The Little Girl Who Fought the Great Depression: Shirley Temple and 1930s America

by Kasson, John F.

  As Christmas approaches, Mary and the other household servants contrive to make it a special celebration for Shirley, as do Loop and a band of irrepressibly jovial young aviators at the airport barracks, who dote on the little girl. Thus, in what was still the depths of the Depression, Christmas becomes another occasion of consumerist delight, like the fancy-dress Arthurian ball in Little Miss Marker and Shirley’s birthday party in Baby Take a Bow. Money alone may not be able to buy happiness, but materials lovingly bought and arranged—an elaborate birthday cake from a bakery, a beautiful doll and carriage, a lavishly decorated Christmas tree—trigger the wondrous surprise and gratitude of a sweet little girl and vicariously thrill her adult benefactors. Presumably, taking a child to this very movie, which opened in first-run theaters just before Christmas, gave similar pleasure to millions of viewers. As a model child, Shirley was also an exemplary consumer, and the movie provided ample opportunities for merchandising tie-ins. As the trade paper Motion Picture News noted appreciatively, “This sure-fire box-office attraction will draw in any locale and affords timely exploitation possibilities surrounding Shirley’s Christmas party sequence.”59

  Shirley thaws flinty Uncle Ned (Charles Sellon) in a production still for Bright Eyes. (Photofest/Fox)

  The great foil to Shirley’s wondrous innocence, sweetness, and love in the movie is the Smythes’ daughter, ironically named Joy and memorably played by eight-year-old Jane Withers, who became a child star in her own right in Fox’s B movies.60 Pampered and spoiled, she is mean, loud, and destructive. Rather than cherishing dolls, she “kills” one and proposes to “operate” on Shirley’s with a knife. When Shirley speaks trustingly of what Santa Claus might bring her for Christmas, Joy interrupts, “There ain’t any Santa Claus. . . . My psychoanalyst told me.”

  On Christmas Day, as Shirley’s mother rushes toward a trolley to take her daughter a special cake, she is struck and killed by a passing motorist. There ensues a melodrama of contending custodians for Shirley. Mr. and Mrs. Smythe, contemptuous of this servant’s daughter, would cheerfully pack her off to an orphanage. Yet Shirley has penetrated the flinty exterior of Uncle Ned to his soft heart (as well as the tender heart of his niece Adele, Loop’s erstwhile fiancée), and he is determined to adopt her. To remain in his good graces and his will, the Smythes agree to lodge Shirley in their home—but only temporarily, they tell each other. Opposing both the obnoxious Smythes and imperious tactics of Uncle Ned is Loop. He willingly risks his life in a perilous flight to earn the money to give Shirley a home with him. At the conclusion of a custody hearing, a grandfatherly judge takes Shirley on his lap and, guided by her desires, constitutes a new family comprising those who love her most: Loop; his repentant fiancée, Adele; and regenerate Uncle Ned. Spurned and furious, Mrs. Smythe gives her daughter a slap in the final scene, to the delight of critics, exhibitors, and, quite probably, many viewers.61

  In the course of the story Shirley is lifted or caressed by at least fifteen men, each of whom is utterly smitten by her infectious mixture of jollity, candor, and affection. The most famous scene is that in which Shirley performs the song “On the Good Ship Lollipop.” It is part of the Christmas party that Loop elaborately stages for her, including taxiing around the airport on the newly introduced fourteen-passenger, twin-propeller Douglas DC-2. The number is in many respects a distillation of the vicarious pleasure taken by adult men—and, presumably, the moviegoing public—in the performance of childhood innocence, whimsy, and delight. Although the song is ostensibly from the perspective of a child, like Shirley Temple’s movies as a whole, it is in fact a vision of childhood innocence carefully constructed by adults. To the accompaniment of composer Richard A. Whiting’s skipping rhythm and hopping ornaments, the lyricist Sidney Clare traces a magical flight to a land of sweets before landing in dreamland. (Sheet music of the song quickly sold over 400,000 copies, and it reached the position of number three on the charts in February 1935.)62 Supposedly to a recording over the airplane radio, Shirley performs the song with practiced assurance and broad pantomimic gestures. The dozen aviators (played by members of the University of Southern California football team) become a male chorus, singing an accompaniment as they present her with huge lollipops and boxes of candy. At one point they lift her and pass her gently down the aisle. The scene is a celebration of childhood innocence, but, as in Shirley’s previous films, that innocence contains an implicit contrast with a romantic adult alternative.

  The popularity of the movie, the paternal affection it aroused, and its possible erotic subtexts were all suggested in a letter to the weekly trade paper Motion Picture Herald. In the section “What the Picture Did for Me,” in which small-town independent movie theater exhibitors reported on their successes and frustrations, Herman J. Brown, manager of the Majestic and Adelaide theaters in Nampa, Idaho, gushed, “I am infatuated with this little elf. This picture left me helpless in a new kind of love. I am wild to be my best girl’s father. Something James Barrie [author of Peter Pan] perhaps can understand but a terrible amour for an old gent like me. I should pay to run these Temple pictures but instead this one paid me like anything. Let us all join Fox in thanking Heaven for Shirley.”63

  Still another letter to the “What the Picture Did for Me” section testified to the equally enthusiastic but far less ambiguous response of a special audience of adult men, the inmates of the New Jersey state penitentiary in Trenton. The prison’s recreational director described how the movie “went over 100 per cent. I saw plenty of tears mingled in between the numerous laughs. The men got a great kick out of the antics of the spoiled rich kid, a part which Jane Withers played to perfection, but their hearts were delivered on a silver platter to Miss Temple!” In the next few years the director reported similarly enthusiastic receptions by the inmates to other Shirley Temple movies, including Captain January, Stowaway, Heidi, and The Little Princess.64

  In 1941, six years after these prisoners laughed and wept watching Shirley Temple in Bright Eyes, the writer-director Preston Sturges made his brilliant film Sullivan’s Travels. It is a picaresque tale of a fictitious Hollywood director, John Sullivan, who, dissatisfied with his ephemeral though lucrative comedies, travels incognito in search of material to portray the authentic experience of the downtrodden and destitute. Though initially frustrated in his efforts, Sullivan ultimately succeeds all too well: he is convicted of assault and sentenced to six years on a southern chain gang. One evening he and the other prisoners attend a movie at a small African American church. As they shuffle to the pews, the black preacher and congregation conclude singing “Go Down, Moses.” Watching a Mickey Mouse cartoon, the entire audience—congregants and convicts, blacks and whites—is united in uncontrollable laughter, and Sullivan has a secular revelation. Comedy is not trivial but humanly necessary, and movies that lift the spirits of the depressed may provide a balm as sustaining as a hymn. The immediate point for Preston Sturges’s character—and for the real-life prisoners who laughed and wept at Bright Eyes, as well as countless other viewers in the Great Depression—was not to change the world but to summon the emotional resources simply to persevere in it. In all her 1930s movies beginning with Stand Up and Cheer!, Shirley Temple helped them to do so.65

  CHAPTER 3

  DANCING ALONG THE COLOR LINE

  By Christmas 1934 Shirley and her proud parents could look back on the most astonishing year of their lives. Their talented daughter had vaulted from obscurity to worldwide fame. George and Gertrude Temple, so recently worried about making ends meet, along with countless others, giddily reeled in their new riches. Shirley had chased the gloom from their lives and, momentarily at least, lifted the spirits of untold millions. Two months later at the annual banquet of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, toastmaster Irwin S. Cobb was still in a Christmas mood as he bestowed a special miniature statuette on Shirley in tribute to her box-office power. “When Santa Claus did you up in a package and dropped you down Creation’s chimney,” th
e triple-chinned humorist said as he presented her diminutive Oscar, “he brought the loveliest Christmas present that I can think of in all the world.”1 Yet already this golden child was hard at work in another astonishing year of film fame, one in which she had an extraordinary new dance partner, Bill “Bojangles” Robinson.

  From the moment of her breakthrough in 1934, Shirley Temple’s smiling charm was set against the smiles of emotional deference and buffoonery of African American adults. In Stand Up and Cheer! Stepin Fetchit (the stage name of Lincoln Perry) performed his signature role of a lethargic, mumbling fool, and Tess Gardella appeared as her blackface character Aunt Jemima. In Little Miss Marker Willie Best played the janitor Dizzy Memphis, a slow-witted character similar to Fetchit’s, and Mildred Gover served as Sarah, Bangles Carson’s deferential maid. Fetchit and Best continued to appear in Shirley Temple films and to serve as fools and foils to her poise, intelligence, and courage. Other comforting mammy figures came forth, including the irrepressible Hattie McDaniel in The Little Colonel.

  Yet the African American actor who most memorably contributed his emotional warmth to her movies was the great tap dancer Bill “Bojangles” Robinson. Beginning with the release of The Little Colonel in late February 1935 and The Littlest Rebel nine months later, they were paired in four films, and the combination of their radiant smiles and infectious cheer delighted moviegoers, white and black.2 It also gave special prominence to what had hitherto been a minor aspect of Shirley Temple’s movies: the emotional work of African Americans in lifting white spirits in the Great Depression.

  For when a smiling Bill Robinson entered Shirley Temple’s movies, it was to enact the racial politics of the mythic plantation South. An essential aspect of that performance, dating back to antebellum blackface minstrelsy, was a broad smile. That smile complemented FDR’s grin of confident command and Shirley Temple’s smile of innocent trust. It signaled contentment, servility, and simplicity, from a race white viewers believed to be without ambition or high intellect. Such performances assumed new prominence in the early twentieth century, appearing everywhere from souvenir photographs to Hollywood films to national advertising campaigns in which a beaming Aunt Jemima sold pancake mix and a grinning Rastus cooked Cream of Wheat. Amid the uncertainties of the Great Depression, such performances of sunny servility still held enormous appeal for whites both as testimonies to continued racial deference and as examples of spiritual fortitude. As the novelist Ralph Ellison later observed, “If blacks could laugh (even if only laughing to keep from crying), who could dare to frown?”3

  In fact, of all racial and ethnic groups, African Americans were the most devastated by the Great Depression. They were the most vulnerable economically—working principally as sharecroppers and tenant farmers or as unskilled or semiskilled workers and domestics—and also the least powerful politically. In the early 1930s more than half lived in the rural South, where collapsing crop prices forced many to hunting, scavenging, or begging in order to survive. In southern cities African Americans suffered too, victims of the contracting economy and racist demands that scarce jobs be reserved for whites. By 1932 more than half were out of work, and further racist discrimination in the administration of relief pushed some close to starvation. In northern cities African Americans fared only slightly better. Though they suffered less overt discrimination in receiving relief, like their southern counterparts, they were the last to be hired and the first to be fired. In the early New Deal, FDR’s administration substantially kept African Americans out of the game, as it was far more eager to appease powerful white southern politicians. Yet in 1935, the New Deal began to address the plight of African Americans in substantive and symbolic ways.4

  Northern African American voters responded decisively to the modest gains they achieved under the New Deal. In the 1932 election they had maintained their historic support for Republicans by a two-to-one ratio. In the 1936 election, by contrast, in what became a permanent shift, three-fourths of the northern African American vote went to FDR.5 Bill Robinson anticipated this historic change. He supported Roosevelt at least as early as 1930, when he performed at a benefit for FDR’s gubernatorial reelection campaign. An autographed photograph of the president hung prominently in Robinson’s Harlem apartment, and it was quite likely one sent to him by FDR through their mutual friend Shirley Temple.6

  Fifty years older than Shirley (and ten years older than her father, George), Robinson had perfected his virtuosic performances over a long career as an entertainer. During the Great Depression he reached his peak of popularity. Yet in a society still saturated with racial prejudice, Robinson inevitably found himself dancing along a color line as dangerous as any high wire. In appearing on stage and screen before overwhelmingly white audiences, he knew he was performing not simply songs and dances but his race as well. His jokes onstage acknowledged that fact. He frequently quipped that he was “having the best time I’ve had since I was colored,” and his anecdotes often involved blackface minstrel humor.7

  Like Shirley Temple, Robinson began as a child performer—but under quite different circumstances. An orphan on the streets of post-Reconstruction Richmond, Virginia, he learned how to smile, dance, and charm white patrons as a bootblack in order to survive. He and his brother lived with their grandmother, a former slave and a strict Baptist, who disapproved of dancing. At the first opportunity he ran away to Washington, D.C., and moved from street performer, dancing for pennies, to pickaninny roles in minstrel-inflected touring shows such as The South before the War and In Old Kentucky.8

  The story of Robinson’s theatrical discovery carefully appealed to comic racial stereotypes. Supposedly, in 1903 he was an aspiring dancer waiting tables at the Jefferson Hotel in Richmond. With his mind more on an impending amateur night performance than the task at hand, he spilled a dish of soup over a diner’s jacket. Profusely apologizing, Robinson reportedly wailed, “Gee, boss! I’m goin’ to quit dis here waiterin’ an stick to dancin’. I’se a tap dancer, I ain’t no waiter.” The soaked guest turned out to be the rising vaudeville manager Marty Forkins. On the lookout for new talent, Forkins went with Robinson to an amateur night performance, was impressed by this “colored boy”—and managed him ever after. In fact, Forkins only became his manager after Robinson had already performed jokes and skits for a dozen years with George Cooper as one of the very few African American acts on the Keith and Orpheum circuits. The story, couched in stereotypical dialect that stressed Robinson’s comic ineptitude and racial deference, helped smooth Robinson’s transition under Forkins to becoming the first African American solo performer in major vaudeville houses.9 Billed as the “Dark Cloud of Joy,” he continued his ascent, becoming with the revue Blackbirds of 1928, a consistent Broadway headliner.

  Bill “Bojangles” Robinson. (© Bettmann/Corbis)

  A headliner, but still one dancing along the color line. For one vaudeville tour, Forkins’s office suggested this publicity ploy: “THE MECHANICAL DANCING SAMBO is still a standard mechanical toy. You know the colored fellow who steps when he is wound up. Get one of your stores to make a window display of these mechanical toys with a sign in the window reading in effect ‘THESE FELLOWS CAN DANCE, BUT YOU OUGHT TO SEE BILL ROBINSON AT THE RKO THEATRE.’ ”10

  Just as Robinson was reaching the peak of his stage career, the advent of sound created vast new possibilities for Hollywood films, including a new medium for tap-dancing. Quickly thereafter, the stock market crash and the Great Depression whetted appetites for cheering, stylish performances that tap dancers’ infectious rhythms, percussive variations, fast, intricate footwork, delicate balance, and exuberant energy satisfied in abundance. Emerging variously out of the blackface minstrel tradition, vaudeville, nightclubs, and Broadway revues, tap-dancing became the rage in the 1930s. Ethel Meglin’s dance studio, where Shirley Temple and Judy Garland took lessons, was one of hundreds of such schools where white children learned to tap. Still, no one did it better than Bill Robinson, and the “Dark C
loud of Joy” was soon appearing in Hollywood films.11 In the single year of 1935, when he teamed up with Shirley Temple, he danced in five.

  The differences among these roles expose the workings of the color line in Hollywood. In African American specialty numbers, carefully embedded in movies with otherwise entirely white actors, Robinson strides and dances through black Harlem, elegantly dressed and self-assured.12 He smiles radiantly, twirls a walking stick, and carries himself with magnetic confidence. Because such possibilities were so rare in Hollywood films, African American moviegoers savored them. At a theater catering to black audiences in Kansas City, Missouri, on a hot August day in 1935, a “restless audience sat through the news-reels, the shorts,” and the bulk of RKO’s musical revue Hooray for Love awaiting the precious eight and a half minutes of Robinson’s performance in a Harlem sequence, “Living in a Great Big Way.” The specialty number treats a common plight of the Great Depression, a tenant’s eviction. As a jazzy orchestral introduction evokes a Harlem street scene, a beautiful, young light-skinned African American woman (played by nineteen-year-old Jeni Le Gon) follows her furniture down the steps of her former apartment and sits on the sidewalk. Her blues last but a moment, however, as the mayor of Harlem (Bill Robinson’s honorary title) strides resplendently from his office, beaming like the morning sun.13 Urging her to count her blessings, he coaxes a smile that makes her “the richest gal in Harlem.” Then, to the snappy number “Living in a Great Big Way” by Jimmy McHugh and Dorothy Fields, they join in a vivacious song and dance, claiming the beaming smile and prestige of the president (“I’m a Franklin D. Roosevelt”). Now feeling like a million dollars, she somehow persuades the landlord to relent. Meanwhile, Robinson continues the song’s gently swinging beat in a scat number with Fats Waller (in his first film role), then does an exuberant and increasingly virtuosic solo to the admiration of swaying black onlookers—and a white policeman directly behind him. “When Bill’s Harlem scene flashed, the applause was deafening,” wrote a correspondent for the African American Chicago Defender newspaper. “It was as if Bill was on the stage in person, smiling in response to the welcome, as if he knew and understood that he was the asset necessary to the happiness of the audience. . . . Many sat through the picture twice and many grumbled because there wasn’t more to see,” the reporter noted, “but the manager smiled in understanding.”14