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

by Kasson, John F.

  “Sorry, Shirley,” wrote an exhibitor from the Ritz Theatre in Stafford, Kansas, “but you can’t get them in any more. Since ‘Curly Top’ you have been steadily losing ground until now you can’t even get average Sunday business for me.” A man from the Paramount Theatre in Schroon Lake, New York, added the ominous report, “Many a time during the run of the picture I heard the remark, ‘She isn’t as cute as she used to be.’ ”47

  For the moment Zanuck could shrug off such complaints. Little Miss Broadway finished among Twentieth Century–Fox’s most popular movies in the domestic market in 1938, closely followed by two other Temple films, so that Shirley retained her title of box-office champion for the fourth year in a row.48 No one else had ever come close to such success. Still, local exhibitors and Hollywood moguls agreed that her luster was fading fast.

  For Shirley’s last film of 1938, instead of devising fresh innovations, Zanuck redoubled his bet on familiar situations, characterizations, songs, and dances, as if to cash in on Shirley’s popularity while it lasted. Originally titled All American Dad, it was variously known as Lucky Penny, Little Lady, and Sunny Side Up until Zanuck and the studio finally settled on Just around the Corner—a reference to the predicted return of prosperity popularly attributed to Herbert Hoover.49 In what would be Shirley’s last movie set entirely in the Great Depression, she has a broken-hearted widowed father for whom to find a new wife, another frozen-hearted tycoon to melt, and, in a mild twist, a spoiled rich mamma’s boy to turn into an all-American kid. Shirley’s character, Penny Hale, earnestly seeks to understand her architect father’s and the country’s economic plight. When he shows her a political cartoon, in which various figures—farmer, businessman, laborer, and housewife—all pull on Uncle Sam’s legs and demand, “Help me first,” she asks, “Why doesn’t somebody try to help Uncle Sam instead of pulling on him?” The plot ends in a ringing reaffirmation of “that good old American spirit” of confidence. Once again, Shirley lifts the country out of the Great Depression, just as she had in Stand Up and Cheer!

  Like Little Miss Broadway, Just around the Corner provided numerous opportunities for Shirley to sing and dance, including numbers with Bert Lahr, Joan Davis, and, most notably, Bill Robinson, in what would be their final pairing. Yet in the rush to keep the running time to seventy minutes, such interludes were brief.

  By now the cheerleaders and detractors of such fare were predictable. William Weaver of Motion Picture Herald, who certainly needed no Uncle Sam to stoke his optimism, marveled, “This Shirley Temple matter is getting out of hand. All the rules say she’s overdue for a flop. . . . This film proves the signs mean nothing. . . . [It] is as near an approach to perfect box office as it is reasonable for any showman or customer to expect to lay eye upon.”50

  By contrast, the New York Times’s Frank Nugent seethed with exasperation, a sign of the widening divide between film critics and Shirley’s diehard fans. “Certainly nothing so aggravating as this has come along before, nothing so arch, so dripping with treacle, so palpably an affront to the good taste or intelligence of the unwary beholder,” he sputtered. After sardonically recounting the film’s plot and situations, he concluded, “Shirley is not responsible, of course. No child could conceive so diabolic a form of torture. There must be an adult mind in back of it all—way, way in back of it all.”51

  Less irritated, the New York Herald Tribune’s Howard Barnes still reluctantly agreed. Although he praised Shirley as “the most talented acting tot of our time,” he lamented the unimaginative material that Twentieth Century–Fox furnished her. Granting the “extraordinary assurance and virtuosity” of her performance, he added, “The trouble is that we have seen all of Miss Temple’s tricks and pirouettes so many times before that they are apt to seem a bit monotonous in so dull a framework as this. . . . The new Shirley Temple picture,” he concluded, “is little more than a reprint of her previous song-and-dance successes” and so “a very ordinary entertainment.”52

  Even an ordinary Shirley Temple film enjoyed box-office success, although Just around the Corner trailed previous Temple pictures in sales. The experiences of local movie exhibitors inevitably varied, but many filed reports similar to Sam Schiwetz of the Rialto Theatre in Three Rivers, Texas: “A good Shirley Temple picture that failed to draw. Business falling off with every Temple picture. Fox better give Shirley something different or she will be a has-been within a year.”53

  Perhaps foremost among those worried about typecasting Shirley in predictable stories was her mother, Gertrude Temple. Publicly restless about Shirley’s material as early as Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm and alarmed by what she regarded as the thin substance and weak casting of Just around the Corner, she demanded a meeting with Zanuck. As Shirley Temple Black later recounted their interview, Zanuck listened patiently to her concerns but defended the formulaic character of Shirley’s films as necessitated by the star system. The business of the studio was not principally to develop Shirley’s growth as an actress, much as Gertrude Temple might wish it. Rather, it needed to capture or produce a personality for as long as it suited popular taste. “Now she’s lovable. The less she changes, the longer she lasts.” “You can’t create a public fad,” he insisted to Mrs. Temple. “Once you have a fad, leave it alone.”54

  The year 1939 remains Hollywood’s annus mirabilis, with high movie attendance and an exceptional number of excellent films, including Beau Geste, Dark Victory, Destry Rides Again, Drums along the Mohawk, Gone with the Wind, Young Mr. Lincoln, Gunga Din, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Love Affair, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, Ninotchka, Of Mice and Men, Only Angels Have Wings, Stagecoach, The Wizard of Oz, The Women, Wuthering Heights, and Goodbye, Mr. Chips. Although Louis B. Mayer, head of production at MGM Studios, at one point had discussed with Zanuck the possibility of trading Shirley to play the part of Dorothy Gale in The Wizard of Oz, no serious negotiations ever followed. Given Judy Garland’s consummate performance in the role, only the most ardent Shirley Temple fans can regret this outcome. Still, Zanuck did respond to the increased emphasis on lavish color productions, of which The Wizard of Oz and Gone with the Wind were the most celebrated, with two full-length color feature films starring Shirley Temple. The first, The Little Princess, which offered a deluxe version of the formula he had established, achieved Shirley’s last financial and critical success for Twentieth Century–Fox.

  For The Little Princess Zanuck cut up another children’s classic to fit Shirley. Frances Hodgson Burnett had published the original novella, Sara Crewe; or, What Happened at Miss Minchin’s Boarding School, in 1888. She later turned the story into a play and, in 1905, expanded it into a full-length novel. Mary Pickford had starred in a silent film version in 1917, the same year she made two other movies that Shirley would rework, The Poor Little Rich Girl and Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm. For Zanuck and his scriptwriters, the nub of the story proved irresistible. A young motherless girl, Sara Crewe, who has been raised in India by her rich and adoring father, is left at a fashionable London boarding school run by the imperious Miss Minchin. At first she leads a pampered existence as the school’s “show pupil.” Then, when her father dies and his fortune is apparently lost, Miss Minchin cruelly compels Sara to serve as a scullery maid and lodge in a cramped garret. Endowed with an indomitable imagination, Sara pretends that she lives in a room of rare splendor. An invalid gentleman and his Indian servant, living next door, contrive to make her dream come true. The gentleman proves to be her father’s friend and partner, and he becomes a second father to her, doubling her lost fortune and enfolding her into his own affectionate household.

  Such a melodramatic plot of luxury and privation, of fortunes, affection, and fathers lost and restored, clearly provided much to appeal to a movie audience in the Great Depression and especially to Shirley Temple fans. After discarding several earlier treatments of the screenplay, Zanuck and writers Ethel Hill and Walter Ferris included what had become requisite elements for a Temple picture: a young couple for whi
ch Shirley could play Cupid and a partner (Arthur Treacher) with whom to perform a music-hall-inspired song-and-dance number, as well as a dream ballet. (Shirley performed expertly in the former but, a ballet novice, she was the only ballerina in the fantasy sequence not on pointe.) To intensify the drama, in what was sure to appeal to British audiences, the film’s creators moved the story forward a decade to 1899 and the Second Boer War, in which Sara’s father is reported to have died at the Siege of Mafeking. Sara refuses to believe that he is dead, however, and repeatedly searches for him at the nearby hospital. Finally, pursued through the hospital corridors by Miss Minchin and assisted by no less a personage than Queen Victoria, Sara at last finds her wounded, amnesic father and restores his mind, memory, and spirit. Joyfully reunited, father and daughter stand at attention as the aging Victoria leaves the hospital and the band plays “God Save the Queen.”

  Shirley works as a scullery maid in a production still for The Little Princess. (Photofest/Twentieth Century–Fox)

  In addition to talented character actors, several veterans of Shirley Temple films among them, the cast included South African–born Sybil Jason as Becky, the cockney scullery maid at Miss Minchin’s who becomes Sara’s devoted friend. Almost exactly Shirley’s age and height, she delighted the film crew with her accomplished cockney speech. Shirley, who did not attempt to alter her American accent, apart from her rendition with Arthur Treacher of the music-hall song “Knocked ’Em in the Old Kent Road,” later confessed jealousy at Sybil’s appeal. Shirley effectively channeled this envy to another target in the memorably naughty scene—unusual in her roles—in which she is goaded beyond endurance by the spiteful taunts of a snobbish schoolmate and dumps a scuttle of coal ashes on her head.55

  The Little Princess had a running time of ninety-one minutes, longer than any previous Shirley Temple film except Wee Willie Winkie. Lavishly produced and luminously filmed in Technicolor, it was Shirley’s most expensive vehicle to that time. At its release, Zanuck led the ballyhoo, calling it “the finest picture with which I have ever been associated.”56

  No critic went this far, but Nelson Bell in the Washington Post proclaimed The Little Princess “Shirley Temple’s best picture to date.” He applauded the rich color, the dream ballet, the supporting cast, and Shirley’s own performance. Yet he could not resist deriding “the attempt to make the prodigious Miss Temple, with her round face and plump little body, serve as the symbol of persecution and the victim of deprivation that verges close to the borders of starvation.” Mae Tinee of the Chicago Daily Tribune expressed similar delight. “They say she’s at the awkward age,” she noted. “Nonsense. Shirley Temple will never have an awkward age!”57

  Despite the success of The Little Princess, Gertrude Temple continued to chafe at the roles in which Zanuck cast her daughter. “No more backstairs waifs,” she insisted. The time had come for Shirley to portray the “everyday problems of a child.” Instead of settling for mediocre ratings, Shirley would either regain her place at the “top of the heap” or make “a graceful exit.”58 Zanuck ignored these demands, placing Shirley in another familiar situation, as the difference between his and the Temple family’s conceptions of Shirley’s career widened to a chasm.

  In Susannah of the Mounties, Shirley continued the work of healing on behalf of imperial Britain begun in Wee Willie Winkie and pursued in The Little Princess, this time on Canada’s western frontier. Once again, she is already an orphan as the story begins, the sole survivor of a Blackfoot Indian attack. Scooped up by a handsome Mountie (Randolph Scott), she becomes the pet of the men on a military post. Like a B western, the movie included a young Indian boy, a noble Indian chief (played by the former Yiddish-theater actor Maurice Moscovitch in redface), and treacherous Indians and settlers in roughly equal measure, who together propel events to the point in which Randolph Scott would have been burned at the stake had not Shirley saved him in the nick of time.

  Critics did not attempt to conceal their disappointment. “Heap big eyewash as cinema entertainment,” Time magazine grunted. “Strictly for the juvenile trade,” wrote Variety, adding ominously, “Youngster is growing up fast, and is losing some [of] that sparkle displayed as a tot.” Frank Nugent of the New York Times added sardonically, “The early Canadian Northwest Mounted Police certainly wore tricky uniforms. . . . Except for the fact that they are on the screen, people at the Roxy might almost mistake them for ushers.”59

  The independent small-town exhibitors who wrote to Motion Picture Herald echoed such laments, and many felt that Shirley’s star was waning at last. “Fox’s darling is going the way of all child stars,” wrote A. E. Hancock of Columbia City, Indiana. “Each picture she slips a little more.” A woman from Konawa, Oklahoma, sadly agreed: “I believe Shirley Temple is outgrowing her popularity.” A man from the Plaza Theatre in Lyons, Nebraska, chimed in: “Shirley will have to make different and better picture[s] or she will be completely washed up.60

  By this time virtually everyone, including Zanuck and his subordinates at Twentieth Century–Fox, Gertrude and George Temple, film distributors and exhibitors, reporters, and fans, sensed—and feared—that Shirley was at a crucial point in her career. The illusion of childhood could not last forever. What had been extraordinary was how long Zanuck had been able to sustain it. Perhaps he reasoned that, if Louis B. Mayer could bind and corset sixteen-year-old Judy Garland’s breasts in order for her to play Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz, he could certainly preserve the illusion of Shirley’s prepubescent girlhood for at least another year or so. Yet, no matter how much her age was trimmed in scripts and her costumes designed to deny any hint of maturity, signs of puberty could not be wholly disguised. (Her menarche occurred on her eleventh birthday, in April 1939.)61

  Yet, for the first time since Shirley’s spectacular breakthrough in Stand Up and Cheer! five years earlier, no new film project immediately followed Susannah of the Mounties. Instead, Shirley and her parents waited an agonizing six months for the next assignment from Zanuck. “Shirley has been merely cute long enough,” he declared in a widely circulated interview in late July 1939. Proudly calling her the “greatest theatrical attraction since Valentino” and the “outstanding child star of all time,” he added, “Shirley is more beautiful than ever, and she is certainly a much better actress than she was a few years ago.”62

  Nonetheless, Zanuck acknowledged, the revenues from her films had not kept pace with their rising costs. “A slight apathy toward her pictures is becoming apparent in remarks from her fans and in letters, which they still write in very large numbers. They say they think there isn’t much to the Temple pictures any more, but they admit they still like to see this precocious 10-year-old [sic] perform.” It was her fans who made her a star and kept her aloft, and Zanuck clearly took their reactions seriously. “We arrived at the conclusion [that] to retain their interest we must do something absolutely new and different. She can be cute and still ‘do something.’ ”63

  Yet he admitted that finding the proper material was difficult. “She is a specialist, limited to a very few types of things. Specialists never last long, but Shirley is the exception to the rule.” In the search for “more definite characterizations, more meat to her stories,” the studio had invested close to $200,000 in potential material for her that year. Discarded projects included Little Diplomat, in which Shirley would extricate her companions from various European troubles, a mystery, a film with Al Jolson, and a costume drama called Lady Jane. Zanuck had even announced a contest with a prize of $25,000 for an acceptable story idea.64

  One of the stories that Zanuck had purchased with Shirley in mind, outbidding Walt Disney, was the sound film rights to the 1908 allegorical play The Blue Bird by the Belgian author and Nobel Prize winner Maurice Maeterlinck. Regarded as a symbolist masterpiece, it would be Zanuck’s answer to MGM’s Wizard of Oz. In the play a boy, Tyltyl, and his sister, Mytyl, two woodcutter’s children reminiscent of Hansel and Gretel, go on a quest, led by the figure of Light,
for the blue bird of happiness. Their search takes them to various realms, ending with the Kingdom of the Future, with the souls of children awaiting the hour of their births and preparing to bring inventions, agricultural improvements, ideas, and reforms, even one destined to conquer death itself. There they meet their future younger brother, who is also bringing the disease that will kill him, and two child lovers, fated to be born at different times and so be separated forever. Finally, Tyltyl and Mytyl return to their parents’ simple cottage, and, waking from their dream, discover the blue bird and happiness all about them.65

  By the time that Zanuck was steering The Blue Bird through various story treatments and into production, his relations with Gertrude and George Temple had sunk to such a point that they communicated only in writing, following a circuitous route through the Temples’ attorney, Loyd Wright, to Twentieth Century–Fox chairman Joseph Schenck and from him to Zanuck. Shirley Temple Black reported that her mother pressed Zanuck through every script revision to make Shirley’s character “impish, spoiled, and naughty.” (In Maeterlinck’s play the children are naive rather than nasty.) If Shirley’s performance in rehearsal made the film crew hiss, Gertrude Temple wrote, her daughter would be “in seventh heaven.” Shirley’s character did indeed darken in successive drafts, and Gertrude Temple claimed victory. Shirley could have been “even meaner,” she later told reporters. Her daughter was bored with her monotonous goody-two-shoes roles, and Gertrude clearly felt that moviegoers were growing tired of them as well.66

  Shirley and Johnny Russell in a production still for The Blue Bird. (Photofest/ Twentieth Century–Fox)