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

by Kasson, John F.

  Like her films and fashions, Shirley Temple dolls achieved international distribution. Ideal sold doll molds to companies in Canada, Australia, and Latin America. In some other countries, companies produced authorized Shirley Temple dolls from different materials: a cloth body and pressed felt face mask with painted features in Great Britain and France, two composition versions in Germany, a celluloid version with a mohair wig in Poland, and similar versions in Holland and elsewhere. Japanese manufactures made a number of unauthorized composition Shirley Temple dolls and exported them for the American market, underselling Ideal.59

  Yet the biggest threat to Ideal’s sales was not its domestic and foreign competitors but Shirley’s waning luster. In 1937, as Shirley took on more dramatic roles in Wee Willie Winkie and Heidi, Ideal’s doll sales slumped. Varying the Shirley Temple formula in dolls much as Darryl Zanuck was doing in her movies, Ideal allowed her to grow up slightly. The dolls acquired a higher forehead, slimmer, rosier cheeks, more defined eyebrows, darker lips, and a side-parted wig with less distinct curls. She also wore longer, more modest skirts. None of these innovations revived sales, however, and neither did lowered prices. By the late 1930s Ideal had other film stars in their stable of dolls, including Judy Garland, Deanna Durbin, Pinocchio, and Snow White. The company finally announced the Shirley Temple dolls’ retirement in December 1940, half a year after the Temple family ended Shirley’s contract with Twentieth Century–Fox. By this time the public had spent an estimated $45 million on Shirley Temple dolls. The most popular doll to that time in history took her final bow, not to return for almost twenty years.60

  Shirley Temple’s films, products, and endorsements collectively stimulated the American consumer economy at a crucial time, so much so that to some she appeared to be a relief program all by herself. With his tongue only partly in cheek, Frank Dillon, writing in the fan magazine Modern Screen in December 1935, recalled how “a year ago when things looked bleak and hopeless all over the country, when no conversation was ever concluded without a few groans over the depression, Washington held out helping hands in the form of the AAA [Agricultural Adjustment Administration], NRA [National Recovery Administration], SERA [State Emergency Relief Administration], and many other alphabetical combinations.” Still, he observed, “one depression cure has made greater strides toward a complete mental and financial recovery than all the other remedies put together,” and that was the TRA, a program originating in Hollywood rather than Washington, and one that the Supreme Court could not declare unconstitutional. The TRA, he explained with mock solemnity, stood for the Temple Recovery Act, led by Shirley Temple. “Not content with cheering up half the civilized population of the world,” the writer continued, “she has done a man’s size job of bringing about financial recovery for a great many people,” from her coworkers in Hollywood to film distributors to the manufacturers of dolls, dresses, and other Shirley Temple products. Dillon did not attempt a comprehensive estimate of how many workers could trace at least a part of their jobs to Shirley Temple, for that would have been incalculable. Certainly within the United States alone they would have numbered in the tens of thousands. A grand parade of their legions would have easily dwarfed the extravagant parade of workers that ended Shirley’s 1934 breakthrough film, Stand Up and Cheer! As is so often the case, life imitated and surpassed art.61

  CHAPTER 5

  KEEPING SHIRLEY’S STAR ALOFT

  When Shirley Temple’s beaming smile and indomitable spirit first seized the public fancy in 1934, most film industry observers thought that she would be a shooting star, flaring briefly and then vanishing. When in 1935 she soared to the position of top American and international box-office attraction, they were astounded. That she retained this position for three more years, setting a record never equaled, confounded all expectations. Fox producers, distributors, and exhibitors worked energetically to keep her star aloft, but they were never sanguine they could do so. For them, the most exciting and suspenseful Shirley Temple story concerned how long her charmed life as a child star could last. They feared two things above all: the fickle nature of the moviegoing public and the perishable character of Shirley’s cuteness. They tried to preserve both as long as possible.

  In the golden age of the studio system, movie stars were popularly imagined as made in Hollywood, the “dream factory,” as surely as American automobiles were made in Detroit.1 Yet among Hollywood stars, far more than automobiles, there were thousands of potential models to choose from, and public response determined which would become most popular and profitable. Whether the studio strenuously prepared a potential star, changing her name, teeth, hair, makeup, wardrobe, place of birth, parentage, and life history, or, as in the case of Shirley Temple, left her for audiences to discover, they could only launch careers, not determine their course. Actors’ images and personae circulated in a complex, multidirectional chain linking producers and publicists, distributors, exhibitors, journalists, retailers, and moviegoers in first-run and small, independent theaters, with numerous other interests all along the way. Stars might be conceived in Hollywood, but they were born in the collective responses of the moviegoing public.

  That public was far from passive. Although it never spoke with one voice, it expressed its preferences powerfully. It did so most obviously in box-office receipts and more articulately (if less reliably) in praise and complaints to local movie exhibitors, opinion polls, fan mail, and the like. The challenge for the film industry, then, was both to follow that public and to lead it, to anticipate its desires, to satisfy its expectations, and to expand its dimensions. Sustaining Shirley Temple’s place as a star thus involved continued negotiation between moviemakers and moviegoers as to what a Shirley Temple movie should be.

  The two men most responsible for devising and perfecting the Shirley Temple formula were Winfield Sheehan, head of production at Fox until its merger with Twentieth Century Pictures in 1935, and Darryl Zanuck, who succeeded him. Both knew the necessity of keeping this public always in mind—and the impossibility of consistently satisfying it. By the time Sheehan met and signed a contract with Shirley Temple and her parents shortly before Christmas 1933, he had amassed considerable experience in gauging public sentiment. A former reporter for the New York World, he began working for William Fox in 1914 and quickly became his “right-hand man.”2 He played a significant role in expanding the Fox empire overseas, establishing Fox branches in forty-nine countries. In addition, as head of production for Fox studios beginning in 1926, he early sensed the potential of sound to transform the movie industry. From his first years at Fox, he helped to develop a veritable galaxy of stars, including Theda Bara (born Theodosia Goodman), Tom Mix, Will Rogers, Janet Gaynor, Paul Muni (born Meshilem Meier Weisenfreund), Alice Faye (born Alice Jeanne Leppert), and Warner Baxter.

  Even though Sheehan had sensed Shirley’s extraordinary film presence in making Stand Up and Cheer!, her spectacular success stunned him. After her breakthrough, he immediately lent Shirley to Paramount for Little Miss Marker and Now and Forever while he scrambled to find suitable vehicles for her talents. She starred in Baby Take a Bow, released on June 30, 1934, and then in Bright Eyes. Soon most of Fox’s associate producers were wearing paths to his door with story ideas for his young star. Before Fox Film’s merger with Twentieth Century Pictures in May 1935, three more Shirley Temple films followed: The Little Colonel, Our Little Girl, and Curly Top. Our Little Girl, which placed Shirley within a troubled marriage, played poorly, but the other two films pressed closely behind Will Rogers’s Steamboat Round the Bend and In Old Kentucky as the studio’s most profitable in the domestic market in 1935.3

  When the two companies united as Twentieth Century–Fox, Sheehan formally retained his title—but within two months he was gone. Young Darryl F. Zanuck in effect shoved him aside and assumed the position of vice president and head of production. For the next five years, until August 1940, when Shirley’s parents severed her contract, Zanuck closely supervised her movies
for the studio and was the master wizard concocting the Shirley Temple formula.

  Sheehan and Zanuck were a study in contrasts. Fat and jolly, with blue eyes, rosy cheeks, and a square jaw, Sheehan needed only a white beard to look like Santa Claus, Shirley Temple Black later wrote. Extravagant in both his professional and personal life (his Beverly Hills mansion included thirty-three servants), he spent lavishly on old-fashioned epics, allowed directors to consume film prodigally, and frequently exceeded his budgets. He regally presided over Fox’s decentralized system of production, a common practice at Hollywood’s major studios by the 1930s, and relied heavily on associate producers, such as Sol M. Wurtzel for Bright Eyes, Buddy DeSylva for The Little Colonel, and Edward Butcher for Our Little Girl. Among the films starring Shirley between Stand Up and Cheer! and the time of his ouster, Sheehan personally produced only the last, Curly Top.4

  In an industry replete with scantily educated boy wonders, Darryl Zanuck was one of the most phenomenal. The New Yorker writer Alva Johnston described him as a bantamweight version of Theodore Roosevelt, with piercing blue eyes, curly hair, an unruly mustache, a mélange of protruding and missing teeth, and a swagger in his walk. More fancifully, the rival producer David O. Selznick said that the sandy-haired Zanuck looked like “an ear of corn only a maniac would eat.” Still shy of his thirty-third birthday when he took command of Twentieth Century–Fox studios, and nineteen years Sheehan’s junior, Zanuck had already established himself as one of the greatest producers in Hollywood’s brief history. He had launched his career while still in his early twenties as a writer and adapter, and the lessons of this background informed all his later work. “Success in movies,” he liked to say, “boiled down to three things: story, story, story.”5

  He worked on The Jazz Singer when he was twenty-five, then honed the cutting edge of tough, contemporary gangster films such as The Doorway to Hell (1930), The Public Enemy (1931), and Little Caesar (1931). He helped produce one of the most powerful of all early Depression films, I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang (1932), and contributed its chilling conclusion. There we see the protagonist James Allen, once an upright citizen, wrongly convicted and barbarously punished, reduced to a pathetically frightened figure constantly on the run. When his erstwhile fiancée meets him and asks how he lives, he replies as he shrinks again into the shadows, “I steal.”

  A similar sense of toughness and topicality infused Zanuck’s production of the celebrated backstage musical 42nd Street (1933). In addition, Zanuck vastly expanded the possibilities of movie biographies with such films as The House of Rothschild (1934) and Young Mr. Lincoln (1939). He also offered distinctly American interpretations of literary classics, such as Les Misérables, which he called “ ‘I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang’ in costume.”6 He would go on to make such acclaimed films as The Grapes of Wrath (1940), How Green Was My Valley (1941), and Gentleman’s Agreement (1947). In the course of his career, he molded a series of Hollywood stars from Rin-Tin-Tin to Marilyn Monroe.

  Pulsing with nervous energy, constantly chomping on cigars, Zanuck grabbed the reins of power at Twentieth Century–Fox and pulled hard. He immediately discarded twelve of Sheehan’s film projects and halted another six already in production. Reversing the trend toward decentralized organization, Zanuck placed himself at the very center of all production as he expanded and thoroughly revamped the studio. He kept Dictaphones around his home, office, and projection room and poured all of his thoughts. Sweeping into the studio an hour or so before noon, he continued working long after others had left, at times until three or four the next morning. He selected story ideas from numerous book digests prepared for his perusal, immersed himself in script conferences, cast the roles, chose the production team, considered the music, sets, and costumes, and claimed many of the prerogatives of a director, from shooting instructions to film editing. He later said it was not simply the way he liked to work but “the only way I know how to produce.”7

  The two most lucrative actors in the Fox stable that Zanuck inherited were the comedian Will Rogers and Shirley Temple. With his winning folksy manner and vast productivity, Rogers stood at the summit of box-office popularity, although Shirley was already advancing rapidly. Yet within months of the merger, on August 15, 1935, Rogers was killed in a plane crash. The devastating loss meant that Zanuck needed to pay especially close attention to his precious young charge, who continued to be immensely profitable to the studio. Only modest expenditures on her films reaped glittering gross returns: $1 million to $1.5 million on their first runs and even more on subsequent runs.8 Later, Zanuck increased her budgets substantially, beginning with John Ford’s Wee Willie Winkie.

  Although Zanuck clearly had no reluctance to break with precedents set by Sheehan, he nonetheless preserved much of the Shirley Temple formula concocted during her first year and a half at Fox. Beginning with The Littlest Rebel (released November 22, 1935), Captain January (released April 17, 1936), and Poor Little Rich Girl (the first of these three in production but released on July 24, 1936), he ultimately produced fourteen Shirley Temple films. Only one of these, The Blue Bird, was a commercial failure.

  Quite early, Shirley Temple movies established their own genre, and soon, within the industry, they would be known simply as “Shirley Temples.”9 In April 1935, only a year after Shirley’s breakthrough in Stand Up and Cheer!, a cartoon in The New Yorker paid backhanded tribute to the generic conventions. Pitching an idea in a script conference, a man declares: “. . . and here’s the surprise ending that knocks ’em cold, Mr. Feinglass. Shirley Temple is the killer.” As if she could ever be anything other than triumphantly virtuous! Indeed, Shirley had been foiling hardened criminals and converting soft-hearted ones as early as Little Miss Marker, and she continued her work as crime-stopper in Baby Take a Bow and The Little Colonel. All of these movies proved enormously popular, although some criticized the gangster elements as unsuitable for children, and Baby Take a Bow was banned for this reason in Nazi Germany. By the time Zanuck assumed control, such elements had been purged, although larcenous characters popped up occasionally.10

  Yet Shirley stood for much more than virtuous innocence. Underlying the spirit of her films, the very essence of Shirley Temple’s appeal, as Sheehan, Zanuck, and virtually everyone else in the film industry agreed, was the charm of childhood, a charm best captured by a word consistently used to describe her: cute. “Cute,” as it came to be understood in the early twentieth century—as charming, adorable, and often diminutive—was an American linguistic and cultural innovation. Previously, “cute,” deriving from “acute,” meant shrewd, clever, often with an implication of deviousness. The shift in meaning signaled a new sentimental appreciation for figures and objects that combined the pert and the powerless: above all, small children and their accoutrements. Cuteness invited the beholder’s responses on various levels: aesthetic delight, moral protection, and possessive desire. It powerfully combined elements of sentimental reform and the rise of modern commercial culture, especially as they conjoined in admiration and indulgence of childhood’s innocence and wonder. From its inception around the turn of the twentieth century, this notion of the cute celebrated children’s freedom from the besetting concerns of adulthood, so much so that a “normal” childhood came to be understood as defined by an absence of those concerns, including the need to work for a living, to worry about adequate food, shelter, love, and protection, or to know mature sexual desires and relations. Benign parents and other protectors could cherish children’s eager imitations of adult life, even their play of work, marriage, and child rearing, safe in the belief in the boundary separating the realms of childhood and adulthood.11

  Such a conception of cuteness depended on an economy of abundance, permitting childhood to be considered as a stage of life utterly distinct from maturity, one characterized by the pleasures of economic consumption rather than productive labor. To be sure, in the early twentieth century children still constituted an important sector of the labor
market, despite attempts to pass meaningful child-labor legislation. At the same time, one of the defining aspects of American middle-class life came to be the enshrinement of children as objects of indulgent spending and the ability to protect them from working prematurely. Images of cute children were used from the turn of the twentieth century onward to advertise products specifically for children and also a wide variety of adult goods and services from radiators to life insurance, and even, as with Buster Brown endorsements, cigars and whiskey.12 In the effort to stimulate consumer spending, moreover, cute children achieved special prominence in movies from Hal Roach’s Our Gang series to The Wizard of Oz (1939), in radio serials and cartoon strips such as Little Orphan Annie, and in real life with the enormous fascination with the Dionne quintuplets, born in Ontario in May 1934, who costarred in two Hollywood feature films.

  Although cuteness provided an obvious theatrical mode for staging Shirley Temple’s talents, above all, her remarkable camera presence, it entailed important requirements. The first of these was for her to remain distinctly childlike in appearance, manner, and feeling as she interacted and even imitated adults and appealed to their—and viewers’—solicitude. To this end, Winfield Sheehan and Darryl Zanuck did everything they could to exaggerate Shirley’s youth and diminutive stature. In addition to shaving a year off Shirley’s age, the studio often depicted her as still younger in some of her movies, as with the five candles on her birthday cake in Baby Take a Bow (1934), seven on her cake in Little Miss Broadway (1938), and eight candles on another such cake in The Little Princess, released on March 10, 1939, shortly before she turned eleven.

  In addition, Shirley Temple’s juvenile appearance was consistently heightened to intensify her cuteness. All infant mammals share certain features: relatively large heads, prominent brows, large eyes, bulging cheeks, and short and thick limbs. As they mature, their snouts protrude, their bodies become larger with respect to their heads, and their limbs become larger with respect to their bodies. Adults innately recognize juvenile features and characteristically respond with solicitude and nurture. As an aesthetic, cuteness elaborates and extends this biological response from children to puppies, kittens, and the like and also to dolls, stuffed toys, and other inanimate objects with similar proportions.13 Shirley Temple was consistently presented so as to maximize her juvenile appearance and the responses that it prompted. The assiduously cultivated blond pin curls that her mother set each night perpetuated the baby ringlets that many infants (including Shirley) naturally outgrew. They also made her head seem especially large. Moreover, her broad brow and dimpled cheeks, small nose and chin, and plump, short torso and legs were all accentuated by costumes and camerawork. Frontal close-ups in her movies magnified her face to fill the screen and foreshortened her already tiny nose as she addressed viewers directly, often rounding her eyes in astonishment. Other close-ups locked her in embraces with adults—occasionally women but usually white male fatherly and grandfatherly protectors, their heads touching as she sat in their laps, scenes that further cued viewers’ own solicitude. Careful lighting enhanced these effects. The brilliant cinematographer Arthur C. Miller, who worked on most of Shirley’s films for Fox, later boasted, “I always lit her so she had an aureole of golden hair. I used a lamp on Shirley that made her whole damn image world famous.”14