [
sic
] perform.” It was her fans who made her a star and kept her aloft, and Zanuck clearly took their reactions seriously. “We arrived at the conclusion [that] to retain their interest we must do something absolutely new and different. She can be cute and still ‘do something.’ ”
⁶³

Yet he admitted that finding the proper material was difficult. “She is a specialist, limited to a very few types of things. Specialists never last long, but Shirley is the exception to the rule.” In the search for “more definite characterizations, more meat to her stories,” the studio had invested close to $200,000 in potential material for her that year. Discarded projects included
Little Diplomat
, in which Shirley would extricate her companions from various European troubles, a mystery, a film with Al Jolson, and a costume drama called
Lady Jane
. Zanuck had even announced a contest with a prize of $25,000 for an acceptable story idea.
⁶⁴

One of the stories that Zanuck had purchased with Shirley in mind, outbidding Walt Disney, was the sound film rights to the 1908 allegorical play
The Blue Bird
by the Belgian author and Nobel Prize winner Maurice Maeterlinck. Regarded as a symbolist masterpiece, it would be Zanuck’s answer to MGM’s
Wizard of Oz
. In the play a boy, Tyltyl, and his sister, Mytyl, two woodcutter’s children reminiscent of Hansel and Gretel, go on a quest, led by the figure of Light, for the blue bird of happiness. Their search takes them to various realms, ending with the Kingdom of the Future, with the souls of children awaiting the hour of their births and preparing to bring inventions, agricultural improvements, ideas, and reforms, even one destined to conquer death itself. There they meet their future younger brother, who is also bringing the disease that will kill him, and two child lovers, fated to be born at different times and so be separated forever. Finally, Tyltyl and Mytyl return to their parents’ simple cottage, and, waking from their dream, discover the blue bird and happiness all about them.
⁶⁵

By the time that Zanuck was steering
The Blue Bird
through various story treatments and into production, his relations with Gertrude and George Temple had sunk to such a point that they communicated only in writing, following a circuitous route through the Temples’ attorney, Loyd Wright, to Twentieth Century–Fox chairman Joseph Schenck and from him to Zanuck. Shirley Temple Black reported that her mother pressed Zanuck through every script revision to make Shirley’s character “impish, spoiled, and naughty.” (In Maeterlinck’s play the children are naive rather than nasty.) If Shirley’s performance in rehearsal made the film crew hiss, Gertrude Temple wrote, her daughter would be “in seventh heaven.” Shirley’s character did indeed darken in successive drafts, and Gertrude Temple claimed victory. Shirley could have been “even meaner,” she later told reporters. Her daughter was bored with her monotonous goody-two-shoes roles, and Gertrude clearly felt that moviegoers were growing tired of them as well.
⁶⁶

Shirley and Johnny Russell in a production still for
The Blue Bird
. (Photofest/ Twentieth Century–Fox)