The Little Girl Who Fought the Great Depression: Shirley Temple and 1930s America (34 page)

Shirley’s movie career ended with a whimper. Of
Adventure in Baltimore
(1949) Crowther groaned wearily, “Whatever strides toward maturity Shirley Temple may have made in her two to three recent pictures are completely reversed by this job.”
⁵
Significantly, neither he nor anyone else at the
New York Times
reviewed her last movie,
A Kiss for Corliss
, a thin and brittle sequel to
Kiss and Tell.

As Shirley’s professional life spiraled downward, her personal life did as well. Fulfilling a teenage ambition to beat her classmates at Westlake School to the altar, she became engaged to Army Air Corps sergeant John Agar when she was only sixteen. Six foot one with a lean, muscled body, he was seven years her senior. Their wedding in September 1945, immediately after the end of the Second World War, resembled a movie premiere, and it was indeed substantially produced by Selznick, who selected the massive Wilshire Methodist Church in Los Angeles, oversaw the arrangements, and paid the piper. In addition to Selznick, the five hundred guests included Darryl Zanuck and California governor Earl Warren. For every guest, outside the church there surged ten excited onlookers, five thousand in all, and despite the presence of forty-five restraining police, many broke through rope barriers to demand Shirley’s autograph and to tear the bridesmaids’ dresses for souvenir scraps.
⁶

Newsweek
titled its story of the nuptials “And They Lived Happily.” But not so. By Shirley Temple’s account, Agar’s drinking and flirtations made their marriage rocky from the start. The couple lived on Shirley’s allowance in her remodeled playhouse (her mother’s idea), only yards away from George and Gertrude. As Shirley pursued her film career, her husband sulked in her shadow. His own contract with Selznick and roles in two of her films did not revive the marriage but only made him a ripe target for taunts as “Mr. Temple.” A year after the birth of their daughter, Linda Susan, they separated.
⁷

While awaiting her divorce on a Hawaiian vacation with her parents and baby daughter, Shirley met Charles Alden Black, a tall, tanned, handsome, thirty-year-old businessman with a smile to match her own. He did not recognize her, had never seen one of her movies, and was not the least awed by her fame. Son of the president and later chairman of the board of the giant utility company Pacific Gas and Electric, Charlie Black had breezed through the Hotchkiss School, Stanford University, and Harvard Business School, later returning to Stanford to complete his master’s in business administration. During the Second World War he served on Gen. Douglas MacArthur’s staff as an intelligence officer and, as a scout behind enemy lines in Indonesia, conducted over a hundred PT boat patrols and earned a Silver Star for valor. An expert sailor and surfer, he exuded vigor and competence. If she ached for an escape from Hollywood’s celebrity, he offered it. Immediately smitten by him, Shirley (who had not befriended J. Edgar Hoover for nothing) had her friends in the FBI check his background to make sure this golden boy was not merely brass. The couple was married in a small private ceremony, far away from reporters and onlookers, in December 1950.
⁸

Up to this time Shirley had remained blissfully ignorant of her finances. Although twenty-two, she still received an allowance from her father and knew nothing of the size of the nest egg that he had supposedly guarded so vigilantly throughout her movie career. Her first husband had acceded to these arrangements, but businessman Charles Black was less passive. At his urging, she finally insisted on examining her financial records. Only then did she discover how disastrously her father and his business partner had squandered her earnings from her films, licenses, and royalties. Of the $3,207,666 in earnings her family had received in her name, only $44,000 remained in her trust account, in addition to ownership of her former playhouse, a wedding present from her parents in 1945. Leaving the house aside, for every dollar she had made, only a fraction more than a penny was left. Poring over the thick bound volume containing the complicated and depressing account of income, investments, and expenditures, she found how much her innocence had been exploited. With her earnings, her father had indulged his penchant for expensive cars and her mother her taste for fashion. She had bankrolled her father’s speculative gambles, which he consistently lost, and her mother’s racetrack bets. She paid her brothers’ school and college bills and the salaries of a large household staff. Other beneficiaries of her unknowing largess included her difficult grandmother and two paternal uncles, as well as numerous friends of George and Gertrude, to whom they freely gave loans and handouts, rarely repaid. Keeping more of Shirley’s money in her parents’ names, George muttered weakly to Shirley, was intended to save her substantial income taxes. Now it was gone. Through all of the dizzying records, she concluded bitterly, one theme beat clearly: “Keep dancing, kid, or the rickety card house collapses.”
⁹

Not only had her earnings been prodigally mismanaged, her father had also simply ignored the California Superior Court orders governing her 1941 MGM contract and seven-year contract with David Selznick’s Vanguard Films mandating that half of her net earnings be placed in trust for her. Shirley’s gross earnings during these nine years after leaving Twentieth Century–Fox amounted to $891,067. George Temple had evidently treated all of this money as if it were his own. She later likened her father to Mr. Micawber of Charles Dickens’s
David Copperfield
, the jauntily optimistic, improvident man who always believed something would turn up. In a final twist of roles, she protected her father from the humiliation of his colossal ineptitude and, for the rest of her parents’ lives, kept her discovery private.
¹⁰

By the time of Shirley Temple’s second marriage, the Hollywood studio system was rapidly crumbling, battered by antitrust actions and the television industry. Selznick himself stopped producing films for nine years. In addition, simmering tensions in Korea had burst into open conflict, and Charles Black was summoned back to active duty in naval intelligence. Shutting the door on her film career, Shirley moved with her husband and daughter to Washington, D.C., and took up life as a housewife and mother.

In 1953, fifteen years after Shirley Temple and her parents called on Franklin Roosevelt and nineteen years after attaching her screen persona to FDR’s coattails in
Stand Up and Cheer!
, she returned to the White House, this time with her husband and her own daughter to shake hands with President Dwight Eisenhower as her family prepared to return to California. Like FDR, Ike had a hearty laugh, an infectious grin, and an air of cheerful optimism. But the political, economic, and emotional contexts of their smiles were vastly different. FDR’s smile sustained millions during the darkest days of the Great Depression. Ike’s grin shone on a country more prosperous than ever before. Certainly, anxieties remained. The Cold War raged, the nuclear arms race mounted, and Wisconsin senator Joseph McCarthy inveighed against Communist conspirators at every level of government and the military. Yet long after McCarthy’s self-serving charges collapsed in ignominy, the ideal of the private consumer, rooted in the middle-class family and the suburban landscape, dominated postwar politics and the economy to such an extent that John Updike famously wrote in a short story, “America is a vast conspiracy to make you happy.” Shirley Temple had played an important part in launching this conspiracy, in 1930s movies that patched up romantic misunderstandings and family quarrels, bolstered people’s spirits, and got folks spending again. New child actors flooded television, but none could ever attain the cultural centrality or economic significance that Shirley had achieved. America’s model child and model consumer in the Great Depression, she prepared the way for the culture of postwar abundance, in which the smile, once a determined emblem of hope, became an obligatory expression. “The American must smile,” the sociologist Philip Rieff observed in 1957, “or risk challenging the sacramental bond that unites him in one overpoweringly friendly people. In that wide, ever-ready smile the material abundance of America may be said to be transubstantiated into the personality of the American.”
¹¹

Shirley Temple Black with husband Charles Black and daughter Linda Susan at the White House for a visit with President Eisenhower, May 14, 1953. (© Bettmann/Corbis)

Shirley Temple Black was not content either to bask in her former celebrity or to retreat into the shadows like Mary Pickford. She devoted herself to numerous charitable activities, political efforts for Republican candidates, and diplomatic duties, including ambassadorships to Ghana and Czechoslovakia. The former child star who once celebrated the end of the Great Depression, sat on President Lincoln’s lap, and brokered peace on the India-Afghanistan border in her film roles could not claim to have ended the Cold War. But when East and West Germans celebrated the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, she watched them not from a suburban California living room but from her ambassadorial quarters in Prague.

NOTES

INTRODUCTION

1
“Peewee’s Progress,”
Time
, April 27, 1936, 36–38; “Gabriel Washington [Pseud. for Gabriel Meyers],” interview by Charles A. Von Ohsen, February 22, 1939, and John and Lizzie Pierce, interview by I.L.M., September 23, 1938,
American Life Histories: Manuscripts from the Federal Writers’ Project, 1936–1940
, Library of Congress, Manuscript Division, WPA Federal Writers’ Project Collection, Washington, DC; Blake Stimson, “Andy Warhol’s Red Beard,”
Art Bulletin
83, no. 3 (September 2001): 528–29; Ovid Demaris,
The Director: An Oral Biography of J. Edgar Hoover
(New York: Harper’s Magazine Press, 1975), 47; Shane White et al.,
Playing the Numbers: Gambling in Harlem between the Wars
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), 170; Stacey Morris, “Ghosts of Prinsengracht: A Tour of the Anne Frank House,”
Jewish Daily Forward
, April 13, 2007, http://forward.com/articles/10481/ghosts-of-prinsengra.

2
Arlie Russell Hochschild,
The Commercialization of Intimate Life: Notes from Home and Work
(Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2003), 83.

3
“Greeting to Shirley,”
Variety
, April 29, 1936, 26; “Shirley Temple Contest Engineered by Ed Hart,”
Motion Picture Herald
, August 11, 1934, 60; Louis A. Pérez Jr.,
On Becoming Cuban: Identity, Nationality, and Culture
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 300–301; “Gaitou de Hirotta Wasei Tenpuru-jou” (Discovered on the Street: The Japanese Shirley Temple),
Asahi Shimbun
, Tokyo, March 26, 1938, evening ed., 4; “Peewee’s Progress,” 38.

CHAPTER ONE: SMILE LIKE ROOSEVELT

1
For material on George and Gertrude Temple’s courtship in this and the following paragraph, see Shirley Temple Black,
Child Star: An Autobiography
(New York: McGraw-Hill, 1988), 1–2, 96.

2
Material in this and the following paragraphs on George and Gertrude Temple and their families comes from the 1900, 1910, 1920, and 1930 federal census and city directories of Los Angeles and Santa Monica, California, accessed through
Ancestry.com
.

3
Greg Hise, “Industry and Imaginative Geographies,” in
Metropolis in the Making: Los Angeles in the 1920s
, ed. Tom Sitton and William Deverell (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2001), 18; Kevin Starr,
Material Dreams: Southern California through the 1920’s
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 70, 84–85; Bruce Bliven, “Los Angeles: The City That Is Bacchanalian—in a Nice Way,”
New Republic
, July 13, 1927, 197.

4
Black,
Child Star
, 15. Among other future stage and screen mothers who began coaching their children
in utero
were Jennie Cockrell Bierbower (later Janis) and Lela Rogers. See Diana Serra Cary,
Hollywood’s Children: An Inside Account of the Child Star Era
(Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press, 1997), 22, 164. Jane Withers’s mother similarly planned her daughter’s career long before conception. See Tom Goldrup and Jim Goldrup,
Growing Up on the Set: Interviews with 39 Former Child Actors of Classic Film and Television
(Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2002), 33.

5
Theodore G. Joslin,
Hoover off the Record
(Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Doran, 1934), 14; Joan Hoff,
Herbert Hoover, Forgotten Progressive
(Boston: Little, Brown, 1975), 118, 121. The last quotation is from Sherwood Anderson’s 1927 interview with Hoover.

6
Herbert Hoover, August 11, 1928,
Containing the Public Messages, Speeches, and Statements of the President, March 4 to December 31, 1929
, Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States (Washington, DC: United States Government Printing Office, 1974), 503.