The Little Girl Who Fought the Great Depression: Shirley Temple and 1930s America (33 page)

Although the importance of Shirley’s earnings was an open secret, like the parents of other child film stars, the Temples tried to keep Shirley innocent of her financial power and the degree to which they had become hostages to her career. Again, there were ample precedents. “We seldom refer to money before him,” Jackie Coogan’s father told reporters. “He has almost no appreciation of the fortune he has earned.” Indeed, as a child his financial naiveté appeared to have been total. After his parents signed a million-dollar contract on his behalf, a family friend jokingly asked him what he would trade for it. “Will you give me a dollar and a quarter in cash?” Jackie replied earnestly. “I need that to get a new pair of roller skates.”
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Shirley never appeared quite so clueless, yet fan magazines smiled at her indifference to wealth and how she took as much delight in the gift of a dime-store balloon as a diamond charm bracelet.
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As a ten-year-old in fall 1938 she proudly reported that she received an allowance of five dollars every two weeks and had accrued a savings of $105, which she kept in a strongbox.
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To poor children at the time, even this might have seemed to be a fortune, though it placed her reassuringly among the middle class. Among families of all classes, children’s allowances had grown increasingly popular in the first decades of the twentieth century. Such payments acknowledged the historic transformation in the place of the child from a vital economic contributor to a helpful household member and fledgling consumer. Like the parents of such child stars as Jackie Coogan and Jane Withers, George and Gertrude Temple participated in this practice designed to teach how to save, spend, and give wisely. In this way, they sought to normalize their child’s stupendous income and to neutralize its immensely transformative effects on their family, even as other children saved their pennies for Shirley Temple movies and products.
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By rights stretching back to British common law, as the parent of a minor under their roof, the Temples were entitled to every penny that Shirley made, but that situation was about to change. Precipitating that change were two spectacular instances of mercenary parents and relatives who plundered child stars’ earnings for their own use. Freddie Bartholomew was the target of the first. His aunt, who had raised him from infancy, brought the ten-year-old English actor to America in 1934, signed with MGM for him to play the title role in
David Copperfield,
and had herself named his legal guardian. Over the next five years, while Freddie’s film career and earning power soared, his mother, father, and grandparents all testified to how deeply they treasured the boy and how rightly they deserved a share of his earnings. Further suits for a portion of his earnings pursued him until 1943. Consequently, Freddie appeared in court only slightly less frequently than he did before the cameras. By the time he was fifteen, he had been the subject of twenty-seven legal suits among contending relations, and the legal fees squandered his fortune.
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In 1938, while disputes over Freddie Bartholomew’s earnings dragged wearily onward, another sensational legal dispute erupted. Three years earlier, five months before his twenty-first birthday, Jackie Coogan narrowly escaped death in a car crash in which his father and two other passengers died. Soon afterward, his mother married his business manager, Arthur Bernstein, and the couple lived luxuriously while he remained virtually penniless. He sued them for the money he had made as a minor, an estimated $4 million. In a bitterly contentious trial, his mother tearfully testified, “Jackie was a bad boy, a very, very bad 20-year-old boy” who “couldn’t handle money.” Less tenderly, she insisted, “He isn’t entitled to that money. It belongs to us.” Coogan reported that she told him firmly, “You will never get a cent.”
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As a result of the suit, Coogan gained support for a new principle that a child actor deserved a portion of his earnings. It was a largely pyrrhic victory, however, as he recovered only a fraction of his fortune. The dispute prompted the California state legislature in 1939 to pass the Child Actors Bill, the so-called Coogan Act, which required parents or legal guardians to put at least half a child actor’s gross earnings in a court-approved fund or savings plan until the child turned twenty-one, though the law contained loopholes that considerably weakened its protection.

The Temple family did not seem to need the Coogan Act to remind them of their obligations to their child. They said they had established a court-approved trust fund for her as early as 1934 and repeatedly emphasized from that time onward that they placed her earnings in “sound securities.” “All the money Shirley has earned has been invested for her,” Shirley’s fans were reassured again in 1939 in the aftermath of the Coogan case. “The Temples live on George’s and Gertrude’s salaries. So don’t think Shirley is being taken advantage of, financially. She isn’t.”
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At this time Gertrude Temple passionately reaffirmed their selfless devotion to Shirley: “There is nothing, nothing that can hurt me so much, nothing that can make me so angry as to have it said that I am a ‘money-grabbing woman making that poor child work so hard.’ ” She placed her confidence in her husband as an experienced banker and head of the household to manage Shirley’s money prudently. As for herself, “I haven’t the slightest idea in the world how much we have, how much money Shirley has. I know that her money is well and wisely invested for her, in Government bonds, mostly, and in insurance annuities which will mature at different ages.” By ensuring that Shirley would never receive all of her money at once, this arrangement protected her against fortune hunters. “Beyond this certainty that all is safe for Shirley, as safe as anything can be in our times, I have not concerned myself. Mr. Temple keeps enough in my personal checking account to provide for my household and personal expenses and I let it go at that.”
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Throughout the 1930s fan magazines and interviews with the Temple family celebrated their ability to retain a normal family life, little different in its essentials from the lives of millions of middle-class families. Yet the nature of private life was changing fundamentally, most obviously for the Temple family but also for all of those whose lives she touched. Shirley Temple’s stardom marked dramatic changes in the interrelated cultures of celebrity, consumption, and the commodification of childhood. In important respects, these changes came not simply despite but because of the Great Depression. Eager to see faces of cheer and fables of optimism, adults and children alike responded intensely to Hollywood personalities whose smiles could fill the screen and lift their hearts. They wished to believe that such entertainments were created in the same spirit of play in which they were consumed and that the winning little girl’s performances expressed a private life of perpetual happy-ending.

Yet the irreducible fact is that Shirley Temple worked hard. Children had done so for centuries, of course, but she saw herself not as a child laborer but as a professional. She made this point repeatedly in her memoir of her career as a child star. Far from bewailing her situation, she proudly insisted on her interest in the craft of film acting and pride in doing it well. Even so, as labor, Shirley’s work made a variety of demands on her, physical and emotional. It was not as physically punishing as most forms of child labor, although it consumed long hours and included physical risks. Its emotional requirements extended far beyond the set, however. In addition to the work of acting, Shirley assumed the fraught position of becoming the financial and emotional center of her family’s life. She possessed tremendous power not only in the universe of the global public but also, and more momentous to her own development, in her family’s world.

While FDR sought to curtail or eliminate many of the most egregious forms of child labor, emotional labor nonetheless flourished in the Great Depression, most obviously on stage and screen, less so in the paid demands on children in service positions and the unpaid demands of cheering their families. As the service economy developed in subsequent decades, emotional labor became an essential element of many jobs performed by older children and adults in the workforce and also in more private and domestic settings. Yet service with a smile can take its toll. Just as workers can grow alienated from the goods that they produce in an industrial economy, the sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild has observed, so too they can become alienated from the services that they provide in a service economy. From the hospitality industry to the growing care sector, such emotional alienation has become a prominent condition of much of modern work.
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Children are usually considered the objects of adults’ emotional labor, but they have often become the providers as well: from the trophy child who is constantly pressured to win new markers of achievement for the gratification of the parents to the emotionally abused child struggling to keep the remnants of family together. To be sure, children have always been centers of immense emotional expectations as well as economic ones. What has changed is the extent to which these expectations are now enmeshed in a consumer culture that idealizes childhood as blissfully carefree even as that ideal and the everyday lives of children and their families grow increasingly commodified.

In carrying the double burden of professional and familial expectations, child actors have been especially vulnerable to emotional alienation. The actor and comedian Milton Berle, who began performing at the age of five, later wrote, “I guess I thought my childhood was fun while I was living it. Looking back, I can feel in my gut that it was lousy.” He added, “You don’t take on grownup responsibilities while living inside a kid’s body without paying a price for it.” The child actor Ted Donaldson, five years Shirley’s junior, reflected, “It can be a wonderful life, but I think for it to be good you need parents who have their own lives, who are not trying to live your successes or not trying to be successes through you.”
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Shirley Temple may have escaped such a fate, but it was her greatest occupational risk.

In the face of such risk, child actors served as the canaries in the mine shaft of modern consumer culture. The carefully constructed image of Shirley’s private life was cherished precisely because she seemed so impervious to the immense consumer markets in which her image circulated. Offscreen as well as in her films, in scores of articles and interviews during the Great Depression, the overarching narrative of Shirley Temple was of an irrepressibly sunny, good-hearted, emotionally direct, and delightfully unaffected child. Showered like a fairy princess with adulation, wealth, and luxuries, she seemed supremely uncontaminated by them.

As she assumed the position of a fairy princess, however, those most directly propelling her into the consumer market—her directors, producers, publicists, and parents—worked like alchemists to turn her ebullient child-spirit into gold while leaving her innocent and unchanged. They implicitly testified to their sense of the high risks of the endeavor with each reassurance that she remained unaffected, despite the myriad potential profanations of the markets in which she was a prime mover. Magnetic as Shirley Temple was to moviegoers and the larger industry of products attached to her name, she would break the spell if ever she awoke to a full realization of her immense economic importance. Those around her spoke repeatedly of her unspoiled nature, which they prized as the emotional and moral capital that children uniquely possessed, even as they sought to exploit that capital for its maximum financial return. They proved themselves to be both calculating capitalists and credulous sentimentalists. The separation of the child from the world of market relations in the twentieth century was increasingly a myth, but it was a useful one, not only in the self-serving way it consoled people such as film producers Winfield Sheehan and Darryl Zanuck and parents such as Gertrude and George Temple, but also for the reassurance it provided for the emerging consumer culture as a whole. It allowed both merchants of the child commodity market and parents of consuming children to sleep better at night.

EPILOGUE

SHIRLEY VISITS ANOTHER PRESIDENT

A
fter the Temples broke with Darryl Zanuck and Twentieth Century–Fox in 1940, Shirley and her family sought to place her movie career on a new footing. George Temple erected an independent production company to give her family greater control of her film projects, but it collapsed like a sand castle. Then Gertrude Temple pressed for artistic control of her daughter’s films in contract negotiations with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer but got nowhere. Gertrude Temple blamed poor stories for Shirley’s decline in 1939 and 1940, but the new ones were weaker still. Following Shirley’s brief contract with MGM, for which she made another movie about a motherless poor little rich girl,
Kathleen
, and an independently produced remake of an old Mary Pickford property,
Miss Annie Rooney
(distributed by United Artists), the Temples eagerly signed on Shirley’s behalf with producer David O. Selznick’s Vanguard Films. Fresh from his triumphs in
Gone with the Wind
and
Rebecca
, Selznick sparkled as Hollywood’s finest independent producer. Gertrude Temple felt that at last her daughter’s career was in safe hands.
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Altogether between 1941 and 1949 Shirley made thirteen movies, less than half the pace that she had set in the 1930s but a considerable output nonetheless. These included some critical and commercial successes, notably in
Since You Went Away
,
Fort Apache
, and
The Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer
, but increasingly in supporting roles in which other actors carried the pictures.
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For a time she retained her popularity among core fans, but she landed some embarrassing flops. The former adorable child now frequently played a perky, headstrong teenager (a word newly coined in this decade), spouting slang and brimming with puppy love, beginning with
Miss Annie Rooney
(1942). The
New York Times
’s Theodore Strauss called it “the kind of show that makes indulgent souls feel much less kind toward children. . . . Couldn’t Miss Temple be kept in school for just a little while?” he asked.
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The
Times
’s Bosley Crowther, who praised some of Shirley’s performances, including her “superb” acting in the domestic farce
Kiss and Tell
(1945), shook his head in dismay at her last movies. By this time, David Selznick’s production company was shaky, and his own attention distracted by his infatuation with the actress Jennifer Jones. Lending Shirley and other stars to various studios, he gave them little personal attention. Reviewing
Honeymoon
, in May 1947, Crowther sighed, “The friends of Shirley Temple must be getting a little bit tired of seeing this buxom young lady still acting as though she were a kid.” Five months later, appraising the feeble melodrama
That Hagen Girl
(in which she costarred with Ronald Reagan), he wrote, “She acts with the mopish dejection of a school-child who has just been robbed of a two-scoop ice cream cone.” Crowther went on to link Shirley with a political crisis quite different than that of the Great Depression. The House Committee on Un-American Activities was then embroiled in hearings on alleged Communist infiltration of Hollywood. Friendly witnesses before the committee included Ronald Reagan, then president of the Screen Actors Guild, and two of Shirley’s former costars, Adolphe Menjou and Gary Cooper. Crowther, who would become an outspoken critic of such red-baiting, concluded his review, tongue in cheek, protesting her dreadful role and performance in the film and tweaking her costars in the process: “They shouldn’t do such things to Shirley. It’s downright un-American!”
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