42 For an instance of Robinson’s temper onstage, see the account of an incident in which Bill Robinson rebuked a party of white southern hecklers as he performed his dance, “Bill Robinson Gets ’Em Told,” Chicago Defender, September 29, 1928, 6. Later, Robinson responded to young black hecklers of his “Uncle Tom” jokes. “ ‘Bojangles’ in a Fit of Temper,” 6. For offstage altercations, see “Bojangles Stops ‘Black Hitler’ in Dispute,” Chicago Defender, November 17, 1934, 4; “Bill Robinson Freed on Assault,” New York Times, September 21, 1938, 26. On Robinson’s Hollywood disagreements, see “Bojangles Sore about Way His Film Is Cut,” Afro-American, May 18, 1935, 8. Later, he reportedly pulled a gun on Benny Carter, the musical director of the film Stormy Weather. James Gavin, Stormy Weather: The Life of Lena Horne (New York: Atria Books, 2009), 131.
43 St. Clair McKelway, “Bojangles,” The New Yorker, October 6, 1934, 26–27, and October 13, 1934, 30; Calgary newspaper clipping as quoted in Haskins and Mitgang, Mr. Bojangles, 130.
44 Haskins and Mitgang, Mr. Bojangles, 130, 290.
45 Haskins and Mitgang, Mr. Bojangles, 222.
46 “Celebrities and 8 Miles of Crowds Pay Tribute to Bill Robinson,” New York Times, November 29, 1949, 1, 25.
47 “Gives Bojangles Left-Handed Slap,” New York Amsterdam News, December 3, 1949, 18; Christopher C. De Santis, ed., Langston Hughes and the “Chicago Defender”: Essays on Race, Politics, and Culture, 1942–62 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1995), 207. See also Hughes’s essay “Curtain Time,” unpublished during his lifetime, in Christopher C. De Santis, ed., Essays on Art, Race, Politics, and World Affairs, vol. 9 of The Collected Works of Langston Hughes (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2002), esp. 296.
CHAPTER FOUR: THE MOST ADORED CHILD IN THE WORLD
1 Lyn Tornabene, “Here’s Oprah,” Woman’s Day, October 1, 1986, 56.
2 Samantha Barbas, Movie Crazy: Fans, Stars, and the Cult of Celebrity (New York: Palgrave, 2001), 113; Shirley Temple and the editors of Look, My Young Life (Garden City, NY: Garden City Publishing, 1945), 9; Lin Yutang, “China and the Film Business,” New York Times, November 8, 1936, X4; Simplicissimus, February 11, 1940, 72; Frank Kerr, “Shirley Temple,” Cavalcade (New York: Film Daily, 1939), 292.
3 “Prime Minister Returns,” Nambour Chronicle, August 23, 1935, 2; “Japanese Envoy’s Tot Visits Shirley Temple,” Citizen News, May 2, 1936, Clippings File–Shirley Temple, MHL; “Chilean Navy,” Los Angeles Herald, March 13, 1936, Clippings File–Shirley Temple, MHL; “Russian Polar Flyers Meet Shirley Temple,” New York Times, July 18, 1937, sec. N, 2; Shirley Temple Black, Child Star: An Autobiography (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1988), 134–35, 207–8; H. G. Wells quoted in Kirtley Baskette, “The Amazing Temple Family,” Photoplay, April 1936, 16.
4 Black, Child Star, 87, 74, 206.
5 Dika Newlin, ed., Schoenberg Remembered: Diaries and Recollections, 1938–76 (New York, Pendragon Press, 1980), 42.
6 “Movie Survey Shows Shirley Temple as Fans’ Big Favorite,” Arkansas Gazette, December 13, 1935, 24.
7 “Quarterly Survey IX,” Fortune (July 1937), 103–4.
8 John Trumpbour, Selling Hollywood to the World: U.S. and European Struggles for Mastery of the Global Film Industry, 1920–1950 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 226; “Gabriel Washington [Pseud. for Gabriel Meyers],” interview by Charles A. Von Ohsen, February 22, 1939, and John and Lizzie Pierce, interview by I.L.M., September 23, 1938, American Life Histories: Manuscripts from the Federal Writers’ Project, 1936–1940, Library of Congress, Manuscript Division, WPA Federal Writers’ Project Collection, Washington, DC.
9 Data compiled from U.S. government Social Security Administration website, http://www.ssa.gov/OACT/babynames/.
10 On women and movie culture and stars’ personalities, see Barbas, Movie Crazy, 36–37, 61–65.
11 Barbas, Movie Crazy, 98; see also Margaret Farrand Thorp, America at the Movies (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1939), 86; Joshua Gamson, Claims to Fame: Celebrity in Contemporary America (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1994), 11, 21.
12 “Shirley Entertains,” Los Angeles Times, April 20, 1934, sec. 1, 13; “Eiga no Oujo” (The Princess of the Theater), Yomiuri Shimbun, Tokyo, September 23, 1934, special ed., 1.
13 Advertisement, Atlanta Constitution, April 21, 1936, 6; advertisement for Ideal Shirley Temple dolls, Playthings, March 1935, 3; Gary S. Cross, Kids’ Stuff: Toys and the Changing World of American Childhood (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), 117; “Greeting to Shirley,” Variety, April 29, 1936, 21. For Shirley Temple birthday events at department stores, see E. Evalyn Grumbine, Reaching Juvenile Markets (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1938), 341, 387–88; Black, Child Star, 138–39.
14 “Shirley Observes 7th Natal Day by Taking Pony Ride,” Citizen News, April 23, 1936, 36, Clippings File—Shirley Temple, MHL; unidentified newspaper clipping, possibly from Los Angeles Herald, January (?) 1936, Clippings File – Shirley Temple, MHL.
15 Even in spring 1933 during the depths of the Great Depression, newsstand sales of the leading fan magazines were impressive: Modern Screen 556,421; Silver Screen 471,806; Photoplay 461,842; Motion Picture 456,002; Picture Play 341,218; Movie Classic 326,852; Screen Book 267,573; Screenland 262,611; Screen Play 211,132; Hollywood 181,694; Screen Romances 137,141; plus three Tower movie magazines sold at Woolworth’s with a combined estimated sales of 1,360,669. “Big Fan Magazine Drop,” Hollywood Reporter, May 25, 1933, 1, 7; see also Frank Pope, “Trade Views,” Hollywood Reporter, August 15, 1934, 1, 3; “ ’35 Space Grab in Fan Mags,” Variety, January 1, 1936, 6; Anthony Slide, Inside the Hollywood Fan Magazine: A History of Star Makers, Fabricators, and Gossip Mongers (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2010), 73–92, 122–43; Barbas, Movie Crazy, 89, 98–99.
16 Fox Film advertisement, Motion Picture Herald, May 19, 1934, 81. See also similar ads on 73, 75, 77, 79, and 83; Helen Hunt, “Is Hollywood Spoiling Shirley Temple?” Movie Mirror, October 1934, 10.
17 Frank H. Ricketson Jr., The Management of Motion Picture Theatres (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1938), esp. 23, 214.
18 “Baby Photos,” Variety, August 7, 1934, 17; “Temple Doubles,” Variety, May 1, 1935, 19; Alan Davies, Sydney Exposures: Through the Eyes of Sam Hood and His Studio, 1925–1950 (Sydney: State Library of New South Wales, 1991), 21; see, e.g., advertisement for “Shirley Temple Competition,” Bombay Chronicle, November 7, 1936, 5.
19 Juan de La Habana, “Las Shirley Temple Cubanas” (The Cuban Shirley Temples), Carteles, April 5, 1935, 38–39, 73; see also Louis A. Perez Jr., On Becoming Cuban: Identity, Nationality, and Culture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 300–301.
20 “Shirley Temple of France Here,” New York Times, May 7, 1936, 25; “Paris ‘Shirley’ Snubs U.S. One,” Salt Lake Tribune, May 15, 1936, 19.
21 “Nihon no Temupuru” (I’m Shirley Temple), Asahi Shimbun, Tokyo, January 24, 1936, morning ed., 11; “Kodomo wo Tane ni Sagi” (Child Actor Scam), Asahi Shimbun, Tokyo, June 18, 1937, morning ed., 13; “Tenpuruchan Ijouda” (More Popular than Temple), Yomiuri Shimbun, Tokyo, June 18, 1937, morning ed., 77.
22 “Shirley Temple Contest Engineered by Ed Hart,” Motion Picture Herald, August 11, 1934, 60; on “personality development” in the 1930s, see Celia B. Stendler, “Psychologic Aspects of Pediatrics: Sixty Years of Child Training Practice: Revolution in the Nursery,” Journal of Pediatrics 36 (1950):122–35, as cited in Daniel Thomas Cook, The Commodification of Childhood: The Children’s Clothing Industry and the Rise of the Child Consumer (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), 89; “Shirley Temple Gift Contest,” Silver Screen, December 1936, 51.
23 Henry James Forman, Our Movie Made Children (New York: Macmillan, 1933), 141; Herbert Blumer, Movies and Conduct (New York: Macmillan, 1933), 17.
24 Frank, Taps!, 175.
25 A. J. Liebling, The Telephone Booth Indian (New York: Broadway Books, 2004), 63.
26 E
ileen Bennetto, “Carefree,” in When I Was Ten: Memories of Childhood, 1905–1985, ed. Len Fox and Hilarie Lindsay (New South Wales: Fellowship of Australian Writers, 1993), 216.
27 Ruth Kligman, Love Affair (New York: William Morrow, 1974), 165.
28 Kligman, Love Affair, 140–41.
29 Kligman, Love Affair, 141–42.
30 Dorothy Weil, The River Home: A Memoir (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2002), 44–45.
31 Kathy Plotkin, The Pearson Girls: A Family Memoir of the Dakota Plains (Fargo, ND: Institute for Regional Studies, 1998), 196.
32 Roddy Doyle, Rory & Ita (New York: Viking Press, 2002), 137–39. Cf. the longing to escape her father’s sexual abuse, to become Shirley Temple, and the nun’s condemnation, circa 1956, in Catherine McCall, When the Piano Stops: A Memoir of Healing from Sexual Abuse (Berkeley: Seal Press, 2009), 27–28.
33 Beatrice Muchman, Never to Be Forgotten: A Young Girl’s Holocaust Memoir (Hoboken, NJ: KTAV Publishing House, 1997), 14, 65, 79.
34 Diary of Anne Frank, July 11, 1942, quoted in Hans Westra, Inside Anne Frank’s House: An Illustrated Journey through Anne’s World (Woodstock, NY: Overlook Duckworth, 2004), 72–73, 130 ; Stacey Morris, “Ghosts of Prinsengracht: A Tour of the Anne Frank House,” Jewish Daily Forward, April 13, 2007, http://forward.com/articles/10481/ghosts-of-prinsengracht/; see also Carol Ann Lee, Roses from the Earth: The Biography of Anne Frank (London: Viking, 1999), 76.
35 Barbas, Movie Crazy, 38–39, 52–53.
36 Diana Serra Cary, Jackie Coogan: The World’s Boy King: A Biography of Hollywood’s Legendary Child Star (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2003), 62, 86–87.
37 Grumbine, Reaching Juvenile Markets, 6; on the transformation of marketing to children in this period, see Cook, Commodification of Childhood, esp. 66.
38 Lisa Jacobson, Raising Consumers: Children and the American Mass Market in the Early Twentieth Century (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 46; Grumbine, Reaching Juvenile Markets, 288–90, 21–22, 32–53.
39 Grumbine, Reaching Juvenile Markets, 17, 28, 21.
40 Albert Darver, Children’s and Infants’ Wear, May 1937, as quoted in Grumbine, Reaching Juvenile Markets, 354–55.
41 Grumbine, Reaching Juvenile Markets, 387–88, 357.
42 Grumbine, Reaching Juvenile Markets, 342–44, 346, 351, 109, 6–7.
43 Grumbine, Reaching Juvenile Markets, 6–7; Quaker Oats advertisement, Ladies’ Home Journal, April 1937, 119. For an example of a Quaker Oats advertisement directed to the mother’s point of view, see the October 1937 advertisement “Suppose Shirley Temple were your little girl . . .” reproduced in Grumbine, Reaching Juvenile Markets, 290.
44 Grumbine, Reaching Juvenile Markets, 26; Ladies’ Home Journal, September 1936, Clippings File—Shirley Temple, MHL; advertisement, Parents Magazine, April 1936, author’s collection.
45 Grumbine, Reaching Juvenile Markets, 387–88.
46 “Conference with Mr. Zanuck [on Temporary Script of Jan. 19, 1938],” January 24, 1938, Little Miss Broadway, Twentieth Century–Fox Scripts Collection, Cinema Arts Library, USC.
47 Pictorial Review, June 1935, 20, as quoted in Cook, Commodification of Childhood, 92.
48 Boris Emmet and John E. Jeuck, Catalogues and Counters: A History of Sears, Roebuck and Company (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1950), 5; see also Sanford M. Jacoby, Modern Manors: Welfare Capitalism since the New Deal (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), 99–101; Sears, Roebuck catalog, Fall/Winter 1935, 75; on the Sears catalog as a wish book, see Harry Crews, A Childhood: The Biography of a Place (New York: Harper & Row, 1978), 54.
49 “Morris Michtom, 68, Toy Manufacturer,” New York Times, July 22, 1938, 17; Flossie Flirt doll advertisement, Sears, Roebuck catalog, Fall/Winter 1926–27, 652.
50 Playthings, October 1934, 6; Playthings, November 1934, 3.
51 Tonya Bervaldi-Camaratta, The Complete Guide to Shirley Temple Dolls and Collectibles (Paducah, KY: Collector Books, 2007), 6–7; Ian Fleming, Powerplay: Toys as Popular Culture (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1996), 40.
52 Playthings, April 1935, 13; Bervaldi-Camaratta, Complete Guide to Shirley Temple Dolls, 20, 25.
53 Bervaldi-Camaratta, Complete Guide to Shirley Temple Dolls, 92.
54 Ann Reebok, transcript 36, September 15, 1987, 7, 8; Joanne Wasenske, transcript 47, September 29, 1987, 24, 3; Lois Green-Stone, transcript 53, October 12, 1987, 16; Esther Zannie, transcript 35, September 14, 1987, 3, 4, Doll Oral History Project, Brian Sutton-Smith Library and Archives of Play, The Strong, Rochester, NY.
55 “200 Letters Show Shirley Temple’s Grip on Children,” Motion Picture Herald, February 16, 1935, 54. For an instance of a contest in which children colored a drawing, see “Concursa Shirley Temple” (Shirley Temple Competition), Bohemia, [Havana, Cuba], August 4, 1935, 27.
56 Robert Cohen, ed., “Dear Mrs. Roosevelt”: Letters from Children of the Great Depression (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), 187–88.
57 Cohen, “Dear Mrs. Roosevelt,” 188–90.
58 See D. W. Winnicott, Playing and Reality (London: Routledge, 1971). Lisa Jacobson speaks of consumer envy in Raising Consumers, 7.
59 Bervaldi-Camaratta, Complete Guide to Shirley Temple Dolls, 78.
60 Bervaldi-Camaratta, Complete Guide to Shirley Temple Dolls, 60; Black, Child Star, 85.
61 Frank Dillon, “Shirley Temple, Saver of Lives,” Modern Screen, December 1935, 26–27, 78–79.
CHAPTER FIVE: KEEPING SHIRLEY’S STAR ALOFT
1 This phrase was popularized by Hortense Powdermaker, Hollywood, the Dream Factory: An Anthropologist Looks at the Movie-Makers (Boston: Little, Brown, 1950).
2 “Amicable Settlement,” Time, July 29, 1935, 46.
3 “All Fox Producers Fighting for Shirley,” Variety, October 22, 1934, 3; Aubrey Solomon, Twentieth Century–Fox: A Corporate and Financial History (Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1988), 217.
4 Shirley Temple Black, Child Star: An Autobiography (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1988), 36; “Amicable Settlement,” 46; Geoff Gehman, ed., Down but Not Quite Out in Hollow-weird: A Documentary in Letters of Eric Knight (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 1998), 11, 21.
5 Alva Johnston, “The Wahoo Boy,” The New Yorker, November 10, 1934, 24–25; George F. Custen, Twentieth Century’s Fox: Darryl F. Zanuck and the Culture of Hollywood (New York: Basic Books, 1997), 10–11, 173. I have drawn on Johnston’s two-part profile (November 10 and 17, 1934) and Custen’s book for much of the following material on Zanuck.
6 Quoted in Johnston, “Wahoo Boy,” November 17, 1934, 27.
7 Johnston, “Wahoo Boy,” November 17, 1934, 25; Custen, Twentieth Century’s Fox, 251.
8 Custen estimates the costs as between $200,000 and $400,000 (Twentieth Century’s Fox, 207). Aubrey Solomon agrees with the larger point, although his estimates of costs are between $400,000 and $700,000 (Twentieth Century–Fox, 29).
9 Custen, Twentieth Century’s Fox, 211.
10 Cartoon, The New Yorker, April 13, 1935, 29. For criticisms of the subject matter of Little Miss Marker and Baby Take a Bow, see “What the Picture Did for Me,” Motion Picture Herald, September 8, 1934, 50; September 22, 1934, 49; October 13, 1934, 82; October 20, 1934, 65; October 27, 1934, 69; November 10, 1934, 63; November 17, 1934, 67; December 8, 1934, 75; December 15, 1934, 60; “Reich Bans ‘Baby Take a Bow,’ ” New York Times, September 13, 1934, 26.
11 See Gary S. Cross, The Cute and the Cool: Wondrous Innocence and Modern American Children’s Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004); Lori Merish, “Cuteness and Commodity Aesthetics: Tom Thumb and Shirley Temple,” in Freakery: Cultural Spectacles of the Extraordinary Body, ed. Rosemarie Garland Thomson (New York: New York University Press, 1996), 185–203.
12 Cross, Cute and the Cool, 60–61, 69–70.
13 Konrad Lorenz, “Part and Parcel in Animal and Human Societies,” in Studies in Animal and Human Behaviour (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Universi
ty Press, 1970), 2:154; Michael C. LaBarbera, “The Biology of B-Movie Monsters,” 2003, Fathom Archive, http://fathom.lib.uchicago.edu/2/21701757/; Merish, “Cuteness and Commodity Aesthetics,” 187.
14 Tino Balio, Grand Design: Hollywood as a Modern Business Enterprise, 1930–1939 (New York: Scribner’s, 1993), 97.
15 Black, Child Star, 116, 211.
16 Black, Child Star, 20; “While Shirley Plays in Her Sandbox,” Motion Picture Herald, July 21, 1934, 18; “[Shirley] Temple’s Physical Condition,” Screen Guide, undated article [1938], Shirley Temple scrapbook, vol. 1, Constance McCormick Collection, USC; “Life Goes to Shirley Temple’s Birthday Party,” Life, May 15, 1944, 116–18, 121.
17 The first three Shirley Temple films in which Treacher appeared, in each case playing a butler or valet, were Curly Top, Stowaway, and Heidi.
18 Around 1936 an English newspaper reported that Shirley Temple was a thirty-year-old “midget” with two children. Shirley Temple Black, “Tomorrow I’ll Be Thirty,” Good Housekeeping, November 1957, 134; “Peewee’s Progress,” Time, April 27, 1936, 37. In 1937 Silvio Masante, a Sacramento pastor and special correspondent for the Vatican newspaper Osservatore Romano, interviewing Shirley Temple and her mother, told them, “In Italy as in other countries in Europe there is the persistent rumor that Shirley Temple is no child at all; but that she is a midget.” He thought that the rumor “was so vigorously spread, because many of the common people are unable to understand how such a child could do as many different things as Shirley does in her pictures.” George Shaffer, “Shirley Temple Interviewed by Papal Journal,” Chicago Daily Tribune, March 2, 1937, 14; see also Edith Lindeman, “The Real Miss Temple,” Richmond Times-Dispatch, October 31, 1937, Sunday magazine sec., 7; and Michael Jackson, “Protecting the Future of the Greatest Little Star,” Photoplay, March 1937, 27.
19 A. H. Saxon, P. T. Barnum: The Legend and the Man (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989), 124–30; P. T. Barnum, The Life of P. T. Barnum, Written by Himself (New York: Redfield, 1855), 263. The link between Shirley Temple and the exhibition of people with dwarfism is insightfully developed in Merish, “Cuteness and Commodity Aesthetics.” The comic confusion between Shirley and a diminutive adult was made explicit in Little Miss Broadway (1938), in which a detective confuses her character with that of Olive Brasno, an actress with proportional dwarfism.
The Little Girl Who Fought the Great Depression: Shirley Temple and 1930s America Page 27
