The Little Girl Who Fought the Great Depression: Shirley Temple and 1930s America (29 page)

It was her fans, not Fox Film, that initially made Shirley a star, and she depended on her fans to keep that star brightly shining. Yet the nature of fan culture and of the movie industry in the golden age of the Hollywood studio system made it especially difficult to place limits on admirers’ desire to pierce beyond the shadows on the screen and encounter the “real” Shirley Temple, as much as the Temples strove to maintain a wall of privacy. Fame required that the line between public and private life be minimized. In an interview with a fan magazine writer, Shirley supposedly asked, “What’s a private life?” The interviewer replied, “When you’re not acting” and “just having fun.” “Dimples dawned at the corners of her mouth. ‘I’m just having fun when I’m acting too,’ she chuckled. ‘So I guess my whole life’s a private life.’ ”
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Film publicists kindled the flames of fans’ fascination with the stars and did everything they could to keep them burning. Indeed, the origins of movie fandom may be dated to a publicity stunt. In March 1910 Carl Laemmle’s Independent Moving Pictures Company (IMP) leaked a story that their leading actress, “the IMP Girl,” previously known as the Biograph Girl for her work with that studio, was in fact Florence Lawrence and that she had been killed in a streetcar accident. A few days later, IMP piously protested that Lawrence’s death was a lie perpetrated by a rival studio and that “very shortly some of her best work in her career” would be released. It was the kind of hoax to make P. T. Barnum wink in his grave, and it launched an endless succession of Hollywood stunts intended to tantalize fans’ appetites for news of movie actors’ offscreen lives. Yet the stunt triggered a genuine threat to Florence Lawrence’s safety—one that was also a portent of future threats to other stars. When Lawrence appeared in St. Louis to reassure admirers that she was alive and unharmed, she was nearly crushed by a mob, consisting mainly of women and children, “that swept toward her . . . like an avalanche.”
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Henceforth, movie fans persisted in delving into stars’ private lives, and occasionally other mob scenes erupted. When in 1920 two of Hollywood’s most celebrated stars, Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks, celebrated their honeymoon in London, a frenzied horde almost pulled Pickford out of a moving convertible and nearly crushed her at a garden party. As the New York drama critic Alexander Woollcott wrote, “The public passion was to see, in the flesh, these two mimes whose dancing shadows had played so large a part in the humbler public’s festivities for many years—to see (if possible to touch) Douglas Fairbanks and more especially to see, touch, and kiss Miss Pickford. The intention was amiable and the process may sound agreeable; but when, on the way from the station to your rooms, ten thousand people approach you with beaming countenances but a none-the-less grim determination to pet and fondle you or die in the attempt, it is a trifle dismaying.”
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Similar mob scenes, teetering on the edge of riot, came to represent the ultimate seal of popular approval at movie palace openings and film premieres. The opening of Sid Grauman’s Metropolitan Theatre in Los Angeles in 1923 earned this dubious accolade. As the
Los Angeles Times
reported, the police were joined by militia forces armed with rifles, who at times “struggled for the possession of the guns” with unruly fans. “The police had to be continually on guard to keep the crowd from storming the theater so great was the spectators’ desire to obtain a glimpse of the stars and of the interior of the house.”
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Premieres of such films as
Rosita
, with Mary Pickford (1923),
The Thief of Bagdad,
starring Douglas Fairbanks (1924), and
The Trespasser
, in which Gloria Swanson had her first talking role (1929), sparked similar crowd frenzy.

In 1927 in New York City still larger crowds of women, men, and children pushed and shoved one another as they pressed toward the Broadway funeral home where the matinee idol Rudolph Valentino lay in his silver-bronze coffin. On several occasions the crowd surged forward, breaking large plate-glass windows and trampling onlookers. When the funeral home flung open its doors, the throng swept up even the mounted police in its tide, and officers repeatedly charged into the mass to break it up. Ultimately, over a hundred people suffered injuries, and the street was littered with torn hats, shoes, umbrellas, and other personal belongings.
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During the Great Depression unruly crowds continued to swell movie premieres in Los Angeles, New York, and other cities for films such as
Little Caesar
(1931) and Charlie Chaplin’s
Modern Times
(1936). The 1937 Los Angeles premiere of one Shirley Temple film,
Wee Willie Winkie
, nearly erupted in riot. On that occasion an estimated five thousand fans paid fifty cents apiece to perch on backless seats for up to eight hours, eagerly awaiting a glimpse of the diminutive star. Another five thousand standees joined the throng. The appearances of stars such as Eddie Cantor, Tyrone Power, Sonja Henie, and Sophie Tucker merely whetted their appetites. Then, just as the Temple family arrived, many of the luminaries and their parties turned stargazers themselves, forming a wall that eclipsed Shirley’s appearance from the view of the multitude. The outraged roar of the crowd could be heard for miles, as frustrated spectators surged against the ropes. It took fifty police to restore order.
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Less menacingly, waves of fan mail also poured over Hollywood stars. Such letters began with the advent of the star system, and the flow quickly became a torrent. In 1920, at the peak of her career, Clara Bow received forty-five thousand letters a week. Some stars hired their own secretaries. Mary Pickford’s mail became so voluminous that the Los Angeles post office asked her to cancel her own stamps. Hollywood studios also organized fan mail departments to respond to the intense demands. In 1928, on the eve of the Great Depression, some 32,250,000 letters flooded the Hollywood film studios, which spent over $2 million dealing with them.
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Despite the need to pinch every penny in the Great Depression, ordinary citizens wrote public figures—politicians, entertainers, journalists, and others—in greater numbers than ever. They often claimed a personal relationship with these celebrities, confiding their own stories and difficulties. In addressing movie and radio actors, they frequently assumed continuity between the fictional characters such actors portrayed and the performers’ own personalities. Shirley Temple’s fan mail began pouring in immediately after her success in
Stand Up and Cheer!
in 1934. At first, she and her two older brothers enjoyed the novelty of slitting open the envelopes, but the correspondence quickly amounted to a deluge. By early 1935 her mail was reported as four thousand letters a week, demanding a full-time secretary to handle it.
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None of these letters appears to have been preserved, but a few that were published at the time suggest the range of correspondents as well as the diversity of their attraction to Shirley. They included messages from girls and boys, women and men, seeing in her an adored sister, friend, sweetheart, or daughter. “I think you are very cute,” a seven-year-old girl wrote, “and I’d like to be like you. You dance so much better than I do.” A grade school boy mixed adulation with a dash of caution (shared by many, as we shall see) that Shirley might lose her unaffected innocence: “I think you’re swell and when I grow up I’m going to marry you if you haven’t been spoiled by then.” Mothers often included photographs of their daughters, nominally asking Shirley but really Gertrude Temple to confirm the striking likeness of their offspring and wondering how to get into the movie business. (Rarely did Gertrude Temple see any resemblance to Shirley.)
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Shirley herself never read these letters, but other attentions could hardly escape her notice. Much as Gertrude Temple had worked to achieve her daughter’s success, the intrusions on their family life that immediately followed Shirley’s sudden celebrity overwhelmed them. “Overnight, we, who had lived an inconspicuous and very modest life in our bungalow at Santa Monica, found ourselves in the floodlight of motion-picture publicity,” Mrs. Temple said. In addition to the torrent of mail and unsolicited gifts, “people knocked at our doors. Bolder ones pressed their faces against our windows. The telephone rang from morning till night. It simply was too much for us, not to speak of the child, who was tugged at, fondled, gushed over, and followed.” One evening as the Temple family sat at dinner, the doorbell rang and eight tourists rushed into the dining room. “We’re from Pennsylvania,” they explained, “and we just had to see Shirley before we went back home.”
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When strangers recognized Shirley in public, they often flocked around her. As early as the summer of 1934, only months after she had become a celebrity, the Temple family discovered that they could no longer enjoy the beach near their home in Santa Monica, as in previous years. “We expected to stay at the beach all summer, but it is impossible,” George Temple told a reporter. “People came swarming down here like a cloud of locusts. I believe youngsters came from a hundred miles around to play with Shirley and she can’t play with so many at one time. We have been besieged by tourists, salesmen, autograph collectors and people who were just plain curious so we have to move.” By August 1934, less than four months after Shirley’s breakthrough, the Temples were making plans to leave their Santa Monica bungalow for a house in Hollywood or Beverly Hills, surrounded by a high wall or hedge. “We have to have that,” George Temple said, “to protect our little girl.”
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Even in shopping for a new house, the Temples found themselves pestered by real estate salesmen—from “subdivision promoters to depression millionaires who would sacrifice their Bel-Air mansion for a paltry $50,000,” as one fan magazine reported. California Bank, where George Temple had risen from teller to assistant branch manager prior to Shirley’s breakthrough, quickly discovered that employing the father of a child star was excellent publicity. The bank displayed life-size photographs of Shirley handing her paycheck to her father around its numerous branches in the Los Angeles area and made him manager of a branch in the heart of the neighborhood where major motion picture companies maintained distributing offices. With no secretary to act as a buffer, he sat prominently at a desk and shook hands with dozens of new customers eager to meet the father of the adorable child star. Within a few months, the bank’s receipts had risen a reported 20 percent. Still, not only did salesmen besiege him here, but “even my own bank picked on me!” he said with rueful amusement. “The trust department tried to sell me one of the Hollywood show places—with about 10 bedrooms, 6 garages, and at least a dozen baths. It was too much for me. I’m not going in for that kind of thing.”
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Wearing her jacket from
Stand Up and Cheer!
, Shirley hands her paycheck to her father, George Temple, to deposit at the California Bank, where he worked. (Culver Pictures, Inc.)

Soon the Temple family moved several blocks in Santa Monica into a larger, more secluded red-tiled bungalow. Still modest by Hollywood standards, it nonetheless reflected Shirley’s new importance within her family. She had a bedroom with a Bo Peep mural, a playroom with space for her doll collection, and accommodations for a housekeeper. Shirley could also play outside shielded from gaping strangers in an enclosed patio and fenced-in backyard, complete with a playhouse. She had always been her mother’s special delight, eclipsing her brothers. By now they were largely absent: Jack, twenty, at Santa Monica Community College (he would soon transfer to Stanford); and Sonny, four years his junior, at New Mexico Military Institute—opportunities made possible by Shirley’s earnings. In permitting journalists to chronicle their domestic arrangements, George and Gertrude Temple—and the Fox publicists who monitored them—tried to preserve a balance between family privacy and public curiosity, as well as between comfort and circumspection. A reporter for the fan magazine
Screenland
declared appreciatively, “Such a home befits the manager of a bank rather than an ostentatious movie star.” Gertrude Temple struck a still more egalitarian note: “I suppose we live exactly like most of the families in American small towns.”
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Yet a year later the Temple family moved again, exchanging their more elaborate bungalow for a fashionable fortress fully befitting the adored child star. On a wooded four-acre lot along the rim of North Rockingham Avenue in Brentwood, with views of the Pacific Ocean, the Temples built a two-story, shingle-roofed house designed by John Byers and Edla Muir in an eclectic mixture of English and Norman styles. The showplace that they had earlier resisted was now theirs. Extending to more than five thousand square feet, it boasted a two-story circular entryway, a living room with an impressive fireplace and vaulted wood-beamed ceiling, and four bedrooms, including one for Shirley with adjoining dressing room and playroom. Beside well-tended gardens and terraces, Shirley could skip along flagstone paths to the swimming pool, guest cottage, carousel, badminton court, and stable with a riding ring for her ponies. The address placed them snugly among a constellation of Hollywood celebrities, including the British actors Charles Laughton and Nigel Bruce and the director Henry Hathaway, as well as ZaSu Pitts, with whom Shirley had performed a bit part in
Out All Night
(1933), and Mary Nash, who portrayed the formidable villainesses Fraulein Rottenmeier in
Heidi
and Miss Minchin in
The Little Princess
.
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