The Times Great Women's Lives

by Sue Corbett

  Although her attempt to win a seat in Congress failed, she was given important diplomatic jobs by Presidents Nixon, Ford and Bush, culminating in three years as US Ambassador to Czechoslovakia during the post-Cold War turmoil in Eastern Europe.

  She was born in Santa Monica, California in 1928, and like many young stars she owed her early start to a fiercely ambitious mother. The motive was not financial. Temple’s father, George, was a banker, and although he had to take a pay cut during the Depression the family was comfortably off, with its own house and car.

  Her mother, Gertrude, had been frustrated in her own ambition to become a dancer and was determined that her daughter should not miss out. Her sons showed neither the talent nor the inclination to become performers, but Shirley, who was born when her brothers were 13 and 9, did.

  She was enrolled for dancing classes at the age of 2, and at 3 was spotted by a scout for the Educational Film Corporation, which was about to launch a series called Baby Burlesks to rival the Our Gang comedy shorts. The Baby Burlesks were ten-minute films in which children parodied the film stars of the day — Temple took easily to the idea, not least with a character called Morelegs Sweet Trick, alias Marlene Dietrich. When any of the children starring in the Baby Burlesks misbehaved, they were locked in a windowless sound box with only a block of ice on which to sit. “So far as I can tell, the black box did no lasting damage to my psyche,” Temple wrote in her 1988 autobiography Child Star.

  The Baby Burlesks were a start but it took the persistence of her mother to ensure that she made the transition to feature films. Gertrude Temple became her daughter’s coach — teaching her how to project herself physically and through her voice — as well as her agent, scouring casting offices to find her work. She would always instruct her daughter to “Sparkle, Shirley!” before she appeared before an audience.

  After a series of small parts Shirley was recommended to the Fox studio, which put her in Stand Up and Cheer (1934), a film designed to counter the Depression blues. Temple sang a song, Baby Take a Bow, and although she was well down the cast list she impressed Fox enough to put her under contract. Her first starring role came in Little Miss Marker, a Damon Runyon story in which she did the first of many celluloid good deeds by reforming Adolphe Menjou’s renegade gambler. She proved so intimidating, with her 56 perfect blonde ringlets, unshakeable optimism and boundless self-confidence, that Menjou said that Temple was “making a stooge out of me”.

  After supporting Gary Cooper and Carole Lombard in Now and Forever she confirmed her stardom on Bright Eyes, in which she performed her most famous song, On the Good Ship Lollipop, which sold half a million copies in sheet music. During 1934 she made nine films and the year’s work brought her a special miniature Oscar.

  By the end of 1935 she was America’s most popular star, thanks to well-chosen vehicles such as The Little Colonel, which saw the first of several appearances with the black dancer, Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, and The Littlest Rebel, in which she sat on President Lincoln’s knee to plead for her imprisoned father.

  In 1935 she was taken by her parents to Washington to meet President Roosevelt and his wife, Eleanor. The President invited the Temples to a barbecue at the Roosevelt home in Hyde Park, New York, where Eleanor, bending over a grill, proved too much of a temptation for the impish child star. Temple unleashed a pebble from the catapult she carried in her lace purse and hit the First Lady smartly on the rear.

  Temple herself proved such a money-maker that her mother and studio officials colluded to shave a year off her age to maintain her child image. At her peak she earned huge sums and an industry grew up around her, of dolls, toys, clothes, books, and soap. As a result of her father’s banking expertise her money was sensibly handled and led to none of the acrimony which blighted the adult lives of other child actors. The price of wealth and fame, however, was vulnerability to kidnap and the studio was forced to provide Temple with a bodyguard.

  While films such as Curly Top and Dimples were created around Temple’s natural assets, others were specially tailored versions of well-known children’s stories. Wee Willie Winkie (1937), her most expensive picture and the first with a frontline Hollywood director, John Ford, came from a Kipling story in which the child who becomes a mascot to a British regiment in India was a boy.

  Wee Willie Winkle sparked a famous London court case in 1938 in which Temple and 20th Century Fox sued Graham Greene, then a leading film critic, for libel. In his review in the magazine Night and Day, Greene suggested that Temple was an adult masquerading as a child and wrote of her “dimpled depravity” and “dubious coquetry”. Greene lost, and Night and Day was closed down.

  Temple was awarded £2,000 in damages — later used to build a youth centre in England — and the film companies were awarded £1,500 for the “beastly libel”.

  Johanna Spyri’s Heidi was another children’s classic accorded the Temple treatment; yet another was Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Little Princess (1939), her first Technicolor feature. By now Temple’s popularity was slipping fast. She was a candidate to play Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz but the part went to Judy Garland, and at the age of 11 Temple’s career as a child star was over.

  Her contract with Fox was cancelled and she moved to MGM — which let her go after one film. From then on she made her way in character parts, and apart from John Ford’s Fort Apache her later films were undistinguished. Ford, though, still thought enough of Temple’s pulling power in his 1948 western to pay her the same as his lead actors, John Wayne and Henry Fonda. In Fort Apache Temple played opposite her husband, John Agar, the former Army Air Corps sergeant turned actor, whom she had married in 1945 when she was 17. The marriage, which produced a daughter, Linda, was short-lived: Temple filed for divorce in 1949.

  In January 1950, at a cocktail party in Hawaii, where she was taking a holiday after her divorce, she met the man who was to become her second husband, Charles Alden Black, a decorated war veteran and businessman from a wealthy Californian family. “We were introduced,” Temple later recalled, “and he said ‘What do you do, are you a secretary?’ I said, ‘I can’t even type. I make films.’ He wasn’t too sure what I did. It was very refreshing to me — a handsome guy who wasn’t interested in Hollywood or anything about it.”

  After a whirlwind romance — Black wooed her with a Tahitian love song and proposed after 12 days — they were married in December of that year, and she announced her retirement from films. The couple subsequently had a son, Charles Jr, and a daughter, Lori, and Black adopted Linda, Temple’s daughter with Agar.

  In the late 1950s, having given up her acting career to be a mother and homemaker, she made a comeback on television. Shirley Temple’s Storybook was a series of dramatised fairytales which she introduced and appeared in, along with star names including Charlton Heston, Claire Bloom and Elsa Lanchester. Shirley Temple Theater, a similar concept, followed two years later, but the show lasted only one season and her screen career fizzled out.

  The Temple family had always been Republicans and in 1966 Shirley worked for a fellow screen actor, Ronald Reagan, during his successful campaign for Governor of California. When a congressional seat became vacant the next year, Temple declared herself a candidate. Her political inexperience showed, however, and she failed to get beyond the primary. It probably did not help that On the Good Ship Lollipop was repeatedly played at rallies during her campaign.

  There was compensation when President Nixon appointed her as a US delegate to the United Nations in 1969. She performed well in the role, speaking out about the problems of the aged, the plight of refugees and, especially, environmental problems.

  When President Ford made her Ambassador to Ghana in 1974, it caused an outcry in some quarters. She said after her appointment: “I have no trouble being taken seriously as a woman and a diplomat here [in Ghana]. My only problems have been with Americans who, in the beginning, refused to believe I had grown up since my movies.”

  She later became the
first woman to hold the post of Chief of Protocol of the United States, responsible for organising President Carter’s inauguration in January 1977. One of her duties was leading a one-week training programme for new government envoys, she said: “We teach them how to get used to being called Ambassador and having Marines saluting. Then, on Day 3, we tell them what to do if they’re taken hostage.”

  Although no worthwhile job resulted from the Reagan Presidency, George Bush chose her to run the US Embassy in Prague when he succeeded Reagan in 1989; her time in office thus coincided with the fall of Communism in Eastern Europe. The post would normally have been expected to have been awarded to a career diplomat, but Temple served for nearly four years in the post, earning widespread admiration in the process — Henry Kissinger, for one, called her “very intelligent, very tough-minded, very disciplined”. While in Prague she also learnt that there had been a Shirley Temple fan club in the city 50 years previously; people with long memories brought old “Shirleyka” membership cards for her to autograph.

  She was disappointed that her political appointments did not lead to bigger things. Her film career, however, was recognised: in 1985 the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences presented her with a full-size Oscar to replace the miniature one given 50 years earlier.

  In 1972 she had breast cancer diagnosed and underwent a radical modified mastectomy. In going public about it, she was one of the first Hollywood stars to highlight the disease, which brought her 50,000 letters of support. She held a news conference from her hospital bed to urge women who found lumps not to “sit home and be afraid”.

  When her second husband died of bone marrow disease in 2005, she kept his voice on their answering machine, saying: “I don’t ever want to erase it.” As he lay dying she sang him the same Tahitian love song that he had sung to her during their courtship.

  She is survived by her three children: Lori played bass guitar for various bands before becoming a photographer, Charles Jr became a businessman and Linda a high-school librarian.

  Shirley Temple, actress and diplomat, was born on April 23, 1928. She died on February 10, 2014, aged 85

  ALICE HERZ-SOMMER

  * * *

  CONCERT PIANIST WHOSE MUSICAL TALENT SAVED HER LIFE IN A NAZI DEATH CAMP AND WHO BECAME THE WORLD’S OLDEST HOLOCAUST SURVIVOR

  FEBRUARY 24, 2014

  Amid the glitz and glamour of the Oscar ceremony in Los Angeles next month, there will be a celebration of a life more extraordinary than any created by Hollywood. The Lady in No 6 has been nominated in the category of best short documentary and its subject is Alice Herz-Sommer, the oldest survivor of the Holocaust.

  During the film, Herz-Sommer plays the piano in her one-roomed flat in Belsize Park, North London. She still played every day, spending many hours practising Bach and Beethoven, and it was her consummate gifts as a concert pianist that enabled her to survive two years in the Theresienstadt ghetto, a Nazi concentration camp in Terezín in her homeland of Czechoslovakia.

  Herz-Sommer reckoned to have given more than 100 performances at the behest of the Nazis. Music saved her life and that of her son but it could not spare her husband, who was sent to Dachau and died of typhus in the final days of the war.

  Alice Herz was born one of twin sisters in Prague in 1903. Her life came to typify the fate of so many assimilated Central European Jews in the 20th century: she strove to become part of a German cultural world in the final years of the Austro-Hungarian empire; was rejected by the Czechs after the creation of Czechoslovakia; persecuted by the Germans who occupied Prague in 1939; and then shunned and tormented by the Czechs after May 1945. She found refuge only in the new state of Israel, and latterly in retirement in London.

  Her father, Friedrich, owned a factory making precision scales and had customers throughout the Austro-Hungarian empire. Her mother Sofie (née Schulz) was from Iglau (Jilava), a former German-speaking pocket south west of Prague. Gustav Mahler came from Iglau, and the Schulz and Mahler families had been acquainted.

  In Prague the Herz family belonged to a world of German-speaking Jews that would later achieve world fame through Franz Kafka and Max Brod. Alice knew both men well.

  She grew up as an assimilated Jew. There were more than a hundred thousand Jews in the city, and of these a little under half gravitated towards the small, but powerful German community based around the garrison and the university. They tended to be professional and middle-class. Religious observance was limited.

  At the age of six Alice began to learn the piano. She would perform duets with her brother Paul, a talented violinist. Her elder sister Irma, also a pianist, introduced her to a teacher who fostered a love of modern Czech music that formed part of her repertoire all her life.

  The Herz family was dealt a blow when Austria-Hungary sued for peace in 1918 and Tomas Masaryk called the Czechoslovak Republic into being. Masaryk was himself anxious to make a multi-ethnic Czechoslovakia work, but many Czechs were not keen, and shortly after the end of the war there were riots directed at the Prague Jews.

  Herz-Sommer remained firmly implanted in the embattled German world. At 16 she gained a place in the piano master-class at the new German Academy of Music. Her master was Liszt’s pupil Conrad Ansorge. She graduated with distinction and she was soon dividing her life between the concert stage and private teaching. Immediately after leaving the Academy in 1924, she made her debut performance with the Czech Philharmonic and from then she gave two or three solo recitals a year. She continued to take lessons and for a while was taught by Eduard Steuermann, but she was unhappy with his teaching as she thought he was interested only in money. She auditioned for Arthur Schnabel in Berlin, who told her he could not teach her anything she did not know already.

  In 1931 she married the businessman Leopold Sommer. Their only child, Stephan, was born in 1937. When Hitler’s armies marched into Prague in March 1939 many members of her family left, but Herz-Sommer decided that she could not abandon her mother, and that Stephan was too young to move.

  As a Jew, Leopold lost his job and briefly worked in Belgium but when the Nazis occupied Brussels he returned home. Bit by bit everything they valued was taken from them, but they clung on to music, and Alice and her fellow Jewish musicians held illegal concerts in their flats using instruments they had kept hidden from the Nazis.

  Leopold worked for the Jewish community organisation and was involved in drawing up the lists of those to be deported to the “model ghetto” of Theresienstadt, north of Prague. One by one the family’s friends and relations were deported there or to other camps. Alice’s beloved mother, in her seventies, was sent on a “work detail”; after six months in Theresienstadt she was taken to Treblinka where she died.

  The Herz-Sommer family were summoned to assemble for transportation on July 5, 1943. At Theresienstadt the Nazis had used the idea of creating a modern ghetto in an 18th century fort to fool the outside world into believing they had no evil intentions towards the Jews. Although the camp was hopelessly overcrowded and lethally unhealthy, it was not the policy to exterminate Jews there. On the other hand there were sickeningly frequent transports towards the ghettos and extermination camps in the east.

  As a well-known concert pianist, Herz-Sommer was “protected” from transport while she could put on concerts that would help to maintain the deception. Operas were performed with the blessing of the commandant and a propaganda film was made to show off life inside the walls. Stephan performed in the children’s opera Brundibar and slept at his mother’s side. Years later he recalled: “She did everything to hide the atrocities from me, and to create a kind of normality.”

  He shared her protection but her husband was shipped off to Auschwitz in September 1944 and from there to Dachau.

  Herz-Sommer performed her concert repertoire many times, ending up with her fourth programme: a rendition of the fabulously difficult Chopin Études. Her music gave solace to her fellow prisoners but many of them were sent to Auschwitz as soon as they had ou
tlived their usefulness.

  By the beginning of 1945 the camp was half empty. It began to fill up again with “protected” Jews who were married to Aryans. They were followed by half-dead, plague-ridden prisoners who had been evacuated from other camps before the Russian advance. Herz-Sommer stayed in her room but her son fell ill and when the Red Army liberated Theresienstadt, she could not leave. A month passed before she returned to Prague.

  She soon learnt that she was not welcome in her home town. The native Germans had already gone: they had been beaten (and often killed), dispossessed and shoved into transit camps awaiting expulsion. For Jews, the right to reintegration was based on “orientation”. If they were “German-orientated” they were liable to expulsion. Herz-Sommer was compelled to lie; she told the civil servant that she had spoken Czech at home, read Czech newspapers and had Czech-speaking friends.

  She was allowed to stay but could not move back to her home or retrieve her belongings. Everywhere she encountered flagrant anti-Semitism. She decided to begin a new life in Palestine. At first the Czech authorities would not countenance her taking her newly acquired piano. It was only with the help of Max Brod that the president Klement Gottwald allowed her to ship her concert grand. When she finally took delivery of the piano in Jerusalem, however, she found it had been left out in the rain and the hammers had rusted.

  In the newly created state of Israel in 1949 Herz-Sommer found work as a piano teacher at the Jerusalem Conservatory. She had made a decision in Prague not to talk about Theresienstadt and found that this was in keeping with Israeli thinking at the time. It was only with the trial of Adolf Eichmann that the silence was broken. She was allowed to attend the trial. A lifelong optimist, she still found she could not hate the man responsible for the deaths of her husband and mother.