The Little Girl Who Fought the Great Depression: Shirley Temple and 1930s America
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Shirley in a characteristic expression of astonishment. (Photofest/Twentieth Century–Fox)
Shirley’s outfits greatly reinforced her juvenile appearance. “Keep her skirts high,” Darryl Zanuck ordered. “Have co-stars lift her up whenever possible to create the illusion now selling so well. Preserve babyhood.” Reviewing photographs of her in proposed costumes when Shirley was about ten, he complained, “You’ve got her looking like Mae West. Give her a streamline. Minimize her, back there. What do they feed her, Hershey bars?”15
From Little Miss Marker in 1934 through The Little Princess in 1939, the very titles of seven Shirley Temple movies emphasized her diminutive stature. Moreover, in all of her movies, Shirley was made to look smaller (and implicitly, more powerless) by contrast with bigger-than-average adults, men especially. Three feet tall at the beginning of her movie career in the Baby Burlesks, she was forty-three inches tall by summer 1934 according to one source, yet another reported her as only forty-one inches tall the following year and forty-nine inches tall in 1938. (She would ultimately grow to five foot two.)16 Most of the leading men with whom she appeared were above medium height, and a conspicuous number were large, strapping figures. These began with Gary Cooper in Now and Forever and Joel McCrae in Our Little Girl, both of whom stood six foot three, and included barrel-chested John Boles in Curly Top and The Littlest Rebel, and six-foot-three Randolph Scott in Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm and Susannah of the Mounties. Cesar Romero accentuated his six-foot-two height by wearing turbans in Wee Willie Winkie and The Little Princess. Two of her dance partners were slender men who towered roughly two and a half feet above her: six-foot-three Buddy Ebsen in Captain January and six-foot-four Arthur Treacher, who appeared in four of her films, although they danced together only in the last, The Little Princess.17
Victor McLaglen and Shirley wearing dress uniforms of the Seventh Highlanders in a production still for Wee Willie Winkie. (Photofest/Twentieth Century–Fox)
Such physical contrasts created numerous opportunities for humor, intensifying Shirley’s cuteness. Especially when Shirley and an adult performed the same movements in tandem, whether in dances, calisthenics, or drill, her mimicry of her partner comically highlighted their contrasting bodies, age, status, and, frequently, gender. In Wee Willie Winkie, loosely based on a short story by Rudyard Kipling and set on British India’s Afghan border in 1897, Shirley’s character strives to earn the love of her crusty grandfather, the regiment commander, by learning to be a soldier under the demanding Sergeant MacDuff, played by Victor McLaglen. Of all the actors who appeared with Shirley Temple, McLaglen provided the greatest physical contrast. A circus strongman and boxer before he turned actor, he once fought an exhibition bout against heavyweight champion Jack Johnson—which he decisively lost. Nine years later, in 1918, McLaglen became heavyweight champion of the British Army. When he made Wee Willie Winkie he stood six foot three and weighed perhaps 250 pounds. As Sergeant MacDuff, he provides Shirley’s character a miniature version of the dress uniform of the Seventh Highlanders and instructs her in the rigors of military drill. The disparity between her tiny body and movements and those of the husky sergeant and the men under his command prompt passing officers to explode in laughter.
Without further development, this mock-heroic effect would have made Shirley cute but inconsequential. To exploit the full potential of the contrast between her tiny body and great ambition, the makers of Wee Willie Winkie have her voluntarily join the men when they are ordered to drill for three more hours in the broiling sun. Like so many of Shirley Temple’s films, Wee Willie Winkie exposes the similarity of sentiment beneath disparities of size, age, and status. Her character’s demonstration of pluck testifies to the large soul in her tiny body, even as she reveals the soft boy’s heart in the biggest and toughest of men, McLaglen’s Sergeant MacDuff.
Nevertheless, the contrasts of scale produced an unexpected result: rumors that she was not a little girl at all but an adult dwarf. Such charges persisted in Europe as late as 1937, the year Wee Willie Winkie was released, sustained by her preternatural talents, including a gift for mimicking adults evident as early as the Baby Burlesks and fully displayed in two of her major films.18 In the “You’ve Got to S-M-I-L-E” number of Stowaway (1936), she deftly imitated Al Jolson, Eddie Cantor, and the dancing couple Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. The “When I Grow Up” number in Curly Top (1935) demanded still more of her gifts. Here Shirley’s character performs a rapid series of imitations of various stages of womanhood: first, sweet sixteen; next, marriage at age twenty-one; and finally old age and the pleasures of the rocking chair. The quavering voice and stiff, stooped movements with which she performs this last are so successful as to be uncanny.
Shirley Temple preserved much of this enchanting, toylike character while turning what might have been considered freakish attainments into talented set pieces. Both dwarf and child actors had enjoyed great popularity in the United States since the mid-nineteenth century, and both kinds of performers highlighted the boundaries—and ambiguities—between childhood and adulthood. Little People, particularly those with proportional dwarfism such as P. T. Barnum’s celebrated attraction General Tom Thumb (Charles Stratton, 1838–83) specialized in adult impersonations. Beginning when little Charlie was still shy of his fifth birthday and was no bigger than he had been at six months (fifteen pounds and twenty-five inches tall), Barnum trained him as a performer who, dressed in elaborate costumes, sang, danced, quipped, and spoofed eminent figures. As with the characters in Shirley Temple’s early Baby Burlesk shorts, his body seemed to contradict his adult roles.19
Although Shirley and other child actors frequently imitated adults, their principal task was to perform childhood—without calling too much attention to the fact that it was indeed a performance. In the opinion of many movie reviewers and exhibitors and countless millions of fans, Shirley did so very well. “The nation’s best-liked babykins,” a New York Times reviewer called her in summer 1934: “A miracle of spontaneity, Shirley successfully conceals the illusion of sideline coaching which, in the ordinary child genius, produces homicidal impulses in those old fussbudgets who lack the proper admiration for cute kiddies.”20 That her spontaneity and ease were to an extent an “illusion,” the product of “sideline coaching,” the reviewer took for granted, though millions of less sophisticated fans did not.
As Shirley grew older, the challenge of keeping her cute without arousing the ire of fussbudgets young and old mounted year by year. In a script conference for Dimples a few months after he thrust Sheehan aside, Darryl Zanuck insisted, “Be sure and put in a lot of pieces of business for Shirley—some cute things that Shirley could do.”21 The 1936 movie provides an illuminating instance of the Shirley Temple formula, its potential, and its perils. Like The Little Colonel and The Littlest Rebel of the previous year, the movie placed her in a historical setting, here New York City circa 1852. The plot rang a few new changes on an already familiar Shirley Temple pattern. Once again, she is an orphan, this time as Sylvia “Dimples” Appleby, living in lower Manhattan in a shabby apartment with her grandfather, “Professor” Eustace Appleby, a broken-down actor played by Frank Morgan. Unlike most of Shirley’s film guardians, he is a larcenous if lovable scoundrel, full of fustian bombast and blandishments. From the outset, Dimples wishes both to believe in his goodness and to mend his ways. The movie clearly sought to exploit the sounds and color of old New York as early Shirley Temple films had exploited the moonlight and magnolias of the Old South. The script’s original working title was Under the Gaslight, then The Bowery Princess, before the studio finally settled on Dimples, no doubt reasoning that the most important thing was to highlight Shirley Temple’s smiling face and the spots where, as one man said, she had been “kissed by an angel.”22
Early in the story the professor robs the furs of partygoers at the mansion of a rich widow, Mrs. Caroline Drew. Suspicion falls on the innocent Dimples, but the kindly host (played by Helen Westley) bef
riends and forgives her. The professor returns for Dimples, scattering the purloined furs outside and then pretending heroically to rout the thieves.
Quickly, then, the contending figures and issues are established. Should Dimples live with rich Mrs. Drew, who will love her and give her every advantage that money can buy? Or should she remain with her poor grandfather, who also loves her but can supply none of these advantages—and is an incorrigible rascal to boot?
Almost as quickly, a subplot emerges. Mrs. Drew’s nephew, Allen, is smitten with the theater and is working on a new play—a stage rendition of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Allen hires Dimples to play the role of Little Eva, and, after a long series of comic complications, her performance of Little Eva’s deathbed scene leaves not a dry eye in the house. The movie ends with a blackface minstrel show, in which Shirley Temple, in white satin tails, plays the interlocutor to Stepin Fetchit’s Mr. Bones.
Shirley Temple certainly had plenty of cute things to do in Dimples, including performing the most famous deathbed scene for a child actress in the history of the American theater. Yet her costar Frank Morgan in the role of the professor found many cute things to do as well, so that the two strenuously competed for viewers’ attention. Shirley Temple Black later claimed to have understood the nature of this struggle and acknowledged she was a keen competitor. Nonetheless, she complained, Morgan used all of his tricks to divert the camera eye from Shirley during close-ups: flicking his handkerchief, jiggling his gloves and top hat, gesturing with his hands, and the like. Shirley felt powerless to stop him, short of nipping his fingers. A veteran character actor with a special talent for playing lovable hucksters (including the title character in The Wizard of Oz), Morgan adroitly used his ingratiating chuckle and winning smile, thus dueling Shirley with her chosen weapons.23
The struggle was evident to movie reviewers and presumably some moviegoers, although they did not necessarily see Morgan as the chief offender. Indeed, Time magazine cautioned Shirley for her methods: “She steals scenes from two old-time stage mimes [Morgan and Helen Westley], dances, sings, mugs shamelessly on Little Eva’s death bed.” The New York Times’s Frank Nugent, whose impish wit and critical sarcasm frequently sparkled in his columns, openly sympathized with Morgan’s plight. Shirley’s “Little Eva performance is shameless bathos,” he declared, “and so is the love song she sings with her arms twined about the suffering neck of Mr. Morgan. If that episode had been done in Technicolor, I am quite sure we should have observed a blush at his collar line.”24
Rejecting the Temple formula as a whole, Nugent delivered a sharply worded verdict: “ ‘Dimples’ is its apt title, apt because it is just another word for Little Miss Precocity and does not pretend to describe the story material it employs.” He continued, “Why they bother with titles, or with plots either for that matter, is beyond us. The sensible thing would be to announce Shirley Temple in ‘Shirley Temple’ and let it go at that. Or to follow the example of the authors of children’s books and call them ‘Shirley Temple in Dixie,’ ‘Shirley Temple at Cape Cod’ or ‘Shirley Temple in Little Old New York.’ ”25
Variety agreed. “All that the production does is closely follow the pattern set from way back for the youngster, missing not a single trick, whether it comes to jerking tears, dancing, singing or bringing true love together.” Even so, the trade paper thought movie exhibitors would not be disappointed with box-office returns. “Regardless of the soggy humor and the straining at human interest, the going of Shirley Temple with her fans won’t be a bit undiminished [sic].”26
Yet some of the independent movie exhibitors who mingled most closely with Shirley Temple’s fans expressed similar frustrations as they examined their disappointing receipts. “ ‘Dimples’ is poor entertainment,” Ralph Cokain of the Indiana Theatre in Marion, Indiana, declared. “The plot is thin, the continuity is jumpy, and the whole thing leaves the impression that Darryl Zanuck must have said to associate producer Nunnally Johnson, ‘Now, Nun, we’ve got to get this picture out to meet the release date. Rush everything. . . . It may not turn out to be the best Shirley Temple, but then it’s a Temple, and that’s all that matters.’ ” Another Indiana exhibitor added ominously, “While Shirley still draws above average business, we are beginning to hear some rumbles from the adult audience that these child prodigy pictures are all cut over the same pattern, and certainly there is nothing original about this. It is the same old gag. Feed all the lines to the prodigy and have her do a couple of songs and a dance or two. Shirley is cute and a good little actress, but is the same thing over again in all her pictures.”27
Zanuck and Twentieth Century–Fox wrestled with this dilemma for the next four years. If they continued to give the moviegoing public more of the same thing in which Shirley played Little Miss Fix-It, they could easily anticipate its bitter end in stale situations and a child star who outgrew her cute persona. Alternatively, they could place Shirley in more dramatic roles that would enable her to develop as an actress—but at the risk of violating fans’ expectations. Either way, it was a high-stakes game.
In Wee Willie Winkie Zanuck gambled on the second approach—with mixed results. From the outset, he conceived of it as a distinctly new kind of Shirley Temple picture, one devoid of her usual “tricks.” Although it was loosely based on a rather slight Kipling short story, and one necessitating that the title character be changed from a boy to a girl to fit Shirley Temple, Zanuck imagined a film comparable to the movie adaptations of Little Women (1933) and David Copperfield (1935), both directed by George Cukor. Always alert to story possibilities, on an early treatment outline for the movie, Zanuck scrawled excitedly with his orange pen: “Magnificent adventure as little child sets out to settle impending war on her own—Courageous—Glorious—walks into forbidden territory with childlike confidence that enemy will listen to her—and they do—You feel for her.” Amid doodles, he added, “Wonderful possibilities . . . full of sentiment—tears—heart aches—child philosophy—very human and devoid of hoke or physical melodrama.”28
In keeping with his determination to mount a new kind of Shirley Temple picture, Zanuck chose as director the brilliant but irascible John Ford, who had recently won an Academy Award for The Informer. Ford’s explosive temper and antipathy to studio executives were notorious, and he loathed child actors. “I’m going to give you something to scream about,” Zanuck told him. “I’m going to put you together with Shirley Temple.”29 To mollify Ford, Zanuck promised him a large budget and another chance to work with Victor McLaglen, who had won his own Academy Award for Best Actor in The Informer.
Although Wee Willie Winkie considerably varied the Shirley Temple formula, it retained its essence. Once again, Shirley plays a half-orphan, in this case Priscilla Williams; she and her mother are forced by poverty to leave their American home in 1897 and depend on the support of a stern, forbidding grandfather, Colonel Williams (played by the six-foot-four C. Aubrey Smith), commander of a British outpost near the Afghan border in colonial India. The colonel is locked in a struggle with a rebellious Afghan tribe, led by Khoda Khan (Cesar Romero). Rather like Shirley’s characters in The Little Colonel and The Littlest Rebel, Priscilla plays the part of peacemaker as her character simultaneously wins the admiration and affection of her grandfather and the Afghan chief. Ultimately, through her simple childish innocence, she brings the warring leaders to reconciliation, thus saving untold lives.
Along the way, there are many of the familiar elements of the old formula, including Shirley’s beaming smile and stifled tears, gift for mimicry and guileless trust, and longing for acceptance and for love. There are also a cute terrier puppy that is given limited exposure so as not to upstage Shirley’s own cuteness, and an older drummer boy, earnest and unsympathetic, to provide a foil for her winning charm. Yet there are distinct departures from the formula as well. Shirley does not dance, and she sings her one song with notable simplicity (albeit with offscreen accompaniment). Most importantly, more i
s demanded of her as an actress.
In fact, as Shirley Temple Black described the making of Wee Willie Winkie, she appears unconsciously to have transposed a major theme of the movie—Priscilla’s determination to learn to be a disciplined and courageous soldier and so win the affection and respect of her crusty grandfather—to her relationship as a child actress determined to win the respect and affection of crusty John Ford. Ford demanded much from his actors and gave little praise in return. Black later described how she thawed his icy facade and won his friendship and respect, culminating in her portrayal of the scene in which she visits Victor McLaglen, as the gentle giant Sergeant MacDuff, on his deathbed. Ford, whose dark glasses and gruff manner concealed a deeply sentimental streak, elicited the full measure of her tender affection without letting her fall into mawkishness. There had been numerous lullaby scenes in her films, but here she sings “Auld Lang Syne” straightforwardly to MacDuff. Told he is improving, she believes him to be merely falling asleep as he takes his last breaths and expires.30