The Little Girl Who Fought the Great Depression: Shirley Temple and 1930s America (31 page)

Fans greet Shirley and her parents in Honolulu, August 7, 1935. (© Bettmann/Corbis)

Even as her luster as a child star was waning, during a 1939 Christmas Eve
Screen Guild Theater
radio broadcast in Los Angeles, Shirley became the target of irrational rage. As she sang a song promoting
The Blue Bird
, a scowling, frumpy woman, seated in the front row, took a small handgun from her purse, stood up, and aimed directly at Shirley. Two local FBI agents, alerted to the presence of a suspicious person, seized her and bore her silently away as Shirley continued a very nervous performance. It emerged that the woman had given birth to a baby girl several hours before Shirley’s reported birth, and the infant had died at the moment when Shirley was believed to be born. She blamed Shirley for stealing her daughter’s soul and determined to avenge the theft with a bullet. In the sort of garish irony in which Hollywood specialized, the change of her birth year, intended to lengthen her film career, set in motion a mad psychological thriller that came within a hair’s breadth of ending both career and life with a shot.
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In addition to the people who pressed toward Shirley individually or in crowds, millions tried to peer into her and her family’s private life by reading articles and interviews. Some titillated readers with the prospect of shocking revelations. Articles bore such titles as “The Story behind Shirley Temple’s Amazing Career,” “The Real Miss Temple,” “The Life and Loves of Shirley Temple,” and “The Private Life of Shirley Temple.”
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Yet, with rare exceptions, these writers collaborated with studio publicists to present a portrait of the child star as meticulously constructed as the thousands of close-ups for which Shirley expertly posed.

Normality was an ideal enshrined by child-rearing experts in the 1920s and 1930s, so that it was essential to portray Shirley’s personal—and even, as far as possible, her professional—development within its sturdy frame. There were obvious difficulties in this effort. After all, she seemed to enjoy little that was private, given the demands of her career. She had started performing in motion pictures around age three and had been signed by Fox when she was five and a half. Thereafter Shirley worked a six-day week, almost entirely with adults, that included spending long hours on the set, cramming three hours’ worth of school lessons into short work breaks, and ending at bedtime with her mother coaching her on her scenes for the next day and curling her hair. In 1934 child actors in Hollywood between ages two and six were supposedly limited to six hours on the studio grounds, including three on the set. Once over six, they could work eight hours on the lot, four of these on the set. School instruction needed to be provided, but this restriction was lifted on Saturdays, school holidays, and vacations. Shooting schedules for Shirley’s films generally ran six to seven weeks, and she made four movies a year through most of the decade. Between films, she was still obliged to work at the studio for six to seven hours a day to be fitted for costumes, give interviews, and pose for publicity photographs, which appeared in newspapers, magazines, and advertisements at an estimated rate of twenty a day. Even her vacations with her family amounted to publicity tours.
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Then there was the stigma of precocity. Her camera sense unnerved some of the greatest actors of the day. “This child frightens me,” Adolphe Menjou said when making
Little Miss Marker
. “She knows all the tricks.” Shirley would back him out of the camera, step on his lines, and steal his laughs. “She’s making a stooge out of me. . . . If she were forty years old . . . she wouldn’t have had time to learn all she knows about acting. . . . She’s an Ethel Barrymore at four [
sic
].” Making
Now and Forever
the same year with Gary Cooper, the six-year-old performed most of her own scenes in a single take, and when he needed three takes to complete one scene, she asked, “Mr. Cooper, I did mine in one. Why can’t you?” The publicity photographer George Hurrell, who began working with Shirley when she was seven, later marveled, “Shirley Temple had the photographic sense of someone four times her age.” How in the world could this demanding routine and uncanny professionalism be made the stuff of a normal, carefree childhood?
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Certainly, to preserve the image of a normal private life within the Temple household, Gertrude Temple’s dreams of a film career for her daughter and Shirley’s early dance instruction had to be minimized. Accounts of stars’ accidental discoveries, such as that of fifteen-year-old Lana Turner while sipping a Coke, were a staple of movie fan magazines. If Shirley’s film career sprang from a lucky break rather than years of preparation and knocking on studio doors, then she ducked the charge of being merely a parental puppet or a hothouse plant. A 1935 Fox publicity profile stressed that she did not come from “a theatrical family” and that “the baby star came into the film industry by accident.” While “dancing with a group of children,” the release said blandly, she “was selected for a small part in pictures.”
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Gertrude Temple learned to stick faithfully to this story. Shirley’s movie career, she frequently explained, emerged from the unforced development of natural gifts. “From the time Shirley started to talk she carried on imaginative play-acting,” and she danced “almost from the time she began to walk.” Mrs. Temple sent her infant daughter to a neighborhood dancing school simply because Shirley so enjoyed dancing and music. There scouts for Educational Films noticed her and asked permission to give her a screen test. “We thought it would be amusing,” Gertrude Temple said. “The tests were good, and what we had thought might be a novelty in Shirley’s life—facing a movie camera—suddenly became a problem for us to solve.” Santa Monica might be only twelve miles from Hollywood, but Mrs. Temple affirmed the values of the American heartland: “We didn’t want Shirley spoiled, didn’t want her made artificial, didn’t want her to lose her childhood, regardless of what screen fame meant otherwise. . . . So at first we were a bit doubtful about a screen career.” When she once slipped and mentioned in an interview Miss Meglin’s dance studio, well known for its training of child stage and screen performers and thus a dead giveaway of her intense ambitions for her daughter, she demanded that the published article speak vaguely of a neighborhood “dancing school” instead.
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Similarly, at each step of Shirley’s career, the goal was to emphasize the extreme solicitude of everyone around her, the film studio and her parents especially. Her personal welfare came first. This solicitude was supposedly enshrined in the contract that the Temple family negotiated with Fox on Shirley’s behalf in summer 1934. The agreement that irretrievably transformed Shirley into a commodity was celebrated as safeguarding her childhood. As reported in “The Private Life of Shirley Temple, Wonder Child of the Screen,” some of that contract’s provisions (the full text was never publicly disclosed) were protections that any parent might applaud and delights any child might envy. She was provided with her own cottage on the studio lot. (Its previous tenant, Gloria Swanson, and her steamy affair with actor Herbert Marshall were discreetly unmentioned.) A bulwark of privacy, it had a bedroom where she could rest, a schoolroom in which she had lessons from a private tutor, and a dining room with kitchenette, where she could take her meals, prepared by the studio chef according to her dietary needs, free from distractions or the fuss of coworkers. Decorated with pictures and furnished with toys and games, the cottage amply fulfilled Fox’s contractual obligation to “keep her as much as possible in the atmosphere of childhood.” Shirley appeared on the set only during shooting of her own scenes and, again under her contract, purportedly never for more than an hour a day—although directors and producers were notorious for overriding such restrictions. All coaching on her lines was to take place in her cottage, often by her mother, who drew a salary for her services. Fox provided medical supervision to ensure Shirley’s healthy development. Her regimen included a nutritious diet, ample exercise and relaxation, and plenty of sleep—all detailed in publicity materials for the instruction of others. Perhaps the most notable difference between Shirley’s life and the lives of her fans was that she was forbidden to go to the movies at night. Studio officials aimed to keep her from imitating other performers and also from realizing her own importance. A preening little moppet would be box-office poison. In this last goal, public relations and self-interest converged. “She can’t get spoiled,” Winfield Sheehan warned Gertrude Temple. “She gets spoiled, it shows in the eyes.”
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Articles on Shirley presented her life on the set as thoroughly normal, supremely educational, and more fun than a circus. William Seiter, who directed Shirley in four films, declared, “It makes me laugh to hear people ask: ‘But aren’t stage children cheated out of their childhood?’ Shirley has a grander time than any kid I know—with her school work
and
her movie work.” The atmosphere on the set was light and joyous. “Everything’s a game with Shirley. . . . She likes to clown and tease, she likes to peep through a door before she comes in. Then, when she’s played enough, you say: ‘O. K. Shirley’—and, whatever’s to be done, she goes to work and does it.” Between shots, Shirley mastered her lessons at her own pace, faster than in a conventional schoolroom. Her mind was unusually retentive, readers were told, and she reportedly had an IQ of 155. Yet, as a piece in
Ladies’
Home Journal
reported, “she conforms to the pattern from which the little girl next door is cut. She makes mud pies and plays jacks.”
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Movie magazines bulged with photographs of her in energetically normal activities: feeding fish, swinging on a gate, riding a bike, twirling a lariat, and the like, or, in another, proceeding through a day in her life from breakfast to bedtime prayers. Even her height and weight, which might have been seen as sensitive points, were presented as close to the average for a girl of her presumed age.
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Such depictions placed Shirley within the comfortable larger narrative of “egalitarian distinction,” in which movie stars much resembled their fans in their personal tastes and private pleasures. The qualities that stars and fans shared far outnumbered those that differentiated them, such stories stressed, and, indeed, the essence of a star’s distinctive gift was characteristically indefinable. A special “something” had by a stroke of luck grabbed the attention of Hollywood producers, for whom it was as mysterious and compelling as it was to fans. But was it luck or destiny? In a tradition of success stories stretching back through Horatio Alger novels to Puritan narratives, the star’s elevation from the multitude represented both a seal of merit and a sign of grace. A deserving star would prove worthy of such favor by seizing the opportunity that Hollywood extended without losing the common touch. Public acclaim would not alter the star’s private self.
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When Shirley Temple rose to stardom, her mother was elevated to the position of a child-rearing expert, repeatedly telling the story of “How I Raised Shirley Temple” to reporters, mothers, and movie fans in the United States and abroad. Middle-class parents read such articles avidly, although no one seemed the least interested in how she raised her two sons. They were irrelevant to what millions considered the central drama of the Temple household, one all the more compelling because it was set in the midst of the Great Depression. That drama concerned how to enjoy Shirley’s success to the utmost while insulating her from its excesses and preserving her private life. A plethora of experts could give instruction on how to raise normal children, but none of them could speak from personal experience about how to raise this golden child who could transform entire industries, achieve worldwide fame, and earn a fortune while remaining a delightful and dutiful daughter. How could Shirley remain at once so powerful and so innocent? What was Mrs. Temple’s secret?
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Although Gertrude Temple undoubtedly downplayed her desire to see her daughter in movies, her determination to keep Shirley unspoiled appears genuine. From the moment that Shirley became famous, she received what her mother called “a constant flow of flattering, petting, and attention.” As one journalist described Shirley’s predicament, “Strangers seeing her on the studio lot, or in those unavoidable moments when she would go from the Temple car into a shop or a restaurant, would cry out with little gasps of ecstasy, would instantly cut off any escape, would grasp her chin and turn her small face up to be stared at and commented upon in extravagant language, which included eulogies also upon her cleverness and charm, her adorable eyes, her wonderful curls!” Gertrude Temple’s challenge was to muffle that attention whenever possible so as to keep Shirley’s fame from overwhelming her personal development. “Mommy, why do people always want to touch me and ask questions?” her daughter asked. “Shirley,” her mother replied, “haven’t you ever noticed that everybody loves little kittens and rabbits and baby birds? Don’t you love them? You’re just like a little kitten—a little rabbit. And you’re a happy child, too. People like happiness.” Shirley accepted this explanation, and her mother sighed in relief. Yet her dread persisted: “I was afraid it was dawning upon her that those people adored her image and her acting. I was afraid she would begin to act for me.” She added, “I want her to be natural, innocent, sweet. If she ceases to be that, I shall have lost her—and motion pictures will have lost her, too.”
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