The Little Girl Who Fought the Great Depression: Shirley Temple and 1930s America (36 page)

68
Virginia Miller to FDR; Etta A. Buckley to FDR; Mrs. A. J. Bell to FDR, President’s Personal File 200B, Public Reaction, March 13, 1933, FDR Library.

69
Paul H. Russell to FDR; Chester E. Bruns to FDR, in Levine and Levine,
People and the President
, 48, 42; Will Rogers, “Roosevelt Illiterate—Rogers,”
Miami News
, January 26, 1936, 11; “Common Words Keynote of Roosevelt’s Talks,”
New York Times
, May 16, 1937, 174.

70
Perkins,
Roosevelt I Knew
, 72.

71
Eleanor Roosevelt, as quoted in Levine and Levine,
People and the President
, 18; FDR to C. Leffingwell, March 16, 1942, in Elliott Roosevelt, ed.,
F.D.R.: His Personal Letters
(New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1950), 4:1298.

72
Melvyn Douglas, “Number One Movie Fan,”
New Republic
, April 15, 1946, 543.

73
Of course, FDR’s opponents did not applaud such appearances. One of Peter Arno’s most famous cartoons depicted a patrician-looking group in evening dress inviting friends on an outing. It was captioned, “Come along. We’re going to the Trans-Lux [a Manhattan newsreel theater] to hiss Roosevelt.”
The New Yorker
, September 19, 1936, 16.

74
Douglas, “Number One Movie Fan,” 543. The journalist Marquis Childs observed that FDR was a “man who could be photographed . . . always with just the perfect camera angle.” Ward,
First-Class Temperament
, 552.

75
James MacGregor Burns,
Roosevelt: The Lion and the Fox
(New York: Harcourt, 1956), 447; Leuchtenburg,
FDR Years
, 13.

76
Samuel I. Rosenman, ed.,
The Public Papers and Addresses of Franklin D. Roosevelt
(New York: Random House, 1938), 7: 615.

77
Conrad Black,
Franklin Delano Roosevelt: Champion of Freedom
(New York: Public Affairs, 2003), 316; Douglas, “Number One Movie Fan,” 542.

78
“Smile like Roosevelt,”
New York Times
, August 21, 1933, 11; “Roosevelt Canvas Approved by Wife,”
New York Times
, March 2, 1934, 25; “A Laughing Cavalier,”
Vanity Fair
, October 1933, 15. On portraits of FDR, see Stein, “President’s Two Bodies,” 32–57; and David Meschutt, “Portraits of Franklin Delano Roosevelt,”
American Art Journal
18, no. 4 (1986): 3–50.

79
I. Hoover,
Forty-Two Years in the White House
, 233; Fulton Oursler,
Behold This Dreamer! An Autobiography
(Boston: Little, Brown, 1964), 419; Ward,
First-Class Temperament
, 711.

80
Joseph W. Martin and Robert J. Donovan,
My First Fifty Years in Politics
(New York: McGraw-Hill, 1960), 73.

81
Graham J. White,
FDR and the Press
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979), 36.

82
H. L. Mencken,
On Politics: A Carnival of Buncombe
, ed. Malcolm Moos (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 262; Mencken, “Three Years of Dr. Roosevelt,”
American Mercury
, March 1936, 257; Charles A. Fecher, ed.,
The Diary of H. L. Mencken
(New York: Knopf, 1989), 76; George Wolfskill and John Hudson,
All but the People: Franklin D. Roosevelt and His Critics, 1933–39
(New York: Macmillan, 1969), 28.

83
Rauch,
Roosevelt Reader
, 166.

84
“No Hasty Inflation,”
New York Times
, May 9, 1933, 16; Leuchtenburg,
FDR Years
, 312; Lenthall,
Radio’s America
, 126, 141.

85
Christopher Duggan,
The Force of Destiny: A History of Italy since 1796
(London: Allen Lane, 2007), 477; Alex Ross,
The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century
(New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007), 238. Ross here speaks of Hitler and Stalin, but the phrase is equally applicable to Il Duce.

CHAPTER TWO: SUCH A HAPPY LITTLE FACE!

1
The story of Shirley’s weekly bleachings appeared in Lloyd Pantages, “I Cover Hollywood,”
Los Angeles Examiner
, October 16, 1935, Clippings File—Shirley Temple, Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Beverly Hills, CA (hereafter MHL); see also Shirley Temple Black,
Child Star: An Autobiography
(New York: McGraw-Hill, 1988), 69. A brunette Shirley appears in
New Deal Rhythm
(1933).

2
Diana Serra Cary,
Hollywood’s Children: An Inside Account of the Child Star Era
(Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press, 1997), 149.

3
Black,
Child Star,
12–14.

4
Black,
Child Star,
14.

5
Anne Edwards says that Shirley Temple’s earnings from her films before
Stand Up and Cheer!
were $1,135. Edwards,
Shirley Temple: American Princess
(New York: William Morrow, 1988), 49. Shirley Temple Black says her earnings on the Educational Films shorts and her early bit parts amounted to $702.50. Black,
Child Star
, 31.

6
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), 21, 334.

7
Black,
Child Star
, 15–16.

8
Black,
Child Star
, 14.

9
Black,
Child Star
, 20–21.

10
Black,
Child Star
, 21–23, 25–27, 19.

11
Edwards,
Shirley Temple
, 70.

12
Gertrude Temple, “Bringing Up Shirley,”
American Magazine
, February 1935, 92; [Max Trell], “My Life and Times: The Autobiography of Shirley Temple, Part I,”
Pictorial Review
, August 1935, 40. A
Time
magazine cover story echoed this assertion: “Her work entails no effort. She plays at acting as other small girls play at dolls.” “Peewee’s Progress,”
Time
, April 27, 1936, 42.

13
For example, the mother of the silent film star “Baby Peggy” Montgomery told reporters, “She [Peggy] works—if you would call it work—four hours a day, never at night and never on Sundays. She considers her work play and nothing is ever done or said to let her feel otherwise.” The former child star found this comment bitterly amusing. Cary,
Hollywood’s Children
, 92.

14
Viviana A. Zelizer,
Pricing the Priceless Child: The Changing Social Value of Children
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), 95.

15
Susan Rae Applebaum, “
The Little Princess
Onstage in 1903: Its Historical Significance,”
Theatre History Studies
18 (1998): 71–72. In New York City, applications to the mayor’s office for licenses for juvenile actors, which had been fewer than two hundred in 1896, spiked to over four thousand in 1903. Benjamin McArthur, “ ‘Forbid Them Not’: Child Actor Labor Laws and Political Activism in the Theatre,”
Theatre Survey
36, no. 2 (1995): 63–80.

16
A particularly formidable critic was Elbridge Gerry, longtime head of the New York Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children. See McArthur, “ ‘Forbid Them Not,’ ” 66–67.

17
National Alliance for the Protection of Stage Children,
Stage Children of America
(New York: Times Building, [1911]), 5, 16, 8, 22.

18
I. A. Taylor, “The Show-Child: A Protest,”
Living Age
9 (1896): 113, 116; see also F. Zeta Youmans, “Childhood, Inc.,”
Survey
52 (1924): 464.

19
Educational Films continued until 1939.

20
The song may also have had roots in Yiddish theater. See Howard Pollack,
George Gershwin: His Life and Work
(Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2006), 44.

21
Rob Kapilow, interview by Susan Stamberg, “A Depression-Era Anthem for Our Times,” National Public Radio, broadcast November 15, 2008.

22
Gary Giddins,
Bing Crosby: A Pocketful of Dreams
(Boston: Little, Brown, 2001), 305.

23
Film dialogue throughout this book is my own transcriptions.

24
Black,
Child Star
, 232–33; David Emblidge, ed.,
My Day: The Best of Eleanor Roosevelt’s Acclaimed Newspaper Columns, 1936–1962
(New York: Da Capo Press, 2001), 27. Black notes that originally the bill made no exceptions with respect to age for children in films. She mistakenly says Roosevelt signed the bill on the day of her visit, June 24, 1938. So ludicrous did the idea of Shirley Temple as a child laborer seem in the mid-1930s that it was the subject of a humorous imaginary interview between the child star and Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins, in which Shirley says, “I don’t work. I dance and sing and make faces.” Corey Ford with illustration by Miguel Covarrubias, “Impossible Interview: Frances Perkins vs. Shirley Temple,”
Vanity Fair
, September 1935, 33.

25
In this context, FDR has been frequently quoted by Shirley Temple Black and others as paying tribute to her cheering smile, saying, “When the spirit of the people is lower than at any other time during this Depression, it is a splendid thing that for just 15 cents, an American can go to a movie and look at the smiling face of a baby and forget his troubles.” Lester David and Irene David,
The Shirley Temple Story
(New York: Putnam, 1983),16; Black,
Child Star
, 59; George F. Custen,
Twentieth Century’s Fox: Darryl F. Zanuck and the Culture of Hollywood
(New York: Basic Books, 1997), 199. I have been unable to verify the quotation, however, and suspect that it is apocryphal.

26
The character of Cromwell was loosely modeled on Florenz Ziegfeld. In the script’s earliest conception, Will Rogers was to play the secretary of laughter. Rian James, “Fox Follies, Rough First Draft,” 3, n.d. [c. July 1, 1933], Twentieth Century–Fox Scripts Collection, Cinema Arts Library, University of Southern California, Los Angeles (hereafter USC). On restrictions of Roosevelt’s likeness in films, see Ronald Brownstein,
The Power and the Glitter: The Hollywood-Washington Connection
(New York: Pantheon Books, 1990), 76–77. Later, FDR broke this policy for
Yankee Doodle Dandy
(Warner Bros., 1942), in which Roosevelt’s voice is used and an actor impersonates him. Melvyn Douglas, “Number One Movie Fan,”
New Republic
, April 15, 1946, 543.

27
Shirley Temple earlier made a very brief appearance in another Hollywood homage to the NRA, Paramount’s
New Deal Rhythm
(1933).

28
Mae Tinee, review of
Stand Up and Cheer!
,
Chicago Tribune
, May 2, 1934, 17; review of
Stand Up and Cheer!
,
Boston Globe
, May 4, 1934, 41; Boyd Martin, review of
Stand Up and Cheer!
,
Louisville Courier-Journal
, July 5, 1934, 8; George Shaffer, “Film Reporters See Stardom for Girl of 4,”
Chicago Tribune
, May 30, 1934, 28.

29
“Shirley Temple a Sensation; ‘Little Miss Marker’ Cashes,”
Hollywood Reporter
, May 29, 1934, 7; review of
Stand Up and Cheer!
,
Time
, April 30, 1934, 28.

30
Steven J. Ross, “How Hollywood Became Hollywood: Money, Politics, and Movies,” 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), 258–64.

31
Douglas Gomery,
The Hollywood Studio System: A History
, rev. ed. (London: BFI, 2005), 74.

32
Gomery,
Hollywood Studio System,
76; Gomery,
The Hollywood Studio System
(New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1986), 84–85.

33
See the cinema attendance surveys in Hadley Cantril and Mildred Strunk, eds.,
Public Opinion, 1935
–1946
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1951), 486.

34
Kerry Segrave,
American Films Abroad: Hollywood’s Domination of the World’s Movie Screens from the 1890s to the Present
(Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1997), 115; Thomas M. Pryor, “More on Foreign Quotas,”
New York Times
, October 24, 1937, 168; Ruth Vasey,
The World According to Hollywood, 1918–1939
(Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1997), 145.

35
Tino Balio,
Grand Design: Hollywood as a Modern Business Enterprise, 1930–1939
(New York: Scribner’s, 1993), 13–18; Robert Sklar,
Movie-Made America: A Social History of American Movies
(New York: Random House, 1975), 161; Douglas Gomery,
The Coming of Sound: A History
(New York: Routledge, 2005), 37–45, 115–16. Lary May calculates that “in six major cities, theaters failed at an average of 36 percent from 1930 to 1933.” Lary May with the assistance of Stephen Lassonde, “Making the American Way: Moderne Theatres, Audiences, and the Film Industry, 1929–1945,”
Prospects
12 (1987): 121 n. 8.

36
Daniel A. Lord,
Played by Ear: The Autobiography of Daniel A. Lord, S. J.
(Chicago: Loyola University Press, 1956), 295. The Payne Fund investigators were especially concerned that of those attending the movies on a given week on the eve of the Depression, nearly 36 percent were under twenty-one, and roughly half of these were fourteen or younger. Henry James Forman, “Movie Madness,”
McCall’s
, October 1932, 14–15, 28, 30. Among the many books and articles on the coming of the Hollywood Production Code, see especially Richard Maltby, “The Production Code and the Hays Office,” in Balio,
Grand Design
, 37–72.

37
Maltby, “Production Code and the Hays Office,” 37–72.

38
“Good Cheer Wanted,”
Moving Picture World
, February 20, 1909, 196; Ian Jarvie and Robert L. Macmillan, “John Grierson on Hollywood’s Success, 1927,”
Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television
9, no. 3 (1989): 315–16.